Choux Pastry

When I was home for Christmas a couple of months ago, I was by myself in the house one afternoon, and was very bored. So, as I often do, on a whim I decided I'd finally have a go at making choux pastry for the first time. Having seen it the most amazing choux gateaus on the Great British Bake Off this time, these examples from Brendan and John, I knew that this is probably a bit beyond me at this stage; so I thought I would start with something slightly easier.

Heading yet again to the BBC Food website I found this recipe by James Martin and this one by Nigella Lawson. Both of these looked like they were relatively straightforward to have a go at, so I decided start with Nigella's recipe, making a couple of tiny alterations (such as adding 4tsp of caster sugar to the choux pastry mix), and using a homemade piping bag (basically I cut a small corner off a sandwich bag - actually made a great piping bag) to pipe out the pastry mix instead of simply spooning it out.

This recipe takes a lot of time, patience and energy - stirring in the beaten eggs gradually actually takes a lot out of you, and my arm muscles were definitely aching by the end. However I can say that the end results were definitely worth it. For the first 10 to 15 minutes that the profiteroles were in the oven they didn't change at all; basically they still looked like the piped-out choux pastry batter, which I wasn't very happy about. I started to think that I had definitely messed up somewhere along the way, possibly in mixing the eggs into the batter. Then in the final five minutes they suddenly changed beyond recognition. They puffed up and they actually looked like profiteroles - it was amazing.

Profiteroles!!

I was pretty chuffed as this is my very first attempt at choux pastry. Now obviously they were not completely perfect; some of the profiteroles around the edges of the layout of the tray had not quite browned as much as I wanted them to, and two of them, when I attempted to take them off the baking paper, actually came away leaving the base of the profiteroles behind. Still, that left me with plenty more profiteroles to fill with the sugared cream and then to top with some melted chocolate. Testing them myself, I thought that they actually tasted quite nice, but I am never a very good judge of my own cooking and my neurotic brain means that I always have to have someone else say that it's actually okay. Therefore, I took some of the profiteroles over to my friend S, and was delighted when she and her family really liked them as well. I have since made these for my housemate L and her boyfriend, who both seemed to rather enjoy them, so I'll mark these down as another success.

Beckie.

Tarte au Citron

Once again I must admit to being influenced by The Great British Bake Off. As an adoring admirer of Mary Berry, I finally bit the bullet and attempted her Tarte au Citron for the first time. I was very interested in the idea of trying out a new sweet shortcrust pastry recipe having relied on the Crazy Kitchen shortcrust recipe for so long.

Having watched the episode of the Great British Bake Off where they made the Tarte au Citron, I was very conscious of the fact that it would be very, very easy to over-bake the lemon filling. In fact this was very much the case for my first attempt at making this tarte. As you can see from the photo, the filling has started to separate from the pastry, and in fact in the centre of the tart there was a fairly large crack in the filling. This is a wonderfully tart and flavoursome lemon filling, which is one of the tastiest recipes I've ever tried.

Mildly successful Tarte au Citron

Again undeterred I decided to keep trying to make this tarte successfully. It is really easy to over-bake this tarte and I have done so several times. I have also come across problems with pouring the filling into the pastry case; sometimes it just overflows and other times simply sliding the tarte into the oven causes some filling to spill over and to make the pastry soggy, which can cause the pastry to collapse. This means that you can lose some of the tarte when you try to remove it from the tin after baking. However, this doesn't take away from the delicious flavour of the tarte, and it has always gone down very well with L, my housemate, and several other friends of mine.

Beckie.

Pfeffernusse/Lebkuchen

I have very strong memories from when I was young going to visit my Granny in Bristol. Being from Germany, she was very fond of these yummy little spicy icing-coated biscuits which I now know are called either Pfeffernusse or Lebkuchen, and she always had some in whenever we visited her. Around Christmas time, Sainsbury's sell packets of Lebkuchen which I buy in bulk, but then this year I decided that along with buying the Sainsbury's ones I should actually have a go at making my own.

So once again I made use of my broadband connection and hunted around for some recipes. I found these two recipes online (from Channel 4 and All Recipes), and decided to go for a combination of the two, mainly using the Channel 4 recipe but adding in the molasses (treacle) from the All Recipes page. I used pomegranate molasses in this recipe, but I did not use the plum jam or the chocolate suggested in the Channel 4 recipe, preferring instead to simply cover the biscuits in icing.

Pfeffernusse

These little biscuits turned out really well, although I had to halve some of them as I'd made them far too big. I also foolishly ran out of icing part way through, so some biscuits only had two coats of the icing, but they still tasted suitably sweet and spicy. The only issue I came across was that there was just too much of the ground black pepper in these for my own personal preference, so I think next time I'll halve the amount of black pepper that I add.

I like to think that my Granny would have been proud of me for making these.

Beckie.

Sweet Delights

Rather than do one post per smaller bake, I thought it best to do one post dealing with a group of them. This post is looking at the sweet-based bakes I've been experimenting with.

First up is honeycomb (also called hokey pokey). I've always loved honeycomb (Crunchie bars!), so have always loved the idea of making my own. I used this recipe by the amazing Lorraine Pascale from, you've guessed it, the BBC Food website. Most recipes just use sugar and golden syrup, but I was intrigued by this recipe as it called for the addition on butter. The part of this that is the most fun is of course stirring in the bicarbonate of soda - a veritable explosion of sugar occurs.

Honeycomb.

Despite following the recipe to the letter, sometimes this just doesn't work exactly as planned. However, whilst the honeycomb may be a little flat, the butter added earlier means that the flavour is incredible. The honeycomb has a wonderful snap to it to accompany the rich, syrupy flavour.

Next in the agenda was more sugar work, and an attempt at one of my favourite pieces of confectionary - peanut brittle. I found this recipe on Nigella Lawson's website, and felt that it looked easy enough. I knew that the trickiest bit was going to be melting the sugar, and sure enough the very first batch was burnt beyond all salvation. The problem was I did not have a wide enough pan for the amount of sugar the recipe suggested. Therefore, I reduced the recipe amounts, and heated a thinner layer of sugar in the pan. This seemed to work nicely, and the sugar easily caramelised into the mahogany-coloured liquid the recipe described. This time I stirred the peanuts into the sugar in the pan, and then poured (or rather scraped) the mixture into a baking-paper lined tray. Again, I learnt from this - the next time I made a batch of the brittle, I poured out a layer of the caramel, waited for it to cool, and then sprinkled the peanuts on top. I then melted some more sugar, and poured out another layer of caramel, this time directly on top of the peanuts. I found this to be a much easier way of making the brittle, though I'm sure others would disagree.

Great big tray of peanut brittle.

Bite-size chunks.

Next up were simple hard-boiled sweets. I found this recipe online, which seemed simple enough for a novice like me. Again, the main issues I had here were with melting the sugar. Trying to get the sugar and golden syrup to the right crack stage without a sugar thermometer proved to be a bit hit-and-miss, so there were times when the sweets were soft and chewy (and could pull out teeth if you weren't careful). However, I eventually bought myself a sugar thermometer and some really great silicon sweet moulds, and I was in my way to being more successful with the sweets. One of the great things about this recipe is that you don't taste the golden syrup, no matter what flavouring you add. I have made these sweets in mint, orange, lemon, and maple syrup flavours. They were all delicious, and went down very well with my friends.

Minty goodness.

A more recent attempt of mine was an old favourite. I have long had a love of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and one day I decided to have a go at making them myself. One of my best friends, M, was coming over for dinner, so I decided that was as good a day as any to have a go at making my own peanut butter cups. For this, I didn't follow any recipe, just my own instincts. What I did was first melt a blend of milk and dark chocolate, and then pour a thin layer of the chocolate in the base of cupcake cases. These were then put aside to cool completely. Once they had cooled, I placed a teaspoonful of peanut butter onto the chocolate base, and then spread it out almost to the edges of the case. Once the peanut butter was in place, I simply poured more melted chocolate over the peanut butter until it was completely covered, ensuring that the layer of chocolate was fairly thin on the top as well as the bottom. When the Peanut Butter Cups had set, M and I jumped on them, eating most of them in one sitting. M even demanded the recipe off me, which I definitely see as a success.

My own version of Peanut Butter Cups.

Finally in this post is a recipe that was in the Radio Times one week, related to the The Great Comic Relief Bake Off. These 'Honeycomb Crunchies' made use of a lot of ingredients I already had in, including some honeycomb is made weeks before. This also meant that the recipe took less time than usual, as I didn't have to make the honeycomb from scratch. These bites were delicious, the richness of the melted butter, golden syrup and chocolate blending perfectly with the crispy honeycomb and the digestive biscuits. In the future, I may even add some glacé cherries, making something akin to a Rocky Road, but without the marshmallow. L took a tub of these into her Physics Department, and they apparently disappeared within seconds - there were obviously some very hungry physicists around that day.

Honeycomb Crunchies.

Beckie.

Experiments With Ravioli

Whilst making pasta and ravioli is not exactly baking, it's still an interesting area of cooking that I'd been dying to try out for a while. Not having a pasta roller, I would be rolling out the pasta by hand, something which I knew would produce pasta that was not as good as pasta that's been through a pasta roller. Still, I was undeterred, and luckily found this recipe on the BBC Food website, from an episode of Masterchef. Even better, the recipe called for rolling out the pasta by hand, so I was eager to have a go.

Sweet Potato Ravioli

I am extremely lucky to have the wonderful Freshways two minutes walk from my flat, so getting hold of semolina was incredibly easy. Generally I found this recipe easy to follow, but I did come across a couple of very obvious issues: 1) One egg yolk is definitely not enough for the pasta mix, especially with the amount of semolina the recipe asks for. I ended up using two egg yolks and one egg. 2) The very first time I attempted this, I did not roll the pasta anywhere near thin enough, which meant that the ravioli was not quite cooked all the way through after being boiled for the stated 5 minutes. This was my own stupid fault of course, but luckily did not take too much away from the lovely flavours of the sweet potato and the sage. My friend M happily ate her entire plateful, and was far too tactful to mention the over-thick pasta. I definitely corrected my errors the next time, and the ravioli was given the thumbs up by L and her boyfriend.

A few weeks after I'd first tried making ravioli, I suddenly had the idea to make some unusual ravioli. I was curious about a vague memory I'd had of someone (probably on Masterchef) making a chocolate ravioli dessert. I'd also recently discovered a spread that Waitrose sell, Lotus Caramelised Biscuit Spread (really yummy, well worth a try), which I though could make a great filling for chocolate ravioli. So I had a quick search online, and came across this recipe on Epicurious. I combined this pasta recipe with the one I'd used for the sweet potato ravioli earlier, which meant including semolina along with the egg, flour and cocoa powder. I managed to roll the pasta very thin, and filled each one with a teaspoon of the biscuit spread. I then boiled them for five minutes, and made a simple almond butter to accompany them.

Chocolate Ravioli with Caramelised Biscuit Centre and Almond Butter.  Yum!

This was an immediate success with L, the chocolate flavour of the ravioli not being too overwhelming, and complimenting the caramelised biscuit and the almond butter nicely. I think I may try it with hazelnut butter next time, to see what that flavour combination is like.

It is definitely worth having a go at making pasta even if you don't have a pasta roller - whilst the results may not be quite a good as pasta that has been made using the roller, it can still be quite successful. It certainly went down well enough here.

Beckie.

Custard Tart

By the time the summer rolled around, I'd had a decent amount of practice making shortcrust pastry (I'd basically made a LOT of treacle tarts), so I finally decided to have a go at making an old family favourite: the custard tart. Once again, I turned to the BBC Food website, and after some searching I came across an intriguing recipe, this Honey and Date Custard Tart by James Martin. Now I'm not the biggest fan of dates, so I decided to leave them out, and just have the honey. Using the same shortcrust pastry from The Crazy Kitchen's Lemon and Ginger Tart recipe, I made my usual pastry case, and then moved onto making the custard filling. This is actually a fairly simple filling to make, the main thing to watch out for is burning the cream when you boil it. I got lucky with it this time, but I get the feeling that it could be just a matter of seconds between just-boiling cream and burnt cream.

After whisking the boiling cream into the egg yolk and honey mixture, I carefully poured the filling into the pastry case and then gingerly transferred it to the oven. 20 minutes later, this was the result:

Slightly over-done, but still tasty.

The only problem here was the fact that the tart filling was slightly overdone. In my desperation to get the custard set, I'd left the tart in the oven about five minutes too long. However, the flavour was not compromised, and I loved the honey flavour that came with this custard filling.

Despite the relative success of the honey custard tart, I really wanted to make a traditional custard and nutmeg tart. Using the same James Martin recipe, I simply left out the dates again, and substituted the honey with 50g caster sugar, put in a few drops of vanilla essence, and added half a teaspoon of nutmeg into the custard mix. Once the filling had been poured into the pastry case (made following The Crazy Kitchen recipe yet again!), I then sprinkled yet more nutmeg over the top to give the custard tart that traditional look. This time I timed the bake perfectly, and the custard was beautifully done, with a beautiful hint of nutmeg and vanilla.

Yummy custard tart.

As you can probably see, the pastry was very thin (not necessarily a bad thing), which meant that there were a couple of cracks in the side of the case that appeared when I moved the tart from the wire-rack to the plate. This is a common issue for me, but I'd rather have a thin and crispy pastry than one that is too thick and stodgy.

This has become one of my favourite recipes to make, and was even requested by my parents when I went to stay with them for Christmas. This time I made excellent use of the leftover pastry scraps, rolling them out and making custard tartlets along with the main tart.

A family of custard tarts.

I must say, they all went down very well with my parents; it's always nice to hear that my parents like your baking (they'd experienced my poor cooking skills in the past, and have been pleasantly surprised by my baking renaissance), and it's particularly gratifying to hear that they liked my version of a long-time family favourite. That makes it one of my proudest baking successes in my mind.

Beckie.

Meringue

Having been fairly successful with the meringue topping for the "S'moreanne Cupcakes", I decided to have a go at making simple meringues using the Italian meringue technique. This involves boiling sugar and water together until it reaches the soft-ball stage, and then whisking it into already-whisked egg whites. Having remembered hearing Mary Berry say on the Great British Bake Off that it was really hard to over-whisk meringue, I was mindful of not under-doing them. I also decided to flavour them with a few drops of almond extract.

The first time I attempted this, I messed it up completely. For some unknown reason, I poured in all the boiling sugar in one go and whisked it all in. It's caused a problem, because most of the sugar sank to the bottom of the bowl and set there. Therefore there was not enough sugar in the meringue for it to set and bake properly, resulting in a sloppy mess when I attempted to bake them. So I tried again, and did it properly the second time round, pouring in the sugar very slowly whilst whisking at the same time. This resulted in an extremely stable meringue mix, and after three-four hours in the oven at 110°C, out came eight perfectly glossy and shiny meringues. They tasted beautifully of almond, and had a very nice crunch when bitten into.

Second-Round Meringues

Only the other night, I made some giant vanilla meringues, and sprinkled in some cocoa powder to half of them as well. I am very much aware of the fact that they look messy, but I promise that they tasted great, and were even approved by my mother.

Messy, yes.  Yummy, definitely.

I've also tried swirling in various different food colouring right before they go into the oven. The success of this depends on how much food colouring you actually swirl in. One drop is enugh, believe me. I made some green, yellow and red meringues the other night, and most were great. However, the three which I'd added the red food colouring to were not so great, as I'd added far too much of the food colouring, causing them to sink during the bake.

Beckie.