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.

Treacle Tart Mark Two

So here it was, the time for me to attempt making pastry from scratch for the very first time. I decided to make another treacle tart, as the filling seemed to be nicely stable during the bake. I also made some changes to The Crazy Kitchen's recipe: I left out the lemon curd, and added black treacle instead, attempting to gain a rich treacle-y flavour. This was my first time blind-baking as well, and I was very nervous about it.

What can I say? The pastry turned out incredibly well; I was pleasantly surprised at how well, in fact. As you can see from the photo, before I took it out from the tart case there was a lot of pastry overhang. I should have cut the overhang off after the initial blind-bake, but I didn't think to at the time, so had to resort to breaking-off the overhang once the tart had cooled. Luckily for me, this didn't result in the entire pastry case splitting (as has happened with subsequent bakes when I've forgotten to cut off the overhang after the blind-bake).
 

My very first short-crust pastry from scratch - I was so proud of this!

As you can see, it wasn't the neatest pastry ever, but one of the beautiful things about pastry is that you can patch up any cracks before the bake. The main thing of course is if it tastes good, which luckily for me was the case here. The black treacle was an addition that worked very well, and made for a very treacle-y, yummy tart.

Beckie.

Treacle Tart Mark One

My absolute favourite dessert is treacle tart, so after a few months of baking, I decided to finally have a go. I'm going to be completely honest here and admit that for my very first attempt, I used a shop-bought pastry case. Please try not to judge me too hard, I promise it was only the once I did that   :-)

So I browsed around online and came across this tantalising-sounding recipe from The Crazy Kitchen, a Lemon and Ginger Treacle Tart. This sounded amazing, and I knew I had to give it a go. I love treacle tart, lemon curd and ginger, so what's not to love about this recipe? The recipe included instructions on how to make the pastry, but for now I concentrated on the filling alone.

Ok, so I cheated with the pastry, but it still looks good :-)

The result was a wonderful-tasting and perfectly balanced tart filling. The ginger and the lemon curd combined perfectly, and I immediately knew that this was going to become a firm favourite. And having made this, I was determined to attempt my own shortcrust pastry next time.

Beckie.