The Good Wife 1

So this year I decided not to buy the Hubs a birthday present, hoping that the baby would slip out of me on the morning so that I could go "ta-dah, here's one I made earlier". Sadly, things haven't been going to plan. To make up for it, I promised him a meal of his choosing, cooked with love. This is what he picked:
Beef Wellington
Potato Gratin
Black Forest
Cheesecake
I make a mean wellington and gratin, if I do say so myself, so no doubt I will post about those when I feel like there's nothing else to post about. I've never been a particularly good baker though, and so when I find recipes that work for me, I figure I ought to share them.

With the thousands of food blogs out there, I tend to seek my recipes from the net these days. It was surprisingly hard to find a black forest recipe that looked good and feasible. In the end I settled on a variant of this one, and aimed for good and possible. My variant was this, and turned out very dense but delish:
Phase 1
300g sugar
300g flour
225g cocoa powder
100g shaved chocolate
1 tspn salt
1 1/2 tspn baking powder
2 eggs, beaten
120ml oil
240ml milk
240ml boiling water

1. Preheat oven to 170 Celsius. Line the bottom of a cake pan (I recommend springform since otherwise it's a removal disaster).
2. Combine sugar, flour, cocoa, salt and baking powder. Sift twice.
3. In a separate bowl, combine the beaten eggs, vegetable oil, and milk. Stir to mix. Then, with the mixer on low, pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Mix on low until evenly distributed.
4. Gradually pour the boiling water into the batter and mix on medium low until smooth.
5. Pour the batter into the cake pan. It was more liquid than I expected and I was unconvinced that it would set, but it did, so have faith!
6. Bake for 35-45 minutes. When a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out cleanly, the cakes are done. Remove from the oven and let cool completely.

Phase 2
250g chopped chocolate (I used dark)
75ml heavy whipping cream
1 tbspn butter

1. In a saucepan, heat the cream and butter just until simmering.
2. Pour the hot cream mixture over the chocolate. Whisk the cream into the chocolate until smooth.
3. Slice the cake into the number of layers you'd like. Mine didn't rise much (maybe more baking powder needed?) so I determined that this would be two slices. I also took off the uneven top layer (and started soaking this in kirsch syrup).
4. Spread a thin layer of ganache on top of both of the cooled chocolate cake layers. Let set for an hour in the refrigerator.

Phase 3
Pitted cherries
2 tbspn sugar
1 tbspn cornstarch
1 tbspn kirsch or brandy

1. Place the cherries in a saucepan and cook over medium heat until the cherries begin to release their juices.
2. Add the sugar into the cherries, stirring until dissolved.
3. Pour some of the cherry juice into a small bowl. Add the cornstarch to the juice and whisk until the corn starch is completely dissolved. Add the cornstarch and juice back into the saucepan.
4. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook for one minute. Remove from heat and stir in the kirsch or brandy. Let cool before using.

Phase 4
125g mascarpone cheese
400ml heavy whipping cream
100g icing sugar

1. Combine the mascarpone cheese and cream in a bowl. Whip until soft peaks.
2. Sift in the icing sugar and continue whipping just until you reach stiff peaks. Be careful not to overwhip! Use immediately.

This could have used more cream, but I was scared.

Phase 5
1. Spread a layer of mascarpone whipped cream on the prepared ganache-chocolate cake.
2. Top with cherries. I added a layer of the soaked uneven bits of cake and repeated the cream and cherries.
3. Add the top layer of cake.

4. Frost the outside of the cake with the remaining cream.
5. Overindulge

Southern Hospitality

Sometimes random lyrics make an impression on me for no real reason. One example of this is the line "If I gave you peaches, out of my own garden/ and I made you a peach cobbler, would you slap me out?" from "Hate on Me" by Jill Scott. I think it has something to do with the way she enunciates "peach cobbler". Either way, I've been obsessed with the idea of making peach cobbler ever since I first heard the song. Today, I finally got around to it. The 4th of July celebrations that the girls in London were emailing and posting about inspired the nesting instinct, and so I decided to attempt a Southern meal.

First up - King Ranch Casserole
This turned out to be an American version of the first dish my mother ever taught me to cook. It was really easy to make, though I did end up tweaking a lot of the recipe by using chicken broth with dried porcini and mascarpone cheese (leftover from last week's salmon en croute) instead of condensed milk. I couldn't find "chiles" or chilli beans, so subbed with cayenne pepper and portobello mushrooms. The human guinea pig gave it the seal of approval.

On the side, we had corn pudding. I'd never had a proper version of this before (sorry, missus Whaley!), I don't think, because it was first introduced to me at Thanksgiving 2008 or so, when Mrs Whaley accidentally added Blueberry muffin mix into hers. This recipe didn't have any flour, which surprised me, but the cornstarch in the creamed corn, as well as what was added, made it set despite my expectations. I also cut back on the egg. Five eggs seemed too much for something that wasn't an omelette. This was surprisingly good, despite needing absolutely ages to cook. Definitely one to repeat.

Finally, the finale, the cobbler! I subbed two peaches for some cherries but followed the rest of the recipe. I had expected the cobbler to be similar to crumble, but it was actually much stodgier, almost suety. Either way, it was delicious, and (considering it was an American dish) not as unhealthy as I'd expected.

I did want to take lots of pictures for this post, but am still unable to work the camera, so sadly wasn't able to get any. Boo! Hope you can take it on faith!

Baked Bun

Its been awhile since anything was baked in our household. Having a bun in the oven seems to have created a reverse-nesting instinct in us, despite all that would ordinarily be predicted. The main thing we did was hire a full time helper. She started on Saturday and has already made a huge improvement on our quality of life. So much so that the urge to cook has been revived! That's why I decided to actually bake some buns on Buddha's Birthday . As with any desire I've had to bake something bready, my first port of call was Dan Lepard, whose recipes never seem to go amiss. Having said that, I've never been good at following instruction, and so the following is slightly varied from the original (per the link).

CINNAMON BUNS
400ml milk
1 whole Nutmeg
4 cloves
Finely grated zest of ½ lemon
500g strong white flour, plus extra for shaping
80g unsalted butter
1 medium egg
70g caster sugar
1 sachet fast-action yeast
1½ tsp salt
Oil for kneading

For the filling
3 Finncrisp/Ryvita
150g soft brown sugar
3 tsp ground cinnamon
Butter
Beaten egg, to finish

Put the milk, nutmeg, cloves and lemon zest in a saucepan.
Turn on the heat and whisk in and 50g flour till it reaches boiling point. It thickens quite quickly once it hits boiling point, so turn off the heat asap.
Stir in the butter and leave until warm.

Beat in the egg, sugar and yeast, followed by the remaining flour and salt.
Mix to a soft and very sticky dough. This was wetter than I'd expected, and was so sticky that it was spattered in clumps on the side of the mixing bowl/saucepan.
Cover and leave for 10 minutes. I was a little worried that Hong Kong would be too warm, but this worked fine.

Oil a worktop and knead the dough on it for about 10 seconds, then put the dough back in the bowl, cover and leave for 10 minutes. Repeat this kneading twice more at 10-minute intervals, then leave the dough for an hour.

The recipe recommends lining the baking tin with nonstick paper. I was using disposable trays and so I didn't bother.

Grind the Finncrisp/Ryvita in a food processor until very fine, then mix in the sugar, cinnamon and some butter. I really struggled to get this properly fine and think a pestle and mortar would work better (or the alternative of taking a rolling pin to a bag of the biscuits).

Flour the worktop and rolling pin (the dough is still sticky).
Roll the dough to about 0.75cm thin.
Dab a little butter over the dough and sprinkle the cinnamon mixture evenly over it.
Roll it up tightly and cut into 2-3cm slices.
Lay these cut side up in the tin, cover and leave for 45 minutes.

Brush with beaten egg and bake at 190C (200C fan-assisted)/425F/gas mark 7 for 15-20 minutes, until brown on top.

The result wasn't as sweet as I expected and I think I may ice or frost these going forward. All in all though, it was an easy recipe for a rainy type day (or in my case, a GMAT study day).

Yorkies

I have been neglecting this blog lately and thought I’d use the excuse of the Resident Froggie asking for my (ridiculously easy) yorkshire pudding recipe to put something up.

The recipe goes like this:
Hot hot hot oven, I tend to max out my little campervan oven, then turn it down to 180c when the magic needs to happen
2 eggs
300ml of the most fattening milk you can find
Pinch of salt
Heat up some kind of animal fat in the dish. I try to make this so it’s about 2mm deep and tend to use the grease I get off the roast, or from the decimation of streaky bacon.

Pour in batter and bake.

I have found that this works best if the pan is metal and the fat copious. They freeze fairly well, ready for those emergency roast-in-a-sandwich needs.

From http://urbanpainner.blogspot.com/

Tonight was the inaugural Urban Painner dinner, and the challenge was to make dinner in the Hong Kong kitchen, complete with the countertop oven. Up first was Dan Lepard's Peanut Chilli Bread. The toughest thing about making this was the patience involved. There was a fifteen minute rest period, then a half hour, then another ten minutes, and finally forty-five. After all that waiting, this was the end result, ready for an hours baking:

The next course was Ottolenghi's aubergine cheesecake, which was another dish that required some preparation time but was otherwise simple. Dessert was a variant of Dan Lepard's Dark Chocolate Berry Cake. It was impossible to find a cherry preserve here, so instead I bought a tin of cherries and made a quick replacement with corn starch, reserving some for decorating. I'd also managed to forget brown sugar, so used caster instead. The unfortunate side effect was that the frosting became too liquid, so I ended up compensating with icing sugar and cocoa.

The end result?