Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Chocolate cupcakes

Saturday, November 14th, 2009 | Cooking | 3 Comments

Recently, my youngest sister wanted to bake these ‘advanced’ cupcakes, so she asked whether I would bake them with her. Never avoiding a chance to bake with others, I immediately agreed, and we had a lot of fun preparing, decorating, and not least eating the cakes.

It’s a fairly standard chocolate cake with whipped egg whites carefully folded into the chocolate batter. After a good bake we piped butter frosting over the cupcakes and drizzled candied violet over it.

Looking closely we can see the small pieces of candied violet better:

Normally I don’t fancy cupcakes too much as I think they have a tendency to become a bit too dry, but these were very good. Yummy.

Tags: baking, cake

Apple blackberry tart

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Starting as an experiment on creating whipped cream from an oat-based cream, the apple blackberry tart is a nice dessert, but since it is fairly dry it really needs whipped cream. The tart dough and fruits applied does look rather appetising.

The blackberries are fresh from our garden, so I think they deserve a closeup.

This is a closed tart receiving a lid of more shortcrust dough.

It is supposedly possible to whip the oat-based cream by adding some gelatine, but even after we threw it in the freezer for a while to strengthen the gelatine’s properties (they were not working without this step at all) the result was lumpy and disappointing, nowhere near the impressive tops and lightness of regular whipped cream. So we had to settle with a slightly thickened cream on the tart.

Darkness fell between the assembly of the tart and it finishing its bake, hence the bad lighting in the last photo.

Tags: baking, cake, dessert

Feeling peckish

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

I have so far gotten the hang of creating bread for our daily consumption by baking four .5 kg loaves once a week, freezing two of the loaves and taking them out of the freezer as needed. It’s a nice, relaxing routine to bake Hamelman’s straight dough French breads, and they have such a lovely taste. So as part of the celebrations of my oldest sister’s rite of confirmation, I offered to bake some bread and cakes to remove some of the stress from my parents as they were having the house filled with guests.

Being a fairly small family, I just had to bake for about 16 people, but then it started to nag at me… what if there isn’t enough food? So I cleaned out the kitchen tables and got ready to bake some cake.

The recipe I chose for the cakes was Fudgy Brownies from the most awesome chocolate book Crave by Maureen McKeon. This is the book for chocolate lovers. As I have remarked before I really do not like underbaked cake, so I usually give the cake a wee bit more in the oven than is given in the recipes (enough so that there is no batter left on a fork when I put it all the way through the cake and lift it up again). To liven it up a bit, I went to a specialty store and got candied violet leaves to decorate the cake.

I made a quadruple portion of the cakes, you know, just for good measure. Over a kg of sugar, over a kg of chocolate and lots and lots and lots of oat-based cream to avoid any fun moments with us lactose intolerant people. This is one heavy cake. The candied violet leaves worked wonders.

Of course, this was the easy part. The fun part was to bake ten .4 kg loaves so no one would leave the party hungry. Not taking any chances I went with my tried and tested straight dough French bread from Hamelman’s Bread.

Is it just me or does this make you want to go ‘Ferment, my babies, ferment!’ in a good, classical cheap television production Frankenstein voice too?

Baking the French bread involves a lot of times where you need to fold the bread, it needs to be divided, shaped, scored, and baked, and the bread better not overproof or everything might be ruined! Three doughs meant that I had run out of alarm clocks to signal when I needed to do what! Fortunately, salvation was only 60 lines of Python away, and my laptop sat happily on the kitchen table, reminding me to do all the things in the correct order, at the correct intervals, and fortunately I timed everything so that none of the foldings, shapings or bakings got in the way of each other. I would feel daunted by trying to run a bakery and having to interleave not only three doughs, but thirty or fourty doughs!

So, feeling peckish?

Tags: baking, cake, chocolate, white bread

Molten chocolate cake

Friday, April 25th, 2008 | Cooking | 1 Comment

I have to admit that we are cake lovers. In particular chocolate cakes seem to vanish almost as quickly as they are baked. Really, one would not have guessed from looking at this blog, right? So I was immediately hooked when I was browsing food blogs and saw that the Tuesdays with Dorie food blogger group was baking Molten chocolate cake. Once I actually found this, the week had passed and everyone had posted their molten chocolate cake results, and a couple of them including the recipe, so I had my wife pick up some fancy muffin forms for baking, and off I went.

The recipe is actually very straightforward and the cake is basically an underbaked cake. With that in mind I used pasteurised eggs to avoid any fun moments due to salmonella. The cake came out exactly as I had intended:

As to the taste… what a disappointment. Even with the light, slightly acidic and fresh taste of pineapple, I will be no fan of this underbaked, pasty cake anytime soon.

Tags: baking, cake, chocolate

Parisian daily bread and pear-marzipan tart

Sunday, April 6th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Today it happened again. I was out of bread by breakfast and rapidly growing hungry, so things needed to move rapidly in order to get lunch at a time that might just serve as a probable time for lunch. Fear not, the day before I had been skimming through Daniel Leader’s Local Breads and had seen the recipe for Parisian daily bread, in which he states that ‘There’s nothing like tearing into a warm baguette, fresh from your oven, just a couple of hours after you decide to bake.’ Now that sounds great, I can shave off several hours from Hamelman’s French bread recipe, I thought!

So, today comes around and I start reading the recipe… rest for 20 minutes, mix for 10 minutes, ferment for 45 minutes, ferment again for 45 minutes, proof for 40 minutes, bake for 20 minutes… this seems oddly above a couple of hours to me, but it still saves me a couple of hours to Hamelman’s recipe. After kneading the dough on the machine, it is supposed to receive a bit of more kneading on an unfloured desk, but even after kneading it for a bit more than 10 minutes on my mixer, it was extremely sticky and nowhere near ‘springy’. It took quite a bit more flour than the recipe called for to get it even remotely possibly to knead by hand.

So after a good three hour preparation and bake, and twenty minutes of cooling to settle everything in the bread, I was well past lunch time (oops), but nevertheless, fresh bread from the oven is good pretty much no matter what. It is quite a decent bread, but if you have two or three extra hours, the French bread recipe from Hamelman’s book beats this hands-down. Hamelman’s bread is much more of a savory bread that you can use for any kind of meat or vegetable, whereas Leader’s Parisian daily bread is more comfort food-ish—going nicely with butter, jam or cheese, but not so well with meat or vegetables. Its crumb is also a lot more dense than Hamelman’s French bread, and a bit too much on the salty side for my tastes.

As an afternoon cake, my wife wanted to surprise me with a lovely pear and marzipan tart (I simply adore marzipan in any shape and kind. I can eat it by the kilo in its raw form!), but once the alarm sounded for it to be done and it was being taken out of the oven, I hear a large crash, which mean I should rush into the kitchen, usually. Suffice to say, the cake did not really look like the lovely cake with pears lined up symmetrically and the batter spread carefully. It looked rather much like this…

It was quite decent, despite this accident, though.

Tags: baking, bread, cake, dessert, marzipan, white bread

Brown sugar brownies with sea salt

Sunday, March 30th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Over the past few weeks I have been taking my first few steps into perusing the huge number of food-related blogs on the web, and among other things fell into a couple of interesting food ‘happenings’ like the daring bakers who all try to make the same recipe each month and post their results, or the bit more fickle ‘browniebabe of the month’ (the month should be taken with a grain of salt as it does not seem to run that often). However, as a confessed brownie lover, I was hooked with the huge number of different brownies (many with recipes!) that were linked to from there, and I just had to try to make one of the most solid brownies I have seen to date, sporting no less than 340 grams of chocolate.

The recipe I attempted is Brown sugar brownies with French sea salt, and it is dense in all respects. To complement all the heavy ingredients, there is only 60 grams of flour to lighten it up a bit. The beginning of the recipe comes together nicely like any of the brownies I normally make. The margarine (as a substitute for butter) and chocolate mixture was delicious.

After baking it, the recipe calls for you to turn it out to cool off on a rack, but that was easier said than done, not only did the centre of the brownie stay in the roasting dish, but the cake further cracked when I pulled it out, yielding a veritable brownie crater landscape.

The ganache, in which I had to replace the cream with an oat based cream, came together nicely, but due to the fracturing of the cake I had to get it a lot more solid than it was after mixing and resting on the counter, so I had to put it in the fridge for 30–40 minutes before it was so solid that I dared smear it across the cake. And finally sprinkle it with a bit more sea salt. The ganache has a nice chocolate mousse quality to it.

The sea salt in the dough gives it a very nice touch, much like what is used in regular breads, but the sea salt on top of the brownie just does not work for me. I sprinkled a good deal less than what the recipe calls for (I guess I was a tad skeptical in advance) and even then it was much too salty. The brownie in and of itself without the sprinkled sea salt is wonderful, though, and can very much be recommended. I think I need to work on my cutting capabilities, though. My brownie pieces always turn out a bit rugged.

Tags: baking, brownies, cake, dessert

Brownies

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

So, while I am on the topic of cooking anyway, one of my favourite cakes to bake is brownies. They come in countless variations and pretty much each and every one of them tastes absolutely marvellous. I think my first infatuation with brownies is thanks to a childhood friend of mine’s mother who baked these small chocolate wonders for us to eat late in the night while we were playing role playing games. I’m still a bit sad over losing that recipe, but fortunately I have found other and likewise good recipes. I think the one that comes closest to the brownies I remember from when I was younger are the ‘simple brownies’ from Anne Wilson’s Brownies, fudges and toppings, except they don’t have any nuts in them.

The ‘simple brownies’ have a delicate, spongy chocolate taste. Just be sure not to use too bitter chocolate—anything above 75% is probably too much. Like the marzipan cake, this cake also evaporates rapidly. In fact only half the cake is left in the shot below, less than a day after it has been baked. The thing in the back is my brand new Pillivuyt square roasting dish, perfectly sized for brownies. No more oval brownies for me!

Tags: baking, brownies, cake, dessert

Toffee pie

Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 | Cooking | No Comments

One particular kind of food that we are very fond of is cakes of all sorts. The photo below shows the toffee pie, which is a regular pie dough with home-made caramel poured onto the baked dough and with a cover of meringue. Lovely.

Tags: baking, cake, dessert, pie