So, it is on shaking ground that I break with dogma and not only replace the raspberry jam with forest berry jam (we were out of raspberries, sorry!), and use margarine instead of butter (so us poor lactose intolerant people won’t suffer the worse, apart from gaining weight). Of course, we didn’t really have any jam at all, so we had to make that first from a blend of forest berries that we had in our freezer, along with some fresh Danish apples to provide thickening.

Allow to cook in with a smidgen of sugar.

Once that’s reduced a lot more, we can apply it to the baked shortcrust pastry slices.

And now, with jam, glacé icing and hundreds and thousands ready, just smear, smear, smear (carefully, though, so the slices don’t break apart).

Once the jam is applied on two of the slices, the remaining two are carefully placed on top. If you are wondering, this is what too much jam between the layers looks like.

So, just add the glacé icing and the hundreds and thousands, carefully cut into mouth-sized bites (provided you have extremely large mouths).

You can see how the jam is spilling out a tad too much. But even if we broke dogma, they had that raspberry slice feel and taste to it that is always great to bite into. Our daughter applied the hundreds and thousands; according to dogma, they should only be placed in a small but generous strip in the centre of the slice, but that was a bit too much to explain to a two year old who got to sprinkle them across the slices (I know, it’s almost sacrilegious).

Today when my daughter woke up from her midday sleep, she resolutely pointed to one of my baking books, flipped around for a short while then resolutely pointed to a recipe for honey top cupcakes and making them could only go too slow (she was trying to get her apron fastened almost before we managed to get into the kitchen).

With such a scrumptious base, how can you go wrong? In case you wonder, we like to bake—probably also more than is good for us, but that is another story—so we have a decent stock of cupcake forms, here nicely added to our metal form to lessen the clean-up mess.

Our daughter diligently helped mix flour, spices, egg, wheat-based cream and the sugar-honey-margarine base above into a coherent dough that we (more or less successfully) managed to move into the forms.

This just leaves a bit of baking to be done for a while.

And, of course, no cupcake is complete without some form of icing. A nice lemon icing with red fruit colour. Nothing too pompous so our darling daughter won’t die of sugar shock.

It’s awesome to be baking the whole family together, in case anyone should be wondering.

With cinnamon, ginger and ground clove these cupcakes taste very Christmasy (basically the same things we stuff into our Christmas cookies over here). So, with a chance of beating even the store advertisements… have yourself a merry little Christmas.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!