Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Apple medals

Sunday, February 8th, 2009 | Cooking | No Comments

In Denmark we have a range of cakes that are called something with ‘medal’ in them – these are typically shortcrust cake layers around… something. The most traditional ‘medals’ have whipped cream in a layer between two shortcrust layers and with icing on top of the top layer.

A few ‘medals’ are actually closed as in the two shortcrust layers are glued together, typically with egg, a bit like mini-cobblers. This blog post is about one of such ‘medals’, the apple ‘medal’ – I have been unable to find a traditional English name for these cakes, so if you know it, please let me know.

The apple filling in the apple medals are mashed apples that have been cooked for a while to remove the excess moisture. A small amount of this ‘cream’ is then added to each shortcrust bottom.

Using egg to weld each cake shut, a wash of egg is applied and nuts are drizzled on top – traditionally you use almonds, but we only had hazelnuts, so I used those instead.

After baking, the cake is a tad dry, as baked shortcrust often is, but the creaminess of the apple in the interior makes up for this… mostly. (They are still a tad too dry for my tastes).

To make up for the dryness, serve with a nice portion of whipped cream and a few berries.

Tags: baking, dessert, pastry

Cinnamon loaves

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | Cooking | 3 Comments

One of the glorious things from my childhood was the sunday trip to the bakery where we got to pick our Sunday morning treat. Normally this treat was to be a single item like a rum snail, a croissant, or the like, but just once in a while I managed to sweet-talk (read: emotionally bribe) my parents into buying a cinnamon loaf. For those unfortunate enough that they haven’t come across this wonderful bread before, it is a butter and egg enriched dough that is rolled around a cinnamon-enriched remonce cream (mix of butter and sugar). For quite a few years now, I have had to pass these things by in the bakery, along with most their other treats, since I’ve been ‘fortunate’ enough to pick up lactose intolerance on the course of my life. Furthermore, we have egg allergists in the family as well, so what else was there to do than replace the butter with milk-free shortening and replace the eggs with a mix of water, oil, flour and baking powder? (We have also prepared these loaves with the egg, but there is practically no difference between replacing the egg as well).

The first part is rolling the dough into a fairly thin square, however, I can never, ever, manage a square when rolling dough like that, so it gets to be square-ish. We smear the remonce over this and roll it up nicely.

For those of you who aren’t experienced remonce-smearers, this is what too much remonce looks like (you will see why in a bit).

These three rolls are then used to carefully braid the loaf (in most home-made versions of cinnamon loaves it is just rolled into a single roll, but that does not get the authentic bakery braid).

After some careful braining and a graceful finish at each end of the braid, you get this.

Now it just needs to be placed in a form and proofed until it’s nice and wiggly.

And after being baked for half an hour, this is the oozing goodness that meets the eye (ok, normally it doesn’t ooze quite that much, but we brought it upon ourselves by using a larger portion of remonce).

Or seen in a bit larger perspective.

Now comes the time to turn out the loaves from the forms.

This was also the time I suddenly realised that I was supposed to have greased the forms.

It’s not all bad, though, as it is still great to eat out of the form, but the loaf in the background, above, is collapsed a bit due to this.

Now we only need to add the final touch to complete the masterpiece: icing.

The best part is, you do not have to wait for these loaves to cool, you can eat them warm, oozing and savor their delectable creamy consistency that is punctuated by the sugary cinnamon and the crisp and sweet crust on the top of the loaf.

It’s still as good as I remember it from my childhood.

Tags: baking, bread, dessert, pastry, sweets

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

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

Why is the rum gone?

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

So it has been a bit since I have posted any lovely baked goods that I have produced (mainly because I have been busy with other things and mostly just have baked the same breads I have already shown). One of the things you get to miss a lot when you are allergic to milk (and have had some time where this wasn’t the case) is wienerbrød or in English, danishes. This is mainly due to the fact that the sweet dough is very hard to make without butter, but not being shy for a baking challenge, I took on the dough this morning and… it was incredibly difficult to do with the much softer milk-free margarine. So much so that I wound up using a lot more flour than the recipe calls for just to make it possible to roll it flat.

One of the local wienerbrød (there are of course many, many kinds when you are in a sugar-loving nation like Denmark) is the romsnegl, or directly translated, the rum snail. It is made from the sweetened dough that you roll out flat on a flour-covered table, then you smear a mix of sugar, margarine and some other ingredients on there (it varies a bit from recipe to recipe), you then roll up the dough and cut it into thin slices that sort of look like snail houses (hence the name). Once these things are baked, you add a mix of icing sugar and rum on top of them and it tastes just awesome. However, we did not have any rum (why is all the rum gone?), so I had to improvise a bit and use water instead. It does not quite give the same flavour, but it was still pretty good.

Tags: baking, danish, dessert, pastry

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

Marzipan ring cake

Friday, January 11th, 2008 | Cooking | 1 Comment

Sugar is good, marzipan is made of sugar, so marzipan is good, marzipan ring cake is made with marzipan and powdered sugar, so that must be very good!

Well, my tastes in sugar are very refined as you might be able to tell, so with Ida out partying, what better endeavour for the evening than to bake marzipan ring cake… just not, well, in a ring. This is the fourth time I bake these within the past two weeks, and I have been meaning to take photographs of them each time, but due to their very fine quality they mysteriously evaporate almost immediately after being baked. They have now been pristinely captured in their full glory in the picture below.

Traditionally there’s a thin stripe of icing on top of the marzipan cake in the zig-zag pattern you can sort of see above. This is normally made by taking powdered sugar, mixing it with egg or hot water and then putting this mass in a plastic bag where you’ve cut off a tiny hole in the bottom that you can squeeze the icing out of. However, my icing-foo was too weak so I wound up applying the icing manually, slowly pouring it from a spoon, hence the uneven look of the icing—yes, it’s on purpose that I put the best made one in the front.

As a side-note, we had a confectioner create a marzipan cake in the shape of a basket with fruit inside it for our wedding, which was awesome! Also, many people traditionally eat marzipan ring cake (yes, in stacked rings) for weddings and on new year’s eve here in Denmark. Also, some variants come with nougat inside the marzipan cake, this does not detract from its delicacy.

Quite a lovely mass of sugary cake. Yummy.

Tags: baking, 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

Boiled sweets

Thursday, December 13th, 2007 | Cooking | No Comments

Sweets. It is the ever corrupting sugary epiphany that drives us back to their delectable temptations. Home-made boiled sweets doubly so.

Sorry about the flash reflection, it’s really hard getting these shots good (either that or I need to work on my photography skills) due to the less than ideal lighting conditions in our house in these dark winter months. We really need to figure out what lamps we’d like to get. We still haven’t gotten around to that yet and we’ve already lived here for over a year. Crikey!

Edit: Updated the post with a new photo taken with somewhat better lighting conditions. It helped tremendously, but we still need to figure out what lamps we want to have in the house, of course.

Tags: candy, dessert, sweets