Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Forest berry slices

Saturday, October 9th, 2010 | Cooking | No Comments

There is this small cake that is a staple at almost any Danish bakery, the raspberry slice. While it is small and not terribly fancy compared to a lot of other cakes, it has a rather religious following of people who simply cannot do without it. At the basic level it’s two thin layers of baked shortcrust pastry on top of each other, separated with a layer of raspberry jam and decorated with layer of glacé icing and hundreds and thousands. But for some reason, a bite of this unseemly cake can compete with a lot of fancier cakes.

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).

Tags: baking, cake, pastry

Croissants

Saturday, May 16th, 2009 | Cooking | No Comments

Between having taken up a new job and having a baby daughter there is practically no time left to do anything, and blogging has been prioritised rather low in the little time there has been, and baking only slightly more than that, so it has actually been several months since I have been able to find time to bake anything. So, the day that I actually found time to bake had to be used to its fullest with something non-trivial, and one of the things I have missed dearly has been some of the folded butter doughs like wienerbrød (Danish pastry) and croissants.

The dough has to be rolled out to a rectangle and be fairly thin, then you add a block of butter (or margarine in my case), fold the sides over the margarine, roll it out and make a single fold. Then you refrigerate it for 30 minutes, roll, fold, refrigerate, roll, fold, refrigerate, and then you shape. I would’ve liked to get some photos of the margarine work, but from previous experience everything gets easily ruined when working with margarine if you pause overly long, since it is a lot softer than the butter that is usually used. So we skip forward to shaping the croissants.

Since the margarine is so soft I have had to add more flour to keep it from leaking everywhere, making the dough a good deal firmer than it is supposed to be. At least they are croissant-shaped, but they will most likely be somewhat more dense than what I had hoped for.

Sure enough, not the light flaky croissant you get at a bakery, but a tad heavier, albeit still decent, croissant. They weren’t all bad, though, about 25 of these disappeared within a few hours.

Tags: baking, pastry

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

Butter poppy seed rolls

Saturday, October 4th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

These rolls go by a couple of different names in Danish: tebirkes, smørbirkes or Københavnerbirkes, and it seems that no one really agrees on how to make them. They also have no official translation to English, so this was the closest I could dream up. In the traditional bakeries near Copenhagen, most kinds are filled with remonce, but most bakeries will also have savoury kinds without the remonce. The recipe I’ve found is a typical home-baking recipe from Denmark using a full package of fresh baker’s yeast (50 grams), which means that it’s quickly done, has little flavour and mostly only taste good warm out of the oven. However, the rich butter dough (which I’ve replaced with margarine) does taste awesome fresh out of the oven. The day after, however, it is hard to stomach.

It’s a very easy thing to make: basically you just throw together some flour, butter, egg, salt and yeast and presto, you have the dough after some kneading. Brush with eggs, fold twice and brush with eggs again and add some poppy seeds and this is what you have. The lighting sucks in the photos, I’m afraid, as I made them late in the evening and our artificial lighting in the kitchen is fairly lacking.

After a relatively quick proofing and bake they turn out a tad more voluminous. In the professional bakery versions the layers are usually somewhat more visible and there’s even a hole showing through the sides of it. No such thing here.

Cutting it up it shows a very dense crumb, which is heavy with butter and egg. Very good warm, otherwise… not.

Tags: baking, pastry

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