English Muffins

For those who are not familiar with English muffins, let me explain the difference between English and American muffins.

The English muffins is a bread product that is round in shape, fluffy in texture and dusted with semolina or polenta. It is traditionally sliced open and toasted, then buttered and eaten while still warm. For a more substantial meal, the muffin is sometimes topped with ham or smoked salmon and then with a poached egg and hollandaise sauce.

An American muffin is an oversized cupcake that you get overcharged for in Starbucks.

I and my housemate, Julie, had a lengthy “discussion” with another colleague during the week on which was the “proper” kind of muffin and which was invented first. I can confirm that the answer to both of these questions is the English muffin.

So when I fancied making something special for breakfast this weekend, it was to the humble English muffin I turned. I made eggs royale - muffins topped with smoked salmon, poached eggs and homemade hollandaise.

The muffins were excellent - fluffy inside, marked with the distinctive pale golden brown circles on the top and base and only improved by their toppings.

I used a Paul Hollywood recipe. This will produce 8 muffins.

You will need:

a 9cm straight sided biscuit cutter
300g strong white bread flour plus extra to dust
6g fast action yeast
6g salt
15g caster sugar
15g softened butter
15g polenta or semolina
1 egg
170ml milk
olive oil, for greasing

1. Put the flour in a large bowl and add the yeast to one side of the bowl and the salt on the other side. Add the sugar.

2. Stir the flour, sugar, yeast and salt together. Make a well in the middle of the mixture and add the butter, egg, milk then beat in to form a soft dough.

3. Tip onto a clean, floured work surface and knead with well floured hands for 10 minutes until smooth and elastic.

4. Roll the dough into a ball and put in an oiled bowl, Cover with clingfilm and leave for an hour until doubled in size.

5. Dust the work surface with a mixture of flour and semolina or polenta and roll out the dough to a thickness of 2.5cm. Cut out 8 muffins with the biscuit cutter and place on a tray dusted with the same flour/polenta mixture.

6. Cover the tray with clingfilm and leave to prove for 30 minutes. Close to the end of proving. heat an ungreased griddle pan over a low-medium heat. When the muffins finish proving, cook them in the pan, flipping after 5 minutes to cook on the other side until each side is cooked to a pale golden brown.

7. To serve, slice open, toast and butter the muffins, add your desired topping and eat.

Happy baking!

Ellie
xxx

Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Icing

I love eating carrot cake. It's moist, lightly spiced, has a great texture and certainly doesn't make me feel like I'm eating a vegetable.

Not that I mind eating vegetables, being a vegetarian and all.

The only problem is, I hate making carrot cake. Grating five to six carrots, quite probably chipping a nail as I do so, is not my idea of fun.

Luckily for everyone else (except my housemate, who will probably be finding carrot gratings for weeks), I can be easily persuaded to make carrot cake.

I made this cake for my friend and colleague Karolina's birthday.

You will need:

For the cake:
225g self-raising flour
250ml sunflower oil
250g carrots, peeled and coarsely grated

½ tsp nutmeg

½ tsp cinnamon

large pinch of salt

225g soft light brown sugar

3 large eggs 

2 cake tins of the same size

a handful of pecan nuts, roughly chopped

For the icing:

225g cream cheese (such as Philadelphia)

25g icing sugar

50g butter at room temperature

1. Grease and line the cake tins and preheat the oven to 180C. Beat together the brown sugar and oil. Beat in the eggs one by one.

2. Mix together the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg and fold into the sugar mixture. 

3. Add the grated carrots and fold into the cake mixture.

4. Divide the mixture between the two tins and bake for 30 to 40 minutes. If a knife inserted into the centre of a cake comes out clean it is ready. 

5. Leave the sponges to cool. Beat together the cream cheese, icing sugar and butter.

6. When the sponges are completely cool, spread the icing over the top of each sponge and stack one on top of the other.

And there you have it. 

Bye,

Ellie
xxx

Lime and Ginger Cheesecake with Mango Coulis

Today I am sharing with you a cheesecake recipe.

I have always been a bit suspicious of the cheesecake. I like cheese and I like cake, but bring the two together and you get something that doesn't really resemble either very much.

But then again, cheesecake is the perfect cake for someone who isn't a great lover of the usual variety. It's rich, but has a fresh quality about it, brought by the cheese, and you can easily cut through the richness and sweetness of the filling with a fruity topping.

This is what I've done here. This cheesecake recipe cake came about one year when my dad asked me to make one for his birthday and requested a cheesecake that was "a bit different".

After I repeatedly watched a remix of Masterchef clips about cheesecake (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfeyUGZt8nk), I got down to work on this recipe, adding some tropical flavours for a classic baked cheesecake with a twist.

The first time I made this cheesecake I had a few hiccups along the way but this time I like to think I had learnt from these mistakes and it went off with barely a hiccup.

I took the cheesecake along to a picnic, where it was greatly appreciated.

You will need:

For the cheesy bit:

900g full fat cream cheese
115g soured cream
2 eggs
115g caster sugar )
grated rind of one lime
½ tsp vanilla extract

3 tbsp cornflour

For the base:

250g ginger biscuits (I used ginger nuts)

150g melted butter

For the coulis:

2 ripe mangoes
1 tsp agar agar
juice of half a lime

1. Preheat the oven to 180C and grease and line a 24cm spring form cake tin. Crush your ginger nuts (alright, stop giggling).

2. Mix the ginger nuts with the melted butter and press them into the base of the cake tin. Bake for ten minutes then place on a wire rack to cool.

3. Turn the oven up to 200C. Mix together the cornflour and caster sugar in a bowl.

4. Add the cream cheese and beat until fully combined. Add the eggs, vanilla extract and lime rind and beat again.

5. Bake for 40-45 minutes, until the top is slightly browned and the filling is set round the edges. Then turn the oven off and stand cake for as long as possible while the oven cools. Do NOT open the oven door, even for a cheeky peek. This stops the cheesecake from cracking too much on top.

6. Take the cheesecake out of the oven and put in the fridge to set properly.

7. While the cheesecake is chilling (getting cold, that is, not relaxing with a G&T), peel and stone the mangoes, blend in a processor and then force through a sieve with a spoon into a small pan. Be persistent - it may seem like you won't get much mango through, but keep at it and you should be able to get it all but a lump small enough to fit in a tablespoon through. Make sure you scrape any remaining mango puree off the bottom of the sieve. 

8. Add the lime juice and agar agar to the mango puree and heat. stirring regularly until it starts to spit and bubble. Take the mixture off the heat and pour it gradually on top of your cheesecake, spreading it all over the surface of the cheesecake as you do so. If the cheesecake has not cracked, you may not need to use all the coulis, so set aside the rest in a jug for pouring. If it has cracked, you may want to pour extra in the middle, to hide the cracks. If you keep the cheesecake horizontal this should not be a problem, as the cheesecake should be slightly bowed in the middle.

8. Refrigerate the cheesecake until serving. Do NOT, as I once did, tilt it whilst looking for space in the fridge, as you will tip mango coulis off the side. Clear a space in the fridge, leave the door open and then and only then go and get your cheesecake and place it carefully in the fridge. Treat it like a baby or housepet, that, for some inexplicable reason, needs to be refrigerated.

There you go, a beautiful, fruity cheesecake.

Happy baking!

Ellie

xxx

Almond Croissants

I've been experimenting with puff pastry this week. On the whole it went really well. I made salmon en croute and it was delicious, but I'm not completely sold on the recipe. I used a recipe that used half bread flour, and the pastry was almost too crisp, it was hard to cut through the base. 

So I'm not going to give you that recipe. Instead I'm going to give you this awesome recipe I learnt at the weekend. It's not strictly baking, but it does involve baked goods. 

As most of you will probably know, it was Gay Pride in London this weekend. My flatmate had some friends to stay and after a late night on Friday, I woke up early feeling like something had died in my mouth, which is inevitable when beer and I get together. I naturally decided that what I needed to take the taste away before we headed out to watch the parade was an almond croissant and some good strong coffee and that I might as well make enough for everyone.

A few minutes and a quick Google on my phone later I had a recipe for the baked treats and let me tell you, they were so easy to make, I couldn't believe they tasted so good.

This recipe takes  very little time at all and the results are impressive. Brew some coffee, whip up these almond croissants and you can serve up an awesome breakfast and look like a domestic god/goddess with very little effort.

One of the best things about this recipe is it uses stale croissants. Come on! You bought too many croissants? No problem. Almond those bad boys up. Instant awesome.

You will need:

8 one or two day-old croissants (croissants that have previously been frozen also good)

3 tbsp flaked almonds

icing sugar, for dusting

2 large eggs

250g ground almonds

115g butter

120g caster sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 200C. Mix together the ground almonds and sugar in a bowl. Beat in the butter and then the eggs and whisk until fully incorporated.

2. Slice the croissants in half horizontally and spread a good 2 tbsp of the almond paste on each bottom half. Put the top half back on and spread a 1 tbsp on top.

3. Sprinkle the almonds over the croissants and bake for 15 minutes. Dust liberally with icing sugar and serve.

That is it. Can you believe you just made something that looks so good so easily? Go you. 

In other news, Pride 2015 was really fun and we all looked fabulous. Here's a picture of me sporting the rainbow flag on my cheek and pouting, because I'm like that.

Stay fabulous,

Ellie

xxx 

Lemon Drizzle Ring

I know, I've been a very begrudging blogger indeed lately. It's now been over a month since my last post, which is not good enough.

I have baked in that time - in fact I've made three batches of scones, but I already have a recipe for scones buried somewhere in my 2014 blog posts, so I didn't want to repeat myself.

So I've waited until I've baked something new and here it is: a lemon drizzle ring.

For some reason, lemon drizzle is a very British kind of cake. Only the other day, at my office (which is very international) someone made a comment to me along the lines of how much the British love their lemon drizzle.

In the middle of the British summer, there's just something so very right about lemon drizzle cake. It's like strawberries and cream, tea (or Pimm's) in the garden, Wimbledon and rain. Summer's not complete without it.

However, this time I've put a little twist on the old classic by baking it in a bundt tin which I dusted liberally with polenta to stop the cake from sticking. So I've added two European influences - polenta from Italy and bundt cake from Germany.

I adapted the Hummingbird bakery's lemon loaf recipe to make this cake, pictured below:

Will serve many many people. But awkward to cut, as I found out the other day.

You will need:
zest and juice of 2 large, unwaxed lemons
320g caster sugar
350g plain flour
3 eggs
250g melted butter, plus extra to grease tin
100g icing sugar
250ml milk
1½ tsp baking powder
½ cup of dry polenta (you may not have to use it all)

bundt tin (if you do not have a bundt tin, use a lined loaf tin and omit polenta)

1. Preheat the oven to 170C and use some of the melted butter to grease the bundt tin well. Dust the tin with polenta, rotating it to make sure there is polenta in every little crevice.

2. Beat together the eggs, sugar and lemon zest in a large bowl.

3. Weigh the flour and baking powder out and add a third to the egg and sugar mixture and fold in. Add a third of the milk and mix in. Repeat until all the flour and milk is used up.

4. Fold in the melted butter, pour into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour 15 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Turn out the cake onto a wire rack over a baking tray to cool.

5. Pour half the lemon juice over the cake, so that the excess runs into the baking tray below. Beat the icing sugar into the other half of the juice and once the cake has cooled, drizzle it across the cake.

Lovely moist lemon cake, topped with a deliciously sharp-but-sweet icing.

Amazing with a nice cup of tea.

Happy Baking!

Ellie
xxx

Peanut Butter Brownies

It's been a long time since my last blog post and I'm sorry about that. I really have been very busy.

Not only have I had a birthday (I'm in my early twenties and that's as specific as I'm prepared to be), but I have also moved house and run in my first ever vaguely competitive event.

Pretty much since my birthday, I have spent every minute thinking about the 10km that I finally ran on Sunday. I avoided alcohol all week (no mean feat, for me), chewed my way through endless slices of peanut butter toast, drank water like it was going out of fashion and planned everything from my pre-run breakfast to my route to the race.

After all that, the feeling of crossing the finish line was amazing, despite this photo, which would have you believe it sucked:

I then enjoyed a day of eating, drinking, wandering about complaining that my legs hurt and refusing to remove my medal.

When I woke up on Monday, my legs REALLY hurt. Selfishly, my friend Elena had refused to massage my calves the night before and now fhey had complefely seized up. I thought I was going to have to start a Royal Society for the Protection of Ellie's Legs, or RSPEL for short.

Vaguely remembering something about protein repairing muscles, I found some peanut butter and prepared to apply it liberally to my achy thighs and calves.

Luckily, my sister, who knows a lot more about these kind of things, intervened. She explained that protein in the form of peanut butter does not find its way to your sore muscles by way of osmosis through your skin - you have to actually eat it.

Understandably, I was disappointed. Who doesn't want to smear peanut butter all over themselves given the slightest excuse? Except people with peanut allergies, of course.

But I soon decided that if I couldn't cover myself in peanut butter, the next best thing was to eat it in the form of chocolate brownies. What could be better than the combination of salty, savoury, peanuts contrasting with sweet, rich, dark chocolate?

This recipe is adapted from the Hummingbird Bakery's chocolate brownie recipe and makes about 12-16 brownies, depending on how greedy you are.

You will need:

200g dark chocolate
175g crunchy peanut butter (preferably no added sugar)
325g caster sugar
130g flour
3 eggs
25g roasted salted peanuts
90g white chocolate
1 deep rectangular baking tray, lined with greaseproof paper

1. Preheat the oven to 170C and set the dark chocolate and peanut butter in a bowl above a barely simmering pan of water. Leave until melted, stirring every now and then.

2. Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the caster sugar.

3. Stir in the flour.

4. Beat in the eggs and spread the mixture evenly in the tray. Scatter over the peanuts and press them in gently. Bake for 30-35 minutes.

5. Remove the tray from the oven and melt the white chocolate in a bowl over a barely simmering pan of water. Either spoon it into a piping bag or use a teaspoon to drizzle it all over your tray of brownies.

6. Go all Jackson Pollock on your brownies.

You're done. Delicious, protein-rich brownies. The food of champions. Totally worth every twinge of pain, every time I thought I was going to puke on the track and every burst of speed I had to put on to overtake someone I'd been behind for two laps.

Bye,

Ellie
xxx

Easter Egg Custard Tart

If you are lying on the sofa near-comatose after an Easter Sunday dinner, the remains of an Easter egg smeared around your mouth, this is not the blog for you.

Put the phone or tablet down, step away from the computer and go slump in front of Poldark (other television programs are available).

I do not specialise in light desserts and I saw no reason to make an exception for Easter. So here it is:

Egg custard tart, spiced with nutmeg and decorated with a chocolate nest filled with chocolate eggs.

I had planned to use mini eggs but had to buy some different chocolate eggs as the shops had run out. You could use any kind of chocolate eggs - foil wrapped or otherwise.

This is adapted from several different recipes and the tart is filled with a baked custard, but should be chilled before serving. Will serve at least 8 and should serve more, unless you are all very hungry.

You will need:

For the pastry:
165g plain flour
25g ground almonds
120g chilled unsalted butter, in cubes
55g caster sugar
1 egg
30cm tart tin (recipe also makes 2x20cm pastry cases)

For the egg custard:
3 egg yolks
250g whole milk
1 tbsp cornflour
half a freshly grated nutmeg

For decoration:
100g plain chocolate
1 handful small chocolate eggs
an upturned dessert bowl, with the base wrapped in cling film
piping bag (optional)

1. Mix together the ground almonds and flour, then add the cubed butter.

2. Rub the butter into the dry ingredients with your fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs.

3. Mix the caster sugar into the mixture.

4. Mix the egg in with your hand to form a soft dough, then knead into a ball, wrap with cling film and refrigerate for 30 minutes. After chilling, roll out the dough and use to line the tart tin.

5. Trim away any excess pastry with a sharp knife and use a piece of spare dough to press the pastry into every corner. Return to the fridge and preheat the oven to 200C.

6. Make the custard by whisking together the egg yolks, caster sugar and cornflour.

7. Bring the whole milk to the boil in a small saucepan, then pour into the custard mixture, whisking all the time to stop the egg yolks from scrambling. Return to the saucepan and whisk over a low heat until the mixture thickens and the whisk leaves traces in it. Pour into the pastry case and sprinkle over the nutmeg.

8. Bake the tart for 30-45 minutes until the custard has domed slightly but still wobbles a little in the middle. If you are worried the pastry is browning too much, cover it in foil and lower the temperature to 180C.

9. While the tart is baking, break the chocolate up and set it in a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water until it melts, stirring occasionally. When the chocolate has melted spoon it into a piping bag, or use a teaspoon, and pipe it in tight spirals onto the base of the cling film wrapped bowl. Then pipe or drizzle lines outwards like the spokes of a bicycle. Put the bowl into the fridge for the chocolate to set.

10. Once the custard tart has baked and been chilled, invert the cling film wrapped bowl and carefully remove the chocolate nest, then peel away the cling film. Place on top of the tart, fill with chocolate eggs and serve immediately.

And if that has turned your stomach after a day of chocolate punctuated only by a roast dinner and short walk, then I'm sorry, but you were warned.

Happy Easter, hope you had an eggcellent day and that this cracking blog post only makes it egg-stra special.

Sorry,

Ellie

xxx