New Zealand Fig and Almond Bread

It's been so long since I made the New Zealand Fig and Almond Bread I think this post will just have to be a pictorial. I can't remember too much about making it except that it wasn't too tricky. The results for me were disappointing. The flavour was nice but the texture was crumbly and dense. A nice rise and bready texture on these type of wholemeal loaves seems to elude me. I guess practice makes perfect.

Babka!

Babka! the musical. (Doesn't it sound a bit like the title of a Broadway show?) Actually I don't think I did any singing while making this (who can read and sing at the same time?) but I didn't do any swearing either. And I was singing the next morning (someone mentioned Frank Sinatra on the radio and I found myself singing 'Fly me to the moon...') when I cut the Babka to taste it again and found it was really good.

I needed something to take to work for a Harmony Day lunch this Monday. This is my favourite 'day' since in Australian workplaces harmony is primarily interpreted as sharing foods of your ancestors. For some reason, more than any other occasion, this results in some amazing spreads. Despite my complete lack of ancestral connection to Babka I was intending to offer this up as my contribution. When I tasted it on Sunday night I wasn't sure whether it would be suitable because it was more bready than cakey. The Monday morning tasting was more hopeful, hence the duet with Frank.

This is another of those recipes where I felt absolutely delighted with the results - the finished product looks so impressive (to my eyes). And I'm sure that's due to Rose's excellent instructions (particularly for yeast goods) which make the seemingly impossible, possible.

It's not a difficult recipe and it only requires the usual type of rising and waiting schedule. Just the sort of thing to fit into a quiet Sunday afternoon. The bread starts off with a sponge which sits for several hours before the other ingredients (including eggs and butter) are kneaded in.

In between the risin' an' the waitin' (now I'm onto country and Western), you can make the filling. There's a choice of flavours for the filling, but chocolate, of course, has universal appeal. By the time I made this, other Alpha Bakers had already pointed out that you needed cake crumbs for the chocolate filling. I didn't have any (and am never likely to have any stashed away for a rainy day) and I don't like the thought of buying a cake to make a cake. So I decided to use ground almonds.

The filling also uses almond paste. I wasn't sure what this meant exactly so after a brief google interlude I decided to use marzipan. Since the ground almonds wouldn't be as sweet as the cake crumbs I didn't think it would matter if the marzipan was sweeter than almond paste. The result was delicious although probably not as soft as the cake crumbs would have been.

If you have a penchant for tasting everything, including raw dough, as I do, you'll find that this dough is delicious - sweet and tasty with a lovely soft, velvety texture.

Rose gives detailed instructions for flattening out the dough then rolling it up with the filling. At one stage she admonishes the baker to take it slowly and carefully, without rushing. Sometimes I think Rose can see into my kitchen.

It all went pretty smoothly and the rolled dough fitted nicely into the baking tin. My oven temperature is still fluctuating a bit, but if I keep an eye on it I can keep it on the straight and narrow. I put foil over the Babka while it was cooking but took it off again at the end and it got a little dark. It didn't affect the top side though and, brushed with melted butter, it looker rather magnificent.

I cut the Babka that evening and it was soft and delicious but the filling fell out very easily and I was worried it might be too dry. I tried it again the next day, after it had spent night in the fridge, and the texture was soft but firmer and the filling didn't fall out. It was still completely more-ish. Fly me to the moon...

Next week we're making the Chocolate FloRo Elegance with White Chocolate Caramel Buttercream. Oh dear, buttercream.

Mini Gateaux Breton, ho hum, ho hum

Well, it was a pretty average week of baking for me. First I had ho hum results with the Bread Bible Pretzel Breads, after which I produced tasty but unimpressive looking Mini Gateaux Breton for the Alpha Bakers' Baking Bible project. Have I lost my baking mojo? Or was it something more mundane such as too much moisture in the biscuit dough? I'm not sure, but I cooked the dough in two batches, a day apart, but they both came out fluffy on the bottom. I put the second batch in some mini baking papers so at least they looked cheery. The flavour was more developed with the second batch of biscuits when the dough had been in the fridge for a day.

These were certainly quick and easy to make. The only 'complication' was the toasting of almonds before grinding them. 

The biscuits were meant to be baked in mini brioche tins (which did look very sweet) but they're difficult to find, so I used a baking tin I had in the cupboard with mini-sized shapes.

Unfortunately the bottom of the biscuits came out fluffy/crumbly rather than smoothly replicating the swirl from the bottom of the baking tin as I'd hoped. 

Next week we're baking Chocolate Hazelnut Mousse Tart.

Six steps to a Lemon Almond Cheesecake

I should say up front that the Lemon Almond Cheesecake is completely delicious and well worth the effort. But oh what an effort! It's not something to make when you're feeling tired (which I was). I had to compartmentalise this recipe to avoid being overwhelmed by the amount of work involved.

Step One: baking tin Tetris

If your oven is small like mine then you need to work out the biggest baking tin you can use to take the voluminous cheesecake batter, that will also fit into a slightly larger tin which is used as a water bath, that will all fit into your small oven. You also need to find a tin which is very slightly bigger than the cheesecake tin in which to bake the cake bottom. 

There was quite a lot of grumpy banging around in the cake tin drawer before I found the winning combination. Next cheesecake I'm buying some more tins.

Step Two: the cake bit

The light almond cake which is used as the base of the cheesecake is not too difficult but it requires toasting some almonds and then grinding them finely. It's the little steps that drive you crazy. 

I had a slight panic just before adding the eggs. I could find no weight in my ebook for the egg whites. Just when I've been trained into weighing eggs the rug (shell?) is pulled out from under my feet. Luckily Alpha Bakers Hanaa and Patricia came to my rescue with the right weight.

The good thing about this cake is that it makes two layers. Good housekeepers can use this opportunity to freeze one layer for later. I ate mine. It was delicious. And very light.

Not the best looking cake you've ever seen, but a bit of trimming got rid of the 'browner' bits. 

My gorgeous colleague asked me genuinely what the brown stripe was between the cheesecake and the cake. I had to fess up that it was a darker than desirable cake top rather than, say, a deliberate chocolate layer. 

Step three: more sour cream than you've ever seen in your life

The cheesecake batter-making part of this recipe is a bit of a blur. And my camera ran out of battery so I have nothing to remind me. I remember zesting a lot of lemons and weighing out my own body weight in cream cheese and sour cream. I also had to google 'substitutes for turbinado sugar' (again). I used golden caster sugar.

This was a truly delicious batter and there was a lot of it. I didn't add the suggested almond essence (I'm a bit scared of its potency) or lemon oil (I don't have any and the potency thing also). 

Step four: water bathing

Is this a new form of torture? It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have oven/baking tin issues. But all the same I still manage to somehow flick water on the cheesecake. Every time.

And all the foil in the world can't seem to keep out the water. The cheesecake survived despite this, although my state of mind was a little fragile by the time I took it out of the oven. And that was a little too soon perhaps, but by the time I realised there was no way I was putting the bath back together.

Oh good God, there's a step five??!!

Lemon curd glaze. I've made a a lot of this recently. I have the zombie stance standing over the pan stirring, down pat. I was so comatose by the time it thickened up, I even found myself straining it, just like the recipe says. 

And possibly it was worth it because it looked pretty smooth once I put it on the cheesecake.

Step six: almost too tired to eat

Not really. I'm never that tired.

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making Irish Cream Scones with Raspberry Butterscotch Lace Topping. I just looked at the recipe. Multiple steps!! Scones! How does Rose do it?!

Lemon and cranberry (sunburst) tart tart

The photo of the Lemon and Cranberry Tart Tart in the Baking Bible is one of the prettiest in the book, in my opinion. The tart is primarily lemon with sunbursts of red from cranberry sauce. I've been waiting to make it since the Alpha Bakers started a year and a bit ago. Needless to say I wasn't confident that my cack-handed decoration skills would achieve the same level of beauty. 

Actually when I took my mini tarts out of the oven I looked at them and thought 'yes!'. Then I checked the photo in the book and thought 'ah...no'. I hadn't reproduced the cranberry fireworks of the original. But mine were still quite pretty so I wasn't too disappointed. The tart was also delicious and the unusual combination of lemon curd and cranberry sauce is inspired. I only wish I'd used more of the cranberry in the tart.

Rose's instructions for making pastry in the food processor invariably ask the baker to pulse the butter until it's the size of small peas. My impatient hand generally pulses straight past small pea stage to minuscule crumbs. This time I slowed down and gave peas a chance. Boy, was I peas'd to see those pea-sized lumps and now my mind is at peas.

Terrible puns aside, I was pleased to be using up the bag of mega-expensive frozen cranberries I have in my freezer from a previous baking project. Until I measured out 50g. Only about 550g to go.

I need to confess that I didn't make the lemon curd this week. Before Christmas I made lemon curd for some lemon jammies biscuits I made as gifts and I had a reasonable amount left over. This is my first week back at work and I was quite relieved to have one of the tart components already made, even though it might be a bit different to Rose's recipe. Because I only had a limited amount of curd I decided to make a couple of small tarts rather than one big one.

The pastry for this tart is a lovely almond-based sweet pastry and is very soft and buttery. Unfortunately this doesn't make it easy to roll out and you can see my first disastrous attempt to roll out and fill the tart tins. Hmmm... back to the fridge.

You are in a beautiful garden... There is no pastry...

Even after a night in the fridge the pastry melted really quickly in the heat of my kitchen. I worked a bit faster for the second one and it was slightly better looking. I made 3 tart shells from the pastry but I could only fill two with curd.

Straight from the oven and even my decorations on the edges of the pastry are looking quite pretty.

Next week we're making the perennial favourite, chocolate chip cookies.

The Day of the Ischler

The name does bring to mind a sci fi film rather than biscuits. But there's nothing Triffid-like about these, and my cooking experience was apocalypse free (thankfully, after last weeks' confidence-sapping episode).

I was pleasantly surprised by how successful these biscuits were. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it's hot and humid here? (haha) I've been making Christmas biscuits for colleagues, friends and neighbours for quite a number of years. Every year I spend a happy time planning my biscuit choices and anticipating the pleasure of gift-giving, primarily choosing European-style traditional Christmas biscuits. And then every year I curse and sweat late into week nights struggling with butter laden doughs which come out of the fridge too hard to work and about 30 seconds into rolling them out, are too sticky. Sometimes the results can be less than ideal, particularly when I'm trying something new.

The Ischler came at just the right time in the Alpha Baker's schedule* for my Christmas biscuit campaign but had potential for the same sticky dough challenges. And when I made the dough, which includes butter, almonds, icing sugar and a little egg, it turned out very wet. I probably should have been a bit more careful with the amount of egg I put in (no, I couldn't be bothered weighing it). It was so wet and different from the description in the recipe, that I added a little extra flour.  It was still quite moist but I didn't want to change the proportions of ingredients too much. I packaged it up anyway and put it hopefully in the fridge.

I made these biscuits over several nights. The apricot lekvar was a simple process of soaking and cooking dried apricots, and produced a lovely dense paste.

 

When I took out the first package of dough a couple of days later I was ready to wrestle with sticky dough and spreading biscuits.  However miraculously (a Christmas miracle!?) I was able to roll the dough out quite thinly and get the cut out shapes onto the trays without tears (that's the crying kind).  I made some in a star shape for a bit of Christmas jollity.

I think the relative success with this biscuit dough is due to: the small packets of dough recommended by Rose (so the others can stay in the fridge until needed); the use of gladwrap to roll out the dough; and apparently (according to PastryGirl) the egg Rose puts in gives it more elasticity so it's easier to work with. Having suffered badly from biscuits spreading in the oven the previous year, I also made sure I put the trays back in the fridge while they were waiting their turn for the oven.

I have to say I was a bit shocked by Rose's suggestion that using up the dough scraps was optional. I had to read it twice. As I was munching on some of said scraps.

I needed to package some biscuits up for a colleague who was going on holidays early (Christmas time is our long summer holiday period here) so I whipped up the ganache (burning the chocolate slightly in my haste) and put them together with the apricot lekvar. They looked great despite my slapdash ways. The recipient thought they were delicious and asked for the recipe.

The other biscuit in the picture above is a favourite of mine with spiced fruit and almonds called Alfajores from Movida Rustica. I'm just about to bake another of my favourites - Rugelach from Rose's Christmas Cookies.

*Marie once more proves her omniscience