Araxi Lemon Tart - another Alpha Baker paean to mixing bowls

I really should look up paean to check it means what I think it means. Whatever, we did use an awful lot of mixing bowls again. Despite all the washing up, this tart was pretty straightforward and pretty delicious too.

At first I couldn't remember whether I'd already made the pastry or not. And it wasn't because my dementia was playing up again. It's because Rose's pastry methods don't vary much (weigh butter, cut up and refrigerate; weigh flour and whisk with salt...etc) and I was remembering the biscuit dough I made last week. No matter, because it was no bother to make except for zesting the lemons (which I find a bit annoying). And it was really delicious dough - a definite 10 on the raw dough scale.

Since this bake-through is coming to an end very soon I've been thinking about the things I've learnt through the experience. Patching together my holey pastry case calmly and serenely I realised that I haven't learnt to stop making the same mistakes over and over; or to miraculously change personality and become more painstaking. In fact I've learnt to perfect those mistakes - so I know just how to deal with them and am confident that the finished product will turn out to a standard I will be happy with - most of the time.

This time I perfectly botched filling the pastry case and had to patch it together...again.

I don't like wasting perfectly good food to blind bake pastry but I'd cleaned out the pantry recently and cavalierly thrown out my 'blind baking chickpeas'. Now I have 'blind baking rice and chickpeas'. I really should get some pastry weights.

The tart filling is also easy-peasy to make although requiring multiple bowls and, yes, a sieve as well. It's only eggs, sugar and lemon juice mixed with whipped cream. You're meant to leave it in the fridge for 30 minutes to separate. I put mine in the fridge and five minutes later this is what the mixture looked like. That was separated enough for me and my impatience.

My experience of baking is that a lot of time is spent preventing mixtures from separating, not encouraging them to do so. So my question is, was this recipe a mistake, in a good way, like the story of tarte tatin, which burnt on the stove but actually turned out to be a great success? 

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making Brandy Snap Cannolis. Oh dear, I suspect this might turn out to be a humidity-led fail.

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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?!

Renee Fleming Golden Chiffon Cake

This week is a rest week for the Alpha Bakers (because we've done A LOT of baking). I chose to make it a catch-up week because I don't like to miss out on trying cakes (I missed baking this cake when it was scheduled at the end of last year) and plus it looked pretty delicious. It's the Renee Fleming Golden Chiffon, which is a lemon chiffon cake served with lemon curd cream. It's also meant to be sprinkled with some lemony dust but I miscalculated and ran out of lemons to zest, so no fairy dust for me.

This cake was incredibly soft and light and, served with the lemon curd cream, was absolutely delicious. I'll be making this again very soon. Rose dedicated this cake to her favourite soprano, Renee Fleming. I have to admit I wasn't familiar with her before this cake, but was able to appreciate her beautiful voice courtesy of YouTube. I can see why Rose is a fan.

This cake is made in a very similar way to the other light cakes in The Baking Bible. A mix of flour, sugar, lemon zest, egg yolks, oil and water are whipped together until thickened, and then the beaten egg whites are folded in. It's meant to have lemon oil but I didn't have any so I put some lemon juice in instead. I thought the finished cake was lemony enough with the juice and the zest. 

I considered cutting down the sugar since I found the Pavarotti cake a bit sweet. Then I panicked and put it back in because I thought it might ruin the structure of the cake, and structure is all with chiffon cakes. I feared ending up with a collapsed mess. 

The recipe instructs us to use a high sided springform tin but I have this reasonably expensive angel cake tin which I'd like to get my money's worth out of, so I used that. It's also custom made for balancing upside down, which you need to do when cooling this cake. (the cake, that is, not the baker). When I took the photo I didn't realise the bunny was peeking at me from behind the tin.

The cake turned out looking very nice and it didn't fall out of the tin when I cooled it upside down, which is always a relief. I forgot to take any photos of the lemon curd cream process. It is a very stiff lemon curd which is beaten into whipped cream. This is a fantastic recipe just by itself. And, oh so delicious!

This was also a great recipe because I got to use my new angel cake cutter. This has to be one of the most unnecessary kitchen tools ever invented. I'm not sure who did invent this (did they have a lot of time on their hands?) and I've never seen it used or sold in Australia. But there's nothing wrong with a bit of inexpensive frivolity and I've had it on my wish list ever since I saw it on another Alpha Baker's post (sorry I can't remember who). I was lucky enough to get a gift voucher for Christmas and promptly ordered this and a rotary apple peeler (also pretty cheap) that Patricia from ButterYum recommended. The reasoning behind the cutter is that the cake is so delicate a knife would squash it when you cut a slice. The sharp tines of the cutter loosen the cake and then you can gently separate the slice. It makes a fluffy but slightly ragged cut.

Next week the Alpha Bakers are all back from our break and baking Lemon Almond Cheesecake.

Lemony jammie deliciousness

This week is all about lemony deliciousness with the Lemon Jammies biscuits from the Baking Bible. I missed these a few weeks ago when the Alpha Bakers tested them out but I was really keen to make them since I love lemony flavours. So it was lucky that a catch up week turned up while I still had all the lemons I bought but didn't get to use. 

And I wasn't disappointed. These biscuits are plain butter biscuits flavoured with lemon zest and stuck together with lemon curd. I can't stress how delicious these are - I loved them and so did my testers. I'll definitely be making these again. I wasn't even put off by the fiddlyness of cutting out and sticking together.

The recipe starts with two tablespoons of lemon zest - that took a whole lot of lemons.

There was a heavenly scent when I opened the food processor after whizzing the sugar and lemon zest together. The recipe is simple to make in the processor, you just add the butter to the sugar/zest mixture then pulse in the flour.

The dough straight out of the food processor is crumbly but is easily pressed together through the plastic wrap. This dough is up in the top ten for tasty raw doughs.

It really is good to divide the dough into smaller amounts and to roll it out slightly before you rest it in the fridge. That way the dough pieces are in the right shape for rolling later and you can control the temperature of the dough once you start rolling and cutting. Thanks Rose and my fellow Alpha Bakers for these tips.

I used a recipe for lemon curd from Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion. Her recipes are very reliable and always delicious. The lemon curd was no exception. It looks orange in the photo although it was really a deep yellow - the egg yolks were very deep orange.

It's very satisfying to line the biscuits up neatly and it helps to check my rather cavalier shape cutting system. I was pretty happy that we're in the dry season now so the humidity is much lower. This makes the dough easier to deal with and the cook a lot happier, so biscuit making is much calmer all round. 

I used my Christmas biscuit cutter which has a removable middle cutter, so centring the round was not a problem. Happy days.

The advantage of making these after my fellow Alpha Bakers is that I can learn by their experiences. I decided to use a plain cut out for the middle which meant that there was minimal effort in lining up the biscuit shapes when sticking them together.

Some of them turned out slightly oval :) but it wasn't too noticeable and frankly lemon curd cures all ills, including slightly skew-whiff biscuit shapes.

Next week we're making Chocolate Oriolos.  mmmmmm chocolate...

Delicious Lemon Posset Shortcakes

This week for the Alpha Bakers it's Lemon Posset Shortcakes. Posset, it appears, is an olde worlde (non-gelatin) set fruit cream and it's paired with a sponge cake that's moistened with lemon syrup and glazed. If I'd read the recipe by myself I would never have chosen to make it. It has multiple, and at first glance, inexplicable steps and you only end up with six little cakes. It also involves making a old fashioned sponge/genoise mixture without any added raising agent, which always has potential for disaster.

HOWEVER since I have promised faithfully to bake along with the Alpha Bakers I gave it a go. It turned out, of course, to be fairly simple and really quite explicable. And the finished product was so very delicious.

These are the cake ingredients; plain flour doctored with a little cornflour to lower the gluten, caster sugar, butter, eggs and vanilla.  I probably would have added some lemon zest but I hadn't been shopping for the posset ingredients at that point, so no lemons.

I was a little nervous about the cake part of the recipe, sponge cake having a bit of a terrifying reputation. 

First you heat the butter to separate the milk solids and make beurre noisette. This gives the butter a lovely nutty taste. It's one of those processes where you have the heat low and stare at the saucepan anxiously for ages, glancing away only to look at the recipe again to see if there are any more clues as to success (why is failure so immediately obvious?).

We're looking for dark brown (not burnt) milk solids in amongst the foam. Not sure I can see that...

But it will do. The butter tastes nice so I call it a success.

Then on to the more nerve wracking part. Combining the eggs and sugar and heating them over a bain marie. 

At this point in an old fashioned sponge cake, you would keep whisking over heat until the egg mixture ballooned to the 'ribbon stage'. Those cooks must have had super arm muscles. Well thank goodness for modern technology, we just whisk the egg mixture until it's lukewarm and then transfer to the stand mixer to do the rest.

As Alpha Baker, Marie mentioned in her post this week, there really is nothing better that watching eggs whisk into something entirely different. And with sugar it becomes a silky, voluminous pillow. 

Once you've quadrupled your egg mixture, you hold your breath and fold in the flour and then the butter. I tried out the fold setting on my mixer but I think it might be just as easy to do that step myself.

I was in such a hurry to get these into the oven without losing the 'airiness' that I didn't get any pre-oven photos. I used a friand cake tin because shortcake tins are unknown to Darwin (as is shortcake) and I decided the expense was too high to order online. And Rose suggested you could cut out the little 'holes' for the lemon posset, so that was all the permission I needed to make do.

I left them in for the full 20 minutes although I think I could have taken them out before then as they were just a touch dry. Luckily all that syrup and posset meant that didn't matter.

I did try a cake by itself and it had a lovely flavour from the butter. I was tempted briefly to ditch the lemon posset idea and just sandwich them with cream and raspberry jam. 

I cut reasonably deep pockets for the posset so I was able to fashion myself a cooks treat of lemon posset 'trifle'. 

There was a lot of waiting between stages in the recipe but I'm never inclined to wait so I whipped up the lemon syrup (very easy) and brushed it on.

Then not long after I brushed on some heated, sieved apricot jam. It was meant to be apple jelly but neither Darwin nor I had heard of that, so apricot jam it was. I was hoping it didn't overpower the lemon flavour. 

I had been wondering why all this brushing of the cake with different mixtures but once I started making the recipe I realised that the cake needed something to keep it moist and also to seal the posset mixture in its little pocket. The only change I would have made would be to add in some lemon liqueur at some stage. I think a bit of alcohol would elevate these little cakes into dinner party territory, which is probably the only time I would go to the trouble of making multiple little desserts like these.

There's no before or during photos for my lemon posset making, only after (below). It was late, I was tired and just wanted to get them finished. It seemed very easy since you just heat the cream and add it to a syrup made from lemon juice and sugar. I'm not sure mine set exactly as it should have but then I didn't really give it a chance. The aforementioned impatience to finish meant I cut short the waiting time on every stage. I only gave it two to three hours to set and it was good enough to spoon onto the cakes at that stage. I didn't mind if it sank in and soaked the cakes. In fact if it turned into one big floating lemon posset cake-island type desert I wouldn't have minded. Although not what Rose had intended, presumably. 

I found the instructions about multiple measuring jugs and moving things around a bit confusing. In fact I think Rose is wildly overestimating the number of glass measuring jugs the average home cook owns. From my Baking Bible experiences thus far I think I can safely advise that one should have a measuring jug and sieve on standby at all times. (I may have to add a set to my cyclone kit)

At the back of the photo below you can see my little pot of cake cut outs with lemon posset. Yum. 

I had a few more spoonful's of 'leftover' posset out of the bowl before it dawned on me that it was just lemon juice, sugar and cream that I was downing so liberally. 

Yum.

They could have done with some sprinkled decoration to cover the slightly messy filling. Rose suggested making lemon fairy dust (or something like that) but I didn't have the energy. I wasn't taking these anywhere special so it wasn't necessary.

These little cakes were lovely. I used lemons rather than Meyer lemons (Darwin...) and the taste was creamy but piquant and light. I'd like to try making a whole cake with the lemon posset in the middle which would be less fuss and just as delicious.

Next week is hamantaschen, a sweet made for Purim.