Henrietta and the White Chocolate (no Peppermint) Christmas Cake

No peppermint was harmed in the making of this cake. I'd like to try the proper pepperminty version at a later date but at this point in time I thought it might be difficult to market to my current limited clientele of two parents, a cat and six chickens*. Also I made a half recipe of this because it's just after Christmas and frankly no one I know needs any extra cake. The cake itself with just vanilla flavouring is very nice and even though I botched the buttercream, it tasted lovely and I used it as filling rather than icing.

*I need to get back to work because my colleagues will try anything...several times, if required.

Making this cake is quick and easy, although since I'm still in Tassie I had to wait around while the butter softened. At home I only have to take it out of the fridge for a minute and it's at room temperature. 

This is another of Rose's recipes where you mix odd ingredients together to get funny looking mixes - the small bowl with the whisk has egg whites, vanilla and milk - quite a (temporarily) unattractive combination.

The white chocolate custard is brought to you courtesy of Henrietta and friends and their delicious eggs. The girls are big fans of Christmas, just like me, and for similar reasons. Christmas is a scraps bonanza, their top favourites this year being ham fat and Christmas pudding (a sad baking failure due to lack of suet). They're a competitive lot when it comes to food, as you can see. You need to watch out for your toes when the frenzy begins.

You can see how yellow the egg yolks are in the white chocolate custard below. The recipe says to test the temp with an instant thermometer (very good advice) but the toffee thermometer I found was about as instant as dial-up internet.

A not-so-perfect looking cake. It's quite freckly, plus it has a distinct hill on one side despite my efforts to smooth out the batter before I baked it.

I wasn't going to make the white chocolate custard into buttercream because it's not my favourite.  I thought I might add some whipped cream instead and just use it as a mousse-like filling for the cake.  However my mother pointed out there was no problem since she was going to take it for church morning tea and I wasn't going to be eating it anyway (hmmm...a casting vote for the buttercream option). It was hard to argue with that logic so I whipped up the butter and added the custard. It didn't look that good and I think I may have over whipped it. I thought vaguely about looking up ways to fix buttercream but holiday-itis won out and I forgot to care.

'How's the serenity?' Who can worry about cake or icing with this beauty to admire?

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making Lemon and Cranberry Tart Tart. If I remember rightly this is a spectacular looking tart - as photographed in the Baking Bible I mean. I'm not promising anything here.

Happy Christmas all!

Summer holidays and the start of Cranberry Christmas Bread...*and finished

So, poor old phylliscaroline has been a bit lonely for a few weeks while I struggled through the traditional pre-Christmas end of year work, social and biscuit-making frenzy. Then I suffered through the traditional holiday earache. Okay that's not a tradition, but it did mean that I spent a lot of time in bed with a hot water bottle on my ear, and missed making two pies (*and a cake as well) with the Alpha Bakers. I've come South for Christmas with family again this year so at least while I was sick I was surrounded by the beauty of my parent's garden and some beautiful summer weather. 

And this is as far as I've got with the Cranberry Christmas bread. Yes I'm only at the beginning biga stage, staring hopefully at the starter, looking for movement. (And now that I'm away from it, I must say one thing about the humidity of Darwin is that you never have to worry about whether the room is warm enough for fermenting yeast.) I'm working with different ingredients in an unfamiliar kitchen so I guess we'll see how it goes. I'll update the post once I've baked the bread, hopefully tomorrow afternoon.

Update* 

It was quite a challenge to get this finished in between watching Star Wars, last minute shopping and Christmas Eve dinner preparations. But I managed to follow the steps...

Et voila! It may be a bit dry (probably better tomorrow) but very nice with blue cheese. It will be a nice addition to the cheese plate for Christmas lunch.

Next week the Alpha Bakers are cooking White Christmas Peppermint cake.

Splodgy Spritz Butter Cookies

My Alpha Baker project for this week, the Butter Spritz Cookies, came out looking very pretty if a little splodgy. I think the splodginess is due to the fact I should have refrigerated them before I baked them. I was lead astray from my hard-learnt Principles of Baking in High Heat and Humidity by the fact that these are so quick and easy to make and the dough is very well-behaved. 

Somehow this didn't dampen my enjoyment of these biscuits, both making and eating. The flavour is very nice, with a distinct almond taste, and the texture is soft with a slight crunch. If I was going to start a rating scale for Christmas biscuits (and why wouldn't I) these would be a 7 out of 10 for ease of baking and aesthetics, only losing marks for being a little plain in flavour (I enjoy the spice that comes with a lot of Christmas goodies but other may see plainness as a positive).

The only thing I wasn't too keen on for this recipe was the glace cherries which I grudgingly bought. I always pick them off but you do need some colour and shine to make the biscuits look a bit interesting (i.e. Christmassy). Happy days though, as I was strolling the aisles of the supermarket I spotted not one but two different types of jelly tots (one from the UK, one Australian version). I bought them both, a move which really heralds the start of my annual campaign of Christmas excess and general overkill. They do bring down the tone of the biscuits a bit (to something a bit more childish), but they taste a lot nicer that the cherries. Guess who's getting glace cherries in their stocking? (hello Mum).

Piping bag or ancient hand-me-down biscuit press? This is the type of big philosophical question we Alpha Bakers have to face week in, week out. And the answer is...biscuit press.

I tried the piping bag first (you can see the cute little test-biscuit below) but the biscuit came out so small and then my $2.99 piping bag started expelling dough from the sides, so I gave up. I got out a biscuit press which came from either my grandmother or great aunt, which I have never used.

The biscuit press took a little while to work out. You can't see too clearly in the photo but the biscuit closest to the camera is enormous with decreasing size as you move away around the baking sheet. I put these back in the dough pile and started again.

The first tray was pretty comical looking. Pressed too close to the tray, too far away from the tray, double press. I tried it all. But it was a lot of fun and the dough was very easy to deal with. I could have scooped them back in and started again but I wanted to see what shape the different models baked into. And how the different jelly tots held up in the oven.

*Phew* much more evenly sized. I started to get the hang of it. This is when I should have put them in the fridge.

The third tray - evenly sized with sparkles!

Now I'm off to the kitchen shop to see if I can find a modern biscuit press and a better piping bag.

Next week we're making Pumpkin Pecan Pie, which is what I said last week, but this week it's really true. See you then.

And Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends for Thursday!

The start of Christmas baking? Hazelnut praline cookies

The Alpha Bakers are making biscuits this week - Hazelnut Praline Cookies to be exact. I have to be honest, baking biscuits doesn't excite me too much unless it's directly associated with Christmas. (Because everything to do with Christmas is more fun.) I'm always happy to eat biscuits, of course. 

There's not a lot for me to complain about with these biscuits though. They were quick and easy to make as long as you don't fluff the toffee making (not this time) and factor in refrigerator time. Actually I find time required for cooling or rising often makes it easier to fit baking around the rest of my life.

It's impossible not to like biscuits which are made up of three quarters praline. I may have cooked the first batch a bit too long since I found them a little bit too dry. I have some more dough in the fridge so I'll try cooking the next biscuits for less than 15 minutes. I think shorter baking time would bring out the flavour of the praline more. And if I considered making these for Christmas I might go to the trouble of half dipping them in chocolate to really fancy them up.

I enjoyed this recipe also because I got to use one of my favourite kitchen equipment purchases for the year. (I keep meaning to do a round up post on all my new stuff - maybe at the end of the year I'll get to it.) Rose's penchant for minuscule measurements (2/18ths of a teaspoon anyone?) meant I was in need of extra measuring spoons. I found a set which measure amounts such as a tad, a smidgen and a pinch (1/16th) which I used for the salt in this recipe.

Oh, I didn't mention that you're meant to spend time boiling and skinning the large amount of hazelnuts in this recipe. If I had had to do that there would be a lot more complaining in this post. As it was I found some blanched hazelnuts at my local shop (luckily they don't realise I would be willing to pay almost any price for them). I managed to make a small amount of toffee without incident, to pour onto the toasted hazelnuts to make the praline. The praline was so delicious I ate a shameful amount of the unused portion with a spoon.

It was simple to mix the biscuit dough ingredients up to a wet paste, which firmed up in the fridge.

The biscuit dough was very forgiving, even in the heat (ha, bet you thought I wasn't going to mention the weather this week). I much prefer rolling little balls than rolling out dough and cutting shapes - it's so much less stressful. I also prefer it because I never weigh the individual balls of dough even though this is suggested by Rose. I like to think hell will freeze over before I find myself weighing tiny pieces of dough but I guess you never know what another year with Rose and the Alpha Bakers will bring.

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making Pumpkin Pecan Pie which is very timely for our US contingent celebrating Thanksgiving.

The most delicious strudelly biscuit

Do not wait. Do not think. Do not stop. Go straight home and make these. You may want to stop for some ice cream to eat with them but that's the only diversion you should make. These are seriously delicious (not really biscuits and not really strudel) and you do not want to miss out. If you've read my other posts you won't be surprised to learn I did NOT wait the recommended 6 hours after baking to try these. I don't think I even made the 6 minute mark. And I just kept on 'trying' them. Eventually I rushed some over to my neighbour, just so I could truthfully say I hadn't eaten them all myself.

These are the rather prosaically named (for Rose) Cookie Strudel from the Baking Bible. I'm not sure I would have chosen to bake them, if left to my own devices, because the picture doesn't do justice to the flavour (how could it?!) plus it's always a bit trying to make this kind of pastry in the heat. I love Rose's rugelach but they always end up looking like they fell out of the oven when I make them at Christmas. Of course I've learnt some new skills over the last (almost) year; in particular the benefits of refrigerating dough/biscuits at every stage to help combat the effects of the heat and humidity.

Actually you might be slightly misled by my 'do not stop' advice since you have to wait a number of hours for the pastry dough to firm up in the fridge before you can finish these. And if you live in a very warm climate like Darwin you need to refrigerate during the shaping and before the baking too.

You can see that my dough came out very wet. It looks like cake batter almost. It was quite tasty but not really rating highly on the delicious scale for raw dough. 

It was a miracle that (after overnight in the fridge) that wet dough was able to be rolled out (using plentiful amounts of flour) into a thin rectangle (with some emergency refrigeration in between).

The scant filling of walnuts, currants and cinnamon on top of apricot jam makes this a fairly cheap biscuit/dessert to make. 

Now that my workmates have discovered phylliscaroline there are no baking secrets anymore and I fear I may have to make a batch for them to avoid outrage and retribution for not sharing. I might need to make it double batch. Surely I couldn't eat a double batch myself before I got to work...?

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making (the long winded) Marble in Reverse with Custom Rose Blend Ganache Glaze.

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...

Golden not-so-Orange Panettone

Another endurance test from Rose this week. She's a hard task mistress, no doubt about it. This week's recipe required the Alpha Bakers to map out a campaign that a three star general would be proud of, with the cooking starting one week in advance; not to mention special training for the Alpha Bakers' fridge-muscles (open-bowl in-close, open-bowl out-close, and repeat).

This week's recipe is the Italian Christmas treat, Panettone; in this case Golden Orange Panettone. The Baking Bible version has orange peel, golden raisins, Triple Sec and orange oil. I replaced the candied orange peel (eeeww) and Triple Sec with espresso coffee and Kahlua. There aren't that many common-or-garden variety foods I really dislike but glace orange and lemon peel is one of them. I used Kahlua because that's what the shop had in their stock of tiny bottles and the espresso was the natural complement to that.

Special requirements for this bread include a panettone baking paper, golden raisins (see below) and Gold Medal flour. I guess I could have ordered them via the interwebs but I thought I'd make do this week having (over) spent on baking paraphernalia in the post-Christmas period.

As an aside, in cooking through the Baking Bible I've been pondering the choices an author has to make about the audience they write for. No doubt the broader your audience (and the more geographically diverse) the more difficult it must be to write a recipe that is generally successful. The biggest hurdle is probably the flour specifications. But there is also the difference in measures. Can you believe that an Australian tablespoon is 20ml as opposed to the UK/US 15ml; and an Australian cup is 250 ml?  (I mean, who decided that?!) Lucky most things are able to be weighed. I have spent some time looking at protein levels in flours for this bake-along but I imagine a lot of people would just use what they have in the cupboard. I have to say despite these challenges, my impression is that Rose does seem to fool-proof her recipes through the techniques she specifies (so a fool from any nation can make them :-) ).

I only spent three days making this if you don't count the two I spent looking in the fridge to see how things were going. The first task is to make a biga six hours and three days before the next step. This is just flour, water and yeast mixed together, left to ferment for six hours and then refrigerated for three days (or two and a bit if you get sick of waiting). I had to pop home from work in my lunch hour to fit in the six hour fermenting time. I do love a yeast recipe and this one was no exception. I love both the lacy texture and the springy sheen of the live yeasty dough. The biga was quite a stiff dough but I trusted it was going to turn out all right and was relieved to see it bubbling away.

Three (or two) days later you combine the now sticky biga with water, flour, more yeast and the first two of the five egg yolks in this recipe. With all those egg yolks and quite a bit of butter it's a pretty rich bread. Then you add more flour and yeast to the top of this mix and wait for it to bubble up again.

Finally you add the rest of the ingredients (golden syrup, butter, egg yolks and the alcohol and espresso) to get a dough with a lovely caramel tan. It's pretty sticky at this stage and it's hard to imagine it's going to turn itself into anything as solid as bread. It did let itself be made into a rectangle however with the aid of some dusted flour (spot the new tools).

Then the dried fruit is added into the dough and kneaded in slightly. You can see in the picture below that I haven't used golden raisins. We don't have golden raisins in our island state. AND I thought, after googling this a while ago, that I had it sorted that golden raisins meant sultanas (which are brown not golden but who am I to question Google) in our language. UNTIL one day I saw a packet of golden raisins in the supermarket (and they were golden not brown). Anyway I skirted the issue and used currants because I had some in the fridge and I like them best out of the grape variety of dried fruit. As I mentioned above no candied orange peel sullied this dough.

When I came to look at my photos for this post I found an awful lot of dough in various, slightly confusing stages of rise (or fall). So... dough goes up.... dough does down... dough goes in the fridge... It was gratifyingly successful at this stage (my indicator of success is that the dough rises, which is not technically correct probably but ignorance is bliss). I also did a couple of business folds somewhere in this time but have no photos.

I'm quite proud of my handiwork with a DIY baking paper lining for the tin. I did the second to last rise in a bowl because it's just easier for the lazy baker than putting it in a plastic bag. I just tipped it out of the bowl gently and was quite pleased with the success of this. I shaped it and put it in the tin for the FINAL rise.

Look, isn't she lovely? So shiny and full of life. I butchered a cross into her top with scissors (Rose said to).

My oven is still not fixed so I baked this in my new convection microwave (all my appliances have given up the ghost).  Unfortunately the oven is not that high so when I put it in the dough was already close to touching the oven ceiling. I was so focused on making the panettone in the traditional high loaf I somehow couldn't convince myself to put it in a wider and lower tin. This of course meant that the top was overcooked, even with a cap of foil, and didn't rise with the promise it showed when I put it into the oven. So it was a qualified success.

I was pretty pleased with it despite the crunchy top half. The bottom half was soft with a caramel-y flavour from the Kahlua and espresso. I do like panettone (although I've only ever had commercial varieties before now) but I don't find it really special. While I really enjoyed the process I'm not sure I'd put in all the effort and all those egg yolks for the result. I'd rather make kouigns amann. Yum.

Next week is a biscuit recipe - gingersnaps, which should be a snap...

Almond Coffee Crisps

I love Christmas time for many reasons, many of them related to childhood nostalgia I suspect, but also for the opportunities for baking and cooking special dishes. These biscuits fall squarely into the special category, being quite unusual in texture and flavour.

This post will have to be short and sweet (haha) since I'm away from home and working from my iPad. I made these biscuits a week or so ago but Christmas travel and general busy-ness got in the way of posting about them.

This recipe calls for instant coffee powder.  I couldn't find the recommended brand but Google recommended a similar one I could find in the supermarket. Unfortunately it wasn't powdery so I decided in the pursuit of accuracy to whiz it into a powder.

The dough is made by grinding almonds into a meal and adding it to creamed butter and sugar. It's a fairly simple process although my dough came out fairly wet. I was going to say that I added a little bit more flour to it but actually in all the hecticness I can't remember if I did or not.

I refrigerated the dough as instructed but I could have left it for longer since it was pretty sticky when I got it out to roll out into balls. I pressed on under time restrictions and it wasn't too messy to roll into balls. The flattening was a bit trickier, with the little disks sticking to my hand, the glass I used to flatten them, my finger....etc. I used a bit of water to stop it sticking to the glass but I wouldn't recommend it since some of the biscuits became 'water damaged'.

Happily most of them came out quite well. And I dusted the first few with coffee powder when they came out of the oven as the recipe instructs. I then tased one which did not go well. I thought they were terribly bitter and that I must have done something wrong (sigh). I didn't brush any more with coffee powder and when I tried one the next dayit was lovely. I think the difference was a nights' sleep and no coffee powder on my fingers(!), as well as leaving the coffee powder off the top.

These are lovely biscuits, thin and crispy with a lovely coffee flavour. I had to put them in the freezer but I think they'd be lovely in an Eton Mess type desert with cream and fruit. I look forward to trying it when I'm back from hols.

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate this time of year and best wishes to everyone for the new year.