Dammit

Oh I just give up.  I can't make shortbread.  I had yet another try yesterday, this time using a recipe which follows something close to the classic 3-2-1 proportions but then adds a little almond essences and a little vanilla essence.  

I love the rubbing in method, finding it genuinely relaxing and purposeful.  I make mean pastry, which I put down to the fact that I have Raynaud's so my hands are always cold.  It occurs to me that this may lie at the heart of my shortbread problem.  Every time I stare at the contents of the bowl wondering how I will get the breadcrumb-like mix to become a kneadable dough without waving a magic wand.  perhaps if I had warmer hands it would loosen up the butter a bit and help it to gel.  I have tried recipes where you add liquid at this stage but the finished result just isn't short enough and loses the melt in the mouth flavour.

By my usual standards, yesterday was not actually a bad attempt.  I didn't come close to kneading it till smooth but did manage to shove it into a mass which I was then able to flatten and shape slightly on the baking tray.  Not a rolling out so much as a nudging with the knuckles.  

The end result wasn't bad.  The almond essence worked really well and it was pretty short, although unfortunately it did not cook quite through in the middle - another minute and a half would have done it.  But certainly worth a revisit.

I also had a bash at ginger nut biscuits.  This was a hugely satisfying recipe of the atmost simplicity - melt some butter and syrup together in a pan while sifting flour, cinnamon, ginger and bicarb together.  Mix it together, roll into small balls and flatten slightly on the baking tray.  15 minutes and they're done.  Sadly by this point I was up to my elbows in the rubbing in for the shortbread and, as usual, drifting away in my thoughts.

Still, on the plus side, although this particular batch had the slightly bitter taste of just-burnt baking, the kitchen still has a heavenly gingery smell and I'll be returning to the scene of the crime to make them properly tomorrow.  This time without losing track.

Demoralised by two failures in a row - one undercooked and one overcooked, perfectly edible but just not right, I bashed out a batch of failsafe chocolate chip muffins.  These are from one of those cookbooks that pre-dates the wide availability of free range, organic eggs and the rich flavour these produce was a little overpowering for the recipe, but the muffins were still light as a feather and have been disappearing at an alarming speed from the tin.  Which is good as I'll be needing that space for ginger nuts this time tomorrow.

And I really must try the shortbread just one more time with the extra 90 seconds of baking time...

Say cheese

Friends are coming for lunch tomorrow.  As ever, the house needs cleaning from top to bottom, the dog needs walking and there just isn't enough time to do everything.  A risotto will be an easy lunch tomorrow; with warm bread rolls and a tomato salad it can be done in half an hour while chatting over a glass of wine.  Pudding is a different matter, so tonight I've made a lemon cheesecake from Annie Bell's Gorgeous Cakes. 

I absolutely love this book.  It is beautifully laid out with photos that really inspire without being intimidating.  There are sections of the book I will probably never use (much though I am looking forward to being an aunt, I really can't see a stage coming when I will ever want to decorate a celebration cake with anything other than simple icing.  Piping just isn't me) but even these are fun to flick through.

The other reason I love the book is that the recipes work.  They have that wonderful sunshine feel so alien to Shropshire in January - fresh mango and passionfruit rather than sultanas and dried apricots, a promise of the summer to come.  Almond meal and coconut feature regularly and you can almost taste the moist, fruity sponges just from reading the recipe.

The cheesecake is a lovely twist on a classic.  A retro Digestive base, plenty of lemon juice and zest in with the cheese, baked till it rises and starts to firm up.  Then my favourite bit - sour cream spread across the top before it returns to the oven.  There is nothing sickly about this cheesecake, and no slick fruit topping.  It gives a fresh, zingy, sharp mouthful and will be wonderful with raspberries piled up next to it.

Now all I have to worry about is keeping our dog away from their baby.

Rolling on out

And this is what always happens. Made a Swiss roll last night then had to more or less sit on my hands to stop myself baking another. Walked the dog this morning, hit the kitchen and have now made a further Swiss roll, plus a sultana and orange cake (well, once you get in the zone...)

After looking at various recipes I started with the old standby the Dairy Book of Home Cookery. This is one of the things my husband brought to our marriage, and he swears by it. Their basic recipe was absolutely fine and pretty much standard. It led to a fairly eggy-tasting sponge but that's bound to happen with free range eggs in a recipe of this sort.

I broke away from their instructions to roll the still-warm sponge in parchment and a tea towel, leaving it to cool. I also didn't bother to measure the jam. This led to a lovely roll with no cracks but also to the jam making a bid for freedom once it was re-rolled. My husband the critic also tells me that fruit 'with lumps in' is no good for this sort of thing. The oven was a little too warm (I turned it one before starting, a mistake given how long the eggs and sugar have to be beaten for) and the shelf was too near the top (something I am terribly lazy about because our shelves don't fit very well and it can be tricky to move them). The resulting sponge was a fantastic shade of golden brown but it could probably have done with another minute for the bit that ends up on the inside of the roll.

So on the whole, I'm pretty pleased given how long it has been since I made one of these. Of course the fact that last time I was in my early teens and managed it without a moment's concern may suggest that I should just get a life.

This morning I made a chocolate roll - same recipe, oven not turned on until I was ready to add the flour and cocoa to the mixture - and it came out perfectly. Following a request for chocolate buttercream to fill it the end result is not as striking as a roll with a cream filling, but it does taste great. The buttercream is fantastically light, and with the cocoa masking the eggyness (egginess?) of the sponge this is apparently the way Swiss rolls are to be made in this house from now on.

This is always a problem. Once the tasting begins regulations start being laid down. My husband has one of those cake addictions which mean that one slice is never enough, so I know that if I wanted to keep experimenting with the plain sponge and non-lumpy jam the results would get eaten, but where's the fun in that? He'll happily contribute detailed feedback, comparing one cake to the last time the same recipe was used or even five times earlier (begging the question of why he can't tell me which of two outfits looks better when I'm going out) but knowing at the outset that it will always be a second rate cake in his eyes is off putting, given that he'll be the one who has to eat it.

While the Swiss roll was cooling in it's sausage of paper and towel, the orange and sultana cake came together. This was by the rubbing in method, which I love using. It's such a relaxing way to spend five minutes and I love the way you hit a tipping point where the stubborn lumps of butter suddenly disappear without trace, leaving a lovely warm colour to the mix.

The cake is a variation on a family fruit cake from the same book. As always with these things I put in more peel that was called for (I hate it when you can barely taste the citrus) and the result is a cake bursting with plump sultanas and zing. The chances of the Swiss rolls being eaten have just plummeted.

This is my other major frustration. It would be almost physically impossible for my husband to eat the amount of baking I could happily produce, and apparently having kids specifically so you can forcefeed them cake is frowned upon (political correctness gone mad). So no more baking for today, and nothing for it but to get the hoover out.

Well, here goes

I love baking.  I love everything about baking.  I am fond of baking trays, I get excited by cute measuring spoons, I crave cake tins in every shape and size.  I don't know much about science but I know what I like, and what I like is to take simple ingredients, mess them about a bit, wang them in the oven and have some miraculous baked item appear.  My idea of heaven is good stuff on the radio, nobody in the house and a whole afternoon to work through different recipes.  Baking relaxes me and the only downside is that the moment I have finished one recipe I want to start the next.  

I don't have a particularly sweet tooth and once I have had a quick taste of what I have baked to see if it worked I have little interest in eating more.  I have no doubt that some killjoy psychologist would have a field day with that but I can live with it.

At Christmas 2007 I wanted to make cup cakes for friends as gifts.  I looked in all my recipe books, I haunted bookshops, but found little to inspire me.  Through the joy of Google I found a little site with a simple vanilla cup cake recipe on it.  Something about the way it was written, the context it was in, made it clear that this was the recipe of a home baker with heart.  And so it proved - the best cup cake recipe I have ever tried, which also makes a wonderful Victoria sponge.  This was particularly pleasing as Victoria sponge has been one of my recurring failures.  I know all the theory for why a sponge cake would be too thin, would crack, would shrink away from the sides, would sink in the middle, would cook unevenly.  Knowing the theory and adjusting accordingly did not stop any of these things happening, occasionally and memorably all at the same time.

Having cracked the sponge, my other two problem areas are also kitchen classics.  Scones and shortbread.  I suck at both.  I keep coming back to them and trying different recipes, different techniques, different everythings but to no avail.  I am determined to master them both, but along the way to just carry on trying new recipes for all sorts of other things and to keep baking for the love of it.

I'm not a decorator and I'm too clumsy to be great at detail.  Straightforward classic baking of cookies and tarts, fruit cakes and tea breads, cheesecakes and brownies, tray bakes and shortcakes.

Last weekend, on a whim, I made a pineapple upside down cake as a last minute pudding for my father-in-law.  The last time I made one of those I must have been 13 and in home economics class.  This has got me on a nostalgia trip and after a similar time lag of 20+ years I'm going to make a Swiss roll.  This is a bigger deal than it may sound given my traditional problems with sponge cakes and of course the terrors of rolling the thing up.  So I'm off for a happy hour of looking at the various recipes I have before plunging once more into the mix.

At this moment in time I have no idea whether this blog is going to be something I stick to or not.  My intention is to keep a record for myself of which recipes I have tried, which I have loved, what has gone hideously wrong and what has been fixed.  I am unlikely to record everything I bake and may not get any further than this first post.  Either way, I'll be baking, so I for one will be happy.