MM8 - Crunchy crusted citrus scones - International scone week

What, you mean you hadn't heard about this?!? It's international scone week!!! (Check out Celia's blog for links to some of last year's participants) And I couldn't be happier because I love scones. I'm sure I've said this before, but never mind, now I've said it again. They're just such a good portable snack - not too sweet, not too rich (well, until you slather with butter/clotted cream/jam), they're quick and easy to make and bake and they're all round fantastic. I've tried out a few recipes for scones, but tend to stick to my old tried and true recipe (1lb self raising flour, 4oz butter, 2oz sugar, 3.5oz raisins) which I know by heart, in pounds and ounces because I've been making them since I can remember and I started to cook in pounds and ounces! I've been known to go to the freezer after dinner, realise that I'm all out of scones and turn the oven back on to knock out a quick batch to satisfy my craving...

So it takes some recipe to trump my T&T. Well, I think this one has done it and done it with style. And what's most annoying is that I've known of the recipe for years. I remember reading the recipe in the April 2002 edition of BBC Good Food and wondering when I could make them. I was at uni, without a reliable oven and then by the time I arrived home I'd forgotten about them. Over the years they've popped in and out of my memory, always being pushed down by something else that looked more exciting, but I have finally, finally managed to get round to making them. I'm so cross - nine years of missing out on these delicious treats. If you're a fan of scones make sure to make these soon, don't make my mistake and wait for years before trying them.

As you can see, I've already made them three times! The recipe is here, and I followed it exactly, well almost. I subbed lemon for orange. The first time I made them I decided to make a large round, as instructed in the recipe. Mine caught a little because I was unsure as to whether it was cooked through and left it in a little too long. It didn't taste burnt though, contrary to appearance. I did divide it into eight rather than six though, which was a good decision as the eight were still quite large! The next time I decided to use a cutter and got 12 rounds. There is a lot to be said for making one large round though - it's much quicker to shape the dough, and the end result seemed to be moister than the smaller ones. Don't forget to sprinkle with sugar - that crunch is one of the lovely things about them!

Having made this discovery, when I made the third batch I switched back to one large round. For the third making, I chose fresh cherries and vanilla although I can't quite remember how much of either I added, I'd guess about 100g fresh cherries, stoned and halved and a tsp of vanilla. Wow were they delicious - the vanilla and cherry combo was just gorgeous - the dough being vanilla flavoured and punctuated by juicy bursts of cherry. Can you tell I'm in love?

This is such a good recipe - these are the moistest scones I've ever had, and the lemon flavour permeates them so well. I can imagine that they'd be great served as suggested with clotted cream and lemon curd, but actually, they're moist enough to be utterly delicious on their own - no added butter or other embellishment needed. And I still have some in my freezer ..... yum!!!

This is the next in my series of 'Marked and Made' recipes - those that have been languishing too long in the 'to make' pile. Jac, over at Tinned Tomatoes has recently revived the Bookmarked Recipes (founded by Ruth at Ruth's Kitchen Experiments) event and so I'm submitting it to that too. Have you finally got round to making something that's been in the pile for far too long?  (And don't pretend you don't have a pile, you know exactly what I'm talking about!!!) Check out the round up too!

MM7 - Lemon butter cake

This is the fourth and final post in my mini series on baked goods using condensed milk - the others are double chocolate blueberry cookies, brown sugar chocolate cake and blueberry and cranberry condensed milk oat cookies. It's also another in my 'Marked and Made' series - all of the things that I've had bookmarked either physically or on the t'internet as being things that I should really get round to making at some point. That point has arrived!

Dan Lepard (who else!) first published this recipe for Lemon butter cake in August 2006. Wow, I really am digging into the archives aren't I!

I followed the recipe pretty much as given here, but I don't think I had quite enough lemon juice - I think that some of the volume of my lemon juice was made up with lemon segment bits, so next time I'd add the full amount of lemon juice for even more tang. I can't link to Dan Lepard's forums on this cake at the moment because he's doing maintenance on them (hoping to have them back soon, as they're an invaluable source of hints and tips!) but Suelle at Mainly Baking has made this cake (before she started blogging!), and mentioned that she had trouble whisking the egg white to the required consistency. I was unsure what to do about this, but decided to go with Dan's instructions as I had an electric hand whisk to do the hard work (which Suelle didn't have) and I think that they turned out ok - see pic below:

I haven't done much work with egg whites, but these are fairly shiny and probably soft peak stage? I'm not sure if that is correct, but the cake seemed to work well. The only other change I made was to cook the cake a little longer (if you look carefully you can see it's a little overdone on the edges) and I omitted the lemon juice in the icing topping. I really wish that I had used it though, because I think it really would have added to the overall lemon-yness of the cake.

Such a lovely, lovely cake. I wish I hadn't waited this long to try it for the first time. I will certainly be making this one again. The cake has a close crumb, and wasn't really what I was expecting - I suppose I was expecting it to be similar to the lemon syrup cake I often make (a Nigella recipe) although there's no reason to think it would be. The lemon flavour is beautiful - not absolutely in-your-face, but very definite and almost builds in intensity as you chew the cake, going back for one mouthful after another. I think that a lemon icing would have just finished this off and I'm very annoyed at myself for having not used lemon juice in my icing. A real success, and a great use of condensed milk! I think that overall, the two cakes I made with condensed milk were more successful than the cookies, but then I'm not great at making cookies I guess!

Maslin Soda Bread

The trouble with starting to revisit lists of things you meant to make, and things you meant to do, is that there was obviously a reason for the item to go onto the list in the first place. When I was making the brown sugar chocolate cake, I was browsing through the many pages in Dan Lepard's forum, specifically the board where the Guardian recipes are posted. The brown sugar chocolate cake was a few pages in, and it took me a while to find it, taking me past lots of the other recipes that I really did mean to make, but just haven't got round to. This is one of them.

I recently found myself with a freezer full of cake and fruit, but no bread (how does that happen?!) and with lunchtime rapidly approaching (and being rather too lazy to leave the house for the shops) I thought it would be a good plan to test this recipe out now! I have to confess to not entirely following Dan's recipe. I looked at all the different flours I had lining up in the cupboard and decided to do a bit of a mix and match. I kept in the rye flour and the amount of oatmeal, but mine was medium rather than fine. For the 350g wholemeal flour I used a mixture of 100g strong white flour, 100g barley flour and 150g wholemeal spelt flour. I kept the proportions of everything else the same.

I decided to follow Joanna's idea (on the forum discussion) of making the bread in a tin, and used an 8" deep, loose based tin, well greased with butter and then covered with more oatmeal - the intention being to have a slightly crunchy crust to the bread when it was baked, and hopefully to stop it sticking.

So my ingredients list is as follows:
75g rye flour (mine was wholemeal rye)
75g medium oatmeal
100g strong white flour
100g barley flour
150g wholemeal spelt flour
14g dark muscovado sugar
1tsp salt
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
43g (don't ask!) butter
150g fat free greek yogurt
300g water

The method is simplicity itself. For Dan's original version see here, but because it's so simple I'll reproduce my version of it here.

- Preheat the oven to gas 6 1/2 / 210C. Grease an 8"/20cm deep round tin, either springform or loose based (mine was loose based) with butter and then generously dust with either flour, or in my case, more medium oatmeal.

- Place all dry ingredients in a roomy bowl and mix well.

- Rub in the butter until no lumps remain.

- Combine the yogurt and water in a jug and then pour the mixture into the dry mixture.

- Mix well with a spoon, and then dollop into the prepared tin. The mixture is very sticky, and I didn't attempt to knead it at all. This isn't a traditional bread dough.

- Place in oven and bake for 35 minutes (I left mine 50, but it was probably done after 45, and my oven was cooler than Dan specified).

- Remove as soon as possible and allow to cool on a wire rack.

This is absolutely divine fresh and still slightly warm, which is how I enjoyed it, with a roast tomato and goat's cheese salad. I would thoroughly recommend this recipe, I've previously made Delia Smith's recipe and although I like it, this trumps it without question. (I've tried to find a link to Delia's recipe, but it doesn't seem to be on her site, it's not the soured cream soda bread recipe there. The original is from her How to Cook Book 1, published about 10-15 years ago). This maslin soda bread is surprisingly light - the crust is chewy and crunchy from the oatmeal on the edges but the centre is delightlyfully soft and moist, without being too crumbly or dry at all. I know that a quick style non-yeasted bread like this will never have the complexity or sourness of other loaves, but it does have quite a distinct and interesting flavour, due to all the different flours, and a slight sweetness almost, possibly from the interaction of the yogurt with the flours. Writing that seems wrong, I would expect yogurt to add tang, but to me, soda bread always tastes slightly sweet.

Oh, just writing about it is making me want to go and grab another piece to butter and enjoy! I'm very glad that I made this long bookmarked recipe, it will definitely replace Delia's recipe as my go-to for soda bread from now on!

Edited to add: I'm also going to submit this to 'Bookmarked Recipes'. This event was originally founded by Ruth of Ruth's Kitchen Experiments, and has recently been revived by Jac at Tinned Tomatoes, as a vegetarian event.

MM5 - Brown Sugar Chocolate Cake

This is the second of my 'things to do with a tin of condensed milk' mini series. The first can be found here - double chocolate blueberry cookies. It's also resurrecting a series I started a very long time ago, 'Marked and Made' - things that have, for one reason or another, been languishing on the 'to bake' list for far too long. I guess it's just my way of acknowledging having finally made them. Interestingly, I don't actually make all that much that I've bookmarked - I seem to be far more influenced by things that I've seen recently and I suppose that if I haven't made something pretty soon after I've seen it, the chances are it'll have to wait far longer than I ever expect.

This brown sugar chocolate cake is a case in point. Dan Lepard first published the recipe for it in November 2005 - five and a half years ago..... even I hadn't realised it had been that long! I think I also avoided making it because there had been an extensive discussion on Dan's message boards about people who had had spectacular failures with this cake. I hate a failure, and often won't give something a go if I think it won't turn out well. But Dan's careful step-by-step photo guide gave me more confidence and when it was successful, people raved about it. I was still a little nervous though.

I decided that I would use half and half self raising and plain flour, and a very scant tsp of baking powder. I left the cake for 50 minutes initially, which I think has slightly overcooked it, and I was slightly worried that the top would taste burnt as it looked very dark. As you can see from the picture above, my cake had obviously risen too much in the oven, and had already collapsed back on itself by the time I took it out of the oven. Thankfully, it didn't sink any more while it was cooling, so I ended up with a flat, but not sunken cake. Given the history of the recipe I wasn't expecting peaks or massive rising, so I was a happy bunny indeed!

And what made me even happier was the divine taste of this cake. The 'burnt' top I thought I saw, wasn't burnt at all, for which I was very thankful! The first thing to say is that it is extremely delicate, but I'm sure that actually this is part of what makes the cake so delicious. It is a moist, chocolatey, melt in the mouth loaf with a beautiful soft crumb and I wouldn't hesitate to make it again. Next time I think I'll use all plain flour. Suelle at Mainly Baking has also made this recently (which was another prod to my memory that I ought to make it) and wasn't 100% about it, having made a couple of changes but I thought my relatively unchanged version was truly delicious. I think it would be great with vanilla icecream and a chocolate pouring sauce too, but it was fabulous at tea break time. My colleagues were really pleased with it too - I gave it to some colleagues who rarely get my baking these days and they were very happy!!!

MM4 Marmalade buttons

I've been meaning to make these for ages now, the combination of bitter marmalade, chewy peel and crunchy sugar against the background of a buttery melting biscuit was irresistible. Hmm, how did I manage to wait so long to make them?

It was partly thanks to Foodycat for bumping the thread discussing these little biscuits on Dan's forums that reminded me of their existence, in combination with an inventory of the cupboards that revealed more marmalade than one person can reasonably be expected to consume in a lifetime... ok, I exaggerate slightly but you get the picture. For this batch of buttons I chose 'Three fruit marmalade' boasting lemons, oranges and grapefruit. I complemented this by choosing lemon and orange peel to cut up. This would be my only proviso for making these; chopped mixed peel is bitter and nasty, mixed peel that you chop yourself is chewy and citrussy and sweet and delicious. It's more than worth the stickiness and time (little) that you will expend to chop your own peel for a far superior result. You know you want to...

I made the recipe exactly as specified here and used semolina rather than ground rice, because my semolina was open and the ground rice wasn't. Mine took 20 minutes to become golden brown. There are a few links to other people who've made them on the link above and Foodycat's version is here.

Were they worth the wait? Yes and no. They were delicious - buttery and crumbly, with a good orangey flavour from the marmalade and peel. But they were a little soft for my taste - I prefer my biscuits with more crunch than these gave. I don't feel that I could have cooked them any more though, as the more well-done ones were verging on overdone. However, I really did like the peel in them and the marmalade, so I might try applying this to a different base biscuit recipe. I was also quite pleased with the crunchy demerara crust. I have a feeling that this would have been even more successful if I'd read the instructions in the recipe that say to wet the dough log before adding the sugar to help it stick. D'oh!

Colleagues were pleased but I'll have to experiment further to find my favourite biscuit.

MM2 - Chocolate Shortbread

Who doesn't like shortbread? Crumbly, buttery and utterly delicious it's a fine treat in its original state. Add chocolate, both cocoa powder and chunks and you'll get something even better!

This recipe is one from a fairly recently acquired book; Easy Baking by Linda Collister. There are so many amazing looking recipes in this book that it's already bristling with post it notes marking the pages of the recipes I want to make. But you have to start somewhere and here seemed as good a place as any. The recipe has also been published online in the Independent (in 1998!!!! years before I started baking with any degree of seriousness!) and is about halfway down the page, here. Ignore the ounce measurements, they've forgotten some vital spaces and / signs!!! I decided to add more chocolate to my version and some semolina for a little added crunch, and I resized it for a smaller tin. My version is given below.

Chocolate shortbread

Ingredients

150g softened butter

75g golden caster sugar

15g cocoa powder

15g fine semolina

195g plain flour

45g dark chocolate (72% cocoa solids is my preference), chopped

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease and base line an 8"/20cm round tin.

- Beat butter in a bowl until very soft and creamy. Add the sugar and beat again until well combined.

- Add cocoa powder, semolina and flour and mix well until no flour remains visible.

- Mix in the chocolate then tip into the tin and press until smooth.

- Bake for 20-25 minutes. Do not allow to brown or it will be bitter.

- Remove from the oven, sprinkle with more caster sugar, mark into 12 and allow to cool completely in the tin.

This was lovely, but I wasn't sure that the middle was cooked properly even though I probably left it in for nearer to 30 minutes. Lovely and buttery and crumbly though, and the added chocolate chunks had a delicious bitter contrast to the main sweet body of the biscuit. One to be repeated but just cooked a little longer I think.

MM1 - Divine chocolate ginger cake

I had a bit of a disaster with this one, but I'm sharing it anyway because I think that it could easily be rectified. The recipe comes from the book Divine - Heavenly Chocolate Recipes with a heart by Linda Collister, which I've had for ages and not managed to bake anything from until now. I have a lot of cookbooks that I've never made anything from (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this!) so I think this cake should be the beginning of a new series on the blog, the MM posts. Marked and Made. I think I should credit Chele at Chocolate Teapot for inspiring this idea, with her Cookbook Challenge posts; I've always thought that this was a really good idea, so thanks Chele! I don't know how frequent these posts will be though....

Anyway, back to the cake. I was really pleased to be able to find this cake already on the internet here, so I can share the recipe with you. I'm sure that if you've been following for a while you'll have realised that I love all things chocolate and ginger is one of my all time favorite flavours so a combination of the two in cake seemed perfect to me. I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to make this recipe, as it was really good! I made one change only; to use dark rather than milk chocolate because I'm that way inclined! and I love the contrast of sweet cake and bitter chocolate (and I have loads of dark chocolate in my cupboard and no milk!). I used Divine brand chocolate and whilst searching the internet for the recipe I looked at their website and spotted lots more delicious looking recipes, as well as lots of info about Divine chocolate which I'm definitely going to be looking at in detail!

As I mentioned at the beginning though, I had a slight disaster. The recipe in my book specifies a 450g loaf tin, which I duly used. The mixture overflowed. Luckily I had thought to put a baking tray on the shelf below in the oven before I put this in (the amount of mixture in the tin made me suspicious that it wasn't all going to stay put during baking!) so I didn't get the nasty burning smell as cake mixture hits the oven floor that I hate! The cake also took longer than the specified 45-50 minutes to cook, so it's rather brown on the top. A little too brown really. However I think that next time if I use a 900g loaf tin it'll be much better - the cake will cook more quickly and not overflow. And I really hope there will be a next time, because this was one delicious cake. Large hunks of chewy crystallised ginger and big chunks of bitter chocolate made this a very more-ish cake.

You can see the waterfall effect on this side of the cake where the mixture rolled off in the oven. I bet people would pay good money to get that effect deliberately and I've managed it anyway..... or perhaps not! Anyway, make the cake, it's moist and gingery and chocolatey and good. And one of my colleagues asked for the recipe because she liked it so much. Yay!