A bready update

50% wholemeal spelt soured cream rolls

There haven't been very many bready posts recently at all (aside from the not-cross buns!). This is not because I'm not eating much bread, far from it. However I am often a creature of habit and when I find a recipe that works for me I tend to stick with it. Recently this has been Dan Lepard's Sour Cream Loaf. Not as a loaf though - as bread rolls. I've blogged about the recipe before and the original can be found on the Guardian website here.

Of recent times I have made 12 rolls from the recipe amounts, which suits me well as a lunchtime sized roll. I've also played with the flour a little too. At the top of the post you can see a batch I made using half wholemeal spelt flour, half standard strong white flour. These were good, and it's sometimes good to have a change from all white too.

Unbleached white soured cream rolls

Above you can see a batch made with organic, unbleached strong white flour. I bought this from a supermarket, but the producer is Gilchester Organics. Their website has areas for learning about their products and also recipes. (This is not a sponsored post - I'm just talking about the flour I bought). The flour is a creamy colour and produces bread that it neither white nor wholemeal. I think in terms of comparison the nutrient profile is probably similar to white flour but the flavour is different. The photo above is not the best - I thought I had a better one from one of the more recent batches I have baked, but it seems not - my recent batches look more like the top picture.  The crumb is close and even textured and very soft - delicious. And of course, using the soured cream bread recipe means that the whole house smells of warm cream while you are baking, which just cannot be a bad thing!

Small unbleached white soured cream loaf

So, what have you been baking recently? Anything I should try to lift me out of this (rather pleasant ) bread baking rut?

Treacle and Greengage Muscovado Muffins

When I saw that Dan Lepard's column in the Guardian a few weeks ago was all about baking with treacle I quickly investigated further - I love treacle and baking with it. So far from being a slightly 'weird' ingredient as Dan proposes, I was keen to see what he was suggesting we could use this gorgeously sticky substance for now. Both recipes appealed, but the Treacle and Caraway Apple muffins sounded amazing. Unfortunately I discovered fairly recently that I'm not really a fan of the flavour of caraway in baked goods. Perhaps it's something I'll come to appreciate more (as I get older, or should that be wiser?) but at the moment, caraway is no-go. Easy enough to leave out though. I also had a glut of greengages and decided to use those instead of the specified apples - there will be time enough for apples later in the autumn and I wanted to make the most of the last of the seasonal fruit available now. I changed the proportion of flours too, and have noted my changes here.

Treacle and Greengage Muscovado Muffins
Ingredients (for method, follow the link highlighted in the text above to Dan's recipe in the Guardian)
100g butter, melted
40g sunflower oil
50g black treacle
175g light muscovado sugar
3 eggs
2tsp vanilla extract
200g plain flour
100g wholemeal spelt flour
2tsp baking powder
around 6 small(ish) greengages, chopped into about 8 each
Oats to scatter

Since the recipe specifies scattering the muffins with flaked almonds before baking I racked my brains for a suitable alternative and came up with oats - not quite as crunchy (in fact not nearly as crunchy) but provided a little visual appeal to the finished article and a bit of a contrast of textures. I think next time I'd be a little more generous with the oats. I also made 18 muffins out of this mixture, which was perfect for me - 12 would have made very large muffins for my requirements.

These were immensely popular at work, and rightly so. The combination of flavours - the treacle, vanilla and then the soft delicate plum were great together. They were beautifully moist and the greengages worked superbly in place of apples, becoming deliciously soft and squashy. I'm sure that any soft plum would work well (although I'm not sure about those ones that are bullet hard and available year round). The treacle flavour was definitely there, adding depth and background, but if you're not a treacle fan, it wasn't overwhelming. I gave my version of the recipe to an interested colleague. I hope she enjoys them as much as the rest of us did. I'll definitely make these again and would recommend you make them too! 

Spelt Raisin Breakfast Loaf

It's been a while since I last made a fruit loaf for my breakfast - I've been eating hot cross buns for a good while now. Delicious but sadly all gone. I haven't baked with spelt for a while either, and find it a good flour to use for breakfast breads as it doesn't seem to have the slight bitterness that wholemeal flour sometimes has.

A mixture of wholegrain spelt and strong white flour ensures that the loaf rises well and keeps its shape, yet still has the goodness of wholemeal flour contained in it. Although this is a fruit containing loaf, it isn't sweet - I don't really want too much added sugar for my breakfast (I get that through the rest of the day...) so I don't add sugar to my loaves usually. Here the flame raisins provide a little natural sweetness to kick start the day.

I have used these rather lovely Fairtrade raisins in my loaf - they are enormous!

The ones to the right are normal raisins for comparison! The flame raisins are darker too. They are from Chile and distributed by Traidcraft. You can find out more about Fairtrade here on Traidcraft's website, and you can also see the huge range of products they stock here. I admit that I don't always use fairtrade ingredients, but I don't really have an excuse because they are becoming (and have already become) much easier to get hold of - all of the major supermarkets have pretty extensive Fairtrade lines, and in some cases only stock the fairly traded version of a product (I think bananas certainly fall into this category for some of the supermarkets).

Spelt Raisin Breakfast Loaf
Ingredients
150g wholemeal spelt flour
60g raisins
225g boiling water
150g strong white flour
1tsp instant yeast
1tsp salt

Method

- Weigh 75g of the wholemeal spelt into a large mixing bowl, add the raisins and pour over 225g boiling water. Mix well and leave for a while until cooled (not completely cold, but cooler).

- Add the remaining spelt flour and white flour, yeast, salt and mix to a soft dough. I found I needed probably about 25ml more water to allow the dough to come together.

- Leave for about 20 minutes to rest.

- Knead briefly and leave for a further 30 minutes or so to rest.

- Prod out the dough to a rectangle, roll the short side towards you into a tight roll and place on a baking tray lined with parchment paper.

- Leave to proove until increased in size. Mine didn't take all that longer - 30 minutes perhaps, perhaps a little more.

- Preheat the oven to gas 7/220C. Bake for 10 minutes then reduce the heat to gas 6/200C and bake a further 20 minutes. Turn over the bake the base for 10 more minutes at gas 6.

- Remove from oven and allow to cool on a wire rack.

The method may seem a little odd, but pouring boiling water over the flour is a technique I learnt from one of Dan Lepard's recipes (although it was a while ago so I can't remember which one!) and is supposed to be a very old technique - a portion of the flour is effectively 'cooked' by the boiling water and is supposed to help the loaf stay fresher for longer. I can't say I've tested this because my loaves are cut for the freezer as soon as they're cool - it's the only way I can keep them fresh enough for the rate I eat them. However, the technique also helps in a second way here - my flame raisins are quite shrivelled and dry, so sitting in the cooked flour mixture allows them to plump up nicely - making them juicier to eat and less likely to burn whilst baking too.

As I had hoped, this was an absolutely delicious bread. Not packed full of raisins, which wasn't the effect I was aiming for anyway - this is a loaf of bread with the occasional added raisin, rather than raisins held together by dough, if you see what I mean. It was very much enjoyed buttered for breakfast and would make fantastic toast, if you're so inclined! In fact, there's another one in the oven as I type!

I am entering this bread into this month's Fresh From the Oven challenge, which is Breakfast Fruit Breads, hosted this month by Sarah of La Cuisine de Sarah with a round up to be published by Michelle of Utterly Scrummy Food for Families and also into Breakfast Club (founded and hosted this month by Helen of Fuss Free Flavours), where the theme this month is Fairtrade ingredients.

Soft Wholemeal Loaf

I suppose you could say this loaf has been a long time in the making. Not, I hasten to add, because it takes an excessively long time to make (although this is no bad thing with bread) but because it is another step on my bread making journey.

There wasn't really very much bread on the blog prior to the autumn of 2009, and the few bread recipes I did post weren't all that great. These Spelt and Rosemary Rolls looked fine, but my memory of them is that they were rather denser than I wanted, and the crust rather chewy. I didn't make all that much bread. Around that time I think I started to make more successful bread by following Dan Lepard's recipes and reading the comments people were making on his forums. I can't say everything was always delicious or always 100% successful, but the loaves started to be good enough that I didn't really want to buy bread any more. Occasionally I ran out of mine, or spotted something in the shops I fancied, and then I bought it.

My bread making has come a long way since then and I rarely buy bread now - I am lucky enough to have time to make my own. I've picked up all sorts of tips and tricks that allow me to create the bread I want - soft, substantial, white, grainy, sourdough (well, that's very much a work in progress) I can now often (but not always) get the outcome I want. And I often know why something hasn't worked too, or can think how to tweak it. It always seems to me that it takes an age to acquire a skill, and when I look at other people's blogs with their fantastic photography and wonderful loaves I wonder why it seems to take so long for me to improve. I guess partly I'm hampered by lack of practice - I balance the bread I bake with the bread I eat and don't have hoards of people munching through my loaves to afford me more practicing space (I'm sure many of you would be grateful to have your bread last a few days without needing to rebake!).

So anyway, this loaf is a combination of many things, and it didn't turn out perfectly (it was a little soft and didn't rise up as much as I would have liked, more outwards). But when I look back on where I've come from with bread, this is a million miles from how I started.

Wholemeal, Oat and Mixed Flour Loaf

Ingredients

40g rolled oats

200g very strong white flour

150g wholegrain flours (I used about 130g wholemeal spelt, with about 10g wholemeal rye and 10g wholemeal, just because I wanted to use up odds and ends)

1 tsp salt

1 generous tsp fast action yeast

Method

- Pour 300ml boiling water over the porridge oats in a large bowl. Cover with clingfilm and leave to cool until comfortable to the touch.

- Add the flours, salt and yeast and mix to a soft dough.

- Leave for around 10 minutes and then gently and briefly knead the dough.

- You can repeat this kneading if you want, a couple more times at short intervals (10-20 minutes) but I don't think I did this time.

- Leave the dough until it has risen appreciably. Knead briefly and then form into your desired shape. I chose a baton/torpedo type shape.

- Leave to proove again until risen, but not doubled. (I think this is where I went wrong - the oven was occupied and the dough had to be left out too long. I was itching to get it into the oven, but there was a partially baked cake in there. Such is life)

- During this time, preheat the oven (if not already being occupied by a cake) to Gas 7/220C.

- Steam the oven, slash the loaf and bake at 220C for 10 minutes. Turn the oven down to 200C/Gas 6 and bake for a further 30 minutes then turn upside down and bake for 10 minutes more.

- Allow to cool completely on a wire rack before slicing and enjoying.

This is one of the softest wholemeal breads I have made. The oats aren't a noticeable flavour at all (in fact I forgot they were there until I found a little piece of oat husk in my sandwich one day!) but provide moisture to the loaf (and some added fibre). Soft and delicious yet substantial too. Great for lunchtime sandwiches.

A lot still to learn, with baker's yeast and without, but if all my bread along the way can be this tasty I am happy to plod along at my own pace.

Overnight wholemeal sourdough, quick and easy

A colleague was kind enough to share his rye sourdough starter with me recently. I accepted gratefully (and with some embarrassment that I couldn't get my own going - he had no trouble whatsoever!) and started thinking of all the different kinds of sourdough I could make.

It is the most active sourdough starter I've ever seen - tonnes of bubbles and probably takes about six hours to double in volume. It smells pretty good too - when it's just been refreshed I reckon it smells more like apples, but when it's due for feeding and refreshment again there's a much stronger smell of acetone. Not so nice!

My colleague used the instructions in Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters book and it reminded me that I haven't really opened this book for ages. It's the first bread book I bought, a number of years ago now (in fact, I think I had it around the time I left home!). The only bread I remember making from it was the sundried tomato, which I was a little disappointed with for all the faff it took. However this is an old memory, and perhaps with the bread and yeast experience I have gained over the intervening years I would find it less hassle. (But if you're looking for a fine tomato bread I can thoroughly recommend this one). Time to revisit this book.

As we were talking at work I decided to have a quick search on the internet (in a break I hasten to add!) and see if there were any Andrew Whitley recipes out there before getting home and looking in my book. I struck lucky and came across this recipe in Country Life. Elisabeth Luard has apparently chosen it as one of her greatest recipes ever. It's certainly one of the simplest bread recipes I have ever come across. There is not much kneading to speak of (well, not in my world anyway, because I don't tend to knead very much, and this dough was pretty soft and didn't seem to want me to knead it much) then a quick shape and into the tin, to be left alone overnight to rise..

I used a 1lb loaf tin, and fully lined it with baking parchment, without using any fat to make the parchment stick - I didn't want to risk my loaf sticking, and I didn't want to grease the tin so that the crust became oily. I covered with clingfilm and left it overnight (about nine hours) expecting to have to leave it a little longer in the morning. The next morning it was fully risen, sticking to the clingfilm (which I hadn't expected - next time it will be going into a plastic bag, puffed up to keep the dough moist but away from plastic) and asking to be baked. I quickly preheated the oven, and then gingerly peeled off the clingfilm, expecting collapse. I certainly didn't expect (or get!) any oven spring, but since I thought it had already been left too long I didn't hold out much hope.

Thankfully I was wrong. It rose a little, didn't brown too much, didn't stick to the tin, and although I didn't slash it (too soft) it hasn't torn either. And what's more, it's delicious. Only a little loaf, but that suits me perfectly and I think it would lend itself to some experimentation with different flours and perhaps added flavours. I made a couple of other things and in comparison to rye, this wheat based sourdough seems sweeter. I'm happy - I have sourdough, and am very grateful to my colleague who can manage a sourdough starter when I can't!

Spelt Ginger Cookies and Rye and Raisin Cookies

This weeks Short and Tweet challenge (#shortandtweet) organised by @EvidenceMatters (blog here) was either Spelt Ginger Cookies (page 245) or Rye and Raisin Cookies (page 247). Or both, if you're greedy and fancy both recipes like me!

I had seen the rye and raisin cookies before, but for some reason they hadn't really appealed to me. However, this time round the recipe looked like just the ticket. I think that the use of an egg white had put me off in the past - I'm not very good at using up the components of eggs separately - I don't go for recipes where they need to be separated (having had a few failures with cakes needing whisked egg whites in the past) and hence have no repertoire of recipes to use up excesses of either yolks or whites. Happily though (and I presume deliberately) the recipes chosen complimented each other perfectly - the spelt ginger cookies requiring the yolk! Very satisfying.

Both of these recipes came together very quickly and easily - I baked them on Sunday morning and was done well before lunch, including the need to bake trays of cookies separately - I think I had about six trays worth of cookies! The spelt ginger ones especially so as they didn't require softened butter or any creaming in the technique. I have to confess that I did actually weigh out the dough into the specified size, so I got almost exactly the number of biscuits given in the recipe. I found that they took seven minutes to bake and achieve the required slightly golden colour.

For the rye and raisin cookies I wanted smaller cookies than specified, I made some with 35g of mixture and some with 25g of mixture, spacing them fairly far apart for the first batch. I didn't have any problems with these running together. I then realised that I had forgotten the bicarbonate of soda specified in the recipe and added it to the remainder of the mixed dough. I don't know whether it was for this reason, or perhaps just that the mixed dough was waiting around for a while, but the next couple of batches seemed to spread quite a bit more - with the result that the second tray had quite a few cookies making friends with each other. I preferred them less spread out, so if this was the effect of adding the bicarb, I'd give it a miss next time - I shall have to peruse other people's blogs to find if their cookies also spread out or not! I also found that inspite of making my rye and raisin cookies smaller than the specified size, they took longer to cook. Hmm, don't know why! I baked mine for about 20 minutes - at the specified 12-15 mins they looked very soft indeed.

I was prepared not to like the rye and raisin cookies. I don't really know why. Perhaps it's the slight nubbliness of the rye flour (which didn't really come through in these cookies), or my sort-of-indifference to raisins in some situations. Dan notes that if you don't have a very sweet tooth you can reduce the sugar slightly. I reduced the quantities of both types of sugar by about 15g and thought the cookies were still lovely and sweet. Well, I was pleasantly surprised because these were delicious. The rye, raisin and chocolate blended really well flavourwise, and the texture of slightly crispy and sugary and then chewy raisin was great.

I hadn't seen the recipe for the spelt ginger cookies before (I don't think it's a recipe from Dan's Guardian column) but a little googling will find it without too much trouble. I have to say that of the two recipes, this is the one that really, really appealed to me. And I wasn't let down. I love ginger flavoured cakes and biscuits and these were really good. I had a couple almost straight out of the oven and they were utterly delicious - slightly crispy edges and a great chewy centre, gently spiced with ginger and lovely little nubbles of stem ginger to add a bit of bite. My only regret was that after only a couple of days they had softened significantly and were just chewy without the delicious contrast of crispness round the edge that I had so enjoyed the first day. I wonder if they could be re-crisped in the oven? It seems a shame because the recipe makes quite a large batch and it would be nice to keep them for a week or so. Aside from this they were superb.

The use of wholemeal flour (rye or spelt) in these biscuits doesn't make them health food by any stretch of the imagination, but the knowledge that you are taking on a little more fibre than might be expected from a sweet treat does no harm, and without being told that these recipes were made with wholemeal flour you certainly wouldn't have guessed. I fear that I am beginning to sound like a scratched record, but both of these recipes were excellent and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them (oh, and recommend buying the book too!).

Thanks to EvidenceMatters for excellent choices for this week, which again, I probably wouldn't have made on my own.

Malted Grain Bread in a Pullman Tin

When my lovely brother asked me what I would like for Christmas, my thoughts sprang, as ever, to baking. I have been very fortunate and have amassed quite a lot of baking kit - tins and cake cases and so forth, perhaps what I really need is more time to make things and experiment, and people on whom to test my experiements. But T couldn't really buy me some time for Christmas! So my next thought was the Bakery Bits website, treasure trove of amazing products for the home baker. I have seen other bloggers making breads in Pullman tins before, and have also seen homemade/makeshift versions of pullman tins, with more or less successful results. It seems that bread dough is extremely strong when it is rising and the oven spring of a good loaf is enough to dislodge a baking sheet held down by a housebrick or two!

Having seen these attempts at Pullman loaves, I thought it would be one to skip until I had the right tin for the job. And this Christmas I was lucky enough to receive one of these. Since there is a need to have the correct volume of dough to fill the tin and give the characteristic square shape, it made sense to attempt the recipe linked to on the Bakery Bits website. You can find the recipe here on the Bakery Bits blog. I adapted it slightly as I didn't have all of the specified ingredients, but stuck to the main proportions of ingredients.

Malted Grain Bread
Ingredients
400g strong white flour
100g malted grain flour (I used Dove's Farm)
20g olive oil
300ml warm water
scant 2 tsp dried yeast
10g salt (although next time I would reduce this slightly I think)

I essentially followed the method given on the Bakery Bits website, which follows the usual method I use for bread - Dan Lepards method of fairly minimal kneading. I didn't think that the dough was particularly softer than any of my usual bread doughs, but this could well be due to my changing the recipe!

When it came to shaping the loaf to go into the tin to prove, I greased the tin lightly with butter rather than use oil and just rolled the dough up and plonked it into the tin. I then pressed it down to try and make it more even, with some of the centre dough pushed to the ends, because the middle always seems fatter! I then left it to proove while I did other (baking) things. When it came to sliding the lid on, the dough had almost reached the top of the tin in the centre so I had to be a little careful.

The bread was then baked at 200C/Gas 6 for about 40 minutes. After this I tipped it out onto a tray and continued to bake for around a further 10 minutes to colour the three sides of the loaf that hadn't really coloured. The top seemed to have browned quite well anyway but the other sides were pale.

I loved this loaf - absolutely amazing! I made a 100% malted grain loaf with the same bag of flour a few weeks ago and it was a complete chore to eat my way through it - the malted flavour didn't seem as strong for some odd reason, and the bread hadn't risen very well. This loaf was the complete opposite! Somehow, having less malted flour makes the taste more prominent when you bite into a grain, and the crumb was beautifully soft and tender. I left the loaf until the following day to slice and it was so easy to cut into even slices - brilliant. It made the perfect sandwich loaf, and would be ideal for children's packed lunches (or mine, come to that!). An added bonus was that the crusts of the loaf, which I adore, are huge - in a normal tin loaf, the crusts tend to be quite small, but not here!

The tin worked so well, I can see myself adapting lots of recipes to use it. I'd like to try a sourdough in it, but will have to wait a while for that - my starter is *ahem* inactive at the moment. I certainly won't be using it exclusively, as some breads work so well without a tin, and sometimes you want a different kind of crust but this is definitely a most successful Christmas present - thank you very much T, and to Bakery Bits for starting to stock this smaller size tin - the larger one would make far too much bread for me! 

I am going to send this to Helen at Fuss Free Flavours for her Frugal Food Friday blog event (the current Linky is here) - I think that making your own bread is certainly frugal (plus more satisfying and delicious - although I appreciate it's not for everyone), even if this magnificent tin wasn't (although it will pay for itself over time!).

Spelt honey cake

This is another of the type of cakes I regard as everyday 'snacking' type cakes. The ones that you keep in the cake tin to grab a piece of as you pass by. Not a posh dessert, but something simpler, just to keep you going. But this cake was no less delicious for that.

I would almost call it frugal - it felt that way to me because I was using up lots of bits of ingredients that I had lying around the place, as you will be able to tell from the ingredients list! However, I don't think it was a particularly cheap cake to make - it still contains butter and eggs and the spelt flour isn't exactly a routine ingredient for many people. Frugal in spirit I think (and the pictures are certainly frugal - please excuse them!).

The spelt flour was a new product that I had seen in the supermarket and wanted to try. I have enjoyed cakes and breads made with spelt flour in the past and wondered what the Dove's Farm flour would be like. Although I have only used it for this cake, I'm pleased with it. One of the brands I have bought in the past is full of bits of husk, which pretty much necessitates sieving it, and then picking through the bran to get the husks out and then adding the bran back in so as not to lose the weight of flour, or the nutritional benefits of that part of the flour. It's a pain! But the Dove's Farm flour doesn't seem to have husks in as far as I can tell.

Spelt honey cake
Ingredients
175g butter, softenend
80g caster sugar
90g honey, melted *
100g plain flour
100g wholemeal spelt flour
scant 2 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
60g buttermilk (the end of a pot used for a different cake)

* I used a runny honey, but it had crystallised and wouldn't squeeze out of the squeezy nozzle (I'm going to stop buying squeezy honey - I never get it all out before it crystallises), so I chopped the top off the bottle, spooned it into a pan and melted it very gently over a low heat, just to get rid of the crystals.

Method

- Preheat the oven to Gas 4/180C. Grease and line an 8"/20cm square tin. Mine was a shallow rather than deep tin.

- Cream the butter and sugar until slightly lighter in colour.

- Add the flours, baking powder, honey (which was warmish), eggs and buttermilk and continue to beat until well combined.

- Spoon into the prepared tin and level. Bake for 40-50 minutes (ish, I can't quite remember!) until well risen and golden and springy to the touch.

- Allow to cool on a wire rack.

As I said above, I hadn't intended this to be a decorated cake, and was more interested in the flavour that the honey and spelt flour gave the cake. To this end I should really have used a more interestingly flavoured honey! It was  a lovely, moist tasty cake. There was a slightly wholemeal flavour, which was good, and the honey was discernable but subtle. I  think I'd definitely make this again, but would use a better honey to get a more obvious flavour. I think mine was just a fairly generic runny honey.

Nice cake, went down well at work!

Extra thin rye crispbreads - short and tweet

A rather puritan start to 2012 you may think. This week I have chosen to make Dan Lepard's extra-thin rye crispbreads from Short and Sweet for the Short and Tweet challenge hosted by Evidence Matters (@EvidenceMatters). I made them as a pre dinner nibble for New Year's Eve and when I mentioned to my dining companion, J, that I had made rye crispbreads she seemed rather underwhelmed. "What, like Ryvita?" Well, no, not really like ryvita at all as it happens!

They are made from wholemeal rye flour but with a dab of butter, a little salt and sugar and rolled paper thin with the aid of plenty more flour (I used normal plain white flour to roll with) but they bear no resemblance either in taste or texture to the cardboard known as Ryvita.

I didn't find the dough difficult to work with at all, and made them whilst making the rest of our NYE dinner, not too much brainpower or effort required for a very tasty result. I would recommend being pretty generous with the flour for rolling out though, as otherwise the dough tended to stick. One of my favourite parts of this recipe was the instruction to leave the edges ragged - I'm rubbish at rolling out proper shapes and so this made it so much easier!

All was well though, since after tasting, J described her thoughts on them thusly.... "Well, if Ryvita is like eating cardboard, these are like a very fine writing paper..... though obviously I wouldn't eat writing paper either..." Funny thing is though, I know what she meant. And if you make these I think you'll know too. Irresistably moreish, we had them before dinner with a little unsalted butter (how pretentious does that sound?!) but then for breakfast the next day they were enjoyed smeared with homemade lemon curd. A great start to the new year! Thanks to Evidence Matters for picking these, I would never have tried them otherwise!

Rye Apple Cake - Short and Tweet

Sunday evening, must be #shortandtweet time again! Once again I was really pleased that the pick for this week was the rye apple cake. I have made this cake before in the past, but didn't have all of the correct ingredients for it, so I was pleased to have an excuse to revisit the cake. You can see what I thought of it last time here (I don't think the links to Dan's forums work any more. I'm waiting to see if those discussions are restored or not). The recipe can be found on page 136 of Short and Sweet, or here on the guardian website. The recipe does contain a (relatively) small proportion of ground almonds, and the cake is topped with flaked almonds before being baked, but it was easy to substitute for these. I used plain flour for the ground almonds in the cake, and followed Dan's suggestion of topping with demerara sugar, which gives a pleasingly crunchy contrasting texture to the baked cake. I baked my cake for an additional 10 minutes.

This seems to have been a really popular cake, from what I have read on other people's blogs, and rightly so. I haven't tasted this one yet, but the combination of apple and cinnamon is always a winner, and by some magic, the apple stays suspended in the cake, which is extremely satisfying. The first time I made it, I was convinced the apple would sink, but no. And this time was no different, apple suspended throughout the cake. I wish I knew how to tell before baking which recipes are going to be the ones where the fruit sinks and which ones are going to have it successfully distributed throughout. Hmm, I'll just have to make more cakes and practice!

I'll add tasting notes when I've had a proper piece, but from memory (and a quick nibble!), this is a really soft, luscious cake, with a lovely crunchy topping to contrast with it. The rye flour definitely adds a nubbly note to the cake, I think the rye flour I used is relatively coarse. I used an eating apple (a royal gala) which worked fine. Ideally, I'd use something with more flavour, but I bought the royal galas by mistake and am looking for ways to use them up, and spiced in a cake is preferable to eating on their own.

You can see the rest of the December challenges here, on the Short and Tweet blog, and you'll be able to see the round up here when it's posted. Don't hold your breath for next week's challenge - it's pastry, and pastry isn't one of my strengths!