Buttermilk Oatcakes - Short and Tweet

Again, I'm only just going to get my post up before the Sunday 6pm deadline!

These are the second item I've made from Dan Lepard's new book, Short and Sweet, for the challenge set up by Evidence Matters on twitter and the Short and Tweet blog. Check it out for more information.

This week there was a choice of recipes, we could make either the cheese and black pepper buttons (p258) or the buttermilk oatcakes (p259). Or both of course! I chose to go with the buttermilk oatcakes, I can't find a recipe for them online, but if you fancy making the cheese and black pepper buttons, you can find the recipe here. This was a good challenge because I'd never have made these otherwise, and would have missed out on a good recipe, very quickly made yet pleasing and impressive.

The method involves grinding oats to oat flour/powder in a blender (I love this step, it's so satisfying!) and then mixing the flour with bicarbonate of soda, a little sugar and salt, a little butter and buttermilk or low fat yogurt to mix to a paste. I used low fat yogurt because that's what was in the fridge! These were really quick to pull together, and would be very impressive to serve guests with a cheese board - they need never know that you hardly had to put any effort in at all!

My oatcake dough was really quite soft and sticky, I'll be interested to find out how other people found it. I baked for the specified 25-30 minutes until they were starting to go slightly brown round the edges. The finished oatcakes were still quite soft in the middle, rather like a soda bread type texture rather than the crisp oatcakes you can buy from the shops. Not unpleasant at all, just not quite what I was expecting, although given the combination of yogurt and bicarb, plus the softness of the uncooked dough, I'm not sure why I was expecting them to be crisp!

They are actually quite sweet on their own, which surprised me, because for the half batch of dough I made, I only added 10g of sugar (recommended amount 15-23g). I'm quite pleased with them, because although they will go well with cheese and chutney, they will also be tasty on their own, and I do rather love the taste of oats. I think if you're a fan of porridge you'll like these, because the flavour is the same, but don't be put off if you don't like porridge - these are obviously biscuit texture, not soft and sloppy!!! I made 19 small oatcakes from half a batch.

I hope I manage to make next week's top teacakes, but I may well run out of time!

Vegan chocolate banana brownies

After making Dan Lepard's banana muffins last week, I had some very ripe bananas left over and wanted to find a home for them. A standard banana bread wasn't appealing to me so I decided to search for brownie recipes.

I was very happy to discover that a book I already owned (Vegan with a Vengance) contained a recipe that someone else had adapted, and that I have adapted further. Thanks to Sara at the Veggie Eco Life for posting this delicious recipe!

Chocolate banana brownies
Ingredients
120g 70% cocoa chocolate (I used Lindt)
30g dairy free margarine (Pure Sunflower here)
1 tbsp light olive oil
2 large very ripe bananas, mashed
220g caster sugar
1tsp vanilla extract
90g plain flour
25g cocoa powder
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
Method

- Melt the chocolate (I actually did mine over a pan of hot water, because I had different thicknesses of chocolate and wasn't sure about using the microwave for it - the irony of using a Lindt chocolate bunny for making vegan brownies hasn't escaped me...). When melted stir in the margarine until melted. Leave aside to cool for a bit.

-  Combine the mashed banana, vanilla extract and olive oil in a large bowl. Add the sugar and beat well to combine. The mixture will be very runny.

- Sift in the dry ingredients and then continue to mix until all combined. The mixture will now be much thicker.

- Spoon into the prepared tin and bake for 40 minutes. A cocktail stick/toothpick inserted will not come out clean.

- Allow to cool a little and then turn out.

Baker's notes

- I used my bundt tin (another idea from Sara), and lined it as best I could. I'm glad I made the effort because these stuck like anything to the tin, which was annoying! The brownie did come out in one, but wouldn't have had I not lined bits of the tin. It then broke up. D'oh!

- I reduced the sugar from the original recipe but these are still very sweet!

Deliciously chocolatey. It looked like the edges had risen up and baked more quickly than the middle, which appeared a little sunken. No matter, this made the brownie all squidgy and delicious with a fairly substantial chewy crust - just how I like my brownies. One of my colleagues said that she was surprised by how banana-ry these were, even though they were labelled 'Banana Chocolate brownies'. Something to do with not expecting the banana flavour, what with them being chocolate coloured! They were pronounced generally delicious.

Grateful thanks to Sara at the Veggie Eco Life for bringing this recipe to my attention. The original recipe calls for a topping layer, and I would never have thought to adapt this to miss off the topping. I think this is another of the occasions where lack of pictures in a recipe book means that I would otherwise have missed a really good recipe. I would definitely make these again, and next time I might try them in a more standard shape tin.

Baker's confession: I scraped all of the stuck bits off the tin and popped them straight into my mouth when no-one was looking. Mmmm, stolen bits!

Dan Lepard's Olive Oil Potato Flatbread - Short and Tweet

Short and Tweet is a new baking challenge being set up by Evidence Matters. There is a new blog dedicated to short and tweet here, check it out. I'm going to be fairly brief here, largely because I need to post this soon if I'm going to make the 6pm deadline for entering the challenge!

The idea is that a group of people make the same (nominated) recipe out of Dan Lepard's recently released book Short and Sweet so that we can all compare notes on how it has gone. There isn't an obligation to opt in or to join a group, and this suits me perfectly because although I want to make lots of the recipes in the book, there will be some I have already made and don't want to remake, weeks where time just runs away with me, and other weeks where the ingredients of the recipe just don't appeal or I can't substitute the nuts for something else because the recipe depends on them.

Thankfully, this week was something I really, really wanted to make, and have done for ages. I think this was first published by Dan in the little booklet that was given away with the Guardian one Saturday four years ago. I still have my paper copy of this booklet, well thumbed and in danger of falling apart so it's a good job that it's still available online, here! The recipe we are using this week is here. The only difference is that the recipe in the book has 50ml less water.

I was worried about making this dough for a number of reasons - last week I made bread that turned out like a house brick and was worried that my yeast was having a sulk and wouldn't work. I wasn't too concerned about the softness of the dough - plenty of olive oil is always helpful, and in this case adds to the flavour of the bread.

After I tipped my bread onto the baking tray and pushing it out as far as I could, I left it about 15 minutes to relax and then stretched it further. I don't think I went nearly far enough though, because mine is less of a 'flat'bread - the clue should be in the title, and mine is pretty puffy really! I added dried rosemary to half of my loaf because I cannot countenance making a foccacia style loaf without at least some of it being rosemary flavoured - I just love it, and the way that the olive oil and rosemary complement each other.

Baking notes:

- I used a splash more water to get my dough to come together and was concerned that it would be too dry to do the folds specified in the recipe, but all was well, and the folding worked well.

- Next time I would bake at gas 7 for only 10 minutes and complete the rest of the baking at the lower temperature - my loaf browned very quickly indeed, and I had to cover it with foil to stop it burning during the remaining time, which isn't ideal really.

- As I cut into my loaf I thought of the foccacia challenge on the Great British Bake Off this year, and how Paul Hollywood cut into the contestants loaves and pronounced them too dry or that they had added too much flour, or that the crumb structure was too tight and close without the characteristic air holes. I'm pretty proud of my loaf - all of the folding must have really helped to create a lovely light open structure with lots of the desired air bubbles!

I'm sure there will be lots and lots of loaves out there, but I've seen Joanna's leek rarebit version over at Zeb Bakes, and it looks gorgeous. I can't wait to see all the different loaves and how everyone found working with this dough. The little piece I've tried already was delicious - chewy and moist, I think my bread will be perfect for lunches with lots of roasted med veg, yum, I'm looking forward to it already!

Honey not-nut raisin banana muffins

These are Dan Lepard's recipe from his fabulous series How to Bake (from which the recipes in the recent Short and Sweet are taken), published last week. I was lucky enough to be able to find some relatively ripe bananas in the supermarket so I was able to make them straight away.

As a no-nut person, I substituted the nuts for 100g raisins. Luckily I like raisins (well, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have put them in) because I do like to be able to substitute something to provide the textural contrast that the nuts would have done. The texture of raisins is obviously soft and chewy rather than crunchy like nuts, but I like this in my muffin, and to my mind, raisins are a great flavour combo with bananas, cinnamon and honey.

As I followed the recipe as written, aside from the aforementioned substitution of 100g of raisins for the specified 125g nuts and the use of light olive oil rather than sunflower so I will leave you to find the original recipe and method here. I used a fairly bog-standard runny honey.

These smelled very strongly of cinnamon while they were baking, and they weren't massive movers in terms of rising. They did rise, but are a wholesome muffin, more suited to breakfast-on-the-run rather than a cake to be eaten daintily with afternoon tea. I'm sure though, that this was the intention of the recipe, and for this purpose it suceeded entirely. I didn't really taste the honey in them, but then I did use a very mild honey, and the raisins were a good substitute for the nuts, providing little bursts of sweetness and juiciness in the muffin. Yum.

A good recipe for muffins as a substitute for breakfast, but not as a light and airy treat.

World Vegan Day - Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes

Disclaimer - the little sugar rose is sadly not vegan - I forgot to buy vegan-friendly decorations and since most of my recipients are not vegan I guessed they wouldn't mind!

Well, the clue is in the title - these are indeed vegan chocolate cupcakes to celebrate world vegan day, which is held each November 1st, to celebrate the founding of the world's first vegan society in 1944 by Donald Watson. Information shamelessly taken from the homepage of World Vegan Day. Check it out for more information! World vegan day has only been going since 1994 though!

I am not vegan, I am not even vegetarian (although the frequency that meat or fish appears on my plate is vanishingly small!) but I am a complete magpie - I like to be able to pick and choose the things that appeal to me most. October has just been VeganMoFo, a celebration of the massive variety of amazing vegan food produced and eaten by a talented, imaginative and committed group of people. VeganMoFo, the Vegan Month of Food is designed to showcase whatever the person blogging wants to talk about, as long as it's vegan. One of my favourite vegetarian blogs, Johanna at Green Gourmet Giraffe has been participating in MoFo this year, and she has produced some amazing things, as have so many other blogs I regularly read. The massive commitment here comes because the bloggers commit to posting either every week day, or every single day of the month. There really are so many inspiring blogs out there!

But anyway, back to the task in hand, vegan cupcakes. I bought Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (VCTOTW) quite a while ago mostly because I was annoyed that so many people were raving about recipes that I couldn't access (mostly on the Post Punk Kitchen forums) and I wanted a bite of the cherry (cake!) too...

These are the first cupcakes I've made from the book, and as luck would have it, one of the only three cupcake recipes on the PPK blog. It's a really interesting little book, with loads of different ideas that I definitely need to explore further. You can find the recipe here, with the original US cup measurements, but because I prefer to weigh I will give my measurements here. I will leave you to link for the method.I also used the melty chocolate ganache on pg 143 of the book rather than the choc mousse topping given in the link (though that does look particularly delicious!). I made a couple of minor amendments to suit what was available in my storecupboard.

Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes
Ingredients
225ml soya milk
7ml white wine vinegar
150g white caster sugar
70ml(g) light olive oil
1tsp vanilla extract
1/2tsp chocolate extract
125g plain flour
30g cocoa powder
3/4tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2tsp baking powder
1/4tsp salt

Oh yum! These are fabulous. They are so soft, light and moist and with such a deep, rich red chocolatey colour and aroma that you couldn't fail to be pleased by them. The topping was amazing too - it was just sweet enough, and stayed soft and slightly gooey sticky, and really complemented the cupcakes very well indeed. A tiny, minor point is that personally I found the cake a touch sweet, but other colleagues commented that it wasn't too sweet - opinions obviously vary!

Once again, as with my avocado chocolate cupcakes, I was really impressed by the dark red colour of these cupcakes and work colleagues seemed to like them too. I had a recipe request from someone who prefers to avoid eggs and my lovely vegan colleague was really pleased that I had made cupcakes that she could have, and I was thrilled that she enjoyed them.

I think these could definitely become one of my go-to recipes - the method is easy because you don't have to soften butter or do any creaming step, and there is no worry that the eggs will curdle the mixture. All of the ingredients are storecupboard, even the milk, as it is easy to buy long-life cartons of soya milk, so there is never any excuse to not be able to whip up a batch.

As I said earlier, I'm not vegan, but these are seriously amazing cupcakes, and more fool you if you skip making them because you aren't willing to accept alternative ingredients!!!