Crystallised Ginger Pear Cake

I'm never quite sure about pears. I do really like them, but it depends on my mood as to whether I want a lusciously ripe and dripping Williams pear or a hard crunchy Conference, preferably cold from the fridge. So I bought pears and then decided that I didn't really want them at all. And we all know that pears usually go from rock-hard to soft-and-squishy in the blink of an eye so I decided that I ought to use these ones up. One found a home in this rather good cake.

Pear and ginger are a good combination of flavours and I love the fudgy toffee-ish depth of flavour that light muscovado sugar brings. Pear has a fairly subtle flavour sometimes and I didn't want to overwhelm it in the actual cake, so I left my ginger just for the top of the cake rather than the batter itself.

Crystallised Ginger Pear Cake
Ingredients
120g butter, softened
120g light muscovado sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
160g self raising flour
1 medium sized ripe but firm pear, chopped (mine was a green Williams)
35g crystallised stem ginger, chopped very small

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and base line a 7"/18cm round cake tin.

- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

- Add the vanilla, eggs and flour and beat until combined. The mixture will be very stiff.

- Add the chopped pear (my pieces were about 1cm cubes, or slightly smaller) and mix to combine.

- Spoon into the cake tin and level as best you can (again, the mixture is stiff).

- Scatter over the finely chopped ginger.

- Bake for 35-45 minutes (I can't quite remember how long this took now) until risen and golden and a cake tester comes out clean.

- Allow to cool on a wire rack

This was really successful. The cake was soft and moist and because the pear was still relatively underripe when I used it, it hadn't turned to mush whilst baking and retained a bite in the cake, making for a nice contrast of taste and texture. The ginger on the top worked well too, providing a crunch and a little hit of heat. A success.

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?

Fruity Chocolate Squares

Yep, another brown square.... tasty though

I knew I wanted chocolate cake and nothing too fancy but didn't really know what else beyond that. As I hunted in the cupboards and fridge for inspiration, a carton of soured cream that needed to be used (having been bought with no particular recipe in mind) and some dried fruit caught my attention. The dried fruit in question was some that I had bought reduced-to-clear a while ago. It's dried fruit though - I'm not sure why they were so desperate to sell it off but they clearly were, it had been reduced from £1.50 to 29p with about 6 months still until the best before date. I can only think the manufacturers wanted to launch new packaging. Anyway, a bargain is a bargain. Unless you don't use it so I thought I'd better incorporate my dried blueberries into a cake. 

Double yolker, I promise this isn't just two eggs. Marginally more interesting than a brown square...

Fruity Chocolate Squares
Ingredients
60g 72% cocoa chocolate, melted (I used the microwave - carefully!)
120g butter, softened
175g light muscovado sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg, beaten (mine turned out to be a double yolker!)
225g self raising flour
20g cocoa powder
150ml soured cream
70g dark chocolate, chopped
55g dried fruit (I used 30g dried cherries, chopped in half and 25g dried blueberries)

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line an 8" square tin with baking parchment.

- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy - this might take 5 minutes or so even with an electric mixer.

- Add the vanilla, egg, flour, cocoa powder and soured cream and beat well until combined.

- Stir in the chopped chocolate and dried fruit and transfer to the baking tin (this is a stiff mixture - don't worry)

- Bake for 40-45 minutes until risen and a cake tester comes out clean.

Brown square from a slightly different angle...

I had been worried that this cake would be rather dry and crumbly, but actually I needn't have worried at all. It was moist and tasty and the combination of dried blueberries, dried cherries and chopped chocolate meant that each bite had an extra, interesting taste and texture. 

(Not) Hot Cross Buns

Last year's buns with crosses and glaze - very pretty

A little late I know, but I did actually make these on time (i.e. before Good Friday) this year. I decided not to do the traditional crosses, making them into Not Cross Buns and therefore perfect for any time of the year, because these little beauties should definitely not be confined to the celebration of Easter!

I used the same recipe as last year, which can be found here: No Knead Mini Hot Cross Buns. The minor changes I made were to use all raisins rather than a mixture of raisins and cranberries, to use whole milk rather than semi skimmed (2%) and to use normal bread flour instead of extra strong. I got 17 50g balls of dough from the recipe.

This year's buns - not so pretty but equally delicious

It's perfect as far as I'm concerned - a little forethought for the soaking of the raisins to make them beautifully plump and juicy, no kneading of the sticky dough, minimal intervention on my part, and the loveliest soft, juicy buns at the end of the process. The only thing it requires is time really - I find sweet (enriched) yeasted doughs take much longer than you think to rise and I know this is where I've made mistakes in the past - not letting the dough rise enough has led to bullet like buns. The spices also retard the action of the yeast, so here patience is a virtue. I also like to arrange my buns to proove so that they batch together, maximising the softness.

Soft crumb with juicy raisins

I am the first to admit that these are not the most picture-perfect round, glazed hot cross buns but oh wow do they make up for that in taste and texture. J was chief taste tester for these and her first comment after finishing one (interspersed by comments such as 'Ooh, these are really good') was 'Have you brought any more for me....?' Make them, you won't regret it!

I'm entering these not cross buns into Calendar Cakes, where the theme this month is Easter Extravaganza. The host this month is Laura of Laura Loves Cakes, and the challenge is also hosted by Rachel of Dolly Bakes.   

Dan Lepard's Chocolate Lamingtons

Lamingtons with successful glaze - mark 2

Well, sort of. Last year, Dan's recipe for double chocolate lamingtons was published in the Guardian, ahead of ANZAC day. I made them at the time, and used the glaze that he recommended for coating them. However, since I avoid coconut (as one of those things to which I might be allergic but don't fancy finding out about) I didn't want to actually coat the lamingtons and dip them in desiccated coconut, I just wanted to glaze the cakes. 

Lamingtons the first time round - with a rather runny glaze used in the middle and on the top

I rather fancied Suelle's take on the cake, which you can find here Chocolate and Coconut Layer Cake. She had the rather brilliant idea of halving the coating quantities and splitting the cake in half, sandwiching it together with the glaze and spreading it across the top. I decided to go for this too but unfortunately I was in a bit of a hurry to get the cake iced and my glaze was steadfastly refusing to thicken, which as a coating I think you'd probably expect. My lamingtons were good, but rather messy to eat and the glaze wasn't really what I wanted. I think I possibly used a different chocolate to Suelle and that's why my glaze took so long to set. I refrigerated a little of it and it did eventually thicken up. 

As with many cakes I make that end up turning out not quite right, I intended to remake the cake (very successful) and ice it with a different icing. But as usual, time slides and I didn't get round to remaking the cake. Then as part of the step-by-step baking series that Dan is now doing for the Guardian, he published a more conventional lamington recipe recently, for Australia Day (26th January) and also a twist on this recipe,  Macadamia Ginger cake with lamington icing. These two recipes reminded me of how successful the chocolate lamington cake had been and how I had intended to give it another go. And so I did.

I used the double chocolate lamington cake recipe, as stated here and then taking inspiration from the macadamia ginger cake with lamington icing, used an approximation of the lamington icing from that cake to ice mine with. As with my first attempt, the cake was successful. I did note that it took longer to bake than stated (about 10-15 minutes longer) and the top surface seemed a little darker than I would have liked. However, once the icing was on not only was this not noticeable, there was no hint in the taste of the cake that it had caught at all, so the dark surface was obviously just in my mind.

Dan states for the lamington icing that you need a half batch of the lamington icing, plus 75g dark chocolate. I used the quantities stated below (which are approximately 1/3 of the amount stated, plus 30g dark chocolate) , which gave a generous covering for an 8" (20cm) square cake, as you can see in the pictures. 

Lamington icing
130g dark chocolate (I used G&B 72% cooking chocolate)
10g cocoa powder
100g caster sugar
65ml milk

Method

- Bring the milk, caster sugar and cocoa powder to the boil in a small pan, whisking.

- Add the chocolate, stir until melted, allow to thicken if necessary and then use to spread over your cake.

* I found that it was difficult to beat all of the small lumps of cocoa out of the icing, therefore I would recommend sifting it first. I also ended up transferring the sugar/cocoa/milk mixture to a small bowl to try and beat some of the lumps out of it before adding the chocolate. The mixture thickened quickly when I added the chocolate and was easily spreadable - I could happily spread the mixture right to the edge of the cake without fear that it was going to run off.

The actual cake was lighter than I expected and as you might expect from the ingredients, really quite sweet. I'm not sure why, but the top 1/3 of the cake seemed to be more aerated than the lower portion - you can see this in the picture above. The icing was very successful - it was less sweet than I was expecting and I would definitely use it again (I'm not that keen on super sweet icings as a rule). The icing doesn't dry to a gloss, but to a matt finish. I also decorated my cake with hundreds and thousands, and these needed to be added quickly while the icing was still wet enough to hold them, otherwise they just rolled off....

I'm entering this into We Should Cocoa, the monthly chocolate blogging challenge set up by Choclette of Choc Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Teapot. The host this month is Lucy of The Kitchen Maid and she has chosen 'Fame' as the theme. Lamingtons are a famous Antipodean treat and Dan Lepard is a famous baker so I think these qualify!