Oooh, a snowy cookie!

The snow has finally begun to disappear (for us at least, and for now...?) and unfortunately no snow day for me.  For a train service that runs shockingly badly a vast proportion of the time, First Capital Connect actually managed to run services in and out of London with a decent amount of frequency. 

Damn.  I really wanted a snow day.

Anyway, talking of snow that seems like a great segue to another one of the Christmas recipes, Pfeffernusse, more German spiced cookies except these ones look like they've been dusted with snow! 

The recipe - Pfeffernuse (slightly adapted from Chow.com)

For the spiced sugar:

1 cup icing sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground mixed spice (I used my own mix which you can find here)

For the cookies:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp fine salt
1/4 tsp ground mixed spice (again, my own mix)
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup sliced almonds, toasted (I used pre-toasted almonds)
8 tbsp unsalted butter (1 stick), at room temperature
2 tsp packed finely grated lemon zest (from about 2 medium lemons)*
2 tsp packed finely grated orange zest (from 1 medium orange)*
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 large egg
3/4 cup honey (I used runny honey)
1/4 cup finely chopped candied lemon or orange peel (or a combination) (I couldn't find any...)

1. Start by making the spiced sugar (although you could equally do this while the cookie dough is is the fridge).  Sift all ingredients together into a large bowl; set aside.

2. Then move onto the cookies themselves....Sift together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, ginger, nutmeg, salt, mixed spice, and pepper into a large bowl; set aside.

3. Place the almonds in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a blade attachment and process until finely ground, about 25 to 30 seconds. Add the almonds to the flour mixture and stir to combine; set aside (to be honest, I see no reason why you wouldn't just buy ready ground almonds to save a bit of time!).

4. Place the butter, lemon zest, and orange zest in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment and beat on medium speed until fluffy and combined, about 1 minute. Add the brown sugar and beat until incorporated and lightened in colour, about 1 minute. Add the egg and beat until incorporated, about 30 seconds more. Add the honey and candied lemon or orange peel (or mixture thereof) and beat until just incorporated, about 1 minute. Stop the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl and the paddle with a rubber spatula.

5. With the mixer on low, add the flour mixture in three additions, mixing until just combined, about 1 1/2 minutes total. (Do not over mix.) Cover and refrigerate the dough until firm, at least 1 hour (go wrap some presents, watch some tv, have a glass of wine...make more German cookies...).

6. Heat the oven to 350°F and arrange 2 racks to divide the oven into thirds. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper; set aside.

7. Roll the chilled dough into 24 (3/4-inch) balls and space them 1 1/2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Bake the cookies for 8 minutes, then rotate the sheets from front to back and top to bottom. Continue baking until the cookies are very lightly browned around the edges, about 5 to 6 minutes more. (The tops will be soft, but they will firm up as the cookies stand.) Transfer the baking sheets to 2 wire racks and let the cookies sit until cool enough to handle but still warm, about 3 minutes.

8. Drop the warm cookies into the spiced sugar, making sure to coat them all over, then shake off any excess sugar and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

9. Repeat baking and sugarcoating with the remaining dough. Store the cookies in an airtight container, layered between pieces of waxed paper, for up to 3 weeks (if they last that long!).

Yes, I know this pic looks familiar...

So yes, another batch of yummy cookies.  Bueno.

Right, now I need to go and amend my profile because sadly our lovely cat Maverick is no longer with us.  RIP Mav :(

* Not sure what to do with the now naked orange and lemons and the bells of St Clements are nowhere nearby?  Why not make this little aperitif to go with your cookies??

The Inappropriate Muffins

"Mummy lets make butterfly cookies" the Pose asked one Sunday while we were eating lunch.

"Ok Pose, if you are a good girl and eat all your sandwich we can make cookies" I lovingly replied.

"Ok mummy"

That's a verbal contract in my book.  

She didn't eat her sandwich.

Not the end of the world I grant you but with the current battle-of-wills-Mexican-style-stand-offs we have begun enduring as our little person demonstrates she has indeed inherited both her father's AND mother's stubborn-must-always-get-my-own-way-nature, I was determined to stick to my guns (ah the sweet sweet irony).

Within an hour I was feeling bad about it.  I had been away on the Thursday night for a biz trip and was departing for another 4 days on the Monday and wanted to have a nice Sunday with Posie.  I had also decided that it would be nice to leave something baked for them to eat while I was gone.  Plus muffins aren't cookies right, so I technically still won this battle (at least I'll keep telling myself that).

We all love blueberry muffins so it seemed logical that I'd make those to leave as a token of my love for my little family (ahhhhhhh).  Now here's where I admit that I've never made blueberry muffins from scratch.  Don't get me wrong, I've made them before but with a little help from Betty Crocker!  We have a little shop at the end of our road and they always have blueberries so we popped down to pick up a punnet.  Except they didn't have any today.  Le Pose spotted strawberries and bright little thing she is, suggested strawberry muffins.

After a little peruse on the t'interweb I found this recipe which seemed like good brekkie fodder...

The recipe - Strawberry Oatmeal Muffins courtesy of the Yummly website

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup rolled oats
2 tsps baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp salt
1 beaten egg
½ cup milk
¼ cup olive oil (light)
½ cup sugar (I used caster)
½ pt strawberries (chopped fresh)

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Grease 12 muffin cups (I just put muffin/cupcake cases into muffin tins, I didn't bother with the oil). 

2. In a large bowl, mix flour, oats, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together egg, milk, olive oil and sugar. Mix in strawberries. Stir strawberry mixture into oat mixture just until evenly moist. Spoon into prepared muffin cups.

3. I then thinly sliced some strawberries to use for decoration and carefully pressed a slice into the top of each muffin.

4. Bake 18 to 20 minutes in the preheated oven, until a knife inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.

Ummmm...

They tasted great and at only 174 calories were great for a low cal breakfast (I found dumping low fat yoghurt on top made it even yummier).  The Pose and the hubster both enjoyed them so it made me very happy.  Until hubster made a comment on the appearance.  I was horrified.  These were made with the little one's "assistance" so I felt awful that without thinking I had made "inappropriate" muffins with my toddler....ooops.*

* If you can't see it I'm not explaining!  How embarrassing....(*hands her head in shame*)

Hummingbird Cake (without the feathers)

Yep, I made this.

I've got no idea why Hummingbird Cake is called Hummingbird Cake.  I can only speculate that its because of how sweet it is.  In fact, before a few weeks ago I'd never even heard of it.  

When I started the blog I often debated whether or not to tell colleagues (especially colleagues on my secondment.  I mean I wanted them to like me and thought that to let them see my silly little mind might not be the best idea).  When I kept bringing in baked goodies to work I got questioned on why I was always baking and having got to know 1 of my colleagues well I finally let on to my dirty little baking secret and she seemed quite enthusiastic about it (well people are...to your face).  I told her that I was very happy to take requests so she sent me a link to Sweetapolita's sky-high version of the Hummingbird Cake.  I was less happy about my enthusiasm about letting people put in requests.

Now I put off making this on the basis that it really looks far too fancy for just normal baking so I decided to wait until the right opportunity, a birthday preferably.  April rolled around and brought 4 birthdays in my team in the space of a week.  There are only 9 people in my team.  Time to attempt the Hummingbird Cake I thought....

I had a look on the web and found a recipe on Joy Of Baking's website and when I looked at the Sweetapolita recipe I noticed that she had also used the Joy of Baking recipe as a starting point.  They both looked good so I kinda worked back and forth between the two, using the Joy of Baking recipe but the Sweetapolita method on constructing the cake.  As usual, the actual recipe is in italics and my additional commentary is in normal font.

The recipe from the Joy of Baking and Sweetapolita

For the Cake:

1 cup (110 grams) pecans, toasted and finely chopped
3 cups (390 grams) all-purpose flour
2 cups (400 grams) granulated white sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
3/4 cup (180 ml) sunflower oil
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 x 8 ounce (227 grams) can crushed pineapple, do not drain
2 cups mashed ripe bananas (3-4 medium sized bananas)

For the Frosting:

1/4 cup (57 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
8 oz (227 grams) cream cheese, room temperature
1 lb (454 grams) (about 3 2/3 cups) confectioners (powdered or icing) sugar, sifted
1 tsp (4 grams) vanilla extract

Garnish:
pecan halves

1.  Firstly to the cake....Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C) with the rack in middle of oven.  Prepare three (I used only two pans!) 8" round cake pans with butter/oil spray and a parchment circle on bottom of pan. Set aside. 

I even bought new pans! Exciting times...no seriously

2. Chop the pecans.  I used one of my favourite kitchen tools - my Pampered Chef Food Chopper.  Its great, you just put whatever you want to chop underneath and bash the top, ideally focusing on someone you really dislike or something that is pissing you off then bang, bang, BANG!  All done.

3. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, and cinnamon. Set aside.

4. I could only find pineapple rings so I simply blitzed the pineapple chunks using a stick blender.  I then mashed the banana.

5. In a separate large mixing bowl, combine the lightly beaten eggs, vanilla, chopped pecans, oil, bananas, and pineapple.  Pour the wet mixture into the dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon until combined.  

Looks a little vomity, right?  Tasty.

6. Divide the batter evenly into 3 (remember, I only used 2) prepared 8" round pans. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean from the centre of the cake (about 30 minutes - I don't know if my oven is playing up but I definitely had to keep the cakes in for a good 50mins). Don't open oven for first 20 minutes, then rotate pans, checking after 10 more minutes. Try not to over bake! Let cool on wire racks for 20 minutes (in the tins), then invert onto racks, remove the parchment paper and let cool until cool to the touch.  Wrap the cakes in foil and put in the fridge overnight (this makes them easier to slice).

7. Remove the cakes from the fridge and unwrap from the foil.  Taking a bread knife carefully and evenly cut each cake into 3 thin layers.

8. Then onto the icing...Using electric mixer (how generic, of course I turned to dear Berta), combine the butter and icing sugar until just combined.  Now I had some problems here, possibly due to the fact that I realised I only had fondant icing sugar.  The butter and icing sugar just refused to combine so I had to take some drastic measures.  I needed to warm the butter enough to be able to combine it with the icing sugar.  I thought that actually heating it would be a mistake so instead I took a bowl of lukewarm water and put the mixing bowl into the water - enough to warm the sides of the bowl (its metal).  This definitely helped and put the icing back on track.

9. Add the cold cream cheese, all at once, and beat on medium speed for about 4 minutes. Turn up to high speed for another 1 minute. It should be fluffy (mine wasn't but again I believe this is all down to the fondant icing sugar). Don't over beat, or the icing will start to lose thickness.

10. Onto assembling the cake!  Taking one of the bottom layers spoon a big blob of icing into the centre and carefully spread the icing to evenly cover the cake.  Always cut side down, place the next layer on top and repeat the process.  Repeat with the remaining layers.

No, there is no Tabasco in the cake.

11. Spoon the rest of the icing onto the top of the cake and, using a palate knife, smooth it all across the top of the cake easing it to the edge and down the sides (this was how I had to do it because of the consistency of the icing.  I think it would be more spreadable and less drippy with regular icing sugar).  Make sure the cake is evenly covered and decorate with a couple of pecan halves.

12. Carefully transfer to your serving dish! (I transferred it to my brand new spotty tins to take into work.  I love my new spotty tins)

This cake is quite sweet but fantastic and serves plenty.  It went down very well at work and every last crumb was eaten.  If you want a cake to impress - this is the one.  Personally I found it was best served off ducky paper plates that were left over from one of Posie's parties but obviously you do not have to recreate this ;)

I'm all up for gratuitous self-promotion!

I'm just banana's about my Kitchenaid

When we first moved back from the good ole USofA back in '07 we paid an exorbitant sum of money to have the contents of our very tiny 1 bedroom apartment shipped to the sunny climes of Leyton in East London*.  It took forever and we slept on a blow up double for about 2 months but finally the day came that they delivered all our junk.  We unpacked the boxes and Mister set about getting the desktop PC up and running.  I believe he used a step-down (well, I hope, but am pretty certain) but all I recall was hearing a bang and running into the spare room to see smoke pouring out of the vent in the PC.  Not a good start.  Now, you would have thought that we would have learned from this first experience (I mean, as a human you're meant to learn from your mistakes right?), but not us.  For some reason (although I do believe that this one was the hubster's fault) the Dyson was then plugged in.  Yet another pop, no smoke, but dead Dyson.  In one fell swoop we had managed to kill 2 of our most expensive appliances.  Then we learned. My most prized posession was the black Kitchenaid my mother-in-law kindly bought me and there was no way in hell I was going to risk my Kitchenaid.  

So poor Kitchenaid (I should really give it a name, perhaps Berta) sat lonely in its box for nearly 5yrs.  Then last week I was having a chat with a colleague who was talking about the Kitchenaid she had bought her husband.  I was supremely jealous.  She encouraged me to look into getting an adapter she had seen on Amazon and to take the plunge and bring Berta (yes, I like Berta) out of her box.  By the middle of the week I was asking my Daddy-o for specific advice on voltage and wattage and step downs (oh my!).  Yes, this is where I reveal that my father is a sparky (well, he can't fix your telly but he can do a blinding plan of your electrical schematics for an off-shore living platform....).  I'm not sure why I hadn't properly discussed it with him before but I finally asked him about the Kitchenaid/converter situation.  After many texts, most of which I really didn't understand, he advised that Berta should survive with my step-down.  

Wicked.

Now, following my Gluten Free Banana Bread post I had promised another colleague, a gluten intolerant (that doesn't sound right does it?  makes it sound like she's personally "anti-gluten" not that she has a genuine medical issue), that I would bake my Banana Bread and bring it into the next meeting.  This morning we had a meeting...

Ok, I know this isn't a "new" recipe but I amended it (read: improved!) and added a new component.  Firstly, I pulled Berta out of her box and with great trepidation plugged the step-down in, then plugged Berta into the step-down.  I switched on the step-down.  Holding my breath I moved the lever to "stir".  Berta worked.  No smoke.  No bang.  Just purring motor.

I kissed my Kitchenaid.

I was back in business and in a great mood.  I set about making the recipe as previously posted but with these tweaks:

Firstly I was making normal muffins (not mini muffins) - the mix makes around 12 large muffins or 18  smaller muffins.  I also used spotty muffin cases.

Secondly, tweaks to the basic recipe:

90g caster sugar (instead of 110g)

4 large ripe bananas (instead of 3)

1 tsp of baking soda (in addition and added at the same time as the other dry ingredients)

Thirdly, streusel topping (gluten free!):

75g soft brown sugar

70g granulated sugar

85g rice flour

3/4 tsp ground nutmeg

60g unsalted butter, cut into small cubes

To make the streusel topping, mix the sugars, flour and nutmeg together.  Add the butter cubes and rub the mix together using your hands until it becomes the consistency of bread crumbs.  

Spoon the topping (about a tsp per muffin) onto the muffins and press gently onto the surface of the muffins (the streusel recipe makes quite a lot so I had a fair amount left over).  Then pop the trays into the oven and bake for around 35mins (just keep an eye on them).  Cool on a wire rack.

I took the muffins into work and they went down very well with my colleagues (in fact several people had more than one and all 18 were gone).  My favourite response was "that's good sh*t".  Job done.

But.  What sort of mother (or wife) would I be if I baked something I know my daughter loves and then didn't let her have anything??  And since I had my dear Berta back in my life and was very much enjoying using her...I of course baked another batch.  Again, slight differences catering for the particular audience:

Firstly, I made a loaf since hubster prefers it like this (so he can spread butter all over it and then fry it...) so you will need to lightly butter the loaf tin.

Secondly, although I used the same tweaks to the basic recipe above I also replaced the 50g cornflour with 50g ground oats (I blitzed them in a little blender).

So basically mix the recipe as usual and pour into a loaf tin (preferably bigger than mine - I was a little lazy and should have either split the mix between 2 loaf tins or poured it into my larger glass loaf dish but meh, not the end of the world).

Spoon on the streusel topping (like I said, I had a lot left over, and still had some left over after topping the loaf and have put it into the freezer to see how well it freezes) and gently press into the batter.

Bake for about an hour.

Leave in the tin to cool until the tin is cool enough to handle, slide a knife around the edge then ease the loaf out of the pan.  Put the loaf on a wire rack to cool.

Mange mange mange!!

I love how I said to the hubby I was just going upstairs to write a short blog post.  Yep, real short.

*Incidently I stuck it out for 6 months in a flat that's main architectural features were a hole in the ceiling in the bathroom and 2 beautiful patches of mould in the spare bedroom and the living room.  Following a stabbing on the high street I had had enough and begged hubster to move back to my roots in Highgate.