Christmas treats

I love other bloggers. It's so fab to get new ideas from people who love food and baking and messing about with recipes.
Lately I've had top fun with the blog from the very ace Mary-Anne Boermans, one of the final three in this year's Great British Bake Off. M-A is the sort of woman I'd enjoy hanging out with, and the recipes I've tried from her blog are delish. You can follow her on Twitter as @wotchers
Incidentally, I've had to go back and edit out the word 'ace' in that paragraph 3 times - I clearly associate that word with M-A very strongly!
Anyway, my most recent bit of playing as been with her recipe for millionaire's shortbread cups. Their appearance of dainty little treats are a disguise for the buttery sweet explosion of tastes that take you back to childhood. I made them last night for Luke because he's not a fan of the mince pies, Christmas cake and other fruit-laden things filling my house and I wanted him to have a baked treat he'd enjoy.  We swapped the dark chocolate for milk in this case, because that's his favourite, but I would stick to the dark otherwise to offset the super-sweet caramel.
Thanks to someone on a parenting board I play on, I also found the truly scrumptious Exclusively Food site from Australia.  It was the chocolate Christmas pudding truffles that took me there.  Chopped up Christmas cake/pudding, pecans, melted chocolate, cream and rum mixed into little balls then dipped in dark chocolate. I put a blob of white chocolate on top and a pair of sugar holly leaves and berries from my sprinkles collection to make them look properly festive (I'm going through a phase, I think - all my chocolate cupcakes look like Christmas puds at the moment too!)
I made them far too big; they should just be a little mouthful as they are so very rich. I will definitely be making more!  My 9 year old son, with tastes far above his age, thinks they are delicious.
The last bit of domestic baking I've been doing is my home made mince tarts.  They aren't technically mince pies as I don't tend to put lids on them.  I like more filling than pastry, personally.  The pastry is utterly delicious, though. It's adapted from my tutor Judith's recipe, and is called German Paste; a very rich shortcrust. I love butter, so have swapped it for half the fat.  You could stick with Judith's method of all veg fat.
Here's the recipe. It makes masses, so scale down as needed:
600g plain flour
200g caster sugar
200g butter
200g vegetable fat (like Trex)
1 beaten egg.
Stick the flour, sugar and fats into the food processor and whiz until breadcrumb-y.  Add the beaten egg and whiz again. Tip it out and pull it together into a soft dough. Wrap in cling film and refrigerate.
I am rubbish at handling pastry - hot hands, hot kitchen - so I find rolling it out between two pieces of cling film means I get thinner pastry without overworking it, using heaps of flour and making it tough.
For mince tarts I grease my tart tins, roll out the pastry thinly and cut rounds slightly bigger than the holes in the tins, pop them in gently, add a heaped spoonful of mince meat (recipe for that next time I have a moment) and bake at 180 for 10 to 12 minutes.
Right, back to the kitchen,
Happy Christmas!
Jay x

Smug, me?

Was it only last week I was avoiding making pastry? And here I am all self-satisfied and smug, whipping up a batch in between other jobs.

I've made about 9 batches of mince pies this week. I'd done them with butter rather than Stork as per Judith's recipe because that's what I had in. I am a MASSIVE fan of butter, I think it is utterly delicious. That probably explains some of my girth, I expect. However, I am swapping to vegetable fat for pastry now we've done the shopping as it gives a slightly crisper pastry.

My mincemeat of choice is Rachel Allen's recipe in Bake which I made last year by the vat and am still using up. It's really easy and very tasty; the shop bought ones taste a little naff by comparison.

For all non-mince-pie related activities this week, it's been cookies, more Christmas cakes and egg free cake. I get a bit antsy about egg free cake. It isn't as structurally sound, it goes stale quickly and it doesn't have quite the same mouth-feel (pseud's corner, I know. But true anyway). I know some people require it for religious or moral reasons but, having 7 lazy cosseted hens in the garden, I feel free range hens do have a pretty good time of it and the eggs are wonderful. But it's not my call - it's up to the customer. Hell, I won't eat meat so I'm hardly in a position to comment on other people's dietary restrictions.

After some mixed results I tried this recipe. It's egg-free but not dairy free so it suits my Hindu customer and my egg-allergic pals but isn't suitable for vegans. It's a bit weird to make - basically you're making a sort of condensed-milk-alike solution by simmering sugar, syrup, milk and butter together, then stirring the dry ingredients in. I baked it for 25-30 minutes in a 20cm square tin. It would have done as a low traybake but I added a second layer with a chocolate ganache in the middle layer.

It was very good. Not overly sweet and very rich (110 grams of cocoa will do that) but the icing and ganache helped with that.

So, eggless cakes which used to make me so nervous are now easy peasy and I'm confident with the whole mince pie thing. Smug, me?

Pastry adventures continue

I don't know about you, but I LOVE snow. Proper snow; dry, squeaks-under-your-boots snow. Not that rubbish slushy stuff. This weekend we've had lots of proper lovely snow and I am feeling about as festive as is possible with 4 weeks to go until Christmas.

Last night I made another 9 little Christmas cakes (demand is quite high this year) and today I decided I'd better get back to my experiments in pastry making so I can do mince pies. Being a bit of a wuss i found 4 or 5 little jobs it was *essential* I do first but by 11a.m. I stopped my displacement activities and bit the bullet.

My tutor Lesley said she used the Roux brothers' shortcrust pastry recipe. I didn't find it online although I did laugh watching a telly clip of them bickering in the 80s. Googling also threw up stuff by their son/nephew and I can understand SJ's crush on Michel Roux Jr. He's always ace.

My other tutor, Judith, was amazingly kind. She uses a recipe called German paste. She not only gave me the recipe (in an official catering format, which threw me a bit) but also a big splodge of pastry dough to have a go with.

German paste uses slightly different proportions to the shortcrust recipes I'd been used to. It is 3 parts flour, 2 parts fat and 1 part sugar plus an egg. I rolled it out between two pieces of clingfilm as recommended by Rachel Allen and tried to remember to keep it THIN. It felt much greasier to work with and I have to admit I was a little sceptical as I watched it in the oven. There were no temperatures or timings given so I tried 190 for 12 minutes. It looked a little underdone so I left it a further 3. The finished mince pies were rather shiny so perhaps I didn't need an egg wash.

Mark commented that he likes a more biscuit-y pastry like the mince pies from the supermarket. Yuck. However, I found a recipe on the BBC Food site that claimed a more biscuit-y taste so i tried that. The suggested method is to squish a ball of dough into the tartlet tins. Hmm. Many of the comments below the recipe from people who'd tried it suggested adding an egg and rolling it out as a big improvement and that's the route I took.

The cooking time was given as 20 minutes. That seemed a little long but I trusted the recipe. Oops. They were definitely overcooked.

By this time the mince pies from Judith's pastry were cool. Mark and I tucked in to them with cups of tea. Wow. I mean really, Wow. I apologise for my doubts, they are utterly delicious - quite crisp and just meltingly tasty.

Next test is to try and make it myself.

Steep Learning Curve

I've had for first attempts at mince pies this year. As will all new endeavours, it's a pretty steep learning curve. I can honestly say I'm learning loads of things not to do.

I knew Nigella was being a pain about all that darned putting stuff in the freezer. She says to add enough orange juice to get the dough to start coming together. That took a lot of orange juice. An awful lot. Far more than I thought. But hey, trust the recipe and all that, right? Stick to it the first time and tweak it on subsequent trials.

Nah. It was a disaster. I am convinced the dough didn't come together with the small amount of orange juice expected because the butter in the pastry was frozen. Once it warmed up slightly - i.e. when I came to use it - it was a horrid sticky gloopy mess. It's in the bin.

Rachel Allen suggests putting the pastry between two large pieces and cling film when rolling it out. That worked really well. I never roll pastry out thin enough, I know I don't. This helped me to roll it quite thinly without added more flour and risking the pastry becoming tough.

Rachel's cutter sizes were a bit weird. They didn't work for me at all. The lids were too small, although those covered with a star rather than a lid fared better. The pastry as a tiny bit underdone and was far paler than I'd expect for something given an egg wash. I think the oven was a bit low; perhaps 190? and I think I'll try 210 next time.

The pastry itself was delicious. lovely and light and flaky, so a thumbs up on the taste department. I need to practise more with the amount of mincemeat to go in it. It's a pain when it overflows but I do hate an under-filled mince pie. The home made mincemeat is delicious and I want heaps of it.

I'll keep plugging away at it in between this week's commitments. I want to have a decent mince pie ready for December 1st. Given the number of Christmas cakes I need to do before then and now, it'll be a squeeze but I am confident I'll manage it.

Feel the Fear...

There are some irrational fears I have. Driving a car, carpet sharks (they're real, I swear, they just disappear when the light comes on) and making pastry.

The lack of car driving is a fairly substantial stumbling block for some forms of business expansion. I believe there will come a point when the desire to drive for the business will be greater than my fear I will kill someone with a car and I will finally learn to do it. Or I'll earn enough to hire a driver.

Carpet sharks are unlikely to create a problem in a baking business.

Pastry... well, pastry is a different thing entirely. If I could do it with confidence I could expand my product range. It can't be that hard, loads of people manage it. Last year I swore I'd get the hang of pastry in 2010 and I'm swiftly running out of time.

You will no doubt be stunned to hear (yeah right) that when a client asked if I do mince pies I said, "Sure, no problem". I thought it would force me to pull my finger out and get down to it. Then I faffed about thinking about whether or not to buy a food processor which everyone says makes pastry easier - but how long would it take to recoup the cost? In the end I got a little trigger happy at John Lewis online, when buying the replacement dishwasher and ordered a cheap Kenwood model which was delivered yesterday.

Christmas is not nearly as far away as I would like so Finger-Pulling-Out day is clearly upon me.

I like to be thorough when I try something new. I have all my favourite baking books splayed around me and I am making their recipes for pastry one by one. Rachel Allen's shortcrust is resting in the fridge as I type, Nigella Lawson's mince pie pastry is weight out and chilling in the freezer before mixing as per her instructions. Personally, Nigella's emphasis on iced water,

chilled orange juice and frozen ingredients is rather freaking me out. I have warm hands and a hot kitchen and I'm trying not to feel doomed before I start.

Next will be Nigel Slater's recipe from Appetite, which is heavier on the butter than the others - sums Nigel up in a sentence, bless his delicious fattening soul. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's

recipe uses 2 egg yolks and I expect will be too expensive for me to use commercially. Annie Bell favours the inclusion of ground almonds, Prue Leith is a fan of egg yolk but uses one to Hugh's two.

I'll let you know how I got on.

As for the business...

I guess the biggest change is in the number of hours I am working. I am definitely full time now. There's a happy balance between work for the Deli and the play centre - one is busiest on

pleasant days when people pop out for coffee whilst the other is heaving on rainy days when kids need a dry place to run around. I do marginally more work each week for the play centre and it's confined to one mad busy baking day. The Deli remains 3 deliveries a week.

Another change is in the number of private commissions I'm doing. I've put a few photos up of some recent ones. The Hello Kitty cake was a roaring success. I have concerns about using a copyrighted image and have contacted the copyright owner for advice but they took so long getting back to me (have yet to hear!) that I got on with it.

The cake with heather and white roses had me scratching my head for a while. The family has roots in Yorkshire and Scotland and wanted to represent both florally on the cake. It's the biggest cake I'd done (12 inch square). I found the madeira cake recipe x 1.5 was about right for each layer. I bottled out of doing my own white roses and bought some instead. The heather was a result of something Lesley said when I was fretting about modelling heather, "or maybe piping it would be better." Of course! Heather is a brown twiggy stalk with loads of tiny little round flowers in clusters, and I could definitely manage that in royal icing.

It took longer than I thought (doesn't it always) but I was pleased with the result. The client was absolutely thrilled, yay!

Oh, the lettering was white overpiped with a thin line of the heather colour. It looked much better on the cake than it looks in the photo!

The black and white cake was a rush job and they didn't want to spend too much. A parent from school needed a 40th birthday cake for 3 days to go with a black, white and silver themed party. I went all Mary Quant with circles and trimmed the base with black satin ribbon with a band of silver across the centre. I think it looks pretty effective.

Anyway, all this blogging is just an excuse not to make that pastry. Best get on with it!