My friends took home jars of granola, I could have fallen over backwards, they were fighting over it and I was having to save some back for myself. I thought I’d made far too much, how wrong I was. I’m looking forward to leftovers and breakfast tomorrow morning.

The cake was little, really little, 5-inches, for I couldn’t foresee many, or greedy, people eating it. It turns out that a cake that a cake this little can be packed in a backpack with ease and and survive a cycle ride across town with no damage. A housewarming offering, chocolate, as requested, little dairy, as required. I walked in to the smell of bacon frying and poked around to see the lovely flat, in a lovely area, I’m jealous.

This cake tastes of cherries, after a while I worked out that it was just the almonds causing this wonderful and unusual flavour. This cake doesn’t make a lot of sense, it doesn’t taste as you might expect but it does taste good and the lack of raising agent is useful when the supermarket is clean out of baking powder.

Its rare that I, and probably many others beside, gawp at the complexity of a recipe at first glance only to find that it’s relatively quick and simple to make. The many parts of the daring baker’s recipe this month, that seemed to assume a kitchen full of gadgets turned out that way. The challenge was a chocolate marquise, served with meringue, caramel and nuts.
I guessed when my sugar syrup was ready instead of using a sugar thermometer, used the grill instead of a blow-torch and ‘made my own stand mixer’ so that I could do more than one thing at once. I’m far to lazy to stand holding beaters for 10 minutes, which this recipe called for, twice, so I balanced my stand mixer on a pile of books. The setup proved to be surprisingly stable, I luckily happened to be using the right size bowl, which helped a lot.

The marquise tasted great I forgot to put pepper in it and substituted the tequila for amaretto, amaretto and chocolate are always a great combination. Eaten with  meringue and caramel (again made with amaretto) it tasted great and didn’t seem to be lacking. I didn’t make the nuts, I don’t do nuts.

The caramel recipe is slightly odd, it produced an exceptionally thick caramel I ended up adding a lot more amaretto and a lot more water to it and it was still thick.

This would make a perfect dinner party dessert, rich, luxurious, simple to make and could be made to look fabulous.

Recipe pdf is here.

The May 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Emma of CookCraftGrow and Jenny of Purple House Dirt. They chose to challenge everyone to make a Chocolate Marquise. The inspiration for this recipe comes from a dessert they prepared at a restaurant in Seattle.

The days roll on monotonously, the sprawl of notes, paper and folders spreads and occasionally an exams interjects. I am glad of the bright mornings and the useless blinds in my room, which mean I am woken up early every morning; but sometimes, with only a day of revision ahead, its not quite enough. Those days call for a better breakfast.

When I came across this baked french toast recipe at Smitten Kitchen I knew I had to try it, it had never occurred to me to bake french toast before, or even to leave the bread soaking longer than a couple of minutes. So I did it properly, soaking bread overnight in beaten egg, milk, cream, vanilla, cinnamon and the tiniest touch of sugar. Then once they were baked sprinkling a little sugar on top and caramelising it under the grill. Sprinkled with strawberries and drizzled with maple syrup the french toast was good, very good, though maybe a little overcooked, it had dried out a tiny bit more than I might of liked. I feel that maybe adding a little more sugar to the mix and leaving off the maple syrup would have good, the maple syrup didn’t quite work in the same way it does with my usual french toast.

For a more exciting breakfast on a weekday morning.

It’s been a long time, everything has, so I’m slowing easing myself back into the world. With a vile set of exams upcoming that transition is slower than I might like. A week ago there was something refreshing about being able to maintain a distance from the world in order to immerse myself in revision; now, I’m bored of it. I’d like a holiday, thank you very much, from lectures to projects to (an epic and surprisingly enjoyable) fieldtrip to revision and exams, this course has been non-stop for so long now.

My level of distraction has meant that I found myself reaching for the beaters and making brownies. I found this amazing picture of chocolate-cheesecake marbled brownies on BBC Good Food years ago, yet I’d never made them. The picture looked fabulous and while I didn’t believe I’d quite be able to replicate it, my failure was greater than I’d expected. The brownie mix all sunk to the bottom of the tin and the cheesecake rose to the top. I’m not quite sure where I went wrong, I’ve double and triple checked the recipe, they tasted pretty good though, so I might be trying it again, with some tweaking.

I halved this recipe, maybe that’s where the problems lay.

From BBC Good Food

Marbled Brownies

Brownie:

200g plain chocolate

200g butter

250g caster sugar

3 eggs

125g plain flour

Cream Cheese:

400g cream cheese

1tsp vanilla

2 eggs

Oven 180˚C

Beat together cream cheese, vanilla and eggs, set aside.

Melt chocolate and butter together in a bowl over a pan of simmering water.

Beat sugar and eggs together.

Stir chocolate mix into sugar and eggs.

Fold in flour

Pour 3/4 of the brownie mix into a greased and lined 20x30cm tin. Pour cream cheese mix ontop, add dollops of remaining brownie mix and marble.

Bake for 35 mins.

I was terribly excited when I saw the Daring Baker’s Challenge this month only to then start reading the recipe and find that it wasn’t ‘coffee cake’ at all, just a brioche style bread stuffed with meringue and other sweet things. Very disappointing.

My first attempt at this was disastrous, I was out of bread flour, so I used plain flour instead and I was being highly impatient so I didn’t let the dough rise for long enough and I was halving the recipe in my head so I think I might not have had the right amount of liquid. After all that, the filling came pouring out of the bread while it baking in the oven. Needless to say it went straight into the bin. My second attempt was a little more successful, I didn’t bother with the meringue again and kept it simple with a banana and chocolate filling. This worked, it was at least edible, it is, though, just a brioche recipe and not a particularly good one at that. When I find a good brioche recipe I will be making banana and chocolate brioche, they, after all, work so well together.

The March 2011 Daring Baker’s Challenge was hosted by Ria of Ria’s Collection and Jamie of Life’s a Feast. Ria and Jamie challenged The Daring Bakers to bake a yeasted Meringue Coffee Cake.

Sometimes things are just the way they should be, seeing old friends in whose company you can completely relax and forget about the world. Forgot about the world indeed, forget about the relentless pounding that is doing a Master’s course. So while everybody else was working hard at uni, I did what is best done with a Sunday and spent it with friends.

Tea and cake, classic and simple. My mum just happened upon a copy of the Good Housekeeping cookbook in Oxfam after I’ve been stopping in every secondhand bookstore that I’ve passed by for more than a year, in search of a copy. I’m in love with this cookbook, I have been for a very long time, I used to have a copy but it got lost somewhere along the way. The spine is peeling off my mum’s copy, which is held together by tape. It’s that kind of cookbook and that’s the reason I couldn’t buy a new copy. In time I’ve seen various editions of it and there’s something rather charming about the older ones. This one is of the most recent edition but the recipes are still classic, so I knew where to head when I wanted a good, basic carrot cake recipe.

(I’m not going to go into my cream cheese icing issues…)

Adapted from ‘The Good Housekeeping Cookery Book’

6oz butter

6oz light brown sugar

3 eggs, seperated

4 1/2 oz SRF

1 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 oz ground almonds

1 tsp mixed spice

2 carrots, peeled and grated 9with water squeezed out)

1 apple, peeled and chopped into tiny cubes

Cream butter and sugar together, beat in egg yolks.

Stir in flour, ground almonds and baking powder

Whisk egg whites until stiff, fold into mixture with carrots, apples and sultanas.

I cooked it in two 8-inch sandwhich tins at 180˚C for 40 mins.

a large handful of sultana, chopped

Yesterday I saw fields and blue skies for the first time in a while. London has a habit of being so grey; so I was very excited when today I woke up to brilliant sunshine and that first feeling of spring in the air but now its pouring with rain, once again. The birds, though, continue to chirp through it all.

I don’t much like pannacotta; I thought that might change if I made it myself. It didn’t at all, considering I’m a great fan both of cream and of sweet things this is rather surprising (or it is to me, I’m surprised by many of my own dislikes). True I misjudged the gelatin hugely and ended up with a very solid pannacota, which I may hasten to add, my flatmate ate very readily but it most certainly didn’t have the texture it should have had. The florentine cookies were good, I fancied trying them again and making fancy shapes out of them but I never ended up getting round to it. I used wholemeal flour because I was out of plain flour and significantly reduced the amount of sugar, but they still came out exceedingly sweet, I also felt they were too buttery (I know, right?), so the recipe could do with some tweaking. I left out filling them with chocolate, which may have tempered the sweetness slightly.

The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies.

Florentine Cookies, the way I made them, Daring Baker’s PDF recipe here:

75g butter

80g oats

100g sugar

45g wholemeal flour

30ml golden syrup

30ml milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

Melt butter in a medium saucepan. Add the rest of the ingredients to the butter and stir. Place teaspoonfuls very far apart (5 cm or so) on a lined baking sheet. Bake at 190˚C for 6-8 minutes until golden brown.

Its been a long time since I’ve made bread, even soda bread I’ve only made once in the past few months. So I pulled out a packet of a mixed seed bread flour that’s been sitting around my cupboard for a little too long and decided to try out the no-knead recipe with it.

Only one thing: I couldn’t resist kneading the dough, even if just for a minute… it is the best part of making bread.

As others stood in line, with their parcels in special red and white postal boxes held together with lashings of parcel tape, I felt a little special knowing that, at least in my life, brown paper parcels tied up with string still exist. There was sellotape in the house somewhere but I couldn’t find it and pritt stick was never going to hold, so I decided hold together my brown paper wrapped parcels the old fashioned way, with string. I wonder that the custom ever died out, sellotape may now seem the obvious choice but string works so well. Saying that, my parcels are yet to arrive intact and in the Royal Mail I certainly do not trust.

The first, and the last, time I made these cookies was almost exactly 3 years ago. I made them for exactly the same reason I make them now: because their history speaks of their potential. Look up ANZAC biscuits on Wikipedia, there it will tell you of their association with the Australian and New Zealand Army corps, the same story is told above the recipe in my cookbook. ANZAC biscuits are so called because they were made by the wives of the Australian and New Zealand Army corps and sent to the soldiers when they were stationed in Galopilli (or so the stories go…).

Recipes surprising rarely tell you how long biscuits are likely to last or how easily they can be packaged and posted. While my past experiences of sending cookies in the post have been successful, I have only ever made a limited number of attempts. One of those attempts involved Canada Post and whilst I was reliably informed that the cookies were well enjoyed they did arrive 3 weeks after posting and rather stale. The lack of ability of Canada Post to get parcels to their destination in a reasonable amount of time means Canada will forever remain blacklisted as a country to and from which one cannot send cookies; to all my friends in Canada I apologise and send recipes instead.

So, if these biscuits were good enough to be sent around the world during the First World War, then they are certainly good enough to be sent around the world now. To top it off, they take little more than 5 minutes to make and are quite delicious.

ANZAC biscuits

from BBC Good Food

85g oats

85g dessicated coconut

100g butter

100g sugar

100g plain flour

1 tbsp golden syrup

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

Melt the butter and stir in the golden syrup. Add the bicarb to 2 tbsp of boiling water then mix into the butter mixture.

Roll desertspoonfuls of the mixture into balls and flatten slightly onto a lined baking tray, an inch apart or more apart, they spread quite a lot.

Bake at 180˚C for 10 minutes or until golden brown.