Cupcakes with lemon and orange-passionfruit icing

Tomorrow we are having a fundraising morning tea, to raise money for the Christchurch earthquake victims.  Everyone is bringing something to eat, and donating $5.

I know it's not bread, but making cupcakes is baking, so I thought I'd write about it.  I have a vague memory of making cupcakes with my grandmother, who was an amazingly good baker.  I don't think I've made them since because I seem to associate them with muffins.  I hate muffins, they're thick, pasty, and sit in your stomach like concrete, and it annoys me people eat them because they think they're healthy.  They have fat and sugar in them, like cupcakes, but at least cupcakes are honest and don't pretend to be anything they're not.

This recipe is from Nigella Lawson.

Ingredients:


125 self raising flour
125 castor sugar
125 unsalted butter
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
2 tbsp milk

Put everything except the milk in the food processor and whizz until smooth.  Add the milk a little at a time, with the motor running, until you get a soft, dropping consistency.  Scrape the mixture evenly between 12 cupcake paper pans and smooth out.  Bake at 200 C until golden.

Just a little word about butter.  Australian butter is no good for baking.  If you live here, your best bet is Lurpak Danish butter.  The consistency of Australian and European unsalted butter is completely different for some reason.  I'm not being a butter snob but for cooking purposes go European.

Icing


I've included two icing recipes, both inspired by Maggie Beer.

Lemon butter icing

50g soft unsalted butter
Zest of 1 lemon
30ml lemon juice or a little more to taste
215g icing sugar, sifted

Orange-passionfruit icing


50g soft unsalted butter
Zest of 1 orange
1 tbsp orange juice
1 tbsp passionfruit pulp, with or without seeds
215g icing sugar, sifted

The method for both icing recipes is the same, mix everything together and stir until smooth.  Spread on the cupcakes when they are cool.

I've heard it said one easy way to tell apart an English person and an Australian is that the English won't eat passionfruit seeds.  I'm not sure if this is true but I'm going to use them in my version.

Lemon on the left, passionfruit-orange on the right

Wholemeal no-knead bread

I try to use organic flour for the bread I make, and ever since I bought the Thermomix I have been milling wheat grain into flour.  I find the terms wholemeal, wholewheat etc very confusing, and so it seems do the manufacturers of commercial bread.  A lot of this product has a varying amount of white flour added, to make the bread rise more and give a lighter final product.  There are no standard definitions in different countries either, so what you buy may not be what you thought you were buying.  Some breads even have artificial colouring or molasses added to make them look brown, when they are in fact highly processed.

Whole wheat or wholemeal flour is made of the entire grain, with nothing added or subtracted.  It contains volatile oils, so it won't keep as well as white flour.  This is why I prefer to mill it myself, because the grain keeps better than the flour.  Using 100% wholemeal flour will result in a denser bread, which is not to everyone's taste.  I love the smell and taste of wholemeal bread, and I think it makes nice toast too.  There is less gluten in wholemeal flour, and also the bran prevents air pocket formation so the final result is not surprising.  However, you can counteract this to a certain extent by adding more water and leaving the bread to rise longer, or let it rise twice.

With wholemeal flour you get nothing added and nothing taken away.  A lot of white flour has various things added back, in some countries by law eg folate, so if you want to know exactly what goes into your loaf use wholemeal flour.

I wanted to try the no knead method with wholemeal flour.  This weekend I'm also going to make some cupcakes for a morning tea at work on Monday to raise money for the Christchurch earthquakes.  Although Australia has had its fair share of natural disasters in the last month, what has happened in New Zealand is beyond words.  New Zealanders and Australians are family.  I might put the recipe for the cakes in here later in the week.

Ingredients for wholemeal no-knead bread


3 cups wholemeal flour
Roughly 2 cups water
1/4 tsp dried yeast
1 and 1/4 tsp salt

There is more water in this recipe than the standard recipe, but different flours will take different amounts of water, particularly wholemeal flours.  Mix everything together, starting with 1.5 cups water and slowly add the rest until you get a soft mushy consistency but not too wet.  Place in a bowl, cover tightly with cling wrap and leave for 12-18 hours at room temperature.  Tip out the dough onto a floured surface and fold over once or twice.  Cover with a tea towel for 15 minutes, then shape into a ball.  Place onto a heavily floured tea towel, cover and leave to rise for 2-3 hours.  Preheat oven to 230 C, with your cast iron or ceramic pot inside, for at least 30 minutes, then upend the dough into the pot.  Replace lid and leave in oven for 30 minutes, then remove lid and cook for another 30 minutes.

The final product was very dense. although when I cut it there are pockets of air inside.  I sliced off a bit while it was still warm, and it tastes delicious.  Overall though, I'm a bit disappointed.  It's too heavy and crumbly for sandwiches, so it will probably end up as toast for the next few days.

French country style bread from Paula Wolfert

I don't know if anyone has ever tasted Poilane bread from Paris.  Their website is here: http://www.poilane.fr/

They make huge, dense round loaves of bread that have the reputation of being the best bread in the world.  Probably the most expensive too.  I've never bought a whole loaf, but you can buy small packets of the slices in some shops in the UK.  I've bought one of these, and although the bread was probably a bit stale it tasted incredible. I saw some for sale in Sydney once too, I wonder how fresh that would have been? People line up to buy this bread for hours (so the rumour goes) but honestly, I can't be bothered doing that and anyway the last time I went to Paris all the shops were closed because it was a Sunday.  And a gypsy cursed me.  So I am going to try and make a vague approximation of it at home.

Paul Wolfert is an American cook and food writer.  I think her books are astonishing for the amount of research, history and clarity of the writing that goes into them.  She's known for her interest in slow cooking, Mediterranean food, North African cooking and probably most famously the cooking of South-West France.  Her latest book is all about cooking in clay pots, which sparked my interest in using these for  bread.  This recipe comes from "The Cooking of South-West France" and is a refreshing book for its celebration of things like bread, lard, goose fat, cream and the remainder of the 5 food groups.

Ingredients:


1.5 tsp dried yeast
3/4 cup water at room temperature
1 cup strong white flour

1.5 cups lukewarm water
4.5 tsp salt
1 cup wholemeal flour
5.5 cups strong white flour

This is a time consuming recipe with multiple rises and is not for those who are time challenged.

First, make a starter with the first 3 ingredients, the 1.5 tsp yeast, 3/4 cup of water and the 1 cup of white flour.  Mix it and cover with cling film.  Leave it at room temperature for 1-2 days.  The longer you leave it the more of a sour dough character it will develop.  If you live in a warm climate like me it would be best to leave  it in an air-conditioned room, or even the fridge.  If there's any liquid on top of the starter stir it in before the next step.  It does smell very sharp but that's ok.

The next day, add the 1.5 cups water and the salt to the starter, and mix it in.  Add the cup of wholemeal flour, and mix it in.  Add the remaining 5.5 cups of white flour 1 cup at a time.  If the dough is too wet, add another 1 or 2 tablespoons flour.  The texture should be quite soft, but not wet, and also not too tough.... sort of a Goldilocks dough, I suppose.

Anyway, knead it for about 10 minutes.  Be careful if you use a dough hook.  It's such a large amount you could burn out the motor.  Best to knead it by hand.  Put it in an oiled bowl, cover with cling-wrap and leave somewhere warm for 1-2 hours.  Mine took 2 hours to double in size at an outside temperature of 33C, so it seems the yeast has to recover a bit from the starter.  At first I thought it wouldn't rise at all, but the second hour did the trick.

After the 2 hours, knock down the dough and knead for a couple of minutes, place back in the bowl, cover and leave somewhere warm again for another 2 hours.

After this, knock down, knead for a couple of minutes and shape into a ball.  At this point you can cook it in 2 ways, one which I used and one which I didn't.  The first, and to my mind the easiest way, is using the cloche system.

Preheat oven to 230 C
Put the dough ball onto the base of a cloche which was had some polenta scattered on it
Leave dough to rise for about 45 minutes covered in the cloche
With a razor blade, make some deep slashes in top of the loaf, any pattern you like.
Leave it for another 10 minutes to recover
Cook in cloche at 230 C for 50 minutes
Take off lid, and leave for another 10 minutes or so until brown and the crust has developed.
Place on a rack to cool.

For those who do not have a cloche, Paula Wolfert gives the following advice:

Flour a bread-rising banneton or put a tea towel in a 20-15cm bowl and flour the tea towel heavily.  Put the dough in the bowl, cover with another cloth and leave for 1-2 hours.  Preheat the oven to 230 C and tip the dough gently upside down onto a baking tray covered with polenta to prevent sticking.  Just before putting the bread in the oven, spray the oven with a few mists of water in a squirter, which will help the crust develop.  Cook for 50 minutes, but keep an eye that it does not burn, you may need to reduce the oven temperature.

I'll let you know how it tastes tomorrow, but I'm impressed with how much it rose in the oven.  As it cooled the crust cracked like a mosaic.

A couple of years ago I stayed in Paris, and in the ground floor of the apartment building was a bakery/cafe called Le Pain Quotidien.  I learned French at school for 5 years (not that anyone going to Doncaster High School in the 70s was likely to be in a French speaking environment for some time, but that's another story).   I can read French, sort of, and speak food related French very badly.  They had wonderful loaves of bread, and it was a lovely spot for breakfast and lunch.  After a very nice lunch, with lots of gesticulating to make myself understood, I asked if it were possible to buy one of the hessian lined straw bannetons that festooned the shelves along with bottles of olive oil, tapenade and other things ostensibly on sale.  The very nice waitress (in English) assured me that this was fine, so I waited at the checkout to pay my bill and get my basket.  After a long wait, a man I assume to be the manager appeared, and proceeded to lecture me in French, extremely rudely and loudly, that this was impossible, out of the questions, insupportable etc.  Despite the fact the baskets had price tags on them.  This ruined what had been a very pleasant lunch, and I did not go back into the shop again as a result.  I managed to find another one somewhere else, luckily, but that was an unpleasant taste of how awful the French can be.  The other example was the appalling desk bitch in a hotel in the Marais who refused to order  us a taxi, but that's another story as well.  Bon appetit.

Italian savoury bread

I felt like a change from the type of bread I've been making recently, so I thought I'd give this a go.  Italians love stuffing bread dough with all types of goodies, including olives, cheese, vegetables herbs and meat, particularly southern Italians.   They make a great snack as you everything has been added to the bread already.  Good for serving with pre dinner drinks, or as a snack or part of an antipasto.  You can add anything you like really, but this one is just a guide.

Ingredients:

500g strong white flour
1 tsp salt
3 tbsp good olive oil
10g dried yeast
250ml water
100g pitted and chopped black olives
100g salami chopped
100g chopped provolone cheese
Chopped sprig rosemary leaves

Mix all the ingredients together and knead for about 10 minutes.  If it's too wet add some more flour, a tablespoon at a time.  Place in an oiled bowl and cover for 1-2 hours until doubled in size.  Knock it down and knead into a round loaf.  Place on a baking tray with some polenta spread on it, to prevent sticking.  Leave to rise again for about 45 minutes or until doubled in size.  Bake at 200 C for 45 minutes.

This is a good dough to experiment with.  You could also add sundried tomatoes, chopped roasted capsicum, prosciutto, basil.  I've seen one recipe that involved braiding whole raw eggs in their shells into the dough, mainly for decoration but apparently you can eat the egg too (don't think I'll try that one).  Stephanie Alexander has a similar recipe, with just olives in it.  You can flatten that one out and make focaccia as well,  and she also has an amazing recipe in "Feasts and Stories" for a bread pie.  The casing of the pie is the olive dough, and it's filled with cooked chicken, potato and garlic before it is baked.  I made it years ago for a picnic, and it's like a ready made sandwich when cut into slices.

Anyway,  I'm going to take this one into work for afternoon tea and see what people think.

Barley Bread

I'm returning to a tin loaf today, made for a friend who finds my free form loaves scary.  She's been completely socialised into accepting the supermarket factory loaf of bread as the norm.  So much so that my lovely, brown, crunchy free form loaves make her sick!  So my challenge is to make her a loaf of bread that looks boringly 'normal', but tastes great.  Once again I turn to Elizabeth David.

Ingredients


450g strong white flour
120g barley meal (milled barley)
10g dried yeast
10g salt
340ml water
2 tbsp of buttermilk, cream or full cream milk

Mix all the dry ingredients thoroughly, then add the liquids and knead for 10 minutes.  Let it proof in warm place in an oiled bowl covered with cling wrap for 1-1.5 hours.  Punch the dough down, shape into a sausage and place into a 2 litre bread tin.  Preheat oven to 230 C and let the bread rise for 45 minutes until doubled in size.

Bake for 15 minutes at 230C
15 minutes at 200 C
Tip out of tin onto its side and bake for 15-20 minutes at 180 C.

Here is the result:

The dough rose amazingly well, better than any other mix I have tried.  I'll report back on the taste.  I've read that barley has a low glycaemic index and can also actually reduce blood sugar - who knows?  As I've made chocolate ice cream for dessert maybe that's a good thing.

No knead bread and clay pots

Well, the postal service seems very efficient post cyclone, as my second clay pot has arrived from the USA.  This is a hand made pot specifically made for the no knead bread recipe.  The recipe was developed by trial and error, in an attempt to get a European-style crust in a conventional oven.  Some have hailed it as the greatest breakthrough in bread technology in hundreds of years.  From the first attempt I made, I would have to agree.

Here are some photos of the pot.

The second picture is the bread proverb written inside the lid, which differs for each pot.  It's a really nice touch.  The pots are made by a lady called Judy Motzkin.  You can read about them and order them here:  Judy Motzkin's no knead bread pots

The recipe is simple.  There are lots of links to this style of breadmaking, the first I found was in the New York Times: Jim Lahey's no knead bread

Ingredients


3 cups strong white flour
1 and 1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp yeast
1 and 5/8 cups water

Mix everything together in a glass bowl for about a minute.  You can use a knife, I have found the best thing is a rigid silicon spatula because it's easy to clean.  The dough will look rough and sticky and  pretty ragged.  If you don't mix it well though, you can get hard lumps of flour in the final result.  It should come together pretty quickly.  As I live in the tropics I use iced water, as I want the yeast to act slowly.

Cover tightly with cling film and leave for 12-18 hours at room temperature, about 20 C is ideal.  It should look very bubbly.  Scrape it out onto a lightly floured surface, sprinkle lightly with flour, and with floured hands (because the dough is sticky) fold it over once or twice.  Leave covered with the cling film for 15 minutes, and then shape it into a ball, tucking all the edges underneath.  Place it on a heavily floured tea towel (a linen one, not a towelling one), with the folded edges underneath.  Flour the top of the dough, and cover with cling film or a tea towel and leave for 2-3 hours to rise again.

Pre-heat the oven to 230 C.  You will need a cast iron casserole eg Le Creuset, or an ovenproof ceramic bowl with a lid eg Romertopf.  You could even use a corning ware glass mixing bowl.  Cast iron pots are easier, because you can put them into a hot oven.  If you use glass or ceramic, you need to put them in a cold oven and heat it up, otherwise they will crack.  If handling glass or ceramic, avoid sudden changes in temperature.  Put them into a folded tea towel or wooden chopping board if they're straight from the oven, don't put them on a cold surface.  The pot should be at 230C for at least 30 minutes before it's ready to start baking.

Take the hot out out of the oven.  Pick up the dough by placing your hand under the tea towel, and upend it, upside down, into the hot pot.  Don't burn yourself.  Don't worry if it looks collapsed and awful, all will be well.  If it's not central, give the pot a shake to centralise it.  Put the lid on top, place it back in the oven for 30 minutes.  Then take the lid off, and leave for another 20-30 minutes until brown and crunchy.  Magically, the dough does not stick to the hot surface and it comes out easily.

Even if it's a bit lopsided, looks uneven, does not rise as much as expected, your worst effort will taste better then any other bread you have eaten.  I love this recipe and it's fun to cook it in different containers, or use different flours, to get great results.

The long proofing time makes the bread taste exceptional, with sourdough overtones and a delicious crust.

The Cloche - honey wheat bread

Okay, well Cairns has survived and narrowly missed being destroyed by cyclone Yasi.  The towns of Tully, Cardwell and Mission Beach south of us have not been so lucky.  I'm lucky to have power and internet access.  There's not much to eat, so I'm going to make some bread.

The first of my baking pots from the US have arrived.  The other one  - who knows where that is, now that the highway has been cut off to the south!  The one that has arrived is called a cloche, made of stoneware ceramic.

The whole idea of under cover baking is to preserve the moisture in a closed system within the oven.  This will do two things.  Firstly, the steam rises to the top of the enclosed container, and this encourages the bread to rise upwards instead of outwards.  The dough continues to rise within the container when it's first put into the hot oven, because it is initially protected from the intense heat of the oven.  The second thing is that the crust will be far crunchier due to the steam that is confined within the container.  There's also the combined outcome of the crust not hardening before the bread has cooked internally, so you end up with a well risen loaf with a good texture, rather than a sadly disappointing sized loaf with a dense texture.

Here's a picture of the cloche:

I think I will use this one for the usual type free-form loaves that don't need a tin, and use the pot that's still to arrive for the no-knead dough.  I'm trying a recipe in the brochure that came with the cloche.  Sadly, my Kitchenaid mixer blew its motor on this recipe so I have to buy another one.  I thought they were supposed to last forever?  I blame the cyclone.

Honey wheat bread


Ingredients


1 tbsp dried yeast
2 cups milk at room temperature
1/4 cup honey
3 to 4 cups strong white flour
2 cups wholemeal flour
1 tbsp salt
2 tbsp vegetable oil


Mix together yeast, honey, milk, oil, salt, wholemeal flour and 1 cup of the plain flour.  Add 1 more cup of plain flour at a time, until the dough is not too wet or too firm.  Err on the side of leaving it a little moist as you can always add more flour while you knead it.  I only needed to use 3 cups of plain flour.  Different types and brands of flour will absorb different amounts of liquid, wholemeal flour in particular, so you must be prepared to judge the amount required.  Knead the dough for 10 minutes, then place in a oiled bowl, cover with cling film and leave somewhere warm for 1.5 hours.  Knock the dough down, shape it into a round loaf and place in the centre of the cloche dish.  I use some polenta to cover the base in case the dough sticks.  Cover with the lid and leave to rise for an hour.  Preheat the oven to 190 C.    The take the lid off for 5-10 minutes until it looks cooked.