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Recent Comments
Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies
Robin, 20 Sept 2011, ‘Announcement’
¼ c soft butter. I did once make these with all peanut butter and mysteriously it wasn’t as successful. The straight butter brings out the peanut flavour somehow—as well as producing a better crumb—or again it may have been that particular jar/batch of peanut butter. Peanut butter isn’t as variable as honey, but it’s surprisingly variable nonetheless, especially, I suspect, if you decant it from giant vats at your health food shop, which I used to do, when I had a health food shop with giant peanut-butter vats. The original recipe called for equal amounts of butter and peanut butter, however, which I don’t approve of either. This is about the peanut butter. Well, and the chocolate.**
½ c chunky peanut butter. This may need adjusting depending on how squidgy your peanut butter is. But stand by to add more flour if the dough is very soft and goopy.***
1 c well tamped down dark brown sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract (NOT FLAVOURING. That hellgoddess obsession: use REAL VANILLA.)
2 c flour. I recommend half standard white and half spelt. They make white spelt now, if you can get hold of it. When I was still making these you could only get wholemeal spelt, and you could push up the percentage to about ¾ spelt, but you need a little plain white to lighten the texture. I’d try it with wholemeal and white spelt. The spelt flavour goes really well with the peanut butter.
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 c chopped dark chocolate or semisweet chocolate chips
I’ve been known to add ½c chopped hazelnuts. No, not peanuts. Hazelnuts are more interesting, and to my taste they go with peanut butter better than most of the other standard nuts—almonds, walnuts, cashews. I bet Macadamias would be good too.
Cream butter and peanut butter together thoroughly, then brown sugar. Then beat in egg, finally vanilla. Beat AND BEAT till fluffy. Mix the baking powder and soda into the flour(s), stir till all the same colour, then add to the creamed stuff. Beat till blended but no more. Stir in chocolate chips last.
Drop on greased or parchment-paper-lined cookie sheets. 350°F, probably about 12 minutes, till they’re just going brown around the edges. They’ll be fragile when they come out, so leave them alone till they’re at least half cool. This is why I use parchment paper: you can just pull it, cookies still in place, off the sheets. Of course then you run out of counter space†, but hey.
Less (Almost) Instant Chocolate Gratification, But Still Pretty Fast
Robin, 21 Jan 2012, ‘Death-deflecting Chocolate’
10 oz dark chocolate
6 T butter
1 egg
½ tsp vanilla
1 c granulated sugar
1 ¼ c plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
Reserve about 2T of the sugar.
Melt chocolate and butter together and cool. Beat the egg, then beat in the sugar till light and pale. Add the chocolate mixture when it’s cool enough not to cook the egg** and the vanilla. Then add the flour. If it gets too stiff to stir easily, knead the rest in.
Break off bits of the dough and roll cookies into big round pebbles the size of walnuts. (I do this between my palms. Some people prefer a table.) Roll in the reserved sugar. Then space out on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. I squish them very lightly with a finger so they don’t roll around. They will not be pretty if they turn themselves from free electrons into molecule clumps. Ahem. You can get the lot on a single baking sheet, but use all the space, they do spread.
400° for 8-10 minutes. They crack all over.
They don’t take nearly as long to cool as the refrigerator bars do to set.
Mettlesome Muffins
Robin, 18 June 2011, ‘Really Ratbaggy Weather and Suitable Distractions’
1 egg
3 T butter
¾ c strong tea
1/3 to ½ c honey: this is going to vary both with how sweet you want your muffins and how runny your honey is. I’m always going on in my recipes about how individual ingredients vary. Honey more so than most. Honey is actually fairly tricky to bake with, but muffins are pretty accommodating.
Melt the butter, let cool; beat the egg, add the honey, then the tea, then the melted butter.
1-2 c wholemeal/wholewheat flour. You want about 1 ½ c flour total, but if you want to use some white flour to lighten it, use up to ½ c.
½ c (dry) oatmeal
1 T baking powder
If you like cinnamon (I often put cinnamon in my tea), you can add 1 tsp ground
Mix all this dry stuff together, then stir in quickly to the wet. I recommend using a whisk. It’s true that lumps will (probably) bake out, but they make me nervous.†††
Plop in about 12 muffin cups, which you’ve either buttered first or put paper muffin cups in. About 20 minutes at 400°F. They should puff up beautifully, and the tops should be pretty hard. And if you wanted to brush them, when they come out of the oven, with a little honey thinned with a little water, that would be good too. If you want to you can run them back in the oven again for just about a minute more, to get a nice crackly effect from the honey wash.
††† I personally think the whole ‘don’t overbeat your muffin batter’ is kind of a bugbear. But it’s true you beat only minimally, unlike a cake batter, say, where you want to see the batter change colour.
Cherry (Almond) Ice Cream
Robin, 12 July 2011, ‘Summer Fruit and Squishiness’
2/3 c milk
1 egg plus one extra yolk
½ c granulated sugar
¼ tsp vanilla
1 lb sweet cherries
1 ounce slivered almonds
2/3 c whipping cream
Scald milk, set aside to cool. Mix the egg and the yolk in the top of a double boiler/bain marie with the sugar and beat like mad, till it turns pale and ribbons off the spoon. (Your electric mixer is your friend.) Pour on the slightly cooled milk; place over gently simmering water and stir till thick. Stir in the vanilla and leave to cool.
Stone your cherries. Ugh. This is the worst bit. You will need more than a pound, of course, because you’ll eat some of them to sustain morale. I’m not sure how to allow for this, since the original weight includes the stones, which you are discarding. Make your best guess. The original recipe tells you to put the stoned bits in a food processor and buzz them to puree, but I think this is unsporting. I just kind of rip them up some in the stoning process. You do want enough pulp to turn your ice cream red, but I don’t think you can avoid this with dark expoding-sweet high-summer cherries. Stir them, in whatever form, into the custard. Whip the cream till it forms soft peaks. Fold into the cherry mixture. Pour the lot into your ice cream maker and do what it tells you to do to produce ice cream.
While your custard is becoming ice cream, toast your almonds. The original recipe tells you to fold them into the finished ice cream, but unless you’re going to eat it all in one go, I wouldn’t; the almonds will go soft. I sprinkle them on per serving. This will, I admit, probably mean that you need more almonds, but hey.
Red Velvet Cake
Robin, 9 Oct 2011, ‘Geography and Chocolate’
½ c soft butter
1 ½ c golden sugar: the raw, low-refined kind that isn’t the pure white of standard granulated. It doesn’t have as much flavour as brown, but more than white, and it’s mellower than dark brown (and more interesting than light brown. Say I).
2 large eggs
1 tsp REAL vanilla
2 c flour, or maybe a little more
¼ c unsweetened non-Dutch-process ‘natural’ cocoa powder
pinch salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 c buttermilk, or 1 c milk minus 1T, plus 1T vinegar to sour it. I’ve been told many times this is cheating, but it’s a lot easier than finding buttermilk and then figuring out something to do with the rest of it. Theoretically, I think, if you’re using vinegar, it should be skim or low-fat milk—‘butter’ milk is a misnomer—but I always used to use whole/full fat because that’s what I drank, and it worked fine. Most of that soured-milk stuff works semi-interchangeably in baking—I always thought—you get a slightly different taste and texture if it’s sour cream or yogurt, say, but if your ingredients, especially your chocolate, are good quality it’ll all be silky—or velvety—and damnably excellent.
Standard cake deal: cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs. Sift dry and add alternately with sour milk. Beat hard, but don’t hang about either: as soon as the vinegar hits the baking soda your batter starts expanding. Turn into 2 8” or 9” round pans with removable bottoms which have first been buttered and floured with great enthusiasm and thoroughness. (A greased and floured cut-out of parchment paper works just as well if you don’t have push-out-bottom pans.) 350°F about half an hour: the layers should rise in the middle, and the edges start to pull away from the pan walls. Let cool at least ten or fifteen minutes before you try and get them out of the pans. I tend to think soured-milk cakes are more fragile than others, but that may just be my karma.
Frost when cool. I recommend vanilla buttercream, myself, but as you like.
Baked ground-seed somewhat breadlike substance
Robin, 10 Nov 2011, ‘Bleeeech con’t, day two’
Start with an egg. Beat it up.
Add ¼ c oil or melted butter. Groundnut (peanut) oil is good. If you like the flavour, olive oil is also good. Beat together thoroughly.
Probably about 2c ground seed. This is what Penelope used, and what I’ve used since: http://www.linwoodshealthfoods.com/productdetails/36/milled_organic_flaxseed_sunflower_pumpkin_seeds.aspx And yes, it’s eye-openingly expensive—but your nonbread will be more filling than your average mere floury object too, and you can get away with thinking of it more as a vegetarian main course. But stir in enough to make a softish but not runny batter—gooeyness more or less what you’d expect out of an ordinary tea or quick-bread batter.
You may want a little salt. I like a little tamari.
When you’re happy with the texture, sprinkle or sift one or two (measuring) teaspoons of baking powder and one or two (measuring) teaspoons of dried herbs to your taste over your batter, and beat that in.
If you’d rather use fresh herbs, chop them up and add them before you add the baking powder because chances are they’ll dampen the batter a little more and you’ll have to adjust. A big handful of parsley or coriander is good. I don’t think fresh basil bakes all that well: if you want basil, I’d use the dried.
Pour it into a round 8” pan. I haven’t cared to find out just how sticky ground seed is, so I butter and flour the pan and put a circle of parchment paper in the bottom and butter and flour that too.
350°F for about half an hour. It won’t rise, but the baking powder and the beaten egg seem to stop it from turning into a brick. Bake till the edges are turning brown, and the middle is firm to a light touch.
Sooty Cake
21 Aug 2010, Robin ‘Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote!!!!’.
125g butter
2 c plain flour
250 ml stout or porter: you want the darkest, richest beer you can find. The kind that has echoes on your tongue long after you’ve finished swallowing a mouthful. I live near the Best Pub in Hampshire and it makes a porter to die for. Except they don’t make it all the time. Sometimes you have to settle for draught Guinness.
2c dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/4c + cocoa: I use about 5T. You could try 6. I probably will the next time I make it.
1 tsp baking soda
Grease and flour an 8” cake pan with collapsible/detachable sides, although if you line it with parchment paper I’m sure you’d be fine with the solid kind. Heat oven to 350°F.
Cream butter and sugar thoroughly. Add eggs one at a time, and beat furiously. It’s going to curdle the minute you add the beer, so you want it as homogenous as possible at this stage.
Blend cocoa with a little of the beer in a separate bowl to make a kind of runny paste, then beat the rest of the beer into the butter/egg mixture. Beat in about half the flour, then sprinkle the baking soda over with about half the remaining flour and beat all that in. Then beat in the beer-cocoa, and last the final one-quarter of the flour. Beer is variable, like so much else in life and baking, and if your batter seems excessively liquid, add some more flour. First time I made this it didn’t rise properly—or rather it rose and then fell in the middle—but it cooked through and tasted great and even the texture was fine. Once I cut it up (supposing you are a master at the craft of cutting up fallen cakes to not show their fallenness, which I am) no one would guess. Next time I made it I allowed myself to paranoiacally add about another ¼ c of flour, and it behaved itself, but beer varies, especially, I think, home-made beer from the Best Pub in Hampshire. You’ll get a finer crumb, the less flour you think you can get away with, but this isn’t necessarily a cake that needs to be very fine.
Pour into cake tin and bake for 60-70 minutes, till it’s risen but (you hope) fairly firm in the middle and pulling gently away from the sides of the pan. Let cool a good half hour before you even try to get it out of the pan.
It’s very good with Earl Grey tea (if you like Earl Grey. Good Earl Grey, not perfumed floor sweepings). Just by the way.
Iced Chocolate Cookies
30 Oct 2010, Robin ‘PEGASUS and Cake, continued’.
3 c sifted plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
pinch salt‡
½ c cocoa powder
½ c butter
1 c granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
½ c buttermilk or soured milk
Sift the dry and set aside, mush‡‡ the butter and sugar together, beat in the eggs, then the vanilla. Add half the sifted dry, beat, then the buttermilk, beat, then the rest of the dry. Beat hard. Drop on parchment-paper-lined cookie sheets: 350°F about 12 minutes. They’ll still be softish, but the bottoms will be firm. (They may also subside a little as they cool. Don’t worry.)
Before they cool completely, ladle some frosting on them. Quantities and texture are up to you. If you want them to be really decorative, make your icing thin enough to pour, put the cookies on a rack that will be easy to wash later, and pour over. Finish the job with grated chocolate (after they’ve finished cooling). I tend to prefer the less artistic but more graphic approach, which is to say lots of frosting. I usually use about 3T butter, 3c icing sugar, 4 T milk and 1 ½ tsp vanilla.
‡ I have mixed feelings about salt. It does heighten the chocolateyness of chocolate, but . . . salt is everywhere. Like sugar. And here we’re concentrating on the sugar. The original recipe calls for 1 teaspoon salt. Good grief.
‡‡ The more you mush, which is to say cream, the smoother the eventual result. I find that beautifully thorough, cooking-school creaming is a bit wasted on cookies. It’s even more wasted on cookies that are about to be curdled by soured milk anyway. Cream enough to produce something relatively homogenous, and don’t sweat it.
Apple Butter Pumpkin Pie
30 Nov 2010, Robin ‘Morning-after Pumpkin Pie’.
1 9” unbaked pie crust
1 c mashed cooked or tinned pumpkin (DON’T use so-called ‘pumpkin pie filling’)
1 c apple butter: herewith begins the lecture. It all depends on your apple butter. You want something as thick as possible, and preferably not too sweet, but use what you like
¼ to ½ c dark brown sugar, depending on your apple butter
Again, the amount of spices you use will depend on the spiciness of your apple butter. So, approximately ½ tsp cinnamon, ¼ tsp allspice, ¼ tsp ginger. I like sweet spices and would expect to use 1 tsp cinnamon, but if I’m using apple butter that I also made, this may be overkill
3 eggs
½ c evaporated milk
Probably a tablespoon or two of ordinary milk
Combine pumpkin, apple butter, brown sugar, spices. (Mush up the brown sugar in a little of the pumpkin first, so it’ll beat in smoothly.) Beat eggs together vigorously, then lightly into the pumpkin. Stir in about half the evaporated milk and look at what you’ve got. It should look gloppy but not runny. (It helps if you’re used to what ordinary pumpkin pie filling looks like raw. This will be darker and have more texture because of the apple butter, but it should be about the same consistency.) If it’s already runny, stop now. If it still looks kind of La Brea Tar Pitsy, stir in the rest of the evaporated milk. Now look at it again. If it’ll actually keep its shape in a spoon, that’s too gloppy: add a little milk. If it slowly oozes over the edge of the spoon—perfect.
Pour in the unbaked pie shell. I cover the edges with tin foil so they don’t burn. 400°F for about 10 minutes, then lower to 350° and start checking after about 20 more minutes. You want it set but not shrivelled, and you want to take the tin foil off the edges of the crust about 15 minutes before you take the pie out. I usually figure 45-50 minutes total.
As I recall it took me four days to get through it. It was gone by the weekend—I did have a friend round once for a cup of tea and a slice of pie. That was back in the days when I had a metabolism however . . . and also I lived alone, so if I wanted to have a glass of cranberry juice and a quarter of a pie for supper, it was my business.
Apple butter
4 Dec 2010, Robin ‘Pumpkin, winter, etc’.
Grah. I keep meaning to look for my old apple butter recipe, and keep forgetting. However. You don’t really need a recipe: Take your apples. Core, peel and chop them—and you don’t have to chop them fine, just chop them—put them in a large, heavy, wide-bottomed pan with as little water as you can get away with—or better yet, apple juice—and boil, gently, till they go mushy. At this point use a potato masher on them. I personally find this a lot less effort than all that chopping-small stuff. Depending on the tartness of your apples and how sweet you want your butter you’ll need somewhere around ¼ to ½ c sugar (brown or white: I like brown) per cup of apple pulp, and if you mix it in with a whisk you’ll get the last of the lumps out. Again, depending on how spicy you like your butter, you’ll want anywhere from about ¼ to 1 tsp of cinnamon per cup, and about half that of allspice Then turn the heat down to low and let it cook forever. If you want to stand there and stir it you can have the heat a little higher, and it’ll take a little less time but . . . not enough less. Stirring is one of the most boring occupations on the planet.† You should be in the same house with it, however, your large, heavy, wide-bottomed pot with your future apple butter in it, because you need to stir it occasionally and make sure it’s not sticking. It will eventually congeal into . . . apple butter. I don’t remember how long it takes, but it’s one of these put it together before lunch and it’ll be done by dinner things, and then you’ll have fresh apple butter for breakfast tomorrow. As you’d expect with something that slow-cooks and is full of spices, it improves with a little age.
I never bottled it the way you’re supposed to. A couple of big jars of apple butter in the back of the fridge didn’t last long enough to be a nuisance. And the way I make it—without stirring—if you made it in a big batch it would take FOREVER to cook down to sludge. My way it’s simple enough that doing it again is not a big deal.
One more warning: you lose a lot of pectin—the stuff that stiffens the applesauce it into something you can spread—by peeling and coring. The first time I made it I’d automatically peeled and cored, because that’s what you do before you cook apples, and then I reread the recipe and thought, oh, frell . . . and besides, sieving the muck to get the peels and cores out is again to me way too much like work, like endless stirring. So I did it my way and it still came out butter, and has always come out butter†† every other time I’ve made it my way. I don’t know if I’ve been extremely lucky in my apples, or what. So you might want to follow a proper recipe.