Cranberry Oat Cookies

I'm usually a very organised person. In my group of friends I'm always the one in charge of making Christmas dinner, responsible for organising outings, acting as travel agent for our group holidays, and generally making sure that things happen. However, I've managed to forget to take photos of the baked cookies. This is obviously not because I was too busy stuffing my face with them as soon as they came out of the oven, because I definitely saved all of the triple batch that I made to take into the office the next day. Obviously. Ahem. Anyway, this post is somewhat lacking a picture of the 'final product', so you're just going to have to take my word that they were golden brown and delicious. So there.

                        If you squint a little and tilt your head to the left, these will look like baked cookies. Honest.

Remember, because these biscuits are very oaty and have 'fruit' in them, you can pretty much pretend that they are healthy. Kinda. I did receive a minor complaint from a colleague who found them a little too healthy-tasting, as he'd been hoping for chocolate chip. Oh well...

Cranberry Oat Cookies
175g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
100g porridge oats
150g caster sugar (or golden caster sugar if you can get it)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
140g butter, chopped
100g dried cranberries (unsweetened, if possible)
1 egg, beaten


Sift together your flour and baking powder, then add your oats, sugar and cinnamon to the bowl. Mix well using your hands. 

Add in your butter and rub it into the mixture using your fingertips, until it has been completely incorporated into the mixture. It should be the texture of crumble-topping.

Stir in your cranberries and your egg, then mix well using a wooden spoon until it all comes together into a ball of dough. Lightly flour your work surface then turn the dough out and roll into a sausage-shape, about an inch wide (depending on how large you want your cookies to be).

Once you've rolled the dough into a log, wrap it in cling-film and chill it in the fridge until solid. At this point, you could also freeze your cookie dough for later; it should keep for about a month.

When you want to bake the cookies, pre-heat your oven to 160 degrees Celsius (on a fan oven). Unwrap the cookie-log and slice into inch-thick discs. Arrange them on a lined baking tray.

Bake for about 15 minutes (add on a few more minutes if baking from frozen), until the cookies are golden. Leave them on the tray to harden for a minute or so before moving them onto a wire rack to cool.

The recipe is really easy to double/triple, so you could easily make a bigger batch and then pop a log in the freezer, ready for any 'emergency' situations where you might need cookies. Enjoy!

Easiest Dessert Ever.

This dessert is so incredibly easy that I feel as though I'm cheating by making it/blogging it. Of course, now that I'm writing about how easy it is to make, I won't actually be able to impress people with it anymore. Gone are the days of exclamations of amazement while I stand there blushing modestly and graciously saying, "Oh, it was nothing really", while actually thinking it was nothing. I have nothing to gain from this, so it seems. Remind me why I'm doing this? See the sacrifices I make for this blog?

Anyway, this is basically my take on a Roux brothers' tart from their book, 'The Roux Brothers on Patisserie', which is my pastry/dessert bible and I love to pieces. The fact that the pages are covered in scuff and butter grease-marks just shows that it is well loved. Really. In their book, my pastry idols call their dessert 'Tarte Chaude aux Deux Fruits' and serve it with a delicate sabayon. I call mine 'Crispy Apple Tart' and served it with (good quality) shop-bought vanilla ice-cream. Why, yes, I am sophistication incarnate. Hells yeah.

But seriously, this is a ridiculously easy dessert that can be whipped up in no time at all and does genuinely look rather pretty and tastes scrummy. It's a nice, light finish to a dinner party (which is needed after my last post, since that tart is quite the opposite) and seems to go down well. I actually served it at the same dinner party mentioned in my last post, and my dinner guests did enjoy it. This also meant that I was able to rope the lovely Jason into taking photos of the final product, so once again photos are thanks to him.

Crispy Apple Tart
200g of puff pastry. (You could make your own, use trimmings, or use good-quality frozen butter puff pastry. Whatever floats your boat. Roux brothers suggest you could even use pate brisee if you like)
500g of dessert apples, Cox if you can get your hands on them.
70g of unsalted butter
60g of caster sugar
The juice of 1 small lemon, or half a lemon if you don't want it to be too zesty
1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 240 degree Celsius. If you're using frozen puff pastry, then use the instructions on the pack. Place your pastry on a baking sheet and prick the surface lightly with a fork.

Peel, halve and core your apples, then cut each half into thin, even slices. You don't want them to be paper thin or they'll be mushy once you sautee them, but you do want them to be thin.

Place your apple slices in a pan and saute them with the butter, lemon juice, cinnamon and sugar for about 2 minutes, until they havejust softened a bit. Remove the apples from the pan and keep them aside to cool. Keep reducing the remaining liquid until it has thickened just a bit to a light syrupy consistency. At this point, you could also flambe the syrup with Calvados (as the Roux brother suggest), or just leave it be.

Arrange your cooled apple slices on your prepared pastry in an overlapped pattern, depending on the shape of your pastry. If you've rolled your own pastry, roll it into a circle and arrange the apples in a rosette. I used frozen pastry, which came in a square, and so just arranged the apples in overlapping rows, which still looked nice.

Using a pastry brush, brush the reserved cooking syrup over the apples before placing into the oven. If you want a slightly crisper top, you could sprinkle a little caster sugar over the top but if you're planning to do so, you should probably reduce the amount of sugar that you cook the apples in.

Place the tart in your preheated oven and allow to cook for 10 minutes. Remove from the tart from the oven after 10 minutes and brush a little more of the syrupy glaze over the apples before returning the tart to the oven for a further 5 minutes. The tart is ready once your pastry has puffed and is crispy.

The tart is fine to be served straight from the oven with a good scoop of ice-cream on the side, or lukewarm. Ice-cream is a must, though.

Enjoy! And please, if you do make this, don't be a fool like me and tell people how easy it is- just let them think you've spent hours slaving away in the kitchen. Ah, sweet regret...

Bitter Chocolate Truffle Torte.

Two weekends ago I made dinner for some work friends for a belated birthday celebration. I'm always using said friends as (fairly willing) guinea pigs for whatever new recipes that might have caught my eye, but since it was meant to be a nice dinner party and I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally poison them or serve them slop, I turned to a trusted source that has always helped me deliver drool-worthy desserts to the dinner table; Not So Humble Pie. Everything of Ms Humble's that I've tried to make has always turned out pretty perfectly, so I figured I couldn't go wrong with one of her recipes.

I've been eyeing up her Fresh Mint Truffle Tart for a while now, but decided against following the recipe to a tee as I know that some people (crazy people) are not too keen on the mint-chocolate combination. Personally, I think these people are nuts, but I decided to omit the mint flavour from my torte and just make a really bitter, chocolatey version instead. The recipe I'll post here is very much Ms Humble's recipe, but with the few minor edits that I made.

I was lucky enough to have a good friend take these gorgeous photographs for me at dinner (how I regret not insisting that he was there to document the baking process!). Thank you, Jason! 

Crust:
60g icing sugar
130g plain flour
25g good quality cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
113g cold unsalted butter

Filling:
300g dark chocolate (minimum 70% cocoa solids), chopped
177g semi-sweet chocolate (minimum 56% cocoa solids), chopped
290g double cream
2 tablespoons of unsalted butter

First, preheat your oven to 175 degrees Celsius. Grease an 11" tart tin with a removable base, then place it into the freezer. This isn't always necessary, but it makes a difference when you're making proper pastry (especially delicate ones like shortcrust pastry), or if you live in a hot, humid country (like I do).

Next, whip out your trusty old food processor. I have to admit, one of the things that really made this recipe appeal to me was just how easy to make the crust sounded. How easy, you ask? Well, this easy...

Pop all the dry ingredients for your crust into your food processor and give them a good pulse. Cut your cold butter into small pieces and add them to the food processor. Blend the mixture until it forms a fine crumb that just holds together when pinched between your fingers.

Pour the crumbs into the tart tin you prepared earlier, and press them down until they are firmly packed into the tin. Bake the crust for 15 minutes, then leave to cool completely.

Start on your filling while waiting for the crust to cool.

Put your cream in a saucepan and bring it up to a simmer. Take it off the heat and let it cool down just a little bit; while waiting, start chopping your chocolate. Once chopped, add the chocolate, warm cream and the butter to a heatproof bowl or small saucepan, which should then be placed over another saucepan of simmering water (a makeshift double-boiler, basically). Make sure your bowl is over the water and not in, as you don't want it to get too hot.

Stir the mixture until the chocolate has melted and the mixture has emulsified into a smooth, glossy ganache. Pour the ganache into your cooled crust, then place the whole tin into the refrigerator to set (which should take a few hours).

I decorated it with a sprinkling of cocoa over the top and served it at room temperature with a good dollop of vanilla ice-cream. It went down a treat with my guests and was a rather decadent end to dinner. 

Thanks to the lovely Ms Humble for allowing me to blog the recipe. Hopefully I'll have an excuse to try it again...but with mint next time.

Plum & almond tart.

I know, I know... I've been pretty terrible at updating; I do apologise for that. However, in my 'absence' I have made a few things that will be making an appearance on the blog in due course.

To start, I have an adaptation of a recipe from Gregg Wallace, the jovial pudding-loving half of my favourite Masterchef UK judging duo. I found this recipe on BBC Good Food's website (one of my go-to sites for new recipes) and it seemed fairly straightforward.

The original recipe calls for peaches, but I couldn't find any good ones and so I decided to go with plums instead. It turned out alright and was well received by my test subjects, but I'm not entirely sure if perhaps I didn't slice them thinly enough or if plums are denser than peaches as I had a bit of a 'sinkage' issue when placing my plums on top of my almond filling.

Since I made this a couple of weeks ago when being attacked by a chest infection, I decided to be a little lazy and use the rather foolproof pate brisee recipe (see Blueberry Pie post) rather than making a more delicate pate sablee shortcrust pastry.

Anyway, here we go (and I also apologise for the minimal photos).

1 portion of pate brisee
2 eggs, beaten
140g ground almonds
100g caster sugar
140g butter
50g plain flour
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
4 plums, sliced

First, prepare your tart tin. I always grease my tin with a little butter and then place it in the freezer for about 15-30 minutes. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius (fan oven).

Once your tin has been prepared, line it with your thinly rolled out pate brisee. Line it with greaseproof paper or foil and weigh down the centre with baking beans (dried, uncooked rice or beans also work). Bake for 15 minutes then remove the foil/paper, brush the inside of the tart with an egg wash and bake for a further 15 minutes, until the pastry has begun to firm up to an almost biscuit-like, crisp texture.

While waiting for your pastry to cook, make the filling. Cream together your butter and sugar until the mixture has become fluffy and pale in colour. Beat in the eggs and your vanilla essence, then sift in your flour and fold in your ground almonds.

Spoon the mixture into your pastry case and arrange your plum slices in a pattern.

Return the tart to the oven for a further 30-40 minutes until golden and the almond filling has set and is fairly firm to the touch. The mixture shouldn't seem too wet, nor should it be too dry and hard- it should still have a little give.

Serve at room temperature or still warm with a dollop of creme fraiche or tangy Greek yoghurt (I definitely recommend the latter).

Guest-starring... Jaffa Cake Muffins.

So, I'm currently a little laid-up after an operation on my knees...so I've called upon the services of my dear boyfriend to provide me with a guest-post (read: he wanted to make muffins. I gave him a recipe. They turned out well. I preyed upon his love of Jaffa Cakes and muffins and bullied him from 10,000 kilometres away to give me a guest-post). Anyway, here we go!

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It’s a great honour to be invited to make a *guest post* on Alia’s food blog; the only logical next step is running a three Michelin-starred eatery in the Lake District, surely. 

Please be forewarned; I am not a very good cook. I’m not completely useless; if I had to sum up my culinary ability, it’d be “ham handed” (the joke is that Alia doesn’t eat ham DO YOU SEE). If Alia and I ever embark on a joint cooking project, I’ll usually be relegated to “De-shell these pistachios” or “Put this wine in this glass”; it’s humiliating, but ultimately it’s for the best. 

As such, I shall be presenting a recipe which has a very favourable risk-reward ratio. In other words, it’s foolproof (me being said fool). We’re making JAFFA CAKE MUFFINS HELL YEAH!

If you want to follow in my stumbling, incompetent footsteps, you’ll need the following:

·         125ml vegetable oil
·         Two eggs
·         Two 35g pots of chocolate mousse (I’m pretty confident that you could use chocolate custard instead, if that floats your boat)
·         250g of plain flour
·         Two teaspoons of baking powder
·         150g of caster sugar
·         75g of light brown sugar
·         One orange
·         JAFFA CAKES

                 Oh god, I should have emptied that grease tray before taking this photo. My grease is my shame.

Dump the “dry” ingredients (flour, both kinds of sugar and the baking powder) in a mixing bowl.

In a separate bowl, combine the eggs, oil and chocolate mousse.

                                                                           Appetising

Cut the orange in half and force-choke the juice out of that mofo.

                                                                          RAAAAARGH

Grate the skin of the orange to get your zest (previous, harsh words/beatings from Alia reminded me to STOP AT THE WHITE BIT), and add that to your bowl.

Now, attack it with a fork until it’s smooth, then pour the contents into your mixing bowl.

At this point, Alia would tell you to “fold” the wet ingredients into the dry ones. I’ll let you into a Kitchen Secret – I think that’s just a fancy way of saying “mix”. Together we will BREAK DOWN THE WALLS OF OPPRESSIVE COOKING JARGON, comrades.

Ok, now grab your jaffa cakes!

                                   PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE HALF-EATEN JAFFA CAKE BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Take your knife and let those tiny cakes Know True Suffering. It’s not exactly a precise science to work out how many jaffa cakes you’re going to want in your mixture as a whole (retrieve your jaws from the floor, dear readers), but I ended up using about seven. There was definitely room for more, though, so your mileage may vary. 

Anyway, get your jaffabits (patent pending) in your mixture, and baptise them in your Holy Batter (I don’t know; shut up).

From here, just spoon the mixture into muffin cases and whack them into your muffin tray. If you’re concerned that there isn’t enough sugar in this recipe (there is), feel free to sprinkle some light brown sugar on top. I won’t stop you, but your arteries might.

Bung it in the oven. At 200°C in a fan-assisted oven, they should take around twenty minutes. 

OMG THEY ROSE! YES WE CAN! YES WE CAN! Sure, one of them was clearly overfilled and spilled over the edge of the muffin tray, but rudimentary, delicious cosmetic surgery sorted it out.

So yeah, that’s it. Easy but rewarding stuff. The muffins were soft, with visible jaffabits inside; finding little bits of orange jelly inside brought tears of joy to my pathetic, engorged face. There’s obviously massive scope for varying this recipe, and with that in mind I’m currently drawing up a mental list of alternative fillings (early frontrunners: “Boost” bar, Jammy Dodgers, Malteasers, haggis).

If you’ve honestly learned something about baking from this post, consider me incredibly flattered. If you haven’t, congratulations: you’re a competent cook!

EPILOGUE: I’d totally forgotten that Jaffa Cake Muffins already exist!

Faced with almost certain copyright infringement (trust me, I’m a lawyer), I did what I would advise a client to do in the same circumstances: DESTROY THE EVIDENCE.

...No, not really – in actual fact I’d left the bowl on the hob and my flatmate’s girlfriend accidentally melted it. My story’s better, though.

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So there you go! Give the muffins a go and hope you enjoy them  :) 

Cheesecake Confession...

So, I decided to make an Oreo Cheesecake. After work. After a long day at work. I might have screwed it up. A little. Kind of. Hmmm.

I've actually never made a set cheesecake, but I figured "How hard can it be?" Apparently it can be pretty damn difficult when you're tired, misread the recipe and dissolve your gelatine in 5 times more water than you're meant to... Ahem.

However, I discovered that my triage skills are actually pretty good (and I'm now convinced that mascarpone has the power to fix everything and anything). Thankfully, despite my rather colossal slip up, it was nothing that a little extra gelatine powder and whopping great dollop of mascarpone couldn't fix.

In fact, it actually turned out pretty well. I was using a recipe which I'd found in a copy of The Australian Women's Weekly which my mum had lying around the house. It caught my eye thanks to the advertised feature of 'Our Best-ever Cheesecakes', so I felt fairly confident that the recipe should be pretty good. However, I liked the way my would-be mistake turned out, so I've adapted the recipe very slightly to incorporate my weirdly successful quick-fix methods and a couple of edits I made when I realised I happened to not have enough caster sugar... 

250g plain chocolate biscuits
130g melted butter
1 1/2 teaspoons of gelatine
1/4 cup (60ml) of water
200g softened cream cheese
150g thickened cream
250g mascarpone
250g good-quality white chocolate
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
50g caster sugar
60g light brown sugar (I did this as I didn't have quite enough caster sugar, but if you do then 110g caster sugar would be fine. However, I thought that the brown sugar ended up adding a nice flavour to the mix and stopped it from being too sweet)
150g cream-filled chocolate biscuits (Oreos), broken into rough pieces
50g melted dark chocolate for decorating


First, grease and line the base and sides of a 22cm springform cake pan, then place the pan in the fridge to chill. I always do this whenever I'm making a cake or tart that has a 'base' (either pastry or biscuit crumb) as I find that keeping your tin chilled helps to make sure that once your tart is finished, it will come out of the tin easily (particularly when you're in a hot, humid country like I am).

Process the plain chocolate biscuits into a fine crumb, then stir in the melted butter until it is evenly mixed through. Press the biscuit mixture evenly over the base of your pre-greased tin, then press it evenly halfway up the side of the tin. Place the tin back into the refrigerator while you prepare the filling.

Sprinkle your gelatine over the water in a small heatproof jug or small saucepan, then place the jug or saucepan over a larger saucepan of simmering water. Stir the mixture until the gelatine fully dissolves, then let it cool for about 5 minutes.

Beat the cream cheese in a bowl with an electric mixer until smooth. Then add the cream, mascarpone, vanilla, and sugar until combined. Once everything has been fully incorporated, add the gelatine mixture and continue beating until just combined. Fold in your melted and cooled white chocolate, then gently fold in your biscuits.

                                        Reason Why You Need to Make This #1: The left-over Oreos that you need to eat...

Once the biscuits have been folded into the mixture, pour the filling into the biscuit base in the pan. Place in the refrigerator until set, which should take at least 3 hours.

Just before serving, place your melted dark chocolate into a piping bag and drizzle the chocolate across the top to decorate (or, if you're like me, realise that your piping bag is pretty terrible and settle for odd-looking splodge-swirls...).

                                                            Strange splodge-swirls. Like so.

And voila! It's really rather easy (yes, I know I shouldn't say this when I was a total genius and screwed it up really... But it is), and you don't need to worry about baking it in a water-bath or anything. Just bung it in the fridge. And remember, you may find that you're left with extra Oreos, which you will have to eat immediately since you don't have an air-tight container to store them in...and you wouldn't want to waste them. So you should definitely eat them while patiently waiting for your cheesecake to set in the fridge.

Fruity Tart...

Hello!

Just a quick little update for you, with a quick little recipe to go with it - a simple fruit tart. The main component of the tart that might be a little tricky is the creme patissiere, or pastry cream, which you do need to keep an eye on.

For the actual tart case, use a portion of the pate brisee from the blueberry pie recipe (first post on this blog). That should give you more than enough pastry to line one tart tin, and I found that I actually had a bit left over. Quick note - do try to roll the pastry out as thin as you can manage, to make sure you have a really nice crisp pastry case (to leave space for oodles of pastry cream filling). Remember to bake the pastry case all the way through since you won't be baking it again after you've filled it.

The recipe stated below is for the creme patissiere.

4 egg yolks
100g caster sugar
25g plain flour, sifted
1 vanilla pod (scored down the side), or 1 teaspoon of good-quality vanilla extract
350ml full cream milk


In a bowl, whisk together your egg yolks and sugar until the mixture becomes thickened and pale. Stir in your flour until well combined.

If using a vanilla pod, place it in a saucepan with the milk and bring it slowly just up to the boil. Remove the vanilla pod and pour the hot milk over the egg mixture, whisking the entire time. It's important that you keep whisking throughout the process, to prevent lumps of cooked eggs forming and to let the mixture incorporate properly.

Once the mixture has fully mixed together, return it to the saucepan and stir over a low-medium heat until it comes up to a gentle boil. Be careful not to let the bottom of the mixture burn. It must boil in order to thicken.

Continue to cook the mixture for a further few minutes, stirring continuously until it has thickened and any lumps have disappeared. If it does appear lumpy, whisk until the lumps break up. You can also pass it through the sieve if the mixture goes too lumpy during the cooking process. If using vanilla essence instead of the vanilla pod, stir it in now.

Cover and place aside until the creme patissiere has cooled.


Now, once it has cooled properly, you could use it as a base filling for a simple fruit tart (which is what I did).

Just take your fully cooled and cooked through pastry case and fill it with your creme patissiere. Then grab some soft fruits to layer over the top.

I chose blueberries...  

And strawberries... 

To be honest, you can pretty much do this whatever way you like. Pile them up on top, or slice and arrange them. I'm usually a fan of just 'artfully' piling things into a heap, but decided to change things up and slice them. What can I say? Sometimes I just like to be a bit mental like that.

So yeah, in a moment of total madness, I halved the strawberries and then dotted the blueberries around...

 

And there you go. Tart. Oooeerr. The creme patissiere really doesn't take long to make, you do just have to keep an eye on it as I, ahem, might have learned the hard way. Nothing a quick passing through a sieve couldn't fix, thankfully, but a lesson learned!