Category Archives: Recipes

Blueberry Muffins here too!

In the best (worst?) tradition of see something and want it now a post from Sally BR at the Bewitching Kitchen hit my inbox last night. Some not so sublimal message went straight to my brain…..

Copycat muffins

‘Oh yes!’ , I thought, ‘Blueberry muffins, I want them and I want them now!’ – (after a virtuous light supper of broadbeans and tomato passata on pasta). Thank you Sally! Sometimes reading my friends’ blogs is just what I need to prompt getting out the mixing bowl!

I went outside and inspected my very small blueberry plant, there were exactly 6 ripe blueberries on it. Not quite enough for a batch of these, in fact, let’s be honest, I have never grown more than a handful of these and the dogs have a habit of hoovering them off the plant anyway when they think I’m not looking.

As I have a mild phobia about translating cups to grams, I made them this way…

and I made them very fast.
250 grams plain flour
170 grams golden caster sugar
2 tsps baking powder

2 eggs
150 grams full fat yoghurt
grated fresh lemon zest
100 ml unsweetened soya milk
50 grams melted butter (as used full fat yoghurt reduced the butter- but you could use more like 100 grams if you are using low fat yoghurt I guess)

200 grams big fat blueberries

I sieved the dry ingredients together.

Beat the eggs, yoghurt, and soya milk together gently. Didn’t have buttermilk or much yoghurt left so added soya milk which seemed to work fine.

Added the lemon zest.

Melted the butter in another pan.

Then mixed the dry ingredients with the eggy/milk/yoghurt mix, drizzled the cooling butter in on top, gave that a quick stir, till the butter was just mixed in, folded the blueberries in. Plopped it into 11 muffin cases. I’ve realised that if you use one less muffin case, you get bigger muffins and they look more convincing.
Baked them at 160 C on Fan setting for 25 minutes.

Eaten approx 15 minutes after they came out of the oven.

Watered the veg bed, admired the rainbow, went to bed.

Rainbow at bedtime

Keep the pizza coming….

All stretched out and ready for action

Mushroom and basil and pepperoni

A thin and crispy pizza. Think I am getting the hang of this now. Thanks for the recipe Abby! I like this one. This one was made with dough that had sat in the fridge for 48 hours previously. Baked at a scorching 260 C in my little oven at the weekend.

Edit : Abby says it’s ok to post the recipe so here goes with my version of it: This makes enough for 5 225g pizzas.

680 g strong bread flour (I ran out of strong bread flour so added in some soft plain flour to make up the weight about 200 grams)
12 grams salt
3 grams instant yeast ( I used active instant yeast and I think I should have used a bit less as it’s more potent than regular instant yeast)
Sugar or honey or agave if you like (just a bit)
482 grams water, at room temperature
2 tablespoons olive oil (optional)

Combine all ingredients at least the night before you want to have pizza. Mix to a rough dough, leave for 20 minutes and then knead lightly either by hand or machine till you get a smooth dough which Abby describes as being somewhere between sticky and tacky.
Put a little oil on a work top. Move the dough onto it. Coat your hands lightly with oil and stretch and fold the dough. Divide the dough into 5 225 gram pieces and round into balls. Figure out how to keep them in the fridge till you need them. I put mine in little plastic pudding bowls with snap on lids, which I had lightly oiled. Abby used freezer bags which she misted with oil.

I didn’t use the dough for 48 hours, by which time it was pushing the lids of the tubs in the fridge.

I took the dough out about an hour before I used it. It was a very warm day, so you might need to take the dough out earlier if it is cooler.

I shaped the dough into pizzas using a floured worktop, some people do it with oil but I find flour easier, providing you use the minimum you need. I flatten the dough a little with the palm of my hand and then reshape it into a tightish boule. Leave it to rest for 15 minutes or so while I organise the toppings and put the oven on as hot as it gets and put the kiln shelf in ( my equivalent of a bread stone currently).

Then I start stretching the dough. I flatten the boule to a smallish circle and then drape it over my fist and see how far I can stretch it that way before I panic. Forgot to say, I use fine semolina on the peel so that when you shove the peel into the oven, the pizza should slide off as if it’s on ball bearings. So I carry on stretching the pizza dough out, leaving a lip round the edge. This dough got a bit too thin in the middle, so I sprinkled or shook the tomato sauce over the dough with one of those silicon pastry brushes, rather than drag the brush across the surface and risk ‘holing’ it. Then added toppings, mozarella slices, mushrooms, italian pepperoni, as above and baked for about 7 minutes. I added the basil and a drizzle of olive oil after the pizza came out. Apparently you can freeze the dough too and I will try that and see how it goes. I met Abby through Mellow Bakers, we are having a great time. If you fancy having a go at French bread or bialys or some heavy duty rye bread that’s what we might be doing this month coming… or not… depends how we feel :)

I’ve got one more pizza crust recipe to try as well that Oggi recommended… that one uses ice cold water.

Battenburg Revival

I might horrify you here. I scared myself a little – I had an important mission to undertake: I was asked to make a Battenburg cake last week. My memories of these are of pink and white sawdust cake, eaten to be polite, the cake that could not be refused. But we found two packets of old marzipan left over from Christmas in the garage and Brian suggested this, adding the killer line,

My Gran used to make this for me, and it’s my favourite.

Lego cake

…. here is my first attempt – tasteful, natural colouring, extremely fashionable looking isn’t it? Note lack of pinpoint precision and razor sharp lines too :) Because I can’t resist looking these things up this is what Wiki has to say

The origin of the name is not clear, but one theory claims that the cake was created in honour of the marriage in 1884 of Queen Victoria‘s granddaughter to Prince Louis of Battenberg, with the four squares representing the four Battenberg princes: Louis, Alexander, Henry and Francis Joseph.

OK, probably a bit heavy on the pink stuff, but the sponge worked beautifully
and I used these two Matfer tins that I had, one of which I got for a song in Cheltenham the other week. 25 cm long x 7 wide approx (the tin doesn’t need to be very deep) more like a couple of inches so you could use any two shallow tins. I got lucky this time.

So now what I want to do is make a brown and green one, that red food colouring is just a bit much. Though if you close your eyes and eat the cake it is actually melty delicious, soft light sponge, and sweet with apricots and marzipan and home made is definitely better than anything you can buy. Assembling the thing has a certain lego like quality of silliness that made me feel very happy. Who can be sad looking at a cake like that?

But to my reason for writing this post – can anyone suggest how to make

this sponge mix into chocolate and pistachio ????

175 g self raising flour
175 g caster sugar
175 g butter
3 eggs
and of course red food colouring (only use a couple of drops, not like me who used a teaspoonful!)

for the two sponges

You also need

small jar of apricot or raspberry jam
old packet of leftover marzipan from Christmas

Cream soft unsalted butter and sugar till really really white and fluffy
Add eggs one at at time
Fold in the flour gently.

Nothing complicated until you have to decide how much food colouring, don’t use as much as I did (!) and how to divide the batter between the two lightly greased tins.

I cooked these at 170 C in an ordinary oven for 27 minutes, might take less or more depending on your oven. Felt soft and delicate when I pressed with finger but the skewer came out clean so took them out.

Leave to sit in tin for a couple of minutes then turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool completely before cutting each sponge in half into 2 square profiled logs with a serrated knife.

You can cut away till you get them more or less the same and eat the bits as you go along.

Assemble the cake from your four logs, white on pink, using warmed jam as the mortar on the inside surfaces, don’t put jam on the outside at this point. The logs don’t have to be perfect, the cake is quite forgiving as you assemble it.

When putting the marzipan on, you need to roll it out quite thinly to about 1/4 inch deep. You need to do a bit of measuring to make sure you have a piece that will wrap all the way round the cake. Then you brush some warmed jam on the top of the cake Pick the cake up and place it jam side down on the marzipan sheet.

Then cover the sides and the top with a layer of jam and gently bring the marzipan up round the sides, pressing and smoothing as you go and across the top.

Trim off the ends with a sharp knife and turn upside down again so the seam is on the bottom of the cake.

It’s a good idea to chill the whole thing in the fridge for an hour to help it firm up once you have put the marzipan on.

So…
what sort of chocolate/cocoa would I need to add and how much ?

ditto if I chopped up pistachios and toasted them a bit, how much would I need to add?

And if anyone wants to have a go at it and show me how it should be done, that would be great! If you send me a picture, (or if you blog, a link to your post that would be fun too) – and I’ll add them on to this post if you want me to.

Oh, and was it like his Gran’s? I have no idea, he’s eaten most of it, so lets hope so :)

To see Lynne’s and be inspired to have a go click here. Do send me a picture if you feel like sharing it here. Email zebbakes at gmail.com

Edit: Since I wrote this post I have had a go at a chocolate version using Suelle’s suggestions of adding 1 tbsp of cocoa and 50 g of melted chocolate to one half of the mixture and 50 grams of ground pistachios and a smidgen of green food colour to the other half. Here’s a picture: I really like the chocolate marzipan which was 2 tbsps cocoa worked into a packet of white marzipan….