The Munchies Blog

The other day, I had a good reason for baking a cake. Somehow, I didn’t really feel like chocolate (still not quite sure how that could happen, but nevermind…). We did, however, have lots of nice sprayfree lemons in the fridge. So I decided on lemon, passionfruit and preferably white chocolate for the flavours. A quick search led me to this recipe. Here is the result:

I followed the recipe exactly, with the one exception that I used preserved passionfruit (it’s not exactly passionfruit season right now). I could only find preserves that had sugar added, so I left out the sugar in the passionfruit topping.

I was very happy with the result. I think this was the first time that I managed to make a nice fluffy sponge cake. Now I just need to practise cutting sponges in half horizontally and piping pretty chocolate lace thingies :)

It’s still blueberry season here in New Zealand — but you have to be a bit careful, some varieties are not really nice.

The other day, I made blueberry clafoutis, a recipe I’d wanted to try out for ages.

I didn’t change much from the original, but here is a translation.

Blueberry Clafoutis

• 500g blueberries
• 3 eggs
• 50g icing sugar
• 4 tablespoons standard flour
• 100ml milk
• 100ml cream — or just double the amount of milk
• pinch of salt
• butter for greasing the baking dish
• icing sugar for dusting

Pre-heat oven to 220°C.

Grease an ovenproof dish and put the berries in.

Beat the eggs together with the icing sugar until frothy, then add flour, milk, cream and the pinch of salt.

Pour mixture over berries and bake about 35 minutes. Let cool down slightly and dust with icing sugar.

I was a bit confused when I got the ingredients out of the pantry, so I overlooked the icing sugar. I used caster sugar instead, which seems to work just as well. I used 200ml of milk as the cream… well, let’s not talk about this.

Altogether, I liked the clafoutis. But I think I prefer more substantial cakes.

I felt like baking the other day, so I made chocolate crinkle cookies from a recipe at Anne’s Food.

It feels a bit strange to make them: most of the moisture comes from melted chocolate and butter, and they have to stand in the fridge overnight. Then you form small balls, roll them in icing sugar, and put them on a cookie sheet — almost like baking chocolate truffles…

The cookies look very good (I was actually quite impressed — I have this unfortunate tendency to mess up things that are supposed to look good, but this time things went really well). I’m not that happy with the taste though. It feels like something’s missing. Maybe it’s because they do look a bit like christmas cookies, but there isn’t even any cinnamon or something in there. I think next time I’ll try adding some chopped almonds or something.

For those of you who do not speak Swedish, that would be “My Grandmothers Rhubarb Pie” (barbarians ,) ). It is not a pie in the traditional sense with a bottom, but it does have a nice crust. When I made it the rhubarb turned out to have a very nice texture, and a taste which was slightly sour, but not very. Perfect, in my humble opinion ;)

So, let’s get to the good stuff…

Take about 500 gr. of rhubarb,
1 dl sugar,
2 tsp potato flour.
Put the oven to 225 degrees C.

Peel and slice the rhubarb, mix with the sugar and the potato flour and put in the oven for 10-15 minutes.

While the rhubarb are in the oven to pre-cook, it’s time to prepare the crust.

Take 100g butter,
1 dl rolled oats,
0.5 dl sugar,
1.5 dl flour,
0.5 - 1 tsp cardamom (depending on how much you like it).

Mix it all together. When you think the rhubarb are done, crumble the mixture on top of the rhubarbs (using spoons didn’t work for me) and make sure to have an even layer.
Put it all into the oven again until the crust has a nice golden colour. It should take about 10-15 minutes.

Serve with custard or ice cream.

You can of course use different fruit or berries, but you might not have to pre-cook them in that case, and you might have to use a different amount of sugar. I will try it out with raspberries and blueberries soon.

I think it was in one of my baking books that I first read about the concept of a pound cake: Use the weight of the eggs to measure out equal amounts of butter, sugar and flour. Back in the old days, when people had proper kitchen scales and so on, the eggs were simply used instead of the usual metal weights. In German, this batter is sometimes also called “Eischwerteig” — with “Ei” meaning egg, “schwer” heavy and “Teig” batter or dough.

The cookbook said that nowadays, use of rising agents like baking powder allowed for “better” proportions of ingredients, or something. I was still fairly curious, and seeing a recipe on Fool for Food (in German) convinced me to give it a try. Claudia (and I) used some amaretto for flavoring the cake. Well, I really like it (very moist and much nicer than my usual “I feel like baking” cakes), but I guess one shouldn’t be scared of greasy food…

Almond Pound Cake

• some eggs — 4 seems to be usual; I used 3, at room temperature
• butter, at room temperature
• sugar
• flour
• about 40ml of amaretto (could be more, I think)
• pinch of salt (which I forgot)

Weigh the eggs (still in their shells), measure out the same amount of butter, sugar and flour. Apparently it’s really important that all ingredients have the same temperature.

And now everything depends on the order the ingredients are added — and it’s very important to beat them properly.
Beat butter and sugar with a balloon whisk for 3-4 minutes. Yes, this is hard work in the beginning.

Beat in one egg at a time, always stir until it’s completely mixed in.

Add the amaretto and stir it in completely.

Fold in the flour. No more stirring afterwards.

Pour in greased(!) cake tin and let rest for 45 minutes. Bake in pre-heated oven at about 150°C/300°F for about 45 minutes (Claudia’s recipe says 180°C, but our convection oven seems to need lower temperatures).

In case you haven’t greased the cake tin: get someone to use brute force to get the cake out of the tin… (Not fun, this part.)

If you insist on decorating things: mix some icing sugar with a splash of amaretto. Cover cake with mixture. Sprinkle over some almond slivers.

When I tried out the recipe for a chocolate and pear cake in Linda Collister’s “Backen mit Schokolade” (the English original is Chocolate Baking) last Christmas, I realised that a good recipe is more than just a recipe for good food. A good recipe is one that you can follow without constantly reading ahead — one that takes the planning/scheduling overhead away from you. Bad recipes tell you to do things in an order that doesn’t make sense. Or they cheat by calling for things like “4 large eggs, separated” — instead of telling you to separate the eggs at a time in the recipe “flow” where it makes sense.

The chocolate and pear cake is really nice, but the recipe… well, isn’t. I haven’t managed to optimise it yet, but I’ll post it here with the modifications I made today.

Recipe: Chocolate and Pear Cake

Base:

• 180 g all-purpose flour
• 110 g cold butter, diced
• 30 g brown sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 2-4 Tbsp ice water

Sieve flour into a bowl, add the butter. Work with your fingertips (much easier than fighting with the food processor) until crumbs form. Add sugar, egg yolk and water. Now the recipe says to use a knife with a rounded tip to make the mixture into a dough. It also says to start with 1 Tbsp ice water and add a bit more if the dough stays too dry. Well, this kind of dough always stays too dry when I do it. That doesn’t really matter though. Just mix things a bit more and try to get a bit larger crumbs.

Make a ball out of the dough (well, if you can get the crumbs to stick together, that is), wrap in foil and refrigerate for some 20 minutes.

Get rid of all the stuff hiding out in the oven. Put a baking tray on the oven floor. The oven needs to be preheated to 200°C — do it now or, if you want to save energy, wait a bit with that. Find a springform, about 23 cm in diameter.

Filling:

• 125 g bittersweet chocolate, broken into pieces
• 125 g butter
• 90 g brown sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 125 g ground almonds
• 2-3 drops almond essence (I guess a little splash of Amaretto would work just as well)
• pinch of salt
• 2 ripe, medium-sized pears (preferably Williams Christ)

Put an ovenproof bowl in a saucepan with water. Put chocolate into bowl. Heat (not boil) the water so that the chocolate melts.

Meanwhile, separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites together with the salt (hint from one of my aunts: much easier if you also add a Tbsp cold water) until soft peaks form. Set aside. (My reason for doing that now is that I only have one bowl that I can use together with the food processor. After setting aside the egg white stuff, I can clean and reuse that bowl.)

Check that nothing bad is happening with the chocolate. And if you haven’t started to preheat the oven yet, better do it now. Take the dough out of the fridge and put it into the springform. Flatten it out and stretch it a bit so that it covers the bottom and goes up at the sides, about 2-3 cm high. Now it’s probably time to take the chocolate off the stove.

Whisk the butter (which should be fairly soft — either put it in the microwave for a very (!) short time, or reuse the chocolate saucepan), add the sugar. The recipe says that this should become thick and creamy. Well, doesn’t happen when I do it. Just ignore the recipe and gradually whisk in the egg yolks. Stir in the chocolate, then add the almonds and the almond essence or amaretto. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Pour the filling onto the base and make the surface look pretty.

Peel the pears, cut them in half and get rid of all the stuff you wouldn’t want to eat (if the pears are ripe enough, a teaspoon can be very helpful for this task). Slice thinly, but don’t cut all the way through — the slices should stay connected at the top (look at the picture, that makes things much clearer). Spread out onto the filling in a decorative way.

Set the springform onto the hot baking tray and bake for 15 minutes (still at 200°C). After that time, turn down the heat to 180°C and bake for some 10 more minutes — until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Carefully get rid of the side part of the springform. Serve the cake warm or cold. The recipe suggests to serve it with crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream. Whipped cream also works well (and I’m a bit sceptical about the crème fraîche).

According to the recipe, the cake tastes even better the next day (even though it won’t look as pretty).

Note: It’s important to use ripe pears. Or to equip people with knives.

After reading a posting on Chocolate & Zucchini about a cookie baking mix that is sold in glass jars, layered up like those “colored sand in a pictureframe” things, I decided that this would make a good present.

The cookie recipe I used is this one (I basically used the first one from allrecipes.com that looked okay and didn’t ask for raisins or anything like that).

Of course I had to try the cookie recipe first. What a good opportunity for my new cookie jar (from IKEA). I just fear they won’t last long — I really like them. Andreas doesn’t, though (”too much salt, too much butter”). But maybe that’s a good thing ;)

I don’t know if it’s actually going to work out with making cookies from this mix. After all, the original recipe says to mix the butter with the sugar first and add the other ingredients afterwards. But I guess with a food processor that doesn’t matter too much.

If I ever hear what happened to the jar I gave away, I’ll write about it.

I’d seen a biscotti recipe on Cooking for Engineers a while ago, but I didn’t feel like trying it out. One problem is that it’s difficult to get hold of untreated oranges here, and in addition to that I’m not too fond of aniseed. When I stumbled over a recipe for Chocolate Biscotti a few days ago, I decided to give it a try. “Everything’s good if it’s made of chocolate”, after all ;)

I followed the recipe, with one exception: I didn’t have much time when I made them, so I baked the slices standing upright, thus saving the “flip slices over and bake for another 20 minutes” step. The biscotti were fairly nice, but I think I made the slices too thick (about 1.5 cm, should be 1 cm). As I used the food processor to mix the dough, I might have overmixed it a bit (I hadn’t seen the warning about that on Cooking for Engineers until it was too late). I’m definitely going to make them again, but then I’ll add almonds or walnuts to the dough. Chocolate is nice, but the biscotti would be even better with a bit of texture variation, I think.

I’ve wanted to make panna cotta ever since I first tasted it. My only problem with the recipe I had was that it requires gelatin, which I do eat but prefer to avoid in my own cooking. Fortunately, I recently spotted an Agar-based gelatin replacement in a local supermarket, so I decided to give it a try.

Panna cotta as I know it is usually served with berry compote. Unfortunately, it isn’t exactly berry season at the moment. I was thinking about using frozen berries, but then I remembered the blood oranges that were lying around in the kitchen and decided to go for blood orange sauce instead.

The panna cotta turned out really well, and the combination with the blood oranges proved to be a good one. As usual with panna cotta, everyone would have liked larger servings (knowing full well it was better for them that they didn’t get more). The fruit sauce itself was so nice that people finished off the sauce leftovers with the rest of the grated white chocolate.

Vegetarian Panna Cotta
5 servings of 100 ml each

• 200 g cream (30% fat)
• 300 ml milk (3.2% fat)
• gelatin replacement (or gelatin) for 500 ml liquid
• 1 vanilla pod
• 50 g sugar
• pinch of salt

Pour the cream and milk into a small saucepan. Slit open the vanilla pod lengthwise and scratch out the seeds. Put the seeds and the pod into the saucepan. Stir in the sugar. Refer to the gelatin replacement’s packaging for usage instructions and use accordingly. The stuff I had could just be stirred into the mixture (the only requirement was that it had to boil for at least 2 minutes). Bring the mixture to a simmer and let it simmer for some 15 minutes. Stir occasionally.

Prepare 5 small molds (capacity 100 ml) by washing them out with cold water (I’m not sure why this step is required, but my original recipe included this. It might make it easier to flip the panna cotta out of the molds before serving). Fill the cream mixture into the molds, let cool down a bit, then refrigerate for at least 2 hours, better overnight.

Take the panna cotta out of the fridge about an hour before serving. Flip them out of the molds if you like (I didn’t). Serve with (warm or cold, I used warm) blood orange sauce and grated white chocolate (from about 15 g white chocolate).

Blood Orange Sauce
enough for 5 servings and some leftovers

• 5 blood oranges
• 1/2-1 Tsp sugar
• 2 tsp cornstarch

Put the orange juice and pulp into a small saucepan. Stir in the sugar and the starch and bring to a simmer. Let simmer for a few minutes. Taste and add more sugar if required. I had added too much sugar and tried to rescue things with about a teaspoon of lemon juice. I don’t think that made any difference though.