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Archive for the ‘Recipes’ Category

Marty’s Triathlon Cookies

Posted in Food & Friends, Recipes, tagged , , , , on March 16, 2009| 6 Comments »

martys-cookies

We have a lot of mad friends, but our mate Marty is by far the most bonkers. His latest passion is triathlons and, true to form,  he’s become completely obsessed with them.  I sent some cookies home for him last week and subsequently received this email: “Awesome cookies, trialled them at a tri last Sunday. Felt so good at the end of 1.5/40/10 that I went to the gym to burn off the excess energy”.

He has a big event coming up soon, so I’ve baked another batch for him.  His brief is pretty simple – the cookies have to be hard and chewy (not brittle or crunchy, otherwise they tend to shatter when he’s eating on the run) and they have to be easy to pack in the little box on the handlebars of his bike.  I felt the original batch was too sweet, so I’ve been tinkering with the recipe tonight (and as a result baked over 70 cookies). The final cookies are based on a heavily modified applesauce oatie recipe, which I overbaked slightly to give them a chewy texture.  A disclaimer – I don’t run marathons or triathlons, so these are just a cookie that our friend enjoyed and requested more of.  Please don’t write to me and tell me they’re not balanced or have too much sugar – as long as Marty’s happy with them, then I am too!

  • 1 cup quick oats
  • 1 cup traditional oats
  • 1 & 1/2 cups plain (all-purpose) flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp bicarb (baking) soda, sifted
  • pinch salt
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 125g (1/2 cup) unsalted butter
  • 1 large egg
  • 3/4 cup apple butter (we used homemade)
  • 1 cup dark chocolate chips
  • 1 cup dark raisins
  • 1 cup slivered almonds

Note: I used almonds and raisins because they were in my pantry, but I think you could probably use any mix of dried fruits and nuts that you have on hand.  Having said that, I think the chocolate is non-negotiable!

1. Preheat oven to 190C (375F).

2. Combine the oats, flour, baking powder, soda and salt in a large bowl, and stir well to mix.

3. In a large mixing bowl, beat the sugars and butter to form a grainy paste, then beat in the egg and apple butter.

4. Add the flour mixture, choc chips, raisins and almonds and mix on low heat to combine.

5. Drop by large tablespoons onto a tray lined with Bake (parchment paper).  Wet your hand and gently flatten out the cookies a little.

6. Bake for 5 minutes, then rotate the tray(s) and bake for an additional 8 – 10 minutes, until well browned (keep an eye on them near the end to make sure they don’t burn). Transfer to a wire rack to cool. The cookies will still be a bit soft to touch, but will harden as they cool.

EDIT : A follow up – here’s the sms I received from Marty today after his big event on the weekend .. “Cookie Power!  Thanx 2U.  13.19 + feeling great.  Luv m”.  Makes it all worthwhile!

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Cooking Class with June

Posted in Food & Friends, Recipes, tagged , , , , on March 14, 2009| 2 Comments »

I’ve had a wonderful day!  My neighbour June was baking some of her traditional Hungarian sweets today, and she let me sit in her kitchen and watch.  It was like having a private cooking class, only better, because I got to hear stories about her life and family, which had me completely captivated.

She made two different dishes, her jam kifli (which is completely different to her vanilla kifli – the jam ones are a filled pastry as opposed to a cookie) and a cottage cheese and sour cream cake. The jam kifli are made with a tactile, pliable, smooth-as-silk dough, which June whips together by hand on a large piece of laminate that her darling husband made for her decades ago.  Interestingly, there’s no sugar in the dough – the kifli get their sweetness from the filling and the icing sugar mixture that they’re tossed in after they’ve cooled.  The pastry is amazingly flaky and light (June’s more so than mine) and it’s way too easy to inhale three in a single breath.  Pete looked at me forlornly tonight and said, “Babe, I think I’ve eaten too many baked goods”. I could only groan in agreement…

Recipe (with photos) here…

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The cottage cheese and sour cream cake is completely different – it’s an elegant dinner party dessert, which looks as good as it tastes.  June hunts high and low for the European style (“Farm style”) cottage cheese that she uses – unlike the stuff we normally get in little tubs, this comes in a large half kilo block and is quite solid, although it crumbles easily with a fork.

The pastry she uses is very flexible – June uses it for both this cake and apple pies – and I’m sure it would work well for other sweet pies as well.

Recipe (with photos) here…

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June’s Vanilla Kifli

Posted in Recipes, tagged , , , on March 11, 2009| 6 Comments »

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Our neighbour June makes the best almond crescents I’ve ever tasted.  She refers to them by their Hungarian name – Kifli – and they’re so good that after the first bite, I downed tools, hot-footed it across the road and begged her for the recipe.  Incredibly generous soul that she is, she gave it to me straight away – I didn’t even need the jar of jam I’d taken with me as a bribe.

Let me try to explain how good these really are. June sent some over – “for Peter” – and all ten cookies were devoured before dinner.  Our 16 year old neighbour mows her lawn, knowing that he’ll be rewarded with a container of kifli.  And the darling two year old on the corner, when offered a crispbread recently, went into meltdown, weeping,”Noooo…want June bikkie!”.

I was reminded again today that getting a recipe in writing and actually executing it to a given standard are two very different things.  I’ve always maintained that baking is only partially about the ingredients; at least half of the success lies in the technique and handling. June’s recipe is a classic example – it seems simple enough, and yet my first batch was a complete disaster.  After I’d tried to beat the dough into submission, I managed to burn the entire two trays worth – a humbling and annoying lesson.

The second batch was far more successful.  Whilst they’re not exactly like the original, Big Boy did declare that they were “close”.  That’s partly because I used straight almond meal, whereas June uses a mix of almond meal and unblanched whole almonds, which she grinds in an old hand mill that she brought with her from Hungary half a century ago.  But I’m sure the main difference is experience – she’s made this recipe a hundred times, and knows instinctively how to handle the mix.  She laughed at my fussing with the dough, and insists that she just kneads it all together and rolls it out flat, whereas I found it easier to handle the dough more gently.  Here is my take on the recipe..

  • 250g unsalted butter
  • 1/2 cup (110g) caster (superfine) sugar
  • 2 cups (250g) almond meal
  • 2 cups (300g) plain flour, sifted
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/2 cup icing (confectioners) sugar mixture

Note: If possible, use the weight rather than cup measurements when preparing ingredients – trust me, you’ll get a better result!

1. Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fanforced).

2. Cream the butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy, then add the vanilla extract and mix until blended.

3. Whisk together the almond meal and plain flour, then mix them into the butter mixture. Mix until just combined.

4. Tip the mix onto a sheet of Bake, and gently squeeze it together until it’s combined into an homogenous dough.  Pat or roll it out into a rough rectangle about 1.5cm thick (June makes hers a bit thinner, but I was gunshy after having burnt the first batch).

5. Using a round cutter, cut the dough into crescent shapes, and place them gently onto an oven tray lined with another sheet of Bake.

6. Bake for 10 minutes, then turn the tray around and bake for a further 8-10 minutes, or until light golden brown (you don’t want them to darken).

7. Using a spatula, move the kifli to a wire rack to cool.

8. Sift the icing sugar mixture into a small bowl, and toss the cooled kifli in it to coat (one at a time and handle with care, as they can be a bit fragile).

I took one across the road for June to try and, bless her, she was kind and encouraging.  I was gone for maybe four minutes – and in that time my sons ate six crescents between them. Looks like this has already become a family favourite!

Refining the recipe : Vanilla Kifli – Revisted

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Brownie Cupcakes

Posted in Recipes, tagged , on March 11, 2009| 6 Comments »

These baby brownies have superpowers. They can satisfy the ridiculously fussy Small Man, breathe life into an exhausted music teacher, quell a temper tantrum and last week they stopped Lynda’s kids from cannibalizing each other in the car.  Each one is tiny – barely a mouthful – but that means you can eat three (or four or five) without feeling guilty.  Based on a recipe from the best sweet things cookbook ever – fittingly titled The Mrs Fields Best Ever Cookie Book – we’ve tweaked the recipe to use milk rather than white chocolate ganache, and bake them in even smaller portions than specified, so that each batch makes about 40 mini cupcakes.  The recipe itself is pretty quick, but make sure you allow time to spoon the mix into the little tins, which seems to take ages.

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Brownies

  • 180g (1 cup) Callebaut dark chocolate callets (mine were 54% cocoa, any darker than that and Small Man complains)
  • 125g (½ cup) unsalted butter
  • 90g (½ cup plus 2 tablespoons) plain (AP) flour
  • pinch salt
  • 2 large eggs
  • 165g (¾ cup packed) brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Ganache Topping

  • 125g Callebaut milk callets
  • 60ml (¼ cup) cream (heavy/pouring)

1. Preheat oven to 175C (350F) with fan.  Line 40 mini-muffin cups with paper liners (you might not need that many).

2. Put the butter and dark chocolate callets in a pyrex bowl and microwave in 30 second bursts on high until almost melted, then stir until smooth.  Leave to cool.

3. In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until thick and pale, then add vanilla and cooled chocolate mixture until well blended.  Stir in, by hand,  flour and salt until just combined.

4. Spoon into muffin pans, filling them until 3/4 full.  Bake for 12 – 15 minutes (mine took 14) until the edges are just set but centres are still a bit squidgy.  Cool in pan on rack for 15 minutes, then remove to cool completely.

5. To prepare the topping – in a small saucepan, gently heat the cream until simmering.  Place the milk chocolate in a small bowl.  Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and stir very gently until thick and creamy.  Refrigerate the ganache for a few minutes to allow it to thicken, then dip the tops of the cooled brownies in the chocolate. (If you have too much ganache, you can use it to make a pretty wicked hot chocolate, just by adding hot milk).

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Homemade Pectin

Posted in Recipes, tagged , , , , on March 9, 2009| 43 Comments »

All of our jam is made with homemade pectin stock.  We make it in large batches, whenever apples are cheap at the markets, and can it – that is, we seal it in sterilised glass jars which are then heated in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.  This preserves the pectin so that it can, in theory, be stored for up to 12 months on the shelf, although we’ve never had it for more than about eight months (by which time either stonefruits or berries are in season, and the whole lot gets used up in jam-making).

In our opinion, the homemade version tastes better and, unlike commercial pectin, it can be boiled for a long time, which makes the jam process a lot easier.  To give you some idea of cost, we purchased a 16kg box of Royal Gala apples last Friday for $10, which produced 17 x 300ml jars of strong pectin – enough to set up to 50kg of fruit.  The pulp of the apples also provided us with 16 jars of applesauce.

Ingredients:

  • Lots of apples (not over-ripe, as they don’t seem to work)
  • Water

1. Peel and core the apples (don’t waste the pulp – turn it into apple sauce or apple butter, or use it for apple pies).  Place all the peel and cores into a large pot and pour in enough water to just float them.

OR

Cut the apples into quarters and place them in a large pot.  Pour in enough water to just float them.  Doing it this way will produce a slightly nicer tasting pectin, and you can pass the leftover pulp through a food mill to make apple sauce or apple butter.

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2. Cover and bring the pot to a rolling boil, then reduce the heat and allow to boil gently (covered) for a couple of hours, or until the solids turn soft and mushy.

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3. Line a colander with a clean piece of calico and pour boiling water through it to sterilise the fabric.  Place the colander over a large stock pot and carefully tip the apple mass and liquid through it.  Do not press the pulp, or you’ll get cloudy pectin.  Leave the whole thing to drip for several hours or overnight (I usually fold the ends of the cloth over the top of the apples, then cover gently with the stockpot lid, in a perhaps futile attempt to keep the insects out).

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4. When the liquid has completely drained through, remove the colander and reheat the pectin until boiling.  You now need to reduce the pectin until it reaches the strength you require – as we don’t want it to set rocky hard (Pete likes his jams softly set), we normally just boil it a bit to make sure it’s all hot before we start canning.

Here is the test – pour a little pectin into a small bowl and put it in the fridge to cool (test won’t work if the pectin is hot).  Pour some methylated spirits into another bowl, then tip the cold pectin into it.  If you’ve made decent pectin, it will coagulate in the meths, and you should be able to lift it out as a jellied blob with a fork.  Please – make sure no-one accidentally eats or drinks the contents of the bowl – it’s poisonous!

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5. In order to store the pectin, you can either freeze it, or pour it into sterile glass jars, seal, and then process the jars in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

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Tip : When you go to use your homemade pectin, do what Pete does, and taste a tiny bit of each jar as you open it.  The pectin should taste like mild, unsweetened apple juice.  It may have darkened slightly with storage, but if it tastes good, then it’s should be fine.

More on pectin making here: Compost Jelly.

For tips on making jam, please have a look at our Jam Making Primer.

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© copyright 2009 by Fig Jam and Lime Cordial. All rights reserved.

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