Buttery treacle spice biscuits recipe

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 2 February 2011 in cooking, recipes | 5 comments

I meant to write up this recipe a few weeks ago but in all the end of year/new 2011 goals excitement, I forgot. The rich dark treacle flavour and cinnamon make them a great winter biscuit – almost warming!

They’re also a perfect fill-the-oven companion to my quick-and-easy soda bread recipe – I get my soda bread in the oven then start making these guys. By the time I’ve measured, mixed and shaped, it’s about 20-25 mins into the soda bread baking, then the biscuits go in and everything finishes at the same time – perfect!

As there is no egg or anything like that in the mix, they’re one of my favourite “cook’s perks” recipes – ie, I get to “test” the dough throughout the making process and lick all the bowls & spoons at the end. :D

There is also a fourth wonderful feature of these biscuits which I say explain at the end so those with easily-offended-by-tastelessness aren’t put off a great biscuit recipe! ;)

Lovely Buttery Lemon Curd recipe

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 26 January 2011 in cooking, preserving, recipes | 6 comments

I mentioned on Monday that I made a batch of lemon curd while my frustrating, sticky marmalade was boiling away.

Lemon curd is far easier and more fun to make than marmalade, and oh my wow, it’s delicious.

It doesn’t have a long shelf life though – what with the butter and the eggs – but I don’t mind having to make it regularly because it’s so quick and easy that it’s not a problem.

Compared to jams from foraged or grown fruit (where the only expenses are sugar, a tiny bit of spice & energy), this is expensive – lots of bought-in items. Using eggs from our own chickens, it worked out at about 70p a jar; if we’d had to buy in good eggs, it would have been about £1 a jar – not break-the-bank expensive and it is very very nice, but not the cheapest either (the blackberry jam I made last autumn worked out at about 25p a jar since the only thing I had to buy was sugar). It’s a good way to use up egg gluts – something we’ll have to get more proactive with now the girls are laying more.

Buttery Lemon Curd recipe

Ingredients
5 large lemons
5 medium-to-large eggs
250g of butter (!), room temperature
400g of golden caster sugar
2tsp of cornflour

Makes just under 3lbs of lovely lemon curd

Six things I learnt while making marmalade yesterday

Posted by louisa on Monday 24 January 2011 in cooking, preserving | 16 comments

1. Squeezing multiple oranges and lemons after a couple of days of sewing & gardening is a mistake

I spent a couple of hours yesterday morning cutting back scratchy shrubs (including working underneath a holly bush) and I spent Thursday & Friday evening sewing (aka stabbing myself in the fingers with needles). I also have a tendency to bite the skin around my nails.

OH MY OW.

(Although admittedly after searing pain for a few minutes, it stopped hurting quite so much. They did keep tingling overnight though and even now are more painfully than little cuts or scratches should be.)

2. It’s easier to finely slice rind if it’s rind up, pith down than vice versa

I started with the rind to the chopping board but made much better progress when it was the other way around.

Spicy sausage and lentil casserole recipe

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 18 January 2011 in cooking, recipes | 8 comments

Could a sausage and lentil casserole be anything other than spicy with us? We heart the spice!

I first made this when we were on holiday in a wonderful cottage in Staithes a few years ago so it always has connotations of relaxed cosiness – we’ve been there a couple of times out of season and had the quietest, most relaxing holidays ever. Recommend ++.

Anyway, back to the casserole, it’s a fab winter warmer – and can be pretty darn cheap if made with sausages on offer, as ours were when I made this on Saturday.

Quick bread: no-rising-time soda bread recipe

Posted by louisa on Friday 7 January 2011 in cooking, recipes | 17 comments

The other week, I asked about how people manage with baking when the weather is cooler – when it’s hard to maintain a yeast-friendly heat for bread to rise (especially if you’re going for a 12-18hr slow rise bread).

In the comments, Karen M said:

In my rural living days without electricity or central heating, we ate a lot of bannock and other unleavened breads in the cold times.

A smack-the-forehead moment for me. Unleavened bread, of course!

I hadn’t heard of bannock but John loves its Irish cousin, soda bread so I decided to give that a go. After trying his first slice of my first soda bread, John declared we’re never buying shop-bought bread again. We will, of course, but I liked his sentiment ;) I’ve made it a few times now and it’s been a hit each time.

Soda bread is super quick to make. Most bread relies on yeast “breathing” to create carbon dioxide bubbles but soda bread uses the chemical reaction between the alkaline bicarbonate of soda and something acidic (like vinegar, lemon juice or cream of tartar) to make the gas instead. It’s an instant reaction rather than something that has to build up over time – so no need for rising time or proving time.

And extending kneading is a no-no too – the reaction works best if it’s happening in a warm environment so it needs to be mixed, shaped and bam! straight into the oven. Super fast.

It’s a dense bread – no big yeasty air bubbles like in good yeast-based bread – but the sponge is soft and a touch sweet. Possibly because of the slight sweet milkiness or possibly because of the texture, there is something scone-like about it for me – but it’s considerably lower fat than actual scones.

Like scones though, it’s fantastic with butter and jam. Or dipped in a hearty soup.

Baking bread in the winter – how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 22 December 2010 in cooking, frugal | 11 comments

We’ve got out of the swing of baking bread recently – partly due to general winter lethargy and partly due to the fact that we’d struggle to get yeast do its thing.

It would be very difficult to grow a slow rise bread – one that needs a good 12-18 hours to rise. With our woodburners in the office & living room, we get a room temperature of 16-18C (60-65F) for a few hours during the day but for the rest of the time, it is much lower than that. The kitchen is poorly insulated (it’s an addition away from the main body of the house with lots of windows and a hard-to-insulate flat roof) so has frequently been see-your-breath chilly (especially last week when the central heating was out and it was even colder than normal). Opinions differ on the ideal temperature for yeast activity but it’s typically seen as 25-35C (75-95C) – we don’t even come close to that. (Admittedly we rarely come close to that even at the height of summer but it’s warmer, and more consistently warmer, than it is now.)

I’m loathed to use the (electric) oven as a warming box – not only would it be using energy, it would need a lot of management – turning it on and off – since the temperature setting doesn’t go anywhere near low enough for the oven thermostat to manage it. And 12-18 hours of that sort of management isn’t realistic.

Lethargy aside, we would like to get back into baking bread ASAP – it would save a lot of frozen-faced walks to the shop and, of course, shops are going to be closed over the next couple of weekends anyway/out of stock because of snow issues.

We could possibly manage some shorter rise time breads when a woodburning is running – leaving them for longer to account for it still being a bit cool – or even, if I had to do it, in the oven. That’s not out of the question, I’m just a sucker for slow rise bread: I haven’t perfected a non-slow rise loaf recipe yet and I suspect now might not be the time to work on one!

Are you still baking bread at the moment? How are you managing? Have you got any suggestions for things I could try? Or got a fool proof pretty-quick-rising loaf recipe?