11th July 2009
For the first time in – I can’t even remember – years? I got up this morning and felt like making bread. I used to make bread a lot – around the time Lily was a wee baby. I can distinctly remember patting a very tiny Lil to sleep in her cot one night in a sleep-deprived daze only to realise after a few minutes that I was gently kneading her like a loaf of bread. But life gets busier and bread, while it takes little effort, does require you to be around the house for a chunk of hours so that you can return to your dough after each rising to whup it into shape some more. But today was wet and cold and we had absolutely *nothing* on the agenda – no playdates, no expected guests (so no cleaning), no shopping, no anything by popular demand… so time I had.
The girls were completely absorbed in a complicated make-believe game of teachers and babies and school photos and what-not so I cracked open my copy of the Tassajara Bread book which I bought late last year after reading Amanda’s recommendation.
Here is the Tassajara Bread Book, sitting victoriously on top of The River Cottage Cookbook, whose bread recipe I usually use. I have a soft spot for the Tassajara cookbooks because one of my first cooky books in my collection was this one:
My Mum’s old hippy copy of Tassajara Cooking which contains awesome line drawings of vegetables
and this fabulous picture of author Edward Espe Brown (and unnamed woman and child), who still teaches zen baking at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Centre (have you seen How to Cook Your Life which Amanda also recommended some time ago? A much older and hairier Edward Brown is the subject of the doco.)
So I made the “sponge” and it was crazy and sticky and I am sorry to say that I had very little faith in all of this at this point because it just seemed way too wet, but I left it to rise, and when I peeked under my damp tea towel after about thirty minutes it looked like an enourmous frothy milk shake. When you see yeast work so thoroughly, you get pretty enthused. And the rest of it worked like a charm.
It certainly isn’t a quick loaf, but boy is it a good one. Light and tasty and all gone in the blink of an eye. We devoured an entire loaf with butter for afternoon tea after returning from the library. (I borrowed Stephen King’s “On Writing” – thanks for the many recommendations!)
I made the “basic” recipe today and I am keen to try more of the numerous variations and then move on to the pastry chapter. Mmm.
6th June 2009
I can tell Winter is here because I am spending time looking at beach-holiday destinations and imagining how nice it would be to lie on the warm sand. Hmm. Byron Bay looks nice in wide-angled photos. I seemed to remember doing similar browsing in the middle of Summer, imagining chilly destinations including the Ice Hotel in Sweden.
Because it was a more than a little Wintery here today, the girls and I spent large amounts of time drawing pictures for each other to colour. And when I wasn’t answering to the call of “Mum, draw me! Draw me!”, I made rock buns – have you ever made Jane’s rock buns? They are delicious and lemony and I highly recommend them. Leave them to cool a little when they come out of the oven, but make sure to eat them while they are still a bit warm. Lily did not eat hers (which is unsurprising, as she is a non-eater in general, unless it’s bread or chocolate), but the rest of us devoured two each.
10th April 2009
My annual hot cross bun making event went with the usual amount of drama today. Broken machinery, small child tantrums, expired ingredients, miss-timed everything. It could have gone a lot worse, as I was mixing up the flour and water paste to make the crosses to glue on, as the buns cooked away in the oven, and I was just saying to my mate Kim, who sat at the kitchen table, “wow, basically I am making crosses out of glue”, when she said “um, aren’t you supposed to put the crosses on *before* you bake the buns?”… oh yes. Of course. Lucky she mentioned that, otherwise they would have been Hot Glue Buns.
The good things were that firstly they rose beautifully, the best success I have had with yeast yet. And secondly they are the perfect texture. Hardish and well baked on the outside, and soft and squooshy on the inside. Kim tasted one and said “while they might not look like it, they taste like real hot cross buns!” So that’s a thumbs up I think.
I used Delia’s bun recipe and did a fair bit of ad-libbing, especially at the yeast frothing stage, and I left out the lemon peel (sadly, as it was well and truly over it’s used-by date) so added generous gratings of lemon rind to both the dough and the sugar glaze. Oh and I have just read my post from last year’s bun making and I totally forgot to heat the milk. I think these are better than last year so it must not matter too much.
See Mike’s for another “How I made hot cross buns“, Pip-style.
31st July 2008
*** UPDATED to say it’s SELF RAISING FLOUR! Sorry! ***
After the day before yesterday’s cake baking revelations I meant to publish the revised recipe as part of that entry but I got distracted by proof reading etc., which is lucky because it would have still been wrong. Mum called me early yesterday morning to also admit that the recipe I have also calls for too much butter! Sabotage! I made another cake today and while it didn’t rock my world it’s slowly improving. I am thinking of moving on to another chocolate cake recipe which I can call my own. If anybody has any good recipes they feel keen to share, please do!
But due to popular demand, today I can provide for you the FULLY revised, spot-on chocolate cake recipe. Here it is:
Melt 85 grams (3 ounces) of butter.
Put in bowl (in order of appearance) with 1 cup of sifted self raising flour
1 cup of caster sugar
2 Tablespoons of cocoa (sifted) — not drinking chocolate, but real cocoa
2 cold eggs
dollop vanilla
pinch of salt
1/2 cup of whole cream milk
combine & beat 3 minutes
Cook for 45 minutes on 180°c
Clearly this is a very brief recipe… you will need to tip it out of the tin when it’s cooled a little and then ice it with something delicious.
Mum’s tips: If it’s a cold morning, warm the (preferably metal) mixing bowl with hot water and then dry before adding the butter. Use stale eggs. Use fresh self raising flour.
The cake recipe was given to my mum from Dad’s young cousin, who used to come and spend weekends away from boarding school with them back in the late 60s, early 70s. She used to cook this cake in Mum’s kitchen, cover it in cream and take it back for the school week. She told my mum “If you’ve got cake, girl, you’ve got friends.”
And just for fun, here are some photos from the family album of the cake in action.
This is my brother c. 1975 enjoying the cream on the top of the cake on a family picnic:
This is me, in our backyard in Adelaide, on my 10th birthday (showing off my new watch):
And here is Dad, Amelia and me in Mum and Dad’s kitchen on Amelia’s 1st birthday, almost five years ago – that must be a 1.5 sized cake because it sure looks huge:
It was Amelia’s first experience of cake! It looks as though she had about four bowls full.
And on that same occasion this is Mum pouring some kind of sparkling burgundy, probably saying “oh yes, definitely cook it for an hour, and definitely 3.5 grams of butter…” and I look very trusting (or drunk) but the cake was obviously good because we seem to have eaten it all.
And this is Lily from last month on her second birthday … just LOOK at that slice of cake! Sensational!
29th July 2008
Ahhhahaha!!
Let me say that again; AHAHAHHHHAHAHAH!
That’s ten years of pent-up baking angst.
We have had an ongoing cake drama, my mum and I – well actually, mostly just me. It’s been going on for nearly ten years. Mum has a fabulous chocolate cake recipe which she has cooked ever since I can remember. It’s light and moist and supposedly super easy; minimal ingredients, minimal fuss for maximum taste. It’s a simple little cake which will suit almost any occasion.
A long time ago I got the recipe from her and have tried to cook it many times with unvarying results – it always sucks. No matter how many different times I have tried, and how many different ways I wooed this little baby, it always came out resembling something more like a dried up slice than a cake. I know it’s just a tiny thing in the bigger life picture, but over a decade it has really bugged me that I can’t master this “simple” cake. How lame can I be?
I tried all sorts of tricks; new flour, warm eggs, cold eggs, old eggs, fresh eggs, sifted cocoa, unsifted expensive cocoa, small tins, big tins, and so on – finally we decided the difference in our success with this recipe must be the difference in our mixing bowls – we both had 1970s Kenwoods, but mum has a metal bowl and I had a plastic bowl. Because melted butter is the first ingredient added we theorised that perhaps it’s the hot butter hitting the cold metal bowl and the resulting cooling reaction that is the KEY step. So you can imagine how excited I was to get a Kitchen Aid with a metal bowl. Mum’s chocolate cake was my first test run of our new toy, but…
NO GOOD!
I don’t know if you can see it in this photo, but although the cake tasted ok, the crumb was dense and dry. The metal bowl seemed to make no difference at all. I stomped around the house cursing and shouting “Sabotage! GRRR!”. You see, it’s been my secret theory all these years that mum had deliberately altered something on the ingredients list she gave me back sometime in the 90s so I would never make as good a cake as she. This is a great theory which kind of ignores the fact that my mother is not a vindictive, petty minded person even in the slightest. But even so, this supposedly easy “never really fails” cake once again… well… sucked.
Once again I rang mum and tensely read the list of ingredients down the phone so that she could reconfirm (as she has done on numerous occasions over the years) that I had the right stuff. Yep, yep yep. So I suggested that mum could actually make the chocolate cake when she came over today, with my kitchen aid, in my oven while I watched… with beady, searching eyes… determined not to miss a beat.
So today we threw out my old self raising flour and opened a new bag just in case my flour was stale, we watched as the hot butter hit the cold (but not too cold) bowl, we mixed it thoroughly for three minutes and carefully poured it in the ring tin and placed it in a slightly cooler than previously tried oven, taking in to account that our old oven might be just a bit too hot. All this time I was studiously checking off the ingredients and the directions in my copy of the recipe. So far it all matched Mum’s moves.
3/4 of an hour later mum said “ok, let’s look at it.” We carefully opened the oven and mum peered into the blackness, she gently pulled it out and poked at it’s surface and showed me how it sprung back and then she said “Yes, I think it’s done.”
“Really?” I felt a little surprised, “because according to my instructions I would have left it for another 15 minutes. I always cook it for an hour.”
“Oh no! What? No… an hour?? Never! That’s way too long!”
“But it’s tiny! It hasn’t risen up over the edge of the tin yet!”
“But it never does, not if I’m making these proportions, but usually I’m making a 1 and a half times sized cake.”
Which explains the size of my cake! – I was always expecting my cake to match mum’s 1.5 cake.
“But my recipe says cook for 1 hour!”
“No! Not unless it’s for 1 and half sized cake! Didn’t you ever check to see if it was done?”
“Well no! Because I was scared that the rush of cold air from opening the oven door would make the cake sink! And any time I did look, hoping to find it rising over the edge of the tin, it was always so tiny that I thought I had made it sink by checking! So then I would always leave it to cook for the rest of the hour! Always!…
…BECAUSE, LOOK!”
I opened my recipe book and stabbed my finger on the “Cook for 1 hour at 180c”
“ahhh…”
“I knew it! Sabotage!”
No wonder my cakes have always looked like a little shriveled, dried up thing.
Much laughing ensued — and check out the guilty look on my mum’s face!
and here’s mum poking at the cake saying, “Oh, it’s a good one”.
So hooray! It’s not me! It was the recipe all along (and maybe the plastic bowl had a hand in it too)! I never thought that perhaps mum was altering the ingredients to make a bigger cake… and I never thought to read back to mum the amount of time it needed to cook for, not in all those years. Why it never occurred to me to cook it for less time even though my cakes always looked a bit crispy around the edges, I’m not sure… I think it’s because I’m not a terribly experimental cook, I am a bit of a stickler for instructions.
But I knew it! It was Mum! She sabotaged me! (Though she is claiming that she’s just a little vague – but just look at that evil smile…).
11th March 2008
Hello people from google who have come here searching on dodgey search terms. Welcome to a blog post about baking!
I made these same buns two years ago from Delia’s recipe and apart from slightly overcooking these little guys yesterday, they were just as delicious a second time around.
They are meant to be Hot Cross Buns but I forgot to cut crosses in them before letting them rise for the second time and didn’t have time to make posh piped ones so they are simply Hot Buns.
I highly recommend Delia’s recipe. If you are nervous about messing about with yeast and dough I say don’t be! If I can do it, you can too. These buns are a little more time consuming than simply making bread because you have to heat milk, melt butter, measure out more ingredients and so on, but if you have a few hours at home so that you can let the dough rise twice, then it makes for a yummy morning tea.
