Cherry Bakewell Cookies

Marks & Spencer picnics used to be a staple of the summer holidays for my friends and I. An indecisive bunch, we’d spend ages at each section: the sandwiches, the fruit and drinks, the crisps, the baked goods. Only once everyone had finally chosen would we move to the next aisle and begin the deliberations all over again there. A staple of the picnics would be a packet of M&S cookies. We took this decision in particular overly seriously (bad biscuit selection can ruin a picnic): games of heads or tails and ip dip doo being employed to gradually narrow down the choice. When I was in a Marks and Spencer recently, I noticed the selection of flavours in this range has more than tripled since we last went – I’m not sure we would have had any time for the actual picnic if this had existed when I was younger. But one flavour in particular caught my eye: the cherry bakewell cookie. I’ve made mini cherry bakewell tarts before but I really liked the idea of changing this classic dessert into cookie form. I was also feeling inspired after watching the first episode of Great British Bake Off (side note – I’m fully obsessed with Norman) where they made a cherry and almond sponge. These biscuits have exactly the same flavours but none of the ‘will the cherries sink’ stress – it’s a win win! The M&S version I saw didn’t have icing but I couldn’t resist. I was really happy with the result considering I’d pretty much made up the recipe – buttery shortbread, decent level of almondy flavour and sweet glace cherries are a dangerously addictive combination. I’ll admit that the cookies did spread a little in the oven so I trimmed off the edges to make them all the same… an unnecessary OCD step probably but then cookie trimmings = chefs perks! You can find the recipe below, I’m off to dream up other cookie versions of classic desserts. Tiramisu cookies anyone?

Cherry Bakewell Cookies
Makes 8 large cookies

• 125g unsalted butter
• 60g caster sugar
• 120g plain flour
• 60g ground almonds
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 50g glace cherries, quartered
• 100g icing sugar, sieved
• 1/2 lemon, juiced

1. Line two baking sheets with greaseproof paper. Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add the almond extract and mix to combine.

2. Add the flour and ground almonds to the mixture and stir to incorporate. As the dough begins to come together, add the glace cherries and continue to mix until they are evenly distributed throughout the smooth dough.

3. Tip onto a lightly floured surface and roll out to just under 1cm thick. Stamp out with an 8cm cookie cutter and place on the baking sheets. Chill for 20minutes. Preheat the oven to 180’C.

4. Meanwhile, sift the icing sugar into a bowl. Add the lemon juice and stir to a smooth paste.

5. Bake the biscuits for 10-15minutes, until lightly golden. Leave to cool completely on a wire rack, then drizzle over the icing. Enjoy!

Royal Rascals!

So, the royal baby has arrived! Prince William and Kate have had their baby boy, George Alexander Louis, the third in line to the throne and one day King. The dozens of photographers who were camped outside the hospital wing for weeks can finally go home and the nation can finally celebrate! I knew I wanted to bake something themed to celebrate this special royal occasion but I was slightly stumped. My decorating skills are not up to the level of creating intricately iced cookies, my family doesn’t need a huge celebration cake hanging about (much as I’d like to think we do) and there options for naturally blue food are pretty non-existent once you’ve got past blueberries. It was my Dad who eventually suggested these – Royal Rascals!True, my Dad suggests these every time I wonder what to bake – they are one of his favourite things. But this time I loved the idea. Whilst baby Prince George of Cambridge will obviously live a very different life to the overwhelming majority of people, I hope that he still gets a chance to be a little rascal (definition: a mischievous or cheeky person) as he grows up. Plus, there aren’t many things more quintessentially British than a scone! In honour of the baby I added sparkling silver balls to my traditional fat rascal recipe, found here, and of course welcomed the opportunity to use my royal napkins! Enjoy :)

Banana Cake

Bananas are a divisive fruit in my family. My Mum and I like them, my Dad and my sister don’t. When my sister was little, my Dad told her bananas were horrible and so she’s grown up not liking it. Be careful what you tell 3 year olds! Even at school, bananas get strong reactions. They seem to be like Marmite: you either love them or hate them. For this reason, we don’t have bananas much at home. With only two ‘eaters’ it seems a bit excessive to buy lots even before we get to the idea of baking with them. But, with my Mum’s friends coming round and my Dad away (and therefore unable to moan about the bananas) – an exception was made. This banana cake is sort of a jazzed up banana bread – the addition of some dried fruit and bright glace cherries makes it a little more luxurious than a bread. This cake also has a sweet honey glaze, giving your kitchen a bit of shine on a dull October afternoon. The recipe is an old favourite of my Mums, and is easy to make up. The key factor with this cake is really careful baking: my oven is quite hot and so after only 1hour out of the 1.5hours specified the cake was already slightly overdone. I’d start at 50 minutes and check it accordingly – as when it is still moist and slightly sticky. If I were to bake it again, I might use slightly riper bananas and up the sultana content to give it a punch more flavour :) Banana Cake (makes one 9x5x2inch loaf )
Ingredients: 225g (8oz) self raising flour
1tsp salt
100g (4oz) butter, cubed
175g (6oz) caster sugar
100g (4oz) sultanas/dried berries
100g (4oz) glace cherries, halved
2 large eggs
500g ripe bananas
50g honey (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/350’F/Gas Mark 4 and line your loaf tin with a strip of parchment paper.
2. Sift the flour and salt into a large bowl. Add the butter and rub into the flour until crumbly/pea-sized pieces. Add the sugar, sultanas/dried fruit and cherries and create a hollow in the centre of the mixture.
3. Crack the eggs into the hollow. In a separate bowl, mash the bananas with a fork, or whizz in a food processor, until fairly smooth. Add the banana to the flour hollow.
4. Fold the mixture all together into a smooth cake mix, and pour into the prepared tin.
5. Bake in the centre of the oven for 50mins, then check. The top should be golden and a skewer should come out mainly clean (provided you didn’t go through a sultana). It may need up to 1hour15mins, depending on your oven.
6. Melt your honey in a small bowl. Using a pastry brush, spread over the top of the cooled cake. Cut generous slices!

“Petit Fours aux Amandes”

aka gorgeous almond “macaroon” style biscuits that are completely impossible to ignore when you walk past their tray. To me, it feels like there are so many skills to learn when you start baking – and especially baking for a baking blog. Obviously, there are simple things to master first, simple things to be able to build on. Sponge cakes, roll-out cookies. But then I gradually find there are more things – candy making, fancy-buttercream making, complicated-cakes, puff pastry, elaborate sugar craft. Of course most of these things are completely unnecessary and few but the professional do them – but they are so much more noticeable when you look at the “big blogs”. One small technique I had yet to master properly was piping.

Which is why these biscuits appealed to me and were on my new To Bake list. They were unusual, from a new book, looked darn tasty – and could give me a chance to improve on that old piping.
For Christmas, I was lucky enough to receive Mary Berry’s Complete Cake Bible. Readers abroad may not recognize the name – but Mary Berry is a classic – a little like a British Dorie Greenspan. This book (as the title may give away) holds every recipe you’re going to need, for every occasion, every ingredient, every time. As I read through it, almost every page had me thinking “Ooh”, “I should make that”, “That sounds nice”, “How clever!” or “That’s so pretty!”. Definitely a book I would recommend. 

Happily, these cookies turned out delicious. They are moist and slightly sticky, bursting with almond flavour. The book says you would probably only make these as a gift as they are slightly fiddly. Well…ahem… my family enjoyed them very much and not one was shared! They are so delicate and small it becomes dangerously easy to munch on a couple at a time. I got the hang of the piping, and feel much more confident with that now.
Notes: I had three trays of cookies and each turned out differently. Tray 1 – had about 9 minutes and turned out perfectly. Tray 2 – same time, but for some unknown reason the piping detail disappeared whilst baking. Tray 3 – had 12 minutes, a little too dark. Just something to bear in mind! You can see the three different batches in the bottom picture.

Petit Fours Aux Amandes from Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cake Bible, by Mary Berry

Ingredients: 2 egg whites
4oz (100g) ground almonds
3oz (75g) caster sugar
a little almond essence

To Decorate: glace cherries or angelica (these do NOT have to be chopped into heart shapes like mine, but I was baking with my arty sister and well…they are so cute!)

To Finish: 1tbsp caster sugar
2tbsps milk

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/350’F/Gas 4. Line two baking trays with non-stick paper.

2. Whisk the egg whites until stiff. Fold in the ground almonds, sugar and almond essence.

3. Spoon the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a large star nozzle, and pipe into small rosettes. Decorate each rosette with a small piece of glace cherry or angelica.

4. Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes or until golden. Lift onto a wire rack.

5. To finish, mix the caster sugar and milk together and lightly brush over the cooked petit fours.

From left to right, Tray 1, Tray 2, Tray 3.

Fat Rascals

The past few days have been fairly busy sorting things out from out holiday and also trying to sort out the whole house after builders laid a lovely new floor on our whole bottom floor whilst we were away. The view from the bottom terrace!

As I said previously, we had a lovely holiday relaxing, enjoying the views from one of the suntrap terraces as above, or just chilling out by the pool with a good book – but some days we did go out and on one in particular we drove down about 2hours to the famous Alhambra gardens on the mountains beside Grenada. A view over Grenada old town (which we visited on my Dad's birthday!) from the Alhambra.

The gardens were beautiful and we did have a nice time looking round the various palaces dotted around the gardens. As it was my Mum’s birthday we ate at restaurant called the San Francisco Parador for a birthday lunch – I can report that some parts were good (my orange chocolate ice cream cake!) other parts were very disappointing (a surprise starter soup where we couldn’t quite work out what the flavour was). We didn’t see everywhere because that day temperatures were around 38’C-40’C and we were desperate to get back to the icy pool! Me in the Alhambra!

Today I made Fat Rascals! I was going to help make birthday cake for my Daddy but the tins are still in storage so that is tomorrows project. These Fat Rascals, however, certainly did not disappoint! They are a cross between a scone and a rock cake and the idea originated in Yorkshire where the recipe was a simple dough with currants. I have watched my Mum make these before (and enjoyed the end result!) so decided to have a go myself. It is a recipe from the Waitrose website, and these cakes are served at Betty’s tearooms in York. They worked a treat. The idea is to make about 6 huge scones and drop them in a “rascally fashion” onto the baking tray. The method is rather similar to the Welsh Cakes I made.

I didn’t have some of the exact ingredients and the weather is so awful I wasn’t eager to go out so I made some easy substitutions – which as usual are in pink with the recipe. Very good results – I would definitely recommend these.

Fat Rascals, from Waitrose Magazine

Makes 6

Ingredients: 150g plain flour, sieved
150g self-raising flour, sieved
1tsp baking powder
130g cold butter, cubed
90g caster sugar
Grated zest of both one orange and one lemon (I used the grated zest of a lime)
1tsp cinnamon (I used 1tsp of ground mixed spice instead which contains cinnamon and nutmeg) ½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg (see above)
150g mixed dried fruit (I used 150g currants)
50ml milk

Glace cherries and blanched almonds to decorate

1. Preheat the oven to 200’C.

2. Sieve both flours and the baking powder into a bowl. Add the butter and rub into the mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs.

3. Add the sugar, zests, spices and dried fruit and mix well.

4. Add the beaten egg and enough milk to bring the mixture together into a soft (read sticky) dough.

5. Form the mixture into 6 saucer sized rounds – 2cm deep.

I split my dough into 2 batches - so if anything went wrong with the first I could alter

the problem and rescue the second lot. Luckily, everything worked well!

6. Transfer to a non-stick baking tray and make for 15-20mins.

7. They are best served warm with butter and jam, but can be frozen and reheated.

Because he has now had to wait 4 days before getting birthday cake, I made a special Fat Rascal just for my Dad:

The end result was delicious - buttery, crumbly dough, sharp currants, crunchy almonds and oh-so-sweet glace cherries! Enjoy! x