Spiced Apple Buns

These buns are the recipe I mentioned I was forced to put on hold due to the combination of a lack of ingredients + heavy snow = me not going outside. Normally I’d have just forgotten about the recipe and moved on to one of the many other tempting bakes in my cookbooks or recipe files, but something made me keep thinking about these. Then I was looking back through my archives and noticed that in January 2011 I posted these Stollen Swirls and in January 2010 I made Glazed Fruit Rolls – I clearly have a thing for yeasted rolls in January! It must be a combination of wanting to start the new year by challenging myself in baking including doing more work with yeast, and the more simple desire of something warm, doughy and carby to eat in the cold! Either way it was a clear sign and as soon as the pesky snow melted I was out making sure my cupboards were prepared for these.The recipe was an interesting twist from standard Cinnamon Rolls and I thought the combination of tart apple and super sweet marzipan alongside the rich bread dough would go down a treat. I was not proved wrong! When I was layering up the fillings onto my rolled out dough there seemed to be a heck of a lot of apple, marzipan and sultanas if I was planning to roll these up neatly. I decided just to add one large apple instead of two and whilst the buns were definitely quite full I think they would have benefited from the extra apple for more tartness as the apple chunks reduced in the oven quite drastically. Note to self: stick to the recipe! Having said that, I added a simple glace icing which I think added a good extra element.These are nicest warm out the oven, but even after a couple of days a few seconds in the microwave will easily restore them to this goodness. You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

Tablet

If you’re still  on a January diet then a) I admire your dedication and b) you may want to look away now. The two main ingredients in today’s post are 1. sugar and 2. condensed milk…which is essentially milk with plenty of added sugar. Yep, tablet is no health food.I’ve wanted to attempt making something in the fudge/caramel/tablet family for a while now but scary stories of scorched sugar and candy thermometers made me hesitate. Along with the fact that I knew I would find it impossible to just. stop. eating. But when my planned baking project was scuppered when the heavy (by London standards at least) snow made me very reluctant to leave the warmth of a house to buy ingredients I had to turn to what was already in the cupboard. I’m glad I finally took the plunge and entered the world of sweet making!After surviving all the heating sugar and endless whisking phases, the step of the recipe I skipped was marking the tablet into squares when it was still only semi-set. Mistake. Whilst the tablet melts on your tongue into crumbly goodness, it sets into one pretty rock solid slab. I only just restrained from breaking out the hammer but eventually perseverance with a big knife meant we ended up with happily oversized shards of tablet, but neat little squares would have been better and easier! I think this is easily one of my favourite things I have made, purely because my suspicions were right and I found it impossible to stop eating! It was sweet, rich, crumbly, melt in the mouth…I could go on! I definitely recommend it if you think you have more willpower than me – you can find the recipe here. Enjoy!

Pear and Almond Cake

It’s always difficult to start again in the New Year. Not just resuming work, the gym and everything else that's been totally ignored whilst we happily vegetate on sofas for 2 festive weeks - but cooking too (especially when your camera cable goes walkabout). We've grown accustomed to nibbling on cold leftovers and Quality Street or grazing on bits and pieces from the fridge. As a result the idea of whipping up a huge cake or batch of yet more cookies seems bizarre. The food magazines are full of healthy living, salads and superfoods… yet its snowing outside and you’re craving something carby. Especially when in my house there's still an untouched Pannetone, 2 Christmas puddings and a hunk of Christmas cake left to eat. The relaxed seasonal eating style has been reflected in my cooking recently - some irresistible yet super simple cheddar and chorizo straws, dulce de leche shortbread sandwiches for relatives and these ridiculously moreish cheese crackers. All good food that makes for excellent snacking, but a tad out of place on the blog in January.

I think this cake is a happy medium. It’s simple, isn’t too rich and contains fruit to be mildly healthy if you have strict New Year’s resolutions still going strong and is really comforting in snowy weather. This cake slightly unnerved me whilst in the oven as it properly filled the tin right up to the top, but as the pears sunk into the mixture it just about stayed constrained. The recipe can be found here, it comes from the trusty Good Housekeeping magazines – after sorting through 3 years of GH magazines the recipes are now all neatly in one big tempting lever arch file so expect more recipes from there soon! Including my first attempt at candy making with a batch of tablet – pretty much pure sugar and therefore unsurprisingly delicious and addictive…Coming soon!

Apple, Carrot, Almond and Sultana Shortbread

Catchy eh? When I went on Tastespotting recently, almost every other photo was an apple recipe. Particularly apple pie. Apple Crumble Bars, Blackberry Apple Tarts, Mini Apple Hand Pies, Apple Cake with Salted Caramel Icing…it went on and on. I took this as a clear (and hunger-inducing) sign to get baking and I have been – baked apples, stewed apples, apple crumb bars have all been made and thoroughly enjoyed, but for one reason and another not blogged. So it was out to the garden to pick some final rosy red apples, then back to the kitchen to continue on this Autumn baking bandwagon and finally get something appley on the blog.The name sounds overwhelming for what is an normally a very simple biscuit, but for some reason it works. It started off as Apple and Carrot shortbread, a Tamasin Day-Lewis recipe. I chucked in a handful of sultanas as I love the texture they bring to anything, and they emulated the flavours of carrot cake. I could have left it there, but when I tasted it they actual biscuit dough tasted quite bland –  perhaps as a result of the savoury carrot and relatively small quantity of sugar – and we didn’t have any vanilla, so in went the almond.My parents were quite snooty about these when I told them (me: I’ve made apple and carrot shortbread. My Dad: …was that a mistake?) but don’t be like them! I couldn’t really taste the carrot, and I think the apple just added extra sweetness and texture. Plus I like to think that the added fruit and veg makes these cookies ‘healthy’, meaning you can eat more! Enjoy :)

Apple, Carrot, Almond and Sultana Shortbread, adapted from Tamasin Day-Lewis

200g wholemeal flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
150g unsalted butter, room temperature
100g light brown sugar
50g carrot, grated (about 2 small carrots)
1 small apple, grated
1/2 tsp. almond extract
75g sultanas

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C or 350F. Sift the semolina, flour, baking powder and salt into a medium bowl, and set aside.

2. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Stir in the carrot, apple, almond extract and sultanas.

3. Add the the flour mixture into the butter mixture and stir until a dough forms and brings everything together. Wrap the dough in cling film and refrigerate for at least thirty minutes.

4. Roll the dough out onto a lightly floured surface to around 1cm thick. Stamp out shortbread biscuits, then place them on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for about 10 minutes, or until the edges of the cookies start to brown just a bit.

Makes about 20 cookies, depending on the size of your cutter.

Ruby Red Amaretti Crumble

Quite a fancy name for a crumble, but then it is a Nigella recipe and she is famed for her choices of phrase: chocolate digestives are crushed ‘until they look like dark Mexican mud’, chocolate cake is ‘a confection to exult in, not to regret’ and about peanut butter she says ‘Why, I feel the urge to just rub it all over my body!’ So in retrospect, she went pretty easy on this dish. Plus, this is so good it deserves a glamorous title. In essence, its a Plum, Orange and Amaretti Crumble but its probably the best crumble I’ve ever tried. Apple Crumble is good, the deep purple of Apple and Blackberry even better. Peach is nice in the summer and Pineapple for something a little bit different. But trust me, none are as good as this!The changes that make it stand out are small but effective. The plums are cooked lightly first in a bit of sugar, orange juice and zest to give it a little brightness, make the whole thing smell gorgeous and infuse it with orange. Crushed amaretti crumbs are sprinkled over the plums once they’re in the dish, and then a whole heap more are stirred into the crumble mixture. The combination works so well and smells absolutely intoxicating! We made another one for a friend shortly after ours was all gone, and it proved very tricky to give it away without diving in. With heaps of cream, a rainy evening and the finale of Downton Abbey this crumble made the perfect Sunday night. You can find the recipe here (as well as watch Nigella make it in her classic style) – try it and you might become like my family, planning to add amaretti to every single crumble in the future. Enjoy!

An Edible Mosaic's Virtual Book Launch Party

I’m so excited to be part of this online event, a virtual book launch for the wonderful Faith of the blog An Edible Mosaic and her new debut cook book, An Edible Mosaic: Middle Eastern Fare with Extraordinary Flair. Middle Eastern cuisine is one I have very much enjoyed eating, but am yet to do much cooking of, and so I’m sure the 100+ recipes (mainly from the Levant) in the book will be fascinating and keep me busy for a long time! I always enjoy reading Faith’s blog and learning about new recipes and flavours, so I’m sure the book would be great, and the photos I’ve seen show its a pretty stunning one too. Can’t wait to get it and start experimenting. The recipe Faith chose for us all to make for the virtual book launch event was Saffron Rice with Golden Sultanas and Pine Nuts which I thought was a clever idea as then everybody can twist it up to suit them and pair it with a million different dishes. I skipped the golden sultanas, simply because I didn’t have any in the house, and my family had the dish with Green Chicken Curry. I know blending these dishes is quite unusual, not exactly a traditional combination, but they still both tasted good! I don’t think my photos of the rice could really do it justice, a sit was a classic dark November evening and my hungry family ate super quickly, so I’ll use the lovely one from the book:As I expected, the rice was very tasty. I don’t often make interesting side dishes, sticking to plain rice and simple vegetables, so it was fun to make something a little bit different and more complex as an accompaniment.  I loved the deep nuttiness of the toasted pine nuts against the sweet onion and soft rice and this combination is definitely something I’ll remember in the future as it was so simple but effective. I definitely recommend heading over to the book launch to see what everybody did with recipe, and if you’d also like to learn more about Middle Eastern cooking the book is available on Amazon. I’ll leave you with the recipe…

Saffron Rice with Golden Raisins and Pine Nuts

ROZ MLOW’WAN

Recipe courtesy of An Edible Mosaic: Middle Eastern Fare with Extraordinary Flair by Faith Gorsky (Tuttle Publishing; Nov. 2012); reprinted with permission.

Serves 4 to 6

Preparation Time: 10 minutes

Cooking Time: 20 minutes, plus 15 minutes to let the rice sit after cooking

1½ cups (325 g) basmati rice, rinsed
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons pine nuts
1 onion, finely diced
4 tablespoons sultanas (golden raisins)
1¾ cups (425 ml) boiling water
¾ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon saffron threads (or ½ teaspoon turmeric)

1. Soak the rice in tepid water for 10 minutes; drain. While the rice is soaking, put half a kettle of water on to boil.

2. Add the oil to a medium, thick-bottomed lidded saucepan over medium heat. Add the pine nuts and cook until golden brown, about 1 to 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Transfer the pine nuts to a small bowl and set aside.

3. Add the onion to the saucepan you cooked the pine nuts in, and cook until softened and just starting to brown, about 5 to 7 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the rice and cook 2 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in the sultanas, boiling water, salt, and saffron (or turmeric), turn the heat up to high, and bring it to a rolling boil.

4. Give the rice a stir, then cover the saucepan, turn the heat down to very low, and cook until tender, about 10 minutes (do not open the lid during this time). Turn the heat off and let the rice sit (covered) 15 minutes, then fluff with a fork.

5. Transfer to a serving dish and sprinkle the toasted pine nuts on top; serve.