Muffins! Blueberry, Parmesan and Herb, and Parmesan and Bacon

Yesterday I made muffins!  Three lots in fact as there were a few I wanted to try.  I made 6 blueberry muffins for my boyfriend, 12 wheat free mini parmesan and herb for his mum, and then 12 mini parmesan and bacon for me...or his sister when she comes home on Wednesday.

The recipes for these came from Good Food magazine (February 2005 issue), and are something I've been wanting to try out for a couple of weeks since I picked it off the shelf.  All the recipes in the magazine worked off of one basic recipe (the one for the blueberry muffins) but made substitutions depending on the type of muffin you wanted.

Blueberry Recipe - makes 6 full sized muffins

Ingredients:

• 70g/2/5oz caster sugar
• 125g/4.5oz self-raising flour
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 42g/1.5oz butter
• 1 large egg
• 100ml/3.5fl milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 75g/2.6oz blueberries

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and then leave to cool.
2. Preheat the oven to 200°C/390°F/Gas Mark 6 and place 6 muffin cases in a muffin tray. 
3. Combine the sugar, flour and bicarbonate of soda in a bowl.
4. In a jug, beat the egg and add the milk, cooled butter and vanilla extract.
5. Pour the jug ingredients into the bowl with the flour mix and stir until just combined.
6. Fold in the blueberries.
7. Spoon the mixture into the cases and then bake in the oven for 15-18 minutes.  You want the tops to be golden and a skewer inserted into the centre to come out clean.
8. Cool on a wire rack.

Parmesan and Herb - makes 12 mini muffins or 6 full size muffins

Ingredients:

• 125g/4.5oz wheat-free self-raising flour
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 42g/1.5oz butter
• 1 large egg
• 142ml/4.8fl.oz buttermilk
• 50g/1.75oz grated parmesan
• 1 tbsp thyme
• 1 tbsp basil

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and then leave to cool.
2. Preheat the oven to 200°C/390°F/Gas Mark 6 and place 12 mini muffin cases in a mini muffin tray (or grease the tray if you don't have the cases).
3. Combine the flour and bicarbonate of soda in a bowl.
4. In a jug, beat the egg with the butter and buttermilk.  
5. Add to the flour mix and stir until combined.
6. Fold in the parmesan, thyme and basil.
7. Spoon into the cases/greased tray and top with additional grated parmesan.
8. Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes.  You want the tops to be golden and a skewer inserted into the centre to come out clean.
9. Cool on a wire rack.

Parmesan and Bacon - makes 12 mini muffins or 6 full size muffins 

Ingredients:

• 125g/4.5oz wheat-free self-raising flour
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tbsp caster sugar
• 42g/1.5oz butter
• 1 large egg
• 142ml/4.8fl.oz buttermilk
  
• 50g/1.75oz grated parmesan
• 2-3 rashers of crispy bacon

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and then leave to cool.
2. Preheat the oven to 200°C/390°F/Gas Mark 6 and place 12 mini muffin cases in a mini muffin tray (or grease the tray if you don't have the cases).
3. Combine the flour, sugar and bicarbonate of soda in a bowl.
4. In a jug, beat the egg with the butter and buttermilk. 
5. Add to the flour mix and stir until combined.
6. Cut up the bacon and fold it into the mix along with the parmesan.
7. Spoon into the cases/greased tray and top with additional grated parmesan.
8. Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes.  You want the tops to be golden and a skewer inserted into the centre to come out clean.
9. Cool on a wire rack.

Angel Food Cake With Whipped Cream and Summer Fruits

Huzzah!  Finally a successful bake.  After two failed experiments it is nice to have something turn out right.  Twice in fact, because I made one and then realised I'd made the horrific mistake of not using wheat-free flour!  So I did it again.  So that's wheat free on the left and wheat-ful on the right.

Anyway, this is a birthday cake for my boyfriend's mum (and the spare is going to the school).  She recently gave me a lovely cupcake recipe book and had commented on how nice the summer fruit topped ones were.  So I knew exactly what topping I wanted to give her cake.  But what to go with it?  After some hunting I settled on something I've never tried to make before: Angel Food Cake.  Apparently it's very good if you're on a diet as it doesn't have any fat in it so really she could eat as much of this cake as she liked and not feel too guilty.  However, there was then the issue of finding a small version, since so many recipes involved 12 egg whites and large-ish tins.  Finally I stumbled across one that is baked in a loaf tin.  Perfect!  A delightfully simple recipe, though I made a couple of substitutions.

Recipe - Adapted from Cookie Madness (a great blog with some fabulous recipes!)

This cake is preferably eaten the day it is made but it would probably only last that long anyway.

Ingredients:

• 6oz/170g caster sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2.2oz/60g self raising flour (wheat free if you desire)
• 6 large egg whites at room temperature
• 3/4 tsp cream of tartar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 180ml double or whipping cream
• Various summer fruits
• Some icing sugar for dusting
• Pink food colouring (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and line a 9x5 inch loaf pan (mine was a bit narrower) with aluminium foil.  Do not use non-stick foil!
2. In a small bowl, mix half the caster sugar with the flour and the salt.
3. In a large (metal) bowl, whisk the egg whites until they are foamy and then add the cream of tartar.
4. Continue whisking until you reach the soft peak stage.
5. Start adding the sugar a bit at a time, still whisking but on your lowest setting.
6. When all the sugar has been mixed in, add the vanilla and whisk that in too.
7. Carefully fold 1/4 of the flour mixture into the egg whites with a spatula.  You need to be careful because the flour can fall straight through the egg whites and get stuck at the bottom so make sure you are actually mixing it into the whites.  
8. Repeat until all the flour has been mixed in.
9. Carefully spoon or pour the mixture into the foiled loaf tin and bake in the oven for about 35 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.
10. Cool in the cake in the loaf pan on a wire rack to help keep its shape.
11. When cool, remove from the tin and gently peel off the foil.
12. Whisk the cream with some vanilla until soft peaks form.
13. If using food colouring, drop some drops into the cream and swirl through with a skewer.
14. Put into a piping bag with a large star nozzle (I used a Wilton 1M) and pipe swirls onto the cake.  I did three big swirls and then lots of little swirls to fill in the gaps.
15. Decorate with the fruit and then dust with the icing sugar.

Gingernut Biscuits, take two

Yesterday I did two lots of baking.  One was my first ever batch of shortbread, which I will be posting about shortly.  The other was a second batch of gingernut biscuits, though this time with wheat and gluten free flour.  Learning from last time I made sure to keep a good eye on them in the oven.  I also didn't put too much syrup in this time, so that probably helped too.  They certainly came out much better.  None of them caught.  They didn't flatten out as much as they did in the previous batch but that's not too bad.  They are still delicious apparently.

So, recipe can be seen here. And if you want to make them gluten/wheat free, just replace the flour with a free from equivalent.

Jam Tarts

Last week I was down in Essex visiting my family as I'd not seen them since November and not been home since August.  For some reason, being home resulted into a brief nostalgia moment as I thought to myself 'I've not made jam tarts'.  Jam tarts are one of my Dad's favourite things but I don't remember them being made in our house since I was a little girl.  My mother used to make them quite often.  I did consider trying my hand at them whilst there, but alas we had no jam.  I also don't trust the oven.  It's too complicated for my liking.  A shame since I would have liked to make jam tarts for my Dad.  Maybe next time.  I think I need more practice anyway.

However, once back in Scotland I still felt a need to try them and we have a stockpile of jam in this house.  So today I made 12 little tarts, 6 with raspberry jam and 6 with strawberry.  The pastry recipe came from The Best of Mrs Beeton's Cakes and Baking, which was sitting in our kitchen in Essex.  I made note of a few recipes I wanted to try, the shortcrust pastry among them.

The result....was not quite right.  I left them in the oven much longer than I should have done since I wasn't sure if the pastry was cooked properly.  It wasn't soggy or anything but it didn't seem to be changing colour, which is what I expected it to do.  This meant that they ended up having the consistency of Jammy Dodgers.  Of course, my boyfriend and I like Jammy Dodgers so we didn't see this as a bad thing.  Unfortunately, not very jam tartish.  Next time I'll take them out the oven when I'm meant to.

I also decided to try using a wheat and gluten free flour for the pastry, since my boyfriend's Mum isn't eating wheat at the moment.  Despite Jammy Dodger texture, I believe it worked fine as a substitute.

Recipe - Adapted from Mrs Beeton's Lemon Tartlets

Makes about 12 6cm diameter tarts

• 100g/4oz plain flour (either regular or wheat free)
• 50g/2oz butter
• Pinch of salt
• Some water
• About 18 tsp worth of jam in the flavour of your choice

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C/395°F/Gas 6.
2. Grease a 12 shallow holed baking tray.
3. Sift the flour and salt into a bowl.
4. Add the butter and rub together between your fingers until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.
5. Add water until you get a stiff dough.  I ended up using about 7 tsp of water.  Just add a couple of tsp at a time until you get the right consistency.  Press dough together with your fingers after each addition of water.
6. Roll the dough out on a floured surface and use cookie cutters to cut out the tarts.  This can be really tricky and you may need to add tiny bits of water to stop the dough drying out too much due to the flour on the surface.  You should have enough dough for 12 without any leftovers.
7. Spoon 1.5 tsp of jam into each tart.  As I said, I did 6 each or strawberry and raspberry jam.  No need for blind baking as nothing went soggy.
8. Put in the oven and bake for 15-20 minutes. (I had mine in for about 45, which is why I got Jammy Dodger tarts instead).
9. Cool on a rack.  Do not eat straight from the oven as the jam will be very, very hot.