Han-Na Cha

Kat’s mum’s apple cake

Apple cake baked in Phnom Penh — The apple cake that I baked living at Simon and Becci’s in Phnom Penh

I recently found out that these apples are really tasty and cheap, compared to the other varieties of imported apples that they sell here. So, when I woke up, I realised that the one thing that I really wanted to do today was to bake Kat’s mum’s apple cake.

Remember how I confessed to being a baking addict? Since moving to Cambodia, I’ve limited myself to baking once a week and I think that’s as far as my baking addiction allows me to go before I get my next fix.

That need fuelled my first ever visit to a fruit stall in the Russian market, where I bought 8 pomme for 8400 riel (the equivalent of $3.50). I may have overpaid for my apples: I haven’t learned yet how to bargain for food in the market. But, I didn’t mind paying a bit extra if if meant that I could bake. However, I wasn’t quite prepared to pay $3 for 250g of palm sugar (the only raw sugar they had available), when what I really wanted was demerara sugar. Let’s bake together at a later date, palm sugar. I think that you’ll be delightful in a cookie.

This apple cake goes down in my baking history as the third ever cake I made on my own. I was 21 at the time. Kat’s mum baked this apple cake for us when Kat invited a few friends to her Devonshire home for a holiday during our final year at university. The cake tasted wholesomely delicious and I found myself asking Kat’s mum for the recipe. I was no baker in those days so what convinced me to attempt making this cake was her reassurance that the recipe was really simple.

And it was. Once it entered into my baking repertoire, it was then pretty much the only cake that I baked for the next 2 years.

I told you that I came late into this baking thing later than most foodies.

The only step that requires a bit of time is peeling, coring and chopping the apples and this time, Simon and Becci did that bit for me this time round. Hurrah for happy helpers. But once you’ve done that, you can pretty much throw the ingredients altogether, mix it around with your hands and pop it into the oven. There’s no faffing with trying to make it look pretty: part of the charm of baking this cake is that is meant to look rustic. I’ve made it before when I’ve reserved a few choice apple pieces to make it look prettier, but the detail got lost underneath the topping of sugar and ground cinnamon. You can also use a loaf tin or a round tin, as you can see from my photos.

Since being here and discovering how expensive it is to bake with butter (the cheapest i’ve found is $3.50 for 227g) I reverted back to using margarine. The cake tastes better, I think, if you make it with margarine rather than butter.

You can also use any apples. I really like using cooking apples because of their tartness and size, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

Ingredients for Kat’s mum’s apple cake

8oz/225g self-raising flour
4oz/110g margarine
4oz/110g granulated sugar, preferably golden but it can be white
3 or 4 cooking apples, peeled, cored and sliced into 1-2cm slices.
2 large eggs, beaten
a splash of milk

Cake topping – adapt the measures according to taste.

1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp demerara sugar

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/gas mark 6. Grease and line either a 2lb loaf tin or a cake tin, that is deepish and anything between 8-10 inches.
2. Prepare the topping first for ease because your hands will be gloopy by step 5. In a small bowl, mix together the demerara sugar and cinnamon.
3. Peel, core and chop the apples and put them into a large mixing bowl.
4. In a medium sized mixing bowl, rub together the flour, butter and sugar until they resemble crumbs. Add this crumbly mixture to the apples.

5. Add in the eggs and a splash of milk. Mix it around with your hands so that it all combines into a gloopy mess.
6. Sprinkle the demerara sugar and cinnamon mix on top of the cake.

Trying to make it pretty apple cake — you can prettify it if you want

7. Pop into the middle of the oven and bake for about 1 hour. Check after 40 minutes. If the top of the cake is browning too much then cover the top with foil. The cake is ready when a tester comes out clean.
8. Let it cool down and rest before taking it out of the tin.

trying to make it pretty baked apple cake — but the cinnamon/sugar topping negates the efforts

Enjoy while it’s still warm if you can. I think that it’s worth pointing out, that with this cake you get one portion of your fruit and veg allowance, only if you eat a quarter of the cake.

Glamping and Saying Goodbye

A few weeks before I left for Cambodia, one of my friends, Helen, organised a glamping weekend away with me and some friends as one of my leaving do’s and very wittily called it my Han-do. Nine of us girlies ‘glamped’ in beautiful bell tents in this beautiful orchard in Worcester. Everything was set up for us when we arrived: tents, beds, cutlery, plates… They provided wood for campfires and charcoal of a BBQ. It was a brilliant set up and I loved the glamping experience. We could just walk in and enjoy it. We played games, tried geo-caching for the first time, built camp-fires (some more successfully than others), spent an evening praying for each other, drank wine, caught up with each other’s lives and a few of us even braved the bracing temperatures of Droitwich Lido. I remember thinking what lovely friends I had, how we all got on so well with each other and that the activities were exactly the sort that I enjoy.

No surprises there as the whole weekend was for me!

At the beginning of the weekend, Sarah (of the Kenwood lending kindness) and I remarked to each other on how much we had been looking forward to the Han-do, until it had dawned on both of us separately that the whole weekend was happening because I was leaving. That made us both sad.

So, helpfully, or unhelpfully (I don’t know) I said to everyone at the start, that I was looking forward to the weekend but was sad because I knew it was because I was leaving for Cambodia. So perhaps we could sort of ignore that the tiny fact that I was leaving and focus on having fun and enjoying each other’s company. It made the whole weekend much less miserable for me.

Oh gosh, leaving! How was that?

‘Miserable’ is how I described myself to friends, family and colleagues in the 2 months leading up to my departure date.
‘Unbearable’ to quote my mother, is how she later described me, in the lead up to our Berlin, Dresden and Prague holiday when I was tired from the CELTA course, packing, sorting and to top it all off had PMT.
I’d also add ‘selfish’, ‘out of character’ and ‘acting up’ to the mix. When I saw poorly children acting up, I suddenly realised that I was behaving in the same way.

I knew that I was going through some sort of grieving process and that the intense sadness I felt was completely normal; it was still a difficult thing for me and those around me to go through. Some days, all I could do was pray, “God, help me, help me, help me…” It’s not just the emotions; the never-ending todo list of moving my life across continents resulted in me developing atopic eczema because of the stress. I’ve moved countries, cities, houses many times before, but this time beat it hands down.

‘They’ (those experts in moving across cultures and countries) say that it makes for a better transition if you say farewell to people, places and things. Imagine daily saying goodbye for the 3 months to such and it may help you to understand my misery.

saying goodbye to Haribo (my car) and selling him onto my sister

Nor was it wasn’t an entirely joyless period of time. Many people and things made me laugh. I also deliberately did things that make me happy and/or take me out of myself. My top 3:

Playing with young children and babies
Swimming
Baking

When there were 2 weeks looming before my departure date and I was still miserable, I wondered whether Simon and Becci were going to receive a joyless wretch. But then, God turned it around with 10 days to go.

Oh gosh, writing about my experience of leaving has rather taken over this blog post. The glamping in the orchard bit was meant to be an introduction to Kat’s mum’s apple cake. However, now that I’m in Cambodia and I’m happy, I don’t want the apple cake to be forever associated with the pain of saying goodbye. So, here’s a photo of the apple cake that I’ve baked, since living in Phnom Penh and I’ll write up the recipe as my next post.

Birmingham New Street Station in a Heatwave

My CELTA course in Birmingham and the summer’s astonishing heatwave have coincided in July 2013. It has meant that I’ve become a rail commuter again and I get to traipse through Birmingham New Street’s revamped station. I rather like its new look.

It’s a shame that they haven’t done anything about the narrow escalators and stairs that connect the platforms and the concourse.

I think that we’d had an input session on teaching writing one morning in which we’d discussed how we could encourage ESL students to write poetry. It reminded me of how I always preferred to write poetry than prose at Korean school when they set their writing competitions: poetry requires minimal words and I was the weakest student in my group. Somehow, I managed to wow someone with my creative outputs and won a few prizes. Ironically, they were dictionaries!

I’ve been reading the Psalms and Norman MacCaig’s poems during my commute. The combination of all these things has culminated in me writing a wee one of my own.

Birmingham New Street Station in a HeatwaveIt’s okay,
It’s fine really,
until you’re at the top of the stairs and then –

My nose!
My nose!

Assaulted by these people’s
sticky, sweaty,
familiar smells. Their stale scents
stick at the back of my throat.

Descending the steps into
sultry staleness.
Dim, dingy, dirty.
Pining for fresh air.

Stalemate.
Waiting for my shiny steed to whisk me away.

A pre-intermediate lesson on Panzanella

The English language and lesson plans.

I think that those are the best two phrases which sum up my life at present.

During this month of July, I’m training to be an English Language teacher, so that I can take this new skill and (hopefully) qualification with me to Cambodia. I’m doing the intensive 4-week CELTA course and we’ve just passed the halfway mark. In our most recent tutorials, my teaching practice group had been encouraged to try out materials in the classroom, outside of our coursebooks. On Monday we had a lesson on using ‘authentic’ texts. Texts, which are not created for the sole purpose of teaching. I felt inspired to try it out in my next lesson… which just happened to be the next day.

Me, being me, wanted to try using a recipe as authentic text. We teach in pairs. Each person has 45 mins to do half of the lesson. On Tuesday, I was teaching with Rachel. We divvied out the skills and the language. I had listening and vocabulary, Rachel had writing and grammar.

H (imagine it with lots of enthusiasm): “I was thinking that we could do food as a topic and use a recipe to teach it.”

R: Ooh. Yes. There’s lots of imperatives and vocabulary that we could be teaching. I could get them to write a recipe to follow on.

And as I had the enviable task of teaching the skill of listening, I thought that a short video from someone like Nigella would be good as they’re easily accessible on the BBC Good Food or youtube.

Half an hour into drafting out the two parts of our lesson, our teacher tells us that recipes are notoriously tricky to teach because the extensive vocabulary, and more importantly, she reminds us that it is Ramadan and half of the group are muslims. Perhaps we are being a bit culturally insensitive to teach on the topic of food? “But,” she tells us, “it’s too late to change the topic of the lesson.” So, Rachel and I continue with our plans, with a tinge of apprehension. Enlightened, I wondered aloud, whether Nigella was really the best fit for our group of learners. “I wonder whether she’s too flirtatious on screen?” Rachel points out, “the ingredients in her recipes aren’t always normal ones either.”

And this is how I came to be teaching 14 students, a recipe on how to make a Tuscan Bread Salad called Panzanella – i mean, it’s not even an English dish! However, importantly for our group of pre-intermerdiate learners, the ingredients are few and commonly available and the method is simple.

I had never heard of Panzanella until I watched Simon Hopkinson’s, A Good Cook, a few years back. I’ve raved about him before to you, haven’t I. I love his recipes and they have been really doable to recreate. Panzanella has become my favourite taste the summer salad: the one that I make when I want to taste a bit of sunshine, regardless of the weather outside. The difference in flavour imparted by sun-ripened tomatoes and good extra virgin olive oil sets it apart. It’s also simple to make, healthy, easily adaptable to other ingredients and filling because of the bread. Have I sold it to you yet? I’ll continue. How about, it’s a great way to use up any stale bread and it uses ingredients that you’re likely to have knocking around in your fridge and cupboards?

Simon Hopkinson’s Panzanella recipe, as I presented it to the class. (The italicised parts are what I’ve edited in since, for your benefit.)

Ingredients (serves 4)

5 handfuls of sourdough bread (think of a slice of thick bread as being a handful)
salt and freshly ground black pepper
7 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 cucumber
1 red onion
6 vine tomatoes – you want about 200-250g. Try substituting cherry tomatoes (see step 5)
3 garlic cloves
handful of basil leaves

Method

Tear the bread into small pieces and put it into a bowl. The best bread to use is sourdough bread, but you can use any stale bread.
Season with salt and pepper. You can always add more seasoning later on.
Add the olive oil and red wine to the bowl. You don’t have to add in all the olive oil, if you want to be a bit healthier.
Put the tomatoes into another bowl and pour boiling water over them. This helps the skin to come off.
Remove the tomatoes from the water. Peel off the tomato skins and cut the tomatoes before adding it to the bread. If you want to be simplify this step, then you can get away with not removing the tomato skins or use the equivalent weight in cherry tomatoes. I like removing the tomato skins, not just for the therapeutic value but also, because it softens the feel of it in your mouth when you eat it.
Peel a cucumber and cut it into small pieces. Add it to the bread and tomatoes.
Cut the onion into thin slices and add it to the bread. Try using red onions or shallots because they are milder in flavour.
Finely cut or crush the garlic cloves before you add them to the salad. You could reduce the number of garlic cloves if you don’t want such a strong flavour.
Tear up the basil leaves. This is essential and you must not miss them out!
Finally, mix up the ingredients. I’d suggest mixing them up with your hands because it always tastes better when you do.
You could serve this on a hot summer’s day for lunch with friends, or on any day that you want a taste of summer.
Don’t forget to pair it with a fruity red wine.

And how was the lesson? (I don’t normally ask that at the end of a blog post on food! Told you my life is about the English Language and lessons plans at the moment.) The panzanella video with Simon Hopkinson went down really well with the learners, they learned some new words but then I got unexpectedly bogged down for 5 minutes trying to explain basil to the group. I learned that asking, “What is basil?” is relating noise to notion (there’s some TEFL jargon for you!), and that is not the way to do teach new vocabulary! I ran out of time to do all the planned activities because of my basil moment, so I wasn’t too sure how it had gone when I finished my part. The group did appear to be enjoying the subject matter, even with it being Ramadan. Then in Rachel’s part of the lesson, I was delighted when the learners reproduced the vocabulary in the recipes and produced some really detailed, high quality writing in their recipes. In fact, our observer really praised Rachel and me on our learners’ outputs.

Well done, pre-intermediate class in room 118!

This weekend I have an assignment to write and a lesson to plans, so I’d better get back to it. I leave you with this one question – how would you describe/define basil to english as a foreign language learners?

Iced buns and some news: I handed in my notice

iced buns 1

I’ve handed in my notice at work.

In about 4 months time, I will be stepping onto a plane and waving good bye to the UK. Because… because (wait for it…) I am moving to Cambodia to join my friends Simon and Becci who lead a church in Phnom Penh. I haven’t got a job lined up for me, nor do I know exactly what I’ll be doing when I arrive, past the first couple of days of getting over jet lag. I imagine that my initial months will be spent learning Khmer language and culture. But, it’s all guess work if I’m honest.

It’s both exciting and terrifying.

I don’t think that I’ve talked about this on the blogosphere before and that makes me feel somewhat dishonest with you. I’m sorry. So, let me give you a bit of context. Ever since I was young, I have wanted to live and work in another culture, specifically doing something that would help people have a better life and give hope. My earliest, serious career ambition was to live and work with street kids in a peruvian shanty town. I think that I was about 9 or 10 at the time and I definitely had some jacked up, romanticised ideas on poverty and ‘doing good’.

I’m 31 now and from what I know, romantic is definitely not the adjective to describe poverty or that kind of work. I’m expecting it will be uncomfortable as I adjust to a new climate and culture, confusing to be illiterate in a new language, hard work and lonely being so far away from my family and friends.

So, how come I’m upping sticks and moving to the other side of the world? Besides, what difference can one person affect?

Well, I know that one person can make all the difference. And that childhood dream never died, nor did I want it to. Instead, in all the intervening years, it’s been a real trusting game to wait for the right moment and opportunity.

About this time last year, I was sitting in a house, built on stilts over the sewers in Phnom Penh, thinking that sewage really did smell like durian. Between the floorboards, I could see faded, old rubbish lying a couple of feet below me. There were all these rustling sounds that kept distracting me from the conversation and I was trying really hard to curb my imagination as to what those sounds could be.

I think this was day 3 of a 10 day trip I was making with a team from my church, visiting Simon and Becci’s church. We had brilliant fun with them and I thoroughly enjoyed myself, even if the airline did lose my luggage for 24 hours and I got really bad diarrhoea for 4 of those days. I never imagined that I’d be joining Simon and Becci in Cambodia. In fact, I distinctly remember the thought passing through my head, ‘I really admire what Simon and Becci are doing, but there is no way that I could do that or move out here’.

Ha! God definitely has a sense of humour. Unbeknownst to me, Simon and Becci were thinking the exact opposite.

So, towards the end of 2012, they sprung it on me, out of the blue. A couple of months later, I told them yes and now I’m finally telling you. And to balance out my earlier apprehensions, let me tell you some of what I am looking forward to:

Learning a new language and culture
Being part of Liberty Family Church, Phnom Penh
Making new friends
South East Asian food – this is going to be one culinary adventure!
Riding a moto
Having lots of fun
Travelling around the region
Blue skies and the sun

And the time just seems to be right.

Which brings me neatly (!!!) to the subject of iced buns. No, honestly it does. Remember how I spoke about trusting and waiting for the right time and how it can be a bit emotional, earlier on? Well, that’s kind of how it feels baking with yeast and bread: you can’t rush the time the dough takes to rise on that first prove; you have to trust that the yeast will work and nothing beats the thrill of seeing your dough doubled in size. I could continue the analogy but suffice to say, there’s quite of bit of emotion and waiting involved!

Attempt no. 1: glazed cream buns

This is a brilliant recipe that I’d wanted to make from the Great British Bake Off Series 2and I finally got round to trying it out 2 weeks ago. The first time, I stuck to the recipe (except I added too much water to the icing by mistake so ended up with glazed buns) and baked them into 12 buns, which I shared with my triathlon club. However, they were pretty big portion sizes and the cream was a bit bland, if I’m honest, not that they complained! So, the second time, I made them into 24 ‘mini’ iced buns, coloured the icing and added vanilla extract to the cream. They weren’t that mini, as you can see. Being somewhat unpracticed in the skill of whipping cream, I overwhipped the double cream on this second occasion and had to use my palette knife as a makeshift cream shovel! Not as pretty as my first attempt but that’s alright when it’s homebaking. I can’t imagine Paul or Mary raving about my presentation but the buns still tasted great and looked pretty. I took them to a charity clothes swap that my friend was organising and the buns were all polished off.

So, here is my iced buns recipe, adapted slightly from Paul Hollywood’s iced fingers recipe.

Ingredients for the dough

500g strong white flour
50g caster sugar
40g unsalted butter, softened
2 large eggs
14g fast action yeast
2 tsp salt
150ml whole milk
140ml water

Method

1. Scald the milk in a small pan, by heating it up until it is just about to boil, and leave it to one side to cool down. I find that doing this creates a softer dough. Alternatively, use the microwave to heat up the milk until it is neither hot nor cold. I added in the cold water to bring down the temperature even more.

2. If you’re doing it by hand, then measure out the flour in a large bowl, mix in the yeast, then add the sugar and the salt, rub in the butter and finally add in the eggs, milk and water. I use a scraper at this point to combine the ingredients, but you can use just your hands. It’ll make a wet dough but don’t be scared by it. The wetness of the dough should ensure that it’s soft texture. Turn it out onto your work surface and knead. If you’re like me and a bit slow at kneading, it’ll take about 15-20 minutes. Of course, you could use a machine fitted with a dough hook. In which case, put all ingredients for the dough into a large bowl, ensuring that the yeast and salt are added to opposite sides of the bowl. Mix on a slow speed until it all combines and then move it onto a medium-high speed for about 10-15 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic.

3. Pour a little bit of vegetable oil into the bowl and lightly cover the dough with oil. This helps the dough not to stick as it rises. Cover the bowl with cling film or a damp tea towel and leave in a warm place for at least 1 hour and doubled in size.

4. Line two baking trays with baking paper

5. Turn the dough out of the bowl and knock out the air by pressing your fingers over the dough. I like to strengthen the dough at this stage. Shape into a vague rectangle. Take hold of a longer side, fold one third towards the centre and press down with your thumbs or the heel of your hand. Fold the other third towards the centre and press down. Finally fold it in half lengthways, press down and roll it out a bit with your hands. The dough should feel stronger.

shaping rolls 1 shaping rolls 2

shaping rolls 3 shaping rolls 4

shaping rolls 5 shaping rolls 6

6. Divide the dough into half, then half again, so that you have 4 sections. Work with one section at a time and cover the others with a tea towel or cling film so that they don’t dry out. Divide each section into 6 equal-ish pieces. Each piece will probably with between 35-40g. Shape these into rolls, using exactly the same steps as before when strengthening the dough. Place them onto the baking tray, leaving about 1cm of space between them so that they can double in size in the second prove. Cover with a tea towel for about 30-40 minutes.

7. At this point, preheat the oven to 220°C/425°F/Gas mark 7.

8. Bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes. Check after 8 minutes and lower the temperature by 20C if they look like they’re browning too much. Then set them aside to cool on a wire rack. When the buns are completely cool, start on the icing.

Ingredients for the icing

200g icing sugar
5 tsp cold water
food colouring and edible decorations, such as chocolate curls, coloured sprinkles etc. (optional)

Method

1. You can just ice the buns and not fill them, if you want to. However, if you’d like to fill them with cream then use a bread knife to slice the buns in half horizontally, leaving one long edge intact. Do this step now, otherwise the icing transfers onto your hands and they get sticky holding the already iced buns.

2. Measure out icing sugar into a medium sized bowl. Add in the water, one teaspoon at a time until it becomes a thick paste. You want the mixture to be thick enough to stick onto the buns. I coloured half of my icing pink, just for fun, using a cocktail stick dipped into a tiny bit of red colour paste.

3. Dip the top of the buns into the icing, smooth out with your finger and set them to dry on a wire rack. The icing may drip down the sides of the bun a bit, but that’s okay. Sprinkle on some decorations if you’d like. I used strawberry curls, white chocolate stars and sugar butterflies.

Ingredients for the filling

300ml double cream or whipping cream
1 tbsp vanilla extract
5 tbsp jam – I used raspberry, Paul suggests strawberry, but you could use any flavour that takes your fancy

Method

1. Lightly whip up the cream with the vanilla extract in a medium sized bowl until it thickens but is pipeable. Fill a piping bag fitted with a small star nozzle.

2. Spoon the jam into another piping bag and snip off a very small opening.

3. Pipe a generous amount of cream, followed by a thin line of jam into the middle of each finger. Gently fold the top of the bun down.

Et voila – iced buns! Enjoy.

A Hazelnut Brown Butter Cake with Baileys Ganache

I had already decided that I was going to like this hazelnut brown butter cake the moment I saw it. And then I read on:

‘This is a cake that has it’s roots in dacquoise and meringue.’ – Shuna Fish Lydon

A whatcha, whatchamacallit? Dacquoise and meringue.

Meringue is a dessert that we’re pretty aware of, but dacquoise? I’ve been blissfully ignorant of its existence until Monday evening. I was trying to find another cake recipe to make for Sarah’s birthday, other than Praline Almond Cake, because I didn’t have enough butter for that recipe and I was much too tired to trawl round Tescos. I can’t even remember how my brain jumped from praline almond cake to hazlenut brown butter cake, but somehow I found myself reading Smitten Kitchen Deb’s enticing blog entry on it. Debs links onto Eggbeater Shuna’s detailed poston how to make this cake. I highly recommend reading Shuna’s step-by-step instructions before baking the cake because if you follow it, it’s pretty fool-proof. And that’s where I first stumbled across dacquoise. A dacquoise, so Wikipedia tells me, is a french dessert made with layers of nut meringue and whipped cream or buttercream. The meringue is normally made with almonds and hazlenuts.

I decided to read up a bit more on the cake. I got as far as Jibuyabu’s metricised description on making this cake(thank-you) and then I stopped. It was 9:30pm and I needed to begin the baking.

My preliminary reading on this cake intrigued me. All three bloggers were in awe of this chef named Suzanne Goin, like we should all know her. “Chef Goin served this as her wedding cake. Need I say more?” – Smitten Kitchen. Well yes. Who is she? and why should that sway my decision on whether or not I should make this cake? As it turns out she is one of America’s most highly-acclaimed chef. That is, at least, according to her book on Amazon. Debs and Shuna are US based food bloggers so that probably explains their awe of her. So, okay maybe that should sway my mind. But it doesn’t really. At least, not yet. I wondered, whether she is the equivalent of say, Tom Ketteridge in the UK. Now, all you non-Brits, might be typing Tom Ketteridge into google search because you’re scratching your head and wondering, ‘who is this Tom Ketteridge dude?’ Just this incredible michelin starred chef! Ah – the nuances of across the pond baking.

I tell you what, though, if we just call the cake what it is – a hazelnut brown butter cake – I think that it makes it sound utterly enticing. Don’t you think so?

The ‘not your standard cake’ ingredients and the fun of trying out a new technique, validated it as the one to make as Sarah’s birthday cake (the same Sarah of the Cardamon, White Chocolate and Rosewater angst and Chocolate Macarons)

In Suzanne Goin’s original recipe, she serves it up with sauteed pears and icing sugar; Debs from Smitten Kitchen went for a chocolate ganache. It’s a no-brainer which option Sarah would prefer, and I tweaked Deb’s version and replaced the coffee with baileys liquor.

And I’ll tell you what – the cake lives up to expectations and tastes perfectly divine. On Tuesday evening, I served it up and we all commented on how it smelled and tasted like ferrero rocher. It’s not heavy, even with all that butter. Moreover, I believe that it would taste better as it gets older because of all that lovely moist nuttiness. Do you know – I’m pretty sure that we all managed two slices, after a pretty big main meal – so there’s not much a chance of this cake hanging around that long.

Hazelnut Brown Butter Cake with Baileys Ganache, adapted from Smitten Kitchen, Jibuyabu and Sunday Suppers at Lucques

Ingredients for the cake

140g blanched whole hazelnuts plus some extra for garnish
225g butter
1/2 vanilla bean or 1tsp of vanilla extract
170g icing sugar
45g plain flour
180g egg whites, which is about the equivalent of 5 extra large egg whites or 6 large egg whites
45g granulated sugar

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and prepare a 23cm or 25cm springform cake tin, by greasing the sides and lining the bottom with baking paper. I only had a 23cm cake tin and it turned out fine.

2. Toast the hazelnuts under the grill or in the oven, by spreading them out in one layer on a baking tray, until they smell gorgeously nutty and turn a golden brown. It normally takes between 10-15 minutes. Once done, leave them cool. I transferred them onto another baking tray so quicken the cooling process.

3. Put the butter in a medium sized pan. Slice the vanilla bean lengthways down the middle and scrape out all the seeds onto the butter. Add the vanilla bean to the pan. Now, make the brown butter. I was a bit intimidated by this ingredient until I read this tutorial on Poire au Chocolat. Cook the butter on a medium heat until the butter browns, finishes crackling at you and smells nutty. It’ll take a good couple of minutes for this amount of butter. Take the pan off the heat and leave it to one side to cool. Remove the vanilla pod and dump it in the bin.

4. Weigh out the icing sugar and place in a food processer. Once the hazelnuts have cooled down, add them to the food processer too and whizz them up until they are finely ground (this takes about 10 minutes, interspersed with moments of me scraping the sides of the food processer with a knife so that everything gets whizzed up). Add the flour and pulse it a few times to ensure that the flour is evenly mixed through. This mixture will smell gorgeously nutty and it tastes good too, if you happen to get some of it on your fingers while you are emptying this out into a large bowl. There are some perks for being a bit clumsy.

5. Whisk the eggs with a stand mixer or a handheld electic beater. I held off adding the sugar until the eggs had formed soft peaks, but in the original recipe she says to add the sugar in from the start. Keep whisking until they form stiff peaks.

6. In a small bowl, take a large dollop of egg white and a generous splash of brown butter and mix it together vigorously before re-adding and folding it to the egg whites. Eggbeater Shuna explains this process as creating an emulsion between two ingredients that would normally repel each other (whisked egg whites and butter) so that after it is introduced to egg whites, it makes it easier to incorporate the remaining large quantities of ingredients.

7. Alternate folding in the dry mixture of the icing sugar, hazelnuts and flour and the liquid brown butter to the egg whites, being careful not to overmix and knock back all the air that you’ve carefully worked into the egg whites.

8. Pour the batter into the cake tin and bake for 40-50 minutes. It’s done when the cake is coming away from the sides of the tin and a knife comes out clean. Allow the cake to cool in the tin for about 30 minutes, before then inverting it onto a wire rack so that you can peel the baking paper from it’s bottom.

9. Turn the cake back over onto the plate that you’ll be serving on.

** You could serve it just like this with a dusting of icing sugar and sprinkle the reserved hazelnuts. To make it pretty, why not use a stencil?

Ingredients for the ganache

100g dark chocolate
100ml double cream
2 tbsp baileys or irish cream equivalent

Method

1. Break up the chocolate into small pieces and place in a small pyrex bowl. As you can see, I put mine directly into a pyrex measuring jug to make the pouring bit over the cake easier.

2. Heat up the double cream in a small pan until it just starts bubbling and then pour it over the chocolate. Leave it for a few minutes, then gently stir until all the chocolate has melted and the mixture is smooth. Add in the baileys and stir to incorporate.

preparing to dress the cake with ganache

3. Carefully pour the ganache evenly over the cake. It doesn’t matter if some of the ganache spills over the sides of the cake. I think that it adds a certain charm and elegance. Decorate the top of the cake with the remaining hazelnuts. I toasted and crushed them before sprinkling them over the cake. Alternatively, you could make caramel hazelnuts or a hazelnut praline (unfortunately, I had run out of sugar as well, so couldn’t pursue either of those options). Or… just serve it as it is. Plain with the chocolate ganache.

You can make this a day or two in advance and store it in the fridge or in an airtight container in a cold room. So, go on – bake this one up and impress your friends.

A Twist on Cranachan: Raspberry, Oatmeal and Whiskey Roulade

Cranachan – pronounced ‘cran-ah-hkun’ (the ‘ch’ being the soft, guttural, scottish ‘ch’ sound, as in loch’). The scrummy, scottish dessert made with raspberries, whiskey, honey blended with cream and sprinkled with oats. I’d like to appease the purists in cyberspace by letting them know that I had planned to serve it up in the traditional way at my Haggis, Neeps and Tatties in 3 ways Dinner Party.

Until Friday. At 10pm, I had this hankering to make it into a roulade because I’d never made a roulade before. You see, I don’t have a swiss roll tin and previously, that has been the one barrier that has stopped me from baking a roulade. However, as I was in an inventive mood, I improvised with a suitably sized baking tray and it all worked out. Hurrah 🙂

Well, there was more improvising in store. I know that you can make the roulade base purely with egg whites and sugar; there were too many online recipes demanding that I add in some sort of flour or flour substitute. So, that’s when I came up with the idea of using toasted oatmeal. And as I couldn’t find a recipe for an oatmeal meringue online, I made it up. So, as the hand beater is whisking the egg whites, balancing somewhat precariously on the bowl, I measure out the oats, scatter them across a baking tray and carefully toast them in the oven until a wonderful nutty smell wafts around the kitchen. As you can imagine, I had more moments of K-mix envy as I stood attached to my electric mixer, passing it from one hand to the other as I waited for stiff peaks to form. I can only imagine the freedom of leaving the egg whites to whisk in the stand mixer, while I line the tin, toast and ground the oatflakes… Admittedly, not that it stopped me but that procedure wouldn’t have held the same amount of trepidation.

Naturally, I wanted to omit the cream to create a healthier, lighter dessert and I replaced it with full-fat greek yoghurt. If you’d like to do this, then wait until it’s almost time to serve the dessert before you start spreading the greek yoghurt onto the base. It’s much runnier and wetter than whipped cream so will seep through the base, softening the structure.

(Incidentally Friday was Burns Night. Perhaps the scottish bard inspired me to take artistic license with this dessert.)

My guests really enjoyed the cranachan roulade on Saturday night. The raspberry, honey and whiskey combination is sweet but not overpowering. Those who like oats particularly enjoyed the nutty, oaty flavour of the base. So I’d make this again with a few tweaks (see below).

My own invention of Cranachan Roulade, serves 6-8 people

Ingredients for the meringue base

4 egg whites
225g caster sugar
50g toasted oatmeal or finely ground oatflakes

Ingredients for the filling

500g greek yoghurt or 250g lightly whipped double cream
2 tbsp whiskey
3 tsp runny honey, preferably of the heather honey variety. I didn’t have any so I used a Thai honey instead and it was good.
350g raspberries

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4. Line a 23x33cm swiss roll tin (or a similar sized baking tray with raised sides) with tin foil or baking paper, folding the sides up so that you create a raised 4cm border and squeeze the corners together. Lightly spray or brush with vegetable oil.

2. If you are using a stand mixer, then you can do step 2 after you begin the whisking of the egg whites described in step 3. Measure out the oat flakes and spread them on a baking tray and pop it in the oven for 4-5 minutes. Then take them out, turn them over and pop back into the oven for a few more minutes. The oats should be a very light brown colour and smell deliciously nutty. Leave to cool for a few minutes and then grind them up in a food processer until they are the texture of ground almonds, at the very least. I think that I created oat flour, I ground the flakes so fine.

3. Whisk the egg whites until they have a firm peak. Then add the caster sugar in 4 stages if you are using an electric beater, or all in one go if you’re using a stand mixer, continuing to whisk for 5 minutes until stiff peaks form. I used an electric beater and made the mistake of adding all the sugar in one go. The resulting base was fine but it took at least 15 minutes before anything vaguely resembling stiff peaks formed.

4. Now add the ground oatmeal to the meringue mixture. Fold it in using a metal spoon until it is just mixed in, making the utmost effort not to knock out the volume in the meringue mixture.

5. Spoon out the meringue mixture onto the prepared tin and evenly smooth it out using a palette knife. Now pop it into the oven and bake for 15-20 minutes, until it is firm to touch and ever so slightly brown on top. In the meantime, prepare an additional sheet of foil or baking paper that is just larger than the size of the tin and sprinkle it with icing sugar or caster sugar. I didn’t do this and in hindsight I think that it’s a good way to further ensure that the base doesn’t stick to the foil.

6. Take the roulade base out of the oven and allow to cool for about 3 minutes. Here comes the slightly scary part, akin to when you flip pancakes, so do it with confidence. Quickly invert the baking tin onto the prepared sheet of foil, so that the lining is on top. Leave for a few minutes, then gently remove the foil on the base. Don’t worry if a few bits come off. No one will see it anyway. Leave to cool completely.

*You could make it up this point the day before and leave the base out on the side, like I did.

6. For the filling, empty the yoghurt into a medium sized mixing bowl. Mix in the whiskey and honey. Spread the mixture evenly on top of the base but leave 2cms round the edges cream free. Sprinkle a thin layer of raspberries on top, reserving a few raspberries to decorate the roulade.

7. Now to roll. This proved trickier than I anticipated. Not helped by the fact that I chose to roll with the longer edge and my hands are too small to do it. When you’ve finished rolling, leave the foil around the roulade so that it is easier to gently transfer the roulade onto the serving dish. Or, if you are using cream, then you can store the roulade in the fridge for a couple of hours with the foil tightly wrapped around it before serving.

Enjoy and cheers!

Here are my top tips on rolling:

1. Sprinkle the foil with icing sugar or caster sugar before inverting the base onto it. This helps prevent the roulade base from sticking to the foil.

2. Make a cut along the edge of the roll, about 2 cms in, that you’re going to begin rolling with so that you are only cutting halfway into the base. This will help you create a roll, as opposed to a circle. Just so that you know, unlike moi, most people use the shortest edge.

3. Use the foil to create tight roll by firmly pulling the foil horizontally away from you with one hand and at the same time gently pressing down on the foil with the other. Do it slowly to start off.

4. Here’s an online video tutorial.

Variations on the theme: I’d like to experiment with a few tweaks to this recipe. Next time, either make a raspberry sauce by crushing raspberries and adding sugar to it or make a raspberry compote. Spread the raspberry sauce on the base. Substitute mascapone in place of the greek yoghurt or cream so that there’s a firmer mixture before adding the raspberries, rolling it up, sprinkling with icing sugar et voila!

Peanut and Rosemary Cookies

I am, in fact, quite excited that it’s snowing outside. It has given me that wee impetus to press publish on this recipe, which has been lurking around in my drafts folder for a while.

On an aside: say aloud with me, ‘lurking around for awhile’. Doesn’t it conjure up that horrible childhood fear of a shadowy bogeyman patiently waiting to catch you in the middle of a long, dark corridor? Mind you, saying the whole of that first sentence out loud now brings up a ridiculous image of a recipe like a white vapour, snaking out of a metal filing cabinet. It’s not quite the way that I’d planned to introduce this recipe to you.

rosemary rosemary 2

peanuts peanut and rosemary cookies

So, back to the recurring theme of this post. Essentially, it’s about ideas remaining dormant and not being actualised because of whatever reason.

You see, I’d been wanting to bake these peanut and rosemary cookies ever since one of my colleagues passed me a newspaper clipping with this recipe on it. That was about 18 months ago. The timing of this recipe landing on my desk was perfect because I had just been thinking about combining rosemary or thyme with a sweet dessert for a wee while. But I just didn’t get round to it, or I forgot. Maybe some student emergency came up before I fully committed to baking the recipe, or something! You get the idea. The recipe continued to lurk in between the covers of other recipe books.

When summer came around, my tastebuds changed and my mind started exploring the idea of combining lemons and black pepper. So, one afternoon I invented a lemon, fig, nut and black pepper cookie recipe, which Val promptly decided were her favourite cookies.

When the nights started drawing in and the temperatures dropped, my tastebuds hankered after a more pungent flavour. I pulled out this recipe, sent myself off to go to the shops to buy some salted peanuts and snipped off some fresh rosemary. It’s as simple as that really. I think, that most of you, will have the other ingredients as standard store cupboard items already. The other joy of this recipe, I discovered, is that you can pretty much make this in one bowl, mix it within 5 minutes and be biting into your first batch within 20 minutes of starting out on the recipe. I don’t know many other cookie recipes out there that can beat that!

And boy, did I enjoy eating them.

These are fast becoming my favourite cookies: I baked them twice within 5 days. Elegant, fragrant, crunchy and very more-ish. If you want an alternative sweet grown up sweet this season, or you’d like to do something different with your leftover bag of salted peanuts which you offer to your guests, then I’d recommend this recipe to you. I know that rosemary and salted peanuts cookies sound odd but I have to congratulate Dan Lepard on this fine flavour combination.

Dan Lepards’ Peanut and Rosemary Cookies.

Ingredients

100ml sunflower oil
200g golden caster sugar
1tsp honey
2tsp very finely chopped rosemary – I used one very long sprig
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 egg
150g salted peanuts
200g plain flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and line two baking trays with baking or greaseproof paper. I tried out the pizza stone for one batch but found that the baking trays did a better job than the stone.

2. Mix the oil, sugar, honey, rosemary and cinnamon in a bowl until it is like a paste. I use a metal spoon for this,

3. Add in the peanuts and egg and mix well.

4. Finally stir in the flour and bicarb of soda. Naturally you start mixing this in with the metal spoon, but soon, it becomes clear that it’ll be much easier to get hands-on stuck in with your hands and finish mixing in the flour.

5. Press together 30g balls of dough. That’s ping pong sized balls, for those of you who don’t really want to measure out them out. Lay them out on the baking tray, spaced 5-6cm apart because they spread a lot. Last time I made them, the peanuts rebelled a bit and didn’t want to stay on the cookie dough. Tell them who’s boss and push them on.

6. Bake them in the oven for 12-14 minutes, depending on how chewy you like them. I aim to take them out when they’re a golden colour, rather than bronzed all over. The bronzed ones are fine warmed up, but otherwise they get a bit hard when they cool. Lift the baking paper with the cookies, off the baking tray and let them cool on a wire rack for a minute, then carefully peel them off to the wire rack.

They make 24 cookies, so I bake these in batches.

If you find them a bit too salty, Dan suggests that washing the salt off the peanuts first. Personally, I like salty sweetness. To top it off, I’ve got a kitchen fragrant of rosemary.

Mulled Wine for 300

Mulled wine syrup for 300

For the past three years, we’ve put on a Winter Wonderland event for our Cryfield and Redfern students, with Christmas music, plenty mulled wine and mince pies to get them into the festive spirit. Of course, the first year we ran this, I realised how gauche I was about how one went around making mulled wine. My previous experiences of making mulled wine consisted of using a cheap bottle of red wine and dropping one of those mulled wine sachets into it. You know the kind I’m talking about right? The schwartz mulled wine spice bag.

So, that first year, I was marshalled into the mulled wine making army. We were inside this tiny kitchen, mixing vast quantities of homemade mulled wine syrup with bottles and bottles of red wine, adding sugar and dropping oranges into stock pots. Passing vats of the stuff outside to the thirsty punters, without making too much a mess, proved one step too far. Cleanliness was sacrificed for speed. I’m not sure that the redfern subwarden’s kitchen ever survived it.

It’s an understatement to say that it was somewhat of a revelation on how to make mulled wine. But you know what? That mulled wine tasted sweetly spiced wine with the tanginess of oranges, more akin to glühwein, and far superior than my previous homemade mulled wine. And that was even when we were doing it in bulk! The experience revolutionised my approach to making mulled wine.

The following year, I volunteered to make the mulled wine. A bit of research and arithmetic later, I began to compose my email to our deputy warden and organise my mulled wine making team.

Cha, Han-na

Actions

In response to the message from Border, Daniel, 21/11/2011

Sent Items

24 November 2011 00:45

Hi Dan,
I’ve put the costcutter order into one email.
I’ve gone for the Guardian’s mulled wine recipe – with a wee bit adaptation, think it’ll be tasty. –http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/dec/09/how-to-make-perfect-mulled-wine.
Chris and Dan – a few questions at the end which need your okaying to.

Here’s the mulled wine order for 300.

50 bottles of wine
25 oranges
25 lemons
4.5kg granulated sugar
8 jars of cinnamon sticks
2 jars of cloves
6 packets of whole star anise
3 jars of whole nutmeg
4 jars of whole cardamon pods

Hot chocolate order for 60:
12 litres of semi-skimmed milk
1200g hot chocolate powder

Pies and Biscuits:
300 mince pies (6×50 packets)
150 apple pies (6×25 packets)
2 packets of dark choc digestives
2 packets of milk choc digestives
3 packets of ginger nut biscuits
3 packets of bourbons

Could we have it ordered for Wednesday 30th November for 5pm pick up, rather than the Thursday and store it in Chris’s flat? Pinar said that she could store some of the milk in her fridge too.

If we have it on the Wednesday then Pinar and I can make the mulled wine syrup the night before, making it less stressful on the Thursday.

I’ll send an email to the wider group with an update and also request for manpower on the Wednesday, if Wednesday delivery is okay? Also have queries about urns/stock pans etc, which i’ll include in the email.

thanks,
Han-Na

For the next few days, I couldn’t quite get over the fact that I had ordered 50 bottles of wine!

Pinar and Rumana came round the evening before to make the mulled wine syrup with me, studding oranges with cloves, peeling lemons…

2 hours and plenty of chatter later, we produced about 7.5 litres of mulled wine syrup. Later that night, I got the calculator out again to work out the mulled wine syrup to wine ratio.

This is what happened on the night.

We had 47 bottles of red wine to mull and 2 hours to do it. I’d printed off the instructions in the morning and stuck it up on a cupboard.

For 500-550ml of mulled wine syrup, add 3 bottles of wine and 2 oranges. Heat it on a gentle heat so that all the alcohol doesn’t burn off. Empty the pan and start again 🙂

Rumana and Jue took charge of the mulling of the wine, whilst the rest of us began putting up decorations and heating up the pies. They were super-efficient and had it all done before 7pm before our first punters arrived. Shortly after the event began, I nipped off to a friend’s birthday party, confident that my job had been done.

I guess it’s becoming a tradition now to make the mulled wine from scratch for this annual event because this year I find that I’m initiating the new Cryfield team recruits into the art of making mulled wine syrup for the masses. We follow the success of last year and make the syrup a few nights before. Sarah needs a plaster when her finger exchanges sharp words with a vegetable peeler and Rumana shows off her skill for removing citrus peel. Glugs of orange juice and red wine are added into the pans by Dan. The good old calculator comes out as I work out the amount of spices that’s going into each stock pan and the ratio of syrup to wine when it comes to mulling.

But this time, it’s all happening out of my Redfern kitchen and I’m in charge of organising the whole event. What a difference a year makes!

So there you have it. Mulled wine for 300. Rather simple with a bit of organisation, preparation and a team of hardworking, happy helpers.

Cryfield 3 Pudding Competition: 4th November 2009

Follow-up to Cryfield 3: the start of the pudding competition from Courgettes and Limes: Recipes and Rhymes

6 November 2012

Haha! Here’s a blast from the past: I was editing the tags on this blog entry when I hit save for later button by accident, thereby changing the publish date on this entry!

Many people ask me what it is that I do, in my residential life role. I normally end up telling them a selection of the good, the bad and the ugly. Some stories of when you know that what you’ve said or done had really helped a student, some horrid grief that a student has given you and then the vomit… It doesn’t really do the residential tutor role any justice but it gives them a flavour of it. There is rather a lot more that goes on in the general humdrum of residential life. We go around the blocks to try and get to know the students and in doing so end up answering questions on topics such as heating, fridges and personal tutors. Then there are the nights when you don’t get any sleep, for one reason and another. And of course, we run events for students. In my first year as a resident tutor, I ran a pudding competition in my block with 84 students. Pretty much all of them took part. In those early days of blissful ignorance of a disease called ‘apathy’ so commonly caught by students, I did not realise what a monumental achievement it was to have the whole block take part.

I found these photos lurking in my photo archives. I can’t claim any credit for them. One of my students took them and then passed them onto me to publish online, which I never got round to. It’s a hazy memory now, but I remember being pretty sleep-deprived by then and losing the will to write any blog entries regularly. So here are some photos of what the students got up to. Finally! And all because I accidentally hit the ‘save for later’ button. (photos courtesey of my Cryfield 3 kitchen 5 2009 students)

1. spotted dick; 2. bakewell tart (the winner)

3. Bread and Butter Pudding and Chocolate Rice pudding in the foreground; 4. Sticky Toffee Pudding

5. Trifle; 6. Students lining up

The Cryfield Pudding Competition is on Wednesday 4th November. We’ve decided to stick to english puddings this time round and if it’s a success, then we could have an international spin on things… tiramisu, cheesecake all spring to mind.

We’re hoping that, as competitors, you have fun with each other in the block, have enough puddings to taste and discover all the hidden talents that you have.

The rules are relatively simple:

The competition will happen on the evening of Wednesday 4th November.
Entry costs £1 per person (this covers cost of food and the rest will be donated to a charity).
At a 8pm the puddings are to be brought down to the common room where the judging will take place.
There are seven kitchens so there will be seven types of puddings. Each kitchen makes a pudding – or several of the same version.
The puddings will be judged on the following: flavour, originality and presentation.
Students must produce the recipe that they followed plus photographs or a video that show who took part in the making of the puddings and how it was made.
Each kitchen must make enough of their pudding so that they can feed their kitchen.
There are extra points available: Extra 3 points if all the students in your kitchen take part, 2 points if 2 students don’t take part, 1 point if 3 students don’t take part.

And here’s the bit that you’ve been waiting for allocations of kitchens and puddings:

Kitchen 1 – Trifle
Kitchen 2 – Bakewell Pudding
Kitchen 3 – Spotted Dick
Kitchen 4 – Crumble
Kitchen 5 – Sticky Toffee Pudding
Kitchen 6 – Bread and Butter Pudding
Kitchen 7 – Rice Pudding

The judges are Cryfield Resident Tutors and we’ll provide bowls, spoons, cream and custard. Looking forward to it!

ps. please use the comments facility, if you would like to suggest a charity that we can donate the proceeds to. If not, David and I will pick one and let you know.

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Author: Han-Na Cha

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Mulled Wine for 300

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Cryfield 3 Pudding Competition: 4th November 2009

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