Chocolate Chip Not-Cross Buns

Yes, it's been an absolute age since I last posted here, and I'm very sorry for that. For one reason or another, I've lacked time and motivation to do write-ups of lots of things cooked over the last few months, and it needed something very special to get me back in the mood. Also, due to going back into full-time employment, I've been making use of a lot of ready-meals in the evenings... most of which didn't really warrant a review.

And, hey, let's face it, it's unusual enough for me to make event-specific foodstuffs and actually write about them on the day, rather than a good week or two later.

So, without further ado... a somewhat secular and chocolate-oriented take on the Hot Cross Bun. The recipe upon which this is based came from the Cadbury Kitchen but, as is de rigueur in my kitchen, I didn't follow it precisely for several reasons, ranging from forgetting to buy some ingredients (such as 'mixed spice') to personal preference (my girlfriend is vegetarian, and so we decided against adding the gelatin-based glaze). Also, since the crosses aren't the most interesting part of the recipe (and adding them involves the use of a piping bag, so I couldn't be bothered with the fuss), they were made without.

Considering this is the first proper baking project I've undertaken in a while, and it involved mixing things up from scratch rather than using a pre-prepared bread/cake mix, it all went fairly smoothly, too...

I've left the formatting in the US-style 'cup' measures because it's easy enough to find such cups these days - my nearest Morrisons has them in its Kitchenware section, and I believe they're available at the likes of Waitrose and Lakeland. The ingredients listed below are sufficient for 12 decent-sized (ie. larger than the sort of thing you can buy in a supermarket) buns.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups Plain Flour (plus a dusting for a worktop during the kneading stage)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons Cinnamon
• 14g Dried Yeast (ie. 2 sachets @ 7g each)
• 1/4 cup Caster Sugar
• 300ml Milk (room temperature)
• 2 Eggs
• 1 cup Sultanas
• 3/4 cup Chocolate Chips (I used a single 100g bag of Morrisons Dark Chocolate Chips)
• Butter (for greasing a baking tray)

Preparation Time: about 20 minutes (plus rising time) to prepare the dough, then about 20 minutes to cook

Tools Required:

• Large Mixing Bowl (for the dough mix)
• Small Mixing Bowl (in which to beat the eggs)
• Measuring Cups (obviously)
• Measuring Jug (for the milk) 
• Spatula/Flat-Bladed Knife (to mix the dough - I used a Pampered Chef jar scraper... it was the closest thing I had!)
• Whisk or Mixing Implement of Choice (for the eggs)
• Sharp Knife (for dividing the dough)
• Cling Film
• Baking Tray (Foil optional)

The Process:
First off, I measured out the flour, cinnamon and sugar. These were dumped into a large mixing bowl with the yeast and stirred with an Alien chopstick, because it was handy. The eggs were cracked into a small bowl and lightly beaten with a cute little semi-automatic whisk thing I picked up in a nearby branch of Tiger (interesting aside - sometime before Christmas, there was a market in Harrow at which one of the stalls was selling a similar product, perhaps slightly more refined, at almost four times the price, but 'specially reduced' to only about twice the price for the market event), then poured it into the flour mixture. As my girlfriend started stirring it all together, I added the milk gradually, in small stages. The original recipe calls for 350ml of milk, but we found that rather excessive - the dough was coming together very nicely by about the 300ml mark, so the excess was returned to the bottle. At the point where the mixture started to become a cohesive 'dough', I added in the sultanas, then the chocolate chips (conveniently, a 100g bag from Morrisons is pretty much bang-on 3/4 of a cup), then took over for the final stage of stirring, where it started to become both sticky and a little stiff.

Once all the flour mixture had been fully absorbed into the dough, it was turned out onto a section of worktop that had been dusted with flour. I kneaded the dough for somewhere between five and ten minutes, by which time it had become somewhat less sticky (though I wondered if, perhaps, I should not have washed my hands directly before kneading, because so much of the dough remained stuck to my fingers). Then it was dumped back into the mixing bowl, covered over with Cling Film and left to rise for about an hour.

After that time, the dough had more-or-less doubled in size. The original instructions stated that it should be beaten back to its original size, but I'm not sure how well I accomplished that. I kneaded it again briefly, then rolled and stretched it to make it easier to cut into twelve reasonably-similar-sized pieces. While I was doing this, my girlfriend laid out a piece of foil on a baking tray (largely because it's looking a bit manky with age and use, and it's often easier to dispose of a layer of foil than it is to adequately clean the tray) and smeared it with butter to prevent the buns sticking. Once the twelve pieces were laid out, the tray was covered with cling film and left for a second round of rising, for about 30 minutes. The ideal result is that the buns double in size, squishing together on the tray for that authentic 'group of freshly-baked buns' look. At around the 20 minute mark, the oven was switched on and set to 190C.

At the half-hour mark, and since we weren't decorating the buns in any way, they went straight into the oven for 20 minutes. While they looked, if anything, a little burnt (particularly at either side of the tray) they were briefly tested - by sticking a chopstick into one of the middle buns - to ensure they were thoroughly cooked.

The Results:
We had one bun each after leaving them to cool only briefly, because there are few things nicer than a hot bun (and, after all, they're called 'hot cross buns' because they're meant to be eaten hot). We're both of a mind that they could have done with a bit more cinnamon (perhaps the 'mixed spice' would have offered a more substantial flavour) but, otherwise, the buns tasted good - not too dry, though the chocolate (which, naturally, melted slightly) and the sultanas went some way to keeping them moist.

Those that appeared burnt actually seem to be OK, which got me wondering if the glaze is actually a fairly important component for this kind of bun... After all, hot cross buns are noted for being well browned,  with a glossy finish that moistens the crust.

I'm pretty pleased with the results and may well try this recipe with alternative additions... though I'll likely steer well clear of candied peel - a staple in 'normal' hot cross buns - because I'm not especially keen on that stuff. A mix of sultanas and raisins, or ginger, or something wacky like popping candy might be worth a try. Certainly, the next batch will have two teaspoons of cinnamon, if I use any at all.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Culinary Shenanigans

I've been toying with the idea of backdating this post so it appears on the 23rd November rather than today, but realised there's so sense in trying to rewrite the timeline of this blog. It would have been nice to have posted this over the Doctor Who Anniversary Weekend but the content this post deals with was actually made over the course of the 23rd and 24th anyway, while the plan was to make up some cupcakes and some truffles, then scoff them all while watching the 50th Anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor.

So... Just over a week late, here's what happened...

My girlfriend had previously brought round a whole stock of Lakeland's exclusive Doctor Who silicon cake pans and ice cube molds, as well as the Dalek cupcake wraps and toppers (colourful ones, based on the New Dalek Paradigm). All we needed was some food colouring (red, orange and blue) and a piping bag, and we'd be well on our way to making a selection of Dalektable* cupcakes to gobble up whilst glued to the screen. I also suggested using the ice cube tray to make some Doctor Who truffles, since it's been a while since I last larked about with chocolate.

It didn't all go smoothly... The first problem was that the Morrisons where I now do my usual weekly shop didn't seem to stock any red food colouring. I'd have expected blue to be hard to find because it's quite a weird colour for food, while red is surely pretty common these days. In the end, I had to make a brief second trip out, to my local Sainsbury's, to get the red colouring.

Next up, while the cakes themselves worked out very well - we just made twelve using two standard cake pans rather than the silicon molds (they're not as well-suited to having icing piled on, since the character designs on top would be covered over) - the icing was where it started to go wrong. Perhaps I should have known better than to expect a £2 piping bag to hold together, but the darned thing started to split before we'd even done three of the cakes, and was completely unusable by the time I finished the first six. We ended up only producing plain vanilla icing because of this, when the plan had been to (hopefully) make three of each colour.

Now, granted, I used ready-made Betty Crocker icing... but it had been out of the fridge for most of the day, and was easily soft enough to be piped right from the start. The piping bag I bought had a very thin heat-sealed seam, and split gradually further as I worked, even though the icing only got softer while the bag was in my hands. I'd have taken it back were it not for the fact that I already had a piping bag I wasn't aware of, and this new one came with seven nice, metal nozzles, which are a massive improvement on the three crappy plastic ones that had been packaged with the other bag. A quick switch-around, and I'll be ready to pipe icing again next time...

Thinking about it in retrospect, making three extra colours of icing would have required an awful lot more time than we allowed for the project, since the piping bag would have needed washing out after each group of three had been iced. As it was, we finished these just in time to start making our dinner, which was then ready just in time for the Doctor Who special.

Still, they turned out OK... and the two plates of cupcakes were further decorated with Jelly Babies, in a nod to a certain former Doctor who made an unexpected appearance in the show.

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The truffles were also not quite right. Where my previous attempts used bricks of Willie's Cacao chocolate, shattered by hand, we tried an easier option this time: bars of Fairtrade 70% Cocoa Dark Chocolate.

That it was far easier to melt should have clued me in to its vastly different makeup - far more cocoa butter, for one thing - and the final mixture of chocolate, butter, honey and egg yolk was much runnier than any previous truffle mixture I've made. This did make it easier to pour into the mold - which is always good - and it still set perfectly well - which is also good - but the truffles ended up much, much sweeter than I'd have hoped. It's not that the honey was the most potent flavour, but it certainly came close and, without the coating of cocoa powder, these could have been almost unbearably syrupy. As it was, I could only eat a couple at a time... which was, I suppose, true of the last batch of truffles I made, just for a very different reason.

The molds were Daleks (naturally), the TARDIS (just as naturally) and K-9. All were reasonably detailed molds, and the truffles came out with minimal breakage (the Daleks' dome lights broke off quite easily, as did the lantern on the roof of the TARDIS, but the bulk of the detail came out well. Dumping them all in cocoa filled in a lot of these details - most annoyingly the 'K-9' lettering on the side of the robot dog and many of the TARDIS window panes - but the end result turned out well... And the truffle mixture left over from the nine molded characters went on to make at least a dozen 'balls' of truffle.

* Excellent food/Doctor Who pun courtesy of my girlfriend

Fishcake Roundup

I have a funny relationship with fishcakes.

And when I say "funny", I mean either they're completely underwhelming or they make me unwell.

But, what's important here is that I don't let that put me off fishcakes. I keep trying them. And so, here's a post about a pair options from The Saucy Fish Co's new range of 'Saucy Centres' fishcakes!

Salmon and Hollandaise
Described as 'Succulent salmon and cod with a creamy Hollandaise sauce bound up with real mash in a crumbly golden coating', these weren't so much underwhelming as a clear disappointment. First off, the ratio of salmon to cod is very much in favour of the cod, almost to the point where it's pretty misleading to call them 'Salmon and Hollandaise Fishcakes'. Even the image on the box shows very little salmon in comparison to the rest of the filling. Worse than that, though, the cod plays second fiddle to the mash. Granted, that's par for the course with fishcakes these days - what was once included for binding purposes has become almost the main ingredient, simply because it makes them cheaper to produce.

The worst aspect of this fishcake is the Hollandaise sauce. I have to confess that I bought the two different kinds of fishcake listed here at the same time, and wasn't really paying attention when I decided to cook these ones first. I knew one had a cheesy sauce and, to be honest, when I was eating these, I assumed I was experiencing one of the most disappointing cheese sauces I've ever encountered. It was only later, when I looked at the packaging again, that I found I had experienced the most flavourless Hollandaise sauce I've ever encountered.

These are a great idea, but the lack of the alleged prime ingredient pretty much ruins the execution.

Smoked Haddock and Davidstow Cheddar
The moment I opened the package, I knew I was dealing with smoked haddock - the aroma is unmistakeable... and reminded me how much I enjoy smoked haddock. Just like the salmon version above, the packaging doesn't show off a mass of haddock pieces and, sadly, the photograph is accurate. Once cooked, the smell of haddock is dramatically reduced, and the flavour is all but overwhelmed by the mash.

When I wrote about The Saucy Fish Co's basic packaged smoked haddock fillet with Davistow cheddar sauce, I noted that the sauce was disappointingly light on apparent cheese flavour. There was some improvement in these fish cakes - the sauce does add to the experience, but it's still nothing special.

Again, it feels like these were made to fit a very strict budget, with mashed potato being the main constituent. It is great mash, but it should only be there to bind the fishcake together, not as a cheap filler.

My area doesn't offer a great range of Saucy Fish Co. products and, while none of the options I've tried have been outright terrible, some of them have been quite disappointing. I like the idea of a piece of fish coming packaged with its ideal accompanying sauce, but when that sauce is underwhelming, the whole product suffers. Their fish fillets can be a little on the small size, but the fish content of these fishcakes is shamefully low, and neither sauce really added a great deal to the experience.

There seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment of putting sauce inside a product (did it start with the likes of Gü puddings, or were similar things available before they sprang up? Could it perhaps be said that these fishcakes were inspired by jam doughnuts?) and, while I like the idea - because it generally means less mess when cooking, unless the product splits open - the end result never quite meets the expectation.

On the upside, neither of these fishcakes ended up making me ill, so they have restored a small measure of my faith in fishcakes...