Biscuit Baking the Tim Fisher Way!

Tim Fisher is an award-winning and widely respected pastry chef, having won more than 50 competition awards including over 30 medals at the British Open Cookery Championships. He also won the Dessert of The Year title in 2004.

And I, budget baker that I am on occasion, have had the immense privilege not only of meeting Tim on many occasions but also enjoying samples of his work - melt-in-the-mouth chocolate chip cookies, mini pastries, petite gateaux and delectable savouries when he catered for my friends' events.

This is why I am so happy to endorse his Biscuits and Cookies book, which can be snapped up at Amazon for a sweet £14.

I've enjoyed trying out his recipe for peanut butter cookies (you may recall I am obsessed with PB, and have a couple of years ago posted my own budget PB cookie bake). I won't say whose is better but I'll give you a clue - it's Tim's. Don't tell him! I'm also going to try out his custard cream and jammy dodger recipes - the sort of biscuits one never thinks to make at home but Tim makes it look easy...

What I really like is that Tim has made this book exceptionally accessible to the normal person who likes to bake every now and then. Too often recipes call for random and expensive items, like Belgian woodland truffle flakes, or Fijian salamander scales dipped in 100% Cambodian carob. This is not baking on a budget, but cooking on credit.

But Tim's book is designed to help even casual bakers like myself produce great-tasting treats for friends and family without having to shell out on unusual ingredients. Of course, if you want that little bit extra, there are some fancy biscuits in there too for those extra special occasions!

For those of you who happen to live in Surrey, England you might be interested in joining his Facebook: Tim's Pastry Club, or following him on Twitter: @timspastryclub Instagram: Tim's Pastry Club www.timspastryclub.com

Bake Off's pastry perfection: what is Blind Baking and how can I do it?

I s-pie. Pic: Samantha Beddoes (2012)

The Great British Bake Off (#GBBO) has filled us with a host of new terminology. Cream cakes are no longer cream cakes: they’re crème patisserie. In fact, it's actually Crème Pat. 

Those spaces under the oven where we all store our spare cake tins is actually a proving drawer, which should be kept clean and clear and tidy for when we need to prove our home-baked dough.

We're now alert to the dangers of soggy bottoms and dense sponges.

And, what is more, we all have to blind bake whenever we make pies.

But what is Blind Baking when it comes to pastry? Well, it's basically a way to get a perfect pie crust.

If you cook the pastry without its filling, the pastry could rise and become bumpy and uneven. But if you cook it with the filling from its raw form, the moisture from the filling could make the bottom of the pastry crust flabby and soggy. 

So blind baking involves weighing your empty pastry case down and cooking for a certain length of time to help get that perfect crustiness.

The easiest steps to follow when it comes to blind-baking shortcrust pastry (whether sweet or savoury) are as follows:

1. Heat oven to 200C/180C fan/gas mark 6.
2. Fill the pastry case with a round of greaseproof paper and add baking beans (these are basically ceramic peas and can be bought quite cheaply from Lakeland or Amazon) to weigh it down.
3. I usually prick the bottom of the pastry a couple of times. I’m not sure why. My mum always did it so I do it.
4. Bake for 15 minutes (check on it though as some ovens are slow and fan-assisted ovens are fast) then carefully remove the paper and beans and cook the pastry for five more minutes.

This can then be cooled ready for whatever filling you need to put into the pie, flan or tart. 

PRO TIP: don’t touch the ceramic beans when they are hot. Please learn from my fail.

March of the Penguins

I LOVE Lakeland.

I often ask for presents from here because there are often good sales on items I'd like, and I can use them again and again to create wonderful food.

One such thing I treated myself to was a set of stacking star-shape cookie cutters, so that I could create a stack of stars that looked something like this. This photo is from Lakeland's own website as I have not yet decorated and stacked my own stars.

Credit: Lakeland. Star cookie cutters. Beautiful!

Another thing I like about Lakeland is that with certain items they also provide basic and easy-to-follow recipes. So the recipe that came with the star cookie cutters can be found here  or I have reproduced it below.

You will need:
300g unsalted butter, softened
300g caster sugar
2 small eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract - I found that this was not enough so used 2 teaspoons in my Penguin batch
a pinch of salt - I did not use salt; I used slightly salted Flora Light
600g plain flour, sifted - Sifting does not really matter much (sifting is a bit of a Women's Institute-style myth. It's the mixing that does it, not the sifting. However don't use self-raising flour, it makes the cookies too puffy and dry.

How To:
Reheat the oven to 180°C (350°F), gas 4.
Cream together the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Add the beaten eggs, vanilla and salt and mix well. Gradually add the flour and mix until incorporated. Bring together into a dough, divide into 2 balls, wrap and chill for 1 hour.
Roll the dough out on a lightly floured work surface to a thickness of 3-4mm. Dip cookie cutters in flour before each use. You need 2 cookies of each size. Arrange them on prepared baking trays.
Bake the cookies on the middle shelf of the preheated oven for about 12 minutes, or until firm and golden, swapping the trays over if necessary. Leave to cool for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

NOW for the PENGUINS. I do like penguins! I made some last year to adorn the 2014 Christmas Cake  - as can be seen below:

Which way to the South Pole? Penguin alert. Credit: SimoneySunday

Having purchased a cute little penguin cookie cutter from Biscuiteers in Notting Hill a year or so ago, I was keen to try to make iced penguin biscuits this year - but needed a good recipe. I toyed with the idea of gingerbread but I'd already made a gingerbread house and, I liked the basic nature of Lakeland's easy recipe.

So with a few tweaks - as I mentioned - I found it a little too low in flavour for my palate, I added extra vanilla flavouring and a teaspoon of cinnamon to make it a little more punchy. I also reduced the sugar element slightly as the icing itself will be sweet enough.

I used Fondant icing for the black and royal icing for the white, but I think next year I will try to learn liquid icing techniques as this took AGES to shape and cut the icing. I also used a small piping bag of red icing to fill in the beak, and some gold balls for the eyes.

And here are the end results - the march of the penguins.

Hallo mate! @SimoneySunday

Marching onward - the Penguin brigade @SimoneySunday

Bread and Butter Pudding

Another brilliant way to use up leftovers is to make bread-and-butter pudding.

Bread and Butter Pudding. Instagram pic credit: SimoneySunday

Too many people throw away crusts of bread or bread that has started to go slightly dry. This is a terrible waste.

According to a study published in September in The Guardian, 49 per cent of UK adults claim they they eat bread every day, with 38 per cent of them buying two loaves a week.

However, the research, commissioned by the group Love Food Hate Waste, as part of its #UseYourLoaf campaign, also found that 18 per cent often threw away a forgotten loaf before opening it, while a quarter of had discarded the bread before reaching the end of the loaf.

I haven't bought bread for over a year, not since we were given a breadmaker for a wedding present. Instead of keeping this as one of those 'gadgets' that never get used, I decided to use it.

Flour, yeast, milk, oil, water, salt and sugar - these are the basic ingredients to making brown bread or white bread. And as one 1kg bag from Tesco costs about 80p, and I can make 2.5 3lb loaves from one bag of flour, I basically spend £1.60 on five loaves of bread.

I've already shown how to make cheap sauce and jam for gifts or just slathering onto toast in this blog. I will do a post later on how to make Rosemary bread with olive oil. Yum!

With the bread I make, I cut half of it straight away, and one half I wrap up tightly and put in the fridge, where it keeps about a week.

The other half, I slice, and wrap and put into a tupperware tub for making sandwiches in the near-term. Sometimes I freeze slices individually for 'emergencies'. This really reduces waste - which also reduces our yearly food bill!

However, when there's one slice left and some crusts, I take a bread knife, create some thinner slices, lather them in butter... and prepare a bread and butter pudding.

How to:
Take 2 medium eggs
2/3 cup of semi-skimmed milk (or cream if you really like it rich)
Handful of currants or raisins, washed
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
Your slices of buttered bread

Cut the bread into small enough pieces to create layers - bread & butter, some raisins, some brown sugar, some of the spices.

Do this as many times as you can. Sprinkle the rest of the raisins over the bread and butter.

Mix the remaining spices up with the eggs (whites and yolks) and the milk, and pour over the bread and butter.

Cook for about 1/2 hour at 160 degrees or until you can see the mixture is no longer runny.

Serve with cream, custard or home made icecream - a recipe for this is also here.

Enjoy!

Things go wrong... before they go right

In the halcyon days of summer '15, namely the couple of summery days that actually graced the UK this August, I decided to make some healthy salady accompaniments to dinner.

Having had at work a mango salad one day to go with (if you can believe this), a roast squash samosa and way too much rice, I thought I would replicate the salad with some light, poached salmon and vegetables for dinner at home.

I knew I had a mango in the fridge getting a little sorry for itself, I had plenty of spring onions and a brown onion leftover and I had some tomatoes and peppers that I needed to use up. Never throw anything away!

So all I had to buy was a cucumber.

I dutifully washed and diced all the vegetables and started to compose the salad.

Alas it was not to be. The mango was far too soft and it made the whole salad look as if it had been left out all day in the sunshine to melt.

This was the result - still colourful but pretty sorry for itself.

All by myseeelllllf, 

With just 20 mins until the hubby was due home I wanted to perfect it, but how? Sure it tasted okay, but it looked weird and it had a floppy texture.

And then I remembered that a friend of mine in Canada had made a salsa salad with peaches in it. Peaches - I had none of these.

However, I did have a couple of nectarines in the fridge.

So I put the offending salad into a little tub for me to take to work for lunch the next day, and began again with the leftovers - or leftovers of the leftovers that I had been using initially, and swapping the nectarines for the Mango.

The result: much more solid, much firmer.

Ingredients
One FIRM Mango (or 2 Nectarines)
1 brown or red onion, diced
1/2 cucumber, chopped finely
1 yellow pepper, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
Lemon juice (freshly squeezed or from a bottle)
One small chopped red chili pepper
1/2 teaspoon of dried parsley

How to: 
Wash everything carefully
Chop it all up, mix it up, chill and serve
Time: about 10 minutes to prepare

It really is a great way to combine a range of fruit and veg leftovers, perhaps bits that might be too small to use as side-dishes in their own right, so it cuts down on food waste.

As it is a slightly more 'exotic' kind of salad, it looks very swish when presented on the table along with whatever else you are serving, as well as being a healthy alternative to many accompaniments.

The Nectarines Saved the Day. Pic: SimoneySunday

It goes very well with fish, chilli, couscous or fishcakes and is very simple to make.

Food Hack #99: The Gravy Train

I do not subscribe to the Bisto fan club. Every time I go to someone's house and the Bisto comes out, I sigh a little inwardly. 'Ah. Bisto'. I haven't got anything against Bisto per se and personally I love using Oxo and Knorr stock cubes for flavourings in sauces, pies, stews and soups.

But the art of using good natural stock seems to have gone down the (sauce) pan these days.

FREE gravy is the best gravy! It is healthier, not packed with salts and preservatives, and perfectly complements the food you are serving.

All you need to invest in is some supermarket own-label cornflour. I use Sainsbury's own and it has kept me going for almost two years.

Suppose you are cooking a roast dinner? Firstly, are you boiling any vegetables? Do not strain the water into the sink. Pour a tiny amount into a bowl or jug, allow it to cool and then mix in one to two tablespoonfuls of cornflour, depending on how thick you want it to be. Stir until it has become a white liquid. Add a little more water as necessary. It should look like milk.

Pour more veg water into a small saucepan and add the liquid cornflour from the jug. Add some salt and pepper, and put on a moderate heat. Stir occasionally. You will see it start to thicken.

Never add cornflour powder directly to a saucepan of hot vegetable water. It will not thicken but congeal in weird white lumps that look like snot.

Take the meat from oven and use a baster or large spoon to gather up some of the meat juices from the bottom of the dish. Add this to the saucepan and stir. If you fancy, add some herbs or spices. Sometimes to darken it up I add a tiny squirt of brown sauce, but only if I am cooking with beef or lamb.

What this gives you is gravy made from the very food you are about to eat, so the flavours match what you have cooked, instead of competing with it.

It is also extremely cost-effective and much healthier for you. Get on that budget gravy train!