A Weekend Away!

I've spent the weekend in the depths of Suffolk teaching at an Embroiderers' Guild (late) summer school... Not that it felt much like summer driving up in torrential rain on Friday afternoon. Despite the appalling conditions I arrived at Belsey Bridge unscathed, where I was teaching a course on machine embroidered landscapes.

I had thirteen lovely students... They got on well, shared their materials, laughed and chatted and generally supported each other.

They started with a source of inspiration such as a magazine photo or in some cases a picture they had taken themselves. This was then interpreted with strips of torn coloured paper before turning them into amazing mahine embroidered landscapes. The one above was inspired by a Tanzanian landscape...

 

 And this one was based on a David Hockney painting.. but see for yourself... thirteen stunning embroideries that don't need me to say anything.

 

And while they all worked hard on their landscapes I put together one of my own...

It certainly made a change from baking cake!

Pancakes

I always knew that taking part in the Great Bloggers Bake Off this week was going to be a challenge. With the programme not airing until Wednesday evening, Thursday being my Farm shop baking day with the additional pressure of forty cupcakes to make for a wedding, and then having to leave for a weekend away teaching embroidery on Friday there was a good chance I wasn't going to do it before the weekend if at all. But as many of you already know I am just a little bit bonkers!

I wasn't overly inspired by "Batter Week". The bakers had to make filled Yorkshire puddings for their signature bake, lacy pancakes for the technical challenge and churros for the showstopper. I know I'm probably on my own here but I'm not that keen on Yorkshire puddings. I can make them... and did so on a weekly basis when all the boys were still at home... but I can take them or leave them. I quite liked the idea of making churros and will probably give them a try when I've got more time as that is something I've never tried before. So that left the technical challenge... pancakes. As far as I can see, frying pancakes has very little to do with baking... and is not that much of a challenge either... except these ones were lacy! So I decided to make them for dessert this evening.

I only made half the mixture as with only two of us here I thought twelve pancakes might be a few too many, especially when we don't usually eat dessert. To be fair getting that lacy pattern was trickier than it looked... my first attempt wasn't terribly elegant! But it got easier as I went along. By the last one I'd got the hang of it.

Should you want to try them yourself my pancake mixture was 90g plain flour whisked up with one medium egg, 130ml milk, a dessert spoon of caster sugar and a teaspoon of melted butter. You need a non stick pan smeared with butter and your mixture in a squeezy bottle. Get the pan reasonably hot, squeeze out your design... cook for about a minute until set and flip over to brown the other side... that's all there was to it. If you really want my opinion (and you probably don't) I wouldn't bother with the squeezy bottle and just put spoonfuls of the mixture in the pan to make normal pancakes because I can't see the point of all the lacy nonsense! But what do I know?

I guess they did look pretty and they tasted good with a sprinkle of sugar and ice cream... although bang goes the diet for this week!

Joining in with Jenny of Mummy Mishaps for the Great Bloggers Bake Off.

Clandestine Cake Club

I've known about the Clandestine Cake Club for quite some time and have thought about joining but never quite summoned up the courage. It was started about six years ago by Lynn Hill in her home in Leeds but has grown in popularity and there are now groups all over the UK and even further afield. The idea is simple...  members meet in a secret location and all bring cake, eat cake and talk about cake. As I'm aiming to do sixty new things by the time I'm sixty I decided to bite the bullet and join my local group in Cambridge. As Cambridge has a new organiser the theme of Monday night's meeting was "All Things New"

I've been wanting to try an elegant Chiffon layer cake like this one by Jin Yee Chung in The Cambridgeshire Cook Book for quite a while so it seemed an ideal opportunity to give it a try. The unusual green colour comes from an Eastern flavouring called Pandan... an extract derived from Pandan leaves

I was slightly alarmed at just how bright green my  cake mixture turned out...

Less elegant... more neon! The cake is three layers of very light sponge layered with a Pandan and coconut flavoured custard.

With some trepidation I took my cake into Cambridge on Monday evening to Novi, our secret location. Despite giving off an air of confidence I find new situations like this a bit nerve wracking but I need not have worried. Every one was really friendly and when I got inside I even found there was someone I knew which was lovely (Hello Terry!)

The table was laden with the most amazing looking cakes and I was a bit concerned that not only did my cake look rather unusual but might taste a bit different too... Pandan tastes a bit nutty like coconut but has a flavour that resembles basmati rice! Being "new" to me I didn't really know what it was going to be like!

But I was relieved that others really seemed to like it...

The first cake I tried was this wonderful chocolate daquoise, that was so good I didn't want to eat anything else... but I did! I tried four or five of the cakes before I reached my limit. We laughed and talked... mostly about cake... and the two hours whizzed by. About thirty women of all different ages joined by a love of cake!

And what's more... we got to take the leftovers home!

I'm already looking forward to the next meeting!

And that's another sixty by sixty crossed off my list... only fifty five left to go!

I'd like to tell you there will be something other than cake in the next couple of posts but with another bake off challenge coming up and a Cake Slice Bakers deadline next week, there's going to be more cake I'm afraid... although I'm also back teaching embroidery this week too. It's one of those weeks!

My Dampfnudeln...

Are too big!

Cheap humour but it amused me... and it seemed a more interesting title than The Great Bloggers Bake Off part two! And dampfnudel has now pretty much become my word of the week... because it's funny!  (or is that just me?)

Given the disppointing results of my attempt at the chocolate Barmbrack... (in my defense I am pretty sure the recipe was way out on its ratio of wet to dry ingredients and even though I thought it was pretty revolting Stewart has been eating it with relish)... I decided to bite the bullet and give the technical challenge a go after all! I used Paul Hollywood's recipe for Dampfnudel and followed it pretty much to letter, only substituting semi skimmed milk for full fat because that was what I had. It was pretty straightforward but quite a lot of faffing about. And it took me way longer than the two hours alloted. If you add up all the resting plus cooking times it adds up to two hours and five minutes so how the contestants were meant to weigh ingredients and do all the other bits of prep I will never know. Hats off to each of them for actually getting something made at all. No wonder their dampfnudeln were nearly all under cooked!

I made the plum sauce and vanilla custard too!

The method of steaming bread in a pan is entirely new to me so I wasn't sure what to expect. Despite using my biggest pan they cooked up into the the most enormous dumplings, all tightly squished together. With the lid all steamed up it was difficult to see if they were cooked but I gave them the full 30 minutes after which they still looked very pale. And even more difficult to see if they were evenly browned underneath. I was just beginning to get a whiff of burning as I whipped them off the heat.

Now dear reader... should you wish to try these at home, do not be fooled by the instruction "Carefully lift out the dumplings using a slotted spoon". You will need a knife... a very big sturdy strong knife...  or possible even a chisel. And the result as you can see above was not little round even dumplings but big fluffy uneven pillows of dough, that were stuck together with bases that were probably just a little on the wrong side of golden and caramelised!

And as for my pan... a good soak is required! Do you think the Bake Off contestants have to do their own washing up?

Anyway... I know what you are wondering... what did they taste like? Well, surprisingly good! Despite their silly name and rather pale and insipid appearance, they were light and rather delicious. Not unlike a brioche or an iced bun in fact.

The plum sauce and custard were tasty additions but I have also eaten one cut in half and buttered and I almost preferred that. So I may not have got points for twelve identical little round buns... but they were cooked and tasted good.

And I'm glad I tried the technical challenge this week, because at the start of Bake Off I thought I would challenge myself to do the technical challenge every week as part of my "Sixty by Sixty". This was the project I set myself last year to do sixty new or different things before my sixtieth birthday next year. As many of the things on my list involved walking I was rather thrown off track when I broke my ankle and I cast the project aside. But I've taken it up again with gusto and have lots of ideas in the pipeline (many involving cake)... although still a very long way off sixty! And there are several weeks and plenty more technical challenges to complete before I can add this to my list!

Joining in with Jenny of Mummy Mishaps for the Great Bloggers Bake Off.

Bread Week

Already week three of the Great British Bake Off and it's bread week... Have you got a favourite contestant yet? I can't pick a favourite but I know who I don't like... However I'll keep quiet on that subject! And Val? How on earth is she still in? Ah well, it makes good television I suppose!

We ran out of bread at the beginning of the week so I made a sunflower seed and honey loaf which a reliable favourite in our house... and good practise for bread week! It was actually meant to be a plaited loaf but the dough was a bit wet so the plait disappeared... I'd have lost marks for that but it still tastes good!

It has made lovely toast for breakfast but as it is a tried and tested recipe it didn't seem fair to enter it for this week's Great Bloggers Bake Off hosted by Jenny of Mummy Mishaps

Now I made a decision last week that I would attempt to make the technical challenge each week... but Dampfnudeln? Really. They sound pretty uninspiring and looked it too if I'm honest. So instead I decided to try a chocolate bread. I used Andrew's Chocolate Barmbrack recipe from the show but tweaked some of the ingredients.

I used 70g of raisins and 30g of dried cranberries for the fruit... and also 30g of dried apricots instead of the peel because I really don't like candied peel in cakes or bread. I didn't have any mixed spice so used a mixture of nutmeg, ginger and cinnamon. the recipe called for two and a half tablespoons of spice which seems a lot... so I think it's a misprint and should be teaspoons. And last of all I used a mix of chopped dark and milk chocolate instead of chocolate chips.

The dough was wet... very wet! But I've worked with wet dough before and with a bit of patience and perseverance it usually firms up and turns out better for it. But this just stayed really wet! And it didn't rise much even though I left it for hours! I know my yeast was okay as I'd only just used it three days ago so can only imagine it was the fact that it was such an enriched dough. I stuck it in a cool oven to help it along a bit... which it did, but of course it also melted the chocolate so my intention to knock it back, knead it and give it a second rise didn't quite work out. Instead I tipped it into a loaf tin (it would never have worked free form), let it rise a bit more and then baked it!

It made the kitchen smell good as it baked but it looked a little dark when it came out of the oven. Not burnt exactly but in Selasi's words... slightly caught... crispy!

And my verdict... still a bit doughy, far too much spice for my taste despite using less than the recipe required... and I've decided that I really do not like chocolate in bread! I've never been a fan of Pain au Chocolate so I guess I should have known really. So it looks like I might be making Dampfnudeln after all, so I think I'll wait before adding my link. But do check out what other bloggers have baked by following the links here.

Little Knits

We've got some exciting news as Stewart's daughter and partner are expecting their first baby in December... I'm going to be Step-Grandma! Which of course means a good excuse to be knitting all sorts of tiny things in the coming few months.

We know it's going to be a boy and as Adrian is a big Spurs fan I thought I'd make the baby a little Spurs supporters outfit. I was convinced there would be loads of patterns available but so far haven't found anything suitable so will probably come up with my own design. However whilst searching for all things sports related I did find these little baby sneakers and couldn't resist.

They knitted up in no time at all and I'm now thinking that the well dressed baby probably needs these in several colours! These were knitted in Debbie Bliss's Baby Cashmerino and Rowan Tweed.

I had also intended to knit one of Julie's little cotton rabbits as I've made these several times before and love the way they turn out. I got as far as making the head and then I got to thinking it might be fun to make a little black cat instead as Kirsty and Adrian have a much loved black cat.

I'm not convinced I like him as much as the knitted rabbits I've made previously and it took me a couple of attempts to get the head right... One head ended up in the bin and I'm not sure I like this one much either. I played around with Julie's pattern a bit and made the ears a bit bigger which I preferred... And I know the jumper is too big but I doubt the baby will mind all that much. This was all in Baby Cashmerino, mostly because it is so lovely to knit with (and why the jumper is too big!) I expect there will be a rabbit too!

I'd forgotten what a nightmare it is trying to knit with black yarn though... so hard to see what I was doing and impossible to sew up in artifical light. And not easy to photograph either... a bit like black puppies!

This naughty boy has discovered my sewing room... probably as it is the only downstairs room with carpet so it's comfortable plus he does like to follow me about wherever I am. Of course now I have to be extra vigilent about what ends up on the floor...

I just retrieved a needlecase from his mouth before it did any damage!
 Everything goes in his mouth... It's worse than having a baby!

Viennese Whirls

The second week of the Great British Bake Off... Biscuit week... Did you watch it? Oh how I love that programme. Also the second week of me joining in with Jenny of Mummy Mishaps and The Great Bloggers Bake Off. The technical challenge on the programme this week was to make twelve identical Viennese Whirls in one and a half hours. I hate to set myself targets that I can't keep up with, but I do like the idea of trying the technical challenge each week. I started them at 6.30 pm last night when I should have been starting dinner so taking photos of the process was not high on my agenda!

I skipped making the raspberry jam as I already had a pot of homemade strawberry jam sitting in the fridge and went straight to making the biscuit mix which I piped into "swirled rounds" not "Rosettes" as instructed... and the difference is? Blowed if I know but I piped swirly things! These then chilled in the fridge to allow them to firm up while the oven heated and I got on with making dinner. 

They were then put in the oven, baked and taken out to cool whilst we ate dinner. I sandwiched them together with vanilla buttercream and the strawberry jam after we'd eaten and cleared up. Ready to eat with a cup of tea at 8.15pm! One and three quarter hours start to finish with an aubergine, chilli and tomato sauce on tagliatelle made from scratch, eaten and cleared up at the same time... and nothing ended up on the floor (you needed to have seen the programme to get that reference!)

I think mine should have had a bit more height and definition (probably solved by chilling for a bit longer) but overall I was pleased with the way they turned out and they do at least all look uniform. And the taste... not half bad... incredibly crumbly and melt in the mouth. I had to stop Stewart eating more than one last night as I wanted to photograph them in the light this morning but he's made up for that today!

Looking forward to bread week!