Tag Archives: cookies

May 2, 2012

A Minty Fresh, Gluten Free Success (or, Mint Chocolate Biscuits and Cupcakes)

I made these cake to share at work, to commiserate ourselves over one of our fold leaving to work in London. It was a sad event, though we did try to drown our sorrows in peppermint icing. When people asked me what flavour they were and I said ‘mint chocolate’, everyone responded with a variation of ’Oooh! I love mint chocolate!’. I also love mint chocolate, it’s my favourite ice cream flavour, and given that you would think I would have made mint chocolate cake before. Not so – this was my first mint chocolate creation, and I have no idea why I let it go so long. Let’s start with the best photo of the lot – the solo mint chocolate cupcake, with a mint chocolate biscuit on top:

I was beyond pleased with this project – it was the first time I successfully made gluten free biscuits, for a start. Previously I’d tried them only to end up with a structure so loosely held together that it crumbled to dust the instant you tried to take a bite, coating the inside of one’s mouth with what may as well have been ash. Sugary, floury ash. Sigh. As you can imagine, this put me off trying them again, but when I got the idea for these little biscuits I decided to take the bull by the horns and try again. I used this recipe for peppermint creams, which I’ve been eyeing up on Pinterest for some time, to make both the biscuits and peppermint fondant in the middle. I added one crucial ingredient to the biscuit dough – an egg. The humble egg; how it spelled the difference between success and failure for this blogger. I otherwise followed the recipe, swapping Dove’s Farm gluten free blend flours in for the self raising and plain flours, and oat milk for the normal milk.

Steph at Raspberri Cupcakes made these in pretty flower shapes; I had been intending to follow her lead and use my icing stamps to make flowers and hearts, but in the end I stuck with the classic round biscuit – yes, like a well known brand of biscuit that begins with O, but I insist that mine are better. I used the narrow end of the insert of a piping bag – you know, the bit that you screw the nozzle on to? – to get the shapes perfectly uniform. The uniformity is one of the most pleasing things about the biscuits, apart from them not shattering into dust when you try to eat them.

What a mess. The biscuit dough was very soft, so I had to work quickly, but I wanted it to be a little softer than a normal biscuit – gluten free baking dries out a lot more than normal baking, so if you start with something that holds a little too much liquid, you should get a good end result. I also let the dough rest in the fridge for longer than the 15 minutes in the recipe – it was in there for at least an hour. They baked for about five minutes, being so tiny – again, with gluten free baking being drier, it was even more important than usual not to over bake them.

They came out looking like this, rows and rows of identical, tiny biscuits:

While they cooled, I made the peppermint fondant. This was really easy, and you could use it as a decorative icing to cut into little shapes, if you wanted to. I used about half a teaspoon of peppermint essence and a little green food dye to get the colour and flavour I wanted. It doesn’t look very inspiring on its own though.

Now it was time to sandwich the biscuits together. I chose not to coat them in chocolate, though I would like to, because I saw the trouble Steph had getting it to set evenly, and also I was trying to do a batch of 36 cupcakes, with buttercream icing and biscuit toppers, in the few hours between work and bedtime.

I could hardly stop looking at these little wonders. Sometimes I make something that I think looks really proper, like you might have bought it in a shop, and it amazes and surprises me. And then I eat it.

While I was chilling the biscuit dough, I made an enormous batch of devil’s food cupcakes – a more enormous batch than I meant to, in fact, I got a bit confused over how much to increase the recipe by… I always use the devils food cake recipe from Cake in the Country now, you may have seen me mention it before. I don’t need another chocolate cake recipe any more. It’s particularly good for gluten free adaptation because there is so much liquid in it that it would take a long time in the oven for them to dry out. This time, I doubled the recipe, which gave 36 cupcakes, and I changed half of the vanilla essence for peppermint essence, which just gave a hint of peppermint to the finished cakes.

This is what I meant by a huge batch. Note the immense mess everywhere. I was multi tasking. Sadly, one of my tasks was not cleaning up.

My poor kitchen wasn’t really designed for this kind of thing.

Once the cakes were out of the oven (they had to be done in two batches), I started on the mint buttercream. This was easy, but sadly ‘easy’ and ‘instant’ are not the same thing… I softened a block of butter and then added double the weight of butter in icing sugar, plus a hint of green food dye and a teaspoon of peppermint essence. You could experiment with how much mint and how much colour you’d like to add, of course. I let my food mixer do the work while I made a start on the dishes and cleaning the sugar off every surface in the house, for what felt like the millionth time. Occasionally I’d go back and scrape down the sides of the bowl and check on the progress of the buttercream. When it was smooth and well combined, I made a start on the icing by rudely dropping a spoonful on each cake. Don’t they look affronted?

I did it this way so that I could make sure I had enough icing to go round – if I’d iced them properly, one at a time, I could have run out towards the end and had to go back and start over again. I also chose to spoon it on to the cakes rather than swirling – swirling uses up at least twice as much icing, there just wasn’t enough for that.

I smoothed the icing out by hand, because it stuck too much to the back of the spoon, and then pressed a wee biscuit into the top of each one. That was a quick sentence to write, and a slow process to undertake! But it was well worth it, because in the end I had this:

This time they’re jostling to get to the front, so they can be in the photo. It got dark while I was baking. It very often gets dark while I’m baking, and my photos are not improved by the situation.

These were a big success all round – they look almost exactly as I’d pictured them, though I would have preferred to have an extravagant swirl of icing, but it wasn’t practical on the day. Everyone who had one was very complimentary of them; the flavours were balanced, the chocolate sponge is so moist and the minty icing is fresh and not too heavy. Another time I might try making a mint syrup from real mint instead of relying on the synthetic essence, but I have to say it tastes great, not synthetic or plasticky at all.

My favourite part is definitely the biscuits, though. I have extra biscuit dough and fondant in the freezer, ready for the next time!

15 comments | tags: biscuits, cake decorating, cookies, cupcakes, mint chocolate | posted in Cake, Chocolates, Confectionery, Gluten free, Other people's recipes, Snacks

January 13, 2012

Ginger and Honey Dinosaurs

By Rock Salt

Rawr! This is the first time I’ve used my dinosaur shaped cookie cutter, and I just loved how the biscuits turned out. I made a few dinos and then made the rest of the biscuit dough into sweet little stars, so that it would stretch far enough to share with everyone at work. The recipe for is here for these gingerbread biscuits – though personally I do feel that honey and ginger biscuits is a more accurate name for them, the honey flavour is really pronounced. This is explained in the recipe note, and the recipe itself gives you the option to add more or less ginger as you prefer. I say MOAR!

The dough is so easy to make, even without a food processor, and is quite unusual in not needing any eggs to hold it together. The ingredients are all easy to get – you might even have them already in your kitchen, making these perfect last minute biscuits, at any time of the year. You can make them fancy with coloured icing and decorations if you fancy it, though they’re pretty cute as they are. Especially the dinosaurs.

3 comments | tags: baking, biscuits, cookies, gingerbread men | posted in Confectionery, Other people's recipes, Snacks, Vegetarian

December 31, 2010

Christmas Food – Finally!

By Rock Salt

This post was begun on Christmas Eve Eve, but I ran out of time to pick it back up again. Our return from Leeds was marked by me finally coming down with the Martian Death Flu that’s been threatening to take me out for months now, so sadly this year in blogging is coming to an end with more of a whimper and a sniffle than a bang! However, my blog anniversary isn’t until early in the new year so perhaps I can make a grand Year of the Cake finale before moving on. In the meantime, here’s the Story of Christmas Snacks…

As someone who can take a notion out of the blue to make a Chinese banquet, Christmas is an excellent time to cook and bake up a frenzy. I’ve been accordingly busy in the kitchen tonight and last night, and wanted to share some of the results.

Miss J and I are hopping on a train to Leeds tomorrow afternoon – hopefully it will take us there and not just sit in the station, being delayed, but in case it does that very thing, and in case of FREEZY DEATH, I have done some train snacks. These are spicy blue cheese and tomato soup, and smoked salmon sushi with ginger and wasabi rolled right in, to keep our sinuses nice and clear and perhaps a little bit on fire. The soup recipe is from LC (quelle surprise) and I interpreted it a little: I left out the cream; halved the other ingredients (though admittedly it was a very generous quarter cup of blue cheese); I couldn’t lay hand to sriracha sauce so used two tbsp of generic chili sauce instead, and the tinned tomatoes were Morrison’s ‘The super finest best chosen by you’ type cherry tomatoes, not specifically San Marzano. And I swapped the oregano for thyme. And I used a small red onion instead of half a medium one. OK I interpreted the recipe quite a lot – it never feels like a lot while I’m still cooking, it’s only when I look back that I realise. In any case, the soup is good – creamy, rich, a bit spicy, velvet smooth – and this is all from someone who usually doesn’t like tomato soup.

I’ve made sushi a couple of times before but never documented it particularly well, so I’m going to do a bit of that here – not in great detail, I’m against the clock this evening, but I’ve got a series of pictures and apparently they’re worth a million words each? So that’s a really long blog post if you look at it that way. Excellent value.

Note: I am no longer against the clock. Get comfortable.

I pre-seasoned the rice to get round the problem of not having those little squeezy fish bottles you get with supermarket sushi, though I do have a little tub of mixed wasabi and soy in case the seasoning isn’t just right. The rice process is what takes the longest with sushi; it gets rinsed, then soaks for half an hour before simmering for ten minutes and then sitting, drained, for a further 20. While it was resting, or whatever rice does when you let it sit for 20 minutes after cooking, I added some rice vinegar and Japanese soy, and mixed through. Then, when it was *quite* ready thankyouverymuch, I squashed it onto two sheets of dried seaweed – one at a time, I’ve only got two hands. If I was an octopus I might be able to do both at once, but then I might feel differently about eating seafood. The rice is inordinately sticky, which is good for helping form the sushi, but bad if you get some on your hands. It sticks more determinedly than something with superglue on it that’s been put in the wrong place. That sticky. Next, and in the middle of the rice, I made a row of smoked salmon, topped with a row of pickled ginger, topped with a very thin layer of freshly made wasabi paste, which I applied with the top of my finger then WASHED OFF REALLY QUICKLY. I added more soy to the rice on either side of the filling, and then I was ready to roll the whole lot up.

I have one of those little rolling mats, which is really helpful for getting the roll started and then for squeezing it together tightly so you don’t end up with sushi that crumbles when you try to lift it – trick sushi, if you will. Good for dinner parties. Entertain your guests, as long as they don’t mind getting fish and rice all down their front and up their sleeves. Hilarious.

There’s not much to the rolling process, other than just doing it and trying to make sure it gets rolled tightly on the first go, because trying to unstick and re-roll just doesn’t bear thinking about. If the nori isn’t keen on staying fastened once you’ve rolled it, dampen it with a little water to make a seal, that should to the trick. One rolled and sealed, I gave it a few more squeezes and such to make sure the whole lot was going to hold together, and then sliced with a serrated knife – an extremely sharp knife should also work, but alas, I don’t keep my knives in good enough condition.

As well as the train food, I baked three batches of snacks for sharing; bacon cookies, apple and cheddar scones and chocolate ginger cookies. The links are all there, and I recommend all three recipes as excellent snack time items. The bacon cookies went down particularly well, I think for two reasons: one, nobody even expects them to be as nice as they are and two, I added half a cup of the same sharp cheddar from the scones to them. This did, however, lead to some interesting complications when baking.

I made the bacon cookie dough the night before and put it in the freezer to firm up, and to keep its shape. I find that cooling cookie dough in the fridge can leave you with a flattened edge, like a flat tyre, unless the dough is already very firm when it goes in the fridge. Putting it in the freezer also means you can leave it longer before baking, so is useful for ‘make ahead’ scenarios. It was tricky to slice evenly – a sharper knife would have helped, again. Top tip here is to use a smooth slicing action rather than a sawing or rocking one, unless you don’t mind every single cookie breaking in half as you cut it. At any rate, I finally had them all sliced and lined up between a baking sheet and the base of a roasting tin, which I’d turned upside down so I could use the flat surface. This did mean that one or two of the cookies hung over the edge a little – this lead to bacon cookies a la Dali, which, while not what I was aiming for, did give me some amusement.

You may also notice, from the photograph of the baked cookies, a certain amount of fizziness in the background. Imagine my surprise when, on checking the progress of these bacon delights, I found the entire baking tray filled from edge to edge with a fizzy combination of bacon fat, cheese and butter. Surprise isn’t even the word, really. Perhaps shock or horror would better fit. The fizz receded once they were out of the oven, though, so I could see that the cookies were actually baking alright in among all the madness, so I popped them back in and left them to it. Look at them – if that’s not an unexpected sight then I don’t know what is. It’s like someone put a load of sherbet amongst them while I wasn’t looking. I LIVE ON MY OWN.

I had also prepared the apple and cheddar scone dough the night before, and was concerned at its moistness when I took it out of the fridge to bake. I had to use what seemed like quite a lot of flour to stop the dough from sticking to the work surface, scone cutter and my hands, but they seemed to come out not too badly, perhaps a little over-fired to ensure that they were cooked through. I’d make them fresh if possible, but it’s good to know that they can be done in advance. I went against the suggestion of cutting the dough into wedges in order to get more scones out of the mix, but the first time I made them I followed the recipe and must say that the big, buttery triangles of delight were extremely pleasing and not at all rude, as that phrase suggests that they might have been (sorry).

Sadly, I was in a fankle by the time the chocolate ginger cookies came round, and I didn’t take any photos of them. This is sad because they go in the oven looking like chocolate truffles, and come out looking like perfectly formed biscuits (or slightly malformed because you’ve sat them too near each other on the baking tray biscuits, depending). They are very tasty, and very festive indeed with their mis of chocolate and spices perhaps I’ll try them again with some different flavours, maybe start adding some ground nuts… You know, ‘interpreting’ the recipe…

Some karaoke classics from this Christmas in Leeds – guaranteed to get you off your seat and fighting for a mic (or perhaps that was just us…). Rock Salt Playlist Week Nine – we’re back to the official numbering system, and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. I know I have.

That is all I have to say about Christmas, now, and I’m stumped as to any words to say for the new year. Perhaps all that there is to say is thank you to everyone who’s supported by cookery-based ramblings this year, and I hope that whatever it is you really want, you find it in 2011.