More Adventures In Baking!
It is such a delight being able to bake again, thanks to my little bench top oven, that I've been doing lots!
Before Christmas I was busy with gingerbread, in hopes of being able to make gifts, but my gingerbread biscuits were not quite right. Oh, they tasted nice, but... The texture wasn't quite right. Too hard. So I tried again. This time better but dull. A writer friend proudly posted a gingerbread house made by an eight year old grandchild doing a course. It looked the right colour and it was... Well, all I could say, comparing mine, was "Ouch!"
I tried decorating the next batch with piped icing, but I never did get the hang of piping.
So, I found a cake decorating shop that had been recommended to me, to look for little silver cachou decorations. There were tiny ones and larger ones. I bought both. And there was a special deal on gingerbread man cookie cutters. Perfect!
I made both ordinary round gingerbread biscuits, using a large cachou to decorate each, and tiny gingerbread "boys"(the packet featured a family), decorated with a sprinkle of small cachous. The boys were fiddly. I'm told that plastic works better for cookie cutters than metal, and it's true, I had to roll up several and start again.
But the large cachous melted into the biscuits - perfectly edible, but not something to give as a gift. I gave the rest of the large cachou jar to a colleague who enjoys cake decorating. That's what they're for. The small cachous were fine for baking and the gingerbread boys were okay for gifts, though I only gave away one jar of them, to my library tech, herself a fine baker, who said she would offer them to her small grandson. Everyone else got honeycomb of the kind aka hokey pokey. That usually works well and you can make it in a frying pan.
On New Year's Eve I was with my mother, as I usually am on Saturdays, and we were watching Rick Stein in Berlin, making a German apple cake. It looked simple enough almost not to need a formal recipe - my successful brown bread recipe was like that. Still, I looked it up and then, because I believe in doing a recipe as written the first time, I had to go out and buy some ingredients. But you can't get "golden" caster sugar here, so I had to use white. Research told me that was fine.I looked for Demerara sugar, but it wasn't to be had either, not at that supermarket. Raw sugar would have been okay, but I bought coffee crystals, which I believe are not far off. So, after all that, I still had to substitute!
Still, nothing I had to substitute was going to affect the cake beyond flavour and I suspect it was a subtle difference. And the cake is delicious.
As usual, I'm making notes. I need to remove the lower rack next time, that top rack is too close to the fan and everything burns a bit. Perhaps a bit more sprinkled sugar on top. It adds to the crunch. Really, I think the cake could do with grated apple mixed into the batter. The cake is nice, but under the layer of apples it's a bit dull.
So, I learn something every time! I am so pleased with my new toy.
Before Christmas I was busy with gingerbread, in hopes of being able to make gifts, but my gingerbread biscuits were not quite right. Oh, they tasted nice, but... The texture wasn't quite right. Too hard. So I tried again. This time better but dull. A writer friend proudly posted a gingerbread house made by an eight year old grandchild doing a course. It looked the right colour and it was... Well, all I could say, comparing mine, was "Ouch!"
I tried decorating the next batch with piped icing, but I never did get the hang of piping.
So, I found a cake decorating shop that had been recommended to me, to look for little silver cachou decorations. There were tiny ones and larger ones. I bought both. And there was a special deal on gingerbread man cookie cutters. Perfect!
I made both ordinary round gingerbread biscuits, using a large cachou to decorate each, and tiny gingerbread "boys"(the packet featured a family), decorated with a sprinkle of small cachous. The boys were fiddly. I'm told that plastic works better for cookie cutters than metal, and it's true, I had to roll up several and start again.
But the large cachous melted into the biscuits - perfectly edible, but not something to give as a gift. I gave the rest of the large cachou jar to a colleague who enjoys cake decorating. That's what they're for. The small cachous were fine for baking and the gingerbread boys were okay for gifts, though I only gave away one jar of them, to my library tech, herself a fine baker, who said she would offer them to her small grandson. Everyone else got honeycomb of the kind aka hokey pokey. That usually works well and you can make it in a frying pan.
On New Year's Eve I was with my mother, as I usually am on Saturdays, and we were watching Rick Stein in Berlin, making a German apple cake. It looked simple enough almost not to need a formal recipe - my successful brown bread recipe was like that. Still, I looked it up and then, because I believe in doing a recipe as written the first time, I had to go out and buy some ingredients. But you can't get "golden" caster sugar here, so I had to use white. Research told me that was fine.I looked for Demerara sugar, but it wasn't to be had either, not at that supermarket. Raw sugar would have been okay, but I bought coffee crystals, which I believe are not far off. So, after all that, I still had to substitute!
Still, nothing I had to substitute was going to affect the cake beyond flavour and I suspect it was a subtle difference. And the cake is delicious.
As usual, I'm making notes. I need to remove the lower rack next time, that top rack is too close to the fan and everything burns a bit. Perhaps a bit more sprinkled sugar on top. It adds to the crunch. Really, I think the cake could do with grated apple mixed into the batter. The cake is nice, but under the layer of apples it's a bit dull.
So, I learn something every time! I am so pleased with my new toy.