Whether as a treat in a lunchbox or as part of an old-fashioned tea-time spread. My mum ran a tea-room in Stratford upon Avon when I was growing up, and the smell of cakes and biscuits as they come out of the oven still takes me right back. For a lot of us, this was where we first tried our hand at cooking, helping to make a Victoria sponge or tray of flapjacks and getting to lick the bowl afterwards. It’s certainly a great way to get children interested. It’s important for them to learn that cooking savoury food can be just as rewarding, but that a sweet treat won’t do you any harm as long as it is an occasional indulgence. All of my children have enjoyed rolling up their sleeves and getting stuck in.
We’ve got a good repertoire of cakes and biscuits in this country, but in this chapter I wanted to explore some recipes from other countries such as America, France and Turkey. It always amazes me how different nations can put different twists on things. None of these recipes have to be eaten at tea-time, of course. The Lemon and Poppy Seed Madeleines, for example, are great at breakfast, too, and I can’t imagine anyone complaining about being served a slice of
Chocolate and Mint Caramel cake for pudding.
Whereas in most savoury cooking you can experiment with the proportions, adding less or more of each ingredient according to taste, with baking you do have to be more precise. Baking
is a science, in which the ingredients react against each other to achieve the result you want – the rise of a sponge, for example – and you mess with the proportions at your peril. If you do have trouble with a recipe that hasn’t performed the way you expected, this is always the first thing to check. Did you weigh everything out properly? Overleaf are a few more tips that will apply either to these recipes or more general baking.
BAKING TINS
Buy the heaviest you can as they will heat up evenly. To prevent food sticking, either butter and line them with greaseproof paper, or butter and dust them with flour. You can also get silicone muffin trays nowadays, which are very easy to turn out, but you can’t use them to make other things like Yorkshire puddings, obviously.
BUTTER
I prefer to use unsalted butter in my sweet cooking as I find it creams better and it also means that if I want to add a pinch of salt (which helps to accentuate the sweetness) I am in control of how much to add. One of the most important things when making a cake is to have all your
ingredients at room temperature. If your butter is too hard, it won’t cream properly and then you will struggle to incorporate the air it needs to rise. Don’t put it in the microwave, but you can cut it into cubes and put it in lukewarm water for a few minutes.
FLOUR
Plain flour is made from wheat, but you can experiment with different types. A little chestnut flour works beautifully in cakes. I’m a great fan of wholemeal or spelt flours, which retain more of the husk. They tend to be a bit heavier than plain flour but can give a nice nuttiness to biscuits or muffins. If you want your dish to rise, for example, in a muffin or American pancake, you will need to use self-raising flour, which is plain flour with baking powder added. Plain flour will
keep indefinitely, but self-raising does have a use-by date because the rising agents will become less effective with time. If you want to make your own self-raising flour, add 2 teaspoons of baking powder to every 150g of plain flour and mix well.
GOLDEN SYRUP
A great addition to biscuits as it adds a chewiness to the finished texture. You can also add a spoonful to your sugar when making caramel as it interferes with the formation of sugar crystals which can make your caramel seize.
SUGAR
Different sugars all have different qualities. Muscovado is sticky and treacly, so great for biscuits, fruit cakes and pickles. Powdery icing sugar dissolves easily so is ideal for
buttercreams and icings. Palm sugar, made from palm tree sap, usually comes as a paste and adds a caramelly flavour to sweet and savoury Asian dishes. Demerara has larger crystals to add crunch to things like cookies, crumbles and flapjacks. And then there is caster sugar, halfway between granulated and icing sugar and the ultimate for baking.
WORKING WITH PASTRY
You should always chill pastry after it has been rolled out into the tart tin to prevent it from shrinking in the oven. If you are going to be adding a runny filling that will make the pastry
soggy, recipes usually call for it be blind baked. This means filling the case with ceramic baking beans (or lentils or rice) to weigh the pastry base down and stop it puffing up. Normally after about 15 minutes’ cooking, you will remove the beans and continue to blind bake the case until it is golden. Now you can add the filling and return it to the oven without fear of the pastry being soggy on the bottom.
LEMON AND POPPY SEED MADELEINES PEAR AND CRUNCHY GRANOLA MUFFINS PEANUT BUTTER AND JAM COOKIES
DULCE DE LECHE BISCUITS
CRANBERRY, MARSHMALLOW AND PEANUT CHOCOLATE FRIDGE CAKE LEMON AND PISTACHIO BAKLAVA
CHOCOLATE AND MINT CARAMEL CAKE SALTED CARAMEL POPCORN