A Tropical Birthday – Coconut cake with exotic fruits

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I never used to make a birthday cake for Keith’s birthday. I used to be very lazy. One birthday I made some vanilla muffins topped with shop bought lemon mousse, one year I made a coconut cake with whipped cream and topped with all sorts of sweets and another birthday I made a gooey chocolate cake topped with a mint chocolate icing and that’s as close as I got. I never made a proper cake that’s well thought out and that I spent lots of time and thought on. However, I’ve changed. Last year I made him a chocolate cake filled with a chocolate arrack ganache topped with whipped cream and marzipan, he loved it. This year I asked him what he wanted and he just said “something fruity”. I should have known; he’s getting around to rich chocolate desserts and dark chocolate but most of the time he’ll still prefer something fruity.

I spent lots of time thinking up this cake. I had decided on a cake with meringue, vanilla sponge, lemon curd, strawberry compote and strawberry mousse but one sleepless night I had en epiphany when I imagined a tropical cake with a coconut sponge, another coconut element of some sort, orange curd, mashed bananas and passion fruit mousse. After much thinking I decided that the second coconut element would be a macaroon disc, because the cake had to be balanced in terms of consistencies as well as flavour. I also decided to add banana in the passion fruit to provide it with some more complexity and to complement the tropical flavours further, as well as softening the tartness of the passion fruit and the orange. As an afterthought I decided to add a orange jelly mirror with some Passoa liquoer in it. I wanted it as a decoration only but it added yet another consistency dimension to the cake and made it a bit fresher.

Soft sponge, chewy and slightly hard macaroon, deliciously juicy orange curd, slightly chunky mashed bananas topped with airy and velvety passionfruit banana mousse and a fresh jelly mirror. Perfect!

You will get some leftover sponge, bit of leftover mousse and probably some leftover orange curd.

The recipes are my own apart from the passionfruit banana mousse, which I borrowed from Joe Pastry, slightly changing the batch size.

Tropical cake with coconut, passion fruit, orange and banana

Coconut sponge

1 egg
90 g/3.2 oz light brown sugar
50 g/1.8 oz melted butter
38 g/1.3 oz orange curd
50 g/1.8 oz desiccated coconut
45 g/1.6 oz plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Put the oven on 175 degrees C/347 degrees F (150 degrees C/302 degrees F if you’re using a convection oven). Butter and flour a 5 inch cake tin. Melt the butter together with the orange curd. Stir together the coconut, the baking powder and the flour. Whisk egg together with the sugar until it’s light and pale, about 4-5 minutes. Whisk together the egg mixture and the dry ingredients and the butter mixture until it’s combined nicely. Pour the mixture in the cake tin and bake it for about 20 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Slice the cake into three pieces, two pieces that are about 40% the thickness each and one that’s about 20% (this is the leftover one, do what you want with it).

Macaroon disc

1/2-1 egg
50 g/1.8 oz desiccated coconut
22 g/0.8 oz light brown sugar

Put the coconut and the sugar in a bowl and add egg until it’s a sticky batter. Let the batter swell for ten minutes. Pat it out into a 5 inch circle on a sheet of greaseproof paper and bake in the oven at 175 degrees C/347 degrees F (150 degrees C/302 degrees F if you’re using a convection oven) until it’s golden.

Orange curd

Juice and zest of two oranges
Juice and zest of one lemon
90 g/3.2 oz butter
200 g/7.1 oz sugar
3 egg yolks
Pinch of pectin sugar (you can omit this but the curd wont be as thick as I like it)

Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and cook it on medium heat while whisking until it’s thick and covers the back of a spoon, this might take over 20 minutes. Strain it through a sieve into warm jars and let it cool down.

Passionfruit banana mousse

264 g/10.4 oz sieved passion fruit pulp
110g/2.82 oz banana
56 g/2 oz sugar
20 g/0.7 oz lemon juice
2.3 teaspoons/just over 9 g/just over 0.3 oz gelatine powder
300 g/10.6 oz whipping cream

Make the mousse just before you’re about to pipe it into the spring form tin. Put the banana and the sieved passion fruit in a blender together with the sugar and blend the fruit until it’s a purée (if you don’t have enough passion fruit then make up the weight with more banana), add the lemon juice and strain the mixture through a sieve. Put about a third of the mixture into a saucepan, warm it gently and add the gelatine. Stir until it’s dissolved and put this mixture in a large bowl and add the rest of the purée. Let it cool while stirring every now and then. When it’s close to room temperature whip the cream to soft peaks. Put the fruit puree in a cold water bath and scrape it with a spatula until the puree is getting thicker, remove the bowl from the bath and whip the cream to stiff peaks. Fold in the fruit puree.

Orange juice jelly mirror with Passoa

200 ml/7.1 oz orange juice
20 ml/0.7 oz Passoa
2/3 teaspoons lemon juice
Just under two teaspoons gelatine

Make this about an hour before you’re going to pour it over the cake (see below). Put the gelatine, the passoa (don’t weight out the Passoa as it contains alcohol and has a different density to water) and the lemon juice in a bowl, stir slightly and wait a few minutes for the gelatine to become spongy while you put the orange juice in a saucepan and bring it to a simmer. Stir the gelatine mixture in the saucepan and pour it into a jug that you put in a cold water bath. Stir every now and then until it becomes thick (this takes quite some time).

Assembling of the cake

If you have some suitable acetate sheets then take one or two of these and line a 6 inch spring form tin with it, grease the bottom of the tin with vegetable oil. The acetate sheets needs to be so thick that they don’t feel flimsy and so that they hold their shape in the tin, if you don’t have any then just grease up the sides and the bottom of the tin. Mash up 2 big or 3 medium bananas. Put the macaroon disc at the bottom. Arrange some of the banana mash in a circle, like a border, over it (this is so that the curd wont spread out over the sides). Spread some orange curd (as thick as you want it) on top. As you assemble the layers you pipe passion fruit mousse around the edges, making sure it gets all around the cake (I didn’t do a very good job). Put one of the thicker coconut sponge discs on top of the mashed bananas and the orange curd and put another layer of banana and orange curd the way you did it the first time on top of the sponge. Pipe more fruit mousse around the cake, top with the last of the thick coconut sponge discs and pipe the rest of the mousse of top, spreading it with a palette knife as well as you can. Put in the fridge overnight. Pour the passoa mirror over the cake while it’s in the spring form tin a few hours before you’re going to serve the cake. Carefully loosen the spring form tin from the cake and carefully peel of the acetate sheets. If you didn’t use any sheets the risk is that your mousse might break a little bit. If you’re brave then try to move the cake from the bottom of the tin, if you don’t want to risk anything then just leave it.

Decorate it how you want it, with chocolate decorations, some sliced up fruit (strawberries, passion fruit, kiwi would be nice for example) or with some coconut flakes.

passion fruit mousse

IMG_0640

A comforting treat – Cassia ice cream with oat biscuits and raisins

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It’s more or less impossible to find good quality fruit ice cream in the supermarkets in the U.K (I can count to two; a lime coconut ice cream and a lemon curd ice cream) so in the last two weeks we’ve been making fruity ice cream in my precious, new ice cream machine but since I’m a girl that at heart always preferred richer things such as chocolate, nuts and biscuits I soon felt like I’ve had my temporarily cravings satisfied and I felt like making something indulgent. I consulted Keith and we looked through my list of ice creams to make (it spans over two pages now!) and we chose to make a cassia ice cream with oat biscuits and raisins.

My inspiration for this ice cream was part oatmeal biscuits with raisins in them but I also once (or twice, or thrice…) had an ice cream in Sweden called Berte’s äppelpaj which was an apple pie ice cream with crumb chunks, cassia and apple pieces. I thought that why not combine the two flavours, the raisins, the oat-y flavour from both the biscuits and the crumb and the cassia from the apple pie. I expect you could stick some apples in there, but I wanted to focus on the biscuit part of the ice cream, having lots of those chunks.

This flavour ice cream is interesting. Even thought it’s a cold dessert it feels warm and cozy in your stomach, a bit like as if you’ve had a cup of hot chocolate, I think it’s the oat biscuits and the spicy warmth of cassia that does it. If you don’t have cassia then just use cinnamon, it’s fairly similar but a bit harsher and not as sweet. I used muscovado sugar instead of the normal white sugar and it’s caramel tones complements the spice and the oats beautifully. You’ll get biscuit leftovers, but you don’t mind, do you?

Eat on it’s own, half melted over a cassia/cinnamon bun or together with apple pie…

Cassia ice cream with oat biscuits and raisins

300 g/10.6 oz milk
300 g/10.6 oz whipping cream
3 big egg yolks
40 g/1.4 oz glucose syrup
75 g/2.7 oz muscovado sugar
2 teaspoons of cinnamon, or to taste
55 g/1.9 oz raisins

Oat biscuits

70 g/2.5 oz thick cut oats
70 g/2.5 oz instant oats
75 g/2.7 oz vegetable oil
130 g/4.6 oz muscovado sugar
40 g/1.4 oz golden syrup
Pinch of flake salt

Make the oat biscuits first. Put the oven on 190 degrees C/375 degrees F (165 degrees C/330 degrees F if you’re using a convection oven). Put everything in a bowl and mix together. Spread on a sheet of greaseproof paper and bake until it’s golden. Let it sit until the next day and break it up into little chunks.

For the ice cream put the milk, the cream and the cassia in a saucepan together with the glucose syrup. Bring to the boil and put the saucepan carefully in a basin with cold water and let the mixture cool for about half an hour. Whisk the egg yolks together with the sugar for about two minutes until it’s fluffy and pale in colour. As you whisk, pour the milk and cream mixture carefully into the egg and sugar mixture. Make sure that you pour the milk and the cream mixture into the egg and not the other way around or the egg mixture might curdle. After the two mixtures are combined, pour into the saucepan again and heat on medium heat while whisking until the mixture is 84 degrees C or it’s thick enough to cover the back of a spoon. Strain the mixture into a bowl and put it into the water filled basin again to cool down, stirring every now and then to prevent a skin from forming. When it’s cooled down, cover with cling film and put it in the fridge over night. Churn the ice cream the next day and when it’s done stir carefully and quickly in the raisins and the about 1/4 of the oat biscuit chunks. Put in the freezer to set into a harder consistency.

cinnamon biscuit ice cream

Back to the roots – Scandinavian waffles

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It’s funny, growing up in one country but ending up living in another. For me it either feels like I belong in both Sweden and England or, on a bad day, like I belong nowhere. One thing that is true is that whenever I’m in one country I always miss the other country quite severely. When I’m in Sweden I miss how crowded England feel in comparison, I miss hearing people speak English and I even miss the big, also crowded supermarkets with a million different things to buy (Cadbury chocolate for example… Tut tut, I should have better tastes than that but I don’t). My feelings of loss is more subtle when I’m in England and it take longer for them to grow strong but they are there nevertheless. They express themselves mainly by making me extremely proud that I’m Swedish. I will make comments such as “The doors in Sweden are so much better than the English ones; they swing out away from you, rather than towards you. Safer in case of a fire!” or “Swedish trains are much better. So much faster.”, little things that doesn’t really matter at all, but that feels oh so important to comment on.

Every now and then when the feelings of loss are getting too strong I do something Swedish. I bake rågsiktskakor or perhaps listen to Kent even though I prefer other bands. The other week, I decided to order a couple of old, rusty and very Scandinavian cast iron pans of eBay, after spending a very long time trying to find somewhere that sold them. One of them is a Scandinavian style waffle iron and the other one is a “rånjärn” or more commonly known by the Norwegian name krumkake iron. I felt lucky, managing to find something that’s so rare in the U.K. However, when it was only one day before I planned to use them and it came to cleaning off the rust and the ground in dirt as well as seasoning them I felt less lucky. Spending hours scrubbing away with steel wool, muscles getting sore and nails chipping and then getting much of the kitchen dirty from rubbing them with oil and salt and lastly heating them on the hob with oil in to season them was quite tiring (not to mention cleaning up).

We wanted to make some waffles, seeing as we missed the waffle day this year (and the last seven or so years). I did some research and decided on a recipe that looked good. It was quite tricky to use the cast iron pan; you have to remember to turn it every now and then and there was a spot that wasn’t seasoned correctly so the waffles got a little bit stuck at that particular place. We had to experiment with heat settings of the stove as well as time to cook the waffles but we got there in the end. As I was standing there, working like an animal, I felt very Swedish and very admiring of all the Swedish women (and men) that in the past cooked with these heavy cast iron pots and pans every single day.

This recipe makes six waffles. It might not sound like a lot (Keith seemed to think they were like pancakes and thought he could eat four!) but one waffle with a generous topping of whipped cream and jam is normally how much one person eats (although, they are easy to eat so many people eat more and I can’t blame them). As mentioned, best served with whipped cream and jam. Cloudberry jam is very traditional but if you don’t have any then strawberry jam is what I always had when I was small and what I still truthfully prefer. When I was small I used to have whipped cream, ice cream and a few different types of jam on top and I’d often eat at least three waffles… I could eat a lot for being so small! If you have a cast iron pan you’ll have to experiment with heat and time because all stoves are different. And remember to whisk the batter slightly between each waffle or the flour will sink to the bottom! And lastly: I’m not sure how this recipe fares in the more common Belgian waffle iron, so better use a Scandinavian style iron.

Swedish Waffles

50 g/1.8 oz butter
50 g/1.8 oz whipping cream (not whipped!)
180 g/6.4 oz plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch of salt
400 g/14.1 oz milk

Melt the butter and let it cool down while you prepare the rest of the batter. Mix the flour, salt and baking powder in a bowl. Pour in half the milk and whisk until no lumps remain. Add the rest of the milk, the melted butter and the cream and whisk again until the batter is uniform. Heat your pan and grease it with some butter and pour in 80-100 ml of batter. On our stove on a medium heat it took about 2 minutes on each side. Repeat until no batter remains and serve immediately.

Swedish waffles

A new start – Cherry almond chocolate chip ice cream

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I turned 24 last week. I’m not old (although I sometimes feel old and bitter) but I’m not a child anymore, and it was five years since I was a teenager. As you grow out of childhood and into the responsibility of being an adult you usually get less and smaller presents for your birthday. I don’t really mind; if I want something these days I can usually get it myself because with adulthood comes independence in many ways. However, there is one person that’s still spoiling me; Keith. On my birthday he put a huge box on top of our bed filled with little and big presents. I started with the small ones, opening them in the order he suggested, and at the end there was a big box. I lifted it out, it turned out to be quite heavy, and opened it.

Many people give hints about what they’d like starting a few weeks before their birthday, I’m usually one of them, but my hints are always very subtle (because I do prefer my presents to be personal and thoughtful rather than something I picked out myself) thus not pushing anyone into getting anything for me, but this year I was so busy that I simply forgot.

And that’s why I was surprised when I saw that in the box there was an ice cream machine, which is something I’ve wanted for a long time. It was even the model I was thinking about getting, I guess it helped that we looked into ice cream machines together (reading Ruben’s blog Ice cream science for example, he has written some excellent reviews). As you know I’ve made ice cream before a few times so I already had access to an ice cream machine but the one I used to use was very poor and we got inconsistent result with it (even though the canister had been in the freezer for days before using it it quite liked to turn my ice cream into frozen slush every now and then and it also fell apart while churning the ice cream) and I was tired of taking chances with my ice cream batters that’ve taken time to make and that contained expensive, good quality ingredients.

I was (and still am) very happy, and spent quite some time last week looking at the box next to our bed and stroking the ice cream machine. I also spent quite some time on my birthday and other days last week thinking about what ice cream to make, and I ordered The Perfect Scoop from Amazon to give me more inspiration (although after reading the info bit about technique and ingredients involved I feel like I should have chosen a book that’s more in depth about how ice cream works rather than using up most of the pages on recipes). Together with Keith we eventually decided that the very first batch of ice cream to make in our ice cream machine would be cherry ice cream with coarsely chopped almonds and dark chocolate chips. It felt like a nice way to start a new era of ice cream making (yes, I know. I shouldn’t be this into kitchen appliances).

The ice cream turned out nice, but was a little bit crumbly when it came to scooping it. After doing some reading I figured out that I might need to use more cream in the recipe, some alcohol in it, more glucose syrup, more sugar or (my own thoughts now) not puree any of the cherries because that will make the cherries mix in more with the ice cream thus needing to add more fat and sugar to the ice cream mixture to make it creamy again. It’s absolutely not a problem when it comes to eating it (just leave it out 5-10 minutes before eating), so I suggest that you make some of it if you fancy, but I’m a perfectionist and feel like I should point it out to you.

Faults aside, the cherry flavour has got quite a bit of a kick to it. It’s very tangy and a little of this ice cream goes a long way. The chocolate chips add some richness and bitterness to it and together with the buttery, soft flavour of the toasted almonds it balances the tartness of the cherries nicely, mellowing it ever so slightly and giving it depth.

(Keith really liked the ice cream. I’m planning on making ice cream once a week now and I have a feeling he’s not going to regret giving me the ice cream machine! He’s almost as into eating ice cream as I am)

Cherry almond chocolate chip ice cream

301 g/10.6 oz milk
342 g/12.1 oz cream
40 g/1.4 oz glucose syrup
115 g/4.1 oz sugar
3 big egg yolks
550 g/19.4 oz frozen cherries
70 g/2.5 oz toasted almonds
100 g/3.5 oz dark chocolate chips

Day one

Put the milk and cream in a saucepan together with the glucose syrup. Bring to the boil and put the saucepan carefully in a basin with cold water and let the mixture cool for about half an hour. Whisk the egg yolks together with the sugar for about two minutes until it’s fluffy and pale in colour. As you whisk, pour the milk and cream mixture carefully into the egg and sugar mixture. Make sure that you pour the milk and the cream mixture into the egg and not the other way around or the egg mixture might curdle. After the two mixtures are combined, pour into the saucepan again and heat on medium heat while whisking until the mixture is 84 degrees C or it’s thick enough to cover the back of a spoon. Strain the mixture into a bowl and put it into the water filled basin again to cool down, stirring every now and then to prevent a skin from forming. When it’s cooled down, cover with cling film and put it in the fridge over night.

Day two

Start with the cherry puree. Put the cherries in a saucepan together with 40 g sugar and heat it. You don’t need any water because the frozen cherries should release plenty. Keep into the mixture while stirring until it’s reduced to about half the amount you started with, you want it thick and syrupy. At this point I pureed about 2/3 of the mixture but I recommend not doing that. Let it cool down in the fridge until it’s the same temperature as the ice cream custard.

Make sure you have your almonds toasted and chopped and your chocolate chips out. Pour the custard in the ice cream machine quickly followed by the cherry puree. When it looks like it’s almost done churning, slowly and carefully pour in the the almonds and the chocolate chips. Quickly use a rubber spatula (remember, no metal in the ice cream canister!!!) to scrape the ice cream into a tub and put it into the freezer and let it freeze into the consistency you want it before eating it.

cherry ice cream

Happy Birthday – Hazelnut dream cake

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By the time you’re reading this my Birthday will be gone and the cake in the pictures will only be a memory. Most likely I’ll have had a nice day with many nice memories and ready for another year of my life. I’ll be 24. I don’t care so much about age anymore, once you’ve passed 20 it’s just another number and once other people pass 20 they don’t really change much with one year, three years, ten years… You’re like a stone and one year is like 100 water drops on your surface; they don’t do much difference but in a few years there might be a small, noticeable difference anyway. Ever drop is an experience of your previous year, a meeting with a new person, a journey somewhere new, a new hobby, a new skill you learnt or just an important train of thought like an insight or a decision made. Small drops, just little things that slowly turns you into who you are and one day in one, three or ten years you’ll wake up and realize that these Birthdays, these drops of rain and these small things after all managed to change you even though you feel like things and people will always be the same.

Ah.

I tried some of the banana mousse I made last week with some leftover brownie pieces. I had planned my Birthday cake to be a thin brownie topped with a praliné layer, bananas, chocolate mousse and with banana mousse around and on top of everything but it didn’t work; the brownie took over too much. After much thought and sleepless nights I decided to make a hazelnut sponge topped with a thick layer of caramelized hazelnut spread, grilled bananas, a layer of hazelnut dacquoise and chocolate mousse around and over everything and some caramelized hazelnuts for decoration. I wasn’t quite sure how to incorporate the bananas but one day when I had a grilled banana with yoghurt I took a piece of the banana and tried it with a Nutella type spread. There is one thing you have to understand about grilled bananas; if you grill or bake bananas the banana flavour becomes a lot stronger and suddenly it tastes like caramel. The banana slices leak syrup and turns everything it comes in touch with into a luxurious, syrupy, caramel-y dessert. Together with hazelnuts and chocolate you get something that feels like velvet on your tongue. Comforting, soft, caramel bananas complimented with the earthy flavour of the hazelnuts and finally the rich, luxurious taste of chocolate. I was planning on incorporating a layer of toffee-fudge sauce in the cake but by grilling the bananas I eliminated that need.

And let’s talk about textures. You’ve most likely heard that in terms of flavour a perfect dish needs to be balanced. White chocolate with a caramel filling topped with meringue? No, too sickly. Salted caramel on top of buttered toast? Probably too salty. The same goes for textures and consistencies, something I had in mind when thinking up my Birthday cake. Chewy meringue, crunchy praliné, soft bananas, more softness in the shape of a hazelnut sponge, velvety and airy mousse and finally more crunch in the shape of caramelized hazelnuts.

This cake is perfection. It’s pure decadence and love and joy and luxury and velvet in the form of a cake.

(Of course, before I forget it, I better mention that the chocolate mousse recipe is from good old Joe Pastry. The hazelnut sponge recipe is from The Baking Life and I made half the original batch size)

Also, you’ll get one leftover meringue disc and one leftover sponge.

Hazelnut dream cake

Hazelnut dacquoise

70 g/2.5 oz toasted, peeled and ground up hazelnuts
18 g/0.6 oz coarsely chopped toasted and peeled hazelnuts
2 egg whites
90 g/3.2 oz sugar

Put the oven on 175 degrees C/347 degrees F (150 degrees C/302 degrees F if using a convection oven). Draw two circles just under 5 inches/12.7 cm on a sheet of greaseproof paper. Whip the egg whites into a stiff foam, you should be able to hold the bowl up side down without anything falling out. Whisk in the sugar and whisk until it’s dissolved. Fold in the nuts and pipe the batter in the circles and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes.

Hazelnut sponge

75 g/2.7 oz toasted and peeled hazelnuts
70 g/2.5 oz flour
Pinch of salt
3 eggs
68 g/2.4 oz sugar
22 g/0.8 oz vegetable oil

Put the oven on 175 degrees C/347 degrees F (150 degrees C/302 degrees F if using a convection oven). Butter and flour two 5 inch/12.7 cm tins. Blend flour, nuts and salt until it’s like a flour. Whisk the eggs and the sugar until it’s tripled in size. Fold in the nut mixture in two additions. Transfer a large blob of batter to a bowl and whisk in the oil. Foil this back into the other batter. Pour the batter into the two tins and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

Caramelized hazelnuts for the praliné layer and decoration

100 g/3.5 oz toasted and peeled hazelnuts
200 g/7 oz sugar
5 g/0.2 oz butter
4 tablespoons water

Put the sugar and the water in a saucepan and heat it to the soft ball stage (118 degrees C/244 degrees F). Put the hazelnuts in the saucepan and keep stirring. The sugar will crystallize and then melt again. When the sugar is completely melted and browned nicely you stir in the butter. Pour the praliné on a greaseproof paper and separate the nuts as well as you can.

Praliné layer

Most of the caramelized hazelnuts, leave however many you want for decoration
About 40 g/1.4 oz butter
Big pinch of sea salt flakes, or to taste

Put the caramelized hazelnuts in a blender and blend until it’s the consistency you want. I recommend that you blend it so that it just started to form a paste but it’s still very thick so that when you’ve mixed in the butter and it’s been in the cake in the fridge overnight and it’s time to eat the cake it has formed a hard, crunchy layer in the cake rather than a soft layer, like butter or Nutella. Remove from the blender and stir in the butter and the salt

Chocolate mousse

113 g/4 oz paté a bombe
227 g/8 oz whipping cream
170 g/6 oz dark chocolate, chopped finely

Whip the cream to just under stiff peaks (if you’re unsure, better to whisk it too little than too much). Prepare your paté a bombe if you haven’t already and while it’s whipping, melt your chocolate, careful not to burn it. Add the chocolate to the paté a bombe (make sure you don’t use the whole batch of paté a bombe, but only FOUR ounces of it), which should also be warm and stir until well incorporated. Add in a third of the whipped cream and whisk until it’s smooth and fold in the remaining cream.

Assemble the cake

3 medium bananas
Leftover caramelized hazelnuts

If you have some suitable acetate sheets then take one or two of these and line the spring form tin with it, grease the bottom of the tin with vegetable oil. The acetate sheets needs to be so thick that they don’t feel flimsy and so that they hold their shape in the tin, if you don’t have any then just grease up the sides of the tin. Slice the bananas and put them under the grill on a low heat until they are soft. Put the hazelnut sponge at the bottom of a 6 inch spring form tin. Carefully put the praliné mass on top of it, put the bananas over the praliné. As you assemble the layers you pipe chocolate mousse around the edges, making sure it gets all around the cake. Top with the hazelnut meringue and pipe the rest of the mousse on top of it and spread it as evenly as you can with a palette knife. Put in the fridge overnight and decorate with caramelized hazelnuts. Carefully loosen the spring form tin from the cake and carefully peel of the acetate sheets. If you didn’t use any sheets the risk is that your mousse might break a little bit. If you’re brave then try to move the cake from the bottom of the tin, if you don’t want to risk anything then just leave it.

hazelnut mousse cake

caramelized hazelnuts

chocolate mousse cake

A successful test – Banana mousse cake with walnuts

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If you’re me then you think about food for quite some time every day. If it’s your birthday next week then you think about it even more, because there’s a lot to plan. What restaurant? What type of birthday cake? If you’re me you’re also terribly picky when it comes to what goes in your mouth and since your horizon is very broad and you know of many different types of cakes from different cultures it’s extremely hard to decide what type of birthday cake to make because it feels like there’s endless possibilities. If you then decide on something chances are that it involves an element that you have never made before so you need to make a small, simplified trial cake just to see if you can get that part right.

Crazy? Obsessed? Yeah, that’s me. Last week I decided to try my hand at mousse again, this time a banana mousse. I’ve failed making mousse twice now so I was quite hesitant, but felt like you can only fail so many times. This mousse is a little more complicated than the usual melt chocolate-whip cream-fold together-type mousse that you might be used to, but it’s worth it and you’ll feel very proud of your achievement once you’ve finished it. The recipe is from Joe Pastry and apparently it’s a Bavarian cream. The quantities mentioned here makes half a batch, which was enough for my cake. I used some leftover walnut sponge cake that I froze a few weeks ago. The recipe is my own and it’s a bit wonky and it tends to rise unevenly (although that might be because of the oven in this house). You’ll get more cake than you need from the recipe so you can just cut off a slice the thickness you want (about 2-3 cm I’d say is a good thickness) thus solving the problem with the cake being uneven and eat the leftovers or you can look around online for another recipe.

If like me you love advanced French desserts with mysterious names you should really try making this cake.

Banana mousse cake with walnuts

Walnut sponge

60 g/2.1 oz ground up walnuts
2.5 eggs
60/2.1 grammes sugar
100 g/3.5 oz flour
11 g/0.4 oz melted butter
1 tsp baking powder
25 g/0.9 oz coarsely chopped walnuts

Whip the eggs together with the sugar until it’s light and fluffy. Mix the flour together with the baking powder and the ground up nuts and fold this into the batter. Fold in the melted butter and the chopped nuts. Pour the batter into a baking tin about 15 cm/6 inches diameter and bake in the oven at 180 degrees C/356 degrees F (165 degrees C/329 degrees F if you’re using a convection oven) until a skewer comes out clean.

Banana mousse

142 g/5 oz peeled bananas
42 g/1.5 oz sugar
1 tbs lemon juice
7 g/1.8 tsp gelatin powder
237 g/1 cup whipping cream

Mix the bananas and sugar together in a blender and add the lemon juice, strain the mixture. Put about a third of the puree in a saucepan, heat it slightly, add the gelatin and stir until it’s dissolved. Pour the contents of the saucepan in a large mixing bowl and add the rest of the puree, let it cool down, stirring every now and then. Whip the cream to soft peaks. Put the bowl with the puree in a cold water bath and stir until it gets thick. Whip the cream to stiff peaks and fold in the puree.

To assemble the cake you grease up your tin with some oil, place the slice of sponge in the middle at the bottom of the tin and lastly pour in the mousse, spreading it as well as you can. Let it set in the fridge for several hours or overnight.

banana cake

banana mousse

Easter egg – Chocolate fudge with arrack and raisins

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I realized that I had to make an effort one way or the other when it came to Easter. I knew I could get away with not baking anything special but I also knew that Keith were expecting something nice and homemade to go in his Easter egg. Because I’m so interested in the making of chocolate and confectionery I couldn’t buy my way out like everyone else, it would be downright rude. I thought about it for a long time, and decided that I would feel bad if I didn’t put my whole heart in it, so I decided to 1. take a huge risk and make something I’ve never made before (apart from once when I failed miserably) because what I wanted to make would be the perfect thing to give and 2. take an even bigger risk and make my own recipe because I wanted it just right.

Keith loves fudge and he loves rum and raisin. He also really like arrack so I decided to make some arrack and raisin fudge with chocolate melted in it because it goes so well with the arrack. If you don’t have any arrack, then just use rum or whatever boozy stuff you might have at home that you like. Baileys could be nice. My only complains with this fudge is that it breaks when you cut it, but it’s very smooth and tastes great.

You’ll need a huge saucepan. I used the biggest one in the house (a guess is that it holds five litres) and it still nearly boiled over. You’ll want to stir the mixture often (if not all the time) as it cooks to prevent any scorching. You’ll also need a thermometer and you’ll have to do a soft ball test as well just to make sure. Once it’s cooked to the temperature in the recipe you’ll need to let it sit undisturbed until the temperature is under 50 degrees C/122 degrees F (mine crystallized too fast so I had to start beating in the chocolate and the raisins when it was around 60 degrees C/140 degrees F. Since you’ll be using my recipe you might have to do the same), it’s really important not to poke at it too much because if it gets disturbed too much you might end up with a grainy fudge rather than a smooth one. To prevent the fudge going grainy you’ll also need to wash down the sides of the saucepan with a wet pastry brush in the start of the cooking process so that there’s no undissolved sugar crystals on the side that later one can seed it with big sugar crystals. And don’t weigh out the arrack, since it contains alcohol 60 ml wont equal 60 g.

Chocolate fudge with arrack and raisins

500 g/17.7 oz whipping cream (About 36% fat content)
450 g/15.9 oz sugar
50 g/1.7 oz glucose syrup
60 ml/2.1 fluid oz arrack
150 g/5.3 oz dark chocolate, chopped finely
120 g/4.2 oz raisins

Line a 20 x 20 cm tin with greaseproof paper and oil the paper slightly. Put the cream, sugar and arrack in a saucepan and bring it to the boil while stirring. Add the glucose syrup and stir until it reaches 118 degrees C/244 degrees F and when the mixture forms a soft, malleable ball when dunked in cold water. Take the saucepan off the stove and let it sit undisturbed for about 30-40 minutes until it’s between 50 and 60 degrees C/122-140 degrees F. Melt the chocolate and pour it over the fudge together with the raisins, mix it in and agitate the fudge until it’s very thick and matte. Transfer the fudge to the tin and pat it down with your hands. It will look greasy but it’ll sink in after a few hours when the fudge has set. Cut it carefully with a knife and wrap in paper and put in an airtight container.

chocolate fudge

Dreaming of Sweden – Rågsiktskakor

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It’s almost Easter, and I promise you, I was going to blog about hot cross buns. In my head I imagined making the best hot cross buns ever, using fresh yeast, the plumpest dried fruit and my own spice mix and then using cold liquids and ingredients so that they would need lots and lots of time to rise and thus becoming the most flavourful buns you can imagine, soft and airy and absolutely perfect. However, I was tired. I didn’t want to fiddle around making a new recipe and I didn’t want to make anything too time consuming. Besides, I had a hot cross bun from Morrisons (Or Asda) the other day, I spread it with butter. It was soft alright, but lacking in fruit and it was very salty. At the end of it, I didn’t feel like any more hot cross buns this year.

Yeah, call me lazy. Call me unbelievable because I wont blog about anything Easter related like a good food blogger should do. No Simnel cakes, no hot cross buns, no Easter eggs… But you know what? By the time you’re reading this you’ll be tired of Easter anyway because most likely, thanks to the over commercialization of Easter (and Valentine’s day, and Christmas, and Mother’s day…), you’ll have eaten ten hot cross buns, you’ll have recieved five cheap Easter eggs, you’ll have had Simnel cake until it’s coming out of your ears and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d have some sort of Easter roast that Waitrose claims is something you should eat around Easter, just to boost their sales.

Here’s something special, something more exotic and something you probably haven’t had before. The recipe is from Matgeek and I hope you’ll find it refreshing. I didn’t make these only because I was lazy, it was also because I really missed those sweet types of rye bread that many people in Sweden eat. I remember eating it when I was small, eating it when I was a teenager and I wanted to eat it again.  I recommend that you eat them as an open sandwich with butter and cheese. The original recipe calls for dark syrup but you can’t really get anything similar to the dark syrup we use in Sweden. Treacle tastes too much like licorice so just use golden syrup instead. I also added a little bit more flour to mine, only about 20 grammes.

(I, like many other Swedish people, dunked mine in hot chocolate. Keith thought I was a monster, and watched with horror as I ate)

Matgeeks rågsiktskakor

100/3.5 oz g butter
500/17.7 oz g milk
50 g/1.8 oz fresh yeast
100 g/3.5 oz golden syrup
10 g/0.4 oz salt
3 tsp fennel
3 tsp aniseed
500/17.7 oz g strong white flour
320/11.3 oz g fine rye flour

Melt the butter and pour over the milk. Heat it until it’s lukewarm. Crumble the yeast in a kitchen machine bowl and pour over the milk and butter. Stir until no lumps of yeast remains. Add syrup and salt. Grind the herbs in a pestle and mortar and pour them in as well, stir slightly and pour in the flour. Let the machine knead the bread on a slow speed for ten minutes. Cover the bowl and let the dough rise to twice the size, this will take between 40 minutes and an hour depending on the temperature in your kitchen. Divide the dough in four parts and shape them into round balls, let them sit for ten minutes so the gluten network in them can relax. Flatten them til 5-8 mm/0.2-0.3 inches round discs and prick them with a fork. Cover with a towel and let them rise for 30 minutes or until they feel soft to the touch and the fingerprint your finger leaves behind when poking them springs back.Put the oven on 225 degrees C/437 degrees F (200 degrees C/392 degrees F if you’re using a convection oven), spray them with water and bake them for about ten minutes, opening the oven door half way through to let steam out.

rågsiktskaka

rye bread

Abused and misused – Caramels

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Keith never liked caramel much, unless it was in a Lion or a Mars bar. I always agreed with him, we used to joke about it and say that whenever the big mass producing confectionery companies wanted to make a candy bar and wasn’t sure what to pad it out with they would have a meeting and the people would say to each other: “Let’s fill it with wafers or caramel. I know, let’s fill it with both!”. I think I have a point, because how many bars aren’t there like that? Caramel these days is used like a cheap filling ingredient, when you’re too stingy to afford good ingredients or not creative or daring enough to try something new.

It’s a shame it’s gotten to this. I’m saying this because recently I’ve learnt that caramel can be something good. I don’t particularly like Hotel Chocolate because their chocolates all taste so similar but that was still the first time I had a good quality caramel filled chocolate. The caramel in them wasn’t just a sugary substance, it was something that had lots of flavour in itself. I guess what I’m trying to say is that caramel is like vanilla; an ingredient (or lack thereof in the case of vanilla) that is extremely abused by the mass producing companies that can be great if done correctly.

I had finally gotten to the part in Greweling’s book about non crystalline confections and I decided to try to make some caramels, because I felt like the cooking of sugar is a very basic concept that I have to know inside and out. I was a bit apprehensive because people sometimes say that good caramel is hard to make, but it wasn’t that bad. You can’t see it from my pictures but I didn’t stir well enough so there are tiny little spots of browned sugar in some of the caramels that came off the bottom of the pan but apart from that I had no trouble making them. I don’t have a confectionery frame so had to use a tin with greaseproof paper in but I used a really bad type by mistake that everything sticks to so the caramels didn’t look as perfect as I wanted but that’s for practice.

This recipe makes a quarter of the original recipe. The tin size is approximately, you can use a slightly bigger or smaller depending on desired thickness you want. Remember to stir all the time while the caramel cooks.

Greweling’s caramels using condensed milk

125 g/4.4 oz sugar
90 g/3.2 oz sweetened condensed milk
50 g/1.8 oz water
1/4 vanilla pod
108 g/3.8 oz glucose syrup
50 g/1.8 oz butter
1/4 tsp salt

Mix the sugar, sweetened condensed milk, water and vanilla pod scrapings in a saucepan, bring to the boil while stirring constantly. Add the glucose syrup and lower the heat to medium while stirring, let the mixture get to 110 degrees C/230 degrees F, add the butter and keep stirring it until it reaches 117 degrees C/243 degrees F. Do a soft ball test to make sure it’s ready and remove from heat, add the salt and pour the mixture into a 20 x 10 cm/8 x 4 inches tin lined with oiled greaseproof paper, let the caramel get to room temperature before you cut them.

caramels

IMG_0565

Swedish classics – Cinnamon buns

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It was only a matter of time before I’d make a post like this because what would a Swedish baking blogger be worth if she haven’t written anything about cinnamon buns? Cinnamon buns are to Sweden what scones are to Britain and what croissants are to France; absolutely necessary. They even have a day on their own, the 4:th of October; Kanelbullens dag.

My mum was never one of those stereotypical mums that bake bread every day, make your lunch (that might be because the school lunches are free in Sweden) or clean your room for you. I don’t blame her for that, in fact I think it was a good thing that she didn’t, it made us children a bit more independent. However, there was one thing that she did for us, that I really appreciated: we would almost never buy mass produced cinnamon buns that are so dry that they taste like cardboard because she’d bake them herself instead. Thanks to this, I have fond memories of “helping” her bake them in the kitchen; brushing the buns with egg wash and putting nib sugar on top of them and of course “trying” the dough and the finished buns just to make sure they were safe to eat. And later on the obligatory stomach pain from eating too much dough.

There is a few things you should know about making cinnamon buns: the dough should be rolled thinner than you think, don’t be stingy with the filling (if it looks dry then it needs more!), when you roll the dough and the filling make sure you roll it quite tight and don’t be tempted to add too much flour. And as always when it comes to baking with fresh yeast: don’t melt the butter and use cold liquids. It takes longer but the result is much better. You might end up with too much filling but it’s always better to end up with too much than too little; buns without an adequate amount of filling aren’t very nice. Put liberal amounts of filling on the dough!

Cinnamon buns

Preferment
100 g/4 oz water
160 g/5.7 oz milk
300 g/10.6 oz strong white flour
25 g/0.9 oz fresh yeast

The rest
210 g/7.4 oz strong white flour
6 g/0.2 oz ground cardamom
100 g/4 oz unsalted butter
50 g/1.8 oz sugar
60 g/2.1 oz honey

—

5 g/0.2 oz salt

Filling
200 g/7.1 oz butter, cubed at room temperature
150 g/5.3 oz sugar
25 g/0.9 oz cinnamon

Nib sugar or slivered almonds for decoration.

Sugar solution
65 g/2.3 oz sugar
100 g/3.5 oz water

For the preferment you mix the yeast with the liquid until the yeast is dissolved. Add the flour and mix until it’s a smooth dough. Let it rise slightly in it’s bowl covered with cling film or a clean towel for 45 minutes to an hour, longer or shorter depending on how warm it is in the kitchen. Cube the butter and let it get to room temperature. Add the rest of the flour, cardamom, butter, sugar and honey to the preferment and mix on a slow speed in a kitchen machine for 5 minutes. Add the salt and mix on a medium speed for 3-4 minutes. Let the dough rest for 30 minutes to an hour again depending on the temperature, it should feel soft to the touch and increased in size. Make the filling by combining room tempered butter with the sugar and the cinnamon. Roll out the dough with a rolling pin, spread the filling on the dough making sure to reach the corners and the sides and roll into a roll. Cut into slightly thicker than 1 cm pieces, just under half an inch. Put the oven on 240 degrees C/465 degrees F (215 degrees C/419 degrees F if you’re using a convection oven). Sprinkle nib sugar or slivered almonds on the buns. Make the sugar solution by putting sugar and water in a saucepan and bringing to the boil and then taking it off the stove. Let the buns rise until they have increased in size by quite a lot and feel light and fluffy when you poke them. Bake for a few minutes until they look nicely baked and brush with the sugar solution.

IMG_0480

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