Baking again - Lardy Cake

Goodness me, is that April and May nearly gone already? It's all been a bit quiet on the baking front recently. Not only have we been brought low by a couple of nasty colds, but I've been trying to get back on with brewing - a nice bitter, and a mild to be ready in about 3 weeks - and Ali was working flat out to put together stock for her first craft fair. Read more about that over on the Craft Matters blog.

Then there's our new Facebook shop opening, again more on this over at Craft Matters. Special offers there for a limited time...

In addition to all this activity, having gone through a few of our old cook books to find some interesting recipes, I've had a few un-blogworthy disasters... So finally, it's third time lucky with a great recipe for lardy cake from the Dairy Book of British Food I last dipped into just before Easter.

Lardy cake is not something for those worried about their waistlines, and probably comes under the category of occasional treat rather than everyday staple! It's traditional to the West Country and the version I made did compare quite well to a memory of lardy cake from a holiday in Devon several years back.

So here's the recipe:

450g (1 pound) strong white bread flour
1.5 tsp dried yeast (or fresh yeast: 15g or 1/2 oz)
1 tsp salt
75g (3oz) lard, diced
75g (3oz) butter, diced
180g (6oz) dried fruit: sultanas, currants, raisins, whatever you fancy.
50g (2oz) candied peel, chopped (optional - if not, bung in some more sultanas)
50g (2oz) sugar

Sprinkle dried yeast into 300ml warm water with a pinch of sugar & leave somewhere warm for 10-15 mins until frothy. Or blend fresh yeast with 300ml lukewarm water.

Put flour & salt in a bowl and rub in 15g (1/2 oz) of the lard until all the lumps are incorporated in the flour. Make a well and add the yeast & water mix. Then beat together to make a dough which leaves the bowl clean. You don't want it too sticky: add flour or water to get the right consistency.

Then either turn out onto floured surface & knead for 10 minutes or put in a food processor with a dough hook on the lowest setting for 10 minutes. It needs to be smooth and stretchy.

Put the dough into a bowl, cover with a clean tea towel and leave it somewhere warm for an hour until it has risen to about twice its original size.

Then turn out the risen dough onto a floured surface and roll it out into a rectangle about 1/2 cm thick, a bit like this:



Dot the dough with a third of the butter & lard and then sprinkle it with a third of the dried fruit (and peel if you're using it) and sugar:



Now fold it into thirds: fold the bottom third into the middle and the top third over the bottom third and you end up with something like this:



Turn the dough through 90 degrees and sprinkle it with another third of everything:



And then fold it into thirds again. Rotate once more, repeat the sprinkling and folding and then squish the parcel down gently with the rolling pin until it's the right size for your tin:



Now cover it loosely with a polythene bag and leave it to prove in a warm place for about 30 minutes. Halfway through this period pre-heat your oven to 220C (Gas Mark 7). The cake should puff up like this:



Score the top with a sharp knife in a criss-cross pattern and bake for about 30 minutes until it's golden on top. Check it after 20 minutes and if the top is browning too quickly, cover it with some foil for the rest of the time. Take it out of the oven to cool:



It's especially delicious sliced while still warm, or cool it on a wire rack and wrap it up to last for a couple of days. The book suggests spreading it with butter! That seems a little excessive...

Baking Day: Rice Bread

This recipe is taken, with a couple of minor tweaks, from Jane Grigson's classic English Food, Grigson herself adapting the recipe given in Elizabeth David in English Bread & Yeast Cookery. It seems to have been very popular in nineteenth century England, as Jane Grigson says: "Lady Llanover said it was by far the best bread for sandwiches, in particular for chicken sandwiches".

We wanted to make this with brown rice, because it's nice and nutritious and our two really like the flavour. And it got a big thumbs up when we gave it to them this lunchtime with some home-made hummus on it. The grown-ups had cheese & mustard sandwiches and now there's hardly any left at all..

But on to the recipe. Here's what you need:

85g (3oz) long grain brown rice (uncooked weight)
8g (1/4 oz) dried yeast (or twice that quantity fresh yeast)
15g (1/2 oz) sea salt
500g (18oz) strong white bread flour

Some olive oil for brushing

The first thing to do is to cook the rice. 85g is about a half cupful. Put this in a pan and add a cup of water. Bring to the boil then cover and cook very gently on your lowest heat for about 40-45 minutes. It may take longer and you might have problems with it sticking to the bottom of the pan, so check it towards the end, stir and add more hot water if necessary.

Some time while the rice is cooking, combine the dried yeast (or twice as much fresh yeast) with a little lukewarm water until it has dissolved.

Measure out the flour and dissolve the salt in about 150ml (1/4 pint) of very hot water in a measuring jug. Add another 100ml of cold water once the salt has dissolved (ie. get 250ml or 8 fl oz of lukewarm water). If you want to use less salt, I'd probably go for about 8-10g.

Add the hot, cooked rice to the flour and fork it in a bit.



Add the salted water and the yeast mixture and combine together until you've got quite a soft, sticky dough. We used the bread hook on our Kenwood and ended up with this:



Cover it over with a polythene bag and leave it somewhere warm for about an hour and a half, until it's doubled in volume. Like this:



Knock it down and knead it gently for about 5 minutes (again, we used the Kenwood). Add more flour if it's too sticky - you want it leaving the bowl clean and so it doesn't stick too much to your fingers.

Next, oil the bottom of a 1.5 to 2 litre bread tin a little and line it with some baking parchment. Brush the inside of this with a little olive oil and tip in the dough, pressing it gently into the sides. Cover with the polythene bag again and leave it somewhere warm until it rises up to the top of the tin. After about a quarter of an hour, pre-heat the oven to 230C (gas 8); after a further quarter of an hour or so it should look like this:



Gently remove the bag and place it in the oven. Cook for 15 minutes at 230C (gas 8), then lower the heat to 200C (gas 6) and cook for a further 15 minutes. Take it out of the tin at this point and then cook it upside down for another 5 minutes. Put it on a rack to cool.

It's a very tasty bread indeed, with a lovely flavour and texture from the rice and a great crust. And it does make great sandwiches - cheese, egg or cold meat would all be equally yummy. The boys said it was v. tasty with hummus and even with some butter and honey.

** Just a little update on this one - we've also made it replacing half of the white flour with strong stoneground wholemeal flour with delicious results. It's possibly even more delicious.

Our Breakfast Buns

This is another recipe using buttermilk so I hope you've found your supply by now! This recipe has an interesting twist - the flour is soaked overnight in buttermilk before being baked. I first encountered this idea in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. Her theories are a bit too complicated for me to go into now (buy or borrow her book - it's well worth a read) but one of her ideas is that soaking grains before use (as practised in many traditional cultures) makes them more easily digested and makes their nutritional content more easily available.

We call these Breakfast Buns at home because that's when we usually have them - they make a great weekend treat. The recipe is very much like that for buttermilk scones - but they are more moist and lighter than ordinary scones. They keep better too - although if your family are anything like mine, there wont be any left to keep. They also, I assume because of the soaking process, need considerably less bicarbonate of soda than ordinary scones require.

Our Breakfast Buns

325g plain wholemeal flour (spelt makes a brilliant alternative)

90g chilled butter, in cubes

200ml buttermilk (maybe a little more)

100g (very approximate!) plain flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

pinch of salt

Put the flour in a large non-metallic bowl. Add the cubed butter and rub the fat into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs (see picture). Or use a food mixer of course!

Add the buttermilk and stir in with the flat blade of a knife (this bit is definitely better done by hand rather than machine). You are aiming for a mixture like a very wet bread dough - if your mixture isn't sticky, add a little bit more buttermilk. You need something that looks like this:

Cover the bowl with a plate, clingfilm or a plastic bag and leave overnight at room temperature.

The next day, put your oven on to 220C (Gas 7). Line a baking tray with baking parchment and get a round pastry cutter ready - I use a 6cm cutter. Add the salt and bicarbonate of soda to the dough and then add enough plain white flour to make the dough into a rollable state, like this:

I find the amount required can vary wildly - start with a couple of tablespoons and add more as required. Start mixing with a knife and continue with your hands.

Flour your work surface and use your hands to flatten the dough into a round disc about 2.5cm (1 inch) thick. Cut out rounds with your pastry cutter and transfer to your baking tray - they can be pretty close together - like this:

Keep cutting and re-rolling the dough until it's all used up - I can usually get around 14-17 buns from the mixture.

Put them in the oven and bake for 8-10 minutes, until risen and golden brown. Leave to cool a little on the tray then transfer to a cooling rack. Eat quickly with lots of butter, and spread with honey, jam or (especially) marmalade.

It's Shrove Tuesday today and we forgot to have pancakes this morning - so we'll have some after dinner I think. Our boys prefer thick American style pancakes - which is good because I am useless at making the thin kind - I think you need a really good frying pan too. We like to use the banana and buttermilk pancake recipe, as blogged here by Kit in South Africa, from Nigella Lawson's Feast - they're quick and easy to do, and I like to tell myself that the banana is getting a little bit of extra nutrition into their tummies. And, of course, it's another use for buttermilk... It really is a useful thing to have in your fridge!

Irish Wholemeal Soda Bread

A very tasty, non-yeasted, quick to make loaf this week. Soda bread is a traditional bread in Ireland, and is brilliant if you need bread at the last minute, because it only takes an hour to make from start to finish.

Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) is used as the leaven (raising agent) rather than yeast, and buttermilk is the traditional liquid component. Buttermilk can be hard to get hold of, but once you have some, it is very easy to maintain a supply (see below for information about this).

The 1st time I made soda bread the result was pretty unpleasant - it was very heavy and really tasted nothing like the wonderful versions I had had on holiday in south-west Ireland. This, much more successful recipe, is taken from Rick Stein's Food Heroes - Another Helping. It has more white flour than the recipe I used first time round, I've learned an important lesson - it's important not to over-mix the dough, as Rick Stein points out, very little kneading is required.

A final note before you get started - you need ordinary plain flour to make soda bread - bread flours are no good for this because the gluten content is too high.

Wholemeal Irish Soda Bread

275g stoneground wholemeal flour

275g plain white flour (plus a little extra for kneading)

1 rounded tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

1 tsp salt

450ml buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 230C/Gas Mark 8. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Make a well in the centre, pour in the buttermilk and mix together (note: I use a knife and then my hands) to make a soft but not too sticky dough. Add a little more buttermilk if the dough seems a bit dry.

Turn the mixture out on to a lightly floured surface and knead lightly and very briefly into a round. Flip the dough over and gently flatten in into a disc about 4cm (1 inch) thick. Lightly dust a large baking sheet with flour (note: I use baking parchment), place the dough on it and then, using a large knife, cut a large cross in the top, almost all the way through the dough. Stab each quarter once in the centre with the point of the knife.

Bake the loaf on the middle shelf of the oven for 15 minutes, the lower the oven temperature to 200C/Gas Mark 6 and bake for a further 20-25 minutes, until it sounds hollow when you tap the base. Remove from the oven and leave to cool before serving.

*****

Soda bread is very definitely best eaten on the day it was made - although it isn't bad toasted the next day (although the slices can be an odd shape for a toaster!). We like it with soup or cheese, but it is particularly good with fishy things like gravadlax, smoked salmon and my personal favourite, rollmops.

Buttermilk

I think a bit of confusion surrounds buttermilk. There are 2 products called buttermilk - one is the by-product of butter making - the liquid that remains after cream has been churned into butter. This is pretty much unobtainable, although we've been lucky enough to get it at Farmers' Markets in the past. The second, more widely available version, is a cultured milk product similar to yogurt. It's available in bigger supermarkets - the brand I have seen most frequently is Yoplait.

Once you have bought buttermilk it is easy to keep a supply on hand indefinitely. All you need to do is add a little buttermilk to ordinary milk (in the proportion 1 part buttermilk to 4 parts milk) and leave at room temperature for around 12-18 hours. You can use a bowl covered with a plate or cloth for this, but the easiest container for this is a a clip-top preserving jar (the type with a rubber sealing ring). Once the mixture has thickened you can transfer it to your fridge where it will keep for a week to 10 days.

There are other uses for buttermilk besides this delicious bread. To make creme fraiche just add 3 tbsp of buttermilk to about 200 ml of double cream. Leave at room temp and after 12-18 hours you will have a delicious creamy creme fraiche. Or, leave 1 litre of buttermilk at room temperature in a large clip top preserving jar until it separates into curds (solid white stuff) and whey (liquid). Line a sieve with muslin or folded kitchen paper and pour in the buttermilk. Then tie up the white solids in the cloth and suspend overnight to let more liquid drip out. After the curds have drained you will be left with absolutely delicious creamy curd cheese. Try this mixed with garlic and fresh herbs and spread it on your soda bread. Scrumptious.

Pitta Bread

Pittas are really versatile and good fun to make yourself. Even better, they freeze well, so you can make a big batch of them every so often and have stacks in. There are lots of recipes for pitta breads easily accessible from Google; Delia Smith has a good one too, but she uses a breadmaker to make the dough. This one is based on the recipe by Madhur Jaffrey in her Eastern Vegetarian Cooking, with a few tweaks here and there.

Ingredients:

250g strong white bread flour

200g plain wholemeal flour

1tsp sea salt

1 tbsp olive oil

250g lukewarm water

2 tsp dried yeast

1 tsp sugar

Method:

Mix together with your hands in a large bowl:

250g strong white bread
200g plain wholemeal
1 tsp sea salt

Then dissolve in 50g hand-warm water in a small bowl or glass:

2 tsp dried yeast
1 tsp sugar

- and leave it for 5-6 minutes.

Make a well in the flour, add the yeast mixture, 1 tbsp olive oil and 200g hand-warm water. Mix it together until it comes together in a ball and the sides of the bowl are clean. You'll probably have to add some more lukewarm water to bring it together - about 2-3 tbsp probably.

Turn it out onto a clean, dry surface and knead for 10 minutes until you've got a smooth and stretchy dough. Brush the large bowl with a little olive oil, put the dough in, cover it with a damp cloth and leave to rise somewhere warm for 1.5 to 2 hours.

Make sure your bowl is big enough for it to double in size! I used a smallish glass bowl for these before and after photos and the risen dough nearly took over the kitchen:



Once it's risen, knock it down and knead it again until it's nice and smooth. On a clean, floured surface roll it out into a sausage shape. Actually I did it into two sausages, about 6-8 inches each, which were easier to manage. You should divide your dough into 12 equal pieces. Squish them down into ovals and then roll out until they're about a quarter of an inch thick.

They need to prove for about 45 mins next. I found the best way of doing this (so they didn't end up sticking together) was to line roasting tins (or baking sheets) with baking parchment, sprinkle this with flour, lay out the pittas and then cover it loosely with a tented polythene bag. Leave out on the surface.

About 20 minutes before the end of this period, heat your oven to its maximum temperature and put either a cast iron griddle or frying pan, or a baking sheet, into the oven to heat up. When the oven's got to the top temperature, add 2-3 pittas at a time to your pan in the oven and cook them for 3 minutes.

When they're done, wrap them in a damp cloth to cool. Before eating, re-heat them under the grill.

*********************

What to have with them?

Hummus is a good thing to make and one of these days I'll work out the measurements for my bung-it-all-in recipe! A really good way to make hummus is to blend together all the ingredients (chick peas, a teaspoon or two of light tahini, a garlic clove, 2 tsp or so of roasted & ground cumin seeds, the juice of half a lemon, 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil**) in a bowl using a hand blender.

**ok, so that's almost a recipe for about a tinful's-worth of chick peas (although we cook from dried). It's vague because I usually start the extras (especially the tahini and the lemon juice) small, taste as I'm going along, and add some more if I think it needs it.

Another really nice thing is some spiced or otherwise flavoured yoghurt. Here you can experiment a lot. We like to just squish a couple of garlic cloves in salt and add that. Another thing we do is roast & crush coriander seeds then stir them through, maybe with a pinch of cayenne pepper too.

Pittas are great for packed lunches and picnics, especially for kids. Our two like them filled with hummus, chunks of sausage or fish. They're really nice with salt beef and English mustard in them too. There's also the old Grub on a Grant student special of pitta bread pizzas, which are pretty much what you'd expect!

Baking Day: Banana and Apple Bread

This week's bake - Banana and Apple Bread - is a recipe from the original Cranks Recipe Book. Cranks was the first ever vegetarian restaurant in the UK in the 1960s. I got this book in the early days of my vegetarian period (around 1990 I think) and it has served us very well since - even though I'm back to eating meat now. You can see from the picture that it is very well used - half the pages are falling out these days. There are some quite hard going meal ideas in here, but it has some excellent, very wholesome recipes, especially for baked treats. Favourites in this house include carrot cake, ginger and orange cake, sticky prune cake and bara brith.

Whilst I had the oven on for the bread yesterday I also made a loaf of bara brith - twin 1 has now demolished a fair proportion of it (it's his absolute favourite), but this is how it looked before he got his hands on it. Bara brith is a tradional Welsh recipe (bara brith means speckled bread) and appears to have 2 different styles - yeasted and unyeasted. I expect the yeasted style is more authentic, but the recipe in the Cranks book is an unyeasted one. Sultanas, raisins and currants are soaked overnight in tea (this is the traditional method) which plumps them up so they are lovely and juicy in the finished cake. The next day you add flour, an egg and some spice, and a little sugar (I don't usually bother) and bake for 40 minutes or so. The huge advantage of this recipe is that it contains no fat and you can make it with no added sugar - there aren't too many delicious cakes that you can say that for!

This week's bread is another no-added-sugar recipe. We make this very regularly - it's a good way of using up left over apple puree (a favourite pudding with the boys) and over-brown bananas.

Banana and Apple Bread

450g plain wholemeal flour (for a slightly less dense bread you can use half plain white flour)

7g dried yeast

150 ml lukewarm water

3 tbsp of apple puree (1 apple, chopped small and cooked in small pan with 1 tbsp of water until mushy)

25g sugar (optional - you can omit this entirely or use a tbsp of honey)

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

4-5 gratings of whole nutmeg (or 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg)

50g sultanas

1 large (or 2 small) mashed bananas

grated rind of 1/2 lemon

In a large mixing bowl, mix together 100g of the flour, the yeast and the warm water and leave in a warm place until it rises and bubbles (see left). If you are using a food mixer, put the flour and water straight into your food mixer bowl as I've done here. While the ferment is rising, line a 1lb loaf tin (21cm long by 11cm across by 6cm deep) with baking parchment. You can use a bigger tin but your loaf will be flatter when it comes out of the oven.

Now add the rest of the ingredients (including, obviously, the rest of the flour!) and stir thoroughly, either with a wooden spoon, your hands, or the beater attachment on your mixer. You do not have to knead the dough - just ensure that the ingredients are thoroughly combined. If you are using a mixer then leave the sultanas out until near the end of the mixing process, so they don't get mushed up by the beater.

The dough should be quite wet and sticky - if it feels a little dry and is not sticking to your fingers, add more apple if you have some, or a tablespoon or 2 of water.

Transfer the dough to your prepared tin and smooth the top of the dough with wet hands. Put the tin inside a large polythene bag (a supermarket Bag for Life is, as usual, ideal for this) and leave in a warm place until the dough is teetering on the brink of rising over the edge of the tin (see right). Now's the time to put the oven on to pre-heat to 190C/Gas Mark 5. When your bread has risen, transfer the tin carefully to the oven and bake for about 35 minutes until the top of the loaf is golden brown and the bottom sounds hollow when you give it a tap. Remove from the tin straight away and leave to cool on a wire rack. This is delicious, still warm from the oven, with butter and honey. We also like to have it toasted for breakfast, with honey, marmalade or fruit butter. Twin 2 likes it with chocolate spread, but the rest of us are not convinced by that one!

Words of Wisdom

The way to approach baking is with peace in your heart and a jug of cider by your side.

Keith Floyd

Focaccia

An Italian flat bread, rich with olive oil and with a nice firm texture. The recipe below is based on the one given in Ursula Ferrigno's brilliant The New Family Bread Book, which goes into really helpful detail and has stacks of great recipes. It's her quantities we followed for the 'biga', which is a yeast starter added to improve the texture of the bread.

It's one to be done over two days:

The evening before

'biga'
100g strong white bread flour
1/4 tsp dried yeast (or 1/2 tsp fresh) dissolved in 130g warm water

Mix thoroughly - it resembles a stiff pancake batter. Cover & leave for 12-24 hours at room temperature.

Main recipe

250g strong white bread flour
2 tsp salt
1 tsp dried yeast (or 2 tsp fresh)
160g warm water
olive oil
4 tbsp biga

sea salt crystals

extra virgin olive oil

Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl.

Dissolve the yeast in 2 tbsp of the water.

Add the dissolved yeast, olive oil & biga to the flour & then add the water, a little at a time, bringing it together into a soft, but not too sticky, dough.

Knead for 10 minutes on a floured surface - at the end of this, the dough should stretch nicely when pulled, and not break. Oil a bowl, put the dough in it, brush a little more oil on the top, then cover with a damp tea towel or a polythene bag and leave it somewhere warm to rise for 1.5 hours.

Knock back and knead for 5 minutes, then cover again and leave somewhere warm to rise for 10 mins.

Roll out into a square or circle, about 1cm thick & transfer to a baking sheet. Tuck a polythene bag around the sheet like a tent over it and leave for 30 minutes to prove.

Pre-heat the oven to 200c (gas 6). Make little dimples in the top with wet fingertips, sprinkle with salt crystals and some fresh rosemary. Leave it to rest for another 10 minutes.

Bake for 30 minutes or until it's a nice golden colour.

Leave to cool and then sprinkle and spread the top with good extra virgin olive oil.

*****

What we like to do with focaccia is something we read Nigel Slater recommending once - which is to slice it in half across-ways, fill it with yummy stuff, wrap it in foil and return to the oven until everything's piping hot.

We did two fillings. The first was spread on both sides thinly with tomato puree then layered with sliced mozzarella, chopped black olives and parma ham. The second had tomato puree mixed with a touch of chilli powder spread on each side and was then filled with mozzarella and anchovy fillets.

Bath Buns

When we lived down in Cambridge we were frequent customers of the brilliant market stall called the Earth's Crust. They had excellent sourdough and rye breads, brilliant pastries (their chocolate and almond brioche made Sunday morning very special for me) and yummy cakes.

Our sons were particularly fond of their Bath Buns, which is understandable because they are completely delicious, and toddler-satisfyingly huge.

So now we can't indulge at Earth's Crust any more, I thought it was about time that we had a go at making our own Bath Buns. This recipe is based on the one in Jane Grigson's English Food, which she got from Cobb & Co Ltd (I presume a bakers) of Bath. I've added sultanas, because my sons believe that all buns have some kind of dried fruit. I've also omitted some of the sugar in the bun in an attempt to cut down on the calories. These buns are incredibly rich, but I am unapologetic about that because everyone needs a treat now and again. They're definitely best eaten on the day they were made, preferably warm from the oven.

Bath Buns (makes 12 buns)

Ferment

10g dried yeast

10g granulated sugar

70g lukewarm water

4 eggs

75g strong white flour

Dough

450g strong white flour

180g softened butter cut into cubes

45g sugar

a pinch of mixed spice

a pinch of salt

150g sultanas

Bun wash and topping

30g sugar

3 tablespoons water

coarsely crushed sugar lumps, sugar crystals or granulated sugar

The buns start with a ferment which gives them a better flavour and results in a lighter dough - which is fairly essential for this very rich recipe. Put the yeast, sugar and water into a medium mixing bowl and whisk together to dissolve the yeast. Leave in a warm place for about 15 minutes until it has bubbled up. It will look something like this:

Beat the eggs in a separate bowl and then stir into your yeast mixture. Sift in the 75g of strong white flour and stir gently until combined. Cover the bowl with a damp tea-towel or cling film and leave in a warm place until the mixture has frothed up (this takes an hour or more depending on the temperature). You will have something that looks like this:

Put all the dough ingredients, except the sultanas, into a large bowl, gently add the ferment and mix it in using your hands or a mixer with a dough hook. It will seem impossibly sticky at first but patience is required. If you are doing this part by hand, as soon as you are able, turn the mixture onto a very lightly floured work surface and knead for about 10 minutes. If it does not show signs of losing it's stickiness at this stage add a little more flour (start with 1 tbsp). but don't rush into adding flour in the early stages. If you are using a mixer then mix for about 5 minutes. The finished dough should be smooth, a little sticky and will spring back when poked.

Flatten the dough to about 3cm thickness and press the sultanas into it, fold the dough over then press down again. Keep folding, pressing and kneading until the sultanas are fairly even distributed. You should end up with something like this:

Put the dough back in the bowl, cover the bowl with a damp tea-towel or clingfilm and leave in a warm place until it has doubled in size. Again, depending on the temperature this will take at least an hour, probably more like 2 hours for such a rich dough. Your risen dough will look like this:

Line a baking tray with baking parchment, or flour the tray thoroughly. Take your dough, and handling it gently, divide it into 12 pieces, each around the size of a small apple. Try and ensure that you don't have too many sultanas poking out through the dough because they will burn in the oven. Put the buns on the tray with a bit of space around them to allow them to rise:

Put the whole tray into a large carrier bag (I find 'Bags for Life' invaluable for this), making sure that the bag is not touching the buns, and put in a warm place until the buns have puffed up and are 'batching' (i.e. pushing up against each other). This will take anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. Now is the time to preheat the oven to Gas 7/220C.

When the buns are ready to go in the oven, remove very carefully from the bag and bake them for around 15-20 minutes. Keep a close eye on them - the rich dough can burn quite quickly.

Whilst they are baking make the bun wash. Put the 30g of sugar and the water into a small saucepan and heat gently until the sugar is dissolved, then boil until the mixture is syrupy. Again, watch carefully, it is easy to get toffee at this stage! If using, crush the sugar lumps coarsely in a pestle and mortar.

When the buns are baked, remove from the oven and transfer to a cooling tray lined with a fresh sheet of baking parchment or greaseproof paper. Brush the tops of the buns with the syrupy bun wash and sprinkle with the sugar.

Leave to cool a bit and then enjoy - like this!

Twelfth Night Spiced Bun

Cakes were always a big thing for Epiphany, Twelfth Day, Twelfth Night, or whatever.

It might be the fifth of Jan, the sixth of Jan, or really, whenever you fancy. Confused by when to count the first day of Christmas, by whether to celebrate on the eve or the evening of Epiphany, or even by some diehards celebrating Old Christmas Day on the 6th of Jan after calendar reforms, it's best just to throw up your hands and seek refuge in a cake.

Cakes are really the traditional English Twelfth Night food. In some households the person who got a bean in their portion would become the president or captain of the evening's festivities; earlier in wealthy households this took the form of a carnivalesque inversion of authority, a 'Lord of Misrule' who ensured everyone got drunk. Much later, there are stories of mischievous urchins nailing the clothes of those peering in bakers' windows to the wall, as the queuing public stood in static admiration of the cakes on sale.

Whatever the history, here is our first baking recipe for 2010. It's for a kind of bun loaf for which you'll need a tin of around 16cm diameter - we used a circular one with a removable base which worked just fine. The basis for the recipe is a ferment and dough given by Andrew Whitley in Bread Matters, as we mentioned here. The book's well worth looking out, as we've said numerous times before..

Night Before:

180g mixed dried fruit: raisins, currants, sultanas - the usual suspects
45g brown sugar
spices: cinnamon stick, cloves, allspice berries, grated lemon zest, whatever you fancy

Soak overnight in 250ml of tea. Strong black tea is fine - we used strong red bush tea.

On the day:

The baking takes about three and a half hours from start to finish.

First make the ferment in a small bowl:

5g sugar
5g fresh yeast, or 3g dried yeast
60g milk, warmed slightly
50g wholemeal flour

Mix together well and leave somewhere warm for 1 hour.

The dough:

30g sugar
60g strong white bread flour
50g wholemeal flour
1 egg
120g of the ferment
50g butter

1. Mix sugar and flour together.

2. Add egg and the ferment. Work into a dough and knead for about 1 minute. You can do this in a mixer with a dough hook.

3. Add butter and knead for 10 mins (by hand) or for 5 mins if you're using a mixer. You should end up with a soft and sticky dough. Wet your hands a bit if you're kneading by hand!

4. Cover with a polythene bag and leave somewhere warm for 1 hour.

5. Drain the fruit from the soaking liquid and pick out the whole spices. Fold the soaked fruit into the dough pretty thoroughly.

6. Line your tin with baking parchment so that it comes over the sides a bit. Drop in the dough (don't be too rough with it), cover it with a polythene bag, and leave somewhere warm to prove for 30 mins.

7. Pre-heat the oven to 180c

8. Brush the top with a bit of beaten egg and bake for 35-45 minutes - check with a skewer to make sure there aren't any squidgy uncooked bits in the middle.

9. Remove it from the tin and the paper and leave to cool on a wire rack.

Here's what it looks when it comes out of the oven:

And it tastes very nice indeed.

Baking

Happy new year! I think you can just about get away with saying that still in the first week of 2010. The plan for this year is to do more baking and blog a few tested recipes here. The aim is for one each week - we'll see how we do with that!

With this in mind, I'm attempting a festive Twelfth Night bread-cum-cake tomorrow, using an excellent dough recipe from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters (which we wrote about earlier a couple of times) as its base. The book's a great buy for anyone looking to get into all kinds of baking, by the way, highly recommended. Here's it's Amazon link.

Our cake-y bread-y thing is going to be a fruity and spicy number, to suit the season, so the first step for baking it tomorrow is going to be soaking the fruit, so that's about:

180g of mixed dried fruit

45g of brown sugar in a bowl

- soak overnight in about 240ml of tea with a cinnamon stick, 5 cloves & 4 allspice berries. Or any whole spices you fancy.

I think I'll use red bush tea, as that's been successful for us when making bara brith in the past.

The full recipe will appear tomorrow, once I've wrestled the thing into something edible for Twelfth Night, which depending on your preference is either the 5th or the 6th of January. Of course, you can always come up with your own excuse for baking and eating a lovely cake...