Lemon Squares

This is a really quick and easy food processor recipe, but it does mean that I have naff all in the way of "in progress" photos:)



Ingredients

Preheat oven to 180C (350F)

Base

2 cups plain flour
1 cup cold butter, in smallish pieces
1/2 cup icing sugar
1/2 cup coconut - flaked or desiccated

Lemon Layer

1/4 cup plain flour
2 cups white caster sugar
4 large eggs
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon baking powder

Greased and lined 13 x 9 x 2 baking pan

Place all the ingredients for the base into the food processor and process until it looks like wet sand. Press the crumb mixture into the base of the pan and bake for 15-20 minutes until the edges are golden brown.

While the base is baking in the oven, put all ingredients for the lemon layer into the food processor and blend for two or three minutes until well combined and to let the sugar begin to dissolve into the eggs and lemon.

Pour the lemon mixture over the base while it's still hot and bake again for 20-25 minutes until the surface of the lemon mixture is crisp and golden. It's easier to do the pouring if you just leave the baking pan in the oven and slide the shelf it's sitting on out of the oven slightly to make it easier to get at, rather than try to carry it back to the oven full of liquid.

Once baked remove the baking pan from the oven and place on a wire rack, then leave the squares in the pan until complete cool and cut into squares ready to serve.



The lemony layer is very like a firm set lemon curd with a very light and crispy topping.

Enjoy

Non Bread Tasty Loaf Thingy

A friend likes to call this cinnamon and apple soda bread, because it uses soda as a raising agent, but my dad disagrees as it doesn't use buttermilk. He likes to call it a tea bread because that's generally when he eats it, but because it isn't made with tea and doesn't contain yeast I disagree about the whole tea bread theory or even the bread bit to begin with.

It's closest relative is the muffin but because of the size almost everybody disagrees with me. Though if I make individual ones in muffin cases, they'll happily play along.

What everyone does agree on is that it tastes really good, warm or cold and it gets even better as each day passes. It's the perfect little loaf to make in the evening so you can drift off to sleep to the smell of warm cinnamon (perhaps with a slice already in your belly) and wake up to a fat slice for breakfast, spread with a little butter or jam.


Ingredients

Preheat oven to 180C (350F)

1 1/2 cups plain flour (dug in cup fulls from the bag)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup white caster sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar (packed firmly)
1 teaspoon bicarb/baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon (we love cinnamon but you can half this amount for a more subtle flavour)

1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1 cup applesauce

Place all of the dry ingredients into a large bowl and mix to combine. It's usually easier to scrunch the brown sugar through the rest of the ingredients with your hand.



Place the wet ingredients into a jug or another bowl and again give them a good mix.



Dump the wet ingredients into the dry and stir until just combined, don't worry too much about little lumps, especially where the brown sugar is concerned. Pour the batter into a 2lb loaf tin and spread it around a bit to level it.



This batter starts to rise pretty quickly, even in just the time it takes to mix in the bowl and pour into the tin, the batter will have become almost mousse like. Place the tin in the preheated oven and bake for at least an hour.

It takes about an hour and 15 minutes in my oven, slighter longer in mum's and as much as 90 minutes at a friend's house, but after an hour test for doneness with a skewer. It's ready when moist crumbs cling to the skewer rather than any batter.



Leave it in the tin to cool for about ten minutes and then turn out. It will have a light fluffy crumb on the inside and a crisp crust which softens once it is completely cooled.

Serve hot from the oven, cold the next day or warmed slightly under the grill with or without butter and jam.

You can of course make up this recipe and make individual muffins. It will make about a dozen large muffins and they take about 30 minutes to bake and make a great breakfast on the go.

Enjoy!

Meringue Christmas Tree Cookies

Well they're not really cookies as such, but you can pick them up with one hand and eat them so 'cookies' will do for me.

Start off by preheating the oven to 100C (80C for fan assisted) and beat four egg whites until stiff peaks form. I used a stand mixer but you could use an electric whisk or even do it by hand if you're feeling energetic.

Once the eggs are stiffly beaten, whisk in 250g caster sugar and beat until the meringue is glossy.

Next put the meringue mixture into a piping bag (it really is easier to do these in a piping bag rather than trying to spoon it onto the tray and make a tree shape).



Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or silpat and pipe Christmas tree shapes by zigzagging back and forth.




You can pipe these really close together because meringues don't spread.

Now pop the tray in the oven and basically forget about them for two hours. It doesn't really matter what size you make the trees, it'll still take about two hours.




Once they're ready take the tray out of the oven and lift the trees straight off to cool down. They actually only take about ten minutes to cool so you can spend the time getting your decorations together.

Yes, there is a sneaky snowman up in the top left corner:)




We used blue and pink icing 'tinsel' on our trees, but you could use anything really. Dip them in chocolate (but wait til it cools a fair bit), cover in sprinkles add a shake of edible glitter or sandwich two together with fresh cream and strawberry jam in the middle, anything goes really with meringue.



And enjoy them.

With 20/20 hindsight, I should have been making these all year. You can freeze them undecorated, they keep for months and months in the freezer and they're a great way to use up any eggs that are close to their best before date because old eggs make better meringue than fresh.

I should plan ahead more next year.

A Quick Q & A

Just popping in to brush away the cobwebs, don't mind me.

I had a little plunder through my analytics today for the first time in months probably and I noticed that quite a few people find this little kitchen of mine by asking questions that I've yet to answer.

So I'll get right down to it...

"Why does my Victoria Sandwich Cake break at the edges"

The most likely reason is that it is sticking to the cake pan. I use a recipe I found on Recipezaar which is just one part solid vegetable fat or shortening, one part vegetable oil and two parts plain flour (you can replace the flour with cocoa for a chocolate cake). Beat these three ingredients together and store in an airtight container, it keeps for eons in the fridge so you can make big batches and you just use it to grease your cake pans. Superglue couldn't stick to this stuff.

The other thing that will cause a cake to crumble is not enough egg in the recipe. You really need egg to make a good cake and I always use this simple recipe to make sure that there is exactly the right amount of egg in my cakes every single time.

But in the end if your cake tastes great nobody is going to care if it looks a little shabby round the edges. Your going to eat your cake, not frame it.

"Boiling potatoes in their jackets"

Yes you can, in fact it's about the only fool proof way to boil floury potatoes like British Queens without ending up with a pot of potato soup. Don't prick them or anything like that, but do start them off in cold water and bring it up to the boil with the potatoes already in the pot. This way the potatoes cook evenly the whole way through and you don't wind up with perfectly cooked innards and watery edges. Invest in a good potato ricer and you can even make mashed potatoes and the ricer reserves all of the skins which you can just discard. All of the goodness and none of those icky brown bits that kids will wrinkle their noses at.

You'll also thank yourself for buying that potato ricer when you're making banana bread and wrist deep in 20 mashed bananas because "they were on sale".

"Cake overflow, will it ruin the cake"

Not a chance. I've done it often enough myself.

When it has happened to me and if it's a plain cake (purely for the sake of having a cake in the house) I tend to get it out of the pan and spread jam over the top while it's still warm and then sprinkle coconut over the jam. I remember it from school dinners when I was a kid and my love it when they get a slice of 'cake gone wrong' and a pouring of custard over the top.

If your plan was to decorate the cake, I've had some success in just trimming away what is overlapping the edges of the cake pan, the same way you would trim excess pastry away from a pie dish and leave the top of the cake as intact as possible. The more of the cake's crust you remove the more structural integrity it will lose and there's a good chance that the weight of any icing or frosting will make the cake collapse.

"Can I make a pavlova without an oven"

Now this I genuinely don't know. At least I've never heard of anyone making a pavlova without an oven.

What I know you can do without an oven is make Italian meringue. The ingredients are exactly the same as for normal meringue. The difference is that you start off with the four egg whites in you mixer or if you're using a handheld whisk have them ready to go and forming firm peaks before going any further.

What you then want to do is put 500g of white sugar and 100ml of water in a heavy based pot and boil the sugar until it reaches 115C (240F) it will just barely be changing colour at that stage and then all the while whisking the egg whites add the sugar to the egg whites in a thin steady stream and you have meringue. You can pile it up and colour the outside with a blow lamp for a brulee like crust or float a couple of spoonfuls on top of hot chocolate.

"if pavlova cools too quickly"

I'm about the least patient person I know and while a pavlova that is left in the oven until it is completely cold (even if it takes four incredibly long hours) is the best pavlova in my opinion, the only difference I've noticed in whipping it out of the oven after about 15 minutes cooling time is that it sometimes cracks a lot more (hey, its not like it's going where it's going completely unscathed any way) and the inside is more mallowy than the chewy almost toffee like centre that allowing it to cool in the oven gives you. Not a bad thing in my book. If you need it quickly, get it out of the oven.

"How to store pavlova"

Freeze it. Pavlova bases freeze perfectly. Well, actually that's something of a lie, they don't really freeze they just get very cold and sit there in the freezer and I swear you could lift it out and be eating it in 10 minutes. You can leave them in there for months as well, no harm will come to them and it means you can have a few sitting ready to go so that you don't have to worry about taking them out of the oven early and cooling too quickly.

"Using chocolate chips in baking"

Don't!!!!! I mean it, don't even go there. I mean what are we talking about really to be able to use lovely, good chocolate that you've chopped yourself? Two minutes. Two minutes and you don't have to use icky chocolate that's full of stabilisers and rarely tastes anything like real chocolate, big bags of chocolate chips wouldn't look too much like chocolate chips if it weren't for all the additives.

And then you can kiss goodbye to the two minutes you saved on making the cookies when you have to spend ten scraping the kids off the ceiling or coaxing them off the top of a wardrobe where they're rocking back and forth going "fehumana humana humana".

The less additives the better if you ask me.