Shocks and Shoes: Baking Partners

Recipe for the Week – Cheddar Oregano Scones (Baking Partners Challenge #23)

12:01:00 pm

I’m back with a recipe!! I missed last month’s Baking Partners challenge with everything that happened, so I really wanted to do this month’s. All the more since I’ve never made scones before although they’ve been on my ‘must-bake’ list for so long. They are surprisingly easy to make, and the end result is more than satisfactory!

This month, we had two options – a savory tart and cheesy scones. This recipe doesn’t have those small cute scones; instead it features larger scone wedges. This is another reason the recipe is so easy and quick – no scone cutters required. The original recipe is from here, and was modified a little for us by Archana from The Mad Scientist’s Kitchen. Archana also provided some useful tips along with a step by step tutorial which was very helpful :). The recipe actually calls for sage, but I couldn’t find any and made do with oregano.

What you’ll need:

225 g plain flour, plus more for dusting

3 tsp baking powder

A pinch of pepper

50 g salted butter, plus more for greasing

50 g + 50 g cheddar cheese, grated

1 tbsp oregano + ½ tbsp oregano

1½ tsp English Mustard

100 ml curd

50 ml water

Note: The recipe calls for unsalted butter and added salt, but I skipped the salt and used salted butter. Also, I couldn’t find powdered English mustard as mentioned in the original recipe, so I went with regular English mustard.

What you’re going to do:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C and grease and flour a shallow baking pan. Cut up the butter into small cubes and put it back to chill.

2. Whisk the curd till smooth and add water till it hits the 150 ml mark. Set aside a tsp to brush on the scones. Whisk the mustard into the remaining buttermilk.

3. Sift the flour with the baking powder and pepper till well combined.

4. Rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips till it resembles breadcrumbs.

5. Add 50 g cheese and 1 T oregano and mix it all together with your fingers.

6. Make a well in the centre and add the buttermilk-mustard mixture. Roll into a soft dough.

7. Pat the dough into a circle 3 cm thick. Transfer this circle onto the prepared pan.

8. Cut the circle into 8 parts and separate the wedges a little on the pan.

9. Brush the scone wedges with the reserved buttermilk and then sprinkle the ½ tbsp oregano on top. Follow with the remaining 50 g cheese.

10. Bake for about 15 minutes till the scones are browned and the cheese is completely melted.

Check out that beautiful brown and all that glorious melted cheese:

The recommended way of serving these scones is with butter, but we skipped it.

Instead, we had it for breakfast with sausages and some Tabasco sauce on the side :).

This is perfectly lovely for a cold rainy morning. Doesn’t take too long, and doesn’t need the butter to be left out or anything. I think it would go really well with some scrambled eggs too :). Or maybe baked beans; the options are endless!!

Have you ever tried baking scones? If not, do try out this recipe!! Till then, here’s a little something for Game of Scones….err….Thrones fans:

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Baking Partners, Food

Recipe for the Week – Chocolate Babka Muffins (Baking Partners Challenge #21)

2:43:00 pm

Hot hot hot!!! God’s own country is now God’s own grill!! Seriously, stepping outside is like stepping into a preheated oven. We live somewhat near the beach, so we get a good deal of breeze, but even then, it’s HOT!!!!

Being crazy busy in March, I missed out on the Baking Partners Challenge. I resolved to do it this month and I’m so glad I did – these chocolate babka muffins are super yummy!! If you think you’ve heard ‘Babka’ before, maybe it’s here:

It isn’t much fun standing near the stove when it’s so hot, but baking is better, just pop it in, set the timer and run from the kitchen! The original recipe asked for milk chocolate and cinnamon, but I used dark chocolate and skipped the cinnamon. I also skipped the streusel topping to go easy on my butter consumption :).

This recipe was suggested by Tamy of ‘Three Sides of Crazy’ and has been adapted from this recipe at ‘Portugese Girl Cooks’.

For the Dough:

1/2 cup whole milk, warmed 110 degrees (I boiled it)

1/4 cup sugar

2 teaspoons instant rapid rise yeast

1 large egg at room temperature

2 cups all purpose flour

3 tablespoons butter at room temperature

Note: Original recipe asked for unsalted butter and ½ tsp of salt, but I used salted butter and skipped the salt.

1. With an electric whisk, combine the milk, sugar and yeast. Add the egg and whisk till blended.

2. Add the flour, mixing on low until sticky dough begins to form. Mix in the butter until well blended with no remaining chunks. The mixture now looks like this:

3. Knead the mixture to form loose and sticky dough. Place dough in a greased bowl, cover with tea towel and let rise until doubled in a warm place. This will take 1-2 hours, depending on the humidity in your place (which obviously Kerala has loads of). Here’s how it looks before and after 2 hours of rising:

For the Chocolate Filling:

3/4 cup dark chocolate chips

1/4 cup brown sugar

3 tablespoons salted butter at room temperature

1. Place chocolate chips, brown sugar and butter in a small mixer jar and whiz till blended.

Note: The original recipe mentioned the resulting filling to resemble crumbs. I got more of a paste.

Making the Muffins:

1. Turn out the dough onto a floured surface. Punch out all the air from it. Flatten into a rectangle shape with your hands and let to rest for 5 minutes.

2. Roll it out into a larger 12”x20” rectangle using flour as needed.

3. Spread the chocolate paste (or sprinkle if your filling is in crumb form) all over the rectangle evenly.

4. Roll the rectangle tightly into a log. Cut out uneven ends if any, you can bake these pieces separately.

5. Divide the log into 1” pieces, cutting with dental floss for neater results. Place each piece cut side down into muffin cups. I used silicon cups, you can also use a tin, but they’ll need paper liners to prevent sticking. Cover with a tea towel and let them rest for 30 minutes.

6. Preheat oven to 190° degrees. Brush tops with beaten egg. Bake for about 15-20 minutes till brown around the edges. Cool completely on wire racks, although they are just as yummy when really warm :).

They turn out really nice and soft; check out the inside of one of the edges that I had cut off from the dough log:

I love how the excess chocolate melts on top of the muffin – yum!!

These can actually be baked on a baking sheet as well, in which case they’ll look more like rolls than muffins. I’ve always wanted to try those pull apart cinnamon and Nutella buns I’ve seen on Pinterest, but never got around to it. The technique here is similar so now I’m confident to go ahead and try them!! Muffins, rolls or buns – if they’ve got chocolate in them, I don’t care what they’re called!!

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Baking Partners, Food

Recipe for the Week – Heart Shaped Crunchy Seed Cookies (Baking Partners Challenge #19)

3:36:00 pm

I’m surprised at how widespread Valentine’s Day is in India nowadays, even in small towns and cities :). It’s becoming bigger and bigger as the years go by, and all bloggers start getting into gear right from mid January!! The Baking Partners group is no different, and this month’s challenge is a Valentine special :).

We had a choice of Linzer Heart Cookies or Heart Shaped Crunchy Cookies. I went with the latter since I like a good crunch – be it in cake, chocolate or cookies! This recipe has been adapted from the book, Chewy,Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy, by Alice Medrich.

What you’ll need: (for 20-30 cookies, depending upon the size of your cookie cutter)

1 tbsp black sesame seeds

1 tbsp white sesame seeds

1 tbsp flax seeds

2 tbsp coarse raw sugar (I used Demerara)

1 cup + 2 tbsp all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp cream of tartar (or substitute with ½ teaspoon of baking powder)

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/8 tsp salt (I skipped it since my butter was salted)

4 tbsp butter, very soft

1/2 cup granulated sugar

Half of 1 large egg (optional)

1 tsp Vanilla extract

Note: You may use nuts and seeds of your choice, like poppy or sunflower seeds or finely chopped almonds or cashews.

What you’re going to do:

1. Preheat oven to 190° C. In a shallow bowl, mix seeds and coarse sugar and set aside.

2. In a different medium bowl, combine the flour, cream of tartar and baking soda, and mix together thoroughly with a fork.

3. In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugar with an electric mixer on medium-low, until smooth and well-blended but not fluffy.

4. Add the egg and vanilla extract and beat until smooth. Add the flour mixture, half at a time, and mix with a spatula until completely incorporated and formed into dough.

5. Flatten the dough into a disc and place it between two sheets of parchment or cling wrap. Roll till the dough is about ¼-½ inch thick.

6. Sprinkle the dough with half of the seed-sugar mix. Roll tightly over the seeds with a rolling pin to press them in. Turn the dough over. Sprinkle and roll the remaining seeds.

7. Use a heart shaped cookie cutter to cut out heart shapes. Carefully lift each cookie with a spatula and place them two inches apart on parchment-lined baking sheets.

8. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes (14-16 for larger cookies) until cookies are slightly browned on the edges, rotating pans halfway through. Set the liners on racks to cool.

Cookies will keep for up to two weeks in an airtight container. With the scraps left behind, I repeated the process, but sprinkled a little of the seed-sugar mix on the cut out cookies.

These cookies are super, super crunchy!!! The seeds give it a beautiful nutty taste and smell, and they’re just delicious overall! This recipe is really good, the dough doesn’t stick and the cookies are easy to cut out and place in the pan. It’s easier than it appears, so do try it out. Thank you Swathi for suggesting this recipe!!

Baking Partners, Food

Recipe for the Week – Koffiebroodjes/Dutch Coffee Buns (Baking Partners Challenge #18)

9:25:00 pm

Cold winter afternoons beg for something warm and comforting, to go along with your coffee or tea. You can, of course, scour the neighborhood bakery for cupcakes and the like, but there is really nothing like home baked goodies accompanied by those amazing smells!!

This month’s Baking Partners Challenge is perfect for the current weather and is something most of us haven’t even heard of before – Koffiebroodjes or Dutch Coffee Buns. This recipe has been suggested by Kaveri, and is adapted from the one at The Dutch Table. The original recipe doesn’t have any trace of coffee; these are intended to be had with coffee :-). I however tweaked it a bit to my liking – replaced the raisins with chocolate chips and replaced the jam glaze with a coffee version. Read on to see if you like it!!

For the Pastry Cream:

1 cup warm milk

3/4 Tbsp vanilla

2 egg yolks

1/4 cup sugar, powdered

1/4 cup flour

A pinch of salt

1. Mix the egg yolks with sugar, add salt and 1 T flour. Mix till creamy.

2. Add vanilla to warm milk and stir. Mix 1 T of milk mix into egg mix. Stir in rest of flour.

3. Carefully stir all this back into remaining warm milk and on low heat, stir the mixture till it is a thick mass.

From this.....

.....to this.

4. Take off stove and cover with plastic film so that the film is touching the surface of the pastry cream. This is to prevent the formation of a skin. Cool to room temp.

For the Bun Dough:

1 cup lukewarm milk

2 tsp active dry yeast

5 Tbsp sugar

3.5 cup flour

60 g butter at room temp

1 tsp vanilla

1 small egg

1/4 cup chocolate chips

1. Dissolve the sugar in 1/2 cup of lukewarm milk and add the yeast. Leave to rest for 15 minutes till it foams up.

2. Add the proofed yeast mix into the flour along with the vanilla, butter and egg and mix into a smooth dough. Add the remaining milk slowly and as needed.

From this....

.....to this.

3. Cover with a damp cloth and proof till doubled in size, about 1 hour.

4. Roll out the dough into a square 12x12 inches approximately. Use extra flour if the dough appears sticky.

5. Spread the pastry cream onto the dough, leaving the sides free. Sprinkle the chocolate chips on the cream.

6. Take the furthest end of the dough and roll it towards you. Place it seam down and divide the roll into equal slices about an inch wide.

7. Place the slices cut side down on parchment placed on a baking sheet. Cover and proof for about 30 minutes or till the dough is puffy.

8. Preheat oven to 180° Celsius and bake the rolls for 10 minutes. Turn the baking sheet around and bake for a further 10 minutes till golden brown. Cool to room temperature on a wire rack.

For Coffee Icing:

25ml of hot water

2 tsp instant coffee

100g of icing sugar

Make an espresso with the hot water and coffee and whisk it with the icing sugar to a smooth lump free paste.

Drizzle the icing on top of the buns and enjoy with a cup of coffee. Doesn’t just reading about it make you feel all warm and cozy?

The bun part turned out really soft and fluffy, and it went perfectly with the yummy pastry cream and the melting chocolate chips. Mmmmm!!!!!

This requires a bit of prep, considering the pastry cream and the proofing time, but otherwise it’s actually easy and doesn’t require too many ingredients. I’ve wanted to try some pull apart buns for a while, and I’m glad I got this recipe that has a similar technique. Do you guys have any tried and tested recipes to go with your afternoon tea or coffee?