Sam's First Meringue Roulade - Christmas Style!

Merry Christmas everyone!
In light of the Christmas festivities, a classic time for cooking and baking, I wanted to do something special. Since we don't eat Christmas cake or pudding in our house, I've been looking to having a range of possible alternatives that are just as tasty and special. So I settled on a trusty favourite - meringue roulade, by who else but baking queen Mary Berry herself. Since I already knew that Sam likes meringue, I thought this was a failsafe option, which I could easily spice up into a festive style.

Instead of fresh strawberries, I added home made cranberry sauce - there are many recipes online, but I picked this one from the Ocado website, and modified it to make it suitable for a dessert by omitting the shallots and doubling the amount of sugar recommended. Also, I didn't have any red wine open, so I thought I'd just substitute it with a little bit of port!

you can also see in the background the process of how I made the blue sugar star decorations. I used a recipe from the brilliant Sugar Hero with a very funny description of how she was inspired to make this recipe (from the show Breaking Bad, nothing at all to do with the festive recipe for which I'm using it here). The details for the sugar stars are at the end.

The recipe itself is pretty simple and starts off with making a very stiff meringue!

Since I wasn't using the almond flakes in this recipe, I added extra speaks for texture before baking in the oven.

After baking and leaving to cool, it was time to add the filling. Here I tweaked the recipe again a little, and used a Christmasy champagne double cream as a filling. After laying the cranberry sauce on top of it, the roll looked like this:

The extra space at the far end is required as when you roll up the roulade, the filling has a tendency to ooze out. This is nothing to worry about, and adds to the overall messy look to this tasty dessert! The rolling part is probably the trickiest, but it works best when you take the band aid approach - just do it in one, quick, swift movement!

Then we decorated the roulade with glitter sprinkles and the blue stars, like so:

It's quite easy to get the sugar shapes, just place some metal cookie cutters into the poured sugar while it is still molten. Then carefully pop them out when they've hardened.

 

I think it turned out reasonably well, and with a few tweaks, it could be really perfect. Unfortunately, Sam didn't really take to my cranberry sauce, I think that they were a little bit tart for him! 

Sam: The meringue was lovely, it was a perfect mix of crunchy on the outside, and gooey and chewy on the inside. I'm not a big fan of cranberries, but the sauce tasted relatively nice. Overall, I'd give it 7/10

Sam's First Crème Brûlée

Okay, so after a bit of a hiatus due to academic commitments, we are back, with a little taste of something we cooked up last week, before the looming deadlines were upon us.
Sam first came upon this dish when we were at the Himley hotel on a weekend away, and after a brief description, he was convinced to try it. The dish that came out was so much to Sam's liking that requests ensued to recreate it at home.
And after a bit of resistance on my account, due to a mistaken belief that it was a complicated and time-consuming dish to make, I felt I ought to give it another chance, and to my pleasant surprise, it actually turned out to be neither. I say "another chance" because, admittedly, I had once tried to make this before, but the results were a curdled mess in a pot, with a patchily charred topping - it was a less than tasty experience I quickly wanted to forget. But after having been inspired by the technical challenges the Great British Bake Off crew seemed to get through, I thought it was worth another try.
So, time to jump in to the crème brûlée! (Or as Sam says, "Burnt cream!") It's such a long-standing recipe, it was actually quite hard to find a basic one, since there's an array of variations out there. After settling on this one, things went pretty smoothly. Since the first part of the recipe is simply beating some egg yolks with sugar and heating some double cream, I've skipped to the part where we put the ramekins into the bain marie.

Having said that, prior to this point, Sam had done his fair contribution by holding the electric whisk until the mixture went pale and fluffy, and I do wish I'd taken a photo of him doing so!
After cooking, came the best part - the torching!

And the results were super tasty :)

With a good crunchy caramel topping

Sam: 9/10 I love contrast between the smooth custard and the brittle caramel topping. Deliciourific! Taste-tastic! Would definitely make this again

Sam's First Pain au Chocolat

Ok, so I know what you're thinking - surely Sam hasn't gotten this far in life without trying a pain au chocolat? The man loves croissants, and surely they're almost the same thing? Well Sam may have tried them some months ago now, but I can truly say that before me, he hadn't ever had a single one. He was so taken with croissants, he never saw any need to deviate from the predictable flaky goodness of a croissant. In fact, the bold step to even try one only came along when a few months back, our local Waitrose had run out of the premade frozen croissants we used to buy for Sam's breakfast. "Are pains au chocolat okay instead?" I asked nonchalantly, having already placed a packet in our online basket. "What are those?" came the reply. Shocked, yet excited, I ordered the bag of frozen pains and after they arrived, we popped them in the oven and they rose beautifully and turned a lovely golden brown. Sam was surprised to find that he enjoyed these other French pastries.
Sam's comments: lovely! 8/10. But why are they called "pains" of chocolate. It's not painful at all. Is this similar to that other dessert I keep hearing about "death by chocolate"?

Sam's comments: Eva sure was interested in me eating these pains of chocolate. She thinks I've never seen them before, but I have. I just didn't want to touch them. They may have had a chocolatey-looking filling, but I couldn't really be sure without trying one. And frankly, when you've got something as tasty as a croissant, what is the need to deviate? Having said that I did end up liking these and do enjoy them sometimes

Sam's First Cannoli

Recently when the continental market came to Leicester on its biennial visit, I was too busy to pop down, but since Sam had a couple of days off and was in town running a few errands, he offered to pick up a few things for me while he was there. So of course, I asked for my usual favourites - ostrich burgers and cannoli. "Right, so where do I find these canneloni?" After correcting him, he seemed to find his way to the aptly named "Italian temptations" stall, and clearly gave in to the 6 for the price of 5 offer, since there were many there in the box to greet me when I got home. But unusually, this time around Sam seemed interested in trying them out. I wasn't sure whether to be happy since last year, he didn't even want to touch them, or to be disappointed that there were fewer left for me. I decided to go with the former, since he clearly seemed to be enjoying them!

Sam's comments: They were nice. They were just like an Italian Milky Way Crispy Rolls. 7/10

Sam's First Pumpkin Pie

Sorry for the dry spell in posts recently, the start of the new term has been busy for both of us, so we've had to put our cooking hobby a little bit on the back burner for a while.
But when the holiday season came along, even we couldn't resist but rustle up something in the name of Halloween and Bonfire night. So in the end I snapped up a pumpkin at the market for a £2 bargain.
Sam helped to start off the carving and put in a bit of elbow grease in scooping out the flesh of the pumpkin as well.

Since we had a pumpkin, I thought we may as well make some pumpkin pie. So I just followed the basic recipe from Anthony Worral Thompson, except first I made some of my own sweet shortcrust pastry from scratch (mainly because I'm not a fan of shop bought sweet shortcrust pastry with all the hydrogenated fat and it allows me to add brown sugar and crushed pecans, for a boost of extra flavour and texture). So after blind baking, it looked like this:

After steaming and blending the pumpkin flesh, it was mixed with the eggs and cream:

After 35 minutes cooking, it looked pretty well risen, as if it was about to bubble over, but after leaving to cool like the recipe said, it collapsed back down. I decorated with with a few chocolate shapes to make it look more festive:

The pie turned out well and sturdy, with a good flavour in a way that a good traditional pumpkin pie should. It seemed to go down well with a fellow PhD friend who was excitedly trying out pumpkin pie for the first time. However, it didn't seem to be such a hit with Sam himself, who promptly left the remainder of the slice after trying only one spoonful:

Sam: "Urgh! It tastes like slime! I won't be eating that again in a hurry!" 2/10

Still, we cheered him up by putting a carving into the pumpkin of his favourite spy that's been popular in the cinemas lately :)

James Bond pumpkin

James Bond pumpkin-tastic!

Sam's First Coca de San Juan (St John's Flat Cake)

Continuing with our Spanish thing, there was one thing that certainly caught Sam's eye (and his stomach). Every morning, we would peruse the delicious things on offer in the local bakeries, and inevitably, Sam would almost always ask for the same thing. Decorated with a colourful array of dried fruits, Coca de San Juan is a flat sweet bread that is traditionally eaten as part of the feast on the eve of St John's Day on 24th of June, as part of the Spanish midsummer celebrations (just after the summer solstice). It could be that they were prevalent because we were there just a matter of weeks after this date, or maybe they are available all year round, but whichever it is, it was certainly delicious.

We used a simple recipe from a little Catalan cookbook we bought in one of the tourist shops:

Ingredients:

300 g bread flour

125 g softened butter

3 eggs

40 g of sugar or more to taste

1 sachet of baking yeast

a pinch of salt

For the decoration:

100 g of glazed fruits such as candied orange slices, glacé cherries, angelica

20 g pine nuts

50 g sugar

1 glass of muscatel or other sweet dessert wine

1. Leave the dried fruits to soak in the sweet wine for 2 hours

2. Mean while, rub the butter into the flour, then combine with the remaining ingredients to make a bread dough. I usually combine the butter and flour by hand, then add everything to a bread machine on the dough setting. Add some milk if the dough is too dry, and some flour if it's too wet. The dough can also be flavoured with lemon zest or anise for a more traditional flavour

3. Cover the dough and leave to rest for 4 hours (yes, the recipe really says 4 hours!) until it is doubled in size.

4. Stretch the dough out into a flat cake oval shape, but try to avoid knocking all the air out of it. Spread the fruits on top, then sprinkle with the pine nuts and the sugar. Leave to rest in a non-draughty place for another 30 minutes, during which time you can preheat the oven to 180 oC (I found this was too hot for my fan oven, so I took it down to 160 oC)

5. Bake for 25 minutes until golden brown

6. See how long it lasts when it is fresh and warm from the oven!

Sam's First Reibekuchen (Potato Pancakes/Latkes)

Recently, when a German friend reminded me of these wonderful fried goodies, they seemed like the perfect accompaniment to my attempt to bring a little bit of Spain with us for our weekend dinner; not just because I haven't quite mastered the finer Spanish arts with potatoes such as croquettes, but also because patatas bravas seems to be a form of glorified roast potatoes. In addition, they reminded me just a little bit of my childhood (although my dad would refer to them as "krumpli lepény"). And when I found out that Sam had never tasted these deliciously irresistible treats, I knew I had to incorporate them into our next meal.
My German friend recommended this recipe, but I found the onion content rather high, and there's an equally good one on the BBC Food website. Having said that, this is really one of those recipes that can be done by eye according to the cook's preference.

So, as always, it starts with grating the onions and potatoes:

As you can see, I used a mandolin on the julienne blade to get nice, clean, thin, slices, as I find that using a cheese grater tends to "mush" the vegetable flesh too much. This way you get a nice crisp finish. Also, I find that in this way you get less of the liquid which many recipes tell you needs to be eliminated to achieve the best finish.
Then mix with the eggs and flour to make it all stick together:

Scoop out large serving spoonfuls into hot oil in a frying pan, like so:

It is perfectly fine to shallow fry these, just give them a few minutes on each side; there is no need for a deep fat frier.
And that's it! They're done pretty quick:

Ok, so whilst they're not the most aesthetically pleasing food creation, they are one of the most delicious, and had Sam in fits of saying "More, more!", followed by "these are like crack!" and finally "I've found heaven and it's in the shape of a potato pancake!". There were many more, but some are less appropriate to mention here!

So I can safely say that this is a whole hearted 10/10 from Sam, with requests for them again the following day! :)
The complete dish was home made chorizo in red wine (using up the chorizo we brought home from Barcelona!), peas, and the reibekuchen drizzled with bravas sauce. A bit of a European fusion meal

Sam's First Battenberg Cake...Jubilee style!

So, after many different cakes tested, Sam settled on a traditional English Battenburg Cake, but jazzed up with some jubilee colours! The recipe itself is pretty straight forward, and Sam has pretty much got the sponge recipe down pat. The only part of the recipe that was fiddly was that we used two tins, and had to align them exactly, and also, the cut sides of the cake were not easy surfaces to spread with butter cream. But overall, we had a great time making it:

Sam: 8/10! I really enjoyed making this cake.It was fit for a Queen :)

Sam's First Attempt at Lemon Drizzle Cake

So, with Sam's work Jubilee weekend bake-off only round the corner, he has gone into cake over-drive, road-testing other recipes that he could bring along. This week, he thought he'd give his old favourite Lemon Drizzle Cake a go, using a recipe from Olive. Having learnt the creaming method from the previous cake, Sam got off to a great start.

He could even be safely left alone to zest the lemons (he spiced things up a bit by adding a lime too)

My intervention wasn't required until the final stages, when a surprisingly dry cake mix gave away the fact that Sam had neglected to put in four eggs - yes! FOUR eggs! With disaster averted, Sam was confident that the cake would nonetheless turn out well, regardless of what order the ingredients went in. It seems that he was proved correct in this case, since the cake turned out as tasty as ever:

Sam was very pleased with himself :)

Sam's First Marble Cake

Now, I know what you're thinking - "Surely, Sam couldn't possibly have gone through life without ever trying any marble cake?!" Well I'd say that you were right! (And don't call me Shirley) In fact, this was Sam's first attempt at baking a cake, so he started off with a simple, familiar family favourite. So after finding a good, basic recipe for marble cake on the BBC Food website, he enthusiastically threw himself into the joys of baking. The initial stages of creaming the butter and sugar together were done by hand, so they needed a strapping young lad like Sam regardless, and I'll admit I've put his brute force to good use in other such situations. Here is Sam at work, in happy anticipation of the cakey goodness coming up:

 This project required the minimal supervision, just a few checks during mixing, and before going into the oven:

And after an hour's baking, it came out quite well:

Sam's comments: I chose this recipe because it was a childhood favourite. It wasn't too complicated, and I wouldn't mind making it again.  I've yet to perfect the recipe, as it came out slightly dry, so much so that at one point, I think I aspirated some crumbs and almost started choking! 7/10, but with promise for the future :)

Sam's First Macarons....Dutch style!

OK, so strictly speaking, these aren't Sam's first macaroons, but he only had one at Christmas, so this was his first chance to really savour them. I'd previously made macaroons at Christmas from the fabulous Lorraine Pascale. I'd tried a few macaroon recipes before, but this one is the only one I've found that properly works:

So, when I was invited to bring something along to a birthday party of a Dutch friend, I decided to give these a go again, but this time, with a twist!

Ok, so I couldn't get the colours quite right, but, I'm sure you'll agree, there is some semblance to the Dutch flag! Unfortunately, the red sides didn't turn out quite as well as the blue ones, so after finding an excess of blue macaroons, I decided to pay homage to Argentina too:

They seem to go down really well at the party, and by the time it was drawing to a close, every single one had gone!

Sam's First Chicken Cacciatore

Hello everyone, it's time for another entry, and Sam is back in the driving seat again! On this occasion he chose to make Pollo alla Cacciatore - this time, surprisingly by none other than the domestic goddess herself - Nigella! Initially, I was sceptical, since normally, chicken cacciatore has a reputation for requiring considerable time cooking/stewing. However, Sam had picked out this quick version from "Nigella Express", it was supposed to take much less time, and the recipe did in fact live up to its name! We were done in no time at all, which is a blessing on a week-night. Not only was it quick, but the flavours were really so delicious, we were fighting over who would have the leftovers for lunch the next day (In the end, I thought Sam deserved it, since he'd created the lovely dish in the first place)

We only slightly changed the recipe by adding some boiled potatoes for carbs, and I cheekily added a small portion of sauerkraut on my plate (You can take the girl out of Hungary, but...) 9/10

Sam's comments: It was so tasty my toes tingled! 9/10

Sam's First Easter Bread

So, since Easter is traditionally a time for the breaking of Lent, lavish celebrationary feasts and chocolate indulgence, of course we could not pass it without at least one notable mention of our culinary experiences. The most delicious of which was a modern take on the classic European Easter bread, bursting with butter and littered with tasty chunks of nuts and dried fruit, and hence widely popular especially around Eastern European countries, from Poland to Bulgaria and Greece.
This version was mainly based upon Olive's recipe for the Pecan Twist, which has a slightly different variation on the shape of the bread and uses pecans instead of more traditional European nuts. For added taste, we also threw in some chopped dried apricots and chocolate chunks. For the basic dough recipe, I used Dad's trusty old Beigli recipe - rich, sweet, yet springy enough to even make doughnuts from! So after leaving the dough to rise, I rolled it out, added the filling ingredients and proceeded to twist it in the method outlined in the magazine. It was a bit fiddly, but I think the result was worth it!
Within half an hour of cooking, the kitchen began to fill with the most delicious smells, which I later found out had percolated into the corridors and lead my neighbours to enquiry about what exactly was cooking, and by the time the day was drawing to a close, more than half of it was gone. Definitely a wonderful dish prepared fresh, it can be simply devoured in large chunks and is even better drizzled in honey or maple syrup depending on your choice.
Sam's verdict: Deliciously chewy 7/10

Sam's First Paella

A wonderful take on the classic chicken and chorizo paella!

Sam's verdict: Wonderful! 9/10. I like how the taste of Spain is expressed in this dish. I wish we could have had more. Can we have this every night?