An hour later, I'd ordered her books from Amazon for an impulsive £8.00 for both Baking Made Easy and Fast, Fresh and Easy Food. I wasn't sure whether I was sceptical, or pleased - but she had a wonderfully warm and friendly approach to friend, and her Caribbean burgers with halloumi fingers looked like the perfect summer lunch and that was exactly what I felt like eating.

Sometimes, when it's cold outside and won't stop raining, you need a pot of tea and a large bowl of scones.


They don't take very long to make, and they're oh-so-delicious when eaten straight out of the oven. And, surprisingly, you can add interesting things to them. These are date scones.

Sometimes you just need to spoil yourself. Especially at the end of a hard weekend of Christmas Market Crafting.

It's been some time since I last posted a recipe here at bakercourt; it's something about baking regularly for other people, I think, that prevents you from putting anything in the oven for yourself other than dinner. This week, though, I made Abel & Cole's Breakfast Cookies, and I'm so glad I did.


They're not the most attractive biscuits I've ever had, but they're oh-so-delicious. They're like oat biscuits, filled with the deliciousness of dried fruit and nuts, and doubly delicious with the extra addition of a grated carrot.

And did I mention that they have no butter or eggs in them? My kind of biscuits.


Like I said - not the  most beautiful! I think if you added pumpkin seeds for green, and a sprinkling of grated carrot to the top of each biscuit, you'd end up with something akin to the photo on Abel & Cole's website. Don't let that put you off though; these are the most scrumptious breakfast biscuits ever. I made mine with walnuts, flaked almonds, roasted hazelnuts, dried dates and a spoonful of coconut. Mm.

Here's the recipe, from Abel & Cole.  By the by, you should also try their Rustic Irish Potato Bread and "anything goes" veggie fritters. Yum.

Ingredients:


125g wholemeal or spelt flour
150g jumbo porridge oats
1/2 tsp bicarbonate soda
a pinch of sea salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
100g dark or light brown sugar
4 tbsp maple syrup or agave nectar
1 large carrot or 2 medium-sized carrots, coarsely grated
100ml olive or coconut oil
100g chopped dried fruit (raisins, dates, apricots, mango and/or figs)
100g chopped nuts or seeds
Grated zest of 1 lemon (optional)

Method:


1. Preheat oven to 180°C/Gas 4.

2. Add the flour, oats, baking soda and salt to a big bowl. Mix well to ensure the baking soda and salt are evenly distributed. Add the remaining ingredients. Mix everything together.

3. Scoop by the tablespoon and press into rounds on an oiled baking sheet. Tidy up the edges. You'll probably get about a dozen per tray. If you don't want two batches, just freeze the rest of the mix for another day.

4. Bake for 10 mins, or till just starting to set and just picking up a little colour. They'll set to be soft and chewy like this. If you'd prefer them crisper, flip the cookies over and return to the oven for 3 mins or so to crisp up the bottoms.

5. Once cooked, they store nicely for a week in an airtight container.

Enjoy!

I love peanut butter. It's a particularly indulgent treat here at Bakercourt. Mostly because when I do indulge in a piece of buttery toast with 'peanutter', it's a rare Saturday morning when the sun is shining outside and I just felt like a bit of a pick-me-up of the culinary variety. Otherwise, it is likely to be encased in a tell-tale orange wrapper with the brand 'Reese's' blazoned across the front. Oh, I do like me some Reese's Cups when I've had a bad week and I feel like a nutty treat.
















So, when I spied a recipe for Peanut Butter Brownies in the Australian Women's Weekly biscuits, brownies & biscotti, well, the next step was logical.

















I got baking. This is a slightly unusual brownie recipe because you do it over the stove, rather than in a mixer. But, the end result was delicious.

















I changed the recipe slightly because I didn't have enough chocolate to whip through the mix after the initial 150g that you melt in with the butter. To compensate, I added a very generous helping of chopped hazelnuts to the top. I also baked my brownies in a larger pan which made them thinner, but still delicious.

















And here you go. Peanut butter brownies swirled with extra salted peanut butter and served with a side of crunchy peanut butter ice-cream. Because, really, you can't get better than that.

















Here's a look at the underside of the brownie. I took the peanut butter straight out of the fridge before dolloping it in to the mix so it stayed together really well for little peanut butter bite-sized surprises in each brownie.

And, because I know you can't possibly wait to try this yourself, here's a copy of the recipe from The Australian Women's Weekly website. You can thank me later.


Ingredients:

180g unsalted butter, chopped
150g dark chocolate, chopped
1¾ cups (385g) caster sugar
4 eggs, beaten lightly
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
¾ cup (110g) plain flour
2 tablespoons self-raising flour
1/3 cup (35g) cocoa powder
50g dark chocolate, chopped, extra
1/3 cup (95g) crunchy peanut butter

NOTE: This recipe can be made a week ahead; store in an airtight container.

Method: 

Preheat the oven to moderately slow (160°C). Grease a 20cm x 30cm lamington pan, line the base and two opposite sides with baking paper.

Combine butter and chocolate in medium saucepan, stir over a low heat until smooth; transfer to a large bowl. Stir in sugar, eggs and essence, then sifted flours, cocoa and extra chocolate.

Pour the mixture into the prepared pan. Drop small spoons of peanut butter into the chocolate mixture and swirl through the chocolate with a knife.

Bake in a moderately slow oven for about 50 minutes or until firm; cool in pan.

Cooked brownies suitable to freeze. Butter mixture and chocolate suitable to microwave.

I read a lot of foodie blogs and chat to a lot of lovely foodie writers here in the UK and around the world. Everyone operates using clever little blog names (mine is derived from the very first block of flats I lived in when I moved to the UK, Baker Court, which seemed fitting at the time of starting this blog!) or titles, and sometimes you come across one that really stands apart from the rest.

There is one blog title that I love, the aptly-named Baker Street which is full of lovely recipes and has lots of quirky design elements that draw inspiration from the London Underground transport system. Baker Street is a stop on the Circle and Hammersmith & City line, and is full of Sherlock Holmes regalia (plus, I can't help singing Gerry Rafferty every time I hear the name announced when going there).

Right-o, so that's a big long roundabout story about how I happened upon a recipe that was just calling out to be made. Cinnamon Hazelnut Shortbread. Yum. After reading the blog post I printed it out and stuck it on my fridge in anticipation.


















Here's a link to the recipe on Baker Street which she has adapted from Beth Lipton's book, You Made That Dessert. The book, by the way, looks incredible and utterly fool-proof, which makes it a winner in my book. I'm a sucker for can't-be-broken recipes, ideal for when you're having a bad day and want to bang a few pots around in the kitchen.

It's a good biscuit recipe that is very simple to make, and produces some tasty results. After seeing it day-in and day-out on the front of my fridge, I gave in. I doubled the cinnamon content because I fully believe that you can't have too much cinnamon with your hazelnuts, and I chopped up a handful of hazelnuts instead of using store-chopped nuts so the chunks were a bit uneven in size but equally delicious in taste.

The biscuits didn't have a particularly 'shortbread-y' texture, although the cornflour went a long way to giving it a starchy crumble. I would have increased the baking time by a few extra minutes - just keep an eye on the biscuits and catch them before they go brown.
















The end result was an ideal comfort-eating kind of biscuit, which is exactly what I wanted them for. For interest's sake, I halved the recipe which worked fine, and I baked them in a round tin which was the only thing I had on hand. They came out rather well as tall, shortbread chunks with plenty of nutty goodness to go around.

Have you seen the new Baked & Delicious magazine on the news-stands? It's bright and pretty and oh-so-desirable with attached silicon bakeware. It gave me a bad case of the wanties when I went into Tesco's earlier this week and perused the magazine racks.

I admit: magazines are my guilty pleasure. I don't like glossy magazines with celebrity gossip. I don't like magazines that cost £4.99 and make you feel like you made a bad choice because they're packed full of adverts and not very many recipes/patterns/articles. I really, really like magazines that give you free things. I started buying The CrossStitcher last year in February because you got a beautiful button tin with one of the issues. I picked up this month's Let's Knit because it came with a tea-cosy pattern, two balls of yarn and pretty bead-topped 4mm needles. And now, silicon bakeware with every issue? Uh oh.

















Besides, isn't that cupcake on the front absolutely YUM? Well, what do you think...






















Yes. That's my iced vanilla cupcake in dove-blue silicon cupcake case, topped with raspberries and dusted with icing sugar. Well, you can't have a magazine like this and not test out the recipes, can you?

The first issue of the magazine comes with 8 recipes (not bad for the introductory 99p but I really hope that the subsequent issues at £4.99 come with a bucket-load more! Although, there are promises of silicon loaf tins etcetera so that makes up for the price). They each have huge A4 photographs displaying the final product, and the 'basic' recipes (or 'techniques' recipes) come with step-by-step pics which is great if you're learning how to do something for the first time -- or if you're not so sure about something that you really should know but have been faking for a long, long time.


















I was given a copy and I couldn't resist testing out the vanilla cupcakes (as featured on the cover). They are a variation on a traditional vanilla sponge topped with buttercream icing and raspberries. I made a half-quantity of batter which perfectly filled the 6 silicon cupcake cases supplied.






















The cakes rose well, browned nicely, and filled the silicon cases with a nice flat top.


I then iced them with vanilla buttercream and  - well, you know the rest. Yum. They didn't have the nicest texture but they were very, very tasty. It always pays off to use the best ingredients, I think, and my pure vanilla extract is really delicious (although I cringe if I ever spill even the tiniest little bit from the lid or the end of a spoon - it's like precious black gold!).






















While those cooled (you can see them in this photo - they're the colourful cakey blobs in the background), I tried out another recipe in the magazine: Bitter Chocolate Puddings.

Now these are worth sharing.






















Firm on top, spongy on the inside, and pure gooey chocolate oozing out the middle when you break into them. Serve with a single scoop of pure vanilla ice cream and you'll be sorry that you don't have another batch coming out of the oven.

Here's the recipe, slightly modified for easy reading, from the Baked & Delicious magazine:

Bitter Chocolate Puddings

Ingredients
125g dark chocolate (70% cocoa, at least)
125g unsalted butter (plus extra for greasing)
150g caster sugar
2 large eggs plus 2 additional egg yolks
50g plain flour

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 190'C and butter 6 small (150ml) or 4 large (200ml) ramekins or pudding bowls.
2. Break the chocolate into a bowl and add the butter, cut into cubes. Place the bowl over a pan of gently simmering water and let the butter and chocolate melt. Stir to combine thoroughly and then leave to cool slightly.
3. Whisk the sugar, eggs and egg yolks in another bowl until they are thick and pale, then beat in the melted chocolate mixture.
4. Whisk in the sifted flour.
5. Divide the mixture between the ramekins and bake for 25 minutes (large ramekins) or just under 20 minutes (smaller ramekins) or until the puddings are lightly risen, slightly cracked but spongy to the touch.
6. Serve warm with a generous helping of vanilla ice cream.

The recipe suggests that you add a spoonful of brandy to the batter, or coffee, to give it extra depth, or alternatively add in a handful of chocolate chips in your favourite flavour.

I once ate a pudding just like this at a fancy restaurant in Cape Town. It was served with pistachio ice cream and retailed for about 12 times the price this cost to make. Not only that - the puddings I made were readily received and eaten within just a few minutes. Now that's baked and delicious.

We had a leeeetle bit of a drama last week: our car was clamped and we had to pay a massive to release it - in front of our flat! The building management has decided to enforce parking restrictions and we were amongst 30 of our neighbours who were caught up in it because, although we had the correct permit, we were not parked in an adequately-marked bay. Awfully frustrating, huff.

Well, the cure for car troubles, or indeed any sort of troubles, is a beautifully-baked loaf of bread. It's not only the taste of bread that helps: it's the process of rising, the hour-and-a-bit that you need to wait while the yeast does its yeasty business, the anticipation of the delicious baking-bread smell that fills the house and then - ta da! - the smell itself and the arrival of a beautiful loaf of baked bread that is hot and waiting to be buttered.

Such is bread.

When I bought my Kenwood Chef, which is undoubtedly my favourite possession of all time, I also got a lovely recipe book with it: Making Great Food Simple: Recipes for the Kenwood Chef & Major by Jennie Shapter. It's a great book - I use it all the time - and there's a wonderful bread recipe that I thank my lucky stars I found. It's adaptable, easy and doesn't have any of the thumping-whacking-kneading kind of bread-baking which is nice and therapeutic for the baker, but time-consuming for the work-at-home individual with little time to spare.

Basic White Bread


You'll need:
- 7g of fast-action dried yeast (that's one packet)
- 300ml of luke-warm water
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 450g strong plain white flour

1. Add the flour to the Kenwood bowl, then add in the sugar and the yeast.
2. Using the dough hook on minimum speed, gradually mix in the salt and the water until the mixture forms a soft dough.
3. Knead for 1 minute on minimum and 4 minutes on speed 1 until smooth and elastic. Remove the bowl, cover with oiled clingfilm, and put somewhere warm for about an hour, or until doubled in size.
4. Using the dough hook on minimum speed, knock back the dough for 30 - 60 seconds. Transfer to a lightly floured surface and shape. Cover with oiled clingfilm and leave to rise for 30 seconds, or until doubled in size.
5. Bake for 25 - 30 minutes at 220'C.

That's it.

It's a great basic recipe, and you can easily adapt it to create other kinds of breads too. For rolls,
add milk instead of the water, and shape into small balls or plaits instead of a round or loaf. Brush them with an egg-and-milk glaze to get that nice crispy roll texture and look. Or, make flavoured bread.

To combat car woes, I made a bread with some of my favourite things. I wanted a thick bread with a buttery, doughy texture and I wanted to be able to eat it with only a dab of butter and nothing else. So, when knocking it back (step 4), I added in some chopped sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts, a glob of garlic butter and a drizzle of balsamic glaze.

















Then, I shaped it into a round loaf, tucked underneath for texture, and put a cross on the top so it would burst up a bit to create a pretty rustic-looking loaf (a good-looking bread is even better to help combat particularly bad woes, I might add). You could also put three diagonal cuts in it, or just dust it with flour. If you cut it, make sure you don't cut too deeply: about 3mm is just enough.

















And there you go. I cooked it on a fan-forced temperature of 180'C for 20 minutes, but my oven does tend to over-cook things so I need to adjust cooking times and temperatures a little. This is a half-quantity, by the way, and it's just enough to not leave any leftovers if you're sharing.

















It breaks beautifully with exactly the right texture and a lovely combination of tastes. You have to be very careful when changing the dough's consistency by adding butter or other oil- or liquid-based ingredients, but this turned out just fine.






















Served for lunch with balsamic glaze and cubes of mature cheddar. Yum.

I've been wanting to make a Prinzregententorte for months. It's an elegant cake, a royal cake ... an epic cake. The kind of cake you get from Limnos or Cassis. It takes hours and hours and hours to make, and it's such a risk to invest that much time and energy (not to mention money!) into something you've never seen or tasted for yourself. But I made it anyway. And it was worth it.



It's a six-layer cake made up of six small sponges (individually baked) and a whole lot of chocolate. The sponges are delicious (they taste exactly like Boudoir Biscuits!) and they are joined together by layers of Buttercream in alternating flavours: Chocolate, Bailey's Irish Cream, Coffee, Bailey's, Chocolate. The whole cake is covered with a chocolate-Irish-cream glaze and finished with chocolate shavings.

As far as I know, the Prinzregententorte (shall we just call it 'Prince Regent Cake? It's awfully royal anyway) has its origins as a Bavarian treat, served for his Royal Highness Prince Regent Luitpold. For us, it's just extra-yummy cake which should be served at any special occasion or opportunity. With coffee. It's positively scrumptious.

Be prepared to set aside at least three hours for mixing, beating, battering, baking, icing, glazing, and decorating. It might take less (or more, if you have little people helping) but three hours is a good bench mark.

For the cake:

- 250g of butter, slightly softened
- 250g of caster sugar
- 50g of cornflour
- 200g of flour
- 1 teaspoon of baking powder
- 4 eggs
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200'C.
2. Cream the butter and the caster sugar together until light and fluffy. Then, slowly add the eggs.
3. Sift in the dry ingredients and fold in lightly.
4. Grease a loose-bottomed 25cm round baking tin. Line it with a circle of baking paper (I traced the bottom of the tin and cut out six circles).
5. Spoon 1/6th of the batter into the bottom of the tin. Make sure that the batter is spread evenly across the bottom of the tin. Bake for approximately ten minutes.
6. Turn out the baked sponge, remove the paper and let the sponge cool while you do the next layer.
7. The rest of the layers should be completed by using 1/5th of the batter, 1/4, 1/3 and so on until you have six very nice (and tempting!) sponge layers.

















If you do six layers, you end up with a good thickness that is just short of 1cm. Here's a side view:




Don't throw away your baking paper! Use it to separate your layers if you're tempted to stack them (like I was). Otherwise, they stick together and you had better have a nice icing spatula to separate them.

I realised this afternoon that it is Sunday, the end of the week, and NO baked goods had graced my kitchen counters. None. Okay, there were some baked wholemeal bread rolls, but those hardly count, do they? Well, it was only right that I bake the most amazing, mouth-watering and epic cupcakes to make up for it.

My kitchen is a safe-haven. A lovely place to escape to. A happy place. And there is nothing that my kitchen likes more than new kitchen gadgets.






















Enter: brand new kitchen scale! It's beautiful and neat with a glass top and a digital blue output. Mm. And it weighs perfectly. This is wholemeal flour being weighed for a batch of burger bun rolls. That's because, for the first time ever, I'm going to show you that when I'm not baking in my kitchen, I cook. It happens from time to time. Ah, food blog, we're one step closer to you.

Yesterday, a very charming and involved Nice Recruiter Man (here) was telling me about his The-Apprentice-and-Burgers night and recommended a delicious Spicy Burger recipe, from the BBC. In my enthusiasm I went and picked up some lean mince and chillies from Sainsbury's and promptly left behind the burger buns. That's how it all began: burger buns made from my favourite bread recipe and topped with flaked almonds. For interest's sake, if you click through the recipe, I replaced the white flour with wholemeal flour, and replaced half the water with milk. I also halved the recipe so that we didn't have unnecessary leftovers.

















Easy peasy. I particularly like that they come out beautifully browned and glazed (thanks to an egg yolk and water wash) and the almonds are a really nice touch (really works with the wholemeal flour).

The burgers were also easy to make. Like our meat rissoles, these combine mince, egg, chopped onions, garlic, spices and herbs, and a chilli. There's even some mustard.

















Chillies here are deceptive. The English like their food mild - bland, even - so, thinking that these spicy little treats wouldn't be that popularly sold in Sainsbury's unless they were particularly mild -  I popped an entire scotch bonnet chilli in to the mix. Uh. Not a great idea.






















Here's a picture of my veggie bowl in the kitchen. Can you see the chillies? HOoooooOOOOge. Anyway, I chopped up a nice sweet looking yellow chilli and added it to the mix. When I was done, I washed my hands, cleaned up a bit, and tottered off to do some work while I waited for the bread dough to rise.

And then my hands started burning. And so did my nose (because, of course, I had blown my nose when I sat down). So I washed my hands again and again and again, and had a bath instead of working. Sigh. Needless to say, I was hysterically laughing about the potency of the chillies which continued to burn until well after we had eaten dinner.

















Anyway. The burgers turned out particularly nicely. I love the added mustard to the mince mixture: I'll definitely make them again.

















I couldn't resist photographing the salad as well: look at all of those beautiful colours and textures! I think that's my favourite aspect of food: the textures. Especially when something subverts your expectations of those textures (Heston would have a field day with that!) and you end up with super-crunchy croutons on your salad when you thought they were going to be a bit crumbly. Yum.






















I leave you with one last image of the oh-so-spicy burgers. Yum! Nice Recruiter Man said that he grilled some blue cheese to add to the top which would have made the perfect topping, or perhaps some crumbed Camembert with a sweet chilli sauce? I topped ours with basil pesto - yum.