Mmm, smurfy goodness!

My grandmother would freak out if she saw what I made on Pancake Tuesday earlier this week.

I’m not sure how it started, but traditionally my grandmother (who still lives in India), and then her daughters (including my mum), would make these delicious crepes stuffed with a sweetened coconut filling on Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Tuesday/Mardi Gras. I’ve never come across this concoction anywhere else in the world; neither in stores or home-made by other people. So it is something special for me and over the last couple of years, I’ve continued the custom.

Cardamom pods

Since I didn’t have a recipe, I went by taste. The secret ingredient (I suppose not so secret anymore) is cardamom infused into a mixture of coconut, sugar, milk and almonds. The aroma is heavenly – exotic and somehow evocative. I had made a little bundle of cardamom pods in a square of muslin and let it simmer in a saucepan with the other ingredients.

Pink coconut stuffed crepes

The way my mum and grandmother used to make it, the coconut was delicately coloured a pretty pastel pink. So this year I did make half a batch of pink coconut as a tribute to them. But the little bottle of blue food colour was much too tempting. Honestly, why would they make blue food colour if you weren’t supposed to use it? I made blue coconut mix. My aunt practically screamed when she saw it on Skype, and I definitely heard my mum mutter, “Good Lord, that child!!” (yes, she still refers to me as “that child” despite the fact that I’m 28), but they were every bit as delicious as the pink ones.

My Shrove Tuesday crepes

See the full recipe here.

Recipe: Coconut Stuffed Crepes

These yummy crepes can be eaten as a light dessert or instead as a healthy snack. Okay FINE, I had one for breakfast today too.

Cooking time (duration): 30

Number of servings (yield): 6

Meal type: dessert

My rating: 5 stars:  ★★★★★ 1 review(s)

I don’t have kids – rather, my dad had bought it for me as a joke before my first day at university. Little did he know that it would end up being one of my favourite go-to books over the next ten years and more! Since it’s geared towards kids, every single step is accompanied by hand illustrations, which makes it just that much more fun to sift through. Without further ado, here’s the recipe (pics below).

Here’s what it looks like (sorry, I just had to show the funny little illustrations for kids too)

It was published in the early 90s but there are still a few copies floating around online. Good if you have kids. Great if you have teens! Here’s a link for some on Amazon:

See larger image Kids' Cook Book: No. 2 (Paperback) By (author) Family Circle Editors List Price: CDN$ 7.70 CAD Used from: CDN$ 0.01 In Stock

Little chocolate cupcake

I was in the mood for something small and simple. Half an hour later, I had a few trays of these mini chocolate cupcakes sitting on my kitchen counter.

I found that even grown men get all childishly gleeful if you hide mini cupcakes in their apartments while they’re away. Still others start drooling and manage to polish off a whole box of these in a single evening.

Sometimes the smallest things elicit the biggest grins.

Spice cookies and milk

In this case, we were in the middle of – yes – another snowstorm. Heaps and heaps of fluffy white stuff dumped on us. The streets buried and sparkling under the streetlamps. Deadly silent. Not a soul ventured outside.

Afternoon game of hockey in the snow

And while I was tempted to experiment with a new recipe, another part of me just wanted a snuggly warm blanket, dog curled up at my feet, a mug of frothy hot chocolate, and a couple of my all-time favourite chewy spice cookies. You can guess what happened next

Spice Cookies

Spice cookies won by a long shot. I had actually been meaning to archive the recipe online anyway, since the original, scrawled on a scrap of paper bearing the marks of plenty of usage, was looking rather shabby.

Cookie recipe

And so it was that as the snow continued to blanket the city through the night, we curled up at home with the earthy smells of cinnamon and clove perfuming my cosy kitchen.

Cookies and Milk

Try out the recipe here. It’s wonderfully versatile!

Chocolate spice cookies

• 1 cup unsalted butter or margarine
• 1 1/2 cup sugar (I’ve done batches with only white sugar, only brown, or both mixed. Works fine either way)
• 2 eggs
• 1 tbs molasses (you want table molasses, NOT bootstrap or unsulphured)
• 2 1/4 cups cake/pastry flour
• 1 1/8 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp vanilla

Directions

1. Pre-heat oven to 180°C / 350ºF.
2. Cream butter and sugar until well-mixed
3. Beat in one egg at a time, then add molasses
4. Add in the dry ingredients and mix with a wooden spoon.
5. Optional: If you want to make a chocolate version, add a few spoons of cocoa powder and chocolate chips. Alternatively, you can add nuts, raisins etc for other varieties.
6. Drop spoonfuls onto a greased baking sheet (I prefer to roll a heaped teaspoon of dough and flatten slightly for a smoother cookie surface).
7. Bake for 10 – 12 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. (Okay, eat one while it’s piping hot. They’re delicious!!)
8. Serve with a cold glass of milk, or warm with some ice-cream.

These cookies keep very well if you store them in an air-tight container, with wax paper or paper towel between each layer.

Recipe: Lemon poppyseed muffins with crystallised lemon

Cooking time (duration): 20

Diet (other): Reduced fat

Meal type: breakfast

Culinary tradition: USA (General)

As a kid, one of the best things about visiting my grandmother’s 100-year-old house in India was a far bedroom which once belonged to my dad during his childhood. Bookshelves covered two walls, from ceiling to floor, and the rest of the room was filled with random antiques and items that could be fashionably considered vintage today. This was a quiet place, where the rest of the household rarely ventured at that time, so I made it my hideout.

The faded, frayed Persian rug at the foot of the bed had obviously been the bearer of plenty of traffic in its better days, but it was always a hushed delight to pluck a book off the shelves (at least the ones I could reach) and curl up there to while away the hours.

Afternoons were the best for this.  The sun would be beating down unbearably on the dusty roads outside but apart from the droning insects, all else was quiet – most people  retired to their beds for an afternoon nap to seek refuge from the heat.

Except for me. Gleeful with my little books. My absolute favourite, even when I’d long outgrown the recommended reading age, was a book that was at least a couple of decades older than me. It had something to do with a family of bears. Bored during a hot summer’s day, the mother bear organised a picnic and made fresh lemonade with oranges and lemons for her little ones. Now, I have no idea what sort of scratch and sniff technology they had in the sixties, but whenever I opened the pages of that book, the fresh smell of oranges and lemons never ceased to enchant me. I can’t count the number of times my mother walked in on me, with my nose literally buried within the pages of that book.

So on this wintry day (thank you weather.ca, with your forecast of -10 to -26C), I caught myself pleasantly daydreaming of that book and those afternoons. The name of the book completely escapes me (apparently I never saw fit to investigate this key bit of info in my youth) and no amount of Google searches for “oranges and lemons, +bears +book scratch and sniff” have revealed the title yet, but I have revived it temporarily at least, with these exquisitely fragrant lemon poppyseed muffins. I did one batch with marmalade hidden in the centre, another with slivered almonds (I was sort of craving almonds in a muffin), and a third batch with thin slices of sugared lemon on top.

Just tried one with the lemon slice. Pure heaven. Mmm. Mornings are going to be a little warmer and sunnier for me this week.

edit 10 minutes later: I can still taste lemon on my lips.

Recipe here

Basic yet delish recipe:

5 cups flour (makes quite a large loaf!)
1/2 tsp salt
4 1/2 tsp instant yeast (you can go up to 6 tsp if you like it more yeasty)
max 1.5 cup of other grains, cereals, herbs

First step: Throw dry ingredients into a large bowl and mix. Not rocket science yet.

2) Get a smaller bowl and mix together:

2.5 – 3 cups of luke warm water
1/4 cup honey OR 4 tsp of sugar (mix with water)

3) Make a well in the dry stuff and pour about half of the liquid in. Start mixing until the dough is smooth-ish but still pliable. I used a spoon, and then my hands. If it’s too wet/sticky, add a bit more flour. Work fast so that the water doesn’t completely cool down right away.

4) Now listen carefully: place the ball of dough on a plate or something, clean out the bowl and then grease it lightly. Put the ball of dough back in.

5) Loosely place a cloth (eg: a clean dishtowel) over the bowl and place it in the oven. Fill a mid-sized bowl with boiling water and place that in the oven too, towards the back. Close the oven door and leave it to rise for about an hour and a  half. DO NOT TURN THE OVEN ON!

6) Shortly, you’ll notice your kitchen starting to smell absolutely fantastic. You should now have a lovely risen dough. Here’s my dough’s instant before/after makeover:

7) Get a large surface to shape the dough. If you don’t have a really gigantic chopping board, then disinfect your kitchen countertop properly, spread some flour on it and more flour on top of your dough as well. Now turn it out onto the surface/counter. It shouldn’t give you much resistance at all, getting out of the bowl.

8 ) While you’re going to be working on the dough, turn on the oven to 180C/350F and put your bread baking stone in there so that it warms up. Remove the bowl of water that we’d put in earlier.

mmm doughy…

9) Treat this dough like your baby. That means no fists, no kneading and definitely no punching. You want to keep the air in. Very gently, fold the sides of the dough underneath itself and shape it into a loaf. Cut a slit down the length of it, or cut a few diagonal slits  spaced apart. Coat with a milk or egg wash, and decorate with oats or other grains/flakes/seeds/herbs etc.

10) Sprinkle some cornmeal or flour onto the bread stone in the oven. Carefully slide the dough onto a chopping board or some sort of portable surface and then slide it over to the bread stone.

11) Bake for an hour. Use a cooking thermometre to check the temperature. Take the bread out when it’s about 90 – 95C and let it rest outside for a grill. Don’t start slicing until it’s cooled down, or else you’ll lose a lot of the moisture. Voila!

Lastly, to keep the bread after it has cooled completely, wrap it up tightly in the cloth, then double wrap in a plastic bag and store in the fridge.

If there’s something else you could learn from this post, it’s this: don’t bake while wearing dark clothes.

p.s. In the unlikely event that you completely botch up the bread, do what I did with horribly dense experimental buckwheat loaf last week: make a bread pudding! Warm bread pudding with pistachios and caramelised brown sugar topping. Love it!

]]> http://blog.tinarayna.com/baking/artisan-bread-part-2/feed/ 2 http://blog.tinarayna.com/baking/making-artisan-bread/ http://blog.tinarayna.com/baking/making-artisan-bread/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2011 22:58:46 +0000 tangerinetea http://blog.tinarayna.com/?p=35 Just got back from Bulk Barn bearing little bags of pleasantly aromatic millet, steel cut oats and some lovely dark rye flakes. I’ve also got some ground almonds and other nuts in the fridge, left over from my Christmas baking supplies, so I might incorporate those in too. Really nothing quite like making your own bread (in ye olde oven mind you, no bread machines here!). Best part is when you step outside your front door and realise that the amazing aroma is emanating from your kitchen! Eat that, neighbours! (Or rather… don’t. Right, anyway, back to the bread.)

I’ve been wondering why there is this general misconception that baking bread is a huge, complicated task. I mean honestly, it’s completely mind-bogglingly simple. To show you, my next post will be a step-by-step tutorial (with pictures for extra simplicity! ooh! aah!) for fresh, delicious, single-rise artisan bread.

What makes it artisan?

a) Not tasteless, pre-sliced, bagged grocery version

b) Yummy grains, seeds and/or cereal embedded in bread

c) Fancy schmancy oats on top, for which they’d charge you an arm and a leg at premium bakeries (good GAD!)

d) It just looks, tastes and smells fantastic, okay? You can’t go wrong. You’ll spurn grocery-store bread after this. Your significant other will love you marginally more. Your pets and/or kids will come sniffing into the kitchen every few minutes until the oven beeps. You will swaddle your loaf of bread in cloth and pretend it’s your new baby. (No seriously. You will.)