So well... I'm back

Actually I'm back home since a couple of days, but we sort of just got things back on track after being away for so long. And now my parents are here visiting. But today is posting day for this months Daring Bakers challenge, I thought I should post about it. I actually managed to make the cake (after I got back, the kitchen in D.'s little appartment in Lille doesn't have an oven). And the cake was a succes with everyone who ate it (I brought it to a dinner at a friends house), except for possibly me. Personally, I think I need to work on my skills wit

h nut meal genoise before I'm happy.

Because of allergies of the host of the party I choose not to use hazelnuts, but used almonds instead. Also, I used rasberry liquor for the syrup and the ganache glaze instead of orange liquor. I didn't have time to take many pictures, but here is the cake packed into a larger spring form pan in order to transport it. 

A big thank you to this months host Chris at Mele Cotte! The recipe for the cake can be found at her blog, direct link to the post here. 

The recipe, I had no problems with most of it. Everything except for the genoise went without trouble. The genoise was trickier, but mainly due to my being lazy. I was thinking I had been doing this sort of thing kind of  a lot lately, and so I didn't pay as much attention as I ought to. Note that the recipe is a bit weird when it comes to the end of the genoise part. The part when butter has to be poured into a container and then the nut and flour should be folded in freaked me out. (I didn't read far enough ahead to notice that the nuts should be folded into the batter, not the butter. The recipe could be a bit clearer, I think.) And then the cake wasn't really finished when I pulled it out of the oven. Didn't notice that until I turned it upside down to cut, so I had to take it back to the oven again. Oh well. The result, as I said, was appreciated by everyone who ate it except for me. :)

And one more thing about last months challenge. I actually made it, before leaving for France. I just didn't have time to post about it, since finding an internet connection 

turned out to be trickier than I thought. And, since I made it when I was just about leaving I didn't really have time to find somebody that could eat it, so I froze most of the dough. I made one braid tho

ugh, with a strawberry filling, and it was tasty. And so much fun. 

I never made a laminated dough before, and was really curious about how that would be. Pitty it's so buttery, otherwise I would make it a couple of times just to play with it. Interesting!

The one photo I managed to snap is quite ugly, but anyway, here it is...

And one more thing. Photos and things about Lille are coming. (Oh, market shopping! Can't be done here.) But I just can't find time right now, with parents visiting and all... I'm trying to read through a lot of blogs that I missed, just to see what happened in everyone else's life... Good to be back too, in some senses.

Baked stuff

Time to look back here and put something new up. I think I maybe should try to make some kind of posting schedule in order to post more regularly. I actually started this post right before dinner, but I ended up setting the table instead, and here I am with half a glass of wine left waiting for D to make a raspberry sauce for the dessert. (No, I didn't find any fresh raspberries, but our freezer is somehow magically refilled with berries every once in a while. People who pick berries and just give them away are wonderful.) So, what have I been up to lately?

Well, yesterday I had another go at making macarons. Still no perfect results, but it's getting better. You could even spot something almost like feet, at least on some of them. If you're looking closely. And they certainly taste good.

This morning I also made a kind of weird scone, but it was oh so tasty. Especially with the left over lemon curd from the macaron making...

(Oh, sorry, I had to leave for a little while. Dessert was ready.)
So, anyway, today's breakfast was banana scones with lemon curd. I know, it doesn't sound like the healthiest breakfast, but common, it's Sunday. And it seems I'm only keeping D. here for a little more than another month, so I better spoil him. He's leaving for a post-doc beginning in April. Great news! (But I'll miss him.) On the other hand, I get to go visit. In France. Not far from Paris. Hmm.. I can certainly live with that. :)

So, to make not-so-healthy, but good for spoiling someone, scones I did something like this:

Mix 2.5 dl flour, a little oat bran (maybe 1/4 dl, just to add some crunch), a pinch of salt and 1/2-1 teaspoon baking powder together. Add 75 g of butter cut into little pieces. Cut into this until butter pieces are very small (as if making a pie crust or similar). Alternatively, put into food processor and pule until butter is in small pieces. Add 1/4 dl sugar, 1 egg and 1/2 dl milk. Mix together. Finally, add one banana cut into pieces, and knead into the mixture. If using food processor, take everything out and add the bananas by hand (beware of the knifes while getting it out of the bowl!) Bake in 175°C oven for about 15 minutes. Serve with lemon curd (or something else a little sweet, a little sour).

Swedish Mardi Gras Sweets - Semlor

So we are a day early, but we had the smell around all since we made the sweet bread for this yesterday. We just couldn't resist any longer...

Those are traditional Swedish Mardi Gras treats. It's really quite simple. A bun made from sweet bread dough (any recipe could be used, preferably a one that produces a light result.. many traditional recipes contain a leavener with ammonium bicarbonate in addition to yeast to achieve this). Some almond paste. A little cream and confectioner's sugar.

To put them together, cut a bun into two. Remove most of the interior of the bottom part with a spoon. Crumble this and mix with about an equal amount of almond paste. Add some cream or whole milk to get a mixture that holds together somewhat. Put back into the hollow bun. Spoon or pipe some cream, but the hat back on and sift on some confectioner's sugar.

Traditionalists eat it like D. did, in a bowl of hot milk. I prefer eating them as they are. Any way, this is how Tuesdays between now and Easter should be celebrated.


One more comment to add the day after (I just made a couple more for tonight which is, after all, the right day). The bread should of course contain cardamom. This is just the way sweet bread is to me, so I even forgot to mention it. The only time I ever make sweet bread without cardamom is when I make it with saffron, then I might choose not to have cardamom. (And that one time I tried to make cinnamon rolls in Prague, where I just couldn't find cardamom. The rolls didn't turn out as they should - no good idea.)

Disaster

Well, it turns out baking before waking up is not always so god. My lussekatter turned out goodlooking, the dough was nice and light and everything seemed fine... until I realised that, after putting the first bunch into the oven that it was something wrong with the recipe. The recipe was in an e-mail from my mother, and it seems she wasn't 100% there when copying it onto the computer... sugar was not in the ingredient list. And I was sleepy enough when putting the dough together to not find it odd. So I quickly kneaded some sugar into the dough that was left, but I had already filled two out of three baking sheets before that. I was hoping that the lack of sugar wouldn't be that bad for those poor buns. It turned out it was though. Those last ones which had some sugar kneaded into them at the end were tasty enough. They look a bit odd, since the sugar wasn't completely incorporated which made them brown unevenly. The unsugared ones tasted like.. I don't know. Not saffron, but rather bitter. Eating a part containing a raisin provided a completely different experience though. Some sugar there. Anyway, since I put a lot of saffron into them, and since it seemed they only needed something sweet nearby, I ended up putting some sugar onto them, by stirring it with a little water. This means they are sticky, but hopefully eatable. I fell totally stupid. :)
Anyway, D:s parents arrived a little after my baking finished, bringing cookies and laughing with me at my not so perfect lussekatter. And they happily ate some too, though I chose to serve the ones that actually had gotten some sugar into them.

Oh well. The kind of things that happen. Maybe I'll make another batch before Christmas.

By the way, done right this is terribly tasty. This is my mother's recipe, or rather, ingredient list, with what I think is the right amount of sugar added. She doesn't bother to write down the method for me since she trusts me to be able to make bread, but I'll add a short description:

Lussekatter
2 -3 envelopes of saffron à 0,5 g
2 teaspoons of sugar (for the saffron)
50 g fresh yeast
0,5 l milk
150 - 200 g butter
0,5 tsp salt
2-3 dl sugar
1 egg
250 g kesella 1 %
1.5-2 l flour

kesella is low fat fresh cheese (I don't really know the English word, but the Swedish and German word is "kvarg")

Melt the butter and add milk. Heat until lukewarm. Meanwhile, mash 2 tsp of sugar and the saffron together in a mortar. Add to the milk-and-butter mix together with the egg, salt and the yeast. Stir until there are no visible pieces of yeast. Put into mixer bowl, add kesella and about half of the flour. Start the mixer (with suitable kneading attachment) and add flour until the dough gets a dough-like consistency. Run the mixer until the dough is shiny and stretchy. Since I used less hard flour than I usually do when making bread this was rather quick for me. Let the dough rise until doubled (takes about 45 minutes - 1 hour - there's quite a lot of yeast in there). Shape the dough as in the pictures, one from before baking, and one after.
Decorate with raisins as in the pictures. Coat with some lightly whisked egg. Let the finished breads rest a few minutes before putting them into the oven. Bake them at about 250°C if small, until well browned and finished through. For a little larger ones, lower the heat to about 225°C.

And no, everything up here is not blue, even though the photos indicates that. The problem is probably the very low amount of daylight, even at midday in a kitchen with a window in the north. And a very crappy cell phone camera. I'm still searching for the cable for the real one. And if I'm lucky, Santa Claus might have something even better for me (at least I asked for that).

Yellow

Yay! I just realised that if I use the camera in my mobile phone instead of my camera I can get the pictures to the computer EVEN THOUGH THE CAMERA CABLE IS LOST! So this morning is for making "lussekatter", a sweet bread made for Christmas. It contains a lot of saffron, and my dough does at the moment look like this:
Hmm... The mobile phone camera is really crappy. The bright yellowness doesn't come out, at least not on my screen.

A few more minutes of proofing, and a quick breakfast for me. Now it's time for shaping. I used to love this as a kid, now I haven't done it for a couple of years. I'm afraid my dough is a bit sticky and not kid friendly, but I expect good bread from that. And there are no kids around here. Be back later when finished baking!