Brown Breads

First off, brown breads are not actually anything to do with bread, they're cookies, and delicious ones at that.
My grandmother makes them, and the first time I tried 'em, using a recipe from a standard cookbook, they weren't nearly as tasty. I then got my grandmothers recipe, and it really is a completely different thing.
These cookies are really fragrant and delicious, and, a small tip, I think they're actually even better frozen. The taste is the same, but the texture is better.

Brown Breads

Ingredients
200g Butter
2 dl Sugar
2 tbsp Golden treacle
2 tsp Cinnamon
100g Hazelnuts
2 tsp Bicarbonate
4-5 dl Flour

Grind the hazelnuts, and dissolve the bicarbonate in a small amount of water.

Place all the ingredients, directly onto the table, and mix by hand until it forms a uniform dough. It should not be sticky, if it is, add a little more flour.

Form the dough into 1 or more (I think 3 makes it easy to handle) rectangular "rolls", about 4 cm in height and depth.

Cut the "rolls" into slices, about 1 cm thick, and place on a baking tray covered with grease proof paper. Make sure to leave plenty of room, as they will expand quite a lot.

Bake in the middle of the oven, at 175°C, for about 15 minutes.

Salted Caramel Macarons

It was my turn to bring cookies to work this Friday, and I decided to make salted caramel filled macarons.

In my search for a recipe for the filling, I came across a new recipe for the macarons themselves. I learned that the recipes that I've been using up to now were the "french version", but that there is another option, the "italian version". The difference is in how the meringue is done.

I decided to try the "italian version", and I don't think I'll be going back.

This adds a tiny amount of complexity to making the batter, but it also makes it much more stable and consistent.

I found the recipe from another blog, which linked to another blog, which had the recipe but also referred to the book it came from... No offense to other bloggers, but I'll just say that this recipe is from the book "Bouchon Bakery". If you like the recipe, buy it. It looks to have a lot of good recipes, and I'll probably be making something else from it before long.

You can leave out the instant espresso if you like, it's just a very subtle flavor and gives a slight tinge to the macarons.

Salted caramel macarons

Ingredients - Macarons
212g Almond meal
212g Powdered sugar
82g + 90g Egg whites
236g + a pinch Granulated sugar
158g Water
0,5 tsp Instant Espresso (optional)

Ingredients - Salted Caramel
2,35 dl Whipping cream
3,55 dl Granulated sugar
2 tsp Salt (preferably coarse)
220g Butter


First, to make the macarons. 

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Sift the almond meal and powdered sugar into a large bowl and whisk together. Make a well in the center, but leave a bit of almond sugar at the bottom. Pour in the 82g of egg whites, and optionally, the instant espresso. Mix together using a flexible spatula, you should get a fairly thick mixture.

Now comes the bit that makes this "italian", and italian meringue. Put the 90g of egg whites into a bowl, and get your electric whisk ready. Put the granulated sugar and water into a pot, and place on the stove over a medium-high heat. You want to bring the sugar to 120°C at the same time as the meringue reaches soft peaks... The sugar takes some time to reach this temperature, so you don't need to start the meringue until the sugar reaches 100-110°C. At that time, add a pinch of sugar, and whisk at medium speed until it reaches soft peeks. As soon as the sugar reaches 120°C, take it off the heat, and slowly trickle into the meringue while whisking. Continue to whisk at medum-high speed for a few minutes, until it's firm and glossy, and the meringue has cooled (the bowl might still be warm, that's fine).

Fold 1/3 of the italian meringue into the almond mix, then continue folding the meringue in, a little bit at a time. You probably won't need quite all of it, but most of it. You are looking for a texture, where it is still somewhat firm, but but not too firm. It should still form ribbons, but sort of "relax" into itself. The best way to think of it is probably this, we are about to pipe this onto a tray, as we do we'll get a peak, the mixture should be soft enough that the peak collapses into the batter so that we get a smooth top, but also firm enough that it doesn't go completely flat.

Pipe the batter, using a circular hole tip, onto a baking tray covered with grease proof paper. You are looking for about 4cm in diameter (they'll grow a little as they settle down, so keep that in mid as you pipe the next one).

Place in the middle of the oven, immediately turn it down to 160°C, and bake for 9-12 minutes.

As you take them out, do so gently, a bang will make them collapse a bit (not a disaster, but still).

Let them rest on the tray for about 5 minutes, then transfer to a rack for cooling.

Heat the oven up to 180°C again, and repeat until all the batter is baked.

Now for the salted caramel.

Cut up the butter into small pieces, and leave in room temperature.

Place the cream and salt into a small pot. Place the sugar into a wide pot (the thinner the layer of sugar, the easier it'll be).

Bring the cream to the boil, and take of the heat. In the meantime, melt the sugar over a medium-high heat. As the sugar melts and starts getting dark, it might be a good idea to warm up the cream again, it really needs to be warm when it's combined with the caramel, or it won't work.

Once the sugar has become a dark brown caramel (around 175-180°C), take it off the heat and, while whisking, slowly pour in the warm cream. Be careful! It'll bubble and spit, and you do not want this stuff on you.

Once it has cooled to a reasonable temperature (50-60°C), stir in the butter, a little at a time. Place in a shallow container and let cool in the fridge.

To finish up.

Place the salted caramel into a bowl, and whisk (by hand, it's important not to over whisk it, as it'll separate). It should become softer making it easy to pipe.

Match cookies that are the same size, pipe some caramel onto one of them, sprinkle with a small amount of coarse salt, then place the other one on top and twist until the filling fits nicely along the edges.

Lemon Hearts

This was originally supposed to be  "lemon stars", but I found I don't have a star shaped cookie cutter, so hearts it is. They are essentially lemon shortbread biscuits. This is a cookie best suited with tea or similar, they're a bit to dry to have on their own. The flavor is quite nice though, there's a definite taste of lemon.

This recipe is from an old-timey cookbook, which means that it's very short on details. For example, it doesn't state how long the cookies take to bake, it just says "until they have a nice color". That, coupled with a printing error, where it says to make the cookies 2 cm thick, when (I think) it should be 1/2 cm, means that I had to do some guesswork to make these. Rest assured though, I'm filling in all those blanks here and letting you know exactly how I made them.

Lemon Hearts

Ingredients
300g Flour
200g Butter
100g Sugar
1/2 Egg white
Juice of 1 lemon

1 Egg
Confectioners sugar

Ingredients

Whisk the 1/2 egg white to firm peaks.

Place the flour on the table, and make a well in the center. Put the butter, sugar, egg white, and lemon juice into the well and bring together into a dough.

This dough it very soft and sticky, so wrap it in cling film and place in the fridge for at least 1 hour in order to make it easier to handle.

Roll the dough out, between 2 pieces of parchment paper, to a thickness of 1/2 cm, and cut out the cookies with a cookie cutter. Take the remains of the dough, and repeat until there isn't enough dough left for any more cookies.

Place the cookies on a baking tray lined with parchment paper. Bake, in the middle of the oven, at 200°C, for 10-15 minutes. Keep a close eye on it towards the end, 1 extra minute can be the difference between beautiful and burnt. The cookies are done when the edges are golden brown.

Put together

Dough

Pre-oven

Post-oven

Wienerstänger

These cookies are small, sweet, simple and delicious. They work particularly well with coffee. Try to have to have just one... Go on, try it.

I'm using homemade raspberry jam for the filling, but that only because the pips always annoys me. Really, any store-bought raspberry jam will work. If you're like me and don't like the pips, making the jam is super easy. Take raspberries, almost as much sugar as berries (by weight) and some pectin, bring it to the boil in a pot, and let it cook on a slow boil for about 10 minutes. Pass through a sieve, pour into a sterilized jar (Just rinse the jar out with boiling water), and leave to cool in the fridge.

Wienerstänger

Ingredients - Pastry
125g Butter
0,75 dl Sugar
1 Egg 
3,5 dl Flour
0,5 tsp Baking powder

Ingredients - Filling
Raspberry jam
1 dl Powdered sugar
0,8 tbsp Water


Whisk the sugar and room temperature butter until combined. Whisk in the egg. Mix the flour and baking powder, and add to the rest. Use your hands to bring it together into a soft dough.

Wrap the dough in plastic wrap, and leave to rest in the fridge for 30-60 minutes.

Cut the dough into 3 equal pieces, and shape them into balls. Roll them out into quite thin rolls, the same length as the over tray. Cover the oven tray with baking paper and place the rolls on the tray.

By pressing down with a finger, make an indentation along the length of the rolls, a sort of grove. Spread the raspberry jam into the indentation.

Bake in the middle of the oven, at 175°C, for 15 minutes. They'll seem quite soft, but don't worry, they'll firm up when they cool down.

After taking the cookies out of the oven, you need to wait a couple of minutes before spreading the frosting on top. You want them to cool a little, but not too much. Generally, the time it takes to make the frosting should be about right. To make the frosting, just whisk the powdered sugar and water together until there are no lumps. The frosting should be quite thick, but still runny. You might need to adjust the water/sugar ratio slightly.

Spread the frosting over the jam-covered part of the cookies. Wait another minute or to for the frosting to start to set. Cut the cookies, on an angle, about 1 inch wide. Place in the fridge for the frosting to set completely.

Rolls, the length of the tray

With the groove

Filled

Baked

Frosted

Cut

Jitterbugg

This is a cookie that I first made at the request of my mother. She told me that my grandmother used to make them for her when she was young. Unfortunately, this is not her recipe, it's just one that I found, but they still taste pretty amazing, and I try to make them at least once a year, for my mothers birthday.

The real "point" of these cookies is the shortness of the pastry, combined with the chewiness of the meringue. Don't get me wrong, there absolutely nothing wrong with the taste either, they're buttery, sweet, and delicious.

Jitterbugg

Ingredients (~40 cookies)
5 dl flour
1 dl + ½ dl sugar
200g butter
2 tsp vanilla powder
2 egg whites

Ingredients

Put the flour, room temperature butter, vanilla powder, and 1dl sugar into a bowl and mix (it's easiest to do with your fingers). This is quite a crumbly dough, try not to work it too much. Split the dough into 2 equal parts, and place in the fridge for ½-1 hour.

To make the meringue, whisk the egg whites to a stiff peak. Add the ½ dl of sugar, gradually, while whisking, then keep whisking for a couple minutes more. The meringue should be stiff and shiny.

Take one of the doughs out of the fridge, and roll it out between 2 sheets of parchment paper. The result you are looking for is a square, 20x30 cm in size, I like to measure and mark the top layer of parchment paper with a pen.

Spread half the meringue over the sheet of dough, as evenly as you can. Roll the dough, from the longer side, using the parchment paper to help, into a cylinder, so the internals will have a spiral pattern. Wrap in the parchment paper and put in the fridge to firm up.

Repeat for the other piece of dough.

The amount of time needed in the fridge can vary a little bit, usually it's ½-1 hour, but the important thing is that they are hard before you take them out, otherwise they will be impossible to cut cleanly.

Cut each roll into about 20 slices, approximately 1 - 1½ cm thick. Don't worry too much if your slices aren't perfect, or the dough breaks a bit, it'll meld during the baking. Place the slices onto an oven tray covered with parchment paper.

Preheat the oven to 200°C, place the tray in the middle of the oven and immediately lower the temperature to 175°C. Bake for 14-15 minutes. When done, the meringue turns a sort of peach color.

Dough

Meringue

Dough between 2 sheets

Rolled out

Top removed

With meringue

Rolled

Ready for the oven

Raspberry macarons - take 2

This is my story of woe and joy.

About 3 months ago, I made some Lemon and Blueberry Macarons for the birthday party of one of my nephews. My other nephew, who is a bit of a cookie monster, told me that I had to make them for his birthday party as well, and this weekend it was time. Since raspberry is my favorite flavor for macarons, that's what I did.

I decided that I would make them smaller than I usually do (I normally make them to big), which I did. The downside to this, was that it (obviously, in hindsight) changed the cooking time required, so the whole first batch were overcooked. Instead of a crispy outside with a chewy center, they were crispy all the way through...

So, start again. The first half of the second batch came out even more burnt than the first batch, and they were cracked besides. Turned out that I had set the oven to 175°C instead of, as it should be 125°C.

Once I figured all that out though, the second half of the second batch turned out beautifully. With this recipe, unlike with previous recipes that I've tried, all the macarons "popped up" and hardly any of them cracked in the oven. All in all, I'm very happy with the results, and I feel like I'll be able to reproduce them with this recipe.

Raspberry macarons

Ingredients (80-100 "halves", ie 40-50 macarons):

Macarons:
165g Almonds
255g Powdered sugar
135g Egg whites
3 tbsp Caster sugar
Red food coloring (Optional)

Ingredients for the cookies

Raspberry butter cream (You probably won't need all of it):
200g Butter
3 dl Powdered sugar
2 tsp Vanilla powder
1 Egg yolk
Raspberries (to taste, I used about 250g)

Ingredients for the raspberry butter cream

For the macarons, we first need to peel and grate the almonds. If you like, you can buy peeled almonds, or even ready-made almond flour instead.

Assuming you have ordinary almonds, with the peel on, drop them into boiling water for about 1 minute, take them out and allow them to cool. Now peel them, the peel should pop right of. Let them sit for a couple of hours, preferably over night, to dry.

Grate the peeled almonds, my almond grater isn't fine enough for macarons, so after having grated them, I also run them through the food processor for a while. Pass the grated almonds and the powdered sugar through a fine mesh sieve and set aside.

Whisk the egg whites, starting slowly and then increasing the speed. Once it starts to become stiff, add in the caster sugar a little at a time. Keep whisking for a few minutes more, the egg whites should be stiff and shiny.

Add a few drops of red food coloring, the almonds and the powdered sugar, and fold together to a batter. It shouldn't be runny, but nor should it be too firm.

Pipe the mixture onto an oven tray covered with parchment paper, in round "blobs", about 4cm in diameter. Give the tray a couple of good bangs against the table, this should smooth them out a little and get rid of the "peak". Then allow them to rest for a full hour. This lets a coating form on top of the cookies, which keeps them from cracking in the oven, and gives you that ring on the bottom that means that they have "popped up".

Bake at 125°C, in the bottom of the oven, for about 20 minutes. If you can, GENTLY, lift them up from the tray in one piece, then you know that they are done. When you take them out, immediately remove the sheet of parchment paper with the cookies from the tray, and allow to cool.

Now for the raspberry butter cream, super easy and super delicious.

Place the raspberries in a pot and mush them up, then bring to the boil while stirring (I'm using frozen raspberries, but of course you can use fresh ones if you want). Strain the raspberry coolie to get rid of the seeds.

Whisk the butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla powder until white and fluffy. Add the egg yolk and the raspberry coolie and mix. Store in the fridge until it's time to assemble the macarons.

To assemble, pipe some butter cream on a cookie, and place another on top.

Below, the first 4 pictures are from batch 1, and the last 2 from batch 2, that's why there is a difference in shading. I decided that I liked a paler pink, rather than the almost neon of batch 1. Also, I didn't make any pictures for the butter cream, it's really simple.

Meringue

Add the rest

Mix well

Not environmental, but easy

Pre-bake

Post-bake

Jimmy's Dreams

This is a recipe that I got from my grandmother, mostly because it literally has my name on it.

"Dreams" are traditional Swedish cookies, flavored with vanilla. They have a very crisp and light texture because of the rising agent used. I actually had to look up what it's called in English, and it is apparently quite rare outside of Scandinavia. The rising agent used is called "hjorthornsalt", literal translation would be "deerhornsalt". In days gone by it was extracted from the horns of deer, but nowadays it is manufactured chemically. Anyway, the English translation is powdered ammonium carbonate, or baker's ammonia. When baking the cookies, the ammonia will be released, so it's a good idea to hold your breath as you open the oven door. Don't worry, the cookies will not smell or taste of it.

You can replace the "hjorthornsalt" with baking powder, if so double the amount, but the cookies won't become quite so crisp and light.

The part that makes these a little different from "normal" dreams is that they contain cornflakes, which adds an additional crispy texture.

This recipe produces about 70 cookies.

Jimmy's dreams

Ingredients
4 dl sugar
200g butter
2 dl vegetable oil
8 dl plain flour
2 tbsp vanilla powder
2 tsp powdered ammonium carbonate (hjorthornsalt)
4 tbsp potato flour
4 dl cornflakes

Ingredients

Lemon-Blueberry Macarons

I realize it hasn't been a very long time since I last made macarons, although with a different flavour, but they seem to be the sort of thing that you want to perfect. Unfortunately, they are notorious for being difficult to perfect, but I'm giving it another go anyway.

The result this time was better than the last time, I got a nice smooth surface and they "popped up" nicely. The downside was that a fair few of the cookies cracked, maybe next time I will let them rest a bit longer before putting them in the oven. I also learned that overcrowding the oven-tray is a bad idea. Still, the once that didn't crack were near-perfect, so progress.

Strictly speaking these are not "lemon-blueberry macarons", but lemon macarons with a blueberry butter-cream.

Lemon macaron with blueberry filling

Ingredients (about 60 "halves", ie 30 macarons):

Macarons:
4 egg whites
0,5 dl caster sugar
4 dl powdered sugar
150g peeled almonds
2 tsp yellow food coloring
2 tsp lemon aroma

Ingredients for the macaron cookies

Blueberry butter cream:
150g room temperature butter
2,25 dl powdered sugar
1,5 tsp. vanilla sugar
1 egg yoke
A couple of handfuls of blueberries

Ingredients for the blueberry butter cream

 

Oatmeal cookies

These oatmeal cookies are delicious, kind of in the middle of crunchy and chewy. They're easy and quick to make, and don't contain any ingredients that you (or at least I) don't normally have at home anyway. Perfect if you have someone coming over and nothing in the cupboard, or if you are simply feeling peckish.

Simple oatmeal cookies

Ingredients (30-40 cookies):
125g butter
3 dl oatmeal
1,5 dl sugar
2 dl flour
1,5 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla sugar
3 tbsp water

Ingredients

Raspberry macarons

Macarons are essentially 2 almond meringues, put together, with filling in between. In this case, the filling is a raspberry butter cream.

They are notoriously difficult to make (and distinguage with macaronis when pronounced). However, I find that the only thing that is really difficult, is to make the perfect macarons. Things like, is the top smooth and shiny, and have they "popped up" are the concerns? The perfect macaron is a lovely thing, both to behold and to eat. However, most of the things that are likely to go wrong when making macarons are cosmetic, ie they will still taste wonderful. So unless you are planning to sell them, I say give it a go!

This is only my second time making macarons, and as you can see from the images below, I don't quite have the estethics down yet, but the taste is still nice, and to my mind, that's the main thing.

Raspberry macarons

Ingredients (about 60 "halves", ie 30 macarons):

Macarons:
4 egg whites
0,5 dl caster sugar
4 dl powdered sugar
150g peeled almonds
red food coloring (optional)

Ingredients for the macaron cookies

Raspberry butter cream:
150g room temperature butter
2,25 dl powdered sugar
1,5 tsp. vanilla sugar
1 egg yoke
A couple of handfuls of raspberries

Ingredients for the raspberry butter cream