Nordic Bakery Cinnamon Rolls

For Christmas, my mum bought me the Nordic Bakery Cookbook.  Its chock full of great Scandinavian recipes and delights.  If you are in London, you may have visited one of the Nordic Bakery stores and sampled their legendary Cinnamon Buns.

Thankfully this recipe was in the book I got, so guess what I made first??

My buns look huge in comparision to the image on the front and inside of the book.  However, they tasted divine.  I think next time I need to get the dough a bit thinner before rolling and roll that little bit tighter.  It does use over 1kg of flour, so be prepared for some hard work!

Anyway, enjoy the picture spam below.

What is your favourite recipe with Cinnamon?  Let me know in the comments and thanks for stopping by.

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Spicy Pear Tarte Tatin

Just a quick bit of baking for you, now that the nights are getting darker there is something quite comforting about sitting down with a hot pudding and a bit of cream.

This is what the hubby and I made a couple of weeks ago.  Its a bit of a mash up of a number of recipes, but effectively its a sheet of shop bought puff pastry, some pears with some sugar and spices.

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I boiled down some sugar with a touch of water, some star anise, a few cardamon pods and some cinnamon.  Then placed in some pear halves (peeled) cooked them for a few minutes.  Now most recipes they say to pop the pastry over the top of the fruit in the dish you are cooking in.  I had too many pears for that, so I quickly transferred then to a warm roasting tin (warm so the syrup doesn’t do rock hard in seconds) arranged the pears and then placed the pastry on top.  Tuck it in around the edges and pop in the over.  25-30mins later – YUM!

Simple.  And you can do this with lots of fruits, I love the subtle warmth of the spices, but you could amp it up if you wanted a bit more heat.

Chocolate Brownie

 

A couple of weeks ago we went to a friends house for dinner. It was my turn to make a pudding of some kind – so I needed something easy that would travel well and make an impact.  What better than chocolate brownies!

Out comes Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess and her faultless recipe.  Its pretty easy, you have some dry ingredients and melt all the meltables into a liquid, mix them together and then bake.  And bake some more.  The thicker it is, the longer it will need in the oven.

I think its lovely, you get a rich, dense chocolate delight.  Yum!

What is your favourite recipe for brownies?  Do share, I LOVE trying out new ones.

Thanks for popping by!

Scone Sunday

I made some scones.  They are so simple and easy to make.  Just a bit messy at the start but the speed with which you can knock out a batch more than makes up for it.  I used my favourite scone recipe for these and just kept them plain this time.  My recipe comes from Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess.

Look at them, all higgley-piggely on the baking paper.  Do use the baking paper or it will stick like the devil to your tray.  I speak from bitter experience!

Yum, which one first??

And of course, scones are best with a good dollop of jam and a spoonful of clotted cream along with a cup of tea!  Bliss.

Happy Sunday!

Sunday Croissants

There are few simple pleasures on a Sunday.  Something lovely to eat, a sunday paper and a good cup of coffee.  I’m not a big fan of store bought croissants, simply because they can be a bit tasteless and plastic.  There is nothing to beat fresh bakeds ones.  With that in mind, and aimed with my trusty Baking Made Easy by Lorraine Pascal, I decided to try and make my own.  I love this book, great recipes and really easy to follow.

In a nutshell, you need flour, yeast and butter.  There is a lot of rolling and folding to create the layers of flaky pastry that croissants are known for.  In between the rolling and folding, you need to chill the pastry.  I think the trickiest bit happened after I made the dough, you have to fold into the dough pretty much a whole packet of room temp butter.  So it can go everywhere.

Butter folded in, I did two more folds then left it in the fridge overnight.  In the morning, I gave it one more roll and fold before rolling it out and cutting it into triangles.  I googled lots of other croissant tutorials, the best shape is a base to the triange of the size you want the croissant and then make a really large peak.  Then you can get a good roll and they look better.

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With a good egg wash they are off into the oven.  And they were divine.  So lovely, so flaky and so much better than I had hoped for.  I made tonnes of dough, so I froze it.  It was easy to work with once defrosted, but instead of getting up early to made them up, I did them the night before and covered them with clingfilm.  They rose quite well, better in fact and you get a great gap in the centre where steam build up and makes the pastry yummy.

I am so going to make these again.  Next time, I’m going to make some fruit scones….

 

 

I made bread!!

I made bread.  With my own hands, seriously!  The hubster and I have been watching the Hairy Biker’s Bakeation, you can see some of the recipes here and if you are in the UK you can watch them in iPlayer for the next couple of weeks.

Its a fairly straightforward focaccia recipe, lots of strong white flour, yeast, salt, water and a good glug of of olive oil.  Top with some rosemary and salt and cook!  Two rounds of waiting for bread to rise here.  I was quite surprised at how quickly the dough came together, I was always under the impression that focaccia dough was meant to be very wet.  This wasn’t too bad and after a good bit of kneading it was ready for the first proof.  Then you can bash the hell out of it and pop it into the tray you are going to bake it in.  Leave it again for another proof.  Then stab it with your fingers (delicate I think you will agree) sprinkle with some rosemary and some salt.  Then into the oven.  Very straightforward and if it wasn’t for the waiting, quicker than you might expect.

Yummy!  Once out of the oven, a bit more oil and serve.  Went down a treat and great with a hot cup of soup.

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Baking at Easter

It was the Easter weekend last weekend.  And like all weekends of note, it included some baking.

First up was a sticky ginger cake.  You may remember this recipe as Sticky Orange Cake, but with the use of some ginger preserve, some ground ginger and a pinch of cinnamon, we got us a new cake.  This one was actually better, I used a tablespoon more preserve than the recipe and it was much moister.  Plus before smearing with warm preserve on the top I made twice as many holes in the surface to soak up the preserve.  Yum yum yum!

Secondly, I made an Easter Rocky Road.  I had to cut up a whole load of Bunny shaped marshmallows – that felt a bit mean!  So I used 200g dark chocolate, 100g marshmallows, 100g Golden Syrup, 100g of unsalted butter and 100g of pink wafer biscuits.  Then topped off with a SMALL packet of Cadbury’s Mini Eggs.  I mean, come on, we don’t want to over do it!

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Did you bake over the weekend?

Nigella’s Coca Cola Cake

There is nothing I love better than CAKE!  (apart from my hubby and my son, oh and the rest of my family… and… you get me yeah?).  So CAKE!  Something to soothe the soul, make you feel better and deliver a yummy, sugary chocolate fix.

This is one of our kitchen staples, Coca Cola Cake as introduced to the UK by the Baking Goddess that is Nigella Lawson. This recipe is not available on the website but in the How to be a Domestic Goddess cook book which most woman in the UK probably own.

This is a blissfully simple, quick to assemble moist cake.  You get your dry ingredients together, you get your wet one sin another jug, you melt your butter with some coca cola and some cocoa.  And then bang it all together.  Suddenly it comes together in a gloopy, chocolate, gloriously smelling batter.  Pour this into a well lined tin and bake.

A bit of icing, and VOILA!  (no images of icing as it got eaten v quickly…..)

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Sticky Orange Cake

This weekend we had lots of snow, about 5 or 6 inches. It isn’t a lot but it manages to make the world go crazy, at least in the UK. Three snowflakes and the country grinds to a halt. Madness. Anyway, whilst everyone was off sledging, I invested some time in a Sticky Orange Cake. I managed to use a whole jar of Seville Orange Marmalde…..

This recipe is from the book for the second series of Great British Bake Off, How to Bake: The Perfect Victoria Sponge and other Baking Secrets. I’m secretly in love with this book, there are lots of brilliant recipes and if it wasn’t for Boy Wonder (my 5yr old) picking this one out, I probably would have struggled to pick. Recipe was super easy, creaming butter, adding sugar, eggs and then flour. Finally some milk and marmalade. Bake, glaze with warm marmalade and then ice when cool. Yummy!

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Apple Sponge Pie

Recently shopping in the supermarket, my 5yr old asked me if we could make ‘apple sponge pie’, so I asked him what was in it.  He replied – eggs, flour, sugar, vanilla and apples, about 5 apples.  So I bought some apples as I usually have all the rest in and came home and Google’d it.  He was quite particular about how it should look and eventually we found one he was happy with.  We made something akin to it, your basic sponge mix with chopped apples and a sprinkle of sugar, and voila!

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