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I've used baking as a form of stress relief - and to keep myself away from back-lit screens - off and on for years.
I received Nadiya’s Kitchen, the cookbook by 2015’s Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussein, as a birthday present last year. Apart from admiring the photos of her, her food and her adorable children making and eating the food, I hadn’t really done much with it. So I’ve decided to, you know, spend some time making the recipes. Since she won GBBO for cooking fancy desserts, I’m starting with the easiest baked goods recipes. Here’s what I’ve attempted thus far.
Biscotti: Oh man, these turned out really well. Better than Paul Hollywood's. (His “Bread” book is typically the one we turn to when making, er, bread.) I didn’t have everything in her recipe, so instead of cranberries there were sultanas and instead of currants there were chopped dried apricots. It didn’t matter in the slightest. They are delicious and are being yummed up by the family at an alarming rate.
Grapefruit cat’s tongues: These are a sort of madeleine-like biscuit, except thinner. Butter, icing sugar, egg whites, flour and a bit of salt. No bicarb - all the fluff comes from the egg whites. The biscuits are supposed to be piped onto the baking paper, which I couldn’t be bothered with, so I just treated the dough like I would for a drop-cookie and made little blobs that spread out into circles. Delicious, melt-in the mouth circles. Again, I didn’t have a grapefruit handy so I zested a lemon instead. I suspect any citrus flavouring, or vanilla, could be substituted into this recipe.
Honeycomb: This was my first failure. Honeycomb should be ridiculously easy to make. It is, after all, simply sugar, honey and bicarb. Somehow mine fell flat. I heated the sugar and honey and stirred until it all went golden, but my two teaspoons of bicarb produced only dispirited fizzing and not the vigorous bubbling it ought to have done. The bloke and I puzzled over this and tested the bicarb in some lemon juice, whereupon it behaved as normal. We concluded that perhaps our local Worcestershire honey was simply not acidic enough, and that next time I should add a splash of balsamic or lemon juice to produce the desired air bubbles. What I made is more like very chewy toffee. It still tastes good though.
I received Nadiya’s Kitchen, the cookbook by 2015’s Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussein, as a birthday present last year. Apart from admiring the photos of her, her food and her adorable children making and eating the food, I hadn’t really done much with it. So I’ve decided to, you know, spend some time making the recipes. Since she won GBBO for cooking fancy desserts, I’m starting with the easiest baked goods recipes. Here’s what I’ve attempted thus far.
Biscotti: Oh man, these turned out really well. Better than Paul Hollywood's. (His “Bread” book is typically the one we turn to when making, er, bread.) I didn’t have everything in her recipe, so instead of cranberries there were sultanas and instead of currants there were chopped dried apricots. It didn’t matter in the slightest. They are delicious and are being yummed up by the family at an alarming rate.
Grapefruit cat’s tongues: These are a sort of madeleine-like biscuit, except thinner. Butter, icing sugar, egg whites, flour and a bit of salt. No bicarb - all the fluff comes from the egg whites. The biscuits are supposed to be piped onto the baking paper, which I couldn’t be bothered with, so I just treated the dough like I would for a drop-cookie and made little blobs that spread out into circles. Delicious, melt-in the mouth circles. Again, I didn’t have a grapefruit handy so I zested a lemon instead. I suspect any citrus flavouring, or vanilla, could be substituted into this recipe.
Honeycomb: This was my first failure. Honeycomb should be ridiculously easy to make. It is, after all, simply sugar, honey and bicarb. Somehow mine fell flat. I heated the sugar and honey and stirred until it all went golden, but my two teaspoons of bicarb produced only dispirited fizzing and not the vigorous bubbling it ought to have done. The bloke and I puzzled over this and tested the bicarb in some lemon juice, whereupon it behaved as normal. We concluded that perhaps our local Worcestershire honey was simply not acidic enough, and that next time I should add a splash of balsamic or lemon juice to produce the desired air bubbles. What I made is more like very chewy toffee. It still tastes good though.
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unsolicited honeycomb recipe
My recipe, which I've been making long enough to remember middle sister accusing me of trying to poison her by deliberately ensuring that the piece she took contained an unmixed-in mouthful of bicarbonate of soda, is:
1 oz butter (It is an old recipe. It is in ounces)
6 oz granulated sugar
2 tbsps golden syrup
2 tbsps water
Heat to soft crack on a sugar thermometer (140C). Remove from heat. Add 1/2 tsp malt vinegar and 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda and stir madly while it does chemical reaction stuff in your saucepan.
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Re: unsolicited honeycomb recipe
Thank you for your recipe. I will attempt it! Is your step after mad stirring "pour into greased-baking-parchment-lined tin"?
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Re: unsolicited honeycomb recipe
Make sure the sugar dissolves completely before heating it to turn it into toffee. The temperature will affect the set/softness/crunchiness but isn't disastrous if you haven't got a thermometer. I've never lined the tin, just greased it. It can stick to the tin a bit but you just turn it upside down and bash it and I'd be worried the paper might stick to it otherwise. Good luck. It is fun edible chemistry!
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Re: unsolicited honeycomb recipe
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This entire post made me hungry :3 It all sounds delicious, even the "failed" honeycomb.
Worcestershire
Slightly off-topic, but how would you pronounce Worcestershire? My grandmother pronounced it "worr-cess-shurr", but a former coworker told me it was "worr-chest-err-shire".
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Worcestershire is pronounced "WUSS-ter-shurr" here, so your grandmother was much closer to the English pronunciation than your co-worker (who would probably be roundly mocked for theirs by pitiless natives).
The pronunciation of English place names never fails to aggravate. Towcester, for instance, is pronounced "toaster". Leominster is "Lemster". And Wymondham is "windum". Seriously, my dudes, why did you put in all those extra letters if you weren't going to pronounce them?! :P
Oh, oh, and you have Chester, which going by the above should be pronounced "Ster". But no. It's "chester". AAARGH
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Even the English can't do Cornish placenames. If they get the pronunciation approximately right they'll get the stress in completely the wrong place.
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Also, to counter by far the most common (or do I just mean stereotypical?) American mis-pronunciation of British place names: When the suffix "-shire" appears as part of a place name, it *NEVER* rhymes with "tyre". That only happens if it's being used stand-alone, e.g. in a phrase such as "here in the shires", or Tolkien's "the shire". The RP pronunciation is "-sheer", but in casual speech most people will shorten the "ee" sound to an "i" or an "uh", depending on their regional accent.
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If so, I know them as lidah kucing (literally "cat's tongue" in Malay) and they usually look like these served during Hari Raya/Eid:
(Admittedly these ones tend to look a lot better than they taste — adding citrus sounds like a wonderful idea — but it always pleases me to eat rainbows during my most heteronormative time of the year.)
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