Cherry and Lemon Biscuit Bites

Tags

baking, biscuit, caster sugar, cherry, dried cherries, lemon, recipe, snack, zest

Last night I reached a metaphysical crisis point.

You see, I had gone to bed nice and early (9pm!) in order to read quietly before settling down to sleep. (My usual nightly routine is to stay online until whatever time my eyes feel like they’re bleeding and then haul myself off to bed with the potential inclusion of half an hour of my current book and a wonder at why it takes me ages to drop off to sleep.)

Not only is my current book not doing it for me (A Game of Thrones by George R R Martin) but after an hour and a half I was hungry. Not for a roast chicken dinner or anything, but maybe a biscuit.

There were no biscuits in the house. No biscuits, no muffins, no cookies, no small snacks of any kind. In the end I had to make do with a slice of bread and butter – which is all very Dickensian and not something up with which I intend to put.

(In case you’re interested, I also changed my book to Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.)

Consequently today I have had biscuits on my mind, and this afternoon I made some, cleverly including the extraneous pack of apple-juice sweetened dried cherries. 

I want to point out that I have a small amount of lemon curd in the fridge (a couple of tablespoons at most) and was very, very tempted to add that to the dough. But I refrained. I’m not sure why. Next time …

Ingredients

• 100g/3.5oz butter, softened
• 100g/3.5oz caster sugar
• Zest of one lemon
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 275g/10oz plain flour
• 100g/3.5oz sweetened dried cherries, chopped

 

Method

Preheat oven to 190C/375F and line a baking tray/sheet pan with either greaseproof paper or a silicone sheet.

In a mixer cream the butter and sugar together. Once combined, add the lemon zest.

Slowly add the beaten egg and vanilla extract and combine well.

(I then removed the bowl from the stand and used a wooden spoon for mixing in the flour.)

Sift in the flour (I did this in three batches) and beat well. Add the chopped dried cherries and continue mixing until the mixture comes together to form a ball. (Add a small amount of warm water or milk if it doesn’t!)

Tip out of the bowl onto a floured surface and knead slightly to form a ball.

Roll out to approximately 1cm thick.

Cut into whatever shapes your biscuit cutter collection allows! I used a 2″/5cm fluted circular cutter. Place onto your baking sheet and bake until pale golden brown.

I was expecting them to do be done after 8-10 minutes, but they weren’t quite cooked so in total they were about 12-14 minutes in the oven.

Remove and leave to cool slightly on the tray before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely (or snaffle whilst still warm!).

If you wish, you can ice them with water icing, or perhaps scattering with caster sugar when fresh out of the oven. Either way, enjoy with a cup of tea – or perhaps in the middle of the night when sleep proves elusive!

Lemon Snowball Shortbreads

Tags

baking, biscuit, cake, cookie, icing sugar, lemon, lemon drops, lemon extract, recipe, snack, zest

Technically this should be entitled Lemon Snowball Cookies – as that is what the original recipe is called. But – and I don’t know if I can explain this in the right way that doesn’t make me seem awfully jingoistic – it sounds terribly American. I have nothing against the term ‘cookie’ and don’t automatically think ‘biscuit’ is the better word (after all, how often do we actually twice cook our biscuits?). However, I made these and immediately went “Oh – this is shortbread. Why not just call them shortbread?” So I am.

(As a potentially interesting aside, I actually had to look up the difference between shortbread and shortcake. Shortbread is one part sugar, two parts butter, and three parts flour. Shortcake uses vegetable fat (usually) and a chemical leavening agent (i.e. baking powder) which gives a different texture. And the ‘short’? Its from ‘shorten’ in the sense of ‘make crumbly’ – which happens because the fat inhibits the formation of long gluten strands within the flour.)

I actually made these twice. For good reason. You see, the original recipe featured either lemon chocolate chips (which sound, quite frankly, AWESOME – but I didn’t really want to order them online around Christmas as who only knows when they might arrive) or lemon drops. Lemon drops clearly being the winner when it comes to ease of purchase … Or so I thought. Instead, all I could find was lemon sherbets. Shame. So I crushed up a handful (i.e. 5 or 6) to be added to the dough.

Not the best idea I’ve ever had, I have to say. I have nothing against shards of cooked sugar in things, but the molten glass effect was exacerbated by the fact that I FORGOT TO REFRIGERATE THE RAW, SHAPED BISCUITS! Big tip for you when working with a dough that’s so high in butter: put it in the fridge for 15-20 minutes for the butter to firm up once you’ve handled it, and then cook it. Holds the shape and improves the texture all round.

Not that there was anything wrong with the first batch. Adding the crushed sweets didn’t take anything away from the biscuits – but it didn’t add anything either. So on to batch number two … No lemon sherbets. Just lemon zest and lemon extract (yes – lemon extract – a bad one is some kind of oil with lemon oil, a good one is lemon oil and a spirit – usually vodka) to give it that clean tang of citrus. And smaller balls. Which were refrigerated.

Another tip: Leave to cool completely on the baking tray and then dredge with icing sugar. When they’re straight out of the oven they are very friable and prone to breakage. The lemon flavour also improves as they cool.

As mentioned, the original recipe was from Chocolate Moosey, but its all in cup measures. Whilst I can work in cups – and have a set of cook’s cups – the fact that you can measure butter in cups threw me for a loop. Translating it into ‘sticks’ doesn’t help either. I want measures of mass, dammit, not volume! So I translated it all into grams where necessary.

Whatever set of measures you use, these are incredibly simple to make so give them a go!

Ingredients

• 113g butter, soft
• 31g icing sugar
• Zest of one lemon
• Half teaspoon lemon extract
• 145g plain flour
• 50g lemon chocolate chips/crushed lemon drops (optional)

Method

Preheat oven to 200C/400F. Line a baking sheet with either a silicone cooking sheet or a square of greaseproof paper.

Cream the butter and icing sugar in the mixer with the lemon zest and lemon extract. (I find it helps to hold a tea towel over the bowl to stop the icing sugar blasting over the kitchen surfaces.)

Slowly add the flour and mix until just incorporated. The dough should be thick and fairly unwieldy at this point.

Remove bowl from the mixer and stir through the chocolate chips or lemon drops (if using).

From the first batch – with crushed sherbet lemons

Scoop a teaspoon of mixture out and roll into a ball, placing on the baking sheet. Repeat for the remaining batter. The original recipe says this amount makes 24 cookies when rolled into one inch balls. The first batch I got 14. The second time I got 17.

These don’t spread too much so don’t need to be too far apart on the tray.

Refrigerate tray for 15-20 minutes before putting in the oven.

Cook for around 8-10 minutes. The cookies should be brown on the bottom and golden on top, with a slight squidge to them (they feel slightly underdone at this point – but that’s what you want). Remove from the oven and leave to cool on the baking sheet.

Once cool dredge with icing sugar through a sifter/sieve or spoon sugar into a bowl and roll them through.

Lemon Curd & Poppyseed Muffins

Tags

baking, buttermilk, cake, lemon, lemon curd, muffins, poppyseed, recipe, snacks

I’m not going to open with an apology for having not written anything here for months on end. I’m really not. Having not apologised, let me move on …

My mum likes to buy me little cookbooks. However, as she lives in France these are (in the vast majority) in French and (in the vast majority) a little odd. One of those little gems is this one: Muffins – Petits, Délicats Et Irrésistiblement Savoureux

Muffins – Small, Delicate And Irresistibly Delicious

Despite the title, this includes not only muffins (les globe-trotters) but doughnuts (sweet and nourishing), bagels (the preferred patisserie of American breakfast), cookies (les petits fours à l’américaine), scones (well, almost), rolls and cakes as well. The recipes are split into several categories:

• Fruity
• Filled
• Alcoholic (this is a French cookbook, after all)
• Festive
• Savoury

The fruity and filled sections have the normal, run of the mill recipes. Like courgette & banana, fig & carrot, chocolate & mint, spiced chocolate and papaya. Even the alcoholic and festive sections are almost ordinary. I mean, who wouldn’t want not one but TWO egg liquor recipes? But the true majesty of this book lies in the final chapter: Sablés.

Savoury muffin goodness …

Excuse the page crease with the scan, but I couldn’t not show you muffins topped with salsa or fried bacon and onion, let alone salami. But the picture below shows you the jewel in this book’s horrific, jaw-dropping crown:

Nightmare Muffins

What looks like the bastard offspring of a charcutier‘s nightmare and a sausage roll are, in fact, “Muffins saucisse-fromage”. Of course they are. Huge chunks of Frankfurt sausage smothered in a batter impregnated with onion, leek, red pepper, paprika and cheese and baked until solid and sprinkled with chopped herbs.

I’ll leave you with that one …

I’m not sure why I love muffins so much, but I’ll take muffins over cupcakes and their acres of tooth-achingly sweet icing and mounds of vanilla-ish nothingness any day of the week. And I’m not talking shop-bought muffins either – all bicarb and grease and no trousers. Proper homemade muffins are right up there in the baked goods department – maybe its the texture (not too fluffy, not too dense) or the way you can mix and match flavourings and ingredients …

I also know that I have mentioned several times about my love affair with lemon (go Team Zest!), so it seemed only natural that when perusing my fridge for baking ideas and my eyes befell a partially sliced lemon that I decided that was for me. (I should point out that the main reason I made them was to use up half a pot of buttermilk left over from making these bad boys …)

Muffins. I love them. Sweet or savoury, its all good. Surprisingly, I’ve only blogged one muffin recipe before now. Now we can make that two. Did I mention that these are insanely easy to make and the shot of intense citrus tang provided by the lemon curd is a wonderful treat! (I’m also imagining these with lime curd … eaten in the sunshine with something cold, zesty and alcoholic …)

This amount only made 6 muffins, but you could eke it out by making the batter wetter … or making smaller or less generous muffins than I did!

Ingredients

• 200g self-raising flour
• 100g golden caster sugar
• Poppyseeds (amount dependant on how much you like them!)
• 1 egg
• Quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 125ml buttermilk
• Zest of one lemon
• Tablespoon milk
• Lemon curd

Method

Preheat oven to 180C and line a muffin tin with muffin cases.

In a bowl mix the flour, sugar and poppyseeds.

In a measuring jug, mix the egg, buttermilk, lemon zest and milk until blended. Add to dry ingredients and beat until just mixed. This will barely take a minute. Over-beaten batter equals dense and tough muffins. And nobody wants that …

Spoon in a blob of batter into each muffin case and top with a scant teaspoon of lemon curd. Cover with another blob of batter.

Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes, or until firm to touch.

Leave to cool in the tin and try not to scoff all at once …

I will be back soon with more recipes … Promise.

Lemon Cheesecake

Tags

cheesecake, dessert, lemon, mascarpone, no-bake

I love lemons. Not that I sit around and suck them or do anything weird to them. I’m not a crazy. But there is something … incredible about that ellipsoidal yellow fruit. Its history is a bit crazy. A genetic study found that it was a hybrid of the citron and the sour orange – which in itself is a hybrid of the pomelo and the Mandarin orange – and they were first used in Europe as ornamentals in Islamic gardens. 

For me, you only have to smell a freshly-cut lemon to be refreshed (a 2008 study showed that lemon oil aroma can affect human moods – this was published in the snappily titled periodical  Psychoneuroendocrinology) … and even the sight of that cheery yellow peel makes me smile. 

If it were up to me then I’d use lemons everywhere. 

This recipe was one I cooked on my recent jaunt to les parents in France. There were a few sad-looking lemons (not perky and bright by any stretch of the imagination), and there was also a tub of mascarpone lurking in the back of the fridge. Yes, you may have guessed it. This is a no-bake cheesecake. (Although this serves as a bit of a push for me to make another ‘proper’ cheesecake – the last time I had a home-baked cheesecake was at the reception of a friend’s wedding and was being lauded as some amazing piece of confection – it may have been nicer had the cook halved the amount of sugar he’d used …)

Ingredients

• 10 digestive biscuits
• 75g/3oz butter, melted
• 1 tbsp clear honey
• 700g/1½ lb mascarpone cheese
• 2 lemons, juice and zest
• 200g/7oz caster sugar, plus more to taste
• 4 tbsp icing sugar

 Method

Brush the bottom of a 23cm/9in springform cake tin with some of the melted butter and place a round of greaseproof paper in the base.

Crush the biscuits and tip them into a bowl, add the melted butter and honey and stir until well combined.

Tip the mixture into the bottom of the cake tin. Using the back of a spoon, gently push the crumbs from the centre outward, until smooth and level. This will form the base of the cheesecake. Chill in the fridge while making the filling.

For the filling, mix the mascarpone cheese, lemon juice and zest and caster sugar together in a bowl until well combined. Do not mix the mixture too much as this will cause it to split. Taste the mixture and add more sugar, to taste.

Spoon the mixture into the tin on top of the chilled biscuit mixture and chill in the fridge for at least 2 hours, preferably overnight.

When ready to serve, either run a hot cloth round the outside of the tin or warm a sharp knife in hot water and run around inside the tin and ease out the cheesecake.