Lemon Poppy Mini Loaves (gf/df)

To say it would be a while since I last blogged would be an understatement. It seems like a lifetime ago (and that's not just the lifetime that seems to have passed between two weeks ago when I had a job and was living a fairly normal life and today when I have no job and most of the world is in quarantine). Since then I started, and finished, a pastry program at culinary school, got my first job as pastry chef at a catering company and cafe, ran two marathons, took a three week holiday,  hosted Christmas in our little falling-apart apartment, found out we'd be moving to DC this summer, and now have lost my job, am not sure when I'll next make it home, live in the time of social-distancing, and try not to think more than half a day ahead of where we currently are to try to maintain some sense of sanity. Exhale. 

I hope you're all coping okay, staying safe, keeping your distance, eating lots of vegetables, and finding new hobbies to keep you sane. Baking during times like these helps. It's become a sort of therapy to me over the last few years, and that has never been truer than right now. So, to try to distract myself and entertain you, I thought I'd start sharing some of the recipes I've been working on over the last many months. First up, these lemon poppy loaves.

Baking in Brooklyn involved trying to create as many gluten-free/dairy-free/vegan/everything-free treats as possible. And while I didn't always stay true to that, sometimes I did. These gluten- and dairy-free lemon poppy loaves were so popular in the six months we sold them at the cafe. Hopefully they can bring a little brightness to you now too. If you don't have a mini loaf pan, a muffin pan would work well too, just be sure to grease it really well. And I know food shopping isn't the easiest, so switches can be made. Any citrus you can find will work, canola oil can be changed to olive or whatever plain-ish oil you have, poppy seeds can be omitted, and the glaze is totally optional. Anything else you need to swap? Let me know. We'll come up with a solution.

Stay safe and strong y'all. Eat a salad as well as cake. Talk to your friends. Post a rainbow in your window. Stay home. Sending virtual hugs. I'll be back soon.

Makes 18 mini loaves

(I use this pan).

Ingredients

for the cakes:

8 eggs, separated
340ml canola oil
300g sugar
4 lemons, zested (keep the rest of the lemons!)
Pinch of salt
200g cornmeal
280g ground almonds
2 teaspoons baking powder
4 tablespoons poppy seeds

for the syrup:

2 lemons, juiced
30g sugar

for the glaze:

3 cups powdered sugar
2 lemons, juiced
Poppy seeds, to decorate

What to do

for the cakes:

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Grease and line the base and short sides of a mini loaf pan.

Whisk together (by hand or in a stand mixer) the egg yolks, canola oil, sugar and lemon zest until combined. Make sure the oil is incorporated.

In a stand mixer (if you used it for the yolks mix, be sure to clean and dry it well), whip the egg whites and salt to stiff peaks.

While the egg whites whip, whisk together the cornmeal, ground almonds, baking powder and poppy seeds in a large bowl. Fold in the yolk and oil mixture.

When the whites are ready, add them in three batches to the batter. It will be hard to incorporate at first as the batter will be thick, but the whites will gradually loosen it. Be patient, don't mix too hard, but also don't be scared about knocking some air out of them. It's okay to have streaks of egg whites still visible between adding batches, but before you stop mixing entirely, make sure it is well combined.

Fill the molds in the prepared pan, making sure they're not filled right to the top (roughly three-quarters). Quickly get them in the oven.

Bake for 10 minutes, rotate, and bake for 8 more. When they're done they should be lightly golden brown and beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan. A cake tester should come out clean. Set aside to cool.

When cool, remove from the pan. Place them upside down on a lined tray. Using a cocktail stick (or whatever sharp, small tool you have), prod 3-4 holes in each cake.

for the syrup:

Mix the lemon juice and sugar together in a pan. Place over a medium heat and bring to a boil. Boil for 1 minute. Remove from the heat.

Use a pastry brush to soak the syrup into the cakes. I like to do two rounds of a light soak. (If there is extra syrup left, you can add some seltzer for a homemade lemonade.)

for the glaze:

Sift the powdered sugar over a large bowl. Whisk the sugar as you gradually add the lemon juice until it becomes a think, smooth glaze. If it's too runny, add more sugar, and if it's too dry, add more lemon juice or water.

Using a piping bag or a tablespoon, glaze the lemon cakes, and top with poppy seeds. These will last for 4-5 days in the fridge.

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Molly Yeh's Funfetti Cake

Molly Yeh's new book has been born. I've been dreaming of this book for years, long before Molly even started writing it, and it lives up to every hope, dream, and expectation. It's an honest, funny, beautiful, whimsical, lifestyle-jealousy-inducing, totally inspiring creation, and the best new addition to my ever-expanding cookbook shelves. Since I got the book in my hands last Tuesday, I've read it from cover to cover in every free batch of non-occupied five minutes I managed to sneak into a hectic week. It didn't take much deliberation to figure out where to start: at the end, with the three-layer, buttercream-coated, crazily colorful, funfetti cake.

As per every recipe of Molly's that I've ever made, the cake is perfect. An unbelievable amount of work, experimentation, creativity, and trialling, has gone into creating this cake recipe, and the result is a sweet, bright white cake, dotted with the most stunningly artificial colors. Each layer is strong enough to support the next one, but not so strong that it's a dense and heavy sponge. Instead, it's fluffy, super sugary, packed full of rainbow happiness, and layered up with the fluffiest, airiest buttercream.

If you grew up in a household were funfetti cake was an annual birthday tradition, I'm certain this cake will bring back wonderfully nostalgic memories. I grew up in an organic-obsessed home, so no boxed funfetti cake ever appeared at our birthday parties. But I'm definitely not complaining: instead we had homemade chocolate sponge cakes (shaped into rabbits or whatever the current obsession happened to be), a baked alaska that was transformed into the millennium dome (I was a demanding child), and a cake topped with the three handmade marzipan bears, for my (you guessed it) third birthday. So yes, I was spoiled rotten with my birthday cakes, but funfetti wasn't a feature. However I have now made up for anything I feel I may have missed out on by eating at least half of this cake in just three days: Any absence of dyed sprinkles in my childhood has been compensated for in one brief weekend. 

You can find Molly Yeh's Funfetti Cake recipe on this beautiful blog over here.

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Nectarine & Blackberry Crumble Pie

By far the most important discovery I have so far made since moving to New York is that of the magical world of pie. Yes, pie. That simple, totally typical, all-American dessert. It's such a basic, widely-loved creation over here that it's almost taken for granted.  For those of us who have been bought up on crumbles, cakes, and flapjacks (this kind, not this kind), pie is a wonderful amalgamation of all my favorite things. Especially when it's a crumble pie, filled with bubbling fruit, and with a crust so thick it's almost too much for my teeth to handle.

On the subject of pie crust, I just want to take a moment to explain how it has taken me astoundingly long to get it right. I once spent a whole summer perfecting my French-inspired tart crusts, making them as thin, light, flaky, and buttery as possible. So whenever I roll out any pastry into a circle, up until this point in my life, I have immediately, automatically started treating it like that classic tarte au citron, and, inevitably, I am always disappointed by the lack of thick, crusty, almost burned, layered pie pastry when I cut into the tart-pie hybrid I have produced. However, it seems that I have finally managed to delete my muscle memory and I've managed to bake a pie where the crust is so thick that the crimping pretty much held it's shape, it's challenging to cut through, and it actually resembled the numerous slices I've eaten at Four and Twenty Blackbirds.

So, without further mumblings about my inability to not over-roll my pie dough, here's the recipe for the pie y'all need to make before we're out of nectarines for the year.

Nectarine and Blackberry Peach Pie

Makes 1 9-inch pie. 

Pastry (barely adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 tablespoon caster sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 stick (110 grams) unsalted butter, very cold, cubed

1 cup iced water

Place flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor. Pulse to combine. Add the butter and pulse until the butter has broken down into pieces which are no bigger than tiny peas. Add 1/2 cup iced water and pulse. If the dough is beginning to come together, remove from the food processor. If it needs more water, add a tiny bit more, but be careful to not to use any more than you need. Knead the dough into a ball and flatten into a disc shape. Wrap in cling film/plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.

Filling

4 nectarines, stones removed and thinly sliced

1/2 cup blackberries

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/3 cup all-purpose flour

1/3 cup light brown sugar

5 teaspoons caster sugar

Place the nectarines, blackberries, and vanilla extract in a large bowl, and stir together. Add the flour and both sugars and toss gently to combine, trying not to break up the fruit too much.

Crumble (barely adapted from Lily Vanilli)

30 grams (1 ounce) flour

30 grams (1 ounce) dark brown sugar

30 grams (1 ounce) unsalted butter, cold, cubed

30 grams (1 ounce) rolled oats

1/2 teaspoon salt

Mix the flour and sugar together. Add the butter and, using your fingers work it into the sugar and flour mixture until it has broken down and looks like breadcrumbs. Stir through the oats and the salt.

To Assemble the Pie

Flour, to roll and dust

Ice cream or whipped cream, to serve

Heat the oven to 180 degrees C/350 degrees F.

Roll the pastry out on a well-floured board into a circle at least 1 inch wider in diameter than your pie dish. Fold it into quarters and transfer it to your pie dish, and then unfold it. Fold the excess pastry back under the edge of the dough and crimp the edges as desired. Dust a couple of teaspoons of flour over the pastry base.

Pour in the fruit and sprinkle the crumble topping over it.

Place on a baking sheet (to catch any spillage) and bake in the oven for about an hour, or until the pastry is golden brown and the fruit is bubbling. Let cool (this will take a couple of hours) before serving with ice cream or freshly whipped cream.

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Spiced Pepper Plum Tart

Yesterday I returned from the market with far too many plums. Although it was tempting to just throw them in the oven with some spices until they turned into a juicy compote (which would have made breakfast this morning infinitely more exciting), I had a free afternoon ahead of me, so something slightly more complex seemed apt.

I curled myself up in one of our giant armchairs with a cup of tea and a huge pile of cookbooks. After bookmarking many, many plum recipes, I eventually settled on Justin Gellatly's Spiced Pepper Plum Tart. It sounded bizarre, and therefore intriguing. In a good way.

The pastry of the tart is filled with black pepper, cinnamon, allspice and orange zest: it smells almost Christmas-y when it's baking in the oven. Who doesn't want an apartment that smells of Christmas cooking on the first day of Fall?

Plums are placed on top of the pastry base and then more of the pastry is grated over the top and sprinkled with Demerara sugar to give it golden, crunchy lid. The spicing blends in with the juicy plums, and with a splash of rich, thick cream drizzled over the top, I can't think off a better way of using up these beautiful September fruits.

Justin's recipe for Spiced Pepper Plum Tart can be found in his brilliant book, Bread, Cake, Doughnut, Pudding.

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Blueberry and Cinnamon Flapjacks

After a huge and perfect flapjack from Albion on Tuesday in the office, I was back in flapjack-obsessive mode. So when I hit tea o'clock and didn't have a flapjack to accompany said tea on Wednesday, I was rather upset. Pre-bake off on Wednesday evening therefore became flapjack making time. Super quick and easy, adding in whatever extra treats I could find, these flapjacks were chewy, crumbly and squidgy. A perfectly acceptable breakfast, snack and pudding. Versatile creatures, these flapjacks.

Ingredients

300g rolled oats

180g golden syrup

20g black treacle

170g butter

4 tbsp light brown sugar

2 handfuls of fresh blueberries

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 handful of chocolate chips (optional)

Method

1. Heat oven to 180ºC

2. Grease and line a square baking tin

3. Melt the butter, sugar, syrup, treacle, sugar and cinnamon together in a saucepan

4. Mix in the oats

5. Chuck in the blueberries and chocolate and mix together

6. Sneak a spoonful into your mouth while noone's looking

7. Bake for 25 minutes until golden

8. Cool in tin for 10 minutes before cutting into squares

9. Leave to cool completely before removing from tin

These will last for at least a week. No more lonely tea breaks.

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Orange and Chocolate Polenta Cake

On Wednesday evening B was out at his pottery class in a railway arch, and home alone as I was, I set about on a sporadic baking frenzy. This orange and chocolate polenta cake was the result. A result I was rather pleased with. Store-cupboard staples with lots of fresh oranges and a few chunks of chocolate for good measure ended up with a gluten-free, super moist (sorry!) loaf with a dark crust and lashings of sugary orange syrup. It disappeared pretty fast.

Orange and Chocolate Polenta Cake

For the cake:

4 eggs

170ml olive oil

170g caster sugar

Zest of 2 oranges

100g ground almonds

140g polenta

1 tsp baking powder

100g dark chocolate

For the syrup

150ml orange juice

55g caster sugar

1. Heat the oven to 180°C

2. Grease and line a loaf tin
3. Beat together the egg yolks, oil, 150g caster sugar and orange zest until smooth
4. Mix the dry ingredients together
5. Fold dry ingredients into oil and sugar mixture
6. Whisk egg whites to stiff peaks, then beat in the remaining 20g caster sugar
7. Fold the egg whites into the cake mixture a few tablespoons at a time. Don't worry if this seems tricky at first, the mixture will loosen up as you go
8. Bake for 45 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean

9. While it's baking make the syrup: heat the fruit juice with the caster sugar until the sugar dissolves, then let it boil for 1 minute, before leaving it to cool

10.Pierce the cake with the toothpick

11. When the cake is cool, pour over the syrup and leave to seep through the cake before cutting in!

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