Sticky Chai v.1

Ingredients: 
100g black Ceylon tea
15g cinnamon sticks
5g whole clove
20g vanilla powder
5g turmeric powder
15g dried ginger
5g aniseed
3g licorice root
5g whole green cardamom
10g black peppercorn
5g coriander seed
200g yellow box honey

Break the cinnamon sticks in half, and pull them apart.

Crack open the cardamom pods, and extract the seeds from the pods -- keep the pods.

Break up the slices of dried ginger -- pull apart with your fingers or chop.

Pour all the dry ingredients into a bowl, then pour the honey on top and stir. Everything should be moist with honey, without dry spots. Put into a jar and leave it in a dark and cool cupboard for 2 weeks.

Notes: 
I am making my own Sticky Chai because I find the original one to be too sweet, not spicy enough and lacking in licorice/aniseed flavor that Matthias so loves.

I did not mix this by hand. I recommend using your stand mixer on the lower setting, with a dough hook. It is less work to clean the dough hook and bowl than to do this by hand.

Using the dough hook also minimises the crushing of the spices. While some crushing is ideal (that is why I pull apart the cinnamon sticks), I suspect that crushing or grinding the mixture down may cause some of the spices -- particularly the clove and the star anise -- to taste too bitter in the final product.

I only used yellow box honey because it was cheaper. Any regular honey will be fine. I plan on making a batch with maple syrup at some point, but with less of the aniseed.

Tasting Notes: 

Makes for a very mellow, and mild chai. I have to add some fresh ground pepper and chopped ginger to give it even the slightest kick.

Maple Cake

Ingredients: 

4 egg whites
50g sugar

50g flour
20g sugar
100g milk
1 egg yolk
maple extract
vanilla bean paste -- optional
pinch of salt

50g flour
1/4tsp baking powder

Dissolve sugar in warm milk. Whisk milk into first 50g of flour, followed by egg yolk, extract, and salt.

Beat egg whites until stiff with the sugar. Pour milk mixture in while whisking, then sift into flour.

Divide into 12 cupcake forms and bake at 160C.

Notes: 
The cupcakes did not open up, and were too chewy. I think that was too much milk for 12 cupcakes. I am going to increase the egg yolks and decrease the milk.

Fennel and Potatoes in Cream

Adapted from Food52

Ingredients: 

1 fennel head
5 potatoes

black pepper
2tsp coarse salt
1 bay leaf
200g milk
200g cream

Chunk up the potatoes.

Cut off the fronds and other dark green bits of the fennel for another use. Quarter it, cut off the hard rooty bit, and pull it apart. Slice them into roughly the same dimensions as the potatoes.

Pour the rest of the ingredients into a pan, and warm up on low heat. Stir, then add the potatoes and the fennel.

If the milk does not submerge the vegetables completely, cover the pot. Keep an eye on it because milk has a tendency to bubble up and out of the pan and it is a terrible mess to clean up.

Cook for about twenty minutes, or until tender. Taste for salt.

At this point, you can drain the vegetables, reserving the milk liquid for another use. You can serve the vegetables at this point.

You can also portion them out onto gratin dishes and broil them until crispy. I recommend brushing a bit of oil over the top to help it crisp up faster.

Notes: 

You can swap out the fennel for leeks, if you like, or the potatoes for another root vegetable. Parsnip would probably work well.

For flavor, you can add a clove of garlic, garam masala, chilli flakes, amongst other things, to the milk. But if you use fennel, I actually suggest adding fennel seed instead, because I am afraid the garlic etc will over power the fennel.

Next time, I will probably not use cream. It is not necessary.

You can use the milk after that in a roux-based sauce. I plan to fry up some steak in butter, use that to make a roux and dump in the milk after that.

Green Tea Ice Cream

Ingredients: 

27g matcha powder
180g condensed milk
450g heavy cream -- 40% fat

Dump everything into a mixing bowl, and whip until stiff.

Please keep an eye on the mixture as it whips up pretty quick if your cream is cold.

Scoop into container and freeze for at least 6 hours.

Notes:

I assume that you will not be able to resist having a taste of the mixture before it freezes. The matcha powder, before freezing, will be a touch too much, but it will smooth out after freezing.

You can also put this into an ice cream maker, but I do not have one.

I am going to try this recipe for condensed milk soon, with the coconut sugar.

Soft Chocolate Cake

Ingredients: 

45g egg yolk
195g whole eggs
135g sugar

45g cocoa powder
50g flour
45g sugar
40g heavy cream
60g milk

50g flour
1/4tsp baking soda

Dissolve sugar in cream and milk over gently heat. Whisk into flour and cocoa powder. It will be a stiff paste. Cover.

Whip eggs up with sugar until you can draw an initial over the top before it begins to disappear.

Whisk in cocoa paste.

Whisk in flour with baking soda.

Bake at 160C in a 25cm round tin.

Notes: 

Need to adjust cocoa and flour ratios. Cocoa powder can be reduced 30g, I think.

Matcha Cake

Ingredients: 

250g egg whites
200g sugar

80g all-purpose flour
10g matcha
100g milk
50g cream

80g all-purpose flour

Sift the first 80g of flour with matcha. Warm milk and cream together, then stir into matcha-flour mixture. Make a smooth batter.

Whip egg whites with sugar until stiff peaks.

Whisk matcha mixture into egg whites.

Sift second 80g of flour and fold through.

Bake in 25cm round tin at 150C.

Notes: 

Next time, I will put some off the sugar into the matcha mixture instead. It should help keep the matcha mixture more liquid and increase the volume of the egg whites a bit.

This is a slight modification of the Coffee Cream Cake, which should really be called the Latte or Cappucino cake. I removed the egg yolks because I think they will get in the way of the matcha flavor.

Tasting Notes: 

Soft, moist and redolent of matcha. I am definitely on the right track.

The texture could be finer and more even, but I put that down to the matcha mixture not being as smooth as it could be.

I am going to reduce the amount of flour in the wet mixture a bit further, to make it smoother and easier to incorporate into the egg white.

Coffee Cream Cake

Ingredients: 

100g all-purpose flour
150g heavy cream
60g milk
10g instant coffee powder
5g coffee extract

10 yolks + enough egg white make up 440g
200g sugar

100g all-purpose flour

Warm up the cream and milk. Dissolve the instant coffee powder and then stir in the coffee extract.

Whisk the coffee mixture into the first 100g of flour. It should be a smooth batter that looks rather like soft and melty chocolate ice cream.

Beat the eggs and sugar on low speed over a barely simmering water bath until very light and thick. If your eggs are fresh, it should take at least 10 minutes. Eggs that start from cold and are not particularly fresh will take at least 15 minutes.

Stir some of the egg mixture into the coffee mixture to loosen it up, then dollop it into the rest off the eggs while whisking.

Whisk in the second 100g of flour a spoonful at a time.

Pour into a 25cm square tin (lined on the bottom), and then bake at 150C until a skewer comes out clean.

Notes: 
I forgot to loosen up the coffee mixture, but you should do that. Makes it easier to get a batter that does not streak.

I want to try this with only egg whites, partly because I have a surfeit of them and partly because sometimes I find that you get a cleaner flavor. Matcha will probably be the first one I try.

I split up the flour for textural reasons, but it is also far easier to get a mixture that can be whisked into the eggs this way.

You can split the recipe into 2 8 inch round tins or 2 7 inch square pans.

Tasting Notes: 
The coffee taste could be stronger, but the texture is really quite good.

I think you could quite easily skip the coffee and just use vanilla extract, or put some powdered spices like ground cinnamon into the cake.

Chendol Cake

Ingredients: 
8 egg yolks + enough egg white to make up 440g
80g coconut sugar
70g caster sugar

50g gula melaka
200g thin coconut milk -- see notes
60g thin pandan juice -- see notes

3 egg yolks
200g all purpose flour -- sifted

Line the bottom of a 25cm square pan.

Melt the gula melaka into the coconut milk and pandan juice. Let cool a bit, then temper in the egg yolks.

Whisk the gula melaka mixture into the flour. Set aside.

Whisk the remaining eggs, coconut sugar and caster sugar over a barely simmering pot of water. I brought a pot of water to boil on a slow cooker, then left it on the keep warm setting.

It will become very thick, and it is ready when you can completely write an initial over the top with the mixture before it sinks.

Fold a scoop of the egg mixture into the flour + gula melaka mixture to loosen it up. Whisk this into the eggs with the mixer still going.

Scrape the bottom, and pour into the prepared tin. Bake at 160C until a skewer comes out clean.

Notes: 
Chendol is a Malay dessert. It has shaved ice, green spaetzle-looking strands of noodles, sometimes red bean, and it is all doused in coconut milk and gula melaka syrup.

Gula melaka is a kind palm sugar, and is not the same as coconut sugar. There are no coconuts involved in the making of coconut sugar. You can probably use other kinds of palm sugar, but make it a dark colored one -- Thai palm sugar is too pale.

Thin coconut milk is coconut milk after the coconut cream has been skimmed off for other uses. You can probably substitute regular coconut milk and water in a 50:50 proportion.

Thin pandan juice is the water skimmed off the top after squeezing pandan juice. The stuff at the bottom is the thick stuff, the paler, cloudy-water looking stuff on top is thin pandan juice.

I actually had excess pandan juice and accidentally tipped it all into the pan, so I simmered it for until it was reduced to the proportions I gave above.

It would be interesting to try using 50:50 coconut cream and pandan juice.

Tasting Notes: 
Failure! The bottom half was gluey and 'kueh'-like, but the upper half was gorgeous. Fine crumbed, and soft and spongey.

I am going to try this again, but this time I will only add the hot liquid to half of the flour, and whisk the rest in bit by bit at the end.

ETA: 
I am making something else today with the same technique of whipping eggs up until super light, and I suspect that when I made this, I did not whip the eggs for long enough.

Quarkkuchen, or Matthias's Favourite German Cheesecake made with Quark

Adapted from German Kuchen

Ingredients: 
125g butter
200g sugar
4 egg yolks

1kg quark

Juice of 1 lemon

45g semolina
20g cornstarch
1tsp baking powder

6 egg whites
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
50g sugar

Cream butter and sugar. Add yolks one at a time.

Add quark. Scrape the bottom several times.

When the quark mixture is fully combined -- and no longer has streaks of yellow but is a pale yellow through out -- add the lemon juice, followed by the dry ingredients.

Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks with the cream of tartar and the sugar.

Fold the egg whites into the quark mixture.

Pour into a 25cm springform tin -- the German-style ones with the glass bottom are great -- and bake at 160C until done. The cake will rise, puff and then sink. It is done when a skewer comes out clean.

Notes: 
I used this recipe because it was the most similar one to Matthias's mom's recipe.

I added an additional two egg whites because I have found that when making cakes that puff and then sink, the addition of the extra egg whites makes for a better, smoother textured cake. If you do not have extra egg whites lying around spare, the cake should taste perfectly good without them anyway.

You cannot use a smaller tin without reducing the recipe. Even with a 25cm tin, there was plenty extra to make Matthias and I a small one tonight plus some extra batter for him to eat.

Tasting Notes: 
Matthias says that I do not need to finagle with the recipe any more, but I shall see what his mother has to say when I get her recipe.

Soft Almond Cake

Adapted from Genoa Cake, or Pain de Genes

Ingredients: 
4 large eggs
250g marzipan
60g flour
1tsp vanilla extract

Blend the marzipan into the eggs. If using a stand mixer, I recommend trying the dough hook, and scrape the bottom regularly. . You may also use a blender.

Switch to a whisk and whip at medium speed for at least 15 minutes, until the mixture is very light, very pale and very fluffy.

Whisk in the flour and vanilla extract.

Pour into a 22.5cm pan and bake at 180C for 15-20 minutes.

Notes: 
The annoying part is working the eggs and marzipan into a uniform paste. Using a blender is fastest, but you will need to clean it -- and also waste batter transferring it to different bowls and such.

This was a cake designed from laziness. It takes similar proportions to the Genoa Cake, but fluffs it up with a machine and gets rid of the heating eggs and almond paste bit.

The pan does not need to be very tall, as the cake does not rise very much in the oven.

As it does not rise very much in the oven, it also stays pretty flat. If you were to stack the cake, it probably will not need levelling.

It would be lovely topped with fruit and glazed, or sandwiched with lightly sweetened custard.

Tasting Notes: 
The texture is spectacularly good. Very soft, fine and moist.

It does not taste as strongly almondy as the Genoa Cake recipe does, but it is still very fragrant.

In some ways, it takes the best things of the Genoa Cake and makes it better with what I consider it to be superior texture.

Three-Day 100% Wholemeal Flat Bread -- with starter and scalded dough v.1

Ingredients: 

Scalded Dough:
200g strong wholemeal flour
300g boiling water

Starter:
5g active dry yeast
10g sugar -- optional
100g strong wholemeal flour
150g milk -- buttermilk or other soured milk products is also fine

250 strong wholemeal flour + extra for dusting
2tsp salt
50g oil

Toppings -- optional

Day 1: 

Scalded Dough:
Stir boiling water into wholemeal flour. It is fine if there are dry patches. Cover with clingwrap and let cool for a bit before placing in the fridge overnight

Starter:
Scald the milk. Let cool before stirring into the remaining starter ingredients. Make sure that the starter rises before putting it in the fridge.

Day 2: 

Chunk up the scalded dough, then pour the starter on top. Knead or stir until it is uniform. If using a stand mixer, let it knead away, scraping the bottom occasionally, on the lowest setting for 8 minutes.

Pour in the salt and oil. Add about half the flour, and then the rest by the spoonful until the dough is just barely tacky. Knead for 4 more minutes on the lowest setting.

Tuck into a ball, and let sit on the counter for about 1 hour. Place in fridge overnight.

Day 3: 

Portion the dough out.

Pat or roll each piece out. If adding any toppings, sprinkle them on the dough now. Then roll them up like a cinnamon roll, seal the edges and tuck the ends in.

Cover and stash in fridge until ready to use.

When ready to cook, heat a dry, clean pan.

Roll out the dough, and flip into pan. When it starts to puff, flip again. The bread is ready when both sides are speckled with dark brown spots.

Notes: 

This recipe was the result of Matthias saying he liked the Scalded Dough Flat Bread better after it had sat in the fridge for another day. He is German and likes his bread thoroughly fermented and preferably sour.

If using a soured/fermented milk product, you do not need to scald it, just warm it up a bit.

It is fine if you need to flip the bread multiple times because you haven't gotten the timing right. That is probably better than burning them anyway.

I do not know how well this bread works as a 'filled dough', as opposed to just using things like spring onion or sesame seeds and things like that.

I plan to try using sesame oil for the dough and then adding a couple tablespoons of sesame seeds to the dough (not as a filling, add it as the last ingredient on Day 2).

Tasting Notes: 

This was kinda gummy. The other version was better. I think I need to figure out if the gumminess is from excess liquid or the milk.

Toscakaka

Adapted from Poires au Chocolat 

Ingredients: 

Cake:
100g soured milk
100g butter
1tbsp vanilla extract
4 large eggs
20g glucose
130g sugar
200g flour
5g baking powder
3g salt

Almond topping:
180g butter
180g sugar
80g heavy cream
230g flaked almonds
1/8 tsp salt

Cake:
Line the bottom of a 25cm springform tin.
Melt the butter, and stir in the soured milk. Leave to cool.
Mix flour, baking powder and salt.
Crack eggs into mixer bowl, add sugar and glucose. Whisk at medium speed until thick and creamy. It should leave a trail long enough for you to write an initial.
Sift in a third of the flour, and then whisk until it disappears. Pour in half the butter-milk mixture. Alternate in this way until the flour is all in.
Scrape the bottom and fold it roughly (without deflating the mixture) to make sure that it is even.
Pour into tin and bake at 160C.
Remove when a skewer comes out clean -- about 25 minutes -- and turn the heat up to 200C.

Almond topping:
After the cake has been in the oven for 20 minutes or so, start making the topping.
Dump the butter, sugar and cream into a pot. Heat on medium, while stirring. When it turns into a glossy mixture with large bubbles, remove from stove, and pour in the almonds.
Stir to coat the almonds in the mixture.

Pour the almond topping on the cake, spreading it around with a spatula. Put it back in the oven for about 8 minutes. Watch the cake, and take it out when the topping is shiny and brown but before it burns.

Notes: 
Be mindful of the temperature of the eggs. If they are too cold, the mixture will curdle a tiny bit when you add in the soured milk and butter mixture, and the texture of the cake will be coarser.

This makes for a very topping heavy cake. You can reduce it a bit, if you like.

I make more caramel mixture than is needed for the almonds to adhere to the cake because I like it to soak a little into the cake too. It helps make the cake a little less dry in case you forgot to take it out of the oven on time too.

The cake is best on the day it is made. The next day,  warm it up a little in the oven. It makes the caramel chewy rather than crisp again, but it is definitely better sloppy caramel.