I’ve Been Baking…

I’m suppose to be jogging right now, trying to get rid of the stone I’ve manage to catch since the summer but feeling rather puffed out with all the misfortunes with my baking this week…so instead while the 3 year old is kind enough to give me a little break I’m going to explain how I’ve been hard at work baking but still managing to show an absence of any recipes on here!

The idea was a simple one: Clementine Pavlova with Rhubarb Poached in Orange Flower Water.  I had an idea of adding zest to the pavlova, adding a orangey tang, and in fact it was a very good idea because speaking as someone who doesn’t care for meringue I was rather addicted to snipping bits of it and eating this citrus flavoured meringue.  The other good idea about making this very seasonal dessert was that I had frozen egg whites which needed using up.  So what could possible go wrong with that?

Well the word is Pavlova and the various ways it kept coming out.  I will make a post on pavlova showing the results of my many failures, with over-whipping, adding the cornstarch and vinegar too early, using frozen egg whites, oven temperature, opening the oven…

All of these have resulted in my 5th pavlova now sitting in my oven, cooling down with the hope I’ve manage to give it the best circumstances in order to prevent horrid large cracks.  Little cracks fine, but large cracks right across the pavlova not good, making it difficult to pick it up.  I’ve also discovered all sorts of things like the oven temperature was crucial to growth of the meringue and the outcome at the end.

The failures was not limited to this week nor pavlovas.  I have to go back two weeks when trying to make a rhubarb pudding.  OK, so the rhubarb pudding was not a failure as such, just not as right as I wanted it, photo below.

I followed a traditional recipe and it seemed quite unnecessarily complicated, I keep thinking I can simplify it with better results.

The rhubarb pudding is one of those self-saucing puddings or also called curd pudding, where the top is soufflé-like texture and the bottom wetter and more of a curd mixture.  I ate some of it and quite nice it was.  But not yet good enough to post about it…work in progress.

In the meantime I carried on with practicing shaping batons with my sourdough bread and was very pleased with the one below.

I don’t use moulds which is not good to keep its shape but I’m a bit of a dis-organised and hopeless person when it comes to getting myself the right equipment, it’s only been since June or July when I told myself I was going to order some baskets for shaping sourdough!

Leaving my experiment with the rhubarb pudding aside for a while I thought I would give it a go with something I’ve made before and know I can make; soufflé.

I’ll make a rhubarb soufflé ready for Valentine’s week…

It started off good enough and even did some beautiful rising in the oven as photos below show…but before I could open oven door to bring them out, they collapse fantastically while in the oven.

I should have taken a photo of them, all of them collapsed, it was quite funny and a little sad.  I only have myself to blame.  Instead of following a traditional recipe with a roux base, I tried to make it dairy-free, only used a little arrowroot and there wasn’t enough support for the egg white to hold their shape once risen and…puff!…..they went.

I ate a lot of it…well…it was only egg and rhubarb…I ate them standing by the kitchen sink over-looking my garden one sunny Saturday afternoon while listening to the radio.  It was quite a moment for me.  I realised you can’t push soufflés around.  They don’t like it.  Oh and by the way it is a proven fact if you eat food while standing up you don’t get fat!

While I was having the soufflé disaster, I was also making Dan’s Soft Rolls, which I will blog the recipe soon.  I started making rolls the first couple of times I made the recipe but I’ve already said before, I hate making rolls and decided to make one big loaf, too big for my 3 pound tin but still managed to produce the over-sized loaf below successfully.

I’ve been trying different ways to achieve a soft bread for my daughter which is dairy-free, and I could adapt Dan’s recipe.

Having made the loaf I realised this bread made the most perfect toast for her to replace her bagels in the morning.  She loves toasted bagels, I can’t always get the right ones and they are a big pain in backside to make.  This recipe turned out to make the perfect toast to replace it, it has the slight sweetness you have with a toasted bagel.  It was a big hit with all of us.

Another surprising result was the sourdoughs below, using the same recipe but one had 100g of starter and the other 200g of starter treated in the same conditions resulted in the same texture tasting equally sour.  I was very surprised by it, so much so I’m going to try it out again.

After my successes with the bread I went back to the rhubarb for the pavlova poached in orange flower water, which tastes wonderful as I discovered last year.  The beautiful thing about using forced rhubarb is the amazing gorgeous pink colour it has and its syrup… you simply don’t get with summer rhubarb.

While on twitter last weekend someone twitted about using beetroot with the rhubarb, an idea I still think it could work but not sure in which way, probably savoury.

Twittering about the rhubarb and beetroot idea, I remembered my experiment last year of rhubarb roasted in a sugar crust which resulted in the most amazing colour and tasting syrup.  So I made some beetroot syrup.

Making the rhubarb syrup I fell in love with its colour, when in a mass it was deep luscious ruby red but when you spread some on a white surface, around the edges it has the most shocking pink, it was really quite an impressive colour.

I was left staring at this luminous pink edges and thinking if I still painted what would I do with it?

I have the rhubarb ready waiting for the pavlovas to sort themselves out.  I also had the beetroot syrup waiting for something to happen.

While all of this was happening I had four large bananas going to the dark side, they kept saying to me, “..you promised to make banana parfait…all the way back in the autumn and now it’s nearly Spring still no banana parfait!”  The disasters with the soufflé and pavlovas it was time to make something successfully.

The idea was Banana, Salted Caramel & PX Sherry Parfait.  Made sense since I had egg yolks now to use up…you see I had gone through the egg whites in the freezer and now I was on to using fresh ones, with egg yolks being left behind…great idea to make the parfait.

I started by following the parfait recipe in Larousse Gastronomique but if you can see the photo below on the right it was a disaster!

Yes.  Another disaster.  I was determine to save this dish.  I reverted back to my instinct and made the basis for the parfait the way I know will produce whisked eggs to a light, moussey, airy texture holding their shape.  I used the basis of a Genoise recipe.

This method was successful and the bowl on the left shows that light fluffy mousse.

I ended up with a touch too much parfait mixture for my  3 lb make-shift bread tin and put some in two little mini tins, photo below.  I turned out one of the mini tins this morning to taste.  It was really delicious.  I will post the recipe.  Hooray…one success!  This was yesterday.

Today along with my 5th trial of pavlova I used some of the beetroot syrup to make a simple sponge cake…lovely shocking pink…I know 3 yr old will ask for a pink cake this summer and I wondered if I could provide it this way…looked promising with the raw mixture….Barbie would be very happy with these.

Unfortunately they turned out quite different, a slight tinge of pink but mainly brown-orange colour.

While I was on a role with the pink, I used some of the beetroot syrup with a simple meringue, looked promising.

Again another Barbie contender.

However while in the middle of writing this post, they were in the oven.  I followed some advise of letting them cool with the door slightly ajar after baking and having just checked on them, it has made them collapse on the top…also the colour was not quite what I was hoping for.

Here’s my four pavlovas made during this week, plus two little disks which showed something very interesting, baked at the same time, same size, one had cracks, one didn’t.

It’s not my month for baking, is it?