ROSE AND CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES


Does it sound odd to you, rose and chocolate chip cookies? Or does it sound quirky? Well then, you should definitely go for this very simple bake, and I assure you that there is no margin for failure with this recipe.

Baking time: 45 min (15 min preparation, 15 min baking, 15 min cooling)








Ingredients (makes about 30 chestnut size cookies)


Dry ingredients
3,5 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
rose petals (if you have any)

Wet ingredients
9 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature (if your butter is very hard, just put it in the microwave for 20 seconds and voila!)
1 cup sugar
2 medium eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 teaspoon rose water (less if you are not familiar with rose flavour, but for me the stronger the rose smell and taste, the better. Rose flavour loses its strength when baked, just keep this in mind)
1 pack of chocolate chip cookies, usually 100 grams.


Preheat the oven to gas mark 4, or 180 Degrees C. Line two trays with non-stick paper.

Combine the dry in a separate bowl.

Whisk the butter and sugar until white-ish pale yellow, it should have a very fluffy texture. Mix in the eggs one at a time, but don`t over whisk. Mix in the vanilla extract and rose water.

Combine the dry and wet ingredients, make sure you don`t lose the air in the mixture. So don`t whisk at this stage, just blend with the help of a flexible spatula.

Use two table spoons to scoop and scrape off the mixture on to the trays. Line the cookies 1 cm apart from each other. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes. If you have a gas oven, rotate the trays mid-way.

When you take the cookies out, leave them in the tray for 5 minutes, then cool them on a rack for another 10 minutes. Then these beauties are good to go, be it to your stomach, or a jar.

They stay fresh up to a week, after one week they lose their crunch, still taste good though.

I adapted this recipe from http://baking.we-wish.net/2011/12/milk-chocolate-chip-rose-water-cookies/ I found this recipe lacking the real edge rose water provides, and too buttery, which overpowers the taste and smell of rose. So don`t hesitate, just experiment with rose water.

NOVEMBER BAKING SESSION!

Dear all,

Hope this email finds you well and not too stressed!

Many thanks to all those who took part last month. It was great fun to get started, and I hope you saw the photos of the bake on our blog. Last month's draw winners, Yi and Bjorn, took home a veritable mountain of buns and pretzels, so just remember, this month...it could be you!

LATEST KITCHEN NEWS: St. Cross will not allow use of their kitchens, so I had a look at Wolfson's Buttery, which is rentable. Unfortunately, though the space is certainly larger, the oven is smaller, and inferior to my own, probably ok for heating stuff up and making a baked potato but that's about as far as I would go. Also, no other devices are there on site. 

Thus I am afraid we will have to continue as we are with small sessions at my home, (limit 6 people), until/unless we can come up with another option. 

Fortunately, St. Cross is prepared to help with buying some items of equipment so I will be drawing up a list and hopefully that will get sorted out soon. Bundt tin, anyone?

THIS MONTH'S BAKING SESSION DATE is SATURDAY 17th of NOVEMBER. Reply asap to get your place. 

PROPOSED BAKE: A Sweet Pie! It's that time of year, when the cold weather inspires a bite of warm pastry and filling. Once you have a place on the baking session, we will choose our filling between us: expensive pecan? classic apple? perhaps a challenging cherry? or something totally different? Our bakers will decide. 

My first attempt with the Bon Appetit Vanilla Cloverleaf Bun recipe

This was carried out well before our baking session last Sunday so we can see how our experimentation progressed!

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=30706324#editor/target=post;postID=4450841113344552789

Sweet Dough Session Photos!

Chocolate and Original sweet pretzels. With pearl sugar! Without Pearl Sugar! With Cinnamon Sugar! With Plain Sugar! Oh MY!

Thank you to everyone who came to bake at this, our first session of the (academic) year. And Congratulations to Zhu Yi, who won this month's draw and a huge quantities of freshly-baked yumminess!

Our new FB Page!

Dear all, we now have a FB presence here.

(URL is: http://www.facebook.com/hotcrossoxford)

So, as they say.... "Like us on Facebook!"

Cake Wrecks

And anyway, this is *the* best site if you need a laugh to cheer you up!

Always good to remember...it could have gone worse

HOT CROSS Aprons?

Would anybody be interested in buying a Hot Cross Apron if we were to design such a thing?

My 2012/13 Bakery HIT LIST

At the meet & greet today we discussed our ambitions for the coming year. I have quite a few, and as I'm on maternity I have a *little* bit of time to make them happen. My hit list is below, so if anybody knows how to make any of these please let me know...I would love your tips! Most of these are pretty complicated so we may not want to do all of them in the club, but I will be pursuing them in my own time, and I will keep everyone posted of my experiments (and results!); so if anybody wants to join me in having a go, just let me know!

1. Macarons (left)
2. Brioche (my favourite!)
3. Madeleines
4. Cannelés (below)
5. Financiers
6. Choux pastries
7. Some Viennoiseries.
and last but not at all least, I am going to begin the big project of making:
8. my own sourdough bread including cultivating my own sourdough starter.

For those who don't know about the special qualities of Sourdough bread and why it is one of *the* big challenges have a look here.

(nb Anatolij, there are some desirable bacteria in these breads, so we *have now* found a cross over between your DPhil and baking group!)

I'd like to get a bit creative with sugarpaste too...I tend to do buttercream icings because they are tasty and I'm lazy. 

Please do feel free to share your HIT LIST for the year. It's good to be ambitious, and I can't wait to see your ideas.

Freshers' Fair Coconut Milk Bread

The recipe for this delightfully fragrant bread comes from the amazing book Warm Bread and Honey Cake by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra. It's great right out of the oven with or without butter and makes wonderful toast, especially yummy topped with peanut butter, reminding me of the classic peanut and coconut flavour combination in some Chinese and Southeast Asian desserts like the wonderful gluey "Snowballs" that you can buy in Chinatown bakeries or sometimes find on the dim sum trolley. I will be adapting this recipe to try as a steamed bread for a coconutty mantou soon!

Good for the lactose intolerant because the melted butter can be replaced with vegetable shortening.

Ingredients:
750g/1lb 10oz/5 cups strong white bread flour
2 1/4 tsp easy blend (active dry) yeast
3 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
100g/3 1/2 oz/ generous 3/4 stick butter, melted and cooled slightly to blood temp.
350 ml/12 fl oz./ 1 1/2 cups lukewarm coconut milk

2 x 450g/ 1 lb loaf tins, greased

Makes 2 loaves

Method:

Put all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix to moisten the dry ingredients. Use a heavy duty mixer fitted with a dough hook to knead thoroughly until smooth and supple. This is a medium-soft dough. Alternatively, turn out onto a floured surface or a non-stick silicone mat and knead until smooth and supple. Bring together in a ball and return to the bowl. Cover the bowl with clingfilm (plastic wrap) or a damp tea towel, and set aside in a wwarm, draught-free place until doubled in size.

Knock back the dough and knead lightly until smooth again. Divide into 2 portions and roll or flatten each piece out into a recangle that is as wide as your tin is long, with a thickness of about 1cm/ 1/2 inch.

Roll up the dough, starting at a short side, and pinch the seam to seal. Place it seam-side down in the tin and shape the other loaf in the same way. Cover both loaves loosely with lightly oiled clingfilm and leave in a warm, draught-free place until almost doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas Mark 6

Bake in the oven for about 30 mins. To test remove the loaves from the tins. Tap sharply on the top and bottom; they should sound hollow. Cool on a wire rack.

The loaves with keep well for a day or two if well wrapped and can also be frozen.

The votes are in: OCTOBER is SWEET DOUGH Month!

Thank you to everyone for coming to our first meet and greet today. For those who couldn't make it...hope to see you soon! We spent the time introducing ourselves, our baking back-stories and our ambitions for the coming year, and chowing down on the better part of three dozen sweet pretzels. (some were brought home...we weren't QUITE that greedy!)

In fact, the pretzels were such a hit that folks were keen to make them! Therefore, October is officially sweet dough month, and all slots for baking are now filled (and then some). 

The sweet dough recipe comes from Bon Appetit magazine, and is a great thing to learn as it is so versatile.

Here are the six recipes that Bon Appetit suggests that you can use the basic sweet dough for. So far I have made the pretzels and the Vanilla Clover Buns. Both came out very well (in the pic above I think I messed up the contrast because it looks like some of the pretzels were burned. Rest assured, they were not!). The dough is quite similar to the one that my mom and I use to make Lussekattor around Christmas time (our family recipe does not use saffron, contraversially, and instead we flavour with plenty of cardamom only, and decorate with currants), so I added a little cardamom to the pretzels as well as some vanilla bean. The flavour of the buns is a much more intense vanilla (one pod per dozen!) and strangely, somehow the flavour of the dough with thus results in what I find to be a really wonderful, fresh, almost grassy vanilla flavour. It's lovely!

One idea we had today was to do a twisted pretzel with 1/2 the dough flavoured with chocolate. :) We'll have to give it a try.

HOT CROSS FRESHERS' FAIR SHORTBREAD RECIPES: the savory ones!

Gosh, I made the garam masala cookies and zaatar cookies on-the-fly, and I can't quite remember what went into them.

But the basic recipe was the same as the sweet cookies, except with half the amount of sugar. 

For the Garam Masala cookies, I started by adding some berbere spice mix with the flour, then continued mixing and adding berbere until the dough had a strong chili aftertaste. I probably added around two tablespoons berbere total. At this point the dough did not have much initial taste, so I added some ras el hanout bit by bit, stirring in between doses as with the berbere. I think I added around one tablespoon of ras el hanout. The dough gained a dull initial taste that needed a little more bite, so I added cinnamon (again, about 1 tablespoon) until the dough was to my satisfaction.

For the zataar cookies, again, my memory is a little sketchy. I started by adding a couple of tablespoons of zataar with the flour, then I added a couple of teaspoons of light-colored opaque honey, and I finished off with a few teaspoons of ground mace.

HOT CROSS FRESHERS' FAIR SHORTBREAD RECIPES: the sweet ones!

People stopping by our stall at St. Cross and Wolfson Freshers' Fairs were able to sample 5 different varieties of shortbread that we came up with for the occasion: 3 sweet, (Chocolate Chip & Cocoa Nib, Stem Ginger, and Saffron & White Honey), and 2 savoury (Garam Masala and Zaatar) adapting a basic shortbread recipe from a book called Culinary Tea by Gold & Stern, to exciting result.

Here's the basic recipe:

1lb/455g unsalted butter, chilled
1 cup/200g golden caster sugar (for savoury flavoured shortbread, reduce this by half)
4 cups/500g plain flour
1/2 tsp fine sea salt

Basic Method:

In a large bowl, use an electric mixer on medium speed to cream together the butter and sugar until smooth. Add any liquid or paste flavourings you are using (e.g. vanilla, marmalade). Mix until incorporated. Then add flour, salt and any dry flavourings/chunks (nuts, tea, chocolate chips). Mix until the dough just pulls together.

Divide dough in two and flatten into two rectangles. Place each between two sheets of wax paper/baking parchment and roll out to 1/4 inch thickness. Transfer to the fridge carefully to chill. The original recipe says that you can chill for as little as 20 minutes, but we have found that to make the dough manageable, and crucially to allow the flavours to infuse through the dough, it is better to leave it over night if possible. I think minimum would probably be an hour if you were in a real hurry.

You can chill the dough for up to 3 days, or freeze for up to 1 month at this point.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 150degrees C. Cut the cookies out and place on baking sheets lined with parchment or sprayed with cooking spray. Cook for about 30 minutes until the cookies appear sandy and dry, and have a slight golden colour. Cool on a rack and store in an airtight container at room temperature.

FOR SAFFRON, WHITE HONEY & Rose Water:
Soak 1 tsp of saffron for at least 1/2 hour in 1/3 cup of warm water. Add 4 tbsps of this one at a time, blending well after each addition, to the creamed butter and sugar, along with 2 tbsps of rose water, the seeds of 1/2 a vanilla pod scraped out, and 3 tbsps of white, set honey. Your butter mix will be looser than it otherwise would be with all this liquid, so you may have to add a little bit more flour.

FOR STEM GINGER (and Cointreau):
We added both raw and candied ginger to our ginger shortbread to give a fresh heat and bite. In this recipe I'm also suggesting you add some powdered dried ginger too; all three preparations emphasise a different aspect of ginger's flavour, and by combining them you get more depth of flavour. Add to your creamed butter and sugar 1/4 cup of peeled and grated fresh ginger, and 2 tbsp of Cointreau (or more...to taste!), then add 1 tbsp of dried ginger with the flour, and finally at least 100 g of chopped candied ginger. Mix well.

FOR CHOCOLATE CHIP & COCOA NIB

Add the seeds of 1 vanilla pod to the creamed butter and sugar. Add 2 tbsps of cocoa or, better yet, grate in about a 1 and 1/2 inch piece of pure cacao stick, available from Rabot Estate. Then add in 2/3 cup of milk chocolate chips or bits and the same again of cocoa nibs, the ends of the raw cocoa bean which can be bought in health food shops like Holland & Barrett or online. 

Shortbread is easy and delicious, and as you can see, it is versatile: Not only can it, like other rolled cookies, be cut into all manner of shapes, but it can take a wide variety of flavours too, and its melt-in-the-mouth "short" quality, makes it great for savoury varieties, as we found out.

HOT CROSS takes on the Wolfson Freshers' Fair! We're expanding!

DK, baby Léontine and Jenn recruit even more cake-heads with an enticing spread at Wolfson College Freshers' Fair on Friday the 5th of October!

We will be posting the recipes we made here, on the blog, shortly!

MEET & GREET for MEMBERS NEW & OLD: OCTOBER 11th, 5.30pm

Come and meet your fellow Cake-Heads!

Where: Saugman Common Room, STX
When: Thursday 11th October, 5.30pm

Bring any recent bakes, recipes, ideas, or just yourself! 

Halloween Inspirations 1

THINK: HALLOWEEN! This was our house last year...and I imagine it will look pretty similar this year.

This has to be the ultimate evil chocolate cake, with a fantastic twist, courtesy of bon appetit magazine. It is obviously a bit complicated for us to do as a group in a reasonable amount of time, but I submit that this is the Devil's Food Cake to bear in mind as an ideal.

First Session: October 20th!

You love a good bake. So do I. That's why along with a trusty band of intrepid bakers (including the lovely Jen, who met all new members at the Freshers' Fair) I launched the St. Cross Students' Baking Group, (a.k.a. Hot Cross), last year. We have gone from strength to strength in our monthly meetings, from pastry to cake to pizza, but the baking must go on!

How it works:

Our Group meets once a month to bake. Prior to our baking session we float ideas for what to make through our blog and/or via email, and I usually present everyone with a narrowed down list. We then vote for our favourite, and divide the cost of ingredients among us. Because we use the blog to vote on our choices, to share recipes and photos, you will all be receiving invitations to join it, so please do sign up if you would like to participate.

At our sessions we make a double recipe of whatever we are making: one lot is shared between all the bakers to eat, and one is given away to a lucky baker drawn at random. This means that you could end up leaving with your very own dozen brownies or Finnish rye loaf.

Lunch-time group meet sometimes follows, where we eat, if the recipe was not something we were able to eat right upon making (e.g. something that needs to set in a cooled fridge), or individual members present their own improved versions of the recipe.

Normally we do the baking at my home, where we have good facilities, and limit the numbers of baking participants to around 6, with the first to respond being first included. You must reply and confirm your attendance before each session if you wish to bake. We have recently learned that we may be able to secure larger kitchens for the baking sessions, so I will keep you posted of any changes.

This month I would like to schedule our baking session on Saturday the 20th of October.

Since this is our first session of the year, I propose we go back to basics and make:

a chocolate cake with icing (can also be cupcakes), a white bread loaf, or a sweet dough.

Whatever we do, Halloween is approaching, and so it's definitely going to have to be themed. I will be posting images and ideas here, on the blog to get you in the mood.

DK
danielle.defeo-giet@stx.ox.ac.uk
danielle.defeo-giet@orinst.ox.ac.uk

Even Jack Bauer Can't Resist the Bake.

ST Cross Freshers' Fayre

Thanks to everyone who made it to the St Cross Freshers' Fayre and tried our cookies! We are planning to have our first session real soon. Danielle and I are thinking of what to bake, so once we have a few ideas we will send them out via the mailing list to see what you all think. Looking forward to meeting you again!

Jen

Coffee and Do(ugh)nuts Session?

Today when we were making hot cross buns, we thought about what we should make next baking session.

We had the idea to have a coffee + donuts session! We could make a variety of donuts with different coatings/fillings.

I thought we could make a Bosnian 'donut' called Lokumi. It is very versatile; it can be eaten plain or with a sweet glaze (honey, jam, nutella...) or with a savory topping. Conveniently, lokumi do not need a deep fat fryer; they can be fried in a pan containing 2 cm of oil.

Here is a recipe:

Lokoom balls

2-3 eggs
about 100 ml sunflower oil
200 ml milk or yogurt
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
about 450g all purpose flour


In large bowl, beat eggs, add oil, yogurt or milk, salt, sugar untill well blended. Combine the flour and baking powder and gradually stir in wet ingredients to form a soft dough.



Turn onto a floured surface. Roll into 1/2cm thickness. Cut with glass or cutter into circles or cut to 5x5 cm squares. Put oil into the pot (about 2 cm from the bottom) and heat. Drop the Locooms in hot oil, upon one side become golden brown, turn to the other side and then bring to bowl.
Serve with cheese or jam or nutela or whatever you like. Leftovers are tasty even the day after.

(from http://kuhinjazaposlenezene.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/lokumi.html)


An alternative recipe, using yeast:

Ingredients:

250 g of sour milk or yogurt

150 ml milk

20 g fresh yeast

5 grams of baking soda

3 eggs

1 teaspoon sugar

Salt to taste

800 grams pastry flour

half a black coffee cup of oil

Oil for frying

Method

1. Combine the yeast, the lukewarm milk, the sugar, a spoon of flour and a pinch of salt. Mix and leave to swell.

2. When the mixture has foamed, add with other ingredients except for the flour. Gradually add the flour with constant stirring. Mix dough to be as softness as pie dough. Allow to warm, stirring occasionally to create air bubbles.

3. Place dough on a surface smeared with oil. Rub the upper side of the dough with oil, and use a rolling pin to reduce the thickness to 1 cm. When greased this way the dough will absorb less oil during frying.

4. Cut the dough into desired shape and fry in hot oil

Can also bake rather than fry: Put in oven preheated to 180 degrees. After 10 minutes reduce to 140 and bake another 15 minutes.

(from http://www.coolinarika.com/recept/709776/#content_info)

Jen

Hot Cross Buns!!

We had a fun time making hot cross buns this morning :)

We made two varieties: one with raisins and cranberries inside, the other with raisins and chocolate chips inside(andcolored with cocoa).

Very delicious with hot with butter!

Here they are right before baking:

some photos from last time :)

great success,well done everyone~

February session Idea: Turkish feast.

So I was thinking of Pide (photo by someone who made two fillings below)

Also Borek

You can read more about Turkish Cuisine here

yum yum

Please do vote if you would like to do this, or make some suggestions! More than happy to hear some. 

Photos from January Session: Crack Pie