Monday Recipe Danish Pepper Nuts

At Christmas I can't help but bake recipes that call for spices, especially gingerbread. There is something about the smell of cinnamon and ginger that just screams Christmas to me. 

I got this recipe from an article in The Telegraph magazine a couple of weeks ago in which there was an interesting selection of Danish Christmas recipes. These sounded the most interesting to me so naturally I had to try them! I’m not sure how correct my attempt at these is, my research into these was blighted by a lot of conflicting information.

The following has been summarised from Wikipedia:
Pfeffernüsse are small, firm, round biscuits, sometimes with ground nuts. The name translates to pepper nuts, which describes their spicy taste and the fact that some recipes do contain nuts (walnuts or almonds). They do not necessarily contain black pepper, Danish recipes call for white pepper.

And this is where the conflicts arise, as you can see from below as my recipe does not call for pepper of any kind and the article claimed that the name just comes from the warmth of the spices as there is no pepper in them. Further research I conducted uncovered recipes containing everything from pepper (both black and white), cardamom and even mace! But when baked they do look like the pictures of pepper nuts I found on Google, so I’m just going to stick with this version as I know that I like them! If any Danish folks to read this post please comment below and correct me on the recipe! 

Makes 120
Ingredients

375g plain flour, plus extra to dust
½ tsp baking powder
½ freshly grated nutmeg
½ ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
175g salted butter
180g soft, dark brown sugar
1 egg, beaten

Method

In a large bowl; sift together the flour, baking powder and spices. Melt the butter and stir it into the flour mix. Add the egg and the sugar, and then knead the dough on a lightly floured surface until smooth. Leave the dough to rest for an hour at room temperature.

Preheat the oven to gas 4/180 C, then shape the dough into small balls, about 1.5 – 2 cm in diameter. Place them on a lined baking tray, leave a little space between them (doesn’t need to be a big space as they don’t spread much). Bake for 10 minutes and cool on a wire rack.

Apparently these keep for up to four weeks in an airtight tin. 

When baking goes wrong, part 1: How to cope with baking disasters

As far as hobbies go baking is a fairly cost effective hobby, even if a recipe doesn’t work out the way you hoped the results are usually still edible. But having a recipe go wrong can be a little upsetting and annoying, so here is a short guide on how to cope when baking goes wrong.

Step 1 Allow yourself to be annoyed or upset
When things go wrong I get annoyed if it’s a recipe I know well or upset if it’s the first time I’ve tried it. No matter what emotion you feel when the worst happens I find the best solution is for 5 minutes to just let yourself feel like that, so have a cry or yell at your oven. Do whatever it takes for you to get the initial upset or anger out of your system because bottling up your feelings is not healthy.

Step 2 Try and find the positives
Just because something in a recipe has gone wrong doesn’t mean that the results are awful, most of I find there is usually a positive side. As an example my recent attempt at macaroons, they went totally wrong but they still tasted like they should. Always try and find that positive part of the bake, like the fact it still tastes right or it can be used for something else. So if you cake has sunk in the middle that doesn’t mean you can’t still eat it. It’ll still taste good and if you don’t want to serve it just cut it up and use it to make something else like cake pops or trifle!
Sometimes everything going wrong can be funny (especially if it’s a recipe you make a lot) and I think finding the funny side and having a good laugh totally counts as a positive side.

Step 3 Work out what went wrong
You may have noticed that I do this when I post about recipes I’ve tried, I believe that analysing your bake is very important. If you don’t try and work out why everything went wrong what is there to stop you from making that mistake again? It may be something as simple as opening the oven door too early and too often or a complex series of issues (see my post on macaroons!), but if you try and figure out the problem it should be much easier to avoid it happening again. But don’t panic if you can’t figure out the problem, sometimes stuff just happens!

There you have it my 3 step program to dealing with baking disasters, in part 2 I shall be listing solutions to common baking problems and tips on how to avoid having a disaster. 

First adventures in macaroon making

It may not be immediately obvious given the content of many of my posts here and the name of this blog, but I do actually bake more than just cupcakes! At the moment I am focusing on expanding and improving my skills rather than widening my repertoire, with a particular focus on bread and pastry. However since I can’t be bothered making pies and am running slightly low on yeast, bread and pastry have been pushed aside somewhat in favour of more interesting experiments. This is why a couple of weeks ago I decided to try my hand at macaroons.

I love macaroons, they are one of my favourite things to have with a cup of tea, sadly they are also very expensive which is why I don’t get to eat them nearly as often as I like. That and my favourite shop to buy them from is in London and I don’t go there very often...
Moving on, they are also have been a challenge on The Great British Bake Off several times and given my intention to apply for the show I figured it was about time I tried them out. And er this was the result

As you can see, not a complete success, apart from being rather misshaped (I didn't take my time piping them) they look OK  There is a crisp outer shell, the problem came when I tried to remove them from the sheet. It turns out they weren't fully cooked, the inside of the shell was still sticky and wet. However despite this I did taste one and they did taste right, so all in all I don’t think this was too bad for my first attempt.

Now when something I bake goes wrong I always try and figure out why, I believe that is the best way to improve. So here is what I think went wrong here.

First of all I think the proportions of my ingredients were off. You see last Christmas I was given a macaroon making set which included a bag of almond meal (blend of icing sugar and ground almonds which is the base for a macaroon), which according to the instructions in the kit was a 1:1 ratio of almond to sugar. However the kit recipe was made using the Italian meringue method and since I don’t like working with sugar much I didn't follow those instructions. I actually followed the instructions in a macaroon recipe book I own, which makes them the French way and in the book the almond meal ratio was 2:1 (icing sugar to almond). I believe using combining the two recipes with their different proportions was my first mistake.

Secondly I don’t think I left them alone long enough, you see after piping out the mixture it is essential that macaroons are left alone to dry out. According to my book this can take anything from 10 minutes up to an hour and is the key to making macaroons, this drying process is what gives macaroons their distinct crinkled “foot” and crisp outer shell. As I was up against time constraints I don’t believe I left mine long enough to dry out and in addition to this I don’t think I baked them long enough, this is partly why I think the inside was still wet and sticky.

Finally I think the other problem was the weather, I know that sounds like I’m being very British and just talking about the weather because I can but I do have a point. You see meringues are very sensitive to climate, and can really only be baked on dry days, otherwise they absorb any moisture in the air and tend to go rather sticky. Since macaroons are essentially almond meringues I am beginning to suspect that they might also be affected in this way, especially as it was a foggy day I was making them on.

So all in all I think are combination of things contributed to my downfall, however now I have identified them hopefully these issues can be resolved for future attempts. Will I be attempting macaroons again? Yes but probably not for quite a while! 

opps, unexpected hiatus

As you may have noticed from the complete radio silence here I have had a little unexpected hiatus from Princess Cupcake, however this is now over and hopefully I should have some new posts in the next couple of days.

Why the sudden silence? Well truth is, my life has recently got a little hectic again. Recently I have been rather busy job hunting, celebrating my birthday and getting ready for Christmas (lots of fun craft activities). All this in addition to my volunteer work and all those other boring things we have to do (*cough* cleaning *cough*), which means I really haven't had much time to bake, this in turn means I don't have much to write about here. Hopefully now that life has settled down a bit again and I've been able to start baking again things should start to pick up a bit round here.

So what have I been baking? Nothing too exciting, mostly boring things like flapjack and bread, however I have had my first attempt at baking macaroons, the results of which I shall post about in the next few days. I'm also going to start posting some Christmas/Winter themed stuff, how to plan your Christmas baking and fun food gifts to give .etc However I am going to take a break from writing recipes, I haven't had much inspiration in that department recently and I really don't want to start posting recipes from books. From now on recipes will still be posted on Mondays just not as frequently as before and other posts will go up whenever I get time to write them! Same goes for book and product reviews, these will still be Fridays just on a more ad hock basis.

Well that's all for now, I shall return in a day or so (maybe later today looking at the time!!) with my first adventure in macaroon making and a kind of follow up post to the fondant fancy adventure.

Snapshots- Halloween Treats

Snapshots –Halloween Treats

This post is something new I’ve decided to do, basically it’s just a random collection of pictures of bakes I’ve done at some point. These posts probably won’t happen very often but when I do post them I’ll try and keep all the images related to a particular theme, so to get the ball rolling on this new series let’s start with some Halloween bakes!

This post will be a bit short as I generally don’t do much Halloween themed baking since I don’t really bother with it, so most of these bakes are actually for parties that I was forced to attend.

In preparation for my review of the book “A Zombie Ate my Cupcake” I decided to try out one of the tutorials in it. As I’ve been keen to try making meringue frosting I decided to give the Ghost Cupcakes a whirl. These little guys were the result! The recipe was such fun to make, even if the meringue was really sticky! After I took this picture the icing I used for the faces melted a little in the heat of the kitchen, so the sad looking one on the top right now looks like it’s crying! Poor little guy! It wasn't until later that I noticed one of the spider biscuits had lost an eye, poor critter looks like he's had a terrible accident.

The following cakes were baked with my friends as our contribution to the catering of a Halloween party out housemates were throwing.

This was a yoghurt cake covered in water icing and an albino spider, designed to look like a gravestone. The cake turned out to be a bit more crumbly than we expected but I thought that looked good as it make the gravestone look weathered and old.

And now a selection of cupcakes, these ones were chocolate orange flavour. I mostly like the colour of the icing on these.

A selection of albino spiders...

And finally our “radiation” cakes, I honestly can’t remember what flavour cakes these were, probably chocolate. The design was loosely based on the hazard symbol for radiation and was created using the same chocolate dots used on the spiders.

Oh and because I had so much fun making them here is another picture of my Halloween fondant fancies.

That’s all for now I’m afraid; I really don’t do much Halloween themed baking the next snapshots should hopefully be much longer!