Caramelised apricots and caramel frozen yogurt - lactose free

More adventures with my Channel Island yogurt where I pre-treated the milk with lactase.  This time a simple caramel frozen yogurt, made with a couple of tablespoons of soft brown sugar, cooked gently until it just began changing colour, a desert spoonful of Pineau des Charentes, picked up on a visit to some friends in western France, and a teaspoon of vanilla.  Let the caramel cool before adding the alcohol or it will evaporate, leaving a pleasant taste but not retaining its anti-freeze qualities.  Cool, mix with 500g yogurt and freeze in an ice-cream maker.

I bought some reasonable looking apricots but they were not as sumptuous as I wished - apricots really need to be picked ripe off the tree in the sunshine.  Cut each in half, sprinkle more of the brown sugar in wide pan and place the cut apricots on the sugar.  Cook gently on both sides.  The juice from the apricots will give the caramel sauce a lovely zingy flavour.

Serve with a scoop of the frozen yogurt and a little of the caramel drizzled over.

I only have white crockery - terrible for photographing very pale ice-cream!  I should have put this in a glass and photographed against a coloured background, but I ate my desert before I put the photos on the computer.  Tastes much better than it looks.

Baking experiments - gf bread in a Panasonic bread machine - Phase 3: large white

Learning how the machine handles seedy bread and that with buckwheat. This time I decided to find out what the plain flour, water and yeast mixture produces - a 'white' bread

side view of loaf

Ingredients
500g flour (40% urid, 40% tapioca, 20% cornmeal)
625 ml water
3 tsp yeast (I have been using a lot more yeast than usual due to short rising time)
1 tbs agave syrup
1/4 tsp vanilla
1 tsp oil

Mix together in a bowl and pour into bread tin.  Set the Panasonic Bread maker on Setting 1 and tell machine it is an extra large loaf with a dark crust.  Lets see what will happen!

Well, what happened is that the batter rose a lot and collapsed when cooking.  Not a surprise really given how wet the mixture was.  If I was baking such a wet mix with so much yeast by hand I would have let it rise about a third more than the initial batter volume and then baked.  This turned out about 2.5 times as tall on the edges as the initial batter.  The batter was 5cm deep in the tin and the loaf is 12cm high at its tallest point.

collapsed top

However, despite the central collapse and the large hole left by the blade, the texture was even.  It hadn't produced the claggy bottom of the previous version, perhaps due to the different setting - but I don't know what difference telling the machine to do an extra large crust with a dark crust does.  There didn't seem to be any difference in the cooking time and there is no read out of the temperature.  I might ask Panasonic what these controls do to the cooking programme.

soft light slice

The bread is very soft and light - quite astonishingly so.  The slight rolling of the dough seen on the slice is probably due to my impatience - the bread was still slightly warm when I sliced it.  I find waiting for bread to cool in order to find out how it worked is the hardest part of baking.

note high sides and blade hole.  Shown next to bread 2

The initial cut through the middle of the loaf shows the dip in the middle and the hole left by the blade.  This may have been exacerbated by cutting before it was completely cold.

The bread toasted well the next morning though I couldn't cut it neatly.  The very light texture and the hole from the blade made this difficult.  As the bread is more moist than wheat bread the blade of the bread knife also tends to stick.

The trick is to manipulated the quantities of ingredients to get maximum lift with minimum risk of collapse.  I have some potato protein I have been sent to test as an aid for gluten free baking, so I think I will replicate this collapsed loaf with some of that to compare.

Gluten-free Wedding Cupcake Tower.

I may well never make 120 cupcakes plus giant cupcake for cutting again so it seems like a good idea to write about it on the blog.

This morning I scrubbed the kitchen and then laid out four double recipe quantities of all the ingredients so that I could pound through the making efficiently. I find more than a double recipe a bit hard to handle this size fits well into my mixing bowls and I don’t have to worry about having more batter than will fit in the oven in one go.

I was all set to go when my mother-in-law turned up for coffee, so proceedings were interrupted while we heard about her week and she expressed amazement that I was wearing chef whites (actually blue and white check trousers with white jacket and hat).

The recipe is adapted from the ‘romantic rose cupcakes’ on the BBC Good Food website. I have posted it before but to save hunting around here it is again.

I’ll make the whole batch of cupcakes, freeze them and do the frosting the day before the wedding. The flowers are all piled in boxes waiting to be put on top. The amusing cake topper I made out of polymer clay, of the couple on a tandem (they had a tandem on their wedding invites) fell apart on the final firing in the oven so I’ll manage without that; there isn’t really time to do it over again.

Makes about 12 deep cupcakes or one 7inch cake. Double recipe for a layer cake suitable for a party.

Ingredients

150ml pot natural yogurt

3 eggs, beaten

1tsp vanilla

175g golden caster sugar

120g flour

120g ground almonds

3 tsp baking powder

175g unsalted butter, melted

White chocolate frosting

100g white chocolate

140g unsalted butter – room temperature

140g icing sugar

Line cake tins and set oven to 190C, fan 170C

Cake

In a jug, mix yogurt, eggs, butter and vanilla extract.

Sift flour and baking powder together, add almonds and sugar and mix well.

Add wet to dry ingredients and mix well. Spoon into tin /cupcake cases.

Bake approx 4 5-50 minutes for large cake, 20-25 minutes for cupcakes. Test with skewer to see if comes out clean.

Cool on wire rack. Eat within three days or freeze as soon as possible.

Frosting

Melt chocolate in microwave, stirring occasionally. Leave to cool.

Beat butter and icing sugar until soft and light. Beat in chocolate. Cover and chill for up to one month.

This cake freezes well, and can be frozen with the frosting. Eat within two days of defrosting.