Foodie Penpals June 2012

This month, my Foodie Penpal was Lin, from Lin’s Foods. We exchanged a couple of emails wherein I was very vague about what I’d like in a parcel, then Lin sent me this gloriously fragrant parcel full of hand made treats. You can’t see it, but the whole box was scented with rose petals, so as soon as I opened it I was treated to their wonderful, soothing fragrance. I love rose scented and rose flavoured things, rose tea is one of my favourites at the minute, but I’d never mentioned this to Lin. Quite a coincidence, and another piece of evidence to support the ‘Foodie Penpals have psychic powers’ theory.

She also included a really long handwritten letter, telling me all about the contents of the parcel, and a print out of a recipe for Spanish tortilla. This was because I’d told her I was starting to learn about tapas, such a thoughtful gesture. I envisage me, a bucket of sangria and a Spanish tortilla having a whale of a time in the not too distant future.

I was deliberately vague about what I’d like in my penpals parcel because one of the most interesting things about Foodie Penpals, to me, is seeing what your Penpal will choose for you. I like to see what things catch other people’s eye while they’re shopping, find out what their favourite things are and try local foods that I might not otherwise have heard of. In this case, Lin has a Passion for spices, and some serious skills in mixing them. She showcased this in these three pots:

From left to right, they are curry powder for meat, curry powder for fish and a Japanese seasoning, togarashi. All crafted and mixed by Lin herself, isn’t that awesome? If you’d like to see how she does it, you can find her page on Homemade Curry Powders here. I can’t adequately describe the smell of the curry powders to you, but I can say that they are head, shoulders, torso, legs, feet and six inch heels above any ready-mixed curry powder I’ve ever bought. They smell a little sweet, and fragrant, with a pleasant tingle at the end. This is just the smell, you understand, the taste is bound to blow me away. I already have a slightly unusual idea for their use in my head, as well as imagining making pots and pots of the most delicious curry anyone has ever tasted. Togarashi is something I usually have in the cupboard, but the pre-mixed stuff pales in comparison to the fresh and potent home made gear. Lin says she likes her togarashi to have tangible flakes of seaweed in it, and I can’t say I disagree. I’ve already used the togarashi – I’ll tell you more about that next week.

Next in the parcel in this adorable jar of lavender sugar – again, home infused, and the jar is just as welcome as the sugar. I know I should do the right thing, when it’s all finished, and send the jar on to another penpal… but I don’t know if I can bear to do it. It’s hard enough leaving it at home when I go to work, never mind actually giving it away.

The lavender sugar smells floral and mellow, and I’m thinking of pairing it with some white chocolate in a batch of cookies. I’ve baked with lavender a few times – lavender macarons and lavender icing were both well received so I look forward to trying something new.

Keeping with the sugary theme, Lin also included a little box of these wonderful sugar hearts. These were also handmade! I saw the technique for this on Pinterest recently and plan on trying some of my own, but now I have a very high standard to live up to. What’s more, Lin’s kids helped her to make these hearts, and also helped her to infuse the lavender sugar – what a talented family they must be.

The final addition to my parcel this month was these little decorative crackers. They are so pretty! I will try to start including them in my blog photos to fancy them up a bit. Who knows, perhaps now that I have them I’ll become a good photographer?

 

My other penpal this month, the one I sent a parcel to, is Monique at What I Am Up To. Monique lives in Germany, so it was great fun trying to think of interesting things to send her. Head over to her blog to see what I ended up putting in the parcel (there will be a recipe post about one of the items soon!).

If this has inspired you to join in with Foodie Penpals, we’d be delighted to have you! If you’re in the UK or Europe, you can find out more about it at the Foodie Penpals page here on Rock Salt. If you’re in the US or Canada, you can find out more at The Lean Green Bean, where you will also be able to read many other reveal posts from blogs in the UK, Europe, the US and Canada.

The basic premise of Foodie Penpals is that every month, you are assigned one person to send a thoughtful parcel to, and a different person will send to you. This way, you’re meeting two new foodie chums at once. You can specify any and all dietary requirements and preferences and these will be respected, so no worries about ending up with a box full of liquorice (or whatever your least favourite food is) or a big load of chocolate when you’re trying your best to eat healthily.

The group is free to join, and you can opt out again at any time. What are you waiting for?!

The Daring Bakers Challenge June 2012: Battenberg

Mandy of What The Fruitcake?! came to our rescue last minute to present us with the Battenberg Cake challenge! She highlighted Mary Berry’s techniques and recipes to allow us to create this unique little cake with ease.

The Daring Bakers are a great group to be involved in, if only because it gets you to try things that you may have been *meaning* to do but not quite getting round to for some time. Like Battenberg cake. I’ve wanted to try one of these awesome, chequered cakes for ages but it was always supplanted by some other shiny cake that popped over my bakey horizon. This month, I had to actually give Battenberg a try, and I’m glad of it.

I’ve been thinking of making an alternative to marzipan quite a lot lately, and wondering how a pecan marzipan would work out. A quick search showed that at least one other person had wondered about the same thing, and found that it worked out just fine. This other person was Dan Leperd, and you can find his recipe for spiced pecan marzipan here. I left out the cinnamon, changed the honey for maple agave syrup and used all liquid glucose instead of part glucose and part glycerine. Here are the stages of pecan marzipan making:

You mix ground pecans and icing sugar, then in a pot mix brown sugar, egg yolks, maple syrup, liquid glucose and vanilla. You put the pot over a low heat and whisk until light and fluffy. Combine the two and you’ve got yourself pecan marzipan. I added extra icing sugar to get the right consistency – a little more might not have gone amiss, given that my marzipan ended up getting a bit melty in the sunshine…

With the marzipan resting and cooling, I went about making the Battenberg sponge. Mary Berry advocates a simple sponge recipe and the all in one method, which makes things much quicker. However, I didn’t exactly follow the given directions and ended up making one plain sponge and one mocha sponge, both wheat free, and then over mixing them in an effort to get the consistency right, so the sponge took longer than I’d have hoped. It also had a very dense final texture from the overworking – curse you, wheat free flour! I even messed up splitting the sponge mix in two, so the plain side ended up having more than the mocha. All that aside, in the end I still had enough sponge to make two small Battenberg cakes, which is just what I wanted. The situation was not beyond redemption.

I didn’t put in a tinfoil barrier between the two kinds of sponge – I figured if I was going to have to trim the edges away anyway, there was no point adding more crumpled tinfoil to the bin.

I trimmed all the edges, and the top surface of the plain sponge to make the two the same thickness. Then I used a tape measure (no joke) to slice each flavour of sponge into four equal strips. I stacked them up to see how they would look in the finished result. Pretty cool, was the answer to that question. Not perfect, but pretty cool.

I sandwiched all the strips together with chocolate buttercream, then coated the three outside edges with buttercream, too. Then I split the marzipan in half and rolled it out until it was big enough to wrap around the first Battenberg. I carefully lifted the cake onto the marzipan, turning it so that the bottom was now on the side, which meant I could coat it with buttercream too. Then I carefully wrapped the marzipan around the cake, pressing to get a smooth finish, and trimmed off the edges. I repeated this with the second half of marzipan and the second cake.

When both cakes were done, I took a very narrow slice off each end, to properly level them off, then applied little gold decorations along the top, as a slicing guide as much as for aesthetics.

They weren’t perfect, but I was pretty pleased none the less, and they sliced  up a lot more neatly than I’d worried. I had visions of squares of cake pinging off into corners of the room. I gave myself more work than I had to, by choosing to make the marzipan myself, choosing to make the sponge wheat free and choosing to make the cake alongside making some bread and starting some Limoncello brewing. The Rock Salt Kitchen was a hive of activity! I wouldn’t recommend it, if I’m honest… I did really enjoy the pecan marzipan and will be making that in place of normal marzipan again. I can recommend it for people who don’t enjoy marzipan, the texture is the same but the taste is very different. Maybe make it in advance, though…

Thank you Mandy for a brilliant challenge. I look forward to reading all the other Daring Bakers posts to see the variety in colour, flavour and decoration that everyone came up with.

Mushroom and Spinach Falafel

I know you’ve all been eagerly awaiting to find out what was on those tortilla/wrap/flatbread sandwiches last week. Your wait is now over.

These guys!

I’ve never made falafel before, and when the opportune moment arrived I decided to mix it up a bit and add in some more flavours to the little chickpea ‘meatballs’. I love mushrooms in any form, so that seemed like quite a good choice, and from experimenting with curries in the past I know that mushroom, spinach and chickpea is an absolutely killer combination. I thought it might be time to try that combination in a different form, and thus the mushroom and spinach falafel was born.

Mushroom and Spinach Falafel (makes 14 falafel):

• 2 small blocks frozen spinach
• 125g button (or other) mushrooms
• 2 spring onions, sliced into rounds
• 1 clove smoked garlic
• 400g tin of chickpeas
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1/4 tsp sesame oil
• 1 tbsp water (taken from the defrosted spinach)
• zest of 1/2 lemon
• salt and pepper to taste
• 3 tbsp brown rice flour (ground in spice grinder from brown rice)

I started by putting the frozen spinach in a little bowl and covering with boiling water. I left that to defrost while I set about finely chopping the mushrooms and sauteeing them with the spring onions and garlic.

When the mushrooms were cooked, I put them into my food processor along with all the other ingredients and processed until a paste was formed. I didn’t discard the water from the spinach straight away, instead keeping some of it to loosen up the falafel mix a little – I figured I may as well keep as much of the spinach flavour as possible.

I shaped the mix into fourteen balls. The rice flour holds the mix together really well – it’s absorbent without being gluey or chalky as other flours can be. Rice flour can be a bit gritty but when it’s mixed in to something like this that’s not a problem. I made my own by simply grinding the grains of brown rice until they were a fine powder – you can see a little more info here.

I put the falafel in a frying pan that I’d sprayed lightly with oil, over a medium heat, and cooked for about two minutes on all sides until browned – for these purposes, you can treat the falafel a bit like dice, so there are six ‘sides’.

When they’re browned all over, they’re ready to eat. You could actually eat them as soon as you shape them, there’s nothing raw in there, but cooking them firms them up a bit and adds some texture. Falafel are usually deep fried but I wanted to take a healthier approach. Plus I’m a bit scared of deep frying.

I served them with the tortilla/flatbread/wraps, some fresh lettuce (grown in Father Rock Salt’s garden), some cauliflower roasted in ginger oil and a quick lemon, coriander and yogurt dressing. A couple of the wraps were a bit on the crispy side, so they got torn up and tossed with the other ingredients to turn the whole lot into a salad.

And there we have it – an interesting and wholly successful experiment in falafel. I like the idea of trying different flavours in future, and possibly experimenting with the texture of the mix – leaving it coarser might be nice, but would they be too crumbly then? I think these particular falafel could stand to have more by way of mushroom flavour – either more mushrooms added to the mix, or a dash of mushroom ketchup might do the trick. I’ve often looked at mushroom ketchup in the shops but never bought it – does anyone have any experience of it?