Looking Out To Sea

It was Helen’s birthday last week and, as per tradition, she took cakes to work her tutorial group at university.

She was too busy studying so I made the cakes (this was okay, as in recent years she has ended up making cakes for me to take to work on my birthday, so this was repaying the favour), and had a bit of fun with them.

I had been following one person’s escapades with baking cakes inside cakes, such as brownie inside muffins (really) and thought I would take a first foray in that direction. I made some fairly plain cupcakes but buried some chocolate balls (slightly larger than a malteser) inside each one. The chocolate balls were Hallowe’en treats that each came individually wrapped in “eyeball” tin foil. Then when I was trying to work out how to ice them Helen suggested using icing pens to write on them. Then she went to bed and I sat down to work some words out.

My first thought was to take Word of the Day for Helen’s birthday for the last ten years (I had ten cakes to decorate) but I couldn’t easily find a list going back that far. The easily-searched sites (like wiktionary) weren’t established long enough to have ten years of archives!

My second thought was nonsense words, and this was even harder. I would have to look through the published works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in order to find some really good ones. Good nonsense words, ones with a nice feel and pleasing sound, are harder to find than you might think.

In the end I settled on cake words. What I actually did was search the installed dictionary for some nice cake words, and then fill in a few more from memory. (I didn’t like griddlecake or coffeecake and thought the latter should probably be two words.)

$ grep cake$ /usr/share/dict/words
cake
cheesecake
coffeecake
cupcake
fruitcake
griddlecake
hotcake
pancake
shortcake

Once I had my words I removed the cake part and iced the remaining prefix/suffix onto each bun. So I had a bunch of cakes with the words “pan”, “beef”, “short” and so on.

Now Helen tells me that when she opened the tin on the following day no-one could understand what these words meant. They sat and thought and came to no good conclusions, until someone finally said:

Well, I’m going to have the “beef” cake — oh

I was glad to have provided a little bit of mystery. :-)

If you’ve never seen real naan made in a tandoor it’s hard to imagine the strangeness of the procedure. Stretching out a thin piece of dough and attaching it to the walls of a dangerously hot clay oven for a few brief minutes. But it works marvellously to bake thin bread like naan, and produces a unique combination of smooth even flatbread on one side and charred blisters on the other.

The method I used was a combination of Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe and Heston Blumenthal’s baking technique. Heston Blumenthal, for reasons best known to himself, uses a chemically-leavened dough which seems more suited to scones than bread so I didn’t bother with his recipe. But the technique of heating two baking stones face-to-face in the oven seemed worth pursuing. You use one stone for baking the bread while the other reflects heat onto the outside of the naan. If your oven can do it you could experiment with the grill at the same time for extra direct heat.

I ran out of time to let the bread rise properly when I tried this recipe, which resulted in a stodgier less elastic product than I was hoping for. But the fact that naan is spread extremely flat before baking means it’s quite resilient to under-proving: in essence it becomes a slightly fluffier unleavened bread like a pitta or something.

The baking was great fun. I had my two pizza stones face to face in the V shape prescribed, the temperature of the oven at maximum, and a tea towel with my teardrop shaped naan sitting on it. Real tandoor chefs seem to use a small cushion to attach the dough to the walls of the tandoor, so the tea towel was a good approximation which worked really well. I could push the dough hard onto the stone and it would stick firmly. After 3–4 minutes I pulled them out and put the next one in. The flat side was evenly brown and the bubbly side had a nice organic texture and browned bubbles. Pretty authentic looking.

It tasted quite nice, and the sour note of the yoghurt came through quite well. Less time restrictions would have produced an even nicer texture, I’m sure. My next foray will involve flavourings, which I had neither the energy nor time to investigate on this occasion. Garlic looks like a good place to start.

This is one of those I should have been doing this ages ago posts that will have other people rolling their eyes and muttering “well, yeah”.

bread
© ian

Last week I made a batch of low-yeast bread which was allowed to develop over the course of an evening. I moulded them and let them prove overnight in the fridge.

Not only was it easier and less hassle to bake first thing in the morning but I also had the satisfaction of making some of the nicest loaves I’ve made in a while. Helen and I took a baguette each and a box of sandwich ingredients to work, which also cut down on my effort in the morning. No more making sandwiches!

I’ve been too busy to do this again lately — I tried again on Sunday but the yeast was more active than I assumed it would be and it would have been over-proved after a night on its own. So I just baked that night. But I’m looking forward to doing this again.

I’ve been on a quest for some time now to get a baking stone for making nice crusty bread in our domestic oven. Most of the baking stones to buy are small and expensive, particularly the ones branded as “pizza stones”, which are actually circular and so of limited practical use for long loaves.

A few people sell more conventionally-shaped slabs of stone for your oven, but they are still awfully pricy. (I found one at a garden centre for thirty pounds. For some reason it’s always the garden centres that sell these things.) Until last week, when I stumbled across an alternative: a “worktop saver”.

Now, I honestly don’t know what a worktop saver is. They seem to be made of glass or stone. You can’t use them to put hot pans on, because the thermal shock would do for them pretty quickly. And I can’t imagine anyone using them as a chopping board unless they wanted to blunt their knives in short order.

But whatever the original purpose of these things, you can get a lump of granite about the same dimensions as the inside of an oven for between ten and twenty pounds. The one I bought was £20 from Debenhams because Asda didn’t have any £10 ones in stock. These things are ubiquitous, if you just know what to look for. (Curiously, I’m not the only one to delight in these things — they are useful for stabilising hi-fi equipment.)

I haven’t used mine extensively yet (a few pizzas in one baking session) but it’s holding up fine so far. I was careful not to put it cold into a hot oven, and it takes longer to come up to temperature, but it works well and radiates a lot of heat even when the oven is cooling.

Do it yourself

If you buy a granite worktop saver like mine you’ll probably need to prepare it first. Mine came with six foam-rubber feet on the unpolished side. I cut these off with a pen knife and then sanded down the remaining residue with the coarsest sandpaper I had. You’ll probably find that the unpolished side has very obvious grooves — presumably from where the stone was cut — and scraping/sanding along these ruts makes your job a bit easier.

Give it a quick once-over with a damp cloth to remove the dust and leave it to dry. I have used the stone polished-side up though I will probably try it upside down in future. The marks from the feet are still there, and very obvious when the stone is wet, but there is no smell of burning foam so I’m quite happy!