Simple Shortbread

Gosh! I must be on a bit of a biscuit binge at the moment… but here is another simple biscuit recipe that tastes delicious and is extremely versatile.

 

What I love about this recipe is that the ratio of ingredients is so easy to remember and is basically 3:2:1 of plain flour:butter:sugar. It is a classic shortbread recipe which I have baked here in the shortbread mould that I recently bought but you could just as easily make individual biscuits by rolling out the dough to about half a centimetre thick and using a circular 6cm cookie cutter to stamp out. You can make thinner biscuits, but you will need to decrease the baking time.

 

The basic dough can be flavoured with lemon or orange zest or you can experiment using different spices. I sometimes make thin, individual biscuits flavoured with freshly ground black pepper which I serve as an accompaniment to the strawberry mousse that I often make when fresh Irish strawberries are in season (these may sound a little odd, but the pepper compliments the strawberries so wonderfully). The point is that this recipe is extremely versatile provided you keep to the basic ratios given above.

 

If I were to impart any advice, it would be to use the best butter that you can lay your hands on. You can use unsalted butter, but if I’m completely honest, I rarely do because I like the very subtle salty flavour. This is NOT a recipe where margarine can be substituted. It has to be butter and given that I believe that Ireland produces the best butter in the world – I always use Irish butter!

 

My food obsessions not only include the eating of food, but also cover an OCD like compulsion to continuously add to my extensive food book and magazine collection. I am a complete sucker when it comes to buying new cake tins and other kitchen equipment. I'm lucky in that I have quite a lot of storage space in my kitchen, but every cupboard is overflowing with various tins, tools and implements.

 

My two daughters love all things even vaguely related to One Direction and whilst I'm sure that I would find it amusing to meet Harry, Louis, Zayn and the other 1D boys, it would be nothing compared to the idiotic, incoherent, star-struck fool I would become if I met some of my favourite chefs. I would be an absolute simpering eejit. Alas, the opportunity to do this does not look like it’s going to present itself in the near future so I shall continue to console myself with the acquisition of more cookery equipment!

 

My latest purchase was a circular wooden shortbread mould, into which you place your shortbread dough to imprint a pattern before removing from the mould prior to baking. I found that it worked very effectively although the thistle pattern which was carved into the wood did not imprint as distinctly as I had hoped it might.

Ingredients:

300g plain flour

200g butter, softened

100g caster sugar plus a little extra to sprinkle over the shortbread

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 170C/Fan Oven 150C/Gas Mark 3. Line a baking tray with non-stick baking parchment and set aside.

2. Place the butter and caster sugar in a large bowl and using a hand-held electric whisk, beat together until light and fluffy and a pale colour.

3. Add the flour and work into the butter and sugar mixture with a wooden spoon to form a dough. Knead briefly with your hands to bring together into a bowl and place on a lightly floured work-surface.

4. Divide the dough in half with a sharp knife. Form each half into a circle and roll out gently with a rolling pin until it is roughly the size of your shortbread mould (My mould is 20cms wide). Lightly flour the mould and press the dough into it. Gently remove and place on one end of the lined baking tray. Repeat with the rest of the dough.

5. Bake in the preheated oven for 25-30 minutes until the shortbread is a light golden colour. Remove from the oven and score each round into eight wedges and lightly sprinkle with a couple of tablespoons of caster sugar. Leave to cool. The shortbread keeps very well for several days in an air-tight tin.

Makes 2 rounds of shortbread.

Ginger Snaps

Ginger in all its guises is just the MOST wonderful spice.

Without a doubt my favourite things to have with a good strong cup of tea, are a slice of liberally buttered homemade ginger cake (which I make with ground ginger, grated fresh ginger and some finely chopped stem ginger) or ginger biscuits.

I have always had a particular fondness for ginger snaps with their cracked surfaces, crunchy texture and strong flavour hit of ginger. Luckily these are one of the easiest biscuits to make and they taste far superior to their mass-produced counterparts. They are great to bake with children, who love dividing up the dough into small balls, rolling them between their hands and then flattening them on the baking trays prior to cooking. 

These biscuits use ground ginger which gives a spicy, almost peppery warmth that just goes so well with strong hot tea. In fact, I believe that these biscuits, although a treat must also have psychological and health benefits, because I always feel so good after eating them. 

There’s nothing frivolous or over-the-top about these biscuits. They are what they purport to be; - ginger biscuits. However, they should not be dismissed as run-of-the-mill or ordinary because these are biscuits that are easy to make, straightforward and reliable in character and… oh… almost forgot - they taste so good! 

Ingredients:

350g self-raising flour
Pinch of salt
200g caster sugar
1 tblsp ground ginger

125g butter

75g golden syrup

1 egg, beaten

Grated zest of half an orange

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 160C/Fan 140C/Gas Mark 3.Line two baking trays with non-stick baking parchment.
2. Sift together the flour, salt, ground ginger and bicarbonate of soda into a large mixing bowl. Add the caster sugar and stir with a wooden spoon to mix into the other dry ingredients.
3. Heat the butter and golden syrup in a small saucepan over a moderate heat until the butter has melted. Remove the saucepan from the heat and allow the mixture to cool slightly before adding to the dry ingredients. Mix thoroughly to form a firm dough. Use your hands to shape the dough into approximately 30 small, even-sized balls.
4. Place the balls onto the baking sheet leaving space between them so that they have enough room to spread out. Flatten slightly with your fingers. Bake in the pre-heated oven for approximately 15-20 minutes until cooked through and a rich golden colour. Allow to cool on the trays for about five minutes and then, when cool enough to handle transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. When they are first removed from the oven, the biscuits will appear quite soft, but don’t worry the biscuits quickly firm up on cooling. These biscuits can be stored in an air-tight container for three or four days.

 

Makes approximately 30 biscuits.

Pickled Pears

I do love pears. When they are at that moment of optimum ripeness, there really is nothing to beat them. Apples are undeniably popular and this is due in part to their versatility, but the complexity of flavour that a perfectly ripe pear possesses is something that, in my opinion an apple never achieves.

Pears are wonderful used in cooking, and have something valuable to contribute to a range of sweet and savoury dishes. They are easily preserved and made into different chutneys, jams and pickles.

Pears are abundant in Autumn, although they can be a little tricky to cultivate if grown on an exposed, windy or cold site. Certainly, I have never been able to grow them successfully because of prevailing chilly winds where I live! Thankfully a number of different Irish varieties are available in supermarkets and greengrocers at a reasonable cost when they are in season. I tend to bulk buy them at this time of year and celebrate the many different dishes that I can create using them.

There’s something about making jams, chutneys, pickles and other preserves that really appeals to me. I love the somewhat romantic notion that I have developed of having food available during the “long, hard Winter” The irony of this is not lost on me given the fact that in the modern world all you have to do is walk into a shop and there are so many different foods that can be bought, but still, every year I like to bottle and preserve some fruits and vegetables.

This pickle is great and extremely easy to make. 1 kilogram of small to medium pears will yield three 500ml jars of pickled pears. I really do urge you to store the pears for at least a couple of weeks before eating them, because the flavours mellow and become almost sweeter but without being overly so. I particularly like eating these pears with cold meats at Christmas, but I recently tried them with some home-made vanilla ice-cream as a dessert and they were also delicious. In fact they made quite a sophisticated dessert and the sour acidity of the vinegar was well-offset by the sweetness of the sugar and the cinnamon.

Ingredients:

1kg pears
425g granulated sugar
400ml cider vinegar
200ml white wine vinegar
6 cloves
3 star anise
12 black peppercorns

1 cinnamon stick broken in two

4 strips of orange rind

4-6 slices of fresh root ginger root, peeled

Method:

1. Put all the ingredients except the pears into a large heavy based saucepan and bring to the boil over a high heat. Turn the heat down so that the pickling sauce is gently simmering and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from the heat and leave aside while you prepare the pears.
2. Peel and halve the pears trying to retain a small length of the stalk at the top of each pear. I find it useful to use a very small sharp knife when doing this. Use a melon baller or small teaspoon to neatly scoop out the pear cores.
3. Place the pears in the pickling liquid and heat up over a moderate heat and allow simmer until just tender. This should take about twenty minutes, but to be honest the timing completely depends on the pears that you have used.
4. Once the pears are ready, remove them with a slotted spoon and place in sterilised 500ml jars. I used Kilner Jars.
5. Continue to boil the pickling liquid until it reduces and becomes quite syrupy, but do remember that it will thicken more as it cools. Strain the syrup over the pears, but scoop out the cloves, star anise, peppercorns and cinnamon and add to the jars. Do not add the orange rind or root ginger.
6. Seal the jars and store for at least a week before eating. They can be stored for up to 6 months in somewhere cool and dark.

Makes 3 x 500ml jars.

Beef Pie with Quick Flaky Pastry

In a previous post I talked about how I like to use leftovers in a variety of ways to create meals for my family.

 

Pies are a great way to make something tasty out of food that you might have remaining from a previous meal. By making a simple sauce and including a few vegetables, you can transform what otherwise might lurk around in the fridge until you inevitably end up throwing it away. For example, if I have some of the meat leftover after making a roast chicken, I use the bones from the chicken carcass along with a few basic vegetables to make a stock from which I make a tasty sauce into which I put mouth-sized pieces of the chicken meat and add a few sautéed mushrooms or leeks.  I then pile this into a pie dish and top it with flaky, puff or shortcrust pastry and bake in the oven.

 

The pie recipe that I give here uses up some of the Beef and Guinness Stew that I have previously written about. It really does make a delicious pie and is so simple to make.

 

You can use shop-bought puff or shortcrust pastry and whilst it is a bit of palaver to make authentic puff pastry at home, shortcrust pastry is quick to make and home-made tastes so much nicer that the mass-produced versions that are available in the supermarket. To be honest, I prefer to use a puff or flaky pastry when making savoury pies, but that is just a personal preference. The whole point is that with a little planning it is actually far simpler than you might think to create tasty nutritious meals rather than resorting to ringing the take-away or sticking a ready-meal in the microwave.

 

Given my liking of puff pastry but my hatred of the time that it takes to make puff pastry, I was delighted to discover this recipe for quick flaky pastry many years ago. I can’t remember where I got it from, but I suspect that it may have come from a “Delia” book!

 

Ingredients:

225g plain flour
155g butter, put in freezer to get really cold about an hour before you want to make the pastry
4 tblsp very cold water
1 egg beaten with a fork
 

Method:

1. Put the pastry into a large bowl. Using the coarse side of a grater, grate the cold butter into the flour. Do not rub in the butter but make sure that it is gently mixed through and coated in the flour. Add the water and bring everything together until it just forms a bowl. You will still be able to see flakes of the butter in the dough, but don’t worry this is the way that it is meant to be. Briefly knead on a lightly floured work surface.
2. Wrap the ball of pastry in cling-film and leave in the fridge to rest for at least half an hour.
3. To make the pie, preheat the oven to 220C/Fan 200C/Gas Mark 6.
4. Pile your pie filling into a pie dish. Roll out the pastry until it is about 5mm thick, working it as little as possible.
5. Cut a thin strip of the pastry, about 1.5cms wide and place on the rim of the pie dish. Put a thin strip of pastry around the rim and using a pastry brush, paint with a little of the beaten egg. Next place the rest of the pastry on top of the pie and the pastry rim. Trim with a knife to give a neat finish and crimp the edges. Any leftover pastry can be quickly cut into leaf shapes and used to decorate the top of the pie.
6. Place in the preheated oven for approximately half an hour until the filling is piping hot and the pastry risen and golden on top.

 Serves 4
 

Beef Stew with Guinness and Herb Dumplings

Everyone has a dish or something that they eat that manages to transport them back in time and which represents so much more than the actual food that is being eaten. There are several dishes that manage to do this for me but the recipe that I give here probably achieves this more than any other. Whenever I eat this stew it evokes memories of when I was a child and of the family sitting around the table eating together on Wintry evenings when everyone had arrived in hungry from work and school.

This is my version of the beef stew that my grandmother regularly cooked for us and I just love the way the beef melts in the mouth, the sweetness of the carrots and onions and the beautiful rich sauce that brings everything together. She would serve the stew with some boiled or mashed potatoes and cooked green beans.

I have recently started including little herb dumplings which I plop into the stew about half an hour before the end of the cooking time. Although this is not something that my grandmother did, I have to admit that I love them. They puff up during cooking and take on some of the richly flavoured Guinness sauce and are not in the least bit stodgy. The dumplings use beef suet which adds another subtle but very savoury meaty element that complements the beef so well. The dumplings are incredibly easy to make and I would definitely recommend including them. Use whatever herbs you have to hand – I used chives, thyme, rosemary and parsley and they were delicious.

Once you initially prepare the ingredients and put them in the casserole dish, the stew can be quite happily left in the oven to cook away slowly at a moderate heat for a few hours. In fact, this dish actually improves if made in advance and re-heated. I often make it the day before I am going to serve it and then re-heat it for about an hour in the oven. If there are any are left-overs, I use them to make a puff- or shortcrust pastry- topped pie, where I put the remaining stew into a pie dish, top it with the pastry, brush it with egg wash and put into a hot oven for about 25 minutes. This is delicious served with some boiled potatoes and a green vegetable such as broccoli or peas.

This dish is a celebration of Irish beef and Irish stout. I honestly believe that we have some of the best beef in the world. Often when I complain about the amount of rain that falls in Ireland, I remind myself that if it wasn’t for all the rain, we wouldn’t have all the rich green pastures on which our cattle and sheep graze and which provide the perfect conditions for our dairy and meat industries.

What I particularly like about this recipe is that it demands the use of cheaper cuts of beef which have to be slow-cooked… Don’t get me wrong, I love fillet and sirloin beef but they can be so expensive and are by necessity mostly reserved for special occasions. Truthfully, although cheaper cuts of meat can be tough if not sensitively cooked, they do have so much flavour. Because of the slow-cooking involved here, the meat literally melts-in-the mouth and is oh so comforting to eat.

Ingredients:

3 medium sized onions, roughly chopped
750g stewing beef
3tblsp vegetable oil
2tblsp plain flour
Salt and pepper
5 carrots, peeled and cut into large chunks
500ml Guinness
1 tin of chopped tomatoes
250ml water
Sprig of thyme
Dumplings:
125g self-raising flour
65g shredded beef suet
3tblsp of finely chopped herbs (e.g. parsley, rosemary, thyme, chives)
 

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 160C/Fan 140C/ Gas Mark 3. Cut the beef into large bite sized pieces and trim off any large pieces of sinew or fat. You do not need to be overly worried about removing all fat and sinew, because it renders down during the slow-cooking and adds to the richness of the finished dish.
2. Sprinkle the flour over the beef pieces and season well. Heat the oil in a heavy based, oven-proof casserole dish and fry the meat in batches over a high heat until nicely browned all over. When each batch is done, temporarily remove to a dish while you get on with frying the rest of the meat. Do not overcrowd the pan or the meat will boil rather than sear and will not take on the lovely caramelised colour that you are seeking.
3. Once you have seared all the meat, add a touch more oil to the casserole dish, if needed and fry the onions until a nice golden colour. Return the meat to the casserole dish, add the carrots and pour in the Guinness. Allow to bubble for two or three minutes and then add the chopped tomatoes and a little of the water – you may not need it all at this stage, but can top up during the cooking process if the stew looks like it is drying up.
4. Season generously and add the sprig of thyme. Put the lid on the casserole dish and place into the pre-heated oven for anything between 2 and 3 hours. Check half-way through the cooking time and add a little more of the water if needed.
5. To make the dumplings, sieve the flour into a bowl and then add the beef suet and finely chopped herbs and mix through.
6. Add 100ml water and mix with a wooden spoon to a soft dough. Form walnut sized balls of the dough.
7. Take the stew out of the oven, remove the lid of the casserole dish and plop the dumplings in. Return the casserole dish to the oven, but do not replace the lid. Allow to cook for another 30 minutes. Serve with mashed potatoes.
 
Serves 6 generously.

 

Orange Madeleines with a Cointreau Glaze

Madeleines are small little sponge cakes that are baked in little tins with a shell-like pattern. These tins are available to buy in kitchen supplies shops. I use metal tins, but silicon moulds are also available. Madeleines are a traditional French cake and hail from the small towns of Commercy and Liverdun in the Lorraine region.

The finished cakes can be dipped in melted chocolate or a sugar glaze; both of which are delicious. Alternatively, they can be left plain and eaten just as they are. I love the sweet tang of oranges so I have made an orange flavoured version here where the sponge is flavoured with orange zest and each indivdual cake is covered in a Cointreau sugar glaze. As you are probably gathering by now, I love using liqueurs and other spirits whenever I can in my cooking and baking and this seemed like a great opportunity to use the wonderfully orangy Cointreau. But if you don’t have any to hand, just substitute the Cointreau for more freshly squeezed orange juice! These cakes are delicious and particularly tasty with a cup of tea or coffee.

Much of the madeleine’s allure comes from the highly evocative piece written by the French author Proust in his book In Search of Lost Time where he reminisces about eating madeleines and how they made him feel. I have to admit that reading this passage made me want to eat them to see what he was talking about.

Ingredients:

3 large eggs at room temperature
130g caster sugar
175g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Zest of one orange
120g butter, melted and allowed to cool slightly
Glaze:
150g icing sugar
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed orange juice
2 tablespoons Cointreau

Method:

1. Brush the madeleine moulds with melted butter and then dust with flour, tapping out an excess. Place in the fridge while you get on with making the cake batter.
2. Whisk the eggs, caster sugar and orange zest with a hand-held electric mixer until doubled in volume and a light colour. This will take about five minutes.
3. Sieve the flour and baking powder together and fold into the egg and sugar mixture. Pour in the melted butter in a steady stream and fold in. Cover the bowl and place in the fridge for at least an hour but anything up to twelve hours. This is to allow the batter to rest and helps create cakes that are light but with a denser crumb.
4. To bake the madeleines, preheat the oven to 220C/Fan 200C/Gas Mark 6. Fill each madeleine indentation with enough batter to three-quarters fill. Bake for 7or 8 minutes until the cakes feel just set.
5. While the madeleines are baking make the glaze. Mix all the ingredients together to create a smooth paste. Remove the madeleines from the oven and tip out on to a cooling rack. When they are cool enough to handle, dip each cake in the glaze, turning them over to make sure that each side is coated. Leave on a wire rack to allow the glaze to set. Place some greaseproof paper underneath the wire rack to catch any drips.

Makes 24 small cakes.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time