The Breakfast Series - Ax's Soured cream pancakes

Now I have a thing about pancakes. To be honest, I’ll happily admit that I have a 'thing' for most carbs that then get smothered in unhealthy quantities of either salt or sugar. However, sitting squarely on the top of my list of favourite unhealthy things, is an eternal wrestling match between the many varieties of pancakes and the many-holed joy of crumpets. Both are very happy to be smothered in maple syrup but I think I’d much rather have the pancakes for breakfast.

At this point I should probably let you into a little secret - I’m not that good at pancakes, or crepes to be precise. In fact, I can barely remember a time when I’ve managed to make two good crepes in a row. Thankfully, the world of pancakes is wide and varied and although I struggle to make a decent crepe (or British pancake for that matter; which looks much like a crepe but tends to be thicker and heaver), I can do a decent American pancake, or scotch drop scones or whatever-you-want-to-call-them. Ax mixed copious quantities of blueberries and strawberries with these pancakes and then served them with some rather nice, oak-smoked bacon. All in all, it was a very good, if mildly healthy start to a Saturday morning. But let’s be honest, if you wanted purely healthy then you wouldn’t be reading this blog now would you?

Soured Cream Pancakes

• 285g Plain Flour
• 2 tsp Baking powder
• 1 tsp Salt
• 55g Caster Sugar
• 2 Eggs (separated)
• 250 ml Soured Cream
• 150ml Milk
• 55g Unsalted butter
• any fruits that you may wish to add (Ax used Strawberries and Blueberries)

Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into a bowl. Put the egg yolks, soured cream, milk and butter into a second bowl and beat well, then add the flour mixture and beat until smooth. Put the egg whites into a clean bowl and whisk until soft peaks form. Using a metal spoon, fold the whites gently into the batter and the fold in the fruit. Do not over mix at this point; a few spots of batter or egg white don't matter.

Lightly grease a frying pan and preheat over a medium heat, add 3 tbsp of batter to the pan and turn the heat down to low to avoid burning your fruit. When bubbles are beginning to form and the underside of the pancakes have turned golden brown, it’s time to flip them. They should take about 1-2 mins on each side. These can be kept warm in a low oven whilst you finish cooking the rest of the batter in batches or can be stolen by the ravenous hordes as when Ax was cooking.

The Breakfast Series - Muffins

Yes, I am well aware that my last post was about muffins. However, I hasten to point out that they were English Muffins (created to be part of Eggs Benedict, even if that was not to be), whilst today's post is about muffins; a difficult distinction to be sure. Given that we had a guest for breakfast this week who is allergic to nuts, I admit I did struggle with this most recent challenge. But then I do enjoy a challenge.


And so, gentle reader, let us consider the muffin. Gaze at it in all of its fruity, cake-y-ness. Inhale that unique scent of baking woven with blueberries, strawberries and a faint aroma of caramel. Incorrectly or not, I have always thought of muffins to be the American version of cupcakes. They're like cupcakes but supersized - bigger, heavier and a good muffin should have moist slabs of fruit or chocolate, that ooze from the shell, almost willing you to eat them.

My first memory of eating a muffin is whilst at High School - it was one of those foods that we all agreed they did rather well. There was always a scramble to get the first of the freshly baked muffins, still warm, with either chocolate or blueberries winking at you from the paper wrapping. The tops had mushroomed out of their restrictive paper shells in the baker's miniature version of a nuclear cloud and become crunchy, whilst the insides were soft, moist and fluffy. My experiences of the humble muffin since then mainly come from the bakeries of Starbucks and from thence they have varied greatly from the dry-sahara-esque impresionistas to the deeply fragrant and moist muffins I can smell as I walk through the door interlaced with the cloyingly persistent aroma of coffee. As you can no doubt tell, I have found my muffin journeys to be rather pot luck, and it was about time I ventured into discovering just how difficult it is to make a decent muffin.


The most salient point I have gleaned in my research, is the importance of not over stirring. You want to mix it enough so that there are no deep pockets of flour but (and here is the key bit) it does not want to be smooth. It will be lumpy and every carefully honed baker's sense will be screaming at you to keep stirring but be strong, resist and your mixture will thank you. I was rather happy with this recipe but if I do it again I think I may add more strawberries, they did seem to disappear in the cooking a little. However, they came out moist, fragrant, springy and generally a baked good that I was happy to share with a guest.

Presidential Muffins (modified from here)

Ingredients

• 270g (3 Cups) Plain Flour
• 145g (¾ Cup) Sugar
• 1 Tbsp. Baking Powder
• 115g (½ Cup) Butter, Melted
• 225g (8oz) Cream Cheese, Softened
• 240ml (1 Cup) Milk
• 1 Tsp Vanilla
• 2 Eggs
• 115g (¾ Cup) Blueberries, halved
  
• 75g (½ cup) Strawberries, chopped

Directions

Preheat oven to 180°C.
In a large bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, and baking powder then set them aside to get to know each other better.

In a separate bowl, combine melted butter, cream cheese, milk, vanilla, and eggs. Mix them until smooth, I used an electric whisk as I lack the arm muscles to do this by hand effectively. Pour liquid into dry ingredients, and - put down that electric whisk! I see that - no, just put it down! - This is the moment where you reach for your trusted and ill-forgotten spoon, or the fashionable alternative, the spatula. Fold the mix carefully a few times, until only just combined. It will be lumpy, stay strong young grasshopper, all will be well.

Scoop batter into muffin cups, I think you can risk filling them up to about 3/4 to result in that classic muffin-spread (in the good food sense, not the vomit-inducing clothing sense). Lightly sprinkle tops with brown sugar and bake for about 30 minutes or until muffins spring back when lightly pressed. Try to exercise patience when they come out the oven and leave them be for a few minutes. Let them cool and recover from the trauma of cooking, and in return the blueberries won't scald your mouth into oblivion. Enjoy.

The Breakfast Series - English Muffins

So ... well ... yes, I am well aware that English muffins on their own are not typically a breakfast dish. They are really more a part of that fundamentally English meal, afternoon tea. Unless, that is, they are a part of that classic breakfast dish; Eggs Benedict. Such was my plan.

During the week, Ax tutored me in the secrets of the perfect Hollandaise sauce and I in turn spent hours baking the English muffins. It did certainly seem that I was fully prepared for the breakfast challenge. However, a normal sensible person would not have reached that conclusion. Allow me to explain. On Friday I noticed I was developing a slight sore throat, I thought nothing of it. On Saturday I was irritable, out of sorts, felt generally achy and despite my throat now feeling like I had been gargling broken glass; I failed to put two and two together. Sunday morning I was ill. I knew very well that I was ill. My throat hurt, I had a temperature, I was tired and everything ached. Now the most relevant point of this rather rambling description of my general health is this - every time I get a cold I feel like someone has opened up my head, stirred my brain round with a wooden spoon and then closed it up again. Naturally, this is not conducive to coherent thought processes.

Without me realising, the effects of this had set in on Saturday resulting in me forgetting to buy the ham or even enough eggs to do both the Hollandaise and the poached eggs. By the time I realised this, it was already Sunday morning and I had just finished separating the eggs for the sauce. I felt like a right ejit and got rather annoyed with myself. Ax, being the saint that she is, patiently suggested that we could just have the muffins with some of the jam left over from the croissants. We did, they were lovely, I am still ill. As I have said on my facebook status; "I'm melting .... meeeeelting"

I would like to dedicate this post to Ax - My brilliant flatmate, who has had to cope with me this past week. I am fully aware of how irritable, idiotic and pathetic I am when ill and she's been an absolute trouper.

Now English muffins, as I am sure you know, are a bread based product. I heartily recommend getting yourself a copy of either "Crust; bread to get your teeth into" or "dough" both by Richard Bertinet. Preferably one of the versions which come with the free DVD on how to mix and kneed your basic dough mix. I found it very helpful; if somewhat different from the method I had been taught. I used his method for kneading/mixing the dough for a good 10 minutes, when I then got bored and then finished off by using the more traditional method my mother taught me. It resulted in one of the smoothest and finest dough’s that I have ever made.

Traditional English Muffins

Ingredients

• 400ml (1 1/2 cups) milk
• 14g Unsalted butter
• 1 Extra Large Egg
• 2 tsp dried yeast
• 400g (4 cups) Plain Flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 60ml (1/4 cup) fresh orange juice

Directions

In a pan, very gently heat the milk and butter until the butter melts and stirs into the milk. Were looking for tepid milk here people so when I say gently, I mean gently - you'll see why in a moment. Take off the heat, whisk in the egg until combined and then sprinkle over the yeast to dissolve. This is why we were aiming for tepid milk - too hot and you'll kill the yeast and get some sort of flat bread relation, too cold and the yeast won't ferment and you'll get pretty much the same thing. I like to sprinkle a touch of flour over the yeast mix just so that it’s easier to see when the bubbles start appearing. The yeast will take about 5 minutes to start blowing bubbles in your milk so leave it alone and let it do its thing.

Measure out your flour and salt, and sift them together. Make a little well in the centre. When the yeast mix is foamy, pour it into the well along with the orange juice (in case you were wondering, your muffins will not even hint of orange - this is just to help with the rising process). Loosely mix until the liquid is no longer runny and you have a sticky, glutinous mass. Now turn it out on to the side - leftover flour et al - and begin to knead it, Bertinet-stylee. It will, initially, stick to your fingers making you look like you've contracted some horrible disease - cope. If you add more flour then you'll end up with a very dry muffin, which is never pleasant to eat. As you knead it, the left over flour will gradually mix in, making it less sticky and slowly removing most of the dough that clung to your fingers. I started traditionally kneading when the dough was smoother, about 10 minutes or so in.

I cannot emphasis this next point enough - you need patience when kneading, give the dough all the time it needs. You want a smooth, springy, elastic, lump-free mix that almost has the texture of satin. From tipping mine out of the bowl, to stopping, I believe I was kneading for a good 15 minutes.

Now oil a bowl (I just used the same one I had recently tipped the dough out of) and put your dough into it, covered with Clingfilm. Leave it for about 2 hours in a warmish or room temperature space, allowing it to double in size.

Punch down the dough and very briefly knead it, then roll it into a sausage-like-shape. Using a very sharp knife, divide the dough into 16 equal chunks. Now, between your hands, smoothly shape each chunk into a nice round ball then place onto an oiled tray. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave for yet another two hours, or until the dough has just about doubled in size again.

Now put a small amount of oil into a frying pan and warm on a low to medium heat. Add the muffins to the pan and cook on each side for about 5-7 minutes, or until light brown.

The typical way to eat muffins is to split them and then toast them before eating. After toasting, I spread mine with a touch of butter and a generous helping of some pomegranate jam. We did freeze the majority of them and I discovered this morning that they work very well frozen then toasted to bring them back.

The Breakfast Series - The Croissant

Croissants have become so synonymous with breakfast that they have almost transcended their French origins. They can be found in any hotel from the five star to the unclassified and even our local Tesco sells some mass-produced, hydrogenated stuffed croissant like things. They have been used and abused, fiddled with and taken for granted. And yet ... and yet, we still love them. Fluffy and buttery with yet more butter smeared over them with a liberal helping of jam, there's nothing quite like it.

Now anyone reading this may be thinking; "Gosh, isn't that fiddly? Wouldn’t that take ages? My word, what patience she must have!" and of course you'd be right - about it being fiddly of course. I, however, do not have the patience to embark on such a crusade. Besides, it wasn't my turn this week, it was Ax's. As the fully trained chief in the house and myself a mere amateur, I leave the really complicated stuff for her cut and bruised, artistic hands.

The recipe came from a book I was lucky enough to buy last week when we visited the Taste Festival (lots of fun btw - I now have this great desire to visit Le Gavroche as we enjoyed their food so much). In honour of our breakfast traditions I bought a copy of "Breakfast at the Wolseley" by Mr. A.A. Gill. Expect a lot of the breakfast series to be taken from the book, I would certainly recommend reading what he says about the bastardisation of our illustrious friend the croissant by a multitude of cultures. But I digress ... rather a lot really ... so let’s get on to our breakfast and Ax's Croissants.

Ax spent the entire week working on a multitude of batches for this one, the first batch she wasn’t happy with as she didn’t allow the yeast to fully dissolve but the second got her approval. That is until we discovered just how fragile the dough was. A little tip, when the dough is going through its final rise it is so sensitive that even the barest hint of the weight of a tea towel will traumatise them so much that they will retreat in terror and stubbornly shrink to the thickness of a pancake. However, I was much impressed with the end result of the final batch; they were fluffy, buttery, ever so slightly creamy and a tad of crisp resistance that succumbs to your first bite to release a pillow of buttery yummyness.
(... I apologise for the ramble-ness of this post- old woman that I am, it was getting a tad late for me)