Dr Who biscuits

The Easter weekend is fast approaching and in the geek calendar that means two awesome programs will be returning to the small screen - Dr Who and Game of Thrones.

In honour of this I plan on putting up two posts this weekend; this first one is Dr Who themed and the second on Monday will feature two Game of Thrones inspired dishes.

For Dr Who I decided to do some very special iced biscuits. My baking contribution towards last years New Years Eve buffet with friends was a gingerbread TARDIS complete with it’s own little Doctor. It was only my second attempt at doing something like this, my first being a gingerbread cottage at Halloween, and I was very pleased with the results. 

(please excuse the slightly rubbish phone picture)

 However I’ve decided against using gingerbread for this recipe seeing as Baby Bear is going to be off school I want to do something much quicker and gingerbread while not hard is time consuming. My favourite recipe involves melting treacle and butter together so is not really suitable for little hands to help with. This recipe on the other hand is one that I’ve done on multiple occasions and has never gone wrong. It’s a fairly basic recipe but one that can be perked with by adding whatever flavorings you might have to hand such as chocolate chips or raisins, and it freezes well so can be shaped into a roll and frozen ready to be cut into slices and baked should an emergency biscuit be required!

I decided that to make the biscuits in a few different shapes. I made a template in the shape of a TARDIS and a second shaped like a fez ('I wear a fez now, fez's are cool') The third is a bow tie and for the fourth type I just used a gingerbread man cutter.  I made the templates using paint, printed them out and stuck them to an old cereal box.  I then cut around them to make the biscuits.

Vanilla Biscuits

70g icing sugar

1 egg, beaten

125g softened, unsalted butter

1/2 tsp vanilla paste (this should be readily available at any large supermarket)

180g plain flour

Icing

140g royal icing

60ml cold water

food colouring

1) Beat together the icing sugar, butter and vanilla paste then add half the beaten egg.  Add the flour and beat again.  If the mixture is too stiff then add more of the egg although you might not need it all.  The mixture should be of a rollable consistancy.  Put in the fridge to firm up for at least 20 minutes.

2) After chilling roll out the dough to about 5mm thick.  Cut out the shapes with the template and put in an oven pre-heated at 190C/180Cfan/gas mark 5 for 10-12 minutes.  You need to keep an eye on them as they burn fairly easily.  Once cooked allow to cool completely.

3) Once the biscuits were cooled I mixed up the royal icing.   Put the royal icing in a bowl and add the water a tablespoon at a time.  Mix together by hand with a wooden spoon at first until smooth then switch to using a hand mixer.  I find that doing it this way saves me being covered in icing sugar as inevitably happens when I try to use an electric mixer straight away!  The mix should be fairly thick in texture as it will be used to pipe an outline onto the biscuits.

4) Seperate the icing into bowls and colour it how you want it to be - in this case I’ll be using blue for the TARDIS (naturally) with details picked out in white, red and black for the fez and bow tie, . I like to use gel colours as they’re stronger so you only need a small amount to give really vibrant results and while are more expensive initially than the bottles of food colouring they last ages so are more economical in the long term. You can get them from specialist baking shops, online and I’ve noticed them turning up more and more in big supermarkets; I live in a fairly small commuter town and I’ve seen them in our Morrisons so they are becoming more easy to get hold of.

Scoop a small amount of each icing into icing bags - I find that propping the bag up in a tall glass makes this particular job much easier. Snipe off the end of the blue bag and use to draw an outline of the TARDIS.  Use the white to add the windows.  Pop any air bubbles that might be made with a tooth pick and leave to dry.  Repeat with the other colours on the bowtie and the fez, using the black to draw a tassel on the fez.

5) Once the outline is dry it’s time to flood the biscuits. Mix a little more water into the icing so that it’s of a fairly runny consistansy then pipe on to the biscuits, moving the bag from side to side while piping so that it floods the biscuit with icing. Leave to dry. 

So did you watch the episode?  What did you think and any theories about Clara?

Hot Cross Buns

For this first post I thought I'd do something seasonal; with Easter coming up fast I decided to try my hand at hot cross buns.

Hot cross buns use an enriched dough, a dough that as well as having the normal ingredients of flour, water and yeast also uses butter and eggs.  Enriched dough is a completely different beast to a standard bread dough; it starts out as a sticky, messy, weird feeling dough that with much kneading comes together into a beautifully soft, tender bread.  While not an overly complicated recipe it does take time and unless you have a mixer with a dough hook be prepared to get messy!

 
I took my basic enriched dough recipe from this Paul Hollywood recipe from the BBC's website - I've used it a couple of times before and it's always been successful.  It makes a lot of dough so I used half for the buns and froze the other half to use later on in the week to make Cinnamon AwesomeBuns (I'll post the recipe for those at some point soon)

Hot Cross Buns

Enriched dough

500g strong white bread flour
50g caster sugar
40g soft unsalted butter
2 sachets of instant yeast
2 tsp salt
150ml warm milk
140ml water

Extras to turn the dough into Hot Cross Buns
1 tsp mixed spice
75g raisins
2 tbsp plain flour

1. Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl being careful not to let the salt and the yeast touch as the salt will stop the yeast working.  Add the milk and most of the water.  Stir the mix with your hands then add the rest of the water.  Knead in the bowl until it comes together.

2.  Now for the really messy bit!  Turn the dough out on to a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes.  The dough should come together as a smooth ball once fully kneaded.  This will take time and you will get very messy fingers so this isn't a job to attempt when you're expecting an important phone call!  I find a dough scraper like this one from Amazon helped.

3.  Once the dough is forming a ball put it in a lightly oiled bowl and leave covered with clingfilm to prove for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.

4.  After proving the dough needs knocking back.  This basically means knocking all the air out of it.  I find the most satisfactory way to do this is to punch the dough.  There's something about seeing the way it deflates that fascinated me!

5.  Turn out onto a floured surface and knead again.  At this point I halved the dough and froze one part.   I then kneaded in 1 tsp of mixed spice and 75g of sultanas.  When they were fully incorporated I cut the dough into six buns and put them of trays to prove again (I could easily have got eight buns out of the mix but I wasn't sure how big they would be once they were proved)

6. After an hour I made up a paste using flour and water and using a piping bag piped the traditional cross design on the top of the buns.  They then went into a pre-heated oven at 240C/475F/Gas Mark 8 for 20 minutes.

In a pan heat a tablespoon of apricot jam and once the buns are cooked spread this over the top to give a lovely sticky glaze.

Delicious toasted with butter!