Oven baked Rosti Potatoes

 

MUNCH RATING: 5/5

 

I’ve never had much luck making rosti potatoes in a pan, as they never go as crispy as I’d like them to be, so they’re not overly satisfying. But these oven baked ones go really crispy on the outside whilst being soft and fluffy on the inside and they are just so good! This is how good they are: Steve doesn’t really like potatoes and he ate 6, which is the same amount as me and I LOVE potatoes!

 

They do require a fair bit of effort to prepare and 1 hour to cook in the oven, but they really are worth it.

 

1 small onion might not seem like enough, but you don’t need too much as you don’t want the onion flavour to overpower the potatoes. I add garlic powder for a little extra flavour, but this is optional and you can obviously use fresh garlic too.

 

• Makes: 12
• Oven temperature: Gas mark 5/375°F/190°C
• You will need: a 12 hole bun tray, lightly oiled

 

Ingredients:

• 675g (1½lb) potatoes, scrubbed clean (this is roughly 6 medium potatoes)
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 50g (2oz) butter, melted
• salt and pepper
• oil for drizzling

 

Directions:

1. Par boil the potatoes for 10 minutes, until they are half cooked. Drain and leave until cool enough to handle.
2. Peel and grate the potatoes coarsely and place in a bowl with the onion, garlic powder and the melted butter. Season with salt and pepper and mix well.
3. Preheat the oven to Gas mark 5/375°F/190°C.
4. Press the mixture into the prepared bun tray.
5. Drizzle a little oil over each rosti and cook for 1 hour or until golden brown and crispy.
6. Remove from the tin as soon as possible, otherwise they might stick as they cool down.

 

ALTERNATIVE IDEAS:

• Top with cheese and cooked chopped bacon 10 minutes before the end of cooking.
• Add herbs, such as parsley, before pressing the mixture into the tray.

Christmas Cookies - Spicy Ginger Biscuits

 

MUNCH RATING: 5/5

 

The recipe for these cookies is from BBC Good Food and it works well. The biscuits are nice and crunchy and there is just enough ginger to give your tongue a tingle.

They did spread more than I expected, so I would leave at least a 3cm gap between each biscuit.

 

CHANGES TO THE RECIPE:

I left my dough in the fridge overnight, so I did leave it out on the worktop for about an hour to warm up before rolling out.

 

I used my marzipan spacers to roll out the dough, so they were all an even 6mm thick. I baked mine for 15 minutes.

 

I didn’t use white chocolate to decorate as the recipe suggested, as I still had some royal icing leftover from my other Christmas Cookies.

 

I would make these again as they’re really easy to make and keep their crunch!

 

Ingredients:

• 175g dark muscovado sugar
• 85g golden syrup
• 100g butter
• 3 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 350g plain flour , plus extra for dusting
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 egg, lightly beaten

 

Directions:

1. Heat the sugar, golden syrup and butter until melted. Mix the spices and flour in a large bowl. Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in 1 tsp cold water. Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients, add the melted sugar mix, egg and bicarbonate of soda. Mix well. At this stage the mix will be soft but will firm up on cooling.
2. Cover the surface of the biscuit mix with cling film and leave to cool, then put in the fridge for at least 1 hr to become firm enough to roll out.
3. Heat oven to 190C/170C fan/gas 5. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead briefly. (At this stage the dough can be put into a food bag and kept in the fridge for up to a week.) Cut the dough in half. Thinly roll out one half on a lightly floured surface. Cut into shapes with cutters, such as gifts, trees and hearts, then transfer to baking sheets, leaving a little room for them to spread. If you plan to hang the biscuits up, make a small hole in the top of each one using a skewer. Repeat with remaining dough.
4. Bake for 12-15 mins until they darken slightly. If the holes you have made have closed up, remake them while the biscuits are warm and soft using a skewer. Cool for a few mins on the baking sheets, then transfer to a wire rack to cool and harden up completely.
5. Break up the chocolate and melt in the microwave on Medium for 1-2 mins, or in a small heatproof bowl over simmering water. Drizzle the chocolate over the biscuits, or pipe on shapes or names, then stick a few silver balls into the chocolate. If hung up on the tree, the biscuits will be edible for about a week, but will last a lot longer as decorations.

Christmas Cookies – trial run!

 

MUNCH RATING: 5/5

 

Everyone seems to be making cupcakes and I decided I wanted to do something a bit different. I really liked the idea of decorated cookies as there are so many different shapes you can make and I felt there was more freedom to be creative.

 

For my first attempt I’m really pleased at how they turned out. Admittedly I did choose very simple designs for the snowflakes and Christmas trees, but you have to learn to walk before you can run! My reindeer definitely needs some work, but that was just a bit of fun!

 

I absolutely loved decorating these cookies and can’t wait to try different designs and shapes. I found it very relaxing and therapeutic icing the cookies and I would LOVE to do this as a job, so I’m going to practice as much as possible and hopefully I can do something I enjoy for a living!

 

 

I’ve never made/decorated cookies like this before, so I had to do quite a bit of research about how to do it and what equipment I needed before starting. I did borrow Peggy Porshen’s ‘Romantic Cakes’ book from the library which was quite inspiring and gave me an idea of what I could achieve after some practice! But as a complete beginner it didn’t really give me the information I needed. So I was really glad I found a fantastic website called Cake Journal where there was absolutely loads of information and tutorials.

 

THE COOKIE DOUGH:

I chose to use the Vanilla Sugar Cookie recipe from the Cake Journal website and it worked really well as they didn’t spread and they tasted good!

The recipe suggests using half confectioners (icing) sugar and half normal sugar. I actually used all normal granulated sugar, but I whizzed it up in the food processor on its own before making the cookie dough, to make it a finer texture.

 

I made the dough in a food processor rather than a mixer. The dough was very sticky and like wet sand, so I was a bit worried it would be too soft to work with. But after chilling in the fridge it was fine and very easy to work with (the recipe states to chill for 2 hours, but I actually had it in the fridge for 4 days as I was suffering from a cold and too ill to bake!). I did find some big lumps of butter in my dough when I came to roll it out, so I will probably use a mixer next time! I only used a small amount of the dough for my trial run of cookies and I’ve kept the rest in the freezer.

 

I used quite small cutters, so I only needed to bake the cookies for 15 minutes. I baked the first batch using my Magic Non-Stick Liner and they browned a lot more evenly on the bases than when I just used normal non-stick paper.

 

THE ICING:

Cookie decorating seems to be very much an American thing, so all the books and websites I’ve read have a recipe for the royal icing that you need to use. Luckily in the UK we can buy all-in-one royal icing in a box made by Silverspoon, which is available in most supermarkets. I’ve never used this type of icing before, but it was easy as you just add water and then mix for about 5 minutes with electric beaters. Getting the consistency right for piping is something I need to practice, as I think I had it just a tad too thick. I did follow the advice on another great website I found called Sweetopia as there’s a great tutorial on cookie decorating, in particular the consistency of icing.

 

I had loads of icing leftover and I thought it would be OK to store in the squeezy bottles as they had screw-top lids. But the icing split and didn’t look very good after a few weeks, so I threw it away.

THE EQUIPMENT:

The Cake Journal How To flood cookies with royal icing tutorial was really helpful in discovering what I would need to buy to decorate my cookies. So here’s what I’ve bought so far:

• Squeezy nozzled bottles as they looked so much easier to use than piping bags and I loved that you can store any unused icing in the bottles. www.cakescookiesandcraftsshop.co.uk is the only website I could find that sold these bottles in the UK and luckily they were reasonably priced so I bought 6. I would say the nozzles on these bottles are a size No.3 and I found the holes a little big to draw neat lines, but they would be perfect for flooding, which is what Louise from the Cake Journal website suggests them to be used for. She says she prefers to use an icing bag to outline her cookies, but I found a squeezy bottle with a No.2 nozzle on it worked really well for me.
• I also bought marzipan spacers from the same website as they were quite cheap and they really made rolling out the cookie dough to the right thickness so much easier and quicker.
• To colour my icing I used Wilton Icing Colours which are concentrated pastes of colour so that it doesn’t water down your icing. They’re really good as you only need a tiny amount to colour your icing to a vibrant shade.

Resources/inspiration:

www.cakejournal.com

www.sweetopia.net

www.cakescookiesandcraftsshop.co.uk

www.customcookieco.co.uk

www.peggyporschen.com

Here are some more I did recently: