Rhubarb Jelly

No baking this week. There's only room for a certain amount of 'junk food', and we've still got two chocolate eggs to get through. There's also some of the last two batches of cookies (the banana oatmeal raisin and carrot cake ones) in the freezer. for reference, both seem to freeze fairly well. Defrost for an hour or so at room temperature. They may benefit from a short time in a lowish oven, but I haven't tried that.
So, I didn't bake, but I still wanted to make something. So what should I do instead? Our garden contains three clumps of rhubarb. Two are pretty small, but the third is producing quite a lot. So obviously something with that. Some kind of dessert, but something fairly light. I still have some gelatine in my cupboard from the first time I ever tried to use it. That attempt was a success, so why not try again? Rhubarb jelly it was. I went looking for recipes as a starting point, and settled on this one from BBC Good Food. I left out the alcohol, as I don't have any, and reduced the amount of sugar. I have a bottle of rosehip syrup in the cupboard, and thought that might go quite well, so a teaspoon of that made its way in. I don't think it really came through in the finished jelly, but I'd have to make another batch without it in order to find out. Which I just might do.

Recipe (makes 2):
250 grams rhubarb, sliced
200 millilitres water
35 grams caster sugar (40g if not using the syrup)
1 teaspoon rosehip syrup (optional)
2 sheets leaf gelatin (enough to set 300ml liquid)

Soak gelatine in water while rhubarb is cooking.
Put rhubarb, sugar and water in a pan. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 15 minutes. The rhubarb should completely disintegrate.
Remove from the heat.
Pour the mixture through a fine sieve into a jug, gently pressing on the solids to extract most of the juice. You can either discard the solids left in the sieve, or put a couple of teaspoonfuls into the bottom of the jelly glasses and discard the rest. Taste and see.
Pour the liquid back into the pan. Add the rosehip syrup and the gelatine to the pan and stir until the gelatine is fully dissolved.
Pour the jelly into glasses and chill until set.

Carrot Cake Cookies

Bit of an upside-down day today. We went out for lunch to a very nice place just down the road, from us Windlestraw Lodge. The occasion was Dunk celebrating the 'end' of his diet, and the food there was certainly a fit way to mark it. I'm not going to attempt to review it, but if you are in the area and get the chance to eat there, take it.
Since I knew we'd be eating a richer than usual meal, and as we're still eating through the three Easter eggs (and will be for a few weeks yet), I fancied making more healthy-feeling 'hidden fruit or veg' baking. So this week, it's something picked up from Julie van Rosendaal's blog. It's a recipe for Carrot Cake Cookies, for the new edition of One Smart Cookie - which yes, I'll probably be buying, and donating my current copy to someone else (no idea who yet).
Anyway, as usual I made one or two minor changes. First thing, I've started converting recipes to metric measurements. I brought down the amount of sugar slightly, and used hazelnuts instead of walnuts, because I had them in the cupboard and wanted to use them up. The result? Little drops of carrot cake. These are not firm like you'd expect a cookie to be, but more cakey in texture. The nuts I used give just a hint of nuttiness - using more, or using different nuts would still be fine. The overall verdict? Definitely a recipe to keep.

Recipe:
50 grams unsalted butter
75 grams caster sugar
75 grams dark muscovado sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
100 grams plain flour
100 grams plain wholemeal flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
150 grams grated carrot
75 grams raisins
25 grams chopped hazelnuts

Preheat oven to 350F/175C. Line two baking sheets with non-stick baking parchment.
In a medium bowl, combine the flours, bicarbonate of soda, salt and cinnamon.
In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugars together. Once combined, beat in the egg and vanilla extract.
Add the flour, carrots, raisins and hazelnuts a bit at a time to the wet ingredients, mixing between each addition until just combined.
Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto the baking sheets, flattening each cookie slightly.
Bake for 12 to 14 minutes, until golden on the edges and just cooked in the middle.

Banana Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

After last week's muffins, I felt like cookies this week. Well, actually my first thought was chocolate, but I figured since it was Easter last week, maybe I should leave the chocolate alone, and go with something else. Something that I could convince myself was vaguely healthy, or at least not totally devoid of any nutritional benefit. So flicking through One Smart Cookie, I found a recipe that fitted the bill: banana oatmeal raisin cookies.
Now, I'm not sure these turned out for me as they're supposed to. Oh, they're definitely delicious, but, as you can see from the picture, not exactly a cookie. To me, a cookie is fairly flat. Maybe with some bumps, but definitely a disc of a fairly even thickness across its area. These did not turn out like that; they pretty much stayed in whatever shape they were when they went into the oven. From the directions in the original recipe, I think they are supposed to spread. So maybe I missed something, maybe my modifications changed things a bit. Whatever happened, I certainly enjoyed the results.

Recipe:
175 grams porage oats
100 grams plain flour
25 grams plain wholemeal flour
125 grams raisins
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
50 grams unsalted butter
75 grams caster sugar
75 grams dark muscovado sugar
150 grams mashed banana (about 2 medium bananas)
1 egg white
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350F/175C. Line some baking trays with non-stick baking parchment.
In a medium bowl, combine the oats, flours, raisins, bicarbonate of soda, salt and cinnamon.
In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugars until combined.
Add the bananas, egg white and vanilla to the butter and sugar. Beat until well blended.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet a couple of tablespoonfuls at a time, mixing each until only just combined.
Drop generous spoonfuls of the dough onto the prepared trays. Flatten the cookies slightly.
Bake for 12 to 14 minutes, until the edges are golden and the cookies are just set.

Date & Orange Muffins

I've modified recipes slightly before, but this week was a lot more than I've done in the past. It all started with a recipe from the WeightWatchers magazine, for date and orange muffins. However, that recipe called for use of one of their toffee yogurts, and I wasn't going to use that. They're probably full of artificial sweeteners and thickeners and all sorts of stuff, which may have its place, but that place is not in my baking. Normally I'd just substitute an equivalent, but I figured any other fat-free toffee yogurt would suffer from the same issues. So, I started looking round for other recipes. Why not just pick something different to bake? Well, I don't recall using dates before, so I wanted to try something with them.
Anyway, after a bit of looking around and not coming up with anything, I figured why not just try some more extensive modification than usual? So I did. And here's what I came up with. There isn't quite as much flavour to them as I'd like, but they're certainly acceptable. I'm sure that upping the maple syrup (I didn't actually have the full tablespoonful left in my bottle, and if making them again I'd probably double the amount), and the orange would help matters.

Recipe:
200 grams plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
50 grams dark muscovado sugar
50 grams pitted dates, chopped
100 millilitres skim milk
120 grams yoghurt (use a toffee one if you like)
1 egg
30 millilitres sunflower oil
Zest of 1 orange
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon orange juice

Preheat oven to 180C. Put 10 (8 if you want them bigger) muffin cases into a muffin tray.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda in a large bowl.
Mix in the sugar.
Whisk together the milk, yoghurt, egg, sunflower oil, maple syrup, orange juice and orange zest.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry, and stir very briefly.
Sprinkle the chopped dates into the mixture. Stir very lightly and briefly until ingredients are combined.
Spoon into the muffin cases.
Bake for about 20 minutes until the muffins are risen, golden and firm to the touch.

Chocolate Cake

I was in the mood for chocolate this week, so chocolate cake of some description had to be made. These started out with a recipe for low-fat brownies that I got off the SparkRecipes website. I made quite a few changes to the recipe, either because I wasn't quite sure what was meant, or just because it felt right. I mean, when a recipe of American origination calls for apple sauce, what exactly do they mean? I'm not sure - will things turn out OK if I use that jar of stuff I normally eat with my roast pork? I decided not to risk it, and instead of using the applesauce, I used mashed banana instead. I'm fairly certain that in most baking cases the two things can be interchanged; in a low-fat recipe like this, hey are both intended to do the same job - act as a replacemet for some of the fat. It certainly didn't seem to cause any harm here.
The next substitution I made was the use of self-raising flour instead of the plain plus raising agent. Why? Well, I wasn't sure exactly which agent the original writer meant - does baking soda equal bicarbonate of soda, or baking powder? Normally I'd use bicarbinate of soda. However, with the use of banana instead of apple I also wasn't sure about how dense the mixture would be, so decided to skip the whole problem and just use the self-raising flour.
The result? Not quite a classic brownie, which is supposed to be very dense. This is more of a cake, but a very moist one. Completely delicious.

Recipe:
75 grams self-raising flour,
2 tablespoons cocoa powder (I used Green & Blacks)
1/4 teaspoon salt
50 grams dark chocolate (again, Green & Black's, 70%)
20 grams unsalted butter
145 grams light brown sugar
1 egg
1 egg white
6 tablespoons mashed banana
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350F/175C. Line an 8 inch square baking tin with non-stick baking parchment.
In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt.
In a large bowl over a pan of simmering water, melt together the chocolate and butter.
In another small bowl, whisk together the egg, egg white, brown sugar and vanilla extract.
When the butter and chocolate have melted, remove from the heat and leave for a minute or so to cool slightly.
Pour the egg and sugar mixture into the melted chocolate, stirring constantly. Add the banana, and mix until well combined.
Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients, a couple of tablespoons at a time, mixing each addition until combined.
Pour into the baking tin and bake for 20 minutes.