Pandan Swiss Roll

Pandan are bright green leaves, mostly used in Asian cooking. In Malaysia, where I was just on holiday with my family, they have these amazing pandan swiss rolls. We sneakily stowed away some pandan coconut essence into our luggage that we’d bought from the local supermarket so we could try to recreate it. I have absolutely no idea where you’d buy it from in England, but a large Asian supermarket is probably your best bet. I didn’t have a recipe for this so I just followed a simple swiss roll one and added the essence and it seemed to work alright! Pandan has a really unusual flavour, it’s kind of hard to describe but it’s often teamed with coconut so I suppose it’s kind of…coconutty…

Ingredients

4 eggs

100g caster sugar, plus extra for sprinkling

100g self-raising flour

Pandan essence

For Icing

Butter

Cream Cheese

Icing sugar

Pandan essence

Line a 33 x 23 cm swiss roll tin with baking parchment. Preheat the oven to 200⁰C.

Whisk the eggs and sugar in a large mixing bowl until light and frothy.

Add the pandan essence. I added two big blobs but it depends how pandany you want it.

Carefully sift the flour in and fold in gently using a spatula.

Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 10 minutes or until springy to the touch

While the cake is in the oven prepare a sheet of baking parchment slightly larger than the cake and sprinkle some caster sugar all over it. When the cake is baked turn it out quickly onto the sugared paper and remove the lining sheet from the bottom of the cake.

Trim the edges of the sponge then make a scoring mark about 3cm in from one of the edges.

Roll the cake up with the paper still inside from the scored end and leave to cool in a roll (This prevents the sponge from cracking.)

While the cake is cooling make the filling. You can fill it with anything you like really, and the proper authentic pandan cakes are usually filled with fresh cream. I didn’t have any fresh cream knocking about the fridge though so I just made a simple buttercream instead. Cream some butter and cream cheese together and sift some icing sugar until the mixture is smooth but holds its shape. Add a small blob of pandan essence to give it the flavour and colour.

When the cake is completely cool very carefully unroll it.

Spread the icing all the way along.

Roll the cake back up from the scored end, this time removing the outer paper as you go. Sprinkle a little more sugar on the outside if needed. Now, for some reason the outer browny layer of my cake peeled off with the paper. Don’t ask me why, but it doesn’t really matter because I think the cake looks better green anyway!

This is best eaten on the day and served with a cup of Chinese tea.

Fresh Tomato and Rosemary Bread

This bread has sort of been created accidentally. My mum’s tomato plant has been sprogging like mad so I thought I’d try a flavoured bread. One problem I found was that most tomato bread recipes include some kind of cheese which is verboten in our house at the moment. I started to get hungry so I just thought flap it, I’m going to make a recipe up. This bread also accidentally became a half and half loaf because I only realised as I was weighing out my flour that I didn’t have 500g of white…The end result is a sort of hovis-esque more bready than a focaccia should be but also more holey than normal bread should be loaf. I hope you’ve followed so far.

Ingredients (makes 2 loaves)

250g strong white bread flour

250g wholemeal bread flour

10g salt

10g instant yeast

Around 100ml of extra virgin olive oil

360ml cold water

Seasoning

Good handful of fresh rosemary

About 20 baby tomatoes

First off I apologise for the lack of photos! I’d already started when I realised the battery had died so the pictures start kind of half way through…

In a large mixing bowl weigh out the flour. Add the salt to one side and the yeast to the other. Pour in around 40ml of olive oil and three quarters of the water to the flour and combine using the spidey-hand motion. Keep adding the water a bit at a time until all the dry ingredients are picked up.

This is quite a wet mixture because it’s adapted from a focaccia one so don’t be put off that the mixture is very wet and DON’T be tempted to add more flour. Drizzle some olive oil on your work surface and knead the dough for a good ten minutes until it feels lovely and elastic. One of those plastic bread scrapey things that I definitely don’t own would come in handy here.

Pop the dough into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with a tea towel. Leave in a warm place for about an hour or until doubled in size.

Et Voilà we have the first photo!

Tip the dough out onto a very lightly floured work surface, hardly handling the dough to keep the air in. Gently separate the dough into two.

Line two baking sheets with parchment. Put the dough on the sheet and gently stretch it out into a rectangular shape.

Now halve your tomatoes and gently press them all across the top of the dough. Generously cover with rosemary and end with a good drizzle of olive oil and some seasoning. Leave them both to the side to rest for 10-15 minutes while you preheat the oven to 210⁰C.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. The bottom should sound hollow when you tap it.

This bread has a gorgeous sweet savoury taste because of the tomatoes and goes beautifully with some soup.

(Here are some snaps of my mum’s tomato and rosemary plants because it will make her happy.)

Orange Sunset Cupcakes

Hello Lovelies! First of all sorry for not posting for ages, I’ve been on holiday with my family in South-East Asia. We all stuffed ourselves silly with char kway teow, pad thai, pineapple rice and lots of delicious food, so I was temporarily banned from baking anything when we got home (at least 4 pounds fatter). We also ate a fair amount of desserts, pandan cake, coconut sticky rice and these wicked macaroons from Singapore…so stick around and you might see a few inspired recipes popping up.

Of course the most exciting source of baking inspiration right now is the new series of The Great British Bake Off! Hands down, one of the best programmes ever. I want to employ Mel and Sue to run around my kitchen. The first episode’s Showstopper bake was a hidden surprise cake. They all looked amazing and I felt so sorry for poor Natasha whose sunset cake wasn’t quite baked enough because it’s SO easily done. As it was I liked her idea of a hidden sunset the most so I thought I’d try it out in a cupcake.

You’ll see from the pictures that there isn’t a huge difference between the two lighter colours when baked so when I try this recipe again I’m going to keep experimenting until I get the perfect combination!

Ingredients

4 eggs

8oz self-raising flour

8oz caster sugar

8oz softened butter

2 tsps baking powder

Zest of 1 orange

Red/yellow/orange food colouring

Icing

Large pat of butter

Large pat of cream cheese

Lots of icing sugar

Juice of the orange

Food colouring

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C. Line a muffin tray with cases.

In a large mixing bowl combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs and butter to form a smooth mixture.

Finely grate the orange zest and add it to the mix.

Split the batter evenly between 3 bowls.

I didn’t have any orange food colouring which would have made life a great deal easier so what I did was first made all the mixtures the same shade of yellow. I then added one drop of red at a time to each bowl so that in the end I had a dark, normal and light orange mixture.

I then spooned the mixture into the muffin cakes going dark to light. It’s quite difficult to only spoon a small amount in but completely cover a layer so my cupcakes are absolute monsters. If you wanted smaller, more delicate cupcakes you could pipe the batter in to overcome this, but I personally think that’s a bit of faff.

Bake the cupcakes for 20-25 minutes or until springy and a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.

To make the icing beat the butter and cream cheese together. Sieve some icing sugar, and then add a spoonful of the orange juice. Keep repeating this until the consistency holds its shape but it’s still smooth. Spoon about a third of the icing into a separate bowl and add enough food colouring to make it whatever shade of orange you fancy.

To get the sort of two-toned effect you need to squide the orange icing up one side of the bag, then sort of splodge the white icing to fill the gap. Then pipe away!

I’m a bit of a colour/glitter/sparkly pretty thing baker so I would definitely try these again playing around with different colours. Also as a warning, eating a whole one of these if they are as monstrous as mine will make you feel a bit ill.