Birthday baking bonanza

I awoke this morning with a very muggy head (it's still not terribly clear, so apologies if I begin to ramble), the result of a weekend of excess followed by a bracing mountain hike to redress the balance. No.3 Sister turned thirty on Friday and as she is the baby of the family, her arrival into proper grown-up territory required much celebrating and, needless to say, alot of baking.

 

It began on Friday morning with a basket of pretzels still warm from the oven, as requested by the birthday girl following the success of the trial batch earlier in June. For those of you looking for an update on the bicarbonate versus caustic soda bath for the pretzels, I confess that I haven't quite gathered the requisite courage to face the caustic version. An Austrian colleague of No.1 Sister assured her that she'd never heard of anyone using caustic soda and since I've had no complaints on the quality of the pretzel, for the moment I feel if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Besides, I still haven't purchased the necessary safety equipment (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!).

 

 

There was a brief interlude in the baking schedule when No.3 Sister high-tailed it down to Cork to hear The National play (lucky, lucky girl). Cinderella here stayed behind to make sure there was plenty of birthday cake for her return on Sunday afternoon. I planned to bake a Lemon meringue layer cake, sandwiched with cream and lemon curd, to be eaten after the birthday dinner. This was one of only three cakes approved by my extraordinarily fussy sister. She's not a huge cake fan, unless it's something very simple, classic and not very rich. As this cake incorporates two of her favourite things- sponge and meringue - it passes the test. Happily, it's also an impressive sight on the cake stand, birthday candles ablaze, and thus perfect for such a big celebration. The cake was delicious after the lovely dinner Mam made (a very tasty meatloaf with chickpea and tomato sauce), with the tangy lemon curd the ideal counterpoint to the sweetness of the meringue, the buttery, lemon sponge and the richness of the cream. The only complaint from around the table was that I should stop taking photos for my blog and just dish up the cake already (seriously, I barely escaped with my camera intact).

Although the cake plan was approved and in the works (the lemon curd was made in advance on Saturday), I felt there was a brownie-sized gap in the Sunday celebrations. We were all descending upon the parents early afternoon for coffee and a glass of bubbly to toast the birthday girl on her return and since the cake was for after dinner, later that evening, something else was required. As mentioned above, No.3 Sister has no love for decadent, rich, 'fancy' cakes (her word), so I turned to the 1970s All-Colour Hamlyn Cookbook, the go-to recipe book of our childhood, with all the family cake favourites on which I honed my skills. The chocolate brownie in this book is more cake-like than the dense, moist brownie more commonly found today and is not over-poweringly chocolatey (with cocoa rather than melted chocolate in the mixture) - so far so blah, I hear you say. What makes this brownie particularly special and more-ish though is the gooey, fudgy icing that is poured over the top and drips down over the sides. In theory, you could give the icing enough time to set before you cut the brownie into squares, so that there's no dripping and a neater finish. In practice, the temptation to cut, serve and eat is frequently too much (as proved the case on Sunday - witness the icing cascading over the edges of the squares in my photo).

 

All in all, the birthday celebrations were a great success, though the cake and bubbly hangover made yesterday's hike to the top of Djouce mountain in Wicklow quite a bit more painful than it needed to be. Fortune smiles on the brave, however, and in addition to our picnic sandwiches, we had the left-over brownies to fortify us before the march back down. I can think of nothing better than eating a brownie while sitting on the top of a mountain, with the world spread out at your feet and the sun (finally) peeking through the clouds. The perfect end to a lovely weekend.

Pretzel wars

I had no idea, when I first embarked upon the idea to bake pretzels for No.3 Sister, just how high tensions ran in the world of pretzel making. Freshly baked, salty pretzels are one of her favourite things and it just so happened that there was a recipe for pretzels in my newest baking book, Scandilicious Baking by Signe Johansen. Well, I say new, but I actually got it from my Dad for Christmas and I'm only now getting around to trying out the recipes.

All was going well as I gathered everything together and started mixing the dry ingredients with some honey and melted butter (which I thought would have more flavour than the listed oil). Then I looked to the recipe to see what the liquid component was and how much to add... nothing!! Puzzled and assuming an editorial glitch in the ingredient list, I read through the method once more to find that there was none. Sigh. Nothing upsets me more than poor editing, whether it's typos or (more critically) missing ingredients. As none of my other books had a pretzel recipe, I turned to my trusty friend, the internet. I managed to find what purported to be an 'Authentic German Pretzel' recipe (more of this later). It was similar to Johansen's but crucially, it added a mix of milk and water (that's more like it!). The result was eight soft, salty pretzels that were rather tasty if I do say so myself. Authentic, though? That, my friends, appears to be the million dollar question over which wars are currently being fought online.

When I made the pretzels, I followed both the Johansen and the 'Authentic' recipes' instructions to boil the pretzels in water and bicarbonate of soda before sprinkling with salt and baking in a hot oven. Curious after the recipe book fiasco, I went back on line to research some more pretzel recipes and methods to see what, if anything, I might change the next time I make them. I came across a pretzel blog-post on The Fresh Loaf (a fantastic site for amateur bread-makers / enthusiasts), which sparked a heated debate over whether or not the boiling water bath for the pre-baked pretzels should contain bicarb or lye (caustic soda to you or me). Apparently (at least according to some of the more vitriolic posts), if it's not a lye bath, then it's not an authentic German pretzel (though this was in turn debated by one poster whose German grandmother never used lye). Most people seem happy to compromise on authenticity for the safer and easier option of bicarb, as using lye requires rubber gloves and safety goggles and includes lots of caveats (e.g. don't use parchment paper to line your tin as it'll burn right through and it'll also take the non-stick layer from your non-stick tins). Yikes!

Bicarb or lye issues aside, I thought the pretzel twisting, then the boil / bake scenario would be terribly fiddly, but it was all much simpler than expected. The rather plump pretzels were declared a success by all of my sisters when we had them that afternoon, accompanied by cold beers and unusually hot Irish sun. Authentic? Who cares? Delicious? Most definitely. No.3 Sister, a connoisseur of pretzels, has requested more of the same for her birthday celebrations in a few weeks time. Perhaps, if I'm feeling brave I might even don goggles and gloves and get out the caustic soda. Stay tuned!