Marmite is toasting the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee with a suitably patriotic version of its yeast-based toast topper and British breakfast staple.
Known as Ma’amite (the joke really only works in an English accent), the jar sports the red, white and blue of the Union Jack, rather than the familiar yellow and red.
I’ve bought myself a jar from Sainsbury’s already to sit alongside my, er, collection of special Marmite jars that includes a black and white Guinness-flavoured version that the company brought out for St Patrick’s Day a few years back….
It seems you’re no one nowadays unless you’ve got your own baking website which is why UK supermarket Sainsbury’s has got in on the act with www.sainsburys.co.uk/baking.
Joining the likes of Renshaw, Dr Oetker and Allinson Flour’s BakingMad.com, the new Sainsbury’s site will include recipes (obviously), along with techniques and tips, advice on food intolerances and a regular Q&A from from baking guru and Guardian columnistDan Lepard.
To celebrate the launch, the nice people at Sainsbury’s sent me some goodies to try out including a new set of Diamond Jubilee cupcake cases featuring Union Jacks and marching soldier designs. I knocked up some vanilla cupcakes to try them out and they’re pretty good (ie. the cases don’t go transparent and make the designs disappear when put in the oven, as some cheaper cases do).
I’m not Irish. Not even remotely. But that’s no reason not to make some garish green-tinted biscuits (or cookies, if you insist) in celebration of St Patrick’s Day on 17 March, especially when there’s Bailey’s buttercream involved (last year I made whoopie pies with bright green filling).
I was given a cookie cutter set shaped like the British Isles for Christimas (thanks mum!), hence I have a cutter shaped liked the Emerald Isle. If you haven’t got one, you can just make your own template from grease-proof paper and cut around it with a knife.
Apologies for stating the bleedin’ obvious, but thanks to the Baileys, these biccies contain booze so may not be suitable for the nippers.
Makes 16-20 biscuits (8-10 when sandwiched together)
What you’ll need:
For the biscuits:
90g/3oz unsalted butter
100g/3.5oz caster sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
200g/70z plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine salt
Green paste food colouring
For the buttercream filling:
225g/8oz icing (confectioner’s) sugar (sieved)
100g/3.5oz softened unsalted butter
1tbsp Bailey’s Irish Cream
What to do:
First, cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl, using a fork. Next, beat in the egg and vanilla extract. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt and then add to the original mixture. Stir together until it’s all combined. Lastly, add some green colouring, a tiny bit at a time, until you’ve got the colour you want. Once all mixed in, roll the dough into a ball, squash into a flat disc and wrap in clingfilm. If the dough feels a bit too sticky, then add a touch of flour. Leave the dough to chill in the fridge for about an hour.
Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C/160 degrees C (fan oven)/gas mark 4. Roll out the dough between two large sheets of greaseproof paper. This avoids you having to add any more flour to stop it sticking, which can make the dough too dry. Cut out your shapes and place onto a lined baking sheet (make sure they’re well spaced, or they’ll fuse together in the oven when the dough expands). If you’re using an asymmetric shape (such as the outline of Ireland), then you’ll want to flip half of the biscuits over as you’ll be sandwiching two together to form a sandwich.
Bake for about 10-12 minutes or until the biscuits are slightly golden around the edges and slightly soft in the middle (they’ll firm up while they cool). Once out of the oven, transfer them to a wire cooling rack and after they’re fully cooled down then you can make a start on the filling.
For the buttercream, sieve the icing sugar into a large bowl and cream in the butter using a fork. Once it’s all combined and smooth, add the Baileys and mix in. Pop into an icing bag and pipe a blog into the centre of half your biscuits (on the flat underside), then sandwich together with the remaining half (with the flat side touching the buttercream).
Finally, sit back with your ‘Oirish’ snacks, and listen to some suitably Celtic rock, like this ditty from the Dropkick Murphys. They’re not from Ireland – they’re from Massachusetts, but don’t let that stop you. It’s a good tune…
I was recently lucky enough to be taken on a work trip to Tokyo for a week by the nice folk at Sony. Along with a busy week of checking out the latest TV tech at Sony HQ, we also managed to find time to stuff our faces with plenty of Japanese food. As you can see from the photo above, I managed to build up a sizeable snack haul to bring back to Blighty.
Aside from the standard Pocky, matcha powder and Panda-shaped biscuits, the highlight for me was the ludicrous selection of weird Kit Kat flavours including green tea and cherry blossom. My personal favourite was the wasabi flavour – they’ll definitely be a white chocolate and wasabi-based recipe on London Baking in the near future. Other highlights included…
…The ninja star shaped crackers at the ninja restaurant, where you get served by ninjas. (Despite it being our first night in the Far East, we instigated a drinking game where everyone had to take a swig every time the word ‘ninja’ was spoken. Such fun)…
Stumbling across a fantastic bakery at Shibuya station following a wander round Harajuku and Tower Records with Kat…
…this is just one of the snacks I bought there, a custard-filled pastry thingy…
…a night in Bauhaus (possibly the best bar in the world) – that’s me with the Strat on the left…
Jelly experts Bompas & Parr are launching a food explosion service for weddings. Yeah, you heard. Famous for their experimental culinary projects, the team will provide an explosives guru who will lay charges inside your wedding cake (or food of choice) which will then be detonated at an opportune moment.
In celebration of the launch of the service, Bompas & Parr have teamed up with photographer Ryan Hopkinson to document what happens when you blow up a jelly (for US readers, that’s Jell-o), as you can see in the picture.
Once you’ve booked your explosives expert, they’ll chat with your wedding cake provider to go through the safest way to lay the charges and position the cake. They’ll also attend on the wedding day to set up the explosives and detonate the blast. According to the jelly mongers, “All explosives are transported within containers meeting the MoD’s SEAP 4 security standards as referred to in JSP440″. I’ve no idea what that means, but it sounds pretty cool.
Presumably the cake will be inedible once it’s been blown to smithereens, so you’d probably want to get two made for the big day if you actually intend to enjoy a slice without having to scrape it off the ceiling first.
I haven’t had much time for baking so far this year, but the snowy weather this weekend was a good excuse to stay at home nursing a mild hangover while watching DVDs and snaffling copious amounts of cake. I named these brownies, in my traditionally tenuous fashion, after the Happy Mondays’ song, Judge Fudge. I always liked the cover of the single – not sure if the words are made from paint or icing (or frosting, for our American cousins), but I like to think it was the latter…
Enough chat – here’s the recipe…
What you’ll need:
250g/8.82oz unsalted butter
325g/13oz caster sugar
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
4 large eggs
100g/4oz plain flour (sieved)
75g/3oz cocoa (sieved)
0.5 tsp baking powder
0.5 tsp salt Dr Oetker Fudge Chunks (2 x85g bags)
Makes 12 brownies
What to do:
Grease and line a square brownie tin (roughly 10 x 10 inches, or whatever you’ve got) and pre-heat the oven to 180°C/160°C (fan oven)/350°F/Gas mark 4.
Melt the butter in a saucepan and pour into a large bowl. Add the sugar and vanilla extract and mix together. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating the mixture with a fork in betweeen each one. Add the sieved flour and cocoa powder (actual cocoa, not drinking chocolate), baking powder and salt and mix it all together. Finally, mix in the fudge chunks.
Pour into the tin and spread evenly using a spatula, then bung in the middle of the oven for 40 minutes. Once the cooking time’s up, remove from the oven and leave in the tin to cool completely.
End of year blog posts tend to be lazy and self-serving and in keeping with tradition, this one is no exception. It’s basically a hastily constructed round-up of my favourite London Baking blog posts from 2011, with some nice piccies along the way. A fitting tribute to the last year or simply a piece of cakey propaganda? It’s up to you.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! Let’s do it all again next year.
Marmite is toasting the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee with a suitably patriotic version of its yeast-based toast topper and British breakfast staple.
