Linzer cookies

My first festive post of 2020! Hopefully I'll manage more but I'll see how things go. This year I was determined to try a couple of new recipes for baked Christmas gifts instead of defaulting to my usual assortment of shortbread, fudge/tablet and gingerbread biscuits.

First up are these linzer cookies, which are basically festive jammy dodger biscuits. I've had this recipe bookmarked from Katiecakes blog for a while so I'm pleased to have finally tried it. Her bakes and photography are always lovely.

These biscuits were fun to make. The dough didn't need chilling which meant they weren't too faffy to prepare either. My only alteration, if you can call it that, was rolling my dough out to 1/4" thick. The recipe says 3/8" but I felt 1/4" was thick enough considering two biscuits get stuck together. I used a 2.5" diameter round cutter and got 22 completed sandwich biscuits in total from the dough. I also used up almost an entire jar of strawberry jam to fill them.

Not much else to report other than they looked very pretty and made lovely gifts to drop off at relatives' doors this week. Vanilla biscuits with jam are always a crowd pleaser. I also have Katiecakes' chocolate and dulce de leche linzer cookies bookmarked so hopefully I'll try them sometime too.

Wishing you all (if anyone still reads) a Merry Christmas and if you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a lovely Friday.

Sticky ginger and orange cake

I take all my blog photos with my phone these days. In fact all my blogging is now done from my phone since my laptop barely functions anymore. It's something I wasn't comfortable with for a long time as I know I don't put much effort into photography if I'm just using my phone, whereas I generally used to make an attractive set up when I used my proper camera.

However this year I decided to embrace my laidback approach. After all my blog is a casual baking journal, not an aspiring professional food blog, so any form of documentation will do, whether it's (vaguely) styled or just a very quick snap before the cake ends up in my mouth.

This cake is falls into the latter category. It's unfair to judge it on its unassuming appearance and uninspired photography as it is genuinely a really lovely, comforting hug of a cake. 

As with most ginger cakes this cake improved with age. It tasted so much better on the second and third day (photo above is day 2 and below is day 3.) It developed the glorious, soft, stickiness associated with a great ginger cake and the spices became more intense. I've never added orange to a ginger cake before and found it was a lovely addition. It lifted the ginger and added a fresh zing to the cake. Although I ate the cake plain, I bet it would taste amazing served with custard as a cosy, winter pudding.

Needless to say this cake smelled gorgeous in the oven. I baked it whilst watching some terrible Christmas films on tv last weekend and it made my house feel a little bit festive. Bring on all the festive, spiced bakes!

Sticky ginger and orange cake

Recipe from Mary Berry's Baking Bible.

The cake:

100g (4oz) golden syrup

100g (4oz) black treacle

250ml (9 fl oz) water

100g (4oz) softened butter (I used Stork baking margarine)

100g (4oz) caster sugar

Grated zest of 1 orange

1 large egg, beaten

275g (10oz) plain flour

1 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda 

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground ginger (I made it a heaped teaspoon for more kick)

The icing:

100g (4oz) icing sugar

Juice of 1 orange (I used less than one half)

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C /fan 160C/ gas 4. Grease and line a 23cm (9") deep round tin with greaseproof paper.

Pour the syrup, treacle and water into a small pan and bring to the boil.

Meanwhile, put all the remaining cake ingredients into a large bowl and mix with a stand or hand mixer until well combined. Add the syrup mixture and beat again until smooth (it'll look lumpy as hell initially, but honestly it'll smooth out!)

Pour the cake mixture into the tin and bake on the middle shelf of the oven for about 50 minutes or until well risen and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. (I took mine out at 40 minutes as it was definitely ready, so keep an eye on it.)

Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out, peel off the paper and leave to finish cooling on a wire rack.

For the icing, mix together the icing sugar with enough orange juice to make a smooth, fairly thick pouring consistency. Pour onto the cooled cake over a wire rack to any catch drips (or be like me and disregard this step and enjoy the icing puddles which develop around the plate. It's all good!) Decorate with sprinkles if you want to pimp it up or just leave the icing to set for 1 hour.