goat cheese buns. :)

Yesterday, a smell that is generally rarely detected in the kitchen of Ganache-Elf could indeed be found to be floating from that well-used oven, filling the whole house and causing...well, mixed reactions really. My mam was not impressed...it's bizarre, but my mam, who is most certainly one of those people who can be described, in general, as a cheese fanatic...well, I say in general, because she absolutely detests both the smell and taste of goat's cheese. So accordingly, she found the aromas of my fresh goat's cheese buns somewhat off-putting. So obviously, please don't make these if you are of a similar opinion about goat's cheese...I know that sometimes when raw ingredients are baked in something they lose some of their strength of flavour or whatever, but this is certainly not the case with these little fellows. But I love them, all the same. As I mentioned before, they always remind me of my roommate and our baking nights last year - I still maintain that my buns aren't as nice as hers, but this second attempt at making them was, I'm pleased to say, generally more a successful one than my first. They were, for one thing, the correct size - I made twelve buns this time and though they still make quite a substantial snack, they aren't quite as huge as the last ones I made; which was what I really intended. And I think they tasted that bit nicer, too - they were lovely and moist and the tops were interspersed with plenty of studs of lovely molten cheese. I felt quite defensive when I heard Mam's grumbles as I lifted the buns from the oven, tenderly wrapping them in a little tea towel before stacking them on a wire rack to cool...to me, the smell is gorgeous! But each to their own, and I wasn't going to insist on Mam trying one...or anyone else, in fact; for I don't think anyone else in my family is too crazy for goat's cheese; except my auntie and granny over in England, really. But for once I had actually baked these with one person in mind...well, myself. It's rare that I do this, but my goat's cheese buns do make a really good morning snackrel for me that isn't too high in sugar and that, when spreaded with a nice dollop of peanut butter, is arguably quite good for protein too. :) And finally...goat's cheese buns also, of course, make me think of the Hunger Games...one of my favourite ever films. (haven't read the books yet...it's on my reading list...) So I feel quite justified in making them really, despite their unpopularity amongst my family members. But anyway, hopefully what I intend on whipping up today will help me to make it up to them...or indeed, it might be a complete disaster, as I have never made Cornish pasties before, so I am currently feeling that sort of nervous excitement I always get before trying out something new and completely different. Burt hey, I got this feeling when I made goat's cheese buns for the first time three months ago, and look at them now! So let's hope today will be just as successful:)

And because I feel that I have actually adapted my own little recipe for these - I made them for the first time using the one my roommate always used, but now I have sort of formulated my very own recipe for them which I am now really happy with - I think it is time to share it and hopefully make lots of kitchens across the world smell like the Mellark's bakery, I suppose. Apologies in advance, Mam! ;)

To make 12 goat's cheese buns you will need...

·         50 g butter, melted.

·         60 g caster sugar

·         100 g Wholemeal flour

·         200 g plain flour

·         7 g sachet instant yeast/ 1 ½ tsp easy-blend yeast.

·         1 tsp salt

·         250 ml tepid water

·         About 125 g goat’s cheese. (I use the one that comes in a tube in Lidl.:) )

·         1 large egg.

1.      Sift the white flour and the salt into a big mixing bowl, then add the wholemeal flour. Stir in the yeast.

2.      Take the goat’s cheese out of its wrapper and flour your hands lightly. Break the goat’s cheese into little studs about the size of your little fingernail. Set aside about ¼ of the cheese for the tops of the buns, and put the remainder in the bowl with the flours. Mix together well.

3.      Whisk the egg in another big mixing bowl, and then whisk in the butter and the sugar, and the warm water.

4.      Add half of the flour and cheese mix to the wet ingredients and mix together with a wooden spoon. Gradually incorporate in the rest of the flour and cheese, mixing well with lightly floured hands. You should end up with a soft and slightly sticky dough. Ensure that it isn’t too dry – if it is a little on the moist side that’s ok. But if it is very sticky add a little more flour. Add more water if it feels too dry.

5.      Shape the dough into a ball. Grease a clean bowl with a little vegetable oil and then place the dough in it, turning once to grease the top. Cover with greased clingfilm and leave in a warm, draught-free place for 1-2 hours until it has increased in volume and should feel slightly springy to the touch. You don’t need to worry too much about it being doubled in size, but do make sure that it has increased its volume somewhat. I usually give it 2 hours to be on the safe side. J

6.      Preheat the oven to 200c/fan 180c. Grease two big baking trays and line them with baking paper if they are not non-stick.

7.      Very lightly flour your work surface. Take the clingfilm off the dough and give it a good punch with your fist to knock out the air. Turn the dough out onto the work surface. Cut into 12 equal pieces.

8.      Shape the pieces of dough into balls by rolling them underneath a cupped hand until they are smooth and not lumpy, and are a nice round shape. Place the balls on the prepared baking trays, spacing them well apart.

9.      Place the remaining studs of goat’s cheese that you reserved from step 2 in the top of the buns, pressing them down gently.

10.  Bake the buns in the preheated oven for 20-30 minutes, until well-risen and golden brown. They should sound hollow when tapped on the base. Remove from the trays and place on a wire rack to cool.

11.  Eat warm, cut in half and buttered (or in my case…peanut buttered ;) ) , or leave to cool completely on the wire rack, and reheat for a half a minute in the microwave later on during the day. They don’t keep any longer than a day, so freeze any leftover buns and reheat them in the microwave on defrost whenever you fancy one. J

A very, very quick update on recent baking activity.

Ganache-Elf wishes to apologise to her readers now: I did after all claim, in my first entry, that I was going to explain a bit more in my next post what exactly motivated me into creating this blog and what I hope to achieve in doing so. And of course I am going to, in the post which will follow this one. But after all, this is a baking blog and so I thought, since I have been particularly industrious in the kitchen of late, I had better give you a little taste of what I’ve been up to recently in the baking and cooking line. Through my baking and cooking movements, perhaps, you will begin to get a sense of what sort of cook the Ganache-Elf actually is.

Well…ok this isn’t quite as easy as I thought. Where do I begin? You see my problem here is that ever since we finished for summer on the 22nd of May I’ve been baking away in the kitchen as if the currently uninspiring Irish summer weather (uninspiring being a bit of an understatement right now, espiecally on this particular night. As we speak I can hear the rain drumming down upon the conservatory roof and the wind howling with such unnerving ferocity through the eucalyptus tree beside the kitchen window, anyone would think we’re in the middle of November or something. But that’s summer in Ireland for you.) is going to result in flour and butter shortages. (Which better not EVER happen, actually. A truly frightening consdieration for a baker like me.) So it’s difficult for me to even begin to tell you about what I’ve been baking recently, for what, after all, is recently? Does the term refer to the past few hours, days, weeks, or months??

 Here I go again, making a supposedly “quick” blog entry anything but that. Ok, perhaps it would be best if I just told you, for now, about what I baked and cooked yesterday (it’s now Saturday…the paragraph above was written last night. I did intend on finishing this then but all the blogging and baking had worn me out and so I went to bed early instead. Sorrrryyyyy!) and the day before that. Starting with Thursday. I did bake Wednesday but if I go into detail about what I made that day then my promise of being short and sweet with this second blog will look even more farcical than ever. So on Thursday I made something which I have wanted to make, by myself, for ages: ever since I tasted these gorgeous savoury treats in September of last year, when I moved into my new house in Dublin for the second year of college. My wonderful roommate - who is one of the most awesome bakers I know - had whipped up a batch of fragrant, soft, golden goat’s cheese buns a few hours before my arrival; and immediately offered me one as soon as I had dumped my bags of junk upon my new bed. I was hesitant at first- well, for one thing, you have to bear in mind that this was while all the eating disorder stuff was going on; and my first immediate thought on seeing the bun was “oh god I bet that’s fattening”. (I will go into more detail later on about these abnormal thoughts that I had, as I believe it’s important for me to clarify them to you if you want to understand exactly how a person with an eating disorder thinks and behaves.) And also, I had - well, not until recently, anyway - never been a fan of cheese and I had never ever had goat’s cheese before.

But I tried one anyway - and oh I’m so glad I did. They were absolutely delicious and unlike anything else I had really had before. To this day, goat’s cheese buns always remind me of my roommate, and those lovely evenings we spent together at our rented house. We were both bakers and chocolate-lovers so making something we both liked was never difficult. The contents of the little rubbish bags that served as waste-paper baskets in our room usually consisted mainly, alongside the usual piles of discarded scribbly notes which studying English inevitably brings, of Cadbury chocolate bar wrappers, Chocolate Finger packets, bun cases, and such like. We both loved to bake, though each of us had our own unique, individual style of baking and we often, during our special “baking nights” which I will forever look back upon with fondness, were to be found making entirely different things. And so, producing my own goat’s cheese buns in my own kitchen at home brought the memory of the time I spent with her and the fun we had. And, of course, from a more greedier point of view, I really wanted to make these for myself because I absolutely adore them. I love the soft sponginess of these buns; and the delicious studs of goat’s cheese which are distributed throughout each one. The cheese has a distinctive and delightful flavour and texture of its own which I love; and the way in which the top of each bun becomes wonderfully molten during baking - extra goat’s cheese is pressed gently into the uncooked balls of dough before they are placed in the oven - makes them oh-so-hard to resist. While they cooked, the tantalising smells that filled my kitchen could only be described as magical.

But! I have to be honest with you now and tell you that I wasn’t COMPLETLEY satisfied with my batch of buns. I’m not going to be too hard on myself, for it was, after all, my first time ever to make them; and I fear that I was so excited about getting them actually made I may have rushed a bit along the way and, consequently, wasn’t quite as attentive as I usually am when in “baking mode”. So why was I a little disappointed? Well, for one thing they didn’t taste quite as nice as my roommate’s did - they were still delicious, for sure, but I felt that my roommate’s were by far superior - and also, mine were HUGE. About the size of a hamburger!!  I wanted them a good size, but these ones were much, much too big. Eating one of these for a snack would be like having a small meal!! I’m not sure quite why they turned out like this. My recipe was supposed to yield nine buns, and I thought I’d make ten. And then I ended up with buns the size of cobs! Did I put too much yeast in? Or did the dough just rise more efficiently than usual as it was such a warm day? Well, hopefully I will be able to find out what went wrong on my second attempt at making them. Baking is after all like many things - practice really does make perfect and we have to learn from each and every little mistake made along the way.

Oh, dear, so much for “very very quick”, again. Well, I’ll try not to go into too much detail about what I made the following day so. The cookies whose aroma I was describing in the conclusion to my first post - they were the fruits of my labours on the Friday. I say cookies but I usually refer to this particular cookie recipe as Chocolate Drops. Why? Well, as you can see from the picture these scrummy little treats have a “drop” of chocolate ganache in their centre. I use the dampened handle of a wooden spoon to make an indentation in each cookie before baking, and, when they are cold, I fill each little groove with that wonderful, amazing, heavenly conconction known as GANACHE.

I sometimes am never really sure whether to assume or not whether people know what ganache is. Some don’t you see, whereas others are as crazy about it as I am. But let’s not get me started on the matter of Ganache now; as I believe that Ganache is such a fundamental aspect of my baking that it deserves a post entirely to itself. Let’s just say for now that if you have never eaten, made, or heard of ganache - well, I am determined to change all that on your behalf, if I achieve nothing else with this blog.

I cooked those days, too, of course - I will be quick, I will be quick, honest - : Thursday, chicken and coconut curry, and Friday, ham and chicken lasagne. Whenever I cook a chicken curry for my family, there’s always this little challenge for me to get the hotness of the curry just right. My Mam loves a bit of spice, but my poor Dad struggles a bit when it is too hot. With this particular curry, the hotness really depends on what chilli I choose to use. We buy the variety packs from Aldi so we get a mixture of chillis in each packet with varying levels of hotness. This particular time I used a very small yellow Scotch bonnet (on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the hottest, the Scotch bonnet ranks nine. Please don’t make the incorrect assumption that I’m an expert on chillis, as

I’m not. I’m only reading the little slip of paper stuck in with the chillis in their little box.). The chilli itself is tiny, but if your curry or spicy dish has one of these little beauties in it, you will know, trust me. Ham and chicken lasagne is one of my Mam’s favourites. Instead of the traditional lasagne made with ragu bolognaise, this one has layers of cooked chicken and ham in a creamy sauce instead. The lasagne sheets and the gorgeous covering of bubbly melted cheese on the top are still there too, of course. Surely a lasagne wouldn’t be a lasagne without those, now.

Ok, I think I’m done. Maybe I should just stop claiming my posts are going to be short - they never seem to turn out that way, after all. Perhaps for me, this blogging thing is going to be like baking. Once I get started, I just can’t stop.