Muffin Ingleses y ...estamos de vuelta!

¿Hola? ¿hay alguien ahí? :)
No sabemos muy bien por donde empezar, y es que llevamos mucho tiempo alejados del blog, pero echándolo mucho de menos, eso sí, no hemos dejado de cocinar ni un sólo día.
Tuvimos que dejar un poco de lado este mundo que tanto nos gusta, debido a los trabajos y estudios, siempre relacionados con el mundo de la cocina, pero no veíamos la hora ni el modo de volver a compartir con ustedes nuestras historias y recetas.  Así que, sin pensarlo mucho, aquí estamos desempolvando el blog, aprovechando estos días de incertidumbre que estamos pasando debido al estado de alarma que nos obliga a estar en casa. Así que, que mejor momento que éste para decidirnos a encender de nuevo los fogones del blog, mientras seguimos intentando ponerlo más bonito, más actual...prometido!

Hoy os traemos unos Muffin ingleses, que nos recuerdan a nuestros desayunos en Escocia y han sido nuestro desayuno el primer día de confinamiento en casa.

Se trata de unos panecillos esponjosos, con levadura, que se pueden consumir como tostadas o bocadillos, con rellenos dulces o salados. A diferencia  de otros panes o bollos, estos se hacen en la sartén y suelen ir siempre espolvoreados de harina de maíz, que le aporta una textura característica. Típicos de reino unido, Australia, Estados Unidos o Canadá, se suelen consumir en el desayuno o en la hora del té, pero es fácil encontrarlos a cualquier hora del día. Tampoco pueden faltar en cualquier brunch, a modo de sandwich.

Pero bueno, vamos ya con la receta ( hay cosas que no cambian y es que nos enrollamos mucho eh? jaja no lo podemos evitar!)


INGREDIENTES:

-315 ml. de agua
-455 g. Harina de todo uso
-100 g. Harina de fuerza
-5 g. levadura seca de pandero (ó 10 g. aprox. de levadura fresca, disuelta en el agua)
-40 g. de leche en polvo ( sino tienes puedes rebajar la cantidad de agua y añadir leche =275 agua +40 de leche)
-15 gramos sal fina
-70 g. de mantequilla a temperatura ambiente
-harina de maíz, de arepa o semolina para la superficie de trabajo.

ELABORACIÓN:

-Mezclamos todos los ingredientes, menos la mantequilla ( que estará algo blanda pero no derretida). Amasamos bien, cuando tengamos la bola bien formada añadimos la mantequilla en su interior y seguimos amasando hasta que se integre bien ( este paso es un pelín "pringoso" jeje, si notas la masa demasiado blanda añade a la superficie un poco de harina, pero cuanto menos uses mejor).

-dejamos reposar entre media hora y una hora a temperatura ambiente y luego lo ideal es guardarla toda la noche en la nevera reposando, así la tenemos lista para el desayuno.

-a la mañana siguiente, estiramos la masa sobre una superficie con la harina de maíz. La dejaremos con unos 2 ó 2'5 centímetros de grosor. Cortamos con un cortador o algo redondo y dejamos reposar ya formados una media hora más.

-en una sartén con un poco de aceite o mantequilla vamos asando nuestros muffin, hasta que vayan dorándose por ambos lados y listo!

Nota: hoy hemos desayunado los que sobraron de ayer y estaban estupendos. Les di un poco de calor en la sartén y ...a desayunar!! O merendar...o lo que sea!.

Buon appetito y....estamos más que encantados de volver a verlos !!

Fast homemade bread

Have you got two spare hours? If the answer is "yes", then I invite you to do this "fast bread".


The world of breads is really limitless, and step by step we'll bring you more and more recipes for you. But it may seems a world that needs skills or long lasting processes. Exactly for this reason, we want to start with fast breads that we can do without particular ingredients or day-lasting fermentation. Fall in love with the traditional bread! Get back to the true bread, a bread that tastes like bread and not what we can find in every mall everywhere. We've already published other kinds of breads, like the Mediterranean Bread. In this case, we won't bring you aromatized breads, since we have no starter, but we'll add flavours with the ingredients everyone will choose to add according his fantasy. Making bread at home is really fun, satisfactory and even relaxing. You can even use quality flour, a whole or cereal one,  to let the breads be even healthier...let's get started!

Ingredients:

• 550 g. of flour 
• 275 ml.warm water
• 10 g. of salt
• 25 g.of fresh yeast
• poppy seeds, oregano, sesame (you choose, it's for the decoration)

Preparation:

1º- Put the flour, the salt and the warm water in a bowl, then mix it all together until you obtain a dough, at this point we add the yeast, breaking it into small pieces with the fingers, and keep on mixing. The yeast is to be added to our dough later, otherwise our dough will over-ferment, and to avoid the contact between the yeast and the salt, because if so, the dough will not ferment at all.

2º- Our dough has to become elastic and have not to be sticky on our fingers. If needed, just add more water.

3º- In a surface covered with flour, use your dough to create a sort of ball, then make a cross on it (in order to be sure that the dough will not break when it will be put to rest a while) and let it rest with a kitchen towel for some 10-15 minutes.

The dough before the rest

the dough after the rest

4º- After that, flatten the dought with your hands, to take out all the air, and divide it into as many pieces as you want, we can do small balls of 45 grams each, we can do many mini baguettes, a single big bread...you decide! In my case, I've done many little breads, some with poppy seeds, others with oregano, others with pumpkin seeds, others with oat. I've done some oregano baguette, use your imagination!

Breads before the fermentation

5º- Once that you've finished the bread balls, wet the surface with water to let the seeds stick well. If you want to do a baguette, just use your rolling pin and press the dough and enroll it. Then jus add some cuts to the surface, and there you are!
Once our breads are ready, we'll put them in a tray to let them rest for about 30 minutes. It's preferable that you let them in a wet place, or you can also put it into the oven at 40° Celsius with a water bowl on the inside. In this way it will grow a lot!

enroll the pressed dough like this to obtain baguette

6º- When the rest is over, just pop the tray into the preheated oven at 180°C for about 20 or 25 minutes. We don't want them to become too golden brown, a trick to achieve that is to watch the bottom of the bread, if it starts to become golden brown, then it's ready ;)

Breads ready to go to the oven

It would be great if you eat them in the same days, but if not you can freeze them and then defrost them when you'll eat them, or put it out of the fridge some minutes before, then put it over a hob and it will be just great!

If you usually do bake breads, I would advice you to conserve a little bit of the dough into the fridge, and in this way we will have a sort of a starter that we can add to the dough in our next creation, giving it a better taste. In this case, instead of adding 550 grams of flour, we will add 500 grams of flour and 50 of  the starter dough.


These breads are just perfect for the breakfast, for a snack, for an "aperitivo" or even for homemade mini burgers. Try them how you prefer and tell us about them!

Greetings with loads of breads and happy flower month!

Angie

The Cappuccino and its history

A Cappuccino

Today we'll talk about one of the best known drink in the World, the Cappuccino. We can find it everywhere we go, more or less well done...but how was it created?

A capuchine monk drinking a
cappuccino

The Cappuccino as we know it today was born in 1901, by Luigi Bezzera, the inventor of the Espresso Machine. But lots of legends want this drink to have been invented a lot earlier, and not in Italy, but in another country: Austria. The legend says the creator of the Cappuccino was Marco d'Aviano, a capuchine monk in mission in Austria to save Europe from the 1683 invasion of the Turks. The Turks, when they renounced to Vienna, left behind many sacks of coffee powder, a drink they particularly loved.

The monk, when he tried to savour the balck drink, found it too bitter, decider to put some milk in it, obtaining a dink whose colour is similar to his capuchine dress. The drink therefore started to be called "the capuchine's drink", and then Cappuccino. Then, after century, technology permitted the creation of the creamy deliciousness we all know as Cappuccino.

Ingredients and process:

The cappuccino is obtained with an espresso coffee base (1/3 of the cup), milk (another 1/3) and the typical milk foam to top the cup. Usually you can find it with a spinkle of cinnamon or cocoa powder. It is usually served in a china pot in order to keep the liquid hot. The sugar has to be added according our tastes. For example, I like it with sugar cane.

Everyone knows the coffee shop, the caffeteria and the bar version of the Cappuccino, that they obtain through an espresso machine, but we can have our own excellent version in our homes! First step, just made a coffee with a moka coffee pot!

How we make it? Today lots of kitchen robots help us with our cooking tasks, for example in the creation of the milk foam, but the easiest way is to obtain (for example through internet) a a milk frother, or a Montalatte as is know in Italy.

The milk frother, or montalatte

It is very easy to work with it, you just should fill the frother with the milk and put it to heat, then, when the milk is hot, shake it well for some seconds and there you have it your milk foam. Do not warm the milk too much, because, if your milk is hotter than 70°C the foam will dissolve fastly. If you don't have a thermometer, just don't let the milk to reach the boiling point.

the milk frother opened

Another trick to create a perfect foam is to hit a little bit the bottom of the pot, so to addense our milk foam.
Now choose your favourite cup, put your moka coffee pot on the heat and wait for the coffee to get ready. Put the coffe in the cup and then add the milk and the milk foam. You can decide how to decorate your own cappuccino with the now very popular so called Latte Art.

A cappuccino decorated with Latte Art

Let us tell you some curiosity about Cappuccino. In Italy is considered the cornerstone of the Colazione all'Italiana, or italian breakfast, done with a Cornetto (an italian version of the croissant, made with less butter than the transalpine ones) and a Cappuccino. Yes, in Italy we almost never drink Cappuccino after 10 a.m. in the morning! In Us or elsewhere you can drink cappuccino everytime you want, and that's because in the other cultures, breakfast is not sweet-based, like for instance in Italy or France, but made with salted dishes, and therefore the Cappuccino becomes somewhat a substitution of coffee. There's nothing strange in enjoying a Cappuccino at 5 p.m. in London or New York, but if you ask for it in Florence or Rome, the waiter may just look at you arkwardly. In the case, just laugh and add to the waiter: "sorry man, I'm just foreigner!" ha ha!
In other bars or caffetterias you can also find a Cappuccino made with heavy cream. But in this case is not a proper Cappuccino. You would obtain something that in Austria is called melange and in Italy is known as caffè viennese.

That's all for today, we hope you'll try to do your own cappuccino at your house, and that it will become a domestic rite for your breakfasts!

caffeine greetings!

Angie

Coconut and Cinnamon Bundt Cake

Today we bring you our own C&C bundt cake (with coconut and cinnamon), a sweet and different cake , ideal for breakfast and teas.

Bundt cake comes from north America, and they seems to be related with Kugelhopf of Germany. Their typical golden brown colour define them, which is made possible by a mold called, appropriately enough, bundt pan. The peculiarity of those molds is that they presents a sort of "chimney", or a central hole, that allows the heat to distribute uniformly all around the surface of the cake. Those molds generally shows exhuberant shapes.

The word "bundt" began to appear related with this kind of cakes in year 1901 in a book called "The Settlement Cookbook" by Lizzie Cander. Then the firm Nordic Ware started to produce the molds that still nowadays are just so fashon. The very thick alluminium molds are based upon those, made of iron or ceramic, used in parts of Europe (overall in Hungary, Germany and Scandinavia) to bake similar cakes.
During the Fifties and the Sixties, these molds gained a lot of popularity, and we can find Nordic Ware molds even in design museums. The molds by Nordic Ware have even a National day in the US! It's the 15th of November...there you have, that day I want everyone baking his own bundt cake!

And now let us go with our recipe for this delicious bundt cake with coconut and cinnamon...call it how you like it best, bund, cake, bizcocho, ciambella, torta...the most important thing is that you try it!

Ingredients: 

• 200 g. of sugar
• 175 grams of butter at room temperature
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 spoonful of cinnamon powder ( 1/2 tsp)
• 350 g. wheat flour
• 1 pinch of salt
• 50 g. of dried coconut
• 250 ml. coconut milk
• 2 y 1/2 spoonful of yeast ( Royal)
• 1 y 1/2baking soda

To obtain the syrup:
-We will use the remaing parts of coconut milk, that is some 150 ml.
- 35 g. approximately of sugar.

Preparation:

1º- Start shaking the sugar with the butter for some minute, until the mix is well integrated and start looking somewhat white.

2º- Add eggs one by one, taking care that the previous egg is well incorporated before adding another one.

3º- In another bowl, add all the dry ingredients, that is the cinnamon, the flour, the salt, the baking soda and the yeast. Sift everything together and add to this ingredients dry coconut.

4º- Now add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, that is the eggs, the sugar and the butter. We will do it thrice, so that we can incorporate a third part of the dry ingredients and a third part of coconut milk, alternating and beating until we finish all the ingredients.
 
5º- Put some butter around the interior surface of our molding pan and add the mix. Bundt cake are typically rather dense, so do not worry, it will not result dry at all! Once we introduce the mix into the molding pan, flat the surface with a spatula and give the pan little hits against the table in order not to create air bubbles.

Before entering the oven

6º- We put our bundt cake in the oven that's been previously preheated at 180°C with no fan. Put the mold in the lower part of our oven, always above a grill and never above a tray, to let the air circulate in the central hole.

7º- Let it bake for about 40 minutes. When this time is over, insert a cooking needle into the cake to be sure that your sweet threat is ready. If we see that it is baking too much, we can add above an alluminium foil so that the cake will not burn.

8º- Whilst the bundt is in the oven, we can prepare our syrup to wet the cake. Put the coconut milk in a pot heating up along with the sugar, and when the latter melts, turn off the fire and put it aside. In this way we can use the rest of the coconut milk. This is an optional step.

8º-Take the mold out of the oven and let it cool above a rack for some 10 minutes.

cooling on a rack

9º- Use your cooking needle, a fork or a knife to open little holes the upper part of our bundt. Then pour delicately the syrup above our cake.

pouring the syrup above the cake

10º- In general terms, bundt cake are to remove from their mould some 10 minutes after they went out of the oven, but in this case, I would advice you to let the cake cooling for a little bit more, or until it is almost completely cold. This is because, being the cake wet, it can be particularly delicate to remove from the mold.

11º- Decorate it with dry coconut and...bite it right now! Yummy!

This bundt can still be super moist even after days. To preserve it better you can enroll it with a plastic wrap or put it into an airtight box, or you can even frost it...but you will see that you'll have no time to put it into the fridge!

Our Bowl felt in love at first sight with the curves of Bundt Cake of Nordic Ware!

Serve it with a jolly good tea and...have a nice time with your C&C bundt cake!

AnGie