Muscovado and Balsamic Pecans: Recipe!

I know, I know, I have a thing for balsamic vinegar. Yes, I'd probably drink it if I couldn't find something better to do with it. And using it to make candied pecans is undoubtedly better. I make these on a regular basis, and it doesn't matter how much I make, they get picked at and picked at until they're gone. You can't just eat a small handful. If you make them, you'll probably not want to plan anything for tea.

These are less heavy on the sugar than the orange, honey and ginger cashews I did last year, and have a richer darker flavour due to the dark muscovado. They're also a lot simpler to make as they don't involve zesting any citrus fruits, which is a tiresome job at best. I really don't like all the faff involved in cooking. I shouldn't be allowed near a food-based blog really.

Ingredients:

1 cup dark muscovado sugar, tightly packed
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground allspice (and anything else you fancy, such as cinnamon, or a drift of ginger to add a little warmth)
1 egg white
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1lb pecan halves

Mix the sugar, salt and spices in a large bowl. I find the muscovado a little lumpy as it comes out of the packet, and two* sticky to sieve, so once the spices and salt are in, I just mix through with my fingers, rubbing until the mixture is fine and loose.

(*Two? TWO? Two years this post has been up and no one's pointed that out! It's like I've been going round with my skirt tucked into my knickers and no one's bothered to tell me...)

Whip up the egg white to a thick froth, add the tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and whip that in until it becomes stiff. Toss the pecans in the mixture until they are all thoroughly coated. Then tip the whole lot into the bowl of sugar and spices. Again, toss them through until all the sugar has become wet through and all the pecans are coated.

Bake in a low oven (I use 120c fan) for one hour, turning them over and around every quarter hour. Turning is important as otherwise the sugar mixture can bake in a 'meringuey' sort of texture. Tossing them through roughens it all up.

Leave to cool until you can bear to touch them, then gently pull the nuts apart with your fingers. (If you leave them too long, they stick together and break when you try to pull them apart.) Store in an airtight container for a while, or eat. Honestly? I've never had any left to test how long they stay crisp for. Perfect for Christmas, New Year, or little Honeykitten's Nearly-Christmas-Birthday parties. Try serving up a mixture of nuts on a bed of spruce clipped from the tree - wonderful spicey, Christmassy scents!

Happy partying!

Nutty Balsamic Meringues, Recipe!

I've been messing about with sugar again. I love to make balsamic candied pecans as it seems to me that balsamic vinegar is really made for sweet things rather than savoury. It has a lovely mellow flavour that has a similar effect to lemon, or salt, in the way it cuts through intense sweetness and leaves things tasting rich instead.

 I know that vinegar can be added to meringue but have never tried it before so it was clearly time to start experimenting. The result is these gorgeous, nutty, almost cinder toffee-like meringues which work perfectly with fruit and cream. I don't buy the most expensive balsamic vinegar there is, but I do use a good quality one. I've tried cheap ones on salads, and they're not much better than ordinary vinegars. The point of this recipe is its balsamickyness rather than vinegaryness, so try to get a good one.

Ingredients
2 egg whites
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 oz caster (superfine) sugar
2 oz soft light brown sugar,
A few pinches of salt (not shown)
A handful of chopped nuts (I used pecans but hazelnuts or walnuts would work well too)

Sift the sugars together with a pinch of salt, and prepare two oven trays with parchment paper. Set your oven to 110c.

Start whipping the egg whites on low until they're frothy and white but not yet stiff. At this point, add the vinegar and start whipping on high until the mixture becomes fairly stiff.

Keep whipping and add the sugar a spoonful at a time. After the last of the sugar is added, keep whipping until the mixture is no longer grainy if rubbed between the fingers, and holds a stiff peak.

I love the pearly look of freshly whipped meringue. So here's an extra gratuitous close up.

Secure the parchment paper to your oven trays using a little smear of meringue under each corner. Either scoop out small domes of meringue using two spoons, or using a large piping bag and nozzle, pipe out kisses of the meringue mixture onto your trays. Sprinkle generously with the chopped nuts, and if you fancy, add a sprinkling of salt too (there are very few recipes that can't be improved with a sprinkling of salt in my opinion).

Bake at 110c for at least a couple of hours if not longer. All that vinegar will tend to make the meringues want to stay marshmallowy. I ended up cooking them for 3 hours, then turning the oven off and leaving them overnight. By the morning they were perfectly crisp right through.


They taste fairly strong, but are perfect with thick cream and raspberries for breakfast. (Ok, maybe not breakfast for normal people, but when you have a large bowl already made up because you've been taking photographs, what are you going to do?)

My Thoughts on Royal Icing (apparently I have a lot)

I've had several queries lately about my recipes for icing and cookies, so I thought I'd create a couple of posts to direct people to.

Chocolate Concrete, Recipe!

Poor photo. I considered making another, in order to get proper pictures, but that's an AWFUL lot of chocolate concrete there, and I'm at home all day, looking at it.

We used to have this regularly at school and it was amazing. Hot and gooey, very sweet. Not like the rich chocolatiness of brownies, more cakey. I never had custard on mine (I don't do custard). Cold it was chewy and sort of hard, hence the name. I used to make it at home too, after the school sold a spiral bound recipe book of school dinners for tenpence. It had very odd quantities, as I guessed they'd simply divided a bulk recipe by the number of eggs.

I remembered it recently and googled. It seems there are a few versions out there. Some people remember it being very hard when cooked, like a shortbread, and some of the recipes have no egg in them and the fat is rubbed in, which would make a shortbread, but I know there was an egg in ours, because the raw mixture tasted fabulous after adding the melted butter, and then not so good with the egg in. A lot of people had it with pink custard, or peppermint custard, which is odd.

Anyway, I had to spend a lot of time inside google before I finally came across this recipe in a forum, unfortunately with a broken link to its source, with odd quantities that rang bells, and it worked.

10 1/2 oz self-raising flour
8 3/4 oz granulated sugar
8 3/4 oz margarine or butter
1 oz cocoa powder
1 egg

Mix the dry ingredients together, melt the butter and mix into the dry ingredients. Add the beaten egg. Press into a tin or dish of the right size (you'll have to guess - make the mixture rounghly 3/4 inch thick) which has been greased. Lightly brush the top with water (I just used my fingers) and sprinkle with a little more granulated sugar. Cook at 180c for 25 minutes.

Let it rest a few minutes before trying to serve as it will fall apart. And be too hot to eat. And you will get a burned tongue if you try to dig a hole in the middle and eat some to see if it's cooked already although you know better than to do such a silly thing. And if you've just done that, learn from it. Don't dig another hole and do it all over again.

Honey, Orange and Ginger Cashews, Recipe!

These are a really quick treat to make with just a few days left before Christmas. Run out quickly and buy some cashews and an orange, and check you've got a spare egg in the fridge. Obviously you'll need ginger and honey too. But if you haven't got that, just use what spices you have, and give the recipe a different name.

The recipe is so simple, it’s (almost) one of everything.

1lb cashews

1 (large) egg white (or 1 ½ small egg whites)

zest of 1 orange

1 tablespoon of orange juice (just drink the rest)

1 heaped tablespoon of honey (I just used what we had, which was semi set. It’s probably easier to use a runnier type)

1 teaspoon of spices (I use ½ tsp ginger, ½ tsp mixed spice)*

1 teaspoon salt

1 pound of soft brown sugar – maybe less if you prefer a more subtle (sensible?) coating, at least 12oz.

* of course I had to cheat to get all my ingredients into units of 1. You could use 1 whole teaspoon of ginger if you like quite a kick though and that would keep everything nice and neat.

(Edited 5th December 2016: I've just made a huge batch of these for a craft fair, and decided to make them as crispy as possible, so I left out the honey, and used golden caster sugar rather than a moister brown sugar. And then I cooked them for about half an hour longer, still turning them, until I could see the cashews underneath the sugar coating starting to become a soft golden colour. They're beautifully crisp this way!)

Stir the dry ingredients thoroughly. Whip up the egg white into a thick froth, then quickly whip in the orange zest, honey and a good tablespoon of the juice – the froth will deflate and become thin and wet. Tip in the nuts and stir them through the egg white mixture so they are all completely coated. Then tip the whole lot into the sugar and spices. Again stir them through until the sugar has gone sticky and wet and all the nuts are thoroughly coated.

Lay the nuts out on a large cookie sheet (or two small ones) lined with parchment paper or silicon sheets (to spread them out I find it easier just to stick my hands in there and get messy). Bake them for an hour in a low oven, around 120c, making sure to stir them through every 15 minutes.  

Leave to cool until you can bear to touch them without burning your fingers off, then gently pull the nuts apart with your fingers. (If you leave them too long, they stick together and break when you try to pull them apart.)

There will be loads. You can package them in little cellophane bags with ribbon and give them to people you've forgotten to buy presents for and they will think you're ever so clever.

Merry Christmas