How to make (and eat) Hot Cross Buns

Last week I saw that Dan Lepard (no Def Lepard jokes please, he has heard them all) was due to go on Mumsnet.com to do another webchat with bake-a-long after the success of the previous one. Great, thought I. Then I remembered that I am supposed to be on a diet. 

Never mind. The long periods of time between kneading the dough, leaving to rise, then forming the buns and again leaving to rise gave me ample time to fit a run in around my baking. Perfect way to spend a day.



Following Dan's recipe pretty much exactly, I prepared the dough using raisins and mixed spice. I forgot the mixed peel, I am afraid. Leaving it to rise next to the radiator, I set off for a run. It is beautiful here today, wind still, the lake a mirror of the Jura mountains with their icing sugar peaks.

On returning home, found that the dough had indeed risen as promised. Forming the buns, I  tried to follow the instructions of shaping them into a smooth tight ball. I must admit that I weighed them to get the right size. Not like me, I am normally a bit more slapdash. 

Ok, the buns are formed and covered with a tea towel. Time for a quick shower and then a cup of Earl Grey. Bebejones inspired me.

Buns not risen as much as expected, perhaps because I used half wholemeal flour / half plain flour. Have piped the crosses on to them, slightly wonky but done.

And into the oven with them.

Before glazing them. Not as squishy as shop bought ones. The house smells amazing, I do wish someone would come to the door and be amazed.

The finished buns, with glaze.

Dan's recipe for easy hot cross buns

The plain flour gives the crumb a very tender texture. You can also use strong white or bread flour, but you will need a dash more water to keep the dough soft. Use a little flour, or lightly oil your hands and a spot to knead on if you like, but with this buttery dough I don't use either and find it usually doesn't stick much.

Ingredients

• 175ml warm water
• 1 sachet dry instant yeast
• 550g plain flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 75g sugar, any sort
• 4 tsp mixed spice
• 75ml milk
• 75g butter, cut into smallish pieces
• 150g raisins or 100g currants
• 150g chopped glacé ginger, or mixed peel
• Finely grated zest of an orange or lemon
• 1 large egg
• Sunflower oil or extra flour for kneading

Method

1. Heat the oven to 200°C/fan 180°C/390°F/gas 6.
2. Measure the water into a jug, stir in the yeast and leave it while you get everything else ready.
3. Bring the milk to the boil then remove from the heat and add the butter, stir until it melts, then add the dried fruit, ginger or peel, and beat in the egg.
Tip to keep the buns warm
Pour boiling water into the empty mixing bowl to about a quarter or third full. Sit the tray on the bowl and then cover the tray with a cloth. Top up the bowl with a little extra water after 30 minutes.
4. Put the flour, salt, sugar, and spice in a large mixing bowl and give it a quick toss around to roughly combine it. Crumble any lumps of sugar finely with your fingers, but don't worry about any hard ones that won't break up.
5. Stir the fruit and yeast mixtures together then pour this in with the flour.
6. Stir everything together, or use your hands, and leave for 10 minutes. The dough should be a little sticky and soft.
7. Lift the dough out of the bowl and onto the work-top then give it a good quick knead for 10-15 seconds. No, I don't mean minutes. By giving the dough a quick knead now and leaving it for 45 minutes it will be in perfect shape when we divide and shape the buns.
8. Next, divide the dough into about a dozen equal pieces, just under 100g each. Shape each piece into a smooth tight ball - that's the tricky bit - and place them evenly spaced on a tray lined with non-stick paper. Cover with a tea-towel and leave somewhere warm for about 90 minutes until risen by about half.
9. Mix extra flour with water to a paste and pipe crosses on each. Bake the buns for 25 minutes. Finally, mix a tablespoon each caster sugar and boiling water and brush over the buns while they're still hot.

Gardening in Geneva

 Our house is typical for the area. Generally the tenants live in the house somewhere between three and five years. This means that even if the garden was well laid out originally, after about 25 years and perhaps 7 or 8 different families, it was looking a bit tired. 

This house has been rented by MrT's company since it was built and is in very good condition but the garden was just not looking good. There were some old, woody lavender bushes - one of which finally expired this winter, some mini-irises which look good for about 10 minutes before the flowers die and the spiky leaves are left, and some unidentified bushes. The only really decent plants are the two little trees (please do not ask me to identify them) and a sedum. 

Recently I attended a workshop on Gardening in Geneva and asked the Landscape Gardener who was running the course what she recommended. We are away a bit in the summer so the plants would have to be able to go without water for a few days at a time as I don't want to have to ask the neighbours to come over every day. She suggested a Mediterranean Herb Garden, using flowering herbs and lavender to bring in some colour. At home I made a plan and a list (of course) and we headed off to the garden centre to buy these plants:


 

Sage
Lavender
Rosmary
Thyme
Bay tree
Origano
Camomile
Boretsch
Satureja (Bohnenkraut, no idea what that is in English)
Parsley
Dill
Allium (otherwise known as garlic)
Basil



Next came the work of digging out the old plants, placing the new ones according to The Plan and The List. The kids helped with the mucky bit, PetitMonsieur was surprisingly effective at digging the deep roots out. Mademoiselle was Assistant Herb Gardner, responsible for Thyme, Parsley and Rosemary.

Hopefully once the seeds that were planted grow and the herbs spread a bit more the bed will look a bit less naked. And more like I want it to - this kind of thing Herb Garden

MrT and PetitMonsieur getting their hands dirty

MmeLindt finishing off the job

The finished bed

Will look better once the plants grow a bit. I hope.

Is going on a diet possible without low fat food?

Is the question that has been going through my mind this week. I tried on my summer trousers from last year and found to my horror that they are too tight. Even last summer I was slightly overweight so it is time to lose some of these extra kilos. 

The last time I lost weight was a good few years ago, by going to WeightWatchers and eating lots of low fat food. Recently however, I read the fascinating book In Defense Of Food by Michael Pollan which casts doubt on the whole low fat industry. Pollan writes that we have taken to heart the advice, "Eat more low fat food", and instead of cutting down on the size of our portions we are eating more food. Much more food. Is it healthier? 

Low fat food is highly processed, which is less healthy. Pollan advises us to ignore products on the grocery store shelves that our Great Grandmothers would not recognise as food stuff. Much of the processed food in our cupboards would truly baffle Great Granny. You can imagine her confusion if she were to come face to face with Chicken Nuggets or Pringles, which bear no relation to the humble potato. 


White bread is less healthy than wholemeal bread, we know this for sure. The removal of the husks make the flour fluffier and whiter, but we lose a lot of goodness too. 


What does Pollan suggest? His advice is simple, eat good food, not too much, mainly greens. 


Ok, so if I leave out the low fat food, how do I lose weight? Well, first I thought about what low fat foods I still use. Semi-skimmed milk has been a staple in my fridge for many years. It has become so normal to use semi-skimmed that many would react with horror on seeing normal milk in the fridge. But thinking about it, the difference between semi and full fat milk here in Switzerland is merely 1% - 3.5% instead of 2.5%. Does that make a difference really? I am not drinking 25 litres of the white stuff every day. I have changed to full fat milk and found that I use less of it. 

Butter. No, I am not giving that up either. So I use less. I cannot abide margarine, and have always been convinced that it is much healthier to eat a natural product than a chemical product that is trying to be better than a natural product. Marg is the ultimate processed food, there is just no goodness in there. No space amongst all the additives.


Cheese, well there is a problem. How to live in Switzerland and not eat cheese, or eat low fat cheese. It is possible to buy low fat cheese, but it is not particularly tasty or popular. I have tried some but found them not worth buying. I would rather eat less cheese but really good stuff. 


Cutting out bread is another thing that I find incredibly difficult so I have started baking my own bread, which I find to be much more filling that the fluffy white processed bread that I used to buy. Good quality organic flour, yeast, water, sea salt. Delicious and healthy.


So, my diet consists of homemade bread, slathered with butter and a small piece of cheese, washed down with a cup of tea with full fat milk. Small portions, and I have got the scales out to make sure that I am not fooling myself. For lunch I often eat pasta with lots and lots of fresh vegetables, perhaps a bit of meat - ham, chicken, beef, lamb - whatever I have in the fridge. Or rice or even potatoes. No low carb here, just plain good food but not too much of it.


I have started jogging so that should help. Only managing about 3km at the moment, hope to improve on that in the coming weeks.


It is early days yet, I have only been doing this for the past 5 days so it might be that I am completely off base. We shall see.

.

Running for MacMillan

This weekend will see me Running for MacMillan. A poster on an forum that I use lost her husband to cancer recently and during his last weeks they had great support from MacMillan nurses. 

MacMillan nurses provide practical, emotional, medical and financial support for terminally ill cancer patients. We would like to help them help others and one way of doing this is a sponsored run. 

Around 100 of us are taking part, most of them in UK but some in other countries. I started training about 12 weeks ago, never having run before. 

Happy Mothering Sunday

It is Mothering Sunday today, although we are not really celebrating it. Having spent the last 18 years abroad, all of my Mother's Days have been celebrated on a different day. It is getting very complicated now as UK celebrate on one day, the Swiss and the Germans on another and the French on yet another day. So it happens that I can be wandering around a town centre and am struck by the cards and signs in the shop windows advertising the approaching Mother's Day. At which point I fall into a short-lived panic that I have forgotten before realising that it is the wrong country.

My mum should be receiving a delivery today, I hope she is home when it arrives. Sometimes the whole point of Mothering Sunday is forgotten in the hectic of buying a present and having it sent, remembering to phone if one lives far away or arranging the perfect lunch for our mothers. We celebrate Mothering Sunday to celebrate our mothers, not to show off our ideal gift buying talents or to send the biggest bunch of flowers or the most extravagant box of chocolates.

We simply want to say Thank You to our mothers. Thank you for being there, for giving birth to us, for struggling through the first stressful years when you did not know why on earth baby was crying, and you had tried everything to stop us. For the terrible twos when we lay on the floor and wailed because the new buggy just would not go over the threshold of the door, causing you to threaten to take the buggy "straight back to the shop". For the school years, when you had to help us with out homework and surely had to resist swigging a bottle of wine in the airing cupboard when we just could not understand fractions.

In my case, I have to thank my mother for bearing me through the teenage years - surely the worst? - when I spent the O-level revising break lying in the garden with a Mills and Boons book hiding between the pages of my English worksheets. For the worry when I did eventually leave home, had my hearts broken for the first time and came home to be comforted. For the encouragement to go out again in the world, to have the courage to go to Germany and work as an au pair.  For the joy and happiness you shared with me when I finally fell in love with someone who  loved me back and treated me well. For not throwing things at my head as we planned the wedding, even if you did insist that it was The Done Thing to Have a Bus. For sharing the day of my wedding and making it one of the best of my life. For being there when I had a miscarriage, and telling me that it would be all right. For worrying and praying with and for me when I got pregnant and gave birth to your first grandchild, then two years later your second. For the babysitting that is done not out of a sense of duty, but with love and affection and much messy baking.

When I became a mother, I realised what my poor mother went through all those years and was grateful. If this is the day of the year to show that then I am happy to send her flowers and chocolates. It does not mean that I do not feel the same way the rest  of the year - even when I roll my eyes like the teenager still buried deep inside me who only comes out to be exasperated at my parents.

So, Mum. This post is for you. Thank You.

Avec la bise, lave ta chemise - it is washing day

I don't think that I have blogged about La Bise, the bitingly cold Northwind that whistles down Lake Geneva from the Alps. Probably because if La Bise is blowing, my fingers are too cold to type.

Anticyclones (whatever they are - I am copying from the fascinating Winds of The World section on WeatherOnline.co.uk) over North West or Central Europe push the air through the gap that Lac Leman was formed in, whooshing down to the end of the Lake where some silly fool decided to build Geneva. Gust can reach 7bft, which I have discovered means 60km/h. That is faster than you are allowed to drive in Geneva, I wonder if La Bise will get a ticket.

There is a saying in this area, "avec la bise, lave ta chemise", if you have La Bise, get your washing out.

For the last couple of days going outside means wrapping up in several layers. The strength of the wind makes the lake look very blue and pretty which would be nice if we could stand still long enough to admire it.

I took some photos on Friday when I was on the school run of the Buvette that is open but too cold to frequent. Here's hoping La Bise dies down soon.

Baking Soda Bread Rolls - an experiment

After recently discovering how easy Soda Bread is to make, I decided this morning to attempt to make Soda Bread Rolls.

Not out of any Domestic Goddess tendancies, but MrT had left to go to the Geneva Autosalon and I had forgotten to ask him to get bread before he left with the car. It being cold, and me being too lazy, a walk to the bakers was out of the question. But I was hungry and it is Saturday so I wanted a Decent Breakfast, not just cereal.

Baking bread is time consuming but as I recently discovered, Soda Bread is pretty quick as there is no yeast to be patiently awaited on rising.

My favourite Soda Bread recipe, cobbled together from several sources and adapted to suit what the store cupboard offers is incredibly easy. 450g flour (half/half plain and wholemeal), a tsp of sugar, a tsp of sea salt, a tsp of Baking Soda and as much buttermilk as needed to form a dough, around 270ml I think.

Preheat oven, put ovenproof pot into oven to heat up, bung all the dry ingredients into a food processor, whizz around then add the buttermilk. Speed is now the essence, as the buttermilk reacts with the Baking Soda.

Normally at this point I form a flat round loaf and place it into the floured pot. This time I made dainty little rolls




Place the rolls into the pot and put the lid on. Into the oven they go, for around 35 mins. I have been told by an Irishwoman than when the soda bread sings to you, it is ready.

Scottish made soda bread is obviously as tone deaf as their maker, as there was no singing coming from these little suckers, but they did smell heavenly.



As you can see, they turned out pretty good and they tasted as good as they smelled. All in all the preparations took me about 5 mins, added to that the heating of oven and cooking they are ready to eat in about 45 mins.

That is about the time it takes me to look halfway respectable in the morning.