Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri!

This term at school is the longest of the year (starting on August 9th was particularly painful!).  However, it's also the term with the most public holidays - I think we have 5 or 6 4-days weeks, which always feel like such a treat! 

This weekend marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, and is known as Hari Raya Aidilfitri.  Ramadan has been an interesting month here for us.  Obviously we're not fasting (as if!!) but it has impacted on us in many ways - nicely in that Rob has been working 'Ramadan hours' which means finishing work at 2pm every day, but it's also made life tricky trying to get settled in as all government offices also close at 2, so it's been well nigh impossible to get many admin jobs done. 

Many of the Muslim children at school have been fasting, some in my class - who are only 7 years old.  2 of the girls in my class have only fasted for a couple of days a week, and only on the days when they don't have PE or Swimming, but 2 of my boys have fasted for the entire month, meaning that they don't go outside for breaktimes, or take part in any physical activity at school.  They are not allowed to eat - or even drink - in daylight hours, so have been getting up at 4am for breakfast, then not eating again until the evening call-to-prayer at 6:30pm.  I've been pretty impressed by this... until one of them informed me that if he fasted all month he was getting an iPad!  (How touching to see such religious devotion in one so young!!) 

So Hari Raya Aidilfitri started last night...  but we didn't know that until it happened!  In many Muslim countries the dates of the start and end of Ramadan are chosen each year and fixed, but here in Brunei they still do it the traditional way and wait until the new moon is sighted.  This meant that last night we were all waiting to hear whether we would have to go into work today (Friday) - we heard at 8pm that the moon had been officially sighted, so we knew that we would have Friday and Monday off work.  Had the moon not been seen, the public holidays would have moved to Monday and Tuesday next week.

We had made Hari Raya cards in school and I was very touched when 2 of the girls told me that they had made them for me:

Glitter-tastic! 

I was even more touched when another lovely girl in my class presented me with a Hari Raya gift yesterday - some gorgeous peanut biscuits and a special card:

No, you're not mistaken, there are a few biscuits missing...

I got caught in a traffic jam on the way home from work yesterday.  It was 2pm and I hadn't had any lunch so I got stuck into these!

This weekend is very special here in Brunei because it is the only time of year when the Sultan opens his palace to the public.  You can queue up to visit, and the men get to meet the male members of the royal family, while the women meet the females.  You are presented with a small gift, and also get a meal!  Rob is going tomorrow as part of the Armed Forces, and I may go along on Monday.

It's also a time when many Muslims hold 'Open House' parties.  We have already been invited to 3 this weekend, which is very exciting.  It's considered prestigious to have as many visitors as possible - for one party we have even been given a half-hour time-slot in which we must attend!  I'm really looking forward to experiencing these celebrations.

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri everyone!

Custard Cookies

I love anything with custard.  In fact, I consider custard to be a pudding in itself!  During my first year at university when I was in catered accommodation I remember that there always used to be a large 'cauldron' of custard to accompany the hot pudding (often something utterly bizarre such as pineapple and coconut crumble).  Forget the wacky crumbles, I'd usually just have custard, greedily ladled into a bowl (thank heavens for self-service). 

And yes, I do eat the skin!

So when I saw a magazine article which included a recipe for 'Soft Custard Cookies' I felt that I had to give them a try.  The recipe is from the January 2010 edition of Good Housekeeping, and comes from TV chef Phil Vickery. The custard takes the place of egg in the recipe and the result is a soft, almost cakey cookie with a pronounced flavour of vanilla from both the custard and the white chocolate (I also used vanilla sugar and added 1/2 a tsp of vanilla extract - I love vanilla).

The recipe calls for 100g of Bird's Custard, made-up and cooled.  This obviously means that if you had custard leftover from a meal you could use that, but I made up a batch specially, putting the rest into ramekins to set solid for our pudding last night.  Hot custard is lovely, but cold set custard is gorgeous!

The recipe is as follows:

125g (4oz) unsalted butter, softened
125 (4oz) caster sugar (or vanilla sugar)
100g (3 1/2oz) white chocolate, finely chopped (and do chop it finely otherwise the dough will be hard to slice)
200g self-raising flour (I ended up using 250g)
100g (3 1/2oz) cold Bird's custard, made to packet instructions

Cream the butter and sugar until pale and creamy.

Add the custard, chocolate and flour and mix well.

Form the dough into a sausage shape, 5cm diameter, wrap in clingfilm and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.  (***Note - the dough was way too sticky for me to do this so I added an extra 50g of flour.  It was still very soft, but manageable***)

Preheat oven to 180C/350F.

Unwrap the dough and slice into 1.5cm thick cookies, and place onto a greased or lined baking tray.  Leave room between them as they will spread.  (***I got 20 cookies from this mix and used 2 baking trays***)

Bake for about 15 minutes until the cookies are beginning to turn a light golden brown around the edges.
Leave on the tray for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool fully.

I had never heard of using custard in a biscuit recipe before, and an online search showed that it is somewhat of a speciality of Phil Vickery.  I couldn't find this particular recipe online, but did find a similar one of his: White Chocolate and Cardamom Soft Custard Cookies.  I can imagine that this would be a great flavour combination and one I'm now keen to try.

Yet More Cookies - Summer on a Plate

As we prepare for the dreaded 'packing-up-of-all-we-own' for the great trans-Atlantic move, we have, in a very organised fashion, made a list of the food that we have left in the house and are planning our meals around it. It's all a bit 'Ready, Steady, Cook!' - which allows me to cheekily insert this picture, which always gives me a giggle.

Anyway, this means that I am no longer able to justify buying any more ingredients, not even for baking. However, I do still have some diminishing stocks of flour, butter and sugar, and I was delighted to find the perfect use for them this week, in the form of a simple shortbread cookie... with a twist. On a visit to my friend Sarah's house a few days ago I was admiring her garden when I remembered that I have long been keen to use lavender in my baking, inspired both by Paola and Welshie. I had also found a recipe in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's excellent 'River Cottage Year', which had caught my eye in the past. Having gathered a small handful of lavender flowers, I wanted to try the very simplest of recipes with the lavender, so eschewed the chocolate version in favour of the plain, using a combination of Hugh's and Welshie's recipes. I liked the small quantity produced by Welshie's recipe (being a little unsure about how they would turn out) but I used the plain flour plus cornflour suggested by Hugh. I'd like to pretend that was a purely culinary decision, but as usual at the moment, it was all down to what was in the cupboard...

It pleased me greatly to be able to use my lavender-coloured mixing bowl to stir all the ingredients together. It looked beautiful. Now in full domestic-goddess mode, I fell upon my ever-growing but all-too-rarely-used collection of cookie cutters. What better shape to use than a teapot? The dough was fairly friable, but I managed to cut out the cookies, trying to make some thicker and some thinner, to see which I preferred. I dredged them with caster sugar before baking them in order to get that just-crispy crust on the top.

Despite chilling the dough well, some of the cookies 'bubbled' very slightly - not quite the smooth look I was after - but all were attractively flecked with lavender flowers. The thinner cookies were predictably a little crisper, but the thicker ones were far from problematic. I was very pleasantly surprised with the taste - not a hint of the 'soapiness' I was dreading, but a delicate floral flavour that is the perfect compliment to a cup of afternoon tea. Bliss!

The Cookie Project - Part 5

My friend Tom loves carrot cake. In fact he loves it so much that he once swapped one of his beautiful framed black and white photographs (this one to be precise) for one of my carrot cakes. OK, it's a slightly longer story than that, but I can't help feeling that I got the better end of the deal...

Anyway, when Tom's partner Catherine asked me to help with the catering at his 50th birthday party last weekend, Martha's Carrot Cake Cookies were one of the first things that came to mind. Thankfully Martha has saved me the trouble of typing out the long recipe by publishing it on her website here - and this is one recipe that I didn't feel any need to change in any way whatsoever. The cookies are just perfect, although it may be a sensible precaution to warn you that they are really more like mini cakes than cookies, being soft and squidgy as opposed to having any kind of crunch. However, the addition of the oats does give them a delicious chewiness, and quite possibly stops them falling apart too. They are filled with the traditional carrot cake topping of sweetened, buttery cream cheese, so you end up with little cakey sandwiches, quite filling but one of those things of which everyone somehow manages to eat 'just one more'. As the order of the day was 'finger food' I made them slightly smaller than Martha suggests, thereby getting many more than the 3 dozen that she indicates in the book. I'm not sure exactly how many it was, but they more than filled all 4 of my wire cooling racks.

Despite Rob's initial reaction that they looked rather odd (I won't repeat his exact comparison) - it's the grated carrot, what can you do?! - Tom said they made him 'weak at the knees'. What more can you ask? I think that's a pretty great endorsement.

Happy Birthday Tom!

The Cookie Project - Part 4

And so begins the long and sad process of saying goodbye to our friends here in Canada. The end of the school term was a particularly bittersweet moment for me. I felt the inevitable relief of a teacher - having been dealing with classes of increasingly hot, fractious and unwilling-to-work children, the idea of sending them all home to their parents for 2 months was a very attractive one. However, I have also had a fantastic time teaching here, in particular at St Paul's Catholic Elementary School in nearby Alliston. This is the school where I have done the vast majority of my supply teaching over the last year, teaching in all of the 11 classes and also often teaching French (tres drole!). Over the year I have got to know the children really well, and also the wonderful staff. I'd like to hope that my popularity at St Paul's had something to do with me being a capable teacher, but I suspect it also had something to do with my blatant attempts to gain favour by regularly bringing tins of cookies into the staffroom... If there's one thing that schools across the world have in common it's the appetites of the staff for baked goods!


During my final week I wanted to bring in one last batch of cookies to say thank you to my friends there, so chose a new recipe from Martha's 'Cookies' - Lime Meltaways. This was my first attempt at this kind of dough, one where you roll it into a cylinder, refrigerate (or freeze) and then slice and cook. The process was strangely satisfying, especially when you get to speedily slice the cookies; it's great to be able to get them from fridge to oven within minutes. I felt that it's the kind of thing that you should always keep in the fridge for when the craving for freash cookies strikes.

The finished cookies are a citrussy shortbread and have, as their name suggests, a melting texture. They are delicate and elegant, and not too sweet. I had also made a batch of my favourite chocolate chip cookies (using the recipe on the back of the Chipits chocolate chips packet) and it was interesting to see how the two tins of cookies disappeared... those in desperate need of a quick sugar rush went straight for the chocolate, but the cookie connoisseurs took the time to appreciate the quiet appeal of these lime meltaways. I felt that I had managed to please all-comers, and will definitely be making these shortbreads again. I can visualise serving them as after-dinner petit-fours with coffee. If only I ever had elegant dinner parties...

As an aside, I was asked to come along to the St Paul's staff end-of-term lunch. I was surprised and delighted to be presented with a lovely goodbye gift from the staff, a wonderful book called 'Anita Stewart's Canada'. It is not just a recipe book, but full of tales behind the hugely varied cuisine that this great country calls its own. I have since been reading about Anita Stewart and she too has a blog, all about her latest book tour across Canada.

Here's what the staff had written inside the book for me: "God must have looked down at St Paul's School and thought 'something's missing', so He sent us Kate; someone who could fill any one of our shoes with ease, someone who was talented, and so willing to share, someone funny (cause He knows we love to laugh), and someone who knew just how much we loved home-baked cookies!!"

What a wonderful gift. I'll miss everyone there so much and will think of St Paul's every time I cook from this book.

The Cookie Project - Part 3

Bloody Men

Bloody men are like bloody buses

You wait for about a year

And as soon as one approaches your stop

Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,

Offering you a ride.

You're trying to read the destinations,

You haven't much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.

Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze

While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by

And the minutes, the hours, the days.

Wendy Cope

This poem always makes me smile, and sometimes I feel like re-writing it to fit various other situations... right now it should be 'Bloody Blogs'. I write nothing for what seems like months, and then all of a sudden I feel inspired to write several posts all at once.

Contrary to appearances I have been baking recently, but I have also been working full time. Just as one might assume that supply-work would be winding down for the end of the year, it's actually building to a crescendo - I'm feeling very in demand! I think that teachers are getting tired, busy writing report cards, and generally can't wait to get rid of their classes after 10 long months, so just as the children start to get hot and fractious they call in a supply teacher to spend the day with 30 kids in a non-air-conditioned classroom when the temperatures are in the high 30s. No, I exaggerate... slightly... I have had a few days like that, but generally I am loving my job and beginning to feel quite sad at the prospect of leaving the schools in which I have become a regular supply teacher.

Anyway, back to the baking... poor old Martha has lain rather neglected recently, but a few weeks ago I did try the Cream Cheese Swirl Blondies. I have long been intrigued by Brownie recipes that contain cream cheese - the tartness of the cheese would, I imagine, be a perfect foil to the intense chocolately sweetness of the brownie batter - but as I had all the ingredients for these blondies to hand, these are the ones I decided to make. I am too lazy to type out the recipe, but I found some much more conscientious blogger here who has already done so! Thanks Joe in Minnesota.

We enjoyed these blondies, but the whole 'swirling' business was a little tricky. The cream cheese mixture was really quite liquid, but the blondie dough was much denser, so the finished effect was less 'swirl' than 'splodge'. The difference in the batters also proved tricky as I think I must have plunged my cake-tester into some cream cheese batter when the allotted time was up. As it was still very sticky I decided that they weren't quite cooked... but 5 minutes later the blondie batter was slightly over-cooked. Maybe it was the extra cooking time, or maybe it was the recipe, but I found the finished items to be much more like cake than blondies, which I would have expected to be more moist and dense. Having said that, I'm being pretty critical - they tasted delicious. The cream cheese did indeed form a marriage made in kitchen-heaven with the sweet cake. I will definitely be trying Nigella's Cream Cheese Brownies based on the success of these.

The Cookie Project - Part 2

Ever since I read this blog post by Kelly-Jane, I haven't been able to stop thinking about these cookies. I could almost say that I've been obsessing about them, but then you might think I was very strange.

I adore dulce de leche, and have long pondered making my own. Martha, true to form, gives complex instructions about simmering condensed milk in a double boiler for 5 hours (yeah yeah yeah...) but I knew that it was possible to simply boil unopened cans of condensed milk to get the same effect. Slightly scary though, don't you think? I was thrilled to come upon this method, as described in a new-favourite blog of mine, Crockpot 365. I must try that some time... but it takes 8 hours and I wanted dulce de leche NOW! So I followed a link from Crockpot365 to the Eagle Brand website, which gave several methods for making it. The one that involved a mere 26 minutes in the microwave seemed the obvious choice, so that's what I did. It worked really well, although I fear that I nuked it for a couple of minutes too long, as it became almost toffee-like as it hardened, and I found myself chewing it off the spoon. I ended up adding a splash of milk to thin it down to the correct consistency. It tastes perfect, but just keep a close eye on it near the end of the microwaving time.

I only made 1 can-worth of dulce de leche, so decided to also halve the recipe for the cookies. Somehow 'only' using 1 and a half sticks of butter didn't seem so terrifyingly unhealthy as the 3 sticks in Martha's recipe. I still have birthday cake in the house from last weekend, so I didn't want to subject myself to the pressure of having to eat lots of cake and cookies! However, it still made 2 dozen cookies... oops!

I had assumed that the cookies would be like shortbread, but in fact they were rather more like pastry - quite flaky. Unfortunately some of mine were a little like puff pastry, and rose up dramatically during the cooking, making them tricky to sandwich together. I'm not sure why this happened, but I had a few mini-explosions as I tried to squish them flat. Because they were so pastry-like, I found that they looked rather dull. Boring really. Even though I had played about with my fun Linzer Cookie Press (hence the cool cut-out shapes on the tops), they looked a bit sad. This is clearly why Martha recommends the sanding sugar topping, something else that had hadn't been bothered to do. I must address my increasing culinary laziness. OK, now I'm only balking at the 5-minute job of sprinkling some sugar... the next thing you know I'll be blogging about buying microwave ready-meals.

After much faffing around I filled half of them with the dulce de leche, and the other half with Nutella (never a bad option) and after a quick dusting with icing sugar they looked fairly presentable. The cookies themselves are slightly bland, but enough sickly filling means that's not too much of a problem. If I made these again I think I wouldn't actually use this recipe at all - I'd make a plain shortbread cookie and sandwich them together with the dulce de leche.

Re-reading Kelly-Jane's blog post, I see that hers look like - and are described as - shortbread cookies. I clearly did something wrong. Ah well. We live and learn! I had intended to send these into work with Rob for his office bake-sale, but as I now learn that the bake-sale has been cancelled, I know a staff-room where these will be appreciated, no matter what they look like...

The Cookie Project - Part 1

Last week I acquired a new cook book - 'Martha Stewart's Cookies'. This book should really come with a warning on the cover, as I defy anyone to pick it up and browse through it and not purchase it. A friend of mine aptly described the luscious photographs that accompany every recipe as 'Food Porn' - I couldn't agree more. I found myself inadvertently mmmmmm-ing and ahhhhhhh-ing with pleasure as I read through the book in its entirety, and in the days since I have found my mind drifting back to this book, mentally planning which tantalising treats were going to be attempted first.


The book is divided into chapters according to the style of cookie. I found myself immediately drawn to the 'Soft and Chewy' section, as this is exactly how I like my cookies to be. My choice of cookie yesterday - my inaugural recipe from the book - was the 'Anise Drops'. This might seem strange to some; there are many much more striking cookies in this book, and many that may seem initially more appealing. However, given my recent experiments with Tortas de Aciete, I felt like continuing with the aniseed theme.

These cookies are so quick and simple. I whipped up a batch while the coffee was brewing, and we found ourselves eating 'just one more' several times in the course of drinking said coffee. They are plain cookies, but elegantly, beautifully so; pale circles with a gently crackled top. The texture is slightly chewy but airy, the perfectly legitimate lovechild of a cake and a macaron.



My admiration for Martha Stewart is great, but if I had one criticism of her, it is that she is just too bloody perfect. Reading through her 'Living' magazine, or watching her daily television show, I am often struck with a depressing sense of my own inadequacies. Why does my house not look hers? Why can I never manage to have fresh flowers from the supermarket in the house, never mind freshly cut from my own immaculate garden? Well, perhaps it's because I have a life in which beautifying my house comes somewhat lower on my list of priorities than cooking, eating, drinking wine and watching television. Actually, cleaning my house comes lower than all those too... Never mind, my point was that while Martha instructs you to transfer this cookie batter to 'a pastry bag fitted with a coupler or a 1/2 inch plain tip (such as an Ateco #806)' and 'pipe 1 3/4 inch rounds onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper', I settled for dolloping teaspoons of the mixture onto the baking sheets. I admire Martha, but I can't be her, and I can live with that. (The mixture was liquid enough that the cookies spread into perfect circles as they cooked anyway!).

My other minor adjustment to the recipe would be to use only a scant teaspoon of the aniseed essence, rather than the full one advised. I just found that the flavour was slightly too overpowering, although strangely it had mellowed a little by this morning (when I accidentally ate one of these cookies for breakfast). Perhaps it was just that my aniseed essence was new, I'd just say go carefully with it as it's very strong.

For those of you yet to succumb to the purchase of this book, here is the incredibly simple recipe:

Anise Drops

1 1/2 cups of plain/all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3 large eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp aniseed extract

Preheat the oven to 350F (180C).
Mix together flour, baking powder and salt.
Whisk eggs (using an electric mixer/whisk) until fluffy - about 3 minutes - then gradually whisk in sugar until incorporated - about 3 minutes more.
Mix in aniseed extract.
Reduce whisk speed to low and mix in flour mixture.
Plop mixture onto lined baking sheets and cook for 8-9 minutes, until tops crack. You may need to rotate the baking sheets half way through to ensure that they are all cooked evenly. They will remain very pale.
Transfer cookies to wire racks to cool completely.
These will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for 3 days.

I am not going to make any rash resolutions about cooking every recipe in this book, but you may have got the hint from the title of this post that I fully intend to continue baking from it - and perhaps tempt you to try too?