Yogurt oat cookies with saffron icing

The thing about home-baked cookies, it's hard to stop at one. Especially if you have a cup of tea and are enjoying a good book. I've just finished The Hopkins Conundrum by Simon Edge the other day (which I absolutely loved), and having looked at the big stash of paperbacks on my working table, decided to start The Surplus Girls by Polly Heron. A new book and freshly baked cookies is a lovely combination.
I often bake different variations on the plain oat cookies recipe. Having rummaged around the kitchen, I assembled a small pot of Greek style yogurt, a couple of sachets of oats, a small phial of saffron strands as well as the usual flour, oil, egg etc.

There were several mini-sachets from Skinny Food Co in the latest Degustabox delivery. One 10ml sachet of white chocolate syrup (flavour syrup with sweetener and zero calories) was neither here nor there, but as a flavouring for cookies it works well. As an ingredient in this recipe it is optional, you can add a little bit of grated/chopped white chocolate, or skip altogether.

Yogurt oat cookies with saffron icing (makes 15 cookies)
Ingredients:
100g demerara sugar
50g Greek style yogurt
50ml vegetable oil
1 medium egg
60g oats (2 sachets of porridge oats)
200g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
1/2tsp ground cinnamon
a pinch of saffron
icing sugar, enough to make the icing

Cream together the sugar with yogurt and vegetable oil, beat in the egg, add the oats, sift in the flour, baking powder and cinnamon. Mix until well-combined.
Dust hands in flour, so that the dough doesn't stick. Pinch a big walnut-sized piece of cookie dough and roll into a ball, then flatten and place on a tray lined with parchment paper, foil, or on a silicone baking sheet. Place the tray in the oven preheated to 180C.
Bake for about 15 minutes until slightly golden.
If you keep cookies until browned, they will be crispy. We like cookies with a softer centre.

Take the tray out, and put the cookies on the cooling rack.

In the meantime make some saffron icing.
Take a pinch of saffron strands and add freshly boiled water. Leave to steep for a minimum of five minutes. The longer you leave the saffron in the water, the more intense the colour you will get.

In a small mixing bowl or cup, add saffron water to the icing sugar (make sure that the strands don't get in). Mix until you have a smooth icing. Spread it over the cookies and leave to set.

Eat with tea or coffee, or with a glass of cold milk.

Saffron gives not only the colour, but a special flavour to the cookies. You can use a food colouring of your choice, if you don't have saffron. Ground turmeric mixed into the icing could also add a golden colour, but it has an acquired taste, and my guys are not big fans.

Plaice in tomato saffron sauce

Last Friday I went to Waitrose with a recipe in my mind, from an old cutting from Taste Italia.
It used to be one of my favourite food magazines, and I was very sad when they stopped publishing it, and combined it with the travelling magazine. I don't care much for expensive villa holidays or luxury spa days.

It was a recipe for skate wings in tomato sauce with saffron. Skate wings were there all right, but after much deliberating over the cost, I changed my mind and went to the frozen fish section to look for a less expensive alternative. I couldn't find any frozen skate, but found a pack of 4 plaice fillets for £3.99, which I thought was pretty reasonable. I have adapted the recipe to suit my purchase.

Plaice in tomato sauce
Ingredients:
5tbsp olive oil
2 cloves of garlic
1 tin of cherry tomatoes (Cirio Pomodorini)
10g fresh basil leaves, chopped
a pinch of saffron
a handful of sultanas
1tsp cider vinegar
sea salt, a pinch of sugar
4 plaice fillets (454g pack)

Heat the oil in a big frying pan, add the chopped garlic and cook for about 3-4 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the contents of the tin of cherry tomatoes and fresh basil, which has been chopped. Add a pinch of saffron, sultanas, vinegar and season well with sea salt and a pinch of sugar. Bring to boil, then lower the heat and cook on low, simmering for about 20 minutes. If the sauce gets too thick, add a bit of water.
Place the defrosted plaice fillets in a slightly oiled ceramic baking dish, pour the tomato sauce over it.
Place the dish in the oven preheated to 180C for 20-25 minutes.
Serve hot, with a nice chunk of bread to mop up the sauce.

In this recipe I used Cirio Pomodorini (cherry tomatoes). I have slightly squashed them with a wooden spoon, while cooking the sauce. You might easily swap them for tomato passata or tinned chopped tomatoes.
Cirio pomodorini are sweet and intense in flavour, they were canned in tomato sauce to preserve their beautiful taste.

The addition of saffron and sultanas made this tomato sauce extra special. Saffron is an expensive spice, but you can find it for less, if you buy supermarket own variety, I found a jar of saffron for £2 in Sainsbury's.

Disclosure: I received a selection of Cirio products for the purposes of testing in recipes. All opinions are my own.

Spanish saffron cake

Saffron is such a glorious spice, it adds a beautiful colour and a distinct flavour to dishes. It is expensive, but you only need a pinch. I've been rummaging through my old magazine clippings, and came across a Spanish saffron tea bread recipe from BBC Good Food (March 2000).
I decided to bake it as a cake rather than bread-shaped, and also omitted the mixed peel, as my older son doesn't like "bits" in cakes. He would pick them all out and throw, and as I planned to put a slice of cake in his lunch box, I made it plain.

Put a pinch of saffron threads in a bowl of hot milk (150ml), cover it with the lid, and let it infuse the milk. Leave it for an hour to acquire a deep yellow colour.
In a big mixing bowl beat 2 eggs with 140g caster sugar and zest from 1 orange. Add 6tbsp of orange juice (the magazine suggests juice from 2 oranges, but maybe they used small-sized ones, as I used one orange, and there were about 7tbsp of juice). Add the ground almonds (100g), 350g self-raising flour and mix well. Add the melted butter (175g). The magazine suggests rubbing the cold butter with flour, but I just melted it to speed up the process.
At the last stage add the milk with saffron. mix well. Pour the cake batter in a round cake tin or loaf tin if you prefer and place it in the oven preheated to 180C. Bake for about 45+ minutes. Check the readiness with a wooden skewer.
Take the tin out, and let the cake cool before glazing with a mix of icing sugar and orange juice, or pour some honey over.

This is a lovely cake, crumbly and fluffy.
Apparently it improves with keeping. If you can keep it for 2 days before slicing, the depth of flavour is more pronounced. Not that we would know, as I don't think we'll have much left for tomorrow.

Janice from Farmersgirl Kitchen has launched a new linky called #RecipeClippings, which invites you to go through your recipe collection (either organised in files, or piled all over the house like in my case) and choose a recipe to recreate. So, I'm sending this recipe to Janice's exciting challenge.

Also adding this post to #Bakeoftheweek linky run by Helen at Casa Costello.

Crocuses and bunny buns

Saffron costs a small fortune, and though I have seen seeds & plants catalogues extolling the virtues of growing your own edible crocus, I have also read how tricky it could be with the-foliage-aplenty-and-hardly-any-flowers palaver. But what about the plain garden crocus that grows in abundance almost like a weed in my garden? Granted it probably won't be a superior saffron like the proper one, but if I don't try, I won't know for sure. Especially that I love freebies, and foraging in the garden is a pleasurable quest.

Saffron comes from the saffron crocus or Crocus sativus. What we buy as the spice is actually the red stigmas of the crocus flower.

What I have in the garden is Crocus Tommasinianus. The pretty flowers vary from shimmery pale lilac to darker blue-purple. This crocus is definitely a self-seed variety, as I have never planted any of them, and we moved to the current home over 5 years ago. Many thanks to the previous lady of the house who loved gardening as we have lots of lovely spring flowers like snowdrops, daffodils and crocuses running amok in the garden.

My experiment was to collect some stigmas of the plain crocuses (or croci) and cook with them.

First thing I noticed is the aroma, it is much more subtle than the proper saffron.

I let it dry in an open container for a few days and then stored in the little glass jar.

I have added a tablespoon of vodka to the crocus stigmas and let it infuse for 10 minutes. The colour was sufficiently yellow as you can see (it also stained the plastic bowl. Note to self: the next time to use the ceramic dish).

I meant to put all the ingredients in the breadmaker and let it do the kneading job properly, but after I started the machine, I realised the paddle was missing. Frantic search brought zero results, so I have chucked all the mix on the table and started kneading myself.

To make a bunch of bunny buns, I used
1/2 tsp of yeast
250g strong white flour
1 tsp of sugar
1 egg
20g butter
50g water
50g milk
a pinch of salt
saffron infusion

About a week ago I've seen lots of pins and re-pins of the buns shaped as bunnies with the instructions on how to use the scissors to cut their ears. Of course, today when I wanted to look at the recipe, I couldn't find any (I should have repinned it myself). Google wasn't helpful, as I found zillions of images from all over, and none the wiser who the original cook was.

So, here is my version of what I've seen on Pinterest (I would have given full credits to whoever invented these bunnies, but I don't know who it is).

The idea is that you cut the ears with the scissors before baking the bunnies.

And here they are, looking more like alien cats than Easter bunnies. Cute nevertheless and tasty too.

Was it worth the effort, foraging in the garden? yes and no. The colour was certainly there, but the flavour was more diffused and less prominent, perhaps I should have tried to add more crocus stigmas. On the bonus side, it was free and I learnt something new.

Kulich (Russian Easter cake)

Kulich (pronounced KooLICH) is a Russian yeast cake that is traditionally served at Easter. There are actually two types of Russian Easter cakes, one made with the cottage cheese (pyramid-shaped) and a yeast cake, resembling a mix between a rum baba and a panettone (you can see both delicacies in Kustodiev's painting).

Just before Easter I have been searching online and in my books for a recipe for an easy Easter cake.
The recipe I finally used is a combination of several. However, it is heavily influenced by a recipe from"Cakes from around the world" by Julie Duff.

Kulich, Russian Easter cake

This cake is usually baked as a big tall tower or in small sized tins, like rum babas.

For this project I did a bit of a DIY. I wasn't able to find any suitable Kulich tins to buy in the UK, and decided that the ordinary soup/baked beans tins will do nicely (you can buy some very cheap tins of tomatoes and/or red kidney beans from the value range. I got mine from Sainsbury's)
 You have to cut the tins carefully with a tin/can opener on both sides, so you have a see-through tunnel-shaped tins. Check that your tins are not plastic-coated, as then they won't be safe.

You will need:
500g plain flour (+ more)
1/2 tsp of cardamom
7g dry yeast
300ml milk
saffron
3 tbps of vodka
3 tbsp of sherry (or any sweet wine to soak the sultanas)
100g caster sugar
1/2 tsp nutmeg
100g of mixed sultanas & raisins & dried blueberries
50g mixed peel
50g chopped blanched almonds
50 g unsalted butter
2 medium eggs

Icing:
3 heaped tbsp of icing sugar
lemon & orange juice (squeeze about 2 tsps for a runny consistency)

Add all the dried fruit and peel in a small bowl, pour 2 tbsp of sherry, leave for about an hour.
Pour the vodka into a small bowl and put the saffron into it. Leave to soak until the vodka is bright yellow. remove the saffron from vodka.

Sift the flour and spices in a big mixing bowl, add the sugar and yeast.  Stir in the soaked fruit and mixed peel, add the chopped almonds, and saffron infused vodka.
Warm the milk in a milk pan (do not boil) with the butter until it is dissolved, then let it cool to tepid, then beat in two medium eggs.
Pour your milk/egg mixture into the flour, mix well to make a soft dough. Now take it out onto the flour-dusted board and knead for about 8-10 minutes until smooth. You might need to add more flour as you keep kneading. The dough has to be quite elastic. Put it back in the deep bowl and cover with a clean towel. Leave it in the warm place for the dough to double in size (takes about an hour).
Now if you are using my DIY tins, cut the parchment paper and place the rolls of paper, so that they are slightly higher than the tins. I prepared six tins. Divide the dough into six pieces and shape them like a small tower, carefully place inside the parchment tubes in the tins (I have placed all the tins on the tray, which has been covered with the foil and oiled a bit).
Bake for about 40-45 minutes at 180C.
Once done (do the wooden skewer test, it has to come out clean) remove the tray from the oven and let the tins cool before sliding the cakes out of the tins.
You can make these cakes a day before serving and decorate on the day you eat them.
For the icing mix the icing sugar with the lemon and orange juice to get a medium runny consistency. Top up each Kulich with the icing. Once it is set, you can decorate them.

I have written the Russian letters Х В: Христос Воскресе (Christ has risen ).
Many Russians who observe the Easter traditions would take their cakes and decorated eggs to the church for the blessing.

I am submitting my Kulich to the lovely Tea Time Treats challenge hosted by Lavender and Lovage and What Kate Baked.