Food, Cookery and Recipes

[Peter Why]

I'd like to see that recipe!

I've modified the bun recipe slightly to make it clearer what to do if you're proving the dough overnight.

The buns look complicated but if you're used to bread bakery, they're straightforward:
1) Over two days: one evening, prepare the dough (starting with heating the milk); sometime around the same time, wash the dried fruit and set to soak. The next day work in the egg, spices, butter and fruit, prove for a few hours, bake. Prepare the glaze while baking.
2) in one warm day, start in the morning, with perhaps three or four hours proving altogether, and bake in the early evening.

Do tell me what you think of them, if you do have a go. I think I might make a batch for freezing (miss off the glaze before freezing, then revive them in the oven with foil over them to prevent burning, while making glaze).

Peter

[Peter Why]

I used to find "lemon thins" (thin, lemon-flavoured shortbread biscuits) in the supermarket, but haven't seen them for at least a year (though I found a couple of thicker lemon shortbreads ... one was much too buttery and seemed greasy on the tongue, and it had icing/frosting on it! Massive sugar excess!). So I fiddled with some shortbread recipes that I found and came up with this, which seems to give a perfect little biscuit to me. I'm going to work on a gluten-free version (with honey instead of white sugar, too).

125g plain ("all purpose") flour
87 g butter (at room temperature - if using salted butter, you could miss out the later addition of salt, though I found a little extra gives the flavour some body)
37 g granulated sugar (the recipes I found used caster sugar; I like the effect of granulated.)
small pinch of salt
about a quarter teaspoon of vanilla paste (or a few drops of vanilla essence?)
grated zest of two medium lemons, ideally unwaxed (scrub waxed lemons if that's all you have, and dry them)

Rub the butter into the flour (to "breadcrumb" texture). Add the remaining ingredients, stir well, and work with your hands until it comes together into a ball. Roll it into a cylinder about 5cms (a couple of inches) in diameter (rolling's easiest on a stone slab or a silicone mat). Wrap the cylinder in clingfilm (you could probably use baking parchment instead) and put in the fridge for an hour or more, to harden it up.

Turn on the oven at 160C/320F in a fan oven (180C/356F non-fan) [Please see edit at the end of this post]. Spread baking parchment on a large baking tray.

Unwrap the dough and, protecting it from the heat of your hands with a wad of kitchen towel, cut it into approx. 5mm slices (about an eighth of an inch). Place them on the baking tray with about a centimetre/quarter inch between them. (You can smooth any roughness round the edge or over the flat surface of each biscuit with your knife, and can squeeze any broken bits into a ball and press them flat to cut again.) Pierce each biscuit all the way through a few times with a fork (apparently it helps them dry out in the baking).

Bake for five minutes, then check them, perhaps moving them on their shelves. Five minutes more, check again. Then check again every two minutes. (I find an overall time of about 13-15 minutes is about right) They're done when there is only very faint browning at the edges of the outside biscuits. Take out, leave on the tray for 10 minutes to harden up a little (this is essential), then transfer to a wire rack to cool. Store in an airtight container.

EDIT: The oven temperature's probably a bit high, and can lead to slightly under-baked biscuits, even though they are browning. Better at 150C fan/300F, that's 170 without fan/ 340F
Peter