Scalded dough pancakes

I used this easy recipe for scalded dough pancakes a few times already, with several different flours, and it always work quite well, so here goes.

Ingredients, in order of appearance:

Eggs 2
Salt half teaspoon
Sugar 1 tablespoon
Milk 250 ml (1 cup)
Flour 250 ml (1 cup)
Baking powder 1 tablespoon
Boiling water 120 ml (half a cup)
3 tablespoons of oil

Beat eggs with a whisk of fork, add sugar and salt, beat, add milk, beat, add flour and baking powder, beat till smooth, add boiling water, beat, add oil, beat.

Let stand for 20 minutes or so.

The dough will be liquid, that’s normal.

Heat a pan (or two or three) well, spray with oil or wipe with kitchen towel with a bit of oil on it. I generally find it’s enough to do it once.

Figure out the amount of dough needed for your pan to have a thin pancake. It takes very little time, literally a few second on each side. Mix the dough a bit every time you go in with the spoon or what have you, I found that some flours tend to sink to the bottom.

That’s all there is to it.

Enjoy!

Orange and cinnamon cake

First time I made this cake without consulting any recipe, but vaguely remembering that I had made something similar in the past. It turned out so well, I thought I'd write down the recipe next time, if I ever manage to reproduce it. I did reproduce it, so here is the recipe:

Ingredients, in order of appearance:

teaspoonful orange zest
juice of one orange (measured, it amounted to about 100 ml)
2 eggs, medium
1/2 teaspoonful salt
3/4 cup* white sugar
teaspoonful cinnamon
60 ml sunflower oil (refined, so it doesn't smell of anything much; can easily be replaced by other refined non-smelly oil)
100 ml milk
1 and 1/2 half cups plain flour (approx)
teaspoonful baking powder

pancakes

There is a lot of recipes for pancakes around, and I experiment periodically, though I still can't recreate the taste and general feel of the thick pancakes ("оладьи") of my childhood. I suspect it is mostly due to the fact that dairy products are different everywhere, and some of the stuff readily available in Russia ("кефир", for example) is not so readily, and sometimes not at all available where I live.

Cinnamon buns

Now that we are away from sunny and hot Fuerteventura, where I wanted to keep all the cooking to the minimum, it's time to start baking again.

Cinnamon buns are on sale here in all forms and shapes — starting from packages of ready-made ones that apparently will keep "fresh" for years (just how do they do that?), through freshly baked and "just stick in the oven" frozen ones, and to the ones that you need to assemble yourself from chilled dough.

But of course it is more interesting to make things from scratch.

Apparently truly Finnish version of those, although very similar in ingredients, is supposed to have a shape of "slapped ears", where you cut the roll of dough diagonally, alternating right and left angle of the cut, but I decided to go with straight cuts and spiral shape.

Here you can see how much butter, sugar and cinnamon filling is used. An awful lot, if you excuse a professional term.

I followed this recipe, with one important omission — I didn't use the cardamom (gasp, shock, horror). I know it is an essential ingredient, but the first time I did add it and our kids didn't like it, so... On the other hand, now, with the winter approaching, their firm preference is for anything with chocolate, so they might be leaving all of the buns for us, in which case I can start adding cardamom again. 

Copy of the recipe, so you don´t have to go to and fro, with slight modifications:

Ingidients:

Dough
  25 g of fresh yeast
  85 g of butter, unsalted
  250 ml of milk
  50 ml of sugar
  Pinch of salt
  700 ml  of flour
  1 egg for glazing

Filling 

  85 g butter, unsalted
  125 ml sugar
  1 Teaspoon cinnamon

Plus

  1 egg for glazing

Process

Melt the butter and add the milk in a saucepan until lukewarm, break in the yeast, dissolve, add the rest of dough ingredients and knead until smooth. Leave to raise for 30 mins. Mix the filling meanwhile.

Knead a bit more and then roll the dough out in a rectangle. I find it easied to roll it quite thick and in a long rectangle. Spread the filling. Roll into a tube on the short side. For the easiness of cutting, I suggest you stretch/rol the tube till you can see that you can easily cut it in 12 to 16 buns. The filling is slippery, so it is easier to cut into squarish cylinders and then slap them down to disks.

Place to buns on a parchment´lined baking sheet and leave to rise for another 30 minutes.

Start the oven to 225°C. You know your oven best, so time it accordingly. 

Glase with egg, sprinkle with sugar. Bake for about 10 mins.

That´s it!

I guess I should watch my weight carefully in the nearest few months. Freshly baked things are so difficult to resist.

Next — wheat and rye bread. Stay tuned :)

Baked stuff pics on Shutterstock

Dulce de leche

Fresh milk is delivered into local supermarkets once a week, and is good for approximately a week also. They tend to keep the previous lot on the shelves up till the "best before" date. Given that, we occasionally end up with some milk that is about to expire and I urgently need to find something to do with it. Last week we ended up with two 1-liter cartons of milk and no immediate use for it, so I decided to make something kind of new for me — Dulce de leche.

It was only new "kind of", because in my childhood a similar product "варёная сгущёнка", cooked condensed milk, was a firm favourite with pretty much everybody I knew. Dulce de Leche is made from scratch with whole milk and sugar, so you end up with similar-tasting product.

I used this recipe, which was the first hit with google. It worked well, but I must note that our ideas of "simmering" are probably different somewhat. Even after three hours the liquid was not yet reduced to one fourth of the original volume, while starting to turn alarmingly dark, lot darker than in all the pictures I saw. So I decided to stop cooking, and it was probably the right moment.

I was somewhat concerned that it will start burning and I will have to stand by the cooker for all three hours stirring non-stop, but it didn't show any inclinations to do so. Neither it tried to escape form the pan, something that boiling milk tend to do. It just bubbled merrily away, and I stirred it occasionally.

What I ended up with is darker and slightly more transparent than "сгущёнка" from my childhood. Taste is nearly the same.

It probably is not meant to be used just like that, but a bit of dulce de leche on a piece of dry biscuit tastes good. The recipe says that it can stand for a month in the fridge. I don't think it will last that long.

More photos of sweet food on Shutterstock

paella

Yesterday's paella. It doesn't include as many ingredients as "real" Valencian paella of course, and the protein component is represented by just one type of seafood, which is probably a big no-no for aficionados. It tasted excellent though. The only note to myself that I can make is remember not to use red onions in my paellas any more - they mask the beautiful color provided by saffron strands.

By a funny coincidence, I read a nice text in Russian about "sad eyes of the prawns" among other things yesterday as well. Here it is — enjoy (if you read Russian, that it)

More photos of seafood on Shutterstock