The mood is sombre as we gather at the edge of the field, just metres away from the house in which we are staying this week. Perhaps we are a little nervous. The joking and bonhomie have ceased for a while. Poul, our host, has brought a small group of us to witness the profound act that is about to take place. He has everything in order; everything prepared to make what follows quick, painless and stress-free. He throws a handful of meal down for the gathering animals then deftly presses the electric charges either side of the chosen pig, once through the brain, then through the chest. The animal slumps quietly at the first. The other animals keep eating as the pig is then hoisted out of the field and bled, feet away. If they have noticed, they show no sign.

This Easter, we've indulged in these rich, chocolatey, fudgy brownies incorporating those well-known mini eggs with a crisp candy shell. Use your favourites, but ours were made with the ones in the bright yellow packet which I can never resist at this time of year.  To balance the sweetness of all that milk chocolate, we've used dark chocolate, extra cocoa and a shot or two of espresso to keep the grown ups happy.

​Quick and easy to make and bake! Happy Easter!

Fudgy Easter Brownies
(makes 20-24 small squares)
 
Ingredients: 

For the brownie batter:
300g dark chocolate (50-70% cocoa solids)
200g  unsalted butter
200g  caster sugar
200g  light brown sugar
5 medium eggs + 1 yolk
30 ml espresso (approx. a double shot)
2 tsp  vanilla essence
½ tsp salt
180g plain flour
50g   cocoa powder
160g mini eggs (2 packs), lightly smashed
 
For the topping:
30g    white chocolate, melted
30g    milk or dark chocolate, melted
160g (2 packs) mini eggs, broken in half/large pieces
 
 
Preheat your oven to 180°C. Line and grease a 13 x 9 inch (or similar*) baking tin.

Melt the butter and dark chocolate together over a pan of boiling water or using the microwave in 30 second bursts. Add the sugars and combine, ensuring any lumps are smoothed out. Add the eggs, yolk, vanilla and espresso and mix well.
 
In a separate bowl, sieve together the flour, cocoa and salt, then carefully fold into the wet mixture until just (but fully) combined. Take your broken pieces of mini eggs (you can use a rolling pin to smash a little in the bag, but make sure you don’t crush them into tiny pieces) and fold into the mixture, ensuring an even distribution.
 
Pour finished batter into your lined tin. *If you don’t have a tin of the suggested size, you can use any tin that offers a similar surface baking area – just multiply the length by the width and if the result lies in the range 100 – 120 square inches, it should be fine (eg a 10 x 12 inch tin would have a surface baking area of 120 square inches).
 
Bake for around 25-30 mins. The finished brownie will be fudgy not ‘cakey’ (hence no raising agent in the mix), so you are looking for skewer to come out clean-ish, not squeaky clean. It should retain a little squidginess and will continue to bake a little once out of the oven as you leave to cool in the tin.
 
Once cool, turn out and using a teaspoon or a narrow nozzle on a piping bag, drizzle both the milk and the white chocolate over the brownies, then place the chunky pieces of broken eggs for the topping into the still warm chocolate. Once arranged, a little wobble show you which mini eggs aren’t stuck in the melted chocolate. Either move to a more chocolatey area or pipe a little extra blob of chocolate to stick it down. Cut into 20-24 pieces and allow the topping to cool fully before you move the brownies into a tin, so that the topping can set and fix the mini eggs in place.

Out of season, you could replace the mini eggs with a combination of white chocolate chips and walnuts or pecans. 
 
NB If you want to make a smaller quantity, halve all ingredients and make in a 7 inch square tin.

Method
 
To make the enriched dough, place your flours in a bowl and add the yeast. In a jug, mix together the milk, honey, eggs, melted butter and salt. If using a mixer with a dough hook, place the liquid into your mixing bowl, then add your flour and yeast. If mixing by hand, you can pour the liquid ingredients into your bowl of flour and yeast. Mix together with a plastic scraper, until you have a formed a rough dough.
 
Turn out onto your counter and knead for approximately 15 minutes until you have a smooth and elastic dough. In a mixer, this will take half the time. Form into a ball, then place back in your bowl and cover. Leave at ambient temperature to prove for about 1.5 hours until the dough has roughly doubled in size. If your kitchen is cool, it may take a little longer.
 
Whilst it is proving, make the filling. Take 150g of cream cheese – any type, even mascarpone, whatever you have to hand – and add 100g of finely grated good cheddar – the sharp, flavourful mature kind. Now add about 50g Marmite (or any brand of yeast extract).
 
When ready, turn your dough out onto the counter and degas by slapping with the flat of your hand to remove any gas bubbles. Divide your dough into two equal halves, for the two hearts you will make. With a dusting of flour beneath, roll out each piece dough into a rectangle, approximately 25 x 40 cm. Using a knife or dough divider, cut into two rectangles 25cm x 20cm. Alternatively, if you have the space, you can roll out the entire piece of dough into one rectangle 50cm x 40cm and divide into 4 equal quarters. The resulting pieces of dough, 25cm x 20cm, will be the same.

Take your filling and spread half over each of the rectangles, being careful to leave about 1.5cm border all the way round. Now roll up each rectangle carefully, running a little water along the last edge, to seal the dough. You should end up with 4 long sausages of dough. Take each one, and making sure the dough has stretched evenly all the way to the end (pull the corner gently up if it has not). Pinch the ends together (wet a little inside if they are too floury to stick). Roll the ends in your two hands until you have created a sharp point at each end. Now gently roll each one to ensure the seam is secure, then taking each end gently stretch each roll until it is about 30cm long, taking care to stretch it evenly all along the roll. The gluten you have developed should make this stretch easily achievable.

A little project for you or the kids. Or maybe you and your kids – make your own family of hedgehogs!

Kids can’t go wrong with dough. It’s doughty stuff! They can push it, pull it, tear it, thump it, drop it, throw it and it will thrive! Make this a fun activity at the weekend, or why not make it part of home-schooling when you need a break from relentless screen and book work, and tie it in with the science curriculum?

Did you know yeast is a fungus? It’s also known as sugar fungus (saccharomyces). All you need to make bread is flour, water, yeast and a little salt. Easy, huh? So easy, in fact, we’ve been doing it for thousands of years – on hot stones, in clay or iron pots, on ashes, in the ground under ashes... So, a modern oven and some ready dried yeast should make it a doddle!

To start producing the bubbles of gas to rise your bread, the yeast needs some sugar to feed on. It’s its best thing. And flour is full of it, but it’s all locked up in bigger starch molecules and the yeast can’t get to it. Once we add the water, the starch structures swell, allowing enzymes in the flour to work on the starch and break it into simple sugars. Yeast feasts on the sugar and produces carbon dioxide as a waste product. If bread was a liquid (like beer!) we’d see the bubbles rising to the surface, but in bread, it gets trapped by the stretchy gluten structure which fills like balloons within the dough.

Your job is to knead the bread to create the stretchy gluten ready to trap the gas and then wait until each ‘balloon’ has filled, so your bread is light and fluffy. Mostly, nature is going to do all the hard work for you.
All you need is some bread flour, a little salt, some ready dried yeast and some tap water. You don’t even need scales – you can cheat with a coffee mug and a teaspoon. Have fun!

As the tray of rolls go into the oven, throw half an eggcup of water onto the bottom of the oven to provide some steam. Close the oven door and turn the temperature down to 220C and bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown. The longer the bake the crisper the crust, so feel free to leave them in longer – just watch the tips of your hedgehogs’ spines don’t burn!

Allow to cool on a rack – a clean grill pan will do as long as air can circulate and allow the steam to escape from the roll or you’ll find the bottoms will be a bit soft and soggy.

Once cool, you can bag up (and freeze) any you don’t want straight away.

How will you eat yours? Tear off the spikes and dip into something delicious or cut open and fill with your favourite sandwich filling. How about hedgehog hotdogs? Have fun and happy baking!

Apple cake with streusel topping
 
Delicious any time of year, this recipe was dreamt up in Winter in remembrance of snowy days during a relentless grey and dreary January. Each year, for many years, our little family has visited a favourite restaurant in a cosy wooden cabin, usually buried deep in snow and hidden half from view, on the French/Italian border. We usually steal a march on the lunchtime trade by dropping by late morning for a warming drink and a slice of the best apple cake I have ever tasted. We take our treasure and savour it en plein air, under the bluest of blue skies. In lieu of that for now, and hankering as I am for those bright, sunny, carefree days, I have baked my own version. It's close but I'm not sure anything will be quite up to the memory (it really is the BEST cake!). Perhaps I just need the snow under my feet, the warmth of the sun on my face and my lungs full of the that crisp, clean Alpine air...
 
Ingredients:
(Makes one round cake, 23cm-27cm diameter, or 20cm-23cm square tin )
 
For the caramelised apples:
3 dessert apples, sharp and crisp (eg English Cox), peeled, cored and cut into chunks
20g butter
20g brown sugar
 
For the streusel topping:
50g salted butter, room temperature
75g self-raising flour
50g demerara sugar
75g pecans, roughly chopped
 
For the cake batter:
250g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp fine sea salt
250g golden caster sugar
200g unsalted butter, softened
3 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla bean paste (or extract)
150g Greek yoghurt
Zest ½ lemon

Flour tortillas
 
A quick, easy and versatile flat bread, the tortilla can be used for wraps, dips, quesadillas etc. They can be rustled up for an emergency lunch or supper without planning ahead of time which make them super useful when you feel like you're feeding the five thousand and really can't face another trip to the shops! No need for fancy equipment like a tortilla press - these will be easily rolled with a rolling pin as the wheat flour produces an elastic dough. Tortilla presses are used for traditional corn tortillas which are naturally gluten free and have no such elasticity.
 
Feel free to use all plain flour if you have no wholemeal in the cupboard. 
 
Finally, for best results use lard (or vegetable shortening) but you can use butter if you don't have any to hand.
 
We like to use up old sourdough starter in our bakery recipe, but if you don't keep a starter, replace the starter with 75g of extra water plus 75g of extra white flour. This is an almost instant recipe — ready and baked in little more than half an hour, but you can keep the dough wrapped in the fridge for 2-3 days. It is not strictly unleavened, as we use a little baking powder which supplies a little lift on the griddle, giving a lighter, almost flakier, layered tortilla. 

Ingredients:
(Makes 6 tortillas)
200g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp fine sea salt
15g lard (or vegetable shortening)
160g water
150g liquid starter (unrefreshed, but not too acidic. Ideally, 2-3 days old)*
*or substitute 75g flour + 75g water 

This is fast becoming one of my favourite go-to cake recipes. I love the flavour and tender crumb that comes from the addition of sour cream in a cake batter. We can also use a little less butter as a consequence. You can play around with the quantity of ground almonds you use, so don’t panic if you don’t quite have enough – just substitute the missing almonds with more flour. Ground almonds always produce a deliciously moist cake with great keeping qualities.
 
Here, I wanted to use the very last of my greengages, but any firm fruit would do. Try to avoid very soft and ripe fruit or you will find the base of your cake may become a little soggy. If that should happen, you’ll have a very happy accident: just serve warm with some vanilla ice cream or crème fraiche and it becomes a delicious pudding!

Ingredients
Ground almonds                          100g
Plain flour                                       75g
Baking powder                              1 tsp
Bicarb of soda                              ¼ tsp
Vanilla essence                              1 tsp
Sour cream                                  60ml (= 4 tbsp)
Caster sugar                                 150g
Butter, softened                            125g
3 eggs
Approx 10-12 firm greengages or plums
Icing sugar for dusting
 
You will need one 9” (23cm) spring-form cake tin, greased and lined.
 
Preheat your oven to 180°C/160°C fan/350°F
 
 
Method
 
For ease and convenience, you can make this cake batter in your mixer, using the all-in-one method, but I prefer to make the extra effort to separate my eggs and fold in my egg whites.
 
First sieve together your flour, baking powder and bicarb of soda then add your ground almonds and set aside. Next beat together your sugar and softened butter until light and creamy. Add your vanilla essence and sour cream and beat for a few more seconds.
 
Now separate your eggs. Place the yolks in your creamed butter and combine. With a clean whisk, beat the egg whites until you have stiff peaks (ensure both whisk and bowl are completely fat/oil/yolk free).
 
Finally, you can combine the dry ingredients, the egg whites and butter cream. Do this in thirds, folding first a third of the egg whites into the butter cream mixture, then a third of the almonds/flour. Keep alternating and gently folding, trying to retain much of the light airiness provided by the egg whites as you go, until you have incorporated all the ingredients and have a well-combined, light cake batter.
 
Pour/spoon cake mixture into your lined and greased cake tin. On top, arrange your halved, de-stoned fruit (either way up – the fruit will sink lower), and place in the oven and bake for 50-60mins.