caramel (hates me) slice

I find that when your sister is in labour late at night and you're going out of your mind with suspense, the best thing to do is make caramel slice.

I have an issue with slices. Although I do make a mean peppermint slice, I always find there's too much base and not enough delicious goop. I hoped that my AWW Bible would take me a bit closer to the perfect caramel slice. I also hoped that it would distract me enough as to not have a stroke on the kitchen floor.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (75g) plain flour
1/2 cup (75g) self-raising flour
1 cup (80g)desiccated coconut
1 cup (220g) firmly packed brown sugar
125g butter, melted
30g butter, extra
395g can sweetened condensed milk
2 tbsp golden syrup
200g dark eating chocolate
2 tsp vegetable oil

Method:
1. Preheat oven to 180C/160C fan-forced. Grease 20cmx30cm lamington pan; line with baking paper, extending paper 2cm over long sides.

2. Combine sifted flours, coconut, sugar, and butter in medium bowl; press mixture evenly over base of pan.

Now my fingers are sticky

At this stage, I am already suspicious about the large amount of biscuit base so I leave some out (to be eaten raw).

Bake about 15 minutes or until browned lightly.

3. Meanwhile, make caramel filling by stirring extra butter, condensed milk and syrup in small saucepan over medium heat for about 10 minutes or until caramel is golden brown; pour over warm base. Bake 10 minutes; cool.

Now here's where caramel hates me (not even including the fact that during the first attempt, I got a baby-update phone call and burnt the condensed milk during my freakout. Then drove to Coles to buy more, getting halfway home and realizing my headlights weren't on. Nervous me should not cook, or drive). This picture is the closest to 'golden brown' that my caramel came and this was taken after 25 minutes of cooking, not 10.

Recently I have had a rather troubled relationship with caramel: Namely, it crystallizing. This is what my caramel started to do at this point, so I gave it a couple more minutes stirring like crazy, and moved on. I am still at a loss to the art of making caramel--AWW says to cook over medium heat, Margaret Fulton says to cook over low heat. Neither stress the importance of stirring SO constantly that you think you're getting RSI, which seems to be absolutely vital to getting a smooth texture. Anyway, my caramel, apart from looking a bit pale and perhaps not tasting quiiite caramely enough, seemed okay.

I'm really not sure why the caramel had to be baked--I'm sure the chocolate would have settled onto it fine after just letting it set, although perhaps baking it stops any chocolate-caramel contamination. Baking it made the edges very dark and burny, which is nice in it's own way, but not for a caramel slice.

4. Stir chocolate and oil in small saucepan over low heat until smooth; pour over caramel. Refrigerate 3 hours or overnight before cutting.

Verdict: Look, it tastes good. I've had very positive feedback, and not just of the polite variety. The caramel is caramely, despite my angsting over the stove that it just tasted like condensed milk. The base is very crunchy, and I think it may not have been so crunchy if I hadn't let it cool so much while making my emergency supermarket run, before coating it with caramel. But my main issue is, even though I left out some biscuit base, the base vs. caramel vs. chocolate ratio is still to even for me. I want my caramel to be the Hero Of The Dish.


So here are my proposed adjustments:
1. Halve quantity of base
2. One and a half/double the quantity of caramel
3. Cook caramel for 25-30 minutes
3. Bake caramel for 5 minutes, not 10

apple and marmalade freeform pie

My sister went into hospital last night to start having a baby (baby is a bit reluctant to leave the womb-y goodness, so they're giving her a friendly shove). Naturally my first thought was, 'I'd better make her a pie.'

My Australian Women's Weekly Bake book advised me that from all the stuff I had in my kitchen at the time, I could make an apple and marmalade freeform pie, which seemed apt as I could use the delicious grapefruit-lemon-orange-marmalade that my sister made me for Christmas.

Creepy thing about this recipe: The pastry calls for cheese. AWW advises me that apple pie made with a cheese pastry is much loved in the USA. Adding cheese makes the pastry more "short." That's all well and good, but I'm making this pie for a pregnant lady and I don't think now is the time for crazy pastry games.

Omitting the cheese, I followed the recipe carefully:

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups (375g) plain flour
185g butter, chopped coarsely
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup (60g) finely grated cheddar cheese
1/4 cup (60ml) iced water, approximately
2 tbsp marmalade (any flavour)
1 egg white

Filling:
6 medium apples (900g), peeled and cored
2 tbsp water
2 tbsp brown sugar

You'll Love Coles apples...mmm, delicious.

Method:
1. Halve apples; cut each half into 6 wedges. Cook apple and water and sugar in medium saucepan, covered, stirring occasionally, 5 minutes or until apple softens. Cool.

I always find the cooking time for apples in these recipes a little short--I must like my apple more smooshy. I went for about 10 minutes.

2. Process flour and butter until crumbly. Add egg yolks, cheese and enough of the water to process until ingredients comes together. Knead on floured surface until smooth. Enclose in plastic wrap; refrigerate 30 minutes.

At this point, the instructions to 'knead until smooth' confused me. It's shortcrust pastry, right? I can't knead it until smooth. And if I did, it wouldn't be short! Anyways, I kneaded it for a while, assuming it had to be a little more elastic than usual in order to fold it over itself later. As you can see, it remained short.

3. Preheat oven to 200C/180C fan-forced.
4. Roll pastry between sheets of baking paper to 40cm round. Remove top sheet of paper, turn pastry onto oven tray, remove remaining paper.

I found I didn't need the top layer of baking paper here, the pastry wasn't sticky or hard to handle.

5. Spread filling over pastry, leaving a 5cm border. Dollop teaspoons of marmalade about 2cm apart over filling .

Went a little overboard on the marmalade.

Fold and pleat pastry up and over to partly enclose fruit; brush pastry with egg white. Bake about 30 minutes.

Verdict: Nice, but inoffensive. The flavours are mild on account of there being no spices and hardly any sugar, as well as the pastry not being sweetened. Adding cheese to the pastry definitely would have given it more punch, but I'm still not convinced it's a sane thing to do. The pastry was lovely--nice and short but not too dense. I ate a slice with yoghurt and I think it would really need something along these lines (ice cream, cream) to accompany it, because being an open pie, it's not super-moist.

Most importantly, the morning after dropping a few slices off to my sister, her waters broke. Just saying.