Baking Brioche

On Sunday I felt like baking brioche. I had previously used this [Little and Friday - surprise, surprise] recipe when my cousin Kelly and I made homemade doughnuts. But sometime last term, I bought some L & F brioche and now I know how good it is, I thought I would try my hand at it.

I made the brioche (it was taking too long to prove - longer than it took to baste the blue and green quilt - so I put it in the micro for a minute and that sped things up!). I then flattened it into a piece about 45 cm x 25 cm and spread pesto on it, crumbled feta and threw a little bit of grated cheese on before adding chopped sundried tomoatoes and rolling it up. The recipe calls for spinach leaves. I don't see the point in spinach. It doesn't add any flavour and the leafiness just gets in the way.

The recipe easily made twelve rounds as you can see here in the over-sprayed patty tins complete with spills and previously burnt on baking. (I could never be a food blogger - way too messy a baker and nothing is ever uniform.)

And voila, here it is. To improve, I would really try to get the 'slab' of brioche down to 1cm thick as per the recipe. However, mine still tastes good and no one in the English Learning Area complained (-:

I can't imagine chocolate brioche, but it might be quite good too. You could easily make half the recipe savoury and half sweet. I am hoping they freeze well too or I will be eating brioche for lunch and tea until at least Wednesday night.

Yum Yum ... almost

Recently, I experimented with my own version of Little and Friday's Yum Yum Slice. (It's just as well I live nowhere near L & F or I would eat there every day!) I am disappointed the recipe is not in their book, but reckon it uses the base of their world beating caramel slice with a few extras added.

So I made the caramel slice base, put half of it in a small slice tin and spread raspberry jam on that half. Then crushed and added a couple of meringues on top of the raspberry jam. I then carefully added the remaining 'base' mixture on top. When it was cool, I ganached it.

It is a bit dense. I think more creaming of the butter and icing sugar is needed - that's my least favourite part of baking and I never do it for long enough. I would also add more meringues and crush them a bit less so there is more crunch in the middle. I think their version also contains thread coconut. I will definitely try this again. Yum. Yum.

Things I wish I didn't know

Somewhere in my top 10 would be, I wish I didn't know how good the chocolate cake is at Little and Friday.

When my cousin Kelly was in Auckland to go to a horse race in January we finally got to Little and Friday in Newmarket. Kell had the lemon and coconut and I had the chocolate. We called that lunch. I have since invested in their recipe book.

The first recipe I used was the Caramel Slice. Delish. The base is like a brownie - nice and soft. I will definitely be making it again.

Then I made the lemon and coconut cake back at the start of February and it fed my team during our connection project days working with the new Year 9s. It was ok. My cake was quite crumbly and not as coconutty as the bought one. I think the lemon over-powered the coconut. The recipe made two full sized round cakes.

In the weekend I made the chocolate cake. It's the chocolatiest mixture ever - silky smooth with a whole cake of Whittaker's dark ghana chocolate (the only brand I use for baking and ganaching), plus one cup of dutch cocoa.

The recipe made 18 'Texas' sized cakes.

I filled them with marscapone and raspberry jam and ganached them and then fed 18 teachers.

For years I have used Jo Segar's Celebration Chocolate Cake as my go to chocolate cake recipe as it also makes two full-sized cakes and is never fail. The two cakes have quite different textures. This one has more flavour and is a denser cake. I think for special occasions I would take my time to prepare the Little and Friday cakes.