Focaccia forever

I've been a bit down since my not so great attempt at macaroons so I thought I would perk myself up with a real favourite, a delicious yet very simple focaccia. It's basically the same recipe you would use for a basic white loaf with the addition of olive oil. I also find you don't need quite as much yeast as the dough doesn't need to rise as much as a normal loaf.

What I love about focaccia is all the tasty toppings you can add. A few classics would be rosemary and rock salt, cherry or sun dried tomatoes. You just need to prod these softly into the dough just before you bake it.

I'd planned to bake this to accompany a new Italian meatball and macaroni dish on a saturday night. The type of comfort food you tend to crave during the winter months. One of the keys to a great focaccia is not to use a too peppery olive oil in your dough mixture. Just try and use a light and fruity one.

As the photos show, it turned out really well. It will keep for a couple of days in an airtight container and is delicious as a light lunch with some ham, cheese etc. A real winner.

Macaroon madness

Macaroon's have always seemed well beyond my baking capabilities. When ever you see them being cooked on TV by a celebrity chef or one of the Masterchef programmes, the chef in charge always points out how tricky they are to make and that it takes years to perfect the art. What's more, if you ever buy any in cake shops or fancy patisseries, you'll discover how expensive they are.

Anyway, I recently gave them a go and soon realised why they command a high price in shops. These are not for the faint hearted. The key to this recipe is making the Italian meringue part of the recipe which requires you to pour boiling sugar syrup into your whisked egg whites. I'll admit it took me a couple of attempts!

Then once you have mastered this part of the recipe you need to make sure you whip the meringue sufficiently so you can spoon into a piping bag. Again...not straighforward. It's fair to say I struggled with the piping bit, especially as my mixture wasn't firm enough so my kitchen looked like a bomb site after I had finished. I had more mixture pouring out of the top end of the bag than the nozzle end!

But it was worth it in the end. Plus as I will repeat during this blog many times I'm sure, the proof is in the tasting and not necessarily the presentation and they were delicious.

Herman the German

If I'm honest, I'm more of a savoury baker. I'd prefer to make different types of breads as opposed to cakes and the like (donuts not included). However, on a recent trip to see friends up north, I was presented with a small tupperware container of a yeast mixture with some instructions which ended with you baking a cake about 10 days later.

Now, I'm not a hugely patient person but I thought this sounded interesting and well worth the effort, especially as we had tried some of the cake our friend had baked which was superb. Oh yes, the cake was called Herman!

So off we set, back home with our precious cargo, trying carefully not to spill it en route. Over the course of the next week or so, we followed the instructions carefully, stirring it most days, feeding it, talking to it (I made that bit up). Then the big day arrived...bake day. Just before you bake Herman, you add other ingredients including apple, sultanas, cinnamon etc, in fact it's up to you what you add at this stage.

The resulting cake is below and turned out really well. We even passed on the starter mixture to family, who promised to keep the spirit of Herman alive.