Easy Buns

Ingredients for 12 buns

• Yeast: 1 sachet dry or 30g fresh
• Sugar: 50g
• Milk: 250ml
• Water: 125g
• Eggs: 2 at room temperature
• Olive Oil: 50g
• Flour: 600g "strong" bread flour
• Salt: 2 teaspoons

Instructions

1. Dissolve the yeast in the water with a tablespoon of the sugar. Place it in the oven with the light on and leave it for about 10 mins, until a thick froth has formed. DO NOT SWITCH THE OVEN ON! Just leave it with the light on and the door closed. 
2. In the meantime, beat the eggs and warm up the milk. The milk should be just a little warm to the touch. Not hot. If it's hot, the yeast will die. I usually blast it for 20s in the microwave straight from the fridge.
3. Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl: the flour, the salt and the remaining sugar.
4. Add the beaten eggs, the olive oil, the milk, and the frothy yeast mixture to the last drop.
5. Use a wooden spoon to combine everything. You just need to combine all ingredients. It doesn't matter if it's lumpy. It should be a thick sticky batter. [see pics 1 and 2]
6. Cover with a towel or cling film and put it back in the oven. This should still be SWITCHED OFF and with the light on. If you have a cooking thermometer, you can play with the oven settings to maintain the temperature at around 30'C.
7. Leave to rise for about 2 hours. It should more than double in volume. You should also see bubbles on the dough. [see pic 3]
8. Take the bowl out of the oven and squash the dough to get rid of most bubbles. You can give it a gentle stir but try to not to knead it. The dough should still be sticky but very stretchy. [see pic 4]
9. Take a baking tray and lay a sheet of baking paper on it. Then brush the paper with olive oil. Do not use a flat cookie tray. It needs to have a little bit of depth. Mine has a depth of 1cm.
10. Now you need a well floured worktop and you can start making the buns. This recipe is for 12 buns so you can kind of guess how much of the dough you should use for each bun. Personally, I don't care if some end up slightly bigger and some others slightly smaller. They all get eaten, regardless. I use a dough ball that is slightly smaller than my fist to make one bun.
11. To shape the buns, roll each ball on the floured worktop, then pick it up and let it relax on the palm of your hand. Use the other hand to pinch up the edges to make something that looks like a little money bag, then turn it around and tuck the edges underneath to make a dome-shaped bun and place it on the baking tray. Do this one or two dough balls at a time. If you divide the whole bowl into 12 balls and let them rest on the worktop, they might stick to the worktop and become more difficult to handle. [see pics 5 and 6]
12. Gently brush each bun with olive oil and loosely cover them with cling film. Do not seal them tight. They need room to rise. Leave them in a warm part of the kitchen for about an hour. They should just about double in volume and almost start merging into each other. [see pics 7 and 8]
13. Bake for about 20 minutes at 180'C. I use a ventilated oven. I also use a water sprayer bottle as soon as I put them in the hot oven. Two or three sprays and quickly close the oven door. It seems to help building a nice crust.
14. Keep an eye on the buns. Yours might take more or less than 20 mins. A nice warm golden-brown color will tell you they are ready. [see pics 9 and 10]
15. Enjoy.

Pictures

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Paste di Mandorla (Almond Biscuits)

Ingredients

• 2 egg whites
• 200g caster sugar
• a few spoonfuls of icing sugar (for coating)
• 400g almond meal
• 1 teaspoon of almond essence
• 1 teaspoon of honey (preferably orange honey)
• 1 tablespoon of lemon juice
• half a teaspoon of baking powder
• half a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla paste
• pinch of salt

Preparation

1. Whisk the egg whites until stiff
2. Add the lemon juice, the honey, the vanilla paste and the almond essence.
3. Whisk vigorously. The mixture will become much softer, but it should still be fluffy.
4. Add the caster sugar, the baking power, the sodium bicarbonate and the salt.
5. Whisk vigorously.
6. Add the almond meal.
7. No more whisking. This time use a spoon to mix everything. The result should be a soft and somewhat loose cookie dough that will hold whatever shape you want to give it.
8. Make small balls of about 4cm and roll them in the icing sugar. Then shape them however you like and put on a baking tray lined with baking paper (no need to grease it up).

Cooking


Bake at 180'C for 15 mins. The aim is to make thick cookies that are somewhat crunchy outside and soft and sligthly chewy on the inside, so bear in mind that any shape less than 2cm thick will cook quickly and get crunchy quickly.

After baking, you can use any leftover icing sugar to dust the lot, or you can just enjoy them 'au naturel'.


Enjoy!
M.

Marco's Pancakes

Makes 6-8 hand-sized pancakes.


Ingredients

• 1 cup of self-raising flour
• 1 cup of semi-skimmed milk
• 1/2 cup of almond meal
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of margarine
• 1 tablespoon of lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
• pinch of salt

Preparation
Put the margarine and the milk in a pan and warm them up slowly. The milk must be just warm, not hot, and the margarine should be all melted. Stir gently if needed.
While the milk is warming up, sift the flour and almond meal in a bowl, then add the sugar, the salt and the baking powder.
Beat the egg and the lemon juice lightly and leave it on the side.
When the milk is warm and the margarine has melted, add the beaten egg to the flour, then the warm milk and start whisking. If the milk is hot, the egg will start cooking immediately and the mixture will get lumpy. Whisk until you get a smooth dense mixture . If it's too liquid, sift more flour into it while whisking.
Leave the pancake mix to rest for a minute or two. 


Cooking
While the pancake mix is resting, you can use this time to start heating up a frying pan on a medium-high heat. If the heat is too high the pancakes will burn easily on the outside without cooking properly, so this might take a little bit of experimenting.
I use olive oil to cook the pancakes, but some people prefer butter or margarine. With olive oil, I use a few drops in the middle of the pan and then shake the pan vigorously so that lots of tiny droplets roughly cover the whole surface.
Gently pour the pancake mix in the middle of the pan and let it cook for just over a minute. You should see lots of little bubbles being produced, covering pretty much the whole pancake. After a minute, check the bottom of the pancake: if it's a bit brown it's time to turn it over and let it cook for another minute or less.


The size of the bubbles depends on how much baking powder you put in the mix, so if few or no bubbles appear you can try adding a quarter of a teaspoon of baking powder to the mix and whisk again throughly.


Enjoy.