Flying visit to say this week’s food was based on these two recipes: blueberry cream filled meringues and pink grapefruit jellies.

Some thoughts: meringues. I need more practice. I can get them to soft peak stage no problem, but don’t think I’ve ever actually got to stiff peaks. The problem used to be not reading recipes and tipping the sugar into the egg whites from the start, rather than whipping them and then gradually adding sugar. But even doing that, and beating the life out of them, I can’t get them to firm peaks.

I “lurided up” the meringues with green food colouring rather than the pink in the recipe (to go with raspberries) or blue (to go with blueberries) because I went shopping late in the day and the co-op only had red or green.

We have a blueberry bush in a pot in the garden, and this recipe used up what will likely be the last of the crop this year. Our friends have not had any blueberries off their’s as they got chickens this year, and watching the chickens climb into the pot and flap around to steal blueberries off the bush proved so hilarious they’d rather do that than get enough chicken wire to safeguard the harvest.

This recipe is a fantastically effective way of using the limited amount of blueberries you get off one bush – less than three ounces, probably 10 blueberries per person, whizzed up to a purée was definitely enough to get a good taste of blueberries in meringues for all four-point-five of us eating tonight.

The pink grapefruit jellies – slightly less successful. They didn’t set properly. I made a pint of grapefruit juice into jelly with a one-pint sachet, chilled for two days, but it was nearly liquid when served. Did the gelatine not stir in properly? Does it actually matter that the ground cow-hoof is actually, ahem ahem, a number of years beyond its BBE?

The vanilla cream really made it – even if made with cheapskate flavouring rather than real pods or essence. One 300ml pot of whipping cream, whipped, did the blueberry cream fillings for four pairs of meringues, and splodges of vanilla flavoured cream for the jelly.

The pudding club posts can now all be found on the pudding club tag.

This is what I made last time, and it went down a storm.

You need a pie crust – I tend to make my own shortcrust pastry ((not puff or filo tho)) , but I’m sure a bought one would suffice. Usual amount. Used a cake tin rather than a pie tin for once as I was aiming for a high sided tart. However, I rolled the pastry out, lined the tin with it, added in the baking beans – and while it was in the oven, the high sides collapsed a bit. I ended up trimming almost all of the sides off, leaving not much more than a circular pastry base. Next time I shall have to support the sides better.

The pastry was my usual 8oz flour, 4oz butter, 1oz sugar whizzed together, then one lightly beaten egg added followed by however much water you need to bring it to a dough. I didn’t have time to chill before baking, and the mix was not much harmed for that.

While the shell was blind baking for 20-30 minutes in a 180 deg C oven, I made up the apple part of the tart, by peeling and cubing two huge bramley apples, then simmering on a low heat with a tiny amount water, a good spoon of cinnamon, some sultanas, half a lemonsworth of juice, and about four dessert spoons of sugar. Although you don’t want it too tart to eat, you shouldn’t oversweeten it because the fudge crumble topping is a massive extra dose of sugar.

The crumble topping is roughly a 3:2:1 mix of flour, butter and sugar. 300grams flour, 200grams butter and 100grams sugar will make way, way too much, so scale down to about 200grams flour, 100 grams butter and 70grams sugar.

And when I say “flour”, for a crumble, it gets so much nicer if you add lots of interesting things to it. So end up with 200 grams of flour, oats, chopped nuts and the like before you whiz it with the butter and sugar.

There is no need to clean the food processor inbetween making the pastry and making the crumble topping, assuming that the food processor bowl isn’t actually sopping wet. It’s basically all the same ingredients anyway.

This recipe also called for about 100 grams of fudge cubed small and mixed in with the crumble topping after whizzing.

I had spare apples and spare crumble topping at the end of this, so they went into the fridge and came back out as another apple crumble a few days later.

So, into the now-cooled and baking bean-free pastry case, add the apple filling, and sprinkle the crumble topping on top until it’s good and thick and return to the still hot oven for a further 20-30 minutes until the fudge crumble topping is golden brown.

Serve with cream or custard.

And then debate what to call it. Is it an apple tart with fudge crumble? Apple crumble fudge tart is a worryingly vague about precisely where the fudge is located. Apple (fudge crumble) tart might work in type but is clunky in speech. Hmmm

Today’s Food Programme is talking about jellies, and how they should be revived.

Not sugar free sachet powder jelly (although when I’m being good dietwise, I often use these a free sweet). And not the wobbly superconcentrate blocks of coloured jellies.

More the homemade jellies set with gelatin or vegan seaweed based setting agents.

I’ve had a few goes at interesting things like this – and you can find the recipe for a strawberry / rosé wine jelly here.

I have also made a blancmange from scratch, but it seems that I haven’t ever written that up here.

There’s a picture of the bunny blancmange shortly before it fell apart:

And the recipe for this is over at Nibblous.

Another post that has been very long in the writing.

I’m growing very slowly and gradually in the stuff I eat from hedgerows. I urge everyone to make their own elderflower cordial at around about this time each year. It’s really easy, the ingredients are easy to find, and elderflowers are everywhere in England at least. My recipe is here. This year I also have some elderflower gin which needs to steep in a darkened place for another few weeks yet, and which I will report on in the fullness of time. Loosely based on this recipe.

In years past I have made things with blackberries – I’ve only just finished a blackberry vodka made by steeping blackberries in a jar with vodka for a couple of days, then straining. Bramble jelly has been a favourite too, and a bramble / apple jelly also.

But beyond that, I have not been terribly adventurous when it comes to eating things that can be picked in the park for free.

A few weeks ago, that changed. Inspired by Alys Fowler’s Edible Garden TV series we made dandelion pancakes and nettle soup.

Picking the nettles was… interesting. There’s a huge patch around the corner from me, so I donned some of P’s cleaning gloves (( not that I don’t clean, hem hem, I just don’t mind plunging my unprotected hands into neat bleach )) and went to pick them. Standing in front of the nettles, even with protected hands, it was actually quite hard to summon up the courage to grasp the stems and pick them. Aversion to the sting is obviously very deeply ingrained from childhood.

Standing there in front of them, I was reminded of a story about an Australian friend of mine living and working in London, where he was unexposed to wildlife. When, however, he went on a choir tour the countryside, he returned with a very long face. “No-one told me about nettles!” he said. And I don’t suppose anyone did. English children learn very early on not to touch the nasty jagged-leaved hairy beasties and it would never have occurred to me that they are not common in Oz, home to nastier plants and nastier insects than almost anywhere else on the plant. (( “It is true that of the 10 most poisonous arachnids on the planet, Australia has 9 of them. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that of the 9 most poisonous arachnids, Australia has all of them.” – Douglas Adams ))

Anyway. The vinyl gloves protected me from the stings. For the first four stems. On the fifth, the nettle won, and so I returned home and got the really sturdy gardening gloves before continuing. Before long, I had a half-carrier bag full of nettles and headed home to soup them.

I was basing my recipe loosely on this one from Wartime Housewife.

Because I think I got there a little bit late in the nettle season, I removed the leaves from the stalks and discarded the stems. If I’d gone out earlier in the year when the nettles are still acid green, the stems might have been thinner and less manky. But at this stage in the year, I kept the gloves on in the kitchen and pulled all the nettle leaves off before sluishing them through the colander, and adding them to a pretty standard soup base – stock, onions, garlic, carrot, the usual stuff.

The resulting soup was definitely a distinctive flavour. It was a very dark, evil-green. It was nice – I couldn’t finish a whole bowl, but my companions all did.

For the dessert of that meal, we made Alys Fowler’s dandelion head pancakes. For these, I’d just picked dandelion heads – flowers, obv, not clocks – and doused them in a light batter before shallow frying. They were edible, a novelty, but not particularly nice.

I’m getting far behind when it comes to writing up the things I’ve cooked for various pudding clubs over the past weeks.

The week I made the jellies we learned at short notice that more people would be there than initially planned. I had already cooked ahead and made four individual jellies, but that would be no good for the 6 people who would be there, so I took the jellies, but tried to whip up a quick cake to complement it.

I made this Lemon polenta cake and it was delicious, but very unhealthy. A whole pack of butter!

250g butter , softened
250g caster sugar
3 eggs
100g polenta
250g ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
3 lemons (3 zested, 1 juiced)
4 tbsp limoncello
3 tbsp icing sugar

Heat the oven to 160C/fan 140C/gas 3. Butter and base line a 23cm springform tin. Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy (use an electric hand whisk). Add the eggs one by one and beat between each addition. Fold in the polenta, almonds and baking powder. Mix in the lemon zest and juice.

Bake for about 50 minutes-1 hour until the cake is risen and golden (cover the top of the cake loosely with foil after 30 minutes to stop it browning too much).

Make the syrup by warming the limoncello with the icing sugar until the icing sugar has melted. Serve the cake warm cut in slices with a drizzle of limoncello syrup.

(I didn’t use the limoncello drizzle as I knew amongst the eaters would be teetotallers and drivers – I just made a syrup of 100grams sugar, and the juice of 2 lemons)

In recent weeks, I have been watching Cook Yourself Thin – despite the fact that my own diet is completely and utterly off track now. Lots of Gizzy Erskine’s recipes have looked really nice, including the chocolate cake below. However, some of them have really weird ingredients, and I’m not sure to what extent I want to try trawling Asian supermarkets for mirin and gochuchang. Nor would I want to buy a big tub of chilli paste if it ended up I didn’t like the recipe!

The format of the show is: meet fat person; hear what horrendous fatty calorie rich terrors they like to cook; suggest lighter alternatives. There’s three dishes per episode, and the focus is a bit on technique and interesting alternative ingredients as well as just the recipes.

Many of the recipes could not conceivably be called healthy or low calorie in their own right. But they are better than the alternatives being cooked by the show’s daily guest.

So far they have had two cakes based on boiling a citrus fruit, and blending it, and using that as the mainstay of the texture of the cake. There’s this Moroccan Lemon cake, which I haven’t tried, but will; and this chocolate orange cake, which I have tried and mucked up a fair bit:

Serves 12 (< — no! no it doesn’t!)
Preparation time 15 minutes
Cooking time 1 hour 50 minutes
Cooling time 2 hours
Icing time 10 minutes
Ingredients
1 whole orange
125g fruit sugar
200g 70% dark chocolate, melted
100g ground almonds
3 free range eggs, separated
½ tsp baking powder
For the icing
150g 70 per cent dark chocolate, melted
Zest of 1 orange
3 tbsp honey

1. Put the orange in a microwave-proof bowl. Add 250ml water, cover with cling film and microwave on high for 20 minutes, turning halfway through (or simmer for 1 hour in a small saucepan). Leave to cool, still covered.

2. Heat the oven to 180°C. Line a 20cm round spring-form tin with baking parchment. Cut the orange in half and remove the pips. Put in the food processor with 5 tbsp of the orangey liquid left in the pan and blitz to a smooth purée, scraping down the bowl a couple of times. Add the sugar, melted chocolate, almonds, egg yolks and baking powder, and whizz again to mix thoroughly. Tip into a large bowl.

3. Beat the egg whites until stiff, but not dry, and fold into the chocolate mixture. Spoon into the lined tin. Put the tin on a baking sheet, then in the oven. Bake for 50 minutes, covering with a piece of foil or baking parchment halfway through to stop the top burning. Cool in the tin.

4. To make the icing, mix the melted chocolate and orange zest It will start to seize so mix in the honey and it will go shiny again. Transfer the cake onto a plate or stand then simply ice the top.

I tried to make this in the middle of the night, and consequently was trying to make it quietly. Not so possible when you need to blitz the orange into a pulp and use the whisk to get the eggs to stiff peaks.

If it’s not garnished, it’s not finished.

My two major failings with this were: using the wrong sized tin – the cake mix barely touched the sides – and in the melting stage, allowing the chocolate / almond / orange mix to get too cool. Ideally, don’t microwave the chocolate, melt it au bain marie on the stove top. Then you make sure it’s still good and liquid. When I made it, the chocolate nearly solidified when added to the orange and dry ingredients. I then had to beat quite hard to mix it with the egg whites, nearly losing all the air and ending up with quite a heavy cake.

The final thing is a query about maybe whether the icing is just too heavy. Does the chocolate need lightening with cream rather than honey to get a ganache rather than, well, basically, a chocolate bar?

Previously on Pudding Club: