Things I cooked over Christmas

I made some cocktails for gifts before we broke up.

Chocolate orange martini: chocolate liqueur and triple sec with vodka in a 1:1:2 ratio.

Nigella’s Christmas martini: chambord and creme de cacao blanc and vodka, again 1:1:2

Some of my friends also got tasters of my vintage elderflower gin – this was originally a mistake because I steeped elderflowers from my garden for far too long and the gin took on a very bitter taste. But later I added a lot of sugar, and over the 8 years or so it’s been on the shelf, it almost took on a Parma violet note. This is pretty much all gone now.

Also crab apple vodka. The old way of making this was to clean and halve crab apples then leave them in a jar with vodka for a couple of weeks until the sugar is dissolved and the vodka has gone a pinker a colour. Now I’m experimenting with making a sugar syrup by boiling the crab apples with water and sugar and simply adding that to the vodka. The best version I think comes from a mix: some crab apples in a jar with vodka and no sugar, some in a syrup, mix all together into final bottle.

Before we broke up I made some speculoos fudge out of Lotus spread – but couldn’t find last year’s recipe. This recipe is the one I don’t recommend. Jane’s patisserie version is much better and I think it’s the one I used last year.

It’s great to start the festive season with a big batch of fudge… you have something in the fridge that can be turned into gifts to take with you or buffet contributions or feeding unexpected gifts. It keeps a couple of weeks, provided you don’t eat it.

The first Saturday of the holidays found me in front of Saturday Kitchen where I saw a recipe for mulled wine chocolate truffles, similar to this one from Waitrose. If you are mulling wine anyway, just reserve a glass, otherwise the recipe gets you to make mulled wine especially. Looks like this technique could be easily adapted to getting other flavours into other chocolates… how about espresso into milk chocolate or mulled cider into white chocolate or … Just as with the fudge you can make the ganache and leave that in the fridge to turn into truffles whenever you need them. And rolling ganache into truffles is a good activity to get children and non-cooking boyfriends involved in too.

I had my friends and godkids over before Christmas for fondue, ham sandwiches, my own banana cake, and this “next level poke cake” – purely because I love the coffee flavour and don’t make enough coffee cakes. I borrowed the key to church and we roamed all around it, including climbing the tower and looking at the bells, and we all ended up at the carol service, which was delightful.

For Christmas day (I deliberately spent it on my own and had a lovely time) I roasted a chicken, with loads of roast potatoes, carrots. I repurposed leftover fondue as cauliflower cheese and made this strange Jamie Oliver red cabbage recipe with tinned pears and chorizo. It was nice enough but the ingredients did not really blend together at all. It fed me on Christmas day, did two of us on Boxing Day and there was plenty of chicken left to make a huge risotto much later in the break (after a long facebook thread about whether it was safe to eat roast chicken a week after cooking. No ill effects, but be careful out there!)

To Scotland I took the remainder of the fudge and truffles and made again a version of this very forgiving peanut and Crunchie bar rocky road recipe, which went down well.

Yesterday, for pudding club, I made a fridge cake from a fridge cake recipe book, amended slightly but a super simple idea: melt 400 grams milk chocolate, add 300ml of double cream, tinned pears, chopped, and a pack of shortbread biscuits, also chopped. Fridge for a couple of hours in a cling-film lined 1lb loaf tin. Then whip together cream cheese, another pot of double cream and a little sugar (vanilla sugar adds awesomeness) turn out the chocolate loaf onto a cake plate and slather the cream on the outside. Grate chocolate over the top, because if it’s not garnished, it’s not finished.

Three pudding club eats

Aug19

Three recipes cooked for pudding club so far in 2018, none of them blogged! #thehorror

At the start of the year, I was very taken with the new Mary Berry TV series and there were a few things I wanted to cook. Her truffle chocolate pots looked super – a chocolate mousse with some of the mousse reserved and magicked into truffles to put on top. The recipe and her photos are here.

The mousse component was fine. I mean, sure, it’s a faffy way of getting a food processor dirty to make a mousse – previously I have whisked the egg whites and folded into melted chocolate + yolks instead, but that’s not entirely safe if you might be feeding the immunosuppressed.

But the recipe for the truffles on top just didn’t work.

For starters the centres were incredibly sticky and refused to be rolled without extreme fridging and adding in extra icing sugar and cocoa.

And then just dipping them in molten white chocolate to get a shell…

Really, you need to temper chocolate to make it do that. And that’s nowhere in the recipe.

The final pot was delicious, but I totally failed to make it pretty. (Story of my cooking!)

For my next triumph, I made a chocolate cake in a frying pan!

No, I can’t remember why, either, but it was quite nice. The recipe had an interesting frosting and some interesting questions about American recipes. What is “Dutch” cocoa for example? We thought it was probably something to do with the difference between what we in the UK would call cocoa and drinking chocolate. I just used Bourneville. To make matters worse, the frosting calls for quality milk chocolate and I just used Dairy Milk. You could taste that it was Dairy Milk in the finished article and although we all knew that was bad, it turned out to be quite a nostalgic flavour for us all.

I also forgot to take any pictures, apparently…?

For our most recent outing to Pudding Club, my hosts provided this awesome Baked Alaska as the pudding, so I made the main course for a change.

I had previously halved the ingredients and just done the chicken component of Nigella’s Chicken Shawarma as a midweek supper; but this time, I bought everything needed for the sides as well, including things that didn’t sound like I would especially like them… pomegranate seed bejewelled tahini flavoured yoghurt? But it turned out lovely, actually.

The chicken by itself had garnered a “you can make that again”, and it is fantastic, really delicious. The marinade is not hard, but it does have quite a lot of ingredients, and ideally you need to do it the day before. Getting the seeds out of the pomegranate is fun. Whack! whack! Now, what to do with the rest of the jar of tahini?! (Quick google, and these catch my eye: cookies, salmon, lamb, peanut hummus!)

This paprika smells wonderful and I am looking for excuses to cook more with it:

There’s lots of ingredients for the marinade but nothing is actually difficult. I left the coriander out because I don’t like it (tastes soapy to me) and so don’t have any.

Overnight in fridge

Hot oven for 30 minutes, then serve on a bed of lettuce and drizzle over the oily juices. Unless you are, as Nigella says, for some inexplicable reason, anti-oily-juices.

Serve with salad and a pomegranate/yoghurt/tahini dip.

Banana loaf recipe – with pictures

Oct15

The way I make my banana loaf has evolved a little since I first wrote about it, so I thought I would update my recipe. With pictures!

I don’t have scales at the moment, so everything is judged by eye. Break two eggs into the big blender cup.

Add roughly the same volume of vegetable oil

And roughly the same volume of sugar. I’m using dark brown sugar because it makes the resulting taste caramelly and toffeeey and delicious.

Add two bananas and a heaped teaspoon of ground mixed spice. You can also add any other fruit and veg you want at this point. I’ve put a carrot in this time – topped and tailed, cut into smaller pieces, but no need to peel. I often put an apple in too.

You can make other sorts of cake with the same base – I’ve made a pear and chocolate cake this way – add a heaped tablespoon of cocoa instead of the spice. You can also add cocoa nibs and desiccated coconut at the later stage.

I am usually doing this to use up extremely ripe bananas that have gone past how I like to eat them as fruit, but today I bought extra bananas specially.

Blitz

Pour into a bowl and add a few handfuls of the sorts of things you like to find in a fruitcake. I’ve used raisins and glacé cherries today. I usually add chopped walnuts but I’ve run out. I’d always prefer sultanas to raisins but they aren’t always available.

Add enough self raising flour on top to completely cover the mix and stir in with a wooden spoon. You’re aiming for dropping consistency, if you know what that means.

Pour into a lined 2lb loaf tin. Loaf tin liners used to come from Lakeland, but now they are showing up in larger supermarkets too. If you don’t think you’re going to make 40 cakes any time soon, you can also just line it the old fashioned way with plain parchment paper.

Bake in a 170 deg fan oven for around an hour.

Check after 45 minutes to see if it is burning. Stick a knife in it to see if the inside is cooked. If the knife comes out clean, it is cooked. If cake batter sticks to the knife, it is still raw inside. If the cake looks finished on top, or is starting to catch or burn, cover the cake with tin foil so that the top doesn’t brown further, but so that the inside can catch up.

If you have go out at this point, it can sometimes work to turn the oven off now and let the rest cook in the residual heat.

If not, check the cake again every 10-15 minutes by repeating the knife test.

This is an extremely forgiving recipe. You can even make it without the eggs if you want to try for vegan – I tried a dollop of golden syrup instead that time, and it was ok…

Afternoon tea

Sep3

Getting the tea set out is something that’s on the list of things I should do more often, so I invited my lovely friends to come over for the bank holiday weekend.

Normal people in this sitch would take photos of the people, I think, but I took photos of the food.

We ate:

Salads you can make with the grating disk in the food processor

carottes râpées (I grate carrots, mix with something crunchy, pine nuts or pumpkin seeds, sultanas, and then make a dressing out of the juice of half a lemon, olive oil and seasoning)
coleslaw (quarter of a cabbage, a carrot and an apple grated, with mayo from a jar, and a spoonful of wholegrain mustard)

Sandwiches

Two loaves from Aldi with a variety of fillings. 3 rounds of sandwiches quartered to make 12 sarnies for 8 guests. V non-u, but I left the crusts on!

caramelised onion hummus and grated carrot (reserved some carrot from the salad above) (whole pot of hummus)
egg mayonnaise and chives (5 hardboiled eggs) (I feared these would be unpopular but they went just fine. Bought a pot of chives and will plant into garden to see if they live!)
goat’s cheese and onion jam (the caramelised red onion jam is one of those jars at the back of the cupboard that was probably left there by ex as I have no recollection of it and it is ahem approaching its sell by, but these sarnies were delicious, and will definitely make again and/or put in packed lunches. Leave the cheese out for an hour before attempting to spread and I also loosened it a little by beating the cheese with a couple of spoons of mayo)

Cakes

So my aim is something showstoppery for the cake stand, and a variety of nice things for the two tiered plates. Completely lacking in the time and inspiration for a show stopper (OMG did you even see bake off this week!?) I threw together another of my regular blender cakes and set it atop the cake stand. Oh well.

A few days before I had seen (and eaten!) some beautiful coconut macaroons, topped with cherries with even, chocolate decorations drizzled across – I thought those would be lovely to make and would look great topping a tier, so asked for the recipe and did my best from the resulting photo. Only… I don’t have a mixer, or working scales at the moment… So I forked out 20 quid in Aldi for something that’s a bit like a mixer (aargh, it says don’t put in dishwasher!!) to breach the gap and estimated the quantities by googling cup equivalents for the sugar and estimating from the packages – eg 200 grams of desecrated coconut is half the bag…

I think I didn’t beat the eggs enough. I’ve never really got along with meringues, and will have to practise a lot more to see if it’s possible to make in my new mixer or whether it’s just me… But instead of lovely pillowy domes, I got flat discs.

In the end, I decided to drizzle the chocolate on anyway and brazen it out. As it was, they were delicious.

I also wanted to make Portuguese custard tarts, having just returned from (Portuguese) Madeira where they were everywhere!

I went with this Not Quite Nigella recipe to start with except when reading it through I realised half the instructions were just “make custard” and that’s something I’ve been practising a lot lately as a way of using up egg gluts. The instruction for rolling the pastry seemed properly weird, and I was worried

Both the macaroons and the custard tarts were made the night before – and that ended up with the tarts being slightly too soft by the time they were served. Some of them poked out of their cases a bit much, but lots of them looked good and tasted good too.

I got some lovely gifts from my gracious guests – two fab boxes of chocs which did not last long, and two separate people turned up with sunflowers, which I turned into a huge bouquet which looks absolutely super! Both guests were concerned about showing up at a man’s house with flowers. People rarely bring me flowers, but I love it and was delighted to receive them. They’d both separately thought that sunflowers were sufficiently manly to hand them over.

Here are a couple of other posts about times I’ve used the tea set – as a farewell party for councillors and last year with a vegan twist.

And here’s more photos on flickr.

Vegan afternoon tea

Oct16

Friends of mine were looking for an excuse to meet, and were thinking about visiting one of my awesome neighbourhood cafés The Crimson Tree. But I have tea set, I have cooking skillz *uh* vegan afternoon tea.

Of my friends, I had a veggie, a vegan-who-eats-tuna, and someone who is with child, which presented slight fun on the catering front, and I though I would try where poss to make everything as vegan as possible, then everyone could eat it.

With a bit of warning, I was able to cook some things in advance. The vegan shortbread had gone into school for a taster earlier in the week, and I managed to make a vegan cake early on Saturday morning.

To add to the complication my weekend was quite busy: I spent almost all of Saturday behind all three of the cider bars at the Robin Hood Beer Festival. By the end of the day I had excellent product knowledge of the full range of ciders and perries on offer and Sunday morning, I was not quite ready to leap out of bed at 8AM to start hoovering.

I got out all the food I had planned, but my dining chairs were slightly cat-hairier than desirable. (The cats rather like sleeping on the dining chairs under the table, and to be honest, months pass when only the cats use the dining furniture. To mitigate this I keep bags-for-life on some of the chairs to dissuade feline encroachment and on the others I flip the seat pads so they are not sitting where people sit.)

A day on Saturday out of the house, and catering for a 2pm kick off made timing a sourdough loaf a little interesting. In the end I made the leaven at 11am on Saturday, went to the festival, made a dough at midnight and allowed it to prove all night. I knocked it back and put it in the banneton at 10am Sunday and sat it on the hob with the oven on beneath it at 50deg to take some of the chill of my unheated kitchen off. It went in the oven at 1315 and came out shortly before 1400 ever so slightly raw on the bottom.

What do vegans eat in sandwiches? Last time I did an afternoon tea, over five years ago, I did ham and cheese, and tuna. Last time I fed sandwiches to this group of people we were still only veggie so I made egg mayo. This time a little more challenging.

Cucumber sandwiches with sunflower spread. Peeled and sliced cucumbers with salt and pepper. Unfortunately the Aldi shop done barely minutes before the guests arrived had not found a fully vegan spread, and the sunflower stuff had traces of whey in it. Should have just stuck to actual butter!

Caramelised onion hummus and grated carrot. I’m a huge fan of caramelised onion hummus and was delighted to find it in Aldi too. The grated carrot hides extra veg in your sarnie and adds some texture. I think the idea came from the Archers originally – it was an organic lunch that Pat Archer made.

Antipasto pâté Smørbrød. Another use for the nutribullet. Blitz a handful of sundried tomatoes, chargrilled peppers and green olives, all from jars, in just enough of the oil to make the thing work. This was absolutely delicious and I shall be doing it again, vegans or no vegans. Served as open sandwiches.

Vegan shortbread. This recipe, but a great deal simpler. I bought a bottle of coconut oil a few years ago after having read about butter coffee and some other alternatives. I have never quite managed to blitz coconut oil into coffee before heading to school, mainly because it’s solid at room temperature, and I bought it in a bottle. So this was finally a use for it. The entire recipe was 250ml coconut oil, 3 cups plain flour, 3 cups dark brown sugar, mix, chill, bake at 150 deg for 50 minutes.

Vegan choc fruit loaf. One of the many iterations of my now almost weekly nutribullet fruit cake. Blitz two bananas, two pears topped and tailed but otherwise not peeled or deseeded, two heaped tablespoons of cocoa powder, half a bag of dark brown sugar, a good dollop of desiccated coconut, and since, I wasn’t using eggs, a dollop of golden syrup. This was too stodgy for the nutribullet to turn properly so needed some water as well. Pour out into a bowl and add a teaspoon of baking powder and enough desiccated and SR flour to get to a stiff dropping consistency, along with a handful of cocoa nibs for texture, then bake in a 2lb loaf tin at 170 deg for over an hour, until a skewer comes out clean, covering with a foil couche halfway through to stop the top burning. Sorry for the vague recipe, but my scales have been broken for weeks and my baking is increasingly approximate.

Also all the table: Aldi iced finger buns (traces of whey). Ikea gingerbread Christmas biscuits (traces of milk), Italian nougat brought by a guest, fruitbowl (untouched) elderflower gin, crab apple vodka, bottle of champagne, coffee, tea. A roundly admired beautiful spotty teapot made by my friend The Purple Potter.

Nutribullet banana loaf

Jun5

With a little help from Mary Berry I have been making a banana loaf most weeks for the last two months or so. Since my Nutribullet lives on the counter it’s quite tempting to use it for other things, and making cake is definitely something it can do. Even with the blender available to me I have found myself overoptimistic about how many bananas I can eat in a week.

I prefer my banana loaf less plain than the Berry version, so here is what I have been making:

Wet/blitzable ingredients
100 gr melted butter (using melted not softened makes the nutri vessel easier to clean)
175 gr caster sugar
2 eggs
2 bananas
1 other fruit – pear or apple?
good splosh of milk
generous teaspoon of mixed spice

Dry ingredients
225 gr SR flour
2 big handfuls of sultanas
a good sprinkle of nuts, eg walnut pieces, whole shelled hazelnuts
glacé cherries if you have them

Preheat the oven to 180 deg / 160 fan.

Line a 2lb loaf tin – I use Loaf Tin Liners.

Put the dry ingredients in a bowl.

Blitz the wet ingredients in the nutribullet.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir well. Pour the batter into the loaf tin and bake for an hour.

Check after 45 minutes. If the cake is browning on top but still moist inside, cover with tin foil to stop the crust burning.

If after an hour the skewer is still not coming out clean – this is a moist, heavy cake, after all – turn the oven off and allow it cool with the cake still in.

Variations
The same fundamental method works with other fruit, not just bananas. I’ve tried a pear and chocolate cake by substituting three pears for the bananas and adding two tablespoons of cocoa into the flour.

Since the nutribullet means you can blitz any fruit into a liquid, rather than mashing bananas with a fruit, you can turn pretty much anything into a cake. On much the same basis that you can hide vegetables you don’t like in a nutribullet with fruit you do, you can also put vegetables into cake this way.

I don’t see the need to use baking powder as well as SR flour – too much and you end up with a cake that gives you heartburn.

Disaster cakes

Sep7

Preheat an oven to… what was it last time? I think I did it at 180 but I can’t remember if that was too high or too low? Try 160 just to be on the safe side

Weigh three eggs, and add the same weight of fat, self raising flour and sugar to a bowl. I use vegetable oil to save having to faff with getting butter to room temperature without melting it, at a fraction of the cost and without too much taste compromise. I was supposed to be using caster sugar but somehow someone put granulated in the caster pot last time it was refilled so I suppose that will have to do.

Zest a lemon – cripes, that one’s in a bit of a state, oh well, it’s what we have. Joe Public won’t be able to taste it by the time it’s cooked – into the mix and stir until well incorporated.

Spoon the batter into 12 cake cases, realising towards the end that whilst this mix usually does 12 easily, this time it looks a bit hit and miss and there’s only really enough for 9. Oh well, the first six were a bit over full and will probably spill in the oven so I can spoon two tea spoons out of those into the remaining cases. Oh drats, the case came away with the batter and now there’s bits of cake mix all over the tin. That will be a bugger to get off later.

Cook for I dunno 15 minutes? 20? Check they’re not burning after 20 but they’re nowhere near done so turn the oven down, or maybe up? after that and put them back in. They’re done when a skewer – where the heck have all my skewers gone? Oh there they are – comes out clean.

Leave to cool while you watch Only Connect.

Put a pointy nozzle in a disposable piping bag and place inside cocktail shaker. Spoon in a few dollops of home made lemon curd. Pff, yes of course shop bought will do. Pipe the curd directly into the centre of the cupcakes with a firm pressure and oh god there’s lemon curd everywhere, all over my hands, oozing over the top of the bag, and out around the nozzle instead of through the hole at the end.

Neatly use a teaspoon to cut holes in the remaining unruined cakes and spoon the curd in before placing the top of the cake back on and hoping the crumbs don’t make too much of a mess.

Juice the lemon you zested earlier and add icing sugar to make a fruit icing. Not that much icing sugar you dolt! Eek, this is very firm, it won’t spread at all. Oh, well, it will be fine. Normally it’s too runny anyway. Spoon the icing over the cakes taking care not to… oh… the bit you cut out might come away a bit. Yes, there will be a horrid mix of icing and crumbs and it will look awful.

Garnish with jelly lemon slices, which for no good reason are not on sale in Sainsburys any more and don’t seem to be found for love nor money anywhere other than Evil Amazon. These jelly lemon slices were actually ordered before the summer holidays and have been sitting in my pigeonhole for six weeks, but they don’t seem particularly harmed and are still well within their date so meh.

Select six of the least worst looking cakey horrors and pack them in a box for work tomorrow.

Niles's Blog

Teaching, food and other random, infrequent wibblings

Tag Archives: cake