Three pudding club eats

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…

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.

My decadent week of cake

Aug25

Various things – friends visiting to see our new chickens, the last opportunity for Pudding Club before term starts again and a new found fatalism on the weight front (yeah, topping 100kg again!) has meant I have been cooking an awful lot of cake this week. I made…

Mary Berry’s Victoria Sandwich.

Which I burnt. Things I learned: a four egg mix is a good amount for my sandwich tins. 2oz of buttercream is not really enough to fill it and it takes an awful lot of jam. I need to turn the oven down. It’s really enough to combine the mix quite loosely – I would normally cream the butter with the sugar quite vigourously before adding the eggs and flour. This recipe calls for all the ingredients to go in at once and only basic mixing. And it’s fine for it.

Coffee flavoured cupcakes

Things I learned: a one egg sponge mix is ample to fill all four of the dinky new cupcake moulds I got for my birthday. Two spoons of instant coffee for the buttercream and two in the cake mix is about right for my taste but a bit too strong for everyone else. I need to work on my two tone icing technique and on icing more generally.

Mary Berry’s Chocolate Roulade

Things I learned: this is easier than it looks. It uses a lot of eggs (might be a good thing once the birds start laying!) No flour! I turned it into a sort of Schwarzwaldkirschroulade with half a bag of frozen cherries turned into a simple jam by boiling with sugar and bits of port and kirsh I had knocking around. I make sure the sponge was good and damp and boiled some of the left up juice to a slightly stiffer set to make a drizzling jus for presentation:

Dan Lepard’s cinnamon buns

An old favourite. I don’t think I’ve ever made them without burning them a little, however – in this case, although they looked blackened they didn’t taste burnt at all.

What I learned: the recipe fits neatly in my large rectangular roasting tin – I’ve always used my round 9″ cake tin before. If you leave them to prove whilst ringing for a wedding, they will likely go over the top of the tin.

But they will still taste delicious and wonderful anyway.

Brownies

This recipe is a good’un and came out with the desired highly squidgy interiors. The recipe is extremely detailed, and I might have glossed over the finer points.

I had to pop off to Dunelm to buy a new tin for making the swiss roll needed for the roulade, and whilst I was there, bought a square tin for brownies and tray bakes, which I have felt I needed for a while. This recipe fills it really well.

The picture shows afternoon tea with tuna and yellow pepper sandwiches, a small plate of cucumber sandwich bites, strong black coffee, and brownies and cinnamon buns for after.

Perhaps the main thing I learned is that my mobile phone takes horrible food pictures!

Niles's Blog

Teaching, food and other random, infrequent wibblings

Tag Archives: mary berry

Three pudding club eats

Banana loaf recipe – with pictures

Nutribullet banana loaf

My decadent week of cake