Snowflakes in the oven.

I know, it's not even December yet, however, today is "Stir up Sunday" - the day when it is traditional to make your Christmas pudding. I'm not making a pudding, because I'm not cooking Christmas dinner this year, but I did decide to make a cake.  I happened to have just the right amount of marzipan and sugar paste icing left over from the wedding cake - see my two "Tiers of Happiness" posts - and the recipe I used for the wedding cake was actually a slightly tweaked Christmas cake recipe so I think that was some kind of omen. I soaked the fruit in brandy and orange juice for a week and made the cake today.  I will be feeding it with brandy over the coming weeks and then sharing it with my family. Look out for photos of the finished cake in a later post. I'm planning on decorating it using my new snowflake cutters, of which more later.

My daughter has got me in the mood for Christmas early this year, and despite not cooking the actual Christmas dinner as I usually do, I seem to have a pile of foodie magazines tempting me into making all kinds of things, including a chocolate pavlova with salted caramel sauce, and a mulled berry snowflake tart, which most gratifyingly looked even better in reality than in the magazine. I bought the aforementioned snowflake cutters especially on eBay for £2.59 (free postage) which were a triumph!

I didn't make the pastry, though I could have if I'd have wanted to.  I lined my favourite loose bottomed tart tin with the pastry and blind baked it for 15 mins. The rest of the pastry was transformed into snowflakes of three different sizes and these were put on a separate tray and sprinkled with caster sugar. The filling was a mixture of fresh cranberries, frozen mixed berries (including blackberries, blackcurrants and cherries), apple juice, port, sugar, spices including nutmeg and cinnamon, plus cornflour which were cooked in a pan first before adding to the pastry cake and baking for 35 minutes.  For the last 15 minutes of cooking time, the pastry snowflakes were added to the oven.  When time was up, they were positioned on top of the tart, preventing the juice from bleeding into them and hence making for a more glamourous finish.  I added a dusting of icing sugar (a tweak from the printed recipe as agreed by my culinary aesthetic advisor - he knows who he is) and served with a dollop of extra thick cream. The cranberries gave it a fresh taste that wasn't too overly sweet.

I'm going to try a new recipe for mulled wine soon, including lemongrass and stem ginger.  The cold winter evenings suddenly don't seem so bad after all. There will be plenty of new recipes going on over the festive season so watch this space.  It's going to be a good one!

Thank you for reading,

Caroline.

The thinking woman's crumpet.

The last but one post started by mentioning optimism and hope for the future.  Speaking of which, I have met a lovely man (several months ago) who has been instrumental in my recent rediscovery of the crumpet.

A friend tried on Facebook earlier this month to settle the debate "crumpets n jam vs crumpets n cheese". 119 comments later, jam had 21 votes, but cheese won with 36. Many other options were suggested, including both jam and cheese at the same time, peanut butter both with and without jam, Nutella, Marmite, marmalade, golden syrup, fried egg, my personal favourite topping of fried bananas with Malibu... and of course there were the "butter only" purists. 

I've never made my own crumpets (maybe one day, my sister once did and she said they weren't all that difficult) but I got to thinking what creative thing you could do with a shop-bought crumpet apart from simply spreading something on it.  I'd previously seen a photo of a Full English Crumpet sandwich with bacon, egg, sausage and baked beans in the middle; but today I found a twist on eggy bread using crumpets, which I hadn't previously considered.  I beat two eggs with a splash of milk, seasoning, and a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg and soaked three crumpets in this mixture while I preheated the frying pan.  I cooked them on both sides in oil, pouring a little more egg mixture into the holey sides and in the pan to get a little "omeletty" effect around the edge.  Topped with grilled bacon and a drizzle of maple syrup they were a revelation!

Here's a photo of the full English crumpet:

As a little treat, here are a couple of crumpet-related videos for you.  You may need to copy and paste the links.  The first is the Wombles, a throwback to my childhood. I especially like Tobermory's exclamation at about 2 minutes and 10 seconds in:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwBibF-YfBY 

The other is the ever fabulous Muppets Warburton's giant crumpets advert:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp_WNfa7PGY 

Enjoy! And thanks for reading,

Caroline x

Tiers of happiness - part 2

At the end of part 1 - we had got as far as the wedding cake being baked and ready for it's posh dressing up.  Eventually it looked like this:

It wasn't really as wonky as it looked in the photo.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. The cake needed icing, and it needed marzipan before that. The cakes were almost flat so I didn't bother to trim them. I checked them with my culinary spirit level (yes really) and neither of the three were that far out so I thought it would all be fine.  The traditional glue for sticking marzipan to cakes is apricot jam, but I had some marmalade in the cupboard so I used that instead, two parts marmalade to one part water, warm in a mug in the microwave and apply with a pastry brush. The marzipan was rolled out, draped over each cake and smoothed down with icing sugar dusted hands and sort of massaged until it was as smooth as I could get it. Sort of like beauty therapy for cakes!  They were left to dry out overnight before icing.

The icing was applied in a similar fashion (nearly 2 kilos of it for the three cakes!) except that it was stuck to the marzipan with vanilla vodka rather than marmalade glaze.  Yes, the vodka happened to be hanging around too. I used ready made sugarpaste icing from the cake decorating shop rather than making it, which I don't think is cheating really... After some judicious trimming and much smoothing out, and a second beauty therapy for cakes session, the three cakes were suitably enrobed in their double cloaks of marzipan and icing and left to dry for a few more days.

My daughter had decided she wanted to decorate them, so one day while I was at work she spent most of a day being creative.  Using our new piping nozzles, and a LOT of red food colouring paste, butter and icing sugar, and an amazing amount of creativity and general cleverness, she ended up with several different designs of flowers in shades of pink and red around the edges of the larger two cakes, and completely covering the smallest one. At one point she diced with disaster by having the cakes overhanging the edge of the work surface, but didn't notice until she looked at the photos afterwards!  Meanwhile, I spent my lunch break buying two and a half metres of red ribbon.  The colour of the washing up water had to be seen to be believed!

After reading about it in the cake bible, we had decided to use shot glasses for pillars, which worked really well.  As the cakes were heavy, we had to order thick milkshake straws online which were cut down and inserted into the bottom two cakes to help support the shot glasses.

Assembly was left until the big day, just before the cake was cut. It wasn't perfectly straight, and in photos it looks worse than in reality (camera angles can be so unkind), but nobody minded, and most importantly the bride and groom were happy with it.  I nearly missed the cake cutting, being in the middle of a conversation with my uncle in the pantry, and everyone had to shout my name to find me!!  All was well in the end though. I was most impressed when the whole bottom tier was eaten on the wedding day; but then, this IS my family we are talking about! It was a bit crumbly due to the gluten free nature, but the taste and lack of dodgy tummies afterwards in those susceptible more than made up for it.

Thank you for reading.  Hopefully more soon.

Caroline.

Tiers of happiness - part 1.

I love weddings. I've even been the bride at two. It's all so lovely and fills you full of hope and optimism for the future.  And of course, usually there is plenty of eating and drinking as part of the celebration, including "the cake". My sister made both my wedding cakes, the second one was a drum kit, complete with sugar cymbal.  I've made three wedding cakes, two were three tier and one was two tier, if I remember rightly.  They were fairly simple and did look home made, and one I only iced and left the decoration to the groom - who did intricate painting for a living and covered his with several thousand tiny flowers - but I hope the flavour made up for the lack of perfection in appearance of the other two.

My cousin recently got engaged after a whirlwind romance; and the wedding is in a few weeks. I volunteered to make their cake as my gift to her and her lovely soon-to-be-husband. She particularly wanted a Nigel Slater fruit cake recipe, round cakes, and three tiers.  I asked her if she wanted pillars or not (as they are were all going to be fruit cakes they could be stacked without pillars) and she said "I think I want pillars because it's not sensible!"  I already had 8" and 9" round tins in the cupboard and borrowed a 10" one from a lovely lady in the village, thanks to the wonders of social media.

The first challenge was that the recipe was for a little 11cm square cake, and I needed to make three larger round ones. It was at the point of conversion that I nearly got my inches and centimetres mixed up, but thankfully I realised fairly early on.  In the end I used the ingredient quantities from my well-loved cake "bible" but tweaked them to match the Nigel Slater recipe by adding orange zest and juice,swapping whole almonds for hazelnuts, adding ground almonds, and changing the spice mixture (nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice).  I added a tweak of my own by adding vanilla liqueur to the dried fruit soaking mixture as well as brandy and the orange flavours.

After soaking raisins, sultanas, currants and cherries in brandy, vanilla Galliano and orange juice/zest in a big storage box for two days, I creamed nearly a kilo of butter and nearly a kilo of light/dark muscovado sugars and added 13 eggs.  The kitchenaid couldn't quite cope so I had to take some of the mixture out partway through and add the eggs to the remaining mixture as it was also going to be mixed again later.  Then I mixed the butter and sugar into the dried fruit plus ground almonds and whole hazelnuts. Then over a kilo of gluten free plain flour was incorporated (gf according to the bride and other guest requirements), plus baking powder and the spices.  

Mixture done and arm muscles protesting, I divided the mixture between the tins, which had been lined earlier and brown paper put round the outside to protect from burning.  You can't tell from the photos but I recycled a clean and opened out KFC bag for the biggest cake!

They were baked at 140 degrees C for 3 hours (small) 3 and a half hours (middle) and 4 hours (big) and left to cool in the tin.  The smell was amazing!

They are cooling as I type and will have marzipan,icing and decoration added soon... to be continued in Part 2... in which I will hopefully be having enormous fun with my new piping nozzles... 

Thank you for reading,

Caroline :-)

A Grand Celebration!

Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of my only sister's death from stomach cancer.  A sad day but also one for remembering happy times. It also happened to be that I had just got to the point of being about to make the long-awaited one thousandth new recipe since my New Year's resolution of 2008.  I think that was karma.  So I started thinking about what to make.  It had to be special and it had to reflect her.  She was a massive fan of eating and drinking, like me, and even though in the final fortnight of her life when she was in a local hospice and was surviving on little more than ice lollies, she still had tea and cake when people visited, just to be sociable, even though she only managed a few crumbs and sips.

One thing she was famous for was her tiramisu.  Even bona fide Italians raved about it!  I didn't make tiramisu for several years after she died because it wouldn't be as good as hers, but eventually I did make it, and also a Bailey's version. It WAS good, but not as good as hers.  So the 1000th recipe couldn't be that as I had already made it. I always have at least one friend round on her anniversary, to drink bubbly and eat cake, so I thought about doing a gateau, in the gateau chapter of my favourite cake book was.... a tiramisu gateau! Decision made.

Several adaptations later (using a normal sponge instead of a genoese sponge as I've found the latter to be a bit unreliable) and dark chocolate kitkats around the edge instead of chocolate cigarillo biscuits, all was planned.  Two Victoria sponges were cut in half to make a four layer cake. Each layer was drizzled with a syrup made from instant espresso powder, water, sugar and Tia Maria.  I was worried that there was too much syrup and that it would be too wet but in hindsight I could have added more.  In the end I put the extra syrup in a jug and it got poured over the slices of cake as it was eaten, depending on your preference for sogginess of cake and intensity of coffee and liqueur. The layers were sandwiched together with mascarpone cream (egg yolks and sugar whisked together over simmering water, then mixed with the cheese and double cream) and the whole thing was then refrigerated.  It didn't look all that impressive at this stage:

However, that all changed with the assembly.  A final layer of mascarpone cream was spread on the top and sides of the cake and cocoa powder dredged over the top. I used 22 two-finger dark chocolate kitkats around the edge and finished with a gold ribbon that my daughter had bought in her lunch break from college in Stamford.

Shared with friends, it was a great success, in fact my son actually gave it ten out of five!!  I think a fitting tribute to happy memories of an amazing person.  I still miss Friday "wine and crisp" nights with my sister, and often wish I'd been able to share my new recipe adventures with her.

The rest of the gateau was taken into work today and happily polished off by my two assistants, the IT team and several other highly deserving NHS workers in need of sugar and caffeine.  I'm not going to stop at a thousand recipes, even if my Jamie Oliver notebook which contains the list of recipes get full.  There's still so much inspiration out there.. so many recipes, so little time.  I really want to live to be 100 and see how many I've got to by then.

Thank you for reading,

Caroline x

Recipe Gin-spiration!

Gin drinking has suddenly gone all trendy, but I have always loved it. It may have started when when I was small, and came downstairs after bedtime once on my parents' wedding anniversary.  They were drinking gin and tonic and having smoked salmon sandwiches, and I interrupted their post-children-in-bed celebration, but they didn't mind!  It was such a glamourous and grown-up thing, and something I aspired to do when I was a grown up. When eventually I was allowed to try it I really liked the botanical flavours. Over the years I have learned a lot more about the history of gin drinking, the distilling process and the differences between the many types of gins on the market, and I've got a small gin cupboard with my favourite four (as below, plus my new bottle of my newest favourite the beautiful Brockmans), quality rather than quantity being all important.  I've also had a go at using it as an ingredient, and have found loads of gin-spiration for the future, such as using it when curing salmon.  In the past I've cured salmon with vodka and beetroot, but I discovered an amazing recipe for gravlax using a blackberry and sloe gin cure - I HAVE to try that soon.  

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/fish-recipes/sloe-gin-gravlax/ 

It's also great in desserts, I've made a gin and tonic granita with apple caramel drizzled over, which balanced the gin flavour really well.  This was a Tom Kerridge recipe, it's like a sort of grown-up slush puppie!!  Obviously you can make it look more sophisticated with the presentation.

Some gin-loving friends came for dinner last weekend, and they suggested a cherry and gin shortbread ripple ice cream recipe for the dessert.  I've been put off ice cream making in the past due to not having an ice cream maker but have recently discovered the amazing thing that is NO CHURN ice cream.  Basically it's just double cream, condensed milk and flavourings. Whisk together, adding flavourings before or after depending on if you want them broken up or in chunks, and freeze!  You need to let it warm up slightly before serving though. The aforementioned cherry and gin ice cream turned out fabulously, with maraschino cherries and shortbread biscuits in (see photo - not my image but mine did look the same), and I have since experimented with a vanilla bean paste flavoured raspberry and blackcurrant jam doughnut ice cream which got top marks from my son. He assured me that it really did taste exactly like jam doughnuts - probably because they were simply chopped up and stirred in...

I also want to try gin and tonic cupcakes - I'll keep you posted.  Don't forget to drink (and eat!) responsibly.

Thank you for reading,

Caroline.

The ultimate sandwich (and a festive picnic).

When looking at the festive issues of the foodie magazines this year, one recipe jumped out at me - and believe it or not it was a sandwich!  This wasn't just any old sandwich, but rather "The King Of Toasties", the ham, cheese and chilli beetroot chutney toastie.  Upon reading the recipe it wasn't even toasted, but fried and baked and contained an estimated 577 calories.  And I HAD to make it.

Sandwiches are named after John Montague, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an 18th century English aristocrat.  He apparently wanted to eat whilst playing cards without getting the cards greasy, so he ordered his valet to put meat between two slices of bread.  The sandwich can be a humble thing, or a culinary extravaganza, and are also very good for using up leftovers at this time of the year (cheese?  gammon? turkey? even roast potatoes and bread sauce has been known in our house).  In fact, you can make any meal into a sandwich, and any sandwich into a meal! Although it's not all that easy with spaghetti bolognese.  I speak from experience. Also I remember once at work we all tried to describe our lunchtime sandwich in the most "Marks-and-Spencer-like" way to make each one sound more grand than it actually was.

Anyway, back to toastie making.  My daughter makes great toasties, often involving ham, cheese and pesto, which I love, and she does them under the grill, but clearly the making of this particular toastie was not going to be a straightforward affair.  I started by making the beetroot and chilli chutney. This involved grating raw beetroot and cooking it in red wine vinegar with chillies, sugar, black mustard seeds, cumin seeds, salt, garlic and shallots until reduced and syrupy.  I did the chutney part a few days before and kept it in the fridge.

When it came to the assembly, I used chunky slices of "tin bread" from the supermarket and buttered them.  My daughter and I had a toastie each so two slices were placed in a hot frying pan butter side down and topped with chutney, ham and grated cheddar cheese.  I also added dolcelatte to mine as I happened to have some in the house, but my daughter doesn't like blue cheese so we left it out of hers. The other two slices of bread were put on top, butter side up.  After frying for 5 minutes each side while squashing with a fish slice to get them good and brown, the finishing touch of grated parmesan was added and a further flip and fry to crisp the cheese was had before they went in the oven for 5 minutes to properly melt the cheese inside.  And so the best "toasted" sandwich was enjoyed...

This year we didn't have a conventional Christmas dinner, but instead a relaxed "family living room picnic for eleven", enjoyed with assorted relations at my parent's house. It did include pigs in blankets though, as my daughter insisted it wouldn't be Christmas without pigs in blankets.  She was also handed the family sausage roll baton by my Mum, who was not up to cooking as she is recovering from surgery. All involved families contributed to the feast, including me, though only one new recipe was forthcoming this year, the red velvet and chocolate layer cake.  It was layers of red velvet sponge and chocolate sponge sandwiched (tenuous link anyone?!) together with cream cheese icing and topped with raspberries, pistachios and a flourish of glitter and gold.

Not having a roast or too many timings to worry about was great, we cooked the pigs in blankets, warmed up the sausage rolls and baked a camembert, and had the sprouts on boxing day.  It was a triumph! And there was a lot of left over cheese for more sandwiches, though the gammon seemed to have disappeared...

Wishing my readers every happiness for 2017.  I didn't get to 1000 new recipes since 2008, I've been busy having other adventures out of the kitchen, but I'll get there eventually.

Caroline x