Munchkin mail

When sour becomes sweet: a tale of friendship and sugar

2010-09-26T16:45:00.009+01:00

Approximately two aeons ago, my lovely friend Cie gave me a true proof of our friendship. 'Do not kill' said the accompanying note. 'Failure to look after this embodiment of our friendship will bring my wrath and everlasting disappointment upon you.' It didn't of course; Cie is far too nice for that, but when she had to gently rescue Herman the friendship cake sourdough starter she had just given me from suffocation before we'd even left the pub I felt the pressure start to mount.

You've heard of sourdough bread starters? Well Herman is a sourdough cake starter. He is one hungry boy, however, and he also had a very sweet tooth. He needed feeding a whole cup each of sugar, flour and milk every three days, and a good stir on the intervening days. Thankfully he started to grow and bubble quite soon, so I had some regular reassurance that Cie was not going to have to unfriend me on facebook. He is also quite adaptable - my Herman was fed soya milk and a variety of different flours as well. Never able to resist tasting raw cake dough I was initially put off by his sour taste, but as the days went on he got progressively sweeter until at last, a week later, Baking Day arrived.

Herman, after a week of eating a lot of sugar

Herman is a friendship cake because you only use a quarter of the starter to make your cake, and pass the other three on to other people. Herman comes with a recipe for the finished cake, but with plenty of room to play with optional add-ins. I added white chocolate and - you guessed it if you can remember back that far - fresh raspberries. The final touch is some melted butter poured over the top which I must admit made him smell absolutely heavenly.

I took our Herman and one of his Herman progeny to some old college friends the next day. Their children were excited at the idea of their own Herman but didn't like the smell of the baked version - I like to think their foodie noses were picking up on the sourdough yeast smell. We were too full to eat him after lunch, but he got some good feedback later on.

And so, the buck was passed, my friendship with Cie was approved, and a few more of those raspberries met their cakey maker.

The End.

Kiwi treats

2010-09-18T18:49:00.006+01:00

Kiwi Family moved house a few weeks ago and when I went to visit I took a couple of treats with me to remind them of their many recent travels. The first was a reprise of a New Zealand biscuit I made for the first time when they were away - Afghans. This time I used a recipe a Kiwi friend recommended, from the charmingly-named website Ladies, a plate. They are darkly chocolatey biscuits which contain cornflakes - which the recipe description says was a way of using up last bits and pieces in the pantry. Well, I don't need to tell any readers who are still left after being so disgracefully neglected for the past few weeks, that this appealed to my 'eke eke' philosophy immediately. The biscuits had a rich chocolate topping as well which I found I had to thin a bit more to spread - but which was very popular with the Munchkin as well as his parents.

The second treat was particularly for Kiwi Bro, who had just started his new job the day I went to visit. I'd remembered that he said he liked millionaires shortbread, so I made a Kiwi favourite tray bake - Tan Slice. Tray bakes seem to be particularly popular in both Australia and New Zealand, often using coconut and condensed milk. I got this recipe from Kiwi blogger Tammy who has posted several enticing variants and favourites. She also has a chocolate version I'm keen to try - and her philosophy of a greater caramel to base ratio has surely got to win all tasters over. It turned out as I made the slice that it wasn't quite what I had assumed when thinking of something like our millionaire's shortbread. Instead it was slightly more like a cake mixture which formed the base and also the top layer. The base didn't need baking before adding the caramel either which surprised me, but makes it all even easier. I was expecting a good response just from the sheer level of sugary goodness in the slice, but it did even better. Kiwi Sis texted me after I'd left to say they were swooning over it, and they had to fend off their dinner guests with pointy sticks (actually I made up the pointy sticks but there was definitely some fending going on).

So thank you to Alexa and Tammy - definitely a pair of Kiwi keepers!

Afghan recipe here

Tan slice recipe here

Urban foraging leads directly to tasty birthday cake

2010-08-24T19:20:00.009+01:00

I made this cake twice this week, one for my birthday, and the other to take to visit our Vet Friends to see their new Vet Grub (he's three months old but we were all variously busy before now). Plus both Junior Sis and Junior Bro picked up a clutch of good grades in their AS-levels and GCSEs in the last week, so lots of reasons to make and eat this cake. It was borne from a foraging trip with Lauren last weekend, which resulted in lots of wild urban plums, some sloes (sitting in the freezer to be made into sloe gin later on), and some elderberries. I am always worried about mistaking edibles for something horribly poisonous, but Lauren used to want to be a herbologist (I didn't even know that existed outside Harry Potter and am very taken with it), so I felt safe in her hands.

Vet Cat Maggie supervises the eating of foraged plum cake

I found the recipe for this cake while looking for alcoholic recipes that used plums. It had great reviews, and hit a happy nerve as my great-grandmother used to make a German plum cake which Munchkin Granny remembers from her youth. It was very easy and I doubled the quantities to make both cakes at the same time. It turned out to be a gloriously moist and fruity cake - not too sweet (there isn't too much sugar in it, and just an extra dusting with some cinnamon on the top). It wasn't the prettiest but it got good feedback in the pub on my birthday, and from Vet Dad the next day. Definitely a keeper.

Festival of Quilts booty - brown spotty fabric to make this dress (thanks, Roisin!); apple fabric to make a bag/apron; bags of felt to make the cute bright cushion cover kit - birthday present from Doc Eco Sis (thanks Doc Eco!); assorted fat quarters for unspecified quilting projects

On my actual birthday I went to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC with Vicki and Doc Eco Sis. We had a really good day, and I did come away with a bit of a stash of goodies. In the evening we went to the cake-welcoming pub with friends and had more good times :)

Giant crochet granny square and small granny square cushion cover (made in Vancouver), sitting with birthday present knitting books from Vet Friends (thank you!)

And on the goodies front, here are a couple of other craft projects I've been finishing off recently.

Appliqued apron - it used to be a pinafore dress I never wore - recognise the apple from the fabric stash above??

Granny star getting stamp of approval from a passing pook

Plum cake recipe here (and they have some good fruity alcohol recipes there too)

Raspberry stress meets banana stress - and has a happy ending

2010-08-17T17:30:00.005+01:00

I made this cake about a week after the huge all you can pick raspberry trip, and I don't mind admitting that they were beginning to weigh on my mind a bit. I even found myself thinking about what to do with raspberries when I woke up in the night, and over-exposure was even slowing my rate of snacking off them straight from the fridge. To make matters worse, there was a whole bunch of bananas beginning to go over-ripe in the fruit bowl. To avoid a complete head explosion, I searched for some recipes which could use both, and which could then be stashed out of sight in the freezer. This was the only one I photographed but the other one may yet get a feature when I can next face a raspberry muffin.

I found the recipe on, of all places, a mums forum, which isn't somewhere I usually hang out. I made a few tweaks to cut down on the refined sugar - subbing fruit sugar instead, and using coconut oil instead of butter. I also upped the ante with the berries - this was no time to start getting stingy. The original recipe was for muffins, but I made it as a loaf and it worked out really well. The banana flavour was nice and strong, and the berries nice and tart. It also defrosted well when I took it out a few days later for a visit from Kiwi Sis (and a lovely visit it was too :) ). After my double baking session I crammed all of the rest of the berries into the freezer on various cookie trays and then bagged them up (they stay separate rather than form a huge clump that way). I'm glad they won't be wasted, and this way I can get my berry mojo back and appreciate them properly again. In a few months time, maybe.

Banana and raspberry loaf (adapted from askamum)
120g plain white flour
80g plain wholemeal flour
2 tsp baking powder
5 Tbsp fruit sugar
150g raspberries
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
30g melted coconut oil
100ml soya milk
1 ripe banana, mashed

Preheat oven to 200C/400F. Line and grease a loaf tin.

Sift the flour and baking powder into a large mixing bowl. Add the sugar and raspberries.

Beat together the egg, vanilla, coconut oil and milk. Stir into the dry ingredients with the mashed banana, and stir briefly, to combine. THe mixture will be quite lumpy, but there shouldn't be any unmixed flour. Spoon into the tin.

Bake for about 40 minutes, covering after 25 if the top is starting to darken too much. It should be risen and golden. Cool on a wire rack.

Happy Raspbirthday!

2010-08-07T09:02:00.006+01:00

Kate made me laugh with a comment on my last post - that she has to read my blog at lunchtime to avoid drooling on the keyboard :) Well, I hope this one has the same effect as it concerns the biscuits I made her for her birthday last week. This took place during my raspberry glut, but it also gave me the opportunity to try out a recipe for some really pretty little pink treats I'd cut out from an old copy of Prima magazine. They're little butter biscuits sandwiched together with a creamy, white chocolatey, raspberry filling. I didn't manage to get too good a photo of them but they did look very dainty tied up in a little bag. I halved the recipe but made the whole batch of filling, since that's where the raspberries came in. I used some of the rest to ice some chocolate cupcakes - also birthday presents for a certain little Birthday Buddy and his brother, Almost Birthday Buddy, whom I saw in Cambridge last weekend. They were much appreciated. And I had a lovely day with my old friends Tracy and Julie, too :)

Raspberry creams (from Prima magazine)
[full quantity - makes 16]

75g butter, softened
125g icing sugar
1 medium egg, beaten
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
200g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder

Filling:
125g raspberries
1 tsp sugar
5 Tbsp double cream. whipped
150g white chocolate, melted and cooled

1. Cream together butter and sugar till pale and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla, then mix in flour, baking powder and pinch salt until smooth. Between two pieces of clear film, roll out to £1 coin thick. Chill for 1 hour [I chilled it in a ball and rolled it out afterwards].

2. Preheat oven to Gas 4/180C. Line a baking sheet with baking parchment. Cut chilled dough into rounds with a 4cm cookie cutter and place on baking tray 5cm apart [cookies don't spread much]. Bake for 6-8 minutes, until very pale gold Cool on baking sheet for 5 mins, then transfer to rack to cool.

3. Blend berries and sugar, then sieve to remove seeds. Whip cream and raspberry juice into white chocolate. Chill for 1 hour. Sandwich cooled biscuits together with berry filling [the filling in the magazine picture was *much* pinker than mine - either use more berries or add a few drops of pink food colouring if you want it really pink]

A very English flapjack

2010-08-03T17:41:00.006+01:00

I interrupt raspberry transmission with another blog post for the Norse Goddess. It turned out when we were visiting in Vancouver that she hadn't come across a flapjack before - or not an English type one anyway. So in the spirit of sharing culture, I hastened to make some so I could share the recipe.

Yes, I am pretending I've made M&S flapjack bites. What of it?

I've made flapjacks several times recently but have never actually blogged about them. Plus I've never made the same recipe twice and so don't have a particular favourite. Even Marcus Wareing's (which I mentioned in passing as a gamers' treat) was felt to be 'as good as another flapjack but not outstanding' by my Scientist Connoisseur of All Things Butter and Syrupy. He's quite strict in his requirements for flapjack, which actually, are quite similar to his requirements for trifle: keep it simple. I found a good and simple recipe on the website of Lyle's Golden Syrup - (so many good words) - makers of sugar and syrup, and felt there was no better a place to start my search for the latest offering for the Gamers.

Flapjack, is essentially, melted butter, sugar and golden syrup with oats stirred into it, and baked. You can see why it's a favourite really, can't you? In America, however (as I learnt here) it is a sweet flatbread cooked on a griddle. Madness. It's no wonder the Norse Goddess was confused. The smell of all that lovely golden meltingness does smell pretty alluring even for someone like me who's not so fussed about eating the finished product. This recipe evidently got its proportions just right as the flapjacks were a hit and I am happy to make it my go-to fave. Of course you can add all sorts of extras - dried fruit, seeds, nuts, chocolate all work, and there are approximately a squillion other recipes on the web featuring other goodies. But not if you're eating it in this house, ok?

Lyle's Golden Syrup recipe here

Raspberry parade - jam(ish)

2010-07-30T17:23:00.006+01:00

One of the first things I thought of making with my raspberries was jam, and I'd actually just copied down a recipe for raspberry and rose jam from Grandma S's latest copy of the BBC Good Food Magazine. I didn't really want to make too much as we don't get through it very quickly but I had so many berries that I ended up making enough to go with a 1kg bag of jam sugar - about 1.4kg or so. I made it when jam-making expert Cai came round for dinner last Sunday, and must have severely tested my hostessing credentials by hopping up and down at intervals through dinner with a chilled saucer for her to assess how close it was to setting. The trouble was that it started to get close and then it gave up completely and went really runny again. I don't know why this happened - did I heat it too quickly? too slowly? did I annoy it by not offering it dinner? Whatever the reason, I now have eight jars of very runny, and rather overly sweet jam. Cai and Lauren kindly took two jars away with them and I'm considering making it a compulsory leaving gift for anyone else who comes round.

One of the reasons I'd wanted to make this jam was because of the rose flavouring, but when I got my bottle out I remembered that I'd bought rose syrup not rose water. I didn't want to add too much more in the way of sugar, so I used less than the recipe called for, which is rather a shame as the flavour wasn't very noticeable. So, not the best use of the berries, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to strain off some of the liquid and use it in baking - in Cai's chocolate nutella cake, for instance, or a Bakewell slice. Perhaps it's not so bad after all :)

Raspberry and rose jam (from Good Food Magazine, August 2010)
This is the full quantity - I made two thirds
1.8 kg raspberries
1.5 kg jam sugar
2-3 Tbsp rose water

Night before: layer berries and sugar together in a very large bowl, then cover and leave at room temperature.
Next day: give it a stir and set aside until you're ready. Put a small saucer in the freezer
Tip berries, juices and any undissolved sugar into a large wide based pan, and stir in the rosewater. Start over a low heat until the sugar has all dissolved, then bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes. Turn off the heat and spoon a little on to the saucer. When it's cool, push with your finger. If it wrinkles it's at the setting points. If not, return to the heat and boil in 2-3 minute stages until it reaches the wrinkle stage.
Skim off any scum and leave for 15 minus, then pour into sterilised jars. Keeps in a cool dark place for at least 6 months. Refrigerate once opened

Makes 8 jars

Raspberry revels - berry salad

2010-07-29T20:12:00.006+01:00

This was an early foray in using up my giant glut of raspberries, and was inspired by the amazing salads the Norse Goddess made for us while we were in Vancouver. She used a variety of ingredients in her salads, but they all had three elements which made them stand out:

1. Interesting leaves
2. Some gorgeously sweet fruit - mango was a highlight
3. a tasty dressing - we all liked the maple and mustard dressing from Veganomicon, which I haven't made before.

I've been making lots of versions on this theme since we got back, but this week (obviously) I tried it with raspberries. I wasn't altogether convinced in advance, but actually it was pretty good. The berries are sweet but also a bit tart, which was nice. I'd made a variation on the maple dressing, subbing flaxseed oil, and putting a garlic clove into the jar as well. It sits in the fridge and we just get it out and shake it up every time we fancy a bit of magic salad. I made another version a few days later which had diced raw courgette, cucumber and radish, some cherry tomatoes, some quinoa and leaves, plus the berries. I took it to work in a box and it wasn't pretty by the time I ate it, but it tasted good :)

Raving raspberry mad

2010-07-26T17:39:00.006+01:00

We had a lovely weekend just now. We went up to Leeds on Thursday evening for The Scientist and Munchkin Gramps' traditional excursion to Headingley for international cricket. Yes, Munchkin Gramps has five children and three sons-in-law (one more properly an outlaw, which I just like saying), and only one of them likes cricket. I was invited one year but I evidently wasn't attentive enough as the invitation was mysteriously absent the following summer. It was probably for everyone's benefit - I like cricket, but in small doses only. I was glad I wasn't there this year as they came back with terrible sunburn on account of expecting gloom and rain. Meanwhile I spent half the day working, and half with Grandma S and Junior Sis and Bro. We had a nice lunch and went for a lovely walk along the canal, before reconvening for a fish'n'chip supper with the men. Well, fish'n'chips for five, and one sulk from the veggie as the chips are fried in dripping. What do you expect from Yorkshire?

The next day Yorkshire delivered more fine weather, and Grandma S, Junior Sis and Junior Bro indulged me in my perpetual love of pick-your-own fruit farms. The strawberries were over, but there were lots of raspberries, and after a discussion on how many we could collectively get through (they are going on holiday next week), I confidently asserted that it was not possible to have too much fruit, and that I would deal with all the excess. Back at home, three HUGE baskets in front of me on the counter, I started to doubt my words. They were so beautiful though - plump and fragrant, and just falling off the canes into our hands. An hour of washing and triaging (jam versus baking and eating) later, I was feeling a bit less enthusiastic and rather anxious about what to do with them all, but I made my own bed, and now I must lie in all my berries (well, that would get rid of a few).

Raspberry pictures and raspberry styling courtesy of Junior Bro :)

I promised to document my berry adventures for Grandma S, so here is my first foray: raspberry coulis. Simple, yes, but we weren't up for a big dessert after a hot day. Fresh berries are best fresh, and so I made the coulis to accompany a sort of make-your-own Eton mess when Cai and Lauren came round for inauthentic veggie paella last night: meringue nests, raspberries, Greek yogurt and double cream, plus the coulis.

The coulis is really easy to make, though somewhat time-consuming to sieve. Place a cup of berries in a pan with a little water and sugar, and heat briefly, just enough to warm the berries and melt the sugar. Blend in a blender, and then sieve to remove the pips. Add sugar to taste, and chill. I've kept the post-sieving pips and mush to stir into yogurt, though I suspect I'll be picking seeds out of my teeth all day. Hmm, note to self: don't eat for breakfast before a day of meetings tomorrow.

Raspberry count after coulis and Eton mess: three baking sheets' worth frozen, and one giant bowl in the fridge.

Holiday highlights

2010-07-20T18:32:00.013+01:00

We're back from a wonderful two and a half weeks away. We were mainly in Vancouver and the Rockies, with a few days in Boston on the way back, so I could go shopping for baking chocolate. Oh no, I remember the line now: so The Scientist could give a paper at a prestigious international conference. Here are some highlights:

First time I've ever seen tofu scramble on the menu in a cafe. It was much nicer than I expected!

Lots of time spent in coffee shops (this one, Agro cafe, Granville Island)

World famous Japadog stand (in several Vancouver locations). I won't show you the picture of The Scientist stuffing his face with his terimayo dog. It's exactly the same as the photo I have of him stuffing his face with a wurst in Munich, but it had seaweed on it. He said it was amazing. They do veggie dogs too, but I wasn't hungry.

Cherries. I ate a LOT of cherries. They were just sooooo good. I envy you your West Coast fresh produce, Vancouverites

We didn't see a bear. I don't mind. I was scared

View down the high street in Banff. Beats traffic and Primark, doesn't it?

Saw a lot of waterfalls and took a lot of photos. I'm a bit obsessed with how beautiful waterfalls are. I liked it that I managed to get the rainbow in this one

Athabasca Glacier. Beautiful. Used to be much bigger. This makes me more depressed than almost anything else except the polar bears.

And perhaps the best bit: spending time with the glorious Norse God and Goddess - the reason we made the trip over there (and worth every mile :) )

Travel's great. But it's great to come home, too.
That's my giant crochet granny square under the pook, made after a workshop run by the lovely Roisin. I turned it into a star for a bit of variety.

Off on hols!

2010-06-26T12:28:00.001+01:00

We're off on our holidays today, so there will be a break in transmission for a while. Happy baking everyone!!

Trev's requests - cherry choc chip cookies and a new carrot cake

2010-06-13T19:47:00.010+01:00

The Scientist went gaming again this weekend, so it was time for me to get baking. I had a special set of requests this time though, as one of the other gamers, Trev, was celebrating getting through a very long period of pretty nasty health-related stuff. The Scientist asked what his top picks would be and he came straight back with carrot cake, and cherry choc chip cookies. Time to go recipe-hunting.

I've made a few carrot cakes for the gamers in the past, variously featuring banana, pineapple and (inadvertently) semi-raw dough. This time I looked up whether Nigel Slater had a take on carrot cake as I've just been reading his Eating for England which I'd really enjoyed. He does indeed, right here, and it's a pretty traditional one - no extras except walnuts, which I left out because of the usual nut allergy. Everything went fine with the baking, and as you can see, it was sandwiched together with some gloriously unctuous cream cheese icing. The Scientist took some more with him and iced the top when he arrived. The cake was enjoyed by all, but it was the icing which was the real hit. Definitely a keeper basic carrot cake recipe though - Nigel won true again.

For the cookies I decided to go extra decadent and make this red wine and cherry choc chip cookie I'd seen on Cookie Madness. It made an absolute pile of cookies, and while the batter was on the sticky side, it baked exactly as directed. I even made some with no cherries in them to accommodate the no-dried-fruit gamer. I was so pleased with myself - until I found out that Trev really really hates red wine! He did try them and thought they were quite nice, but I know he appreciated the thought. And the others absolutely loved them - the whole pile got scarfed in no time and they've been promoted to the top of the double choc chip cookie list.

Nigel Slater's carrot cake recipe here

Cookie Madness' post on the red wine cherry choc chip cookies (with link to the original recipe) here

Did the gentlemen prefer blonde 1 or blonde 2?

2010-05-29T09:54:00.013+01:00

This post is in honour of two of the loveliest girls I know. The first is Roisin, who lent me THREE gorgeous dresses yesterday AND gave me the most amazing cloche hat which is too big for her. She is seriously one of the most generous and thoughtful people I know and I will make every effort not to get her dresses covered in Scootie hair to show how much I appreciate it.

The second is one of my work friends and colleagues, J. J is also one of those people you just simply can't help but love - she's nice and clever and funny and when I found out within a few weeks of meeting her that she has a project to bake a cake every week and give it away, our friendship was sealed. She mentioned last weekend that her cake of the week had been blondies from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook. I have that book but I haven't tried that recipe. However, I do have a copy of the America's Test Kitchen blondie version, and I said I'd give it to her so she could give it a try for comparison.

Of course this all got me thinking about blondies, and frankly what a weird sort of idea they are - I don't think I've ever met anyone who has eaten a brownie and thought that what it needed was the chocolate taking out. However, given my liking for a quantifiable challenge, I was taken with the idea of doing a side by side comparison of the two recipes.

Getting ready to start testing

Sources and methodology
Now I have to say straight up that I can't reproduce the ATK recipe here because they police people doing that. So this is a report on a scientifically not very robust experiment. What I can say is that the two recipes were pretty similar in terms of ingredient quantities (hard to say exactly because one was in weights and one in cups). The ATK recipe specified brown sugar but that was about the only difference. However, the methods were very different: the Hummingbird one involved melting butter and white chocolate before adding the other ingredients; the ATK was a more traditional creaming and adding sort of job. As you can see from the pictures I didn't do anything sensible like make one and then make the other; no, I tried to do both at the same time, and it's pretty remarkable that everything ended up in the right bowl.

Things are getting crowded already!

Method and get-out clauses
I should add here a few more provisos to my scientific rigour:
1. I didn't have as much butter as I'd thought so one batch's quota had to be topped up with marge. However, this was the batch that won on taste testing

2. One batch was baked in a silicone pan; the other in a baking parchment lined regular pan. The silicone pan batch was the winning one.

3. The mixtures had different baking times, but the faster one took a lot longer than it was supposed to. This meant that both batches had the oven door opened on them quite a few times. The fast-baking-but-didn't version was the winner.

4. The Hummingbird recipe called for nuts. I used chopped chocolate instead. According to the ATK recipe adding nuts would turn them into congo bars which are another thing I'd never heard of.

Out of the oven: ATK on the left, Hummingbird on the right.

Results
So, batches baked, The Scientist stepped up to carry out the 'warm from the oven' test. I know, he has to put up with a lot. The next day I took both batches to the pub (yes, our local doesn't mind if you bring cake - is this the best pub in England??), and got our friends to try one each. Most people said they were too full from dinner, but then ate both anyway. The result was absolutely unanimous: ATK had it, both warm from the oven and cold in the pub.

This is not to say that the Hummingbird recipe was disliked - very far from it. That was the one everyone tried first, and I think they all thought it was going to be the favourite. One person even said he was drooling as he ate it. I prefer not to think about that too much but it can only be a positive comment. Someone else said that the Hummingbird one was more brownie-like, but he preferred the other.

ATK at the bottom, Hummingbird at the top. In the latter the white chocolate is melted with the butter in the first step

Conclusions
I think they speak for themselves really, don't they? I'd be interested to know (but not interested enough to go and research) whether the order in which you taste test makes a difference to your final judgement. If I were being really rigorous I would do it again with the pans switched over, but I think we've already established that I don't mind a little slapdashery (in my baking experiments, not my work, in case any of my colleagues/potential future publishers are reading this). I will be passing on the ATK recipe to J forthwith so she can spread her baking love a little further. As to what I thought: well, I'm a brownie sort of girl, I think. But I promise not to eat any while I'm wearing Roisin's dresses.

Getting creative: embroidered baby bibs

2010-05-25T19:16:00.011+01:00

I've decided to diversify from baby quilts for a while, so I get to try some new projects. These bibs were inspired by my book of iron-on embroidery templates, and were made for our Vet Friends' new baby - aka New Grub. I used some fairly sturdy sort of linen stuff for the fronts, and backed them with fun cottons from my stash of fabrics. The foody one used the book templates completely; the dog one has freehand writing and a doggy template; and the poker one is a complete original (thanks to Dr Eco for drawing me a pattern, and to The Scientist for coming up with a suitable poker slogan).

I really enjoyed making these - hand sewing is my favourite thing, and I tried out a few different types of stitches on them. The templates wash off really easily, and for the freehand ones I used a magical water-soluble fabric pen which fades on its own really quickly (and disappears easily with a damp cloth, too). I added a press stud on the back to close them, and used little running stitches around the front to hold them in shape, and for a bit of extra decoration.

I thoroughly recommend this book even if you're a beginner to embroidery. Must find more stuff to embroider now - if it doesn't move, it's getting decorated (watch out cats!)

Waste-not-want-not leftover butter icing cookies

2010-05-25T18:58:00.004+01:00

I think that the name of these biscuits may not catch on - not as snapping as 'choc chip' or 'ginger-nut', eh? They were an experiment to avoid having to throw away the leftover butter icing from the cricket tea limey cupcakes (yes, this was a while ago now!). It occurred to me that it's just basically butter and sugar, which are two of the main constituents of baked goods anyway - plus they were already flavoured with lime juice and a bit of vanilla. So I added a bit more of both to give them an oomph, and then added flour to the icing until it looked like cookie dough. I had no real idea if it was going to work, especially without adding egg (which I was avoiding as it conveniently comes in one or none) - but it did! You can see from the pictures that the cookies spread a lot, which I think has something to do with the proportion of butter, and they were quite buttery - in an acceptable cookie way. I was pleased because they still tasted of lime. I took them to my sewing group, and gave the rest to our administrator at work, who has booked a lot of meeting rooms for me this semester! Plus, if you've used non dairy marge, they're even vegan :)

Waste-not-want-not leftover butter icing cookies:
Get leftover butter icing, add flour until it's thick and looks like cookie dough. Rest in fridge, roll into balls, and bake 12-15 minus in a moderate oven (or longer if it needs it - I'm sure this will depend on the individual batch).

Dan Lepard's Easy Bread

2010-05-16T17:13:00.003+01:00

Let's talk bread today: easy, almost no-knead, 'I just produced this from almost thin air' bread. I've been trying out some new bread recipes recently, all in honour of a new work project. I've been working with a colleague from another university on a new research project we're planning, and we've evolved a very productive little tradition. She drives over to our house, which is about an hour and a bit from where she lives, but in return, I provide lunch, usually something bread and soup-related. Oh, and we get some work done, too. A few times I've used the breadmaker I bought for a princely £2.50 from the tip shop, but if I can fit it into my morning I like to make my own by hand. This was one I made a couple of weeks ago, inspired by its title of 'The easiest bread in the world'. It's another Dan Lepard recipe, and I do like his recipes (I have him to thanks for the winning entry in the Choc Chip Cookie Research Project after all).

The loaf is based on a starter, which doesn't sound too easy, but in fact it means that you get most of it out of the way in advance. I mixed up the starter the night before and left it in the fridge, and then just added the remaining ingredients in the morning. After that you just knead the mixture briefly three times over the course of half an hour, shape and bake. It sounds churlish to complain but I did find the kneading process a bit of a faff since I had to come back downstairs for the third knead. Perhaps Mr Lepard would point out that trying to combine work and breadmaking was outside the remit of what he had in mind when he named his loaf.

There are several variations offered to the basic white loaf, and I picked the multigrain and honey one which also just involved a bit of pre-soaking. My dough was extremely wet, so much so that I had to add quite a bit of extra flour, but I would put this down to the fact that I had to estimate the weights of the add-ins, on account of having accidentally dunked our weighing scales in the sink along with the chopping boards it was hidden between. It did not like it. It sulked terminally in fact, and I had not yet been able to buy a new one. Despite this, however, the bread turned out really well. I'm always a bit nervous serving a new bread recipe to a guest, but my collaborator (and I mean that in the best non-sinister sense) is very open to being pleased, and she put this one at the top of the breads I'd made for her. We had it smorgasbord-style, with cheese, salad, hummus and pickles.

So, if you want a bread you can whip up on a working morning, this is the one for you. In fact, I'd say this could easily become a go-to bread recipe for any occasion, and it would take all sorts of add-ins and flour variations. I'll definitely be making it again, but in the meantime I might be painting our new scale neon yellow to avoid further risky washing up mistakes!

Dan Lepard's Easiest Loaf in the World: from the Guardian Magazine

Carrot, coriander and sun dried tomato sausages

2010-05-04T20:44:00.006+01:00

I've been catching up with the lovely photos and recipes at Mangocheek's (don't you love the name?!) Allotment to Kitchen blog. She's an ace veggie gardener and also posts some great photos of her trips around the Glasgow area. A few recipes caught my eye when I was reading about her latest kitchen adventures recently, but there was one I just wanted to go and make immediately - some vegan roasted veggie sun dried tomato and olive sausages. We make burgers fairly often but not sausages and I was really taken with the idea.

I couldn't use this recipe exactly though - lovely though it sounded - as it contained several anti-Scientist ingredients. Namely, the olives and the oats which formed part of the filler and also the coating. I also wanted to use up the carrots from our vegbox, but I loved the idea of using lentils and sun dried tomato, and also of roasting the veggies. So I tinkered a bit and was really pleased with the results. The flavours shone through, and the sausages weren't too heavy, as potato-based things can sometimes be. Olives would have been a great addition, but hey, what can you do. The Scientist liked them too - he did say that they could have been less carroty (I pointed out helpfully that they were carrot sausages), and suggested adding some sweet potato another time. I think that would be really good too. I roughly halved mangocheeks' recipe and made five sausages which was just right for us. I served them with some baked potato wedges, dusted with paprika, and also some steamed spring greens, all from the veg box.

Guest photograph: The Scientist took this great impromptu shot of our matching pair of pooks just as the sun was starting to go down last night. I didn't even know he knew how to work my camera :)

Carrot, coriander and sun dried tomato sausages - adapted from Mangocheeks
4 carrots, washed and cut into chunks
2 garlic cloves, left whole
1/4 cup red lentils
150ml stock
handful of fresh coriander, chopped
2 sundried tomatoes, soaked in hot water
flaxseed meal and chickpea flour, for thickening and coating - I used about 1 Tbsp of flaxseed meal and about 1/4 cup of chickpea flour.

Roast the carrots and garlic at 200C for about half an hour - until soft

Cook lentils in the stock until soft

Put veggies and lentils in a food processor, with the coriander, chopped sun dried tomatoes. coriander and seasoning, to taste. Blend until well combined.

Add the flaxseed meal and enough chickpea flour that you can mould it - it will still be soft and quite damp.

Form into sausages and roll in some more chickpea flour.

Cook gently in a frying pan sprayed with some oil spray, turning every so often.

Jaffa drizzle cake

2010-05-02T18:28:00.007+01:00

I've wanted to make this cake for ages - it was from a supplement to the Good Food magazine ages ago, but it's taken until now to find an opportunity. In the meantime Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes had blogged about how good it was, so its credentials had been raised even further. As usual, the opportunity was The Scientist going gaming, and it didn't take long to convince him it was a good bet (approximately as long as it took to say the word 'jaffa' and 'cake' in fact).

Frankly, this cake has everything going for it. It's about the easiest cake you could imagine - bung everything in a bowl, beat and bake. It's orangey. It has orange syrup on the top. AND it has dark chocolate on the top of the orange syrup. The recipe said it would keep for up to a week but I can't imagine any circumstances where it would need to. I asked The Scientist when he got back if it counted as a 'Gamers' Favourite' and he said a definite yes. Mind you, I haven't found a cake which hasn't been a Gamers' Favourite since I started that label. I love baking for these people!

I'm also featuring the other goodies I made for them: chocolate digestives. I loved the taste of the dough for these biscuits - they tasted exactly like the real thing. I baked them for slightly too long by mistake as I didn't hear the oven timer going off from upstairs, but covered in chocolate they were perfectly passable. And yes, they were Gamers' Favourites too :) BUT - I can't remember where I got the recipe from!! I'm rather upset about this as they were so nice, but if I turn it up again I will definitely blog it.

Jaffa drizzle lof (from BBC Good Food Magazine supplement): recipe here

Cricket teas are here again

2010-04-25T20:19:00.013+01:00

I posted last year about taking our turn on the tea rota for The Scientist's cricket club. This year we were picked for an early slot - in fact the first home match of the season (I think that the committee has noticed that I like baking :) ). I was really chuffed that an Australian lady left me a lovely comment saying how helpful my posts about making the teas had been last year, so I thought I'd do a quick update.

The Scientist was in charge of sandwiches again, following his production-line success last time. Luckily we read over my post again to remember what quantities of things we needed as we had completely forgotten that I'd noted that we'd only really needed three loaves of bread instead of four. Three turned out to be pretty much perfect. As far as the cakery went, we stuck with the scones, tray bake, cake formula. The Nigella scones I made last time are now are absolute stalwarts in our house, so I didn't hesitate to make a double quantity of those again. It made about 26 or 27 smallish but tall scones, and while there were some leftover when I left after tea, I'm sure they got snaffled after the match. We also did jam and whipped cream with them. Obviously. This is cricket after all.

The tray bake I did last time was a chocolate biscuit cake, and I actually didn't deviate too far from that either. I happened to have seen a souped-up malteser version on Ruth's kitchen experiments just a week or two ago, and liked the idea of the whole maltesers so much that I went for that. The chocolate melts off the maltesers so you're left with the crunchy middle bit, which looks rather good when cut, I think. The topping was white chocolate which I did find a bit sweet (also it went a bit gnarly as I melted it - I don't have a bowl suitable for a double-boiler, so I had to melt it in a pan). It did look good in cross-section and The Scientist gave it a thumbs up, but I think I'd probably just add maltesers to my regular recipe in future. Still, it was fun to try an alternative.

As to the cake, last time I made a big double-layer lemon drizzle. This time I gave The Scientist a shortlist and he picked a coconut lime cake (spot a citrus theme here?!). I was just a bit worried that a single loaf cake wouldn't feed as many as the big lemon one had, so since I had some coconut milk left over from making a curry, I also made a batch of the coconut lime cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The loaf cake (which I actually made in a square pan as my loaf tin is too small) was very good, and really easy to make - it didn't look the greatest but got a lot of good comments about its limeiness and moistness, but the cupcakes also had a good following too (I didn't mention the vegan bit - although I have to admit that the icing was a butter one). One person said they were the dampest cakes he'd ever had, and when I asked if that was good looked at me as though I was crazy. We got a lot of really nice comments about the whole tea, and The Scientist's egg sandwiches were particularly praised too :)

Coconut and lime cake

The whole process actually wasn't quite as fun as last year - we'd had to get up pretty early for a Sunday to get it all started, and since I was making an extra cake I wasn't able to help with the sandwich production line which had been the fun part last time. But it was still nice to try out a couple of new recipes, and I had a lovely cycle ride over to the ground to help out. Due to an unforeseen batting collapse I nearly arrived too late and the scones had to stay uncut - but I still got to hang around for the kudos :)

Coconut and lime cupcake. Apologies to the creators for their lack of style. I had two issues here: firstly the players were coming in for their tea as I iced; and secondly, the icing was very very sturdy and had to be dolloped on to the cake rather than piped nicely. Luckily cricketers are not fazed by these things (too busy eating)

Update on The Scientist's return: a narrow loss, but extra thanks for the tea!
Note to 2011 us: 600g of cheese is WAAAAAAAAY too much!

I don't like to post the recipe for the vegan coconut and lime cupcakes since the recipes from that book are all over the place. But if you google it you'll find it somewhere!

Coconut and lime cake - from Prima magazine
Serves 12
175g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
175g golden caster sugar
50g tenderised sweetened coconut [I used unsweetened dessicated]
3 eggs
150ml natural yogurt [I used low fat Greek]
finely grated zest and juice of two limes
175g butter, melted

To decorate:
1 lime
12g golden icing sugar [I used normal non-golden]
1 Tbsp tenderised sweetened coconut [or dessicated]

Preheat oven to Gas 4/180C. Grease and line a 2 lb loaf tin [I used a larger square one]. Put flour, baking powder, caster sugar and coconut into a processor. Pulse to combine.

Put eggs into a jug with yogurt, zest and juice from limes, and mix with a fork. Pour into dry ingredients with butter and pulse until just combined.

Pour into prepared tin and bake for 45 minutes until golden. Cool for 10 mins

To make icing: finely grate lime zest and peel away white pith [so you're left with a naked lime]. Put lime flesh into a mini processor and whizz till lump free. Add icing sugar. Pour over cake and sprinkle over finely grated lime zest and coconut.

Some favourite things

2010-04-24T10:18:00.017+01:00

I have been shamed into getting back over here after Caroline pointed out that she had been seeing the same peach and basil muffins for a very long time! I didn't want to do another post until I could respond to an award Johanna gave me though, and that involved actually getting round to photographing some stuff, so that gave me the boost to use the nice spring light this morning and get myself in gear.

The award is a 'Ten favourite things' one, which is pretty much as it sounds. Since number 1 is baking, number 2 is crafting, and number 3 is the British countryside I thought I would illustrate my list with some of my recent projects and some snaps of our recent trip to the Highlands of Scotland. So, here goes:

1. Baking

The gift I made for the friends whose wedding we were going to in the Highlands: a set of table mats and coasters using some of the Liberty fabric I bought in Stratford. I know it's not exactly baking-related, but I'm it will help to show off some tasty baked goods.

2. Crafting

Some of my favourite things illustrated in embroidery (using a new book called Sublime Stitching). I know, I should have ironed it. Feminism is about choosing whether or not to do housework in my book.

3. Walking in the British countryside (current top three places: The Lakes, Dartmoor, the Highlands)

View from the top of Cairn Gorm (we got the furnicular railway; our friends did it properly and walked)

4. Should be top really: my house and all who live in it :)

Really easy knitted bag - just go round and round and round on circular needles. I need to practise my intarsia stitches, but it was my first time trying

5. My lovely friends - especially the ones I made in Cambridge and now in Leamington - plus Eco Sis and Kiwi Sis who don't get any choice in the matter.

Knitted mice, who have started a colony on the arm of the sofa

5. English tea shops - tea, scones, toasted tea cakes - who needs fancy cupcakes?

Beautiful spring day - and snow-capped mountains in the distance. Our friends couldn't have asked for a better day for their wedding

6. Second hand bookshops (best one ever: in Chatham, Kent - can't remember the name, unfortunately, but it even kept the Sci Fi-loving Scientist happy)

7. Markets - of any description.

We may have visited a whisky distillery the morning of the wedding...

8. Pick 'n mixes - I have no idea why since I can't eat most of the things in pick 'n mix sweets, but I especially love the ones with dried fruits and wasabi covered peas and things. I even got excited about a salad leaves one in an Aussie supermarket once.

Sock toy: yes, he used to be a sock, now he's too cute to give away (though the Munchkin has one of his own, made from a pair of socks that got left behind after Kiwi Family came to visit)

9. Curling up on the sofa with The Scientist and a smattering of cats to watch whatever dvd series we're currently hooked on.

Scottish castle

10. History - makes me who I am. Enough said.

Thank you, Johanna, for thinking of me for this meme, and sorry it took me so long!!

Peach and basil muffins; do I sound like a gourmet baker yet?

2010-03-31T21:22:00.004+01:00

I'm a bit behind with my blog posts: I made these muffins about three weekends ago when I had some friends round for a sewing and alterations session. We altered precisely nada in the end, deciding that Lauren's coat was a perfect length already, and that Caroline's dress was too weirdly put together to change - but we did do a lot of bantering and muffin-eating. I'd made two types of muffin: some apple and cinnamon ones using slightly sweetened applesauce, and these peach and basil ones. I'll post the apple recipe another time - frankly the recipe is all the way in the kitchen and I'm quite comfy here on the sofa. And full of noodles after a post-work trip to Wagamama in Oxford.

Both types of muffin were nice and light, though the basil taste wasn't terribly pronounced in these ones. Next time I'll add more. The peaches were tinned, but in season I'd use fresh ones. The recipe was from a book called Muffins Galore, which is definitely my sort of book. It's divided into sections on chocolate, fruity, nut and spice, and savoury muffins, and there's even a separate section on special diets - low fat, low sugar. and gluten free. I have a lot of their other recipes bookmarked, which is good news for my commission of Easter muffins from The Scientist's sister. I'm still torn between lemon and poppyseed, apple streusel, or cinnamon swirl.... Oh gosh darn it, I just noticed that there is even one called Easter muffins, with some cute little eggs on the top. Back to the decision-making drawing board. Sigh. (Still, I'm guessing in the wider scheme of things this is not the worst dilemma I could have)

Peach and basil muffins, from Muffins Galore, by Catherine Atkinson
Makes 12 (I halved it and used the other half of the egg in the apple muffins)

2 ripe peaches, peeled, stoned and chopped into small dice - or the equivalent of well drained tinned peaches
2 Tbsp chopped fresh basil (or more)
3 Tbsp soft light brown sugar
Grated zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
300g self-raising flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
50g butter
80g granulated sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
150ml milk

1. Place the peaches in a bowl with the basil, brown sugar and lemon juice, and stir to mix. Set aside to stand for about 30 minutes.

2. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6. Grease a 12-cup muffin tin or line the cups with paper muffin cases.

3. Mix the flour and baking powder in a large bowl, then rub in the butter until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the granulated sugar and lemon zest.

4. In a separate bowl or jug, mix together the egg and milk. Add the wet ingredients to the dry alternately with the peaches and their juices, mixing briefly until just combined.

5. Spoon the mixture into the prepared muffin cups, dividing it equally. Bake for about 20 minutes or until risen and golden. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack. Serve warm or cold.

Penguin and mushroom salad

2010-03-28T19:23:00.007+01:00

I'm probably inviting all sorts of weird web search results with a title like that - what a world of difference a missing comma makes (as I said to my students this week in a seminar that rather worryingly had to turn into a grammar lesson on how to use an apostrophe). Needless to say, the penguin was only matched with the mushrooms in the course of writing this post, and neither was harmed in the process.

The mushroom salad was actually my entry to Lisa and Jacqueline's monthly No Croutons Required event, which was featuring chickpeas this month. Chickpeas are our favourite pulse (is that sad or with-the-moment?) so I really wanted to enter - but busy-ness got the better of me actually posting it before the deadline. I had paired my chickpeas with a marinated and grilled portobello mushroom, serving it with mixed leaves and sundried tomato, and with some home-made blackberry vinegar drizzled over the top. I would have added avocado too if I'd had any - I think that would be a nice additional texture. You can't really see the vinegar in the photo but it gave a nice fruity acidity. I kept the marinade simple as I didn't want the vinegar to get drowned - just a bit of shaosing wine, some balsamic vinegar and some garlic powder.

Inquisitive penguin

The penguin was another matter entirely. I started him quite a while ago but then didn't have any orange wool, so he sat rather sinisterly beakless and featureless for several weeks. Then I got some more wool and made him his beak, but didn't get round to attaching his wings or giving him any eyes. So when I finally got him all together I was pleasantly surprised at how cute he was. He's another character from my book of knitted toys, and the reason I was pushed to finally finish him, is because he's one of several ambassadors from my sewing group, to an exhibition of toys in Cardiff. One of our remote members lives there, so she will be taking them in, and hopefully seeing them in situ. They come back to their owners eventually, which I'm pleased about - I felt rather sad squishing him into the postbox to go off on his important errand.

Scholarly penguin

The Easter break starts at the end of this week so hopefully I will get a few more posts up - including an award from the lovely Johanna :)

Thoughtful penguin

'Just had to' brownies

2010-03-14T17:38:00.004Z

I'm sure that I'm not alone in bookmarking copious numbers of recipes from other food blogs. Occasionally I even get round to making some of them :) But sometimes a recipe pops up in your reader and you just have to make it right there and then. This happened to me twice in one day last week - once with Wendy's Baked Honey and Mustard Butterbeans which I only didn't make that night because I already had dinner planned (but looking at the picture again just now I still really really want to eat that dish right now!). The other was Alice Medrich's cocoa brownies which popped up on The Wednesday Chef. I don't know quite what lured me in about these brownies quite so irrevocably. It's an interesting recipe, using cocoa powder and no chocolate, and very little flour, but I suspect that it was the chocolatey photos that seduced me. I did go and make a half batch that very evening, and took most of them to my sewing group the next night.

I've made a lot of brownie recipes in the past, and what generally wins me over or puts me off is whether the darn things cook through properly. I like some barely cooked fudginess as much as the next person (who likes barely cooked fudginess - it must be said that this seems to really divide people, as evidenced by the two brownie-eaters in this house). But completely uncooked goop: not so much. These brownies did cook all the way through and firmed up nicely to cut into little pieces. Taste-wise they were very cocoa-ey - actually a bit more than I like, but The Scientist and my sewing buddies liked them. I'm just not too cocoa-y a sort of girl. So while I may not eat them myself again, I will happily make them for other people :)

Now, butterbeans, you say....?

Alice Medrich's cocoa brownie recipe at The Wednesday Chef

Chocolate mousse at Tiffany's

2010-03-04T19:11:00.005Z

Somehow I have never seen Breakfast at Tiffany's. I think that means I can never be truly sophisticated (as if!). But I felt better when it turned out that several of my friends hadn't seen it either, and it very quickly turned into an opportunity for a film night. I was delighted when they all rose to the occasion: Lauren turned up in a vintage suit and hot pink tights, Kate in a dotty tea dress, Caroline in her new skinny jeans, and Helen - was late. From round the corner. And she doesn't have a blog. But it was lovely to see her :) I wished I wasn't wearing my favourite fleecy skirt which is sadly a magnet for cat hair (but hang on - isn't there a cat in Breakfast at Tiffany's???).

Looking sultry and sophisticated - it's obviously seen Breakfast at Tiffany's

We actually had such a great time chatting and laughing that we didn't get round to watching the film. But I'd thought that with such a sophisticated lady as Audrey Hepburn in the room (even if we did keep her inside her dvd case) we needed a sophisticated dessert. These are coffee chocolate mousses from the Green and Black's cookbook. I served them in some vintage teacups which were my Grandad's and which I like to get out and use in careful company sometimes. I knew that the girls would appreciate them particularly.

The mousse wasn't as silky as the one in the cookbook picture, but it was actually a lot less full-on chocolatey rich as I'd expected (a good thing as far as I'm concerned). It also definitely tasted of coffee, but again without being overpowering (a good thing as far as both Kate and I were concerned!). I was so busy trying to photograph the pretty teacups that I didn't really pay much attention to the fact that the mousse looks a bit lumpy. Sigh - unsophisticates it and me both. It tasted good though - I'd definitely make it again, and with vegan marge instead of butter, it's dairy free.

Coffee and chocolate mousse (from the Green and Black's cookbook)
150g dark chocolate
2 Tbsp filter coffee powder
60g butter (or vegan marge)
3 eggs, separated
3 Tbsp caster sugar
cocoa powder, to decorate

Melt the broken up chocolate with the butter and coffee powder, stirring gently. Add the three egg yolks and stir until well combined.

Whisk the egg whites until soft peaks form, then add the caster sugar and continue whisking until stiff and shiny. Fold into the chocolate mixture and combine gently until there is no white showing anywhere. This took a little while and I thought it wouldn't combine, but it did.

Chill for at least 6 hours, and serve with powdered cocoa on the top. Don't put the mousse back in the fridge once it's been cocoa'd though, as it will meld in and spoil the look of the mousse. Or you can forget to do anything with the cocoa powder, like I did.

Not finishing, but getting there

2010-02-28T17:10:00.009Z

I didn't register how busy I've been recently until I got home from teaching on Thursday and realised how relieved I was it's the reading week next week. I've been feeling as though I haven't been getting anything done because I haven't finished any of my big tasks, but with a bit of time away from the university, I've reflected that I've actually made a lot of progress on them all. The Scientist has been away this weekend, and so I've made sure to spend time just relaxing. I've made meals that involved minimal cooking, I've watched girly films he'd hate (Sex and the City, and Chicago - last of the highbrow academics that I am :) ), I've done lots of crafting, and I spent a really nice few hours with my friend Jane in Bicester.

The flowered tin on the top shelf was The Scientist's grandmother's button box; the one under neath it was my great-grandmother's. And the wooden box on the lower shelf was a present from The Scientist, found in an antiques shop in Lewes

One of the other things I did was sort out my crafting bits. I've been looking out for a little cabinet to go at my end of the sofa for a while, as my space is being slowly taken over by an assortment of books, knitted mice, and half-finished projects. This weekend I was doing a volunteering session at the Recycle Warehouse in Leamington, and found what I hoped was just the thing. I brought it back and was delighted to discover that it fitted the space perfectly - and all my bits and pieces fitted it perfectly too. I really can't buy any more craft books now though :) I spent ages sorting out all my embroidery threads and now I feel all happy and organised.

Look! Escaped mice!

I also pounced on this lovely item at the Recycle Warehouse:

It had only just been brought in, and it's full of someone's old sewing things. I wonder who they were, and am a bit sad that no one in their family wanted it (although not that sad, since it meant I got to revel in it instead). It even goes with the cabinet, and for a hoarding social historian it was a perfect addition to my new-look sewing station.

While I'm on the topic, I can't say enough good things about the Recycle Warehouse. I volunteer there once a month or so, and it's full of weird and wonderful things that people don't want any more. I usually limit myself to picking up a few books but this time I got a bit carried away. It's just amazing what people bring in (and quite horrifying sometimes too) but I love seeing things find a new home when their old owners had decided they were junk. Someone brought in a little unit about the size of my sewing station this week, but the front pulled forward on a hinge to reveal a chute for coal. It didn't stick around for long - I wonder what the new owners will use it for? Anyway, if you're local I recommend taking a look. It's run by Action 21, who put all the profits back into their other local community and environmental initiatives. And if you want to feel good about yourself and get a discount on all the items that take your fancy, then become a volunteer!

And on the craft note, one of the members of my sewing group is having a felt give-away! Have a look at her blog, the Felt Fairy

The Recycle Warehouse is at the Princes Drive Recycling Centre, Leamington Spa, CV31 3PH

Stratford stash

2010-02-21T14:32:00.004Z

For the last couple of years The Scientist and I have given each other a weekend away for our Christmas present. That is to say, we have gone away together and each paid for the other's half. Sending each other away for separate weekends probably wouldn't be so romantic. Anyway, it was The Scientist's turn to organise it this year, and he kept it a complete secret until Monday, when he found me faffing about with a theatre seating plan and wondering if I could take up a special offer for King Lear at Stratford for us. He grinned a big grin and revealed that that was my surprise - a weekend in Stratford with tickets to King Lear - and all the Shakespeare houses. The weekend away was lovely enough, but RSC tickets AND all that extra thoughtful planning as well? He's in credit with the brownie points for some time. (And in this house brownie points can be exchanged for actual brownies :) ).

We've just come back and we had a lovely time. The play was amazing - neither of us had seen Lear before, but we both loved it. The hotel was nice, the room luxurious, Stratford cold but pretty (and not too crowded), and the Shakespeare houses we visited beautiful and interesting. And particularly informative given that I'm writing a lecture on homes and families in the past which was a bonus for me and no doubt quite tedious for The Scientist - but he kindly acted interested.

One of the best things about the weekend was not being in any sort of a rush. We ended up doing quite a bit of unexpected whimsical shopping as a result, and this is the stash I came back with. Most of it was from Book Depot, and a kitchen/furniture shop the name of which I forget (too busy ogling haberdashery :) ). The bookshop produced two craft books, some felt and some little handy notepads, and the other the lush selection of fabrics and a needle for knitting in the round to make this bag pattern some day when I've finished my other projects. Yes that is Liberty fabric - on sale and gorgeous. The brighter one is to make some table mats and coasters for a friend's wedding present (the red and the bias binding are to finish them), and the other is to make into a bag. And the pinky one is maybe to make some PJs - or alternatively to make something cute for The Munchkinette. I was really tempted by some fine Liberty cord as well but managed to restrain myself. The noodles were from a health food shop - it's not a good trip if you don't come back with some new noodles. In this case black rice and wakame, and green tea. I feel slightly guilty from all the shopping, but some of it's for presents or present ideas, and I know that my sewing buddies will laugh and sympathise anyway! The Scientist had a good shopping trip too - several books and a good sit-down to read the sports section while I fussed over notions.

Spinach and lentil soup revisited

2010-02-16T18:08:00.004Z

We half live off soup during the winter months and have lots of home-cooked favourites - but I don't eat soup out that often any more as it so often has butter, milk or cream in it. So when I saw that the theme of Jaqueline and Lisa's No Croutons Required this month was copycats I was at a bit of a loss. Definitely the best soup I've eaten in a cafe or restaurant in years though was the spinach and lentil soup from Earth Cafe in Manchester which I already blogged about. When I tried to recreate it that time I put mushrooms in it, and made a nice soup, but not that like the original. But I have to admit that I have a cheat now. The soup was so amazing that I emailed the cafe afterwards to tell them, and to ask if I might possibly be able to have the recipe. Lovely people that they are, they estimated a recipe based on four people and sent it back to me. I don't like to reproduce it directly since they were so nice as to pass it on, but the copycat theme made me think to make a variant on it this week, based on what we had in the house. It was pretty much as good as the one I had at the cafe if memory serves correctly - thick and earthy and pleasingly green. The original recipe called for quite a lot more lentils than I used, but I made mine to eat the next day and it thickened up lots. If you're eating it straight away I'd think about adding some more.

Earth Cafe redux spinach and lentil soup
1 onion, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
1 Tbsp tomato puree
1 Tbsp dried thyme
200g red lentils
1.2 litres stock
Big load of spinach, washed

Fry onion and carrots in a little oil until soft. Add tomato puree and stir. Add lentils, thyme and stock, and simmer until lentils are done. Add spinach and let it wilt like crazy. Blend. Yum.

Earth Cafe is at 16-20 Turner Street, Manchester

Chinese new year cupcakes

2010-02-12T17:37:00.006Z

We're not over the cupcake obsession round here yet. I don't know quite what's happened - it's not like cupcakes haven't been trendy for years. Anyway, these ones were for my craft group's first cooking meetup (we use 'craft' to mean anything we all like, from films to books to shopping to actual crafting :) ). Cie, of the famous blueberry nutella cake, was demonstrating how to make Chinese pork dumplings, and while I had to (unobtrusively, I hope) hold my nose while they were cooking, they were an amazing success. My lack of tolerance for the sight or smell of meat shouldn't detract from Cie and her production line's efforts anyway - a bit of pre-planning and work on her part and a choice of boiled or fried perfect little moon-shaped pillows of [skim over that part, la la la] were fairly rolling off the stove and into eager eaters' mouths.

My contribution to the feast was dessert. Naturally there is a back story to it, so you'd better get comfy - or skip straight to the recipe links. This back story starts in a Chinese restaurant in Pasadena, veers into a Chinese supermarket in Coventry, backtracks into a spring roll (sounds messy), and finally ended in cupcakes. The Pasadena part is from my visit to Tracy (who I am seeing tomorrow - yay!) a few years ago. She ordered us some bean paste dumplings for dessert at lunch on my last day and they were delicious (though we were probably too full to do them full justice!). The veer into Coventry happened a few months ago when we we there for some reason or other and stopped into a Chinese supermarket opportunistically for some shingshao wine. I spotted a tin of red bean paste, remembered those dumplings and picked it up. I regretted this somewhat after it had sat in the cupboard for quite a long time, but then I noticed a recipe for banana and red bean paste spring rolls in a cookbook I found in a charity shop. I'd thought about buying this book before so was very pleased to find it for 50p. I have to admit that I'm glad I didn't pay full price as there aren't too many veggie recipes and there's a limit to how many times you can sub more veggies or tofu for different types of meat. But this recipe was a winner and I made it to take to Vicki and Paul's house for dinner. You just get some filo (or spring roll wrappers), spray some oil over them, spread some paste over it, slice some banana over the top and fold up. They could be fried but we baked them because the oven was already on. They were amazing - the bean paste went all melty and nutella-like.

Bean paste added, ready for more batter over the top. Note Chinese new year red cupcake liners

But that wasn't the end of the bean paste and so when the Chinese new year meetup was announced I knew exactly what I was making, and even what recipe. For the cakes I went to Chockylit, and for the frosting, to Cupcake Project - my two favourite cupcake blogs. The cakes were just vanilla with bean paste in the middle (mine sank to the bottom as I think my cakes were a bit larger but shallower than Chockylit's). I reduced the sugar quite a lot as well as my paste was from a tin, whereas Chockylit had made her own and made it less sweet. I went down to a bit over half what was in the recipe. The frosting Chockylit used was a cream cheese one though and I'm trying to avoid using dairy in my baking now too, so I went for Stef's red bean paste buttercream, using vegan margarine again. She has a Chinese new year cupcake to go with it, but it involved glutinous rice flour which I wasn't sure I could get without more advanced planning.

Finished cupcakes. Note not at all seasonal blue spotty liners

I almost forgot about the cupcakes as we were having such a good natter after the dumplings, but luckily I remembered in time to share them out. Everyone said nice things about them, though I thought they were a bit dense when I tried one later, and The Scientist, while liking the cake, said they could do without the bean paste. What does he know?? We've agreed that vegan marge is no less disgusting than ordinary marge now though, so he should be less traumatised than last time to realise that's what he was eating :)

Whew - long story, good cupcakes, happy Chinese New Year.

Chinese new year cupcake recipe here (I halved it and then almost halved the sugar as well)

Chinese new year cupcake frosting here

Full O'Goodness burgers

2010-02-09T17:45:00.005Z

Look - a savoury thing! We do eat proper food in this house! I made these burgers to use up some tofu and because I just couldn't stay enthusiastic about scrambling it, which was my first thought. The Scientist had said he was game to try it, and lots of people seem to like it, but I just wasn't convinced. So instead, I partnered it with all the good things I could find in the fridge and the cupboard and made some healthy little protein-heavy burgers.

It's easier to describe what I did than write out a recipe as it was all a bit imprecise. I just got out the food processor and threw in: about half a block of firm tofu, pressed and then crumbled up; half of a big sweet potato, which I'd steamed in the microwave; about 1/2 tsp of tamari, and about 1 tsp of sweet miso; a small bunch of hijiki seaweed which I'd also cooked in water for a few minutes in the microwave and then chopped up; a handful of mixed pumpkin and sunflower seeds; and about a tablespoonful of wheatgerm. I blitzed it all up and then added wholemeal flour a bit at a time until it looked as if it was going to hold together. The mixture was very soft, but it held together fine, and I rolled each burger shape in a bit more flour and some wholemeal breadcrumbs for a coating. I dithered about how to cook them, and in the end baked them for about 20 minutes at about 175C. They weren't very crisp so I put them quickly under the grill for a few minutes which helped. We were running to a schedule or I would have left them a bit longer to crisp up some more.

The burgers were much softer than our usual various favourites. But they were nice - sweet from the potato and the miso, with some crunch from the seeds and breadcrumbs. I'd definitely make them again, perhaps playing around a bit with the proportions. We ate them in wholemeal wraps with salad, tomato relish and avocado. I always laugh at how The Scientist and I eat our wraps. I generally only have one so I put quite a bit of filling in, fold up one end, and then roll it up. It's messy but fun. The Scientist has more than one, so he puts less in each, and folds it up into a neat little envelope. I just think it's funny that I'm usually the anal - no, neat - one, but his dinner is so much neater. I had another leftover one for lunch the next day, with baked beans and a fried egg. And then I accidentally nuked another one into oblivion when microwaving it. I still have one left in the fridge - I must have made 8 or so.

I should probably add, in fairness to The Scientist, that I am neat with eating, but not at all neat with my crafting projects or shoes. He is very tolerant as long as all of my knitting stays over my end of the sofa and doesn't menace him or the cats with pointy needles. Seems fair enough, really.

Warning: high sugar post ahead

2010-02-05T17:23:00.006Z

'What do you mean, "warning"?', I imagine you asking. 'This blog has been full of nothing but sugar for months now'. Well this time I don't mean only that type of sugar. I made these double choc chip cookies this week to say thank you to some students for doing some research with me. But I deliberately made extras because I wanted a few to take to Eco Sis's yesterday. You see, after 5 years of Very Hard Work, Eco Sis has become a doctor. A genuine stethoscope-wearing, blood-drawing, diagnosing doctor (as opposed to my type, who swans around libraries and insists it's 'not my period' whenever I'm asked a question). She will hereafter be Dr Eco.

Scholarly cookies getting a bit of research in before goingg to meet their eater

And that's where the sugaryness comes in. Dr Eco: I am the proudest sister in the world. Not only have you worked incredibly hard for the last five years, but you've also been sunny and supportive at the same time; you've devoted huge amount of extra time to the things you think are important; and you've always made time for us to play board games, swap sewing tips, cook dinners, and go on outings. Plus you managed to travel around Europe, visit America several times, part-qualify as an American doctor as well - oh, and get married to the nicest Yank I know. Plus you are an excellent diagnostician who manages to cure at the same time. I have never been bothered by that collapsed lung or that rare psychosomatic disorder since you diagnosed me :) I've said it a million times over the last few years, but you and Kiwi Sis are my best friends and I'm going to miss you while you're away for the next few months.

I didn't say all that when I saw her yesterday, but I'd like to think that the cookies said a bit of it in chocolate form. They certainly said something good: both she and The Scientist have put them at the top of the double choc chip cookie tree immediately. And, as a little bonus (whisper it): they're dairy free. Not quite vegan as they still have eggs in them, but I subbed vegan marge for the butter and they were still delicious. Sorry I didn't make that entirely clear when I offered you one (three?), Scientist, but I thought you were probably pretending you hadn't seen the Pure spread box out on the worktop anyway :)

Medically-endorsed double chocolate chip cookies (adapted from my cookie calendar 2009)

1 cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
120g butter/marge/vegan marge
1/2 caster sugar
1/2 light brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
170g choc chips of your choice (or a mix of types)

Preheat the oven to 160C. Sift together the flour, cocoa, bicarb, baking powder and salt. Set aside. Beat the butter and sugar until smooth and creamy, and beat in the egg and vanilla. Add the flour mixture and mix until almost blended. Add the choc chips and mix.

Scoop the dough onto a baking sheet [the instructions said 5cm apart but I didn't find they spread too much]. Bake 12-14 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Made about 2 dozen

Caroline's blueberry nutella cake

2010-01-30T12:12:00.009Z

Our house smells divine just now. It's a shame this isn't a smell-a-blog. We are having a gloriously lazy morning which has consisted of a lie-in, breakfast under the duvet on the sofa, an episode of Battlestar Galactica under said duvet (Starbuck a man in the original??? I don't think so), some knitting - and a little cake baking. Hence the magnificent smell.

Mmmnn, gooey nutella

Despite recent trends on this blog we do actually eat savoury food round here too, but this is a cake to take to Kiwi Family later today, sort of in honour of Kiwi Sis's birthday a few weeks ago, which is sort of her 30th because we all missed her real 30th last year when they were still in New Zealand. For once I had no dithering at all over what to make because I was itching for an excuse to make my new friend Caroline's blueberry nutella cake. She made it for one of our craft groups and it was just the best cake ever. My commitment to this cake only increased when what should Kiwi Sis give me as part of a lovely Xmas hamper, but some home-made blueberry jam? Serendipity spoke.

So far the cakes are made and cooling, but I plan to update this with photos before we leave to head up to Kiwi Family. I made the mixture in my food processor for the first time ever as the butter hadn't softened as much as I'd hoped and I needed some more welly. It was quite fun. I also added a splash of kettle-hot water as my cocoa mix was a bit claggy, and this works well in one of our family chocolate cakes. And I had to grease but not line the tins because I was out of baking paper, so we will have to see how amenable the cake is to being turned out. The mixture was a bit thicker than I expected as Caroline's cake was really moist (that word again!), but I decided to go with it and tinker next time.

Update: the cake was a winner! I sandwiched it together with Kiwi Sis's jam, and then spread a whole (small) pot of nutella over the top and sides. The Munchkin and Munchkinette recognised my cake tin as soon as we arrived (the Munchkin actually asked in advance what I'd be bringing, but had already been excited that we were coming to stay, so I'm sure this wasn't the only reason he was looking forward to seeing us!), and were pretty impressed with the sight of so much chocolate. I don't think the cake was quite as moist as Caroline's, but I don't think anything with that much chocolate spread on it can ever be a hardship to eat. I haven't tried making any of the vegan versions of nutella (there's one in V-con, and another here, for example), but that plus vegan marge and an egg replacer could make for an excellent alternative version...
Cai's blueberry nutella cake recipe is here

New best carrot cake

2010-01-25T19:09:00.004Z

I've been in the market for a new carrot cake recipe for a while. I used to have a great standby one from a leaflet I picked up at a supermarket checkout one time, but I haven't made it for a few years, as it turned out a bit gooey a few times on the trot. Personally I quite like gooey, within reason, but The Scientist isn't keen, and I've got to admit that veering that close to uncooked egg doesn't thrill me. I tried a Delia recipe for him to take gaming a year or so ago, but also had problems with cooking it through (as well as a whole manner of other problems I don't wish to revisit any time soon). This time I wanted to try one with pineapple in it too, after The Scientist tried a good one in a cafe. It just so happened that this vague yen coincided with our Vet Friends giving me not one, but two, great cookbooks for my Christmas present. The first was James Martin's dessert cookbook, which does feature a very fancy looking carrot cake, complete with caramelised baby carrots on the top - but no pineapple. The other was Simon Rimmer's new book, which coincidentally DOES have a carrot cake with pineapple.

Simon Rimmer is the chef at Green's restaurant in Didsbury, Manchester, which I've never been to, but have heard very good things about. I don't think it's particularly known for its desserts, but if this cake is anything to go by, it should be. For one thing, it avoided the under-cooking thing. In fact it cooked perfectly in the time it was supposed to. I'm sure the fact that you make two cakes to sandwich together rather than one large one helped, but still, I like a chef whose cakes bake how they're supposed to. It was also moist (I'm sure I use this word to describe all my favourite cakes - see the comment above on gooeyness, I suppose. I just asked The Scientist how he'd describe it, and he said succulent, which sounds much nicer). It was also hefty as a whole, but the cake itself was quite light. Am I making any sense? Just go and make it. And make the icing, too. It's not remotely vegan, but the people I was making it for aren't remotely vegan either, and they loved it. I've started a new label for 'gamers' favourites', so I can find the most requested treats for The Scientist's gaming weekends again easily. This one's definitely up there.

And since I mentioned it, the James Martin book is really good too - lots of tips on how to do cheffy decorating things and some lovely looking recipes. I'm hoping to try some of them very soon :)

Simon Rimmer's does as it says on the baking instructions carrot cake (from The Seasoned Vegetarian)

Feeds 10 (or 8 gamers)

300g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarb of soda
1 tsp salt
175g light muscovado sugar
50g walnuts [I left these out as one of the gamers has a nut allergy]
227g can pineapple, drained and finely chopped
3 eggs
handful of sultanas [I left these out too as one of the other gamers doesn't like dried fruit. Picky lot aren't they?]
2 soft bananas, mashed
175g carrots, grated [this was about two]
175ml corn oil [I used vegetable]

Soft cheese icing
100g butter, softened
200g icing sugar, sifted
100g cream cheese
1 vanilla pod, split lengthways
ground cinnamon, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 160C/Gas 3. Prepare two greased and lined 20cm sandwich tins

Sift the flour, baking powder and bicarb of soda together into a large bowl, then add the rest of the cake ingredients and mix well. Divide the mixture between the tins.

Bake the cake for 30-35 minutes, or until risen and firm to the touch

Leave to cool for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and allow to cool completely before icing

For the cream cheese icing, beat together the butter, sugar and cream cheese, then scrape in the seeds from the vanilla pod. Spread half the icing on top of one cake, then place the other cake on top and spread with the remaining icing. Dust lightly with cinnamon.

Banana custard cupcakes

2010-01-08T20:32:00.006Z

Remember I said I'd made three types of cupcakes for Science Nephew's birthday party at the end of November? Well here, at last, is the third. I wanted something a bit special - a little pzazz, a little buffet-table presence, a little cry of 'photograph me' - so after the usual dithering, I selected a banana custard cupcake. After all, it was for a child's birthday party, and what child doesn't like bananas and custard? I even love the WORDS banana and custard.

I've made banana muffins before, but I wanted something more like a banana sponge this time. Handily, there was a recipe that looked just right on my cupcake calendar, so I used that as my base, and it did indeed turn out to be just as I'd hoped. In a perfect world of course I would have made my own custard but this didn't seem the time, so I scooped out a hollow in the middle of each cake, and spooned in some cooled instant custard. The scooped out bit was put back on top and the whole was adorned with squirty cream, and a cherry on the top. It looked just as fun as I'd hoped. As with the others, I took the components along to the party separately and assembled them there. I left the cream until the last minute, but it did still subside a bit, and was certainly pretty messy. In a misguided attempt at not weighing everyone down too much I'd gone for light cream, and I think it was just too light. Another time I'd whip some normal cream.

I think the scale of the cupcakes made them a bit daunting, but once people got stuck in I got some nice compliments (and Science Nephew's other grandma asked for the recipe :) ) The Scientist, however, came up with the best feedback: make bigger cupcakes, fill the middle with jelly AND custard, and make - a trifle cupcake! Inspired or what? Its time will come. It was the leftover squirty cream which made decorating his cupcake SO much fun for the Munchkin the next day. He truly couldn't believe he was allowed to do it and eat the results as well. It's fun being an aunt :)

Banana custard cupcakes

Cupcakes (recipe from my 2009 cupcake calendar - I imagine it has been superseded by this one)
1 cup (2 sticks, 240g) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup caster sugar
2 cups self raising flour
4 eggs
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 cup (about 2 large) mashed bananas

Preheat the oven to 175C. Prepare muffin liners or tins.

Combine the utter, sugar, flour, eggs and nutmeg in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer until smooth - about 2-3 minutes. Stir in the mashed bananas until well combined. Spoon the batter into the cupcake liners. Bake for 20 minutes. Cool on a rack

To assemble
Make up instant custard and leave it to cool
Scoop out a cone from the middle of each cupcake, using a knife
Pour or spoon some custard into each cake - I put in enough to make it level with the top of the cake
Gently place the removed bit of cake back on top
Go crazy with the squirty cream
Put a cherry on top

Persimmon chutney delight

2010-01-08T11:37:00.003Z

How well I remember the first time I met a persimmon. We were in Fremantle market near Perth a few years ago. I had drawn us over to the fruit and veg stands, where lots of the traders had examples of their wares for tasting. I was a bit suspicious when one held out a slice of what looked like very firm tomato - I thought I was quite well-up on exotic fruits from years of celebrating the Jewish harvest festival as a child, but I didn't recognise this. I tried it anyway - and was sold. This was no tomato (though I love tomatoes). Instead it was a supremely sweet-yet-firm nugget of delight, and it was a persimmon. When we got home I realised that you can get them in the supermarkets here, but for at least half their season they are imported from South Africa. For the other half, however, they come from Israel, and I'm prepared to extend my definition of European that far (Eurovision, people - they're in Eurovision). So for those few months I gorge on these little delights, and try not to think about how much sugar I must be ingesting. A few weeks ago I outdid even myself, however, as I bought a whole bag for a pound from Coventry market, and even I don't allow myself to eat that many in quick succession. They were starting to look a bit sorry for themselves after a week or so, and I decided I'd better find another use for them.*

I've been engaged in a long-term project to clear and defrost the freezer so I didn't want to bake any breads or cookies that would end up in there. Instead I was inspired by two very nice fruit chutneys I've eaten over the last few weeks, and found this recipe instead. The reviews were very useful, so I made the following changes:
I halved everything EXCEPT the fruit. I had so much of it, and wanted it to be really fruity, so I used four or possibly even five smallish very ripe persimmons.
I used much less than half of the vinegar as comments said that it was very vinegary. I wanted quite a loose chutney so I added a little bit more water towards the end, and mine was neither too vinegary nor too dry.
I used half cider vinegar and half white wine vinegar because I didn't have enough cider vinegar.

The resulting chutney had a good spicy kick to it, though you could dial the heat up or down according to preferences. I filled one average sized jar from my batch, which was just right. I have a bit of a tendency to hoard chutneys, and now that I hardly eat cheese I don't use it very much! I'm looking forward to trying this one with salads and bread though, and I might even let The Scientist try it. If he buys me some more persimmons.

A couple more pertinent persimmon facts: there are two types of persimmon, one of which is wonderful, but the other of which is astringent and disgusting. There is no mistaking whether you have the right one! The right one is small and tomato shaped, although it also depends on how ripe they are. The other is bigger and more bulbous (see a handy illustrated guide from another persimmon lover here). Secondly, persimmons are also called sharon fruits, but I think persimmon is prettier. Thirdly, my aunt told me you shouldn't eat more than one per day, but I have no idea why. Fourthly, if you cut the top off and put one in the freezer for a few hours, they make a delicious little sorbet you can eat with a spoon. Versatile AND pretty, eh? But I can't show you how pretty because I'd eaten all the others by the time I made the chutney :)

* why didn't The Scientist help me out? Well, to be honest, I don't even know if he likes them as they are so firmly designated as mine. He could try one if he wanted, honest. Well, as long as I had at least six more in the bowl.

Crafty Christmas cont'd

2010-01-03T14:22:00.005Z

I hope you all had a fun festive season. We did - lots of eating, relaxing and spending time together. I will miss The Scientist when he goes off to work tomorrow :(

We were given some lovely presents by friends and family. Here are a few more of the home-made items we gave in return:

Knitted hat and gloves for Eco Sis

Woolly bear, for Vet Grub

Ever-growing litter of pigs - so cute I keep making more, but I suspect they will be joining Kiwi Family's household at some stage

As you can see, knitting is the new patchwork in our house, much to Mausel's delight (it's a game, a game!). The bear and the pigs, as well as a whole lot of stripy mice I haven't photographed yet, are from this brilliant book. The patterns vary in difficulty but there's a glossary of knitting techniques, and most of the toys are made in only a few pieces. I'd definitely recommend it. I made an elephant too but he came out a bit droopy so I've unravelled him and am going to try again using smaller needles.

Christmas crafts

2009-12-24T12:20:00.007Z

The festive season is a time when foody bloggers everywhere are cracking out the sugar, chocolate, cream and cranberries to combine in ingenious ways to express their love for friends and family. For me, this year's little home-made offerings have mainly involved wool and fabric rather than edibles. Here's a selection which speak for themselves:

Felt and button advent calendar, one made for the Munchkin and Munchkinette, and one for Science Nephew

Jewellery case made for a secret santa with my new crafting buddies- we each provided materials and selected a pack for each other to make something from

Leopard and Snow Leopard costumes for the Munchkin and Munchkinette (pictured). I want one too!

And lastly, one which I forgot to photograph, but which its new owner fortunately did - this little gift which went to the lovely Johanna for her daughter Sylvia. I was sad not to be able to fit in a trip to see them when they were in Scotland last month, but you can read all about their holidays at Johanna's blog.

There are more coming, but not yet delivered to their recipients! In the meantime, have a happy festive season everyone! xx

BIrthday cupcakes

2009-12-20T16:58:00.005Z

I mainly write about my family on this blog, but The Scientist has a munchkin nephew of his own, too, and a couple of weekends ago we went to his first birthday party. His mum had asked if I'd do some baking (actually I think I'd asked her if I could do some baking!), so I went a little crazy with three types of cupcakes. I've noticed that even quite simple cupcakes are often the quickest things to disappear at party buffets, especially if they have pretty frosting, and I wanted to do my nephew proud.

These two types pictured here are both from the Magnolia Bakery vanilla cupcake recipe. I'm not much up on posh bakeries, but I think that this is the one popularised by Sex and the City. Hey, if it's good enough for Carrie it's good enough for Science Nephew. I found the recipe here, but added cocoa powder to half the batter to make half vanilla and half chocolate. The recipe was nice and easy, but I was interested to see that it uses both plain and self-raising flour. I don't know it that was the reason but the cupcakes were beautifully light and moist. I frosted them with a simple buttercream, again, half vanilla and half chocolate. And then I got a bit carried away and tinted half of the vanilla frosting pink just for the hell of it. A bit of sprinkling with hundreds and thousands finished them off.

We had to travel for a couple of hours to get to the party, so I took the cakes un-iced, and decanted the frostings into separate plastic containers, kept cool with an ice block. When we arrived I set up a little production line in the village hall kitchen, piping the icing onto some, and spreading it on to others. I did sustain a bit of a cartoon comedy cupcake injury half way through, when I stuck my finger into the plastic tip of the frosting bag to push out the last of the icing so I could wash it - and got my finger stuck! The little prongs on the tip jabbed into my finger so I couldn't pull it out again, and I had visions of having to go to hospital to have my domestic injury fixed. Luckily a bit of twisting and pulling, and running my finger under the cold tap so I couldn't feel it, and I got myself out again, and only a bandaged finger testified to my incompetence!

I was really pleased with my pretty cupcakes and they disappeared very quickly. The impact on the kiddy guests was a bit of a shock - the volume and energy levels soared immediately and I may have to look into a 'come-down cupcake' in future! The Munchkin and the Munchkinette got to sample one each when they visited us the next day, and although the Munchkin seemed to get as much on his face as in his mouth, they both loved them, and especially helping to decorate their own. Kiwi Sis is bringing them up to be good little baker-helpers :)

Just by way of comparison, a week or two later I made some more cupcakes to send to a friend, and this time I tried the Hummingbird bakery's recipe. It was quite similar to the other one, but came out quite a bit denser. I don't know if it's because I halved it, and got the quantity of liquid a bit out, but the batter was definitely less runny. I liked the Magnolia ones better but my friend liked her gift very much, and The Scientist thought that they tasted like doughnut in cupcake form. I'm keen to make them again and put some jam in the middle to test this further! Oh, and in looking up how best to post the second batch, I came across this very funny post. Needless to say, I didn't send them off in a jiffy bag :)

Thank you for all the nice comments while I've been offline. Now that teaching is over for Christmas I hope to get back to the blog a bit more.

Magnolia bakery cupcake recipe here

Lemon and lime meringue-less pie

2009-09-22T19:53:00.009+01:00

It was The Scientist's birthday on Monday. I asked him a few days beforehand what he would like for a birthday cake, but it was a fairly academic question - I knew the answer would be lemon meringue pie. He surprised me though - he said lemon and lime meringue pie. I ran a few recipes by him and he picked a totally decadent one by Rosemary Shrager - the deputy head on one of the few reality tv shows we watch, Ladette to Lady. She teaches cooking at the finishing school on the programme and I like it that she's an old-fashioned sort of Home Economics teacher like the ones I had at school. I did HE for years but the only dish I remember making was lasagne, and that's because I had forgotten to bring any lasagne sheets and had to go round borrowing one spare from all of my classmates. I must have learnt something else though because those classes are how I know how to make a roux sauce - but I wasn't sorry to drop it, and the teacher didn't seem particularly sorry to see me go either. Must have been the lasagne melt-down.

Rosemary Shrager's pie was amazingly decadent. A ton of eggs, butter, cream (yes cream - I've never seen that in a meringue pie filling before), and caramelised sugar in the meringue. I was particularly pleased with the pastry, which I made from a recipe in my standby Women's Institute cookbook (the recipe said to use shortcrust pastry but I went for an enriched flan pastry). The middle layer was fairly involved, partly because it involved a lot of zesting and juicing - thank heavens for the juicer attachment on my food processor, but after that it was straightforward. Getting it into the baked pastry case on the other hand - it took two of us and a lot of careful lowering and tilting but we got it in the oven intact. So far, so good.

The meringue, on the other hand, was a real challenge. The recipe said to heat the sugar gently until it dissolved. This really foxed me as 'dissolved' surely meant that it should be in water? After some discussion we decided that it was ok as long as she meant 'melted', but it took mine an age to melt completely and I ended up turning the heat up quite high. I kept stirring and stirring, but in the time it took to whisk the egg whites (during which time the sugar was off the heat) it burned and made the meringue mix taste just awful. By this time I was very fed up and we decided to abandon the top layer for now. Lemon and lime pie it was.

Despite this setback it was a really successful dessert. I don't like lemon meringue pie but it's largely because I think that the meringue layer is pointless. Without it it was a lovely, rich, soft tart, with soft and decadent pastry. The citrus taste was gorgeous - really tangy without being overpowering (the cream, I suppose). I confined myself to licking the knife - the old 'if it's not mine it doesn't contravene my (no dairy) dietary rules' rubbish, though the knife probably didn't strictly need licking as often as all that :) The Scientist loved it, which is just as well as our lunch guests turned out not to like lemon pie! Luckily I'd made some krispie banana muffins as well, as they had a young child with them. The Scientist enjoyed the naked pie so much that he didn't even request a meringue layer the next day and I think it will go down as the new special occasion lemon dessert. I've tried freezing half of it since we had so much, and The Scientist has a plan to try eating it frozen. I'll keep you posted :)

Rosemary Shrager's lemon and lime (not) meringue pie: recipe here

Polenta plum cake

2009-09-17T20:11:00.007+01:00

I like to play a game if I'm in a cafe or at a farmers' market - which cake would I have if I were going to have a piece of cake? I get all of the pleasure of selecting without the worry of it not living up to its looks. If The Scientist is with me I like to play which cake would he pick if he were going to have a piece of cake too. This is risky as he's more likely to actually buy some cake, which can on the one hand make me feel all happy that I know him so well if he goes for my guess - but then on the other leave me feeling bewildered, disorientated and wondering what's happened to my carrot cake and apple tart loving boyfriend when he occasionally veers off trend and pick something completely unexpected. There's a risky world of cafes and relationships out there.

Of course for me it's not usually so much which cake would I buy, as which cake would I like to go home and make myself. There's a stall at our farmers' market which often has golden, fruity little polenta cakes in fancy wrappers which always catch my eye. I've searched for recipes which look similar - sometimes they're polenta cakes, and sometimes yogurty cakes, sometimes with ground almonds and sometimes not. I now have so many possibilities bookmarked that I've never actually tried any of them, but last week I happened to have bought some more polenta; I happened to have acquired some plums; and I happened to have stumbled on a promising-looking recipe for grape polenta cake on Lucillian Delights.

The plums were from the tree in Munchkin Gramps' garden (the same one which gifted me the fruit for a plum tart last year). They've had another good year but I only had very limited carrying capacity when I was up there last week and a shopping trip with Kiwi Sis to nurse them through (I LOVE it that Kiwi Family are now characters on this blog instead of the intended audience, btw). I brought home more than enough to top a small cake though, and I only had a small cake in mind, to bring out as a lunch dessert for Scientist Sister and her husband when they popped in last weekend.

The cake was unlike anything I've made before. The polenta is steeped with warm flavoured milk and then mixed with eggs - that's it. The fruit goes on the top and the whole thing is baked. I made it as a little break from a work task on Friday, but it was so simple that steeping apart it was all over in the time I could have made a cup of tea. I baked through nicely and looked very promising.

When we came to eat it, I have to admit that I was disappointed. It was quite dry, and not very sweet at all. I thought it was disturbingly like a savoury baked polenta with fruit on the top and really needed either some sweetener in the batter, or a nice fruity sauce. The Scientist drizzled some maple syrup on his which he said improved it, and everyone else did seem to like it more than me - or they said they did anyway :) So I have yet to find my polenta cake nirvana. I think that next time I will try one with some ground almond or other flour to lighten up the polenta. In the meantime I will go back to playing my dangerous cake games in the local cafe.

Thank you to Munchkin Gramps and Grandma S for the plums, and Kiwi Sis for a lovely afternoon of sisterly bonding, and for spending more money than me on our shopping trip :)

Plum polenta cake (based on a half sized version of the grape polenta cake at Lucillian Delights)
125 ml milk
125g polenta
1 1/2 - 2 Tbsp sugar (or more - see above)
1-1 1/2 Tbsp butter
the peel of half a lemon
dash of salt
2 eggs
plums for the topping

Bring the milk to the boil with the butter and the lemon peel. Mix the polenta with the sugar and salt, and then pour on the hot milk. Mix well and leave for at least 30 minutes at room temperature. Preheat the oven to 200C.

Remove the lemon peel, add the eggs and mix well. Pour mixture into a cake tin (I used a small one - perhaps 5 inches across). Place sliced plums on the top and bake for 35 to 40 minutes.

I'd recommend serving this with some fruity sauce or syrup, and dusting with icing sugar.

Cooking Italian

2009-09-12T18:33:00.007+01:00

A couple of weekends ago Munchkin Granny and I did an Italian vegetarian cookery course at the Vegetarian Society's Cordon Vert Cookery School. I used to see adverts for this school in the back of the old vegetarian cooking magazines which disappeared years ago, and always thought that you must have to be terribly well-off and serious about cooking to go on one. Well, roll forwards fifteen years, and there were MG and I, aprons on, hair tied back, sitting round a shiny metal table in the pro kitchen at the Cordon Vert (and for the record, we're neither terribly well-off nor serious cooks). We'd picked an Italian day, partly because the date worked out well, but partly because we both really like Italian food. We had an introductory talk from the tutor, and then between the group of about 9, cooked a three-course meal which we all shared, family style, at the end of the day. We all made pasta, which I've made before at home, but never so successfully, and divided the other dishes up between us. MG made a lemon risotto cake, and I did a tomato sauce for the pasta, and a Mediterranean chickpea salad. Other dishes included stuffed peppers, baked fennel in cream, focaccia. spicy courgettes, and for dessert, a really yummy marinated boozy orange dish with chocolate vegan ice cream and biscotti. The whole meal was really lovely and we all left weighed down with the amount of food we'd eaten, and full of enthusiasm to get back to our own kitchens.

I haven't tried making pasta again since then, but I was tempted to revisit the chickpea salad. On the day of the course I had made it exactly as the recipe stated, but at home I fiddled around a little. My first substitution was to replace celery with red pepper (neither of us likes celery), and the second was to reduce the oil in the dressing from 4 tablespoons to 1. To be honest, I think that the best would be somewhere between 2 and 4. The 4 Tbsp version did coat the salad more satisfyingly than the reduced oil one, although you still got the zingy flavours of capers, lemon and garlic which are sauted in it in my version. I suppose in my one the dressing was more like a garnish, but either way, the flavours in the dressing are what make the main salad ingredients really come together and stand out. I made it for lunch when Scientist Sister and family popped by and it was a hit with everyone. I had to serve the olives on the side to appease The Scientist's palate, but a little self-assembly never hurt anyone.

I'm sending this Italian salad to Jacqueline and Lisa for this month's round of No Croutons Required, which has 'Mediterranean' as its theme.

Italian Chickpea Salad (adapted from the Cordon Vert School's Italian workshop)
Serves 4

1 Tbsp olive oil (or more)
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 Tbsp capers, drained and chopped
1 Tbsp parsley, finely chopped
1/2 Tbsp dried red chilli flakes
1 lemon, grated rind and juice
1 can chickpeas, drained
6 sundried tomatoes, rehydrated (or from a jar)
half a pepper, chopped small
sliced green olives, to taste
1 bag mixed salad leaves, including rocket

1. Heat the oil in a small pan, adding the garlic, capers, parsley, chillies and grated lemon rind. Saute for 2 minutes.

2. Place the chickpeas, sundried tomatoes, pepper and olives in a bowl. Pour the garlic mixture and 1 Tbsp lemon juice over them.

3. Arrange the salad leaves in a serving bowl and add the chickpea salad.

Buckwheat crepes - flipping the French way

2009-09-08T18:53:00.004+01:00

This title is a blatant attempt to take away from the embarrassingly poor quality of the photos of my crepes. What can I say - the light is fading in the evenings and I was very hungry and keen to get on with my dinner. But these crepes were really nice and so I wanted to post about them anyway.

I've been cooking with wholegrains for some time, but I haven't really experimented with wholegrain flours. This is largely because I don't want to let myself buy even more bags of sundries than I already have - the staples storecupboard has recently become even more of a hazard as I discovered several new types of noodles (and I can't resist a new noodle). However, I do have a coffee grinder, and I have discovered that it is extremely easy to grind the grain into the flour. This is how I made the chickpea flour I used in the sweet potato falafel I made a while back, and it's also great for grinding linseeds/flaxseeds. This time it ground me some buckwheat flour with no problems at all.

I was interested in buckwheat flour because it's the basis of traditional French savoury crepes, or galettes. It's also very nutritious, according to this website entry, plus it's gluten free. After a bit of searching about I found a recipe that used almost all buckwheat flour, plus a little plain flour (the recipe is actually gluten free, so it uses GF flour, though I imagine that any other would work just as well). It's from the brilliantly titled 'Book of Yum' blog - I do like a good name to go with a good recipe. I halved it since The Scientist doesn't like savoury crepes, and it made me four good-sized ones. The first night I filled it with The Scientist's best ever bean chilli (so smoky - unfortunately he says he can't remember what he did differently from usual so I'm hoping that intuition will lead him down the same path next time. I would happily have eaten this chilli every night for about a month it was so good). The second time I was eating alone while the best beloved was out playing his last cricket match of the season (65 not out and a catch - not a bad way to end), and I made a mushroom and leek filling with the 'cheezy sauce' from Veganomicon. Both tasted great and photographed badly. But don't let that put you off. I will definitely be making these again as I particularly liked the nutty wholesome taste of the buckwheat. But I didn't flip them properly, I have to admit - just a gentle little blip with a spatula to turn them over.

Not only did I have a jolly tasty supper while The Scientist was out batting like crazy, but his return also brought more excitement. One of the team asked him if I would like to make a dessert for 20 people for the cricket club quiz next month. Needless to say I am already building up excitement levels - I'm currently favouring a tart (lemon or chocolate - or both), or a big pile of cupcakes. Any thoughts?

Buckwheat crepe recipe (gluten free - and there is also a vegan option on the same blog): here

Oaty banana bars - new snack of choice

2009-09-04T19:14:00.004+01:00

I've been trying to think of some new healthy snacks recently, and fancied trying out some variation on a seedy munchy bar. Seeds are a good way to get some good oils into my snacks since I don't like nuts, and I thought that oats and bananas would be a good way to keep them moist, sweet and substantial enough to see me through an afternoon of battling with data not meant for twenty-first-century analysis (standardised names? Pah. Dates which correspond with the modern calendar? Piffle. Entries obscured by 18th century dirt? A mere trifle).

You get the picture; let's get back to the bananas.

I searched around for recipes that featured my main ingredients and came upon a site called Patty Cakes - a blog by a Canadian baker who features lots of healthy recipes which are suited to various special diets as well. This was a recipe called Banana Booty Bars which immediately tickled my fancy, and even more so when I noticed that Patty had included a variation which used coconut oil. I had bought some of this on the Norse Goddess's recommendation, and it's also favoured by one of my favourite bloggers, Heidi of 101 Cookbooks and Super Natural Cooking. It's unrefined, which I like, and it's also solid at room temperature which is sort of fun. If you use the oil they're vegan, and they're also wheat-free. I omitted the walnuts and used sunflower seeds instead, and raisins instead of the dates. I did add some grated orange peel, but decided to try them without choc chips this time. So many variations!

The bars were really delicious. I was probably quite light-handed with the sugar as I wanted them to be fruity-sweet, and it was just the right balance. They didn't taste particularly of coconut but it was nice to know that the fat was a relatively healthy one. The raisins and bananas together kept them really moist, while the oats and seeds lent them bulk and crunch. I made half a batch in a standard loaf tin, so they were quite thick. They were still lovely two days later, and I've put the rest in the freezer to snack on when the data get particularly obstructive. They're great with a cup of tea, and they travel well, too (I ate one on the train home and didn't even get crumbs on my laptop. Though it might explain why I seemed to have an oat stuck under my Ctrl key most of the morning....) Go on, make these now, and go and have a look at Patty's other great recipes too!

Banana Booty Bars (vegan and wheat free): recipe here

New family baker - so proud :)

2009-09-02T18:33:00.002+01:00

We have a new creative baker in the family! Look at what Junior Sis made to welcome home Kiwi Family. Everyone's been so busy marvelling over how it looks that I completely forgot to ask how it tasted, but I'm sure it went down a treat. Junior Sis should be eating celebratory cake herself after doing ama*a*zingly well in her GCSEs!

Reunion

2009-09-01T18:16:00.004+01:00

This week we went on a special trip. We got in our car one morning, and we drove down the motorway for a long-awaited reunion. And at the other end was a small person we'd never met before, and a wrapped up sleeping slightly bigger person with jet lag. And there was a Munchkin Granny with a very big smile on her face, and a long-missed sister and brother-in-law.

Yes, Kiwi Family are home.

It was strangely normal to see them - I hadn't been sure if I'd blub all over the doorstep or greet them as though we only saw them two days ago. In the event, no tissues were necessary, despite there being a whole new member of the family, and the Munchkin now being a proper talking, laughing, joking little boy. We were just so pleased that they're going to be around from now on that we picked up straight where we left off.

So what does this mean for Munchkin Mail? Well, although its original purpose is now defunct, it has become other things, and so I think I'm going to carry on with it anyway. It might not be keeping in touch with a Munchkin and his growing family any more, but I've come to value it as a way of linking up with lots of other far-flung people, from Vancouver, to Pasadena and Melbourne, to Cambridge, Leeds and London. And without it we might never eat another Aztec grain or tofu-based dessert again, and that would be sad. Besides, my semester starts next month, and I think I'm ready for another Great Cookie Challenge (and this time I have a little Munchkin helper to assist The Scientist in his quality-control duties) :)

Taste and create double choc cookies

2009-08-24T08:22:00.004+01:00

I signed up for Taste and Create again this month, and got partnered with Tania from Love Big, Bake Often. Tania is an ice-cream and baking-loving mum with two little 'monkeys' to cook for. At first I was worried about recreating her tasty treats as I don't have an ice cream maker, but then I started discovering the wealth of amazing cookies Tania has made. I had already started compiling a shortlist when she posted a new one - she called them Chocolate Toffee Rounds - basically double choc chip cookies, with added toffee bits. I don't think I need to sell them any further if I quote what Tania said about them: 'rich, chocolately cookie that is reminiscent of a brownie….with all the crispy, chewy edges a true brownie lover looks for!' Enough said. They jumped to the top of the list.

I was surprised at the small amount of butter and flour in the recipe, but it's made up for by lots and lots of dark chocolate. I wasn't quite sure about the toffee chips - I didn't know if they were actual toffee or toffee-flavoured choc chips. I couldn't find either anyway so I left them out, making my cookies a bit more of a traditional double choc chip. They were a cinch to make, and turned out exactly as Tania said - really chocolatey but brownily chewy at the same time. I made a half a batch, and am sending them home with Munchkin Granny, who has some rather special visitors arriving this evening...

Double choc chip cookies (previously known as chocolate toffee rounds) recipe here

And if you want to take part in Taste and Create, go here and sign up!

Epicurean shortbread fingers

2009-08-21T16:34:00.006+01:00

I asked The Scientist what he would like me to make him for a trip recently, and he pretty promptly settled on shortbread 'like the sort you get in packs with a cup of tea'. I was quite pleased he felt so strongly about it - I haven't felt very decisive about cooking recently and this way there was no chance I could keep myself awake fretting over the merits of cookies versus bars. Well, less chance at least. I fretted over what to do with the rest of our veg box carrots instead. I've made shortbread bases before - for the millionaire's shortbread I made Eco Sis, for example, but I've always been put off the most traditional standalone recipes because they call for rice flour. My baking cupboard is in enough of a state without allowing myself to buy more speciality ingredients, and we only have brown rice in the house, which probably wouldn't make for a nice fluffy tea time treat.

A couple of weeks ago though, we went to Coventry for a little shopping trip, and I wandered into the market in search of a weigh-shop I knew was there. You know the sort of place - lots of bins of household goods that you help yourself to, and then pay according to weight. This sort of place is my idea of nirvana, and The Scientist was soon weighed down with little bags, with a tolerant expression on his face. The things you can get though! Cake mix! It had never previously occurred to me that you would want to buy cake mix by weight, and with no instructions. Six different types of breakfast cereal, tapioca, flour, washing powder (better not get those two mixed up), custard powder, nuts, spices - and it's only a small shop. I bought at least five or six different things, none of them big, but still, I wasn't expecting change from a fiver. £1.60. I kid you not. I wish we lived in Coventry - and I have never said that before (though I said it again when we found a nice little noodle place for lunch).

Anyway, you may have guessed that I have included this whimsical digression because one of the things I found at the weigh place was rice flour, so I could make the shortbread. Recipes for shortbread seem pretty ubiquitous but I wanted to make sure I hit the maximum heights, so I got out our copy of Marcus Wareing's How to Cook the Perfect... We've never eaten at a Michelin starred restaurant - try that on two academics' salaries with a fusspot semi-vegan as part of the party - but we like Marcus Wareing when he appears on cheffie programs, and his book includes little tips on how to get the best out of the recipe. In this case, it was handle the butter as little as possible, and rub it into the rest of the ingredients by grating it and rolling it all between your palms. The Scientist had been so particular about the shape of the shortbread that I got him to cut it, but - alas - when I took them out of the pan one broke and he was forced to try it. Let's just say that Marcus Wareing is still number one top chef dude in our house. I made his flapjack recipe at the same time, which directs you to part-bake it, then take it out and drizzle melted syrup over the top before returning to the oven. This makes the top moist and the middle crunchy apparently. Or the other way round; I forget. I'll report back on whether that worked when The Scientist gets back. In the meantime I still have those carrots to attend to.

Marcus Wareing's shortbread (from How to Cook the Perfect...)
Makes about 20 pieces

200g plain white flour
Pinch of fine salt
40g ground rice
75g caster sugar, plus extra for dusting
175g unsalted butter, from a chilled 250g block

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and stir in the ground rice and sugar. Grate in the butter, then work it quickly into the flour until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

Press the mixture into a 20cm square baking tin and level the top. Chill in the fridge for about an hour.

Heat the oven to 140C fan/160C/Gas 3

Bake the shortbread for 40 minutes until light golden. Remove from the oven and prick all over with a fork, then mark into 20 pieces, cutting right through to the bottom of the tin. Dust liberally with caster sugar, then leave to cool before removing from the tin.

Marmite munchies

2009-08-18T19:39:00.006+01:00

We all know that nuts and seeds are good for us, don't we? I want to like them, to garner all those juicy little essential fatty acids and minerals, but I just can't get past their - well, nuttiness, frankly. The sight of a hugely magnified picture of peanuts on the side of a KP nut van makes me gag. Seeds aren't as bad, but they're still not anywhere near the top of my list of snacks. Until now. Thanks to the power of marmite, a pile of unappealing seeds has been transformed into my ticket to EFA and B12 goodness.

I'd thought before about seasoning and baking some seeds like the ones you can buy, but had never yet got round to it. The idea for the marmite was from a cookbook of Munchkin Granny's - a Marmite Cookbook in fact. I have no idea where it came from; one of Kiwi Sis's friends was obsessed by marmite, but I can't think that it extended to planting recipe ideas in other people's kitchens. Anyway, it was so easy that I whipped up a batch in about five minutes flat when I got home, and I've been snacking on them ever since.

Having established just how easy it is to turn seeds into something I'd actually want to eat I'm keen to explore other flavour options now, and other seeds. Before you know it I will be a pinnacle of good health. Either that or essentially fat :) But I think the nuts are a step too far.

Marmite seeds (from My Mate in the Kitchen; the Marmite cookbook)
1 Tbsp marmite
1 Tbsp boiling water
150g seeds (the recipe said pumpkin; I used sunflower)

Mix marmite and hot water, and pour over seeds. Stir to coat them all. Spread the seeds out on a baking sheet (I put them on a silicone sheet to stop them sticking and ease cleaning up). Grill for about 8 minutes, but start checking after 4 or 5. The book says 4-5 total but mine took longer to get crunchy. Leave them to cool, then stir them around to separate the big clumps, and store in an airtight jar.

Banana, lentil and pepper salad

2009-08-12T20:31:00.004+01:00

Yes, that really is banana in my salad. I was thinking of ways to use up some leftover lentils, and fancied pairing it in a salad with some fruit and something crunchy. I had some small sweet peppers which would do for crunch, and some leaves and cherry tomatoes. I nearly went for mango for my fruit component but then I accidentally ate the mango (it happens). But then I remembered a very simple but tasty salad of banana and celery with curry powder some friends made for us a while back. That original recipe had come from am Oxfam Fair Trade cookbook, which I have since picked up in a charity shop - the recipe was donated by the singer Dido, who says it's weird but it works. It does. And it worked in this salad too. I stirred some plain yogurt and curry powder through the lentils, then added chopped pepper, tomato and banana, and tossed it all around with the leaves. I loved the fruity sweetness alongside the tang of curry powder and the crunch of pepper. And the lentils made it good and filling.

I'm sending this to Lisa and Jacqueline for this month's pepper-themed round of No Croutons Required.

Courgette, carrot and halloumi burgers

2009-08-03T20:52:00.007+01:00

Tonight's dinner was inspired by a burger Munchkin Granny and Eco Sis had at Borough Market a few weeks ago. It was a halloumi burger, but it was sweet and carroty as well and I had burger envy. I only had a taste so I didn't have too much to go on in recreating it - halloumi and carrot was about as far as I got. I was thinking of adapting our favourite smoked tofu burger, but when I did some searching for possible ideas I found something that sounded very similar on - of all places for a cheesey burger - the weightwatchers website. It also had courgette in it which appealed as we got lots in our veg box this week and it's only me that eats them. Substance was added with tofu and sweetcorn, and flavour with coriander.

When I started making it I wanted to try to avoid using egg as I was making half a batch and didn't want half an egg hanging around. There was no way the mixture was going to adhere on its own - in fact even with the half egg it wasn't looking too promising, and I had to go out to the gym leaving The Scientist to work his kitchen science magic. I got back to a nice smell coming from the oven, and quite a pleased looking boyfriend. He'd just mashed it all up better in the mini processor and that convinced it to hold together. He also used some wheatgerm to give it a coating, and had happily added grated courgette to my half of the mixture.

These burgers were amazing; my new top favourite thing to go in a bun. The halloumi (which is a mix of goat's and sheep's cheese - though some also contain cow's milk) actually wasn't particularly noticeable as a flavour on its own - but the whole was delightfully fresh and tasty. The corn was probably the key flavour, but it was all gratifyingly similar to what I remembered of the Borough market burger - and not laden with bad stuff either. We liked them so much that I made another batch a few days later, so the half egg wasn't wasted after all. The first time we ate them in wholemeal pittas with lettuce and condiments, with some edamame and seaweed salad on the side, and the second time with pittas again, but with stir-fried chard, chickpeas and tomatoes.

Courgette, carrot and halloumi burgers: recipe from www.weightwatchers.co.uk. but the link seems to be broken, so I'll copy it out here. This is for the full quantity

Makes about 8

300g carrots, grated
1 medium courgette, grated
1 medium onion, finely chopped
50g sweetcorn
150g tofu, chopped
75g fresh breadcrumbs
1 medium egg
100g halloumi, chopped
1 Tbsp ground coriander
1 tsp each salt and pepper [I'm sure I didn't use nearly this much I just seasoned the mixture at the end]

Preheat the oven to 200C/Fan 180C/Gas 6. Mist a large baking sheet with oil spray

Put all of the ingredients in a bowl and mix well, seasoning to taste. [I found it easier to put it all in the food processor to get it really well mixed up]

Form into 8 burgers and place on baking tray [we added some wheatgerm as coating]. Bake 20-25 minutes and serve in wholemeal pittas.

Wholewheat pizza night!

2009-08-03T17:09:00.008+01:00

First of all, may I direct your attention to the cats' lovely new photos in the sidebar? I have the Norse Goddess to thank for them - she snapped the cats in lots of languid poses while she was here, and I now feel quite guilty for neglecting to capture their cuteness so much myself. Piggle is snapped stretched out in 'I am a lady-cat of leisure and I invite you to stroke me - while putting myself in an almost impossible to reach place' pose, under the spare bed. And Pooky is looking like a man about town at the top of the stairs, from where he likes to keep an eye on the catflap. This is just in case any other cat than piggle pops in, which would be tough given that our cats have magnets on their collars to ensure that only they can get in. Luckily none of the other neighbourhood cats seems to have the same system - probably because we're the only ones uncouth enough to put a catflap in our front door, and thus ruin the look of the terrace.

Man-handled roast tomato, basil and buffalo mozzarella

Today's post is our fun Sunday-night dinner from last night. We make pizza periodically, but this time I was moved to try a wholewheat base. I was inspired by the fact that The Scientist enjoyed one at Zeffirelli's restaurant in Ambleside. I used my usual dough recipe, torn from an old copy of Good Food Magazine, but substituted half of the white bread flour for wholemeal bread flour. I also added a generous shake of wheat germ, to up its healthy credentials even more. I was pleased with how soft the dough was as I kneaded it, and it made really tasty pizzas. They were certainly more wholefoody than your average pizza, but then home-made is never the same as you buy in the shops anyway (much better, naturally!). We both liked the extra wholesomeyness - and if that's not a word, it should be.

Potato, smoked garlic, goat's cheese and rosemary

I made several small pizzas this time, partly for variety, and partly because we've found that they don't always cook all the way to the centre if you make big ones. Besides, it makes for more fun variety in the toppings. I always make the dough, and The Scientist usually whips up the tomato sauce, while we both manhandle them onto the baking sheets. I had to do that part on my own this time as he was playing in an online poker tournament and was at a critical point when they needed to go into the oven. That explains why one of them is a little 'lacy' around the edges. I was about to make a joke about that being a professional pizza-maker's term when I remembered that actually I did work as a pizza chef in a restaurant in my university holidays. The fact that I had forgotten tells you something about how memorable the pizzas were there. Not so our dinner pizzas: we made one with slow roasted tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella and one with home-grown potatoes (sliced thin and boiled beforehand), rosemary and goat's cheese to share. I did one with shaved courgette and sweetcorn for me, and The Scientist put some cured meat and mozzarella on his.

Courgette, sweetcorn, roasted tomato and mozzarella

And how does all this cheese square with my dairy-reducing aims? Well it's particularly cow's dairy which I'm avoiding, as it has by far the biggest impact on carbon outputs. My main concerns when it comes to diet and ethics are animal welfare and environmental impact. The conventional dairy farming industry has poor conditions for milk cows, which are milked in pens made when dairy cows were much smaller, demands enormous yields per animal, and is very intensive in terms of land use. Organic is obviously better on all of these counts (although ultimately unsustainable for the whole population) and I do eat some organic cow's yogurt. Sheep and goats are farmed a lot less intensively both in terms of welfare conditions and land use, so when I do fancy some cheese, I seek out varieties using their milk - or in this case, buffalo mozzarella. When I first heard about the latter I thought I was falling for some sort of joke, but it really is made from the milk of water buffaloes. There's even a farm in Warwickshire (and you can get their cheese from Hill Top Farm Shop). And I've discovered that Mozzarella style vegan cheezly does a pretty good job of melting on toast and pizza too. But on the whole I just try to find other things to eat than cheese and I don't very often miss it.

Wholemeal Pizza - adapted from an ancient Good Food Magazine
Serves 4 (makes 2 pizzas - I made five smallish ones but I think that feeding four is a bit optimistic - it would probably feed or four mes, but possibly only two normal hungry people)

150g strong wholemeal bread flour
150g strong bread flour
1 tsp instant yeast
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp olive oil
200 ml warm water

Put the flour into a large bowl, then stir in the yeast and salt. Make a well, pour in the warm water and the olive oil and bring together with a wooden spoon until you have a soft, fairly wet dough. Turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 5 minutes until smooth. Cover with a tea towel and set aside. You can leave the dough to rise if you like, but it's not essential for a thin crust [I don't bother usually as it makes for such a quick and easy supper]

Preheat the oven to 240C/Fan 220C/Gas 8, and move the shelves up to high. Put two baking trays into the oven to heat up (or use a pizza stone which I am always tempted by but haven't given in to buying yet).

Roll out the dough. If you've let the dough rise, give it a quick knead, then split into two balls. On a floured surface, roll out the dough into rounds or squares, using a rolling pin. The dough needs to be very thin as it will rise in the oven.

Top as you prefer. Our quickest and easiest tomato is topping is just some watered tomato paste with some seasonings, but otherwise we make up a nice herbed sauce using tinned tomatoes and fresh herbs if we have them.

Remove the baking sheets from the oven and scatter with cornmeal. Slide, peel or tear the pizza dough off whatever you've left it on and onto the baking sheets. Bake 8-10 minutes, alternating the oven positions half way.

Vanilla poached quince and apricot

2009-07-28T17:14:00.004+01:00

Gosh darn it, I was just about to go out to the gym and it's started raining - and The Scientist has just left to play cricket (of course). So I'll write a blog post and hope it stops. The weather we're having at the moment it might last 4 seconds or it might last all evening.

Anyway, this is a dessert I made a couple of weeks ago after finally spying some quince in a local greengrocer. I've been intrigued by quince since reading Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess, where she features it in several recipes. It's a quintessentially English orchard type of fruit and yet I have never previously seen it in the shops, despite looking. I snapped up two and gleefully brought them home with no particular idea as to what to do with them. They are hard, yellow fruits that look a lot like apples (and are related to them) but I don't believe that you would want to try biting into a raw one - not if you didn't want to spend the rest of the evening with your lips puckered inside your mouth. They have a long and illustrious history, however, being a symbol of fertility (what isn't?), associated with Aphrodite, and possibly even the fruit that Eve ate in the Garden of Eden. David Lebowitz says that they smell so nice that he likes to leave them in his kitchen overnight just for the fragrance. When I read that I went and sniffed ours, but they didn't seem to have an especially noticeable smell.

A week or so later, kitchen still unfragranced, I decided I should do something with them. I wanted something light, so I settled on a simple poached recipe. David Lebowitz has a couple, one of which particularly appealed because it used a vanilla syrup - one of my favourite flavours. I read all his instructions on how to peel these rather hard and knobbly fruits and set to work prepared for a battle. Alas, I had left my quinces a bit too long, and they were quite soft and dark in places when I cut into them. I had to cut so much off that I was only left with a small pile for poaching. I didn't want to give up, so I remembered the gingery poached dried apricots I made a while ago, and so added some dried apricots to my quince.

I was glad I'd stuck with it, as it made a lovely dessert. The quince was nice and soft, but I particularly liked the contrast between it and the chewier apricots. The syrup was very sweet - you could easily cut back on the sugar if you didn't have too sweet a tooth, or were making it for a breakfast compote, but the vanilla flavour was divine. This will be on the list for the next time I stumble upon a quince - whenever that is. Funnily enough though, I also found another ingredient I've been searching for for years this week - samphire. My PhD supervisor's wife used to cook it for their summer parties, but I have never found it anywhere. I finally found it at Borough Market last weekend and brought some back. I just steamed it lightly and ate it atop a poached egg on an English muffin. It was salty and yummy. I wish I'd bought more.

Vanilla poached quince recipe here (and I can recommend adding a few dried apricots too)

Sometimes you just need a chocolate muffin

2009-07-26T17:39:00.006+01:00

Long week. Hard work. Guests for dinner. Needed chocolate-based dessert

That much was clear on Friday night, and the need was enough to make me cut to the chase. For once I didn't look through a million recipes and change my mind six times. Instead I searched for 'chocolate' in my geek-tastic document entitled 'Baking', where I paste all the delicious looking recipes I find on blogs and websites, and stopped when I got to Dan Lepard's Chocolate custard muffins. I don't mind admitting that it was the word 'custard' that got me in particular. Such a comforting word - the stuff of childhood and blissful ignorance of the world of deadlines and grant proposals (don't get me started). No matter that I don't remember eating custard even once as a child (angel delight was our dessert of choice); it has still entered my cultural memory and occupies a hallowed place there.

The recipe was unlike any other muffin I've made. I had imagined that it would be a chocolate cake with custard in the middle, but in fact the whole batter is a custard - starting with a cornflour/water/cocoa/sugar combo in a saucepan, and adding butter, flour, oil, eggs, etc, once it's melted and thick. I used arrowroot powder instead of cornflour, because I hadn't been able to find cornflour last time I was in the supermarket, and it was fine. Cornflour is, of course, NOT cornmeal, but a thickener. I did all the stirring and melting as I prepared dinner, and had the mixture waiting in its pan so that I could add the final ingredients, put it in the cupcake liners and in the oven as The Scientist came back from picking up our weekend guests (Eco Sis and Eco Bro, here to attend the Warwick Folk Festival with us and Munchkin Gramps et al). Dinner was a somewhat eclectic - one could even say random - stir fry with tofu on rice noodles, with shop-bought spring rolls - and potato croquettes, which had apparently leaped into The Scientist's basket with no sense of decorum or grace. They are part of his set of childhood foodie memories; to me they represent Rag Week at croquette-eating competitions at college, which does still show how popular they are amongst children and students alike. Luckily the Ecos are very open to the mix-and-match approach to cookery. We initially deferred the dessert but then got seduced by the baking smell, and tried them straight away. They were very chocolatey, so the main aim was achieved, and while we got distracted by artfully arranging them for their photo and so didn't discuss their custardyness, we did agree that they were nice and moist. I would definitely make them again, and would perhaps save some of the chocolate chips to stir in at the end so that they stayed whole. In fact I had meant to stir in some raspberries, but forgot (naturally). They could probably take all sorts of additions - banana would be very nice, I should think.

Eco Bro's elegant styling in rather poor light - I won't even mention how my efforts came out!

PS to Grandma S or Junior S if you're reading this: sorry I forgot to offer you any the next morning when you came round! I will make them again next time :)

Chocolate custard muffins, from Dan Lepard's Guardian column

50g cornflour [or arrowroot powder]
3 level Tbsp cocoa powder
100g dark soft brown sugar
225ml cold water
75g unsalted butter, broken small [I used vegan margarine]
75ml sunflower oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs
125g caster sugar
125g plain flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder

First make the custard: put the cornflour, brown sugar and water into a saucepan and whisk together over a medium heat until boiling, very thick and smooth [this takes several minutes but you'll know when it happens - it suddenly goes *very* thick]. Remove from the heat, beat in the butter and chocolate until melted and absorbed, then add the oil, vanilla and one of the eggs and beat again until combined. Add the remaining egg and caster sugar, and beat again until smooth and thick.

Measure the flour and baking powder into a bowl, stir together, then sift directly on to the custard and beat through until combined. Spoon into a dozen paper muffin cases sitting in the pockets of a muffin tray [I got 14], and bake in a preheated oven to 180C [that's 250F if you're making these, Norse Goddess!]/Gas 4, and bake for 25 minutes. Briefly try to resist chocolatey baking smell, and then eat, happily.

Joyous tomato and cabbage pilaf

2009-07-23T17:39:00.009+01:00

This simple dinner was inspired by a bag of cherry tomatoes I bought at Borough Market when we were in London last weekend. That and the fact that the tomato-hating Scientist was out playing cricket (or trying to - that boy is very unlucky with the micro climate around here. He came back having got soaked; it had showered for two minutes here, only 15 minutes' drive away).

I had initially planned to make a simple tomato sauce for a pasta dish, but as the day wore on I began to fancy something featuring the crunch of my favourite grain, bulgar wheat. In the end I decided to keep with the simple and made this lovely pilaf, throwing in some cabbage we had in the fridge as well. My favourite way of eating tomatoes (apart from straight from the bag, like sweeties) is to roast them with some balsamic vinegar. It concentrates all the flavour and gives them a nice chewy texture as well. I put them in the oven and then got on with the rest of the cooking after about 20 minutes. This extra stage really made the dish, but you could just cook them in the pan when the bulgar goes in if you prefer not to turn on the oven. My dinner merited a happy dinner wiggle as I ate it, with some plain yogurt on the top, and a bit of wholemeal pitta bread on the side.

Tomato and cabbage pilaf
The trouble with making up my own dishes is that I pay no attention at all to quantities, so this is a rough guide rather than a proper recipe. I was just cooking for one, though as usual I made too much.

Cut a handful of cherry tomatoes in half (I did loads so as to have lots left over for other dishes and general snacking). Put them in a roasting tin and drizzle over some balsamic vinegar, some shaosing wine, a grinding of salt and pepper, and some fresh basil (or whatever other herbs you prefer). You can also add oil but I let the other liquids do their thing in preference. Roast in a preheated oven at around 180C for about half an hour - but leaving them longer just makes them even nicer and more chewy.

After about 20 minutes of roasting, fry some onion in a pan with a little oil. When it softens add some garlic (I used half of a big clove and it was very garlicky!). After a few more minutes add some shredded cabbage and cook for another few minutes, stirring often. Add about 50g bulgar wheat, stir and then add stock, to cover. Put a lid on the pan, and leave to simmer gently for about 10-15 minutes, until the bulgar is cooked. Serve with the tomatoes on top, and some plain yogurt to hand for drizzling. Dinner wiggle is optional, but advised.

Beetroot and rhubarb soup

2009-07-19T17:02:00.003+01:00

I love home grown produce, but I have to admit that my own record in this regard is a bit patchy. So far this year I have failed at least as much as I've succeeded, although I have been very proud of my potatoes (grown in sacks), blueberries and rocket. My little apple and pear trees are looking a bit mournful just now, though I have just moved them into bigger pots to try and appease them, my tomatoes are ok-ish, and the strawberry plants bore fruit very briefly. The butternut squash plants which I planted from seed, and which shot to adolescence under Vicki's careful tending and sun lounge when we were on holiday got munched to bits the instant I put them in the beds, as did the courgette and the sweetcorn I bought at Kenilworth farmer's market. Evil slugs. I was very unhappy. So I have the utmost respect for anyone who manages a better crop - The Scientist's sister, for example, who has courgettes growing aplenty, and our friends E and D, who have a whole plot of rhubarb, broad beans, courgette and gooseberries. We went to visit E and D a couple of weekends ago to meet their new baby, and D very generously sent me off laden with goodies. The gooseberries became a fool, the broad beans went in a soup, and a lot of the rhubarb was stewed and eaten with yogurt for breakfast. I had a bit of rhubarb left though, and fancied making something savoury with it. I was tempted and inspired by Johanna's rhubarb dipping sauce, and Jacqueline's rhubarb and balsamic dressing. In the end I took elements from both, and partnered my rhubarb with some beetroot in a soup. I did find a recipe for this combination which gave me the clever idea of cooking each in turn in the same water. I liked Jacqueline's balsamic, but modified it to red wine vinegar, which is an ingredient in my favourite borscht recipe. I ended up eating the soup warm as it was a changeable sort of day, but I think it would be very nice cold as well. It was rich from the beetroot, with a slight sharpness from the rhubarb, which I think was enhanced by the vinegar. I was quite pleased as I rarely come up with my own recipes - though I have a number of sources to thank for my inspiration!

Rhubarb and beetroot soup
Served 2

3 small beetroots
2 small sticks of rhubarb
red wine vinegar, to taste.
yogurt, to taste

Cut the tops of the beetroot and place in a small pan of water. Bring to the boil, and cook for about 20 minutes, or until soft. Remove from the water with a slotted spoon, and set aside to cool.

Chop the rhubarb into inch long chunks, discarding the ends, and cook in the same liquid until soft - about five minutes or so. Remove from heat and leave to cool, reserving cooking liquid.

When the beetroot is cool enough to handle, slip off the skins, and chop roughly. Place in a small blender with the rhubarb and enough of the cooking water to make the consistency you like (start with a little and add more). Stir in red wine vinegar to taste, and season. You can stir yogurt through at this stage, or do as I did, and serve it on the top.

Belgian buns and Science brownie points

2009-07-14T19:52:00.009+01:00

You know how most people have a favourite bakery treat? A custard tart or a doughnut - or perhaps one of those decorated novelty gingerbread men? For me it was always a cheese turnover - a savoury pastry which my best friend and I used to use as fuel on long shopping trips to town to spend our clothes allowances. I don't know how we stayed fuelled on them all day as they were tiny, but we always used to have one each - until the day when we found that Ainsley's bakery in Leeds had a *mushroom turnover* special. Ah, that was a good day.

The Scientist's bakery treat has followed him into adulthood, although I only became aware of it when we moved to Sussex. This is because his favourite is a Belgian bun, and they are not apparently a standard bakery item (a bit like my cheese turnovers I suppose, which I have never seen outside Yorkshire, not that I've had any inclination to look in recent years). A Belgian bun is a bit like a Danish pastry, but with a different type of accent, and made of a sweet bread dough rather than pastry. Other than that it's very similar - a big spiral containing dried fruit and some sort of sweet filling (lemon curd is a favourite) and then coated with icing and a cherry on the top. I'm not certain enough of what the true Belgian bun looks like to risk buying him one from anywhere other than a Forfars Sussex bakery, but he makes sure to pop in and get one whenever we're back on the south coast.

Unbaked Belgian buns

A few months ago we were talking to his sister about childhood treats, and it turned out that she was also a fan of the Belgian bun, although they hadn't been a shared family tradition. A long conversation about the best place to buy them in the town where they grew up ensued, during which I hatched a plan to see if I could recreate this happy childhood memory. I did find a recipe on the internet, on the endearingly named site bun-recipes.co.uk, which looked as though it had the right sort of dough. We don't live very near to Scientist Sister (who is also busy with a young Scientist Nephew Sprog) so I thought I'd take the opportunity of a sup rise retirement party for the Scientist parentals last weekend to try it out.

The dough has the basic constituents of a sweet enriched bread - flour, yeast, sugar, milk and eggs. My recipe directed me not to knead the dough before its first rise, but instead just to leave it in its bowl in a warm place. The dough did rise nicely, and was a bit less sticky by the time it was ready for kneading. Then you roll it out to a rectangle and scatter it with melted butter, sugar and dried fruit, before rolling it back up again. Then slice it into rounds and leave again, before finally baking. I was really pleased with how they looked (though about half the size of the Forfars' model). I drizzled the cooled buns with some icing made from icing sugar and water, and would certainly have gone down the cherry topping route had we had any. Both The Scientist and Science Sister were delighted with their treats and pronounced them just like the originals. I've already had a request to try putting lemon curd in them next time. They were really fun to make, and nice to be bringing back a little of the delights of childhood. I'm sending these Belgian buns to Stefanie at Hefe und mehr (Yeast and more) who is hosting this month's sweet breads-themed Bread Baking Day.

On a slightly related topic: my treacle tart from our Alice in Wonderland party has been thoroughly usurped by this recipe, which Science Sister made at the surprise party last weekend. I'll definitely be trying it myself some time!

Belgian bun recipe here
And if you're after an enriched vegan bread dough you could try Hannah at Bittersweet's pain de mie

Ashes brownies

2009-07-13T20:15:00.005+01:00

I think that this blog demonstrates that I have a tendency to indulge random moments of enthusiasm for specialist ingredients. This explains the Liquid Smoke, the nori flakes, the wheatberries, sumac and berbere all tucked into our cupboards. Some of them have become welcome additions to our regular dinners, but others are a little, well, specialist. Another flight of fancy led us a merry dance around every specialist food shop we could find in Australia a couple of summers ago because I had read a few nice recipes which used wattleseeds. No matter that they were all for ice cream, and we don't have an ice cream maker; I thought that being Down Under was enough of an excuse to *need* some of those seeds. I am happy to report that we did eventually find some, but somewhat abashed to admit that two years later the jar has yet to be opened.

Wattleseeds grow wild in Australia, and their seeds form part of traditional cooking. Since acquiring my seeds I have collected several interesting recipes - for wattleseed damper, for example, and Gundabluey Brownies. The quality that had attracted me to the seeds in the first place was their coffee/chocolate flavour, so I particularly liked the idea of adding them to brownies. Something made me pick up the jar the other day and I realised that it was getting perilously close to its use by date. This prompted me, at last, to do something with it.

Fortunately I had a good opportunity. Munchkin Gramps and The Scientist share a love of cricket, and they generally go together to watch an international fixture at Headingley. This year they missed out on Ashes tickets in the ballot, but they did manage to get some for the fourth day's play in the first Test at Cardiff. Grandma S always sends them off with a tasty picnic, but since they were setting off from our place this year, the honours came down to me. Given how heated the competition gets at Ashes matches I thought that I would do my bit for spreading cultural amity and make them some Aussie Ashes brownie bites. The first Aussie chef that came to mind was Bill Granger, and lo and behold, I found a recipe of his for brownies in his bill's Food. It was actually an unusual brownie recipe as it involved mixing the wet and dry ingredients separately and then combining, rather than the usual creaming method. I also Aussie'd them up by adding a tablespoon of wattleseeds. I halved the recipe and chose a pan which would make them come out quite shallow so as to make little bites to nibble on through the day.

Knowing that the wattleseeds were in there I thought that I could detect a slight coffee note to the batter. Neither The Scientist nor Munchkin Gramps noticed it, but they both came back extremely enthusiastic about how good they were. I liked them particularly because they actually cooked through in the time they were supposed to - always a bonus with a brownie recipe, but an unfortunately rare one! Since the day's play consisted of the Aussies knocking the ball all over the place and then us fluffing a few wickets before the rain fell I was glad that I'd provided some sort of pleasurable diversion. These are the new go-to brownies in our house, and I will definitely add the wattleseeds again. After all, I have a whole pot, and only a few weeks to use them up!

Wattleseed Ashes brownies (based on bill's food)

I halved this amount. I also froze what wasn't needed for the picnic, and stored what was in the fridge overnight, just to give them the best chance to firm up. It seemed to work.

370g (2 1/2 cups) caster sugar
80g (2/3 cup) cocoa powder
60g (1/2 cup) plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs, beaten
250g unsalted butter, melted
2 tsp vanilla extract
200g chocolate chips (I used a cut up bar of dark chocolate)
1 Tbsp wattleseeds - or more

Preheat the oven to 160C/Gas 2-3

Stir the sugar, cocoa powder, flour and baking powder together in a bowl. Add the eggs, melted butter and vanilla and mix until combined. Mix in the chocolate chips and wattleseeds.

Pour into a lined tin (the full batch goes in a 9 inch/22 cm square one) and bake for 40 to 45 mins

Still testing those scones

2009-07-10T19:31:00.005+01:00

Scones, family apple cake (which didn't photograph very well, though I'm hoping it will appear here at some stage), other assorted tea time goodies (the mustard was for the sandwiches; that is NOT an English teatime scone tradition)

I said a few weeks ago that I had found the definitive scone recipe. Then I thought I'd better check another one, just in case. Nope, Nigella still had it. Then Johanna suggested that I try her lemonade scones which I have to admit had attracted my attention already. She said that they were great - light, fluffy and inspired after someone brought them in to her work. What if they had something that Nigella just couldn't match (carbonation, for instance)? While Nigella swears by plain flour and lots of cream of tartar, Johanna's recipe uses lemonade as the raising agent. I've tried beer in bread - why not lemonade in a scone?

I made these for our Alice tea party which was a couple of weeks ago now, but I *think* I did it all exactly as the recipe stated. The only thing I wasn't quite sure about was whether my lemonade was cold enough. It had been in the fridge but only for a couple of hours. As Johanna herself said, these scones aren't quite as convenient to make as normal ones as they also use cream (which we don't have on standby, largely because The Scientist makes it his business to make sure it all gets used up straight away when we do have it). For that reason alone I wouldn't promote them to top of the list, but they were, again, very good. I quizzed our guests excessively but they were frankly too busy buttering, jamming and creaming to be terribly interested in finessing a review, and The Scientist, who is the only one who has tasted all of the scones, got confused about where the lemonade came in and assumed that we were back to Nigella. I don't think they quite hit the fluffiness of the Nigella ones, but they were definitely lovely and soft. I have to apologise for the photos - I had just got my new camera but not yet the new memory card, and so after using up all ten of my quota of pictures I was back to the Ecos' camera - which I never quite managed to work out properly. Not that I'm not grateful to them :)

My thanks to Neil for for crafting his scone so beautifully, and then waiting for ages while I tried to photograph it :)

I'm on scone duty again tomorrow for another event, and it will be back to the Nigellas for now. But I think there may still be room for further investigation. We had a lovely light scone while we were on holiday in the Lakes, for instance, which surprised us by being flavoured with blackberry and chocolate chips. Neither of us was a fan of the latter in a scone, but fresh seasonal fruit - now there's an idea.

Johanna's lemonade scones: recipe here

Lashings of treacle tart

2009-07-09T19:55:00.003+01:00

When the Norse Goddess nominated treacle as a theme for our tea party last weekend she was thinking of the Famous Five and their habitual picnics. I loved these books too, although neither of us could think of any specifically treacley treats in the lunches Aunt Fanny used to pack up to accompany their adventures. Fruit cake, yes, sandwiches, yes, hard boiled eggs, yes, ginger beer - naturally. But treacle is clearly a very traditional English ingredient and so we went with our fancy. Treacle sponge was our first thought, but it's not very tea-party-like. Then we considered gingerbread, but that didn't quite hit it either. Finally we settled on treacle tart, which also made a nice contrast with the cupcakes we were making.

We didn't eat traditional desserts when I was little. 'Fresh fruit in season' was our usual, with the occasional boil in the tin steamed pudding (which we didn't realise was traditional anyway). I didn't eat school dinners either, and so only have one memory of eating semolina for pudding and finding it completely weird (jam on dessert - what was that about?). The Scientist is a connoisseur of all of these sweet treats though, and so I've tried out various recipes during my time with him. I remember being very surprised when I realised what went into treacle tart the first time I made it. Firstly, there is no treacle, but instead golden syrup, and secondly the filling gets its substance from breadcrumbs. I wasn't expecting that. And yet somehow, it works, making a goopily set, incredibly sweet filling in a tart crust. The Norse Goddess was pretty surprised too when she saw me making it, and it wasn't actually her favourite offering at the tea party (but then there were very nicely decorated chocolate cupcakes on the table :) ). A bit of cream on the side though, and The Scientist was happy.

Treacle Tart (from Martha Day's Complete Baking)
Serves 4-6 (apparently - I rolled my pastry out to fit a larger tin than the author suggests, although this did make for a fairly thin layer of filling)

175ml golden syrup
86g fresh white breadcrumbs (I whizzed sliced bread up in a mini processor)
grated rind of one lemon
2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

For the pastry
170g plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
85g cold butter, cut in pieces
45g cold margarine, cut into pieces
3-4 Tbsp iced water

1. For the pastry, combine the flour and salt in a bowl. Add the butter and margarine and cut in with a fork until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.

2. With the fork, stir in just enough water to bind the pastry. Gather into a ball, wrap in plastic or greaseproof paper and rest in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.

3. On a lightly floured surface roll out the pastry to 3mm thickness. Transfer to a 20cm pie dish [I used a larger one] and trim off the overhang. Refrigerate for at least 20 minutes, reserving the trimmings for the lattice top.

4. Preheat a baking sheet at the top of a 200C oven.

5. In a saucepan, warm the syrup until runny and thin. Remove from the heat and stir in the breadcrumbs and lemon rind. Let sit for 10 minutes so the bread can absorb the syrup. Add more breadcrumbs if the mixture is thin. Stir in the lemon juice and spread evenly in the pastry case.

6. Roll out the pastry trimmings and cut into 10-12 thin strips. Lay half the strips on the filling, then lay the remaining strips at a 90 degree angle over them to form a lattice.

7. Place on the hot sheet and bake for 10 minutes. Lower the heat to 190C. Bake until golden, about 15 minutes more. Serve warm or cold.

A healthy interlude: salad lettuce wraps

2009-07-06T20:54:00.005+01:00

It's been dessert central round here recently and I fancied a change from bread and dips, and cakes for my lunch today. I was all alone for the first time in ages - the Norse deities have departed and The Scientist was working at his office today.

My lunch was inspired in an effort to use up some lettuce. We find it hard to get through a whole head of lettuce but I hate accidentally letting it go to waste. I was going to make gazpacho soup with some other salad ingredients, but then I thought I could wrap my salad up in lettuce leaves and make a fun and tasty little lunch with almost no effort.

I used a round lettuce with quite floppy leaves which made the rolling up easier. The salad was made of stuff I had in the fridge - raw broccoli, carrot ribbons, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, a bit of feta, some sweetcorn, with some pumpkin seeds scattered on the top. I bet adding a grain would be good too. I made up an easy dipping sauce of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and a tiny drizzle of agave nectar, though it turned out to be easier to take the sauce to the wrap rather than the other way round (my leaves weren't big enough to enclose the filling completely!)

It was colourful, crunchy and tasty, and a new perfect way to use up lettuce. While looking up ideas for the lettuce I found some great tips on making it keep longer at Pinch my Salt. Nicole swears by a salad spinner which we don't have, but it does apparently make a big difference. If only we had any spare space in our cupboards :( Next post, back to the desserts!

Chocolate chilli cupcakes: unexpected star of English tea party

2009-07-05T18:24:00.012+01:00

Chocolate chilli cupcakes, mystery treacle offering, jug of the Norse Goddess's sangria. The cupcakes are sitting on a cakestand I inherited from my Grandad.

We hosted a tea party yesterday, in honour of our visiting friends, the Norse God and Goddess. It was the fourth of July so it seemed like a fitting time to get some friends together - what with it being Alice in Wonderland Day and all :) This is a very well known English event, which I had been planning to celebrate for precisely two days, ever since I saw a poster advertising it in the Covered Market in Oxford. Oxford is, of course, the home of Alice, since C. S. Lewis was a don there, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, the site of the famous Treacle Well is near the city [interlude: Roger Federer has just won Wimbledon. During the course of the match I have moderated some essays, read a magazine, read the manual for my new camera, downloaded some pictures and made some bread. But winning Wimbledon sounds pretty good as well]. It was a coincidence that the (Canadian) Norse Goddess had come up with treacle as her first thought for an English tea party, but a happy one. She associated it with the Famous Five, so we were covering lots of children's literature bases.

The Norse Goddess gets creative (and personalised) with the cupcakes

I'll write more about how we turned the treacle theme into reality later, but this post is about the unexpected and not very English star of the tea party - the chocolate chilli cupcakes. This was inspired by the very first entry on my 2009 Cupcake Calendar, so I've been waiting a while to make it. My fellow dairy-reducing friend Vicki has shamed me into also reducing the amount of dairy products I use to bake for other people , so I didn't actually use the recipe from the calendar, but instead adapted the chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World. The calendar recipe called for the addition of chipotle chilli powder to the batter; we didn't have that, so I used regular chilli powder, and some of the sauce from a jar of chipotle chillis in adobo in lieu of some of the vanilla extract. I did go with the orange frosting the calender suggested, just using vegan marge instead of butter.

The Norse Goddess's over-sized butterfly bun (verdict: nom nom - in a Canadian accent)

The cakes were a big hit. There was a good hit of chilli - everyone noticed it, but it wasn't enough to make your eyes water (I'd been a bit worried about this). Our poor friend Neil, who got ambushed by the salt on the margarita-ish cupcakes I made a few weeks ago was also surprised by the chilli, but it doesn't seem to have been enough to put him off my baking, fortunately. No one complained that they tasted of soya milk either, so thank you Vicki for inspiring me to ban the cow's milk and butter :) The Norse Goddess and I got creative with the icing, and when I realised that she'd never had a butterfly bun, I turned one of the extras into her own little English fusion treat.

Cupcake ready for nomming, modelled by Mike

Our Alice party was a lot of fun, and was only slighted marred by the odd raindrop, which just served to push us inside to watch the Wimbledon women's final. The Norse Goddess made us up some sangria, which I've just realised I was drinking without diluting with lemonade, and The Scientist repeated his sandwich-making triumph from the cricket tea. His egg mayonnaise got particular mention in dispatches. The Norse deities were able sandwich minions, and the Norse God made the decorative bunting (environmentally friendly - made from Sunday newspaper colour supplements). Everyone was happy apart from Bamber the dog, who was kept confined to the car to avoid cat spooking. He didn't get a cupcake (naturally - chocolate being very bad for dogs indeed), but he did get a walk once the tea had gone down a little.

Eco bunting (note Andy Murray on third flag from the right!)

Chocolate chilli cupcakes (adapted from Vegan Cupcakes...)
Made 12 fairy cakes and two big cupcakes with the leftovers

1 cup soya milk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup caster sugar
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp adobo sauce from a jar of chipotle chillis
1 cup plain white flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp chilli powder

1. Preheat oven to 175 C and line a muffin tin with paper liners
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the soya milk and vinegar and set aside for a few minutes to curdle. Add the sugar, oil, vanilla and adobo sauce, and beat. In another bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb and salt. Add in two batches to the wet ingredients and beat until there are no large lumps. Add the chilli powder and stir to combine well.
3. Pour into the cupcake liners, filling three quarters of the way (this will create quite flat tops for icing. If you want to make butterfly buns, put a bit more in to get a domed top). Baking 18-20 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. Transfer to a rack and allow to cool before frosting.

Chocolate orange frosting (from the 2009 Cupcake Calendar)
1 cup icing sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder
2 Tbsp Grand Marnier (or Tia Maria)
1/3 cup butter or vegan margarine

Blend all of the ingredients together in a processor. The instructions said to sift the sugar but I didn't bother. Pipe the frosting onto the cooled cupcakes. Or, slice the top of the domed cupcakes and halve the cut-off top. Frost the top of the cupcake and then balance the two halves on top so that they look like wings (see photo)

Scones - just testing

2009-07-02T10:54:00.004+01:00

Oy but it's hot here. I realise that it's not hot in the wider scheme of things, but as is well known, Brits are not very good at being hot or dealing with being hot. We have our beloved friend the Norse God staying with us at the moment, and his beloved consort, the Norse Goddess (now also beloved by us), but it's been too hot to do much with them. Luckily we all like flumping with books, games and good cheer (and/or good cheese, depending on our various preferences). We are about to brave the heat to show them Oxford, but while everyone else is finishing getting ready I'm going to post another scone recipe.

I said a few weeks ago that I was never going to make another scone - I had found scone perfection in Nigella's recipe, and that that was it forever. But I wanted to test it alongside a recipe by Nigel Slater, who is another food writer I like very much. I had cut out a recipe from Sainsbury's Magazine last year, and with a willing band of tasters presenting themselves I made a quick batch for The Scientist's latest gaming trip. I didn't have any eggs so I subbed 1 Tbsp plain yogurt. And I also added dried fruit which Nigel doesn't. The scones were perfectly lovely, and even caused The Scientist's gaming friends to run out for jam and cream. Nigella they were not, however. I am told that they lacked the same light fluffiness - though without the comparison they would have done very well. I hate to make it sound as though I am being critical of one of Nigel's recipes, after all.

So, do make these. They are very nice scones. However, if you want to wow your friends, relatives and partner's cricket team, make these.

Nigel Slater's scones (Sainsbury's magazine, October 2008)
Nigel says that these are the first scones he'd made without plain flour and baking powder - they use self raising flour instead.

Makes 6 or 7 small scones

250g self raising flour, plus extra for dusting
40g cold unsalted butter
25g golden unrefined caster sugar
1 large egg (or 1 Tbsp plain yogurt)
about 150ml buttermilk, or 120ml normal milk with 2 Tbsp natural yogurt
handful of dried fruit (optional and not part of Nigel's original!)
a little egg and milk for glaze (optional)

Preheat the oven to 220C/fan 200C, Gas 7.

Sift the flour into the bowl of a food processor with a pinch of salt [he 'genuinely recommends' sieving the flour here]. Add the butter, cut into small pieces, and then the sugar. Blitz for a few seconds, until you have what looks like breadcrumbs. Break the egg into a mixing jug, whisk lightly, then pour in enough buttermilk to make the quantity up to 150ml. Pour the liquid into the food processor bowl and blitz very briefly. Turn the mixture onto a floured surface and knead gently for a few seconds, just until you can pull the mixture together into a ball.

Pat the dough into a large round, about 2.5 cm thick. Cut out as many scones as you can using a 5-6cm cookie cutter or upturned glass. Bring the trimmings together and press gently back into shape, then cut out a couple more until you have used up all the mixture.

Place on a baking sheet, brush with the beaten egg and milk to glaze, if using. Bake for 12-15 minutes till pale and risen. Serve slightly warm with clotted cream and jam.

Frozen raspberry delight

2009-06-28T20:32:00.004+01:00

A little belated, but here is one of the desserts I made for my editorial board meeting a couple of weeks ago. It's another recipe from the Good Food Vegetarian Summer magazine and looked so amazingly impressive that I just had to give it a go. It's called a Crunchy Raspberry Ripple Terrine. Doesn't that sound classy? And yet full of the goodness of childhood as well - raspberry ripple AND a terrine. Surely this must cater for all tastes. In fact it's even better than that, as a perusal of the ingredients list reveals that it also includes crushed meringue bits. It's basically posh ice cream, tart with real raspberry juice and crunchy with meringue. The hitch must be in the amount of time it takes to craft this dessert - well, no - it's a cinch! All you do is mash up the berries and sieve them, whisk some eggs and sugar over hot water until it's all fluffy, whisk some cream and then combine both lusciously voluminous mallowy piles, fold in meringue, drizzle over the fruit puree, and then freeze. No stirring, no ice cream makers, just leave it alone. And it still slices perfectly when you take it out. I only tried a little bit since it features cream rather extravagantly (which I avoid as part of my carbon-output-lowering regime - the dairy industry is v bad for this) - but it was *really* nice. I especially liked the little crunches of meringue. I managed to save some for The Scientist and he loved it too. And Munchkin Granny was with me when I made it and she liked the look of it so much that she copied out the recipe to make for a party she's hosting. So, if you need a fancy but low effort summer dessert, look no further. The picture of mine sliced looks stripy because I used a knife with a serrated edge to cut The Scientist's portion - a smooth blade will make for a tidier finish (listen to me trying to pretend I know anything about presentation!)

Crunchy raspberry ripple terrine (from Good Food Vegetarian Summer magazine)
Serves 8

350g raspberries [I actually used more]
3 eggs
100g golden caster sugar
284ml pot double cream
2 meringue shells, crushed into small pieces

1. Mash 150g of the raspberries, pass through a sieve into a bowl, discarding seeds, then set aside. Line a 1 litre loaf tin with cling film. Whisk eggs and sugar with an electric whisk continuously over a bowl of barely simmering water, until doubled in volume and thick. Remove bowl from heat. Continue to whisk until completely cool; the whole process will take about 10 mins.

2. Whisk the cream until just thick. Fold the egg mix into the cream until completely combined, then fold in the meringue. Pour the raspberry puree over the mix in a zig zag, then gently pout into the lined loaf tin. Freeze for a minimum of 4 hours, then serve in slices with the remaining whole raspberries.

Herby solstice bread

2009-06-23T20:17:00.004+01:00

In an effort to use up the lovely small-leaved Greek basil (thank you for supplying the name Munchkin Granny!) which MG brought me last weekend I started to think about herby breads. I knew that I had a recipe for a herbed spiral bread in my Complete Baking book, but I also had a vague feeling that I'd seen another one on a website about solstice foods last year. Sure enough, a brief bit of searching turned it up, and since it was the summer solstice on Sunday (one of my favourite days of the year, and also The Scientist's sister's wedding anniversary) I made it for our dinner.

The website I found the inspiration for the bread on said that solstice foods are generally summery fruits and vegetables, and harvested leaves and greens. I think that harvesting it from my windowsill counts, don't you? It's the spirit of the thing after all, and my bread was definitely made in the spirit of revelling in the longest day of the year and all the fruitfulness it brings. I actually used the bread recipe from my book, but followed the original inspiration to scatter fresh herbs over the rolled out dough, rather than cooking them with some garlic and spring onions in butter as the book directed. I just fancied something a bit lighter this time, though I'd be interested to try the cooked version another time.

I've been reading quite a bit recently about how adding too much flour to bread dough as you knead it can make the bread quite tough. I do usually add flour to keep things less sticky, but this time I valiantly ploughed on with my shaggy mess until it started to get a bit less adhesive, at which point I just added a little bit of flour to bring it all together. Despite this, and making sure that the water was a good temperature, the pesky thing didn't rise at all (it evidently hadn't picked up on it being the longest - albeit admittedly not the sunniest - day of the year). I thought that this would affect the final loaf but it was actually still quite nice and light. The mix of white and wholemeal flour meant that it wasn't weighed down too much, but still had a nice nuttiness, and while my herb swirl wasn't quite as visible as the one in the book, it was still just discernible enough to keep me happy. It's a testimony to how nice the bread was that The Scientist tucked in too - normally he's a bit unenthusiastic about my grainy and wholesome breads! We ate it with carrot and coriander soup and made sure that we appreciated every minute of the lovely long evening.

Solstice herbed bread (based on Complete baking, with inspiration from here, too)
Makes 1 loaf

1 Tbsp active dried yeast
1/2 pint (300 ml) lukewarm water
210g strong flour [I used white]
250g wholemeal flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
15g butter
Good handful of chopped fresh herbs - I used Greek basil, normal basil, and a little bit of coriander
Egg, egg white or milk for glazing

Combine the yeast and about 30ml of the water, stir and leave for 15 minutes to dissolve.

Combine the flours and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the centre and pour in the yeast mixture and the remaining water. With a wooden spoon, stir from the centre, working outwards to obtain a rough dough.

Transfer the dough to a floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic. Return to the bowl, cover with a plastic bag, and leave until doubled in volume [hah!] - about two hours.

Grease a loaf tin. When the dough has risen, roll it out to a rectangle about 35cm x 23 cm. Brush with the egg, egg white or milk, and scatter the chopped herbs over the dough.

Roll up the dough in a sausage, and pinch the short edges to seal. Place in the tin, seam side down. Cover, and leave in a warm place until the dough rises above the rim of the tin.

Preheat the oven to 190C, Gas 5. Brush the bread with milk [I didn't do this], and bake until the bottom sounds hollow. The recipe said about 55 minutes but mine was done after about 25 so check early and often! Cool on a rack.

Does giving your cat drugs make you a bad person?

2009-06-21T20:24:00.005+01:00

Just look at her eyes!

I'm glad to report that she calmed down soon afterwards and wandered off to find some munchies :)

Buffet-friendly kamut pilaf

2009-06-21T19:37:00.007+01:00

Last week I hosted a meeting of the editorial board I sit on. The editor usually hosts and cooks up a storm, so I was a bit nervous. He'd put in a request for falafel when I said it was all going to be veggie so I themed the menu around middle-eastern-esque foods. The falafel went down very well, with toasted pittas, a spiced chickpea dip from Moosewood Low Fat Favourites, and a tahini dip (I bribed someone to take the leftovers away with them as I loathe tahini unless it's completely hidden in hummus), some roasted tomatoes and peppers with herbs and garlic, a carrot and orange salad, some salad leaves, some last-minute-panic feta with coriander leaves and oil drizzled over it, a roasted cherry tomato and cheddar tart (for those who aren't used to weird vegan grains) and this pilaf. It was based on a recipe in the BBC Food Vegetarian Summer magazine which used a grain called Ebly which I had never heard of, but which I subsequently have seen in a small box at a great price in the supermarket. I was keen to try out and use up a packet of another grain called kamut which I bought in a fit of zeal about a year ago so I subbed that instead. It looks like spelt and is similarly long-cooking, but is of ancient Egyptian origin. It's only quite recently been rediscovered, and it was described as having a 'buttery' taste in my wholegrains book. It was either going to be great or really really weird.

In the event it was very nice. I don't honestly think that I could have distinguished it from spelt if I hadn't known, and one of the other board members guessed that it was barley. It has more bite than that though - The Scientist liked it and he doesn't like barley. I said there would be a prize for anyone who could guess the grain, and no one had even heard of it which was fortunate as the prize was only dessert, which they were getting anyway :) The other good thing about the pilaf was that it was quick and easy to cook, and was nicely spiced because it simmers in well seasoned stock. I thought of serving it with some feta on the top but in the end decided to style the feta as its own dish to boost the spread on the table! Much to my relief there was enough food and it didn't seem to cause too much consternation among the omnivores. Next time we're going out for a pub lunch so carnivorousness will be restored to the masses!

Spiced kamut pilaf (based on one for Ebly grain in Good Food Vegetarian Summer magazine)
Serves 4 (I doubled it)

200g kamut
1 tbsp olive oil
1 large red onion, cut into thin wedges
1 large courgette, roughly chopped
1 garlic clove, crushed [the original recipe was for 3 cloves but one of my visitors doesn't like too much garlic]
2 tsp cumin seeds, lightly crushed
1 tsp turmeric
200g green beans, trimmed and cut into 2.5 cm pieces [the recipe said runner beans; I used whatever sort had travelled the fewest air miles]
140g cherry tomatoes
350ml vegetable stock
small handful of coriander

1. Cook the kamut in boiling water. It takes about an hour and a half. I did this a couple of days before, cooled and then froze it, but that's only because I had quite a lot of dishes to juggle on the day.
2. Heat the oil in a large frying pan, then fry the onion and courgette over a low heat for 5 minutes until soft. Stir in the garlic, cumin seeds and turmeric; fry for 1-2 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Add the beans, tomatoes and stock to the pan, bring to the boil, cover, then simmer for 5-6 minutes until the tomatoes just start to lose their shape.
4. Stir the drained kamut into the vegetables, then cook over a high heat for 2 minutes. Season to taste, stir in torn coriander and serve.

Very orange carrot and basil soup

2009-06-20T00:05:00.004+01:00

I've been a very bad blogger, I know. I've had a steady avalanche of exam scripts to moderate ever since we got back from holiday, and it hasn't left much time for writing blog posts, or cooking new and interesting things for that matter either. The avalanche is slowing now though, and I'm feeling a bit more confident that I'm going to make it to the snow fields, or the foot of the mountain, or the Pizza Hut of restfulness or wherever you get to when you outrun an avalanche, so here I am again.

This soup was my lunch today, and it was inspired by the contents of the veggie basket at the end of the week, and a pot of special basil that Munchkin Granny brought me when she came to visit last weekend. It had a particular name, which I've forgotten, so let's just call it 'small basil'. It looks really pretty and smells lovely and I wanted to make sure I used it rather than gradually let it wilt which is what generally seems to happen to my herbs. I had a bag of carrots as well, so I roasted them during the morning along with a sweet potato, a red pepper, some garlic cloves and some of the small basil, and then blended them with some hot stock at lunchtime. Given all that orange and redness it's not really surprising that the soup turned out the colour it did, and it tasted clean and colourful as well. The basil paired well with the veggies, and it all smelled lovely too.

I'm sending this soup to this month's No Croutons required, which has leaves as its theme. I would have made a rocket soup with my home-grown leaves, but they are still only about 1cm high so it would have been a nano-soup, and I prefer meals I can see :)

Carrot, sweet potato and 'small basil' soup
Serves 2
3 carrots, peeled and chopped
1 sweet potato, peeled and chopped
1 red pepper, seeded and chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled
glug of shaoshung wine
spray of oil
about 400ml hot stock
1 good handful of 'small' or regular fresh basil, torn

Roast all the veggies in a 200 degree oven in a covered baking tray, covered with the glug of shaoshung for about 45 minutes. Shovel them about a bit with a spatula. Spray with oil, and continue roasting, with half of the basil, uncovered for about 20 minutes more, until all the veggies are soft.

Liquidise the veggies with the other half of the basil and the stock. Reheat if necessary.

A veggie break

2009-06-07T17:49:00.007+01:00

No, not a break from being a veggie (that will NEVER happen, and you can quote me on that), but a break in veggie heaven. We've been in the Lake District on holiday, and I have discovered that not only is it the most beautiful place I've ever been, but it is an absolute paradise for us herbivores. Never since living near Brighton have I been so well fed. Never since our last holiday in Devon have I marvelled so extensively at the beauty of the English countryside. Never since their last stay at the cattery have the cats been so unimpressed at being stuffed in a carrying box. We're all back now, and while the cats are appreciating their usual freedom and The Scientist is banging a nail into the wall for our newly acquired picture as I type, I am mournfully contemplating the prospect of having to cook my own dinner.

Just in case anyone else is looking for veggie tips for the Lakes, here are my recommendations:

Cote How Organic B&B near Rydal does veggie and vegan breakfasts, and is super eco-minded as well (plus the rooms are very luxurious, it's in the middle of beautiful nowhere, and you can walk to Grasmere from their door)

Zeferelli's restaurant in Ambleside is an amazing veggie place - wholemeal crust pizzas, chillis, stews, pastas, and all delicious enough to keep even the most suspicious omnivore happy. We ate there three times and every time it was brilliant. You can eat in the downstairs restaurant or upstairs in the jazz bar, and there's also a cinema. It's worth booking though we managed to sneak in even on a Friday night without.

The Lakeland Pedlar cafe in Keswick - great sandwiches, smoothies and general cafe fare. We both had the falafel wraps which came with proper top quality salad on the side.

The cafe at Brantwood, John Ruskin's home on Coniston Water, is good for veggies though we only ate sandwiches there. The sandwiches aren't very vegan friendly (cheese and egg) but the cooked options looked more varied.

That's just the ones we went to - there are several more around too, and all in a small part of the country without any particular pretensions to hippydom. Next time I have my eye on a couple of veggie B&Bs, but I think I'll have to go without The Scientist!

By the way, while I never intend to stray from the green and animal-friendly path again, I did have one lapse with a tuna mayonnaise sandwich when I was 16 and recovering from glandular fever - which is what the poor little Munchkin has been in hospital with this week! He's home now but we're very sorry that he and his parents have had such a nasty time, and while I couldn't condone the eating of tuna sandwiches now, I do prescribe large quantities of angel delight and ice cream (and I'm a doctor, you know).

I think he's pleased to be home :)

Cocktail cupcakes

2009-05-25T09:13:00.004+01:00

I'm starting to think that this blog really should be called 'Munchkin Messups'. I rarely seem to report on something without going into a digression about how I forgot this or failed to do that, or had to battle with an insubordinate oven. Well this time is no different, and on this occasion the problem was our drinks cabinet. Or, more precisely, the fact that our drinks cabinet is a small and extremely random collection of bottles which live on a wooden box in the living room, and which doesn't include tequila. You know how everyone has a spirit they can't touch because they had an unfortunate incident with it in their late teens? For The Scientist that spirit is tequila, which isn't normally a problem because we are no longer 19, but this weekend it was a problem.

To back up a step, we had been invited to a BBQ party at the house of some very good friends from our university days and I had offered to take some cupcakes. I selected the Mucho Margarita cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, thinking that it would be fun to take a cocktail in cake form. The trouble was that given The Scientist's issues with tequila (the base alcohol for the Margarita cocktail) there was no point investing in a whole bottle, and I just couldn't find a miniature bottle anywhere. Eventually, with no more time for searching, I just used what we had on hand, which in our case, is ALWAYS Tenerifian honey rum, which The Scientist brought back in perhaps unwise quantities after a long research trip out there. I decided that as long as you could taste the alcohol and included a lot of lime, people wouldn't notice the difference. I am sorry to say that I also de-veganised the cupcakes as I was worried that our friends would pick up the distinctive note of soya milk, and so used regular milk and marge [sorry].

The cupcakes were really good - both limey and light, and you could definitely taste that there was alcohol present. The decoration was supposed to be coloured sugar crystals and kosher salt but since I'm trying to get through some of my excessive pantry store of baking goods I used the coloured sprinkles I had on hand, plus the salt. Not quite as authentic, but then I think I threw authenticity out of the window as soon as I opened the rum bottle. I liked the fact that you got the odd tang of salt, although our host did look a little surprised when he got his first salty taste. The cupcakes also travelled well even in a hot car, and just had a brief chill in the fridge when we arrived to firm up the icing again. They disappeared very fast and helped to fuel an exhausting afternoon of sitting on our friends' patio, admiring their vegetable plants (I came home with two more tomato plants so I consider the cupcakes a good investment), laughing at how melty a big black dog can go in the sun, and chatting about all manner of arcane topics.

[Note: In fairness to The Scientist I should probably admit that I couldn't face Baileys for my entire twenties :) ]

Ambiguous Cocktail Cupcakes: based on Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World's Mucho Margarita cupcakes. Cupcake Project's take on the recipe is here. I used a simplified buttercream icing with lime juice.

Dappy Spice's Hasty Fudge Cake

2009-05-20T21:04:00.005+01:00

I was catching up on some blog reading yesterday when I came upon Holler's post about an amazing looking chocolate fudge cake. Dense, chocolatey, moist, mmmnnnn - it looked divine. I left her a comment saying that I needed an excuse to make it, and then thought, darn it, it's a Tuesday, that's excuse enough. Besides, we have Eco Bro staying with us this week while he does a course nearby, and brothers-in-law need treats when they're studying hard, don't they?

I went scampering into the kitchen and blithely started weighing out ingredients into a saucepan. Then I realised why some people shouldn't be trusted with either recipes or web space to style themselves as any sort of decent cook at all. I hadn't read the recipe properly and so hadn't realised that it needed chocolate as well as cocoa. And the only chocolate we had was milk which I was worried wouldn't impart the same velvety dark goopy goodness. I added a few tablespoons of cocoa powder and an extra plop of butter to make up for the missing fat in the chocolate and hoped for the best. Then I nearly forgot the caster sugar but luckily remembered just before putting the pan on the ring. I had to laugh as I did it, as the other (equally sumptuous-looking) chocolate cake I had been reading about that evening was Johanna's mapley wattleseed one, where she almost forgot the chocolate chips. I must have imbibed a little of the spirit of both cakes :) I wasn't really sure if my bastardized batter was the right consistency but it tasted ok, so I put it in a heart-shaped tin to make up for the general ineptitude of the baking, and put it in the oven for a nice dessert after dinner. Holler's cake looked perfectly cooked in her picture. Mine decided to play that 'I'm cooked - ha ha, no I'm not, give me MORE oven time' game. I cracked first by which time it was 10 pm and no one really fancied dessert. I swear the cake laughed. Today I put it back in the oven for a while, and eventually we just ate it out of the tin with spoons after a dinner of Veganomicon chickpea burgers and a greens and bulgar pilaf. Not the whole thing, obviously. That would be as crazy as making a cake on a complete whim without having the vital ingredients. It was nice. Luckily.

You may notice that this post is illustrated by an actual bona fide photograph rather than the threatened drawing. Eco Sis has come to the rescue and lent me their old digital camera which I have almost learnt how to use. :) Hmmm, I spy a get-out clause here. Yes, the cake was wonderful in every way and it's just my photography which is dodgy...

I'm not even going to post what I put into my cake. Just go over to Holler's blog and see what it was supposed to be.

How to do a cricket tea - Part 3: The Cake

2009-05-17T15:12:00.003+01:00

Ok, I'm completely embarrassed about recycling the same photo three times now so this will be my last post about the cricket tea :) I'm glad we were on the rota last weekend though as it's tipped it down this time round and I would have been sorely disappointed (not to say rolling in lemons).

As I already mentioned, we decided that we were going to go for a sliced no-bake (the chocolate biscuit cake - so ubiquitous as to not need a recipe though v yum and I'll probably post about it another time if I haven't already), the scones, and one large sponge cake. Initially we thought carrot cake or Victoria sponge, but I've had uncooked-in-the-middle horrors with carrot cakes before, and I thought the Victoria sponge would be too like the scones. In the end I plumped for a lemon sandwich, which is another of The Scientist's favourites. I used a recipe from the Cream Teas and Boundaries book I found on amazon for the cake, but I made two and sandwiched them together with lemon buttercream. Rather than putting more icing on the top I used the 'lemon crunch' which the recipe suggested - just a mix of sugar and lemon juice, painted on to the top of the still-warm top layer.

It was a really easy recipe - bung everything in a bowl, mix up thoroughly and stick in a cake tin. It baked nicely (I covered it towards the end as it was beginning to brown) and - more importantly - baked all the way through. Plus you use both the lemon zest and the juice which I prefer. I made it in a big 22 inch round tin so it stood nice and tall when it was sandwiched together. I was rather proud of how it looked, although it was lighter in colour than the photo makes it look - and also looked more impressive before I sliced it into a zillion thin slices. It was popular with the cricketers which was very pleasing. It was nice and light and moist which is what I'd been aiming for, but the slices were small, so the buttercream didn't wipe you out. The Scientist actually forewent it as he was batting shortly after tea, but I'll happily make it for him another time as it was so easy and tasty.

And so endeth the lesson on cricket teas. I am still camera-less, so unless something happens on that front rather pronto, I'm afraid I'm going to be reduced to drawing my dinner. And you really don't want that.

Crunchy Top Lemon Sandwich Cake (based on one in Cream Teas and Boundaries)
For each cake (make 2)
100g soft margarine
175g caster sugar
175g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 medium eggs
4 tbsp milk
finely grated rind of 1 lemon

Crunchy Topping (just make one quantity to top the upper cake)
Juice of 1 lemon
100g granulated sugar (I used caster)

Filling
Lemon buttercream - I didn't write down the quantities but it's just butter, sifted icing sugar and lemon juice

Cakes
Preheat oven to 170C/325F/Gas 3. Base line a deep round sandwich tin with greaseproof paper [I used a spring-release 22-incher so just sprayed it lightly with oil].

Measure all cake ingredients into a large bowl and beat well for about 2 minutes until smooth and well-blended. Turn the mixture into the tin and level the surface. Bake for 35-40 minutes until the cake springs back lightly when pressed, or when a skewer comes out clean [watch out that the top isn't browning too much, and cover if it is]. Let one cake cool and then turn out, and pain the other one with the topping (below) while it's still warm. When both are cool, sandwich together with lemon buttercream (it will go runny if you do it while the cake is still warm)

Topping
Measure lemon and sugar into a bowl and stir until blended. When the top cake comes out of the oven, spread the lemon paste over the top while the cake is still hot. Leave in tin until cold, then turn out.

Cricket tea part 2 - perfect scones

2009-05-15T21:10:00.005+01:00

So here, as promised, are the scones we brought to the cricket tea last weekend. Apologies for recycling the same photo. As I've whinged about excessively already, my camera is awol and I'm having to shamefully beg anyone with a photo-taking device to snap things for me :(

Scones were the first thing The Scientist put on the cricket tea wishlist, so I think perhaps they don't feature too frequently. I've made scones before - usually for The Scientist's parents until at last his mum gently let on that she doesn't like scones - but this time I wanted to find a definitive recipe. Something that would become 'my scone' recipe - the one that people make special requests for. This was all inspired by a beautifully fluffy and soft scone we shared in a tea room in Banbury about two years ago. I asked for the recipe but they said they were bought in, and we've never been back to Banbury since to pursue it. I looked at a lot of recipes and they were all broadly similar - some used milk, some buttermilk, some yogurt, but nothing that made me think that these would be The Ones. The most different recipe was Nigella's in How to be a Domestic Goddess, which used plain flour, and a LOT of cream of tartar. She said that this added soft fluffiness, and so in the end that was what swayed me.

Making the scones was completely uneventful (except that I forgot to add the sultanas The Scientist had requested), but the baked scones were absolutely as promised. Dreamily light and soft they delivered everything I had hoped for, and carried their jam topping beautifully. The cricket club captain's one year old daughter was quite a fan, and they got a lot of compliments from the players too (including The Scientist of course). Truly I will never use another scone recipe again. These are The Ones. I might even try them on The Scientist's mum :)

'Lily's scones' from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess
Makes 12 (I made one and a half quantities)

500g flour

1 tsp salt

2 tsp baking soda

4 ½ tsp cream of tartar

125g unsalted butter, diced

300ml milk

Preheat oven to 220°. Sift the dry ingredients together and rub in the butter thoroughly. Add the milk and stir very briefly. Knead lightly together on a floured surface. [It's important not to overwork scone dough] Roll out to approx 3cm thickness and then cut into 12 scones. [I used a cutter a bit smaller than the size Nigella gives - mine was about 5cm across compared to her 6 1/2 and got 18 out of the 1 and a half quantity dough] Bake for 10mins until wonderfully soft but slightly golden. I left ours to cool before cutting them and spreading with jam to transport to the cricket club. I imagine they would be wonderful warm (I have to admit that I tried a couple of tiny bits that 'fell off' while they were still warm so I don't know why I'm pretending I don't know)

How to do a cricket tea - Part 1

2009-05-13T17:43:00.005+01:00

It's very fashionable to be down on being English at the moment. Our transport system is antiquated and expensive, our weather ranges from rain to weedy sun to - oh, snow at Easter, our politicians are mainly expenses-claiming scumbags, and our social services are being kicked into touch by the Welsh and the Scots (as is our rugby team). And our national dish is an Indian curry which India has politely disowned. But there are some reasons to be proud of being English, and most of them involve endearingly bizarre character traits and habits. And one of those is the pottering amateur.

The English love pottering; they love their sheds; they love tinkering and pursuing random hobbies. Sometimes that produces morris dancing (which I personally love because it's so archaic and jolly) and sometimes it produces the Industrial Revolution. It also promotes a sense of taking part, fair play and derring do, often targeted to sports which we gaily take overseas and then lose at. And one of those is cricket. English weekend cricket is a reason to love living in this country. Drive past any village on a summer weekend and there will be a patch of green with 22 slightly overweight and red-faced gentlemen standing and watching two people heft a wedge of willow at a lethally hard ball. Sometimes they will exclaim and make unfathomable hand gestures. Occasionally one will break into a comedy run, usually thankfully outpaced by the one or two eager fit young bloods on the team. NB The Scientist is one of those young bloods, but he is keen to maintain his ability to run after the ball, and so will hopefully be the country's only sprinting nonagenarian village cricketer one day. Even my sprinting, actually-bothering-to-warm-up, stroke-practising-in-the-kitchen beloved other half, however, has a soft spot for what is the essence of English weekend cricket - the tea.

Our cricket tea (photographed by Paul - thank you!)
From left: be-jammed scones, chocolate biscuit cake (in squares), sliced lemon drizzle sandwich cake, clotted cream (in bowl), sandwiches aplenty, more scone, shameful reconstituted meat products (nothing to do with me), crisps, torso of cricketer eager for his tea.

Cricket teas are legendary. In fact, a search on the Internet revealed that some clubs devote more web space to their teas than they do to their matches. They embody the very niceness of English sporting endeavours (no doubt why we rarely lift a major trophy), what with all their 'no no, after you', cucumber sandwiches, china cups and Battenburg slices. Even the cricket commentators at Lords get cakes sent to them by fans. In essence, cricket would not be cricket without a good tea.

At The Scientist's local club they are very egalitarian about their teas. There is a rota for every home match, and the nominated incumbent of the week goes off and spends their budget on whatever they see fit. Of course, with a keen eye to a baking opportunity I had been eager for The Scientist's number to come up ever since we arrived in Warwickshire, and a couple of weeks ago he came back from nets and casually threw into conversation that he'd been asked to do it a few Sundays hence. I immediately went into planning overdrive. We brainstormed the best cakes he'd come across in all his days of playing village cricket; we compared the overall balance of chocolatey and fruity, slices and individual items, the risk of weighing down the home team as opposed to the visitors depending on who batted first. We made, revised and re-revised the lists.

This is how I like to put it. I think that readers of this blog will already realise that in reality all this meant that I faffed, stressed, read baking books from cover to cover, presented The Scientist with a new set of options on a daily basis, and he said 'whatever you bake will be lovely'. And I mean that in a supportive way.

In the end, we tried to keep it simple. I found some really good tips on quantities in a book I couldn't resist buying from an Amazon seller - Cream Teas and Boundaries: Village Cricket Tea Recipes. We revised these a bit in accordance with The Scientist's own preferences, and so having now executed our tea duties successfully, I thought it might be useful to set out our hints and tips for anyone else asked to provide a cricket tea. After the length of this post, recipes will follow later!

Here is what we made, for two teams and a few associated supporters and scorers:

4 loaves' worth of sliced bread, divided equally into ham, grated cheese and egg mayonnaise sandwiches. Half of the cheese and half of the ham sandwiches had pickle in them. We used two white and two white/wholemeal loaves, and spread them with marge under the fillings. Salad additions are also acceptable, but The Scientist is sick of picking out tomato and cucumber from his sandwiches so we didn't bother. That's the prerogative of the tea-maker :)

One pack of supermarket mini sausage rolls and one of mini cocktail sausages

One large packet of tortilla chips

One large lemon sandwich drizzle cake

One large quantity of chocolate biscuit cake, cut into 24 squares

18 fruit scones, halves and spread with strawberry jam, served with clotted cream

Tea and orange squash.

This quantity worked out fine - we could have got away with only three loaves of bread, but people liked snacking on the leftovers after the match. And another bag of crisps wouldn't have gone amiss. The quantity of cakes worked out perfectly.

Hints and tips
If there is more than one of you making the sandwiches, set up a production line. Ideally employ a friendly graduate of the maths or physical sciences persuasion to work out exactly what quantities you need. Fortunately I have one of those on hand for these eventualities. We both buttered the bread and divided it into equal piles. I pickled the ones that needed pickling, and The Scientist took care of the other fillings.

Put the uncut sandwiches back into the plastic bags the bread came in for ease of carrying, and cut them in situ. This prevents the edges from drying out, and doesn't take too long.

If you can, leave buying the sandwich ingredients until the morning of the match (see above comment on possibility of snow at Easter)

Making some of the baked goods the night before will free all parties up for stress-free sandwiching on the day. I only had one cake tin of the right size for the lemon cake, so I made one layer the night before, and the second the morning of the match. We also made the chocolate biscuit cake the night before and stored it in the fridge. That only left one cake, the icing and butter icing, and the scones to make that morning.

Cut and jammify scones at home, and take them sandwiched back together. They just need separating again to be served.

After all my dithering, it was also interesting to see what went first when the weary teams came to claim their tea. I have to admit (to my chagrin) that the sausage rolls and mini sausages were popular, although they were admittedly placed at the front of the table. The lemon cake took a little while to get going, but then disappeared very fast, and the biscuit cake and scones were particularly praised (how I kvelled). I didn't notice any particular preference for sandwich fillings, though the opposing team had a probably unusual number of non meat-eaters. Happily The Scientist is well used to catering for veggies and so this didn't lead to an unedifying scramble for the egg sandwiches even though we hadn't known in advance.

I would make other cakes next time just for variety, but having one large sliced cake and one tray bake was a good division, and I will never cater another cricket tea without those exact same scones again. They were wonderful. And if you've got this far, you will be rewarded with the recipe next time :) As to the result of the match, I'm afraid we must draw a veil to spare the home team's blushes.

Some random facts

2009-05-10T21:43:00.003+01:00

Holler over at Tinned Tomatoes gave me a Preemio Blogger Award - isn't that lovely! Thank you Holler! I have to tell you seven random things to claim it, so here goes (since I am very low on blog worthy photo reserves after leaving my camera in Israel and having such an elderly phone that it only makes calls)

1. I spent this morning helping The Scientist make the tea for his cricket club, and it was one of the most fun Sunday mornings I've had in ages. He calculated the composition of the sandwiches, and took care of the cheese, egg and ham fillings, and I buttered, Branston-ed and made cakes. Photos will follow soon, I hope (courtesy of Paul, whose phone is much more sophisticated than mine)

2. I associate the word 'random' with my university days - I heard it used more frequently in Fresher's week than ever before, I think.

3. I am sitting on the sofa typing this. I am under the spare duvet as it's a bit chilly and it's more environmentally friendly than turning on the heating, and I am covered in cats. They are very cute, but I discovered today that the reason my vegetable and flower seeds aren't germinating is because Mausel thinks that I have cleared the flower bed in order to make her her own bathroom. So it's a good thing for her that she's so cute.

My little sticky fruit trees in bloom!

4. I just learnt to purl, which means I can knit things other than scarves. I was given my first knitting needles at the age of five by my friend Max, but it's taken me until the age of 32 to be able to do anything useful with them (I have to admit that I don't know where those first needles are now).

5. I secretly fancy David Tennant (though Edward from Twilight comes a close second).

6. I can count to seven in Hebrew and I know the word for underpants. It has yet to be of any use in conversation.

7. I am terrible - absolutely terrible - at remembering jokes. I have messed up so many punchlines that my nickname at university was Dappy Spice, and I believed someone recently when they told me that their crisps had been flash-fried in water. What can I say - he had a trustworthy face?

Veggie kedgeree - from the storecupboard

2009-05-05T18:50:00.006+01:00

This is a dish I've had sitting in my recipe folder for about two years. Every time I see it I promote it to the front, but then another veg box arrives, or we go away, or - I don't know - things conspire against it. But eventually I managed to get round to it, and I hope I don't leave it as long for a repeat as it was an easy peasy winner of a dinner. It's storecupboard-tastic, apart from the eggs - and who doesn't have eggs in their fridge? Apart from vegans. And egg haters.

It's a kedgeree dish, which is a British/Indian classic featuring smoked fish - a bastardised Anglo breakfast version of the Indian food our colonial ancestors encountered in their days of painting the world map red. I have never eaten it in its carnivorous guise, although I did like smoked fish in my pre-veggie days (I think I only ate it about twice, and always associate it with a hotel breakfast in Weston-Super-Mare. How weird is that? It sounds like the memory of someone much older than seven which is about how old I must have been). Anyway, it's basically curried rice with eggs and fish, but this version uses lentils instead of fish. I fancied a big chunky type of lentil and so used yellow split peas, but in every other respect I followed the recipe. It's not sophisticated in its spicing and seasoning, but it's tasty nonetheless. The Scientist had also been keen on my description of it, but he went traditional and added some smoked mackerel to his. I thought my Weston-Super-Mare memories would make me tempted until it stunk out the kitchen so comprehensively that I couldn't go in without wrinkling my nose for about a week.

The kedgeree was simple, yet satisfyingly tasty in flavour and texture. I liked the combination of pulses and rice, while the eggs (boiled according to Heidi's foolproof method which I have only fooled up once) give an interesting change to each mouthful. I know, the eggs look huge, but it was just the way I arranged them on the plate. It's also nutritionally pretty good and hardly takes any effort. Go on, don't leave it as long as I did!

Veggie kedgeree (copied from a Slimmer's World cookbook)
Serves 4

1 large onion, peeled and chopped
2 tsp mild curry powder
250g basmati rice [I used wholegrain regular rice]
50g red/yellow split lentils
1 bay leaf
1 cinnamon stick
650 ml stock
8 eggs
salt and pepper
chopped coriander to garnish if you have more of an eye to presentation than I do

Stir fry the onion in fry light for 2-3 minutes over a high heat then add the curry powder, rice, lentils, bay leaf and cinnamon stick. Stir and fry for 1-2 minutes

Add stock, season well and bring to the boil. Cover tightly, reduce the heat and cook gently for around 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and let stand, undisturbed, for 10-12 minutes [I remember worrying that this wouldn't be long enough for long wholegrain rice and I think I cooked it for an extra five minutes just in case. It turned out ok]

Boil the eggs [using Heidi's method if you like your yolks just slightly and deliciously soft]. Shell and halve them. Fluff up the rice and spoon into bowls. Top with the eggs, sprinkle over the chopped coriander and serve.

Thin mints - or mint podgies

2009-05-01T19:03:00.007+01:00

So much for returning to regular blogging! I've been in Israel for a week with Munchkin Granny, visiting my Grandma and going to a family Bar Mitzvah. I meant to get a post up before I went but ended up in a mad dash and didn't make it. And now I've gone and left my camera in Israel and have yet to negotiate with one of my lovely uncles what the exchange rate between camera postage and Cadbury's creme eggs is, so I'm going to be going through my backlog of photos for a little while!

Anyway, the trip to Israel was great. Here's a roundup:
Cousin count: 12 (ten mine, two MG's)
Scary encounters with Israeli drivers: don't know, still have my eyes shut
Beds slept in: 5 in 6 nights, if you include the aeroplane seat where I failed to sleep
Mysterious and invisible dense items making MG's suitcase inexplicably heavy: one (large)
Rites of passage observed: one (bravo, Chanan!)
Number of sausages consumed by cousins: disappeared too quickly to count
Vegan brownies made: One Big Pile
National holidays participated in: two - Remembrance Day and Independence Day
Emails from anxious students staring down the barrel of a deadline: many

So all in all, an eventful trip and lovely to see Grandma and all the other lovely relations over there. While there I neither made nor ate thin mints, but I did try out this recipe for them before I left. I haven't been posting about it, but I have continued to bake for my colleagues at work this semester - albeit a bit more sporadically because of other commitments. I can't remember what led me to this recipe on Baking Bites, but I thought they would be elegant and chocolatey and fitting for the closing of the semester. Thin Mints are one of the cookies sold to raise funds by American Girl Scouts, but I was surprised to find that they are boxed brands, not home-made. My only encounter with Girl Scout Cookies was in a Peanuts cartoon but I gather from Nicole's posts that they are a bit of a cultural institution, and she's been trying out some home-made versions.

I read her instructions carefully but I still managed to make them a bit thick. I liked it that the dough was rolled into a log and sliced - less messy than rolling into balls and flattening (although dipping them in chocolate afterwards was satisfyingly messy). But I should have sliced my slices thinner - the resulting biscuits were less dainty elegance and rather more jaw-cracker. In fact, one of my colleague said that she had broken a tooth on one - I hope she was joking! Another time I would cut them thinner and add a bit more mint, but to be honest, I would make a mint-flavoured version of these cookies in preference. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and it was an interesting foray into an American tradition.

Thin mints: recipe here

Tomato salad au Charles

2009-04-19T19:55:00.006+01:00

Awww, you're all just so lovely :) Thank you for all the sweet comments after my return to blogland. I feel all invigorated to continue and am very pleased to be just managing to sneak in under the wire for this month's No Croutons Required. It's Holler's birthday edition, you see, so it seemed like an extra shame to miss it.

My salad is a very simple one, but the dressing makes it amazing. It's a speciality of my friend Charles, whom I visited yesterday. Charles and I go way back, right back to the first day of university, in fact, and I have him to thank for my initiation into the ways of toasted cheese sandwiches with pickles, how not to make stock, and how to dismount from a bike while it's still moving (actually I've never dared try that again after my debut). Charles' cooking skills have moved on from the cheese toastie days and both times I've seen him recently he's made a version of this salad. It's essentially a mix of lettuce, tomato and cucumber, with assorted other raw veggies and some fruit. The first time he used sliced apples, and this time it was grapes (I nearly made myself ill gorging on all the grapes!). The dressing is what brings it all together in a silky mustardyness, and was passed on to him by his dad. I hope I've remembered it correctly though I'm sure it would stand some customising. My own salad was a a bit of a pared down version as our fridge was a bit low on ingredients - some rocket and watercress, chopped tomatoes and cucumber, and some sliced pear. I added a lot of tomatoes since they are the theme of No Croutons Required this month. I love the smell of fresh tomatoes and am hoping that I'll have some more home-grown ones this year. They are (hopefully) germinating on the kitchen table, along with some peas, broad beans, herbs, and a small cucumber plant I bought on a whim today in the garden centre.

Since it's her birthday Holler has asked that we describe a whole meal to go with our tomato offerings. I'm sending over what I ate my salad alongside as it was fun: sauteed mushrooms, leeks and chard with some thyme and basil in a bit of tomato sauce, wrapped in pancakes. I served mine with some leftover sweet potato soup over the top as a sauce. It doesn't look too pretty but I think it was birthday-worthy. And just in case it's not, I'd bring out a luscious chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream icing as a dessert :)

Salad dressing au Charles
Put into a jar:
1 thumb of vinegar (not balsamic)
1 tsp English mustard
1 tsp salt
2 thumbs of olive oil

Shake and dress.