Let the festivities begin!

 As warm autumn days get rarer and we're all confined to barracks for a month, it's time to think of the future and start preparations for whatever level of Christmas we're able to have. Early November is the ideal time to make mincemeat for this year's mince pies.

In my experience, there's a hierarchy of mince pies. At the bottom is shop bought, obviously*. Next is a jar of mincemeat and ready roll pastry, which gives a pleasing feeling of accomplishment. Only slightly more work than that (so VERY slightly) is making your own mincemeat and using ready roll pastry. I cannot stress enough how much of a difference this makes. It's streets ahead of the stuff in the jars, and is the work of about half an hour. Even better is fully homemade. The greatest of all is homemade by somebody else - no mess, no work! Sadly I rarely come across those.

The wonder of homemade mincemeat is that you can tweak it to your tastes.  Use the booze of your choice, go teetotal, alter the spice mix, add chopped nuts or be nut-free, use vegetarian suet if you prefer.

My recipe is based on the one in Rachel Allen's excellent book, Bake.

• 3 large or 4 small cooking apples
• 2 oranges
• 2 lemons
• 250g suet
• 825g of mixed dried fruit (see note 1)
• 125g mixed peel
• 650g brown sugar 
• 2-3tsp spice (see note 2)
• 150ml dark rum or brandy or whisky or more orange juice
• optional - chopped almons or pecans

Peel, core and chop the apples then simmer with a splash of water until cooked down to a pulp.

In a large stock pot or truly enormous bowl, mix the zest and juice of the oranges and lemons with the suet, dried fruit, mixed peel, sugar, spices, alcohol or juice and nuts if using. Add the cooked pulp, mix thoroughly and put into sterilised jars.

Leave to mature for 2-3 weeks. Easy, right?

Note 1: Rachel Allen had 275g each of raisins, sultanas and currants only.  Personally I think currants are nasty, gritty little things, and I like a touch of sharpness to cut through the sweetness. My prefered mix is  about half sultanas and the rest a mix of cranberries, sour cherries, apricots and prunes; I dice the larger fruits to similar sized pieces.  Dried fig, glacé cherries or tropical fruits can also work - pick whatever combination apeals to you.

Note 2 - Allen goes for 2tsp of mixed spice.  I grate half a nutmeg with a scant teaspoon each of ground cinnamon, ginger and cloves. I love nutmeg in Christmas food. Just use what you like, ditch what you don't. 

If you're going all out and making shortcrust pastry from scratch, my absolute favourite recipe is from my Sugarcraft tutor at college: German Paste. It's one part sugar, two parts fat, three parts flour and an egg to bind it.  Judith liked Trex or margarine for a crisper pastry, I prefer the flavour butter provides. Or go half and half, which is a great compromise. 

• 200g sugar
• 400g butter, Trex or combination
• 600g plain flour
• 1 large egg or 2 small, beaten

Put the sugar and flour in a food processor and gradually add the fat, followed by the beaten egg. Mix until it just comes together. Bring it into a ball, wrap it in clingfilm or a substitute and leave it to rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

For the thinest, crispiest pastry, roll it out very thinly between two sheets of clingfilm or nonstick sheeting rather than on a floured surface and floured rolling pin. Cut out the circles and peel them off the clingfilm to put in a well greased tart tray. Add a heaped teaspoon of mincemeat and top with a pastry star. Wash with beaten egg and bake for 12-15 minutes.

The mincemeat recipe does make gargantuan quantities, so if you aren't planning to give it to friends or bake a zillion mince pies, you might prefer to halve it.  I once put out a plate of 8 that I took through to the living room while I washed up the baking tray, and when I went through with my cuppa 10 minutes later, Mark and Zach had polished off the lot. We go through a lot of mince pies.

*The exceptions to that hierarchy is Betty's of Harrogate mince pies - which are divine - and people who can't make pastry, who should stick to the ready roll rather than make tough pastry. The more you work it, flour it, roll it out, the tougher it gets. Like with scones, Less Is More for pastry.

Gingerbread recipes

Talking to my Very Excellent Mate Kirsty today, I waxed lyrical about gingerbread houses.  I love making them. In fact,  I have to fight my control-freak urge to let the kids decorate them with sweets. I like piping tiny icicles on eaves, I like making daft gingerbread people in different themes. When I baked for a living, I churned out at least 100 gingerbread people a week, and yet I still find the smell oddly soothing.

I have two favourite gingerbread recipes - a normal one and one suitable for vegans.  As two of our closest friends in the toddler years were highly allergic to dairy and egg, that was an absolute necessity for all our early parties.

First the usual one - 

400g plain flour

1tsp bicarb

2 tsp ground ginger

2 tsp cinnamon

180g soft butter

125g soft brown sugar

125g treacle

1 egg

Mix everything, roll out quite thinly, cut into shapes and bake at 180 for 10-15 minutes depending on the side of the biscuits.

Then the vegan one - 

250g plain flour

100g stork or other veg fat

100g soft brown sugar

1tbs treacle

1tbs golden syrup

1 tsp ground ginger

1-2 tbs of orange juice, just enough to get the dough to come together.

Mix everything, roll out more thickly, cut into shapes and bake at 190 for 8-12 minutes.

Despite being on a hideously low calorie, no-carb diet while I sort my blood pressure out, I thought it would be nice to bake some gingerbread the kids for Hallowe'en. However, having spent 90 minutes processing Bramley apples for applesauce, I'm tempted to ditch kitchen work and sit in the gift of autumnal sunshine. 

Also, I have a sneaking suspicion it might all be too much for me, and I'd sneak a gingerbread witch or two.

Hmm, maybe one to leave for next year...

Let's talk about scones.

What feels like a very, very long time ago, the marvellous Val Berry, owner of Haley and Clifford asked me if I could make scones for her as well as the cakes I was already supplying.

Actually, that's not quite true. What she really said was "I bet your scones are great, aren't they Jay. I'm not happy with the scones we've got. Could you do some?" To which I obviously said, "No problem," whilst thinking to myself, "I've never made a scone in my life."

That led to 2 weeks of mad recipe testing, trying to find the nicest rise, the lightest texture without falling into the burn of too much raising agent. The egg versus no-egg recipes, the egg wash versus milk wash, then standing in the school yard with various trays of scones and coloured counters to get people to try several and choose their favourite.

I was VERY thorough.

Seven years on, I've made an awful lot of scones.  I've demonstrated scone making at a church ladies' group,  taught kids and adult groups and once, to my bloke's endless amusement, insisted on talking to the chef in a guest house that served utterly revolting tough hockey pucks as their 'cream tea' and told him what not to do and gave him a decent recipe. (Poor man. He looked most uncomfortable. But for God's sake, he kneaded the mixture in a machine. He HAD to be stopped)

Just this Saturday morning I got up early to blast out 6 and a half dozen for my lovely WI Darling Roses to serve at the local Wool Festival. 

All this is my pitch for Why You Should Listen To Me When It Comes To Scones.  Because you should, you really, really should.

Scones are the single easiest things to bake as long as you know how.  They are an absolute doddle. No kneading, no creaming butter and sugar, no technique beyond Doing The Minimum.

So, how to make scones:

First, what not to do - Don't work the mixture. Don't knead it, don't roll it out. Barely touch it. You don't need to and the less you do the better your scones.  Lazy bakers make the best scones. You don't even need to do that rubbing the butter into the flour thing if you don't fancy it. You can stick it in a food processor if you like.

So - 500g of plain flour and 6 tsp of baking powder

OR

500g of self raising flour and 2 tsp of baking powder

(whichever you've got, it really doesn't matter)

50g of caster sugar

75g butter

You can sift the dry ingredients together and rub in the butter until it's like slightly damp sand

OR

You can tip it into a food processor and blitz it until completely combined.

See? Easy.

If you've used the processor you need to tip things into a big bowl for the next bit.

Pour in 300ml of milk. If your milk is on the turn, all the better. You can swap out 50ml of milk for yogurt if you have it in, you can sour your milk by warming it slightly in the microwave and sloshing in a dash of lemon juice, or just use it as is. It's totally fine.

Here's the important bit:

Mix the milk through the dry ingredients until there are no pockets of dry flour. I use a butter knife, you can use a wooden spoon if you'd rather, but do it S-L-O-W-L-Y. No muscle power, no energy, just barely mix it. If it's not quite come together, use your hands to gently bring it together into one big sticky mess. It will look a right flipping state but don't worry.

Tip the mess onto a very well floured surface. (I have a large thin chopping mat I use, because that's easier to remove scone dough from than my counter.) Pat it gently with your hands until it's approximately even. Don't use a rolling pin, there's no need.  Either flouring your hands or dampening them will reduce how much sticks to you.   All you are after is a reasonably even thickness of dough. At a guess I'd say about 2-3cm thick for 12 scones.

Dip your cutter into some flour, cut out your scone by pressing down, NOT twisting. You can give it a little shimmy if it's sticking, but promise me you won't twist it. If you twist you are sealing the top and bottom edges together which dramatically affects the rise.

NB - that's why using a small glass as a cutter isn't as effective as a cutter - pressing the glass into  the mixture inevitably presses the top and bottom edges together because of the air pressure trapped in the glass as it's forced to accommodate the scone dough.

Brush the top of the scones with beaten egg and bake at 220 C for 10 to 12 minutes.

Job's a good 'un. Well done you.

I want to show you the difference between a scone made the way I suggest and a scone that's been kneaded a bit.

That one on the left is the result of kneading the bits left over to make some spares for the family after doing the proper scone (on the right). Can you see how the right hand side could rise evenly whereas the left one has a split across the middle as the only place it could rise. It was made with more dough than the other but turned out the same size.  It was quite nice but not as light as it could be.

 Here's a size view - the top one is smoother, and has a much tighter crumb That's because the gluten in the flour was activated by the slight kneading. The lower one is light as air. It looks less smooth but that's a Good Thing in scones.

I told you it was easy! Mix some dry ingredients, give a rough stir to mix in the milk, don't bother to roll it out, just pat it gently, cut by pressing rather than twisting. Perfect scones.

Oh, and the rhymes-with-gone versus rhymes-with-stone thing? It rhymes with gone, in case you were wondering.

xx

Roll With It

I'm teaching an evening class at the moment. It's called Family Cake Decorating, although sometimes I think it should be "Messing About With Icing" as mess is a pretty substantial part of the process. It's the 4th year I've taught this particular course and by the time it ends at 7pm I still find I'm glazed like a doughnut from all the icing sugar I've been handling. Not being messy is a skill I've yet to acquire.

I love teaching people new skills.  I get such a kick out of helping someone try something they've never had a go at before. Often all it takes is a little guidance and boom! they've made something marvellous. That grin of "look what a fab thing I did" from people in my class is one of my favourite parts of the week.

I usually bake many, many cupcakes to give my class of 12 plenty of stuff to decorate.  This time, however, I'm not. Taking in 3 or 4 dozen cupcakes each week gets expensive. The school subsidises the class but I do want to keep the ingredients costs from getting too high. It occurred to me that as long as my students had a surface to decorate, to didn't really matter what that surface was. A cupcake or a biscuit can work equally well as their canvas, and with a biscuit I can make bigger batches, so they get more goes. I'll still do a couple of cupcake weeks but so far the biscuits are going down very well.

Just a fraction of a week's biscuits

Several people in my class asked for my gingerbread recipe as last week's gingerbread men were a hit with their families.  I'm putting it here as well in case anyone fancies a go.  It's a pretty nice one, although the dough can be a pain to handle when the kitchen gets hot. However, there's an easy way around that. 

Gingerbread biscuits

180g butter

125g caster sugar

1 egg

125g treacle

420g flour

2 tsp ground ginger

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp bicarb

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale. Add the egg and treacle and combine thoroughly.  Sift the flour, spices and bicarb together and add to the mixture. Mix with a wooden spoon or by hand to bring it into a sticky dough - don’t overwork or knead the dough or the biscuits will be tough.

Ideally chill the dough for a while - the treacle can make it messy to handle when too warm. Roll out and cut into shapes, leaving room for the biscuits to spread slightly on the baking tray. Bake at 180 (170 fan) for 8-12 minutes depending on the thickness of your biscuits.

A NOTE ON ROLLING OUT DOUGH:

The more flour you add to a dough the tougher it will be. When rolling out biscuits dough - and especially pastry dough, where the thinner you can roll it the better- this can make the difference between a great result and a poor one.

You can avoid it sticking without adding flour by placing your dough between two sheets of clingfilm. Roll across the clingfilm until the dough is your preferred thickness (very thin for pastry, a pound coin thickness for most biscuits), peel of the top sheet, cut into shapes fitting them as close together as possible. Then lift up the bottom sheet of clingfilm and peel off the shape/disc and place it on the baking sheet or tart tin. 
 I can just hear Mary Berry congratulating you on the nicely baked tart without any hint of a soggy bottom. Paul Hollywood will tell you it's a nice thin pastry and a good bake overall.  Award yourself Star Baker and a smug grin.

Please sir, may I have S'more?

Last night, having broken Sober September for a bottle of prosecco, I rashly agreed my middle child could have two mates for a sleepover tonight. Discovering this heinous betrayal this morning, Miss B was incandescent with outrage. "He has sleepovers ALL THE TIME. That's SO unfair!" She has a point - some weekends we barely see Zach for sleepovers, or his room is filled with sleeping bags.

As it turned out, one of his mates couldn't come. But the other could - the one whose younger sister is a big mate of Miss B's. At a stroke I could make her happy and give my lovely mates Kirsty and John a child-free night. So I did.

A chance comment of B's reminded me I had nothing in for snacks.  I had foolishly established a 'Midnight Feast' tradition for sleepovers many years back.  That translates to snacks in bed  - usually eaten within 10 minutes of bedtime rather than late at night - and is a crucial part of the fun of a sleepover.

It's raining. I'm wearing not-suitable-for-viewing-by-other-humans clothing (old stained T shirt, long comfy skirt in jersey, no bra because I hate the uncomfortable things). I've been doing stuff in the kitchen, so the Tshirt is more water and ingredient splattered than normal. I am NOT popping to the shops.  So I rooted around in the kitchen and online for ingredients and inspiration respectively.

I decided to try a bar tray bake based on S'mores.  The recipe I saw was here. But I don't have graham crackers, I don't have digestive biscuits (the usual UK replacement) and I repeat I am NOT popping to the shops in this outfit. Or in this rain. Heck, I don't have chocolate chips either (used them all up earlier in the week) but I have a bar of chocolate I can smash up.

My kids love shortbread. I figured shortbread was worth trying as a graham cracker replacement. It works for millionaire's shortbread and at least one of my offspring thinks that's the pinnacle of baking. Here's the recipe I usually use :

• 250g butter
• 125g caster sugar
• 50g corn flour
• 200g plain flour

Cream the butter and sugar until nearly white, add the cornflour and plain flour and combine thoroughly.  

You can use damp hands to roll it into balls and squash them into biscuits, form it into a sausage wrapped in cling film and popped in the fridge until you slice circles off to bake as and when, mix in chocolate chips or fruit zest or poppy seeds and make flavoured biscuits. Or, in this case, press the dough into the base of a lined tray. mid was 23cm square (9 inches in old money)

Bake at 180 until done - usually about 13-15 minutes for biscuits, more like 20-odd for a tray bake. Then I pulled the shortbread out and turned the oven off.

I let the shortbread cool for a couple of minutes while I turned the grill on high. I sprinkled enough mini-marshmallows to mostly cover the base and popped it under the grill for a couple of minutes. Keep an eye on it if you try this - it can burn really quickly.

I battered the hell out of 100g of dark chocolate and sprinkled the bits over the toasted marshmallows. Back it went into the oven where the residual heat melted the chocolate over a few minutes. Then I left it to cool.

Incidentally, the corn flour makes shortbread crisper while remaining buttery. I like that in shortbread but if you prefer your a little softer reduce it or leave it out.

When it came time to sample the results, I found no shortage of volunteers.  The bars were lovely! Mark pointed out the shortbread was a little over baked. I'd left it in an extra 5 minutes because I was concerned about the centre being undercooked and the marshmallows making it gooey. I needn't have worried, 18-22 minutes would have been fine.

I'm sure there were more than that a minute ago

The visiting mates are here, the pull-out beds are made up, we're all set for Doctor Who tonight and we have shortbread s'mores. What more could a Saturday night offer?

More Power!

Yesterday I got loads of apples from next door's apple tree. Today I wanted to make apple sauce with them.  Obviously the first job is to peel the apples.

This can be a pretty straightforward and quick job. Grab an apple in one hand, the peeler in the other and get to it. But why do it sensibly if you can mess about and make a colossal mess?

I saw someone use an electric drill to peel an apple on YouTube once. Despite my power tool aversion, it just looked too fun not to try. So here I am, fearlessly attempting it:

My daft and apple-strewn experience suggests a steady rate of rotation, an apple of a nice even shape (rather than a lumpy windfall one) and a good sharp peeler would make a huge amount of difference to the outcome. I had none of these. My first attempts resulted in apple juice and chunks of peel shooting pretty much everywhere, but it settled down after a couple of goes.

I wouldn't recommend it as a smart and efficient way to peel apples, but I STRONGLY recommend it was an entertaining way to try.

Once the apples were peeled, cored and chopped I cooked them down to a puree to which I added sugar and a small dash of cinnamon. That apple sauce went inside triangles of puff pastry painted with egg wash and granulated sugar to make apple turnovers.  Then I used a further 2 cups of it to make some lovely apple sauce muffins. The recipe is here, although I swapped walnuts for pecans because I much prefer pecans.  The recipe filled 27 large muffin cases. I'll pop most of them in the freezer to grab as lunch box treats for the kids, but a good few didn't make it off the cooling rack. They were so good I couldn't resist...

A Snack For Europe

Ah,  the Eurovision Song Contest. Possibly the most confirmedly bonkers night in the TV schedules.  Masses of countries, many of which aren't even in Europe, competing to be chosen through arcane rules and cronyism as winners of a Song For Europe. Sometimes a pop song, sometimes an easy listening song, occasionally something truly demented. Scandinavian Death Metal band Lordi, I'm looking at you, lads.

When I first moved to the UK I was 16. I sat in the lounge of my Auntie Doh's house, utterly mystified by the relish with which she anticipated an over-long evening of crimes against music and taste. I was appalled. But sort of fascinated.

Within 4 years I loved it - sitting in Mark's student digs while housemate Dave wielded the Mop Of Shame. He was sitting in an armchair a mop's reach from the cheap second hand telly, mopping the screen whenever we wanted to banish a contestant. Many, many beers were consumed.

We never manage to pick winners, Mark and I. We tend to favour the madder-than-a-box-of-frogs entries, the crazy showboaters with a sense of fun.  France and Germany take turns being mentalists most years although Iceland does its share.

Anyway, because I had Very Important Work to do which demanded some truly momentous procrastination, I decided this year to make snack food from as many of the finalist countries as I could manage in 5 hours. You know, for fun.

I am clearly batty.  I know NOTHING about the cuisine of most of the finalists. Azerbaijiani and Armenian snacks are not amongst my repertoire. It was one of those "Google is my best friend" moments.

So here we go - our Snack For Europe menu:

First up, Ukraine. Their song was Tick Tock, which required a man flollop about in a giant hamster wheel for no discernible purpose. The item I cooked was Deruny: a grated potato and onion cake. I followed the recipe except I didn't peel the potatoes. I think a lot of the goodness is in the skin.

Next, Cheesecake from Belarus. Regrettably not the delicious dessert but instead a really awful song about wanting to be some girl's 'cheesecake.'  It included the line "I'm not Patrick Swayze and you're no Jennifer Grey." I think that much was obvious to us all, Mr Belarus.

Then Azerbaijian - Lass in a red dress accompanied by a woman on a trapeze. Or, in our house, a fresh cheese made from yogurt and dill. It's called Shuyudlu Suzme and I confess I reduced the raw garlic by two thirds. I quite liked it, especially spread on the potato cakes, but the others weren't sure.

One of my own highlights of the evening came next - Iceland. As I mentioned, they are often good fun (or off their heads mental. Which amounts to the same thing) and they didn't disappoint. This year they sent a bunch who had raided The Wiggles' wardrobes. In fairness, they sang better than The Wiggles; more akin to Imagination Movers, I think. Bright and daft and entirely fitting to children's TV. It was called No Prejudice and had the line "Perhaps you're thinner, Or someone who likes his dinner..."
I laughed and I nominate them for a guest appearance on Sesame Street.

Musically, quite a lull now. Norway fielded a bloke wearing Morten Harket's leather wrist straps from the mid 80s, but he was too husky for them and looked like they were cutting off the circulation to his hands while he sang a tedious dirge.
Romania sang something louder and with a faster tempo but all I can recall is a circular keyboard the male of the pair pretended (badly) to play (probably also badly).

Incidentally, it only hit me at 7:12pm that our friends were arriving from 7:30 and I hadn't got any bread for all these dips. A somewhat frantic recipe search brought me Armenia's entry: lavash, an unleavened flatbread cooked in the frying pan (because I don't have a tandoor). It was so quick and delicious I'll make it in future. Flour, salt and water can make wonderful things. Sadly, Armenia's song was utterly dire and so forgettable I could barely recall it even while their lounge lizard bloke was still singing it.

From this

To loads of this in under 15 minutes

Little Montenegro at least had the courage of its convictions and submitted a song in its native language. Bloke singing about something or other  - probably love or loss but it could have been about Torville and Dean - while a woman on roller blades dressed as an ice skater swooped around him. The floor lighting effects were cool - lighting up where she skated like Fantasia's Waltz of the Flowers - but the song was not.

 Poland decided to have some buxom woman in an undone peasant blouse "churning butter" and "washing clothes" into the camera while similarly clad women sang about shaking what their mama gave them,
 I'd say she was doing it suggestively, but that implies far more subtlety than the the 'here are my knockers, let this Pole rub your pole" soft porn approach she was taking. It was like a Benny Hill sketch from the 70s. Three of the six fellas watching it in my living room gave it top marks. The other 3 are related to me, so through being decent feminist types, prudes or just wisely knowing which side their bread is buttered, they roundly condemned it. Good lads. Miss B liked their skirts bought thought they should do their tops up.
I rather regretted buying Polish crisps and pretzels. because, y'know, ewww.

Greece was the family favourite, hummus. Ah, hummus. We can never make enough of it. Then, because it goes so nicely with hummus, I made baba ganoush. 

I know, I know,  I was going off piste a little but it's my party and I'll dip if I want to.

Incidentally, Greece's song was a boy band with a trampolinist behind them. No one is sure why.

Then came Austria - bearded drag queen singing a Bond theme was their musical entry; no food from me as it's either meat based or a complicated dessert. No time to spare for Sachertorte and the like, it's a procrastination too far. 

Germany - big cheer form the sofa as Z is studying German and is off there in October while his pal Tom got them in the sweepstake. Blonde lass with a quiff, accordion. I rather liked it, but I was a minority. Again, bad wine and too many sausage based foodstuffs so I skipped over them. Germany seems no place for a wine-drinking pescatarian.

Sweden - tipped as the favourite, this was a lovely ginger and cardamom cake from my Nordic Bakery book.  I mean, it was a dull ballad thing in true Eurovision tradition. A millions of ABBA fans cried out in anguish and were suddenly silenced. Or it could have been terror.

I just likened Euroviosion to the Death Star, didn't I. Hmm, does that make Terry Wogan Grand Moff Tarkin? Is Graham Norton a camp Vader leprechaun? Disturbing images...

Back to the food. 

Some chèvre flew the flag for France, except I forgot to put it out on the table so I had a lovely goat's cheese omelette for lunch the next day. Win!

In retaliation, a pack of lunatic Frenchmen capered about singing of their earnest desire to grow a moustache. Full points for insanity, null points for musicality.

Russia - pfft. Can't be bothered investigating recipes from Russia. Not in the current political climate.  They sent a poor pair conjoined twins - the first case recorded of twins being joined at the ponytail. Very odd. 

Italy - yay! Salad! I did a quick caprese salad of mozzarella, baby plum tomatoes and home grown basil with olive oil. It was a nice accompaniment to all the dips and flatbreads. 

I enjoyed the Italian entry's commitment to white leather, metal embellishments and over the top 80s styling. Just demented.

No dishes for the next lot - Slovenia (jazz-flute woman); Finland (indie pop boy band, I rather liked it. I was slightly embarrassed by this fact); Spain (Good lord, someone we actually knew! Ruth from the only series of X Factor we ever watched. Still rubbish); Switzerland (he whistles! he has a bloke on banjo! His lyrics are a bit sex-pest!); Hungary (cripes. Song about being a victim of child sex abuse. That was unexpected.)

Malta was a challenge. All the recipes I found on assorted Maltese or ex-pat websites were recipes I associate with different countries. I realise this is true of many countries - food doesn't respect political borders - but I had still hoped to find at least one thing I didn't already associate with somewhere else, even if I didn't actually cook it.

In the end I made "Black Olive Pate" which was really tapenade. Looks sludgy because it's made from black and grey and green things whizzed together, but as an olive-loving soul I enjoyed it very much.

Denmark flew the flag with a 2 minute blue cheese spread - just Danish Blue let down with some soured cream until more spreadable. In retrospect I'd have made it thinner still and dipped veg or crisps in it.  Truly AWFUL song called Cliche Love Song. It wanted to be Axis of Awesome's How to Write a Love Song but wasn't.

Then things got better. THE NETHERLANDS! Yay! An actually tuneful country song performed by  a competent duo without howling, whistling nor grandstanding.  It came as a relief after the previous noise. 

The Netherlands won our Eurovision Food Competition too, as the new dish of the night with top marks from Mark and Russell. It was Bruine Bonen Salade (brown bean salad). The beans were tossed in a dressing of minced red onion, mustard, red wine vinegar, oil, parsley and tarragon. I took down the tarragon amount by half and would have reduced it still further for my own taste as I don't like aniseed, so I bumped up the flat parsley.  I love flat parsley.

The kids, obviously, voted "crisps" as the winner. I'm ignoring them.

The final two songs were something forgettable from San Marino - a place I couldn't even start to find on a map - and the UK's entry with the cringingly awful title Children Of The Universe. It was like watching a less energetic Shakira.  I'd decided that should we require food from Britain we could open the pack of custard creams. The kids were too busy eating crisps to care.

All in all, it was a great night. Mates, chatting, bad music to disparage, funny things to applaud, masses of new things to try.
The final score, the one that would count the most the next morning, was this:

Number of garlic cloves used to prepare the food: 9

I apologise to anyone who came into contact with us on Sunday.

Festive and Fabulous

Hello webby chums!

My daughter is fashioning the "number of nights until Christmas" out of blu-tack and sticking it next to her bed, the lads are 'just mentioning' how close it is at least twice a day and the tree is dominating the living room so much that we can't see each other on the couches past it. Everyone I meet seems to ask whether I'm ready for Christmas. I guess we're in the final stretch now.

I'm surrounded by presents to wrap, lists of jobs, chaos and pine needles. I don't mind a bit - Christmas may mean a lot of work but it also means Christmas food. Yum.

In my opinion the greatest of all Christmas food* is the mince pie. Some love the cake or pudding, others favour the chocolate oranges and bit tins of sweets. Mark loves the big roast dinner with all the trimmings but I'd be happy with pasta and a salad as long as I had plenty of mince pies.  I think they are worth a little bit of time. Not much in the face of the hours spent shopping, wrapping or writing cards, but more than slinging something into a trolley.

In my first years living here I used to go to a tiny bakery in Hyde Park, now long gone,  that used light pastry and veggie suet. I'd buy them by the half-gross and we'd still run out by Boxing Day. I don't like the stodgy pastry of supermarket mince pies, so I graduated to Jus Rol and a jar of mincemeat to assemble my own.  Then I learnt to make lovely pastry, thanks to a tutor at college.

That pastry left the jar of mincemeat looking outclassed, so I decided to raise my game. Three years ago I made my own mincemeat and BANG! that was it - my prefect mince pie.

I understand making your own mincemeat may sound a little bit mad, but I promise it isn't. We're not heading into Kirsty Allsop lunacy, I promise. It takes me 30 minutes at most to make enough to fill 8 jam jars full. Trust me, it's worth it. It's far nicer, you can tweak the flavours to your own palate and other than peeling and chopping 3 or 4 apples it's almost entirely effortless.

Apples - 2 large cooking apples or 3-4 regular eating apples
400g sultanas
400g raisins
400g mixed dried fruit - I suggest cranberries, cherries, apricots and prunes chopped as needed.
2 oranges
2 lemons
250g vegetarian suet
125g mixed peel
600g brown sugar
1tsp each ground cloves, cinnamon, freshly grated nutmeg
90ml brandy, cointreau or dark rum

Peel and chop the apples and either microwave or simmer in a small pan until softened into a puree. In a very large bowl, chuck all the dried fruit, suet, mixed peel, sugar and spices. Add the zest and juice of the oranges and lemons. Tip in the apple puree and the alcohol of your choice and mix until well combined.
Leave overnight for the flavours to mature. A week or two is even better, a year is also possible - just spoon it onto sterilised jars and seal.

A note on dried fruit -
Don't use currants. Well, do if you feel you must, but I can't recommend it. For my money they add nothing but grittiness to the mixture. Cherries and cranberries add a welcome sharper note, prunes make everything taste richer and more moist, and apricots work really well too.





*Stilton is for life, not just for Christmas. I thought I best clarify that.

A quick catch up

Hello webby pals!

Sorry I've not posted for a few days. If I wasn't working I was asleep, which left little time for blogging. However, I've a spare half hour now and I thought I'd do a quick round up of the last week's events.

When I bake it is usually to order. People ring me up or email me, and agree what they want and for which date. All my cakes and biscuits are pre-sold, which means there is no wastage. With ingredient costs being so high at the moment, this is a definite advantage and allows me to work for a small profit whilst keeping my cakes as affordable as possible.

However, every year there is an exception to this business model: the school Christmas fair. I bake like a fiend and take a stall there, donating either a fee, a percentage of sales or raffle prizes like a Christmas cake to the PTA. I almost always sell out of cake. I enjoy that 2 hour stint of selling to the public, offering samples, chatting and persuading as best I can. It makes such a nice change from working alone in my kitchen with the radio for company.

Now that I have two kids in our local high school I thought I'd have a go at their school fair as well as my daughter's primary school. It is a bigger event which lasts longer, so I prepared proportionally more cake for it. Lots of cake. Lots and lots.

I did 20 chocolate gingerbread cakes, 35 boxes of Christmas cupcakes, a good stack of hot chocolate spoons, a couple of chocolate malteser cakes and a large iced Christmas cake to raffle off. All the decorations were hand made. Rolling tiny holly berries from red icing is a pretty tedious job, by the way. I'd not recommend doing more than 100 unless you have something really good on the radio to keep you occupied.  And the dratted sparkly glitter on them gets everywhere. Still, I like things to look and taste beautiful and beautiful takes time.

I spent 42 hours in the kitchen in all.
I couldn't manage a photo of the whole stall without getting my fed-up "why am I helping on a Saturday morning when I could be sleeping" son's face in the picture, and he prefers to remain anonymous at this stage, so here are 2 quick snaps of the display. The left side held most of my products in order that the right had space to let people fill in the raffle tickets.

 

Unfortunately, as well as 3 commercial cake stalls they'd booked, the high school had a PTA cake stall selling donated cakes and biscuits. Donated means they don't have to recoup ingredients cost, so they were priced accordingly. With about 1600 pupils across the primary and secondary campus, the PTA had many families to cajole into donating cake. I've never seen a stack of baked good so high in my life.  By the end they were selling them off at 50p for three cupcakes.

Hand crafted cakes made with butter, free range eggs, real vanilla and good quality chocolate cannot compete with that. People went for the pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap option on the whole, except those buying  for a gift. I sold very, very little - enough to recoup my ingredients cost, but not much more.

I sold some of the surplus to the deli and some friends. The chocolate ginger cakes would freeze, so they were fine. The rest I gave away (or we ate!) because all those hand made decorations would collapse if I tried to freeze them. It was a low moment.

Since then I did a day's work in the garden mending fences and mucking out the pets in the cold sunshine. That did wonders for clearing my head. In essence, I lost nothing but time last week. I can't get that back again, so why not kiss it good-bye and move on to things that are more productive. I shook off the disappointment and looks ahead. There was plenty to catch up on.

I've done a little more of the Christmas and birthday shopping, sorted out some paperwork, taught two clubs (glass painting and cake decorating respectively), tried to catch up on all the household chores I'd ignored while I was baking like a mad thing and spent some time relaxing with my kids.
Miss B and I finished reading On The Banks of Plum Creek and started By The Shores of Silver Lake. The Big Lad chose to cash in his reward for a half term of getting to school on time, so we all watched Despicable Me 2  together. There were cupcakes for dessert three nights in a row.  Not a bad few days, all things considered.

Now my focus is Friday's Women in Radio workshop. Eek. Thanks to my marvellous parents - coming over from North Wales to look after the kids while Mark travels back from London - I can go to Birmingham tomorrow afternoon, work out where everything is, potter around their Christmas Market or go to the movies and get up at a reasonable hour for the 8:45am start. I'm meeting a couple of the other attendees for a coffee before hand. From the little we've chatted on Twitter they seem lovely, so that should be a good start to the day.

I'm vacillating between excited and intimidated. Some of the other women who are going seem so professional and qualified. I've just got myself to offer. Yikes.I asked one of the BBC presenters who will be taking part what I should do to prepare. She says all I need is enthusiasm and questions.

I can do that. I've got loads. Wish me luck!
Jay x

I meant it to look like that...

Hello webby pals!

Fancy some cake? Of course you do. All the better if it's home made. And people like me are always telling you how easy it is to knock up a batch of cookies, or a birthday cake, or some scones.  Just throw it together, it'll be fine.
Sometimes we lie.

Blackberry crumble cake

Well, not lie exactly. Once you've got a reliable set of weights and measures, a couple of standard sized tins, an oven that stays at the temperature the dial claims it is and a straightforward recipe, baking is a doddle. And of course you need the correct ingredients, and not to be interrupted at a crucial moment so you can remember whether you'd added the baking powder or not, and you hear the timer go off so you can actually remove it when it's done.

Sometimes life isn't quite like that. The baby needs a change, or you answer the phone and forget the timer or the toddler twiddles the oven dial, or you're stressed or you read the recipe wrong. Or it just all goes a bit wrong and you're not sure why.

It's OK. It's recoverable. Don't panic.

I was chatting to another school parent last week about this when she said she daren't bake because she'll only mess it up.There is generally something you can salvage from a cake gone wrong.  I thought you might like to hear a few of them, on the off chance you make a mess of things someone you know makes a mess of a cake and you can help them fix it. Because I have faith in you.

It Looks Messy - Relish it. That's home made, babe. You know the labels on fancy-pants artisan scarves or jewellery - 'Some variation in texture or colour is a natural part of this hand crafted item' - don't you? That's your get-out-of-jail-free card. We've all heard tales of school bake sale items that have been bought at the supermarket and bashed about at the edges a bit to make it look home made. Home baking is supposed to look a little irregular. You don't want it to look like that mass produced Mr Kipling rubbish, do you?

Burnt top - Easy to fix. Use a bread knife to gently cut off the burnt top. Turn the cake upside down and ice as originally planned. (A cut surface can pick up a lot of crumbs, and it can mess up the appearance of your icing.)

Burnt And A Bit Dried Out - Still not a disaster. Cut the burnt bit off as above. Then make a light sugar syrup - 100g sugar, 200ml water and simmer until the sugar has dissolved and the liquid has reduced by half. Take off the heat, flavour if necessary (with a splash of vanilla or some lemon zest, just to match the flavour of your cake). Using a pastry brush, lightly coat both the top and bottom of the cake. Leave 10 mins to soak in and then turn it cut side down and ice.
This has the added advantage of keeping a cake moist for longer, so is a neat trick if you have to bake your cake in advance of an occasion (like a birthday party)

Uneven - if your baking and icing techniques have abandoned you, I suggest taking the 'More is More' aesthetic and covering it with sweets. Pile enough sweets on and no one will spot the saggy bit or the unevenly trimmed side. I made a friend a cake utterly coated with Maltesers once because I didn't have time to do the fancy icing I'd planned. It looked so over the top and indulgent it was actually better than my original design. (you don't have to wrap it in a chocolate collar like the one in the picture)

Overcooked - if you left it in too long and it's rather stale-feeling, serve it warm with ice cream or custard. A 30 second blast in the microwave, loosely covered, will make it warm and moist feeling for a short while. Warm cake and ice cream is a winner. (This also works with stale cake. I use this with leftovers all the time)

Collapsed In The Middle - There are a couple of options. You could cut the middle out, pour a glaze over it and declare it a ring cake.  Then scoff the messy gooey middle bit yourself and deny all knowledge. Or you could use a cutter - a circular one used for making scones is a good one - and cut out little individual cakes. They actually look very chic when iced. A quick glaze of cocoa, icing sugar, hot water and a knob of butter melted in gives a good mirror finish in situations like that.

The Whole Thing Looks Terrible - have you any fruit purée? Apple sauce? A jar of posh jam? Layer the cake, jam and some custard or cream. Someone dropping a pavlova called it Eton Mess once upon a time and we all fell for it. You can call yours Yorkshire Jumble, or English Pud, or whatever. The trick is to say it with confidence. (Chocolate sponge with raspberry or cherry jam is lovely, by the way. As is vanilla with lemon curd or apple sauce)

Oh God It's A Disaster - anything even vaguely edible, no matter how dry or wonky or cut into uneven chunks it is, will perform the role of trifle sponge perfectly. Even if you don't have it now, stick your chunks of cake in a bag and freeze them until you do.

I Think It's Dead - dropped it, smushed it, generally destroyed it? My gift to you, my dear maladroit chum, is one word: truffles. Cake crumbs, a bit of melted chocolate, maybe a dash of brandy or rum, or perhaps a drop of cream. Mix them well, form into balls, pop on a tray and freeze for a few minutes (or even a month) to firm up, then drop them in  more melted chocolate and remove them with a fork. Look! You made lovely homemade chocolates! You are so good to your guests.

In summary, with a little flexible thinking you can make something tasty out of pretty much any cake that isn't actually charcoal. Assuming you want to.
On the other hand, if you went to the trouble of baking something for someone and they aren't delighted with your thoughtfulness and efforts, they know where they can go. Yep, straight to M&S to buy something.  And you can open a  bottle of wine box of chocs and say to hell with it all.

Jay x

An Apple A Day

Hello webby mates!
My house smells of apples. Our lovely next door neighbours have two big and ancient apple trees in their garden that have reacted to a warm and lovely summer by producing enough fruit to keep the doctor away for a year or five. Unable to use all those apples, they gave great heaping bags of them to me.

I've had a great day this week being a one woman apple processing unit. It could have been a tedious task, peeling and chopping 10 kilos of apples in one sitting, but with a bit of forethought it became a lovely, indulgent day. Seriously, it did. I'm not putting a brave face on it or anything.

The trick is to set up your workstation.  I put a plastic bin - one of those trofast things from IKEA that was holding Duplo until I sold it a fortnight ago - in front of the couch in the living room. I put a large stock pot with water and a slosh of lemon juice on the coffee table. A cutting board, a knife, a peeler and the TV remote and I was good to go.

While I peeled away, the bin neatly catching all the mess and the lemon water stopping the apples turning brown, I watched the first three episodes of The Blacklist. That's an entirely daft series with James Spader clearly having a ball as a charming, immoral master criminal helping the FBI. He is very fun to watch.

Peeling completed, I shoved the trofast tub out of the way and chopped the apples to an accompaniment of Masterchef and The Choir on iPlayer. I think the BBC's iPlayer is God's gift to the modern age.

I took my chopped apples into the kitchen, popped on 6Music on the radio and got to the fun bit - cooking!

I washed some empty jars and popped them in the oven at 150 degrees to sterilise while I made a compote of apples with brown sugar and cinnamon and a huge vat of applesauce.

I'd like to give you a recipe but in all truthfulness there isn't one - the apples can vary so much in sweetness that giving amounts is pretty meaningless. I plopped a saucepan full of apples and a splash of water on the hob, tipped in a cup of brown sugar, a couple of strips of lemon zest and a cinnamon stick. I stirred frequently until it was all cooked. I tasted it, added a dash more sugar and removed the cinnamon and lemon peel, cooked it through for another 2 minutes and it was done.

The applesauce was the same but larger quantities - a stock pot full of apple, a splash of water, a generous couple of handfuls of caster sugar and stir well until cooked. Add more sugar to taste as you go. I like my spiced compote rather sharp and my applesauce sweet, but it is entirely personal preference. Just taste it as it cooks and remember it's easy to add more sugar but a bit of a bugger to try and remove it.

I ought to mention that applesauce or compote does not keep like jam. It's the high sugar content of jam that preserves it for so long. Applesauce has a mere fraction of that. I keep it in the fridge because I know I use it up pretty quickly (I can eat it by the bowlful. It reminds me of being a kid and Canada.) If you are not likely to be using it in the next couple of weeks I recommend freezing it in zip lock bags. It can keep for ages then.

Once the sauce and compote were bottled up I turned the oven up to 180 and made four of Riet's Dutch Apple Cake. I posted the recipe here in 2009, and these days I do make it in loaf tins after all. I can fit four of them in the oven at a time so I'm making maximum use of 1 hour of the oven being on, and the cake freezes well. So, one cake to the neighbours to thank them for the apples and the others popped away for later.

By this point I decided I needed some different entertainment. I swapped to my ipod and sang along to Tom Petty. The wonderful Tom is my go-to guy for songs to work to. I have decorated whole rooms to Full Moon Fever. It is one of my favourite albums in the world. I tend to favour stuff I can sing along with other music. It's just more fun. Although not necessarily for anyone within earshot.

As a treat for my lovely 11 year old I used some of the compote in lieu of jam to make Jam Jacks, our name for Mary-Anne Boerman's Crunchy Oat Slices. I find them a bit too prone to falling apart but that could be me not doing them quite as intended. However fragile they end up, they are definitely delicious.

Of course you can't bake with masses of apples without doing a crumble. It's probably a Law. Ever the law-abiding citizen, I made three - one for the freezer for my parents, one for the neighbour on the other side of our house and one for us.

My New Favourite Thing for apple crumble is to chuck a few fistfuls of pecans in the crumble mix. Apples and pecans are such happy bedfellows. The flavours round each other out, adding a depth and fullness lacking when it's just one or the other. I often experience tastes like they were music, and a good combination is like a wonderful chord as opposed to an individual note. Pecans and apples are a lovely chord.

NB - Other people do that too, right? I assume they do but perhaps they don't. It's like being unhappy in an orange room because it is yelling at you or knowing which numbers are friendly (the seven times tables definitely are, the sixes less so). Everyone is a little bit synaesthetic, aren't they?

My final effort - to The Leisure Society's marvellous album The Sleeper - was to start another batch of bramble jelly. This is 1 kilo of blackberries (from the freezer, as swapped for eggs with another neighbour in September), 1 kilo of apples roughly chopped but not peeled nor cored, an a little over a litre of water. I simmered them all together until they were a total mush ready for straining then boiling up with sugar. I do love the rich purple colour, and how the stained apple chunks look like watermelons with their vivid flesh and green skin.

Anyway, at the end of my own personal Apple Day I had 4 jars of compote, 2 massive ones of applesauce, 4 cakes, 3 crumbles, a tray of slices and a vat of jelly-in-progress.  I'd watched daft telly, listened to the radio, sung lustily along with some favourites and made the house smell utterly delicious.
All in all, a very good day.

The cutest pie in the world

Hello webby mates!

I love Pintrest, don't you?. Yes, it's full of crazy people making mood boards for weddings they won't have, mansions they will never live in, and some really intimidating tattoos but so what? A little dreaming is no bad thing. I have a board for fantasy book shelves, for heaven's sake. To each her own.

However, for me the best thing about Pintrest is the stuff I will actually use. I've made recipes I've pinned, found ideas for kids' costumes, followed knitting patterns and made up sewing projects inspired by pictures I've pinned. It's ace.

A long while ago I pinned an image of a little pastry heart on a stick. Having spent weeks making jam, I was in the mood for making jam tarts and thought it would be the perfect time to try the little pie lollies as well. It was a roaring success!

I used my favourite sweet pastry recipe  - 600g plain flour, 400g fat, 200g caster sugar and 1 large egg in the food processor. To avoid adding extra flour when I roll the pastry out I roll it between two double layers of cling film, then pop it in the fridge to rest for a while.

After 20 minutes or so I cut out large hearts from the cold pastry, pressed a lolly stick gently into them, added a dollop of my jam and topped with another pastry heart. I pressed the edges down with the tines of a fork to prevent jam leaking out and poked a couple of little holes in the centre to let any steam escape. Then I brushed each with egg (or use milk as you prefer) and sprinkled with granulated sugar. 10 to 12 minutes in a 190 degree oven and - ta da! Lovely, delicious and rather unfairly cute pies on sticks.

Pounced on as soon as they were cool

Delicious, if short lived!