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.

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.

A change in perspective

Hello webby world,

The original and lovely Cake Box

I think most of you know I am a baker. My business's name is Cake Box, and come January I will have been trading under that name for 5 years. (I also had a blog called Cake Boxing but I'm not keeping that one up to date at  the moment). My business is small, but I have built up a very good reputation over those years.  I do not advertise and all of my work has been through recommendation. I am immensely proud of my reputation and work hard to sustain it.

Have a look at some of the things I've done - cupcakes, slices, celebration cakes (The one below was for a Beatles fan's birthday), Malteser cake (a fancy one for a special event) and a torte. I make all my own decorations and have FIRM views about how important good ingredients are.

Over the past week I discovered that a new cake shop is opening a few miles down the road. It is called Cake Box.

Upon investigation, it's a franchise called Eggless Cake Box, but the 'eggless' bit is in TINY type. I work in Roundhay; it's on Roundhay Road. They aren't open yet but I've already had some confused customers ring and email. And if people looking for them find me, people looking for me will find them. I have no doubt people who have been told that Cake Box, Roundhay makes lovely cakes will think the shop called Cake Box on the main route to the city centre (Roundhay Road) will be the one.

We have a different core clientèle with some overlap. They are aimed at the Sikh and Hindu community, and others that don't want eggs in their cakes. My customers are the people of my North Leeds community willing to pay more than supermarket prices for high quality ingredients and cakes, which does include a number of people wanting egg free cakes.

I was so upset. My branding, stickers, ingredient labels, business cards, email and domain name are all Cake Box. I can't easily change them - or at least not without a sizable cost. And inconvenience. Having been careful at the time I chose my trading name that there was no chance of confusion with other businesses in the area I was inwardly shouting 'It's not fair!'when another business didn't care about doing the same. And how do I preserve my reputation for lovely home made cakes when something using the same name is advertising "cakes while you wait?"

Anyway, I felt so sad and defeated about it all.

Then I popped to the supermarket. There at the entrance was someone collecting for St George's Crypt, the homeless charity in Leeds.  They had something that looked like a book of raffle tickets but wasn't. The volunteer explained to me that it was a book of vouchers for £5. Instead of giving people begging a coin or two, i you could give them one of the 5 vouchers and they could exchange it for a hot shower and cooked meal at one of the 4 centres around the city. Isn't it a brilliant idea? Everything looks brighter when you are warm, clean and fed. If a paltry quid can get that for someone who needed it, that's an absolute steal. 

I don't believe that telling someone "other people have it worse" is helpful. It's like telling a happy person that someone has it even better than they - so what?  But I was slipping into self pity and it did me good to be jolted out my inward focus. A disappointing and crappy thing happened to my business and I was only seeing problems rather than solutions. Generally I try to shake off those negative thoughts that I cannot  do anything about but I was dwelling on it. And, if I'm honest, sulking. I felt hard done by. 

Yes, my fiver bought meals and showers for people who might need it. But it also bought me a little sense of perspective. Bargain.