Recipe 32: Cherry Cake

Cherry cake at Christmas time in Oz! What could remind one of the old country more, with overtones of Chekov and relaxing afternoons, than a light and cheerful cherry cake? A fresh sponge with little bursts of cherry-popping flavour is just the thing for an airy afternoon cake with a decent cup of tea or, even for a spot of dessert with a little cream drizzled over the top. Sounds pretty good, huh? Well, at least I think so.

Now before I begin telling you about this, I’m sure I can guess the question on your lips:

“But how do you stop all the cherries from sinking to the bottom of the cake?”

Well, having consulted a few recipes it seems that there are two ways to do this:

1. Once you’ve quartered the cherries, lightly coat them in a couple of tablespoons of self-raising flour. This will give them a little more ‘fixidity’ (?), and prevent them from sinking down as much.

2. Delia suggests only putting 2/3 of the cherries in during the folding stage and then adding the final third once the mixture’s in the tin. Pop the cherries on top of the mix and then push them just under the top of the mixture with a teaspoon.

I did both and got on fairly well with it. So, read on for your recipe for a delicious cherry cake.

Ingredients

200g cherries	175g self-raising flour
175g butter (room temperature)	Approx. 75 g almonds to decorate (and/or used crushed ones in the mix itself)
175g caster sugar	Vanilla or almond extract
3 large eggs

Begin with the cherries. If you’re not using fresh ones and they’re covered in syrup, pat them dry. If fresh ones, you’ll need to take the stones out – if you have a de-stoning device (as my brother, whose kitchen it was I was cooking in, has), use this then quarter. If not, take them out as you quarter them. Now coat them in about 2 tablespoons of self-raising flour.

For the cake, cream the butter and sugar together until light, pale and fluffy. Now gradually beat in the whisked eggs a little at a time. 

Sift the flour and carefully fold this into the creamed mixture using a metal spoon. Put in two thirds of the cherries together with the ground almonds and carefully fold these into the cake, adding one or two drops of almond extract (or vanilla extract if using that). 

Now spoon the cake mix into the prepared tin, level off the top with the back of a spoon, then sprinkle over the remaining third of the cherries and poke them just under the surface with a teaspoon. 

Bake the cake near the centre of the oven for 50 minutes, then cover with foil and continue cooking for a further 10 minutes, or until the centre is springy to touch. 

Cool the cake in the tin for 15 minutes before turning it out onto a wire rack to cool. Now all that’s left is to enjoy it with a little single cream or perhaps a nice cup of tea!

Today’s tip:

Apart from the tip to stop the cherries sinking, if you’re using a spring-form tin, to make it easier taking it in and out of the oven without destabilising the base, put it on a baking sheet for conveyance.

Also, having eaten a slice of the cake after dinner, I reckon a little dry Spanish sherry would work very nicely with it too, or maybe a chilled vermouth.

Baked Christmas Eve 2014 in Melbourne!

Adapted from: http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuisine/european/english/old-fashioned-cherry-cake.html

Recipe 31: Basque Hake

This is one actually cooked back in the summer while enjoying the August sunshine of Andalucia, but it's taken a little while for it to come online... I'm pleased to say that this is a delightfully easy and very tasty dish (isn't that almost always the way with fish dishes?) that benefits from it's source being a video from the Guardian website. 

So, apart from the ingredients, you get a little bit of fishing culture and so on in what can only be described as a 'magazine article' about Basque cooking and a demonstration of how to cook it by Michelin-starred chef Dani Lopez. Worth a watch, and not only for the amazing recipe, which is recreated here your reading...

Ingredients:

Hake fillet (one steak-sized piece per person)	100-200ml fish stock (ideally made from hake bones)
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped	Dried guindilla pepper or other pepper (e.g. chilli)
Handful of parsley, chopped	Clams (3 per person)
Tbsp. plain flour	Hake kokoxtas (the little gelatinous bit on the jaw of the fish)  - I couldn’t sauce these so just doubled the clam portion
Good splash of white wine	Fried garlic and garlic flower to garnish J

1. Fillet the hake (video shows you how to do this), ensuring you pin bone the fillets as necessary. Or just buy them filleted from the fish monger. This is what I ended up doing. However, this does mean you can’t use the hake bones to make the fish stock and will have to rely on a shop-bought stock or one you’ve prepared earlier).

2. Coat the base of a pan in olive oil and add garlic and a little of the pepper (just to add a subtle heat). Once the garlic starts to ‘dance’, add a little flour to thicken the sauce. Now add the splash of white wine and then the stock. Allow this to boil to thicken up.

3. Put in the hake, flesh side down, to poach it in the light sauce. If the sauce looks a little dry, add a bit more stock. Cover and poach for a couple of minutes only – be sure not to overdo it!

4. Very carefully (the flesh is nice and delicate), turn over the fillet. A good spatula will aid you in this. Now add clams and kokoxtas. Cover and poach for about 2 minutes, until the clams have opened up.

5. Plate up with 3 clams and 3 kokoxtas per person, drizzle over  a little of the sauce and top with the garlic and flower. This didn't feature in my dish and, if you compare mine with Mr Michelin-Star Chef, my presentation's not quite up there either. However, it did taste damn good, though.  

If you’ve got plenty sauce, I imagine you’ll do as I did and have more so that you can soak it up with some good, crusty bread. Very good. Very, very good, in fact.

Today’s tip:

The quality of the fish stock really does make a difference. The ‘whiter’ the stock, the more attractive the dish. I’ve also tried this with prawns when I couldn’t source clams and it was still pretty tasty. I reckon you could use this recipe for most forms of white, fleshy fish.

Today’s learning:

Hake is the most sustainable fish in the UK but of the 12,000 tonnes landed each year, only 2% is consumed in the UK. Time to eat more, me thinks!

Recipe 30: Fondant potatoes

This is one I've been trying to get right for a while, but never quite getting it from what I thought it was or from snippets on cookery programmes, I actually went online to find out how to do this. There are a number of different ways to cook fondant potatoes, but essentially there are two main stages:

• Fry them in lots of butter until golden
• Boil them in stock (chicken, beef, etc. you choose!)

I’ve used this one from the BBC Food website and, unsurprisingly for anything cooked in lots of butter, it was delicious! I cooked 6 potatoes with intention of having some heated up with lunch tomorrow but before I knew it, two had glided down my throat and I hadn’t even tucked into my duck or courgettes! So, I ended up eating it all.

Serving this with duck, lots of butter, courgettes and my favourite reduced red wine and berry sauce (recipe 24), it felt somewhat French, so I thought I’d crack open the champagne chilling in the fridge. Well, I had had a good meeting with my doctoral tutor late this afternoon, so that might have pushed me over the edge with the champagne. Anyway, without or without fizz, and with or without duck, do try this one. It’s like boiled potatoes but just much, much richer and tastier.

Ingredients

150g butter	2 garlic cloves, peeled, crushed lightly with the edge of a knife
4 potatoes, peeled, cut into barrel-shapes	2-3 sprigs fresh thyme (or dried if not fresh!)
75ml chicken or vegetable stock	salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Heat the butter over a medium heat in a saucepan. When the butter is foaming, add the potatoes and fry until deep golden-brown on one side, about 5-6 minutes. (Do not move the potatoes as they cook.)

2. Turn over the potatoes and cook for a further 5-6 minutes, or until golden-brown on both sides. If you start with a  low heat, you’ll probably want to leave ‘em for ten minutes a side or more…

3. Carefully pour in the stock, then add the garlic cloves and thyme sprigs. (be careful, the hot fat will spit and splutter when it comes into contact with the stock). Season, to taste, with the salt and pepper. The stock won’t cover the potatoes. This is fine. If they haven’t softened up enough quickly enough, simply turn them over in the stock.

4. Cover the pan with a lid and reduce the heat until the stock is simmering. Simmer the potatoes until tender, then remove the potatoes from the pan using a slotted spoon and keep warm.

5. Serve with a juicy meat (I’ve used duck breast, which is a fast and firm treat on a weekday night!

Today’s learning:

Use a low sided pan to do this with. I used a normal saucepan and had the devil of a time turning the potatoes over in the butter; they get quite slippy, you know!

Recipe adapted from ‘The Hairy Bikers’: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/fondantpotatoes_93087

Recipe 29: Slow-roasted lamb with boulangère potatoes

This is another adapted from Tom Kerridge’s book, a book that’s really proving its worth in this kitchen challenge.  This recipe is one I’d glanced at and got a little confused by the picture in the recipe book and simply moved on.  The picture of the recipe and the name stuck with me, however. And then, the other evening, while sharing a drink with friend Richard, we stumbled onto this as a topic of conversation and after discussion, I decided I’d be eating this at the weekend.

Now there are different bits of learning going on here; first there’s the roots of this type of cooking, which is simply that in the olden days of yore, before cookers everywhere, your French peasant-types would bung their potato and meat dish in bakers’ ovens once the bakers had baked their bread and the ovens were slowly cooling down, the peasant-types coming back at the end of the day to collect the slow cooked food. Lovely.  Second piece of learning is about waxy and floury potatoes. Now, I know there’s a difference and that maris pipers are floury, but beyond that, I knew as much as the name suggested. This recipe calls for waxy potatoes (although another I’ve consulted calls for floury). What really is the difference?

Well, simply put, your floury potatoes are ones that, once cooked, tend to mush up and crumble down (perfect for mash and your bashed-about roasties) and your waxy potatoes are ones that keep their shape and ‘density’ more once cooked, and as such are better for salads, dauphinoise, gratins and the like. Charlottes, maris peers, Jersey Royals and salad potatoes are good waxy ones and your King Edwards, reds in general and maris pipers are your common floury ones. In my ever-so-detailed research, I found out that you can test if a potato is one or the other in this, kitchen-science-experiment way (fun for all the family!):

Mix one part salt to 11 parts water in a measuring jug and add the potato. A floury one will almost always sink to the bottom of the jug, while a waxy one will float. (https://www.waitrose.com/home/recipes/food_glossary/potatoes.html)

A second recipe for lamb boulangère I saw on the Waitrose site suggested adding anchovy fillets (although Tom’s doesn’t). Based on the amazing success I’ve had in using anchovies to add a bit of depth and excitement to sauces and lamb previously, I’m lumping on and popping some fillets in to adapt Tom’s recipe.

Ingredients:

6 large, waxy potatoes	1 head of garlic, separated into cloves, peeled
3 onions	600ml chicken stock
Leaves from one bunch of thyme	50g unsalted butter
Shoulder/leg of lamb	Salt and pepper to taste
4 anchovy fillets	Veg as preferred for side

Pre-head the oven to 130⁰c.

Layer the thinly sliced potatoes, onions, thyme in a roasting dish and top with mashed up anchovy fillets (but save some for atop the lamb).

Use a knife to piece the skin of the lamb and pop a clove of garlic into each. Put the meat on the layered potatoes and spread a little mashed up anchovy over the lamb.

Melt the butter into the stock and pour it over the lamb and potatoes.

Put the roasting tray into the oven and leave for 4-5 hours until the lamb tender and potatoes cooked through. Once removed, cover with foil and leave to rest for 20 minutes before carving up.

Today’s learning:

1.       The liquid the potatoes and things have been cooked in is quite delicious – good idea to add the anchovies

2.       With a smaller piece of lamb, pop it in a little after the potatoes (they’ll need five hours) so that it isn’t overdone.

3.       When the lamb is resting, it will ooze out delightful juices; use these to make a gravy to supplement the delicious liquor from the potatoes.

Recipe adapted from: Kerridge, T. (2013). Proper Pub Food. Bath: Absolute Press.

Recipe 28: Stem ginger shortbread

Now you may have noticed that most of the recipes so far have been savoury rather than sweet, and there’s a reason for that. I generally much prefer savoury to sweet food. As a kid I used to love biscuits, but not normally chocolate ones, more shortbread (who doesn’t like them?) digestives and malted milk. But this love has waned as I’ve grown older and if it were a choice between a freshly buttered croissant (maybe with some cheese and a little ham) and some chocolate fudge cake, the croissant would win hands down every time.

It may be for this reason that I wasn’t overly impressed with Recipe 27, the chocolate and ginger biscuits. Thinking they were too sweet I was unsure what my colleagues would make of a tin full of the things when I brought them in for our tea-time treat: 36 large biscuits between half a dozen people - they were going to be there a week at least. However, a lady from the Quality Department (amazing that such departments exist, eh?) popped into the office this morning and, as I looked up from my computer to see how I could help I, I saw that it wasn’t me she was coming to, but the biscuit tin. As she lifted the lid she exclaimed, “It’s the last one!” This was under 48 hours from bringing in the things. Based on this evidence, I think they were far better than I imagined; it was just my savoury tooth that influenced my judgement.

And so I’m bake on the biscuit trail to try another simple biscuit recipe for the office, this time stem ginger shortbread – not as sweet as Recipe 27 and, having just eaten one, a lot closer to what I’m after! I wonder if they’ll still bring in the ladies from Quality…

This makes 20 biscuits.

Ingredients:

200g butter or margarine	½ teaspoon ground ginger
100g caster sugar (plus a bit for sprinkling)	Healthy pinch of salt
260g plain flour	50g chopped stem ginger
40g rice flour or corn flour	1-2 greased baking sheets

Put the soft butter into a mixing bowl and beat it until soft and creamy. Gradually beat in the sugar and continue until it’s light and fluffy.

Combine the flours, ground ginger and salt and sift into the mixing bowl, gently mixing it all up. Add the chopped ginger and then mix it all together with your hands, ensuring you get a nice mixed up dough. Form the dough into a 20-25cm long sausage and wrap in cling film. Transfer this to the fridge for 20-30 minutes to firm up a bit.

Heat the oven to 170⁰C. Unwrap your shortbread sausage and, with a sharp knife, cut into 20 rounds. Pop them on the baking sheets with a little space between them and bake for 20 minutes until firm, but not so that they colour; maybe just to a little bit golden just on the edge of the edges.

Once out the oven, sprinkle with sugar and then leave on the trays to cool a little and ten, when firmer, transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Store these and eat within a week [if they last that long…].

Today’s learning:

You can take out the ginger and stem ginger and replace with chopped pistachio nuts to get pistachio shortbread – now that one does sound like a winner!

Recipe adapted from: BBC Books (2011). The Great British Bake Off: How to Bake. London: Random House.

Pic to the left: my desk at work with one of the little shortbreads...

Recipe 27: Chocolate and ginger oat biscuits

As I was walking out the College this evening, a colleague passed me and commented on the empty cake tin I was carrying, asking if there were ‘cookies’ inside [she is not from British shores].  As it happens, there weren’t, but it had recently carried a carrot cake (see recipe for Week 7) for colleague Peter’s 50^th birthday. An amazing cake and one I’ll make again and again. And again.
 
Anyway, it occurred to me that I hadn't made ‘cookies’ or biscuits for some time, well, since the first recipe in this blog in fact, and so, with wifi enabled, I went in search and found these fellows on the BBC website, from the Great British Bake Off. Can you get a higher pedigree of biscuit?

Now this made 36 big biscuits in my mix – unless you eat a lot of biscuits or know people who do, maybe reduce the recipe accordingly…

Ingredients:

225g/8oz unsalted butter	4 tsp ground ginger
100g/3½oz golden syrup	2 tsp ground cinnamon
200g/7oz soft brown sugar	400g/14oz rolled oats
150g/3½oz plain flour	2 free-range eggs, beaten
2 tsp baking powder	50g/1¾oz stem ginger, chopped
1 tsp sea salt flakes	115g/4oz good quality dark chocolate

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line two to three baking trays with non-stick parchment. Melt the butter and the golden syrup in a pan over a low heat. Set aside to cool slightly.

Combine the sugar, flour, baking powder, salt and spices and mix well to combine. Stir in the rolled oats and mix thoroughly. Pour in the melted butter and syrup and stir until well combined. Then stir in the beaten eggs and the stem ginger.

Spoon in even, heaped teaspoons onto the lined baking trays, leaving room for them to spread. Bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes. Remove the biscuits from the oven and set aside to cool completely. Don’t take them out too early or they’ll be a bit gooey. Let them crisp up to a very light brown.

Melt the chocolate in a bowl suspended over a pan of barely simmering water (do not let the bottom of the bowl touch the water). Dip the biscuits in the melted chocolate and place on a cooling rack until the chocolate has set.

Recipe 26: Lamb, greens and anchovy dressing

Sunday in autumn and it’s time to start roasting meat again! A slight departure from the traditional Sunday roast but with the magical pairing of lamb and anchovy, this is one to savour and repeat. I think anchovy is fast becoming one of my surprise favourite constituent ingredients used in this blog. Adds tremendous depth of flavour. Super tasty!!!

  

This one serves 2.

Ingredients:

125g butter	Salt & pepper to taste
1 onion, thinly sliced	100ml lamb sauce base (see recipe 25)
4 sprigs rosemary (tied together)	For the anchovy dressing
150 cream (double if you can)	150 ml rapeseed oil
Splash of truffle oil (if you can!)	2 tablespoons of dried herbs
2 rumps of salt marsh lamb	1 tablespoon fennel seeds, toasted
2 tablespoons of rapeseed oil (or other lightly flavoured oil)	Finely grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
200ml water	8 salted anchovy fillets, finely chopped, plus extra to garnish
Greens (broccoli stalks are very good but this time I used cabbage – it needed eating up)

 Melt 50g of butter in a pan over a low heat. Add the onion, rosemary and a good pinch of salt. Cover and sweat for 20-25 minutes until softened, but not coloured. Pour in the cream and bring to the boil, reducing until 1/3 original amount of liquid. Now discard the rosemary.

Transfer mixture to a food processor, add the truffle oil (or suitably flavoured oil) and blend until you have a smooth onion puree. Now leave to one side.

To make the anchovy dressing, mix the rapeseed oil, dried herbs, fennel seeds and lemon zest and juice together in a non-metallic bowl. Stir in the anchovies and leave until needed.

Season the lamb with salt and pepper. In an ovenproof frying pan, heat some rapeseed oil and add the rumps, cooking for about 8 minutes until caramelised and brown. Spoon over some of the anchovy dressing, place the pan in the oven and roast the rumps for 5-6 minutes, becoming medium rare-medium. Remove from the pan and spoon over more of the anchovy dressing. Now leave them to rest, covered in foil, for 10 minutes.

Melt the remaining butter with water and cook the broccoli stalks. If using cabbage, steam in a frying pan with a drizzle of fish sauce to add a zingy flavour.

To serve, place a pool of puree on each plate, slice the lamb and put on the puree. Put a little more anchovy dressing on the lamb, drizzle some lamb sauce around the lamb. Add the greens and garnish with anchovy fillets.

Today’s learning:

1. I now know what ‘salt marsh lamb’ is. Check out this description from the BBC’s ‘Good food’ page:

The lambs are born between March and April and live first of all on their mother's milk, then after four to six weeks, grass is added to their diet. They graze on the estuary salt marshes and coastal pastures that are flooded by the spring tides and doused by the sea. The lambs feed on a rich variety of plants and minerals growing in the salt marshes, which give the meat a superb flavour. Surprisingly it doesn't taste at all salty or of seaweed as you might expect; instead the richly flavoured meat has gentle hints of the coastal flora and fauna, such as glasswort, sea purslane, samphire and sea lavender.

I just used lamb shoulder and it still tasted good – just choose some lamb you’re fond of, I think.

2. Broccoli stalks are delicious. I always used to through them away and just eat the florets but the stalks, peeled and julienned are very tasty. No more ‘going in the food waste’ for them. They’re going in my stomach!

3. Onion puree is fantastic. Sweet and amazing!

Recipe adapted from: Kerridge, T. (2013). Proper Pub Food. Bath: Absolute Press.