Pollo Alla Cacciatora (or Hunters Chicken - with apologies to the hunter, the chicken, and Nigella Lawson)

Cooking to the clock - not for me. I can rarely put a meal on the table at the time I've estimated to allow everyone else to get on with other things. All these challenges - Masterchef, BakeOff - where you have to produce your finest in a set amount of time? Putting aside the fact that I don't generally watch them and don't really approve of them, I could NEVER do that. I'd be completely rubbish. May be that's why I don't approve. But I digress. 

You'll remember, perhaps, my fling with Jamie Oliver and his 30 Minute Meals? Definitely stressful, even if the dinner that resulted was rather delicious - and (here's the crux of it) NOT AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE AT ALL. Flinging stuff around, feeling up against it. Cooking is something I genuinely use to relax. It sounds so trite, but all that chopping, stirring, tasting - I love it. But the more time pressure there is on me to get food on the table, the less I enjoy it.

I have, in fact, been feeling very much up against it recently in various elements of life. Combine that with my ridiculous need to cook proper food for the kids (and the Husband, although he's away this week) every night, relaxation or not, and it's not a happy picture. In my last menu planning session, I turned, for inspiration, to Nigella Express. I haven't paid that much attention to Express apart from a rather fabulous cheesecake offering that's graced a number of our smarter occasions in the last few years. Pollo Alla Cacciatora caught my eye (it's on page 296 of my version), and onto the meal plan it went. When you're feeling under pressure, and Nigella says you can have "tea on the table from scratch in comfortably under half an hour" well - it's almost irresistible.

Of course, I had failed to have on hand some of the ingredients that meant the meal could in fact achieve that golden 30 minutes, and I added in some extras, but, as Nigella says, the fact that this is an old recipe "grants a certain amount of licence". Anyway, it was delicious. I'm sure the hunter would have approved. I hope Nigella would too. And it did only take a smidge longer than 30 mins...

Pollo Alla Cacciatora

Serves 4

Olive oil
1 fat clove of garlic, peeled & finely chopped
1 medium onion, peeled and quite finely chopped
100g pancetta cubes
1 sprig of rosemary, leaves only, finely chopped
500g chicken thigh fillets, cut into 3-4 pieces
salt & pepper
125ml red wine
1 x 400g can chopped tomatoes
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp sugar
6 chestnut mushrooms, sliced
1 x 400g cannellini beans

Add a slug of olive oil (about a tablespoon's worth) to a large frying pan, and add the chopped onions and garlic. 

Sweat the onions gently for 5 mins or so then add the pancetta and rosemary and cook for another 5 minutes.

Add the chicken and sprinkle a couple of pinches of salt and grinds of pepper, then tip in the wine and bring it up to a bubble. Bubble for a couple of minutes then add the tomatoes, bay leaves and sugar.

Add the sliced mushrooms to the pan.

Turn down the heat and simmer for a good 20 minutes or so till the chicken is cooked. 

Drain the cannellini beans and stir into the sauce. Leave for a couple of minutes to heat up

Serve.

Even better Brownies

Well hello there. Long time, no see. Hope you've been keeping well? And how was your summer? Grab a coffee & a piece of brownie and tell me how you've been.

Over here at Recipe Junkie HQ it feels like it's been the summer of many things. The summer of all things Dutch, as we headed East for the Haarlem Jamborette, an international scout event that takes place not far from Amsterdam every 4 years. 

In fact, when we went 4 years ago, I'd just started this blog... As well as chaperoning 20 fantastic scouts & explorers for 10 days of 'scout type' fun and adventure (lighting fires, hiking, singing, camp firing, water games, plenty of outdoors), we visited Amsterdam and Utrecht, 

experienced amazing coffee art

visited a big Dutch theme park called Walibi World, and consumed vast amounts of Dutch mayonnaise, Vla ( a type of flavoured custard that is just ambrosial) &amp Sprinkles, and prawn crackers (don't ask).

Vla & Sprinkles. A true delicacy

Back home, it's been the summer of sheep, as we welcomed 26 woolly lodgers of the Shetland and Herdwick varieties to act as ovine grass cutters, and general providers of amusement with their surprisingly idiosyncratic sheep-like ways - especially their propensity to escape and nonchalantly stroll around the garden nibbling the roses & looking for human company...

Can you see why we needed the grass cutting?

It's been the summer of seizing the moment, and heading to the beach whenever possible - of the children choosing to go to the beach as 'the best thing ever', 

Of seeing dolphins, of the exhilaration of the waves, the joy of watching everyone else go home and know that you have the beach to yourselves; 

The summer of the ghillie kettle

Turns out that brewing up on the sand after a swim, usually wrapped up in a fleece (it may have been sunny, it hasn't always been warm), and then drinking it with a home made welsh cake or other bake, is one of my favourite things (funny that).

It's been the summer we finally made it up Cadair Idris - not the highest mountain in Wales, but one that's been on the Husband's bucket list for sometime. 

A view!

Which way?

And it's been a summer of sunsets

Sunset over the River Teifi

It's been a summer of family and friends as people finally sussed out that we really do live in a fantastic place, and we've welcomed visitors - some for an hour, some for a week and everything in between.

It's been a summer of fruit as the garden we have inherited has revealed gooseberries, red currants, blackcurrants, plums and now apples. The greengages are on the way too. There has been much rejoicing and jamming; stoning, freezing and the promise of crumble to come as Autumn creeps in.

It's also been a summer of community - starting to get to know our neighbours; working out who can sell you eggs in your hour of baking need; knowing that in times of crisis, like if you get the lawnmower stuck & set fire to the grass, at least 3 people will come running with buckets of water (ahem); working out how you can help them back; and the summer of understanding that there's stiff competition in the village in all things produce related.

And on that note, it has been the summer of the brownie. Not just any brownie though - the summer of my even better PRIZE WINNING chocolate brownie. Indeed. 2nd prize in the Ferwig Show. The final detail of flaked almonds on top came after the show. I'll nail it next year (not that I'm competitive or anything). Sadly, my jam came nowhere...

Chocolate Brownie

Due to a dinner party earlier in the summer when we had a coeliac amongst our guests, I had a bag of gluten free flour in the cupboards and have been experimenting. I'm not sure if it makes any difference, but it's good to know that it works supremely well in this bake - bring on the gluten free! What undoubtedly does make a difference is the presence of ground almonds which adds to the squodge factor in a most delightful way. After all, there's not much more disappointing than an insufficiently squodgy brownie - at least in culinary terms. Finally, the combination of milk & dark chocolate nails this recipe, as it means it's chocolatey enough for me, but not so dark that Pink won't eat it.

375g unsalted butter
200g milk chocolate
175g dark chocolate
100g gluten free (or just plain) flour
125 g ground almonds
a good pinch fine sea salt
6 large eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
350g caster sugar
50g flaked almonds

Your tin needs to be approx 33 by 23 cm and around 5 cm deep.

Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan.

Line the tin with greaseproof paper.

if you're using blocks of chocolate, chop them up quite finely - or buy drops. 

Put the butter & chocolate in a large pan and melt gently together, then leave to cool for a couple of minutes.

Sift the flour and combine with the ground almonds and salt.

Whisk together the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract.

Once the melted butter & chocolate has cooled for a bit, beat in the egg mixture, then the flour mixture, making sure everything is combined.

Scrape into the prepared tin, sprinkle the flaked almonds on top, then bake for 25-ish minutes, but check at 20 - you don't want to over cook these beauties. 

You're looking for light and a little cracked on top, but still dark and dense underneath. if you're a brownie virgin, I'd recommend making these a few times, just to get the hang of it, you understand...

By the way - a good tip for slicing these babies - put the cooled brownie in the fridge, and then after it's cold, use a hot knife to slice cleanly through. A great tip that I pinched from the fabulous Vicky North - who also planted the idea of using the ground almonds in my head...

Gammon Cawl and Cheesey Garlicky Scones

So those of you who may have become just a teensy weensy bit sick of the photos I keep posting up here of the clear blue skies and sun-kissed beaches of the West Wales coast during what has been, on anyone's view, an absolutely fantastic summer, will be pleased to know that as I write (07:36 on a Sunday morning) the wind that has been howling around the house for the last 36 hours is still doing a good job of trying to blow us off our hill, the rain squalling in torrential downpours. The stormy - and post stormy - skies have their own special appeal, but granted it's not everyone's cup of tea and I haven't exactly welcomed the reappearance of my waterproof trousers into the daily dog walking routine with joy...

The change in the weather is not all bad (honestly!) - it's like that bit that Nigella writes in, Domestic Goddess, when she talks about the Norwegian Cinammon Buns -  "I've always thought that bad weather has its compensations, most of them culinary."This is a view I subscribe to wholeheartedly. While I'm all for tasty salads and delicate desserts in their place, my cooking comfort zone is in soups and casseroles, big dishes of crumble, jugs of custard... Summer and hot weather can be something of a challenge for me in the kitchen, so bizarrely, while I'm (mostly inwardly) weeping at the inability to get the washing dry and gnashing my teeth at having to pull on waterproof trousers and wellies to walk the dog instead of slopping about in flipflops, my kitchen heart sings for joy as I pull out the slow cooker and stock up on bay leaves...

Cawl is very much back on the weekly menu these days. You may remember a couple of months back, I took the opportunity to wax a bit lyrical about how fantastic the kids had been in the immediate aftermath of the move here. Having spent most of the summer term going to a language centre to be taught on an intensive Welsh course, they are now speaking Welsh with what appears to be alarming fluency (especially when they are bickering), and well versed in all manner of Welsh customs, including bursting unprovoked into renditions of Sosban Fach and Ar Hyd y Nos, Blue will be off to the Millenium Stadium to watch his first international rugby match in a few weeks' time wearing a Welsh rugby shirt...

They are loving their school, and the dinners continue to be a big hit. They enjoyed the school dinners at their old school, but they always came home ravenous. Here, though, there are seconds and thirds on offer. It is not unusual for them to refuse the treat that I meet them with from the bus because they are still full from lunch. So my longheld dream of being able to provide an easy tea on school dinner days is realised. And while making scones is not everyone's idea of an 'easy tea', bear in mind that while the kids would be happy with the cawl alone, I also have the Husband (and myself) to feed, and a little fiddling about in the kitchen is actually quite enjoyable, especially when the majority of the meal is in the slow cooker.

Gammon Cawl

500g piece of unsmoked gammon
150g soup mix (dried beans and pulses)
1 large onions
2 carrots
1 leek (it is Wales after all)
1.2 litres vegetable or chicken stock
1 bay leaf
4 cloves

The night before, remove the gammon from the packaging and put in a bowl. Cover with water and leave to soak. Measure the dried beans and pulses into a measuring jug and add 5 times the volume of water. Leave both overnight.

In the morning, get out the slow cooker and heat to high.

Peel and chop the onion and carrots, and wash and slice the leek. Drain the pulses.

Put the chopped veg and the pulses into a pan, add the stock, bring to the bowl and boil rapidly for 10 minutes, scooping off any scum.

Meanwhile, remove the gammon from the soaking water and add to the slow cooker. Once the stock has boiled for the requisite time, pour the contents of the pan over the gammon, chuck in the cloves and bay leaf, pop the lid on and leave till dinner time.

When you're getting close to dinner time, make the scones.

Cheesey Garlicky Scones

100g plain flour
100g spelt flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp English mustard powder
1 tsp smoked paprika
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp caster sugar
1 clove of garlic, mashed up
50g unsalted butter diced quite small
150g mature cheddar cheese, diced quite small
1 large egg
4 tbsp low fat natural yoghurt

Preheat the oven to 200C and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.

Sift the flours, baking powder, mustard powder and smoked paprika into a bowl and combine, then stir in the salt, sugar and garlic.

Add the butter and begin by 'cutting it in' to the flour mix with a knife, then move on to rub the butter in with your fingers till it has almost disappeared.

Stir the cheese through the flour mixture, then whisk together the egg and yoghurt, and combine this with the flour to make a soft dough.

Flour a work surface and your hands, then shape the dough into a rough rectangle/oval (I'm not fussy) about 4 cm thick, then cut into 6 pieces.

Use a palette knife to transfer the scone pieces onto the baking tray and mak sure they have a bit of space between them to expand.

Bake for 25-30 minutes till golden.

While the scones are baking, remove the gammon from the slow cooker to a board or large plate and pull the meat apart using a couple of forks.

 Once shredded, return it to the pot ready to serve.

Serve a steaming bowl of cawl with some cheesey garlicky scones on the side. Rainy day dinner time heaven. 

Enjoy with a side helping of Welsh folk songs. Take it away, Cerys...

Clandestine Cake

I've been fascinated by the idea of the Clandestine Cake Club for a few years now. Pretty much ever since I started blogging and doing the whole social media thing. I joined up and found a club near where I used to live, but never went along to a meeting.

As part of my rather disorganised 'plan to make sure I meet some new people once we move' I had investigated whether there was a Clandestine Cake Club here in the Cardigan area, and discovered that there wasn't. Initially, I was disappointed, then I was encouraged.


Perhaps I could START a Clandestine Cake Club...

Another of my 'plan to make sure I meet some new people once we move' involved a little bit of Twitter stalking networking, which resulted in me getting to know a couple of lovely people, all be it virtually, before we'd even crossed the Severn, and I was having coffee with one of them once we'd landed, and mentioned this idea. Well, what do you know? She had been talking to another friend of hers who had been wondering about the same thing.  A coffee date was hatched and the next thing you know, well here we are, and the first meeting of the Cardigan Cake Club took place on Monday 7th April, not 3 weeks later.

If you don't know about the Clandestine Cake Club (where have you been??) the idea is that a meeting is arranged, and knowing the date and time and roughly the area where it will take  place, you book a place. The exact location is then revealed to those who have booked a place a couple of days before the event. Well, we need some excitement in our lives, don't we.

Each event is themed, and you take along your cake, share it with the others and generally have a good old natter.

That's pretty much exactly what happened on Monday. My co-organiser, the fabulous Vicky North, micro-baker, workshop provider and bread club owner, had already found a venue for us, and when the time came, a select but not insignificant group arrived, with cake. You can read our write up of the event if you're interested, thinking of setting your own CCC up etc, but the purpose of this post is to share the cake that I made for the evening.

The theme was 'My Cake, My Story' which we hoped would get people talking about themselves, their baking stories, and just act as a bit of an ice breaker. It was interesting how people approached the theme. Some people baked a cake that included ingredients representing parts of their lives, for others, the cake itself represented something. For me, it was an easy choice.

As you will know, my life was thrown upside down when my 2 year old son was diagnosed with leukaemia. No more high flying legal career. No more structure to my life other than that imposed by his hospital regime. Chaos reigned, and when, 3 months later my daughter arrived by emergency caesarean, chaos doubled. It wasn't a happy time, although there were plenty of happy moments, and much of it has merged into a kind of fug. One thing that did come out of it, indirectly, was this blog. I wasn't writing at that point, but I seized on a self-imposed challenge to cook everything in How to Be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson in an attempt to gain control over something in my life. And from there, eventually, came this blog.

I still haven't cooked everything from Domestic Goddess - I reckon I've cracked about 1/3 of it, but the easy almond cake represented everything I love about Nigella Lawson and about baking, and the escape that it gave me during that period of my life when everything else was so difficult. The alchemy of throwing together some simple ingredients and creating something of utter loveliness will never leave me.

In honour of the Cake Club, I added my own lemon and poppy seed drizzle icing, and very pleased I was with the result, too.

Easy Almond Cake with Lemon Drizzle Icing & Poppy Seeds

250g unsalted butter, cubed, at room temperature
250g mazipan, cubed, at room temperature, 150g caster sugar
1/4 tsp each almond essence and vanilla bean paste
6 large eggs
150g self raising flour
75g sifted icing sugar
juice of about 3/4 lemon
1-2 tbsp poppy seeds

You'll also need a 23-25cm loose bottomed/springform 'ring' cake tin, well greased and floured.

Heat the oven to 170C

Use a food processor and process the butter, marzipan and sugar together.

Add in the almond and vanilla, and process again, then break in the eggs one at a time while the food processor is running.

A top tip is to break the eggs into a little bowl first. I once made this and accidentally dropped a whole egg into the whizzing mixture. The cake was very crunchy...

Once the eggs are all incorporated, add the flour, process, then scrape the batter into the tin and bake for around 50 minutes until a skewer comes out clean.

Leave to cool in the tin.

Turn the cake out, and mix up the icing - you may not need all the lemon juice - to quite a runny consistency. I used a clever trick I learned to put the cake on 4 strips of greaseproof paper so you can ice then whip the paper away easily. Get me.

Drizzle over the cake from a height (helps get more even drizzles) then sprinkle over the poppy seeds.

This is delicious with a cup of tea. In fact, at the CCC, we discussed that this was almost a contender for a 'cake for breakfast' type of cake...

Chocolate cake

I wasn't going to blog this - on the one hand, it's just another chocolate cake, and I did no more than increase the quantities from Nigella's Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake which features in the chocolate section of Feast, but it worked wonderfully. And there's always room in your life for another chocolate cake, especially easy and lush ones like this.

Hot on the heels of Blue's birthday, the Husband actually turned 40 (as opposed to officially turning 40 in September when we had his party) at the weekend. I made this mindful (as was when I made the Victoria Sponge for Blue) that sometimes, sponge cakes can seem a little on the thin side (may be it's just me) so I increased all the ingredients for the cake (but not the icing) by half, and I was not disappointed. It made a fabulous, generous chocolate cake, which even Pink, who isn't a lover of chocolate cakes, went mad for.

And it went down very well with a glass of champagne before we went out on Saturday night...

For the cake, you will need

2 20cm loose bottomed cake tins, greased and lined
300g plain flour
300g caster sugar
11/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
60g cocoa
260g unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
225 ml sour cream

For the icing
75g unsalted butter
175g dark chocolate broken into small pieces
300g sifted icing sugar
1 tbsp golden syrup
125ml sour cream 

Pre-heat the oven to 180C

Put all the cake ingredients into a food processor and process to a thick, smooth batter.

Divide between the tins and bake for 25-35 minutes till a skewer comes out clean. if you remember, swap the tins round in the oven half way through.

Cool the cakes in their tins for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack.

When the cakes are cold, make the icing. Melt together the butter & chocolate in quite a large bowl (large enough to take the rest of the ingredients and mix the icing up) and set aside to cool a little, then stir in the golden syrup, followed by the sour cream, then stir in the seived icing sugar. to make a reasonably thick spreadable icing. If you need to thin it out, use a tiny bit of boiling water.

Smear the icing over one of the halves of cake, then sandwich the second half on top, then slap and smear the rest of the icing over the outside of the cake.

Onion & bacon upside down pie

For reasons I will not go into here, I ended up with a massive amount of bacon and onions the other day. Not that I'm complaining, but it wasn't the result of an online shopping fail or anything exciting like that.

Sticky onions, smoky bacon. What's not to like?

I was trying to work out a good way to use it all up and hit upon a variation of Nigella's Supper Onion Pie. It's not reproduced anywhere on the web that I can find, but it's in Domestic Goddess if you are interested. I've made it before, unadulterated, and it's met with a mixed reception, but everything tastes better with bacon, so I thought I'd go off piste. Everyone loved it, there was nothing left, which pretty much says it all. It's also fairly straightforward to knock together, and fit it in around the various demands of the after school routine.

I've called it an upside down pie, because it's made alongside the tarte tatin principles - the onions (and the bacon) are cooked slowly till they are soft and a bit carmelised, then you whack a scone base over the top, and bake before flipping over onto a plate so the onions are back on top.


In my capacity as a member of the Tefal Innovation Panel, I should also say that the Ingenio pans (the groovy ones with the removable, interchangeable handle) really come into its own for a dish like this. The pan goes from the hob to the oven, so no need to get 2 dishes dirty, and the removeable handle means there's no worries about it fitting in the oven.

Spot the difference...

Onion & bacon upside down 'pie'

olive oil
4 rashers of smoked bacon, chopped up
around 700g onions, peeled, halved, and each half cut into 4
leaves from a few sprigs of thyme
250g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
100g cheddar, grated
100ml milk
40g butter, melted and cooled a little
1 large egg

Ideally, you need a pan that can go from hob to oven, but not, you need a 24cm (or thereabouts) pie dish for the oven part of this dish.

First, heat a splash or two of oil into your pan over a medium heat and add the bacon. Fry for a couple of minutes, then add in the onion chunks and sprinkle over the thyme leaves.

Cook this gently for 30 minutes or so, giving it a stir every now and then, till the onions are soft and sticky.

Pre-heat the oven to 200C.

Make up the scone base - mix together the flour, baking powder, salt, and cheddar cheese in a bowl, then in a separate jug of bowl combine the milk melted butter and egg. Tip the liquid ingredients into the flour mix and stir together with a fork to make a dough.

Tip the dough out onto a floured worksurface, and press into a rough circle that will fit over the top of your onions and bacon. If you need to, transfer the onion mix to the pie dish. Place the dough over the onions and bacon, and press in to seal the edges.

Pop your dish/pan into the oven and bake at 200 C for 15 minutes, then turn the heat down to 180 and bake for another 10 minutes, when the base will be golden brown.

Remove from the oven, put a late over the top of the dish and turn it so that the scone is then on the bottom and the golden onions are on the top of the pie.

Scrape up any onions that have either stuck to the pan or fallen off, and serve.

Sorry - have to use the same photo because the gannets ate it too quickly...

Teatime Roulette - Mexican Lasagne

My kids are pretty good eaters. It's not fashionable, I know and probably sounds pretty smug, but there we go. It sometimes means that I am less forgiving of the food foibles of other children. On the other hand, when you've got friends for tea, you want to make sure they eat something. It sometimes feels a litte like playing roulette.

I was pretty desperate on Monday night, with extra kids to feed, no plan, and no left over roast dinner to fry up with some noodles and pass off as stir fry. Instead, I had to throw myself on the mercy of the veg patch, the cupboards and the freezer.

We have loads of tomatoes still coming and mostly ripening, and, thanks to the Husband's kidney bean free birthday chilli, several cans of red kidney beans more than will fit in the cupboard. Tortilla wraps in the freezer, and a vague memory of a Nigella recipe in my head.

As it turns out, it wasn't such a bad combination. Minimal fuss, with maximum result: I was fairly sure my kids would eat it, not so sure about their friends, but do you know, they all loved it. With toffee apple squares to finish, it may be a perfect post-school tea. Or may be not. The kids loved it so much there was barely enough left over for the Husband and I...

Bear in mind that you need quite a tight fit dish or tin for layering this up in. I found that a 20cm round cake tin worked well, although I had to raise the sides by lining the tin up with silver foil. You can also make up the sauce and the bean mix separately a little while in advance and then layer up and pop into the oven.






Mexican 'Lasagne'

Serves 4 kids and 2 adults - just.

1 large clove of garlic
1 red onion
1 tsp each of smoked paprika, ground coriander and ground cumin
500g fresh tomatoes (or replace this with a second tin of tomatoes)
1 400g tin chopped tomatoes
2 tins red kidney beans
2 small tins of sweetcorn
220g cheddar cheese
pack of 8 tortilla wraps (you'll need 6, so you can have 2 for packed lunches the next day)

If you're making this all at once, put the oven on to heat up to 200C.

Make the tomato sauce: crush the garlic and finely chop the onion. Heat some oil in a pan and gently fry the garlic and onion for 5-10 minutes till soft. While the onions are cooking, remove any woody stalky bits from the tomatoes, then roughly chop up, and set aside.

Add the smoked paprika, coriander and cumin to the onions and cook for another minute, before adding the fresh and tinned tomatoes and 2 cans' worth of water to the pan. Add some salt & pepper, bring to the boil then simmer for 20-30 minutes till the sauce is thickened and smelling delicious.

While the sauce is simmering, rinse the beans and corn, then mix together into a bowl. Grate the cheese, then stir in about 3/4 of it into the beans and save the rest of sprinkling on top.

Get your dish and layer everything up. I put a tortilla in the bottom of the dish, then a layer of beans and spread some sauce over it, and carried on layering, making sure you have a last tortilla and some sauce to spread over the top, then sprinkle the left over cheddar cheese and bake in the oven for 40-50 minutes. 

You could dress this up with guacamole, sour cream and all that jazz, but on Monday, it was fine as it was.
  

Birthday Brownie

I should be telling you about another great meal last night which used up another of the can of left over kidney beans (the ones I failed to put in the chilli for the Husband's birthday). It was a healthy bean salad type thing, all the more succesful because both kids ate it and enjoyed it. I also made some cheeky toasted cumin flatbreads to go with, which made me feel all domestic goddess-y again because - a confession - I haven't made bread of any sort for a good couple of months now.

But healthy suppers and flatbreads will have to wait for another time, because I cannot get brownie out of my head.

I don't have much that's original to say about brownies. It's mostly been said before, some of it by me, here, but when has that ever stopped me? Badly made, they can be one of the most disappointing things on earth - dry, unyielding - just, well, disappointing.

On the other hand, get it right and you have absolutely one of the best types of chocolatey treat you can, in my humble opinion, ever eat. Rich, damp, squidgy, revealing the hidden treat of a nut or carefully chosen nugget of dried fruit (cranberries and cherries are my favourites, bringing an edge of sour to the party), a good brownie is absolutely to die for.


When I was wracking my brains to think of a suitably birthday-ish treat to take with us last week end and stick candles in to allow for the purposes of singing 'Happy Birthday', brownie was the obvious solution. As it's not actually the Husband's birthday till December, I didn't want to go all out with a bells & whistles birthday cake (plus, the obvious difficulty of keeping something (possibly elaborate) intact on a campsite was vexing me), but I wanted something celebratory. 

Flapjack would absolutely NOT have done.

Nigella offers brownie as a birthday cake solution, and I have to say, she's right. Stacked up, with candles in the pieces, it looks very festive. It's also dead easy to make. Marvellous.

La Lawson reckons you can get 48 out of this quantity. I got 24 (admittedly fairly generous) pieces, but I wouldn't have wanted to go much smaller, and as we were 45, I made 2 batches, one with walnuts, one with dried cranberries. Do watch them like a hawk once you've baked them for around 20 minutes. I set my timer for 22 mins, and probably did take them out at around 25 minutes, but they will continue to cook in the tin, once you've taken them out of the oven, so don't leave them too long in the oven.

Chocolate & Cranberry Brownie

2375g unsalted butter
375g dark chocolate (70% cocoa)
6 large eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
450g caster sugar
225g plain flour
1 tsp salt
300g dried cranberries (if you prefer, use 300g chopped walnuts)

Pre-heat the oven to 180 and line a tin with greaseproof paper (I have a roasting tin which is approx 27 by 23 cm and 4 cm deep. Nigella's is bigger (33 by 23), so her brownie is probably thinner and so more easily cuttable into 48. It's up to you. I won't judge you...)

In a large pan, gently melt together the chocolate and butter, then set aside to cool slightly. 

Beat together the sugar, eggs and vanilla, and in a separate bowl, combine the flour and salt.

Beat the eggs and sugar into the melted butter & chocolate, then the flour, then stir through the cranberries. 

When it's all combined, scrape it into the prepared tin and bake for around 25 minutes. It's worth checking a little earlier just to see how its doing. The top will be paler and may have started to crack, but make sure the middle is still a little squodgy when you take it out of the oven.

Cut into pieces and serve - with or without candles.

Easy apple & almond cake - or what to do with a rogue can of apple compote

The scoutwives hate to waste food.

At the end of every camp we go through the left overs that have come back and divvy it up - what can be saved for the following year (or for other scout activities through the year) and perishable stuff that needs to get used up.

This year, when we got back from camp, we decided
 we had to do something with some tins

of apple compote that had come back from the Netherlands with us in 2011 from a jamboree we took the scouts to. The tins are very much still in date (good till 2016 no less), but somehow we've never got round to feeding the contents to the scouts. Having taken the tins on 2 camps since Holland, on our return from Derbyshire, we decided enough was enough, and each of us took possession of a tin.

Nigella has a recipe in Feast for a damp apple & almond cake, one of her fantastically easy, whizz it all up cakes, which has no butter, and no flour in it, so possibly a good one for those with gluten issues. The amount of ground almonds, eggs and sugar probably negates any benefit the lack of butter might otherwise have had for any one, so don't try and kid yourself otherwise.

It does have fruit in, though, so not all bad -  the puree of 3 tart eating apples. Bingo. I consulted Google and Lo! there is a website which gives an equivalent apples to puree quantity. But of course there is. 

It was American, so in cups, but I have cup measures, and all was well.

Of course, it didn't use up the whole tin of apple compote, but made a good inroad into it, and I gave the rest of it to the kids. They loved it.

The cake came with us as our contribution to a dinner party last night. I sifted some icing sugar over it and served it with some double cream which I whipped up with a couple of teaspoons of cointreau in it.

Apple & Almond Cake

11/3 (one and a third) cups apple puree/compote
1 tbsp lemon juice
375g ground almonds
250g caster sugar
8 large eggs
50g flaked almonds

Grease a 23cm springform cake tin with vegetable oil and line the base.

Whizz up all the ingredients apart from the flaked almonds, in a food processor.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake. Nigella says 45 mins but check after 35. Mine needed about 50 mins.