As I was saying the other day, (in a round about sort of way), it's the start of the season of fruitfulness, gooseberries in the garden, elderflowers sprinkling the hedgerows with their intoxicating scent, strawberries and redcurrants ripening.
I made elderflower cordial last week, and reluctant to chuck away the sliced lemons and oranges, cast about for a means to use them up - after all, it's not as if they'd been boiled for hours or anything, simply steeped in elderflower infused sugar syrup.
A friend had already offered Darina Allen's very sensible use for the lemon slices - freezing them and using in G&Ts, but I recalled a marmalade that I've made before, and wanted to recreate it.
This is a lovely, floral marmalade - I really can't recommend it highly enough. If you've made elderflower cordial, it's pretty easy to make - and quite forgiving. Life kept intervening so it took me the best part of 3 days to get from infused slices to jars of marmalade, which finally materialised on Sunday morning.
If you haven't made elderflower cordial, you'll have to find a different recipe. Obvs.
Lemon Orange and Elderflower Marmalade
3 lemons and 3 oranges, thinly sliced, retrieved once you strained your elderflower cordial into bottles. You can bin the elderflowers though - they will have had it by now.
1kg (give or take) caster sugar
300ml elderflower cordial
4-5 sterilised jars
Put the sliced fruit into a pan, just cover with water and bring to the boil.
Simmer gently until the peel is really soft - it took about an hour but it could take up to 2.
Strain and reserve the liquid, and chop the fruit up as finely as you like, taking care to remove any pips as you go.
Weigh the fruit and then measure our double the amount of sugar. I had approximately 500g of fruit, so I used 1 kg of sugar.
Measure the reserved boiling liquid and add the 300ml of cordial. If necessary make the amount up to the equivalent liquid measure as the sugar using tap water - so for my 1 kg of sugar, I had 1 litre of liquid.
Put the chopped fruit, sugar and 1 litre of liquid into a suitable pan, bring to the boil and keep going till you reach setting point.
How you test to confirm this I leave up to you - jam thermometers, cold plates. I suffer terribly from what I call 'setting point stress' and usually combine at least 2 methods. In this case, 105C on the jam thermometer and cold plate worked.
Decant your marmalade into jars, and Bob, as they say...
For various reasons including a vomiting child and a cancelled party (both the child and the party being my responsibility), I found myself at a loose end and with excessive amounts of oranges to hand earlier today.
What to do?
My eyes strayed to the eggs, and I started to think curd. Specifically, orange curd, having a number of oranges available that were intended for the vast vat of mulled wine I had planned for aforementioned party...
Then I began to wonder if you could lace in that quintessential aroma of Christmas - cloves - into the curd. Such is the way my mind works.
I was making bread sauce in advance of Christmas Day last week, and that smell of clove-y, milk-y, onion-y bread is inextricably linked to this time of year for me, Combine clove with orange and it reminds me of my Granny, who always had a pomander knocking around, Christmas or not, and it reminds me of mulled wine. I mean really. What's not to like?
Since we've moved, one of the things I have definitely missed is the chickens. Our old ladies were unlikely to have made the journey down the M4 and beyond, so we re-homed them, and I have been buying eggs ever since. I was aware that the current stash of eggs were getting on, but marked with the British Lion Egg* logo and a date, I was confident that they would be OK - a change from the hastily scrawled dates I used to add to the eggs of our own chooks as I collected them.
Curd is one of the great things you can make with eggs, although if you're not confident that you have mastered how to boil an egg, you might want to do that first, but then curd has to be one of the things you must make with eggs. You just have to remember that it will take a long time. And during that long time you have to be prepared to stand, stirring, ever-vigilant to avoid turning your fragrant pan-full into lemon (or lime, or orange, or whatever flavoured)scrambled eggs, rather than a deliciously rich and smooth custard. And it simply isn't worth turning the heat up either, for the same reason.
If you're used to sharp lemon or lime curds, this is quite a different animal. Sweet, but not overly so and with a hint of those delicious seasonal flavours, it's almost almondy. In fact it would be delicious with a frangipan topping in a tart (thinking out loud, note to self etc etc)
Christmas Curd
Makes one delicious jarful
75g butter
50g caster sugar
125 ml sweet, freshly squeezed orange juice
3 large eggs
a couple of pinches of ground cloves and of ground cinammon
Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan over a gentle heat, then turn the heat down as low as you can and add in the rest of the ingredients.
Stir continuously with a wooden spoon until a smooth custard forms which will coat the back of a spoon and allow you to draw a line through it with your finger.
Allow to cool slightly then decant into a 350ml sterilised jam jar.
Hide at the back of the fridge and don't tell anyone else you made it.
*This post is sponsored by British Lion Eggs
I was wondering how I was going to fit a Random Recipe in this month, but the blog challenge fairies were obviously smiling on me.
Dom's challenge from Belleau Kitchen this month was to get all those cut out snippets of recipe, those torn out pages, and clippings, throw them up in the air - or spread them out, or do something with them to enable you to randomly select one.
I thought I'd give it a go and see what it came up with. No obligation to complete the challenge if I couldn't fit it in or the recipe was one of the more obscure I'd cut out and kept. But as I say, no need to worry. The selection process turned up Yottam Ottolenghi's Orange Polenta Cake which I'd copied at Christmas from my brother's newly received copy of the Ottolenghi cook book. Fortuitous indeed because we had people coming for dinner, and there had to be dessert. Not that this is a hardship, you understand, but I'd already planned a moorish style chicken & chorizo casserole for the main course, so this fitted perfectly. Caramelised oranges, almonds, some orange blossom water (this is an Ottolenghi recipe after all - poncy ingredients are to be expected!).
First up, though, the challenge of sourcing the ingredients. I know there used to be a bag of polenta in the cupboard, but I must have used it up, because when I looked again, there was nothing. I couldn't get it in my online shop so sent the Husband off to do his hunter gatherer thing. The poor man went to 4 different supermarkets on 2 separate trips after work - he even went and worked at a different office on Friday in order to try different supermarkets, before ending up in Waitrose in Andover. Where, of course, they had at least 2 varieties. Anyway, he came home triumphant with an impressively artisan looking bag, plus some tahini paste and some unsalted pistachios which I also required.
While I've learned my lesson over the years that when people are coming for dinner it's wise to stick to the familiar and easy, there's always a certain amount of frisson to be gained cooking something with a little bit of fiddle factor when you have no idea how it's going to turn out and 10 people expecting to be fed. I have limited experience cooking Ottolenghi, and while it's always turned out brilliantly, I'm not in the same comfort zone with his stuff that I am cooking, say, Nigella. Add to this the opportunity for third degree burns that making caramel presents, and perhaps I should have stuck to something tried and tested, but I like a challenge.
The recipe was at least helpful in that it pointed out the need to thoroughly line the tin (if you're using springform, which I was) in order to prevent caramel leaking all over your oven, and as an extra precaution, I also put the cake tin on a baking sheet. A wise precaution as it turns out because even with what I thought was thorough tin lining, I did have a little bit of caramel leakage. But nothing serious.
Anyway, the recipe. I couldn't find it online to link to, but it's in the Ottolenghi cook book. Having lined your tin, you make some caramel which you use to cover the bottom of the tin.
Next, there are oranges to zest and peel, and place on top of the caramel layer,
before making a deliciously orangey scented batter using eggs, ground almonds, polenta along with the usual butter and eggs. The recipe also calls for orange blossom water, I forgot to put this on the Husband's foraging list, and
having put him through supermarket hell in search of polenta, I didn't have the heart to fess up to needing orange blossom
water, so in the end I just squeezed in a little extra orange juice. I think the random recipe rules
state that you have to cook the recipe as it is, with little deviation.
Well, I'm afraid that as well as missing the orange blossom water, I upped the recipe by a third to make a big enough
cake to feed all of us. I hope I'm not disqualified.
As a result of the increase in ingredients, it took quite a bit longer than the stated 40-45 minutes to bake, and I ended up covering the tin with foil to stop the top of the cake catching, but it all turned out fine. Once baked, the final nerve-wracking turnout passed without a hitch.
Ta daah!
UA-44695690-1
