Classic Victoria Sandwich - the egg weighing way

I've always thought that one of the worst bits of being a parent is the birthday parties. Not the birthdays themselves - I love celebrating another year, the excitement, the presents (well may be not the coming in at 5, then 5.10, then 5.12 to open the presents - you see where I'm going) - but the parties give me a headache, and I am prone to cake-stress.

It's become something of a competitive sport, the birthday cake of today. I myself am not proud to admit to participating in this. When Blue was 4, I spent 15 - yes, 15 - hours, along with a few more hours that a patient and wonderful friend put in, creating a Thomas and the Troublesome Trucks cake. It was, if I do say so myself, completely awesome, but the stress of it all was almost too much to bear.

Of course, the look on his face when he saw it almost made it all worth it, but I vowed secretly that it would never be that elaborate again. That same day, the afternoon of his 4th birthday party, once the guests had left and it was just us again, he asked, in his scrummy, little boy way "Mummy, next year can I have Gordon and the Express?". I laughed (not nastily, you understand) and said "we'll see". And we all know what "We'll see" means, don't we now...

Anyway, every cake since has been a retreat a little further away from the Thomas cake.

Blue had a fire engine for his 5th birthday (if you didn't know what "we'll see" means, you do now), and a series of ever simpler cakes, and while Pink had a rather impressive dragon cake one year, she too has had to make do with pretty straightforward offerings ever since.

Blue was 10 recently. He's obviously got the hint, because he asked if he could have a Victoria Sandwich Cake with jam and cream.

Well of course, I was happy to oblige.

I have 2 sandwich tins, 20cm diameter, and when I've made sponge cakes before, I've followed a recipe and ended up with rather flat cakes. Clearly not enough mixture. This year, I decided that I needed to use 4 large eggs, and use the weighing eggs method.

You weigh your eggs in the shell, then use that same weight of butter, sugar and self raising flour. 

Pre-heat the oven to 180C

Beat the butter till it's pale and soft, then beat in the sugar.

Once the sugar is beaten in, add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition, and adding a desseetspoon or so of the sifted flour if the mixture looks like it's curdled (mine ALWAYS does).

Beat in a teaspoon of vanilla essence, then carefully fold in the flour.

Divide between 2 20cm sandwich tins and bake for 25 mins or so.

Leave to cool then sandwich together.

My 4 large eggs (all 280g of them) worked a treat. We ended up with deep sponge (but not too much) which I slathered with Bonne Maman strawberry jam and 300ml whipped double cream. I would have chosen raspberry jam for preference, but it was Blue's birthday, after all...

Dear Harvey Nics...

Dear Harvey Nics

One of my friends posted your advert on her Facebook page yesterday. You know the one. Promoting your range of oh so hilarious 'Sorry I spent it on Myself' range of gifts.



May be I've lost my sense of humour. I hear that you "... wanted to have a bit of fun and remind people that they shouldn't forget to spoil themselves this Christmas". So you encourage us to give our nearest and dearest elastic bands ("but elastic bands from Harvey Nicols, Dad"), paper clips, toothpicks, a plug, while we fritter away our cash on a gorgeous dress, some killer heels, a handbag (all no doubt available in your hallowed, and no doubt uber-tastefully decorated Christmas gift halls )

 Don't you think we as a race are collectively selfish enough already? It's not just about the money either - the advert suggests, whether tongue in cheek or otherwise, that it's OK to shatter the dreams of our nearest and dearest in pursuit of something material that we really want - and then to blow a raspberry at them in the process.

I find buying presents for people hard enough anyway, trying to choose something appropriate and wanted, and I'd be the first to own up to thinking dark thoughts about the whole Christmas overspend frenzy, while simultaneously handing over the card to pay for many of things that I always doubt are the right thing, when I have holes in my pants (and not in a sexy way). But Christmas is about giving - whether you have a faith that supports that or otherwise - and it doesn't have to be financial. 

If you wanted to spend the money on yourself, there are plenty of other ways you could give that would allow you to do that without rubbing people's nose in it - things they might really want. No doubt if you've got the cash for a Lanvin dress, there's some fairly high powered careers, and perhaps not much in the way of family time going on in the background. Rather than give your kid a plug, why not give him a whole day of you? No iPhone, no laptop, no nanny/childminder/boarding school. It would cost even less than the plug and you'd still be able to have your dress. Rather than give your gran paperclips, why not dig her garden for her, go and see her a little more, talk to her. Rather than give your boyfriend toothpicks, I can think of several things you could give him that wouldn't cost anything, and would put a smile on his face for days, rather than leaving a bitter taste in his mouth (although there might be a bitter taste in yours if you get what I'm on about).

Alternatively, you could do something even more useful with the money - if you're really going to spend a grand on a handbag (as I understand the Givenchy bag in the advert costs - I didn't know such things existed) why not buy people 'Good Gifts' - there are plenty of charity catalogues which give you the opportunity to make donations for specific, useful, practical things in the name of a gift for someone else - and they are really imaginative: from wild flower meadows and hedgerows to help preserve the English countryside to more humanitarian aid - goats for peace, wheelbarrow ambulances. Or just give the money you would have spent on the dress or the bag to a really deserving cause, rather than your wardrobe. 

Because, Harvey Nics, may be I'm being controversial, but do I really need a new dress? No, I don't, although granted the idea is a nice one for a moment. And would I really feel like I'd spoiled myself if I did blow the savings? Actually, probably not. I doubt I'm alone in thinking that what would really be involved in 'spoiling myself' would be the things that money can't buy - certainly not in Harvey Nics. I'd like some time and some sleep. Then I'd like a walk on a beach with the Husband, the kids and the dog. Give me that, and I tell you, I'd be happy as anything.

So when you've got that range sorted, the one that puts a warm glow into my heart instead of adding a little more to the cold hard place that this world is turning into, may be I'll come a shopping.

Love

Sally

Photos of food

I don't rate myself as a great photographer - of food or otherwise.

People look the wrong way when I come near them with a camera. I chop off arms, legs, the tops of heads, with scant regard for my dreams of giving out one of those glossy family calendars with a different charming picture of us (well, the kids) each month as Christmas presents: I have the same dream every year - a dream that gets ever more remote with each incomplete image that I capture.

I do try to make sure the pics I put up here are reasonable, but I look at some other people's blogs and sometimes wonder why I don't just give up now. Part of the problem may well be that I am always making food that I'm about to eat, and there's only so long you (or your family) can stand waiting for it to cool down enough to take a photo of it...

I also take far, far too many pictures of food. My camera is full of food that I have cooked but never got round to blogging about.

In the general spirit of clearing out that is upon me at the moment, I cleared out my SD card, and had a little play on PicMonkey which is a new thing I have discovered to make collages and edit photos. It's lots of fun. You probably knew about it already.

Anyway, here are a few of my unused photos, turned into a collage. How clever is that?

'Mooli'-vous? Great for coleslaw (but not for soup)

Recently, our veg box has revealed mooli. 3 weeks on the trot. 

Doesn't look so offensive surrounded by other veg, does it??

If you haven't come across this before, it's a big white radish. The mooli certainly didn't do very well when veg were getting their good looks - especially obvious when the same box of veg contained the peacock of the vegetable world - the romanesco cauliflower, fractals and all. Flavourwise, well, the mooli is similar in flavour to the radish we all know and love in the UK, although not as fiery. If I was being cruel, I'd say that on balance, the mooli hasn't got a huge amount going for it.

I wasn't inspired, I have to say. 

The first week, I gave it a good stiff ignoring.

Another one arrived the following week, and I decided I had to do something with them. With all the optimism I could muster, I turned them into soup, along with a small turnip I'd forgotten about, and a bowl of left-over cooked cavolo nero kale leaves that needed eating up.

We'll draw a veil over the results of that particular experiment, shall we? 

The best Pink could come up with was "It's horrifying, Mummy" (she really said that). The Husband and I managed to force down a bowlful, but really, Pink was pretty close to the mark. It's safe to say that mooli and turnip soup won't be reappearing on the menu anytime soon in the Recipe Junkie household.

My heart sank when yet another mooli turned up the following week. I get my box from a local organic smallholder, and the option to pick and choose what you might or might not prefer in your box isn't really there as it is in some of the larger box schemes.

Determined to do something with it, I used half a delicious savoy cabbage and some of the carrots to put together a coleslaw to accompany Blue's chosen birthday tea of steak & chips. You'll be pleased to hear that the coleslaw went down much better than the soup. I made a dressing which included some horseradish - as a nod to the steak - and thinned it down with soy and rice vinegar, echoing the Asian origins of the mooli. 

All in all a much fresher option than some of the gloopier coleslaw dressings you can get, and, as I say, it all went down very well.

Veg box Coleslaw

serves 4-6 depending on age & appetite

1/2 savoy cabbage, finely shredded
3 medium-large carrots, washed (and peeled if necessary) and grated
1 mooli, washed (peeled if necessary) and grated
1 medium onion, peeled and finely sliced
3 rounded dessert spoons of mayonnaise
2 rounded teaspoons of hot horseradish sauce
light soy sauce - to taste
brown rice vinegar - to taste
freshly ground salt & pepper to taste

Combine the grated and shredded veg in a bowl or dish.

Mix together the mayo and horseradish, then add a good splash of soy and of vinegar, adjusting to taste and to make a consistency that will be easy to mix through the veg.

Stir the sauce through the veg, along with some salt and pepper if necessary.

Serve. Steak & chips optional.

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...

Ceredigion Calling - Carrot, apple & coconut cake with ginger syrup

So there I was all happy and skipping about the kitchen with a working Kenwood, and could I decide what to bake? Reader, I could not.

The thing is that in all the excitement of the big move, alot of other stuff has pretty much fallen by the wayside. I'm not saying I'm feeding the kids fishfingers EVERY night, but, you know, needs must and all that. Pasta and sauce is featuring very regularly.

Whereas before life was just normal, mad, family life busy, now it's KERAZEE busy. 

Blue is 10 at the weekend, and it's the Husband's actual 40th in a couple of weeks' time, and, oh yes, we're moving house.

There is an ever increasing list of jobs that need to get done.

Where the kids will go to school has been my main concern so far. From that flows everything else, subject only to the Husband's requirement to be within 20 minutes of his new place of work, and both of our insistence that we should live as close to the sea as possible.

I have tracked down most of the Mumsnetters based in Ceredigion (there aren't that many) and quizzed them endlessly for any information they have about primary schools in the area we will be living in. 

I have familiarised myself with a number of place names, short on vowels, long on great beaches and made a nuisance of myself on the phone to a number of long suffering headteachers. 

I have engaged in a very interesting debate with a very nice and helpful man at the responsible County Council over the existence or not of an intensive Welsh language course that the children may or may not be able to attend. 

I have worried that once I have found the perfect school, we won't be able to rent a house in the area.

As a result of my efforts, I have a spreadsheet and a series of appointments for a couple of weeks hence, when the children and I will visit these schools. Just call me Mrs Efficient.

When I am not pondering how the kids will handle being in a 'Welsh Medium' school (where the business of the school is conducted in Welsh, all of it, apart from the English lessons. As Blue's initial reaction to the whole enterprise was: "Well, I am NOT learning Welsh", you'll be pleased to hear that I have taken the coward's way out and for now have not explicitly informed either of them that this is likely to be a necessity. It will become only too apparent once we have visited the schools), I am tackling the cupboards.

The cupboards - and (to the Husband's unending irritation) the tops of the cupboards - containing the junk that I we have accumulated over the last nearly 15 years of marriage, and a few before that. In fact, not only am I Mrs Efficient, I have become Mrs Ruthless.  Mrs Ruthlessly-Efficient, perhaps? We have lived in our present house for 8 years, during which time the suggestion, nay the mere thought of getting rid of some of 'the stuff' would almost reduce me to tears. Yet here I am, chucking out the crap without a second thought.

You see for all the upheaval, the change has energised me. Not only are we lucky enough to have the opportunity to go and live in a beautiful part of the world, by the sea, with the security (as much as it is) of the Husband's job being in the same place, but the idea of starting afresh gives me a sense of purpose. Not that I won't miss our friends and the life we have here terribly. We are very blessed with the village where we are at the moment - we have some true friends, and life has been good to us while we've lived here. But ultimately, I think we're both slightly nomadic, and there is something appealing about putting down new roots somewhere else. I moved a number of times as a child, and then shuttled from Leeds to Newcastle, to France and back, then to York, to London, to Wiltshire and then to Hampshire, where we have lived in 3 different houses. I remember hitting the point 3 years back when I only had one address to put on any of those official forms where you have to state all the addresses you've lived in for the past however many years. I felt a little cheated...

So yes, where, before, the idea of sorting through the cupboards, endowing the charity shop with most of my worldy goods and (gasp!) giving away most of my back copies of the Good Food magazine (well, it's all online now, isn't it) to a good friend (although not the classic September 2009 issue), would have been something I would never have entertained in a million years, now, I'm relishing it. I actually  think the Husband is a little concerned - after I posted on Facebook a picture of my stash of currently empty jam jars* and offered them up to anyone who wanted them, I caught him eyeing me nervously, as if I wasn't actually his wife at all, but some strange alien being in possession of his wife's body. I still haven't made it to the "unalbumed photographs" cupboard - I need a couple of days and a bottle of gin for that one - but, you know, I'm making progress.

One of my other projects is eating up the produce in the freezers and all the tins of stuff that I have hoarded away in case of a nuclear winter. Otherwise, I will cry when we don't take it with us.

All the half used jars of this and that. We won't be moving till February, but I reckon I can reduce our foodbills quite significantly by actually feeding us as much as possible out of the cupboards. OK, so I guess as time goes by, the idea of chick pea and sprinkles soup may pall, but I bet I can get them to eat it at least once.

Which brings me (at last! I hear you cry) to the cake. A carrot cake, but I didn't have enough carrot, so some apple went in it. Mindful of my need to use up stuff in the kitchen, I added some dessicated coconut to the original recipe, and some syrup from a jar of opened stem ginger to flavour the syrup that I poured over the cake at the end. The original recipe is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's in River Cottage Everyday, but this is my version.

Carrot, apple & coconut cake - with ginger syrup

3 large eggs
150g caster sugar
just over 250ml sunflower oil
300g self raising flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
50g dessicated coconut
Approximately 300g carrots, peeled and grated
1 large-ish apple (approx 50g) grated
100g golden syrup
50g syrup from a jar of opened stem ginger

Lightly grease a 23cm cake tin (loose bottomed if possible) and line the base. Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

In your newly repaired, and isn't it wonderful, mixer (or using a hand held electric whisker thing or other contraption - including perhaps a wooden spoon) beat together the eggs and the sugar till light, foamy and slightly thickened

Pour in the oil and carry on beating for a couple of minutes

Sift together the flour, salt and bicarb and fold this into the mixture along with the coconut.

Fold in the grated carrot and apple, then scrape everything into the prepared tin and bake for around 50 minutes till a skewer comes out clean.

Stand the tin on a wire rack over a plate, and then gently heat up the 2 syrups in a pan. Use a skewer to make holes all over the top of the cake, and slowly pour the hot syrup over it, allowing the syrup to soak into the cake.

Leave to cool.

 

This is lovely while still warm as a pud, with creme fraiche, but has also been going down a storm in the lunch boxes this week.





*don't worry, there are still plenty of full jam jars that will be coming with us...

The Kenwood is dead - long live the Kenwood!

My Kenwood mixer.

I love it. 

I must confess to secret fantasies of other mixers. The pretty, retro (and, ahem, uber-expensive) ones. But I stay faithful.

Once I left home, despite wheedling and pleading, I could never make my mum do the decent thing and pass on her old one to me. It did eventually give up the ghost, after many many years of stirling service, and she replaced it with a newer one.

I found one on Ebay. If I remember it was £47.00. It worked for a few years, and then started smoking in an alarming manner and making some even more alarming noises.

Salavation came in Ross on Wye, where there's a little electical shop, like electrical shops used to be. We took it in while visiting the Husband's family one weekend.

My father in law called a couple of weeks' later with the verdict. "He says it's no good except for parts - but he'll give you one in exchange". So I get a 'new' (reconditioned) one and he keeps my old knackered one for parts? That sort of thing doesn't happen in Basing-grad (or 'Amazing-stoke' as more generous hearted folks occasionally refer to it). And because it was a man in a little electrical shop like little electrical shops used to be, and because I am a trusting soul, I trusted that the exchanged Kenwood would be as good.

It was.

And then - disaster! entirely of my own making. I was in a rush, put too much bread dough in the bowl to knead (I usually do it by hand) and the plate which holds the attachments split.

Bereft doesn't even begin to cover it - and the fact that it was my own fault made it even worse.

Is there a sadder thing than a broken Kenwood chef? Redundant in the corner of the kitchen, desperate to help out while it's owner gives herself whiplash beating up cake batter by hand....? The Kenwood is a kitchen workhorse, and I could almost hear her weeping in the corner.


I stopped making cake - certainly nothing that required vigorous beating. Flapjack and brownie became the order of the day. When I had to make proper cake, and some meringues to use up some egg whites, I raised the red flag on Facebook and borrowed a handheld beater.  




I was offered a Kenwood Chef, quite coincidentally, by a PR working for a big retailer. They wanted a blog post but didn't want me to say that I had been given the mixer - only that the post was written 'in association with' said retailer. I was torn, but mindful of useful advice that I'd read recently, I felt I could not accept. May be I was too scrupulous. 

But my friends, there is a happy ending to this tale. The Kenwood injury wasn't fatal. The Husband and a bit of to'ing and fro'ing with Espares, a rather fabulous internet company that can provide spare parts it seems for pretty much anything. We ordered the wrong thing first - no problem, helpful customer service, and advice about which part we should have ordered. Marvellous.

So I have my Kenwood back, I didn't have to compromise anything, and the family have cake again. 

We all win.

*************************
and just to be completely clear, this post was written entirely off my own back, and not for any payment or 'in Association' with either Kenwood or Espares. Just saying.