Sticky Ginger Cake with Lemon Icing

So I was sneaking a piece of this ginger cake from the kitchen when I realised that I hadn't written a blog for OVER A MONTH. 

There's a lot going on, of which more, I hope, in a few weeks when 'the lot' has concluded and I can tell you all about it (I expect you are intrigued now).

I don't know why I was sneaking the cake, because there was no one else in the house, and only my thighs will tell the tale but anyway, there I was taking a guilty bite of this delicious thing and realised that it just had to be shared with the world before, like everything else I've made, my culinary adventures, in the last few weeks, it's been eaten and forgotten, a blissful memory... The ramson pesto, in all its green, wild-garlicky glory, for example,

the crumpets I made (so chuffed), 

the brilliant burger, 

and, of course, THE LOBSTER will simply have to wait - may be even till next year - only immortalised in my Instagram feed until then...

It's not just 'the lot' either ('the lot' that I don't want to jinx by talking about it)  - generally life has been incredibly busy. We've also had the Easter holidays, visitors, and just the most beautiful run of weather. And because everyone says "Oh, yes, Wales, well it's bound to rain again soon", you just have to get out and make the most of it. Not, exactly, a hardship, when getting out and making the most of it involves lots of this

and plenty of that

and quite a bit more of the other, 

but I'm starting to think that this is part of a conspiracy to keep this most fantastic of places a secret. Sorry if I've just blown it, but, honestly, this is the most stunning place, and the weather is not nearly as bad as you might have been led to believe...

But back to the blogging, I am afraid I've been spending a lot of time on the beach, my floors are covered in a fine dusting of sand, and I've gone a little bit more native and taken up crochet. I won't, you'll be pleased to hear, start blogging about the crochet, but neverthless, it's eating in to time I'd otherwise have spent tapping away.

This cake however, fits perfectly with the season and the weather. It's ideal beach cake, I made a slab of it to take camping with friends last weekend on the Gower. A combination of Martin Dorey's The Campervan Cookbooks' sticky ginger treacle cake, and Nigella's fresh ginger bread from Domestic Goddess, it's old fashioned and delicious and just what you want to eat with a cup of tea after a day on the beach.




Sticky Ginger Cake with Lemon Icing

200 ml semi-skimmed milk
3 tbsp black treacle
100g butter
75g plain flour
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp cinammon
200g soft brown sugar
125g oats
A good chunk (maybe 3 inches or so) fresh ginger, peeled & finely grated

Juice of half a lemon (although you may not need all of it)
175g icing sugar

Grease & line a 20cm square cake tin, and pre-heat the oven to 150C (130C fan)

Tip the milk into a small pan. Add the treacle and butter and slowly bring to the boil so that everything melts into the milk.

Keeping an eye on the pan, sieve the flour, bicarb and cinammon into a large bowl, and mix in the sugar and oats. 

When the butter & treacle has melted into the milk, add the grated ginger, give it a quick stir and pour into the flour mixture, then stir to combine.

Pour into the prepared tin and bake in the pre-heated oven for about 50 minutes.

Leave to cool in the cake tin, then make the icing. Sieve the icing sugar then slowly mix in the lemon juice to make a thick, spreadable icing - not too runny, you want a layer on the top (preferably one you can leave teeth marks in) rather than dribbles down the side - and smear it over the cake. When the icing has hardened, cut the cake into 16 pieces, wrap in greaseproof paper and head out.

Corned Beef Hash - with added veg

"Doesn't it look like dog food, though?"

I'll accept those comments now, here, before I even start this post. Yes, come on, get them all out in the open. I know you're thinking them, and to be fair, I'd probably have to agree with you, although I don't feed my dog the kind of dog food that you're talking about - which is possibly why I am able to tolerate corned beef. In fact, I'd go so far to say I really rather like it. Which is pretty contradictory given my usual mantra of fresh, local, organic. So I'll accept that criticism too.

Finished? I'll get on with the main event.

While I've never been ashamed to eat a slice or two of corned beef, tinned potatoes was somewhere I had always drawn the line (well, I'd drawn the line before the tinned potatoes) until we went on Scout camp last summer. I was converted, and for the rest of the summer, corned beef hash became one of our regular camping meals, corned beef, tinned potatoes, tinned sweetcorn. Cheap, filling. Serve with tabasco for the adults, brown sauce or ketchup for the kids. Those with harsher tongues amongst you might whisper "Trailer trash", but I say don't knock it till you try it.

I had corned beef hash on the menu from last week but in the general disarray that my week became, it never happened. On the plus side, the tins of potatoes, sweetcorn and corned beef were sitting nicely in the cupboard ready to be used up, and I supplemented with some brussel sprouts that our allotment neighbour picked for us, and two rather sorry looking leeks. 

That's the great thing about this - you can use up anything in it. I've made variations of this with fresh potatoes too, and with bacon instead of corned beef.  Anything goes, really.

Corned Beef Hash

serves 4

1 tablespoon oil
1 red onion, peeled and chopped
2 leeks, sliced and washed
2 handfuls of small brussel sprouts, trimmed
340g tin new potatoes, drained and sliced up
1 tin corned beef, sliced up into chunks
1 small tin sweetcorn, drained

Heat the oil in a large frying pan, then add in the onion and cook over a medium heat for a few minutes. Add in the leeks and then the brussels sprouts and cook for a few minutes till softened.

Tip the veg into a bowl, then put the pan back on the heat with a little more oil if necessary, and add the potatoes and cook over a reasonably high heat to get them a little browned and crunchy. Add the veg back into the pan, along with the corned beef and the sweetcorn and stir till all is hot.

Serve. With tabasco, ketchup or brown sauce to taste.


 

Fried Bacon Sandwich - or how to recover your camping mojo

My love of camping and the great outdoors is nothing new. There's almost nothing I like better than heading off in Daisy, our camper van, for a week, a weekend, or even a night, exploring new places and heading back to our home from home at the end of the day. I love eating outside, sitting out under the stars, but am equally happy (OK may be not quite so happy, but you know, happy enough) huddled in under the canvas awning, or even in the van, with a bottle of red wine playing Uno as the wind howls and the rain lashes down. I've eulogised plenty about it all before so I won't go on about it...

Sometimes, though, there are moments when it's not quite what it cracked up to be. Don't get me wrong it doesn't put me off for the next time, but there are definitely challenges that make unbidden thoughts flash through my head. 

Mainly "What on earth possessed you?" type thoughts. 

We had a moment like that this last week, camping on Shell Island in North Wales. The campsite itself is an odd sort of place - out on a causeway, you can camp in the sand dunes or facing inland with views over the salt marshes to the mountains beyond. It should be the best place to camp in the world ever. For various odd reasons, it's not quite that good, but we still had a great time. However, one night, the wind got up, blowing straight across the site.

"Will the kids be alright?" (they sleep out in an awning most of the time)

"Yeah, sure"

The wind got stronger. We went to bed ourselves, having checked everything twice.

The wind got stronger. 

There was banging and flapping. Noises we couldn't identify.

The Husband valiantly got back out of bed to do more checking.

In the end, we just couldn't cope with the idea that somehow the wind would whip up the awning, blowing the kids straight over into the salt marshes that we were camped right on top of, so we brought them in to the van and I spent a largely sleepless night with Pink on one side of me, out of her sleeping bag, legs thrown over mine, muttering to herself as she tends to do, and the Husband, family duly safe and protected, snoring loudly in my ear on the other... It could have been worse, I suppose - Blue got to sleep on the floor of the van, nose to nose with the dog.

After a night like that, the best thing of course is a morale boosting bacon sarnie (sorry, all you vegetarians out there, but it really is), but no ordinary bacon sarnie - allow me please to introduce (drum roll please) 

the Fried Bacon Sandwich. 

For this, you need to make sure you are the person cooking the bacon. And really, given that just looking at it makes your arteries tense up a little, it should only be eaten in dire need. But it is so good.

Cook the bacon up for all the sandwiches you are making - then make everyone else's sandwiches first (part of the treat is that only one person gets it). DO NOT clean out the pan you cooked the bacon in. At the same time, make sure there's a coffee on the go somewhere. We take a stove top espresso maker with us - it has justified its van space on many occasions.

Butter 2 slices of pappy white bread, and lay one butter side up on a plate, or the table, or wherever, and put your own bacon on the bread along with any sauce you choose (red tends to be my choice). Heat up all the left over bacon fat/oil that's still in the pan, then place the second slice of bread, butter side up, in the hot fat and fry gently till crisp. Depending on how much fat there is in the pan, the bread may absorb it all. You won't be eating these often, so that's OK. Once the bread is crisp, remove from the pan, and place butter side down (the butter will have gone all melty, by the way. Mmmmmm).

Slice the sandwich in 2, take your sandwich and cup of freshly brewed coffee somewhere far away from husbands, children and dogs, with a view, and enjoy 5 minutes peace and quiet. 

Mojo restored, you can crack on with the rest of your day - whatever that might involve.

BBQ Ribs for the best weekend ever

We have a great local butcher. 

The other week, I was in there and had my head turned by some mighty fine racks of ribs he had in the chiller cabinet. I bought 2 racks, intending to feed them to the children as a playdate tea, but I got my weeks wrong, and the ribs went in the freezer.

This can only have been a good thing, as it meant we could BBQ them last weekend in what will surely be pretty high up on my list of "best weekends of the year" - even though we've only had just over half the year.

 
Yes, we had a hot, sticky and fairly slow journey to darkest Suffolk on Friday night, but once we were there, well, everything was brilliant. The site is very much 'of the moment' - plenty of bunting and hand written signs around, low density camping. A few Dorset bell tents to rent, the option to camp in the woods, Swattesfield Campsite is one I would definitely recommend if you like low key relaxed camping. It's just quite a long way from Hampshire for the weekend...




The weather was awesome, the campfire burned bright at night and the Pimms flowed. The children were occupied in the woods that surrounded the camping area, and the adults were mostly occupied with a wood fired pizza oven that was on the site (of which, more in another post), and we had a gourmet BBQ on Saturday night. And then Murray won Wimbledon as we chuntered back down the M11 in the sweltering heat of Sunday afternoon. Pretty much perfect.

So back to the ribs, which were our contribution to the gourmet BBQ. Ribs are great at any time, but marinaded and cooked over hot coals, they take on a smoky loveliness that can't be beaten. Not the cleanest and tidiest things to eat, but, you know, who cares?

The marinade is based on the one Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall includes in his fantastic Meat book. In a fit of whirlwind organisation, I managed to decant about half the ingredients into their appropriate amounts into various small containers, and then just chucked in the bottles of anything else I needed into the van, but forgot the recipe - not even in scribbled form, so once the time for marinading came round, I had to wing it. 




I should say that Pimms had been consumed at this point, but not too much, and so I'd take this as a guide rather than as a definitive recipe. Just keep tasting as you go...

For 2 racks of ribs - approximately 24 ribs in total. I didn't count. I was drinking Pimms.

3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped

2 tablespoons dark muscovado sugar

3 tablespoons ketchup

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

freshly ground salt and pepper

sherry vinegar to taste - probably about 3 tablespoons

Mix everything together and marinade the ribs for a good hour or 2 - longer if you can.

Cook on a suitably heated BBQ (let your friendly BBQ king take over at this point, if this is not you). They will take 10-15 minutes, may be 20 depending on how much meat they have on them.

Serve as you like. We had potato salad and a rather fancy broad bean (double podded no less, at the insistence of Mrs L) and chorizo couscous. We do like to camp in style...

I'm linking up to the Four Seasons Food challenge hosted by Anneli at Delicieux and Louisa at Chez Foti which has BBQ as the theme this month.

If it's meatloaf, we must be camping

Well, not always, but meat loaf is fairly synonymous with a camping trip in the RJ household.

This is a recipe I picked up from the Good Food magazine, and the original recipe is on the website: Cold meatloaf with squashed tomato salsa. With the emphasis on the cold. This is what we usually take to sustain us on the Friday night trip, especially if the trip is likely to be a bit longer than average. There's also usually enough left over for sarnies over the weekend too, and the 'chutney'/'salsa' that you make to go with it is a perfect foil for the loaf. It's got lots of herbs in, which count towards your 5 a day, always helpful when camping tends to major on the meat and carb end of the food spectrum.


This weekend we're heading off to Suffolk. It's madness, I tell you, via Farnborough to pick up the Husband who can't finish work till around 5, then the all the joys that the M25 clockwise on a Friday night with a good forecast for the weekend will bring, till we peel off on the M11 or A12 - haven't decided which, and a final obligatory skirmish round the back lanes once we leave the main road. The last thing we need is complicated food. And yes, we could stop and buy tea at a Little Road Break, or wherever, but frankly, a bit of good food, and everyone's spirits are lifted, just in time to fight with the awning and get the cork out of the wine bottle sharpish once we arrive.

There is a perfectly good reason for travelling so far - we're camping with my lovely school friend and her family. Normally there would be a third family camping but my other school friend (mum in said family) has recently had a knee op, so instead of camping somewhere relatively centrally for all 3 families, this time we're going to camp near her house.

I'm very excited. The campsite is in Cool Camping. There's a pizza oven we can use. Camp fires are allowed. Apart from the long journey, it's sounding practically perfect. And then of course, there's the forecast. But let's not tempt fate...

Camping Meatloaf with red pepper and tomato salsa

450g pork sausages
500g beef mince
50g breadcrumbs
1 onion
1 clove of garlic
large handful of flat leaf parsley
3 large stalks of rosemary, leave only
2 eggs
salt & pepper

Salsa
2 red peppers
sprinkle of smoked paprika
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil 
2 tsp sherry vinegar 
1tsp caster sugar

400g cherry tomatoes

Leave plenty of foil to overhang

Start with the meatloaf. Line a 2lb loaf tin with silver foil, with enough overhang to wrap the loaf in eventually once it's all cooked and cooled (you'll thank me for this tip later!!). Pre-heat the oven to 180C/160 fan.



Finely chop the onion, garlic and herbs - I whizz it all up in a food processor. - then split the sausages and empty the meat into a large bowl with the mince and mash it all up together with the onions and herbs and breadcrumbs, eggs and some salt and pepper.


Empty the mixture into your lined loaf tin and squish it in, leaving the loaf mixture nice and mounded on top.





Deseed the peppers and slice them fairly thinly. Spread them out on a baking tray, toss in a tablespoon or so of olive oil and sprinkle over some smoked paprika.

Put the loaf in the oven with the tray of peppers on the shelf below and cook for 30 minutes, during which time, quarter the cherry tomatoes and peel and finely slice the garlic.

After 30 minutes, remove the tray with the peppers on it, stir in the tomatoes & garlic, the sherry vinegar and caster sugar and put back in the oven for another 40 minutes or so till the meat loaf is cooked and hot all the way through (test with a skewer) and the peppers and tomatoes are all soft and squidgy and a bit caramelised.

Pour off any juice that has collected round the meatloaf and leave to cool. Squidge up the peppers and tomatoes and put in a sterilised jar or container suitable to take with you.

Once cool, wrap the meatloaf up in the foil and seal the jar with the peppers. Great in rolls, served with the salsa and with potato salad (which you also made in advance!). And don't forget some good cake...

Dinner sorted (cake included!)

Happy Camping!

The herbs are a great addition to this loaf and add a little extra greenery. I'm linking up to Karen at Lavender and Lovage 's lovely Cooking with Herbs Challenge.