Lemon & Poppy Seed Cake

So, there it is then (as they say around here).

We have bought a house here in West Wales. 

A wonderful house. A house that I have carried around in my heart since I stepped over the threshold in January, through the stress and embuggerance that is buying houses in England and Wales (it may be the same else where - I don't know - I understand that in other places it is a lot easier), through the initial silence between our offer being accepted and anything actually happening, through the last minute boundary issue and the changing of completion dates (which also coincided with me doing my back in and Blue sustaining a minor head injury, all while the Husband was back in England for a series of meetings. Never a dull moment, I tell you),,the mysterious missing document (not ours) on completion day a couple of days ago, to moving day.

The bottom line is that my home will always be where the Husband and the children are, but to be able to live in a house like this and call it ours, for it to coincide with where the Husband and children are, so making it home, well, it makes me very happy.

There is work to be done, and I'm sure there will be much cursing and swearing as we go, but for now, it's all good. Busy, but good. And you know me well enough by now to know that in amongst the hectic pace of life, there is always time for cake, especially a lemon cake. 

Loosely based (isn't it always) in this case on yet another of Mr Dan Lepard's fine creations, this came about more as the result of having another purge through the cupboards in advance of moving day than anything else. I seem to have a selection of opened packets of poppy seeds in my cupboards yet no recollection of using them in anything, I didn't have enough lemons, my oatmeal was medium and not fine, and yet, this is a divine cake. More texture than your classic lemon drizzle, good flavour, and a good keeper (it actually makes quite a lot of cake). It also tastes fantastic with a cup of tea - great for keeping removal men incentivised...

Lemon & Poppy Seed Cake

250g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
75g medium oatmeal
30g poppy seeds
225g golden caster sugar
125g unsalted butter at room temperature
100ml vegetable oil
zest of 2 lemons
1 tsp lemon extract
4 large eggs
50 ml hot water

150g caster sugar (doesn't have to be golden), plus extra
juice of 2 lemons

Line a 20cm square, high sided tin with greaseproof paper, and pre-heat the oven to 180 C (160C fan).

Sift together the flour  baking powder then add the oatmeal and poppy seeds, stir to combine, and set aside.

Beat together the sugar, butter, oil, lemon zest and extract until the whole thing is  pale and light, then add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Once the eggs are all combined, beat in the hot water until everything is smooth.

Beat the flour, oatmeal and poppy seeds into the batter, then transfer into the prepared tin and bake for around 45-50 minutes.

Make the lemon syrup by combining 150g caster sugar with the juice of 2 lemons in a small saucepan and gently heating till the sugar is dissolved. While the cake is still warm, poke holes all over it with a skewer and pour the syrup all over it.

Leave the cake to cool, then sprinkle over a couple of extra spoons of caster sugar. Yes, I know it's a lot, but sometimes, it's necessary. Cut into generous pieces and put the kettle on.

Enjoy!

Ginger & Coconut Surprise Cake

I'll cut to the chase here - the 'surprise' in this cake is that it tasted quite as good as it did, given my penchant for adapting with impunity.

I managed to sneak in a baking session on Saturday afternoon, chores done, children delivered and recovered from various activities, dog walked. As the rest of the household settled for rugby induced over-excitement, I sidled into my happy place, emptied the cupboards and got a bake on. A lasagne for Sunday (ragu already made and defrosted, so a mere assembly job) - something easy to pop in the oven after our planned Mothers Day activity of a walk and picnic on the beach; some experimental gluten free brownies, of which more another day when I've sorted out the slight oiliness from slightly too much coconut oil; pizza for post-rugby match appetites (shouting at the TV can make people awfully hungry...) and this cake.

Getting my bake on...

Again adapting from Short & Sweet by Dan Lepard, this is my version of the ginger root cake, the adaptations mostly based on using up what was in the cupboard. You'll be pleased to hear that I now have less than half a bottle of pomegranate molasses in my possession, and although I have found several very good uses for it, I'm not sure I'll be rushing to purchase another bottle.

Anyway, back to this cake. It's not a straightforward cake flavour-wise, but the molasses and ginger complement each other, with the addition of coconut rounding things off. It worked as cake on its own, and also as pudding, topped with some homegrown rhubarb, simply stewed.

And if you were interested, this cake also contains swede. Yes, the vegetable. Not Ulrika Johnsson. And unlike my last attempt to include swede in a cake, this appears to have gone undetected. That'll teach them for watching the rugby...


Ginger & Coconut Surprise Cake

2 large eggs
100g light soft brown sugar
100g pomegranate molasses
150 ml coconut oil
150g grated swede
2 nuggets of stem ginger, finely chopped
175g wholemeal flour
50g dessicated coconut
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarb of soda
2 tsp ground ginger

for the icing
100g icing sugar
lemon juice (probably about 1/4 lemon)

Line a 20cm round springform cake tin and pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Separate one of the eggs and set the white aside for later. Beat together the while egg and second yolk with the sugar until it becomes thick and lightens in colour - at least 5 minutes.

Beat in the molasses and coconut oil, then stir in the swede and chopped ginger.

Mix together the flour, coconut, raising agents and ground ginger, then add this into the mixture.

Take the remaining egg white and whist to the soft peak stage, then fold this evenly through the batter.

Scrape this into the tin and bake for around 40 minutes - it's OK if a few crumbs come out on the cake tester.

Once the cake has cooled, remove it from the tin and make up the icing. Sieve the icing sugar and combine with the lemon juice to make a thick-ish icing. Ice your cake as artfully as you like, and enjoy.

Lemon caramel cake

I love food. That's why I have a food blog. There's not much that I won't try, not much I don't like. But there are a few flavours that I keep going back to. Smoked paprika. Almonds. Lemon.

I'd be hard pressed to choose between lemon and almond, particularly when talking about cake (I haven't yet added smoked paprika to a cake) and I'll often seek to combine the 2 rather than choose, but today, it's all about lemon cake. Yet another one, I know, to join Felicity Cloake's perfect lemon drizzle cake (which does include almonds), the lemon cake with feathered icing, a lemon and blackcurrant cake...

This is another bake based on a Dan Lepard classic from Short & Sweet where it appears as Lemon Butter Cake. There's a version of this loaf cake online on the Guardian Life & Style pages from 2006 - slightly different to that which appears in print, but the constant ingredient is condensed milk, one of my other culinary loves. You might think the combination of lemon and condensed milk would be one that I'd find hard to resist, but in fact I've pondered the possibility for some time and never been quite sure. One of the joys of lemon is its sharpness - would the addition of condensed milk take that away?

Well, the fact is that I've had some tinned caramel in the fridge for far too long, left over from making my favourite flapjacks, so in the end, I didn't use condensed milk at all, and here's the result. No cloying sweetness, just a deliciously sharp, moist loaf cake, with massive mouth-appeal.  .

Dan may bake with integrity - me, I just use up what I've got in the fridge. Either way, this is a mighty fine cake.

Lemon Caramel Cake

100g unsalted butter
2 large eggs
150g caster sugar
125g tinned caramel
grated zest of 2 lemons
Juice of 1.5 large lemons (save the other half for the icing)
275g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder

100g icing sugar
Juice of 1/2 a lemon

Line a large loaf tin with baking paper and pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Melt the butter and set aside.

Separate the eggs and measure out 25g of the caster sugar. Whisk the whites till frothy then tip in the sugar with the whisk still running until the mix forms soft peaks. Set the bowl aside.

Beat together the melted butter, the egg yolks, the remaining 125g caster sugar, the caramel, lemon zest and lemon juice until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is smooth and caramel coloured.

Sift the flour and baking powder into the egg yolk mixture and beat together till smooth, then fold in the egg whites till combined and scrape the mixture into the prepared loaf tin.

Bang the tin a couple of times to evenly distribute the mixture, then bake for 40-50 minutes till a skewer comes out almost clean.

Leave the cake to cool, then make up the icing by combining the icing sugar with the juice of half a lemon to make quite a runny icing. Drizzle this over the loaf.

Pumpkin Ginger Cake with Lemon icing

So a couple of things have irked me this week.

Firstly, at the weekend, the Husband got stuck into the kitchen and produced a much, much better Pumpkin Soup than I did the previous weekend. He followed a Jamie Oliver recipe, right down to frying the sage leaves first in the oil which you then cook your 'base veg' (the carrot, celery, onions type veg, not the ones shouting obscenities as you chop them up). It was delicious. Grrr.

Secondly, I watched an episode of GBBO. 

I know. Shoot me for my hypocrisy.

In my defence, there wasn't even an old episode of CSI Miami (my least favourite of the CSIs) running on 5 USA, and I was too tired to resist I'm nothing if not open to having my ideas challenged. 

What would Messrs Hollywood & Berry say about my icing? On second thoughts, don't answer that...

So in the interests of testing whether I was right in my views about this sort of TV programme, I decided to endure it. You'll be pleased (or not) to know that I remain firm in my view that this is really car crash TV for the middle classes, and quite exploitative in the way that it plays on peoples' emotions and feelings. All that smarmy niceness and then killer comments basically telling the contestants that their cakes were rubbish. And I still don't really know what it's all FOR? I mean, for a start they weren't really rubbish - those cakes. And secondly, we all know that there are thousands of amazing bakers all over the country producing stunning cakes (both in looks and taste). So why do we need to allow some of those amazing bakers to sob into their fondant icing potagers in public? Hmm?

Anyway, rant about the premise of the programme aside, I have to say that I found the actual baking very compelling, and I liked the vegetable bakes a lot. I am a big fan of veg in cake, and when I was flicking through some books and trying to work out what to bake for a coffee morning this morning, I was mindful of the fact that despite my soup, the Husband's soup and the curry I made for the Harvest Festival Supper, we had still not got through even one of the great big enormous pumpkins from the veg patch.

Now, I know Dan Lepard doesn't take kindly to having his recipes repeated on anyone else's websites/blogs, but I made so many changes to his Ginger Root Cake that I really think this can be called an original cake. For a start, I used pumpkin, rather than root vegetables. But whatever, I was really REALLY pleased with how this turned out. Light and with a lovely ginger flavour in the cake. And of course, lemon and ginger are a match made in heaven, so the icing was a must - and who cares that my attempts at artful drizzling were less than beautiful...

Pumpkin Ginger Cake 

2 large eggs
100g dark muscovado sugar
100g treacle (see top tip below for weighing)
150ml sunflower oil (plus a little extra for weighing out the treacle - see below)
160g grated pumpkin
4 balls of stem ginger, chopped fairly small
175g spelt flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground ginger
150g icing sugar
juice of half a lemon

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/160C fan and line a 20cm round cake tin with greaseproof paper.

Separate one of the eggs and put the white to one side, then beat together the whole egg and the separated yolk with the sugar till thick and foamy.

Add the oil and treacle. A top tip for weighing out the treacle is to grease the bowl you weigh it into very lightly with a little oil, also if you are spooning it out of the tin, wipe a little oil over the spoon too, then the treacle will slide out easily. Also works for syrup. 

Beat in the oil and treacle until smooth, then stir in the pumpkin and chopped ginger. 

Mix together the flour, baking powder, bicarb and ground ginger, then stir this into the mixture.

Whisk the reserved egg white to the soft peak stage, then fold it into the rest of the cake mixture with a metal spoon.

Scrape the batter into the tin and bake for 40-50 minutes.

Allow the cake to cool in the tin, then make up the icing by mixing together the lemon juice and icing sugar. You want a pretty runny icing to drizzle over the cake.

I also made Dan's Lemon Butter Cake - which if you own a copy of 'Short and Sweet' (and if you don't I thoroughly recommend that you get one immediately) is on the next page to the Ginger Root Cake - but I pretty much followed the recipe for that, and I'd recommend you do too...

Lemon & Almond Buns - A Random Recipe

There always comes a time when there's a change of routine when you need to bring out the big guns. It's a watershed moment that can be easy to spot if you've experienced it a few times. 

Things are different, no-one's really settled into whatever the change is. Comfort and indulgence is the order of the day to get everyone over the hump and get on with the rest of whatever it is.

Comfort came bun shaped today

I've observed this on Scout Camp the last few years. usually around Day 3. That's when we pull out the biscuits and the hot chocolate at bed time, do some mass jollying along.

Here in the RJ household, we had our own jollying along moment on Sunday morning.

The Husband headed off last Monday for what is probably the longest time he's been away from us since he left the Army. While he's sitting in the desert, surrounded by 'MaMBA' (No, not snakes, Miles and Miles of Bugger All), posting the occasional photo of a lizard on Facebook, Blue, Pink, Fred the Dog, the chickens and I have been trying to sort out a new modus operandi, not required for the shorter trips he's often making. There has been a Daddy-less 7th birthday and a couple of late nights because somehow things have slipped. There has been fractious bickering, there have been tears. The kids are responsible for feeding the chickens and watering the greenhouse - I am responsible for making sure they remember they are responsible. There has been an angry moment (mine) with the lawn mower (don't go there), and more tears (the kids) when the internet occasionally fails to allow Skype to work for the brief period of time when a conversation with Daddy is appropriate.

When I selected my Random Recipe for Dom's challenge for this month -  'Bread' , I wasn't really sure when I'd get round to baking and entering the challenge. My selection of bread baking books and bread baking sections of books included the Sweet & Fruit breads chapter in 'Short & Sweet' by Dan Lepard, and this recipe was where my page flicking ended up. Lemon & Almond Buns - "... a lemon flavoured butter dough that bakes like brioche around a gooey core of marzipan..." Delicious, sure, but a month full of camping, working out my notice at work and preparing to go freelance, sailing the ship on my own, I wasn't sure that there would be time.

Well, may be there wasn't time, but what became apparent over Saturday was that time or not, the kids needed some indulgence. This would normally have been a cinammon bun moment, but instead, the moment for Lemon & Almond Buns arose.

Now, having already fallen foul of Mr Lepard's rather zealous business manager in the past check out the comments), I am not going to even begin to repeat the recipe here. However for those of you wishing to recreate these beautiful buns, you will be pleased to know that they were published in the Guardian Online in 2006 and you can find the recipe here.

Pretty straightforward, although you need to start the night before to get a rough dough into the fridge, and if you want them for breakfast before about 9, you need to be up just before 7, which is fine unless you've had more than a couple of glasses of morale boosting wine with your lovely and supportive neighbours after you've manhandled the kids into bed, tears wiped, stories read,  in which case you might end up having breakfast a little later on...

It's an enriched, lemon scented bread dough which needs little kneading.

From this...

You roll it out into a 70cm by 10cm rectangle, 

to this

then put a sausage of marzipan into the middle of the rectangle and seal the dough over it before slicing into pieces, proving and baking.

The only thing that I can tell you about the recipe is that I had no flaked almonds in, so instead of brushing the cooked buns with melted butter, sprinkling with toasted flaked almonds and dredging with icing sugar, I made up a runny lemon icing using the juice of a lemon (the zest had already gone into the dough), and then sprinkled with poppy seeds.

What can I say? The lemony brioche type bread was light, lemony (as promised) and delicious. The marzipan was oozy and heavenly. The kids LOVED it, and have requested a repeat performance next week, and the next. And strangely enough, everything calmed down today. 

10 days to go...

Horsemeat? No, Chocolate Cake.

While the food world is rocked with the horsemeat scandal, I am afraid I am concerned with a slightly less dramatic, but perhaps no less important (to me, at least) issue - chocolate cake.

I jest, of course. I am horrified that an undeclared product has entered our food chain. Provided it is fit for human consumption, I have no problem with horsemeat being sold & consumed (although I probably wouldn't be rushing to buy it). I do have a problem with the fact that somewhere along the line, it has been passed off as beef, with no thought to whether it is in fact fit for human consumption. As with many other food bloggers, I cook most of our food from scratch (I won't deny that there's a box of fishfingers in the freezer, but you know what I mean). I also buy the majority of my meat from my local butcher, or a small holder, and I trust them both - but I'd like to think that Findus, and the other companies involved in this trusted their suppliers of meat too - and still this happened. Something is very wrong in our food industry.

I will carry on as before - cooking from scratch, buying from people I trust - because there is nothing else I feel I can really do at the moment, and I am not going to comment further at this point. I'd commend these two short and to the point posts by bloggers I admire immensely, The View from the Table and Pint Sized Rants on the subject. As they pretty much sum up how I feel, I'll leave it there and get back to cake.

Pink does not like chocolate cake. Once you've scraped yourself up off the floor and offered me your condolences, let me tell you that I can kind of see why. She has very eclectic tastebuds, and tends to the sour end of the scale - passion fruit, pineapple, lemon (which she will suck with not a hint of eye screwing). On Friday, after school, the kids are allowed 'sweets' from the Co-Op on the way home from school. Blue will often choose something chocolatey, but Pink will go for sweets every time. That's not to say she doesn't like chocolate, but not too much of it, and when I make a chocolate cake, it always ends to be at the dark end of the scale, and it's too much for her.

Saturday was cold and snowing. The Husband and I were out late on Friday night and we had to foray into Basingstoke on Saturday morning for tedious things like school shoes (one pair, previous pair trashed), school trousers (2 pairs, previous pairs irrevocably trashed with the patches coming off), glasses tightening (hockey stick in face incident). On return, and after lunch, I was waiting for the kettle to boil to have a cup of tea and realised that there was no cake in the house (apart from worthy stuff with fruit in it frozen for packed lunches in handy portions):

Seized by an absolute need for chocolate cake, and determined to produce something different, lighter to the usual, I consulted various tomes and came up with a cake based on Nigella's Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake, using a frosting based on Dan Lepard's treacle fudge icing from Short & Sweet. Essentially, buy replacing some cocoa with Ovaltine, it makes a less totally chocolatey chocolate cake, but no less delicious when you're feeling needy on a cold wet Saturday afternoon.

Less Chocolatey Chocolate Cake 

200g plain flour
200g caster sguar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
20g cocoa
20g Ovaltine
175g unsalted butter (at room temp)
2 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
150ml sour cream (at room temp)

Pre-heat the oven to 180C, and grease and line 2 20cm sandwich tins with loose bottoms (as opposed to soggy bottoms).

Beat everything together in a food mixer - I have a trusty old Kenwood for the job. Nigella uses a food processor. You could do it by hand. You get quite a thick batter to divide between the tin, and smooth out, then bake for around 30 minutes until a cake tester comes out clean. 

Cool in the tins for 10 minutes before turning out, and leave to cool while you make the frosting.

Chocolate Fudge Frosting

1tbsp golden syrup
1tbsp treacle
2 tbsp cocoa
2tbsp Ovaltine
4 tbsp cornflour
300ml milk
125g dark chocolate & 125g milk chocolate, chopped (or use buttons that you can get now for cooking with)
2 tsp vanilla extract
50g soft unsalted butter

Beat together the syrup, treacle, cocoa, Ovaltine, cornflour and milk in a saucepan till smooth, then bring to the boil, stirring pretty much all the time - it's a little like custard. When it starts 'phutting' like any kind of custard/white sauce as it comes to the boil, take the pan off the heat and beat in the chopped chocolate until it's all smooth and shiny. When the heat has pretty much gone out of it, beat in the vanilla and the butter (do this in little pieces). 

Use this to sandwich the cake together and then to cover the outside. This makes a little more than you will need for the cake above, but I have had some success freezing this kind of icing.

Serve with a cup of tea by a roaring fire and feel instantly better.

Did Pink like it? Well by the time the the cake was baked and frosted, she and Blue had already departed for their Harry Potter party (the Hagrid costume and the dragon eggs worked fine, thank you very much!), so it was up to the Husband and I to sample it first. We pronounced it to be mighty fine.

The Marmalade Blues

So it's 7.00 on a Sunday morning and this is what the stovetop looks like:

What I really wanted to make this year was lemon & lime marmalade, which of course I could make at any time, but somehow, January is marmalade time, isn't it? And of course, rather than remembering my desire for lemon & lime, I was seduced by the sight of some Seville oranges, conveniently forgot the kilo or so I had in the freezer left over from last year (and some donated by a friend), and bought a 1.5 kilo bag. "I love making marmalade!"

Er, no you don't, Sally. It's all the setting point stress of jam that you put yourself through every summer, plus numerous opportunities for injury during the making process. And it takes a bloody age. You do not have enough time to make marmalade. You want to be doing OTHER THINGS.

Too late.

We had a lovely day with the kids yesterday. The rain meant the Husband's current exterior project is on hold, so we all went into town in the morning and then after a dog walking/homework pause in the happy family scene, we played board games for nearly 3 hours. I must have come over all maternal, because I normally am no good at playing board games (I am a natural cheat for a start), and I will never never play monopoly again, but we had a good laugh. Amazing (and in case you're wondering, my kids are 9 and 6.5 and up till very recently, playing any kind of game for that long would have been utter hell). Great for family relations, but not so good if you've got over 2 kilos of marmalade oranges to prep.

By the time the kids were upstairs it was nearly 8.30. After the annual "Which recipe do we follow?" "No, Nigel's had too much liquid in it." "What about Delia?" "Didn't we combine Dan and Nigel last year?" debate, I settled on a very helpful method from the Guardian online - How to make Perfect Orange Marmalade . Sounded good to me. I didn't have the same type of sugar, but I wasn't about to add to my woes by heading up to the Co-Op (and actually, I'm not sure they stretch to light muscovado anyway) so bog standard preserving sugar (which I had in the cupboard) it is.

I couldn't work out how to get the food processor juicing attachment to work so started off doing it by hand. Squeezing into the pan, scraping the pips and pith into a muslin lined bowl, putting the empty halves in an other bowl... Just as the RSI was setting in nicely, the Husband came in, clicked the necessary attachments in the right place and got the juicer working. Let me tell you that having your knuckles skinned by a food processor juicer attachment when you're already wondering what madness possessed you to start on this, is just about the pits. Less Seville orange, more blood orange marmalade - I wish I'd stuck with the RSI to be honest (I jest, I didn't actually break the skin, but it hurt a lot - you have to hold the fruit halves down onto the attachment and it spins round very fast making it easy to slip and catch yourself. I say don't try this at home, kids.) 

So, oranges (and lemons - I needed 2 - bang goes my lemon & lime marmalade that I was going to knock up from the various ends of lemon and lime knocking around in the fridge...) juiced, time to shred the peel. Oh hoo - f-ing - ray. By now, the Husband in firmly implanted on the sofa, watching TV & eating the crisps.

Reader, I started, with my sharp little knife, I found something I wanted to listen to on the radio and I set to work. Shred, shred, shred. Shred, shred, shred. AAAARRRGGGGHHHHHHH.

I put it all in the food processor. This time with the knife attachment. Fortunately, the lid has to be on for this to work, so no opportunity for further injury there. How is it possible to feel guilty about shredding orange peel in a food processor instead of with a knife. I really need to get a grip.

By now, you can appreciate that there's quite a lot in terms of volume. I have the juice and shredded (ha!) zest of 2.4 kilos of oranges and lemons (I'd got the frozen oranges out of the freezer to add to the mix). I have 2 kilos of sugar. All in my preserving pan (that's the one on the right in the photo - the other one is the Husband's beer making pan). I need to add 4-5 litres of water.

My pan is not big enough. But I have already put most of it into one pan, so I need to work out how to divide it between 2 pans.

I tried decanting some into the Husband's beer pan, but realised that because the sugar hadn't dissolved, there was a definitely uneven distribution. And I had to divide the contents of my muslin bag up. At that point I went to bed.

So you see, nearly 3 hours on and a night's sleep, I am really no closer to having marmalade. This morning, I have brought the stuff up to temperature to dissolve the sugar and then rather precariously remixed it and then redistributed it back between the 2 pans. It now needs to simmer for some time - the recipe says 2 hours, but working on past experience, this could be any time - to get the peel soft - before you get down to the business of bubbling it up to the dreaded setting point. Once I've done the simmering to soften the peel bit, I will be leaving it again till this evening for the final push. That's 2 nights of sofa surfing foregone in the pursuit of domestic smugness. That will teach me.

So is there a point to all this? Well, homemade marmalade is delicious, no doubt about it, but it's a right old faff, and it takes an age, and I'd like you all to remember that. I'm not saying don't do it, but just weigh up the costs and benefits - is it worth RSI, skinned knuckles and late nights? Do you have better things to do? Just think about that.

My only consolation is that with 2.4 kilos worth bubbling away, I will have enough to last us for a long time, and may be I can get on with my lemon & lime version. Can someone remind me of this next year, please?

Rum Hazelnut Brownies

This evening, we are going to a meeting of the local home brew fraternity. Please don’t ask – only know that as far as I am aware, no one in attendance sports a beard.

My activities with alcohol largely consist of either drinking it or adding to it – sloe gin, blackcurrant vodka, that sort of thing – but the Husband has had some success in the homebrew department, with cider and beer, and it appears that he is not alone. This is the first of these events that we have gone to, and the general idea is to bring along some of your finest brew and everyone will have a try.

 After a brief discussion on the school run with the hostess, I have decided that my own contribution to proceedings will be some brownie. I wasn’t sure what would be a good match to beer, but when I googled ‘cake to eat with beer’, the results mostly steered me in the chocolate direction. There was also a carrot cake idea, but I couldn’t be bothered with all the grating today, and really, brownie is very easy.

In view of the occasion, I thought I ought to contribute something with at least a whiff of alcohol about it, so rather than automatically reaching for my tried and tested Nigella favourite (the one in Domestic Goddess) I decided to see what Dan Lepard had to offer in ‘Short and Sweet’. Some interesting suggestions, and these adult treats are inspired by his Bourbon Pecan Brownies.

Rum Hazelnut Brownies 

200g dark chocolate, 125g unsalted butter, 2 eggs, 100g soft brown sugar, 100g caster sugar, 75ml white rum (I used Havana Club), 2 tsp vanilla extract, 175g plain flour, 1tbsp cocoa, 130g hazelnuts, roughly chopped.

Line a 20x20cm square tine with foil and pre-heat the oven to 190C/170fan/375 F

Check out the cake testing hole...

Melt the butter and chocolate together, and leave to cool slightly. Sift together the flour and cocoa, then beat together the eggs and sugar till light and creamy. Beat the chocolate and butter into the egg/sugar mixture, followed by the rum and vanilla extract and finally, the flour/cocoa, then stir in the nuts, scrape it all into the prepared tin and bake for 25mins/until a skewer/toothpick (or whatever your cake testing implement of choice s) comes out barely clean. Leave to cool then cut into squares. I got 16.

Cooking with custard powder

I love custard.

I’m not talking about the made-from-scratch-faff-about-with-eggs-and-vanilla-pods stuff, nor the tetra pac/tinned pre-made stuff, but proper custard. Made-from-Birds-custard-powder custard. I understand that my Grandpa was somehow involved with Birds, and may be it’s because of that that I feel so attached to it. He died when I was 5 (went to sleep after a Sunday roast and never woke up – how brilliant is that?), and although we have photos of him, my only real memories of him are his tweed trouser’d knees and the smell of pipe smoke.

But whether it’s because of my Grandpa, or not, custard is one of those long-standing things from my childhood: fruit crumble and custard in winter and banana custard (sliced banana topped with custard and left to go cold with a skin on) in summer. I still make it now - from the powder - I love the whole thing - mixing the powder to a paste with a little cold milk - heating the rest of the milk up, then the hot milk into cold paste and back into the pan thing. And I know the idea of skin on custard makes some people shudder in revulsion, but for me, it’s a prize worth fighting for.Anyway, recently, I have been woken up to the idea of using custard powder in baking – after all, it’s only cornflour with some flavouring, isn’t it. And because of my love of making up the custard, I always have custard powder in the cupboard.

I started my blog after making Nigella’s custard creams from Feast – I made circles not hearts, but that aside, they tasted pretty fine to me.

Sometime later, when I was flirting with Dan Lepard, I tried his passion fruit melting moments from Short & Sweet. Not a huge success, it must be said, mainly because of the passion fruit seeds in the biscuits. The kids even asked if I would make them again but without the passion fruit – which was kind of the point in the first place...

Then last week, in a moment of weakness and exhaustion while trailing round Tescos with the kids on the way back from a very wet one night (yes, that Thursday) of camping in half term, I crumbled to pressure and bought a pack of custard creams. It’s some time since I made Nigella’s and the kids go mad for them. I had to ration them out. With that in mind, and looking for something quick to bake on Thursday, I made a batch of these babies: custard & white chocolate biscuits . The recipe is there, on the Good Food website, so I won’t repeat it here, suffice to say that they are (1) brilliant (2) dead easy and (3) utterly scrummy.

Granted, there’s no sandwich element, so you can’t nibble off the top biscuit then try and eat the bottom biscuit and leave the ‘cream’ intact till last, but the presence of the white chocolate chunks pretty much makes up for that.

If you read the comments on the Good Food website for this recipe, you’ll see that no one could test the assertion that they will last for up to 2 weeks in a tin. I can concur – they are too good!