We had a month off from the Clandestine Cake Club in August, and so September's meeting crept round rather quickly (a bit like the start of term), with the theme of 'Indian Summer'.
I used up some of the first of the blackberries I picked a couple of weeks in a Signe Johansen Blackberry & Almond Cardamom cake that I found on the Guild of Food Writers website. The original is gluten free but I didn't have enough ground almonds, or baking powder, or even ground cardamom for that matter, but it was still delicious. However, what it also inspired was the cake I took along to cake club, combined with the Seldom Seen Chai Cake that I made ages and ages ago.
I made the chai up first thing, and the Husband complained that it made the house smell horrible, but I think it was because it was combined with the smell of vinegar soaking chutney ingredients. Not a great odour to greet the day with, I'll accept.
Anyway, I was pleased with the resulting cake: less gingery than the original, more cardamom and run through with blackberries, covering the theme 'Indian Summer' both meteorologically and geographically to provide a gently spiced cake bursting with the best the British (well, in the case, the Welsh) hedgerow has to offer at this time of year.
Cardamom Blackberry Cake with Lemon Icing
For the Chai
350ml semi-skimmed milk
12 cardamom pods, bashed in a pestle and mortar
2 cloves
1 cinammon stick
2 regular tea bags
For the Cake
170g unsalted butter
200g golden syrup
50g dark soft brown sugar
30 cardamom pods
300g wholemeal self raising flour
1 tsp ground ginger
pinch of salt
2 large eggs
200ml chai (made as above)
200g blackberries
For the Icing
200g unsalted butter (at room temperature)
200g icing sugar
lemon juice - about 3/4 of a lemon's worth
You'll also need a lined 20cm cake tin
Method
Make the chai first by pouring the milk into a small pan, adding the rest of the ingredients and simmering gently for 10-15 minutes.
Remove from the heat and leave to cool, then strain in to a jug. You need 200ml for the cake so add a little more milk if necessary.
Pre-heat the oven to 170C.
Put the butter, syrup and sugar into a pan and melt gently, then remove from the heat and leave to cool.
Bash up the cardamom pods, scrape out the seeds, discard the husks, then grind the seeds up in a pestle and mortar.
Add the ground up seeds, the flour, ground ginger and salt into a bowl and stir together. Pour in the melted butter and syrup mixture, stir in the eggs and finally the chai, then fold in the blackberries.
Bake for around an hour till a cake tester comes out with a few crumbs on it, then leave to cool before icing.
Make the icing by creaming together the butter and icing sugar then slowly adding the lemon juice till you have a delightfully spreadable icing that also zings with lemon. This will lift the cake to new heights that are well worth reaching, believe me!
If you've read this relatively frequently over the last few weeks, you'll have noticed that I'm quite preoccupied with the contents of the veg patch, the apple trees and all the free food that's around this time of year. Not that I'm not grateful, but it happens all at once, and then there's a mad panic to get things harvested and preserved for the colder months to come. I love it, I really do, but sometimes I think I am secretly a squirrel...
The other thing that has happened is that the Husband had to have an operation last Tuesday. It was unscheduled, although not life threatening - I'll let him tell you all about it over a beer sometime - and suffice to say, our pace of life has slowed down considerably. It's been LOVELY.
For example. Instead of whizzing round in 45 minutes flat, I spent nearly 2 hours out with the dog yesterday morning, ostensibly giving him a really good walk, but actually collecting blackberries and generally enjoying all that early autumn has to offer in the way of nature. If you've been paying attention, you'll remember that the dog is too badly behaved to be off the lead when I'm not concentrating on him, so he spent most of the time with a look of quiet indignation on his face, while I scratched and stung myself to blackberry heaven and made a mental note of where the really good sloes are this year.
Back home with about 1.5 kilos of blackberries, I wasn't really sure what to do with them because I already had pudding covered for Sunday, and I couldn't face jam, so hit upon the idea of making up bags of blackberry and apple mix to freeze and then whip out at a moment's notice for almost instant crumbles. I didn't make up the whole thing because I don't have enough dishes to consign too many to the freezer, so I used my usual crumble dish, filled it up with sliced apple and blackerries, a sprinkle of sugar, and then bagged it up accordingly. My dish takes 500g sliced apple, 250g blackberries and 40g demerara if you're interested. I tossed the apple slices in lemon juice too, to stop them going brown. You can freeze crumble topping too, but I didn't go that far yesterday.
The other thing I did this weekend is have the opportunity for a really good cook up - fish pies (Friday night's dinner and also 2 in the freezer), a lovely casserole for supper using up some celeriac from the allotment, and not one, but 2 tray bakes to take some of the apples off my hands. Both were from the Good Food website, and both are worth a share, although one more so than the other.
It's also a been a good exercise in what they think the cake should look like as opposed to what it turmed out like...
So first up is Toffee Apple Squares. These are calorific and delicious, but I think probably take rather more effort than they have to. I say this mostly because you could manage the topping with a can of caramel rather than boiling up the condensed milk with sugar and butter (and also because I wasn't concentrating and burnt the sugar the sugar in my pan caught and added a rather interesting - but not entirely unpleasant - 'cinder' flavour to mine...). Also, I think the quantity of sauce is probably far too much. I mean, I have a pretty sweet tooth, but I used about half the resultant fudgy caramel sauce (we ate the rest on ice cream - mmm) and it was just right.
I also signficantly reduced the amount of nuts in the topping, limiting it to a sprinkle of flaked almonds. A lovely treat, nonetheless.
The second is this Apple and Date Squares recipe. This is absolutely what you want to make for your kids to take to school and feel smugly virtuous. Apple, dates, oats - and utterly delicious too. It was really quick to make, although my apples took longer to mush down than the recipe suggested, but definitely one to make again. Pink raved about it after school today too - "Mummy I really LOVED the flapjack".
Bask.
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