Cooking: A couple of Christmas cakes

Bourke St Bakery Christmas Cake

Back in September I mentioned that I'd taken responsibility for the family Christmas Cake for the first time and had started my fruit soak using the Bourke St Bakery method.

Making the cake itself was relatively easy. You soak the fruit for five / six weeks giving it a stir every once in a while. I got into the habit of mixing mine up on Monday morning and then used the same spoon for my cereal. Alcoholic? Who me?

When it came to baking the cake I was surprised how little flour you add. The cake is practically just fruit with just a bit of a binding agent. The recipe called for the finished cake to have a weekly feed of brandy in the run up to Christmas. I only bothered twice.

The finished cake was pretty great. Rich, fruity, moist and a mild smell of Christmas. Dad thought it had a bit too much brandy, although I'd disagree and I'm normally sensitive to booze in a cake. If I make the cake next year I'd be tempted to add some flaked almonds to add a different texture.

Date, coffee and chocolate cake

 My cousin was given 10kg (yes, ten) of Saudi Arabian dates for Christmas by a grateful student. I didn't realise that Saudi Arabia is a bit producer of dates, but apparently they are.

Some of the dates found their way to me and I decided to bake a cake with half of them last weekend.

I did a bit of searching online and couldn't find a recipe that inspired me until I landed on this one. I went with it because I had all of the ingredients in my cupboard rather than anything else.

I'm not usually a fan of coffee cakes (this recipe had a cup of coffee in it), but I think the end result worked really well. It might be a bit of an opinion divider though as Becks wasn't the greatest fan. Her little cousin had three slices and her uncle two though, so there are others on my side....

Uni Christmas Lunch 2013

Last weekend saw our annual Uni Christmas lunch. After hosting last year it was my turn to kick back and relax. There was no cobbling together a table from MDF and packing boxes, or running round my neighbours to borrow chairs.

We had a lovely day down in Lewes at Jo and Matthew's new house, a gorgeous Victorian property they only moved into a couple of months ago. You know you are in the countryside when Christmas trees are sold with names. When we arrived Matthew was in the front garden cutting the lower branches off 'Tina' so that she would fit into the stand.

Times are changing, and there were three children at the lunch this year. We had tinsel trains, pet chickens and tree decorating were new features to our Christmas lunch.

Even though I wasn't hosting I couldn't resist getting involved in the cooking and offered to bring along desserts. Inspired by the café tres gourmand we had in Paris, Becks and I decided to make a small tasting plate.

A Sunday flick through the cookbooks we decided to make Annabel Langbein's chocolate and cranberry slice, Donna Hay's maple brulée tart and some fresh pineapple to cut through it all.

The maple tart required me to get some more lighter fluid from my blowtorch so that I could caramelise the top of the tart. I had no idea what to buy and had to purchase two canisters before I got one with the right attachment to fill up my torch.

The desserts all went down really well. Some people preferred the tart and others the chocolate. Two and a half year old Toby stole his mum's forkful of the chocolate start and stuffed it straight in his mouth. His face was a picture when he realised how dense and sticky the chocolate he'd just popped into his mouth was. After a few minutes of quiet concentration he'd scoffed the lot and looked quite pleased with himself!

Cooking: Uni Christmas Lunch

Butternut squash soup with pumpkin crisps 

While I was in Oz a group of friends started meeting for a pre-Christmas lunch. As I hadn't taken a turn in cooking before I volunteered to host this year's lunch. The thought of cooking for twelve people didn't phase me too much, but I got quite concerned about where they were all going to sit!

The excellent dinner I had at Mike and Ollie's  a couple of month's ago made me realise that you could have a great evening crowded round make shift benches so when my friend Will came to stay a few weeks ago we popped to Wickes to buy a big sheet of MDF for a make shift trestle.

Table sorted my next worry was chairs. I decided to put up a sign in the entrance hall of my flat offering a cake for chairs trade with my neighbours. Within four hours of the sign going up I had three offers to lend me chairs. I like to think there is a wonderful community spirit in my block and it was nothing to do with the temptation of cake!

Saucisson from Brockley Market 

The problem of where everyone was going to sit sorted it was time to think about the food. Again my dinner at Mike and Ollie proved the inspiration and I decided that I wanted to try and re-create the awesome poached plum that we had during the dinner. Soup is an easy banker for a starter and who doesn't like a chocolate tart for dessert?

Menu decided I upon I got ordering the food. I've started using the East London Steak Co for ordering meat. A few clicks and I'd got the pork belly on order for Thursday morning. The only problem was that I forgot and went out for a run. When I got back I had four missed calls on my phone and the delivery driver had been and gone. Thankfully the delivery driver was excellent and happily agreed to come back the next morning. That's customer service for you.

Roast nuts 

I can be a bit of a recipe slave sometimes, but surprised myself with how flexible I was with the uni lunch. I read a few recipes to get ideas and then flexed them to suit the ingredients I had in my cupboard or what suited my tastes. I think it worked pretty well!

To get everything started I bought some bubbly from Aldi (don't tell my friends), saucisson from Brockley Market and made some roasted nuts loosely based on a Nigella Lawson recipe. They could have done with a bit more of a chilli kick for my liking, but they were still flavoursome and moorish.

You don't really need a recipe for soup. I decided to go with pumpkin as it's seasonal and I like it! A couple of days before the lunch I watched Nigel Slater's Dish of the Day and saw him make some pumpkin crisps using the peeling of the butternut squash and decided to give them a go. They were a great use of something that you'd otherwise throw away, but I found they took quite a long time to dry out in the oven.

Roast pork belly, gratin duaphinois and poached plum 

For the main event I decided to try and re-create Mike's poached plum. The pork belly was almost an accompaniment and decided to add a gratin duaphinois to fill everyone up!

I poached the pears in some red wine, cinnamon and star anise. Reading  couple of recipes online I decided to poach the plums for twenty minutes which was way too long and they lost all of their texture. Luckily I'd bought a second punnet of plums and poached the next batch for ten minutes which was more or less right. I decided to blitz the over cooked plums into the red wine to make a sauce which worked pretty well.

The pork wasn't quite the splendid version that Mike cooked. It was my first time cooking pork belly and I don't think that I cooked it long enough for that melt in the mouth tenderness and my crackling didn't really crisp up as hoped. I ended up cutting off the skin and giving it a blast under the skin. It was still good just not what I was hoping for.

 

Pear and chocolate tart

 

 For dessert I decided to use Jamie Oliver's pear and chocolate tart recipe. I think the tart ended up being my favourite part of the meal (although the plum was pretty stellar as well). Served slightly warm (if you heat it up too much it goes runny) it went down very well with a bit of ice cream.

 

One of my neighbours got a banana bread for her chairs and the other got some of the pear and chocolate tart. A pretty fair trade I'd say.

 

I've got a load of the leftover pork belly in my freezer. Have any of my cookery minded friends got a suggestion of what to do with it? So far I'm thinking of some stir fries. The pork belly also came with the baby back ribs that I used as trivet during the cooking process. I'm thinking of double cooking and trying some kind of pulled recipe.....

Discoveries of the weekend

Fresh blackberries

I love fresh berries, but have an aversion to paying exorbitant prices for them. When I saw a tweet from Sue that there were fresh blackberries ready for picking in the local cemetery I made a beeline straight there.

I hadn't been into the cemetery before. Many of the graves were overgrown with weeds, but importantly brambles too. Quite a few people had obviously had the same idea, so lots of the easy pickings were gone and I have quite a few scratches from wading through the bushes to get at unpicked berries.

Being a grave yard, it was also a moral dilemma. Is it ok to stand on an overgrown grave to pick blackberries? Balance on someones headstone?

After forty five minutes I'd managed to fill two ice cream containers. There were lots of unripe berries too, so I'm sure they'll be a good supply over the next couple of weekends as well.

Ice cream sandwich

This weekend I also did some experimentation for my sister's wedding using the pork I bought at Jimmy's farm (more on that later). Deciding I needed a dessert for my recipe testers I had the urge to make a mini ice cream sandwich.

I made super gooey chocolate cookies and sandwiched some raspberry ripple ice cream between them. Tonight's take was enhanced by some of my hard won berries.

Chocolate cookies adapted from this Mary Berry recipe.

Ingredients:

200g dark chocolate

50g butter

1 x 405g tin of light condensed milk

225g self raising flour

A handful of dried fruit / mixed peel

Method:

Melt the butter and chocolate in a bowl over boiling water.

Once the butter and chocolate are melted, remove from the heat and stir in the condensed milk.

Place the flour and dried fruit / mixed peel in a (larger) separate  bowl and then add the chocolate mixture. Give everything a good stir to combine.

Place large heaped teaspoons of the mixture on a lined baking tray and bake in the oven for 15mins at 180 degrees. After 15mins they won't look cooked, but remove them from the oven as they will firm up and you want them to remain gooey.

The volume of mixture should make approximately 50 small to medium cookies like mine. I only baked 20 cookies and put the rest of the dough into my freezer. Not something I've done before so hopefully it will be ok when I next want to bake!

The original recipe called for white chocolate chips instead of dried fruit. I decided that with the ice cream there was going to be a lot of sweetness already so would try some dried fruit instead (although fruit isn't exactly savoury). I bought a cheap bag of mixed sultanas, raisins and 'other' mixed fruit. There seems to be some dried orange peel in the mix which I'm loving.

Lego cake, three ways

The highlight of my trip to Brisbane was Joel's first birthday party. Penne decided to cook him a Lego Cake from one of Donna Hay's magazines. In typical Richard fashion, rather than helping Penne I muscled in and more of less took over the cake making.

The cake recipe itself was a pretty simple sponge cake. It was slightly denser than your average sponge, but then it probably needs to be for the various shaping, cutting and decorating feats that you have to put the cake through. (Donna Hay suggests the same recipe for multiple cakes, several of which are more 'structural' than the Lego cake.)

Once we'd baked the cake it was time to make the cream cheese icing and then to decorate it. I haven't played with food colouring since I was a kid. We had to add an unnerving amount of red food colouring to turn the creme cheese red rather than pink. 'E' numbers anyone?

The icing of the cake turned out a lot better than I thought it would do. Without a palate knife I was improvising with a bread knife. Admittedly it wasn't perfectly smooth or square. But it looks pretty good don't you think?

A copy of the recipe can be found here.

I'm not sure what Donna Hay was thinking when she suggested making nearly 1kg of icing. We had at least three quarters of it left after making the cake!

I was determined not to let it go to waste. After a bit of head scratching I decided to make a cheesecake. I added an egg, tablespoon of flour and some grated lemon zest to each bowl of icing and gave it a good mix.

Unsure of how to approach the colour mixing I remembered Suze's rainbow cake and decided to follow the same method.

I wouldn't claim it was the best cheesecake ever, but for some quick improvisation I think we had another success!

The leftover icing was on epic scale. However, there were quite a few offcuts from shaping the cake too. Needing to make a desert to take to a friends house a few days later, I decided on my first ever trifle. The trifle didn't look like the most pretty desert ever, but comfort food never does.

One cake recipe turned into three desserts. Win!