Cornflower

Books and cakes - 51

    As an accompaniment to our reading of The Good Earth I thought there could really be no more appropriate food than this 'creation', but in the end, as Wung Lung seems to like nothing better than bread with garlic, I took some wild garlic from the garden and used it for this recipe.

    From poverty to plenty, food is ever-present in the book, from the pork, pond fish and chestnuts for a wedding 'feast' early on to moon cakes for New Year celebrations and sugar cakes of glutinous rice on the streets of the big city in the south.

    In the end I wasn't confident enough about the recipes I found, nor of getting the special ingredients required for the Chinese cakes, so I took Wang Lung's simple staple, and though my bread is hardly Chinese in origin, it tastes very good and suits the spirit of the story.

Cookbook of the week - How to feed your friends with relish

    I said something the other day about cookery writers crediting their sources and recipes being passed on, and today's dish is a good example. This is Yogurt Cake with Pistachios from Joanna Weinberg's How to Feed Your Friends with Relish, but Joanna in turn takes it from The Moro Cookbook by Sam and Sam Clark (an earlier 'cookbook of the week' - see here and here, and by the way, I've made those flatbreads countless times since and we often have them with Monty Don's roast butternut squash salad).

    To get back to the cake, it's baked in a bain-marie and its consistency, Joanna says, should be a light sponge with wet custard underneath. It contains only a teaspoon of flour, and its substance comes from Greek yogurt and eggs, the yolks beaten with the yogurt, sugar and flavourings (vanilla and lemon) and the whites then beaten to the soft peak stage and folded in. After it has been cooking for ten minutes you sprinkle chopped pistachios on top and return to the oven to finish baking, and when done, leave it to come to room temperature before serving "scattered with torn rose petals" - ah!

    It's an unusual pudding cake, but the taste is good and it went down very well here, even without the rose decoration.

Lock up these biscuits

 

 

    Crunchy peanut, raisin and chocolate chip biscuits, another success from Miranda Gore Browne's lovely book Biscuit. 

 

    We used pecans as we had no peanuts in the cupboard, and our peanut butter was smooth rather than the specified crunchy, but really these biscuits have to be locked away as they are so good and dangerously moreish.

    Roll on coffee time tomorrow ...

Cookbook of the week - Tender Vol. I

    We're cooking with Nigel Slater again, but this week from his whopping Tender: Volume I, A cook and his vegetable patch. What you see here is a truly excellent cake, a real revelation: Beetroot Seed Cake. Now please, beetroot-haters, don't rush off; stay and hear more and perhaps I shall convince you to try it.

    "This tastes no more of beetroot than a carrot cake tastes of carrots, yet it has a similar warm earthiness to it. It is less sugary than most cakes and the scented icing I drizzle over it is purely optional," says Nigel.

    Some ingredients: cinnamon, sultanas, mixed seeds (I'd toast them first, next time), that marvellous grated beetroot ... it's quite scrumptious. As to the icing, Nigel suggests making it with lemon juice or orange flower water but I used rose water as that's what I had and I'd do so again.

    There were a lot of sceptical comments from my family as I was making this cake, but they had to eat their words in the end as they find they love it, and even the extremely anti-beetroot Mr. C. wants more of it, so if you have the book, do try the recipe.

Books and cakes - 50

    For all the detail John Fowles goes into in The French Lieutenant's Woman, he gives us little about food. Early on, before his complicated love life has taken away his appetite, Charles requests a double dose of muffins for his breakfast, but as we had those with Lord Peter Wimsey last month it wouldn't do to repeat them today. Instead I had to look to the book's setting for inspiration for the cake, and as that is mainly Dorset, Dorset apple cake it is.

    This is perhaps too rustic a food to feature at Mrs. Poulteney's table, particularly when she's entertaining Lady Cotton, her "rival for social supremacy" - those gatherings were "in essence, if not in appearance, a thunderous clash of two brontosauri; with black velvet taking the place of iron cartilage, and quotations from the Bible the angry raging teeth; but no less dour and relentless a battle"! Perhaps the cake might appear in the more easygoing Aunt Tranter's house, with Mary feeding a piece to Sam during a snatched moment together.

    There are numerous recipes around (this one and this, for example), but I thought of Dorset's River Cottage, reached for my copy of River Cottage Every Day and made the Apple and Almond Pudding Cake which you see above.

    Back to the book - the 50th. the Cornflower Book Group has read - its post is here.

Start the week with sunshine

    There have been so many food-related posts here lately that it must look as though I never set foot outside the kitchen, and while that's not so, having the cookbook of the week project has certainly helped enormously with putting greater variety into everyday meals, while baking is never off the agenda.

    More from Miranda Gore Browne's lovely book Biscuit, and today's offering - another from the "almost healthy biscuits" chapter - is Lemon and Poppy Seed Polenta Biscuits: a few bites of crunchy, zesty deliciousness sandwiched with a lemony cream cheese filling, which Miranda rightly says taste "sunny"!

    The recipe makes many more than are shown here (15 or so in all), but I had impatient tasters waiting so I didn't stop to fill the whole lot before taking the pictures.

    Miranda's style comes across so well in the book, and I think she and her recipes would lure even the most reluctant baker into the kitchen. With over a hundred treats to choose from there is temptation on every page, but who could resist such things as Coat-pocket Biscuits to give you a 'pocketful of quiet' during hushed occasions such as weddings or concerts, Adventure Biscuits (will I have an adventure if I eat one, I wonder), Hot Chocolate Dunkers, Fudgy Nut Conversation Stoppers, and Chocolate and Stem Ginger Warmers, "a hot water bottle of a biscuit".

    "There is no limit to the world of biscuit-making," Miranda says, and she proves that in fine fashion here.

Chewy, gooey, melty goodness

    I'm so glad I've bought a copy of Miranda Gore Browne's Biscuit as it passes the first test of any cookery book, that is it contains a great number of recipes I want to try, but in addition, in the nicest possible way, it's a homely, cosy, baking-in-the-kitchen-on-a-chilly-afternoon sort of book, just inviting you to get the butter out to soften, find a mixing bowl, line your trays and set about producing delectable treats for tea!

    I've now made two batches of Lemon Drizzlers (runnier icing produces a very moist 'drenched' biscuit which was particularly good, while thicker icing and a crisper overall finish makes for a good dunker or as an accompaniment to a glass of something), and then with the leftover egg whites we tried Miranda's Unbelievable Chocolate Biscuits - verdict: unbelievably good!

    We sampled one while still warm from the oven and Harriet summed it up as "chewy, gooey, melty goodness"; well said, I think. They contain no flour or butter so are dairy and gluten free, and the combination of dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids), cocoa powder and nuts folded into the beaten egg whites and sugar with a little sea salt to bring out the flavours is just yummy. We're planning to make them again and perhaps try a variation such as adding stem ginger chunks, or using frozen raspberries and white chocolate along with the cocoa.

    A lovely book, and fantastic biscuits so far.

Making Monday - Lemon Drizzlers

    Lemon Drizzlers, recipe on the short video here.

  My icing was runnier than Miranda's as I used a very large lemon, but with all that zest and juice the biscuits are zingingly lemony, and the balance between sweetness and tartness, crispness and softness is perfect; so, a great addition to the regular baking repertoire - definitely worth trying.

    This post is my contribution to Natalie's Making Monday series, and there's more 'making' to come soon.

Cookbook of the week - Delia's Complete Cookery Course

    Down off the shelves this week has come Delia's Complete Cookery Course, a book that must feature in millions of kitchens across the land and be referred to constantly for both basic instructions and more elaborate recipes. I've had my copy since I was a teenager - I think it was the first cookery book I bought for myself - and it is still used often, as this week shows.

    No pictures of our first dish from it as stews are hard to capture looking attractive, but the Shin of Beef with Mushroom Dumplings tasted very good indeed and even got compliments from our resident stew-hater.

    We're on firmer ground with the cake pictured above: Date, Apple and Walnut Loaf, another no-nonsense piece of baking that works and pleases everyone.

     Anyone else have (and still use) that book, Delia's classic?

Extreme oatcakes

    What to do with leftover malt soil? Make 'extreme' oatcakes. I used the recipe at the bottom of this page as the basis, having found it very good before, and this time with the depth of flavour the 'earth' provides, they are even nuttier, very short, and excellent with cheese or jam.

Books and cakes - 49

    "Wimsey gratefully took in the cosy sitting-room, with its little tables crowded with ornaments, its fire roaring behind a chaste canopy of velvet overmantel, and the silver tea vessel winking upon the polished tray. 'I feel like Ulysses, come to port after much storm and peril.'

    He bit gratefully into a large and buttery muffin."

    So muffins it had to be - the yeasted variety, of course - made following Elizabeth David's advice to use olive oil instead of the traditional lard or butter, and baked on the hob rather than in the oven.

    In English Bread and Yeast Cookery (where there is an extensive, comprehensive chapter on muffins and crumpets) she quotes Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, writing in 1974 when he was in his nineties, recalling how in his youth,

"muffins would come in their heated covered silver dish along with salt cellar, china tea, cream and folded napkin, and be set down at my elbow by a club waiter still in the livery of the Regency, knee-breeches, silk stockings and buckled shoes ... and all for no more than a shilling."

    The Fenchurch St. Paul Rectory may not run to a servant in livery, but Mrs. Venables' muffins were very well received by Lord Peter Wimsey after his car goes off the road in the snowy, desolate Fen country of East Anglia at the beginning of Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors. It's a terrific book, and you can read all about it here.

Cookbook of the week - A Cook's Year ...

    Almond cookies with cardamom, "crisp, buttery little biscuits to dip into mid-morning coffee ...". In A Cook's Year in a Welsh Farmhouse by Elisabeth Luard this recipe features during the winter months, and as the cardamom adds such a note of almost gingery warmth to the finished biscuits, they are perfect for the colder time of the year, but I wouldn't pass them by whatever the weather.

    You're meant to grind the whole (unskinned) almonds yourself, and I'm sure that would give an interesting texture and an artisanal feel, but I had only ready ground almonds in the cupboard so that's what I used and no harm done, though I forgot the dusting of icing sugar at the end. Next time ...

Cookbook of the week - Sweet Things

    It may seem perversely counter-intuitive to follow yesterday's rather health-conscious post with one today about cake, but all things in moderation ...

    This week's cookbook is Sweet Things by Claire Macdonald, bought some years ago when we were staying in Skye and dined at the Macdonalds' lovely Kinloch Lodge, paw-printed by one of Lady M's dogs, (as you can just see here) and used often since.

    I've made a batch of Raisin and Walnut Slices, and really there's nothing to them - you cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, fold in flour and baking powder, then add a lot of chopped walnuts and raisins and a very generous amount of brandy (I soaked the raisins for a wee while beforehand to make them plumply tipsy, but you can just put the brandy in by itself, or use orange juice if you'd rather). Baked for about 25 minutes, the results are quite delicious, very moist and moreish and satisfying - just one piece with tea or coffee fills a gap nicely.

Books and cakes - 48

    It has been a while since we had a book group book with quite as many references to food as appear in Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (which we're talking about on Cornflower Books today), so there has been lots to choose from for our virtual afternoon tea, and I could have offered you a groaning board: doughnuts, golden-crusted pies, muffins and crumpets, lardy cake, cherry cake, cakes with buttercream, brandy snaps, and so on and so on.

    I've chosen to make oatmeal scones, which Rose and her mother ate hot and spread with butter and golden syrup, at Constance's house at tea which also featured "Scotch bun, the rich cake in a pastry case which is known as 'black death' ", (N.B. Rose notes, "It was good that she [Constance] was Scottish, it meant that she gave us a good tea", and she compares Edinburgh bakeries most favourably to London ones!). First of all I used this recipe (but substituting butter for margarine), and I found the dough very soft and sticky indeed, so cutting out was difficult, and they were more than done in 10 minutes rather than the 15 the recipe indicated.

    Then I read 'How to make the perfect scone' and decided to make another batch this morning, tweaking things a bit with 00 flour, bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar, and less milk than before. This dough was easier to handle but the scones have spread more than the first lot so aren't as well-risen as I'd hoped for, but the texture and flavour is good, the oatmeal gives some interest, and I've had no complaints thus far (I may just revert to this recipe, though).

Cookbook of the week - week 7, part 2

    Harriet spotted the recipe for carrot and apple flapjacks in Maria Elia's Full of Flavour: Create . . . How to Think Like a Chef, she made them, and very toothsome they were - if somewhat crumbly.

    We decided to make that friability work by gently 'encouraging' it, then toasting the crumbs and serving them as a granola-like accompaniment to rhubarb and mascarpone and as a topping for natural yogurt. Recommended.