Cornflower

Outside catering

     

     Dovegrey's having a Russian day, talking about Helen Rappaport's book Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs with the author herself, and I'm flattered that she's asked me to do the virtual catering for this event! While the samovar's been coming to the boil down in Devon, I've rustled up some imperial finger food.

      These are Russian Tea Biscuits: the thumbprint hollows are filled with chopped roasted hazelnuts and after baking they are dusted with icing sugar. Other versions omit the cocoa powder I used here and have the nuts mixed into the dough itself, but these have worked well and would be perfect with tea.

      When the sun is over the yardarm and the vodka's being dispensed, zakuski are the thing to eat. I'm not sure that you could call this zakuska authentic, but a tiny new potato filled with soured cream and lumpfish roe "caviar" makes a change from blinis.

Alan Davidson in North Atlantic Seafood says "zakuski would be laid out very formally on a table, often in a room set aside especially for this purpose and adjoining the diningroom....The company would assemble round this table, propose toasts, clink glasses, down the first glass of vodka in a gulp and quickly follow it with a bite of herring or a caviar canape. This is an excellent sequence; the vodka cleanses the palate, leaving it fully prepared and stimulated for whatever follows" - in today's case, a discussion of the events of 1918.

    Right, I've done the dishes and hung up my pinny, so I'm off to join in the conversation chez Dovegrey!

    

  

    

Baking for the board

       

Those in the upper echelons of corporate life may find board meetings a bit of a chore. Men in suits, (like the elegantly pinstriped Mr. C.) have to endure long formal sessions in impersonal meeting rooms with predictable catering, but one of the beauties of being part of a small and highly individual organisation - as I am - is that we can do things differently.
        The board of the charity Mindroom was meeting in my kitchen today, resident dogs sleeping under the table, coffee brewing on the Aga, and plum and walnut cake to fuel our discussions. It may sound a bit of a lark, but in fact we do very serious work indeed and our approach to it is anything but casual.
        For those who haven't heard of Mindroom, our field is learning difficulties - all of them, any combination of them, slight or severe. We aren't just a source of knowledge, we provide practical help and advice through our wonderful Direct Help and Support Director, Mig. If you have a look here you'll see just what Mig can do. Any family affected by learning difficulties can contact her, in confidence, to ask for advice, information or direct  involvement, and she will respond.
       As boardrooms go, Mindroom's one chez Cornflower is a lot less intimidating than Sir Alan's, and to my knowledge he doesn't serve cake (details of which are on this post).
      

Baking poll

     Margaret, in her comment on Saturday's post refers to an article in this morning's Telegraph on the subject of baking and family bonding. The gist of the piece is that baking is good for family cohesion, and given the modern day relative ignorance of the craft (according to the survey mentioned in the article less than half those polled knew what went into a sponge cake) this bodes ill for the future.

    Before going on I must say that there are many other activities which families can enjoy together, and many skills which can be passed down from parent or grandparent to child for the benefit of the individual and the wider world which are not of the culinary variety, so not being hot stuff in the kitchen isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, given the 'domestic arts' content of this site, presumably most of the visitors to it are interested in cooking, baking, etc. and many will practise those skills themselves. What's your baking background, if you have one? Did you learn at your mother's knee, or have you acquired the interest and the skills later in life? Do you bake with your children, if you have any, or is it something you plan to do 'one day when...' It's said that the massive sales of cookbooks in recent years have more to do with aspiration than reality - people like to look at them but don't really use them much - so is 'vicarious baking' more your thing?!

    

   

   

A recipe and a request

     Specially for Scarlettina, here's the recipe for the cheesecake:

Crush approx. 275g of digestive biscuits and mix into 80g. of melted, unsalted butter. Press the crumbs evenly into a baking tin (say about 23cm diameter, non-stick springform is best). Beat together 600g. of cream cheese, 180g. caster sugar, 1 tblsp. plain flour, the grated zest of a lemon, 1 tsp. vanilla essence/extract (the good stuff!), 2 large eggs and 1 egg yolk and 2 tblsps. double cream. Pour this on top of the crumbs, even off and bake in a very slow oven (Gas 1 or the equivalent/Aga simmering oven) for one hour. Leave to cool in the tin, then chill until required.

    And for Margaret, a call to all Cornflower readers to search your kitchen scrapbooks for the recipe for Alpen Biscuits. Margaret says this appeared on the Alpen muesli box sometime in the early 1980s, but not even the company which makes the cereal can come up with the instructions for this delicacy from their archive, and Margaret's own copy is long gone. Can anyone help?

Cheesecake

     Bearing in mind our recent 'international incident' involving a Pavlova I have no idea how authentic this cheesecake is, particularly as it's a combination of two versions. The base is crushed digestive biscuits mixed into melted butter, then pressed into the tin, while the top is predominantly cream cheese with a few other ingredients added and a flavouring of lemon zest and vanilla essence. It was baked in a very slow oven for an hour, and then chilled.

     Let me know if you'd like precise instructions - the only reason I haven't given them here is that typing text in this new 'compose screen' takes forever, but I'm happy to put up the recipe if anyone wants it.

Pavlovian response

    I see from the comments on last week's Pavlova that the lack of soft fruit has caused the purists to raise an eyebrow or two! The case for the defence is that mine was a Scottish version, not claiming to be authentic, and is ideal when soft fruit is not in season. Further, it must taste better, surely, than the New Zealand creation which uses wine gums (!) for decoration (you can see it here).

   I seem to be jinxed where that dessert is concerned. I mentioned having dropped one on the way to serving it at a dinner party. I made two for last week's Books and Cakes post: I must have spread the meringue too thinly because the first one ended up far too flat to use; the second one cracked in two when I was peeling off the baking paper (the repair was hidden by the topping, of course), and then when I was trying to photograph the finished Pavlova alongside the book, "Voss" toppled over and fell into it. No harm was done, I was able to wipe the book clean and artfully re-swirl the cream and lemon curd mixture - and no-one was any the wiser (as Laurel and Hardy would have said)!

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Edited to add: I love Helen's comment (see below) !

Book and cakes - 6

     For our Book Group "Virtual Afternoon Tea" this month I had hoped that the pages of our current book, Voss, would yield something to complement it. There are mentions of biscuits early on and then apple pie and, later, jellied quinces, and out in the bush, Damper Bread makes an appearance. Patrick White writes about food in a way which seems to highlight it and set it apart for notice, often as a hook on which to hang a scene. He gets points from me for that.

                   

    However, I felt we needed something altogether lighter and frothier than the book can provide, so not without irony I've gone for Pavlova! Devised by an Australian chef (or maybe not?) to honour Anna Pavlova, this meringue confection takes no time to whip up. I've used my mother's recipe which reminds me of an occasion not very long ago when I was helping Mum with a dinner party and had to carry a huge Pavlova from the kitchen to the dining table. I must have tilted the plate slightly because the whole thing slid off and on to the floor. I hang my head in shame at the recollection, however, it wasn't the complete disaster it might have been because, this being my mother, she had another five or six desserts to offer her guests!

    The topping here is half a jar of lemon curd folded into half a pint of whipped cream. You can omit the lemon curd and go for the traditional soft fruit topping, or you can grate a good few ounces of dark chocolate straight onto the cream (we've used that one for birthday cakes sometimes). All are airy and marshmallowy, indulgent and quite delicious.

Snickerdoodles

     Here are the Snickerdoodles I mentioned yesterday, this batch baked by Alice to Nigella's recipe from How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking (I've given the title in full as "comfort cooking" is such an appealing concept!)

Cream 125g butter with 100g caster sugar, beat in an egg and 1 tsp. vanilla extract. Add to that 250g plain flour, 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg, 3/4 tsp. baking powder, pinch of salt. Form pieces of the resulting dough into walnut-sized balls and roll them in a mixture of cinnamon (1 tblsp.) and caster sugar (2 tblsps.) spooned onto a plate. Arrange on lined baking sheets and bake until golden - about 15 minutes at 180/Gas 4. Leave on the tray for a minute before moving them to a cooling rack.

These are buttery, spicily fragrant and very good.

Can you help?

     Susan, in her comment on last week's soda bread post, asks if I have a good recipe for Barm Brack. The answer is, unfortunately, no, but a quick search on the web has provided this version (on a site relating to Jane Austen !), while this one looks good, though it doesn't use tea to soak the dried fruit, and then there's this from an Irish blog.

     But can Cornflower readers come up with something even better? If you can provide a tried and tested recipe - or a link or reference to one - please let us know, then I'll have a go at making it too and post the results.

    (By the way, Susan, I tried to reply to your comment directly by email but my response was bounced back).

Lime and coconut cake

     How often does a main course inspire something sweet? We had this excellent dish the other night, and I thought I'd use two of its main flavours in a cake.

             

There was a lime and a half left over from the fish dish so I balanced their juice and zest with one and a half sachets of creamed coconut (about 75g. in total).

 

I folded the zest into the sponge mixture, and crumbled in the coconut for added texture,

            

then baked the cake until golden before piercing it with a skewer and drenching it with the lime juice syrup.