Covid Cake - Or Make Do And Mend Cake

I was tempted to call this post Old Jam Cake, which is what's in my head when I make it, but then I thought that no one would read it, let alone bake it, so I thought I would call it  Covid Cake, in the spirit of my theme of using whatever you have to hand in these unusual times. Mr Wilkinson thinks that sounds even less attractive. But in my defence, let me say that this is a really good family recipe for normal times, but for these times it seems even more relevant, - It's easy, quick, versatile, and yes frugal.
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Like many people at the moment I'm restricted in what shopping I can do, and have to manage with 

a) what I've already got in and 

b) stuff that has been delivered to me as "substitutes" for what I ordered, and that I don't really want. 

So if you're clearing your cupboards out don't throw away the jam and marmalade that's half used. and the fruit you don't fancy.  You really can make something quite delicious with it.

Make some Covid Cake.

 In principle this is really a kind of ginger cake as it contains no sugar, but uses  instead melted preserves/honey or syrup instead. So you can name it for whatever surplus preserves and leftover fruit you have around Marmalade and Ginger say, or Plum and Apple.  I used some plum jam that was fine but  a bit dull, and as I have lots of other lovely preserves it wasn't going to get used any time soon, so that with half a jar of marmalade that had been open a while, and the remains of some golden syrup to empty the tin. Topping was a couple of Granny Smith apples sent to me in a delivery which I didn't order and which were horrible to eat raw but lovely sliced onto the top of this cake. 


You could use pears, plums, cherries  or nothing at all. I'm sure you get the idea.  


 You end up with a lovely tea time cake, which also doubles as pudding served hot with a drizzle of syrup or honey, and cream or custard.

Not to mention the warm glow of smug satisfaction at your amazing ability to conjure something out of nothing.




















Covid Cake

Stand a saucepan on your digital scales and weigh in
700grams/1 lb 8 ounces of jam, golden syrup, honey and/or marmalade in whatever proportions you like or have available.
Add 300 grams/10 ounces of butter
and warm over gentle heat until just melted.

Put the pan back on the scales and add
500 grams  of plain flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
4 teaspoons ground ginger
good pinch salt
4  eggs
about a half pint/300 ml milk


and beat briefly with a hand mixer till smooth.


Pour into a lined tin, mine was 11" x8"/ 27cm x 20cm

Thinly slice Two apples/pears/plums and place gently on the top of the mixture.


Bake at 160C  for about 45 mins or until risen and firm.









NB If you save a spoonful of the melted jam from the recipe you can brush it over the cake when you take it out of the oven, to give a nice shine and then sprinkle generously with demerara sugar.

Small Luxuries in Troubled Times

I thought I would do a blog post, which I haven't done for ages although I'm always meaning to do an update, stuff just gets in the way, you know how it is. Well now with this Covid 19 business I'm finding a bit more time on my hands than I'm used to, and having almost caught up with the weeding and planting, I'm moving onto baking (anything to avoid cleaning and dusting...not to mention bleach spraying everything that keeps still long enough to within an inch of it's life....)

So here's a nice recipe for Shortbread that most people will have the ingredients for in the house. And simple as it is, you just can't seem to buy proper shortbread any more, if you ever could. You just have to make it yourself.

When I say proper shortbread I mean the kind that melts in your mouth, and has a buttery richness even though it's just a plain old biscuit. I don't like a massive amount of crunch in shortbread, some recipes call for added rice flour or semolina and so on, but I demur. Simplicity is the word here.

You can cook this in a big round in the traditional way, marked into triangles and stabbed with a fork but I think it comes out best if you can be bothered to roll it out and cut shapes, they need to be fairly thick, it's shortbread after all, and it's easier to get an even bake that way.

For about 30 generously sized biscuits

300gr 10oz Plain flour
50 gr 2 oz Cornflour (Cornstarch in US)
250gr 8 oz Butter
75 gr 3 oz caster sugar
half teaspoon vanilla extract

Cream the butter and sugar - I use a stand mixer, -until light and creamy, or cream with a wooden spoon, and elbow grease.


Add the flour and cornflour and continue mixing gently until roughly combined
Turn onto floured board and form into a dough, roll out quite thickly and cut your shapes.


Bake for 20 minutes 160c 300F or on the lower shelf of the Aga with the cold plain shelf above. As always with biscuits, don't over cook them, you want the merest trace of gold, certainly not brown, and then take them out. Cool on a wire tray.

They also freeze really well and so are handy to have in for unexpected visitors, as they defrost almost instantly, certainly by the time you've answered the door, and said Hello Vicar do come in, lovely weather isn't it, do have a seat, would you like some tea and biscuits.





And with the bits left over you can either re-roll for extra biscuits or use as the base for a Millionaire's Shortbread for which I make no apology for revisiting my old recipe here

I also make these as an accompaniment for strawberries and cream, maybe rolled out a bit thinner,  and as such they add a nice home made touch. Makes an ordinary bowl of summer fruit and cream seem like you've gone to a lot of trouble, when you haven't really.  And in troubled times small luxuries are well, a luxury. So win-win.


Stay safe, stay home, bake something.

Millionaire's Shortbread Recipe

If you have a family of what my mother calls "good eaters", (as if it were a kind of skill like dentistry or playing the oboe) like our family, having  a tray of a great standby bake like Millionaire's Shortbread in the fridge pleases everyone and lasts through various teas and snacks over a lovely family weekend such as we have just enjoyed. Everyone knows what it is, the biscuity bit, the caramelly bit and the chocolate on top.

So far so good. But I'm afraid that many of the things I have sampled which purported to be Millionaire's Shortbread were in fact nothing of the kind, Skinflint's Biscuits of the worst sort, mere impersonations of the proper thing. I have even come across these Fagin's Follies in National Trust Tearooms of all places, I know they have to make a profit but really! A thick dry wedge of biscuit, a thin scraping of caramel topped with an even thinner scraping of chocolate, or, deary me, "chocolate flavoured" something or another.

It's quite simple, you just have to think "generous" in all respects. In terms of millionaires, Think Zsa Zsa Gabor, not Srallan Sugar.

Millionaire's Shortbread
Base
8 oz/250gr plain flour
6oz/175gr butter
2oz/50gr icing sugar

Whizz all together in processor until the mixture binds together, then press into a 8"x12" tin and bake in a low oven until slightly golden. Do not overbrown.

Caramel
1 x 1kilo tin condensed milk
10oz/300gr butter
10oz/300gr soft dark brown sugar

Melt the sugar and butter together in a saucepan over a low heat. Stir in the condensed milk and continue to stir over a medium heat until the mixture is a rich brown colour. Should take about five minutes or so. Don't leave it to answer the door, or stop stirring as it will immediately burn. Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly.
Spread over the shortbread and allow to set.

Topping
 300gr bar of good milk chocolate (I recommend Lidl's Madagascan chocolate)

Melt the chocolate and spread over the caramel. Chill in fridge.

Notes
1 You could probably use a bigger tin as I had some left over even with this generous layer. Half quantities would do in an 8" tin if you're on a diet, or have a small  family with delicate tastes.
2  Leftover caramel can be kept in a jar in the fridge and warmed with some cream to make a hot caramel sauce for ice cream.
3 You should have about a centimetre/half inch of shortbread, topped with a very generous layer of caramel and enough chocolate to crack invitingly when you try to slice it straight from the fridge. Probably best in small squares, they can always ask for more.

Proper job.

Sweet Treats for Christmas

Apologies for the lack of postings this week, I've been occupied, like almost everyone else, with Christmassy things entailing much baking of these,

and some of these

and also some of these

I realize these last ones are indistinguishable from a heap of rubbish from my terrible photograph, but they are in fact Christmas Wreaths, adapted from a recipe of Nigella's. If you want to see a picture of what they really look like, have a look at Nigella's Christmas, where you will find a sensible photo. I was making treats to eat at our village Christmas tree lights switching on ceremony last night, and although I made a good stack of mince pies, I know from past experience that small children often don't care for dried fruit generally and mince pies in particular, so I made these treats as an alternative. And very succesful they were too, allowing adults to consume generous amounts of Mulled Wine and mince pies, while they, the children got stuck into the Christmas Cupcakes, Gingerbread Christmas biscuits, and the aforementioned Christmas Wreaths, extracting extravagant sugar fuelled promises along the way from Santa who made his welcome appearance to switch on the lights. Fortunately for the health of the residents, other more sensible people brought some lovely savoury items to counteract the sugary overload of my offerings.

Christmas Cupcakes

I used an 8:8:4 recipe for all in one sponge for these. By which I mean 8 oz SR flour,butter and sugar and 4 eggs ( you see how simple this old imperial measurement is - far easier to remember than metric where the number of eggs, ie 4 bears no relation to the amount of other ingredients ie 250 grams, stop me before I start ranting again....).

Anyway, this amount made around fifty odd cupcakes, so you may like to halve the amounts unless you are considering entertaining the whole neghbourhood's offspring, or you could make larger ones using American style muffin cases instead of little bun cases. You can do the maths. You will need a spot of milk to make the mixture soft enough,and a teaspoon of vanilla essence and be sure to make them small enough to allow for the topping to cover them completely after they have risen.

The topping is royal icing, very easy to make if you have an electric mixer. Just beat 3 egg whites with a 500g packet of icing sugar for about five minutes until the mixture holds soft peaks. I use fresh egg whites because I have an abundance of eggs available to me, but I have used a packet of instant royal icing in the past and it works just as well. I always add a teaspoon of glycerin to the icing to stop it going rock hard, although you should not attempt to keep these little cakes more than a day anyway as they dry out too much. I'm amazed that Christmas Sprinkles for cakes are not available everywhere, at least not in the seasonal red and green colours I like - Tesco's missing an opportunity here - so you have to send off for them, either from Wilton, the US baking supplies people, or sometimes on Ebay. I've also made a lovely discovery that you can buy edible glitter for sprinkling on your cakes to give them that special magical touch - I got mine from the cake decorating department at Hobbycraft. It comes in a tiny pot that will probably last me forever, it looks just like ordinary glitter, but you can eat it without poisoning yourself. Lovely!

As for the little Christmas Wreaths, they are again based again on Nigella's idea

 ( strikes me this picture is almost as bad as mine!)

but I've messed about with the recipe a bit while still keeping to her lovely idea.

6 oz 150g butter

1 200g bag of marshmallows

1 200g bag of caramel toffees

half a teaspoon almond essence

half a teaspoon vanilla essence

 200g cornflakes

Melt the first three ingredients gently together, then bring to a full boil for a minute, then remove from the heat and stir in the essences and the cornflakes crunching them up quite a bit as you go with your wooden spoon. Leave until cool enough to handle and then form into balls, squash down and make a hole in the middle to form a wreath shape decorate with christmas sprinkles and leave to cool. Add little ribbon bows when cool if you like.

Make sure Santa gets some Mulled Wine, recipe tomorrow.

Make Your Own Cereal Bars

Have you seen the price of cereal bars? I know they're not the most exciting foodie must have. But lots of us buy them, they're great for childrens' lunch boxes, and make good breakfast on the run for adults, and like lots of processed food, they're a complete ripoff. For a start, look at the size of them. Tiny. You'd need a whole box of them to make a decent breakfast for a Doyle. And that would be assuming that they contain wholesome tasty ingredients, which they don't.

I suspect people like cereal bars because many of us don't have the time or inclination for breakfast, (the retail market for cereal bars is worth £314million a year) and grabbing a cereal bar on the way out of the door in the morning seems like an improvement on a double chocolate muffin at the coffee shop later. Which indeed it can be, if you make them yourself.

If you have one of these

from the supermarket, you might just as well have the muffin, for all the good it's going to do you.
So I'm suggesting you make your own. It's easy and you can make them as opulent or as  austere as you wish. I tend to make them fairly spartan because they're for breakfast and I like to see them as a healthy start. No matter that it all goes downhill from there, a good start at least shows willing.





This amount makes enough to fill my large Aga baking tray, which is 14" x 10". It's worth making a good quantity once you've established just how you like them, as they keep reasonably well in an airtight tin.

Cereal Bars Recipe

12oz/300g golden syrup
4oz/half a packet butter
half a cup/4 fl oz sunflower oil

Put these to melt over a low heat,while you assemble the dry ingredients, in a large bowl, which can be almost any combination of the following. Quantities are a rough guide, because you can adjust to whatever you like best, frankly I use up what I have half packets of, and what I fancy adding - just try to end up with around 4 pounds of mix in total for the above amount of liquid.


1 lb8oz/ 750g rolled (porridge)oats
8oz/200gr wholewheat flour
8oz/200g dessicated coconut
12oz/300 gr bag of trail mix chopped up or other dried fruit
several handfuls of puffed rice cereal
several handfuls of mixed seedsof your choice such as sunflower, pumpkin, flax,sesame
several handfuls of mixed nuts of your choice brazil, almond, hazel, walnuts chopped
several handfuls of raisins
3 eating apples, grated coarsely, don't bother to peel

Mix your dry ingredients together thoroughly, pour on the contents of the saucepan and stir until well blended. Turn into your tin and press down fairly gently. Bake for about half an hour on the bottom rung of the Aga roasting oven, probably Gas 4 Electric 180  until just tinged golden. Don't overbrown. Burnt raisins are horrible.

Cut into bars and cool on a wire tray. These bars should be reasonably chewy and soft, if you like them harder and more crisp, reduce the amount of apple.

I don't want to harp on about the economy of making your own, lest you should run away with the idea that they're not going to be very delicious, which they are, but I've costed it out roughly and my cereal bars are at least a quarter of the price of the average shop ones. Plus they're jam packed with nuts seeds and fruits, and low in sugar, contain no preservatives or dodgy fillers, and don't leave 30 plastic wrappers and 6 cardboard boxes behind. The recipe above will give you around 25 -30 good size bars (around 4 oz/100gr each) as opposed to the measly 1oz/30gr ones from the shop. Quarter of the price, ten times the quality,you can't lose.

So it's this...                            ...... or this? (It's a no brainer!)                 

                              

Brazilian Christmas Cake

 I wanted to try something a bit different from the usual rich dark fruit cake this year, so if you fancy a change, try this boozy version of a carrot cake, inspired by my trip to Brazil. Many people find a traditional christmas cake a bit too much on top of all the seasonal excess anyway. Not that you could describe this cake as abstemious or frugal in any way, but a nice change of flavour.

If you don't have any Cachaca (and why would you really?) you can use rum instead.

For an 8" round cake tin you will need -

4 oz raisins

4oz sultanas

2oz chopped ready to eat prunes

4 oz natural colour glace cherries

2oz mixed peel

soaked in -

2 fl oz brandy

2fl oz sherry or port

2 fl oz Cachaca (or rum)

1 teasp Angostura bitters

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

zest and juice of 3 limes and 1 lemon

either in the fridge for a few days, or overnight in the kitchen for the flavours to be absorbed.

When you're ready to make the cake, measure out -

12 oz plain flour

2 teasp ground cinnamon

1 teasp freshly grated nutmeg

2 teasp bicarbonate of soda

into a bowl and set aside.

In your Kitchenaid/Kenwood or with your very strong arm, beat together -

half a pint of sunflower oil

6 oz caster sugar

6oz soft brown sugar

4 eggs

until smooth and creamy

Sieve your flour mix in gently.

Then add

12 oz peeled and finely grated carrot

4 oz dessicated coconut

4 oz chopped walnuts or pecans

all the contents of the pre soaking bowl

It's a bit of a squash in my mixer but mix on a slow speed to incorporate everything.

Then turn into a lined 8" tin and bake in a slow oven about gas 2 until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.  Should be around the hour and a half mark. It's a bit less in my Aga, maybe more in some ovens. If it looks to be browning too much cover it with a piece of foil towards the end.

While it's baking make up a syrup by warming gently together until melted -

4 oz chopped Rapadura Caipira (this is a Brazilian sweet basically just a solid block of cane sugar but you could easily substitute light brown sugar)

zest and juice of 4 limes

zest and juice of 2 oranges

Cool and stir in

2 or 3 fl oz Cachaca (or rum)

When the cake is cooked, stab it with a skewer and pour the syrup over while the cake is still hot.

Leave it in the tin to cool and absorb the syrup.

I would normally store a christmas cake in the larder, but I think I will keep this one in the freezer until I'm ready to decorate it just before Christmas, just to be on the safe side. It will easily keep for a couple of weeks though, in an airtight tin if you want to make it anytime before Christmas. I will give it a coat of good quality marzipan and fondant icing in the week before Christmas.

Pears

Have you ever seen Eddie Izzard talking about pears? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh5a0ucs8kQ
He's so right - you do the test squeezy squeezy thing, and they sit there in the bowl hard as rocks, waiting conspiratorially for you to go out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back in they're black mush.

Pears are the last fruit to ripen in our garden, and I've just picked a large basket full.  This year's crop is good but not overwhelming, but as they simply don't keep in the way that apples do, the pear recipes will have to be rehearsed pretty quick.  They are the one fruit you must pick slightly underripe. If you leave them to ripen on the tree they will go "sleepy"  and before you can say Jack Robinson you will be sitting in a pool of pear puree.

 My tree is a Conference, which in my opinion is much better than its reputation, and is always delicious when home grown and ripened. Pick them all when the tree begins to drop a few windfalls, usually at the end of September or beginning of October depending on the weather. Keep the majority in a cool garage, and bring a supply into the kitchen in dribs and drabs, and they will ripen beautifully. But they won't last indefinately, and you may well need to give some away, or use them us in other ways.  You can make jam with them but I don't care for it much - it can take on a grainy texture if you're not careful. They do bottle very well in a light syrup though if you have some Kilner jars. If you're really snowed under you could incorporate them into a chutney, but I'd have to be very inundated, pear-wise to consider wasting their charms on chutney.

There really is little to beat the joy of eating a ripe pear, with the juice running down your chin.

Pear and Almond Flan

My daughter and I have been making this nice almondy flan topped with plums all through August and September but now we're out of plums I thought  I would see how it does with pears and it's pretty good. You can serve it cold as cake with coffee, but it's much nicer just warm, with thick cream as pudding. Sarah uses ready made shortcrust which is excellent, especially if you're a VBP (Very Busy Person, which she is), but I have time to make my own and this is my usual recipe for sweet shortcrust.

Ingredients

1 pack of butter (8ounces) cold from the fridge
1 pound plain flour

4 oz caster sugar

2 egg yolks

2 eggs

10" metal flan tin

Whizz the butter, flour and sugar in a processor to breadcrumb stage. Add egg and whizz briefly, just enough to combine. You may find it best to tip it into a large bowl to press together with your hands. Don't handle it more than you have to though. Roll it out on a very floury surface, and use to line a metal flan tin. I never rest it or bake it blind, and I don't suffer from either shrinkage or  flabby bottoms. It will only shrink if you over handle and stretch it, and I don't find I  need to bake blind if I use a  loose based metal flan tin, which will conduct the heat evenly and ensure a firm, crispy bottom, which is what we all want. This pastry is good for all sweet flans, custards, lemon tarts and mince pies (there I go again, talking about Christmas in October)..You will only need about half of this amount for the flan but it's a good idea to make extra and freeze it in a slab ready for the the next tart or mince pie session. I always make a good quantity so that I have some in, should an unexpected pastry emergency arise.

Filling

1 pack butter (8 oz) at room temperature

6 ounces caster sugar

8oz ground almonds

few drops of almond essence

2 oz plain flour
2 eggs
2 large conference pears reasonably ripe

Peel and scoop out the core from the pears, and slice.
Whisk together the butter and sugar until pale and light, ( I use a Kitchenaid table mixer), beat in the eggs, add the ground almonds, essence, and flour and briefly combine. Pour into your prepared flan case. Top the flan with the fruit slices, and press gently  in. Bake in a medium  Gas 3 150C oven for about 40-50 minutes. Serve warm with clotted cream.

Do try this with plums or apricots when in season as well.

Party Party

As I said, I dropped and broke our camera, so I have been experimenting with my phone camera, and it seems to be reasonably good, so here is a picture of a cake I made for a family party the other day. In case it's not obvious, it's a drum kit, the birthday boy in question being a drummer of great distinction and promise, (good luck at Uni, Lee). I was quite pleased with how it turned out, though there is a degree of "sag" that I did not forsee. I used an ordinary victoria sponge cake and vanilla buttercream for the cake and fondant for the icing. The "sag" effect could have been avoided by the use of rich fruit cake, but most people seem to prefer sponge these days, except for Christmas. Black fondant isn't all that easy to come by in darkest Wiltshire, so I had to send away for a supply of that, - special stuff like that is much easier to find these days, God Bless the Internet. I used the Blue Ribbons Sugarcraft Centre and would highly recommend them for quick and helpful service http://www.blueribbons.co.uk/

And if you live in London there's a great shop called Party Party near Dalston market that my daughter took me to, that sells everything you could need for parties and has a whole floor dedicated to cake decorating. It's just past the Multi-Coloured Wig shop, and the stall selling Giant African snails (alive!!) but not as far as the trendy cafe full of media types with laptops and capuccinos. London is such a treat for country bumpkins like me!

I must have made millions (well not millions, but quite a lot) of cakes over the years, and I always come back to the good old all in one victoria sponge cake, made in a food processor. It really does make the best sponge cake in my opinion. It's couldn't be easier to make, is quick, and endlessly versatile. My recipe is pretty much the standard one (though I have adopted Nigella's suggestion of an ounce of cornflour in the mix) and I do tend to have a bit of stock syrup* around the place these days, (being a beekeeper) which is useful for all sorts of things including brushing over the cake as it comes out of the oven, and ensuring a soft moist cake, even on those occasions when you know you've left it in the oven five minutes too long, and have aquired HCS (Hard Crust Syndrome)

4 eggs
1 pack of butter at room temperature

8 ounces of self raising flour

1 rounded teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon of cornflour

8 ounces of caster sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

about 2 tablespoons milk

Put everything in food processor and switch on till blended. That's it. You might want to mix it without the milk first and then add as much milk as you think you need to get a soft, smooth, but not too runny mixture. Depends on the size of your eggs really.

Cook in two 8 inch sandwich tins, a large loaf tin, lots of little bun cases for butterfly cakes, a roasting tin for cutting into initials or numbers, or whatever you fancy. I cook the 2 sandwich tins on the bottom shelf of the roasting oven of the Aga with the cold shelf on top for about 30 minutes, which is probably about a Gas 4 but only you know your oven. The cake should be a pale golden brown, and springy to the touch, and slightly shrinking away from the sides of the tin when it's done. What you really want to avoid is cooking too fast and over-browning, leading to the dreaded HCS, and dryness. Now, where is that jar of syrup....

*Stock syrup - Dissolve a pound of sugar in a pint of water, or a kilo in a litre, gives you a medium syrup useful as an emergency feed for bees, or cakes.