A Bond Girl's Food Diary

Wine Cake

23rd May 201722nd May 20172 Comments

Are you a lark, an owl, or a hummingbird? I am a lark, and have been for as long as I can remember. I find it really genuinely hard to sleep in of a morning: I wake up early and once I’m awake, that’s it, I am not getting back to sleep. Even if James and I have been out until 2am, I can’t stay in bed past 8am. As soon as I am up my mind is going full pelt and I am usually chatty and busy and keen to organise the day in excruciating detail (this is incredibly annoying for my husband, because he is an owl and cannot hold a real conversation until he is dressed, breakfasted, and topped up with coffee). I do my best work first thing in the morning: I will sit down at my laptop and start blasting through emails and tick seven tasks off my list before 9am.

If you are thinking that I am incredibly smug and irritating and getting ready to slap me, then let me tell you the flipside of this: I am utterly, completely, totally useless in the evenings. I can’t do any meaningful mental work past about 9pm, and really ideally I’d stop all work before dinner. I find it nearly impossible to stay up late – if I had my way I’d sleep from about 10pm to 6am, but sadly my life doesn’t allow for this as I teach in the evenings and we do a lot of late-night socialising. I have fallen asleep on friends’ sofas and in pubs and on the backseats of cars because I have been forced to stay out late and my body is just not having it. I am always to first to bail out of any rowdy late night social occasion. Basically, I am deeply uncool.

And I am in the minority! I understand this. Most people glare at me when I start cheerily rambling on at them at 7am. Everyone sighs at my pathetic nature when I leave the pub and head for bed at 9.30pm. Normal people have decadent weekend lie-ins and wish for a later start to the workday, while I merrily got up at 5.30am for a year and trundled onto the 6.55am train to get to London, loving the empty streets and sunrises.

Anyway, here is my effort to join in with the crowd that is out late drinking, whilst still being at home before dark and spending all my time baking instead of socialising. Wine cake. I should really call this cake something more sophisticated but, guys, let’s be real: it’s got Moscatel and grapes in it. It’s wine cake. Wine. Cake. What is not to love?

Source: Adapted from BBC Good Food.

Notes: Dessert wines often have hints of honey, apricot, and other citrus fruits. That’s why I think the demerara sugar and the lemon and orange are lovely in this cake, it all works together. It’s not overly wine-y – it just has a pleasant backnote of wine. The oil makes it lovely and moist, and it keeps well.

I talk about using a mixer (which could be a hand whisk, a food processor, or a kitchen aid type thing), but it would be fine to do it by hand. I am just lazy.

Ingredients:

250ml dessert wine (dessert wine can be super-expensive, but I use Sainsbury’s Moscatel de Valencia, which is only £5.35)
175ml extra-virgin olive oil
200g light muscovado or light brown soft sugar
100g softened butter
zest 2 oranges
zest 2 lemons
3 eggs
225g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
150g seedless grapes, any colour, halved
5 tbsp demerara sugar

Method:

Bring the wine to boil in a small pan over a medium heat, then simmer for around ten minutes to reduce to 100ml. Pour into a jug, then add the olive oil and leave to cool. Meanwhile, butter a 23cm cake tin, then shake 1 tbsp of plain flour around it and tap out the excess. Heat your oven to 180C/ 160C fan/ gas 4.
Beat sugar and butter together with the zests until creamy and smooth then, with the mixer running, add the eggs one by one. Weigh your flour, baking powder, and salt into a bowl. With the mixer running, pour around a third of your wine and oil mix into the batter, then a third of your flour mix, then a third of your oil mix, and so on, alternating the liquid and dry mixes until everything is in and it’s all well-combined. You will be left with a smooth, fragrant, fairly liquid batter.
Pour the batter into your tin, then scatter it with the halved grapes and the demerara sugar. Bake for around 50 minutes, or until it’s firm and risen and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Start checking at around 40 minutes. Leave to cool for fifteen minutes in the tin before removing, and eat warm (lovely with cream or ice cream for a dessert) or cool.

Pistachio, Blackberry, and Lemon Loaf Cake

16th May 201716th May 20171 Comment

Working from home is a funny old way of life. I’ve gone from school to university to 9-5 jobs to getting my culinary diploma. Now I’ve washed up teaching and running the administration for a cookery school, alongside freelance catering work and making the odd birthday or wedding cake. This means that my hours are mostly my own to organise, for the first time, really, in my life. Apart from actually showing up to teach classes and attending the odd meeting, I don’t generally have to be anywhere in particular for work, and can get stuff done as and when I like.

Mostly, it suits me. I never liked having to be in an office at fixed times, regardless of how much work I had on, and I’m a terrible employee in that I hate being told what to do (yes, this was often a problem). I am bossy, obsessive, and controlling (but quite a nice person generally, honest), so sorting out my own time instead of adhering to someone else’s schedule is usually advantageous.

It’s tricky, too, though. This morning, for instance, I answered three emails, raised two invoices, dealt with some website maintenance, updated a voucher spreadsheet, and researched a recipe before 9am. However, I did all this on the sofa, in my pyjamas, whilst eating toast and cuddling the cat. So it’s easy for me to feel like I am being lazy, especially as my husband is dressed and out the door to go to the office by 8.15am.

I do as much work now as I did when I had a ‘proper job’, but not all of it feels like work (recipe testing and ingredients shopping, I’m looking at you), and lots of it is done at funny times. I work best early in the morning, so I will get a lot done first thing, but then I will often be out doing something at some point during the day when everyone else is stuck in the office. Then again, I am usually doing work late into the night and always on weekends – I once received a surprised and delighted reply from a customer when I answered her email at midnight on Christmas Eve. Plus on most Thursday, Friday, and Sunday nights, you can usually find me teaching and not getting home until 11pm.

I don’t know. I am sure (read: I hope) most people who have an unconventional job and/or work from home suffer from this slight guilt and nervousness. I always feel like I am somehow getting away with something when I have a long lunch with a friend on a weekday, or spend an hour bobbing up and down the Cowley Road to find obscure Asian ingredients on a Wednesday afternoon.

Anyway, as I said, one of the pre-9am things I did this morning was researching a recipe, and that recipe is for this Pistachio, Blackberry, and Lemon Loaf Cake.

I love pistachios. Love love love them to a disturbing degree. They’re so versatile, playing excellent roles in both sweet and savoury dishes, and completely beautiful in their enticing shades of soft purple and vivid green. I have been wanting to make a pistachio cake for a while, and then I thought of the juicy purple of blackberries against a soft nutty green, with the kick of brightening lemon, and this cake was born.

Source: The base loaf cake recipe is adapted from this one at Smitten Kitchen.

Notes: I love blackberries here but I am sure this would work well with blueberries, raspberries, or strawberries. You could also leave out the lemon if you don’t fancy it, and skip all the decoration on the top.

Ingredients:

150g roasted pistachio kernels
200 grams granulated sugar
1 tsp sea salt
zest of 1 lemon
145g butter, cut into rough cubes (from the fridge is fine)
3 eggs
60ml cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 scant tsp baking powder
120g plain flour
1oog blackberries

for the icing and finishing

100g icing sugar
juice of 1 lemon (roughly)
handful of pistachios
handful of blackberries

Method:

Preheat your oven to 170C/150C fan/ gas 3. Roast your pistachios in the oven for 5-10 minutes until they are slightly darkened and smelling lovely. While that’s happening, grease and line your loaf tin (you can maybe get away without doing this if you have a non-stick tin, but I am always too scared to risk it).
Pop your pistachios in a food processor with the sugar and salt blitz it all until it’s a rough powder – you want it as well blended as possible but you don’t want to go too far and make the pistachios release their oil and become wet. Chuck in your lemon zest and cubed butter and blitz again – it will look weird and clumpy for a while but eventually smooth out, so just keep running the mixer. With the mixer running, add your eggs one by one, and pour in your milk and vanilla.
You should now have a rather thin, green, fairly smooth mixture. Take it out of the processor and pop it in a bowl, then add your baking powder, plain flour, and blackberries, then fold to just combine but don’t mix further. If your blackberries are huge you might want to cut them in half for more even distribution.
Pour your mixture into your prepared tin and pop in your preheated oven to bake. This is a slow, gentle bake – my cake took 60 minutes in my quite fierce oven, but as with any cake with a long baking time it will vary quite a bit depending on your oven. Check at 45 minutes and then keep checking every ten minutes until the cake is risen and firm and passes the skewer test.
You can absolutely keep it as it is, but if you want to gild the lily, sieve your icing sugar into a bowl and gradually add lemon juice, whisking it into an icing that is fairly thick and falls off a spoon in a slow drizzle. Let your cake cool in the tin, then turn it out and finish it with a flair of lemon icing and some artfully arranged blackberries and pistachios.

Cherry and Pecan Blondies

29th March 201729th March 20172 Comments

Last week I went to visit one of my closest friends in York, by train, because I am a fool. I usually drive, but decided to take the train this time, reasoning that in the cumulative seven hours of train time over two days I could get a significant amount of work done. I did not take into account the fact that the train would have no working WiFi, or that you would only be lucky enough to be granted a plug socket if you had booked a window seat. So by the time I got to York I had basically wasted three and a half hours and was absolutely starving because I had also assumed the train would have food and so had not packed any lunch.

God, this is a really whiny blog post.

Anyway, when I got to York station there was a brownie stall, so we all know what happened there. I got many, many brownies. They also had blondies, which I did not buy because they were not brownies and brownies are basically my favourite food (I wish I was joking). But they did put the idea of blondies into my head. I realised I had never had one, and enquiries revealed that many of my friends did not know what they were. I think maybe they are more common in America?

The short story is that I made this batch and tried one and then immediately had to give them all away to stop myself from face-planting into the whole tray.

Source: Liberally adapted from the goddess at Smitten Kitchen.

Notes: I have taken the same approach to these as I would with brownies, i.e. that they should be dense and fudgy, rather than light and cakey. Thus I prefer to bake them the night, or a few hours, before I need them, enabling me to undercook them slightly and leave them to set and cool out of the oven, rather than drying them out. However, if you don’t have that kind of time, it’s perfectly fine to either add five minutes to the baking time or eat them hot and gooey from the pan with a fork (or your fingers, no judgement here).

You can obviously put whatever you want into these – different fruit, different nuts, skip the chocolate – but I think this is a winning combination.

This recipe is stupidly easy. You can put the batter together in ten minutes. There is no reason not to make them right now.

Ingredients:

180g butter, melted and browned
270g dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1.5 tsp vanilla
Pinch of sea salt
180g plain flour
80g dried cherries
80g toasted pecans
50g white chocolate

Method:

1. Preheat your oven to 180C/160C fan/ gas 4. Grease and line a 20cm square baking tin. Pop your pecans into the oven to toast for about 5 minutes – keep an eye on them and shake them around occasionally, because they will go from toasty-delicious to burnt frighteningly fast. Pop your butter in a pan to melt and brown it (you can just melt it if you are short on time, but if you take it to the stage of brown nuttiness then it will add an even better flavour to your blondies).
2. Mix your melted butter with your dark brown sugar, then beat until smooth, ensuring you get any lumps out of the sugar. Add your eggs and vanilla, beat again, then add your salt and flour and mix to combine. Chop your cherries and pecans fairly finely and mix them in too, then pour the mixture into the tin and level it out.
3. Break your white chocolate into squares and press them into the top of the raw blondie batter – you can also just mix them in, but I think white chocolate is extra tasty roasted and exposed directly to the heat of the oven.
4. Bake for around 20 minutes – you are looking for it to be set in the middle, but only just. Eat while hot and squidgy, or leave to cool and set for a few hours or overnight and cut into squares.

Proper Chicken Soup

21st March 201721st March 20174 Comments

This recipe is not revolutionary, or glamorous. It’s not authentic, or the definitive version of anything. It’s not even seasonally appropriate, now that I can actually see the sun, and some daffodils, and have abandoned one outdoor layer (but still wear a coat at all times, obviously, because I’m not some kind of crazy risk-taking daredevil who wishes to court hypothermia). It is only something simple that James likes. He asked me to write it down for him, and since I was writing it down for him anyway I thought I may as well write it down for you too. Also, apparently this blog now only covers soup and macarons.

This is the kind of chicken soup that takes a little time, and a little effort, although it isn’t at all difficult. It is genuinely healthy (something that can be said of very few things on this blog). It requires care, and attention. It is the sort of thing I make for people when I want to show them kindness in some way (I am only able to show kindness through the making of soup, bread, and cake, all of which I randomly leave on the doorsteps of friends in the neighbourhood because social interaction requires too much effort and I am useless). It is supposedly the sort of thing one uses to cure illness, and though this claim has no scientific basis that I am aware of, I merrily presume it is true anyway and make it for those who seem to be somehow ailing. This is why I would make a terrible doctor.

Notes: This recipe is obviously infinitely adaptable, so go ahead and add whatever vegetables and herbs you have kicking about. This is just my version among thousands of others.

You will need a large saucepan or pot that you can comfortably fit a whole chicken into.

Ingredients:

1 whole chicken (I usually get one that will feed three-four people even if I am cooking for two, so that we have plenty leftover)
3 large carrots
2 stalks celery
1 white onion
a bunch of fresh flat-leaf parsley
3 bay leaves (fresh or dry, either is fine)
handful of dry black peppercorns
4 shallots
1 fresh red chilli
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
1 nest of dried noodles (egg or rice, or whatever you have, is fine)

Method:

Roughly chop 1 carrot, both stalks of celery, and the onion into large pieces – no need to peel. Put them in the bottom of your largest saucepan or pot, along with the stalks (not the leaves) from the bunch of parsley, the bay leaves, and the peppercorns. Take any string and packaging off the whole chicken and add it to the pot, then cover the bird with cold water. Add a generous pinch of salt. Put the pot on a low heat, cover, and bring the water to a gentle poaching simmer. Let the chicken poach for around 1 – 1.5 hours until cooked through, checking it occasionally to make sure it is still covered in water. When cooked, the legs should be loose and completely floppy, coming away from the chicken when tugged.
Remove all of the chicken from the pot, and turn the heat on the pan up to high, letting the liquid reduce. Meanwhile, strip all of the meat from your chicken and set it aside – you will either have to wait for it to cool slightly, or wear gloves. Discard the skin, and place the chicken bones back into the pot. Bubble the stock away for another half hour or so, tasting occasionally – it should be full of chicken-y goodness.
Meanwhile, prep the rest of the soup ingredients. Roughly chop your parsley leaves, peel your shallots and cut them into slim rings, chop your chilli (seeds in or out, up to you), and peel and dice your ginger. When your stock is reduced and tastes delicious, strain it and discard the original vegetables and the chicken bones. Put the stock back into the original pot.
Finally, add your shallots, chilli, and ginger to the liquid. Cook gently for 10 minutes, then add your chicken meat and your noodles. Cook until the noodles are soft (usually around four minutes). Take your soup off the heat, stir in your chopped parsley, and taste and adjust seasoning, adding more salt and pepper as required.

Roast Butternut Soup with Coconut, Lemongrass, and Chilli

9th February 20179th February 20171 Comment

It’s not often I can say this about a recipe featured on this blog, but this is vegan, gluten free, and healthy. Don’t worry, I have not abandoned the baked goods. But James and I do not live on macarons and pie alone (oh, if only), and plenty of savoury food comes out of my kitchen. Some of it is even healthy. I just don’t tend to feature it on this blog, because I find it less interesting. Also because so much of the savoury food I make is thrown together with whatever is lying around in the fridge, in a very ‘meh, it’ll probably be fine, chuck it in’ sort of a way, and so it’s hard for me to recreate dishes again, let alone write down how I made them.

However, the recipe for this soup was specifically requested (I know, how exciting) after I made it for a group at a yoga retreat, and so I recreated it and actually bothered to write down what I was doing, and here it is. Apologies for the rather uninspiring photos – they were taken at speed in the dying light. Still though, look how healthy it all looks…

Notes:

It’s soup, so you can play it a bit fast and loose with the ingredients. Only one onion left? No problem. Got some herbs you want to throw in there? Go for it. Not a vegetarian and want to go mad and add bacon? Live your best life today.

Ingredients:

1 large butternut squash
olive oil
2 onions
thumb sized piece of fresh ginger
2 lemongrass stalks
80g Thai red curry paste (about 1/2 a small jar, or make your own if you’d rather, or add more to taste)
1 can full fat coconut milk
750ml vegetable stock
1 lime
1 chilli (optional – to garnish)

Method:

Preheat your oven to 220C/200C fan/gas 6. Peel your squash and cut it into roughly finger sized chunks, discarding the seeds. Pop it in a roasting tray, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, then roast for around 40 minutes – you want it meltingly soft and just charring around the edges, for flavour.
While that’s happening, slice your onions, peel and roughly chop your ginger, and bash your lemongrass stalks a bit so they release flavour. Put a generous slug of olive oil in your largest saucepan and cook the onions, ginger, and lemongrass down together, until the onions are soft. Add your curry paste and cook gently for 3-4 minutes until everything smells amazing. Tip in your butternut squash, coconut milk (saving a couple of tbsp if you want some to drizzle on the soup), and stock. Stir it all together and then simmer for around 10 minutes. Find the lemongrass and pull it out.
When everything is all happily cooked down and amalgamated, blitz your soup until smooth – I use a stick blender, but a liquidiser or food processor will do the job. Add your lime juice, give it a good stir, and check the seasoning. It should be rich and warming, with a lingering chilli kick at the end. Add more salt, pepper, or lime as needed. Serve hot, drizzled with the leftover coconut milk if you’re feeling artistic, and add some chopped chilli or extra chilli sauce if you want it to have more spice.

Pistachio and Apricot Macarons

31st January 20172nd February 20172 Comments

Yes, I know my last blog post was also a macaron recipe. I spent a little while worrying about this, before I remembered that this is my blog and I can put whatever I like on it, and if I want to do seventeen variations on macarons in a row and never post a thing about vegetables again, then no one will really care. Except maybe my dentist (sidenote: I used to think I didn’t have a problem with dentists, until I had to have a wisdom tooth removed a couple of months ago. Now I understand why people fear dentists).

Anyway, these were experimental macarons, partly because I have never done macarons with a nut other than almonds in the shell before, and partly because I had a pack of apricot leather leftover from teaching a class and wasn’t sure what to use it for. Apricot and pistachio sounded like a pretty delicious combination. And thus these little babies were born.

Notes (my standard macaron notes):

For this, you will need at least three baking sheets (I sometimes go onto a fourth) and parchment to line them, a sugar thermometer, a food processor, an electric hand whisk or a stand mixer, and a piping bag fitted with a 1cm plain nozzle, as well as the normal bowls and scales and stuff. Sorry, lots of kit I know, but that’s just how it is for these.
This recipe makes around 50 shells, or 25 paired macarons, although this obviously depends on how big you pipe them.
I don’t personally think you need to bother ageing your egg whites unless they are stupendously fresh to start with – perhaps you have your own chickens or something, who knows – but I do always make sure mine are room temperature.
I am not awesome at piping, and so my personal preference is to line my baking sheets with disposable parchment and, using a cookie cutter, draw circles onto it in black Sharpie as a guide, then flip it over ready to be piped on to. You can also buy templates that are already on silicone mats (which I should do but I am cheap) or print them off the internet, or just pipe freestyle if you are confident. You want to end up with something like this.

Ingredients:

for the shells

200g white caster sugar
75ml hot water (from a hot tap is fine, but boil a kettle if you like)
200g icing sugar
100g ground almonds
100g pistachios
160g egg whites (divided into two bowls of 80g each)
Pinch of salt

for the apricot filling

apricot leather – I lazily bought mine, but you can make it, or substitute a thick apricot gel or jam, or flavour buttercream with apricot jam, or use something else entirely. I can’t tell you how to live your life.

Method:

Get out three baking sheets and line them with parchment (or silicone), and create a template if you need one. Pop your water and caster sugar in a saucepan, stir it gently together with a wooden spoon, and put the pan on a low heat to dissolve the sugar (starting with hot water speeds this up). While that’s happening, pop your pistachios with 2 tbsp of the icing sugar in a food processor and blitz for about 2 minutes, or until you have a very fine pistachio flour. Add the rest of the icing sugar and the ground almonds, then blitz again for 1 minute. Scrape the sides down, then blitz for an additional minute. Pass the sugar and nut powder through a sieve into a large bowl. You might be left with some chunkier nut mixture in the sieve. Don’t force it through – you want smooth macarons – but save it to sprinkle over the top of the shells once baked, if you like.
If your sugar has dissolved into your water (the liquid shouldn’t feel gritty), turn up the heat on your syrup, stick your thermometer in it, and start to bubble it up to 115 degrees celsius (which is your target). Meanwhile, mix 80g of egg white into your sieved almond pistachio mixture with a spatula to make a thick, stiff paste. It will look like there isn’t enough liquid, but keep working it and it will come together. Pop the other 80g of egg white into a clean glass bowl with the pinch of salt and whisk to stiff peaks.
When the sugar syrup hits 115 degrees, pour it into the whisked egg whites in a thin stream while still whisking them on high speed. The mixture will become shiny. Once all the sugar syrup is in the whites, keep whisking for five minutes or so while the bowl cools until you have your stiff meringue mix. Whack 1/3 of the meringue mix into the almond pistachio paste and beat it in any old how to loosen it.
Now gently fold the remaining meringue into your macaron batter with a spatula. You need to make sure it’s well incorporated and there are no streaks, but the more you mix it the more air will be knocked out, and the looser the batter becomes. If you don’t mix enough, there will be unincorporated meringue and the batter won’t smooth out when piped. If you go too far, it will run everywhere when piped. You want to be able to lift the spatula up and draw a trail of batter across the surface of the bowl and leave a line which stays there for around 10 seconds, but then gradually disappears back into the body of the mixture. People say it is supposed to look like lava but that’s totally unhelpful to me as I don’t know what lava looks like. Go slowly, one fold at a time, and keep checking it. If in doubt, go for under rather than over mixing, as the process of piping the batter will knock more air out too.
When you are happy with your batter, put half of it into your piping bag and begin to pipe out your rounds. I find it easier to only use half the mix at once or the weight of it makes it come out of the bag very fast, which is tricky to pipe. Piping these just takes practice. Give yourself space, pipe directly down rather than at an angle, move quickly and get into a rhythm. Your batter will spread a little so aim for batter circles slightly smaller than your template circles. Once you have finished piping, pick up each tray, lift it a good few inches off the surface, and drop it straight down. Do this a couple of times. You need to knock out any air bubbles that have accumulated. After this is done, leave your macarons to rest for around half an hour. Once rested, they should have a slight skin. Leaving them for longer – up to a couple of hours – shouldn’t hurt them.
When your macarons have rested, heat your oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 3. Bake your macaron shells for around 20 minutes. This is obviously dependent on your oven and the size of your macarons, so keep an eye on them. Check after 17 minutes. When your shells are cooked, they should lift off your baking parchment without leaving much residue behind. If they are leaving lots of very sticky mixture or not lifting off, give them more time. If they are completely dry and hollow then they are over-baked (but will still be yummy when filled). When they are done, get them on a cooling rack and once they are cool enough to touch, take them off the parchment.
Match the shells of your macarons into pairs of similar sizes. Using a cookie cutter, stamp rounds out of your apricot leather and place between your pairs of shells – or, if you are using an alternative apricot filling, simply pipe rounds of it onto the bottom shell and gently sandwich on the top. If using, sprinkle with the leftover pistachio and almond mix.

Really, you should store macarons in the fridge in an air-tight container for 24 hours before eating them to let the shells soften into the filling but my willpower isn’t always up to this. Regardless, they keep very well.

Saffron Macarons with a Dark Chocolate Cardamom Ganache

20th January 201720th January 20171 Comment

My mother gave me a jar of safflower petals for Christmas, among other things. I had never seen or heard of them before – although they are called ‘poor man’s saffron’ in the product description, they’re beautiful, and have a softer, less brassy flavour than saffron proper. I immediately knew what I wanted to do with them: sprinkle them decadently over little saffron macarons. I say decadently, but actually that was quite a thrifty choice when you consider the price of actual saffron.

I have made macarons several times before, and even written about them on this blog, but I’ve stuck with fairly standard, safe flavour choices. However, the rich, dusky warmth of saffron called for a correspondingly exotic partner, so I’ve gone for a dark chocolate cardamon ganache, spiked with a hefty pinch of sea salt, to match up to the spiced shells. Normally, with macarons, the shells are for colour and the filling is for flavour: you can’t mess with the shell recipe too much as they are quite temperamental, so many of the usual methods of adding flavour in baking are out, and you have to rely on getting a big hit of taste into a small disc of ganache, curd, or gel. However, this is where saffron comes into its own. You only need about a gram of it to flavour the macarons, and because it’s dry it incorporates into the almond mix quite happily. You could even add a touch of orange food colouring to the meringue mix to hint at the saffron flavour within, but I had the safflower petals on hand and I wanted a nice contrast between their sunset colour and the pale shell.

It might give you an indication of how hectic my life is at the moment that I have been intending to make these since Christmas Day and have only gotten around to it in late January.

Notes (my standard macaron notes):

For this, you will need at least three baking sheets (I sometimes go onto a fourth) and parchment to line them, a sugar thermometer, a food processor, an electric hand whisk or a stand mixer, and a piping bag fitted with a 1cm plain nozzle, as well as the normal bowls and scales and stuff. Sorry, lots of kit I know, but that’s just how it is for these.
This recipe makes around 50 shells, or 25 paired macarons, although this obviously depends on how big you pipe them.
I don’t personally think you need to bother ageing your egg whites unless they are stupendously fresh to start with – perhaps you have your own chickens or something, who knows – but I do always make sure mine are room temperature.
I am not awesome at piping, and so my personal preference is to line my baking sheets with disposable parchment and, using a cookie cutter, draw circles onto it in black Sharpie as a guide, then flip it over ready to be piped on to. You can also buy templates that are already on silicone mats (which I should do but I am cheap) or print them off the internet, or just pipe freestyle if you are confident. You want to end up with something like this.

Ingredients:

for the shells

200g white caster sugar
75ml hot water (from a hot tap is fine, but boil a kettle if you like)
200g icing sugar
200g ground almonds
1g saffron (this is very annoying to measure unless you have great scales, but it’s basically a large pinch)
160g egg whites (divided into two bowls of 80g each)
Pinch of salt

for the ganache filling

200g good quality 70% dark chocolate
300g double cream
20 cardamom pods
a good pinch of sea salt

to decorate

safflower petals – completely optional

Method:

Get out three baking sheets and line them with parchment (or silicone), and create a template if you need one. Pop your water and caster sugar in a saucepan, stir it gently together with a wooden spoon, and put the pan on a low heat to dissolve the sugar (starting with hot water speeds this up). While that’s happening, pop your almonds, icing sugar, and saffron in a food processor and blitz for 1 minute. Scrape the sides down, then blitz for an additional minute. Pass the sugar, nut, and saffron powder through a sieve into a large bowl. You might be left with some chunkier almond mixture in the sieve. Chuck this away, don’t force it through – you want smooth macarons – but if there are any strands of saffron left in there, pop them into the bowl.
If your sugar has dissolved into your water (the liquid shouldn’t feel gritty), turn up the heat on your syrup, stick your thermometer in it, and start to bubble it up to 115 degrees celsius (which is your target). Meanwhile, mix 80g of egg white into your sieved almond mixture with a spatula to make a thick, stiff paste. It will look like there isn’t enough liquid, but keep working it and it will come together. Pop the other 80g of egg white into a clean glass bowl with the pinch of salt and whisk to stiff peaks.
When the sugar syrup hits 115 degrees, pour it into the whisked egg whites in a thin stream while still whisking them on high speed. The mixture will become shiny. Once all the sugar syrup is in the whites, keep whisking for five minutes or so while the bowl cools until you have your stiff meringue mix. Whack 1/3 of the meringue mix into the almond paste and beat it in any old how to loosen it.
Now gently fold the remaining meringue into your macaron batter with a spatula. You need to make sure it’s well incorporated and there are no streaks, but the more you mix it the more air will be knocked out, and the looser the batter becomes. If you don’t mix enough, there will be unincorporated meringue and the batter won’t smooth out when piped. If you go too far, it will run everywhere when piped. You want to be able to lift the spatula up and draw a trail of batter across the surface of the bowl and leave a line which stays there for around 10 seconds, but then gradually disappears back into the body of the mixture. People say it is supposed to look like lava but that’s totally unhelpful to me as I don’t know what lava looks like. Go slowly, one fold at a time, and keep checking it. If in doubt, go for under rather than over mixing, as the process of piping the batter will knock more air out too.
When you are happy with your batter, put half of it into your piping bag and begin to pipe out your rounds. I find it easier to only use half the mix at once or the weight of it makes it come out of the bag very fast, which is tricky to pipe. Piping these just takes practice. Give yourself space, pipe directly down rather than at an angle, move quickly and get into a rhythm. Your batter will spread a little so aim for batter circles slightly smaller than your template circles. Once you have finished piping, pick up each tray, lift it a good few inches off the surface, and drop it straight down. Do this a couple of times. You need to knock out any air bubbles that have accumulated. After this is done, leave your macarons to rest for around half an hour. Once rested, they should have a slight skin. Leaving them for longer – up to a couple of hours – shouldn’t hurt them.

While they are resting, make ganache. Break your chocolate into small pieces and pop it in a bowl. Crush your cardamom pods to release the flavour, and pop them into your cream. Heat your cream and cardamom in a pan until it’s just steaming and little bubbles are appearing at the edges, then take off the heat, cover, and leave to infuse for fifteen minutes or so. Sieve the cardamom out, and re-weigh your cream – you need 200g, and some of it will have evaporated in the heating process. Reheat the weighed cream until just bubbling. Pour it onto the chocolate, add the salt, and leave it alone to sit for a couple of minutes. Beat the mixture until smooth. Leave to firm up to a pipeable consistency in the fridge
When your macarons have rested, heat your oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 3. Bake your macaron shells for around 20 minutes. This is obviously dependent on your oven and the size of your macarons, so keep an eye on them. Check after 17 minutes. When your shells are cooked, they should lift off your baking parchment without leaving much residue behind. If they are leaving lots of very sticky mixture or not lifting off, give them more time. If they are completely dry and hollow then they are over-baked (but will still be yummy when filled). When they are done, get them on a cooling rack and once they are cool enough to touch, take them off the parchment.
Get your ganache out the fridge – it might need a couple of minutes at room temperature to become pipeable, depending on how long it’s been in there. Match the shells of your macarons into pairs of similar sizes. Pipe a circle of ganache onto the base shell of each pair and gently sandwich on the top shell. If using, sprinkle with safflower petals.

Sun-dried Tomato and Olive Focaccia

9th January 20179th January 20172 Comments

Sometimes I think there wasn’t much point in my going to culinary school, because all anyone really ever wants me to make is brownies and bread. Seriously. Those are the things that I get asked to make the most often, and those are the things which always inspire the most delight among the people I cook for. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I understand it. Brownies and bread are delicious. But they are also easy. So easy! I could make these things before I expended vast amounts of time and money and effort getting a culinary diploma. Still, at least now I know in my heart that I could make a blackcurrant souffle. Even though no one ever asks me to.

If you are ever going round to someone’s house and you want to bring them something a bit special, then I really recommend that you bake some bread. People go absolutely nuts for the stuff and they will think that you are amazing, even though really all you have done is mix flour and water and yeast together and then let them do their thing. I am now pretty much obligated to make focaccia for family gatherings, because I did so once and it’s like when we fed the teeniest, tiniest bit of gammon to the cat and now that she knows about the existence of gammon she cannot be happy unless she is actively eating gammon.

When I bake bread from scratch for something, someone always says ‘Oh, I can’t be bothered with making bread. Doesn’t it take ages?’ Well, yes and no. Yes, the time from starting the bread-making process to starting the bread-eating process is a couple of hours, but in those couple of hours you will have about fifteen active minutes in which you have to do things to the bread. For the rest of your time, feel free to be gainfully employed in plumbing the depths of Netflix, alphabetising your spice cabinet, or trying to placate your gammon-crazed pet.

Notes:

I’m not going to lie: this is much easier to make if you have a mixer with a dough-hook. I did not have one until last year and owning one has now made me magnificently lazy. With normal bread dough, ten minutes of kneading by hand is no big deal, and can actually be pretty satisfying (plus I always count it as my exercise for the day). With focaccia, though, the dough is really more like a batter because it is so wet, and kneading a batter is a bit trickier, so it’s much easier to shove it in a mixer. The high water content is what gives the bread its light texture and irregular crumb structure: the water in the dough evaporates as the bread bakes, leading to that classic focaccia look. That said, I made this at my parents’ house at Christmas, and I had to do it by hand because they don’t have a mixer with a dough-hook, and it was fine. Although I did whinge about it a bit.

Obviously you can substitute other things for sun-dried tomatoes and olives if you have anything interesting lying about. I have done this with feta, artichokes, red onion, prosciutto, and various herbs. You can see from the pictures that I had some artichokes in the fridge, so in they went. It’s all good, and it would be fine with just salt and olive oil too.

Ingredients:

500g strong white bread flour
2.5 tsp salt
2 sachets dried fast action/ easy bake yeast (don’t worry too much about what it says on the packet – anything that comes in 7g sachets will be fine)
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (if your sun-dried tomatoes or olives come in good olive oil, you can use that for extra flavour)
400ml cold water
more olive oil, for drizzling
fine sea salt
handful of sun-dried tomatoes
handful of olives
fresh rosemary

Method:

If you’re making this in a mixer, pop your flour, salt, yeast, oil, and water in the bowl and start mixing on the slowest speed. Once it’s all combined, turn it up to a low-medium speed and let it mix for around 5-7 minutes. When you’re finished, leave the dough in the bowl and cover it with cling film. If you’re doing it by hand, put all the same ingredients in a large bowl but only use 300ml of the water. Mix it together with a wooden spoon to begin with, and when it comes together as a batter, gradually add your last 100ml water, working it in. Then you’re going to have to move to hand-kneading – I find that coating your hands in olive oil first stops the dough from sticking to you so badly. Knead it in the bowl for about five minutes, by stretching it up to shoulder height. When it starts to come together you can tip it out and knead it on an oiled surface for another five minutes. After you have finished, oil the bowl you started with, pop the dough back in, and cover it with cling film. Either way, leave in a warm place for an hour.
Line a large baking tray with parchment paper and then grease it with a little olive oil (I use a 33x20cm brownie tin for this, but size isn’t too important as long as it’s fairly large. You can also make two smaller loaves if you prefer). Oil your hands, tip the dough onto the baking tray, and flatten it out so that it reaches all the corners and sides. Cover and leave to prove for another hour.
Heat your oven to 220C/ 200C fan/ gas 6. With oiled fingers, poke your sun-dried tomatoes, olives, and sprigs of rosemary into the surface of your dough, pressing them right down so they don’t spring out during baking. Drizzle the whole thing with plenty of olive oil, sprinkle it with salt (the good stuff, Maldon or Cornish), and then bake it for around 20-25 minutes or until it’s golden and risen with a firm crust and the smell of fresh bread is driving everyone in your house crazy.

White Chocolate, Cranberry, and Pistachio Fudge

25th November 201625th November 20169 Comments

So, it’s exactly one month until Christmas day. Also, it’s a month minus two days until my birthday, in case you were wondering. You weren’t? You don’t care about my neglected and forgotten ill-timed December birthday? How very dare you and so on.

I always worry about Christmas presents. I am slightly uneasy with the consumerist mindset of buying loads of people loads of stuff that they don’t necessarily want in an arbitrary way. I know there are dozens of local charities that need my money more than my uncle needs a new sweater. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I buy things and I like giving gifts: I think Christmas can be a great opportunity to treat someone to something they have been really wanting or needing. But the fact is that you don’t necessarily know everyone in your ‘gift circle’ well enough to get them that perfect, meaningful, useful, lusted after Thing. And you feel rude showing up to someone’s house empty handed, especially when you know that they will have bought you a present. So you panic (or I do, at least) and end up buying them some perfume, or a book, or a gift voucher. And it’s well-meant, and I’m sure it’s appreciated. But it’s not necessarily something they really needed or wanted. And don’t we all just have too much stuff anyway?

I am also, to put it mildly, not exactly burdened by the weight of huge wads of cash. I simply can’t afford to go buying glamourous and exotic presents for every person who I’d like to show I care about at this time of year. The obvious solution is to do what I did last year and make a load of food instead. Yes, you are correct: this is my solution to all problems. But it made sense. I spent days making lots of gift food and packaging it all up in hampers for friends and family. It was less expensive than buying everyone proper presents, and while you don’t know if people are going to have already read that book you bought them, you can be confident that at some point they would probably like to eat some food.

This year, though, I’m doubting myself. Don’t home-made presents stop being desirable and adorable once the giver is past the age of six? What if everyone already has far too much food at this time of year and they’re gritting their teeth and smiling politely while inwardly groaning at having even more to get through? Will I look like a cheapskate giving people this stuff when they’ve actually spent proper money on gifts for my husband and I? Surely people are sick of me giving them food when I literally do that all the time?

I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. There isn’t a proper conclusion to this post.

Except this recipe for white chocolate, cranberry, and pistachio fudge. This is the sort of thing that would make a charming and thoughtful gift for people around the festive season. Or would it? I don’t know. Help me.

It’s really tasty though. I can attest to that because I ate a lot of it this week. Well, I did before I had my wisdom tooth taken out. Now I can’t really eat anything.

Notes: Obviously you can add any fruit, nuts, or chocolate you like. But this, believe me, is a winning combination.

I have a thermometer for testing the temperature of meat and sugar and things like that. I’m not pretending it’s not useful here – they are not expensive and if you do any cooking on a regular basis they are a good investment – but you can most definitely make this fudge without a sugar thermometer if you don’t have one to hand.

This is actually an incredibly simple and easy recipe, but it does require your fairly undivided attention for around twenty minutes. Listen to a podcast or something while you stir.

Ingredients:

500g double cream
500g golden caster sugar (gives it a better colour and flavour, I think, but white caster will work if that’s all you have)
3 tbsp liquid glucose (this sounds like a frightening ingredient but Dr Oetker do tubes of it you can get from Sainsburys)
1 tsp salt
100g good white chocolate (I like Green & Black’s)
75 shelled pistachios
100g dried cranberries

Method:

Put your cream, sugar, and liquid glucose into a big (this is important, a small one will not work), non-stick saucepan. Stir it all together and pop the pan on a low-medium heat so that the sugar can melt. Stir it occasionally (I find a silicone spatula works best for this) and make sure it’s not catching on the bottom. Meanwhile, grease and line a 20cm square tin with baking parchment. Chop your chocolate into big chunks. Chop your pistachios coarsely. Have your cranberries ready to go. Get a spoon and a glass of cold water and keep it by your pan, or get a sugar thermometer ready.
When the sugar has melted and the mixture no longer seems grainy, whack that heat up and boil your fudge mixture hard. Now you have to keep stirring all the time. This is why a big pan is needed, because it’s a lot of mixture and it will be bubbling and splashing around and you don’t want it all over everything (especially your hands, because it will burn you – wear an oven glove if you are nervous). You need to keep bubbling it away until it reaches soft ball stage, or around 118C. To test for soft ball stage, spoon a little mixture into your glass of water and it should form a soft ball you can squidge between your fingers. It will take a good ten or fifteen minutes – depending on your heat and pan – to get to this stage, so make sure you have reached it or your fudge won’t set.
When you’re there, take it off the heat. Stir in your cranberries, pistachios, and salt, and keep stirring for five minutes to let the mixture cool and thicken. Scatter in your white chocolate, stir roughly once, and immediately tip your fudge mixture into your lined tin and smooth it out – your white chocolate will melt and marble slightly, but if you over-stir it then it will just melt entirely into the mix (which will still taste good but look less pretty).
Your fudge should start setting pretty much immediately. I left mine on the counter for half an hour, then froze it for half an hour, and it set completely in the hour. When you’re happy, cut it into squares. It will keep for a couple of months (as long as you don’t let me anywhere near it), but don’t leave it in the fridge because it will go soft.

Double Chocolate Banana Bread

30th October 201630th October 20163 Comments

It’s very weird that it’s taken me so long to post this recipe, because this chocolate banana bread is the thing I bake more often than anything else. Even more than brownies. James’s work snack of choice is banana bread, and every couple of weeks I made a this loaf, slice it up, and freeze it so that he can take a piece out every morning. I actually buy more bananas than I know we can eat for the purpose of letting some of them go past their best in order to turn them into banana bread. I fear I am missing the point of fruit.

Banana bread has sort of gained an unearned reputation for being a healthier choice. I do have a recipe for spelt banana bread which is sort of ‘healthy’ (as it uses spelt and wholemeal flours, greek yoghurt, and maple syrup, rather than white flours and caster sugar) but it’s still, inescapably, cake. Banana bread, you guys, is cake. Let’s not be fooled by the fruit contained within and the sober sounding ‘bread’ in the title. Baking it in a bread tin does not make it bread. It’s no more virtuous than a Victoria sponge. Especially not when you do what I have done here and stuff it with chocolate. But why wouldn’t you? It’s so tasty.

It is a delight of a cake. It’s moist, decadent, and full of flavour. It’s very easy to make, and would be a fun, simple one to do with kids. It keeps beautifully, even if you don’t freeze it. You can make it with whatever chocolate you like, or mix it up and add nuts. None of the ingredients are obscure. I’ve drizzled the pictured banana bread with melted white chocolate, but this step could certainly be skipped.

You could even keep up the charade and pretend it’s healthy because it has bananas in it, if it will make you feel better. I won’t tell.

Source: Recipe adapted from the ever-excellent Smitten Kitchen.

Notes: This, and indeed any banana bread, will not work unless your bananas are very ripe. They can be over-ripe, almost completely black-skinned, but they can’t be firm and green.

You can use any type of chocolate for the chunks in the banana bread, but I love baked white chocolate and like the contrast between the dark cake and the pale chocolate here.

Ingredients:

3 large ripe bananas
115 grams butter, melted
150 grams light brown soft sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
125 grams plain flour
40g cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
100g white chocolate

50g white chocolate for drizzle (optional)

Method:

Put your butter on to melt gently. Heat your oven to 170C/ 150C fan/ gas 3. Grease a non-stick loaf tin. Mash your bananas in the bottom of a large bowl – if they are ripe enough, you should just be able to attack them with an electric hand whisk. Whisk in the melted butter, light brown soft sugar, egg, and vanilla. Place a sieve over the bowl and weigh the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt into it, then sift them over the wet mixture. Break your 100g chocolate into squares and add to the bowl. Fold everything together until only just combined, but do not mix further.
Pour your batter into your loaf tin and bake for around 40 mins, or until the banana bread is risen, firm, and passes the skewer test. Let cool in the tin for around 20 mins, then turn it out to cool completely (or just cut chunks off and stuff it into your mouth when it’s warm, as I definitely do not do every time). If finishing it with more white chocolate, simply melt the chocolate and drizzle over the cake, then leave to set at room temperature.