Sometimes Only Cake Will Do

I love baking and I love cake but made a conscious decision to indulge in less of both this year seeing as it's both an expensive and fattening hobby. Mostly it's been okay, though I'll make a birthday cake for anyone who'll accept one at the moment, but some days really demand cake. Yesterday was just such a day so seemed like the perfect time to use up some of the pre baking ban ingredients slowly passing their best in the cupboard. I was looking for something inspired to do with cherries and coconut but didn't really find anything, what I did find was an exciting chocolate cake recipe. Exciting because it involves marmalade and I've stopped buying bread too (not eating cake is pointless if you eat lots of toast with Nutella on it instead) so have a stock pile of jam and marmalade awaiting inspiration.

Marmalade brownies are a favourite but the beauty of this cake is all the same flavours with less ingredients and possibly a shade less trouble. It's a Nigella recipe from 'How To Be  A Domestic Goddess' because often when you want cake nobody else delivers quite like she does. This one is called Store-Cupboard Chocolate-Orange Cake - which is the worst thing about it (I'm sorry but it's a terrible name) because it's made with things you tend to have around. The name gives no indication of the lush rich chocolate and orange flavour, the yielding dampness, the aromatic splendour, and the all round gorgeousness of this cake which manages to be both decadently rich and very hard to stop eating.

Chocolate Marmalade Cake.

125g unsalted butter 

100g dark chocolate

150g caster sugar

300g good marmalade (Nigella says thin cut, I only had thick cut)

pinch of salt

2 large eggs (beaten)

150g self raising flour

Preheat the oven to gas 4 or 180 degrees C and put the butter in a heavy bottomed sauce pan on a low heat to melt. Butter and flour a 20 cm springform cake tin. When the butter is nearly done add the chocolate leave for a moment to soften and then remove from the heat and stir until all smooth and melted. Add the marmalade, sugar, salt, and beaten eggs. Stir until everything is coming together nicely and then add the flour and beat till smooth. Pour into the cake tin and bake for 50 mins or until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool for a few minutes before releasing from the tin. Good warm as well as cold this is basically a well baked brownie with a bit of spring in it. 

The chocolate seems to do something to the marmalade, it loses its bitterness leaving an intense orange flavour, because I used thick cut there are chunks of peel that still have a marmalade hit though, I feel that this adds a certain sophistication and wouldn't change it. It isn't the prettiest looking cake but I have to say again - it's delicious. 

Nigella says you can substitute the marmalade for the jam of your choice, and most excitingly for puréed prunes, I'm looking for an excuse to bake this again soon. 

The Cake

The Cake will continue to be referred as The Cake in honour of it's epic nature. It was baked by my sister (something of a cake diva) and is the Rococoa cake from Nigella Lawson's 'Feast'. The recipe albeit including a picture covers four pages and can be found here, although as ever with Nigella (and this is why I like her) the instructions are easy to follow. The process can be made a little simpler by buying chocolate loaf cakes rather than baking your own sponge. Sister baked everything from scratch. 

This is a cake she's wanted to make for a couple of years but it needs 24 hours chilling time, feeds a small army, has a full shopping list of ingredients, and so, in short, calls for quite an occasion. I flatter myself that I provided just the excuse she's been looking for (although it's possible that the other people coming round for dinner also had something to do with it). 

The end result was delicious (though terrifyingly rich, it's as well there were lots of us, Nigella says serves 10 -12, we think The Cake did a bit more than that) so well worth all Sister's effort, the Scottish one and I contributed the marzipan cherubs (he modelled them I made the fig leaves and did the gilding - we didn't have much gold leaf to hand so although it looks messy in the picture the overall effect was attractively antiqued - honest.)

To eat The Cake is basically a super chocolaty sort of tiramisu and very much recommended for anyine who has the time and patience to put it together.

Not exactly perfect but...

I made biscuits – specifically St Patrick’s Day themed biscuits – shamrock/clover shaped affairs for the benefit of the blonde who I hoped would be impressed. She was convincingly enthusiastic so I feel pretty chuffed which is just as well because getting the green off everything is going to be a whole new challenge.

I’ve been eying up ‘The Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits’ for a while. I don’t think I’ll be buying it (but wouldn’t turn my nose up at a copy if anyone wanted to give me a present) it’s such a very pretty book with some stunning ideas, but this kind of decorating takes a lot of time, a lot of patience, and a steady hand. I hope I’ve picked up enough hints from my covert browsing to have a go at basic stuff but honestly don’t have the patience or steadiness of hand required (the time is a whole other issue).

My biscuit recipe was from Nigella’s ‘How To Be A Domestic Goddess’ (I think they’re called cut out biscuits or butter biscuits or something very like – either way I can eat a lot of them and they hold their shape well) but I imagine any much loved biscuit formula would do the trick – and now for my distilled decorating knowledge – we can all have green sticky kitchens now.

Having made biscuit dough, chilled biscuit dough, rolled it out, squidged it back together, and cut out biscuit dough before finally baking into biscuits and allowing to cool - mix your icing. It should be royal icing which it seems easiest to buy in packets you just add water to (no raw egg to poison myself with thank you very much). Ignore the instructions on the packet – they are only a distraction. For each colour in the design (see how I did a green on green with only green thing – it’s because it was easy that way) there needs to be some thickish icing to pipe an outline in and much thinner flooding icing. That’s icing thick enough to write with and dry fast, and far thinner than I imagined icing that wants to be able to ‘flood’. It helps to have a vast array of icing bags, nozzles and little squeezy tube things to put icing in. The icing goes a lot further than I expected it to – this never happens with cakes.

Edible (or at least non toxic) glitter is the baking equivalent of candlelight. It makes everything pretty and covers up an icing technique I can most kindly describe as naive (I need a lot more practice okay- I admit that). I will be getting more glitter.

The icing will make the biscuits a bit soft – when it’s basically dry re-bake in a low oven (about 100°C) for 10 minutes or so to crisp them back up.

That’s it – that’s what I’ve learned. I want to make Easter biscuits for friends and family – so let me assure you would be recipients that if I do this it’s a lot more effort that buying an egg, so even though I’m blatantly embarking on this project so I can purchase more squeezy bottles and cookie cutters (love them) and will obviously be enjoying myself – it really is all about you!

Capsule Cookbooks – part 2

So much for the cookbooks that I could at a push do without – though they give me a lot of pleasure and almost as much inspiration... What’s on the shelf that’s indispensable? (Indispensable being a loose term here obviously because really all these books are a lovely luxury.)

Ever since I got it last summer I’ve been devoted to Niki Segnit’s ‘The Flavour Thesaurus’. It’s become a key to all my other cookbooks; take one ingredient, look for combinations, find a recipe in one of those many contenders – but better than that (and it would be pretty good if that was all it did) it’s also a great read, lovely to look at, and contains a few good recipes as well. It’s the perfect book for the semi confident cook like me; I like a bit of direction and Segnit does it so well – I’m maybe such a fan because her two key flavours approach is particularly friendly to wine matching and that makes things easier for me too.

Another newish book is ‘River Cottage Every Day’ which was a Christmas present from my sister a year ago. So far it’s been all about the baking, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there. Ideologically the River Cottage way (and sometimes it does feel a little like a cult – but I mean that nicely) is one that appeals to me. Fresh, seasonal, home grown or sustainably sourced – basically food with thought behind it, and all very makeable as well – nothing that the harassed wine merchant/book blogger can’t deal with at the end of the day as long as she’s prepared to get her hands dirty from time to time.

And whilst I’m on the subject of River Cottage there are the handbooks. I love this series and actually think they’re all indispensable. It’s not just food it’s an entire way of life from foraging to fishing via baking and preserving with a bit of gardening. If I was going to be stranded on an island these are the books I’d be hoping would wash up in a packing case and happily if I was going to limit myself to only ten cook books (hell will freeze over first) I could totally cheat the odds with these because so far all but two arguably fall into different categories. Pam Corbin’s ‘Preserves’ and Daniel Stevens ‘Bread’ are the two which are absolutely cookbooks, and I love both of them. ‘Preserves’ has made my kitchen far, far, stickier and jam making has become a bit of a passion, although that’s just the tip of the iceberg. ‘Bread’ isn’t the first bread book I’ve bought (I also have a Ballymaloe version, and actually other books about preserving) but what both of these books have in spades are good clear instructions, and good clear explanations of why you do what they ask. It’s an approach that appeals to my pragmatic learning style, the results have been excellent and they’re not going to be easy books to supersede.

I can’t imagine my kitchen without Nigella Lawson (I’m a child of my times) but though I have all her books – because basically I just can’t help myself – the one that I use more than any other is ‘How To Be A Domestic Goddess’. Hardly surprising given that I’m no stranger to the dark art of baking. There’s something about the philosophy behind this particular book, as well as the absolute reliability of the recipes that makes me think this will always be a great fall back book. It’s certainly been upping my calorie count for the last decade.

I’ve had ‘The Art of the Tart’ (Tamasin Day–Lewis) for almost as long and despite not having a good hand for pastry it’s been responsible for some great tart’s and some awful jokes. I have lots, though not all, of Tamasin Day-Lewis’ books but seldom have the time to use them properly; her thing seems to be food that demands a certain amount of time and pottering, perfect if you have a weekend to spend gossiping in the kitchen whilst giving something the odd stir before unveiling an amazing meal for 8. Not so good when you’re at work till 9pm and back for 9am. Still I can dream/hope and there’s something pleasingly grown up about these books, also once you’ve created your tart it’s very friendly to the work late start early cycle that I can’t seem to escape.

Claudia Roden is another food writer who’s left her mark on me. ‘A New Book of Middle Eastern Food’ (another Christmas present from my sister who’s getting good at this) is a classic that’s not especially pretty to look at but is packed full of not just food but history and culture. For my cooking life Mediterranean food with an emphasis on Italian has been in the ascendancy. It’s all balsamic this and a pinch of fresh basil that, which at one time must have been a nice change from French cuisine but is now so bloody ubiquitous that discovering first middle eastern food and then a whole lot of other culinary cultures (including French) was a real revelation. And delicious.

Better even than Claudia Roden however is Jane Grigson, all her books are fantastic but the ‘Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book’ and ‘Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book’ are hard to beat. Arranged (just in case anyone’s missed out on these) alphabetically by fruit etc each chapter does sweet, savoury, and history. These are books which absolutely fire the imagination with the romance and promise of mulberries, damsons, pomegranates, carrots...

Which would leave me one book left and I think it’s got to be another newish one Susannah Blake’s ‘Afternoon Tea Parties’ because right now this is very much the kind of thing I love; home grown, a little bit vintage, not to formal, fun, decorative – basically indulgent.

Nigella v Hugh

Thursday night whilst I was settling in front of the television for an hour or so of thinking about getting round to the ironing I was disturbed by a text message asking if I too though the background music on ‘Nigella’s Kitchen’ was to reminiscent of a porn film. I wasn’t qualified to answer because a) I don’t watch porn – unless you count Nigella, but as I understand it licking your fingers whilst wearing a cardigan is pretty innocent behaviour, and b) I was watching ‘River Cottage Everyday’ at the time.

Thanks to channel 4’s helpful habit of repeating everything an hour later, and BBC iPlayer this isn’t such a problem – but really why on earth schedule my two favourite cooks against each other? Momentary irritation was soon forgotten listening to the lovely Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall wax lyrical about the joys of mussels but it’s all come back to me today.

Sunday (as you might well have noticed) is my day for cleaning the kitchen before turning it back into a bombsite post bake, considering housework before escaping to mooch around John Lewis and Waterstone’s, and realising that I’ve not done anything really useful and it’s time for bed again. After years of practice I’ve got it down to a fine art but today’s rain is making the walk into town really unattractive and looking for inspiration in the kitchen has ended up in a replay of the Hugh v Nigella dilemma.

It normally does come down to one or other of these two. I love Nigella’s what the hell add more butter attitude – perfect for a Sunday afternoon treat (and Monday evening, Tuesday lunch, Wednesday breakfast...) I like how easy she makes things too, but then Hugh – well he has a twinkle in his eye as well, and theoretically his small holding ethos is nearer to my heart. Realistically Nigella’s brand of chocolate covered domestic goddessery often wins out over wholemeal goodness, but then I like the get your hands properly dirty attitude that comes with river cottage. Choices, choices – because after all Hugh seems to like chocolate too, and Nigella isn’t all double cream; the truth is that my ideal lifestyle would be some sort of unholy combination of the two.

Today river cottage won out and I made Chelsea bus from Handbook number 3 ‘Bread’ (by Daniel Stevens) which by the by is another thing I really like about both outfits. Nigella (with her collection of 4000, count ‘em 4000 cookbooks!) frequently credits other cooks with influences coming from all over, and possibly my favourite thing about the River Cottage books are the handbooks. A whole community of people all adding fresh voices and ideas to the brand. ‘Bread’ is another one I’ve taken away for holiday reading and I can testify to the quality of the buns I made today, and the basic bread recipe I’ve made almost enough times to graduate onto something more complicated.

The Blonde and I have a plan to spend a Sunday making bagels – for me this means spending some serious time comparing and contrasting different recipes and if there are any major variations between them we plan to take one each and see what happens, and unless they’re absolutely the same chances are it’ll be Nigella’s on the one hand and Mr Stevens on the other...

Sundays

Sundays do tend to be about food round my way and today has been no exception. Yesterday the blonde and I headed out to the country to inspect the new house of a teacher friend and fellow Bridgewater fan (whatever else was moving chaos the tea was impeccably turned out) the house is great with a very promising garden, not however as promising as the teachers fathers garden... It has a lot of fruit trees – several kinds of apples, some really good plums, and a damson all gave up their best for us. So fecund were they that even the fact that I was wearing heals didn’t stop me getting bags of fruit. I’ve got some serious plans for all this fruit, now all I need to do is get organised before it goes over.

My last foraging expedition was a couple of Sundays ago when the Scottish one and I went out hunting for blackberries, I baked some into an apple and blackberry version of Apple pudding cake (I seem to remember we liked it!) but the majority went into blackberry whisky (one big jar half filled by 70cl of cheap whisky, 200g of sugar and as many blackberries as it took to fill the rest of the jar). The Scottish one tested it today and has declared it delicious (hopefully my turn soon) with no sign of secondary fermentation (the original Dom Perignon and I have both had problems with this – in my case with homemade mincemeat which is a bit less glamorous than his Champagne experiments) and so we’re hoping to find enough blackberries to make more, possibly using brown sugar which I hope will add another layer of complexity and general deliciousness to the overall flavour.

Today however is about cheesecake – made by request for lunch. I’ve not made a cheesecake for years and had vaguely remembered it being a slightly complicated process. It’s not. This is a version of a Nigella chocolate and lime cheesecake but mine is a lot smaller, lunch was only for 4 and there’s only so much left over cheesecake a person can eat without slipping into a larger dress size. I’m not sure how fashionable cheesecake is these days but it tastes as good as it ever did so here’s the recipe (for the original and probably best see ‘Nigella Bites’ or possibly her website)

1 packet of crunchy chocolate chip cookies – double choc chip won’t go amiss (150g)

40g of butter

100g caster sugar

2 whole eggs + 1 egg yolk

2 tubs (400g) cream cheese (might as well be the light version)

Juice of 2 ½ limes

1 small (17cm) springform cake tin needs to be made as waterproof as possible. It needs a sheet of tinfoil big enough to cover the base of the tin (Inside, and clipped into place by the sides) and to wrap up almost to the top of the outside of the tin. A second sheet of tinfoil wrapped around the outside of the tin should then do the trick.

Next the biscuits should be blitzed into a powder, then the butter added and the whole lot blitzed again into a buttery crumby ball. Spread this on the base of the prepared tin and put in the fridge to harden.

Set the oven to 180°, boil a kettle, and dig out a roasting tin big enough to fit the cake tin with room to spare round all the edges.

Whip the cream cheese until smooth, add the sugar and beat again, then add the eggs and lime juice, poor the gloopy limey mix into the prepared tin and place it in the roasting tin, half fill the tin with boiling water (and definitely below the level of the tinfoil!) put the whole lot – very carefully – into the oven and bake for about an hour. It should basically look set but with the hint of wobble to it.

Immediately remove as much foil as possible without undoing the sides and leave to cool on a rack – when it’s properly cool put in the fridge, still in the tin, for 2 or 3 hours (minimum) to make sure it’s well set and then eat.

Sunday

This has been quite a day for me – I’ve become a god mother (which I’m really excited by), my god son is a paragon of every virtue (he didn’t cry once) and I’ve publicly renounced Satan and all his temptations – which I feel pretty good about. It has been a little bit distracting though so I’m not in the mood to write about E F Benson’s ‘Mrs Ames’ which was plan A, plan B is in a roundabout way about rearranging my kitchen.

Another (less momentous) landmark passed this week – my collection of virago books reached the 200 score. Since last month’s influx of books I’ve been trying to catch up rather than acquire, but good charity shop finds can’t be ignored and the 200 mark is one I was a little bit keen to pass. In for a penny in for a pound and all that – so when I saw the new Nigella book half price in Waterstone’s I couldn’t resist. I honestly meant to wait until Christmas for this one, but her books have almost totemic status in my kitchen and ‘Kitchen’ (Recipes from the heart of the home) is a more than worthy addition to the canon.

‘Kitchen’ has been my bedtime reading for the last couple of nights and the first thing it’s made me do is act on some long held but half formed plans to organise my own kitchen rather better. The Scottish one got to spend Saturday night in town helping me scrub down the top of the fridge and generally shift and carry, and this is the thing I most love about Nigella. On television I find it hard to warm to her, I don’t doubt that she’s a voluptuous and lovely woman (I saw her once at a book signing, I’ve never in my life seen such a long queue of bashful looking men – all clutching baking books) but I don’t see much of my own life in those programmes, that and they feel a bit over staged.

The books are a different thing altogether. I really like the woman in-between these pages, and perhaps more to the point I trust her (who could help but trust someone who confesses to having over 4000 cookbooks, I mean I thought my collection was getting out of control...) I love these cookbooks because they are precisely that – books full of ideas for people who like to cook, nothing chefy, nothing I feel like I couldn’t tackle, nothing I feel I can’t tinker with if I want to change it. These are things which matter to me – I’m an enthusiastic but not terribly skilled cook, the right guide gives me the confidence to try things I might otherwise avoid – which in turn gives me more skills. Cooking and sharing food is something that makes me happy, and I also share this sentiment entirely “a kitchen however inadequate or alien, has the ability to make you feel once you’ve cooked in it a few times, as though you’ve marked out some safe and reassuring place of your own.”

There are no shortage of days which make me feel like a safe and reassuring place is exactly where I want to be and my kitchen is for me just that place (even more so than under the duvet on a dark and stormy night), especially after my rearrange and now that I can see work surface again. It’s also really nice to read someone who’s serious about their food, but happy to have a trashy, kitschy element to it – Nigella never makes me feel judged for liking things I probably shouldn’t (like Fry’s Creams).

The call of the kitchen.

My mother called me earlier (as I was walking past a jewellers, which is appropriate as she’s the kind of glamorous blonde who can smell out a diamond at fifty paces, and can clearly sense her daughters proximity to same) and after discussing plans for the weekend which involved such unlikely phrases as ‘I might want to leave a shotgun under your bed’ she said she thought I should write about something other than books for a change. So Just for my mum (and not because she’s apparently armed) I’m going to write about cake, okay so it’s not much of a change, but it is a particularly good cake.

I found the recipe in Nigella Lawson’s ‘Feast’ which is also where the Guinness cake (although I prefer my sisters much more chocolaty version) hailed from. It’s definitely thanks to said sisters very impressive culinary efforts that I’ve revisited this book which despite my being a general Nigella fan is not one I turn to often, probably because I seldom get to cook for large numbers of people and ‘Feast’ suggests a crowd. There’s a lesson in this for me about not judging a book by its cover (or title), or even in judging a recipe by the section it comes under.

The item in question is ‘Rosemary Remembrance Cake’ which I found under funeral feasts, and I was inclined towards making it because I liked the Victorian connotations of anything to do with the language of flowers. (It was partly an homage to Cornflower after her picture challenge, and also because she does such a wonderful line in recipe and book matching.) Anybody who knows me will find it hard to believe that chocolate cake is not necessarily my favourite, but it’s true, and I think this is one of the best cakes I’ve ever made.

Most like a Madeira cake it turned out a lovely mixture of moist and springy on the inside, with a sugar crunchy top. The rosemary flavour isn’t in the least overpowering, but does make it a great cake to have with tea. It’s also made me want to experiment some more with flavoured sugars, I think a subtly rosemary flavoured syrup would turn this into an amazing drizzle cake. Anyway without further ado this is the Link to the recipe – I did nothing to change it, and if mine was only almost as pretty as the one in the picture it was still a mighty handsome cake. Now back to the kitchen for me – I’m off to make jam before the fruit flies descend on the bargain raspberries I got on the market today, and before my will to sterilise jars totally disappears. It’s a favourite of my mum’s and I want to keep her happy...