Panettone and Hidden Chocolate Bread & Butter Pudding

Christmas time yields countless gifts, not least of which is the flurry of foods you only end up eating at this time of year. Like memories of ripe fruit from childhood, the recollection of these festive flavours is preserved in semi-perfection over the intervening year due to their short window of consumption. Like the Christmas tunes flooding the airwaves from the beginning of the month, they are welcomed in our house with open arms… (Though after a few weeks of these, you are happy to wave them off again.) Mince pies, pigs in blankets, turkey and stuffing, Christmas pud, Kirsty McColl & The Pogues… I love them all.*

In my perfect gingerbread house, the super-soft pillows would be made of rich, aromatic panettone. Light, buttery and filled with candied peel and dried fruit, choirs of (Italian) Christmas angels might have conceived this celestial sponge. A Christmas hit in our house, the BSG and I love it with Nutella for breakfast, a hot drink at teatime or a glass of sweet liqueur later. Quite frankly, it doesn’t stand a chance of lasting more than a few days. Should hell freeze over and stale leftovers remain once Christmas is over (fresh works too in case you can’t wait), then it makes the best bread and butter pudding out – a sneaky one to slip in just before any January detoxing…

For extra festive, sprinkle with icing sugar before serving and lace the layers with a few shakes of Gran Marnier for grown-ups.

Merry Christmas!

 

 

You need (Serves 2)

 

2 small round ovenproof dishes of ramekins, buttered

A couple of slices of panettone (whatever you have left, cut into rounds)

A few squares of good dark chocolate.  Green & Black’s Maya Gold works.

1 egg

160 ml whole milk

1 tablespoon caster sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Grand Marnier (optional)

 

Preheat the oven to 160C. Lay your panettone pieces in the buttered dishes and tuck a couple of squares of chocolate in amongst the layers. Beat the egg and other ingredients together in a bowl and pour evenly over the bread so it comes up the sides. Sprinkle the tops with brown granulated sugar if you like, for a little extra crunch. Put a dish on the oven shelf, with the 2 ramekins inside it and carefully pour boiling water into the larger dish so it comes at least halfway up their sides. Bake for 20-25 minutes until just set.

Serve with creme fraiche or yogurt to cut through the richness, with the essential Christmas clementine on the side.

*Give amazing little sprouts a chance: they’re not just for Christmas, but for the whole winter.

Chelsea Snail Buns

We had grand plans for yesterday, but then the weather reverted to recent form, so we ensconced ourselves in the brilliantly local and cosy Parlour for breakfast (more about that soon), watched the mizzle draw across the window like a lace curtain and shortened our agenda. Better to be realistic, surely, when the elements are winning. I mean, how long can it last…?

The result of our brainstorming over coffee, Bircher muesli and unlimited toast with lemon curd: a spell of long-overdue exercise in the gym and a batch of home-baked Chelsea buns.

I probably should have consulted baking legends Paul Hollywood and Dan Lepard on the bun formula, but yesterday I thought I’d ask my Panasonic bread-maker manual. A great hulk of white plastic, there is nothing pretty about this gadget, which lurks on the counter – in fact it may be even too large to call it that – it is, rather, an appliance. When we bought it four years ago we were told that we’d never use it, that it’d be on Gumtree within a month or in the attic gathering dust until our grandchildren found it.

Always in the back of my mind lurks a desire to prove the naysayers wrong, so as a consequence, this weekend was a particularly pleasing one. We kicked off on Friday with homemade pizzas (made with wholemeal bread flour in the absence of white), especially thin and crispy, the crust bubbled in spots, slathered with a tomato and anchovy sauce and combos of our favourite things. Thank you, bread-maker, for your 45 minute bout of kneading and pummelling to elastic-y wondrousness (honestly, I wouldn’t want to be a lump of dough in that thing).

Flicking through the machine’s manual, largely ignored but for aforementioned pizza dough and our favourite loaf recipes, its pages stuck together in places, I lighted upon the Chelsea Bun formula. Slightly daunting, the prospect of having a whole batch of these in a tin in the kitchen when they are supposed to be a one-off treat a safe distance away at the baker’s. Clearly there would be a time limit on optimal consumption too… which amounts to a few hours after baking as it turns out (they’re becoming more and more bullet-like as today continues, sorry BSG, but they could be gone before you get home).

This soft enriched dough resembles a starter as it is airy – in short, it has a beautiful life of its own, so don’t beat it about too much as you roll it out. This will mean it’ll spread nicely in the tin. As well as the fruit and spice mix ‘spread’, I certainly recommend adding a little diced stem ginger. I am not sure that there won’t be marmalade and chocolate chips in there too, next time. Baffled as to why the dough Catherine wheels were meant to sit together in a sandwich tin with sides, I now understand. On my low baking tray, they were prone to unravelling, rather than keeping the goodies inside their coils as they baked and rose into one another. The results were no less delicious, but perhaps more ‘garden path’ than ‘garden party’ Viennoiserie.

Practice makes perfect, I suppose, but this first attempt has left a tantalising enough taste in our mouths to want to try again. Next up, hot-cross buns. Why on earth not? It’s nearly Easter, after all.

If you have a bread maker (which makes super light work of creating the perfect conditions for your dough) the formula is below, from the gospel according to Panasonic. If you don’t have a great placcy lump dominating your kitchen (besides the fridge, of course), try Paul Hollywood’s recipe out for size.

Chelsea Buns

Dough

½ tsp yeast
250g strong white flour
1 tsp sugar
25g butter
tbsp milk powder
½ tsp salt
1 medium egg
100 ml water

Topping

15g butter
100g mixed dried fruit, stem ginger, chocolate chips, etc
50g soft brown sugar
1 tsp mixed spice

Once the dough is ready (you want to use the dough setting, whatever yours is), knead it lightly and roll it out to an oblong 26 x 20 cm.

Melt the butter and brush it over the dough. Mix the topping ingredients together and scatter evenly over the top, pressing the fruit in a bit. Roll it up from the long edge and cut into 8-10 slices.

Arrange these in a greased sandwich tin so they fit neatly and prove in the oven at 40C until doubled in size (approx. 20 mins).

Bake in a preheated oven at 220C for 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Cool on a rack and drizzle with glace icing.

 

 

A bread and butter pudding for the snow

Bread and butter: so simple, yet the stuff of childish dreams. As delicious-sounding in literature as any cake - especially when drawn from a wicker luncheon basket and laid out on a cloth with jam, or cold chicken and roast beef. Milly Molly Mandy and Billy Blunt gobbled all theirs up on their fishing excursion and it’s little wonder – all someone has to do is say those three words together and I am thinking of teatime (and forever of Grandpa, lord of the tea table with his packet of plain chocolate digestives – neatly secured each day with an elastic band).

Clearly, bread and butter pudding has less to do with butter than it does with bread (not to mention the eggs, sugar and milk) but the very fact that those two happily-wed words are in the recipe makes it a winner in my eyes. Last September on the eve of a friend’s wedding I was lucky enough to be party to his pre-wedding family dinner and thereby to the most fantasmical (that’s fantastic with an extra O) pudding. Although the portion control didn’t exist and my bowlful could have felled an adolescent elephant I nobly ate my way through, amongst the dairy every which way, a warm wedge of white chocolate and whisky bread & butter pudding. INCREDIBLE.

After a long walk on Saturday, or feet crumping through the fresh snow making dreams of mountain adventures, we felt we deserved a treat. This pudding, crisp on top and snowy light within was perfect foil to the conditions. It’s adapted from a recipe that uses croissants (which may be amazing – but I felt somewhat superfluous. After all, we’re supposed to be on some sort of regime until February)… I went in heavier on the whisky – on a medicinal bent you understand  -  yet lighter on the sugar, as we were all chilled to our cores and because white chocolate is sweet enough, thank you.

This is dedicated to my dear, pudding-partial Grandpa. He would have loved it, crowned with plenty of cream. He might have even had a second helping too.

Whisky and White Chocolate Bread & Butter Pudding

500ml milk
500ml double cream
A few drops of vanilla essence
3 eggs
5 egg yolks
150g caster sugar
8-10 slices of white bread, crusts removed and cut in half into triangles
25g sultanas
25g butter, melted
175g white chocolate, smashed into little pieces in its wrapper
4 tablespoons whisky
55g  marmalade (didn’t have apricot jam, but the extra orange taste is a winner)
icing sugar, to dust

Method

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6.

Pour the milk and cream into a pan, add the vanilla essence and bring slowly to the boil.
Crack the eggs into a mixing bowl with the egg yolks and sugar and beat together until pale and fluffy. This bit is actually quite important as your pudding will be light rather than stodgy.
Lay the bread over the base of an oblong ovenproof dish, slightly overlapping each piece. Sprinkle with the sultanas and pour over the melted butter.
When the cream mixture has reached boiling point, take it off the heat and allow it to cool slightly. Add the egg mixture and white chocolate to the cream and stir well. Leave for a few minutes to let the chocolate melt, stirring occasionally.
Add the whisky to the cream mixture and strain it all through a sieve over the bread. Let the bread soak it all up nicely, before covering the dish with foil.
Bake in the oven for 25-35 minutes, or until almost set.
Remove from the oven, coat the top with the marmalade and dust with icing sugar. Either brown the top with a cheffy blowtorch or place under a grill or into a hot oven for a few minutes before serving. Wait if you have to - it must be warm, not hot.

Packing for the beach: sand-proof picnic

Ah, the seaside. Sweeping views, breezes, sandcastles and picnics. You sit back, the sun on your face and the wind in your hair and let the fresh air permeate. Now time for lunch, you unwrap your carefully made sandwich (make sure it’s yours though, with the special mark you made – you don’t want the dry-looking one), bite into the soft roll and get the unmistakeable grind of sand between your teeth. How the devil did that get in there? Split seconds from cling-film to mouth - unbelievable!

It may be fun for building with and burying people in, but when it comes to food, sand is an evil grain with many cunning plans. If your chosen bite falls to the ground with a thuck, you can forget it; it is irretrievable (except maybe if you’re a dog, but I know some fussy dogs). No, for a worry-free shore-side lunch, you need to come up with food that exposes as little of itself as possible to this elements, but remains as exciting and varied as picnic food can be.

I think we may have found a solution.

 

Last Saturday was scorchio, so a secret seven hit our local beach at Brancaster. The unfathomable Brit beach-going rule that ‘the nearer the car park and toilets the better’* meant that we had a huge stretch of it pretty much to ourselves. Not ones to miss a picnic opportunity like this, we took some sandwiches - two, actually. And they were HUGE. We hadn’t so much made these as packed them: two loaf suitcases rammed with flavoursome delights, one all hunter-gatherer and the other perhaps a bit more metrosexual (well, it has more veg in it). Both were free from the mountain of cling-film hell and the guesswork that accompanies so many beach outings. In the battle against the sand invasion, these brutes are all the food you’ll need, I promise. They’re neat, they’re fun to make and a bit like cake, sharing one makes you feel you’re all at a party (there’s also something rather grown-up about bringing a chopping board to a picnic…)

The first, manlier of the two (but refined – like Tom Ford) was the Shooter’s Sandwich, which G had read about courtesy of Tim Hayward on the Guardian food blog earlier this year. Over came the link and down went the gauntlet. This comprised well-seasoned steaks cooked medium-rare, whipped straight out of the hot pan and laid into a hollowed-out long loaf, lined with mustard and/or horseradish and smothered in a savoury, duxelles-type thing. Once the mustard-slathered bread lid is replaced, the whole thing is wrapped in greaseproof paper and string, weighed down with books/saucepans of water/chopping boards and left in a cool place (you’d be amazed how much debate surrounded this particular stage at one in the morning – GCSE Physics, was it? Everyone was an expert.) After an uncomfortable night under the press, the precious package was richly squished with savoury juices and ready to be transported, carved and consumed. Minimum fuss: maximum excitement.

As we did it in a wine-fuelled frenzy in the wee hours I have no photos of the process, but here’s the ‘after’.

I more than made up for it the next morning when we started on the second sanger, based on a New Orleans invention, the Muffuletta. It is a picnic in a sandwich.

This involved a sundried tomato and olive mush made in the food processor with which we lined our hollow loaf, partnered with liberal glugs of green olive oil.

Then alternating layers of Parma ham, salami, Taleggio cheese and roasted red peppers were carefully added.

If I were to be really picky, it perhaps could have done with some more green in the form of avocados – but these would have quickly turned brown so perhaps courgettes and basil instead – I confess that I am prone to over-packing. Nevertheless, that’s the beauty of it: anything goes. To be honest, it would have benefited from the overnight torture the Shooter’s Sandwich had received, being a bit drier and less yielding (perhaps more olive oil required?) Who knows, but it was delicious, fun to build and sand-free. I am very much looking forward to experimenting with the next one.

*Two miles of wide, dune-backed beach and the 50 metres around the entrance is a labyrinth of windbreakers, killer stunt-kites** and orange Crocs.

**Having seen it with my own eyes, it is perfectly possible (probable) that such a stunt kite when badly driven is capable of grounding and swallowing a hefty teenage boy – especially when said bad driver is their dad. It is also absolutely hilarious; just ask his mother.

Egg in a cup.

(for Dave who is running around like a headless chicken setting up his show)

I am sure that every family has a hybridised recipe using these exact same ingredients, but this is ours, and it comes from my Granny Scraggs*. She and my mum have made it a signature dish in our family, ensuring that it will run through generations to come.

When we were small, this was what we ate for tea most often, when the four of us had been out playing too late or were overtired and not up for much else. Nevertheless, it always elicited squeals of excitement, usually preceded by a race down to Gran’s henhouse to collect the star ingredients.

Did everyone have those enormous china tea cups at the back of the kitchen cupboard, that no-one ever seemed to drink tea out of? Well, as far as we were concerned, they had this one extremely important purpose. Even now, using a substitute, a bowl, feels like cheating…

I have altered the volumes, for grown-ups (and I suppose the more responsible adults might want to use brown bread, which works too). It all depends on your appetite.

For a very quick and easy supper, you need

2 eggs
2 slices of soft white bread
Lightly salted butter, out of the fridge for a bit
Salt and pepper

Put the eggs in a pan of boiling water and cook for four and a half minutes or so. Meanwhile, butter your bread - if it tears, then all the better - fold in half and rip apart into chunks, about bite-sized. Place the bread in a wide cup (a bowl is more practical I suppose, but far less fun), then once the eggs are ready, take their lids off and scoop out the soft-boiled egg with a teaspoon, into the cup. Mash up all together with a fork, adding salt and pepper to taste.

You get lots of different bites in this cup, some yolky, some buttery. I would have thought that you could add Marmite, Tabasco, bits of cooked bacon, to your liking, but it is wonderful as it is – an enormous hug – in a cup.



* so-named after the place she lives rather than her lovely Christian name (I am responsible), and who makes the best fish pie in the world.