Frangipane Fly-Away Cakes

These aren’t pure frangipane, being more of a sponge/almond hybrid, so perhaps they should be called frangi-fairies.

Whatever you want to call them, they are light and delicious and are just the sort of thing you could rustle up with whatever you have in your dry cupboard, plus a quick dash to the local shop if absolutely necessary. They’ve come about as we desperately try, in our pre-move purge, to use up whatever happens to be languishing in a crumpled bag, stuffed into the back of the larder shelf - most probably past its sell-by date.

Using sis-in law Jemima’s failsafe sponge-cake formula, you match the flour/almond mix, sugar and butter weight to that of the eggs. Two eggs seemed to make batter for 6 good-sized fairies. However, following our Shed outing, I love the idea of 12 bite-sized versions - pixies if you like - nestled into twists of baking paper.

 

You need:

116g caster sugar

116g butter

2 eggs – (116g)

Drop of almond or vanilla essence

116g (50/50 self-raising flour and ground almonds)

Jam or marmalade (optional)

 

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees. Grease a muffin tin or use paper cases – or smaller twists of baking paper on a baking sheet.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one by one and incorporate, as well as the essence. Sift in the dry ingredients and fold in to combine.

Spoon the batter into the cases, adding a tiny blob of jam or marmalade to the middle of each, if you like.

Bake for 20-30 minutes depending on the size of the cake, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Serve warm from the oven if possible, with a fruit compote such as rhubarb.

Nigel’s Chocolate Muscovado Banana Cake

It’s rare that a banana is allowed to sit for long in my fruit bowl, let alone languish for long enough to go black. Which is, I suppose, where I went ever so slightly wrong with my version of Nigel Slater’s banana muscovado cake, dubbed ‘the best cake in the world’ by my sister-in-law, Rosie. Being mum to a two-year old, Rosie gets cake thrust at her by virtual strangers in most social situations, so I reckon she’d be a bit of an expert. Besides, any excuse to make banana bread, right?

This cake erred towards the bitter because I didn’t have the patience to wait for the bananas to freckle and darken or permeate the kitchen with their ever-so-slightly-binny note. However, heed the words of St Nigel, people: you have to let the fruit go black so it can sweeten. Perhaps if you have a two-year old or willing accomplice, get them to hide a bunch somewhere around the house for a few days. Oh and next time I’d probably use a dark chocolate less intense than 70%. But otherwise, it is tremendous – and just keeps getting sweeter and squidgier as the days go by. Like them bananas, this cake won’t be around for long.

 

 

Ingredients

 

250g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

125g softened butter

235g muscovado sugar

400g peeled ripe bananas

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 eggs

100g dark chocolate

 

Method

Line a non-stick loaf tin with baking paper (we’d run out so I greased mine and the cake came out fine). Preheat the oven to 180C.

Sift the flour and baking powder together. Using an electric mixer (plastic blade on my Magimix) cream the sugar and butter until fluffy and coffee-coloured.

Mash the bananas in a bowl until lumpy. Stir in the vanilla extract. Beat the eggs and add them to the butter and sugar mixture. If it curdles (mine did), just add a bit of flour.

Chop the chocolate into small pieces and fold them with the bananas into the batter. Follow with the flour, gently.

Scrape into the tin and bake for fifty minutes (mine took about an hour). Check to see if its ready with a metal skewer: if its moist but clean then the cake’s ready. If you need to cook it for longer and there is still wet mixture on the skewer, return the cake to the oven and cover with foil for the rest of the cooking.

When its out of the oven, leave the cake in the tin for 15 minutes, then loosen with a palette knife and lift (or turn) it from the tin. Leave to cool a bit longer and then peel off the paper. Serve in thick slices.

 

 

Original recipe from The Kitchen Diaries II by Nigel Slater, published by Fourth Estate, 2012.

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.

 

 

Clem and Rich’s Lemon Butter Wedding Cake

The BSG and I are in charge of the cake for my sister’s wedding. Just to clarify: we are making it, filling it, icing it, decorating it and then driving it the two and a half hours to Norfolk where we will assemble it.

Nervous? Not a bit.

Perhaps it has something to do with us having absolutely nil experience in that department. Some might call this a disadvantage, but it has meant that at every turn we have researched, checked and double-checked. Now, for example, I know not to put a freshly baked and cooled cake in the fridge. No sir, the fridge environment is the nemesis of a light and airy sponge, making it dense and claggy. I will now be storing my cake, sealed in a tin or box, in a cool, dry place. Eureka!

This zilch experience also means that we’ve never reached the end of the process before, only to have the finished article collapse/melt/get dropped/consumed by the family pet, which means that we’ve had a pretty impressive unblemished 100% track record thus far… Perhaps that’s why Clem and Rich have trusted us with such a task.

It’s not a traditional fruit cake, but a lemon cake (so we’re hoping people will actually eat it: it has to taste good). Dan Lepard’s Lemon Butter Cake to be precise. We tried a few out – like one on the Nigella forum from a US reader which, while delicious, should have carried a health warning for butter content (the batter looked like buttercream icing). Though we tried a drizzle cake whereby the lemony syrup permeates the cake, with the large volume of sponge we are working with you’d need more of a deluge to inject any flavour whatsoever. This recipe beat the rest of the field hands down for taste. I don’t know much about Dan Lepard, (except that he is Australian-born). Short and Sweet, his book on baking, is clear and written with authority; it dares you (well, me) to try things you mightn’t otherwise, including breads. It was so packed with good new things to bake that I gave it to my sister-in-law Jemima, who probably knows all there is to know on the subject.

Though the cake looked a little dense when we cut into it, it was light and m…. (I won’t say that word on here) and the condensed milk holds in the moisture whilst giving a delicious flavour – a humectant, apparently. We ramped up the zest by 1 lemon, and seeing as we will be scaling up the recipe even further, there might be a bit more tweaking to be done still. We’ve baked a small trial version which we’ve filled with lemon buttercream, covered with ready-rolled (hallelujah!) fondant icing and are keeping as a control for 4 days. Fingers crossed it stays fresh.

If it does, we’ll be scattering it with crystallised rose petals that we’ve thieved from a few pretty gardens. Tonight we try rolling out enormous blobs of fondant as the ready rolled doesn’t come in extra large.

How hard can it be?! We’ll let you know…

 

PS: For the recipe, please visit the Guardian page on the link above which says Lemon Butter Cake. It appears that I got into trouble with the cyber-police for reproducing it here to my enormous readership.
PPS: The cake was cut, eaten and served to the very happy wedding crowd, all of whom are still with us. So that's a relief.

Parkin practice: add patience.

 
Over time, the BSG and I have been doing our bit, greedily covering most bases in terms of foodstuffs. Obviously there are exotic ingredients from far-flung places missing from the repertoire…all in good time. I tend to take on the shellfish, whereas he is bolder with all things offal. We adore most things we encounter.

Somehow..somehow… parkin has hitherto eluded us both.

However, in this special report I am pleased to annouce that the dark days are over. We are now blissfully living in the age of A.P (After Parkin). A freshly-baked, auburn slab of it sits happily cooling its boots in the kitchen. As aromatic as gingerbread and more complex and grown-up (nutmeg, treacle, dark brown sugar and oatmeal in it) parkin apparently improves with age. In fact the true parkin pros up North frown on its being eaten before its 3 days old. I can’t believe it gets better than it is now, warm from the oven.

Fact is, I am really, really pleased with it. Perhaps this has something to do with having exactly the right ingredients (SO much butter) or me following the recipe to the letter, but it is perfect. I even managed to keep our temperamental oven from burning it to a crisp. The only thing I'd change next time is to not use a loose-bottomed cake tin - the mixture is nervously runny before it starts to cook and will willingly burn in charred drops on the oven floor. You don't want people to smell burning over the other amazing aromas – it makes you look bad and besides, the gingery cooking cloud is too wonderful to forgo. If there was a smell for a hug, then this is it.

It will keep for up to 2 weeks in an airtight container, I’m told. Not sure this baby’s going to make 3 days A.P. I’ll have to make some more…

Parkin

• 8 oz/220g soft butter
• 4 oz/110g soft, dark brown sugar
• 2oz / 55g black treacle/molasses
• 7oz / 200g golden syrup/ corn syrup
• 5oz/ 120g medium oatmeal
• 7 oz/ 200g self raising flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 4 tsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp nutmeg
• 1 tsp mixed spice
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 2 tbsp milk

Heat the oven to 275°/140°C/gas 1

• Grease an 8" x 8"/ 20cm x 20cm square cake tin.
• In a large heavy-based saucepan melt together the butter, sugar, treacle, golden syrup over a gentle heat. Do not allow the mixture to boil, you simply need to melt these together.
• In a large, spacious, baking bowl stir together all the dry ingredients. Gradually add the melted butter mixture stirring to coat all the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.
• Gradually, beat in the eggs a few tablespoons at a time. Finally add the milk and again stir well.
• Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and cook for 1 ½ hours until firm and set and a dark golden brown.
• Remove the parkin from the oven and leave to cool in the tin. Once cool store the parkin in an airtight tin for a minimum of 3 days if you can resist eaten it, you can even leave it up to a week before eating and the flavours really develop and the mixture softens even further and become moist and sticky. The parkin will keep up to two weeks in an airtight container.

Glorious good pud

I have been accosted this week by several indignant blog-readers, some of whom I was unaware of, reminding me that its been a whole month since my last post. I am truly sorry, but even more delighted that there’s somebody outside of my family who  reads this, so this is for you kids, and I promise not to be so slack in the future.

My buddy Mel, who is a teacher and on her well-earned summer holiday (though can’t seem to lie in – she emailed at silly o’clock this morning) tells me she is off to the races at Goodwood tomorrow and she needs to make a pudding that will stand up to two car journeys and summer heat (here’s hoping).

Ah Goodwood! If I close my eyes, I can almost hear the thunder of horses, the sweeping views down to the Solent and enormous cotton-wool clouds drifting overhead. I hope the sun’s out for them.

Anyway, back to the pudding. Trying to stay largely away from anything soft or involving too much melty stuff, such as cream or chocolate I lighted on this delicate and retro-sounding recipe in How I Cook.

I can’t say that I’ve tried them all, but the thing I like best about Skye Gyngell’s recipes is that they come out (even in my clumsy hands) pretty much as they look in the book – minus the backdrop of vintage crockery, country flowers and sun bleached-tabletops of course. I know I am obsessed with this book, so I will put it down after this post, I promise. Though probably not for long.

This can be baked, transported and sliced with the minimum of fuss and the compote will be delicious and summery. A tub of crème fraiche to dollop on the side is all it needs. Put a quid on for me, my friend. x

Pound cake

Makes 12 slices
450g unsalted butter, softened, plus some melted to grease
450g plain flour, sifted
½ tsp sea salt
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarb of soda
450g golden caster sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
6 large free-range eggs
125 ml whole milk
Finely grated zest of an orange
Finely grated zest of a lemon

Heat the oven to 160˚C. Line a loose-bottomed cake tin (23 cm) with foil and baking parchment and brush the parchment with melted butter, dusting afterwards with a little flour. (NB I probably wouldn’t do any of this as I am too lazy and then it would probably stay in the tin, only to be prized out with a spoon…)

Sift the flour, salt, baking powder and bicarb together into a bowl and put to one side.

Using an electric mixer (your Magimix will do fine, Mel), beat the butter, sugar and vanilla extract together on a low speed for 2 minutes, increasing the speed to high and beating until pale and fluffy. Turn the speed down again and beat in the eggs, one at a time, alternately with the milk. (To substitute my lack of ‘speeds’, I would use the pulse button for slow, the continuous button for fast…)

Using a large metal spoon, fold the flour into the mixture in three batches, followed by the orange and lemon zest, until evenly combined.

Spoon the cake mixture into the prepared cake tin and gently level the surface with the back of a spoon. Stand the cake tin on the middle oven shelf and bake for 1 and ¼ hours, or until the cake has begun to shrink away from the sides of the tin and a skewer inserted comes out clean.

Leave in the tin for 5 mins then turn out onto a wire rack to cool. This cake is best eaten slightly warm from the oven (or the sunny boot of your car).

Apricot compote

Serves 10-12

1 kg ripe apricots
175g caster sugar
Pared zest of 1 lemon
1 vanilla pod, spilt lengthways
Tiny pinch of salt

Half apricots and remove stones, keeping 3 or 4 stones and throwing the others away.

Put the halved apricots and all the other ingredients into a pan with the reserved stones. Pour in a little water, just enough to give a 1cm depth in the pan and place over a low heat. Once the sugar has dissolved, increase the heat to medium-high and cook, stirring from time to time, for 10 minutes. The apricots should be soft and brighter in colour, their skins having slipped off. Set aside to cool.

Spoon the cooled compote into a suitable container, cover and refrigerate until well chilled. This will keep until you need it.

April firsts

I am not such a very nice person as it turns out. I mean, what on earth has Rachel Allen ever done to me? Nothing, apart from smile gently down the telly. And yet for some reason, I find all her jingly, lilting sunniness irritating to the point of wanting to leap in and start a food fight there in her spotless, Ballymaloe telly-kitchen.

However, this longstanding grudge dissipated when last weekend I sampled some of her food. Well, not her food exactly, but recipes from her book, beautifully executed by my friend Sarah, who does everything absolutely precisely: she is a scientist to her very core. (We used to have art v. science arguments at school, like the dog v. cat ones I have with the BSG these days - he is pro-cat if you’re interested in taking sides).

A couple of days with Sarah and her family in the rolling countryside outside Leeds had three of us Londoners wondering why we hadn’t jacked in the big smoke for this idyllic, wholesome life. In the first few warm rays of the year we had lunch outside: a delicious, shredded salad of savoy cabbage, carrots, crisp apples, bacon bits and chicken. And it was Rachel Allen – well Sarah, really – who made us feel these first breaths of summer. I think there may have even been some rougeing of the face, but that was my fault entirely.

Feeling rather virtuous after this refreshing main course (I would say light, except we ate all of it, including Sarah’s husband’s portion…He’d been on a run and thoroughly deserved to eat), Sarah produced the most beautiful lemon tart. Honestly, it looked like the best homemade thing I’d ever seen – shop-bought ones with their unbroken perfection don’t quite cut it. And it tasted like a cloud of citrussy sunshine, and had some kind of bruléed crust on its top. Heaven. As it turned out, that was Rachel too. So, not just a pretty husband, then. I even got a picture of lunch, for once, before it disappeared.

It was surprise we’d managed to fit any lunch in at all, when a mere hour beforehand we’d paid a visit to the Ilkley branch of Betty’s Tea Room. For a first-timer like me, simply ordering a coffee (albeit a rich, Latte Latino made with chocolate sauce and cinnamon) just wouldn’t have cut the mustard, so with it came the plumpest Yorkshire Fat Rascal (an enormous warm fruit bun), some freshly baked rarebit scones and Betty’s famous cinnamon toast. Clearly a recipe they’d perfected over time, the cinnamon and sugar lay in a thick crust over crunchy fingers of brown toast – the sort of mean brown toast you’d never have associated with such a treat but which was now transformed under its crystalline cloak. No wonder Sarah’s son, Finlay, eschewed his rather yummy-looking lunch in its favour.

The rest of the weekend continued much along the same theme – three girls from London, being fed like kings, with pancetta wrapped monkfish, white chocolate mousse, pork and apple crumble (my first savoury crumble – won’t be my last that’s for sure) and on Sunday morning, blueberry pancakes like the fluffiest cumulonimbus made by Rhys, Sarah’s hubby; a good excuse to march up onto the moor for a brisk one.

It was very hard to leave, even harder to manage the wagyu burger the BSG had prepared on my return and nigh on impossible to fathom what we’ll conjure up for them on the return leg; I might ask my new favourite person...

Honey and Lavender Cake

It’s August and the air is full. Of dancing spores and dandelion clocks, of lavender scents brushed from the flowers by bees too busy to stay with their fleeting wanton caresses. The sweet tang of muck spread on nearby fields occasionally reigns. Big Norfolk skies swirl overhead, punctuated by weather-fronts and their breezy boundaries, gigantic sheep-like clouds an endless parade of shapes; summer is busying about with a threat of packing up and shipping out. Like the dog helplessly watching its beloved owner pack for a holiday, I am hoping that there’s been some mistake. Surely it’s not leaving so soon, whatever the Met Office says.

Severe weather warnings aside, there are signs of autumn’s impending bounty: bright ornaments sprinkled amongst the foliage in trees and hedges, the flowers fading, making way for the berries. We are just a couple of weeks away from frenzied pilfering sessions – of plums, apples, blackberries and early sloes. But right now, patience must be deployed. Until the hedgerow harvest, why not take inspiration from the bees? The lavender’s in abundance – it seems a shame not to use it. It’s great studded into lamb, rosemary-style.

  

I attempted lavender cake once (bastardized from some sponge recipe or other) and it was amazing, even if I do say so myself. It was one of those rare times when improvisation paid off. God knows how. However, I am not a fool – I know this happens only once if you’re lucky, so I nicked a failsafe formula off someone who probably knows a lot better. Inconveniently, it’s written in American, which if you don’t understand you can decipher courtesy of Delia’s conversion table; as everyone knows, you can’t go wrong with Delia.

To decorate, you can really go all Laura Ashley on it. I promise you it won’t taste like pot pourri. if you still don’t believe me, you can just infuse a pot of sugar with a stalk for a few days beforehand, discard it and use the sugar, rather than grinding the flowers themselves.

Serves 6–8

2 stalks lavender flowers (or 2 tbsp  lavender flowers)

½ cup caster sugar

250g unsalted butter, at room temperature

¼ cup honey

3 eggs

1½ cups self-raising flour

¾ cup buttermilk

2 tbsp sifted icing sugar, to serve

lavender flowers (extra), to decorate

thick cream, to serve

1 Preheat oven to 180C. Grease and line a 22cm spring-form cake tin with greaseproof paper. Grind lavender flowers and sugar together with a mortar and pestle until finely ground.

2 Using an electric beater, beat lavender sugar, butter and honey until light and creamy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Sift flour into mixture. Using a large metal spoon, gently fold flour and buttermilk into mixture. Spoon into prepared baking pan. Smooth top. Bake for 1 hour or until cooked when tested with a skewer.

3 Stand for 5 minutes before releasing clamp and inverting cake onto a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar and sprinkle with flowers (extra) if you wish. Serve with thick cream.

Note: it’s important to use lavender that is home-grown and pest free, not commercially grown lavender that may have been sprayed with chemicals. 

I am challenging the best baker I know, Jemima, to make this (she also happens to be my sister-in-law but these facts are unrelated). Just because. Because of those ethereal Honey Buns (courtesy of Valentine Warner) she treated the BSG and me to the other week, drenched in an orange-y nectar. That was indeed a feast that warrants its own post…

Cake off

In my life I have employed a few odd things to break the fast; fish fingers, beans on toast, cold pizza, curry, left-over Shepherd’s Pie, Egg Mornay…the list goes on. But never cake. No, cake is definitely an after-mid-morning thing for me. Not today. First thing, a loaf-sized box came to the door in the arms of our smiling postman – I am not sure he knew what he was delivering but it certainly seemed that way. I have to admit that I’d had my misgivings when the lovely Michelle at Vanilla Patisserie told me she would ‘post some samples’. I had, until this point, been unaware of the travelling capacity of cake - the only comparable experience being in those plastic party bags we were given when we were small and these were usually sat on in the car on the way home. (If they ever did make it home they were often forgotten in favour of the pot of bubbles and left to languish in their paper napkin, sweating in the bag for a couple of weeks before being thrown out). I was delighted therefore to discover that all 11 samples had survived transit and still resembled cake, moreover, were convincing enough slices to go under the tester’s scalpel to become sample slivers.

The BSG ruled that there would be no talking whilst the testing was in progress. Each piece was marked out of five for moisture and flavour and of course, there would be no conferring. Each teaspoon of cake was punctuated with a slurp of tea (to cleanse the palate you understand), which worked much better than water at erasing the taste memory.

I surprised myself; eleven mouthfuls of cake all but defeated us and the BSG, who is not great mates with sugar under normal circumstances, had the shakes for the remainder of the day. Amidst the more classic flavours were accents of hazelnut (think Nutella) and Cointreau, and a nod to all things retro came in the form of dark chocolate cake with a blackcurrant filling – all we needed was a trolley and some doilies. The lemon sponge was clean and fragrant and danced on the tongue, and the carrot was infused with a lovely ginger-snap taste. The name of the game though was to find the three flavours we liked best – and find them we did.

Although we proved that you can have too much cake and eat it – the nadir of the sugar low hitting me mid-afternoon – it made us very happy and took us straight back to birthday tables of our youth. We won’t be doing much for Valentine’s Day, feeling it is the day of the year to go out for a romantic-supper-that’s-not-romantic-because-everybody’s-doing-it, but we will definitely be cooking, and I might just bake the BSG a cake - low sugar, of course.

Red Velvet Cake

For the cake:
• 120g unsalted butter
• 300g golden caster sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 300g plain flour
• 230g buttermilk or ordinary milk if this cannot be found
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 20g cocoa powder, sifted
• ½ tsp red food colouring, or sufficient to give the cake a rich red brown colour
• 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

For the icing:
• 180g unsalted butter
• 150g sifted icing sugar
• 450g full fat cream cheese
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• Chocolate curls for decoration

Pre-heat the oven to 190 Degrees C/170 degrees for fan assisted ovens. Line and grease a 20cm diameter cake tin.

Cream the butter and caster sugar together until light and fluffy. This is easily done with an electric whisk and should take around 5 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time and beat thoroughly. Add the flour in three separate stages alternating with the buttermilk/milk. Then add the salt, vanilla and cocoa powder and enough red food colouring to turn the cake a rich red/brown. Mix the vinegar with the bicarbonate of soda in a bowl and add this to the mixture.
Spoon the prepared mixture into the cake tin and bake for between 45 minutes and one hour - a cake skewer inserted into the middle of the cake should come out clean when ready.

For the icing:
Cream together the icing sugar and butter until soft, mix in the cream cheese and vanilla essence. Spread over the cake once it has cooled.

Brassicas and birthday cakes

By now I suspect that some close family members will no doubt be wondering how I can have come this far and neglected to mention my love - well obsession really - of cabbages in all shapes and sizes. When I was a child I would have so many extra helpings that whoever was doing the cooking would get in extra, just for me. I always remember Sunday lunches at my grandparents’, granny proudly announcing that she got lots of cabbage in, just for me. Given the dread this foodstuff instils in most children, my family must have thought me a little odd. I could happily occupy the space in my stomach others saved for pudding with mountains of the green stuff, when other children around me would offer me theirs too. I don’t remember there being the adverse side-effects associated with such a habit, any classmates sidling away from me in confined spaces, or siblings running for the hills…at least, I don’t think so.

This addiction has since spread to all green veg; broccoli, spinach, beans, peas, asparagus – in fact, apart from Gossip Girl and SATC reruns, one of my guilty BSG-less pleasures is a bowl of freshly cooked peas, a knob of butter melting into them and a dollop of salad cream…the BSG just about tolerates the presence of a bottle in our fridge…

In eating terms, these leafy delights were probably my first love; though I have discovered many things that I have adored since, it is that intense joy I experienced during these cabbage-laden feasts that remains with me. Happily, and unlike many first loves, I have not endured the lows – apart from the odd school dinner, of course, though the associated self-denial perhaps comes in the revelation that my younger self would not have indulged quite so vigorously had it not been for the ever-present butter or gravy to mop it up with. My adult self is certainly more than capable of taking down a bowl of pure, unadulterated emerald veined Savoy, a mountain of squeaky greens or a plate of tight, firm Brussels sprouts. Just season to taste.

It is at this time of year that those tiny, compact members of the green family come into their own. The sprout. They are so often murdered in boiling water until soggy and yellow, and that is why so many people avoid them. So I suggest trying them a different way. Last week we cooked them in a shallow pan, with butter and a lid, for five minutes, until lightly caramelised but still acid green and slightly firm. They were great. This week they’re for the wok, to be stir-fried with soy and ginger.

So it is Stir-Up Sunday (thanks OFM), the day when traditionally you start on the Christmas cake, and this morning we were indeed baking. However, the candied fruits didn’t leave the cupboard – it was the BSG’s sister’s birthday – Victoria Sponge time. She is one top baker, so the bar was set at astronomical. Watching the BSG doggedly working at the butter and sugar, creaming them carefully to a paler hue, I realised what I had been doing so wrong all my life. Care and attention to this seemingly simple process makes all the difference. How can a mixture of such mundane ingredients; flour, eggs, sugar and butter speak so profoundly to us? I know a girl who used to follow cake recipes to the complete raw stage, then take the bowl, hide under her bed, and eat the lot. What happens during the baking process still completely astounds me, the magic, the alchemy that makes the humble cake batter transform into such a floaty princess of a thing. It speaks to so many of us and conjures countless food memories. We served ours (worthy of the W.I thanks to the BSG's lightness of touch) with a filling of crème fraiche and apricot jam, with steaming cups of fragrant Earl Grey tea, the weather stripping the last leaves from the trees outside.