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…

Well-dressed lobster and phantom meringues

Hmmm, the jury’s out on the cheat’s hollandaise…I had to make an apology to the fish, as time-efficient though it was, it was a different sauce altogether. I also learnt a valuable lesson about making Eton Mess ahead of time – don’t add the meringues until the last minute, after an hour in the fridge they had completely vanished into the cream! Last minute nerves I suppose – nonetheless the evening was great fun, the ambient volume knob inched up by a bottle of delicious Dom Perignon 2000 (a present, wow!), and an amazing Chassagne Montrachet. Not bad for a Monday night.

Foodwise, the evening’s quiet star had to be the amazing buffalo mozzarella we had to start with, along with fragrant plum tomatoes and avocados the size of grapefruits, all from our local Italian deli, Olga Stores on Penton Street.

Dad lives in Norfolk, but work keeps him mostly in New York. When he is here, he does a lot of giving, and not great deal of taking, so when my brother and I saw a chink of daylight in this busy giving-schedule we seized upon the opportunity and staged a Dad-napping for Thursday afternoon. For the most part of last week, he had been looking rather longingly seawards every morning, alas to no avail – there were other things to be done, so Dave and I knew exactly where to take him that day.

Very early this year, on a fruitless (or rather crab-less) mission to Cromer, some friends and I had stumbled upon a secret shrine - a shack if I am honest- to all things crustacean, and fishy, somewhere along the north Norfolk coast. Aptly, it sits in a place named Salthouse. I am deliberately vague about its name – their wares are fresh and bountiful and smell of the sea, it would be too easy, and you need to feel that you have discovered it to compound your joy at what you find within. We plumped for the lobster salad, which not only comprised a day-glo red half-beast, but a generous smorgasbord of other wonders: cockles, herrings, smoked mackerel and prawns – the greatest hits from the Norfolk shores. The pot of mayonnaise and warm boiled new potatoes bathed in butter are a must. They are not licensed, but it seemed all the more Blyton-esque accompanied by a can of eye-wateringly fizzy ginger beer.

I think it is safe to say that this feast, preceded by a breezy walk along the nearby pebble beach at Cley, meant that the sea rushed into all the reaches of Dad’s soul that afternoon – enough to tide him over until the next time he’s here.

P.S: usually a nothing-on-toast-but-marmite girl, I have been bowled over by a gift from my 11 year old goddaughter, who has recently become and apiarist. Contrary to what one might think, this is not a lover of monkeys, but a bee-keeper. Words cannot describe quite how proud I am of this little person in general, but the thought of her in her suit, braving the bombardments of stingers while she collects their hard-worked treasure, just amazes me. Watch this space, the Nacton gold stuff will be on everybody’s Christmas list…