Christmas Cake

This Sunday is Stir-up Sunday. This is the last Sunday before Advent, and is the day to make your Christmas pudding and cake. Traditionally everyone in the household should stir the mixture for luck.

We actually made our Christmas cake a couple of weeks ago, as we had more time then, and the pudding will come from the WI. It is definitely a good idea to make these items in advance. They keep for ages, improve with age, and it means less stress in the build-up to the big day. It does still feel a bit early to be thinking about Christmas though.

Christmas Cake
(based on Delia's recipe)

900g dried fruit (mix of raisins, sultanas, currants)
3 tbsp brandy
225g plain flour (I used Doves gluten-free)
1 tsp salt
A good grating of nutmeg
1 tsp mixed spice
225g butter
225g soft brown sugar
4 eggs
50g chopped almonds
1 dsp treacle
Zest of an orange
Zest of a lemon
Juice of an orange (only if making gluten-free, as it needs the extra moisture)

Mix the fruit with the brandy and leave covered in the bowl overnight.

Preheat the oven to 140C.

Whisk the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, then add the eggs a bit at a time while whisking well. The fold in the flour and spices, followed by the fruit, almonds, treacle, juice (if using) and zest.

Spoon into a lined 20cm round cake tin, and bake for about 4 1/2 hours. When it is cool remove from the tin. It then needs feeding! Poke some little holes in the top and drizzle over some brandy. This can be repeated a couple of times over the next few weeks if you like it boozy (and who doesn't?). Wrap tightly and store in a cool place (like the back of the larder so your father can't find it).

It can then be iced closer to the time - post on that to come.

Parkin

I hadn’t really heard of parkin before, and then once it was sitting in the tin it suddenly seemed to be all over the internet. I obviously hit the zeitgeist! It sounded like the perfect thing to serve at our Bonfire Night supper, post Battersea Park fireworks. With steak and ale pie beforehand it certainly added up to a hearty meal!

It needs to be made a few days or up to a week in advance, which allows the flavours to develop and it become sticky and yummy.

I tweaked a recipe from Delia, but there are loads about this year, including this one from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I particularly like the idea of putting stem ginger in it. Hix have it on their dessert menu too. I highly recommend making this, and I am pretty sure it won’t be a year before I make it again.

Parkin

200g golden syrup
25g black treacle
75 butter
100g soft brown sugar
225g oats (I used Pinhill, which are quite small)
100g plain flour (I used Doves gluten-free)
3 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp mixed spice
1 egg
1 tbsp or so milk

Preheat the oven to 140C.

Weigh the treacle and syrup into a saucepan (the measurements are approximate as I found it impossible to weigh them accurately – too sticky!). Add the butter and sugar and stir over a low heat until the butter is melted and the sugar dissolved.

Then stir the syrup mixture into the dry ingredients, before lastly adding the egg and milk. If you are using gluten-free flour then you may need a bit more milk.

Pour into a greased tin. I used a rectangular one, maybe 8 x 13 inch. Bake for 2 hours, until the whole kitchen smells of the spices.

Now you need to be patient. Once it has cooled remove whole from the tin and wrap tightly in foil and place in a tin. Don’t touch it for at least four days (and we waited a week). The stickiness it develops will be worth it!

This was a good recipe to adapt to gluten-free (as long as you are OK with oats) as it has a relatively low flour content, and becomes really moist and sticky as it matures. No one even noticed that it was gluten-free, which I always think is the best compliment.

Lavender and Lemon Drizzle Cake

I wasn’t quite sure how to name this cake. The lavender is in the cake rather than the drizzle, but it becomes a bit long-winded if you call it a lemon and lavender cake with lemon drizzle. I’m sure people get the idea anyway. The photo isn't the greatest either - the sun was too low - but it was good practice.

The inspiration for this cake came after I found some lavender in the supermarket. I have wanted to cook with it for ages, but we can’t grow our own as we don’t get enough sun, and it has proved difficult to source.

The first thing I made with it was some lavender shortbread, which made a lovely accompaniment to the chocolate sorbet. I was then toying with what to do next. I assume now that it is open it will lose its potency pretty quickly. R has been talking about lemon drizzle cake for ages, and I can’t even remember the last time I made one. The more I thought about it the more I thought the addition of lavender to this cake might be a good one.

The floral note contrasts well with the sharpness of the lemon. I upped the lemon quota a bit from my normal recipe, and the balance seemed pretty good. Next time I might try using partly ground almonds and partly flour (gluten-free) to try and get the damper texture I was after. This would make a great cake for tea party, with its delicate floral-ness.

Lavender Lemon Drizzle Cake

150g butter

225g caster sugar

225g plain flour (I used Doves gluten-free)

4 eggs

Grated zest of 2 lemons

Juice of 1/2 lemon (you might not need this with regular flour)

Juice of 1 1/2 lemons

75g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180C and line a loaf tin with greaseproof paper. Cream the butter and sugar until pale, then add the eggs one at a time, followed by the flour and lemon zest a bit at a time, then stir in the lemon juice. Pour into the loaf tin and bake for 50 mins, until a skewer comes out clean. Prick the cake all over with a fork (or the testing skewer).

Stir the remaining lemon juice and sugar together and then pour over the cake while it is still hot. Leave in the tin to cool completely.

Drawing Room Tea Cake

Why is it that as soon as the dietician said that I couldn’t eat wheat all I wanted to do was bake stuff? And I have this real urge to learn to make bread properly. I even started looking up courses on the internet, until I realised it wasn’t really feasible! (For the record, one of the courses at the Lighthouse Bakery would be my choice).

The bread will have to wait and see if I can go back to eating wheat, as I don’t feel confident enough with regular bread-making to start experimenting, particularly as it must be difficult as all the gluten-free bread I have come across so far is not worth eating!

Cakes and cookies/biscuits are another matter however, particularly since I have discovered Doves gluten-free flour. I just use this in place of regular flour, adding a bit of extra baking powder if the recipe demands it, and some xantham gum. So far everything has worked out pretty well, and people can’t tell they are gluten-free if they don’t know.

One of the best things has been this cake. It has been on my must-cook list for about a million years, but I couldn’t find the required ‘vine fruit mix’, and since I didn’t know what it was I wasn’t sure what to replace it with. It turns out just to be a mix of raisins, although they are particularly good raisins. The recipe is from an old Waitrose recipe card, where it goes under the name of Lady Grey tea cake, and the vine fruits are from there, but any raisins or sultanas could be substituted. As cake goes this is pretty low fat too. It doesn’t have too much sugar, and there is no butter or oil in it at all.

The flavour of the tea really shone through, as did the lemon, and soaking the fruit made the whole cake really moist. R even said I could make this again – the highest praise!

Drawing Room Tea Cake

2 tea bags (I used Whittards drawing room tea, which has bergamot in it)

125g caster sugar

300g vine fruit mix (any combination of raisins or sultanas would do)

2 medium eggs

225 plain flour (Doves gluten-free)

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp xantham gum (only if you are using gluten-free flour)

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

Pour 300ml of boiling water over the tea bags, in a bowl. After about three minutes remove the tea bags and put the vine fruit mix in. Stir well, and then leave to soak for 4-12 hours (trying not to eat them all as you walk past).

Then just add all of the other ingredients to the fruit and water, stir well, and pour into a lined 1lb loaf tin. Bake at 180C for about an hour, or until a skewer comes out clean. I found it needed another 15 minutes or so.

Serve sliced, with tea (or eat standing up in the kitchen because you can't resist!). It made the house smell heavenly too.

Greensmiths, Lower Marsh

Greensmiths seems to be a new sort of concept, or maybe an old one done particularly well. Either way I was pleased to see that there was a source of Ginger Pig meat that is pretty much on my way home from work. My bank manager may not feel the same way however.

The people behind Greensmiths have got a few companies that already have a reputation for quality, and housed them all under the same roof. You can therefore get bread from The Old Post Office Bakery, fruit and veg from Solstice or coffee from Caffe Antica, as well as meat from Ginger Pig. There are also lots of deli items.

I spent a happy half an hour or so browsing before leaving with sausages (gluten-free – yay), great natural yoghurt, special offer strawberries and Montezuma white chocolate buttons (my guilty pleasure).

Their takeaway lunch-type items looked good too, such as quiche with salad, and I think you can eat in as well. The scotch eggs looked worth a try!

Definitely worth a visit if you are in the area, and it is open until 8 pm.

Nigella's Chocolate Macaroons

I came home from work last night quite late and generally fed up, and R was not home yet from drinks after work. More time on the computer or TV didn’t really appeal, and we have people coming for supper this evening, so I thought that I would get 5Live on the radio and do some cooking.

As I opened the fridge I realised that there were a whole lot of raspberries that we bought in the farmers market at the weekend which were starting to look a bit soft. It looked like there was enough for a jar of jam, so I decided to give it a go. I have never made jam before, although I have helped my mother on occasion. I therefore am not quite sure why 8.30 on a Tuesday night was the time to try it, but there we go.

Raspberry Jam

I weighed the raspberries, and then put them in a non-stick pan (for ease of washing up) over a low heat, until they had softened slightly and there was some liquid in the pan. I then added the same weight of caster sugar and stirred to combine. It was then brought up to the boil and simmered until a drop on a frozen saucer wrinkled when pushed (probably took between 10 and 15 minutes, but I wasn’t paying much attention). Then I poured it into a jar, and by some miracle there was the perfect amount for one jar. I think I might have to make scones now!

Then I needed a pudding for supper tonight. I have had my eye on Nigella’s chocolate macaroons for a while now, as they are gluten-free and look yummy. This therefore seemed the moment to try them. I haven’t changed anything, although next time I might make a half batch, because good as they are this makes a lot.

Nigella’s Chocolate Macaroons

2 egg whites
200g ground almonds
30g cocoa powder
175g icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 200C, and line a baking sheet. I just bought a Bake-o-Glide type sheet, and it was brilliant for these.

Then just stir all of the ingredients together. I would recommend a large bowl for this. It looked for ages like there wasn’t going to be enough egg white for all of the dry ingredients, but if you persevere then you end up with a very sticky chocolatey dough.

Have a bowl of cold water close by, and then wet your hands before rolling into walnut sized balls. The water really does help, and making neat balls was much easier than I expected. Put on the baking sheet. I found that they didn’t really spread much, so you can put them quite close together. Then bake for 11 minutes, before removing from the oven and cooling on a rack.

I then found you need to hide them from your husband, so that there are enough left for supper!

Homemade Granola

I am making much more from scratch at the moment, so that I know exactly what is in everything. Searching for a granola that I could eat, unsuccessfully, meant that this was the next on my list.

The recipe makes quite a lot, so you might want to halve it if you are the only one who eats granola in your household. It also really needs to be made on a day when you are pottering about in the house anyway, as it needs regular turning whilst in the oven. It makes the whole house smell great though!

The recipe is adapted from one on Gluten-Free Girl, who in turn adapted it from Orangette (both worth a visit).

3 cups of oats (I used Jumbo)
½ cup chopped walnuts (substitute any kind of nuts you like, or a mixture)
½ cup sunflower seeds
½ cup plain flour (I used Doves gluten-free)
¾ tbsp cinnamon
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp ground ginger
¾ cup maple syrup
½ cup cranberry juice
1 tbsp vanilla
2 tsp sunflower oil
1 cup raisins (or other dried fruit – I think dried cranberries would be good)

Turn on the oven to 120C, and oil a baking sheet. A non-stick one probably makes your life easier, but is not compulsory.

Combine the oats, nuts, seeds and flour and stir well until everything is coated in flour. Add the cinnamon, spice and ginger and mix again.

In a jug whisk together the maple syrup, juice, vanilla and oil until combined. Pour over the dry ingredients and then stir carefully to combine. Mine looked like there was not going to be enough of the wet ingredients, but keep going as eventually it all looked wet.

Put the mixture onto the baking sheet and press down with the back of a wooden spoon, or the back of your hand! Bake for about 2 hours, turning it every 15 minutes or so, making sure that any large pieces are broken up. It should be dry rather than sticky when it is done.

Leave to cool, then add the raisins and put in an airtight container.

I have been enjoying this with fresh fruit and plain yogurt, and I swear I have been walking to work quicker so that I can get to my breakfast sooner!