30 October 2010

Halloween Baking

I love when a new season starts and a whole new array of food is available to cook. Being a baker there are lots of cakes that you make for a particular occasion and a lot of these fit in with seasonal food. And so we have Halloween, ghosts and ghouls, fancy dress party's and pumpkins. Not only do you have the delights of pumpkin and/or squash in a savoury way there are also lots of cakes to be made.
Last year I bought some of the tinned pumpkin that is used in the US to make the traditional thanksgiving Pumpkin Pie. I figured that Whole Foods would stock it and I was right, they had a whole wall made out of Libbys Pumpkin. I had just bought the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook and they had a recipe for Pumpkin cupcakes. I made them and brought them into work and we had a lovely Halloween afternoon tea. So I decided that I had started a tradition and that I should do something again this year (any excuse!).
After another trip to Whole Foods (the High Street Ken one is a nice walk through the park away from work) I looked to the Google machine for inspiration. I fancied doing a loaf, mostly because it is easier to transport but also because they are usually very easy. I found a recipe for a Pumpkin, Lemon and Poppy Seed loaf and decided that was the one. This recipe called for roasting pumpkin and then pureeing it but I was way ahead with my Libbys. It was very easy, the most fiddly thing was processing the flour and butter to make a fine crumb but it was hardly hard work!
Now the other reason I wanted to do a loaf based cake was that I had bought some greaseproof paper lining cases for a loaf tin last week in John Lewis. I have seen these in various places in the last few years but never bought any and thought I would give them a try. Let me tell you I will be going back for the other versions because these are genius. No more greasing and lining you tin, all you do is plonk this in the tin, fill with cake mixture, bake and remove. And the cakes look shop bought! Why haven't I been using these for the last few years! Madness. I duly lined my tin and filled with cake mix (ok, the first attempt went a bit wrong, liner collapse, say no more) and it was so easy to remove, love these. The cakes looked great and smelled of nutmeg and mixed spice, autumn in your kitchen.
I decided I would make a frosting for one and leave the other as Delicious magazine intended. I used cream cheese and icing sugar with a bit of lemon zest (1oz cream cheese to 6oz icing sugar, a helpful recipe from a friend) and transported it to work with the cakes and iced it just before serving. They went down well and there was some leftover for breakfast the next day! Sorry, no photo this time, I forgot. You will have to take my word for it that they looked damned fine.

26 October 2010

Christmas Puddings (Part 2)

Sorry to keep you waiting for the end of the pudding story, I know that you have been on tenter hooks, did she or didn't she? And just in case you can't last to the end of the post, it has a happy ending!
As you know I used my mother's recipe, she sent it to me a couple of years ago, handwritten on some lovely notepaper, notepaper that only a mother of a certain age would own! But stationery apart it works. It's all in ounces and I'm very bad at converting to the gram and when I was buying the ingredients I over-bought on everything! But it means that I have enough dried fruit for my Christmas cake.
Ingeredients: (I'm going to give it to you as my mother wrote it)
6oz Flour
8oz White Breadcrumbs
12oz Brown Sugar
1 lb Currants
8oz Raisins
8oz Sultanas
4oz Cherries (glace)
4oz Mixed Peel
Zest of 1 Lemon
Zest of 1 Orange
8oz Margarine or Butter (I used butter)
3 large eggs
2 tablespoons Brandy or Whiskey
half a pint Guinness
1 teaspoon Mixed Spice
half a teaspoon ground Cinnamon
half a teaspoon ground Nutmeg
These ingredients are enough to make two 2 pint puddings (I bought 2 plastic bowls in John Lewis for £3 each), grease the two bowls and make sure you have greaseproof paper and tin foil for the top.
Put all the dry ingredients into a bowl (all the fruit and breadcrumbs). I managed to get all the dry ingredients in the bowl and was about to add the flour when I realised that I didn't have the breadcrumbs. I was making these at the boyfriends house and he doesn't possess a food processor or a billy whizz (you know that hand held processor?) so I had to use his liquidiser. It works but it's not ideal.
Sieve the flour and the spices in another bowl and add your dry ingredients and mix well. Melt the margarine/butter and leave to cool before adding to the mixture with the beaten eggs and whiskey/brandy. I used whiskey, one from the whiskey society called "Banana Split in a Sauna", I kid you not! My mother put a PS at the bottom of the method "you may not want to put in all the Guinness, you will know if it's wet enough". So leave the Guinness to the end, I used almost all the half pint. My mother was right I did know when it was wet enough.
Now the most important part of making Christmas puddings, the making of the wish. When we were growing up my mother would get us all to stir the mixture and make a wish. I can't remember if the wishes came true but I remember always making sure that I got to make it.
So wishes made fill you pudding bowls and cover with greaseproof paper and tin foil, making a fold in the middle to leave room for air to get in when steaming. My mother always tied twine (you might know it as string) around the bowls making a little handle so that it's easy to get them out of the saucepan. I then steamed them for 6 hours, which just seems like forever. At 8pm on Sunday night they came out and they smelled good, they smelled of Christmas. There are instructions in the recipe for cooking the pudding before serving but you will have to wait until December 25th to hear the end of this story.

24 October 2010

Christmas Puddings (Part 1)

So it's Christmas pudding day. It was supposed to be yesterday but after a 4 hour shopping marathon (don't ask) there was no time for the 6 hours of steaming and I had to move it. One of the reasons for the extended shopping yesterday was that I forgot to bring the ingredients list into the supermarket. Picture the scene: Saturday afternoon on a Tesco Extra with the whole population of London surrounding us (believe me it felt like it), we are nearing the end and I suddenly remember that I don't have the list I need for the puddings. There was a moment where I was thinking of not mentioning it but thought better of that so I told the boyfriend. Rather than getting upset he just smiled and asked if I wanted him to go to the car and get it! Not sure what happened there but I didn't ask just said yes and we met five minutes later in sliced bread. The upshot of which is that I have the ingredients and it's time to start. More later.

18 October 2010

Banana Muffin Disaster

Last week when I was recovering from a cold I decided, as a way of cheering myself up, to bake something. For some reason I fell upon Banana Muffins, don't ask me why, it just popped into my head (much like the stay-puffed marshamallow man!). I did a search and found a food blog (chubbyhubby) where he had made Nigella's Banana Muffins (from Domestic Goddess) and I read on. Well, he didn't like them, he said they were easy but didn't taste good. As a big fan of Nigella I felt a certain amount of resentment and defensiveness at this slight and decided to show him!
I have the book so I checked what I needed and went to the shop. The recipe calls for a small amount of butter (30g), honey (60g), vanilla extract and mashed banana as the wet ingredients and flour, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder (no eggs I hear you say, I know, but Nigella must know what she's doing). You add wet to dry mix and put in muffin cases and bake for 25 minutes.
Once they were out of the oven they looked a bit underwhelming but I iced them with some butterscotch sauce that I had made a while ago and was still confident of a good Banana Muffin. After dinner I offered one to my friend and we peeled away the muffin paper and bit in. Well, I hate to say it but chubbyhubby was right! The only thing that made them taste in any way good was the butterscotch sauce! I wasn't happy and after keeping them for a couple of days I gave in and threw the other ten away. The horror, the horror!
But Nigella remains a heroine as this is the first one of her recipes that I've tried that hasn't worked so that's a fairly good record. So photo for this post.
On another note, Christmas is only ten weeks away (I know) and my friend made some Christmas puddings over the weekend and it made me think it's time for me to make some myself. I will be cooking Christmas dinner for the boyfriend's family this year so it's all the trimmings. I started a search for my mothers pudding recipe, she sent it to me a couple of years ago and I knew I had put it somewhere safe. And I was right, it was in Rachel's Cooking for Friends. So I am armed with the family recipe and I will make them at the weekend, more later.