The-Never-Send-Your-Invalid-Husband-To-The-Supermarket-Post

Living with the Stephens family is without a doubt a bit crazy. I've always said that had Slaveboy and I not had children, we would probably by now be the modern day Bonnie & Clyde. SO we are pretty grateful to our children for keeping us on the straight and narrow-ish.

Slaveboy hurt his back somehow after returning from sound-engineering a live band on Wednesday. When he crawled in at around 2am, I was still up, completing the last details of this roulette wheel cake I had been asked to make for someone's birthday. The floor was plastered with flour, icing sugar was in my hair and sugarpaste icing was stuck to various implements.The pets were getting twitchy and even our friendly poltergeist didn't dare chuck any mini cheesecake at me.

I crazily thought that it was going to be pretty straightforward but I failed to take into account that the given the size the cake will be, it was going to be a real pig to get the numbers on the little sections at the outer rim of the cake. Not helped by the fact that I had to hand cut the numbers as nowhere in town had in stock small number stencils. And my hands weren't strady enough to pipe with royal icing numbers that small (that made me feel quite inadequate - there I was, able to lambdoidal suture manouvres but unable to ice numbers to that size).

The woman who ordered the cake from me was really chuffed with the cake, I wasn't so much but I think I did pretty ok. I know I chickened out on showing you a proper photo of it but I took the photo late at night and it didn't turn out very good.

And to top it all, because Slaveboy had hurt his back, he couldn't bend down to pull his socks off. Totally ming and indeed mong. That's all I have to say on the matter.

Slaveboy didn't get long to recover though as the next evening, he was despatched to the local supermarket for cat food, vegetables and some other essentials. He came home with 6 bags of potatoes, 2 bags of parsnips, lots of salad leaves and 2 punnets each of strawberries and redcurrants. The strawberries did look a bit sad for themselves (he got them off the bargain shelf) and after having got ready for bed, I decided they couldn't wait til the next day to be used. So down the stairs I marched and I weighed the four punnets of soft fruits and added to them the same amount of preserving sugar and left them in an airtight container in the fridge.

The next day, it was just a matter of emptying the content into a pan and allowing the sugar to dissolve and bringing it up to boil for about 5 minutes. Halfway through this process, after the fruits had gone soft, I pushed them through a sieve and continued with the boiling process. Then, I emptied it into three sterilised jam jars and allow them to cool down at room temperature before placing the jars into the fridge.

And in a backward fashion, I made some scones using the sour milk I had in the fridge and some lemon curd buttercream I had skulking around in the freezer. I simply replaced the sugar from the recipe with the buttercream and the end result was delicious!!!! All 30 were gone by the time breakfast was over (that was before they moved on to making themselves porridge).

RECIPE*

8 oz. self raising flour

2 oz. butter, at room temperature

1 oz. caster sugar 

Pinch of salt

5 fl. oz. sour milk

Method:

Preheat oven at 220C or 200C for fan oven. Line a baking sheet with baking parchment. 

1. Rub flour and butter quickly til a fine breadcrumb texture.
2. Add the sugar
3. Gradually mix in the milk with a palette knife and you'll probably end up with a soft mix.
4. Flour your work surface and rolling pin. I usually line my work surface with baking parchment.
5. Roll out the dough to around 3/4 inch thickness. Please, please, resist the temptation to fiddle with the dough or add more flour to it to make it less soft. Just work fast and confidently. You are going for taste, not cookbook perfection visual impact. 
6. Use a 1 1/2 or 2 inch round cutter (I prefer fluted cos I am girly that way) and tap them out on the baking sheet. The dough should make around 12. 
7. Bake for around 12-15 mins. 
   

These keep pretty well, and you can freeze them too. Or you can be totally unconservative (gooo on, you know you wanna), and make them at 11.30pm and eat them at 1.00am and call it breakfast. That way you will never need to feel guilty about missing breakfast ever again. Promise.

 *This recipe was adapted Delia Smith's recipe. Yes, I admit it. I am a secret Delia whore. I am unashamed.

 

As you can probably guess, my task for today was to bring some sense to my fridge and in my rummaging, I found a bowl with egg whites in it, something I had stored two days ago. I remembered reading a completely new way of making meringue in Baking With Passion, a book lent to me by Spiker. She probably won't lend me anything anymore after that ransom note debacle.

It involved actually measuring the weight of the eggwhite and adding to it caster sugar and then heating the mixture up on a bain marie until the sugar dissolves. You then take it off the heat and whisk it until it becomes thick and stiff, and this it did significantly faster than my usual method.

The recipe asked for it to be baked at 150C for a specific length of time and then the oven switched off for the rest of the night (dunno what you were supposed to do if you baked it in the day - hee hee). I couldn't afford the time to do that as I had mackerels to bake so I baked the meringue, which I had dolloped into individual sized ones, for about 30 minutes and took them out when I felt the shells were nice and crisp.

 

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Hee hee. Snort.

Both Spiker and I have been having a crappy time lately so I sent her this photo that I mocked up using the bowl she left here and the icing nozzles she lent me in order for me to do this Roulette wheel cake for someone's birthday.

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Sometimes the wind blows a certain direction..

And I just get some mad idea that I would just randomly cook from a recipe out of the pile of ripped-out-of-old-magazines. I think I was having a bad day yesterday. Which was a follow-on from the bad day I have the day before. Tis all related to this house move and I shan't bore you with it. Suffice to say, I despair at the rate some things are being done.

So, I found this recipe called Candied Sweet Potato. I really should have figured that it was gonna be a no-goer just from the title. Note the optional extra - MARSHMALLOWS!!! I omitted the marshmallows and we had it with cous cous and the kids said that it tasted like cinnamon rolls, and that time, it wasn't a compliment.

So, this morning, I decided I would make a sweet potato loaf cake out of the leftover. I found a recipe on the 'tinternet and I assure you, it is very yummy and moreish. I adapted the recipe to take into account the added sugar and spices already present in the cinnamon rolls casserole candied sweet potato dish leftover.

SWEET POTATO LOAF CAKE

1 1/2 cups sugar  I used soft dark brown sugar 
1/2 cup vegetable oil I used sunflower oil with a little dash of light olive oil
2 eggs 
1/3 cup of water

1 3/4 cups all purpose flour I used plain flour
1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp bicarbonate soda
1/2 tsp salt

1 cup mashed, cooked sweet potato I used my leftover
1/2 cup chopped pecans yum yum
1/2 cup raisins I used sultanas

Method

1. Combine sugar, oil, eggs, and water.
2. Add next 5 ingredients, mixing just enough to moisten.
3. Stir in potatoes, pecans, and sultanas.
4. Pour batter into 2 greased and floured loaf tins.
5. Bake at 175C degrees for 1 hour. Cool 10 minutes, then remove from tins and allow to cool completely.

       
Yesterday was Day 2 of Chichester's Local Food market. I have to say that despite valiant attempts, it was rather lacklustre in the sense that none of the stalls had that visual impact from afar. There were my usual haunts, Debbie from Veg Out from whom I bought 2kg of onion which I made onion marmalade with. The game stall man with his scrummy game pie mix. The Weald and Downlands Museum stall was there and I managed to restock on their stoneground wholemeal flour - a rather large 10kg bag of it. I was happily chattering away to the stallholder lady but I don't think she thought I was orally legible enough, despite my affected semi Sussex accent, or maybe she was just utterly amazed that anyone brown skinned with head to toe in tattoos would be making excitable proclamations about what wonder Yorkshire puddings the flour make.

A rather unattractive view of Chichester's local food market. You can hardly see the Cross for this perspective.

This gentleman was selling hollowed out oversized breadrolls filled with soup!!! I didn't have time to try some.

Cute, kitschy. Cath Kidston-y stall, selling things I don't really need but would love to have.

I did make some bread but have failed to take photos of them. Here, have some pictures of the batch I made the day before. They're whities but still very yummy.

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Fig Tart, stamps and gateau

My morning started with me going downstairs to the kitchen and finishing off the tart I made last night. I picked up some good priced figs in Sainsbury's (where the cashierboy was amazed that someone could calculate the total price of their shopping without the aid of a calculator) and thought I would make a simple lemon and fig tart. Just slice the figs, arrange them on to the lemon cream mixture and then brush on a sweet glaze made with lemon juice and sugar. I remember making the first time I made this tart - it was my sister-in-law's 50th birthday party and I had naively agreed to cater for a party of 60 people. From my tiny, matchbox kitchen. It was frantic. I still talk about it today (she turned 60 last week), in that I-think-I-ought-to-have-therapy-for-that-experience way.

Then it was off to the house we are about to move into. Slaveboy needed help emptying what will be our bedroom and we have a friend coming over later today to pick up the cabinet unit from that room. The thing is, the cabinet unit is filled, to the brim (if it had one) with STUFF. That would have been quite ok to tackle if it weren't for the fact that the room is filled with stuff too. And also the landing. And for that matter, the WHOLE house. There must be at least 4 generations' worth of belongings packed away in dusty boxes and dreaded carrier bags. A chair was stacked upside down on top of the pile of linen and crushed boxes. I went through 5 black bin liners' worth of old, dusty, smelly, mouldy curtains, obviously stored not with the intention of being left untouched for over 40 odd years.

Slaveboy was beginning to get quite wobbly with me as I was being quite ruthless and ploughing through the stuff without a moment's hesitation. That I can understand. Afterall, there is a lot of emotional attachment to the stuff we were going through - letters written by his Nan to her husband after he died. Old, dusty photo albums containing his grandparents' baby photos. We found Clarice Cliff's plates and jugs in amongst complete utter tat, a couple of very valuable figurines which would have fetched good money if auctioned off, had it not been for the fact that they had been badly packed, completely forgotten about and then damaged when the boxes were moved from pillar to post. No one remembered the existence of these items, let alone remembered where they had been packed away to. So, I can't help but wonder about the nation's obsession of collecting things, as I sifted through boxes and boxes of stamps (some of which would have fetched good money), coins, postcards, and, wait for it, 21 nylon(!!!!) bed sheets (oh yes, even my fetishism hasn't sunk that low to appreciate nylon). I come from a family that didn't collect things. No family China, although my Mum was fond of Pyrex's Autumn Blossom or something like that. We certainly didn't squander collectibles away to be reserved for a rainy day or for future generations. And I'm not saying that one is better than the other as I am very pleased with the fine bone china jugs and plates I have received from my late mother-in-law's collection but here is a family who are having to go through items that have been stored away for some reason or another - maybe for best, or for a grandchild or with the blind faith that one day, it would be worth a lot of money, and the sad reality is, as an outsider looking inside, the biggest thing that is hitting the remaining family members is that their elders just didn't sort their shit out at all, for some reason or another.

So a carload to the tip later, Slaveboy has some floor space to work with. The wood glue has arrived for our kitchen worktops. The sash window is about to be reinstalled. We'll just have to figure out how to deal with the rotting window sill. Oh, and the dog has yet to pee in the Belfast sink that is waiting to be plumbed in. It could be a lot worse, like bypassing breakfast and lunch completely and eating what Sainsbury's labels as their Taste The Difference Chocolate Gateau.

Which I just did. Why I insist on eating packaged supermarket cack when there is a homemade fig & lemon tart in the fridge is beyond me. 

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Lemon & Almond Cake - FAIL!!!

Lemons are a relatively new fruit for me. Back where I came from (and no, boys and girls, despite my gleeful claims, I do not originally hail from Bognor Regis), lemons were a pretty rare thing. We have limes, ickle ones which are thin skinned and very crisp flavoured. My Mum used to squeeze the juice out, dissolve plenty of sugar with some icy cold water for a refreshing drink. 

Only recently, do I sometimes choose lemon cakes over chocolate and they have to be pretty damn fine for me to do that - for instance, Spiker's lemon cake which she made for our Tea Party. The thing is, I can't help but make the deduction that only old people would prefer lemon cakes over chocolate - and because of this, I sorta fight this growing fondness for this sharp, unassuming and common citrus fruit. 

Disclaimer: I am quite happy for you to pronounce me as shallow for this very reason. 

So, I wasn't planning to bake any cakes for a few days. I have some bread baking to catch up with - two white loaves, 4 loaves of ciabatta and 3 loaves of soda bread should really keep me pretty busy for the next couple of days but those damn lemons keep beckoning me. I keep thinking of them sitting there in the fridge, just willing me to boil the hell out of them. 

Yes, this recipe requires you to boil them. None of this namby pamby zesting and squeezing the juice out and measuring the quantity in a measuring jug. This, my friend, is a good bit of honest, nonchalant baking. The sort that I don't have to have my contact lenses on for cos the recipe is so simple. 

So, you take 4 lemons (in this case, I used 5 cos mine were weeny), unwaxed naturally, and organic if you can. Wash them and bung them in a good sized pot and boil them on medium heat for about an hour. If you are a sad blogging muppet like me, you would be spending this time writing up your blog and fiddling with your camera and getting the photos uploaded. If you are the baking Goddess I aspire to be, you would seize the moment, take your lover to bed and make love. Logic dictates that you probably would still have a good 40 mins (let's not even try to bullshit and try to drop me comments protesting this) after that to get showered, write up your blog and get your lover to make you a good cuppa. It's a win-win situation! Unfortunately, the latter option is not available to me on account that Slaveboy is at our new house hoovering after his 29 year old son who is rebuilding our sash window. 

In the meantime, don't forget to watch your pot. While a watched pot gathers no dust (oh, how I love my mixed sayings), a not watched one would overspill and cause a fair amount of condensation in the kitchen. Like it has done with mine. This almost reminded me of the time we filled the heated birthpool in our last house when I was expecting the Mai-ster in 2006. The room filled with so much steam, the wallpapers were sweating and threatening to peel off.

Once the lemons have cooled down a little, cut them into wedges, dig out the pips (seeds, whatever you call them), and whizz the hell outta them til they become pulp.



In a separate bowl, whisk 9 eggs til it becomes thick and leaves a thick ribbon trail. Mix all the sugar (350g), ground almond (350g) and baking powder (1/2 tsp) together and fold into the egg mixture. Then lightly fold in the lemon pulp.

Now, this is when I tell you that this is the first time I have made this particular recipe. It is Gary Rhodes's and originally an Orange Almond Cake recipe but he did say that you could substitute the oranges with lemons. Now that I have made this cake and had some, I am n-o-t really convinced.

But I am going to go through the process anyway.

Here is a selection of photos. As you can probably figure out, I have discovered Picasa.

So bearing in mind, you would have read my mind and put your oven on to 180C, you are ready to divide the mix between two cake tins and bake them for about 40mins (believe me, 45 mins was a tad too long but not long enough to really affect the cakes).

So whilst waiting, I had this little pantalooned boy cat keep me company. He is very good at looking not amused but I assure you that this is his come-to-bed eyes.  He's also had a mini-stroke recently (legend says that it was due to the four twiglets I fed him) so he gets away with a lot.

That is not a natural marking on the tip of his nose. That is a I-shove-my-nose-in-the-foodbowl-all-the-time look. I reckon the female cats don't mind the scent of cat chow that lingers around him.

And then, Slaveboy came home with this. He thought the children might find it amusing. I hasten to add that we are trying to declutter. Not to mention move house.

Oh, and don't let me forget to tell you that he didn't come home with the hoover. Ooops. Apparently, he did. I just haven't seen it.

My verdict is, well, a bit meh really. It wasn't sweet enough. It had a lovely texture and it smelled lovely. 

But we will definitely be eating it with custard tomorrow. 

Sigh. 

Sorry. Will try harder next time. Next time I will just cut my losses and use my usual Anthony Worrall-Thomson's (or however you spell his name) recipe. Even if it does claim to be GI friendly and all that stuff. 

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Brownies

A friend of mine asked me to make some fudge brownies on Sunday. This is my staple comfort sweet food. I could make this with my eyes closed. However, I was pretty excited at the prospect of packaging them as I had never done this before. Previously, I had just made do with empty plastic containers, or even worse, cling film or catering foil. I spent the drive home from Tunbridge Wells the night before thinking of ways to package them(where both Slaveboy and I fell asleep at a gig because we we were just so exhausted - honestly, we were like two old fogeys sitting in a chair with our heads leant together, propping us upright - no alcohol involved, just some substandard £2 beef burgers).

I decided on using baking parchment and making two simple origami boxes (takes you to a video demonstrating how to make one - the bloke on there has a sexy schmexy voice). I had to use 5-ply of baking parchment so the box would be stiff enough and each box happily contained 12 squares of brownies, 6 in each layer. I then wrapped the box in a simple parcel method and secured the sides with a length of pretty lace ribbon, with a small card detailing when the brownies where baked and what the ingredients were. My friend was very chuffed with how the boxes looked and texted me at 11pm (funnily enough I was actually asleep by then, which is rare for me as I am often still awake at 1 a.m.) saying that her husband thought the brownies were sublime and that no way was she ever going to be able to eat other people's brownies again. That made me really chuffed.

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Yet Another Birthday

It was my sister-in-law's 60th birthday while we were away on our short holiday (an experience that I am yet to muster up enough courage to write about)  and both my niece and step daughter had planned a surprise party for her in time for when we returned. I agreed to do some of the baking, mainly the dessert part and also a birthday cake. I had written down a watertight schedule as to what needed to be done at what day when I got back and was sure that it would be failproof.

Except that when I got back on Wednesday evening, the designated night to make the peanut sauce, I was absolutely shattered. The most I could do was crawl into bed and silently sing some puja to the bed Goddess. In my head, I was calculating the days I had left (party was to be on Saturday and this was Wednesday evening).

So I had 2 days to make peanut sauce, 3 lemon meringue pies, 4 salted butter tarts and a birthday cake. Not to mention the four trays of homemade pizzas and 2 trays of sticky sweet chicken wings on the actual day.

And I didn't have enough pie tins in the house.

Plus I was skint, on account that the short holiday cost us more than we had anticipated.

But I was not going to be defeated, by golly, I didn't have six children to be defeated by lack of time, sleep and energy.

If I remember, I would post up more about the actual party. My step daughter was having a meltdown as she simply was pulling in too many hours to really have the time to organise the party and my niece was pulling her hair out because her mother was getting suspicious of their frantic attempt to tidy the place for a party. There was also the small last minute issue of my sister-in-law refusing to go out with her friend who was the designated distractor, deciding instead to go sing in the church choir for a wedding that morning. In the midst of all the panic in the last hour, my niece decided that she needed to make chocolate fudge (with Nestle condensed milk - tut tut). The peanut sauce alone warrants a post on its own because it is absolutely delicious. Then there was the incident where I had to baking parchment bandage the sides of the meringue pies. But it all came together in the end. We must have waited for what felt like 15 minutes from the time of first sighting of my sister-in-law walking towards her house. I just love the English - all that build-up, all that anticipation and the intention to create an element of SURPRISE!!!!! and when she walked into the room, I reckon about 4 party poppers went off (not in a uniformed fashion) and 1 failed attempt of getting a surprised look picture and a hell lot of people just standing there like lemons hardly even muttering SURPRISE!!!. You guys really know how to party.

But until then, I just wanted to share with you the cake I made her. It was my first attempt at making gumpaste roses and I am really pleased with them. I think I can make the petals thinner next time but I am amazed at how simple they are to make.

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My friend, Sadie..

Taught me a naughty word today. Vaffanculo. This was after I asked her if it is true that real Italians don't ever use dried herbs in their cooking. I think the vaffanculo was directed at that statement, although I did also ask if she thought it was acceptable to put soy sauce and blackstrap molasses in bolognaise sauce. Tee hee.

Anyway, she gave me a really great recipe for chocolate cake. I was going to publish it here but then, I just remembered that I don't have her permission to post it. So you will have to just make do with a picture of it.. until I get in touch with her and learn yet another useful Italian word and get her ok to post the recipe.

Wooo hoo, that Sadie, she said YES.

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Vanilla Extract Update - Day 8

After reading a blog about making vanilla extract with 80 proof vodka, I decided that this could be a fun thing to do, in a trainspotting kinda way. I reckon I will subject you to periodic photo entry of how my vanilla extract is coming along. Basically take a bottle of vodka, bung some vanilla pods in it - I used 5 Madagascan ones and leave it in somewhere dark and give it a shake every so often. I plan to keep it going for about a year so you guys are gonna SO fed up of these photo updates by the time Christmas rolls in. 

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Ta ta for now..

We are off for a short holiday. The kitchen is a state. I have cut my thumb. Apple pie in the freezer. Bedding in the washing machine. Children waiting to leave, going "Are we going yet?". See you guys soon. Be good now.


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Do bear with me...

I am attempting maintenance work on this blog so it might at times (heh...) look like it is being written by someone who has a bipolar disorder. I have some fine tuning to do and things will resume back to normal soon.


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Stop Press!!!

So, I've killed my hand mixer. I knew it was on its way out anyway cos it started making some funky smells but that was about two months ago and I kind of figured that it might do what most of the appliances in the Stephens family - sort of start threatening to conk out and I then have to humour it and love it - no, hang on, I was thinking of Slaveboy then. Right, ho hum. Anyway. It did today, mid whisking meringue. It was only then did I realise how important it was to have replaced my normal balloon whisk, which, obviously I hadn't. So I had to abandon all that and basically give up.

BUT, not before I made an apple pie. I was given a whole load of cooking apples from my friend, Kak Hery when I went round her house last night. Seeing it is Ramadan, Kak Hery was fasting and she was almost chomping at the bit when Azhar, my friend and I were a teeny weeny bit running late. I would too if I had been fasting from around 5am and desperate to break my fast. Kak Hery is an Asian cuisine Goddess!!! She made a starters of laksa lemak noodles, with all the trimmings of coriander, boiled eggs, plump prawns, sliced chillies and freshly cut limes. She also made ayam masak lemak cili padi which is basically chicken cooked in a chilli and coconut milk sauce with kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass and ginger. There was also urap, an Asian salad dish, the recipe of which had just been translated to her on the phone by her sister in Malaysia. She also served grilled spiced mackerels which were just to delicious for words. There was some well chilled elderflower presse and also freshly made teh tarik. I really did leave thinking I ought to try harder with my home cooking.

Anyway, Kak Hery doesn't like apples. Pure and simple. She has two apple trees in her garden and she cooks none of the apples. I came home with  big bag of apples and this morning, I fancied some apple pie. Funnily, enough, I have never made apple pie. I've made all sorts of apples cakes, crumbles and muffins but not pies. I had a quick trawl on the internet and found a recipe which appealed but I altered it slightly by using my own favourite pastry dough and increased the amount of sugar as these apples were cookers and had no sweetness to them. I also increased the amount of apples used and baked it in a normal cake tin, rising the height of the pie by double.

Excuse the poor presentation. I am going on holiday on Monday and we are nowhere near ready and I am feeling a tad frazzled. 

And I will be sharing a lodge with bloody vegetarians. Whoever said you could choose your friends must have been a lonely guy.

I didn't quite manage to get a picture of it cut as the whole family descended on me (well, on the pie really) and pretty much got stuck in with some West Country cream from Marks & Spencer's, which in my opinion is the best supermarket cream around.

RECIPE


For the pastry 

350g plain flour 

200g cold butter , cut in small 

pieces 

2 tbsp icing sugar 

2 egg yolk  (save the egg whites and make a small meringue case with 4oz. of caster sugar)

The rest of the stuff

115 g unsalted butter

25 g plain flour

60 ml water

100 g white sugar

110 g packed brown sugar

8-10 cooking apples apples - peeled, cored and sliced (use leftovers for applesauce and store in fridge)

Directions

1. Put oven at 220C or 205C for fan ovens. 
2. Melt the butter in a pan.
3. Add the flour to make a paste.
4. Add water, and both types of sugars.
5. Bring it to a boil and then let it simmer away.
6. Line your loose-bottomed cake tin (mine was a 23cm one) which the pastry dough, allowing the edge of the dough to come up to just under an inch from the top of the tin. 
7. Fill with slices of apples until they create a slight mound at the top. 
8. Then cut the remaining dough into strips and create a lattice pattern on to of the pie. 
9. Take the sugared butter liquid of the heat and slowly pour it into the pie, making sure the latticed pastry top gets some of the liquid too. 
10. Ensure that you place the cake tin on a lipped tray as it does ooze from the bottom during baking. 
11. Bake for 15-20mins at the original temperature and then reduce the temperature down to 175C or 160C fan ovens depending on how temperamental your oven is (mine is a Chinese Opera dungaree-ed lesbian). Cook for another 40-50mins (or 15mins if you are my friend, Spiker). 
12. Take it out of the oven. Let it rest for a while. You really want to let the remaining juices to get sucked back in. 

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