quite contrary

things are really starting to happen in the scrubby little excuse for a garden i'm carving out for myself at casa mitchell. it's still very much a work in progress, but all the arse-busting work i did in spring is starting to show rewards. i've got pods on my pea and broad bean plants, i've already eaten my first lettuce harvest, and i keep getting handful after handful of rocket to scatter over just about everything. my small scale herb garden is thriving. the latest success story is my perpetual spinach plants. perpetual spinach is not spinach proper, it's a member of the chard family that behaves in a very similar manner to spinach, in that you can't really tell the difference apart from the plants being hardier. i have two plants, and about say, once a week i nip out and harvest a couple of handfuls of leaves about this size:

i've been starting to pretty much plan what i cook around this weekly harvest, so reliable and prolific as it has become. part of me is intrigued to see how long my plants will keep giving if i keep them well cared for. they're sure enough not showing signs of slowing down.

while it would be easy to get lazy and just start wilting spinach into everything, like i did when i was a student and reluctant to waste any of one of those supermarket pillow packs of baby leaves which i seemed to buy every week; i have been trying to cook things that let the natural flavours of this spinach come through on their own. because if you're putting in the time and effort to grow something yourself, organically, it doesn't make sense to just chuck it any old where. not to mention that home grown produce seems to taste so much more of itself than its industrially raised counterparts, and it would seem a bit of a disservice to it to let it get lost in amongst too many other ingredients.

my most successful endeavour with my spinach so far has been in coupling my growing-to-eat obsession with my other obsession: yeasted baking. i decided, after making the pizza dough recipe from the river cottage bread handbook, that i wanted to try using the dough for calzones, and since in a calzone the filling is protected by folded over dough, there's no risk of wilted spinach scorching at the high temperatures necessary to bake the dough. so i kind of improvised this little number, and was mighty pleased with the results:

spinach and mushroom calzones

half a batch of river cottage pizza dough
1 ball mozzarella, roughly torn (contrary to what food snobs will tell you, using mozzarella bufula campagna is entirely unnecessary in recipes in which it will be melted and is not to be the primary flavour, but buy organic, yeah? unethical dairy production is way more grim than unethical meat farming)
four large field mushrooms, slicked thickly
about 150g spinach, very roughly chopped
two gloves of garlic, finely sliced
1-2 sprigs of thyme (i used lemon thyme from my garden)
olive oil
rye flour for dusting
salt and black pepper

so obviously, apart from the pizza dough prep, which needs to be done about an hour in advance, this recipe is super easy. before you get started, preheat your oven to as high as it will go, with a heavy baking tray or baking stone in it.

heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a pan, and brown your mushrooms, adding the garlic and thyme after a minute or two. and you shouldn't need me to tell you this, but the less you move your mushrooms and the more space you give them, the better they'll be. nothing pisses me off more in the kitchen than having an obsessive stirrer keeping me company and not leaving things to just be. just give the pan the odd shake to flip the mushrooms about so they brown evenly.

when pretty much done, add your spinach to the pan, stir it in, season with salt and pepper, and turn the heat off. the spinach should wilt pretty damn quickly. and it'll look a little bit like this:


leave it aside for a minute while you roll/stretch out your calzone dough. now, i just made two here, but i think if i made it again, i'd divide the dough into three, maybe four, because the ones i ended up with were absolutely massive, and while i have a mega appetite, i struggled with one. you need to roll out your calzones into rough ovalish rounds on a surface dusted with rye flour, size not mattering as much as the fact you're aiming for about a 5mm thickness.

assembling your calzones requires speed more than anything else, so they don't get soggy. dust a rimless baking sheet with rye flour, place one of your ovals on it, scatter your filling on one half, along with some of your mozzarella, fold over the other half, and crimp the edges up with you thumb and forefinger. slide straight into the oven and the heat from your baking sheet or stone will get to work on the base before it has time to get soggy. repeat with the rest of your dough.

they take ten minutes to cook, roughly, and come out looking like this:


not the prettiest (yeah yeah, i'm just gonna stop making mention of the fact i'm totally slapdash on presentation, i think we all get the point now, don't we?), but basically awesome. one of 'em leaked a little bit, but it wasn't really the end of the world in my opinion. mine ended up so big i didn't have anything with the one i ate for dinner, otherwise i might have been tempted by some of my rocket alongside it. and despite the bold flavour of the field mushrooms i'd used alongside it, the whole thing turned out pleasingly spinach-y, and will definitely be making a reappearance on the casa mitchell dinnertable again. especially if my perpetual spinach keeps flinging out leaves the way it is at the moment.

on where to shove great british tradition...*

i'm gonna lay something on the table here, okay? tennis sucks you guys. it actually just sucks. it is the most repetitive sport in the universe, and surely must have been designed for people with the attention spans of goldfish. i would actually rather watch a game of golf in its entirety, which is mostly just dudes walking up hills in stupid clothes, than watch five minutes of tennis. because it sucks. the only way tennis sucks any more than usual is when it is wimbledon season. suddenly loads of people who don't usually give two craps about tennis are talking about seeds and andy murray, and shitting themselves that it might rain, even though wimbledon courts have lids now, so it wouldn't even matter if it did. granted, working in pubs i am exposed to more of this chatter than most, which may be the cause of my excessive aggravation over it, but seriously, wimbledon sucks.

i know what you're thinking, where's my national pride, and sense of tradition and heritage? whatever. i'm half foreign (that half in question being from the commonwealth and thus having a bit of harboured resentment about colonial rule, perhaps), so that's my get out of jail free card when i'm pointing out how boring our traditions of rich people politely clapping over a ball bouncing back and forth like trained monkeys actually are. what about lemon barley water? a clever advertising tie-in. what about strawberries and cream? oh please. fruit and cream is not something to get all misty eyed about to strains of god save the queen, it's a faux-nostalgic take on british seasonal produce, that the supermarkets exploit year after year to sell their imported fruit at insane prices. unless you grow, or pick your own strawberries, or buy them from a farmer's market, your fruit probably isn't even good enough for jam.

so what am i going to do if a punnet of strawberries and a pot of cream suddenly land in my lap gratis (which they did, this week)? you bet your ass i'm not gonna sit down and eat them as they are in front of wimbledon. i'm gonna flick through my copy of nigel slater's tender vol. II and look for something to do with them that appeals to however i'm feeling kitchenwise at the time (which i did). i've been toying with the idea of ice cream for quite a while now. not least because it is my Favourite Thing Ever In The World. so i found a recipe which the right honourable mr. slater reckons is probably the only ice cream worth making even if you don't have an ice cream maker, and upon seeing how laughably easy it looked, a way to play with free ingredients and learn something rather than caving to Great British Tradition was born:

a strawberry ice for a hot summer's day

strawberries - 450g
caster sugar - 100g
double cream - 300ml

rinse the berries quickly under cold running water and remove their leaves. cut each berry ino three or four slices, then put them in a bowl, sprinkle with the sugar, and set aside for an hour.

lightly whip the cream. you want it to be thick enough to lie in folds rather than stiff enough to stand in peaks. put the strawberries, sugar, and any juice from the bottom of the bowl into a food processor and whiz til smooth, then stir gently into the cream. how thoroughly you blend the two is up to you.

here's mine before it went in the freezer (note, any lumps you may see are pieces of strawberry, i got lazy with the stick blender):

transfer to a freezer box, level the top, cover with a lid or a piece of clingfilm or greasproof and freeze for three or four hours. it is worth checking and occasionally stirring the ice as it freezes, bringing the outside edges into the middle.

remove from the freezer about fifteen to twenty minutes before serving to bring it up to temperature.

and here is what mine looked like (no, i don't own an ice cream scoop, and yes, matching sprinkles were necessary):


so, there we have my first foray into frozen stuff. granted, not as technically advanced as ed's ice cream, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out which pot tosser is the most slapdash where technique comes in, does it? it was good, actually, i was surprised at the texture being so smooth given it was literally just fruit and cream, but honestly i can't imagine a custard base working with strawberries, they're kind of a wimpy flavour at the best of times as far as fruit goes, so the less they have to stand up to, the better. i had stuff to get on with in the kitchen that afternoon so i literally took it out and hand whisked it every 30-45 minutes or so, which might have helped. it was enjoyed while reading my current literature crush, one fyodor dostoevsky, and ignoring my mother talking about wimbledon, which has been a tradition at casa mitchell since i've been old enough to know how to ignore efficiently.

anyway, i'm pretty glad i chose a minimum effort recipe first time round, as it's a pretty good way of bypassing what otherwise may be a massive new-technique avoidance that i'm pretty good at cultivating. now that i know i can avoid come dine with me style rock-solid disasters, i might actually give more complex frozen stuff a go.

*...in the freezer, obviously. minds out of the gutter please guys.

kneading stability.

it has to be said, that when my passion for something gets reignited, it gets reignited big style. so, even though i have been delving into sourdough, and in the process trying to cultivate patience and structure in my life (not to mention endeavouring to set up a kind of legacy narrative in my cooking for the future) i haven't been able to keep myself from playing with yeast in other areas.

do you ever wake up in one of those moods where you just want something to do, to occupy your time, but you're not sure what because you're pretty much bored with everything? i do. all the time. in fact, when it comes to days off my default states are either having loads of things to do and being really excited about them all to the point of just not feeling like there's enough time in the day, or a kind of listless 'oh god, i just wish i had something to DO' state. when i get into one of these states i tend to latch on to the first thing i can think of to do, which usually has something to do with my kitchen. and given that all my reading and idea-collecting recently has been to do with yeast, it was bound to be something to do with dough.

i decided to make pizza. now, this is not the first time i have made pizza, my pizza making career stretches from being a tiny tot putting toppings on pre-made bases with my little brother at my childminder's, to making my dough according to the recipe of theo (bloody) randall, when his collaboration with pizza express was feautured in delicious magazine (something i perused avidly throughout my university life, and would still recommend now to those not of the herbivorous persuasion). now, while there are definitely such things as wildly inauthentic pizzas, let's face it, unless we're talking plastic-wrapped supermarket monstrosity, it's pretty hard to create a bad pizza. nonetheless, in my attempt to become Yeast Queen Of The Universe, i turned to my personal flour-covered bible, the river cottage bread handbook, for my dough recipe. and unless something comes along that subsequently blows my mind, i'll be sticking with this recipe in future. it needs to be noted however, that because i was just cooking for myself, as is normal in a house full of inadventurous carnivores (no one ever suffered from lisa simpson syndrome as much as me, i swear it), i halved the recipe, which still left me with leftovers. but since leftover pizza is absolutely a good thing, i'm not going to complain.

so, here is what i gone done and did:

pizza dough

(makes about 8 small pizzas)
250g strong white bread flour
250g plain white flour
5g powdered dried yeast
10g salt
325ml warm water
about 1 tablespoon olive oil
a handful of coarse flour (rye, semolina, or polenta) for dusting.

mix the flours, yeast, salt and water in a bowl to form a sticky dough. add the oil, mix it in, then turn the dough out onto a clean work surface. knead until smooth and silky. shape the dough into a round, then leave to rise in a clean bowl, covered in a plastic bag, until doubled in size, which should take an hour.

while this is going on you may as well make your tomato sauce, which i also got from the river cottage bread handbook:

roast tomato sauce

500g tomatoes (i used a mixture of cherribelle and sungold)
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and black pepper

preheat the oven to 180 degrees c. halve the tomatoes and lay them, cut side up, in a roasting tin. mix the garlic with the oil, pour over the tomatoes, and shake the tin a little to distribute the oil. season with salt and pepper. roast for 30-45 minutes, until the tomatoes are soft and slightly charred. rub through a sieve into a bowl. you'll end up with something that looks a little like this:

when your dough is risen, you can get on with shaping and baking your pizzas.

preheat your oven to 250 degrees c or as high as it will go, with a baking stone or tray inside.

to shape your pizzas, take a lime-sized piece of dough, and roll it 5mm thick on a surface dusted lightly with coarse flour, keeping it roundish, but not worrying too much (unless you can do the fancypants twirling the dough thing, there's no structural benefit to a round pizza gluten-wise, so if you're anything like me, the unnecessary aesthetic fiddling is so beyond not worth it it's not even funny). lay the dough on a rimless baking sheet which you have dusted with coarse flour, add your toppings, and slide onto the hot baking sheet in the oven.

the pizzas are done when the dough is blistered and the cheese is lightly bubbling. which in a domestic oven takes about 7 minutes. i could get two on a baking tray at a time, and therefore did, so i cooked my four little pizzas in two batches. they came out looking a little something like this:

the toppings i chose were mushrooms fried in oil and lemon thyme from my garden, finely chopped rosemary, also from my garden, finely diced taleggio, vegetarian parmesan, pine nuts, and, after they had come out the oven, a scattering of rocket leaves, also from the garden. i'm going to leave you to guess how much i ate, and how many were left over.

these pizzas were made all the better in the eating by the fact i used produce grown by my fair hand on them. i'm already dreaming up other combinations with the stuff that's currently growing like the dickens. i'm thinking a garlic and sharp young goats cheese pizza bianca with a scattering of lightly blanched broad beans after baking, or a feta, spinach, red onion and pine nut combo. authentic? no. likely to taste amazing? yes. i'm also going to experiment with how well this recipe translates to the genius that is the calzone, so expect reportage on that endeavour sometime in the near future. especially given the regularity with which i keep waking up restless and annoyed and seeking kitchen activity at the moment.

and she was moving very slowly.

ladies and gentlemen, i promised you i would return to conclude my sourdough efforts, and in true lazy mitchell style, it has taken me god knows how long to do so. i say lazy, although once again other things have seduced my attention away; namely being elbow deep in maths projects for work; a state which taxes my brain to the point of total lack of energy.

i know, i know, excuses excuses, but i just want it on the record that it isn't like i didn't want to tell you about my sourdough. in fact, i have been dying to. it's basically the coolest thing i've done since i started this blog, in my opinion. that might just be me getting excitable at taking the diy-process to the next level, but working with live yeasts is cool. if i end up some sort of crazy bread lady who croons to her sourdough starter as she feeds it i will be entirely unsurprised. there's not a whole hell of a lot to do in these villages, and anthropomorphizing my bread seems like one of the more pleasant ways available to descend into an eventual total loss of sanity.

anyway, as i've said before, enough of the bullshit, and onto the bread. so we already know all about my starter, which had maybe a week and a half to stabilize and establish itself before i was gonna make anything with it. it's been a nice little routine-maker, feeding it daily. i stand and whisk in the kitchen as my brain slowly comes to life after the day's first coffee and cigarette (usually taken while inspecting the garden) and come up with the things i'm gonna do over the course of the day. i could get used to having this thing with me for the rest of my life. there are ways in which you can slow down its activity, meaning you don't have to feed it as often, such as putting it in the fridge, but personally i like the regularity of the daily feeding, and you have to have it very active to bake with, so i keep it that way as i like to have the capacity to make whatever kind of bread i want, whenever i want.

having said that, sourdough does involve some prep the previous day (if you're not quite as organized a cook as you want to be, like myself, you'll find that getting into this habit gives you way more of a sense of being super on it and in control than is necessary). the technique i used for my first set of loaves, wholemeal sourdough, was my trusty daniel stevens' river cottage bread handbook; and it goes a little something like this:

basic wholemeal sourdough

makes 2-3 loaves

for the sponge:
500g strong wholemeal wheat flour
600ml warm water
a ladleful of very active sourdough starter

for the dough:
600g wholemeal wheat flour, plus extra for dusting
25g salt

before you go to bed, make the sponge. mix all the dry ingredients together by hand in a large bowl or plastic container. mix thoroughly, squeezing out floury lumps if you come across them. put the lid on the container, or put the bowl in the plastic bag until morning.

when i went to bed, mine looked like this:

by morning it looked like this:


the next day, mix in the flour and salt, and squash it all together, addng more flour or water as necessary, to form a soft, easily kneadable, sticky dough. turn it onto a clean work surface, and knead for about ten minutes until smooth and springy.

form the dough into a tight round, flour it all over and place it in a clean bowl. like so:

cover with a plastic bag and leave to rise for an hour. then you should end up with something like this (which since the book says don't expect much rise at first, is a bit of a shock):


tip it out onto the work surface, form it into a round again, and return to the bowl to rise for another hour. repeat this process once, or even twice more. you will notice the dough becoming increasingly airy. like so:



and so:

after the final rising period, tip the dough out onto the work surface and deflate it by pressing all over with your hands. divide into two or three, and shape into loaves. coat with flour, then transfer the loaves to well-floured wooden boards, linen cloths, tea towels or proving baskets. like so:



lay a plastic bag over the whole batch to stop it drying out, and leave to prove until almost doubled in size; which could be anything from 1-4 hours depending on the temperature of the dough and the vigour of your starter. mine took just over an hour:



when the loaves are almost ready, preheat the oven as high as it will go, put a baking stone or heavy baking tray inside, and place a roasting dish on the bottom shelf. put the kettle on. have a spray bottle full of water, aserrated knife and an oven cloth ready, as well as a peel or rimless baking sheet if you are using a baking stone.

when the loaves are ready, transfer them to the hot tray, or one at a time to the peel. slash the tops with a serrated knife (i didn't do this for mine, cos i could see natural cracks had formed in proving). put the tray in the oven, or slide each loaf onto the stone, pour some boiling water into the roasting dsh, and shut the oven door as quick as you can.

turn the heat down after about 10 minutes to 200 degrees c/gas mark 6, if the crust is still pale, 180 degrees c/gas mark 4 if the crust is browning noticeably, or 170 degrees c/gas mark 3 if the crust is browning too quickly. bake until the loaves are well browned and crusty, and sound hollow when you tap them on the bottom. this will take 30-50 minutes depending on the size and shape of your loaf.

so i totally forgot to photograph my finished loaves, because i'm an idiot. here is what was left the morning after baking:


not much, as you can see. i made a big one for casa mitchell, and two smaller ones to give to my baking guinea pigs, my boss aled, (who actually sulks if he doesn't get any bread when i'm baking), and my american friend ed, who i think i've mentioned before, because he and i trade garden produce and food stuff all the time. i'm still waiting to hear from them, but i'm expecting good things, because the crust on this was amazing. i think it's the longer proving time and exposure to air, but i am serious when i say i might have found crust nirvana. i'm glad i didn't slash my loaves, as to be honest, i think combined with the cracks that happened from me shaping them into a round, it would have looked ugly and created a bizarre risen shape, not to mention disrupting the aforementioned crust. the bread itself tasted amazing, it had a kind of hoppy, beery note to it that i wasn't expecting given the sharp, almost pear drop notes my starter has taken on. this is my first venture into sourdough folks, but by no means will it be my last. it's such a pleasurable process that i'm finding it very difficult not to bake sourdough every day; about the only thing stopping me is my complete awareness of what such an excess of carbs would do to my body.

cupcakes don't get tougher than this.

okay guys, so i know i promised you sourdough action on my next posting session, but my super-hectic-village-barmaid-living-in-rural-suburbia lifestyle has conspired to get in the way, and i haven't had a chance to bake with it yet. obviously i am anxious to, and childlike levels of impatience are increasing by the day, so you will be the first to know about it when i do get the chance, but in the meantime i would like to tell you about something that i hope you'll find equally exciting.

now, i am not the competitive type. i would never last five minutes on masterchef because i would be far too interested and excited by what everyone else was doing to focus on trying to trash the competition. but if you throw in the opportunity to eat lots of cake, drink lots of wine, and spend an evening talking to people as interested in baking as i am, well, you've got yourself a competitor. throw in the fact i'm always moaning about there being fuck all to do in northampton, and it becomes very clear as to why i always make sure to get off my arse and do something whenever i am able to attend the monthly iron cupcake competition, at the nook arts cafe in northampton's fishmarket gallery.

anyway, the rules of an iron cupcake are very simple. there is a theme, which you can interpret in any way you see fit. you must make twelve cupcakes (so everyone can try some), and other than doing your utmost to make sure your cupcakes also look and taste lovely, that's basically it. there are prizes for first, second, and third place, and as much tea and/or coffee as you can drink (or, if you're anything like me, an admirably stocked bar that is open for business). you try all the cupcakes, and vote for your favourite three. basically, it's a recipe for an enjoyable sugar rush of an evening.

the theme this month was fine art cupcakes. i have to admit, it left me a little bit stumped. in terms of the visual arts world i'm a little bit of an uncultured swine, having succumbed to the love of the written word at an age early enough to ensure my head's been in a book that doesn't contain pictures for most of my adult life. so it took me ages to come up with anything approaching an idea coherent to the theme. this may also have had something to do with the fact i also like the flavours i include in my cupcake to be coherent with the idea i have chosen to work with. it isn't really enough for something to look cool for me; it has to taste amazing too. i eventually settled on frida kahlo as my inspiration, although i have to admit i played pretty fast and loose with it; citing her preoccupation with mexicana as my visual inspiration, and drawing my flavour ideas from that, settling on a chilli chocolate and dulce de leche combo.

so, let's get onto the constructing of my little beauties (which basically took an afternoon):

dulce de leche

right, first thing's first, you need to get your dulce de leche on the go, because this takes a long-ass time to make, even if it is a fairly hands-off job. all you need for this is a tin of condensed milk. there are quite a few ways to make it, but honestly, i choose the wimpy way, being quite afraid of either trashing the kitchen or ending up with some hardcore caramel burns. i use a tin opener to poke two holes in the tin at the top, and set it in a very large saucepan, which i fill up with water almost to the top of the tin. the water needs to be boiling gently for 2-3 hours, topped up regularly so that it doesn't boil dry. then you leave it to cool a little, pour out the contents of the tin into a bowl, and stir it all up til you get something that looks like this, which you leave to cool:

trying to avoid eating it with a spoon as it is is the hard part here people, trust me.

since your dulce de leche will happily putter away on the stove doing its thing with minimal demand on your attention, you can use this time to crack on with everything else. now, for the actual cake part of my cupcake i played it pretty simple. i knew it would have to play merely a supporting role to the dulce de leche and ganache combo i was planning, so i reached for the turquoise covered beginner's coobook by rosemary wadey that belonged to my mother, that i have been making sponge cakes from since i was tall enough to reach the kitchen counter stood on a chair. in hindsight i probably would have ramped up the levels of cocoa in the sponge to make the cake slightly more bitter and intense, but at the time i was on the autopilot the recipe sends me into. so here is your basic go-to chocolate sponge recipe, and it makes a few more than twelve which gives you leeway for mistakes:

basic chocolate sponge recipe

ingredients:
150g butter
150g caster sugar
3 eggs
125g self raising flour
25g cocoa
vanilla essence
few tablespoonfuls of milk

preheat the oven to 190 degrees c. put the butter and sugar into a large bowl and cream together untl the mixture is light and fluffy.

beat in the vanilla essence, and the eggs, one at a time, followed by a tablespoon of the flour to stabilize the mixture.

sift the remaining flour and cocoa, and fold into the mixture lightly. loosen the mixture to a soft dropping consistency with a little milk.

spoon into a 12-hole muffin tin lined with cases, and bake for about 10-15 minutes. you'll have enough to do an extra half batch or so. perfect if you worry about fuck ups the way i do.

and it's as easy as that. i didn't bother taking a picture here because you all know what chocolate sponge cakes look like, and it's not like i could take an awesome photo of them that you'd all be amazed by, so who cares right? anyway, with my cakes cooling and my dulce de leche still doing it's thing, i got on with my icing:

chilli chocolate ganache

okay, so i love ganache. i love it so much i'd find any excuse to make it, and i consequently pretty much autopilot it whenever i do these days. to start this chilli one i put two dried red chillies and a cinnamon stick in a saucepan with 250ml, or thereabouts, of double cream. on a low heat i bought it almost to the boil, then took it off the heat and left it to infuse for about a half hour. i fished out the chillies and cinnamon, broke up about 250g of the darkest chocolate i could get my hands on (ordinarily i'd choose green and blacks, but lindt's 85 percent was packing the biggest heat at my hideously huge local supermarket, so i went with that) and added it to the pan, along with a small knob of butter (just whatever i chipped off with a teaspoon. i bunged the pan back on the heat, stirring continuously until i got myself a sleek glossy dark brown situation going on. if i'd have wanted something semi-solid, like truffles, or an icing with structure and bite, i'd have left it there, but i was in the mood for something a bit lighter in texture, so i let it cool a little in a bowl, then whipped it a couple of shades lighter in colour and texture. i also let it cool at room temperature, as this gives a softer set to play with, like so:



and now we come on to assembly, folks. there are many ways to fill a cupcake, but to those of us not in possession of a piping bag, the options are limited. i should probably get one at some point, but why do things properly when you can botch them together like i do? while i love cooking i absolutely detest kitchen gadgets, not to mention kitchen gadget people. it's probably down to spending my formative years in a suburban housing estate that makes stepford look rough, but if i go round someone's house and they want to show me their new cherry stoner or milk frother? well ladies and gentlemen, the friendship is over. if i ever start talking to you about a new blender or something, this is me giving you permission to stick my hand in it. anyway, tangent. what do you do if you're filling cupcakes sans unnecessary equipment? fall back on the old butterfly method. with a small sharp knife cut out as deep a cone as you can from the top of the cake. fill the hole with dulce de leche, a la:



cut off the pointed end of the cone, and stick your cake top back on, like so:




(you might notice a touch of ooze there, but these badboys are getting iced, so who gives a fuck?). what comes next? ganache icing, obviously. and then (and this is where i always reveal my icarus tendencies in cake decorating) fondant icing decorations.

i made up a basic fondant icing, (which is just eggwhite, icing sugar, and liquid glucose; my proportions on it being 450g sugar and 50g glucose to every one white, although it varies depending on who you talk to) and i made some sugar skulls (which looked amateur but not horrendous):


and some cacti complete with cactus roses (which were epic fail, and also sort of melted in the car ride over):




presentation is never, ever my strong point. ever. and never has it been more clear than here. but i usually pull back a lot of votes on my taste points at an iron cupcake, and i have to say this time it was no different.

ladies and gentlemen, i, according officially to the photo album on facebook, was a whisker away from placing. i'll take that to mean fourth, and be damn proud of it given a) my hilarious decoration attempts, and b) the fact that the winning three lots of cakes were so ridiculously amazing. i got some pictures to show you of the winners from the official facebook gallery; not that i need to tell you these pictures aren't mine, because you can actually see what they're of.

i mean, this is number three; a totally beautiful gustav klimt themed set of cakes that was cinnamony and chestnutty and let's be frank here, downright stunning to look at as well. they were made by a lovely lady called gabi who i was sat with, who definitely seemed to be my partner in crime in the 'let's get more cake' stakes:



number two were these stunning 'monet's garden' cakes by a lady called caro, which, although you can't really tell from the picture, were also amazingly sparkly. they were apple and maple, which pleased me, as i'm a bit of a sucker for maple syrup, and i counted them as one of my five a day along with the grapes in my wine:




and number one, which actually were my favourite cakes of the evening, were these super yellow andy warhol's banana cakes, made by another lady i had the privilege of being at table with called polly. i voted these top place, because the icing was totally fucking awesome. it tasted like those foam banana sweets i'm not allowed to eat anymore cos they have gelatine in, so i got really excited and ate a whole other one after i'd finished tasting all 10+ cakes that were in the competition. i found out later from polly that she used banana milkshake to flavour the icing, which made me like them even more, cos while she was angsting on an aesthetic level about her cakes, she used a 'pop' food substance in 'em, which i think the man himself would have been proud of (don't know if you've noticed, but my degree has bent my brain into thinking that incorporating ideas about art into technique is the best thing ever)


anyway, i don't feel i've sullied pot tossery's name conceding to these brilliant art cakes, but i will definitely be back for the next round, in which the theme is 'cupcakes in disguise'. i already have what i think might be a brilliant idea. who's coming with me??

patience

so last time i left off talking about long term bread projects and an experience which has left me looking for a sort of yeasted holy grail, right? right. i think before i get fully into the swing of discussing said project, i should let you in on a little secret...

i am not a patient person. not in the slightest. i have never really had to be. i'm still in my early twenties, and have only very recently moved out of that phase of life where life feels as though it never slows down long enough for you to catch your breath; what with all the new opportunities and lifestyle changes that being in higher education flings at you every minute. i have never had to wait for anything simply because i've never had the time to do any waiting, always being busy with something or other. but since i quit education last year, the pace of life has changed considerably. my life's progression no longer relies upon me, my books, and how fast i can type. there are other people in the mix. there is money in the mix. i can no longer fast track myself simply by working longer hours; i have to wait for things. and it's something that, although previously i would have said i was good at, is slowly driving me round the bend. consequently, in my long-standing tradition of setting myself projects over the summer so as not to go crazy in the longer days, this summer's projects all have one thing in common. they require me to be, or at least learn to be, patient.

in cooking terms, this means a relatively hands-off project, something that requires regular maintenance but not too much faffing. given that i had already previously decided that 2011 would be the year of mastering bread baking; the idea of making and endeavouring t kep a sourdough starter seemed like a very good place to start on Operation Patience. so i did what i do best, and spent at least a week reading anything i could get my hands on regarding wild yeasts (and yes, you did read that right; i deviated from my beloved river cottage bread handbook).

it has been a week since i started my sourdough adventure; and while we're not yet at the stage where it's on an even keel enough to bake with, i feel i can now confidently start telling you the hows, whys, and whats of the process. given that i consulted several sources, this is merely the way i have gone about things, so i will issue here the proviso that i am by no means anywhere near the expert level. the title that best befits me is probably enthusiastic amateur; and therefore when i tell you about processes and techniques, bear in mind that this is as much about me learning as it is about me teaching in any way. i couldn't think of anything worse than coming across as a patronizing know-it-all, when it's patently obvious i am far from 'knowing it all' about a practice that has been going on worldwide for thousands of years.

anyway, enough wih the bullshit, and onto the bread.

the basics

okay, so, sourdough is basically bread made with wild yeasts. i guess we're all familiar with the idea that bread = flour + water + yeasts in some combination. and usually the yeasts will be added in some external form, fresh, or dried, right? well, sourdough uses naturally occuring yeasts in the air. yep, you heard me, there are yeasts in the air. anyone who has ever had the pleasure of working in the licenced trade in anything other than a casual pour-a-few-pints-on-a-saturday capacity will already know this. it's the reason you keep beer cellars scrupulously clean; otherwise you end up with all kinds of homes for these wild yeasts to come and hang out and wreak fermentation havoc on your beer. so with sourdough you have to create a good home for wild yeasts to come and hang out and anaerobically respirate themselves silly. which is easy. you just need warmth, moisture, and a starch that can be broken down into a sugar. this home is your starter, a batter of flour and water in which you establish a yeast fermentation, and then 'feed' fresh flour in order to maintain it. you use ladlefuls of this starter, in combination with flour and water, to bake with. it couldn't be simpler. oh, and why is it called sourdough? mostly cos this wild fermentation and feeding process creates and introduces various bacteria, including lactic acid, to the starter, which lend the dough a more complex, pleasingly sour taste.

so now we know about sourdough. here is how i have gone about mine:

day one:

so, day one is, obviously, where you begin with your starter. it is advised to start off with a wholegrain flour. i chose wholegrain wheat flour for mine, although you can use rye, spelt, whatever. this is just because although possible, it takes white flours longer to reach ferment. and while i'm learning patience here, i have my limits. i started with 150g of wholewheat flour, and 250ml of warm water, and whisked them together into a thick batter (you have to be quite vigorous with your whisking, you want air pockets in the batter. i put my starter into a large, airtight container (i used a 2l tupperware box). it has to be large to allow room for frothing, and because you will be adding more to this base you have created. this is what my mixture looked like before i sealed the container:

as you can see, nothing special. the bubbles that are there are just from the whisking. i put my container into the airing cupboard, so as to give it warmth begin it's fermentation process.

day two

on day 2, i pulled out my sourdough and it looked like this:

you can see small bubbles from fermentation beginning, although the starter has only had itself to feed on so far. it smelled different, as well. rather than the slightly gluey smell of just flour and water, the dough smelled vinegary, a kind of sour-sweet smell. day two was time for the first feeding, so in went 150g flour and about 200-250ml of warm water, whisked vigorously. on with the lid, and back in the airing cupboard (i feel at this moment i should point out that the airing cupboard in this house is in my little brother's room, and as a result i took great risk to my health going in there to stow this. the things i do for my art, honestly)

day three

okay guys, this is where the difference starts to get radical. i pulled out my sourdough on day three, and this is what i got:

vigorous fermentation, as you can see. it also smelled much stronger. the only way i can describe the smell, and this may not be any help to those of you who haven't worked in commercial kitchens, is the way a large quantity of either salad cream of marie rose sauce smells. a combination of sugar and vinegar, that smells overly sickly with an edge. it's not a displeasing smell, but it certainly catches your nose and doesn't let go. right, so day three is where you begin to stabilize your starter, so you get rid of half of it, whisk in another 150g flour, and 200-250ml water, put the lid back on, but this time, keep it at room temperature.

day 4

on day four, as we can see, the fermentation has begun to stabilize itself somewhat:

it's still fairly vigorous, but the bubbles are more uniform. the smell mellowed slightly, too, gaining a bit more depth and a bit less 'bite', as it were. you repeat the process of getting rid of half of it, and adding 150g flour and 200-250ml water, from now on this becomes the regular feeding pattern for your starter. obviously once your starter is stabilized in its activity, rather than discard the excess, you start to bake with it, for those who are starting to think this is a wasteful process. again, you just put the lid on, and leave it at room temperature.

day 5

so, on day five i was greeted with:

as you can see, it is beginning, almost, to look like a slice of bread or cake in cross section. the smell gained further complexity and began to take on an almost beery note. i continued on with the established feeding pattern, and will continue to do so.

okay, so, that is a sourdough starter, ladies and gentlemen. literally the easiest thing to do, unless you're as impatient and curiosity driven as i am. i am still in the patience stage, as weekends are a notoriously busy time for me at work, leaving me no time for slow rise baking. so i am continuing the feeding programme and will hopefully be making my first sourdough loaves on tuesday. even with the waiting, this is an interesting project for me. i like the idea of sourdough, not least because it will encourage me to bake near-daily, thus giving me a calm kitchen routine to distract me from all the major things i have to wait for. but there is also the from-scratch element of it; the idea that due to differences in temperature and atmosphere, no two sourdough starters will ever be the same, and neither will the resulting bread. i like the long term nature of it, too. my friend shane told me of the pleasure he had, working in a commercial kitchen, with a starter that was over twenty years old. i like the idea of a piece of cooking heritage to take through life with me. especially if i can one day tell the story of it being something that taught me patience at a time i was feeling particulaly uneasy about waiting around for formalities. next time you can expect a report from me on the results of baking with my creation, and i hope you're looking forward to it as much as i am.

oh, and p.s.

you didn't seriously think i wouldn't sneak in a little quick action baking did you? if you're craving a little quick fix while all this goes on, it's worth making a focaccia or two to satisfy your activity cravings. this is mine:

i made two of these, with black and green olives and rosemary from the garden. one of them got traded with my neighbours for six runner bean plants. i feel like i got the better end of that deal. making focaccia may even have encouraged me to get rid of my old oil-scorched silicone baking trays in favour of some new ones, as, as you can see from the picture, mine have been through four years of war now and are starting to look a little fire-eaten.

guess who's back?

i am the kind of person that definitely feels that time away from things is a necessary component in being able to appreciate them fully. i can apply this approach to pretty much every aspect of my life, from friends and family, to work, to favourite albums, novels and films. even, in fact, to my kitchen. i've always wondered if it's something particular to my tendency toward fixation; i have a habit of letting my mind focus on one idea, playing it out repeatedly until i am sick of thinking about it and have to get away from it out of some kneejerk reaction. it must be something like that, because it's always external influences that make me see the idea in new light, make it seem less oppressive and repetitive. bear with me on this, it is going somewhere.

as you can tell from the fact i have had the time to sit down and write this; i am back from barcelona, which ed and i visited with his friends tim and emma. before i went away i was actually getting sick of my kitchen, running out of inspiration and falling into the dreaded rut of seeing food merely as fuel to get me through weekend shifts. it wasn't at all that i wasn't cooking, it was that i didn't really care what i cooked, i didn't think it worth the time and energy to consider why or how i was making what i was. this listlessness probably came from major stresses in other life areas, but put quite bluntly, the time away from having to put pan to stove couldn't really have come along more conveniently.

barcelona was, obviously, a ridiculously good place for food adventures. yes, even for a strict vegetarian like myself. and by 'like myself' i mean in tow of a totally committed carnivore like ed. i managed amply, and the best bit? i didn't have to put any of the food forethought i was sick of in. but then i had a total starry-eyed moment. ed and i visited the rambla catalunya branch of taller de tapas on a 'well this place looks pretty good' whim (note to woody allen fangirls/boys, i didn't notice til after but this place actually features in vicky cristina barcelona) and spent what probably amounted to a couple of hours in absolute awe of their food. the particular moment i had came upon trying their pa amb tomaquet, which basically is totally a catalan thing, apparently: bread with tomatoes and oil. sounds simple enough, right? wrong. i ate this stuff and it was like a light came on. this bread was actually insane, ciabatta like with the crispest crust, and my brain immediately went into mad scientist mode, trying to work out how they'd done it exactly, or more accurately, trying to work out exactly how i could do it. basically, this is exactly what i was talking about earlier. someone else's idea or product or influence totally rekindling my fascination; making me look at things in a new way and set myself new challenges. as we speak today i am ticking off ingredients for an attempt at ciabatta, and earmarking as much info as i can on sourdough starters. perfect airy bread will be mine.

in the meantime, i'll give you a lifesaver bread recipe for those moments when you're not in the throes of fascination or inspiration with the process. or when you don't have time for the whole slow-rise thing. or for if you're a bad liar but still want to be able to say 'god it was so easy....and it didn't take any time' when you're showing off to mates coming around (don't act like you don't do it, we all do). this isn't bread proper, in that it has no yeast to speak of. but if it looks, feels, tastes and smells like bread, well, who is anyone to argue? it's definitely more of the rough, rustic ilk, denser than the airy mediterranean stuff i've been dreaming of since, but it has it's place in any baker's repertoire, particularly given that we're in the season for young, chalky goats cheeses. best of all, it's flour-to-table in half an hour, which gives me way more time to read up on the science of massive airholes.

walnut and honey soda bread (from the river cottage bread handbook, by daniel stevens)

200g honey (i used some i'd infused with dandelion petals, recipe here)
200g walnuts
500g plain wholemeal flour
10g salt
4 tsp baking powder
300ml water

preheat the oven to 200 degrees c/gas mark 6. soften the honey in a pan over a gentle heat. using a pestle and mortar, crush half the walnuts very finely, almost to a powder. crush the other half very coarsely. this gives the ideal combination - lots of flavour from the crushed nuts, and texture from the large pieces.

combine the flour, salt, baking powder and walnuts in a bowl. add the honey and water, and mix together until evenly combined. knead briefly to a firm dough.

divide the dough mixture in two and shape into rough rounds. flatten to about 5cm high and cut a deep cross in each, almost through to the base. bake for 20-25 moinutes or until the bread sounds hollow when tapped on the base.

allow the bread to cool a little on a wire rack. serve.

so here is mine:

basically, like i said, perfectly good bread in half an hour. a recipe ideal for those sick of the sight of their kitchen, or those busy maniacally researching other aspects of the yeasted baking process. this bread is ace with cheese of any description, or masses of butter and more honey; and i will definitely be knocking it out on a nigh-weekly basis during pear season.

anyways, what with my bread obsession well and truly back, and the fact i plan to start my sourdough adventures this week; i expect you'll be hearing a lot more from me, in far more excitable tones than have been evidenced for the past month. i cannot begin to tell you how good it feels to be excited by breadmaking again.