Spice Girl.

If there's one thing I know about, it's my own mind. I've been with it all my life, and I deal with it every day, so if I weren't an expert, i may as well throw in the towel, right? Given my recent disappointment with the functionality of an Ottolenghi recipe, I knew that if I didn't make another one soon, I'd write off the recipes in Plenty as 'too difficult' as I internalized the bad mood I felt because of those impossible supermarket gigantibeans. So I played to my strengths, and found myself a recipe well within my comfort zone, which, as I have previously explained, is Indian style food.

I chose his double potato vindaloo. Now, the magnificent vindaloo is something much maligned in british culture, a curry seen as the 'hottest of the hot', and often ordered in a terribly unorthodox chicken guise by lager swilling red-faced middle aged dudes in a drunken test of machismo in indian restaurants. You don't need me to explain to you that in this context it's interesting cultural history and origin is often disregarded.

I don't claim to be any kind of expert, as a 23 year old english girl, on Indian cuisine, but I do feel it is only respectful and right to point out the often overlooked raisons d'etre of a dish that has suffered culturally in England mostly due to a seemingly wilful ignorance about food from other cultures. One of the best meals of my life was a vindaloo, a vegetarian one cooked for me by a hindu chef on a beach in goa, where i was staying in a hut made of woven palm fronds with a sand floor. I must have been about fourteen years old, and I remember the word vindaloo striking fear into my heart as I definitely did not have the spice tolerance then that I have now. I tried it anyway, and I'm glad I did, because while it was hot, it was also sweet and warming, and I'm sure if i was living that moment now i'd be anxiously taking notes in a painfully hip moleskine in order to recreate it, but young me was pretty much just concerned with eating it. I don't think it's a taste experience I could replicate, anyway, honestly speaking. i was probably a combination of the location, the sensation of the new, and a mood of feeling like things were good, that I don't mind admitting was largely absent in my teens.

Nevertheless, older Kirsty, armed with her books, her kitchen, and her painfully hip moleskines, still attempts to cook vindaloo. Later in life I learned that vindaloo is a dish particular to goa, a region colonized by the portugese, and so named because 'vin' refers to the vinegar used in the dish. 'aloo' means potatoes, referring to the other necessary component. It is apparently traditionally made with pork, but I have always made vegetarian versions in reference to my first experience of the dish, and because a curry containing potatoes is a logically solid vegetarian offering. It's 'hotter than hot' reputation is apparently a misguided one, as although the sauce is robust due to the inclusion of a lot of warming spices, it's not hotter than say, a traditional goan red fish curry. Usually I rely on vegetarian-ising a pork recipe from Camellia Punjabi's 50 curries of india (a really invaluable beginner's curry cooking source full of amazing information about everything) but in my endeavours to regain culinary confidence, and my joy at finding a sound vegetarian recipe, I jumped at the chance when i saw Mr. Ottolenghi's recipe. so here is my attempt at it (and no panics this time, pure success):

Double Potato Vindaloo

8 cardamom pods
1tbsp cumin seeds
1tbsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp sweet paprika
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tbsp vegetable oil
12 shallots, chopped
1/2 tsp brown mustard seeds
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds
25 curry leaves
2 tbsp fresh chopped root ginger
1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped
3 ripe tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped
50ml cider vinegar
400ml water
400g peeled waxy potatoes, cut into 2.5cm dice
2 small red peppers, cut into 2cm dice
400g sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 2.5cm dice
salt
mint and coriander leaves to serve

Start by making a spice mix. Dry-roast the cardamom pods and cumin and coriander seeds in a small frying pan until they begin to pop. Transfer to a pestle and mortar and add the cloves. Work to a fine powder, removing and discarding the cardamom pods once the seeds are released. Add the turmeric, paprika and cinnamon and set aside.

Heat up the oil in a large heavy-based pot. Add the shallots with the mustard and fenugreek seeds, and saute on a medium-low heat for 8 minutes, or until the shallots brown. Stir in the spice mix, curry leaves, ginger, and chilli, and cook for a further 3 minutes. Next, add the tomatoes, vinegar, water, sugar, and some salt. Bring to the boil, then leave to simmer, covered, for 20 minutes.

Add the potatoes and red peppers and simmer for another 20 minutes. For the last stage, add the sweet potatoes. Make sure all the vegetables are just immersed in the sauce (add more water if needed) and continue cooking, covered, for about 40 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender.

Remove the lid and leave to bubble away for about 10 minutes to reduce and thicken the sauce. Serve hot, with plain rice, and garnished with herbs.

So here is mine, served with a touch of yoghurt to cool its jets a little (sorry purists and vegans!), with white rice in a seperate bowl cos it was pretty saucy:


This recipe is probably as close as i am likely to come to that first experience of vindaloo. It was sweet, jam packed full of warming spices, and solid due to the potato content. Sweet potato is a bit of an unusual addition, but by this time i expect no less from my homeboy Ottolenghi. I actually think this recipe in particular is very suited to plenty as a book, a hybrid dish in essence, with European and Indian influence, it seems to mesh with Ottolenghi's 'citizen of the world' mixed heritage and experimental attitude. My confidence in working with his recipes is totally restored, as i knew it would be, working well within my comfort zones. This, like any other curry recipe, is great for my usual style of big-batching and living off things for a few days, a product of my odd working hours and dietary choice in a household of devoted carnivores. Why? because curries improve in flavour if left to sit for a day or two. The spices intensify and meld together more effectively. People who claim they can't eat the same dish two days running really should try indian cookery; sometimes it's like encountering a totally different dish the next day. Since my potatoes are almost ready to be harvested, I can see myself making this again in the not too distant future, but before i do i definitely want to have a bash at a very interesting looking potato tarte tatin that's also in Plenty. I mean, comfort zones are nice to retun to for a boost every now and then, but staying in them all the time would be the most boring thing in the world, wouldn't it?

In which Ed has a barbecue and gets two racks of ribs...

The weekend before last I had a barbecue.  As you might have guessed, I'm really not the sort of alpha-male douche-bag who couldn't tell his arse from his elbow in a kitchen but as soon as the mercury stretches past 15° wheels out the barbecue and takes complete control because there's fire involved and that's what men (manly men) are supposed to do.  No, in fact I'm far better within the luxurious confines of a kitchen where you can have four things on the go on different heats at the same time rather than just a temperature gauge of either 'red' or 'white'.  But, you know, barbecues are awesome, right?

So, what do you get when you come to a barbecue of mine?  Plenty awesome things, of course.  Sod sausages and burgers (which are fine in their own right), but ribs is really where it's at for proper barbecue.  So I asked my butcher for two racks of baby back ribs, and prepared them thus.

Spice rub
2tbsp smoked paprika
2tsp celery salt
2tsp ground cumin
cayenne pepper
ground ginger
ground toasted Sichuan peppercorns
ground cloves
ground black pepper

Mix all the ingredients together and rub over the surface of the ribs and leave in the fridge overnight.

According to Barbecue Sauce Folklore, I should have at least one Secret Ingredient.  But I don't.  Certainly not of Planet Terror proportions, but then I didn't have hoards of the undead to content with whilst making it.  I don't have a Secret Ingredient, not least because I've already told several people what's in mine, but also because there's not really anything in it that anyone might conceivably never think to put in a barbecue sauce.  Except maybe root beer, but even then my inspiration for using it came from an episode of Man v. Food (which is probably the greatest food show on TV.)  Also I'm not selling it, so it doesn't really matter.

Sauce
1 medium onion
3 cloves garlic
6 tbsp tomato puree
5 tbsp soy sauce
4 tbsp worcester sauce
4 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp cider vinegar
3 tbsp root beer
2 tbsp molasses sugar
1 tbsp chipotles en adobo
2 tbsp olive oil
1 star anise
1 piece mace
2 tsp mustard powder
2 tsp smoked paprika
2 tsp celery salt
2 tsp ground black pepper

Finely chop the onion and garlic and fry in the olive oil with the mace and star anise in a pan big enough to hold all the ingredients until the onion and garlic have softened.  Add everything else and cook on a gentle heat for about fifteen minutes.  This was left overnight with the mace and star anise left in to infuse. 

Set the oven to a low temperature, about 100°C.  Put the ribs in a roasting pan and crumble a few tablespoons of molasses sugar over the top.  Pour about 100ml of water into the bottom of the pan, cover with foil and cook in the oven for between 1½ and 2 hours until the meat is cooked through, but not overdone.  The water will create steam inside the pan, while the sugar will caramelise on the surface of the meat. 

Take the ribs out of the pan and coat the top side with a liberal amount of barbecue sauce and finish off on the barbecue for about five or ten minutes, depending on how hot it is.

Now my fondness for seafood extends to barbecues as well.  As a lot of seafood really doesn't need much time at all to cook, barbecues are great.  Last summer I barbecued some prawns that were about the size of a small domestic animal which were fantastic, along with some squid, which you only really need to wave at the barbecue and it's done.  While I was planning what to do I found a recipe for prawns ideal for barbecuing in Thomasina Miers' Mexican Food Made Simple.  These were just marinaded overnight in several generous spoonfuls of chipotles en adobo whizzed up with some onion, garlic and a bit of water, then barbecued until they turned pink.

I've been wanting to cook razor clams for ages now.  In fact I only got round to eating them for the first time in Barcelona in May, firstly an unfortunate stop in a harbourside tourist trap resorted to after the initial guide book recommendation being hideously beyond standing room only (crouching on the floor room only?) and the hilariously titled Bar Fanny being ominously deserted.  They were about as rubbery as anything you'll ever eat.  At least we did discover an amazing ice cream shop a few yards away in which to continue the Search For Amazing Pistachio Ice Cream.  Secondly, and thankfully, the tapas joint Kirsty and I sort of stumbled across retrieved them fully into 'Oh, actually these are just really incredible' territory.  So when I went to the fishmongers to get prawns and saw a fat bundle of razor clams lying there, obviously I got some as well.  As far as cooking them, I just threw them on the barbecue and put the lid on and waited for the shells to open, then liberally covered them in a mixture of olive oil, lime juice, garlic, chilli and parsley.  I think by then the barbecue had started to die down a bit as they could have done with being cooked over a higher heat for a bit less, but still, they weren't quite up to the Taller de Tapas standard, but then these were about twice the size.  They still tasted sea-salty and fresh...

As well as these I did some aubergines and courgettes, thickly sliced lengthways and brushed with oil and lemon before barbecuing (before any of the meat/seafood went on), a now obligatory focaccia, and what is possibly the best/easiest thing to do with potatoes for such an occasion.  Take some large potatoes (doesn't need to be any specific type, but Maris Piper works fine as Generic Potoato of Choice.)  Slice in half lengthways, then cut each half into three or four wedges, depending on size.  Put in a roasting pan and cover liberally with olive oil, sea salt and ground black pepper.  Smash a few cloves of garlic under the blade of a heavy knife and stick in the pan, along with a few sticks of rosemary.  Roast in a pre-heated oven at 200°C for roughly an hour, or until golden.

I had also planned to do some cous cous using some preserved lemons I found lying around and toasted pine kernels and some other things, which I managed to totally forget about.  I also chargrilled and skinned some romano peppers the night before and left them in a jar with garlic infused oil, which I also totally forgot about.  Even with those in mind I had wondered whether or not that little lot was going to be enough, even though I don't have any Italian ancestry.  Obviously it was plenty, with enough left over to fry up some aubergine and courgette with some romano peppers and toss with some paccheri pasta the Monday after.

So overall it was a splendid barbecue.  Alas Esteemed Blogging Partner was being held against her will by Evil Corporate Pub Chain International, so couldn't come and make more types of bread and make it some sort of combined Pot Tossery showcase.  Large quantities of superlative beer was drunk (and all put on my Noble Green loyalty card, haha), and the neighbouring shitty street party where some two-bit pub band knock out hideous Blues Brothers covers wasn't too intrusive as they all seemingly became distracted by David Haye's tickling contest. 

miss july

hey guys! so, i mentioned my victory at this month's iron cupcake on monday at the end of my last post; because i literally couldn't keep myself from blurting it out. i could, and probably should, have kept you all in suspense for the whole of this post and then dropped the bomb at the end, but i'm just too excited and pleased with myself. when it was announced i properly burst out with 'are you joking???'; not least because the competiton was, as always, totally tough and really exciting.

the theme for this month's competition was cupcakes in disguise (if memory serves, on tamsyn's great call for ideas facebook post, it was actually one of my ideas, which makes it doubly neat that i took the miss july crown). because things have been hitting fever pitch in the garden, i have got fruit and veg on the brain lately, so i had been toying with the idea of a cupcake disguised as part of your 5-a-day (hey if it's good enough for the makers of processed food, right?). i was hoping my courgettes would be ready so i could do a courgette cupcake, with a lime curd filling (the idea for the combo coming from the excellent courgette cake in nigella lawson's how to be a domestic goddess). i'd settled on this idea and not really thought of any others, but sod's law, my courgettes have only just this week started developing fruit bodies, and massive happy yellow flowers (and yes i am going to pop in a gratuitous garden picture, because how could these little lovelies not bring you a smile?):


so, with my courgettes only just bursting into life, i could either defect to imported supermarket ones in a panic (which, if there are alternatives, i really hate doing), think up a new idea, or modify my existing lime idea. being a serious minimum-effort kind of girl, i decided just to modify my lime idea, and go totally citrus with the whole cake. i decided that given that cake decoration is not really my strong point, i'd rely on the 5-a-day disguise idea for adherence to theme and just focus myself fully on getting great flavours going on. i found a recipe for citrus and poppyseed cakes that sounded pretty great, but i couldn't get hold of poppyseeds, so after further moderation, i ended up with citrus and almond cakes, filled with lime curd, iced with a limey cream cheese frosting, and topped with diy candied lime peel. green? they sure were:

let's break this down then. the candied peel is a two day job, as you've got to let it sit and soften overnight. so i got started on my prep on the sunday. the recipe is from my river cottage preserves book, written by my hero pam corbin, and i actually modified it from a recipe for sweets made of chocolate dipped candied orange peel. i know a competiton is hardly the time to be learning a new preserving technique, but whatever man, no pain, no gain:

candied lime peel

4-5 limes
500g granulated sugar
1 tablespoon glucose syrup

scrub the limes, then remove the peel in quarters. to do this, cut through the peel with a sharp knife, going right round the lime, starting and finishing at the stalk. then repeat, at right angles to the first cut. remove the peel, with the attached pith. slice it finely (i used scissors to get long slices i could curl and stuff)

put the peel slices into a large pan and cover with two litres of cold water. bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes drain and return to the pan with one litre of water. bring to the boil, and simmer, covered, for about 45 minutes. add the sugar and stir until dissolved. simmer, covered, for 30 minutes. remove from the heat and leave to stand for 24 hours.

bring the pan to the boil again. add the glucose syrup if using and boil gently, uncovered, for 30 minutes or until all the liquid has evaporated and the peel is coated with a bubbling syrup. remove from the heat and allow to cool. remove the peel and place it on a wire rack with a tray underneath to catch all the drips (this was one of those messy jobs which is really cool/gross/fun to do and you end up covered in syrup) . leave either in a war place like an airing cupboard for 24 hours, or dry in a warm oven for 3 hours (i chose the oven method, as i'm a busy woman, you know)

mine looked like this before they went into the oven, check out how syrupy and drippy they are, it took me aaaages to wash all that stuff off me once i'd got all my peel on the rack:


i made my lime curd on the sunday, too. mostly because i had all the lime flesh from the limes i'd used for the peel pieces and i wanted to use their juice for something (if you're going to use something, you'd best be using all of it if you're in my kitchen, i say). it's a recipe from nigella lawson's how to be a domestic goddess, which i've been making since i was in halls of residence in portsmouth, where there were always recycled pesto jars full of a curd of some sort in my fridge, the moral of the story being don't ever let anyone tell you you can't achieve great things in a limited space. it is literally one of those recipes that's so super simple it's not even funny, but always comes out amazing and impressive; and my top tip is if you ever make a trifle, put in a curd layer of some description either instead of or as well as jelly-it's unexpected and always gets a good reception. anyway:

lime curd

makes 350ml

75g unsalted butter
3 large eggs (always free range organic, you know the drill guys)
75g caster sugar
125ml lime juice (approximately four limes)
zest of 1 lime

melt the butter in a heavy based saucepan, add all the other ingredients nd whisk to a custard over a gentle heat. let cool before filling a jar or cake with it. store in the fridge.

so, ordinarily it's a kind of pale, almost-jade green, but i added a tiny drop of food colouring to mine to get it to this wonderful froggy green colour, because let's face it, iron cupcake is much like my wardrobe, where natural and simple just will not cut the required dash:

also, this stuff has the best wibble known to any foodstuff. if you make some, seriously try wibbling the bowl when it's set, it becomes a compulsion. anyway i popped this in the fridge and exerted a herculean effort not to eat it all with a spoon at 4am or something.

so on monday i had very little to do, just the cakes themselves, and the cream cheese icing. the cake recipe i modified from an australian women's weekly cookbook entitled cupcakes and fairycakes, that my aunt got me for christmas one year. i like the australian women's weekly cookbook series, especially the baking ones, as they're full of interesting ideas and decorating tips, which all get filed on my mental backburner:

almond and citrus cakes

2 tablespoons milk
125g butter, softened
1 teaspoon finely grated lime rind
150g caster sugar
2 eggs (again, always organic, free range)
150g self raising flour
50g plain flour
40g ground almonds
60ml orange juice

preheat the oven to 180 degrees c. line a 12 whole muffin tin with cupcake cases.

beat butter, rinds, sugar, and eggs in a small bowl until light and fluffy.

stir in sifted flours, almonds, and juices. use milk to loosen mixture to soft dropping consistency.

divide mixtures among cake cases, and bake for about twenty minutes. turn onto a wire rack to cool.

and er, that's it. done:

as is usual for iron cupcake, i chose a fairly unadorned, robust sponge recipe. it need to be able to take the weight of a lot of filling and icing, and i didn't want it to compete with the lime flavours i was using in spades. it worked pretty perfectly in the end, and i think tweaking it to include some ground almonds gave my cakes enough body to stand up to the task in hand.

while my cakes were in the oven, i cracked on with my icing, which i made a double batch of so some could be green and some white. i got the recipe for cream cheese icing from nigella lawson's how to be a domestic goddess, too, from her excellent recipe for carrot cupcakes (another classic i've been making since my first year of university). i use this everywhere, in fact i'm sure it's even featured in previous iron cupcake entries:

cream cheese icing

125g cream cheese
250g icing sugar, sieved
1-2 teaspoons lime juice

beat the cream cheese in a bowl till smooth and softened somewhat. and then beat in the sieved icing sugar. squeeze in the lime juice to taste.
here are my two batches, green and white:

and now we come to cupcake assembly. i am still not in possession of a piping bag, so i relied on my ghetto 'cut some cake out, fill and replace', technique for filling the little cakes with curd, like so:

only used about half the curd for filling, so i figured since i was already planning to layer the icing up in a two tone fashion, i'd dump the rest of the curd in with it. i layered up curd, then white icing, then green icing in a freezer bag (which we don't normally have around, i only bought 'em cos of liquid restrictions in luggage when ed and i went to barcelona), snipped a corner off, and squeezed out in spirals on top of my cake like toothpaste, and i got a really need marbled effect in my icing. which i then topped with my lime peel:


so, the evening itself was a blast. my good friend corinne came along to participate in the eating (although i think we've persuaded her to bake next time) and we had a splendid time drinking pink wine and pimms and evaluating all the lovely cakes (and there were some real brilliant efforts there). my favourites, the ones i voted number one on my voting, were these: a kind of cake-f-c thing where someone has made cakes look like a bucket of kfc, and a bucket of chips, beans, and sweetcorn. i think corinne voted for these as number one too, so we were both a bit shocked when my name was read out for first place:

i'm a little confused as to second and third, since it was a tie, and the album doesn't say which cakes it were so in amongst my winner's haze i kind of lost it, but i'm pretty sure one of them was these little fellas:

i didn't catch the name of the lady who made these (although we did have a totally lengthy discussion about citrus curd), but they were really good, dense little lemon sponges, kind of like a fondant fancy if fondant fancies were any good. the eagle-eyed among you might notice that that is my handwriting; i got roped into helping to write out little cards for everybody's cakes when i arrived, so any confusion about names and flavours that there may have been was totally my fault!

and at the risk of this becoming the kirsty's-face-blog, here is me, dazed on my own win and a sugar high of epic proportions, modelling my prizes:

i won a really great book called red velvet and chocolate heartache by harry eastwood (already earmarked several recipes to try; lime and ginger barley water, courgette and camomile cupcakes, lemon and lavender drizzle cake, rosemary and orange drizzle cake, parsnip vanilla fudge, and lemon honey and sunflower seed scones being amongst them), a regency style teacup set that i now drink 'winner's tea' out of on the daily, and two edible glitters, a bold bright purple, and a holographic gold. and er, yeah, i did dress/manicure to coordinate with my cupcakes. whatever, yeah?

the theme for the august one is cupcake cocktails, so my mind is already a-buzz with ideas; i've still got some sloe gin to use up, so the wheels are already working. as ed put it, i've got to defend my title, and let's face it, what kind of barmaid amateur baker would i be if i let that challenge stump me? it was such a good evening that i'm already looking forward to the next one, and much love to boss lady tamsyn at the fishmarket for making it a great evening, not to metion the legions of other bakers for making excellent cakes and always being up for chats about cooking curds, making icing, and where to get pretty cupcake cases. see you all next time around!

everything's coming up roses

i think one of the things people most often ask me when i tell them about my preserves is 'yeah but what do you actually do with them?'. with the more obvious preserves like marmalade, the answer is simple, i eat them (and give jars to ed and friends i visit). with slightly more obscure preserves like my preserved lemons, or the rose preserves i made recently, the answer is that i cook with them. there's something satisfying in cooking with things you've made yourself, it has a kind of building-block feeling to it, like you can trace the finished product back further than you could if you'd simply bought the components. it can be traced even further back if you've grown or picked the ingredients yourself. it's totally satisfying to be so involved in the processes of the things you eat. it seems like the closer i get to the source of my food, the closer i want to be; it's a bit of a circular thing.

i don't know that i mentioned, when detailing the process of preserving my japanese rose petals and hips, that rose flavour is an obsession of mine. i drink rose tea, i put rose petals in my gin and juice, i stew white peaches with a few drops of rosewater all summer long, i wear rose lipbalm, i buy myself big bunches of tea roses in ice cream colours and bury my face in them every time i pass them. when ed and i were in barcelona i ate the world's biggest rose and pistachio ice cream, and it combined so many obsessions (rose flavour anything, ice cream, in particular pistachio flavour, serious sugar hits, and super bright colour schemes) that i didn't even notice ed taking the opportunity to sneak a photo of me like he usually does when i am distracted:


so yeah that is basically what we call a defining kirsty mitchell food moment, as captured by the most persistent paparazzo i know (who, incidentally doesn't like rose, which is brilliant cos it means more for me; i'd feel bad, but he probably feels the same way about bacon or something).

with an obsession with rose as huge as mine, it's no surprise that i already had ideas of what to make in mind when i was boiling up hips and petals to jar. well, less so with the hips, as never having actually tried rosehip syrup before, i had to gamble on what would work.

what i did with my rosehip syrup was make a gloriously fruity, sticky version of chelsea buns, using the recipe from the river cottage bread handbook, which is now a firm favourite. i filled them with dried cranberries, and used rosehip syrup instead of melted butter. i also glazed them with rosehip syrup reduced down with a little sugar. and here we have the result:

these were amazing. rosehip syrup tastes like red berries but has the kind of baked-apple tartness that works well with sticky, pillowy buns like these. i'd put in the cranberries initially as a kind of aesthetic thing, but flavour-wise i think they worked out better than currants or sultanas ever could. i did actually take some down on a impromptu visit to london, but they didn't get eaten before they staled, so there can't be a comment from my esteemed blogging partner on these until i make the next batch. which will probably happen very soon.

i had more of a clear cut idea about the rose petal jelly. what i wanted to do was make a nod to that summer culinary powerhouse, the victoria sponge, but with flavours that are a bit less done to death than strawberries and whipped cream (we already know that i think too much Great British Tradition is distinctly oppressive, and that strawberries are a pretty wimpy fruit). i had in my mind a vision of a raspberry and rose victoria sponge, something uncharacteristically delicate and ostentatious compared to my usual baking fare. so i did what i always do when i need to make a mental baking image a reality, and turned to nigella lawson. more specificallly, her victoria sponge recipe in how to be a domestic goddess. she gives methods for making it in a food processor and for making it 'by hand'. naturally i make mine by hand because i always feel like 'shortcutting' on baked goods is cheating somewhat, that and i love a good whisking session:

victoria sponge

225g unsalted butter, very soft
225g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 large eggs
200g self-raising flour
25g cornflour
1 teaspoon baking powder (if using the processor method)
3-4 tablespoons milk

2 x 21cm sandwich tins, about 5cm deep, buttered.

preheat the oven to 180 degrees c/gas mark 4. if the tins are loose bottomed, you don't need to line them, otherwise, do.

i always make this basic sponge cake in the food processor, which involves putting in all the ingredients except the milk and processing till you've got a smooth batter. then pulse, pouring the milk gradually through the funnel till your cake mixture's a soft dropping consistency. because i'm clumsy, i habitually make a too-runny mix, but it doesn't seem to matter. likewise, if your ingredeints are too cold you may end up with a batter that looks curdled: this doesn't seem to make a difference to the baking either (though it might get in the way of impressive rising).

if you want to make this the traditional way, cream the butter and sugar, add the vanilla and then the eggs, one at a time, followed by a spoonful of flour. fold in the rest of the flour and the cornflour, adding no baking powder, and when all's incorporated, add a little milk as you need.

pour and scrape the batter into your tins and bake for about 25 minutes, until the cakes are beginning to come away at the edges, are springy to the touch, and a skewer comes out clean. leave the cakes in their tins on a wire rack for ten minutes, then turn out to cool completely.

okay, so that's your sponge recipe. to assemble my cake, i whipped about 150ml cream until it was at a soft-fold stage rather than a stiff peak stage. i spread one half of the cake with my rose petal jelly, scattered over about 200g raspberries, then spread the cream gently over the top, before adding the other layer of the cake. and i got something that looked a little like this:


exactly how i'd envisaged it. i had to take a load down to work cos i knew there was no way we could finish it all at casa mitchell, despite the best will in the world, seeing as this cake was absolutely massive. it was really, really good, and i think the only thing i would change is to maybe add another layer of rose petal jelly, but that might be due to my floral fanaticism more than anything else. i am already keeping my eyes peeled for more japanese roses, because i've got about a million more plans to bake with this lovely stuff, and only a jar and a half left.

i'm headed down to london this weekend, but before i go i will hopefully have time to tell you about my victory (that's right, you heard me) at iron cupcake on monday, so do stay tuned for more kitchen tinkering that resulted in seriously good cake.

o rose, thou art sick

i walk past the house i basically grew up in on my way to work almost every day. it's a really odd sensation, waving to old neighbours and stopping for a chat, seeing that the place still has the hideous red blinds my mum bought in the spare room window, wondering what the people who are like live there now. i could kid myself that it's a shortcut, and that's why i walk that way every day, but it only realistically shaves 2 minutes off my journey, and i only ever walk that way on my way to, not from, work. the real reason i walk that way is because it is situated on a contemporary housing estate between the village i now live in, and the village i work in. the people who built the housing estate have given it every faux-suburbia detail you'd expect; fake gables, fake pillars, banks of ornamental plants seperating the path and the road. it's no different from any other in the country; especially down to the fact that these banks of ornamental plants are all non-native to the uk. they're all cheap, hardy, perennial, invasive foreign plants, which stirs something in me, makes me feel uneasy and quite angry in fact. a lot of uk wildflowers and plants are endangered, and the people who build estates like this are building them on land where these plants would previously have grown. i am not saying they shouldn't be building homes, but the idea of planting cheap imported plants to take up space and provide something green and suburban rapidly seems irresponsible when growing native plants is possible, and would in fact be a commendable act of conservation by these companies.

still, as usual i have been making the best of an unsurprisingly bad lot. while spring was spent tossing handfuls of native wildflower seeds in to these banks (i am starting to see some growth, which pleases me), the beginning of summer has seen me anxiously watching one of the invaders with interest.

the plant in question is the japanese rose. the japanese rose differs from wild english roses, in that its flowers and hips ripen at the same time, and its petals are a far more lurid pink (as you can probably guess, it was bred as an ornamental). you rarely see wild english roses these days, so if you're looking to make rose flavoured things you're either gonna have to turn to your back garden, or arm yourself with a pair of scissors and go to battle with the invaders colonizing suburbia. which is exactly what i did.

as with other invasive wildlife, such as the signal crayfish, if you remove reproductive opportunities from the japanese rose, you're actually helping out our native wildlife, so really, there isn't any reason not to pick (and to be honest, there are so many hips on a japanese rose that the likelihood of you preventing it self-seeding more plants is so slim as to be laughable). it's basically your patriotic duty to buy jam sugar and declare war.

these are the petals and hips i got on one half hour outing (and that probably included the walk there and the walk back):


i also got some surprise wild lavender, which i was, i assure you, a lot more responsible in picking (you should only ever pick what you'll actually use and never completely strip a plant; nature doesn't belong to any one person, or in fact, just to people at all), which i found growing in an alleyway on my walk. as you can see, that's quite a ludicrous haul, the tubs shown holding at least 400-500ml each. with my river cottage hedgerow handbook as my guide, i rinsed my haul and got to work on preserving my spoils.

we'll start with the hips, with which i made:

rosehip syrup

basically this is the easiest thing ever. for every 150 grams of hips you have, use 250mls of water. bring it all to the boil in a huge pan, and let simmer for about 15 minutes, mashing gently with a potato masher every so often. strain it through a musin lined sieve, chuck away the pulp, rinse out the muslin, and re-strain into the pan. add 150g granulated sugar, stir over a low heat until the sugar is dissolved, then bring to a boil, and take off the heat. pour it into hot, sterilized jars.

here's mine:


and now onto the petals. with most of mine i made rose petal jelly (recipe also taken from the river cottage hedgerow handbook):

rose petal jelly

makes two small jars

250ml water
250ml japanese rose petals (gently pressed down)
350g jam sugar (ie. sugar with added pectin)
juice of 1/2 a lemon

pour the water into a medium saucepan and bring to the boil. take off the heat and stir in the petals. put into a bowl, cover, and leave for an hour at least, or overnight if you have the time:

strain the liquid through a fine sieve back into your pan and place over a low heat. add the sugar and stir to dissolve, then add the lemon juice and bring to a scary, fast boil. keep this rolling boil going for 4 minutes, then take the pan off the heat.

allow the mixture a couple of minutes to calm down, then pour into hot, sterilized jars, filling them to the brim before screwing on the lid.

here are my jars:


let's all just take a moment to look at the beautiful colour of this. i was awestruck, like a little kid. this was so simple to make that i am already scouting for my next fix of petals; i definitely need as much of this jelly in my life as is humanly possible.

now, for my final petals, and my bonus lavender:

floral sugar

i can't remember where i got this recipe for floral/herbal sugars, but basically all you do is layer up the petals and sugar in airtight jars, and every couple of days, stir, until you have beautifully scented and flavoured sugar for use in baking and cooking. the reason this way is the best i have found is because it does not bruise the petals and therefore it is less likely that your sugar will ferment.

here's mine:

i used granulated sugar for the rose petals, and unrefined caster sugar for the lavender. mostly because it was what i had around, but also because i suspect the lavender sugar will be the one i reach for more in the main body of cakes and baking, and the rose will be more of a 'finishing sugar', for sprinkling on top of cakes and desserts.

so, not a bad haul for one afternoon of walking/picking/singlehandedly taking on irresponsible landscape gardening, eh? i've now got a shelf full of preserves i can use in my cooking, and i've done wild roses the country over a favour in the process. it's a wonder more people don't do this kind of thing; as it definitely does a body good.

everyone forgets that icarus also flew.

sometimes it doesn't matter what you do, a recipe just will not turn out the way it's supposed to. if you're anything like me, this kind of thing happening usually causes at least brief feelings of the end of the world. but then, if you're anything like me, you emotionally invest in trifles to the point where you feel like the world could end any day. and since the results are usually edible, and the world never seems to end, you often find yourself feeling very foolish.

i have been waiting for a long time for my icarus moment regarding cooking the recipes of one mr. yotam ottolenghi. everything so far has gone so smoothly that i couldn't help but get a kind of 'it's too quiet...' feeling, previously only encountered when playing various editions of silent hill. i can't explain why ottolenghi's recipes make me so nervous. it could be the art gallery style presentation of plenty, every page demanding more reverence than someone with a make-do-and-mend personality like mine can give. it could be the total bafflement and dismay his vegetarian recipes caused the contestants of the most recent series of masterchef. it could be my artfully concealed (and equally artfully revealed) recurrent lack of belief in my own ability. whatever is the cause of it, it's there; the shaky 'can i really do this?' feeling that characterizes me embarking upon a recipe from plenty, and usually the 'how the hell did i do that??' sense of stolen triumph when i cook it and everything turns out just fine. or, in this case, the battering i subjected myself to from my inner critic over a minor textural mishap.

i had dogeared the page for the recipe for broad bean burgers in my copy of plenty (see that lack of reverence in effect?) the minute i put my broad beans in the garden. i'm not a fan of 'veggie burgers' of and in themselves, usually they are merely cardboard-tasting signifiers for the absence of meat; a nod to the form of eating a burger with no content of their own. but ottolenghi's recipes never disappoint on flavour and colour, and his recipes never rely on the crutch of simulated meat eating experience, so i figured here that i might be onto a winner. i knew that the idea of me creating this recipe purely from my own four-plant crop was rank optimism, but i figured using mostly my beans and some market, or, and here i shudder, supermarket, produce to fill it out, wouldn't do any harm, right? wrong.

so here's the recipe (and i've added my notes in italics to illustrate the disaster that felt major but was in reality a minor vanity/pride thing):

broad bean burgers

3/4 tsp each cumin, coriander and fennel seeds
225g spinach (easily sourced from my garden at the moment, the spinach plants are still going crazy)
3 tbsp olive oil
500g shelled broad beans (about 2/3 of these were from my garden, the rest were supermarket produce, that were unnaturally big, which i think is where it went wrong)
350g potatoes, peeled and roughly diced
1/2 fresh green chilli, deseeded and finely chopped (i used a whole one, cos i'm 'ard)
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
3 tbsp chopped coriander
40g dried breadcrumbs (just for the record, i keep stashes of the processed ends of my loaves, dried ones in the cupboard, fresh ones in the freezer, so i always have a supply, and nothing gets wasted)
1 free-range egg
120ml sunflower oil
4 lemon wedges
salt and black pepper

put the whole seeds in a pan and dry-roast on a high flame for 3-4 minutes, or until they start releasing their aromas. grind to a powder in a pestle and mortar (or a coffee grinder if you're a lazy spice fan like me) and leave aside.

wilt the spinach in a hot pan with 1 tablespoon of olive oil. when cool eough to handle, squeeze out any liquid, roughly chop, and set aside.

blanch the broad beans in boiling water for about a minute; drain and refresh under cold running water. once cool enough to handle, remove the skins ad discard (my garden beans popped out of their skins just fine, the supermarket monsters on the other hand were a nightmare, the skin was the texture of a condom, honestly, it seriously taxed my talons)

cook the potatoes in boiling water for about 15 minutes, or until tender. drain and tip into a large mixing bowl. immediately add the skinned broad beans, crushed seeds, chilli, garlic, turmeric, remaining two tablespoons of olive oil, and some salt and pepper. use a potato masher to mash it all up roughly; don't worry if some of the beans are not totally crushed (some of the beans?? some of the beans??! could i get those supermarket giganti-beans to so much as yield to my mashing might? no i could not. they kept their shape no matter what i did, and gave me The Fear about the texture of the mixture ever holding together. bastards.). next (after you have Totally Given Up Inside), add the wilted spinach, chopped coriander, and breadcrumbs. taste to check the seasoning. lastly, add the egg.

wet your hands and shape the mixture into fat patties that are roughly 5cm in diameter and 2cm thick. chill them for at least half on hour (during which a few prayers to the kitchen gods that these things will hold together in the frying pan might be advisable).

to cook, heat up the sunflower oil and fry the burgers on a high heat for 5 minutes on each side, or until golden brown. serve warm, with lemon wedges.

so here are mine on day one:


they did hold together, just about. i ate them with the tiniest baby spinach leaves from my garden plants, and a few roughly torn chunks of wholemeal sourdough, still warm from the oven. my annoyance at the texture thing was still fairly present, i have to say, but as you can see, they held together, they looked fine, and they tasted actually really good. ottolenghi's recipes seem so involved in the colour of the dish that you cannot help but associate it with the taste; these definitely tasted green and fresh; there was a heat to them, but it was a clean heat, aniseedy and almost cool, if that's not too much of a contradiction, from the fennel; although still powerful.

because i cook only for myself a lot of the time, i often rely on big-batch cooking, and end up eating the same thing a couple of days running. this recipe was no different, and so i left some of my burgers languishing in the fridge, and the next day, fried them up to have with a lemon and garlic mushroom rice:


i think these ones were better; the added overnight in the fridge had allowed the flavours to marry more effectively, and the mixture had further stiffened and was better behaved in the pan. this second lot i ate feeling a bit like a big baby for kicking up such a fuss about such a minimal issue; after all, given that they held together, looked okay, and tasted good, what was i really moaning about other than wounded pride and a blow to the ego? especially since i've now found a flavoursome vegetarian burger recipe that doesn't pretend to be anything other than the sum of it's (next time, more carefully sourced) ingredients.

pieces of the people we love

i can't really determine whether the extent of my sweet tooth is evident through my posts on this blog or not, as it seems like my posts are split fairly evenly between baking and 'proper cooking'. i'll just clarify, now, in case: my sweet tooth is monumental. it has been ever since i was little. the only person i have ever met who had one to rival it was my late grandfather, geoff slipper, who probably actually initiated mine when i was really little, being in the habit of buying me a 20p mix-up when we used to go and get his copy of the sunday telegraph, which, as family lore would have it, he then had me read to him on his lap, answering all my questions about the phrases and words i didn't know. apparently my capacity for pronouncing foreign politicians names, and grasping the concepts of things like what the cabinet was, other than a cupboard, at an age which seems to mythically get younger in every retelling over the years, was the catalyst for being singled out as the 'Clever One' in my generation of the family. hard as i've worked over the years to rid myself of the title, it firmly stuck, as did the habit of sugar-fuelling myself when reading or writing.

in fact, any given post of mine you care to read was probably constructed whilst consuming something sweet. not a week goes by at casa mitchell where i don't bake something sugary. i'd love to play this off on you as some kind of domestic goddessery, part of a smug, almost housewifely lifestyle in which my days run by meticulously planned routine, but it's actually motivated most of all by sheer greed. i bake so i can eat, no more, no less.

i think the only other shaping factor in what and when i bake is laziness (painting a really pretty picture of myself here, aren't i?). i do not go out and buy one ingredient for a recipe i have looked up. i eiher find a different recipe to make, or subsitute what i do have. why? because it means that a) very little food gets wasted in my kitchen, and b) i don't have to waste time in my day visiting one of northampton's many big box supermarkets/convenience mini versions. in terms of supermarket visitation, i find once a week to be irritation enough, and would far rather not join the culture of people who visit them near-daily. i think perhaps this is another trait i inherited from my grandfather, who was cursing tesco and their market monopoly even in his last days.

so, more often than not, what i choose to bake is dictated by ingredients i have in the house. and that's exactly what happened in the case of these biscuits, a recipe i found in nigel slater's tender volume II, that explicitly states a substitution that should be made rather than going to any great lengths to source a specialist ingredient (or in other, plainer words, he tells you not to stress yourself out over going out to buy stuff, which is pretty much why he's up there on my food heroes list):

walnut not-quite-maple sugar biscuits

makes about 30

maple sugar - 80g, plus a little for dusting (this is the ingredient that you can sub, slater suggests light brown sugar, i suggest the same, but i had a bottle of maple syrup that was gifted to me by a canadian relative at the time of my grandfather's death, so i added a few glugs of that, too)
salted butter - 150g, cut into cubes
a large egg
self-raising flour - 75g
ground almonds -100g
shelled walnuts - 75g
dried cranberries - 75g

set the oven at 190 degrees c/gas 5. put the sugar, butter, and egg into a mixing bowl and cream together until quite smooth. you don't really need to be terribly through about this, but even so you will find a hand-held electric mixer much less trouble than doing it with a wooden spoon. stir in the flour and ground almonds, roughly chop the walnuts and add those along with the dried cranberries, folding them in with a spoon until everything is well mixed.

take walnut sized lumps of the mixture in your fingers and roll them gently in a little more maple sugar, then place them on a non stick baking sheet, pushing them down gently with the back of a spoon. they will be all the more interesting for being left knobbly and rough hewn. a centimetre on each side of them will allow them to spread without touching the next. bake for ten to twelve minutes, then remove and leave to cool a little before transferring carefully to a cooling rack.

so there we have it, lots of lovely little biscuits:



and given how many walnuts and dried cranberries i still have here at casa mitchell after getting them from work when they'd hit their use by date, it's highly likely that batches of these little babies will be popping up with a certain regularity. they were really good, in the way that i find only homemade biscuits can be, nothing else striking the right buttery note for me, nothing else negotiating the balance between crunchy and soft in the same way. my addition of the maple syrup was a good call, not affecting the recipe in any way but bringing in a smoky note that would otherwise have been lacking. slater says you can freeze these if you don't think you can manage thirty, but a) i probably could, singlehandedly, over the course of a few days, and b) nigel slater doesn't also have a family of huge appetites milling around the kitchn waiting for baked goods to appear.i ate this mid-morning, mid-afternoon, hell, even mid-night when i got in from work. these are bisuits that my grandfather and i would have fought over while reading the papers, even if i do read the guardian, in paperless form, something he roundly mocked me for at regular opportunity for most of my adult life. it may be a year since he stopped being a part of my day-to-day, but i still think of him and our newspaper and sugar sessions whenever i make something like this and sit down to read, especially when i catch myself mid-focused-frown and remember the way he used to laugh at the intensity of my concentration even when i was little. i can't help but think a lot about how things and people don't leave you, and the ways in which they stay; and i can't help but think about it most when i'm in the kitchen.