All That Glitters

Even as someone who would undoubtedly rather be cooking than doing anything else, I have no trouble admitting that it's sometimes very difficult to cook in summer. When it's hot outside, there are so many other things that demand your attention; the garden, work being busier, people suddenly feeling a lot less like sitting inside watching dvd boxsets all day. Not to mention the fact that it's quite frankly, too hot to want to be stood over a stove all afternoon. So I tend to find in summer, that I eat things I can throw together quickly, composed primarily of raw ingredients. Probably not even interesting enough to be termed salads, for the most part. Not exactly the kind of thing people want to be reading about; although it keeps my tumblr followers in 'Things I Ate' pictures. If they like that sort of thing.

Nevertheless, there is one form of cooking that will keep me in the kitchen, and that, my friends, is baking. While I was compiling our snazzy new Recipe Index, I noticed the alarming amount of baked goods I actually churn out. I say alarming, only because I was alarmed that the number is only, realistically, about half of what I actually bake, since i haven't included repeats of recipes. My hand is near permanently glued to the whisk, my devotion to the ritual of ingredients so strong that when making lemon drizzle cake, I looked at Ed like he was insane for suggesting the creamed butter and sugar had 'probably been beaten enough', and I had the gall to correct Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's directions on how exactly to add eggs and flour. Ed's 'I think this has risen more than last time' elicited only a wry smile from me. Of course it had. We'd done it my way. It's taken me half a year's worth of reflection on exactly what I cook and when to realize that baking is so second-nature to my day-to-day routine, that it's so ingrained and habitual, that at the tender age of 23 I already have something of the cooking traditionalist about me. Which means I have a cooking tradition. Which means I can be proud. and proud I certainly am.

Tradition, however, gets stale quicker than baked goods left on a countertop uneaten. So it was with a mixture of fear and excitement that I embarked upon my first trials of the recipes in Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache. The reason the recipes in this book are so deviant is because rather than using butter in her recipes, Eastwood uses grated or pureed vegetables. This is ostensibly for dietary purposes, something I inherently disapprove of (especially since the book is so unsubtly marketed toward women), but I figured, hey, I won the book, and finding out new things about the properties of vegetables will be a learning experience my baking could benefit from. So after carefully deciding which of the recipes I'd dogeared in my initial reading to make, I whipped out the cheesegrater and got busy:

Courgette and Chamomile Cupcakes

Makes 12

2 medium, free-range eggs
120g caster sugar
finely grated zest of 1/2 a lemon
200g topped, tailed, peeled, and finely grated courgette (I used a yellow one from my garden)
5 camomile teabags (I used pukka's chamomile and vanilla blend; and I buy most of my herbal teas from them, not because i necessarily buy into ayurveda, but because they're the best tasting ones I've found)
150g white rice flour (all the recipes in this book are wheat free but lazybones like me can sub plain white flour)
50g ground almonds
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp salt (i don't often salt my baking, unless it's chocolate, so i ignored this)

for the icing:
3 tbsp strong chamomile tea (use one tea bag and 100ml boiling water)
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
160g icing sugar, sieved

you will need:
a 12 hole muffin tray
12 cupcake cases

preheat the oven to 180 degrees c/gas mark 4. line the muffin tray with the paper cases.

in a medium-sized mixing bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar for 3 minutes until fluffy and pale. first add the lemon zest and courgette, and give it a whisk until fully incorporated. Next, tip the chamomile out of its teabags (it comes out as a fine powder) into the egg and sugar mixture, and add the flour, ground almonds, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, and salt.

once all are well mixed in together, ladle the mixture evenly into the cupcake cases so that it comes four fifths of the way up the sides. Bake for 30 minutes.

Remove the cupcakes from the oven and cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes.

To make the icing, mix the chamomile tea and lemon juice with the icing sugar in a small bowl until you reach a white, paste like consistency. Ice the cupcakes with the back of a spoon (dipping the spoon into the surplus tea makes it easier)

So here are mine:


Note that I couldn't resist trialling the edible glitter I got in the same Iron Cupcake Victory as the book. I sort of angsted about these while they were baking. I wasn't entirely sure they'd have the same rise and great texture I'm normally so proud of in my baking. But my doubts were assuaged, as these little beauties came out just perfect. The texture of the crumb was actually really springy; and the courgette and ground almond kept it moist. They tasted amazing; the chamomile flavour was a lot more pronounced than i thought it would be, even in the icing, and since i have something of a fetish for the more floral flavours, I was in cake heaven. i took some down to work, upon which kayleigh, my kitchen manager exclaimed that she wants these as her wedding cakes (despite not being engaged), and my American friend Ed deciding that these were excellent enough to brag to half the village about. I'm still answering questions about them when I turn up at work now. I'm looking forward to trying other recipes from this book in the near future, as there are countless other techniques using vegetables i want to try; like using parsnips or beetroot to make fudge, and using aubergine in a dense chocolate torte.