I'm Somewhere Inbetween

So you know how I made all that fuss at the beginning of summer about how I was going to miss slow cooking and afternoons in the kitchen and big bold winter dishes? Well, summer is drawing to a close and I'm finding myself not quite ready to give up on delicate, barely-cooked food picked straight from the garden. I find there's just no pleasing some people. More often than not, I find I'm one of them. I come most alive during periods of transition; when there's the promise of new challenges and scenarios but the old ones are still, comfortingly, in play. I don't so much like change, as the possibility of it; I've always been obsessed with potential. I guess that's why I'm currently happier in my kitchen than anywhere else. The hedgerows are starting to come alive, and I'm picking damsons and blackberries almost everywhere I walk in the villages, but I've still got tomatoes and courgettes and beans ripening in the garden. Autumn is coming but it's very easy to keep Summer alive.

The shops, at the moment, seem to be aiding and abetting my pleasure in indecision. The erratic Summer we've had seems to be affecting not just my garden, but the country as a whole. Some of the best 'summer' produce I've bought has been in the last week or so: late varieties of every type of berry and currant you could conceivably imagine; stunning courgettes and beans; all cheap, plentiful, and wonderful. So i can't help it if my mind is somewhere in July, can I? My surroundings are conspiring to help me.

Now, most of the aforementioned berries and currants were eaten raw, or made into simple compotes and eaten over yoghurt at what I, the nocturnal barmaid, have the gall to call breakfast time. But when you're buying perishables in glut-size lots, you have to vary up how you eat them pretty quickly or you're going to end up wasting them, or getting bored shitless with them, or both. So, when faced with the third perfect little punnet of raspberries after days and days of raw raspberries and yoghurt, I knew I had to make them into something that I would, and more importantly, a lot of other people would help, eat. And quickly.

Now I'm not sure about anyone else round here, but when it's a question of food and mass appeal, the answer, to my mind, is pretty much always cake. Everyone likes cake. Well, this is not strictly true, but everyone I've ever met who has professed to not like cake has been so wilfully miserable and stubborn that I've not kept them around very long. So, to put it another way; all of my friends like cake. If I make it, they will eat it. So I grabbed my punnet of raspberries and got myself flicking through Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache, and found the perfect 'I'm not letting go of Summer and you can't make me' recipe:

Raspberry and Elderflower Cupcakes

2 medium free-range eggs
140g caster sugar
200g topped, tailed, peeled, and finely grated courgette
3 tbsp elderflower cordial (sadly, not home made as I missed the elderflowers this year, but I had this knocking around from making pitchers of lovely Plymouth Lemonade to get drunk on)
80g white rice flour (I used plain, you're allowed to substitute it)
120g ground almonds
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt (I omitted this; I don't often salt cakes unless they're chocolate)
120g fresh raspberries plus 12 extra ones for the tops

For the icing:

140g icing sugar
3 tbsp elderflower cordial

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees c/gas mark 4 and line a muffin tray with paper cases (note, I found this recipe created 18 cakes, so I lined an extra six hole tray).

Whisk the eggs and sugar in a large mixing bowl for 5 minutes, until pale and quadrupled in volume.

Add the grated courgette and the elderflower cordial, and whisk again. Mix in the flour, ground almonds, baking powder and salt until they are well introduced. Gently fold in the raspberries, taking care not to crush them up too much.

Spoon the mixture into cupcake cases, and place in the oven for 25 minutes until risen and cooked. Don't be alarmed that they are flat on the top rather than dome shaped. This is perfectly normal.

Cool the cupcakes for 15 minutes while you make the icing. Sieve the icing sugar into a small mixing bowl. Add the elderflower cordial and mix until it forms a loose white icing. Add colouring if you want to use it.

Ice each cake individually and top with a raspberry.

And here are mine:


Cute little things, aren't they? I have to admit that even as a 23 year old girl I still get just a tiny bit delighted when things I make look like illustrations from children's books. It reminds me of the time when in Brownies I had to host a tea party to get my hostess badge (you're damn right I've got a badge in hostessing; I got one at Guides too), so I went through a load of kid's books, being a kid at the time, along with my mum's Beginner's cookbook from the seventies, in order to work out what a tea party looked like and involved. I remember being very impressed when the cakes I'd made looked like the ones in a picture from a book about kittens having tea. I dare say these little things wouldn't have looked out of place on the kittens' pastel tea party table, either, so I am just as pleased with myself this time.

Still, a busy girl like me uses her hostess badge skills behind a bar these days, so I don't have time for tea parties. Instead I took a whole bunch of the cakes to work to give to my coworkers, who received them with pleasure. they were marvellous tasting little things, and i enjoyed the cook's share of them before work (and after work), with a pot of rose infused tea. But I didn't go so far as trying to share it with my cats. Village life hasn't got to me that badly yet.