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.

When life gives you plums...

I had an early meeting at work the other day (yes, in the licensed trade I do sometimes still have to haul my arse out of bed in the morning, but not nearly so often as you 9-5ers). As I blustered in, I bumped into Lorraine, our cleaner and kitchen porter, who asked me if I liked/wanted some plums. I said yeah, and was immediately granted a bowlful, which perched next to me while I went through paperwork and projects with my training officer:




Now, that might seem like an odd little setup for a work meeting, I guess. But it makes more sense if you consider that my passion for food, gardening, and cooking is gaining repute throughout the village I work in and the community I serve. And that Lorraine's neighbours tree was fruiting at the time, so she had a huge carrier bag of the things with her. I'm often gifted with foodstuffs to 'make something with' at work these days, and I'm always happy to take it, and bring in some of the results to share with my coworkers and friends. I like the idea of food creating community, and community creating food.

So I cycled home, to leaf through my cookbooks and find something to make with the plums. I wanted something to fit the season, not too heavy or wintery, and bizarrely, the only thing i could find that didn't resonate with sitting down in knitwear in a heated house was Nigella Lawson's Winter Plum Cake, from How to be a Domestic Goddess. She calls it a winter cake because it's made with tinned plums (something I sort of shudder to think of, sorry to say) so I figured whipping one up with fresh plums would be enough to take the Winter right out of it. and that is exactly what I did, and here is my adapted recipe:

Not-so-Wintery-Plum-Cake

for the cake:
567g tin red plums (or the unweighed amount of fresh, stoned plums i had, which must have been about the 600g mark)
125g self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
75g ground almonds
125g butter, softened
125g light brown sugar
2 large eggs (keep it organic and free range, people)
1 scant teaspoon almond essence
20cm springform cake tin, buttered and lined.

for the icing:
160g unrefined icing sugar
1-2 tablespoons hot water.

preheat the oven to 170 degrees c/gas mark 3.

Chop your plums. I went for 2.5cm dice, which seemed to be fine, although if you're worried about uneven distribution, chop them as fine as you see fit. Leave aside. Mix the flour, baking powder, and ground almonds. Cream the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs, adding a tablespoon of the flour mixture after each one. Beat in the almond essence, then fold in the rest of the flour mixture and the drained, chopped plums. Turn into the prepared tin and bake for about 1 1/4 hours, though check at 1 hour. When it's ready, coming away from the sides of the tin, take out of the oven, leave in it's tin to cool for ten minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.

When cool, ice with brown sugar icing, which you make simply by mixing the sieved icing sugar with water til you have a caramel coloured paste. pour over the top of the cake to cover thinly, not necessarily uniformly, and leave to drip, here and there, down the sides.

So here it is:

I was quietly proud of this cake, it's by no means an elegant confection, but it has the kind of country cooking charm that's totally appropriate to how I obtained it's principal ingredient. It tasted amazing; the plums were tart and contrasted beautifully with the marzipan-like taste and texture of the sponge; i'm not sure I'd bother making this with sweetened tinned fruit having tried it in this incarnation. It was the perfect unfussy cake to serve in huge wodges with mugs of coffee (some cakes are tea cakes, and some are coffee cakes; i don't make the rules; I just obey them). I took a slab of it down to work with me to share with my coworkers; and it went down a storm. Using cake to win friends and influence people? Maybe, but whatever works.

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.

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.

tried and tested

right, so me again, guiltily apologizing for not being more attentive to my posting duties. again, the garden has seduced me away from the computer, and if you factor in a drunken jaunt to brighton with my esteemed blogging partner (how hard has that phrase stuck, seriously?), and working carnage-tastic bank holiday shifts whilst filling out paperwork about them, that doesn't leave me much time for waffling about what i have been making.


i mentioned in my last post that i have lately been returning to old recipes i know like the back of my hand, perhaps out of a need for kitchen comfort, perhaps out of a kind of autopilot mentality given how busy things have been here at casa mitchell. that practice is still going strong, in both baking and cooking, and as a result i find myself sort of at a loss as to what to write. there are certain recipes you make so many times that they absorb a kind of fabric of memory narratives, and in the telling, the stories trip all over each other and get jumbled. it becomes very difficult to stay coherent, nevermind actually just writing about the food.


so we'll start with nigel slater's coffee and walnut cake; a recipe so good he has printed it in both tthe kitchen diaries and tender vol II. my urge to make this came about after i got a kilo bag of walnuts free from work, as my company is very stringent on what needs to be thrown out when, and so they're always erring on the side of caution in terms of things like nuts and fruit, which so far has resulted in hauls of dried cranberries and pine nuts as well. if it's just going to be wasted, i may as well cook with it. luckily my kitchen manager agrees with me. i perused the walnut chapter in tender vol II, looking at all the things i will undoubtedly make over the next couple of months, but i settled eventually, due to familial request, on coffee and walnut cake. i first started making this cake in my second year of university, when i was living in a creaky victorian maisonette in southsea, portsmouth. it was my then-boyfriend's favourite so it got made fairly regularly, and there was a moment for me, where i had made it for his mother, when i realized that she was deliberately displeased at everything i was doing, because she unconvincingly claimed to dislike it intensely, despite the fact that this cake is cake in the ideal. it didn't really fuss me, it has to be said; i am entirely unsurprised when people's parents dislike me, as any environmentally minded, arts studying vegetarian who dresses like a drag queen, drinks like a fish, and swears like a sailor is apt to be. and it did nothing to stop me from continuing to make the cake in question, obviously.


so anyway, the cake. only on this one petty occasion has it not been met with immediate going back for seconds, and i consider it one of my most reliable recipes for emergency requests re: bake sales and the like. so here we are:


coffee and walnut cake

butter- 175g
golden caster sugar, 175g
large eggs, 3
self raising flour, 175g
baking powder, 1 teaspoon
instant coffee granules, 2 teaspoons
walnut pieces, 65g


for the butter cream:
butter, 200g
icing sugar, 400g
instant coffee granules, 2 teaspoons
walnut pieces, 60g


you will need two 20cm loose bottomed sponge tins.


set the oven at 180 degrees c/gas 4. line the base of the sponge tins with baking parchment. beat the butter and caster sugar until light, pale, and fluffy. you could do this by hand but it is far easier and, frankly, better with an electric mixer (not in my house mr. slater!). crack the eggs into a bowl, break them up with a fork, then add them a little at a time to the butter and sugar, beating well after each addition.


mix the flour and the baking powder together and gently mix into the butter and sugar, either with the mixer on a slow speed or by hand, with a large metal spoon. dissolve the coffee granules in a tablespoon of boiling water, then stir into the mixture. chop the walnuts and fold them in gently.


divide the cake mixture between two tins, smooth the top lightly and bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes. remove from the oven and leave to cool.


to make the butter cream, beat the butter with an electric beater (ahem, or by hand) till soft and pale, then add the icing sugar and beat till smooth and creamy. stir a tablespoon of boiling water into the coffee granules, then mix it into the butter cream. fold in the walnut pieces.

as soon as the cake is cool, turn one half of it upside down on a plate or board, spread it with a good third of the butter cream, then place the second cake half on top. spread the remaining butter cream on top and round the sides.


i have to say it actually felt odd reading that recipe in depth to the point of typing it out, having made it regularly for a fair few years now. anyway, here is the obligatory badly-taken picture of said cake (i couldn't get to photographing it before my family fell to eating it, i shit you not):


so yeah, again, sorry for the bad picture, but it should be a bit of an indicator of how much was gone within two minutes of it being iced, eh? i know you'd think a coffee and walnut cake is kind of unremarkable, but it's exactly the sort of cake i like to make. it doesn't require any razzle dazzle in the form of unusual ingredients or sugar architecture, it's moist, textured, and plastered in enough buttercream to quietly hold its own without. it's the kind of cake everyone thinks of fondly, with either real or false nostalgia depending on age, unless they happen to be impossible to please matriarchs, and if you get hold of a piece good enough to warrant seconds, it's the kind of cut-and-come-again cake that was basically invented for seconds, and thirds, and so on. i would also like to note that this recipe keeps pretty well, which is a good job, since it makes a big cake, but since i've been living with my family i've found the shelf-life of cakes to not be nearly so big a problem.

i don't often outwardly implore people reading this to absolutely try one of the recipes i have posted, but with this recipe, i would wholeheartedly recommend doing so. it's a totally well behaved cake batter from beginning to end, and literally never fails. besides, you guys, buttercream icing. not enough things have buttercream icing these days. i will never turn down ganache, or cream cheese frosting, but buttercream icing, i am afraid, will always win the day for me. whether it's because it reminds me of when i was little and chocolate cake always came iced with butter cream (we're talking pre-chocolate fudge cake as a menu standard days, here), or because it's basically an excuse to just eat butter and sugar, i don't know, but you really can't beat buttercream icing in my book. i like how decidedly unfancy it is, how it gets all over your fingers when you eat, and, let's face it, how ridiculously sweet it is. i may have to singlehandedly try and kickstart the buttercream revolution if i keep thinking about it. in which case, i've got icing sugar to buy, so until next time lovely readers.

things fall apart.

so, things have not been very good at casa mitchell this week. the usual family dramas, reopening of old wounds, and me sinking back into my role as introspective and silent eldest daughter like something straight out of virginia woolf. it's not a place i like to be, or a place that many people who see my day-to-day personality imagine me being, but it is a place i end up a lot, when i'm under the same roof as my family. part of it is because i can understand how all the things that make me myself are very disappointing to my parents. no self-respecting suburban (albeit divorced) pair want to raise a literary, liberal, vegetarian gender theorist who refuses to have sensible hair. that doesn't mean i'm any less proud of myself for what i've achieved, but it does mean i'm sometimes called upon to walk on eggshells and furiously negotiate everything internally before i say it. it's just how things are. families, who'd have them?

i'm not sure how far i'd go in my adherence to the like water for chocolate school of thinking about cooking; the idea that how you feel is imparted into what you make, but there are a few instances in my cooking life that have led me to wonder if it can, sometimes be the case (incidentally said book is quite an interesting female take on latin american magical realism, worth a read, for those interested in such things). these are instances where i have monumentally fucked up. or at least, something has. everyone experiences those moments in cooking where the magic just will not happen, and the more you try and the more frustrated you get, the worse you make things. they just seem to happen to me on what are already pretty horrible days where everything else goes completely tits up as well.

i feel, in some ways, that writing about this particular mistake is going to bring me serious relief. at the moment i have a lot of friends who have just started cooking; and while i appreciate them coming to me for advice; they seem to be on the dangerous verge of viewing me as infallible in the kitchen. i don't think it's healthy to strive to be or learn from anybody who never fucks up or never admits to it, which is why at university i preferred cynical broken marxists, and why in the kitchen i prefer almost documentary writers like mr. slater, who will freely admit to disastrous combinations and what-was-i-thinking moments? although, perversely enough i did use a nigel slater recipe for tuesday's kitchen disaster, which i have slightly rewritten here because i do everything by hand and nigel slater takes the machine approach to his cakes a lot of the time. so, from the kitchen diaries comes:

frosted marmalade cake (also known as 'oh my god what the fuck happened to that?!)

butter, 175g
golden unrefined caster sugar, 175g
a large orange
eggs, 3 large
orange marmalade, 75g (note here i am using my orange and glenturret home made)
self-raising flour, 175g

for the frosting:
icing sugar, 100g
orange juice, 2 tablespoons

set the oven at 180 degrees c/gas 4. line a loaf tin about 25 x 11 cm and 7cm deep. cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. finely grate the orange. break the eggs into a small bowl and beat lightly with a fork. beat the eggs into the butter and sugar a little at a time, then beat in the marmalade and the grated orange zest.

fold in the flour firmly but carefully with a large metal spoon. this may take a while. lastly, gently stir in the juice of half the orange. spoon the mixture into the lined tin, lightly smoothing the top . bake for forty minutes, checking it after thirty-five with a metal skewer. leave to cool in the tin for ten minutes, then cool completely on a wire rack.

sift the icing sugar and mix it to a smooth, runny consistency with as much of the remaining orange juice as it takes, probably just under two tablespoons. drizzle the icing over the cake, letting it run down the sides, and leave to set.

okay so i can already hear everyone thinking 'that seems like an easy recipe, what the hell went wrong?'. well, guys, this is what went wrong:

just....look at it. there was much countertop slamming and swearing afoot in my kitchen that afternoon. combined with panicky texts to ed varying in drama levels. what went wrong was i decided, rather than use the bane of my existence fan assisted main oven, to use the top oven. which then proceeded to unleash fury on the top of my cake. it would have been worse if i hadn't covered the top with foil.

(also, to those of you wondering exactly what the fuck my loaf tin is and why it's bright orange; it's silicone, i got it from a denby/le creuset outlet shop in gunwharf quays, portsmouth, along with several other silicone pieces, that i now refuse to be without in baking as they minimize the need for tin-lining thus earning me a fair few green points given how often i bake.)

still, nobody puts mitchell in a corner, not even a charcoal topping on a cake. and everything else in my day had started to go so downhill that this cake became a grudge point. i'm currently ill-advisedly reading a jonathan franzen during a time of family conflict, and he often uses his character's interactions with food to show what they're feeling. there's a bit in the corrections where an angry father fights with a barbecue in the rain and serves the most hilariously/tragically strained attempt at a mixed grill to his family while they're all silently against him. this cake was, by this point, that kind of metaphor. i cut off the top with a breadknife, increasingly frustrated in my efforts so that gentle sawing verged on manic hacking, turned the whole thing over, and proceeded to make my icing. i say icing, slater is being a bit disingenuous here i feel (especially by using the american term for their excessive take on cake decoration; frosting), it's more of a glaze. a sort of slightly-more-present take on the drizzle stage of a lemon drizzle. it ended up looking like this:

(note, the white squiggles were of some random writing icing i found, and put on in an attempt to buy time before answering a particularly loaded and painful question from my mother). basically then, the ugliest cake in the world. it's a good job, and this came as a shock even to me, that it tasted so good. i believe ed mentioned the questionable size of the shred in this particular marmalade (i blame blunt knives), but that they are possessed of enough give that it doesn't matter so much. they provided a sticky, almost fudgy sweetness in relation to the fresh zest and juice, and the effect was excellent. this cake needs it's icing-it's very moist and the thin crackle and sharp taste of the juice in it provide a good contrast. i was quite pleased that although hideous to behold, the cake at least granted me the pride-saver of actually being good.

i am contemplating making a lemon version with my honey and lemon marmalade, but this time? i'll use the fan assisted oven.