Christmas treats

I love other bloggers. It's so fab to get new ideas from people who love food and baking and messing about with recipes.
Lately I've had top fun with the blog from the very ace Mary-Anne Boermans, one of the final three in this year's Great British Bake Off. M-A is the sort of woman I'd enjoy hanging out with, and the recipes I've tried from her blog are delish. You can follow her on Twitter as @wotchers
Incidentally, I've had to go back and edit out the word 'ace' in that paragraph 3 times - I clearly associate that word with M-A very strongly!
Anyway, my most recent bit of playing as been with her recipe for millionaire's shortbread cups. Their appearance of dainty little treats are a disguise for the buttery sweet explosion of tastes that take you back to childhood. I made them last night for Luke because he's not a fan of the mince pies, Christmas cake and other fruit-laden things filling my house and I wanted him to have a baked treat he'd enjoy.  We swapped the dark chocolate for milk in this case, because that's his favourite, but I would stick to the dark otherwise to offset the super-sweet caramel.
Thanks to someone on a parenting board I play on, I also found the truly scrumptious Exclusively Food site from Australia.  It was the chocolate Christmas pudding truffles that took me there.  Chopped up Christmas cake/pudding, pecans, melted chocolate, cream and rum mixed into little balls then dipped in dark chocolate. I put a blob of white chocolate on top and a pair of sugar holly leaves and berries from my sprinkles collection to make them look properly festive (I'm going through a phase, I think - all my chocolate cupcakes look like Christmas puds at the moment too!)
I made them far too big; they should just be a little mouthful as they are so very rich. I will definitely be making more!  My 9 year old son, with tastes far above his age, thinks they are delicious.
The last bit of domestic baking I've been doing is my home made mince tarts.  They aren't technically mince pies as I don't tend to put lids on them.  I like more filling than pastry, personally.  The pastry is utterly delicious, though. It's adapted from my tutor Judith's recipe, and is called German Paste; a very rich shortcrust. I love butter, so have swapped it for half the fat.  You could stick with Judith's method of all veg fat.
Here's the recipe. It makes masses, so scale down as needed:
600g plain flour
200g caster sugar
200g butter
200g vegetable fat (like Trex)
1 beaten egg.
Stick the flour, sugar and fats into the food processor and whiz until breadcrumb-y.  Add the beaten egg and whiz again. Tip it out and pull it together into a soft dough. Wrap in cling film and refrigerate.
I am rubbish at handling pastry - hot hands, hot kitchen - so I find rolling it out between two pieces of cling film means I get thinner pastry without overworking it, using heaps of flour and making it tough.
For mince tarts I grease my tart tins, roll out the pastry thinly and cut rounds slightly bigger than the holes in the tins, pop them in gently, add a heaped spoonful of mince meat (recipe for that next time I have a moment) and bake at 180 for 10 to 12 minutes.
Right, back to the kitchen,
Happy Christmas!
Jay x

Multi tasking

I have a lovely life. It's ace. It's a bit too full and a bit too busy and I struggle desperately for enough hours in each day but it's lovely.

Teaching Number One Son from home has been an amazing adventure so far. To a certain degree he's autodidactic (isn't that a wonderful word?) where I help set him up with resources and he cracks on alone. For other things, I'm there working one on one with him. It's built an even better relationship between us (with occasional humdingers when we clash) and has taught me at least as much as he is learning. He's also good company and I'll miss him dreadfully when he rejoins mainstream education in a year or so.

However, I do rather miss a bit of free time to manage my own tasks, work and (dare I hope for one?) social life. Home education, running a business, looking after my other two kids and their needs and all the normal household stuff is a bit much some times.

Work is very busy as well. I'm supplying three outlets, all with very different markets which means I ride out the seasonal ups and downs pretty well. I've changed what I do quite a bit: the cake box club is taking a break because I don't have the time just now for all the experimenting. I also didn't do my usual load of Hallowe'en baking for parties and so on; there just wasn't the time.

However, I have branched out in a new direction. I start running an after school baking club at the kids' primary school next week. I'll let you know how that goes. I don't really have the time for it (obviously) but I thought it would be good fun and it does me good to get out of my own kitchen for a little while, even if it's only to go to someone else's!

I did my first ever baking birthday party last month (and supplied the Narnia wardrobe cake above to the birthday girl), and I'm planning workshop days for both kids and adults in the next few months. I've had quite a lot of interest. The main difficulties I have are setting prices - something I always struggle with as I hate charging people money - and sorting out the tedious stuff like insurance and so on. Then there's the Not As Easy As You'd Think matter of finding a weekend when I'm not already committed to doing things.

The last part of my task-juggling life right now is getting ready for Christmas. If last year is anything to go by, i need to make over 40 small Christmas cakes, 10 jars of mincemeat and spend the last week of November marzipanning day and night. I'm also doing some Christmas cakes with gluten free flour this year, which may take a little bit of experimenting.

So, as I said, I have a lovely life. A busy, untidy, chaotic, frequently noisy and usually delicious-smelling lovely life. I have great kids, run a business I love and only really need an extra few hours in a day to get everything sorted. Oh, and for the laundry fairies, washing up fairies and ideally accountancy clerk fairies to come and help out a bit. And a coffee.

Autumn splendour

What an astonishing year! Hot dry spring, cold wet summer, then a dazzling week of heat and golden sunshine as we entered October, with a 15 degree drop in temperature as the cold and rain hit us once more.

September was a blur of baking, home educating, and playing with preserves. I have a cupboard full of plum jam, damson jam, chutney, elderberry jelly, rosehip syrup and elderberry cordial. The latter makes truly marvellous (if very frothy) cocktails when mixed with sparkling white wine like Prosecco or champagne. A hedgerow Kir Royale - yum!

Luke wanted to learn how to make lemon curd, too. It's his favourite thing for toast or pancakes and we'd never had a go at making it. I decided to follow Nigel Slater's recipe from the Guardian as Nigel's always reliable for that sort of thing. It was absolutely delicious, and Luke was extremely proud of his efforts.

On the cake front, the plum cake season is over; shame, I'll miss it. It's apple cake time again, and I'm looking ahead to parkin recipes too. In the name of research I bought some from Betty's tea rooms in Harrogate. I'll not be happy with mine until it can compare reasonably well with that, so I may be some time...

Dabbling in preserves

Last year, faced with my usual disastrous tomato crop, I was ready to compost the lot of it. As each fruit ripened it was struck with blight and we didn't get a single edible ripe tomato. My ace and clever friend SJ said I should use the rest for green tomato chutney - genius!

I'd not really eaten chutney before and certainly never made it. However, I'm a game lass and thought it was worth a go. I found a likely looking recipe but wanted to tweak it a bit. The result was marvellous!

Like a total twerp I failed to write down the changes I made, so this year's deliberately-planted-to-harvest-while-green tomatoes presented a slight challenge. Mark and my pal Kate, who kindly gives me all her jam jars, both were very keen on last year's success and I felt the burden of their expectations a tad as I guessed at what I'd done the year before.

I rather overdid it on the cayenne pepper but on the whole it's turned out very well. Here's what I did:

500g chopped green tomatoes
500g diced red onion

125g sultanas

180g brown sugar

1 tsp (or a bit more) cayenne pepper
1 tsp freshly ground green cardamom

500ml malt vinegar

A quick word about the cardamom - buying whole cardamom and crushing them in a pestle and mortar makes a world of difference to the flavour of the chutney. The rest of the recipe is dead easy, so I do strongly recommend spending that 5 minutes bashing the pods open and crushing the seeds inside a bit.

Bung everything in a bit stock pot or maslin pan, bring to the boil and then reduce the heat to simmer for about an hour, stirring occasionally, until it's all soft and thickened. Spoon into sterilised jars and leave the flavours to develop for at least a fortnight if you can. It should make 4 or 5 jars of chutney (depending on the size of the jars, obviously!)

Mark likes it with pork pie. As a non-meat-eater myself, I can highly recommend it with strong cheddar.

And possibly a nice cooling yogurt to follow, if you went a bit mental with the cayenne pepper. Oops.

I've also been making masses of plum jam. My poor tiny plum tree is so laden with fruit that 7 of the branches snapped under the weight while we were on holiday. I can't have that happening in vain, so despite the fact some of the fruit are fairly unripe I've been churning out the jam at a rate of knots.

I use 1.2kg of stoned, rather unripe, plums simmered until soft in 400ml of water. I then add 1kg of sugar and bring to the boil, skimming off the majority of the skins which rise to the top. When it reaches setting point I pour it in warm sterilised jars and seal them immediately.

I don't think I've quite got that whole setting point malarkey sorted. I pop 3 small plates in the fridge and plop a spoonful on the chilled plate, leave it a few minutes and then push it with my finger to see if it wrinkles. I have to do this a bunch of times, I haven't got the timings right yet. But I'm not letting that put me off my experiments!

My final bit of preserving this week has been VERY fun. We picked a mass of elderberries from the hedgerows on Friday. Using that 'run them through a fork' trick from Jamie Oliver I removed the berried from their stalks and gave them a wash. I boiled up 1 kilo of them with a kilo of crab apples and some water until all pulpy. I slopped it into a jelly bag which drained overnight to give me a marvellously deep purple liquid. I'm going to boil it up with sugar (600g per litre of liquid) and make elderberry jelly.

The rest of them had a more fun outcome:

700g of elderberries
1 lemon
100ml water
150g sugar
Pare the peel from the lemon into the pot, add the lemon juice, berries, sugar and water. Bring to the boil and simmer for a good 20 minutes until the berries are very soft. Taste for sweetness and ass a bit more sugar if you like. Press it through a fine sieve and you've got an utterly marvellous fruit syrup. I'm told it is a very good cough syrup and is delicious over ice cream but most excitingly, it made Mark and I vivid purple and delicious Kir Royales with the champagne SJ brought us.

How to make: Elderberry Kir
a generous teaspoon of Elderberry syrup per glass of dry white wine (or sparkling wine for a Royale)

A word of warning - adding the champagne to the sweet syrup causes a MASSIVE explosion of bubbles, so do pour it very, very slowly. It was utterly delicious.

These Two Imposters

Fortunes up and down at the moment. I've tried new cakes, old cakes, and my first ever tiered cake (the prospect of which scared the pants off me) with both triumphs and disasters. As Kipling instructs us, I need to take both in the same spirit.

Life's been pretty hectic lately. This is no surprise - self-employment from the house, 3 kids, 11 chickens, bits of decorating to do in the house, veg beds to tend in the garden and all the other things that are part of family life mean that if it weren't hectic I'd be surprised. But it's been even more so than usual over the last month while my fabulous Number One Son has a break from formal education and we dabble in a period of Home Education. It's been wonderful but requires time I am struggling to give.

So, as the cake club weekend approached I had not done my usual recipe experimenting to come up with new treats for the subscribers. It'll be fine, I thought. I was wrong.

My rash attempt to tackle the dreaded flapjacks went properly wrong twice. TWICE. I hate my flapjacks, so I don't know which demon moved me to try again. I don't even like the flapjacks of people who make them beautifully all that much, not when I could have cookies or cake. Perhaps I should just admit they are not something I can make. Nah. I will plug away every year or so and one day I'll make flapjacks that I like.

I tried to make a Victoria Sponge following a recipe different to my usual one. Actually, cocky that it would be fine, I made a double batch and popped them in together. Both collapsed; four 20cm sandwich tins full of sunk cake. Great.

Overtired by the time I tackled the meringues, I made a basic error that I could have slapped myself for. The results were just delicious but not the sort of thing I was after. Fantastic; what was I going to do now? Only the Battenburg cake turned out well.

A wonderful thing about baking is that most mistakes can be transformed into something else. Not the flapjacks, unless we fancied unusual roofing tiles, but the others. The meringues suggested Eton mess to me, so the cake clubbers got Eton mess cupcakes. They were utterly scrumptious, they really were.

If you fancy a go, here's how -

12 vanilla cupcakes
100g soft butter
200g icing sugar
splash of vanilla
2 handfuls of berries (I used raspberries, red and black currants and blackberries)

20 small meringues (about the size of a jammy dodger) or equivalent amount of larger ones

Beat the butter until white, beat in the icing sugar and keep going until it's all fluffy and whippy looking. Stir through the vanilla, and if the icing is a bit stiff add a splash of milk.

Bash all but 6 meringues into big chunks. If you're using frozen berries, defrost them and drain any excess juice before folding into the icing with the meringues.

Generously ice the cupcakes with the berry/meringue/buttercream mixture and top each with 1/2 of one of the reserved meringues.

I've made cake pops with mixed success a couple of times before; I certainly wasn't particularly impressed. Having bought a few from different places to sample them, I've found them over-sweet, a claggy texture and pretty disgusting, really. However, I had lots of spare cake thanks to the collapsed Vic Sponges and I do love Bakerella's blog, so I thought I'd have another go.

I aimed at a drier, less sweet mix than I'd had elsewhere and I was far more happy with the result. I dipped them in pink coating with a few pastel coloured sprinkles or glitter on each. The cake clubbers got a pair each, alongside the Battenburg, Eton mess cupcakes and some VERY fragile but rather tasty home made jammy dodgers.

Incidentally, I'll try a different recipe for the dodgers next time; something slightly more robust so they'll be less breakable. Sorry, guys.

Once the cake boxes were delivered I could concentrate on a large order for an 18th birthday. I needed to make 12 vanilla cupcakes, 12 lemon cupcakes, 24 chocolate cupcakes, 60 mini cupcakes, one chocolate malteser cake, one lemon drizzle cake, 24 plain scones, 12 fruit scones, 12 lemon scones and finally a 2 tier cake with hand made butterflies, glittery polkadots and ribbon.

I had been fretting about the cake for days. My very lovely distant cousin in New Zealand had given me the business advice of steering clear of tiers and brides, and I'd generally followed her advice. Lesley, my rather fabulous college tutor, assured me it was a doddle and I'd be fine. And you know what? I was!

I did make mistakes with the cake. I was thinking about the tiers individually, so made them proportionally high, rather than as levels of the same cake, which should have the same height. The top tier needed an extra layer. I'll get that right next time.

My experiences at college had taught me to make spares of all icing details. This was A Good Thing as several butterflies broke when the lid balances across the top of the cake, erm, stopped being quite so balanced and touched them. Knowing my clumsiness, I'd made HEAPS of spares, so could make repairs, keep spares on hand for any damage transporting the cake, and still had enough to top the cupcakes as well.

I'm still pretty pleased with it, but I could really rather do with rest now!

Delish!

Chocolate and nuts - could there be anything nicer? Whether it's almonds in milk chocolate, hazelnut praline, good old Cadbury's Whole Nut or Reece's peanut butter cups, I think nuts and chocolate make a wonderful match.

After seeing a recipe in a cupcake magazine on holiday (the Americans have cupcake magazines, gosh!) I was keen to try chocolate and peanut butter cupcakes. I didn't fancy the recipe as they gave it - too much sugar and not enough butter for me - so I spent a happy time faffing about to get one I was happy with and by George I think I've got it!

Have you bought the Annie Bell book yet? Here's the link -

because if not, you really must. It's great. I use the chocolate traybake for my chocolate cupcakes. They remain moist and delicious for several days and it is an incredibly easy recipe to do. The batter does 18 cupcakes using a 1/4 cup measure, which is about 60ml, to fill each large cupcake case and they take about 22 minutes to bake at 180 degrees Celsius

The recipe for the icing is :

100g softened butter
250g icing sugar
70g smooth peanut butter

Beat them together until light and fluffy. It should have a gently peanut-y flavour. I found it crucial not to have too much peanut butter because it becomes a bit overpowering after a couple of bites and it can lead to an oily, claggy texture, so gently does it.

I was faffing about melting chocolate in the microwave, pouring it in a piping bag and squiggling flowers and stars onto some butcher's wrap, which I then popped in the fridge to set. I plopped one of the shapes in the top of each cupcake and the effect amused me. no good for eating in the garden on a sunny day but kind of fun anyway!

Back to reality

That was one hell of a holiday!

Florida was fantastic fun. I fed a dolphin! By hand! Stroked its chin and everything! I may need to use some more exclamation marks!!!! I was (and am) very excited about that.

I would calm down but I also need to tell you how truly awesome New York was as well. The kids managed to tear themselves away from playing on the Big piano at FAO Schwartz, riding the ferris wheel at ToysRUs and spending the year's pocket money at the Lego shop long enough to come with us to the Top of the Rock, to the glory that is MoMA, to the Natural History Museum (of Night at the Museum fame), to be wow-ed by the marvellous Hayden Planetarium (in the Rose centre, as featured in Spider-Man 2) and then around Central Park to look like extras from Enchanted. New York is like every film you can remember - "except dirtier and smellier" said my daughter.

We rode the Staten Island ferry, had lunch in Greenwich Village and visited the very lovely High Line Park. We saw the actual, original Winnie the Pooh and pals at the New York Library's Children's centre. (Said library appear in Ghostbusters, in case you were interested). The whole trip was about this good - !!!!!!!!!!!
Aren't you glad I saved all those exclamation marks for one little outburst?

Anyway, horrid jetlag and messy unpacking aside, I was straight back to work. It's not been too busy, thankfully. I need to get my body clock sorted before I embark on a major bake-a-thon.

I am inspired to try things based on the cakes and baked goods I sampled in the US. Candy apples - who knew? Apparently they're the new Big Thing. Whoopie pies and cake pops seem to have pretty much disappeared, cupcakes are still very popular despite 5 years of articles in the foodie press claiming they are SO over every couple of months. Tiny little portions of things were very popular too - mini cakes, 'bitty bites' and so on.

I went a little bit mental in the sprinkles store again. How is it possible to spend £120 on sprinkles? I am clearly a nut, but it was all so very tempting. I could have happily spent hundreds of pounds if only I could get it all home again. Still, my customers will get some very fabulous looking cupcakes and when I run out I have a great excuse to slope off to NYC again.

I feel so lucky to come back just before two long weekends and some astonishingly gorgeous weather. It makes it so hard to stay in the kitchen, it's true, but it does make life feel so much more pleasant.

On the down side, my fabulous son has had a tough week, our house is a total tip because we are still in the middle of decorating and have nowhere to actually PUT the clothes we're unpacking, Buffy the lovely hen and Lola our favourite guinea pig died while we were away, both were very young and it was very sad.

Looking at positives, we now own Amy Pond, Donna, Martha, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela and Ace the new chickens and Doctor Who returns to the telly this weekend. As the 11th Doctor might say, Hens are cool.

And so are cakes.