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Book Review: "Eat Your Veg" by Arthur Potts Dawson

03 May 2013 2 Responses »

May 032013

Guest Post by my friend Monica Shaw.

Arthur Potts Dawson has a really big heart. Sustainable. Seasonal. Responsible. He ticks all the right boxes, and has done some fantastic things for London by creating two sustainably aware urban restaurants, Acorn House and Water House, which exemplify the diversity of the city and London’s, what he calls, "environmental salutations". He also recently wrote a cookbook, Eat Your Veg, which has a great premise: how to cook vegetables seasonally and sustainably. What’s not to like? Well…

Let’s first say that I really wanted to love this cookbook. It’s not vegetarian, but rather, a book about vegetables, beautifully photographed, and I love the design. Just look at the cover: pink and yellow in perfect harmony, brought together by one of my favourite things: beetroot. And the pages inside are just as inviting. This cookbook makes you want to cook with vegetables, which is half the battle for many folks who know they should eat more veg but aren’t really inspired to cook with it. Even for those of us who don’t find vegetables a challenge, it’s always nice to find inspiration and ideas to try.

And that’s exactly what we were looking for – "we" being me, Pete and Kavey on a recent weekend at Orchard Cottage, an occasion that typically involves lots of cooking together and feasting (perhaps one of the highest forms of social engagement ever in the world). We settled on a few recipes…

Penne with garlic, rosemary and mascarpone for its simplicity and because it used lemon juice and Kavey likes lemons
Samphire with spinach and lettuce as a salad to go with our fish course
Pea and mint iced lollies because the idea was just so weird that it had to be tested

We ran into a few hitches on the way to "Eating Our Veg". The penne was so overwhelmingly lemony that none of the other flavours came through. It was hard to re-establish the balance of flavour and save the dish. So we moved on…

The samphire with spinach and lettuce seemed unnecessarily fiddly and a bit strange. First, he calls for three pans of salted water for each of the vegetables. First of all, why three pans? That seems like a lot of unnecessary clean-up. Second, why salted water with samphire which is plenty salty in itself? And third, why are we boiling wonderful crisp gem lettuces? So, we skipped the salt…and the three pans. We cooked the samphire then tossed it with the spinach to wilt the spinach, then added our still crispy lettuces and dressed it in lemon and oil as directed. It was fine (and by fine I mean edible), but needed something more. A drizzle of balsamic helped immeasurably. Would we make it again? No.

By this point I felt this strange determination to make Arthur Potts Dawson recipes all the time, as if I were possessed with an insane curiosity: surely some of these recipes must work? Or, to quote one of my favourite television programmes, "I want to believe."

Given my resolve, it was perhaps unwise to choose the pea and mint iced lollies as our next experiment. But I couldn’t resist, and I had a bag of peas. And so it was: peas, shallots, butter, cream and mint, cooked and pulverised and stuffed into lolly moulds then frozen. Sounds weird? Yeah, because it is. Why a lolly? The mix was far better not frozen, but warm, as a dip for corn chips! (And really, do shallots ever have a place in an iced lolly? Discuss.)

At that point I decided to take a break from "Eat Your Veg".

I later came back to it and found much better luck with his grilled aubergine, cooked in a way that was a bit of a revelation: the aubergine is sliced thick, grilled with no added oil until the very end, at which point you smear it with chermoula. The aubergine stays wonderfully moist, almost creamy.

His house dressing is also good, but I mean, it’s just a Dijon vinaigrette, which you can find in most cookbooks. (Though I did enjoy this one in particular with a salad of apple, celery and walnuts.)

There might other recipes in this cookbook that are real gems like the aubergine. But when you’ve tried a few recipes that seem like they haven’t been thoroughly tested or sense checked, you start to lose faith. Worse, you start to lose the inspiration to cook with vegetables, the thing that led us to this cookbook in the first place.

I might dip into this book again, perhaps for some more of that house vinaigrette, and who knows, maybe that’ll lead me to his other pages. I think I won’t push my luck with the "parsnip and shiitake salad". But surely you can’t go wrong with "new potato salad nicoise", or "French onion soup" or "ratatouille". Surely, right?

With thanks to Monica for text and images. Read more on her blog Smarter Fitter.

Eat Your Veg by Arthur Potts Dawson is currently available on Amazon (UK) for £16 (RRP £25).

Lakeland’s Cheese Making Kit

17 Dec 2012 6 Responses »

Dec 172012

When I attended a Lakeland product preview event this summer, the products that excited me most were the components that, together, form a cheese making kit. Sold separately, the recommended items are a large stainless steel maslin pan (though any similar large pan would be fine), a digital thermometer, two different cheese moulds, vegetarian rennet and some muslin squares. Lakeland also sell a recipe book called How To Make Soft Cheese.

We recently received samples of the above items and Pete got to work making some cheese.

Over to Pete:

Halloumi

Not knowing anything about making cheese, I was initially drawn to by the Halloumi recipe, largely on the grounds that it sounded so simple. The ingredient list was pleasantly short too – milk and vinegar.

The recipe instructed me to heat the milk to 95 degrees, add the vinegar and give the curd a few minutes to form before skimming off. This first part was painless; the measures marked on the inside of the maslin pan made it easy to pour in the right quantity of milk without using a measuring jug and and the temperature probe, easily clipped to the side, worked like a dream.

The curds themselves were wet, but easy enough to transfer to a colander lined with a muslin square. But the Lakeland’s muslin squares are the smallest I’ve ever seen and about half the size I’d like them to be. I’d suggest you buy larger pieces of muslin from another supplier, such as this Kitchen Craft Butter Muslin from Amazon.

Once drained, the I spooned the curds into the mould – although the recipe ended up making slightly more curd than expected, so both moulds were pressed into service.

I’d hoped, after all that, to be left with lovely, rubbery, aching-to-be-fried Halloumi, right? Wrong!

What I’d made was crumbly cream cheese – perfectly tasty, but absolutely nothing like Halloumi.

Clearly I’d done something seriously wrong, so a-Googling I went. It turns out that Halloumi is a not only more complicated than the recipe suggests (with additional heating steps that are entirely missing in the recipe), it’s also, and I’m quoting from Wikipedia here, “unusual in that no acid or acid-producing bacterium is used”.

Halloumi is made using rennet, not vinegar, and is heated a second time after the curds have formed.

However the recipe in the book does have a lot in common with paneer cheese, as do the results. Paneer is usually made using vinegar or lemon juice in place of rennet and is strained and pressed once the curd has separated.

Mozzarella

Thinking perhaps that the recipe had simply been mis-titled, the next one I attempted was mozzarella, with Kavey there to assist.

Once again the milk was heated – to only 32 degrees this time – before lemon juice and rennet were added.

After 30 minutes, the curd had set reasonably firm and was ready to be cut and drained.

A portion of the drained curd was then placed in a bowl and microwaved – the aim was to bring it up to 60 degrees, at which temperature it should magically have transformed into shiny, stretchy mozzarella which could then be kneaded and patted into shape.

Well, no such luck for us.

We tried heating it, re-heating it, overheating it and swearing at it.

Despite our best efforts, all we achieved were soft, mushy, slightly grainy balls which tasted overwhelmingly of lemon juice.

The whole exercise was fairly demoralising, especially as we measured the ingredients and followed the instructions on temperature scrupulously, before then trying to apply additional heat and still failing.

Again, we looked up other mozzarella recipes on the web afterwards and discovered that key elements of the method were missing from the recipe in the book; namely the second stage of heating the curds, still in the whey, before the last stage of heating as per the book.

The actual kit, with the exception of the overly small muslin squares, is fantastic and very well made. The maslin pan, with internal measurements marked, is a delight and the digital thermometer quick and easy to use.

The book, however, makes me wonder if anyone actually tried any of these recipes before it was published and is the one product I’d discourage you from buying. Assemble a kit of large pan, accurate and quick thermometer, rennet, moulds and muslin and source your recipes from the internet instead.

Despite our lack of success, we haven’t been put off cheese making and will be trying again with other recipes, very soon.

Kavey Eats received samples of the cheese making equipment above from Lakeland.

The Ultimate Nepalese Cook Book

16 Aug 2012 19 Responses »

Aug 162012

Pemba Lama is an ex-Gurkha soldier, chef for the British army and the author of The Ultimate Nepalese Cook Book. The book is very close to Pemba Lama’s heart, as a £2 donation goes to the Gurkha Welfare Trust for every copy sold.

Pemba recently cooked at a luncheon for the Dalai Lama, during his tour of the UK, for which he presented a predominantly vegetarian menu of dishes from his cook book. He was honoured when the Dalai Lamai signed a copy of the book; it’s very rare for him to do so.

A preview of the book, including several of the recipes included, can be found at the dedicated website.

I asked my mum, Mamta, to review the book, as she’s familiar with Nepalese cuisine, and of course, with Indian, which has much in common with it.

Introduction

When Kavita asked me to review this book my first thought was, “I am going to enjoy this”, because I had very fond memories of Nepalese food from our trip there a few years back. When I opened the book and saw Pemba Lama’s picture on the inside sleeve, with such a gentle expression on his face as he handled the food, that view was strengthened.

Not good enough reasons? Well that is what first impressions are about!

Nepalese food is very similar to Indian food and the recipes seemed very familiar to me, only they had slightly different names.

Golebhera Ko Bhat (Tomato Rice)

My husband just had some dental work done, so I thought this would be perfect and it seemed so simple to cook. The end result did not disappoint me, it was gently garlicky and tasted delicious; it was superb! I have made it again for friends and they have all liked it.

I did however have a couple of minor problems with the recipe, which I could easily adjust, but someone who is not as familiar with cooking might not know to do:

The recipe gives only 400 ml of tomato juice for 300 grams of rice. Most recipes give double the amount of liquid to rice, perhaps a little less when the rice has been pre-soaked. I added water to increase the total liquid, and that worked fine.

The picture at the top right of the page shows a hand adding what look like nigella seeds to the pan but they are not listed in hte ingredients. Perhaps the picture is for some other recipe.

This is a recipe I will make regularly.

Pyazis (Onion Bhajis)

Next I tried a favourite of the English nation – Pyazis. This recipe can be found online, here.

Marinating onions in vinegar and salt for bhajis is new to me, but it worked and tasted pretty good.

Making the batter required a couple of tablespoons of extra water, which was not listed in the ingredients or given in the steps. The vinegar, in which the onions were marinated, wasn’t enough liquid to make a batter. The book says ‘soft and thick batter’ but I’m not sure quite what that means. It was not a problem for me because I am used to making onion bhajis but a first timer might not know what the batter should be like.

These were simple to make and quite tasty. A neighbour dropped in while I was making them and loved them.

One personal observation from a regular onion bhaji maker: the bhajis could have been lighter and crisper, perhaps a pinch of baking powder is needed in the batter?

Keema (Mince Meat) Curry with Peas and Potatoes

I followed the recipe carefully, as it is a little different to mine, both in ingredients and the order of the recipe.

I didn’t add any potatoes as they are listed as optional; I didn’t have any in the basket and was feeling too lazy to go out and dig some! The picture in the book also does not have any potatoes. Pemba’s recipe included one ingredient which I have not used in this way before – dark soy sauce.

I don’t eat meat any more but my husband and friends seemed to enjoy it. They all said it was great.

Alhaichi Kulfee (Cardamom) Kulfee with Raspberry Coulis

I thought I would try the kulfi because this is something I make quite often myself and am familiar with different ways of making it. This one was made with tinned condensed milk and cream, instead of slowly simmering and condensing the milk at home over a long period.

I will definitely make it again, but need to tweak it a bit.

The recipe could have better instructions; it calls for “20 ml gelatine, melted” but doesn’t say how much powder/ leaf gelatine to use or how to melt gelatine. It says to “semi whip the cream” (singular), but doesn’t specify whether that’s the single and double cream together, or one or the other. I whisked both the creams together and it seemed to work.

I decided to make it without the mango, which the recipe mixes into the kulfee cream. I served it with raspberry coulis and fresh raspberries, but I made mine ‘sugar free.

The result was soft and delicious.

The book has a second dessert section written by Nicci Gurr, who was “invited to add a UK twist” to the book. Unfortunately I did not try any of her recipes. I would like to try some in due course., but being a diabetic, I have to control how many desserts I make. They all look good and I have no reason to think that the recipes in this section will not work.

Conclusion

The book has a pleasant cover which makes a good first impression.

The photos of Pemba lama are lovely, and you can’t help warming up to him. It’s obvious that he loves food and has shared some delicious dishes here.

However, I get the impression that the recipes are not written by him, but by someone watching him cook. Some steps are not very clear and some are completely missing, which leaves you to interpret what is required by yourself and I think this would cause anxiety to a beginner. I think the book would work best for people who have some experience of this type of cooking, because some adjustments are needed here and there in several of the recipes.

There are also minor errors, such as references to recipes on other pages, with incorrect page numbers given.

As with the Tomato Rice, there are a couple of recipes which have a wrong picture shown, such as a photograph of steamed broccoli with ginger and chilli for a recipe of curried potatoes and peas.

The index is not complete. Searching for the cardamom kulfi recipe above, it is not listed under kulfi, cardamom or ice cream but under pistachio and raspberry.

Despite these small issues, I loved the book and all the food I cooked from it. Definitely my kind of dishes.

You can buy a softback copy of the book for £14.99 + £2 P&P or get the eBook version for £8. Click here or here to buy.

Kavey Eats was sent a review copy of The Ultimate Nepalese Cookbook by Grierson Publications.

Popping in for a Coffee: Roasting your own beans at home

19 Jan 2012 5 Responses »

Jan 192012

Another great guest post by Matt Gibson.

The other day, I woke up and realised I had no coffee in the house. The fact that this realisation terrified me might give you some idea of the relationship I have with caffeine. It’s a geek thing.

Luckily, I remembered I *did* actually have some coffee. The only problem was that what I had, tucked away in the back of a cupboard, was a bag of unroasted green beans.

So. Out with the popcorn maker!

Yes, the popcorn maker. I’ve had one hanging around since I read a fellow geek’s blog post about how you could convince a hot-air popcorn maker to roast coffee beans. A week after I read that post, I saw one going on Freecycle. They’re just the kind of appliance that people buy on a whim, use twice, and then relegate to the back of a cupboard until the next clear-out, so Freecycle is a pretty good source for them.

The next bit is more easily shown than told, so, without further ado, here’s me, on a Saturday morning, making a cup of coffee all the way from a handful of green beans to the mug:

The coffee tasted pretty damn good. It helps that green beans last for *ages* compared to roasted beans, which is excellent motivation for home roasting.

If you want to try this at home, (a) see if you can find a friend with a popcorn maker they’ve not used since 1988 and steal it, and (b) look to somewhere like Has Bean for supplies – all their beans are available to buy green.

Enjoy! But do bear these caveats in mind:

The same hot air that’s designed to lift the popped corn out of the machine also blows out the chaff (the papery “skin” of the beans.) The chaff starts floating off soon after you put the beans in the machine, and is much harder to catch in a bowl than popcorn. Be prepared to sweep up afterwards.
You normally roast coffee to somewhere between first and second “crack”. Each coffee bean makes a sharp little cracking sound once, near the beginning of the roasting, and then again, a few minutes later in the case of my popcorn maker. The longer you leave it, the darker the roast, which I like, but it’s a fine line between “French roast” and “burned to a cinder”. This guide may help.
Coffee roasting takes longer than popping popcorn. Be careful your popcorn maker doesn’t overheat! Watch for deforming plastic, etc. Don’t leave it unattended. Basically, don’t try this at home, kids, unless you’re prepared for unexpected consequences.
You can, of course, buy “proper” home coffee roasters, but they’re more expensive. And less fun, in my opinion, than repurposing something orange and plastic from the 1980s and bending it to your will.
If you’re going to point an expensive camera lens into a hot-air popcorn maker’s exhaust port, make sure you do it from a safe distance. I got away with it, luckily.
You probably want your beans to “rest” a while after roasting to “de-gas” them. The typical advice is to wait around a day between roasting and using the beans. In practice, though, the coffee tasted fine to me straight away, but that might have been because I was caffeine-starved :)

Gooey Delicious Banana Cake (Revisited)

10 Jan 2012 13 Responses »

Jan 102012

Charles Campion‘s Banana Cake is a recipe I copied across to my blog from a post that originally appeared on a food chat board, or in my general online diary, or was sent via email… or in one of the many places I shared my food experiences before I finally realised I was “stealth-blogging” and set up Kavey Eats!

It’s such a good recipe I always intended to go back and add photos the next time I made it… but, although I’ve enjoyed making and eating it so many times since, I never have.

My talented-photographer-friend Matt Gibson made it recently and showed me his gorgeous photos. My brain started to tick tock tick tock and I discarded the plan to simply slot his photos into that old post, and asked him to guest blog it afresh instead.

Sharing the same recipe on a blog twice might be odd but Matt’s lack of food processor means he’s brought some new advice to the recipe, not to mention his confirmation that it’s a doddle even for novice or nervous bakers.

Over to Matt:

One evening, a week before Christmas, I peered into my fruit bowl. My three remaining bananas stared forlornly back at me. Over-ripe and — based on evidence from the two I’d already eaten — also rather bruised underneath. What to do?

Twitter to the rescue. “Got a banana bread recipe” I asked. “Only this one I’ve found is American, and I have no idea how many bananas there are in two-and-one-third cups.”

Auntie Kavey responded instantly, pointing me at her Charles Campion’s Banana Cake page. Not only did it sound easy — always a bonus for an inexperienced baker like me — but it called for three medium-sized bananas, exactly what I needed to make use of.

So, I dived in, stymied briefly by the local Co-Operative supermarket having run out of both eggs *and* caster sugar (hint, Co-Op: more people than normal are probably baking stuff in the week before Christmas.)

Another minor speed-bump in my road was the first instruction in the recipe, “Measure all ingredients straight into your food processor and whizz into smooth batter,” which rather assumes you own something as fancy as a food processor. Still, at least I’ve got an electric whisk. Instead of boshing it all together I cubed the butter, which I figured would be the difficult-to-mix bit, and rubbed it into the sifted flour and sugar until I had a breadcrumb-like consistency. Then I added everything else, roughly mixing as I went. Finally I took up my electric whisk and zizzed the mixture to a nice smooth batter.

And that was the hard work done, really. I poured the mix into my greased, floured loaf-tin. Pausing only briefly to check I was neither very young, very old, nor pregnant, I took my life in my hands and tasted a wooden spoon’s scraping’s-worth of the cake mix that had clung on in the bowl. Niiiice. So, all the signs were good.

I popped the loaf tin straight into my pre-heated oven, did the washing-up, and went to post some “before” photos on Twitter. This is the 21st century, after all; if you’ve not tweeted about it, it hasn’t happened.

About forty-five minutes later I was walking past my kitchen door and had to stop and stick my head in and inhale the lovely banana-ey bready smell that was coming from the oven. Another fifteen minutes and I was pulling open the oven, crossing my fingers, and manhandling the loaf tin onto the kitchen worktop with two strategically-positioned tea towels (I know, I know. “Oven gloves” has been just above “food processor” on my kitchen equipment shopping list for about eight years now.)

It looked good. Dark-to-golden brown, with a nice light sponginess showing through the split that had formed on the top. After a few minutes, I gently tried to slide the loaf out, but it felt a bit too wobbly and was clinging to the sides, so I tried to practise some patience and left it to cool in its tin for a while. Once it wasn’t so hot, it slid out more easily, and kept its nice loaf shape as I rolled it onto the cooling rack, though the gooey bottom did sink a millimetre or so into the rack as it settled densely down.

After my disaster with Nigella’s Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake, which stayed entirely liquid in the middle when I made it, I was a little scared to finally start slicing into my banana cake, but my fears were unfounded. It was a little gooey at the bottom, but pleasantly so, and the rest was a lovely moist cake with a delicious light crust on top and at the edges (the end parts were my personal favourite.) The banana flavour was good, and I hadn’t overdone the vanilla, despite my worries.

All in all, this was a fantastic recipe, easy for the baking beginner, even if you’re only armed with a £4.99 electric whisk from Argos that smells a bit like a Scalextric car when it’s running. You’ll never let over-ripe bananas go to waste again.

My beginner’s tips:

* “a few drops” of vanilla essence is just under a quarter of a teaspoonful.
* Wait until the loaf’s cooled a bit before you try to de-tin it.
* Don’t shop for cake ingredients in the Co-Op just before Christmas.

Here’s the recipe again with my original notes below. ~ Kavey

Gooey Delicious Banana Cake

Ingredients
175 grams caster sugar
225 grams white self-raising flour
100 grams unsalted butter (I always use lightly salted actually)
3 tablespoons fresh milk (I used fully skimmed as that’s what we buy)
2 large fresh eggs
3 medium sized, very ripe bananas
A few drops vanilla essence

Method

Preheat oven to 185 C (adjust down for fan ovens).
Measure all ingredients straight into your food processor and whizz into smooth batter.
Butter a large loaf tin well, then throw in some flour, tap and turn the tin to coat the flour over all surfaces and then tap out any excess into the bin/ sink.
Pour the batter into the tin.
Bake for an hour.

Note: Campion says “Because we are looking for a soggy end product, the old-faithful test of sticking in a skewer and withdrawing it clean is not appropriate. With practice you’ll simply need to glance at it to tell. In the meantime, because of the style of cake we’re trying to achieve, there’s a wide margin of error to make things easier.”

Note: If it helps, I find the cake rises delightfully and the top turns a lovely rich chocolatey brown (darker than golden brown) and also usually splits, like a lemon drizzle cake.

All images by Matt Gibson.

Pete Bakes: Chocolate & Porter Cake

22 Oct 2011 11 Responses »

Oct 222011

Last week saw me doing more baking than drinking, as I found myself entering the Great Chocolate Cake-Off taking place at Chocolate Unwrapped. Although I thoroughly enjoy baking, in recent years it’s tended to be more bread based, so the prospect of coming up with a chocolate cake worthy of being eaten by anyone other than my nearest and dearest – who are obviously honour-bound to tell me how delicious it is – was a little alarming. As a result, I was a little less than relaxed about the whole affair and even ended up making test cakes to make sure I wasn’t going to embarrass myself too much.

I knew roughly what sort of cake I wanted to make from the start; something along the lines of a Devil’s Food Cake, which is wonderfully chocolaty and dense without being heavy. But I wanted to bring a little something extra to the party and given my day-blog, beer seemed the obvious thing to add. Everything tastes better with beer.

The next problem was the basic Devil’s Food; it turns out that there are more versions of this cake than there are recipe books, none of which quite matched up to how I remember my mum’s version. Having culled all the recipes that involved coffee – which would have been too much with beer as well – I did my normal trick of taking the easiest bits from various sources and normalising it to easier-to-measure quantities. I’m nothing if not a lazy cook.

Having settled on the base recipe, I had to pick my beer. It clearly had to be a dark sweet beer, which really meant a porter. Given that they make the best porters I know, I had initially planned on something from the Kernel Brewery but I have to travel across London to get hold of Kernel beer, so for my first test I made do with some Fuller’s London Porter. My chief taster confirmed that I was on the right path and demanded further cake. One trip to the Beer Boutique later and I had my small supply of Kernel’s Export India Porter. Despite being (in my opinion) a superior beer, it turned out to be less tasty in cake-form than the Fuller’s – sadly I was therefore forced to drink the Kernel instead. Life as a baker is sometimes hard.

When it came to the cake filling, I quickly realised that despite my personal addiction to butter icing, something lighter was required to avoid everything getting too heavy. Clearly it needed to be a bit sweet and beery, which pretty much meant the recipe wrote itself. Having the design talent of an aspidistra, I went for the traditional, village-fete look of ‘cream in the middle, cream on top’, which my less talentless wife suggested improving with some grated chocolate.

I set off to the show feeling pretty good; although the cake hadn’t risen quite as much as the test runs I knew it was tasty and it looked more like a ‘proper’ cake than most of my efforts.

Imagine my state of mind, then, when I walked into the kitchen and saw the other 15 cakes. They had spun sugar. They had frosting. They had tiers. They had cake stands for heaven’s sake. I had what looked like a naked chocolate victoria sponge on a bit of foil board left over from Kavey’s birthday party. I skulked off to wander around the show (well ok, I also popped over the road to The Rake for a swift half) and waited to pick up my 16th place prize.

The results were announce at 4:30 that afternoon, the top five being presented to the audience and discussed by the judges. I think it’s fair to say I was surprised when among the spectacularly crafted things of beauty that appeared on the judging table was my effort – looking, if truth be told, on the amateurish side in such company.

Still, from the kind comments of the judges it seemed my cynical attempt to get them drunk enough to vote me the winner almost paid off even if, in the end, I was beaten by someone who clearly knows how to make spun sugar rather than just how to eat it. Oh, and her sponge was (annoyingly) bloody tasty too.

So, if you want to know how to make my second-prize winning (ok, there wasn’t a second prize as such but you could tell they all secretly liked mine second best) Chocolate Porter Cake, here it is.

Pete’s Chocolate & Porter Cake

Ingredients

For the cake:
125 grams unsalted butter
150 grams granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs
225 grams plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
75 grams of very good very dark chocolate *
100 grams dark muscovado sugar
250 ml porter **

For the cream:
100 ml extra thick double cream
4 tablespoons icing sugar
3 tablespoons porter **

To decorate:
10-15 grams grated dark eating chocolate

* I used Willie Harcourt-Cooze Venezualan Black 100% Caranero Superior, which comes in block form.
** I used London Fuller’s Porter.

Method

Cream together the butter and sugar.Recipes always tell you to use castor sugar. I never have castor sugar in the cupboard, so I always use granulated. It’s all going to end up in a liquid batter anyway, so it’ll probably dissolve and I can’t be messing about with stocking essentially the same product in slightly different crystal sizes.
I actually did this bit by hand (you can see my cake-making fork there in the bowl); I am sure you could use a stand or hand mixer but I’ve always done this bit by hand. It’s part of the cake making ritual, right up there with licking the bowl.

Once that’s done, beat in the eggs one at a time with a spoonful of flour each time.I think adding the flour a bit at a time is supposed to stop the mixture splitting or something, but I don’t really see why it matters. You’re about to beat the hell out of it anyway, which will mix it all back together again. Again though, it’s how my mum told me to make cakes so it’s what I do. By now I’d put down my cake-making fork and let Intergalactic Unicorn (our KitchenAid) do the heavy labour.

Add in the rest of the flour, the bicarb and the baking powder and turn the machine up to high power for a bit, to mix everything in properly.

In a separate bowl, melt the chocolate.

Once it’s all nicely liquid, mix the dark muscovado sugar into the melted chocolate.This seems to be the easiest way of evenly distributing the chocolate and breaking down the lumps you inevitably get in dark sugar; it also creates another bowl to lick clean.

Add the chocolate sugar goo into the main mixture, along with the beer. Crank the machine back up to full power and give it a thorough whisking until it looks right.It’s tricky to describe quite what you’re looking for – the mixture goes a little lighter in colour, and just gets to this perfect, thick cake batter consistency. Or, if in doubt, just give it a couple of minutes.
And that’s it. Scrape what you can bothered off the whisk, and lick it clean.
Divide the mixture evenly between two greased and lined 8” cake tins, and lick the bowl clean.
Pop the tins into a preheated oven at 170C for roughly 30 minutes. Don’t overcook them; the cakes want to be a little moist.
When you take them out, leave them in the tins for 10 minutes, then put them out on a cooling rack.
Wait for the cakes to be completely cool before messing about with the cream – otherwise the warmth just makes the cream melt and go everywhere.
Making the cream filling is properly easy. Chuck all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk until good and thick; properly, almost buttery-thick otherwise it will shoot out of the side of the cake when you cut into it.
Use two thirds of the cream filling to sandwich the two halves of the cake together, and the remaining third to spread evenly(ish) over the top.
Finish it off with grated chocolate to look pretty.
Devour.

above images courtesy of Paul Winch-Furness

When discussing the five finalists, famous pâtissierand chocolatier Paul A Young said of my cake “the porter in this cake was *absolutely* beautiful… really intense, really moist… a cup of tea and a slice of that, a very big slice of that and you’d be on your way.”

Ice Cream Wednesday: Salty Snickers Ice Cream Bars

14 Sep 2011 9 Responses »

Sep 142011

I’ve been so pleased about how much people have been enjoying the Ice Cream Wednesday series on the blog, not just reading my own posts but being inspired to buy their own ice cream machines and get in on the action too!

Kate aka The Little Loaf is a fellow food blogger and a twitter friend, and she has been really supportive of Ice Cream Wednesday. I know she has serious ice cream skillz so I asked if she’d be willing to contribute to the series and I’m sure you’ll agree, she’s come up with an absolute winner.

Incidentally, I just love her blog explanation for her nickname, which was given to her “at the age of two by a great aunt who noticed [her] appetite for bread was considerably bigger than [she] was“. That life-long obsession with all things baked has expanded into a sweet tooth, a love of cooking and an interest in trying new restaurants.

Little Loaf’s Salty Snickers Ice Cream Bars

Do you remember the nineties internet craze of ‘pimp my snack’? People took every day treats and created crazy confections; giant Jammie Dodgers, Cadbury’s Crème Eggs filled with kilos of cream and party rings the size of a dinner plate. This recipe is seriously indulgent, but not quite on that scale.

With more primping than pimping involved, it takes a childhood classic, the Snickers ice cream bar, and makes it into an altogether more sophisticated version, using posh peanut butter, rich roasted nuts, a sprinkle of salt and good quality dark chocolate.

So there you have it, my take on Ice Cream Wednesday: silky smooth peanut butter ice cream topped with a layer of gooey caramel and peanuts, salty-sweet with a pinch of fleur de sel, and cloaked in a rich robe of glossy dark chocolate.

The ice cream is Philadelphia-style, meaning no complicated custard making, which allows you more time to fiddle around with the other elements of the recipe. As long as you make sure the ice cream stays super cold at all stages, you shouldn’t run into any problems.

For the ice cream
(taken from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop)

Ingredients:
180g good quality smooth peanut butter
180g golden caster sugar
660ml single cream
Pinch of salt
¼ tsp vanilla extract

Line a 23 cm square loose bottomed tin with baking parchment.
Puree the peanut butter, sugar, cream, salt and vanilla in a blender until smooth.
Chill the mixture thoroughly in the fridge, then churn in your ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions.
Once almost set, spoon into the prepared tin, smooth the top flat and freeze until hard.

For the caramel

Ingredients:
115g unsalted butter
1 x 397g tin condensed milk
4tbsp golden syrup
Fleur de sel to taste

2 large handfuls roasted peanuts, coarsely chopped

Melt the butter in a pan over a low heat for two to three minutes, then add the condensed milk and golden syrup.
Beat the mixture well until the butter is thoroughly incorporated.
Bring it to a slow simmer then, keeping the temperature even, cook for 10 minutes, stirring continuously, until thickened and light golden-brown in colour (this mixture can burn very easily, so keep stirring and don’t leave the pan unattended).
Once you have a thick caramel, remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly, then remove the ice cream from the freezer and pour a layer of caramel over.
Sprinkle with peanuts and fleur de sel, then return to the freezer to set hard.

For the bars

Ingredients:
350g good quality dark chocolate
170g unsalted butter
3 tbsp corn or glucose syrup
small handful roasted peanuts, coarsely chopped (optional)

Line a large flat board with baking parchment and pop in the freezer to cool.
Melt the chocolate, butter and syrup together in a large bowl set over a pan of simmering water until smooth, then remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly.
Remove the frozen ice cream and caramel from the freezer. Pop the bottom from the loose bottomed tin, then slice the ice cream into bars – I made 14 large bars, but you can adjust to your taste and appetite! Remove your prepared, lined board from the freezer too.
Now you need to work quickly. Taking two spoons, drop one of the bars into the chocolate mixture. Turn quickly to coat evenly in a thin layer of chocolate, then transfer onto the prepared board and sprinkle with chopped nuts (optional).
Repeat for the remaining bars, returning to the freezer in batches if necessary (i.e. if they start to melt).
Keep the bars in the freezer, covered, removing around 10 minutes before you want to eat them so the ice cream softens and the caramel becomes gooey.

If you try this one, do let us know how you get on!

Ice Cream Wednesday: Tarragon, Lemon, Lime & Tequila Ice Cream

17 Aug 2011 5 Responses »

Aug 172011

Let me take you back, back through the mists of time, or maybe just this summer, to the very first Ice Cream Wednesday, when 11 ice cream lovers gathered with two ice cream machines and a wide range of potential ingredients, to make and enjoy as much ice cream as we could in a single evening!

One of my favourite ice creams of the night was Kate‘s incredible tarragon, lemon, lime and tequila ice cream, which she and Emma Jane made to finish the evening with a bang! Ever since, I’ve been chasing Kate to share her recipe, so you too can try this surprising, unusual and very tasty ice cream for yourselves.

Over to Kate:

Tarragon, Lemon, Lime & Tequila Ice Cream

Tarragon is my favourite herb so wanted to experiment with it on #icecreamwednesday. My lovely friend Emma was bringing along some tequila so I was keen to incorporate that and thought that they’d sit well together. Limes are a natural bedfellow with tequila so I purchased some of those and Emma had also brought with her some lemons that her mother had grown in Spain. So this recipe all came about quite organically really.

I originally planned a sorbet for these ingredients as it seemed to fit well and would have a margarita slant to it. I still intend to try it out as one – I’m thinking it’d be a great palate cleanser before dessert at a dinner party.

Ingredients
285ml double cream
4 large egg yolks
170g caster sugar
30 tarragon leaves roughly chopped (as mentioned I love tarragon but it’s a strong herb so you may not want to use as much)
1 shot (about 30ml) tequila (recommend a reposado 100% agave tequila)
juice ½ lemon
juice ½ lime

Method

Heat the cream in a saucepan until it starts to boil. Whilst it’s heating whisk the egg yolks and sugar until they’re thick and creamy. Remove the cream from the heat and slowly stir in the sugar and egg yolk mixture. Return to the heat until it forms a thick custard (15-20 minutes).
Add the tarragon, tequila, lemon and lime and stir in thoroughly.
Leave to cool, pop in your ice cream maker to churn and then into the freezer. If you don’t own an ice cream maker, after cooling put into a shallow plastic container, put into the freezer and stir every 20 minutes.

Ice Cream Wednesday: Plum & Earl Grey Frozen Yoghurt

10 Aug 2011 12 Responses »

Aug 102011

This week’s wonderfully delicious #icecreamwednesday post comes from my friend Leila Dukes, who now works at ING Media, a PR agency with a specialist food & consumer team. Leila’s long been considering setting up her own food blog. Please join me in encouraging her to do just that!

Over to Leila for a fantastic fro-yo recipe:

I considered using the phrase “guilt-free” in the name of this recipe, but I don’t believe that an ugly emotion like “guilt” should ever be associated with food.

I never feel guilty about enjoying any food (it’s all about balance, baby – bring on the cheeseboard now and I’ll work it off tomorrow!) but this combination of creamy yoghurt, tasty plums, real vanilla, fragrant earl grey and just a little sugar can only be a good thing. It’s refreshing and fruity rather than overly sweet; I even had it for breakfast on a particularly hot & stuffy morning.

The origins of this recipe came from this ice cream recipe from Morfudd Richards that the Indy published a couple of years ago. I’ve tweaked it a little – mainly by replacing the cream with more Greek yoghurt, to make it lighter and fresher and because I almost always have yoghurt in the fridge but hardly ever have cream.

Plum & Earl Grey Frozen Yoghurt

Ingredients

600g plums (around 6-7 medium sized – I had almost 15 baby ones)

1 vanilla pod

100g caster sugar

1 Earl Grey tea bag

150g water

150g Greek yoghurt (plus a couple of extra spoons for luck)

Wash the plums, cut in half and remove the stones. Place cut-side down in a wide, shallow pan (make sure it’s well-washed; you don’t want any lingering whiffs of onion/garlic to ruin your fro-yo).

Split the vanilla pod along its length, scrape out the seeds and bung the whole lot in with the plums. Add the caster sugar, tea bag and water and heat until you get a few bubbles.

Let the sugary syrup bubble gently for 15-20 minutes to get the flavour from the vanilla pod & tea bag. Turn the plums halfway through to make sure the fruit is completely softened.

Pick out the tea bag and the vanilla pod (I stuck my vanilla in a jam jar of sugar to make some flavoured sugar) and blend the plums along with the syrup until smooth. Let the plum mixture cool down in the fridge for a bit.
When the plum mixture has cooled, mix in the Greek yoghurt and put in an ice cream maker to churn (or pour into a plastic container and freeze, removing the container every couple of hours to beat out any ice crystals).

Because this is a frozen yoghurt, it sets quite firm so take it out of the freezer for 10 minutes or so before you want to scoop.

I like this on its own or with a few crushed Amaretti biscuits sprinkled on top.

Ice Cream Wednesday: Chloe’s Candied Bacon, Toasted Pecan, Maple Syrup, Southern Comfort & Salt Ice Cream

20 Jul 2011 7 Responses »

Jul 202011

Fellow chocolate fiend Chloe, The Faerietale Foodie, was unable to make the Gaggia coffee and ice cream event I attended several weeks ago. (A 5pm start for a blogger event does rule out most bloggers, who have full time jobs alongside their food blogs). Initially, she was most disappointed about missing the coffee half of the evening, and the chance to meet and listen to top barista trainer Paul Meikle-Janney. However, when Dom and I shared what a great time we’d had, and were then sent Gaggia ice cream makers to review for the summer, she was visited by the green eyed monster!

Dom and I couldn’t bear to see her cute little pout so we quickly suggested an #icecreamwednesday party for Chloe and a few other friends.

Chloe’s candied bacon, toasted pecans, maple syrup, Southern Comfort and salt ice cream went down a storm and she has kindly agreed to share her recipe on Kavey Eats.

Handing over to Chloe:

I’ve never made ice cream before. I don’t often buy it either. Not that I don’t like the stuff you understand… more that I don’t have much freezer space and dessert wise, I prefer cake, or chocolate.

But the chance to invent new and exciting flavours was an opportunity not to be missed and you can imagine how all sorts of crazy thoughts went through my brain!

My first premise was that it needed to be something you can’t buy in your local supermarket, and the first ingredient that sprang to mind was bacon. Well, it just had to be done didn’t it? I’d been playing around with bacon for my candied bacon butter recipe and I was pretty sure my fellow #icecreamWednesday guests would create more traditional recipes so my decision was easily made.

I decided to cheat by using double cream and ready made fresh custard instead of making fresh custard on the day. The bacon and pecans I prepared the evening before. I added the maple syrup and salt to taste just before churning the ice cream. At that point, I felt it needed a hint of something extra…. my brain cried bourbon, Kavey produced a bottle of Southern Comfort and it worked!

Chloe’s Candied Bacon, Toasted Pecan, Maple Syrup, Southern Comfort and Salt Ice Cream

For the candied bacon:
Thick cut streaky bacon
Light muscovado sugar
Drizzle of maple syrup

Preheat oven to 200 degrees.
Lay your bacon rashers on a non stick baking tray and heap the sugar on top of each piece, giving a good drizzle of maple syrup for good measure.
Pop into the oven for around 15 minutes, turning the bacon half way and giving a swish around to gather up lots of that syrup.
Careful, as this has a tendency to suddenly burn.
When it’s beautifully crisp and glossy, let it cool down, then chop into teeny tiny pieces.

For the toasted pecans:
Pecan halves
Softened salted butter

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.
Toss your pecans in the softened butter before laying in a single layer on a non stick baking tray.
Place in the oven for around 5 minutes to toast but keep an eye on them as they can scald very quickly.

For the Ice Cream:
Double cream
Good quality fresh custard
Candied bacon
Toasted pecans, roughly chopped
Maple syrup
Southern Comfort
Salt

Note: I’m afraid I wasn’t paying too much attention to quantities here as I was caught up the excitement of playing with the shiny new machine, so I added ingredients to look and taste.

Add roughly equal parts cream and custard to a bowl and stir until combined then add plenty of maple syrup; I found I had to add a fair amount to get that maple flavour to come through.
Chuck in a good couple of handfuls of pecans and the same of the bacon, and then the salt and booze to taste.
Pour the mixture into your ice cream maker of choice and leave to churn for around 30 minutes.

I might be ever so slightly biased… but I was pretty pleased with the result and was thoroughly impressed with the Gaggia machine. Can I have one too please?

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Ice Cream Wednesday: Salty Snickers Ice Cream Bars

Ice Cream Wednesday: Tarragon, Lemon, Lime & Tequila Ice Cream

Ice Cream Wednesday: Plum & Earl Grey Frozen Yoghurt

Ice Cream Wednesday: Chloe’s Candied Bacon, Toasted Pecan, Maple Syrup, Southern Comfort & Salt Ice Cream

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