By Helen

Autumn in York…

Autumn is here.  Yay!  The trees haven’t started to turn the beautiful hues of oranges, purples, greens and golds: but the weather has defiantly taken a turn towards Autumn with chilly, misty, mornings.  It seems like the perfect time of year to make chutneys, jams and pickle things!  I decided to make jam: bramble (black-berry) jam.  First thing I needed to do was to go and pick brambles: armed with a large tub, Si and I set off – foraging urban style!  York, in the city centre is very short on hedge-rows and we didn’t feel like driving into the country-side, so it was foraging city-style.  We knew exactly where to head: to York Cemetery.   York Cemetery is an amazing place full of high Victorian monuments and nature at every turn: from butterfly walks, herb gardens, ponds to, yes brambles…

Lots and lots of brambles…

The hint of Autumn was with us at every turn…

After a couple of hours picking the brambles, our tubs were full, so it was time to head home to make the jam.  Looking back through my blog, the picis I took of the jam making looked very very similar to those from a couple of years ago: there was something very reassuring that as the seasons change something’s stay the same. 

Fortunately we had picked sooooo many brambles that we found ourselves with a surplus: so we just had to make some bramble whisky – tis a hard life! 

facing my baking demons: loaf cakes…

It is ages since I have blogged about baking.  This is not because I haven’t baked: I have, it is just I have had so many other things to tell you about, blogging about baking took a back-seat.  This is going to change: this year I am facing up to my baking demon – the loaf cake.  I am a good baker, I bake great cakes (even if they are not the prettiest things), Si says so, friends and family say so: but I can’t bake loaf cakes.  Give me a recipe for a round cake or a square cake, everything is fine.  Give me a recipe for a loaf cake and the end result will be nothing short of disastrous.  Every loaf cake I have ever baked has collapse into an interesting V shape.  Think deep valley here, running down the middle of the cake.  I have no idea why: if any of you know why this happens, please, let me know.   So this year, right here, right now, I am going to tackle my issues with loaf cakes: and you are coming along with me…

I have the king of baking: Paul Holywood’s How To Bake in support…

I have a picture, so I know exactly what I am aiming for…

And, I AM going to following his instructions to the letter.  No deviations, no thinking well if I just add this.  Are you ready?  Good.

9.45 – Start the cake.  Gather together all ingredients and weigh them out very very accurately. 

9.50 – Everything is ready to go, first job to beat (does he mean cream?  sorry no deviating) the sugar and butter together.  This can take up to ten minutes.  Ten minutes!!

9.53 – Seven minutes of creaming (sorry beating) to go.  My arm hurts!

10.03 – Adding in the lemon curd.  Yuuuummmmmm lemon curd.  Resisting the urge to eat the lemon curd.  Is adding one table spoon of lemon curd, really enough?  Right, no deviating: stick to the recipe.  It’s just I really like lemons; I like my lemons to be so tart that your face hurts when you taste them. 

10.10 – Ready for the oven…

10.30 – Half way through cooking.  Resisting the temptation to open the oven door.  I don’t want it collapsing on me. 

10.50  - It should be ready!

10.51 – It is ready.  Out of the oven.  It looks like the one in Paul’s picture. I have been here before.  Normally in the next ten minutes is when the valley shaping starts to happen.  Figures-crossed while I make the drizzle.

10.58 – It hasn’t collapsed, yet, so I am going to carefully pour over the drizzle: still hoping for the best.   Looking good…

Yep, I think that this is going to be ok…

Here’s to my next adventure into baking loaf cakes…

Happy baking: it is the perfect weekend for it...

baking up a treat…

It seems like ages since I blogged about baking, in fact it was way back in June .  That is not to say I haven’t baked since then, I have baked lots and lots.  This last week Si has been a bit under the weather and I have to confess that I am not the best of nurse-maids.  I get frustrated, even though I know it is not his fault that he is feeling unwell.  I get annoyed that we don’t eat together; Si seems to have existed to toast and tomatoes soup (from a tin).   Tonight I am going to tempt him with chicken casserole with herby dumplings.  Yesterday I decided to stop feeling frustrated and really treat myself.  I decided to bake something just for me.  I decided to bake an old favourite, something that my Grandma used to bake.  I decided to bake really posh sausage rolls!  I scaled back the recipe so it was just for me, just for one, and this is what I ended up with…

I would encourage you to make these, they are wonderful, perfect as a treat.  Here is the recipe that I made, just for me, but it is really easy to scale up to feed as many hungry mouths as you have.

For one person, you will need:

• 3oz plain flour
• A pinch of mustard powder
• 1 1/2oz of butter, or margarine – whatever you have to hand
• 1oz grated cheese
• 1 egg – separated
• Water
• 1 sausage – skin taken off
• Chutney – I used some of my homemade tomatoes, date and apple chutney from last year

This is what you do:

• Put the flour, mustard powder, butter and cheese in a bowl and rub together until the butter has incorporated into the mixture.
• Add the egg yolk (keep the white you will need it later) and mix in.  Add a little water to combine the pastry together
• Chill the pastry and then roll it out into a rectangle shape
• Spread the chutney over the pastry rectangle
• Spread the sausage meat over the chutney
• Gently roll the pastry towards you, to make a big sausage roll
• Cut the sausage roll into to equal slices and put these onto a lined baking sheet
• Brush the egg white over
• Pop in the oven and cook at gas 7 for 15 minutes then gas 6 for a further 15 minutes
• If you can leave to cool for a few minutes (I struggle with this)

Enjoy!

sweet treat…

York is full of wonderful tea-shop; you are literally spoilt for choice.  If you only have time to visit one: then you would have to go to Bettys.  I can spend ages stood in front of Bettys' shop window, with their mouth-watering display of cakes, biscuits, breads and teas.  Yesterday as I was walking passed the window I spotted these…

Aren’t they the most adorable cakes you have ever seen?  They reminded me of the bees I crocheted last year, when I opened my back-yard.  The bee cakes had to be (sorry) Friday night’s sweet treat.  And, oh boy, they were good.  Chocolate heaven.  Inside the gorgeous chocolate decoration was a chocolate ganache, sat on a layer of chocolate cake.  Chocolate heaven! 

They did remind me that I hadn’t baked for a long time.  So that is how I am spending today: crocheting and baking.  Enjoy your weekend, and if you can make it to Bettys…

mind in a yarn tangle...

I’m back to with reality with a bump.  Not a massive thud, more of a gentle bounce back to reality: definitely back to reality.  I have soooooooo much to do!  This is what the inside of my mind looks like right now... 

A tangle of thoughts, a web of ideas, a confusion of not know quite where to start.  Okay.  Stop.  Breath.  The inside of my mind doesn’t actually look like a massive tangle of yarns, that is the inside of one of my yarn stash draws.  My mind just feels like a massive tangle, there is a difference.  So lets make a to-do list:

• Make pasta salads
• Make sweet salami, see Hairy Bikers' book for recipe
• Made potato salad
• Find pan big enough to cook potatoes in
• Crochet twenty-four flower brooches
• Crochet eighteen more granny squares for cushion cover
• Crochet flower, for July’s flower of the month
• Find way of display crochet projects in something other than a Tupperware box
• Start to tidy house (for something very exciting, which I’ll tell you about another day)

 Wow, that’s it.  Not too bad, all lovely things, just lots of them.  Lots of lovely things.

 Oh yes…and tidy stash draw..! :-)

Ps - I am not intending to east all of the food that I am making over the next couple of days: we are having a party...

cooking up a feast…

Si and I love having friends over and cooking for them; and that is exactly what we did a couple of weeks ago.  It was the perfect opportunity to cook something from my new cookbook.  Rachel Khoo’s The Little Paris Kitchen…

Ever since watching The Little Paris Kitchen I had been hooked, so when the cookbook came out, I knew that it was destined for my bookshelf.  After spending time reading the recipes and looking at the beautiful photographs: I decided what to cook. 

The meal was to start with galette aux pommes de terre et poires avec Roquefort (potato and pear galette with Roquefort.   I have to say my galette looked NOTHING  like Rachel’s…

But then I have not been trained at the Cordon Bleu cookery school.  Despite their appearance they tasted fantastic, even if I do say so myself!  Next I made boulettes de viande avec une sauce piquante et des pates d’Alsace (meatballs in spicy sauce with Alsatian pasta), only I substituted the Alsatian pasta for good old penne.   This did look like Rachel’s…

The only hick-up with this, was I felt like I was eating gravy with pasta.  Nevertheless it tasted good!  Next came dessert, which Si offered to make.  Si carried on the Rachel Khoo theme choosing to make a dark chocolate and raspberry pudding…

This was good, very VERY good!  Chocolate and raspberry loveliness, what more can you ask for?

All of the recipes were very easy to follow and we keep trying out different things from the cookbook and from Rachel’s amazing blog.  I would recommend that you try some out and create your own Little Paris kitchen in your own little home,…

Enjoy x

baking biscuits...

I woke up and felt like making biscuits for breakfast and in just have ten minutes the biscuits will be ready to come out of the cooker, all golden, yummy and ready to eat.  I am making lemon and cardamom cookies, the ones which feature in the Hairy Bikers’ book Bakeation, the same ones which I made a while ago.  Do you remember my moan about how I couldn’t find the cookie stamps to decorate the tops of the biscuits?  I looked EVERYWHERE.  In the end I did the only thing a girl, in that situation, can do:  I asked my Dad to make me some.  My Dad is one of those very clever people who can make almost anything, out of anything, if you show him a picture of it.   He didn’t let me down…

Aren’t they brill-i-a-n-t?  He is so clever; I think that they are just beautiful.   Dad isn’t a baker, so he didn’t realise the practicality of getting biscuit mixture out of the stamps.  Not all of them worked: I was only able to use a couple of the stamps.  The biscuit mixture just wouldn’t come away from the more decorative ones: it’s a shame – they would have made gorgeous looking biscuits.

Hang on a minute; the biscuits are ready to come out of the cooker…

…Oh dear!  The biscuits rose and spread so much that the patterns were lost in the baking.  Think that Dad will see it as a challenge to make some more with deeper and simpler patterns.

Still I have home cooked biscuits and fresh coffee for my breakfast…. ;-)

bakeation…

I think that I might have just bought the best baking book EVER!  Crochet will have to play second-fiddle to baking for a while, while I bake my way through the book.  The book in questions is the  Hairy Bikers' Big Book of Baking…

It’s the book which accompanies their BBC Two programme Bakeation.  The book, rather like the TV programme, is just brilliant, rather like everything the boys do.  I am bit of a fan. 

The book is arranged by countries, and each country has a selection of recipes.  So far, I think that I have baked my way around Norway, with a few pit-stops in Italy, Germany, Belgium and Hungary.

I think my favourite recipe (so far) is the Norwegian Cardamom and Lemon Stamped Cookies.  I have to confess I was a newbie to cardamom, I think that I might have tasted it in other recipes, but never as the main event.  I am a convert.  I can’t describe the favour, but would encourage you to go out and try it.

I was really pleased with how my cookies turned out…

Only one complaint about my cookies: mine aren’t stamped.  By this I mean, that the Bikers had used these gorgeous little presses to stamp pretty pictures of leaves and flowers on their cookies.  Mine were left unstamped.  This was not for want of trying.  I looked EVRYWHERE in York for cookie stamps but nowhere sold them, not even trusty Lakeland (the shop I thought sold everything you don’t know you need).  I found some on the internet, but they had to be shipped from Canada, this seemed a little extreme and I didn’t like the decoration that much to order them.  So my cookies remained undecorated.  Needless to say the lack of decoration didn’t affect the flavour, they were delicious! 

Go treat yourself, buy the book and bake something amazing.

one of the ugliest cakes I have made…

It is official: I have made one of the ugliest cakes that I have ever seen.  It all started out with very good intentions.  Christmas food is finally eaten, the last slice of cake gone, the last of the biscuits away.  That means I can return to baking, without the nagging feeling of you should be finishing this.

After a happy hour browsing through, my staple, How to be a Domestic Goddess (which I have to say I rather think I am already) I settled upon a Marzipan Fruit Cake.  Perfect!  Nigella even says that it is her favourite fruit cake in the entire world.  I would beg to differ: but that is only because she hasn't tried one made to my Grandma’s recipe.  Nigella's recipe sounds promising and, best of all, I get to use up all stuff left over from Christmas.  Christmas truly has finished.   So I kind of follow Nigella’s recipe, substituting here and there with whatever I find in the store cupboard…

A day later (yes a day: you have to freeze the marzipan overnight) voila…

The ugliest cake I have ever made.  It looks nothing like Nigella’s, but I did make so many substitutions that, perhaps, I shouldn’t be surprised.  It was also the strangest mixture to work with…

We weren’t able to follow Nigella’s advice to leave it for a week to mature, we dived straight in.   And you know what?  It tasted a whole lot better than it looked!

winter warmer...

It looks like winter is back: or at least it is for this weekend.  Waking up to frost on the roof tops and plants looking sparkly, if somewhat disheartened, makes it perfect weather for steaming hot porridge...

 

Porridge, this time of year, is a daily occurrence in our house, but today we thought we would indulge in topping of hot fruit compote.  Fruit compote is something that we usually have on re-enactments - it been very medieval and all of that, but who is to say that it should only be confined to the fifteenth century?  Fruit compote is berries (what ever you have to hand), soft fruit (again what ever you have to hand) warmed until they are soft: but not so much that they become jam.  A little port, honey and spices can and should be added.  Once eveything is combined, and you have a sticky thick pan of loveliness, then the compote is ready. 

Perfect on a cold winter morning.