Lemon Drizzle Cake

I’m meant to be having a fete meeting, I’ve made the cake, but only four of us could come so we’ve called it off. Youngest will be pleased, she likes Lemon Drizzle Cake.

It’s quite a useful recipe:
A 5 fluid ounce carton of yoghurt – the measure
1 of vegetable oil
2 of white sugar
3 of self raising flour
3 eggs
The zest of a lemon
Put all the above in a food processor and blitz. Pour into a base lined 10” springform tin and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes at 140°C.
When it comes out of the oven prick the surface all over with a fork or a cocktail stick and sprinkle over the juice of your lemon and a satisfying amount of caster sugar. Leave to cool then remove the tin and serve.
(I expect there’s a litre equivalent, but it’s the method that counts!)

And the chair is on the mend:

Hugh’s Honey Wholemeal Cake

A recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall which I highly recommend.
300g softened butter
250g caster sugar
4 eggs
150g wholemeal self raising flour
150g ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
50g flaked almonds
4 tbsp runny honey
Grease and base line a 23cm springform cake tin. Place on a baking sheet because it will seep butter during cooking.
Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs, flour, baking powder and almonds. (I do this in my freestanding mixer because you do need to get a really fluffy creamy mixture to meet the cooking time and reduce the sinking - though it tastes jolly good even if it’s slightly overdone on top and like a honey lake in the middle as it was the first time I cooked this!)
Scrape into the tin, smooth the top and scatter the flaked almonds over the surface.
Bake at 170ºC for 45 minutes until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.
Remove to a wire rack and, while it’s still hot, trickle the honey over the top. Leave to cool a little before turning out.
This can be eaten as a pudding while warm or as cake for tea. As you can see from my photograph there were considerable inroads made into it yesterday evening, after all a growing girl needs two slices for tea, and a Husband needs it for tea and pudding… Youngest is planning to eat it for breakfast too, though by the time she gets up you could argue it will be time for Elevenses!

Recipe for success

We've been in Dorset.
It was a bit damp but a welcome break despite the lack of Eldest. We walked, pub lunched, ate fish and chips, entertained friends for the day, went to the seaside, did a spot of gardening, looked at Daniel Craig, let Husband win at Scrabble, fought over the puzzles in The Times, and enjoyed the view from the top of the ridge.
Meanwhile I've been asked to post the recipe for Prize Pumpkin. So, in the hope that it's not too late (and pumpkins might be on offer now of course), here it is:

7cm fresh ginger, thinly sliced
Seeds extracted from 8 cardamom pods, ground
1-2 fresh green chillies finely chopped
8 skinless chicken breasts cut into 1cm slices
125g butter
625-750g onions, thinly sliced
6-8 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
125g button mushrooms
50g plain flour
450ml milk
1 large pumpkin (3.25- 3.50kg)
Sunflower oil
Melt ¾ of the butter in a large pan, add onions and cook over a low heat until soft. Add the ginger, cardamom, chillies and garlic then stir. Add the remaining butter and then the chicken and mushrooms once it’s melted and stir to coat. Stir in the flour then gradually add the milk and season with salt. Bring to the boil, stirring all the time until very thick. Remove from the heat.
Cut a circular hole in the top of the pumpkin and scoop out the seeds and all the stringy interior leaving only the firm flesh.
Spoon the chicken mixture into the pumpkin and replace the ‘lid’. Smear the outside with sunflower oil and place in a roasting tin. Place in oven at 240°C for 25-30 minutes. Now turn it down to 180°C for about 1 ¼ hours.
To serve, scoop out the flesh of the pumpkin with the chicken mixture. Serves 8.

Josceline Dimbleby tells you to move the cooked pumpkin onto a serving dish. In my experience you need to be able to serve it in whatever you cooked it in! Also, it tends to ‘leak’ pumpkin juices so don’t use anything too shallow! Any leftovers make really flavoursome soup.

No need to translate flapjack!

When little French girls came to stay I developed an e-mailing habit with Maman, based on my O level French, long before they arrived. If the girls didn’t understand I fished out ancient vocab and we managed. At midnight yesterday we greeted Youngest’s Spanish exchange girl. My Spanish is minimal, of the hola/gracia variety. I am hoping her English will be good enough for us to manage the week. I have had no contact with Madre…

We do know she was very pleased to discover flapjack which you may remember Youngest took as a gift to her hosts. Spanishgirl had hot chocolate and flapjack on arrival and has had the same for breakfast – and taken some to school for snack. She left with Eldest to catch the bus; some careful organization has resulted in a clash of the Spanish exchange with the Work Experience week so Youngest is not at school to be followed today.

This week has been all about my taxi. Youngest has had to be in Chippenham for work from 9 to 4.30. She is loving working in the Swindon and Wiltshire History Centre where she’s been tasked with writing a timeline for our village for their website. I did look at the bus, but it takes an hour and she'd be leaving at 7.30... so that means two round trips a day for me. And then I do the ballet run three nights a week for Eldest.

We will go again tomorrow to catch the train to London to show off the capital and visit the Hockney exhibition. I’m hoping Husband might drive.

Mincemeat Muffins

This post is for Fran at Being Me as she asked what they were.
Mincemeat Muffins have become a bit of a staple in our house: they taste of Christmas but involve none of the bother of making mince pies. The recipe came from a Sainsbury's Magazine. (And we've eaten them all so no photo!)



295g plain flour
75g dark brown sugar
1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
284ml buttermilk
4 ½ tbsp vegetable oil
75ml whole milk
1 large egg
250g mincemeat

Preheat oven to Gas 6, 200°C
Sift together the dry ingredients and stir to mix evenly.
Mix wet ingredients (except mincemeat) together.
Add the liquid mix to the dry and mix lightly.
Add the mincemeat and stir. Don’t aim for a smooth blend, it should be blobby!
Line a muffin tin with muffin papers – it will make 12-15 muffins
Fill the muffin papers ¾ full.
Bake for 20-25 minutes.
Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

These are best eaten on the day you make them, and we like them warm - but you can gently reheat them which cheers them up - I give them a few seconds in my microwave.

Chief Cook

Oh it’s been mad here lately, but, what you can’t tell from where you’re sitting is: I am on-line on my very own internet connected computer! (It's not connected to the printer yet but you can't have everything.)

So we’ll brush over my recent inactivity, writing-wise (I don’t suppose you think fete advertisements count?) and get down to the business of recording life in my little rural idyll.
On Sunday we had old friends to lunch. A traditional family affair, with a roast leg of lamb and rhubarb trifle, followed by a walk along the river, through the allotments and back up the glebe field and home for tea and carrot cake. As I stripped the joint and chopped the leftover vegetables, boiled up the bones for stock and assembled the base of a shepherd’s pie for supper later in the week I had one of those flashbacks.
Roast lamb with onion sauce and homemade mint jelly is a meal I completely associate with my grandmother’s home in Hythe. It’s not that I haven’t eaten it throughout my life, it is just Granny who I picture mincing cold roast lamb in one of those enormous metal contraptions that had to be screwed to the vicarage kitchen table and fed through the top – being careful to keep your fingers out of the way.. and cleaned through with a crust of stale bread afterwards come to think of it. Why I was particularly struck last night was because that is no longer how I make shepherd’s pie – though I used to use the whizzy machine and it’s efficient blade for ‘mincing’. I never met my mother-in-law, she died unexpectedly and rapidly of cancer a few months before I met Husband, but I was very soon told that her version of said pie was better than mine. I have learnt to chop the meat and vegetables so that you can still see what’s what, and to add a good spoonful of pickle (apparently it should be Branston but adding my own is now accepted).Roast lamb always comes with carrots and peas so clearly they can go in along with any left over roast potatoes, the gravy and onion sauce.
Topped with freshly made mashed potatoes and baked in the oven to heat through and crisp the top it is a perfect supper dish! Tonight. When Clergyuncle, who is visiting, will be joining us. I wonder if he will agree that my mother-in-law’s version is better than his mother’s?!

Carrot Cake

High time I gave you a recipe! This is a carrot cake given to me by a gardening buddy.

These quantities will make  a 23cm by 30cm baking tray’s worth .


220g grated carrot
300g plain flour (I mixed white and wholemeal)
400g sugar (I mixed white and brown)
1 tbsp baking powder
170ml cooking oil
2 tbsp ground cinnamon
4 eggs
432g tin of crushed pineapple, drained


Mix all the dry ingredients together and then add in the eggs and oil. Mix well (but with a spoon will do, you don't need a whizzy machine). Fold in the carrots and pineapple. Bake in greased tins at 180°C for 45-60 minutes until cooked through and springy.
Spread with cream cheese icing made using 100g butter to 200g cream cheese to 300g icing sugar beaten together until smooth.
Because it is a damp sponge it doesn’t keep particularly well, but, un-iced it freezes brilliantly.


Eldest doesn’t like conventional fruit cake, and Youngest doesn’t eat fruit or vegetables except in conventional fruitcake… unexpectedly they both like this!

Try and remember to share it with your family. It wasn't just me, honest!

Mixed news

Last week I managed another swimming session (on top of the Pilates): 31 lengths in half an hour and not yet dead.
However I spent Sunday dying quietly, throwing up, with an immoveable headache. I thus cancelled yesterday’s Pilates session and my appointment in school, feeling both weak and wimpy and unwilling to spread unknown germs. In two days I had (eventually) eaten two pieces of dry toast and drunk endless water with the gradual addition of black tea and today coffee and porridge. Do you think my body would rather give up food than exercise?


Microsoft Word is trying to correct my use of ‘drunk’ to ‘drunken’ but as I had had a single small bottle of beer with my curry I think it’s wrong.


Also last week I made marmalade. (The link is here: marmalade recipe.) Hopefully there will be enough to keep Husband in breakfast jam of choice until next year, but as usual I will feel unable to donate any to the church fete just in case. (Is marmalade a jam?)


And my Upholstery class started up again. It isn’t true that I’ve forgotten all my lessons since early December, but it was a slow afternoon accomplishing not a great deal. When (?!) I can add photos I will show you what my sofa looks like now – and you might be able to tell that it will be a sofa again!

A little something for the weekend

I’ve had a very quiet week. I have idled away the time on my own. I have tootled around the blogosphere thinking how much more erudite and focused other people’s blogs are than mine, and generally wondered why I bother. But as you can see I am back anyway!

I have vacuumed the house. I have swept the floors. I have picked raspberries, blackberries, runner beans, purple French beans and courgettes at the allotment. I have bottled apricots.
And I have baked a banana and walnut loaf using a combination of recipes to produce a very pleasing result that Eldest has been taking to school in her lunchbox, and Husband and I have indulged with a cup of tea. (Youngest has been eating the wedding cake we brought home from that occasion which is much more to her taste.) So I thought I'd share it:

Banana and walnut loaf
4 ounces softened butter
8 ounces plain flour
6 ounces soft brown sugar
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
2 eggs
6 ounces toasted walnuts
2 mashed ripe bananas

Mix together all the ingredients except the banana and nuts which should be folded in once you have a smooth mixture. Turn into a 2lb loaf tin (I line mine with Lakeland loaf tin liner) and bake in the oven at 180°C until risen and a skewer inserted comes out clean. Allow to cool and eat slices spread with butter.

I'm afraid recipes still come naturally in ounces...

Flapjack

High time I put up a recipe – like others I don’t feel I can photograph my efforts with the family around. This is Granny’s Flapjack, although she would have melted and mixed in a saucepan and I use a microwave. It is something I remember making with her as a child; a fond memory: she was a very slapdash cook who rarely weighed things and didn't seem to mind how much mess we made. This is a very easy recipe that both my girls can now make on their own, but they too have been making it as long as they can remember.


8oz butter
6oz sugar
8tbsp golden syrup
1lb porridge oats
Melt butter and sugar together.
Stir in sugar.
Stir in oats.
Turn out mixture into 12x6.5x1 inch baking tin.
Bake for 30 minutes at gas 3/160C.
Cool for 5 minutes then cut into squares and leave to cool completely.


Note: Eldest likes this with glace cherries mixed into it, Youngest prefers it with raisins. At Christmas I like to put in half the mixture, then a layer of mincemeat, and then the balance of the mixture spread on top. We all like it straight from the tin while it’s still warm!

Chocolate Chip Shortbread

This is the shortbread dough, rolled out and ready to go. A view of the finished result later in this post, but first, the recipe! Thank-you to the lovely njhausfrau for putting it on her site for us to use, but for other uk types I've moderated for our different measurement system (and yes I know I should be metric, but they're not automatic for me at my age):


8 ounces softened butter
7 fluid ounces caster sugar
20 fluid ounces plain flour
4 ounces chocolate chips

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, beat in the flour and then the chocolate. Then (and here's the clever bit) put into a plastic bag and roll out to about 1/4 an inch thick and then chill in the fridge for at least 2 hours. When you're ready, heat the oven to 180c and break open the bag. Cut the dough into 1 1/2 inch squares and bake for 15- 20 minutes until pale but not golden. I've made 15 using half the dough and put the rest back in the fridge for another day. Very pleased with the result though I might try adding a little vanilla or even branch out and purchase some espresso powder since that was what was originally called for and I didn't reckon freeze dried granules would do.

Husband has been away for a bonding weekend with his father and brothers, Youngest on a guiding trip. Eldest and I enjoyed the company of Schoolsoulmate and an evening of take away curry and Strictly. A rare treat in that combination!

Spiced Apple Chutney

Yesterday I made apple chutney in a successful effort to reduce the glut of windfalls. So, at last, a recipe to share!

Spiced Apple Chutney

5 red onions chopped

4lbs peeled and cored apples chopped

4 cloves of garlic finely chopped

4 green chillies finely chopped

6 oz raisins

1 tbsp Worcester Sauce

1 tbsp mustard seeds

1 1/2 pints vinegar

3 lbs sugar

I use my whizzy machine to do all the chopping. Put everything except the sugar in a jam pan or large saucepan and warm it as you give everything a good stir. Add the sugar and continue to stir occasionally until all the sugar has dissolved - do not let the mixture come to the boil until all the sugar crystals are gone! Then bring it to the boil and simmer gently until the chutney has changed colour and lost most of it's liquid - when you run your spoon through it the channel should not fill with liquid. Pack into sterilised jars and store in a cool dark place for at least 6 weeks. After that the chutney goes really well with cheese or cold meats, and is also a useful addition to such things as Shepherd's Pie.

I used a mixture of malt and white wine vinegar, and a mixture of caster and dark brown sugar on this occasion. What you use will effect the end result, but I enjoy the experiment!

But the picture is clearly of Raspberry Jam! Yes I know, but it is so much prettier than the jar of chutney, and I did make that yesterday too. Chutney always takes longer than I'm expecting, so on this occasion I rustled up some jam.

Raspberry Jam

I used 500g of raspberries from our allotment and 500g of preserving sugar (the sort that has pectin in it). Put them in a large bowl in the microwave. Cook on HIGH for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Keep going until all the sugar has dissolved. Bring the mixture to the boil and continue to cook until setting point is reached. This is surprisingly fast so be careful or you'll end up with jelly. Leave to stand for 10 minutes then stir and pot into warm sterilised jars. Eat it warm on fresh bread straight away!