Bibliocook: All About Food

I’m not much of a fruitcake fan but Tea Brack is an altogether different story. Because the fruit is soaked overnight it avoids the dryness that can often spoil a fruitcake, cuts into gorgeous thick slices and responds particularly well to being generously buttered and served with large pots of tea. The English Engineers, this time without Bridie, came to visit for the weekend so - as I had recently discovered that I had a stash of dried fruit, particularly golden raisins - I brewed up some tea on Thursday night, left the fruit to soak in quite a leisurely manner until Friday lunchtime, when I discovered that I needed to be in Cork at 6pm. The brack was promptly thrown together in a most hasty manner so that it would be cooked before I had to leave the house.

Despite the hurry, it worked out well. I made double the mixture - two large 2lb loaves - and, the Engineers now on the plane home, there is just one half of the last brack left. I had intended to use a drop of whiskey to intensify the flavours but my search in our cellar (the unfinished gap under the stairs where we land all bottles of alcohol) showed that the Husband had imbibed the last of the Jameson during the last cold spell so I had to settle instead for the Ballyvoddy Damson Gin that I made last October, which added an extra note of fruityness to proceedings.

Continue reading "Ballyvoddy Tea Brack" »

Working Saturdays means that any weekend entertaining needs to be planned and organised well in advance, especially when it comes to Saturday night barbeques at the cottage. The Naas Cousin was coming to stay so I grabbed the opportunity to get a few of the cousins together. There wasn't anything complex on offer: free-range chicken drumsticks marinaded for a little while in my thrown together barbeque sauce (mix enough tomato ketchup, wholegrain mustard, cider vinegar, soy sauce and seasonings to coat the chicken. Allow to stand. Throw on barbeque.), some decent meaty sausages, homemade mini-beef burgers and an assortment of roasted vegetables (red and yellow peppers, spring onions, large mushrooms with garlic butter and lemon, sweetcorn with smoked garlic salt). The Husband normally does the cooking outside while I look after the prep in the kitchen as there are always a couple of salads to assemble. This time it was a Pasta and Flageolet Bean Salad with Sundried Tomato Dressing alongside a Green Salad with Blue Cheese, Nectarines and Savoury Seeds, dressed with Sweet Blackberry Vinaigrette.

The Naas Cousin arrived well armed with hummus, vine leaves and wine to kick off the evening and, inspired by my perusal of Piri Piri Starfish, I had made Tessa Kiros' Caramel Cake a few days beforehand for an easy pudding. The Little Sister came armed with pineapples for dusting with vanilla sugar and caramelising over a dying barbeque to accompany the damp, dense cake. To go totally for a sweet overdose, we served the cake and caramelised pineapple with caramel sauce (from Murphy's Book of Sweet Things) and - at this stage I had run out of cream! - dollops of natural yoghurt. The post-barbeque sweet feast was further enlivened by another contribution from the Little Sister - Vodka Chilli Chocolates from Green and Black's cookbook. She didn't tell us that she hadn't gotten around to deseeding all the chillis until a bit later...

When making the Caramel Cake, I didn't have any cream in the house - again! - so I give you my less rich version of Tessa's recipe, which uses extra milk instead of the cream. This keeps exceptionally well but make sure you don't pull the caramel off the heat too soon. If it has been cooked until it is a lovely dark chestnut colour then it will have notes of bitterness to offset the sweetness all around.

Continue reading "Make-ahead Caramel Cake for Saturday barbeques" »

Totally forgot Anzac Day - which was on Saturday - this year. In case anyone else is also in the same boat, but still wanting to mark the date with some baking, here is my tried-tested-and-true Anzac Biscuit recipe.

Lacking my once-easy access to a variety of shops, providing me with a large assortment of ingredients to play with, these days I tend to concentrate on the products available in Urru and have also become a habitué of my local health food shops. After finding some cacao nibs in The Granary (Mallow) and picking up a bag of buckwheat flour from Horan's Health Store in Fermoy, I decided to make a batch of Alice Medrich's Nibby Buckwheat Butter Cookies that had come to my attention through 101 Cookbooks.

I've written about Heidi, her site and her cookbook, Super Natural Cooking, here before. Both the blog and the book are things I keep turning to, again and again, for sweet and savoury inspiration, especially after I pick up something new from the health shop. With the addition of some dark chocolate chips - I wanted to balance the bitterness of the cacao nibs - these turned into Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies, rich and nutty from the buckwheat, crunchy with cacao nibs and sweetened by the chocolate. The flavour of the buckwheat is particularly pronounced on the day that you bake the cookies, mellowing nicely in the days that follow - making these great to fill the going-to-work tin.

I have a suspicion that these cookies will also be great sandwiched with vanilla ice cream, and I've a tub of Murphy's awaiting attention in the freezer at this very moment. I didn't get a score this week from the Polish Colleague but the Mallow Workmate said that they were her favourite of all the things I've brought to work so far (8/10).

Continue reading "Sweet treats for work: Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies" »

Always read the recipe before starting, always read the recipe. That's an instruction that's been drummed into me for years, whether in Home Ec class, while studying in Ballymaloe, or just from experience on many occasions of getting half-way through baking something only to discover that an essential item was missing.

Now, it seems, I read the ingredient list - but forget to look at the method. When I looked at this recipe (originally for a Date and Peach Slice) I figured that I'd just use apricots instead of peaches but I neglected to notice the direction to prepare a 9 inch square tin. Do I have a 9 inch square tin? Not at all. That's why this week's slice ended up turning into a cake (I did have an 8 inch round tin) which, try as you may, is rather difficult to cut into enough evenly shaped pieces for morning coffee to get you through the week!

That said, it was a fantastically moist and well-flavoured cake, flecked with a mixture of reconstituted and dried fruit and well worth the trouble. Next time, I think I'll try to double the mixture to fit in my swiss-roll tin. The score from the Polish Colleague? 7/10 this time.

Continue reading "Sweet treats for work: Apricot Date Cake" »

For those of you who are, like me, without television - or simply without Irish television - you can watch Trish Deseine's first programme, Trish's Paris Kitchen, online from the RTÉ website. Although the first show includes lunchtime cooking classes at L'Atelier des Chefs, a visit to Clotilde's favourite cookware store, E. Dehillerin, and several recipes, it never quite lifts off and is curiously flat. In the meantime - I've been resisting temptation for way too long! - I've Trish's chocolate cookbook on order. I think it was the thought of these Oatmeal and Dark Chocolate Cookies...or maybe it was the Gâteau au chocolat fondant de Nathalie?

Sometimes you start with one particular recipe and end up going off on a slightly different tangent. That's what happened with these Chocolate Hazelnut Squares. After a comment by Sarah on my Lemon Traybake, I wandered over to Val's Kitchen and took a look at the Hazelnut Caramel Slice that she made from a Rachel Allen recipe, dug out the book and started baking.

But the day was getting late, I was also making dinner at the same time (may as well do all the day's washing up together!) and tastings of the raw base mixture - a brownie-style batter - were great so I decided to stop there. Rather than adding the caramel and chocolate layers, I roasted and chopped 125g of hazelnuts (being of a naturally lazy bent, I don’t bother de-skinning them), pressed them into the chocolate base and left it at that.

Val's look amazing but when you're taking something to work, you don't want to be facing something so rich every day! I've started making these Sweet Treats a week before I post the recipe so I can get an idea of how they last. This recipe is very quick, can be made in one medium-sized saucepan and sits quite happily in a tin - Husband permitting - for the week. My Polish Colleague gave them eight out of ten!

Continue reading "Sweet treats for work: Chocolate Hazelnut Squares" »

Since I first wrote about the McDonnell's Good Food Cookbooks I have had several emails asking for recipes that people remember from their childhood or enjoyed years ago but have since lost. The latest request, from Renee who wants to make the cake for a family occasion, is for the Tea Brack recipe from the first cookbook. This is one of our family favourites, a much used recipe, but - as I well remember from frustrated occasions searching for it - annoyingly filed under the name Irish Tea Brack in the Irish Tea Time Favourites chapter, just across the page from Gingerbread.

It is a very simple cake to make. Just soak your fruit the night before you want to bake it - you could always replace some of the tea with whiskey for added interest - and it multiplies up very well. I well remember soaking vast bowls of dried fruit to make four or six loaves at a time as it keeps very well in the old biscuit tin that was always filled with some kind of fruitcake for the after school cup of tea. It is particularly good, cut into thin slices and spread with lots of salty butter. Back in the days when I didn't like fruitcake, I did love this and Boiled Fruit Cake from the same book as the liquid used in both recipes ensured that the dried fruit was properly re-hydrated, the slices crammed full of plump and luscious sultanas, raisins and currants, with maybe the occasional cherry thrown in for good measure.

Along with substituting butter for the marg used in the original recipe, I will give both the imperial and metric measurements as they appear in the cookbook. I haven't cooked this in a fan oven so would be interested to know what kind of temperature/cooking times other people use.

Continue reading "By Request: Irish Tea Brack" »

I think my mother has one of her legendary Pavlovas already in the works for the aftermath of the Easter family lunch but, if you're not going to be as lucky, these Chocolate Hazelnut Mini-Puds, adapted from a Nigella recipe, are well worth trying.

This mixture makes eight - serving our family of seven, with one left over to fight for - but it's a very easy thing to halve the recipe if you are serving less people. You do not want to over cook these mini-puddings so the easiest way to make them is to melt the butter and dark chocolate just before lunch, leave to cool then combine with the rest of the pre-weighed ingredients as everyone relaxes after the lamb (it's Easter - it has to be lamb!), sticking it into the oven while the table is cleared and the obligatory pot of post-lunch tea is made. And please do serve with the recommended jug of pouring cream - the combination of cold cream, gooey chocolate interior, crunchy hazelnuts (and, in the spirit of keeping this simple, I don't worry about peeling them) and crusty sponge is truly worth enjoying in concentrated silence.

Continue reading "Chocolate for Easter" »

After the success of last week's Chocolate Peanut Butter Squares, I decided to move on to something lighter and more fruity for this week's sweet treat. I'm have been reading Annie Bell's Gorgeous Cakes recently - the Mallow library is coming up trumps for brilliant cookbooks - and I have plenty of recipes bookmarked to try. Annie is not afraid of using her kitchen appliances and, after finally getting a kitchen to call my own, I now have both food processor (one of the first birthday gifts from the not-yet-Husband - he knew how to set up things for future baking happiness!) and KitchenAid mixer out and at my disposal. This recipe uses the food processor, taking minutes to put together although, if I were in my NZ kitchen appliance-less days, it would also be manageable with a wooden spoon, although I have to say that I avoided any creaming recipes for the whole year I was living there. I'm sure it would also work with any mixer at your disposal.

Moist and crunchy when fresh, getting steadily damper although no less tasty as it sits in the tin, this Lemon Traybake got a resounding thumbs up from my main testers - the Husband and the Polish Colleague. Now to figure out next week's recipe!

Continue reading "Sweet treats for work: Lemon Traybake" »

Nowadays, with a little breathing space and a (slightly) more regular routine, I'm on a mission to expand my cooking horizons and explore the years of stored up recipes. I finally have all my cookbooks in one house, albeit still scattered between the kitchen shelf, a corner of the table in the living room, piled up next to the computer, along the sides of the stairs and filling the recently-built shelves upstairs in what is supposed to be my office (these days it's still too cold to heat more than the main living room!).

So, surrounded by cookbooks, I try to use new recipes, especially on my days working from home when I fill the tins so that there's something nice to take to work for the Husband, myself and my workmates. I spent a while stuck in a Flapjack rut, but, that now mastered, I've moved on. The criteria are simple - whatever it is has to be quick to make, good to eat with my morning cup of coffee in work and, very important this, happy to sit in the tin for about a week. Here's the latest try-out, adapted from Sue Lawrence's On Baking.

Continue reading "Sweet treats for work: Chocolate Peanut Butter Squares" »

There's always a new one, isn't there? No sooner have you mastered Bittman's No-Knead Bread and played around with jars of starter for your own Sourdough than another intriguing bread recipe comes along. I discovered this one through the NZ FoodLovers Forum, found the recipe, and discovered the book that it comes from - Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë Francois - here.

Last Monday I mixed up the dough, cooked my first loaf on Tuesday evening and ate nearly half of the misshapen bread warm out of the oven. There was another, slightly larger, loaf cooked on Saturday and I made some little bread rolls to be filled with one-egg French Omelettes for supper today. Over time the flavour develops more of a sour tang - once I make more space in my fridge (there's still a very useful jar of sourdough starter in there!) I'm looking forward to keeping some dough for a longer time and seeing how it progresses.

As usual, I've played around with the recipe. I had some of Shipton Mill's textured, seed-speckled Organic Three Malt and Sunflower Flour in the house so used it in combination with some strong flour and it worked well. Next time I'll try to restrain myself and actually follow their instructions. I don't have a pizza stone, though, so I just bake the bread on the tray it has been relaxing on for the last 40 minutes. Still haven't gotten around to slashing it before baking either! I've written up the recipe with my own adaptations below but I I think there just might be a book purchase coming up...

Watch Zoë and Jeff demonstrate their Five Minute Bread technique here and read more on on Zoë's own blog at Zoë Bakes.

Continue reading "Experiments with another No-Knead Bread: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" »

I was on RTÉ Radio 1's Mooney programme yesterday talking about baking and breadmaking - if you're interested, you can listen here (I'm on after the 4pm news!) and here are some links to recipes that I either mentioned, or intended on mentioning, during the show.

My ever-popular Chocolate Brownies
Choc Chip Cranberry Cookies
Lemon & Pistachio Yoghurt Cake

And, for those breadmakers out there, here is a recipe for a simple Brown Soda Bread and - if you're getting more adventurous! - you could try Mark Bittman's No Knead Bread or even experiment with some Sourdough Bread.

Black Forrest Gateau was one of the joys of a '70s childhood. With its layers of chocolate cake, punctuated by cream and tinned cherries, then decorated with chocolate curls, it always stood proud on desert trolleys of the era during the infrequent times my family went out for dinner. My attempts at assembling my own variation on, what was for the time, perfection, were made with the assistance of a small cookbook that purported to show you how to cook everything possibly needed for Christmas well ahead of time and freeze it. I took this all very seriously and well remember myself piping trays of cream rosettes for freezing (and forgetting) in advance of the festive season. That Gateau wasn't too bad but a recent attempt to bring the cake into the 21st Century was even more successful.

I started with Tessa Kiros' recipe for Moist Chocolate Cake in Falling Cloudberries (incidentally, watch out for her new book - Piri Piri Starfish: Portugal Found - due out soon), made it with Griotka cherry liqueur, still sitting around since my Berlin trip, and served it in slices with cream and dollops of the most divine sour cherry preserve. This deconstructed effort is a lot easier to make than the old BFG, no filling or decorating necessary, just slice - thinly, this is a rich, moist cake - and add your cream/cherry accompaniments.

Continue reading "Black Forrest Gateau - Deconstructed" »

Chocolate Chippies are big in New Zealand. Also known as chocolate chip cookies, none of the Husband's family gatherings are complete without a box - or several - of these small addictive biscuits, made by the Husband's Mother or Sisters. When we were in Nelson in January, I spent time going through the Husband's Mother's great collection of recipe notebooks, taking down details of dishes I have enjoyed in the past - especially Gracie's Brown Rice and Chickpea Salad and the Chocolate Chippies.

With this summer a non-starter for barbeques, the salad hasn't been made yet, but the KitchenAid has been put into use several times in recent weeks for the Chocolate Chippies. I love the texture that the condensed milk gives these cookies and they're also happy to sit around - a handful abandoned in the biscuit tin a couple of weeks ago were fine when rediscovered - although they don't normally get a chance. The first time I made these we had the Small Brother staying over and, with the constant urging of the Husband, they got through a large chunk of that batch while they were cooling in the kitchen. The still-molten chocolate chips made for an easy discovery of the culprits.

Last weekend, the discovery of a bag of dried cranberries when I moved my baking trolley (the Husband was installing a washing machine into that corner!) gave me inspiration for these orange-flavoured Choc Chip Cranberry Cookies, using that Chocolate Chippies recipe. I also used dark, unrefined Muscovado sugar to give them a richer molasses flavour. Start to finish, they only take about half-an-hour to make and cook. Just remember to take the butter out of the fridge a while beforehand so that it is easy to cream.

Continue reading "Choc Chip Cranberry Cookies (by way of Chocolate Chippies)" »

I have a confession to make: I've just bought myself a shiny, glossy red KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer! The workhorse of many an American kitchen and beloved by cooks like Nigel and Nigella, I've been lusting after one of these babies for quite a while. I first fell in love with one I saw in the Cork branch of Meadows and Byrne a few years ago but, after peeking at the price tag, never thought there was going to be a chance that it would ever be sitting in my kitchen. Then we got married. And one of the lovely things about having a celebration of your relationship is that people give you gifts. So, several of those gifts, in the handbag of a rather giddy girl, made their way to Brown Thomas a couple of weeks ago. Although my hopes were initially dashed as they had sold out of red mixers - and, having set my heart on a red one, who would want an almond-coloured one instead? - the helpful staff ordered one in and gave me a call when it arrived. The poor Husband got the job of carrying the heavy box, all rapidly-getting-heavier 22lbs of it, home, having been promised future riches of cakes, cookies and breads, and it sat, in its box, in the hall of our Dublin flat - no space for mixers - until this weekend when I finally got to take it down to the cottage.

We barely got in the door before the KitchenAid, together with its shiny stainless steel bowl, dough hook, flat beater and a wire whisk, was taken out from its wrapping and I was finally able to admire it! Looking wasn't all I did with it, and over the weekend I made a Passion Fruit Cake (perfect with an afternoon cup of tea or coffee on a rainy Irish summer's afternoon), finally got the chance to try out the Husband's family's recipe for Chocolate Chippies, a loaf of bread - I just had to try out the dough hook - and some small bread rolls, which I baked in my Baker's Edge for maximum crust. It now sits proudly on the table in the baking corner of my cottage kitchen, below the flour cupboard and right next to the weighing scales. I've been revisiting my cookbooks with new eyes, no longer ignoring or skimming past recipes that involve creaming sugar and butter or whisking egg whites! Although it is also useful for kneading dough, if I'm making just a plain loaf of bread, I think I'll stick to the very successful No-Knead Bread recipe - because of its slow rise, it's got a lot more flavour than any normal homemade bread.

To read more from some fellow KitchenAid converts, check out David Lebovitz's article on the KitchenAid factory, other bloggers' joy at the arrival of their mixers, and some KitchenAid-friendly recipes.

Continue reading "My very own KitchenAid" »

The No-Knead Bread recipe from Mark Bittman - aka the New York Times' Minimalist - is one of those recipes that has taken on a life of its own. Published in the newspaper in 2006, it still keeps cropping up on other people's blogs and, finally - it was on my list of recipes-to-try for ages - I've gotten around to making it.

The first time I used this recipe was three days before our wedding. Awake at 4am one morning, I thought it was a good time to start the 18-hour proving (it sure beat writing wedding preparation lists!) so I threw the ingredients into a bowl and forgot about it until 6pm that evening. We were on our way to the airport to collect the Husband's Cousin, so it got a quick shaping and was abandoned while we whizzed down to Cork, collected the HC, and brought him home. While they brought the bags into the house, I ran ahead to turn on the cooker and start preheating my cast iron casserole - I don't think the bread came out of the oven until midnight but it was certainly worth waiting for. It had a gorgeous, crackly crust, (although somewhat over-floured by yours truly, panicking after trying to shape the wet, shaggy dough) and firm, chewy crumb. We ate it the following morning for breakfast and I was looking forward to trying it toasted - until I landed almost the entire loaf in a sink full of washing-up water as we raced around, getting ready to leave for another airport trip!

Friday night, after we arrived at the cottage, I started the bread mixture, this time substituting one cup of rye flour for one of strong flour. As I wandered off to nearby Longueville House for an indulgent, and prolonged, lunch with the Kerryman's mother, the Husband had to step into the breach for the final shaping although I did make it home for the cooking. This time round, I kept it safe from the sink, we enjoyed the loaf over three meals and it is fabulous toasted, especially when rubbed with a clove of garlic and drizzled with a little olive oil.

For the recipe, I'll refer you to the New York Times. I cook it in my 29cm oval cast iron casserole and these are the proportions that I use:
2 cups strong flour
1 cup rye flour
1 sachet instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt

Update 31/07/07: For a great step-by-step picture guide of how to make this bread go here and Clotilde has adapted the recipe for the metric world over on Chocolate and Zucchini - but, I have to reiterate this, be very careful when you're transferring the dough to the pan to the cooker. It is VERY HOT (last weekend's lovely oven-shelf-shaped blister on my arm is now finally healing after lavish amounts of aloe vera).

A recent request for the Gingerbread recipe from the first of Paula Daly's McDonnell's Good Food Cook Books brought back a host of memories. This was a cake that was often made at home, first by my mother and then, when I was allowed to get stuck into more complicated recipes, by me, standing on top of a chair to stir the sweet, sticky mixture (and sneaking tastes whenever I could!).

Although I still love Gingerbread I hadn't made it for a while and hadn't used this particular recipe in years. Although, unlike the loaf I made last year, there is no syrup drizzled over it when it comes out of the oven, this is still a lovely damp, moist Gingerbread, especially when you wrap it up and store it for a day or two before cutting it - if you can wait that long!

With this recipe, as with anything involving melting ingredients, I find it easiest to put the saucepan on the scales, measuring the ingredients as I add them. Makes life a little easier rather than trying to wrestle golden syrup or molasses into the measuring pan and then into the saucepan. The only changes that I made to the recipe was to substitute one of the teaspoons of ground ginger with cinnamon, use honey instead of golden syrup and molasses instead of treacle. And, of course, use butter instead of margarine.

Continue reading "By Request: Gingerbread" »

One of the many interesting things about food blogging is tracing the movement of ideas and recipes around the widespread world of bloggers. Since the first time I read about Mark Bittman's No-Knead Bread - currently on my (very long!) list of recipes to try - in the New York Times it has travelled far and wide. You'll also find Peabody's Cranberry Orange Cookies a-wandering around other people's blogs, as is Donna Hay's Self Frosting Cupcake recipe, which first surfaced on Niki's Baking Sheet and then moved out into the wider world.

The Baker's Edge baking pan is one of those things that's been wandering around the blogging world for the last while. My interest was piqued when it popped up on Chocolate and Zucchini last year. Beautifully photographed, as always, by Clotilde (she also has a savoury recipe here), I loved its curvy snake-like shape and was intrigued with the idea of a baking pan - it was originally designed for brownies - that was designed to distribute heat equally so that there wouldn't be such a difference between edge and centre pieces. And then I promptly forgot about the Baker's Edge - until it started cropping up other blogs. A few months later, I've become the proud owner of what may be the only Baker's Edge in Ireland!

Solidly constructed from non-stick cast-aluminium, it came with a leaflet of recipes (cup measurements only) as well as a dinky little red spatula which helps to smooth cookie dough around the turns in the pan as well as being invaluable when it comes to dividing up brownies and getting them out of the dish. Unfortunately my Baker's Edge has become a victim of our current peripatetic lifestyle. Living in Dublin during the week and the country cottage at weekends means that it, much like my digital camera, always seems to be in the wrong residence when I want to bake! I still don't feel like I've given it a proper try-out but I have been experimenting with David Lebovitz's Friendship Bars, trying to convert the ingredients for Chef Emily's Signature Cookie Bars into metric and playing with a great recipe for Coconut Blondies (which is how I discovered the thermostat for my Dublin oven is screwy) that I got from the Connoisseur.

I'll just warn any potential purchasers that if they, like me, have a fan oven - nothing else seems to exist in Ireland any more, come back NZ cooker, all is forgiven - to be extra careful when cooking in this pan as it is all too easy to overcook things. I'm fiddling around with a few different recipes at the moment and hope to post them soon. In the mean time, you can read about why the Baker's Edge came about and creator Matt Griffin's efforts to bring it into the market, and browse through some recipes here.

Inspired by my perusal of Heidi Swanson's superb cookbook Super Natural Cooking, I've been motivated to start baking with more esoteric - to me, at least - grains and foods. I'm all stocked up on my favourite quinoa to try out some of her recipes (you'll find plenty more online at 101 Cookbooks), millet, amaranth, linseed and - in the move - rediscovered some Letheringsett Watermill Organic Spelt Flour from our trip to Norfolk. Subtitled "Five Delicious Ways to Incorporate Whole and Natural Ingredients into your Cooking", it's a perfect read if you're interested in cooking with whole foods and wanting to learn more about what is available and what can be done with it. And, unlike the educational but boring-looking Fresh and Wild Cookbook, it looks amazing.

One of the things I really like about Super Natural Cooking is the way that Heidi encourages you to substitute whole grains for what you would use normally. Quinoa instead of orzo, pearl barley for risotto rice, tef flour in a quiche crust instead of wheat flour. Little steps to help you integrate all these new foods in your diet without feeling like you're having to completely change your recipes and ways of cooking. In that spirit, while making some Shortbread to fill the tins, I decided to finally use some of my spelt flour. This was encouraged by the bag almost falling out of my baking cupboard as I reached for the sugar. When your ingredients start to fight back it is definitely a sign that you need to actually use them!

To complement the nutty taste of the spelt, I added a quarter-teaspoonful of dried lavender flowers, bought in a Moroccan supermarket last year. Be very careful while you measure these out - too much and your Lavender Spelt Shortbread can easily taste like the scrapings from little-old-lady dressing table.

Continue reading "Lavender Spelt Shortbread" »

Being a big fan of porridge - especially good with Muscovado sugar and natural yoghurt on a cold morning in the cottage - I always have a bag of oats in the house and they often find their way into my baking. I regularly make batches of Anzac Biscuits and Oaty Apricot Biscuits to keep the tins filled. I've also been known to make my own Granola, using Tessa Kiros' recipe in Apples for Jam as a starting point, throw a few handfuls into Brown Soda Bread, and have been experimenting with variations of Bill Granger's Muesli Bars. But, of all the oaty dishes that I make, this one for Chocolate Flapjacks is a true favourite. It originally came from Green and Black's decadent book of chocolate recipes but has gone through a few changes since with the addition of coconut, dates and seeds. Although there's lots of butter in it (not to mention the golden syrup and sugar!), it's still a slightly healthy snack and has been known to get me though many an evening's post-work yoga class.

Continue reading "Chocolate Sesame Flapjacks" »

A baked cheesecake is one of those dishes that I've been meaning to make for a long, long time. So, when I saw that it was the theme of Hey Hey it's Donna Day #10, as hosted over on Culinary Concoctions by Peabody, nothing was going to stop me from participating. I had also fully intended to get involved with HHDD #10, soufflés, as well but that kind of fell by the wayside when we had to start flat hunting in Dublin again. Spending your evenings getting frustrated with trying to find somewhere to live and the calmness necessary for soufflé cooking just don't seem to go hand in hand.

This time around, though, when the announcement of the HHDD theme and the presence of a frozen packet of cream cheese in my needing-to-be-emptied freezer co-incided it was obviously A Sign. While poking around in the freezer, I also discovered a substantial amount of chicken that also needed to be used up so I had a chat with the Connoisseur and volunteered to host the latest episode of bookclub at mine before we downsize and everyone has to sit on the kitchen counter.

Let me tell you, my baked cheesecake was not an easy task. Of course, this was not helped by my devil-may-care, I'm-too-lazy-to-go-to-the-shop-again substitutions. The fact that I was also working from about three recipes didn't help either! I started off with Nigella's Chocolate Cheesecake and, because of a(nother) freezer discovery of a bag of frozen raspberries and my love of this sweet and tart combination, decided to make a Chocolate and Raspberry Cheesecake.

When I couldn't find any digestives (graham crackers) for the base - none in Dunnes, what is the world coming to? - I decided to use Hob Nobs instead. Because I was after a thicker base than Nigella likes, I wandered over to Nigel's Kitchen Diaries for quantities, while still following Nigella's method. No custard powder? No stress. Just leave it out. Can't be bothered to separate eggs? Throw another couple in instead of just the yokes. Just short of the cream cheese needed? Sure, it'll be grand. And then there was crème fraîche instead of sour cream, blending the whole lot in the food processor instead of using the mixer (down at the cottage!) and a mis-wrapped tin that leaked. I also forgot to put the raspberries into the tin before the filling so they sat on top, rather than being buried, as I had intended, as a tart little surprise in the depths of the cheesecake.

It cracked, it broke, it had to be disguised by a quickly sieved layer of cocoa. Oh, my mistakes were legion. But, and this is always the killer when you produce a dish and tell people that it's not quite what you had intended but hopefully it is ok, it went down so well that I'm now going to give you my own lackadaisical recipe. If you want to cook the proper version, just go here.

One warning: do not, under any circumstances, make this if you're about to have guests over that night. It's something that very definitely is a make ahead desert. As a matter of fact, I made both this and the main course, a Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemons, the night before dinner. It certainly makes having friends over a lot easier and, being lazy by nature, I take any short-cuts I can!

Continue reading "HHDD #10 Cheesecake: Chocolate and Raspberry Cheesecake" »

Since returning from New Zealand we've been spending most weekends down at the cottage, the Boyfriend inventing new and more ingenious ways to catch the rabbits (score so far - Boyfriend: nil, rabbits: merrily increasing by the day) and me pottering around in the kitchen, baking cakes and slices to fill the tins. It's a great opportunity to try out recipes that I've been hoarding away from other blogs and websites (does everyone else have a word document on their desktop which they update regularly with recipes that take their eye?) as well as working my way through the piles of cookbooks currently on my desk, including Bill Granger's latest, Cook with Jamie, the Rose Bakery cookbook, Sophie Conran's Pies and Cook by Thomasina Miers. Bakingsheet is a rich source of recipes and Nic's Mexican Chocolate Loaf Cake, albeit without the orange rind and made in a round tin, was a successful gift for our hosts in Cobh last weekend even though I felt that my cinnamon was past its freshest date. A Maya Gold-flavoured variation of Thomasina Miers's chocolate cake, baked in a Bundt cake tin from my NZ kitchen which I manage to cram into our luggage this time, was a success with one sister - who liked its fudgyness - and a failure with the other, for being too rich! Sometimes you just can't win.

Being out in the country with limited shopping opportunities available locally (hence the stale cinnamon), recipes are often a triumph of available ingredients over specified ingredients and many days find me scrabbling through my collection of recipe books in the cottage for something I can make with what's at my disposal. No butter for the Mexican Chocolate Loaf Cake? The recipe is quite muffin-like so I used sunflower oil instead. Wanting to make muffins for a family gathering? Allyson Gofton's Great New Zealand Baking Book stepped into the breach with chocolate chips substituted for the berries in her Chocolate Berry Muffins.

With my electric hand mixer living in Dublin at the moment, I'm also used to figuring out ways around the instructions "cream the butter and sugar together". There were alterations and substitutions aplenty when I decided to make shortbread using Jamie Oliver's recipe in one of my Christmas pressies, Cook With Jamie. Instead of creaming, I used my pastry blender to rub the butter into the flour and used extra flour instead of the cornflour that had suddenly gone amiss. Still, the end result more than justified the means - not as short as it would have been if I had used the cornflour or some rice flour, but its buttery goodness more than knocks the spots off any bought biscuits. Just what's needed for dunking in hot chocolate on cold Friday nights when we arrive down from Dublin.

PS - Happy Valentine's Day!

Continue reading "Baking days at the cottage: Simple Lemon Shortbread" »

Being a big fan of cranberries, I decided to turn some of the fresh ones currently in the shops into desert for our annual Christmas bookclub dinner last week. For the last few months I've been experimenting with Clotilde's versatile Gâteau au Yaourt or Yoghurt Cake, making different flavoured versions, including an All Spice Upside Down Plum Cake for dinner with my uncle, aunt and cousins in the cottage and, when the Boyfriend was hosting his Arabic class at our flat, a Middle Eastern-inspired Pine Nut, Orange and Rose Water Cake.

This time round, after catching sight of Nigella's Cranberry Upside Down Cake in her How to be a Domestic Goddess cookbook, I decided to adapt her recipe for my own purposes. The cranberries became extra Christmassy when flavoured with port and the cake batter that Nigella uses was replaced by a simple cinnamon-scented yoghurt cake. Although I didn't quite manage to get the cake out of the tin with all cranberries intact, it still - served warm with plenty of pouring cream - tasted good, the tangy yoghurt base complementing the tart cranberry topping, the seasonal jewel-like berries glistening with rich caramel. And, at a time of the year when stodge seems to rule, it is good to have a decently light desert in your repertoire. Merry Christmas everyone!

Continue reading "Cranberry Cake for Christmas" »

We are nearly through our first apple season at the cottage - the few that have been too small to pick are still grimly clinging on to the tree through November wind and rain, while the fallen ones are being enjoyed by our still-prolific rabbit population and I've got a stash for myself upstairs in the spare room.

My granddad, who had a small orchard beside his house, tried many different ways of storing apples, especially cooking apples, through the winter but they often disintegrated into a soup of rotten apples in the bottom of the wooden boxes he used come spring. I'm starting my own system of trials this year, lovingly hand-picking unblemished apples and hauling enamel bowlfuls upstairs to carefully arrange in a single layer on the slatted shelves of the wardrobe.

Storing aside, I've been cooking with the apples every weekend and Barbara's version of Taste Magazine's Cinnamon Apple Cake was a well-timed entry on Winos and Foodies. I've been making this in a double mixture for an after-lunch pudding, so you get more cake to apple ratio - plenty of soakage for lashings of hot custard - and using Muscovado sugar to deepen the flavour. If you've a vanilla pod lying around, do as my little sister did last weekend and scrape the seeds into the custard to give your traditional Bird's Custard Powder - necessary for all family meals! - a bit of an oomph.

Continue reading "Apples for cake" »

Cookies, especially chocolate chip ones, are always a winner. But, when they also contain the nutty goodness of oatmeal and you get your hands on them, fresh from the oven so that the chocolate is still warm and melted, they are a treat indeed. A recipe that caught my eye recently on one of my regular wanders around Nic's bakingsheet blog (her buttermilk pancakes are a regular weekend breakfast favourite) was this one, for Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies from The Frog Commissary Cookbook.

I packed my hand mixer for a recent long weekend at the cottage - I was intending to make Barbara's Cinnamon Apple Cake with apples from our own tree - and I decided to use it to mix up a batch of these cookies before an old school and college friend called over with her new baby. It looks like the hand mixer may become a permanent part of my cottage-going luggage in the future. Life is really a whole lot easier when you don't have to cream ingredients by hand! On Friday I cooked half of the dough and the cookies were very popular, especially with a Boyfriend working hard on ridding the half-acre behind the cottage of nettles. The School Friend turned up with a loaf of homemade brown bread so she took home a stack for her own husband in return.

Nic says that these are the kind of cookies that everyone should have in their repertoire and I would agree. The dough is easy to make and happy to sit in the fridge for a few days. I cooked the second half on Monday, and had them out of the oven just before my cousin arrived but make sure you add a few minutes to the cookie baking time if you cooking them direct from the fridge. They have the right amount of chewiness and crispness, decadent chocolate balanced with (slightly) healthy oatmeal. These are the kind of cookies that don't sit around for long and no one ever manages to stop at one, or even two or, sometimes, three... For my adaptation of the recipe below, I used Muscovado sugar as I love the depth it gives to baked goods and I converted (in a somewhat random way) the American cup measurements to imperial. Perfect cooking for a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Continue reading "Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies for cottage visitors" »

As a child, I was an avid cookbook reader and collector. Of course, growing up in a small town in the middle of the countryside, there weren't too many opportunities to actually buy many new cookbooks so the few that I did have were well-treasured. One of my most loved books, judging by the ingredient-encrusted pages, was a cookbook devoted to chocolate. Although the book itself has long since disappeared, it did leave a legacy behind - my beloved Chocolate Brownies recipe.

It's always the mark of a good recipe when you forget about it for a while, only to be reminded by a friend, family member or an event that it's time to dig it out again and these Chocolate Brownies have been part of my life for nearly twenty years now. While in college, my housemates and I occasionally used to have groups of up to 20 people over for dinner. For those nights, the brownies were a great prepare-ahead desert for lots of people, delicious served with whipped cream or, like Ice Cream Ireland, with a ball of vanilla ice cream and some chocolate sauce drizzled over.

These are not brownies for purists, the ones on the outside of the tin being rather more cakey than many Americans would like - although do make sure that you don't overcook them. Every oven is different (the temperature I give below is for a fan oven) so use your own judgement as to whether they are cooked or not. I use cocoa instead of chocolate and, although you may balk at first, these brownies are not complete without the nutty textural contrast that you get from the walnuts. Do use real butter, there's just no point in substituting anything else, and try to get your hands on good quality real vanilla extract instead of the horrible stuff that passes itself off as "vanilla essence" in the supermarkets. Apologies for the old imperial measurements but I've never made these in metric!

The night before the Boyfriends' birthday last week, I made up a double batch - it's the reason why I always have two swiss roll tins in every kitchen I put together - which, when piled high and with stuck liberally with candles, made an easily transportable and servable pub birthday cake. Any leftovers keep happily for a few days in an air-tight tin but they don't normally get to stay there for too long!

Continue reading "Birthday brownies" »

My friend the Film Critic had a birthday last week and so I took it into my head, late last Tuesday night, to make him a birthday cake. Wanting something simple - and that I already had the ingredients for in the house - I decided on a straightforward Gâteau au Yaourt, which seems to be a French national dish. I first came across this cake on Clotilde's Chocolate & Zucchini blog and, subsequently, it also cropped up in Christelle Le Ru's Simply Irresistible French Desserts and also as a Frenchwoman's contribution to the Moneystown school's charity cookbook. It was evidentially time to try it out.

What originally caught my eye was the fact that you tipped a tub of yoghurt into a bowl and then simply used the pot to measure out the rest of the ingredients. How easy - and how flexible - is that? We always have a big tub of natural yoghurt in the house so the main ingredient was already at hand and the others - eggs, sugar, sunflower oil, flour and baking powder - are also pantry staples. As my tub of natural yoghurt was, at 500ml, much too big I decided to use a 250ml NZ cup as my measuring tool, scaling everything else appropriately. I didn't want the cake to be too plain so I added some lemon zest, pistachio nuts, vanilla and muscovado sugar to the mixture. I was also going to ice it with lemon glacé icing (just a mixture of lemon juice and icing sugar) until I discovered what little icing sugar was in the house. Already half ways through making the icing, I instead used the mixture as a lemony syrup to pour over the hot cake so that it soaked through, leaving a bittersweet crust on top.

Mixed in minutes and in the oven a few seconds later, the eventual Lemon and Pistachio Yogurt Cake was a resounding success. It had a tasty piquancy from the yoghurt, which was heightened by the addition of both lemon rind and juice. I got rather distracted while preparing the pistachios - so difficult to shell them and not eat them! - so rather less that I would have liked made it into the cake. As Clotilde said, this is a great any-time-of-the-day cake but I must confess that my favourite way of eating it is to crumble a slice over some ripe nectarines, sliced into a bowl, and top with a dollop of natural yoghurt. Sweet and soft, fruity and creamy all together. I eat it for breakfast...

Continue reading "A simple last-minute birthday cake" »

Ever since I saw Feast@Home by New Zealand food writer Julie Le Clerk I've been wanting to make the cake on the cover - a Chocolate Ripple Sliver Cake. But, every time I've re-read the recipe, I've realised afresh that I simply can't make it without an electric handheld mixer.

Now, I know that it's possible to cream sugar and butter together by hand, that eggs and sugar can be whipped to a light froth without an electric mixer, and that it's possible to beat egg whites into stiff peaks with just a hand whisk - but have you ever done it? Do you know how much it makes your hand and arm ache? And how damn LONG it takes?! The last time that I made a cake involving the creaming method - an Avoca chocolate cake when I was catering the Writer's hen party - my arm nearly fell off and I had to get the Boyfriend out of bed early on a Saturday morning to help mix. I don't think he was best impressed. So, ever since then, I've been taking the long path around any recipes that entail using an electric mixer. But I knew that I'd have to get one someday - there were just too many recipes in my must-cook files that were getting ignored otherwise.

So, last Thursday when I decided that I simply HAD to make Julie Le Clerc's Chocolate Ripple Sliver Cake for Friday night's dinner, I had no time to make a well-considered purchase, instead legging it into cheap household goods store Argos and picked up the Kenwood HM310 Deluxe Handmixer. I don't quite know what's deluxe about it, but - although the engine didn't sound too happy about mixing the chocolate part of the cake - it was still capable of doing the job.

While standing around the kitchen, beating the eggs/sugar mixture and waiting for it to turn "thick and pale" - it took so long, even with the electric mixer, that I would probably still be beating if I had tried to make it by hand - my mind and my eyes were roaming. I couldn't resist adding some freshly grated nutmeg, to compliment the cream cheese topping, and, given that I love the flavour of orange with dark chocolate, the zest of an orange got thrown in there too.

This was one of the first times I've had a suitably decadent recipe to make the most of the 1kg bar of Fairtrade dark chocolate (60% cocoa solids) that I got from the Connoisseur's Italian boyfriend who works in Amnesty and it was fantastic. It's amazing chocolate and is available from Amnesty's Freedom Café at 48 Fleet Street in Dublin's Temple Bar - a great place for a cup of (Fairtrade) coffee and panini, incidentally.

And the cake? Julie isn't joking - it is seriously rich. I easily got 16 slices out of it and we served with ice cream, strawberries and blackberries on the side, the Tax Advisor's contribution to last week's dinner. What little was left over after desert disappeared between that night's drinking and breakfast the next morning. It's always a good sign of a cake when there's nothing but crumbs left the following day. This is also a flourless cake so is perfect - given that you make sure your cream cheese is gluten free and, as far as I know, the Philadelphia brand is - you can happily serve it to all your coeliac and gluten-intolerant friends.

Continue reading "Julie Le Clerc's cake and a new electric mixer" »

I've often intended to but never quite got round to getting involved in Sugar High Friday. It's a reoccurring blog event that was originally, once-upon-a-long-time-ago, started by Domestic Goddess Jennifer. This round is being hosted by Ruth, who is physically situated in Toronto - virtually at Once Upon A Feast and the theme she has picked for this month is ginger. I love this spice in all its incarnations, ground and used in a delicious little Ginger Gem, chunks of crystallised ginger studing a moist, sticky slab of Gingerbread or - at the other end of the spectrum - slices of the fresh root simmered in a savory chicken stock for soup.

Ginger is well loved in New Zealand and that's very evident in any café or bakery that you go into. One of the (many) things that I love about NZ is the easy availability of great sweet treats to have with a cup of coffee - things like Tan Slice, shortbread, Millionaire Squares, countless oaty slices, amazing looking cookies and, one of my all time favourites, Ginger Crunch. Six months back in Ireland and suffering from a Ginger Crunch deficit, I decided that this was going to be my contribution to the latest round of SHF.

I'm not sure where this recipe for Ginger Crunch came from as it is an amalgamation of several different versions - I'm sure it has its roots somewhere, at some stage, in the New Zealand classic Edmonds Cookery Book. Wanting to to make it particularly gingery I added at two teaspoons of ground ginger to the base, along with some chopped crystallised ginger. Just perfect with a cup of coffee on a Sugar High Friday afternoon.

Continue reading "Sugar High Friday: Ginger" »

Being back in Ireland now, I nearly forgot all about Anzac Day this year on 25 April and it wasn't until a few days later that I got round to making the traditional batch of Anzac Biscuits for the Boyfriend. Although late for the day itself, this baking stint was perfectly timed for the weekend as we're about to embark on a camping trip - the first one of the year (we hope to remember the sleeping bags this time!) - and it's good to have some oaty biscuits to stave off starvation, or "for morale," as the Boyfriend puts it.

While assembling the biscuits for cooking last night, I was a little distracted by simultaneously trying to get my own supper ready (Mushrooms in Milk again, on top of some thick slices of Blazing Salads' Multigrain Rye Sourdough bread - yummy) and so I nearly forgot to add the sugar to the mixture - and it wouldn't be the first time, either. With toast and mushrooms almost ready and demanding my attention, I just grabbed the first bag of sugar that came to hand which happened to be the fabulously rich Dark Muscavado Traidcraft Fairtrade sugar. I'll never go back. The molasses flavoured muscavado gave the Anzac Biscuits a much deeper, almost treacly, flavour than the normal plain white crystals, a taste well worth repeating.

Incidentally, I always double my original recipe to make about three dozen biscuits. It's no extra work and it is well worth it to have a stash somewhere in the house (or tent) for nibbling on when the mood (or the Boyfriend) strikes.

As I finished up at work on Friday, I suddenly, as I looked out into the showery evening, got a yearning for gingerbread. No fancy stuff, I just wanted a damp and aromatically spicy loaf, the sort of teabread that would go perfectly with a cup of tea on a weather-swept Saturday. When I was younger, this kind of longing would be easily satisfied with a squashed loaf in a packet that said "Jamaica Gingerbread" but now, with a well-stocked baking cupboard, spur-of-the-moment cooking decisions aren't too much of a problem.

During my slow month-by-month perusal of Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries (I'm reading it in real time) I had come across a reference to an afternoon's baking involving a Double Ginger Cake. A quick search of the Observer website threw up the recipe but it wasn't quite the one that I was looking for. What I wanted was a cake involving the darkness of treacle or molasses rather than the lighter flavoured golden syrup that Nigel used. Plus he used stem ginger in syrup and, well stocked as I am, I don't have any of that on hand. But the recipe below that - David Herbert's Ginger Cake - was something that hit the spot. I jiggled around with the amount of golden syrup that he used in the recipe, adding some sturdy blackstrap molasses instead. Rather than mixed spice, I added my own mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg and freshly ground peppercorns and, as I had picked up a packet of lovely sugar-encrusted crystallised ginger chunks last weekend while in Nenagh's Country Choice, a small handful were chopped up and added to the cake batter to add a little texture.

This is a cake which takes more time in the oven than it does to put together and perfect for Friday night when I didn't have much time to devote to it. With one eye on the clock, I landed the Gingerbread into the oven while getting ready for a gig at Whelans of Wexford Street - Joey Burns of Calexico was playing. I took a break from applying eye-shadow to ladle the ginger syrup over the cake and resisted the temptation to break into the loaf as I headed out the door. At 2am that night it tasted good, but not as great as it did on Saturday afternoon with a steaming hot cup of tea. I love it when a plan comes together.

Continue reading "Gingerbread for tea" »

Last week the Boyfriend decided that it was time to move on from making bagels which, though gorgeous, are very time-consuming to something a little faster. As we both take our lunches to work, we're going through a lot of brown bread at the moment (mostly McCambridge's...especially nicely nutty when toasted) so he decided to make a couple of loaves of my Brown Soda Bread. After a few minutes hovering and being more hindrance than help, I decided to leave him to it. I curled up on the couch in the living room with a book as he worked away in the adjacent kitchen - close enough to help if asked but far away so that I wouldn't be interfering!

All went smoothly and I just arrived back at the cooker to see him put the loaves in the oven. Normally I sprinkle them with sesame seeds but these looked like they were topped with sunflower seeds. Curious, I thought, asking the Boyfriend what he had put on the loaves. "Sesame seeds," he said defensively, "like it said in the recipe. YOUR recipe." I did a double take - had I just bought a packet of absolutely enormous sesame seeds? - but no, looking through the oven door they were definitely sunflower seeds. And so they proved. The Boyfriend, after looking at sesame seeds in the li