The risky business of a coffee-and-walnut cake…
Photo: courtesy Jayne Clinton
Coffee cakes are a love them/hate them thing – I rarely make one for guests, since those who dislike coffee flavouring really dislike it – for a while they even tried to get rid of coffee-flavoured Revels, for goodness’ sake! Those who love them, meanwhile, really love them…
I was fortunate enough this weekend to have lovely Jayne, Mark and their son Harry staying, and I know from previous visits that they are proper cake lovers. Given that we’ve got pretty comfortable with each other over the last few months, and this was their fourth visit – God bless them! – I was confident enough to risk the excellent, and, I think, bomb-proof coffee-and-walnut recipe passed on to me by my friend Helen, who is what I think of as a proper cook.
Jayne took a photograph and was kind enough to say I could use it, so I thought it was time to share…
It apparently originated with the Two Fat Ladies, by the way.
Ingredients: for the cake
175g/6oz self-raising flour
pinch of salt
3 eggs
175g/6oz soft marge or unsalted butter
175g/6oz caster sugar
1tsp instant coffee granules
2tsp hot water
25g/1oz walnuts
Ingredients: for the icing
1 tsp instant coffee granules plus extra to sprinkle on top (although cocoa powder also works a treat, I’ve found)
2tsp hot water
55g/2oz unsalted butter, softened
115g/4oz icing sugar
40g/1 1/2 oz walnuts for decoration
Method:
Great two 18cm/7in sandwich tins and line with greaseproof paper.
Beat together flour, salt, margarine and caster sugar. Dissolve the coffee in the hot water, then add this and the walnuts to the cake mixture. Divide evenly between the tins and bake in a preheated oven (170°C/350°F/Gas 3) for 25 mins.
To make the icing dissolve the coffee in the hot water, then cream together with the butter and icing sugar. Spread half the icing on top of one of the cooled cakes, and sandwich them together with the other half. Decorate with the walnuts and sprinkle with coffee granules (or cocoa powder!).
Summer’s creamiest, lemoniest cordial
Time works in strange and contradictory ways. Every year it seems as though we are waiting and waiting for summer to arrive. And yet the elderflowers seem to be in bloom far more often than once a year.
And it’s that time again now! When as I pass the door into the garden I catch a whiff of that creamy, lemony smell of the elder tree dipping down over the wall next to where I park my car. It’s unavoidable. And it means that every year I am stricken with guilt unless I do something constructive with them.
One year I made elderflower champagne, but the bottles exploded, and I haven’t been brave enough to try again. Several years I’ve made a batter and fried the flowers in it, then dusted them with sugar to make elderflower fritters – but it’s only Steve and me who’ll eat them. The children are most unimpressed, and turn up their noses.
This year, though, I’ve returned to that old favourite – it works for everyone, and doesn’t make stepping into the cold room feel like entering a war zone – elderflower cordial.
Together my daughter and I snipped about 15 heads of elderflower, and used this recipe:
1.5kg granulated sugar
50g citric acid (available from the chemist’s in a very medical-looking box that says ‘for culinary use’ on it)
3 limes ( a change from our usual lemons)
900ml water
15 heads of elderflower
Simmer the sugar and water together until the sugar is completely dissolved, then bring it to the boil, covered. Once it’s boiled, remove it from the heat, then drop in your carefully washed elderflowers, peeled and sliced limes (together with the peel), and citric acid, and stir. Leave, covered, to steep for 24 hours, then strain through a colander lined with a tea-towel into sterilised bottles.
Dilute the cordial when drinking – we love it with fizzy water best, and you’ll find the flavour is astonishingly strong. A proper taste of summer.
Seed potatoes are the first veg in at Ponden
When I was about 38 I read a magazine article that claimed everyone past the age of 40 got interested in gardening. Everyone. Not me, mate, I thought. I will never be interested in gardening, and that is a fact.
I still can’t claim to be interested in herbaceous borders or hardy perennials, but I must admit I have been doing a bit of daydreaming recently about growing vegetables. To the point where I’m actually doing something about it. Mainly because they are free food. It just makes good economic sense that if you have a spare patch of soil, you could be raising things in it to feed your family at next to no cost. Plus I remember the glorious smell of my grandfather’s homegrown tomatoes and runner beans. And maybe old age is catching up with me after all…
So now the thinking has finally converted into some real action. I bought two packets of seed potatoes yesterday, and today I actually found a spade, got myself out to the garden, dug up a long patch of flowerbed, and planted them, 20cm apart, as the instructions told said I should. According to the packet I’m right at the end of the time for planting, but fingers crossed they’ll still take.
I’ve chosen potatoes for my first foray into vegetable gardening purely because so many people have told me they are idiotproof – anyone can grow them. And planting them certainly seemed straightforward. I’ll let you know how they go on.
As an added bonus, while I was out there I discovered a lavish crop of wild garlic, which is definitely something I’m interested in using in the kitchen. My 14-year-old daughter recently ate at the luxurious Cliffemount Hotel, in Runswick Bay, North Yorkshire, while she was out for the day with her friend Tilly – and ordered a soup she raved about for days afterwards – spinach and wild garlic.
I have spinach. Now I have wild garlic. Watch this space…
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The greenest soup I’ve ever made
I’m on a roll with the foraging for wild food thing – even if that foraging extends no further than our back field at the moment…
So I promised you wild garlic and spinach soup – and I’ve half-delivered. I went out this afternoon and picked a lot of wild garlic leaves (after checking carefully first that they were in fact wild garlic, and not something poisonous and similar-looking, like lily of the valley…), then I started worrying the flavour wouldn’t be robust enough to stand out against the spinach. So I just went for it, and made straight wild garlic soup. I made up the recipe, and it seemed to work fine.
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Wild garlic soup
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300g wild garlic leaves
1 litre boiling water
2 tbsp sunflower oil
2 vegetable stock cubes
One onion
Four medium sized potatoes
½ tsp mustard powder
I sautéed the onion in a little sunflower oil, threw in the water, in which two stock cubes had been dissolved, then the four potatoes, diced. When the potato was soft – after about 15 minutes – I threw after it the spinach, stirred until it was wilted (about 5 mins), added the mustard powder, then blended with a hand blender. Finally, I strained it – although I’m not sure about that. I might go back and put back the bits I’ve strained out when it’s time to eat it. I have a feeling I’ve strained out a lot of the goodness.
It’s a beautiful colour, as you can see, and, being mainly foraged food, was extremely good value for money! I’m not sure how long wild garlic lasts – but I’m hoping it might still be around when my potatoes are ready for harvest?
I know next to nothing about plants and gardening, as will quickly become evident reading this blog. But I’ve got to start somewhere, haven’t I?
PS: While I was taking pictures in the garden I realised our laburnum, and the rhododendrons next to it, were alive with bees – like a monster machine. It made me so happy, because the decline of the honeybee has obviously been really worrying (see www.ibra.co.uk for more information on this). It’s lovely to see them around and active…
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Dandelion syrup
Put away a taste of summer now, and enjoy it through the year
I realised yesterday that the dandelions in our back field were beginning to go to seed. It was time to spring into action if I wanted to get any dandelion syrup made this year.
My 10-year-old son was sent off with a carrier bag to collect flower heads – for syrup – and leaves – for salad. It made sense to do both at the same time. I’d asked for 100 flowers, but though he was out for an hour, and came back very hot and sweaty, he’d only managed to find 81. No problem – still enough for a bottle or so of syrup. At least we’d get a taste of it, and maybe it would last us beyond this gorgeous sunny weather, so that in the first cold snap we’d still be able to sip a bit of that golden liquid and remember the days when it used to be sunny!
So this is the recipe, if you’d like to make it yourself. Get picking quickly, though. Those flowers aren’t going to last long this year!
Ingredients
Dandelions – as many as you can find, but around 100 should make about a litre and a half of syrup.
Sugar
That’s it!
Wash your dandelions.
Cut the green base of the plant away from the flower, and carefully pick off the green casing, pulling out all the petals and placing them in a saucepan.
Cover the petals with a couple of litres of cold water, and make sure they’re all pushed beneath the surface.
Bring to the boil, and boil for 20 minutes, then remove from the heat, cool, and refrigerate in the pan overnight.
Strain the liquid, removing the petals (you can now throw them away), then weigh it. For every 100g of liquid, measure out 95g of sugar.
Add the sugar to the dandelion/water mixture, and stir until it’s completely dissolved.
Cool and bottle.
To drink it, add cold water, as you would with squash – fizzy water is particularly nice – and enjoy a little taste of that summer field from now until you’ve finished the bottle!
It goes without saying that you should be very sure the flowers you pick are dandelions! If in doubt, refer to reference books or online wildflower sites. And do make sure you wash them thoroughly.
The leaves make a lovely, bitter salad as well – they’re really high in vitamin A, vitamin K, carotein and potassium. I dress it with a little olive oil, a tiny bit of wine vinegar and black pepper. Or you can wilt them in a pan with a little olive oil and butter – just as you would spinach. Either way, they’re as good for you as green stuff gets – and they’re free at a hedgerow near you!
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