Cake as Diet Food?

Don't you just love cake? This box of samples has led to a commission for a wedding cake, 75 cupcakes in chocolate and vanilla, topped by a cutting cake to match. I have to say the vanilla buttercream was good - I add 1/4 salted butter to 3/4 unsalted to get a better flavour. A glug of best vanilla extract and the seeds from a vanilla pod, delicious. The chocolate ganache is rich with organic dark chocolate and double cream. You can't eat too many of these special little cakes, but a small amount goes a long way. In effect, perfect diet food!

A Bit of a Do and a Big Cake

A buffet for 84, you say? No problem, bring it on! (The nervous breakdown, that is).

I can do a cold buffet for 60 without batting an eyelid. And a hot buffet for that matter, lots of simmering stews, daubes and curries, rice, cous-cous, potatoes, salads...

But for 84? That's a whole new level. And I work by myself so it's a Big Thing. But, I love a challenge, and I like to push my limits so it's worth a try. And it was fine. The thing that people loved most was, unsurprisingly, the home-baking. The lemon-drizzle cupcakes and the squidgy meringues (to go with macerated Yorkshire strawberries and local, organic double cream, sigh...). But surprise hit of the night was the random courgettes. Half a dozen courgettes remained after I'd made up the yoghurt-lemon-mint marinated chicken skewers, and I sliced them and tossed them onto the barbecue after cooking the chicken. A seasoning of lemon-dill salt and a blast of smoky heat and tumbled them into a bowl. I should have done four times as many, they were a favourite of vegetarians and non-veggies alike, an extra dish added to the menu at the last moment, borne of left-overs, if you like. Isn't it always the way?

So - to the cake.

A work in progress

Four tiers of sponge. Lemon and rose, each piece drenched gently in rose or lemon-infused syrup, buttercream made with 3/4 unsalted and 1/4 salted English butter and cut with a squeeze of lemon juice. Pale aqua sugarpaste, tiny sugar flowers in all colours. Sparkly centres, shiny, pretty blooms. A bright pink satin band around the board, with turquoise pearl pins.



This cake won't be everyone's cup of tea but it very much echoes the taste and character of my niece, the beautiful bride.

Long overdue update

OK, so I'm very very lazy about this diary. My neighbours who have discovered this cookery-blog (Hi! You know who you are!) reminded me I'm still stuck in February, so - when I should probably be cooking them a mighty big lasagne - here's an update:


My 12 hens are now all laying well, the original 6 brown hens plus Nancy New Hen welcomed three White Leghorns for white eggs (Lily, Minnie and Maudie - problem is, they all look the same...) and two Columbines (Peggy and Sally-Henny-Penny), supposedly to lay blue eggs. Only one lays a brown egg. And the other a green one. Hmmm. Anyway, double yolkers are starting to appear (must be all the bugs they eat from their free-ranging over our garden and wood), and the good news is that I can cook using all my own eggs, selling any spares at the Farm gate, as it were.


I've had a few cake commissions, some of which are pictured here:

A Golden Wedding (cake and flowers):

An 80th Birthday for a Bridge-playing, lovely, lively lady who doesn't seem 80 at all:

And a 5th birthday cake for a cheeky monkey:

Next comes The Big Buffet. A fresh Spring menu for 84 people, using as much of my own produce as possible. I love being able to pick from the garden, collect the eggs, and use them in my cooking. I'm hoping to supply salad leaves, herbs, maybe some baby new potatoes with luck, eggs, asparagus, edible flowers as garnishes... fingers crossed. Yorkshire strawberries are now available and are sweet and fragrant. The organic milkman will bring me my milk, double cream and butter and I'm sourcing delicious Yorkshire cheeses for the finale. What I can't source locally I source ethically, from local companies, finding free-range chicken and salmon farmed in a non-intensive way.

This is a big job for me, working as I do on my own, but it's a challenge I'm both bracing myself for and dying to get my teeth into.

And then, oh then, my niece's wedding. A cake, three tiers of duck-egg blue with handmade flowers. I'm terrified and yet excited. And my sister and I are doing the flowers (many sourced from our own gardens), so another challenge awaits.

Brownies, blondies... and whities?

I'm not doing too well with the inspirational cooking I hoped to catalogue in this diary. This week has seen a red-meat fest as I home-diagnosed my son with anaemia. He grows so very fast, I can't keep up with the length of his trousers, which go from trailing in the mud to flapping around his ankle bones in what seems like hours. He's been complaining of spots in front of his eyes and other minor ailments - the doc says not to worry, but I'm a mother and it's my job - so I upped the ante on the red meat and dark green veg front.

A roast piece of beef (just delicious) did four meals in various guises, and lasgane with chopped spinach cleverly disguised in the sauce was rolled out twice too. Some tiny lamb chops cooked pink were a treat, although once you'd picked the eye of meat out from the bone, each chop provided a dainty mouthful only. Rocket and watercress were stuffed into sandwiches for packed lunches (roast beef sandwiches, natch) but I couldn't get him to eat kale no matter how hard I tried. A covering of cheesy sauce, grilled with breadcrumbs like a gratin didn't fool him.

Cake and more cake again this week - something of a theme. Cupcakes for a school beauty evening, chocolate-almond and vanilla-rose. Lots of fiddly toppings involving tiny weeny sweeties, rose petals and sugar balls.

Brownies and blondies for Sunday Lunch pudding yesterday. Mein Host (shan't name for fear of offending - all too easily done, especially by me) was all too confused by the tub of ice-cream I took along to go with the brownies. 'Where shall I put it?' he asked. 'In the freezer.' I said, obviously. 'Not the fridge?' he replied. 'It's supermarket ice-cream, we're not going to be eating it for at least an hour, I would have said the freezer would be best. But, you know, just put it wherever you normally keep ice cream. Whatever you think best.' I tried not to sound patronising. 'So, the freezer, then - or I could put it in the fridge.' he continued. 'Wherever!!!', me sounding slightly sharp and shrill by now. I could tell my face was betraying the fact that this moronic ice cream conversation was irritating me hugely. I have no patience and I'm sure I'm just desperately mean. But, come on, just get it somewhere cold and give me a glass of wine, quickly!

So, Brownies have dark chocolate in them, and so do Blondies, just a lot less of it, but quite what Whities are I don't know. 'Aaah, Whities.' Eh?

Yours, bemused in the Kitchen.
xx

And yet more cake

This week saw:

Nigel Slater's marmalade cake, yum, and his ginger cake, just ok, you know, not to be raved over.

Flapjack has been baked obsessively, still trying to perfect that crunch and snap, with no floury, granular icky bits.

Little lemony chicken patties, which if pork I would have called polpettini, very good with buttered papardelle noodles.

Braised beef with absurdly tasty cheddary mashed potato - I used hot milk and butter and a hand-blender to get a really creamy mash. Garlic cabbage and roasted carrots alongside.

Gorgeous fruit and veg from the market: beetroot to roast stickily with honey and thyme; purple sprouting broccoli to steam and enjoy it's fragrant irony taste; parnsips to mix among the roast potatoes; squash, celeriac, swede, all to roast or steam and enjoy the colours and flavours. A brash pineapple, sweet and sour at the same time; a punnet of tasteless strawberries, redeemed by macerating in vanilla sugar; bland melons ripened in the fruit bowl and enjoyed for breakfast; black grapes with bitter skins and luscious flesh; rude pink rhubarb, desperate for wobbly pale custard.

I won't mention the apple crumbles (with cream), rice puddings, chocolates and crisps that have been devoured in a very diet-crushing orgy of greed.

Cake, cake and more cake

From the sublime to the ridiculous this week - a pretty cake for a lovely little 6 year old girl. A fatless sponge with soft whipped cream, jam and fruit. Then a chocolate almond mole hill with a marzipan mole popping out, cocoa dusted to look like soil. Appetising?

I don't seem to have done much actual family cooking this week, although casting my mind back belies this statement. A particularly fine cottage pie last Sunday with the remains of the previous Sunday's roast beef and some leftover mashed potato (I do tend to keep leftovers hanging around for far longer than the recommended two-three days, we're not dead yet), and a baked ham on Monday which is still being recycled in various ways. A pilaff to go with the ham, with cubes of roasted root veg studded through it. But adding the beetroot just before serving would have prevented the entire meal from being pink.

A roast chicken on Tuesday, party tea on Wednesday with finger sandwiches, cocktail chipolatas, hummus and crudites, crisps and cake. Thursday I was an absentee mother as I went to meet two fellow bloggers and had such a marvellous time I almost didn't come home, and Friday I made a chicken and ham pie with leftovers. The weekend will bring forth another home made pizza but this time I'm trying my hand at making the dough from scratch rather than a supermarket packet mix. Roast pork for the family and all parents on Sunday to celebrate the many January birthdays.

I bought fresh yeast on Monday and have made fougasse and epis from the brilliant book 'Dough' by Richard Bertinet. It's absolutely inspirational and the accompanying short DVD really fires you up to start slapping wet sticky dough about. So much fun, and a great stress reliever too.

A bad week for...

... inspiration.

After the red meat overkill of the weekend, I was at a school meeting on Tuesday so didn't feel guilty letting my family eat fish fingers while I had a nutritious tea of flapjack and crisps. Yum.

Wednesday was lasagne and I realised that the secret to a good lasagne is all in the sauce.

With a kilo each of ground pork shoulder and steak mince from the wonderful local farm shop, Roots, expensive tinned tomatoes instead of the cheapo ones from Lidl, red wine, milk, nutmeg, oregano, and the all-important soffrito of very finely diced onion, celery, carrot and garlic to start with, left to simmer for hours until it's melting, then you have a sauce to sing about. Tamasin Day Lewis's recipe from her brilliant Kitchen Bible is the one I use, and the one that converted me to eating mince again after thirty years of eschewing the grey stuff. The photograph to accompany her Lasagne al Forno recipe is so deeply mouthwatering, the greedy pig in me couldn't resist having a go.

This week's effort contained cheapo tomatoes, mince from Morrisons (they buy the best beasts at market, said my friend's Dad, and I was persuaded to buy meat in the supermarket....), I forgot to buy celery and didn't add carrots, and then forgot to season the white sauce until I'd started the layering... It was passable, but tasted like 'somebody else's lasagne' according to my husband. And he should know, I'm still trying to make something that lives up to The Golden Lion's lasagne, he is devoted to it.

And tonight, let's call it Pizza chicken. Basically a chicken breast, butterflied, seasoned with salt and garlic pepper (Schwarz - I'm obsessed with the stuff) stuffed with mozzarella, a teaspoon of tomato pizza sauce (see how it finds its way into almost everything I cook?) and topped with slices of salami. Add to that a mountain of mashed potato with loads of butter and full-fat milk (and garlic pepper) and a carrot-and-leek combo with butter (and garlic pepper). No wonder I've put on 5lb. It's all the garlic pepper.