Eggshell Diary

Over and Out

2011-07-14T21:43:00.000+01:00

I just don't have time... much as I love baking for others, and love the joy it brings (I hope!), it's come to a point where something's gotta give, and the cakes lose.

So thanks - thanks to customers and readers of the blog, and it's a sad day but Eggshell Cookery is ceasing to trade, I've told my district council that I'm no longer a food business (so I can let the dogs back in to the kitchen when I bake now!) and I've cancelled my domain name.

I'll still be baking, just for fun, for stress relief and for the sheer greed of smelling an apple cake fresh from the oven, and friends know they can always call on me for a cake in a time of need!

A sweet primrose cake

2011-04-11T15:39:00.000+01:00

Ooooh, look, cakes!

2011-03-09T20:24:00.000Z

Someone has asked me for some cake ideas, and here is a selection of pics. I am hopeless at remembering to take pictures before I deliver cakes. I often have to ask friends and customers to send me pics from their birthdays/christenings/weddings. And sometimes they send them and sometimes the cakes all get scoffed before anyone gets chance to photograph them. C'est la vie!

These cakes range from the sublime (I do love the little cakes with crystallised flowers, or sugar primroses on them) to the ridiculous (mole on a mole hill? If it's what Sir wants, it's what Sir gets).

The 16 in Smarties was fun to do, and an acceptable choice for a baggy-bottomed 16 year old, cake isn't cool when you're 16. A monkey cake suited a little monkey friend of mine. The wild wedding cake was exactly right for the bride - brights and happy, all pretty colours and flowers.

Anyway - lots of ideas to set some thoughts in motion...

Christenings and Christmas

2010-10-28T10:42:00.000+01:00

From summer flowers and cupcakes, the Autumn has seen quiches, crumbles and casseroles ordered, and now we find ourselves on the brink of that busiest of times - and the serious business of Christmas.

I have donated Christmas hampers to a couple of local charity auctions or raffles in the last few weeks. It is these jobs I love the most, putting together puddings, cakes, preserves, sloe gin, sweet and savoury biscuits, truffles and mince pies into boxes lined with tissue paper and tied with ribbon. I hope that the recipient will be surprised and delighted with what's within the wrapping.

The kitchen has been heady with brandy-soaked fruit and the delicious smell of cakes slowly baking and cooling for a while now. The sloes and damsons are steeping in gin or vodka, and the larder cupboard is heaving with new packets of ground almonds, marzipan and white icing, ready for the sticky, messy job of decorating the cakes - a project for December.

This week has seen me baking ginger cake - dark and fragrant, heavy with treacle and Guinness, and topped with snowy white lemon icing and white snowflake sprinkles (I can't help it - adornment for its own sake). Perfect for a chilly autumn afternoon, with a mug of strong Yorkshire tea.

A year on...

2010-07-31T09:47:00.000+01:00

Where did that year go? Gardening courses finished - as if by magic Eggshell picks up again with orders for cakes and more coming in regularly. Over the year I have had a few local orders, freezer food, dinner party puddings, that sort of thing. Moroccan lamb and Boeuf Bourguignonne, fish pies and lemon tarts, huge crumbles of seasonal fruits.

And now back to cakes. Who says the cupcake is, like, so last season? Strawberry-vanilla cupcakes for an afternoon tea; vanilla, lemon and chocolate cakes for a christening - hopefully pictures to follow. I found a pressed glass cake stand in three tiers, three colours of glass that looked quite pretty in a vintage sort of way.

Cakes and shortbread and little quiches for village fetes and garden parties, bottles of blackcurrant and raspberry cordial for the store cupboard.

I'm willing on the ripening of the blackberries and the apples, can't wait to start on crumbles and pies again, comfort food, the gooseberries and rhubarb never quite make the grade for me. And they never go far enough, whereas the bulk of the apples just keeps on filling those dishes.

An emergency birthday cake yesterday - a proper sponge (no fat), filled with whipped double cream and raspberries from the garden. No icing, just dredged with icing sugar. What could be better for a summer birthday?

August's work

2009-09-01T20:18:00.009+01:00

A Wedding cake of cupcakes, a Ruby Wedding cake, a birthday cake for a beautiful 6 year old, a birthday cake for her grandfather.

Thoughts are turning to Christmas already. A customer from my day-job has brought me packets of crystallised fruit from France to use in his cakes. He's horrified I haven't baked them yet. Ah well.

A catering order for September came in this morning, things are ticking on by. With college courses and work I won't be pursuing Eggshell Cookery in any meaningful way yet, life does rather tend to get in the way.

In which I make terrible cakes

2009-07-16T18:22:00.006+01:00

So we have this thing in the village throughout the summer where the WI ladies (or maybe it's not the WI, but it's some of their members and their friends, perhaps) make teas for the village elders (shall we say, to be polite about oldies - I got told off last time I mentioned that all old people like weak tea and heavy cake...) and also the Coast-to-Coast walkers who pass through our village on a Tuesday afternoon.

Last year, my next door neighbour did the lion's share of the baking, in fact probably all of it. She was, frankly, done-in by the end of the summer and this year has divvied out some of the baking to the other ladies. In the interest of being kind, and being that I am a baker by nature, I offered a weekly lemon cake. In fact I offered it because my mother-in-law said she was unable to do lemon cake, or any cake, but would have a stab at rock buns.

I make a mean lemon cake. Mary Berry's recipe - it's no secret, but with extra lemon. I don't put buttercream or icing anywhere near it, the sugar-and-lemon juice drizzle is enough. But at Tuesday teas, gilding the lily is order of the day. The lemon cake is required to have lemony buttercream, a slick of lemon curd, glace icing on the top and lemon-and-orange jelly slices.

All this faffing around with a perfectly good plain cake has sent me into a tailspin. Two weeks ago it sank disastrously, a volcano of a cake. I had no more butter to bake another in time so it had to be tarted up with piped buttercream and would just Have to Do.

This week I forgot I was heading off early on Tuesday to the Yorkshire Show so was forced to cut the cake while it was still warm from the oven resulting in the top cracking into three pieces. Again - no time to make another so it just Had To Do, stuck together perilously with glace icing. A really really GREAT advertisement for Eggshell Cookery. Sigh. And it came out of the oven so perfect this time - if I'd only had to drizzle it would have been a triumph. Hey-ho.

So this week I have avowed to make early cakes. Two of 'em. And if one goes wrong then we'll have the duff one and there's another to work on. And if both work out fine then I'll freeze one for next week. Sounds like a Plan! And when mother-in-laws eschews funny-face rock-bun baking to entertain a summer full of house-guests I'll make those too (but I am secretly going to substitute them with buttermilk fruit scones, rock buns are what elephants eat, not real people). They are round with cherry eyes and almond teeth, but we can't officially call them Fat Rascals or the people from Betty's will come and get us...

On a brighter note the spotty cake I made for a 60th went down a treat - a spotty summer fruit cake (no less brandy, though) with a sweet pea posy.

Cake as Diet Food?

2009-07-01T13:16:00.002+01:00

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

2009-06-11T15:28:00.007+01:00

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

2009-05-13T21:27:00.007+01:00

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?

2009-02-16T08:41:00.004Z

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

2009-02-04T15:41:00.003Z

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

2009-01-17T09:48:00.005Z

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...

2009-01-08T21:45:00.002Z

... 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.

Les Rosbifs

2009-01-05T22:01:00.002Z

No wonder the French think all we eat is roast beef. All WE seem to eat is roast beef.
A 6kg piece of rump came our way at Christmas and we've been wading through it ever since in many many guises.

Yesterday saw the final 2kgs roasted and served in the most traditional way, with Yorkshire Puddings, roast potatoes and parsnips, red cabbage, roasted beetroot and carrots, leeks and butterbeans in white sauce with Wensleydale cheese on top...

Followed by Nigella's chocolate babycakes with melting middles.

Groan.

And much the same today. The diet starts on Wednesday. No, really.

Full of Eastern Promise

2009-01-03T18:57:00.002Z

Falafel wraps for lunch - which left the house smelling like an Indian takeaway rather than reminiscent of a Lebanese souk, ah well. I used white and wholewheat tortilla-style wraps, spread with hummus and home-made tomato sauce (the old standby in the fridge - good for pizza, pasta, stirring into casseroles...) filled with freshly cooked hot falafel and sprinkled with grated cheese. Will have to experiment with the cheese - Gruyere just didn't work, too strong a taste and it clashed with the gentle spices of the falafel.

And a further experiment later - flapjack. Mum's recipe (called 'crunch' in our house) is the best, but I can't help but fiddle around. Flapjack for me must be darkly baked, almost burnt, and sharp and crunchy to the tooth. Oats and cornflakes or bran flakes for crunch - yes; sugar must be totally melted into the butter and syrup, I can't stand a granular texture; it should be slightly chewy too, but not dry and pale within. I love a handful of chopped dried apricot or raisins, and if only anyone else in this house liked nuts I would stud it with flaked almonds or walnuts. Perfect. Today's batch had a touch of cinnamon and nutmeg, but somehow it's not quite there - more syrup next time maybe?

Only one proper meal today as tomorrow is Roast Beef, and after all the huge meals eaten over Christmas we feel we should almost fast before mounting a campaign on another one. So French toast for tea - or gypsy toast. Not liking eggs, I don't eat it, so I just have to make it up as I go along - a couple of eggs laid on 1/1, a splash of milk, a tablespoon of vanilla sugar, a shake of cinnamon, fry triangles of bread that have been soaked in this mixture in unsalted butter. Dredge with a mixture of icing sugar and cinnamon. Possibly not how it's done elsewhere, but it went down well here.

Really Souper

2009-01-02T21:52:00.002Z

And again... I found a huge punnet of perfectly respectable chestnut mushrooms on the reduced shelf of the supermarket. So... with an onion, a handful of spinach thrown in at the end just before blitzing, and lots of black pepper and creme fraiche to serve. Marvellous. And cheap, and some more in the freezer for a rainy day.

Disappointing fillet steaks this evening, cooked rare but with no taste, with wilted spinach, roasted cherry tomatoes, portabello mushrooms stuffed with either blue stilton (him) or camembert (me), thin-cut chips and a sauce made with pan juices, wine, and creme fraiche. Grapes and chocolate afterwards.

Losing inspiration already, off to read something inspiring for tomorrow's efforts (must do better etc...)

New Year, good food please

2009-01-01T20:42:00.003Z

I'd like to think I'll find time to write a little every day about what I'm cooking and baking on a daily basis, more as an aide-memoire than to provide interest to anyone but me. So often I make something really lovely and then promptly forget about it until, months later, a random taste reminds me...

So today - New Year's Day - was about soup.

I started with a warming pan of carrot and coriander for poorly husband's lunch. To make him feel better. Nothing special - a straightforward soup of onion, carrots (gets rid of those wrinkly ones from the back of the fridge drawer) and a teaspoon of dried coriander seed for warmth and spice and fragrance. Blitzed to a velvet orange emulsion. Lovely with sourdough bread.

Next, an experiment with parsnips. Parsnip and apple or pear is always too sweet for my taste so today I tried parsnip and butterbean, with some crisply fried lardons as a garnish. I fried off the lardons first (buy them in bulk in those small packs, use them straight from the freezer - just toss them into a tablespoon of hot oilve oil), fried onions and garlic in the bacon-fat and added the parsnips, tinned butterbeans and stock. It's a thick and gloopy mix once liquidized, but I'll add more liquid when I re-heat it. The lardons (those I managed not to eat hot from the kitchen paper where they were meant to be drying of fat, I can't resist those salty, sizzling nuggets) will pep it up, and maybe a crumbling of blue cheese.

And finally, as well as making a tomato sauce for a home-made pizza this evening, I made some roasted cherry tomato and red lentil soup. I added a teaspoon of rose harissa, some smoked paprika, two tins of chopped tomatoes, tomato puree... It will be rich and smoky with a slight kick of chili.

Add two apple crumbles to that savoury endeavour and we've got a full fridge and wholesome warming food for a few days, as well as a store in the freezer.

Christmas at last

2008-12-20T15:09:00.004Z

Traditional soft-iced Christmas cake. Decorated to suit a family with young children.

Nearly there - the cakes are iced, which is one of the last jobs before deliveries start next week.

Chocolate espresso truffle torte with chocolate wattle decorations

I've been making puddings and cakes and jams and chutneys for months, and now we're on the home stretch, just biscuits and chocolates and sweets to be made now.

Detail - sugarpaste Christmas cake decorations.

Autumn puddings

2008-10-11T19:48:00.005+01:00

Comice pears, poached in red wine and cassis syrup, chocolate sauce, fresh blackberries on a billowing cloud of whipped organic double cream piled onto a meringue base. Drizzled with reduced poaching syrup and finished with grated dark chocolate. Autumn Pear Pavlova.

This is the season of crumbles, tarts and pies. The apple harvest is in, stored in the shed in old potato crates. The blackberries have finished now, plenty are frozen for use through the winter. But still the Autumn raspberries continue, giving us a few weeks of extra summer. When the sun shines it's the time to go and eat them straight from the bush, warmed by the sun.

Alchemy

2008-09-01T21:29:00.005+01:00

A colander full of blackberries, a few windfall Bramley apples, sugar, lemon juice and water. And this:

Turns into this:

A lovely morning today, to go out and harvest the garden's bounty and turn it into fruit butter (sharper, creamier and less sweet than a jam, but also with a shorter shelf-life, delicious on bread and toast), and a crumble with a nubbly oaty topping. And the ubiquitous lemon cake for good measure, to feed friends who visited in the afternoon.

Last days of Summer or first days of Autumn?

2008-08-25T11:56:00.006+01:00

We had a barbeque yesterday for the family - only the second of the season for us as our rustic brick barbeque has only just been built. A barbeque is such a summer event, we had sausages from the best sausage maker in the North - Beavers of Masham - and chicken kebabs that had been marinaded in a summery lemon, olive oil and rosemary mixture. And summer salads, buffalo mozarella and tomatoes that had been left to warm in the sun with pungent shredded basil leaves - a chiffonade, don't you love that word?

A strawberry galette, a thin disc of buttery flaky pastry with strawberries, butter and sugar scattered over the top. Crisp and simple and delicious. Then a frozen terrine of blackcurrant sorbet, wild bilberries picked on the hills a few weeks ago, and seed-flecked vanilla ice-cream. Summer's swan-song.

But the finale was the taste of things to come - blackberry and apple pie (inspired by Blossom), with blackberries from our own hedgerows and slightly under-ripe eating apples from my in-laws' orchard. A simple circle of sweet pastry, folded in on a heap of fruit and demarara sugar. It didn't last long...

Smells like Christmas

2008-08-06T17:22:00.000+01:00

The C word. Already. Sorry...

Today I baked a celebration cake for a 75th birthday. My fruit cake recipe is my favourite to make. It's time consuming, it's fiddly with the chopping of nuts, apricots and sticky cherries, but the smell that fills the house is pure Christmas.

And despite my better judgement I am inexplicably drawn to the multi-coloured glace cherries - green, yellow and brightest red. I should know better, I should buy the natural coloured deepest dark cherries, but no. Half the fun is seeing the chopped chips of sweetness in the dark mix of vine fruits, butter, dark muscovado sugar, fruit zest and sloe gin. A mix of crystallised ginger, dried apricots, three colours of cherries and chunks of almonds and brazils glisten in the warm pan. There is a childish delight in seeing the festive colours.

After adding eggs from my hens (today, two double yolkers, the girls are doing sterling work), flour, ground almonds and spices - cinnamon, mixed spice and freshly grated nutmeg - the thick, heavy mixture is turned into the tin and the long baking time allows the most delicious smell to permeate the furthest corners of the farmhouse.

This cake is to be iced in a simple, masculine coffee and cream colour scheme. I will post a picture once it's finished.