Tuesday 29 December 2015

That Festive Feeling

The lead up to Christmas can get exhausting - running, preparing food, writing cards, wrapping presents and trying to dodge the festive bugs flooring several people around me.  I was hoping that the former would help me from succumbing to the latter, but no, I found myself starting with that tell-tale sore throat last Wednesday and spent Christmas Eve dosing myself with honey Lemsip in the vain hope I could ward off the impending cold. For once the cold actually never came to very much - after preparing myself to feel ill for at lease a couple of days, it never come to much more than a bit of sneezing and a slightly runny nose. Something of a result!

It was also a bonus to have the weekend before Christmas free of races or anywhere else I had to be, so it meant I could get some unhurried time in the kitchen to do some preparation for the meal on Christmas Day,as working on Christmas Eve meant I wouldn't have a lot of time in hand the day before.  I must admit, I still hadn't decided on the main course at this stage, but my other half always votes for something in pastry, so I made a large batch of flaky pastry. Some people look at me as if I'm mad when I say I make my own  - they may be right - but I would always advocate making a large amount - if you are going to the time and effort, you might as well make plenty, then cut it into useable portions, wrap and freeze for another day. A spiced parsnip soup was made and popped in the freezer, as were fruit puddings after steaming and cooling, oh, and a toffee sauce - a bit of an afterthought, but I thought it would go well with the puddings.  I made some small rolls to open freeze after proving, so they could just be popped in the oven and served. I used a Paul Hollywood recipe for breakfast rolls from "How to Bake", but substituted his filling with a sundried tomato pesto.  Just to make sure the recipe worked out, I made a small loaf along the same lines to test out, ie. flattening out the dough, spreading it with the pesto, then rolling up to give a spiral effect through the loaf. It was fairly nice, so I was feeling quite positive about the rolls.

My other baking over the weekend was my favourite biscuit recipe - chocolate, peanut butter, chocolate chip and peanut biscuits - the very name lets you know they are certainly not the low-calorie option, but they are fabulous, coming from the aptly named "Death by Chocolate" by Marcel Desaulniers (formerly) of the Trellis Restaurant in Willliamsburg, Virginia. This book was published in 1992 and given to me on my 30th birthday that year by three friends - one who sadly passed away two years later - I still have the gift tag tucked into the cover of the book, not that I would ever forget who gave me it and when. I don't think many Christmases have passed where I haven't made these biscuits.

I made some chocolates too - I don't make as many as I used to, but I like to make a few to package up for other people (and obviously keep some back for quality control purposes of course). My ever thoughtful husband purchased Miss Hope and Mr Greenwood's book "Sweets Made Simple" for me last year - I suspect an ulterior motive - their recipes for gin and lime truffles as well as limoncello truffles have become favourites.  I also made an old favourite, brandy truffles and a newcomer, tested out in the summer after enjoying prosecco on holiday - prosecco truffles topped with a little popping candy.
A little production line.

The hoped for early finish on Christmas Eve didn't happen - watching some people getting their coats on and leaving the office before time was tough going - but it was still a nice feeling when 4:00 came round, knowing I could start my holiday.  I had made up my mind about the main course - a pastry with a layer of aubergine and mushroom, then spinach, then tomato and onion - all made relatively quickly, with the final assemblage done on Christmas morning, plus a white chocolate mousse in a dark chocolate case was made with the help of some acetate strips to form the dark chocolate case, oh, and Michel Roux (senior) whose recipe I used! I was quite pleased that I got so much done in advance - it meant less rushing about on Christmas Day and more time spent with our guests.

A great winter soup from Nigel Slater
Because there's got to be pastry!
Guess who had to have the chocolate dessert?

So, I didn't collapse in an exhausted heap and am still enjoying the relaxed mood of a holiday over the festive period. I'm largely enjoying the running, though the weather on Boxing Day resulted in me being horribly cold and wet, other days have been fairly nice for getting out and about. There is, of course, plenty of excuses for activity in the kitchen - leisurely breakfasts being one. I've made crumpets for the first time, which were quite enjoyable to make, though I seem to be back with Paul Hollywood - "Bread" this time. Paul's claim that once you've tried making your own, you'll not want shop-bought ones again is probably about right - the nice, soft texture was rather a departure from the usual rubbery things from the supermarket. Only possessing two crumpet rings though (ah, that's what they are) meant that the baking bit took twice as long, but as they were so good, that was no big deal - though I will be hunting out another couple the next time I hit the shops. Still a few days of the old year left to try out some more new recipes.  Happy New Year!





Sunday 13 December 2015

Plenty More Where That Came From....

One thing I quite like about a number of recipe books, apart from the actual recipes, is discovering something about the people behind them.  Some cook books do contain quite a lot of biographical details, whereas others leave the reader/cook with just little hints here and there between the glossy pictures of food. I'm curious to know where the inspiration comes from and, being a bit of a nosy individual, I like to know where the inspiration comes through.  Yotam Ottolenghi is a case in point - he can take a simple ingredient, consider the uses of that ingredient in different cultures, getting excited by the range of possibilities, and from there creates some wonderful dishes.

Admittedly, while having an awareness of Yotam's writing for a number of years, I was slow to try out some of his recipes - it took a couple of friends to recommend a black pepper tofu recipe to me that made up my mind to buy "Plenty". Even then, this was not a book I regularly cooked from - Yotam has had some criticism from readers of his weekly columns for The Guardian for his long lists of ingredients, some of which can be a little harder to source in certain parts of the country, outwith that there London place! I can understand that some people would find that off-putting, but it doesn't necessarily translate into something that takes an age to prepare.  I was surprised to find out that, once Yotam was invited to write a weekly column, he panicked that he would never have enough recipes to manage more than a few weeks. The weeks turned into months, then years of various recipes much to his amazement. Other books followed too, including "Plenty More" which I just had to buy - the biggest surprise about Yotam is that he is not a vegetarian, but someone who understands flavours and that cooking and eating should be pleasurable. In recent weeks I've cooked  his aubergine pahi - a Sri Lankan dry curry - , leek fritters, which I served with roasted squash with sweet spices, lime and green chilli (but without the yoghurty dressing), ultimate winter couscous, mushroom ragout, aubergine, walnut and miso with udon noodles - for all the ingredients I have, I had never used miso until a few months ago - don't think I will be without it now. And I have to say they all tasted good.
Yes, Plenty More cost me plenty less.....

Someone else who has a repertoire of fabulous recipes is Denis Cotter of Café Paradiso in Cork. His recipes might look to have quite a few components, which I suppose, they do, as well as the name of each dish telling you exactly what it is - pistachio, green chilli and yoghurt kofta with kale in a fresh tomato-coconut sauce and cardamom-lime pancakes; pan-fried couscous cake of red onion, feta cheese and pinenuts with green olive tapenade and spiced roast peppers with spinach; honey-roasted butternut with avocado-lime salsa, and green curry of cauliflower and beans to name a few. You probably don't need to scan the list of ingredients to see what you need - just look at the heading. Again, some wonderful, tasty dishes have come out of his books Café Paradiso and Paradiso Seasons particularly, when he cooked in the restaurant with his wife, Wild Garlic Gooseberries....and Me when he was going through a foraging stage and made me question whether I really wanted to try nettles, coming back with the comforting dishes (and a new woman in his life) with For the Love of Food foraging.  As I said, finding out about the foodie between the pages.
Looking in good nick all things considered.
So, while I write this, I'm wondering which book will be the source of my tea tonight - I am veering towards Denis as I do have a dinky butternut squash sitting in the veg rack which will do two just nicely.

I have, of course, done a little baking again recently and finished decorating the Christmas cakes. I can remember, back in the mists of time, when December was a fairly relaxing time, where I didn't have much on between work other than a few opportunities to imbibe and make cakes!  These days I seem to have had a few races lined up and have committed myself (or perhaps should be committed) to running every day this month, by agreeing to take part in Marcothon . As I run most days, I'm not phased by getting some miles in, but knowing there are days where I'm only going to be able to run early in the morning (as well as having to ignore horrible weather forecasts), it has proved tough some days to not throw in the towel.  So, a nice warm kitchen is always appealing and, hosting an event last Sunday where I knew there would be cake-loving runners, I had an excuse to bake one or two things.
Poppy seed and lemon cake, plus Sachertorte with popping candy that may not have popped....
 
Fancy biscuits....don't mind if I do!
Once back home on Sunday afternoon, I bottled up the bramble gin I have had steeping since September. I have a good book on bottling, pickling and preserving - funnily enough, that's what it is called - by Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz, which I have used for several years now when making jam and marmalade, plus the odd chutney. I went through years of looking at the alcohol section in the book, telling myself that I must try making something with alcohol - maybe next year - just to forget all over again, until last year, when I tried bramble gin and wondered why it had taken so long for me to get round to it. Such a lovely drink for over the festive period, that I would have being mad not to make it again.

I also fed the Christmas cakes with brandy, before giving them a layer of marzipan - I marked the marzipan on the chocolate fruit with a "c" so I wouldn't get it muddled up - needed have bothered, it weighs somewhat more that the other cake of similar proportions! Yesterday I put a layer of icing on all the cakes and made the decorations, leaving them to dry overnight - finishing them off this morning before I headed out to a freezing cross-country.
Wonder how many calories there are.....
 
Getting there...

Deciding to not make them all the same theme.
Ended up with that affliction of multi-coloured hands.
Done!
So now, I've just got to work out what I'm making for Christmas dinner an I'm good to go!!


Monday 7 December 2015

I Should Cocoa....

I had a trip to York recently with my other half, staying for a couple of nights, with a visit to York Cocoa House very much on the cards.  I have been there once before and never appreciated that the day of our visit coincided with the fourth anniversary of the Cocoa House opening - I could have sworn that our last visit was further back, but obviously not - sure sign that I'm getting old.  Rather like the Chocolate Story, it feels like something York should always have had, given it's chocolate heritage.  The Cocoa House looks old fashioned, which I rather like, has a menu that offers a number of different types of hot chocolate and various edibles.  I went for the medium dark hot chocolate (which came with a salted caramel truffle on the side), and a chocolate and cherry scone for good measure. As it was about eight hours before I ate anything else, chocolate over-load was not really something I was going to feel guilty about, especially as it was all so good. More visits in future I think to work my way through those different varieties of hot chocolate.


The truffle never made it....
The venue for coffee the day before was Lucky Days on Parliament Street - a good sticky orange and chocolate cake was had there. Nice, cheery staff too, and a recipe up on the blackboard in the café for their blueberry and orange scones. This seemed to be a trip where we tried out new places to eat - Strada on Low Petergate and Jinnahs on Micklegate - pretty decent, but I will return to some of the haunts of recent years next time round.
It did make me think though how, when I was a schoolgirl, eating out was not something I was familiar with, and, even visits to York in the late eighties/early nineties proved that the city was not particularly blessed with the number of decent restaurants and cafes it has now. I remember as a schoolgirl paying a visit to a Wimpey Bar (remember them?) to blow my pocket money on an apple pie and, expecting a nice wedge of pastry filled with chunks of apple, I was shocked to get a strange rectangular slab of something masquerading as pastry, filled with molten apple sauce. Don't think I ever went near a Wimpey Bar again!  I also had my worst baked potato experience in York some years later - a greasy object that appeared to have fallen in the fat fryer - to add insult to injury, the cook managed to burn it too!  The café is still there, but, as it has changed hands I wouldn't dream of naming names.  Likewise the restaurant where an incident that involved plates of food being knocked to the floor by an over-zealous front of house manager - the food being quickly scooped up and finding it's way back to our table - has also changed hands in the intervening years (and probably flooring too!). Eating out in my hometown is now infinitely more enjoyable and something I look forward to.

The trip to York wasn't solely food-orientated - there was a visit to some of my family, a jazz gig at the National Centre for Early Music and a trip to the pictures to see Lady in the Van, oh and some Christmas shopping to boot.  I must admit that the only purchase at the Christmas market was three nice Wensleydale cheeses, and a very pleasant mulled wine.

While I enjoyed the trip, I was quite happy to be home again and getting some more baking in - bread this time.

A little oddly shaped, but tasty!
I love making bread, love the smell of it baking, particularly when it has cheese in the mixture like this.  Now some recipes I will follow to the letter, but some times I substitute an ingredient or two or just use the bare bones of a recipe to do something completely different.  The bread was a case in point, from "How to Bake" by Paul Hollywood, the recipe is for a bacon and Cheddar loaf, so I substitute a healthy handful of sun-dried tomatoes for the bacon - not the type in oil, but ones that need to be soaked.  I cover the tomatoes with boiling water and leave for about half and hour, drain, pat dry with kitchen paper and add to the dough along with the cheese. A little bit of heaven!

Saturday 21 November 2015

Christmas is coming......

While I hate to mention the "C" word while we're still in November, baking the Christmas cakes a month or two in advance means one less thing to think about when December does come around.

Last weekend marked the end of a flurry of baking activity for one reason or another, with the Christmas cakes being baked in October, wrapped up and put away until they are ready to be decorated.  I've got a tried and trusted recipe which I have used since 1982, though that year marked my first attempt at 'proper' royal icing, which was nearly a disaster. My mother did the traditional icing when I was a child, mixing egg whites and icing sugar, though she never mixed it to the consistency that allowed it to really set.  I realised that this was because the mixture is supposed to be beaten for about 10 minutes, with the addition of glycerine to give it a melt in the mouth quality, so thought I would give it a bash.  Unfortunately, my first attempt had me failing to realise that the glycerine is added at the end of the beating stage and not with the other ingredients.  The cake that came to the table on Christmas Day looked lovely but practically needed a hammer and chisel to get through the rock-solid outer layer - a lesson in how to impress your prospective in-laws!  Eventually, after several attempts to cut the cake - the original knife bouncing off it, the electric knife proving ineffective - the cake was cut!  I don't recall what knife finally got through the concrete icing but, once broken into, the cake was delicious and the icing, once fractured, was edible.  So, lesson learnt. 

I have had a break from tradition this year with one of the cakes (ours) being a recipe I tried a couple of times earlier this year when making it for the bottom layer of a friends wedding cake - it comes from Ruth Clemens blog "The Pink Whisk". It was among her recipes for the twelve days of Christmas last year, which I didn't view until after Christmas, but was really taken with the recipe and can vouch for it being a lovely cake. That said, here is the recipe for my 'tried and trusted' since 1982 :

110g Glace cherries, halved
175g Chopped candied peel
450g Currants
1125g Raisins
4 tbsp stem ginger in syrup, drained and finely chopped
5 tbsp Brandy
350g Butter, softened
400g Dark muscovado sugar
8 Large eggs, lightly beaten
1 tbsp Treacle
450g Plain flour
1 tsp Cinnamon
1 tsp Allspice
1.5 tsp Nutmeg
1 tsp Salt

Put all the fruit in a large bowl, add the brandy, cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave overnight.

Line a 10-inch cake tin (25 - 26 cm) with greaseproof paper.  Have some brown paper ready to tie round the cake tin before it goes in the oven. Preheat the oven to 150C/300F/Gas 2. 

Sift the flour, salt and spices in a bowl.  In another bowl, beat together the butter and sugar until light and creamy.  Gradually add the eggs, mixing well after each addition, then stir in the treacle.

Gradually add the flour and spice mixture and fold in well.  Add the fruit in two or three batches and mix well.  Spoon into the tin and make a slight hollow in the centre.

Tie the brown paper collar around the tin and place on the shelf in the oven just below the centre.  Bake for one hour then lower the temperature to 140C/275F/Gas 1 and bake for another hour. Check to see that the cake is not browning too much, folding in the brown paper if necessary (I've never found this necessary) and bake for a further three hours.  Leave in the tin to cool overnight and then wrap up well to store.

For an 8-inch cake (21 - 22 cm), halve all the ingredients except the spices and treacle.  The baking time is around the same.

I usually unwrap the cakes once or twice in the preceding weeks to drizzle with brandy, re-wrapping them and storing them until ready for decoration.

I have moved away from the royal icing, now using fondant to decorate after the marzipan layer, but each to their own.  I try to make all the decorations of an edible variety - I know some people use plastic decorations and if that is a preference, I would always advocate that they are on the large side and can't be swallowed along with the cake.  I do remember my mother using small plastic novelties (white ones!) on a cake one Christmas - when she did a count of the said novelties lying on the plates at the end of the meal, the novelties having come out of Christmas crackers the previous year, there was one less than had been on the cake. It was always suspected that my Grandfather had eaten it - I don't know if he ever found out.......

As I say, there has been a lot of kitchen activity going on recently - cakes baked to take into work to celebrate my Birthday, baking to raise money for Children in Need, jam made when I was given a load of apples.  The last week has been a bit more relaxed but there have still being three cakes baked - a lovely Sacher Torte, an apple and marmalade cake and a coffee and walnut cake made for a running friend who missed out on the Children in Need baking.
Birthday Cakes!
Chocolate Orange cupcakes and Bakewell cupcakes
"Cheese" Ginger biscuits - a Frances Quinn recipe.

What the Doctor ordered.......
 
Apple and Ginger jam.

A fair swap!
Two of the jars of jam have being given away - while I like my jam, it's always nice to share - so one to the man who gave me the apples and one to a friend for a jar of his apple and blackberry - pretty to look at and tastes great!  Now I'll just have to get cracking with some bread and scones to go with it......

Saturday 14 November 2015

To begin with.....

Ha! Not the most original title for a blog, but I was reading about some foodie blogs recently which sort of planted the seed to do one of my own. Now I’m no Ella Woodward or Ruth Clemens, but I do have a passion for food that goes back to my childhood and I’ve had an urge for a while to get into a little writing.  I’m an inveterate diarist, I have been for more years than I care to remember, but it’s not really something that would satisfy any aspirations to really write. I’m not even sure that my writing will always be food related, but it’s a starting point as I love baking and cooking is something I really enjoy (eating too). It’s something that I always get to do whereas other hobbies have fallen by the wayside as I realise there really aren’t enough hours in the day.

People who know me know that I spend a reasonable amount of time running, which is something that is bound to get more that a passing mention, I also love being creative - knitting is something I’ve done since my rudimentary efforts at the grand old age of three and a half.  At one time in my life, I knitted every single day; now I just do it when I can.  Sewing is something I’d like to get back to - I remember sewing quite a lot when I lived in an appalling bed-sit years ago – the rent ate up a chunk of my wages, leaving little for anything else - material was cheap, so I could buy a metre of material for under a £1, spending the wee small hours running up something to wear. I’ve dabbled in jewellery making, painting, drawing – I think when I eventually retire I won’t worry about filling my time!  I may even get back to playing a musical instrument again – who knows. Anyway, I digress, back to food. 

The first item of food I remember was on my second birthday – my father worked as a driver for Whittakers the bakers and presented me with one of their cakes in the shape of a house.  I don’t remember actually eating any of it – though I must have – but I remember it having a roof and windows made of chocolate, with mint green and white butter icing.  I remember Rowntree’s confections were very much part of my childhood as my family had a background of working in the factory in York. 
My parents met working in there, the house I was born into was one built for the workers in the factory and my paternal grandmother had worked there. It was funny that when I watched “Who Do You Think You Are” with Una Stubbs about a year or so ago, she was in York talking about her relations who had lived in a certain street, long gone, that housed the chocolate factory workers.  I said “Beaconsfield Street” before the words were out of her mouth – the very same street I lived in for the first three and half years of my life.  The smell of chocolate permeated my life up to the age of sixteen when I left home and York – living so close to the Rowntree’s factory, then, when we moved to Bishopthorpe Road in 1966, the Terry’s chocolate factory was in the same road.  If the wind was blowing in a different direction though, there was quite a distinctive roasting small from the sugar factory, but to me, it still had a chocolaty aroma. Small wonder that I love the stuff!

 My first forays into the kitchen were putting the jam in the jam tarts my mother baked when I was a child. There always seemed to be some baking in the house – cakes always a perfect teatime filler for four hungry children – though I never felt my mum actually enjoyed being in the kitchen.  I recall eating things like Fray Bentos pies with their strange pastry, Instant Whip, Vesta meals – some food was good, some awful – being made to eat strangely pink tinned luncheon meat, which sometimes came with a liberal coating of lard round it, eating tepid mashed potato as my mum never seemed to quite manage to keep it hot before it was served.  I remember on more than one occasion my sister, the baby of the family,  protesting by refusing to swallow her food, sitting at the table gradually becoming more hamster-like as her checks filled with mashed potato and peas. I was never sure how that was resolved as my brothers and I were told to leave the table before my sister spontaneously combusted!

As a Brownie, I discovered the joys of toasting marshmallows over a campfire and squishing them between two chocolate digestives – ah, heaven! I liked mixing things – I was fascinated how the introduction of milk to the powder of Angel Delight or Instant Whip could make such a tasty dessert, how a similar process, a packet of powder and milk, but with the application of heat, could produce a cheese sauce.  My mum did make some things from scratch, but there were a lot of tins and packets involved.  Spaghetti was served largely as it came once cooked, with the sauce sitting in the middle – parmesan was an unheard of addition. Pork ribs with sweet and sour sauce on a bed of rice were good, but the recipe would probably be regarded as an oddity today. My mum only possessed a couple of cook books – the Be-Ro book and the Carnation recipe book – the latter having all manner of pictures of lurid coloured food made with evaporated milk.  I suspect that Fanny Craddock was behind more than a few of the recipes.  Other recipes were cuttings from Woman and Woman’s Own magazines – a scary food article in one was responsible for my mother going back to war-time recipes.  You’ve never lived until you’ve had a cake made with liquid paraffin!  Much of this was to the bemusement of my father, who had different tastes.  I remember him telling me not to be so ridiculous when I told him that mum had made sausage meat meatballs containing peanuts and all manner of odd ingredients – I knew this because I had helped/hindered. When my father bit into the said meatballs, there were shades of Sid James in “Carry On Cruising” when he has a piece of the cake baked by the ships chef (Lance Percival). 


Not to be confused with Sir Alan Sugar!

 

 

 
 
In 1975 I became friends with Jyoti, who was eighteen months older, a friendship which was responsible for changing my tastes in food and led me to become more curious about ingredients that weren’t always readily available. Joy and her family were among those Ugandan Asians stripped of their businesses and thrown out of their country in 1972. Originally bound for Italy, they were put on a plane to Britain at the last moment and ended up in York, while most of their British-bound relations ended up in Derby. Joy and I did play together but the bulk of our time was spent in the kitchen - two skinny little schoolgirls cooking and baking for her family of five brothers, plus various cousins who came to stay at their house from time to time.  I spent so much time there, I was treated as one of the family, even going to various Hindu celebrations dressed in a sari – her mother presented me with a sari when I was about fourteen which I still possess to this day. Her family were a godsend to me as my father had left the family the previous year and I was starting to suffer from the depression that dogged me through much of my teens (I still know how easy it is to fall into a big black hole), so being part of the life of her family and being busy helped. I loved the food we cooked and ate, I was fascinated how Joy cooked by instinct – no recipes books in the house – how she used so many different spices, so colourful and aromatic, how she never considered that something might not work out. We must have made and cooked thousands of chapattis. Such a staple of every meal, Joy could roll them to a near-perfect round, I would cook them on an iron tava, flip them over with my (asbestos) fingers, and give them a light coating of ghee to stop them sticking together.  A huge stack was made to accompany whatever else we cooked - Joy’s father would eat first, followed by her brothers and any male cousins, then the females last. I always panicked as the chapatti pile diminished rapidly, but, somehow, there were always enough left for us. I remember a couple of times being joined by Joy’s cousin Ansuya, a couple of years younger than me, who was generally quite impatient but always fun and mischievous which often led her into trouble. One day Ansuya had been left to her own devices in the kitchen and had received lavish praise from Joy’s mum, for a change, as her chapattis were so perfectly round.  Out of ear-shot of anyone else, Joy questioned Ansuya how she had managed this feat – Ansuya gave a knowing wink, having cut them out with a saucepan lid! 

Joy and I baked cakes for parties, again, trusting to judgement as there were no scales in the house.  My mother was less than happy when I adopted the same method of baking at home - the cakes I baked by eye worked beautifully, or that is what I remember. Mum was probably also unimpressed that I wanted to have the spicy things I had eaten at Joy’s as the ingredients were not easy to get. Cereal was never the same after breakfasting on roti with chilli/garlic relish and fish fingers and beans for tea just seemed to bland.

With my burgeoning interest in food, my mother started buying me 'Supercook' - a Marshall Cavendish weekly publication. I poured over the recipes, and marvelled at some of the ingredients I had never heard of before and soon I had my poor mother trailing round York trying to find chorizo when I wanted to try an egg dish with it among the list of ingredients, along with red and green peppers - the peppers were hard enough to come by in 70's York - the herby pork sausages my mum bought meant the dish was nothing like it should have been, but tasted reasonable to me. When I, at 13 or 14, cooked the family meals during the October half-term holiday  (where every dish began with 'a' as the recipes were in alphabetical order and it was early days in the life of the magazine), it was my mum who had the quest to source whole allspice to go with orange slices as the filling for a rolled joint of pork, and my long-suffering mum was the one doing the rounds of all the newsagents to make sure I got every edition of the publication as general interest in the magazine waned and many places stopped stocking it - she made sure I got all 112 of then! Sometimes my mother, unsurprisingly, went for the cheaper option with some ingredients. My eyes were drawn to the photo above the recipe of something I'd never been seen before - a Black Forest gateau!  This was a thing of beauty, multi-layered, with the sides covered in fresh cream and chocolate curls, cream piped on top with glorious red cherries, stalks still attached, to finish. I just had to make that! Unfortunately, the finished article was a different beast. The chocolate sponge was nowhere near as deep as in the picture, mum thought 'dream topping' was as good as fresh cream, and cherries were too expensive being substituted by 'chellies' (a jelly confection masquerading as a glace cherry). The cake wasn’t a disaster and still got eaten, but I did wonder what the real thing would taste like.

I enjoyed cooking at school – and managed to produce some more adventurous dishes, which made me think that I wanted to go in to some form of catering when I left school.  To this end I bought what is now the oldest cookery book I possess – The Modern Patissier by William Barker, a book useful to working towards a City and Guilds qualification.  It is funny to look at that book now – naturally all the recipes are for large quantities of baking and sugar-work – I do wonder if anyone still creates centre pieces in pastillage – a type of sugar-work. 
 
The book shows how to make a model of St Paul’s Cathedral – just the sort of thing anyone would want to attempt on a rainy Sunday afternoon!  Sadly, all hopes of catering college went out of the window when I left home two weeks after leaving school at sixteen, and moving over two hundred miles away – I needed a job to pay the rent!  My hopes were raised when I was interviewed for a job as a commis chef shortly after arriving in Edinburgh, a job which offered appropriate training – those hopes were dashed when the couple who ran the restaurant decided that they wanted someone qualified who they didn’t have to train. So, the first full-time job turned into a split-shift, six day a week dishwashing job, until I got an office job and never looked back.  I did have a while at the end of the eighties teaching vegetarian cookery and healthy eating at night school – a diversion from the day job, and something I enjoyed, even though I was as nervous as hell demonstrating recipes in front of a class of people, then advising them as they then cooked whatever I had demonstrated. It was a shame when that came to an end, but I don’t know if it would have ruined my enjoyment of cooking and baking if I had being able to make a profession out of it.

So, from that first cookery book by Mr Barker, to the most recent acquisition – Quinntessential Baking by Frances Quinn (2013 GBBO winner) – with I hate to think of how many in between! Even with the range of books on my book shelves, I still make up things as I go along, substitute ingredients in some recipes, and borrow from two of three recipes to create a cake or a dish. Some things do go wrong for different reasons, but the results usually still taste good.  I will post some recipes and give some alternatives to recipes I’ve tried and tested – along with some other food-related tales (I promise future postings won't be as long).