Tuesday's cherry bumpers

The concept of cherry bumpers caused much hilarity amongst my work mates who thought that I was getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. I was in fact describing my next plan to use up some of the 2kg of bargain cherries that I had acquired. I had had a search in my likely recipe books and these seemed like a good option. There was no picture but from what I could make out they would be like little cherry pasties.

The recipe in the book called for shortcut pastry made with butter and lard. I had neither so made do with butter substitute. And I was desperate to make almondy pastry which I felt sure would be possible. My recipe books failed me so I had to make it up. My mum taught me that you can replace the flour in cake recipes with ground almonds and I saw no reason why you couldn't do the same with pastry. So my recipe was:

• 100g ground almonds

• 200g plain flour

• 150g butter substitute

1. Whirled together in the food processor until it was crumby
2. Tipped into a bowl
3. Brought together in a ball (I didn't need to add any water)

While the pastry chilled I prepared the cherries. The recipe stated 250g cherries, stoned. What I had no idea of was whether this weight was before or after the stoning. Since I had so many cherries I went for the post stoning option.

Prepared cherries

My stoned cherries then had to be combined with some sugar (the recipe said 2 tablespoons but I had the dregs of a kilo bag left so just used that which may have been slightly more or less), ground almonds and almond essence / extract (not really sure what the difference is and I can't recall which one the recipe called for). I didn't think that we'd have any and I had prepared myself to use vanilla instead. But whilst delving for the vanilla I happened upon some almond. This must have been left over from when Matt, my husband, made me an everything cheesecake in an effort to impress me with his culinary skills very soon after we met. So that would be about 7 year old almond extract / essence.

The recipe informed me to roll out the pastry fairly thinly. Like the with / without stone cherry problem this vague instruction left me a little befuddled. So I just rolled it out as much as it would to fit my board. Then to cut it out into 10-12cm discs. I assumed that this was diameter rather than radius (that would be a very big disc) or circumference (that would be unnecessarily complex mathematics) and used my bright pink kitchen ruler to identify a suitable bowl to use as a cutter. I made six discs (as per recipe) and had some pastry left over so maybe I rolled it a bit too thin.

I divvied up the cherries amongst the discs and kept some back for the left over pastry. When I came to seal up my first bumper I realised that I had grossly over applied the cherries. So probably the 250g is the cherry weight before stoning. This first bumper needed a bit of patching up with some of the spare pastry but I removed some cherries from the others and had more success.

Adding the cherry filling

Sealed up

I pressed the left over pastry into a mini flan dish, filled this with the left over cherries and topped it with a party heart to make a mini-tart.

They went into the oven at 200°C until looking golden (about 12 minutes I think). They smelt amazing (I wish that you could transmit smell across the interweb): a kind of fruity, almondy aroma. But I didn't indulge right away as Barbara, my mother-in-law, had come for tea and brought a rather decadent cheesecake from a luxury supermarket for pudding; I had had a not insubstantial wedge and couldn't manage anything else sweet so soon afterwards. Matt and Barbara have a stronger constitution than me so they shared one (with some spray cream) for the purposes of taste testing. The verdict was positive. I was particularly pleased as my improvised almond pastry seemed to have worked.

Six cherry bumpers

Delicious served with
some spray cream

My first taste was just before bed when Matt and I shared the mini-tart. I was pleased with the taste. Today I had a cold bumper at lunchtime and a warmed bumper (with vanilla ice-cream) as a post-dancing snack. It was best warm, and the addition of ice-cream is to be recommended.

Cherry tart

Just 2 bumpers left now: 1 each for our packed lunches tomorrow. And I will able to prove to my work mates that the cherry bumper is a perfectly valid baked item.

Monday's cherry assembly

After band last night I needed to deal with 2kg of cherries. I'd got these for the bargain price of £5 at a foodie market at a conservation charity's property,  which is all very well but 5kg is rather a lot.

I love cherries and it would have been entirely possible for me to eat the lot as they came but I am sensible enough to know that while this would have been very pleasant for my taste buds and given me a lovely sugar rush, the effect on my intestines would not be as enjoyable.

This is about four fifths of the cherry haul

So I had put out an appeal via social media for what to do with my cherries. Pie or crumble seemed to be popular options. Black forest gateau was also mentioned. I would love to make (well eat) a black forest gateau but time would not permit on this occasion.

A few ideas for cherry preservation were suggested: 

• Pre-treatment and then freezing - I may yet resort to this but it seems somehow boring
• Jam - would have been lovely but I have no suitable jars (not having anticipated any preserve making I haven't been saving them)
• Cherry brandy - which I can only imagine as something very medicinal tasting

Matt, my husband, had found half a bottle of vodka in one of our cupboards a few days previously (whilst looking for some sherry I think). This was quite possibly left over from our wedding, nearly 5 years ago. So while cherry vodka seems hardly less likely to end up medicinal tasting than cherry brandy it would at least make sense based on the available ingredients.

Firstly I did a bit of cherry picking and chopped out any bits that weren't looking so nice, followed by a rinse. Then Matt joined me in a production line: he cut and stoned and I dropped the cherries into the bottle. The dropping made a very satisfying sound. It was while I was doing the dropping that I realised why it would have been a better idea to use a wide topped bottle: the removal of the cherries will be a challenge.

We added some sugar (arbitrarily 4 tablespoons) and then gave the bottle a good shake around.

The other fifth of the cherries are in here

We'll see just how medicinal it tastes in a few months. And if I can manage to get the cherries out there'll be a boozy black forest gateau to boot.

In the meantime there are still loads of cherries left so my intestines are still not safe....

Saturday's grilled apple cake

A bit of a long blog today (but there are two totally different bakes), so I have split it in two in case you want to read it in parts.

Part 1

The arrival of visitors, even if just for a passing visit on their way to deepest (and based on the weather forecast possibly darkest) Cornwall was a good excuse to spend the morning baking. The alternative was doing chores so there wasn’t really much contest.

That I would be baking a cake of some description was not in question – Sarah and Andrew’s (our visitors) son is a big cake fan and far be it for me to disappoint a toddler. What sort of cake it would be was not clear.

I also wanted to do something savoury for lunch. I had a bit of a browse of my recipes books and cuttings but found nothing suitable. There were plenty of tasty sounding things but I didn’t have the ingredients. Again, a long time has elapsed since we last did a “proper” shop and I was not about to go to the supermarket on a Saturday morning out of choice. So a bit of improvisation would be called for. I decided that I would venture to make some sort of pastry filled bake. It would be a quiche or a flan, the boundaries between which are not clear to me.

I have never made a quiche or a flan before. Therefore I thought it wise to address this first before making the cake. I found a basic sort of recipe in a trusted old cook book and set to work on the pastry. I mixed the flour and butter and then added enough water to bring it together and it resembled pretty much what I thought pastry should resemble. I knew that you’re supposed to chill pastry before cooking but not was not sure whether you were supposed to do this before or after rolling. I went for the chill first option – during which time I relented and did a few chores, mainly to make our house a little less hazardous for the imminent arrival of a toddler.

I removed my ball of pastry from the fridge and began to roll. At which point it all fell apart. I was able to rescue it with my (clean) apron to prevent it from falling on the floor. I toyed with the idea of adding a bit more water but have a vague notion that pastry is ruined by too much water. So opted instead to add an egg yolk. I think I did this because my mum once told me that I could add an egg yolk to my granny’s cheese straw recipe and I saw this pastry as not too different, plus egg is sticky so should hold it all together. I managed to reform my ball.

I couldn’t be bothered to chill it again now so rolled my pastry out. I was amused that without any effort on my part it assumed the form of the Iberian Peninsula.

I sort of managed to line my quiche / flan tin, this required quite a bit of patching up and I decided to rechill it for a while to facilitate pastry bonding. 

So back to the cake. I was tempted to go for marmalade cake but had made this for Sarah and Andrew on our most recent visit to them so thought I should try something different. Chocolate was another option but I’d enjoyed chocolate cake at work (that my friend had brought in for her birthday) for 2 days in a row preceding this. So it was back to browsing through my recipes. I finally settled on an apple and cinnamon cake, the recipe for which I’d picked up at a property conservation charity's tea-room. The recipe stated that I should use 2 apples. But I had 4 small ones that were going a bit wrinkly so would need peeling and thought it could probably take all those. It also called for 1 teaspoon of cinnamon. But I love cinnamon and the volume of the rest of the recipe seemed sufficient that it could take a bigger slug than that (I probably added 2-3 teaspoons). It would also need apple juice. But I only had apple and pear juice and failed to see how this would do any harm. I mixed all up as directed and it seemed ok, kind of like a muffin mixture rather than a sponge mixture but that was to be expected as it uses oil rather than butter.

Still, it was rather sloppy so I put my spring form cake tin on top of another tray just in case of the event of leakage before pouring the mixture into it.

Whilst looking through my recipes I had been intrigued by some of them that were “crumble” cakes. I decided to augment this apple and cinnamon cake with a crumble topping. For this I decided to use the 3 parts flour, 2 parts sugar, 1 part fat recipe that my mum gave me. On this occasion I used the formula where:

one part = 25g

because I had 75g of plain flour to use up (this is a useful use of algebra if ever there was one). I sprinkled the crumble mixture over the cake and put it into the oven to bake.

Part 2

I had blind-baked the quiche / flan case whilst getting on with the cake which was a risky strategy because I had adulterated the pastry recipe so wasn’t sure how long it would have to cook for. Fortunately it seemed to come out ok. Only ok, because there were some small cracks in it where I had done the patching up. Clearly chilling does not facilitate the bonding of pastry but there was no going back now. For the filling I was planning on using leek, mushroom and tomato. I began by chopping 3 leeks and sautéing them to soften. I would normally use olive oil but since this was in the bedroom (Matt, my husband, has been anointing my ear) I used normal vegetable oil. While they were softening (the leeks, not my ear) I prepared my mushrooms but it soon became evident that the leeks were not going to reduce in volume by very much and the volume of the case would be insufficient to accommodate mushrooms as well. In actual fact 2 leeks would have been quite sufficient. We would have the mushrooms raw in our salad.

The time was up for the cake so I took it out of the oven but the skewer test suggested that it wasn’t cooked so I but it back in and got on with the flan / quiche filling. The basic recipe I had required:

• 2 eggs; I also added the egg white I had left over from rescuing my pastry so save it from going to waste
• 75ml of milk which I could do
• 150ml of single cream; I substituted 150g of reduced fat crème fraiche (although this is one of those recipes where it seems pointless to use anything reduced fat but this is what we had left over from our Friday night fajitas)
• No cheese; this would not do so I added about 100g of grated mature cheese (I am not a fan of things that taste eggy and I thought that the addition of plenty of cheese would minimise this risk)
• Salt and pepper; I omitted the salt since I thought the cheese would provide enough saltiness.

Once I’d whisked that all up I skewer tested the cake again. Now it was cooked through, but the crumble on top wasn’t looking very crumbly. Rather than risk over-cooking the cake I decided that this could be remedied by sticking it under the grill for a bit. Unfortunately I got so engrossed with filling my flan / quiche case and decorating it with cherry tomatoes

that I forgot about the cake until the smell of burning sugar hit my nostrils. Based on the amount of smoke that was coming from cake I think that we may only have been moments away from a full on fire (which reminds me that I must get a domestic fire extinguisher).

So now whilst the quiche / flan cooked I attempted to rescue the cake by scraping the burnt bits from the top. I managed to make it look ok but it wouldn’t be until later whether the taste of burning had infused the rest of the cake.

 

In my panicked state following the burning cake I had forgotten to take note of when I put the quiche / flan in the oven. Fortunately I was not so panicked that I didn’t keep a reasonably good eye on it and got away with just a minor bit of cheese crisping (which I love anyway).

Even if these two bakes ended up tasting dreadful I would take a certain amount of satisfaction from the fact that I was able to

extract both of them from their tins and onto cake stands without any disintegration. And there wasn’t any leakage through the cracks in the pastry either.

A certain toddler (and probably the rest of us for that matter) didn’t want to wait until after lunch to try the cake. But we managed. We had lunch in the garden in the intermittent sunshine. The quiche / flan went down very well, with all the grown-ups having seconds. I was particularly pleased because it didn’t taste at all eggy.

We let our flan / quiche (and bread and cheese and salad and crisps) go down before progressing to the cake. It didn’t taste burnt at all. In fact it tasted rather good. 24 hours later it’s nearly all gone – there’s just one piece left; and that’s for Matt as a reward when he’s successfully finished the current phase of his DIY. (We finished the quiche / flan off for tea last night!)

Monday's risky pasta

As I had a band rehearsal to get to, a late finish at work meant that my preference for tea was reheat soup. Matt, my husband had other ideas and made it quite clear that he wanted pasta. I was up to the challenge. 

Since it had been such a glorious weekend, we were particularly devoid of fresh ingredients - grocery shopping is not, in my opinion, an appropriate activity in such fine climes. But I was optimistic that I could concoct something from the available ingredients: 

• some cherry tomatoes (brought for a picnic but then forgotten in favour of naughtier things) 
• a bag of baby spinach (not quite a fortnight past its use by date) 
• a bit of blue cheese (when I came to it a bit less than I had anticipated - I think that someone might have had some for lunch). 

I would make a variation on one of my favourite student pasta sauces of broccoli, Stilton and lemon. 

I began by frying an onion. Even this was the last useable onion in the house - I have to return one to the shop as it was gone off in that way that onions do but that you can't tell until you start chopping. Onion doesn't feature in the original student recipe but it seemed like a sensible thing to do tonight. When this was nice and soft I added the spinach. Based on its use by date this was in remarkably good condition, you have to be a bit suspicious about what they do to it to make it last so long. Hopefully I'll be able to start using spinach from our hanging basket soon, or maybe even chard if I'm feeling fancy. At the same time I added a dozen or so cherry tomatoes. 

Whilst the veggies were cooking I set about the pasta. We have a large choice of different pastas and today I opted for the "fun" pasta from my favourite garden centre. This is because I was not certain of the success of the sauce and, should it be less than delicious, fun pasta might at least distract. When the veggies looked like they were done (spinach a tiny proportion of its original volume and cherry tomatoes exploded) I stirred in the blue cheese. This didn't look like quite enough dairy so I augmented it with a dollop of cream cheese. Finished off with a good grind of black pepper. Unfortunately I forgot that you shouldn't pick up the pepper mill from the top and as well as the good grind I ended up with peppercorns scattered around the hob. 

It culminated in one of those happy coincidences where the pasta and the sauce are ready at just the same time. Furthermore, it was one of those happy coincidences where the things that you throw together from the fridge actually end up tasting pretty good.

And I don't think that it was just because we were distracted by the fun pasta. (I did identify a star, an apple and a bow shape, but these are nothing in comparison to the sphinx that Matt found). 

I'd been a bit excessive with the fun pasta, so one of us will be having even more fun tomorrow lunchtime.

Friday's paradise slice

The dual aim of the Paradise Slice was to use up a load of dessicated coconut and prepare a tasty snack for us during a team building event the following day. I seem to recall my granny making something called Paradise Slice when I was little - I've no idea if this resembled this what I made.

The recipe directed that you should melt some chocolate to make a topping for this. Based on the expected weather this seemed like a very bad idea for something that I planned to carry up a "mountain" with no cooling facilities so I amended the recipe to include some chocolate in the main mix. 

It was a pleasingly simple recipe, ideal for making on a Friday night after a long working week. You basically beat together 100g butter (or fake butter) and 200g sugar. Then you beat in 2 eggs and 200g dessicated coconut. Finally you stir through 100g sultanas, 100g glacé cherries and I think I added about 150g of chopped chocolate - a mixture of plain and white. Even more pleasingly you will note that this requires only one bowl, thus creating minimal washing up.

Then you press it into a baking tray lined with baking paper and bake at 140°C for about half an hour - until golden. Because you've baked it with baking paper you don't even really need to wash up the baking tray.

I neglected to take a photo of this but can assure you it looked delicious. Matt, my husband, kindly chopped it up into pieces in preparation for sharing with the team. 

I think that the verdict was one of approval - I certainly enjoyed it. And it made a good breakfast this morning for my post night out hypoglycaemia.

The remains of the cake

Sunday's topsy turvy cake

My parents arrived for the weekend on Friday night. The culinary inevitabilities would include pizza (always when there are guests), soup (Dad loves this and it probably explains his envy inducing slimness) and bread and cheese (the rest of us love this and it probably explains our non-slimness). And the temporary swelling of household numbers would also be a good excuse for a nice piece of cake.

Saturday was a busy day in the garden, and by the time we had cleaned it and ourselves up and taken my mother-in-law’s Yorkshire terrier for an evening walk at the beach (once all the tourists had gone home), there was no time for cake making. Especially as I wanted to indulge a bit in my favourite fruit based word game.

By the time Sunday came around cake was very clearly on mine and my husband Matt’s mind. We prepared ourselves with a swim, our first since holiday. I felt very out of shape and if I’m going to make a habit of cake making I’m going to need to put a bit more vigour into my lengths than I did yesterday.

Matt was keen that I use up:

1) a large quantity of desiccated coconut. I have no idea how we’ve got so much as I don’t ever remember buying any

2) some cherries preserved in some sort of continental spirit which were opened a while ago in error and have since been sat unused in the fridge

Both were well past their “best-before” dates. I inspected the cherries. As predicted they were fine, they are after all preserved in alcohol and will probably last almost forever. I tasted the coconut. I have no idea what gone-off coconut would taste like, but it too seemed fine. So I was left with the dilemma of whether to try and combine these two ingredients (there must be weirder combinations than coconut and cherry), use one of them (and save the other for another day), or bake something entirely unrelated to either.

My preferred thought to deploy the cherries in a Black Forest gateau. I’ve always wanted to go there to eat this in situ, although I think I might actually be disappointed and find that the Black Forest gateau is something invented in England in the 1970s and has nothing to do with the Black Forest. But at 7pm on a Sunday there was no whipping cream to be had in our local convenience store (not so convenient if you need whipping cream) and I thought that spray cream wouldn’t create the desired effect. So I decided to keep the cherries for another day and use the coconut.

I think that coconut on its own is a bit boring and was thinking about making a pineapple upside down cake with coconut sponge. A kind of baked pina colada. But I also had cake-stand full of almost over ripe nectarines and kiwis that I was no way going to be able to eat in the conventional way before they started to ferment. This called for a multi-fruit topsy turvy cake with coconut sponge.

So I arranged the nectarines and kiwis in the bottom of a big tin. It didn’t look like quite enough fruit so I added some of my bargain tinned strawberries. I was worried that it was all a bit wet so sprinkled over some brown sugar, resisted the urge to add coconut liqueur and put the lot in the oven at a lowish temperature to evaporate and caramelise a bit.

In the meantime I had to make the sponge. Since I could not find a suitable recipe for coconut sponge it would have to be somewhat improvised. It would be an improvisation on my mum’s trusty 6,6,6,3,3,3 cake, only these are in imperial measurements and I prefer metric. So:

1) 150g butter (or butter substitute) and 150g sugar creamed together

2) 3 eggs, beaten and added one at a time with a tablespoon of flour with each one (I’ve no idea if this flour thing is really necessary but recipes always tell you to do this)

3) 150g flour, added gradually so as to make sure it doesn’t get too try (I think maybe the flour you add with the eggs is supposed to come out of the 150g but I forgot to weigh that)

4) 50g desiccated coconut, stirred in. I was cautious with this as I didn’t want to dry the mixture out but 50g didn’t seem to go very far so I added another 50g.

I poured this over the slightly cooked fruit and returned the whole lot to a hotter oven (about 180°C) and baked for about 30 minutes. I didn’t really know how long to bake for but it was looking brown after this long and the skewer test confirmed that it was at least not raw.

My mum declined my offer to drink the syrup that the strawberries had come in but rather than waste is suggested that I could turn it into a sauce. I thought that this might be overly sweet so added some orange juice and zest and set over the hob to reduce. It didn’t appear to be reducing at all and after about 10 minutes I lost patience and threw in a spoonful of corn flour. Mum then gave me a corn flour tip: mix it up with a small amount of water first. But it was too late and I spent the next 15 minutes removing lumps of corn flour. But I added another spoonful in the manner advised by my mum and the sauce duly thickened.

It was one of those bakes that I dread removing from the tin; I was concerned about major cake / fruit separation and didn’t dare risk an intermediate cooling rack between the tin and the serving plate. Amazingly it all held together and looked almost like something out of a French patisserie.

We served it (after soup and bread and cheese) with the sauce, and some spray cream for good measure. It was very delicious and despite all the coconut I had added nice and moist. There’s still half left but because of all the fruit I don’t think it’ll keep very long. Oh well, that’s lunch sorted.