Saturday's carrot cake

My intention had sort of been to make Christmas cakes / Christmas puddings today. Enough of an intention that I had got as far as calling my mum to ask for recipes. She agreed to email me. But I didn't have enough of an intention to purchase a slow cooker for the puddings, especially when it transpires that mum has two spare ones (who needs two spare slow cookers?) and I'm going to see her in a few weeks so can acquire one of these then. And it appears that I am a little premature for Christmas cake (up to 4 weeks in advance the recipe says). So it was off with the Christmas baking and on with the carrot cake.

I have often thought about making a carrot cake, ever since Matt, my husband, bought me a food processor a couple of years ago. You may wonder why the advent of a food processor would mean that I would think about making carrot cake. Well, one of the things that has always put me off before is the amount of manual carrot grating that I had envisaged. Since getting the food processor the thing that has been putting me off making carrot cake is my mum. Her carrot cake is so good that I really think I don't stand a chance of living up to it and all who eat it (who have previously tasted hers) will be disappointed. I have however made a number of successful batches of carrot muffins and was feeling confident enough now to extend my skills to a full on cake.

I've had mum's carrot cake recipe written on a scrap of paper since my university days but decided that rather than a direct comparison I'd try something different. So I selected a different recipe from my box. As well as carrots this also featured sultanas (also in mum's) and coconut which I thought sounded nice. In the end it turns out that for the required 175g of grated carrot you only need 2 carrots – so maybe I could have managed the manual grating after all. It was a pleasingly simple recipe: beat together 75ml sunflower oil and 100g dark brown soft sugar (I used light brown as this was all there was in the cupboard). Then beat in 2 eggs, then stir in everything else.

Unable to resist I decided to add a few more ingredients – as well as the carrot, 100g self-raising flour, cinnamon and nutmeg, 50g sultanas and 50g desiccated coconut, I also added 50g chopped dried apple (I've had carrot and apple soup before which was very nice). I tried to chop the apple in the food processor but it was having none of it (maybe I was using the wrong attachment) so had to chop manually. Then I got a bit worried that there wouldn't be enough moisture to deal with all the dry ingredients so I added a tablespoon of ginger syrup (I've been looking for a use for this since I used the balls of stem ginger in a big gingerbread).

Then you just pour it into a “prepared” 18cm square tin and bake at 180ºC for about half an hour (maybe just under – keep an eye on it). One thing that I have never got the hang of (to be honest I haven't ever really tried very hard) is lining cake tins. With square tins it isn't too bad though – I just stick a bit of greaseproof paper in it and poke a bit at the corners. The worst that happens is slightly untidy corners. I think that before I make Christmas cake(s) using lots of (relatively) expensive ingredients I should try to learn how to line the tins properly. Perhaps mum will have some tips.

In terms of icing I take after my mum i.e. we'd rather not. I was positively amazed that she had full on decorated a cake for my 30^th birthday. So something I could do to increase my chances of a good carrot cake taste comparison would be to ice this one. In general I don't really like the taste or texture of icing but I do like the cream cheese one traditional with carrot cake. In the absence of any oranges in our house, or in the local shop, I made do with the zest of a couple of clementines. Despite assiduously (wow, that word just came to me, I hope it's the one I'm after) sticking to the recipe (apart from the clementine substitution) the icing seemed to be quite runny but it tasted really nice (it would have been remiss not to test it) and I was loath to change the taste with the addition of more icing sugar. Once the cake had fully cooled I transferred it to my chosen tin (one that had previously contained biscuits celebrating a rather big wedding from last year) and spooned over the icing. The trick is to put the cake on the lid of the tin then you don't have to do any manoeuvring to ice or serve it. The icing did pour over the sides quite a bit but I wasn't too bothered, I just cleaned it up with my little finger.

We resisted until after our curry to try the cake out. And I must say I wasn't disappointed. Matt described it as having a good cakiness about it. I was particularly pleased by the apple which I think gave it a satisfying tanginess. Must try it out on my mum.

Saturday's made-up cake

While I was speaking to my mum the other day she mentioned that she had been to a museum café where they had on offer a courgette, ginger and lime cake. I thought that this sounded rather delicious so asked her if she had done anything useful like get a recipe (no), or try some (no). So I had the idea of this in my mind but nothing to go from. Surely the internet would help me out. No. Plenty of recipes for courgette and ginger or courgette and lime but not the three way combination. So I would have to use my imagination.

I have a rather excellent recipe for courgette, lemon, pine-nut and sultana cake, so I decided to work to a variation of this. We had one of my brother-in-law's courgettes left plus two little yellow ones from our garden. This amounted to 220g, the recipe called for 300g. So I decided to augment the courgette with some carrot. Two small carrots made up the short fall.

This was going to be a risky cake, especially as my friend Shelley who was due to visit for the weekend is renowned as a chocolate fiend. Fortunately her boyfriend George is renowned for eating almost anything – he, along with Matt (my husband) and another friend's fiancée formed what they refer to as the gluttony club after their performance with the canapés and puddings (I seem to remember the plum and cardamom mess being a particular favourite) at a wedding last year.

I grated the vegetables along with the contents of a jar of stem ginger in syrup (syrup drained for some other purpose in the future). The original recipe requires 225g of sultanas and the jar said that the drained weight of ginger was 190g and this seemed close enough. The food processor came into its own as I wouldn't have fancied my chances manually grating all the little balls of ginger.

I didn't change the composition of the basic cake ingredients: 150g butter, 175g sugar (although I did use a combination of soft brown and caster rather than all caster), 225g plain flour, 1tsp baking powder and 3 eggs. Once these were all combined in the usual manner a stirred through my grated veggies and ginger. It looked a little bit sludgy so I added a shake of poppy seeds, in the hope of giving it a bit of bite from mouthful to mouthful.

The lime was nearly forgotten, fortunately I remembered in the nick of time and grated all the zest of one into the mix. Sometimes recipes say to use the zest of half a citrus fruit but this always seems a bit wasteful, because what would you do with the other half. I would have liked to have added some lime juice as well but the mixture was already looking quite slopping so I didn't risk it.

I poured the mixture into a large-ish (20cm I think) round spring-form cake tin and put it into the oven at 180ºC. The baking time for the original cake is given as 40-45minutes and I had no reason to think that this would deviate. It started to go golden on the top and the skewer test indicated that it was indeed done after this time.

Next to the icing. As you know, I rarely bother with this, but we had guests and I had a load of lime juice to do something with. I was not going to do anything more advanced than a glacé icing though. I have learnt from previous mistakes and added the juice to a load of icing sugar rather than the other way round. This was a good job because I had a load of lime juice left even after I'd made plenty of icing to cover the cake.

Lunch was reheat pizza and risotto after which we were all rather full so I packed up 4 pieces of cake for us to take on our afternoon walk. We were taking Shelley and George for a walk along part of the Cornish coast path, which would also (much to George's excitement) feature two ferry trips. I was a bit worried about the cake because even though the skewer test had indicated that it was cooked it looked quite wet still when I cut into it. But it was too late to do anything about it now so we'd just have to hope for the best.

The first eaters didn't seem to think there was any problem with under-cooking, and Shelley didn't seem at all disappointed in the lack of chocolate. Seconds were had for pudding on Sunday lunchtime. This is the most made up cake that I've made yet and as such I'm really pleased with it. You can't taste the courgette and carrot – which is good given that they're supposed to add texture and moisture (they did) rather than flavour. The lime and ginger balanced well, you could taste them both but neither to the detriment of the other; from time to time you got a lovely chunk of ginger. Matt took some round to one of his friend's. Thirds and fourths were had by my mum and mother-in-law – more positive feedback. And now it's all gone (this cake probably has to be eaten very soon after baking because I think it would probably go mouldy otherwise – but I guess it might freeze ok).

Unfortunately I seem to have failed to take a picture of the cake. Here's a nice view of the south-east Cornwall coast instead.

Maybe I should try making some more experimental cakes.

Tuesday's muffins

Having thus far failed in my social obligation to provide sweet treats to my colleagues following my return from holiday over a week ago I had vowed to make amends for this yesterday. Normally people bring back something from wherever they’ve been but despite visiting quite a few places I didn’t see anything inspiring in terms of locally produced goodies (or at least not that I would be able to get back to the UK without being devoured first) so decided to make muffins.

I popped into my favoured local supermarket on the way home from work to get eggs as I’d used a whole box in the weekend’s lemon meringue pie. Seeing that that was all I went in for I did rather well and also got:

• a loaf of sliced bread – cue toasted sandwiches in the new sandwich toaster which I’d got at a bargain price at my favourite continental style discount supermarket last week 
• 4 tins of strawberries in syrup
• 2 snack packs of premium raisins – ideal as emergency rations in my car

All for under £5, which was good as that was all I had in my purse. I have never bought tins of strawberries before but at 25p each they seemed too bargainous to leave behind. I thought that I would probably be able to adapt a recipe to turn some of them into muffins.

Muffin making would have the bonus effect of keeping me out from under the feet of Matt, my husband, whilst he continued with his DIY project.

I found a recipe for summer fruit muffins. This called for fresh or frozen summer berries but surely the tinned strawberries could be put to good use here. So where the recipe stated 240ml milk I used 240ml of the syrup from the tin. Then I added the fruit that I had chopped up using my favourite method of scissors inserted into the tin. There was a little bit of syrup and a little bit of fruit left over and rather than have these go to waste I mixed them in too. My main concerns were over-sweetness and over-wetness, but I thought that this was a risk worth taking.

I baked them for a little longer than the recipe suggested, hoping to mitigate the risk of over-wetness. They came out of the oven and appeared to be muffin formed rather than one soggy mess. My muffin recipe book is one of the most reliable that I have but since this was an improvised creation the strawberry muffin would need testing. Fortunately Matt was only too happy to help. The feedback was not overwhelming. Adequate but not overwhelming, so these muffins would have to be improved with icing.

In the meantime I moved onto the next batch of muffins: carrot at the special request of my colleague Jan. This is a tried and tested recipe, enhanced by the addition of lots of cinnamon and raisins.

And then the next batch: lemon. Also tried and tested and one of my personal favourites. I find the given recipe not to be lemony enough so I added so lemon juice to the mixture as well as the zest. It suggests that you use lemon essence but since you have to denigrate a lemon to get the zest and then use some of the juice for icing it seemed only logical to use the rest of the juice in the muffins. These have to be iced as soon as they are out of the oven. It’s a simple lemon glacé icing, but I frequently mess it up. This is because when I start to mix it looks like there’s too much icing sugar, so I add more lemon juice, and then it gets too liquid and I lose patience and I just end up pouring this runny lemony syrup all over the muffins. But yesterday I showed an uncommon level of patience and/ or skill and they were rather successfully iced. The only slight problem was that there wasn’t quite enough icing so there were 2 un-iced ones. I didn’t see this as too much of a problem as there are always some people who don’t like icing.

And then the next batch. I went for the relatively safe option of chocolate (for any fussier eaters) but jazzed them up a bit by adding some experimental orange.  Since I’d not done this combination before I used just the zest but I was informed after some more testing (again, Matt didn’t need any encouragement) that they could be more orangey so will add some juice next time. Or maybe make an orangey icing.

At this point I should have got on with making some dinner (well, toasting some sandwiches) but was in the baking frame of mind and wanted to do more icing. I decided that the best thing for the strawberry muffins would be some vanilla icing so had a bit of a trawl on the interweb and found one that looked likely. Determined not to mess this up (icing is not a strong skill) I applied some of the things that I have learnt from previous efforts (this could almost be a CPD entry). The recipe told me to whisk the stuff together. Rather than make a cloud of icing sugar all over the kitchen I mostly blended with a spoon and gave it a quick whisk by hand at the end – I got a nice smooth icing. The recipe told me to use 2 tablespoons of milk. Not wanting to end up with a runny vanilla mess I used only 1 tablespoon – I got a suitably stiff icing. In fact it was of such a consistency that I even ventured to use my icing set. This was only the second time ever that I had used this. On the first occasion it was an absolute disaster so I was a bit nervous but kind of excited at the same time. I chose my nozzle from the selection of 8, loaded the icing bag and then went for it. Even if I say so myself, it was much more successful than the first occasion and I feel rather try rather encouraged to practise a bit more. Maybe I might even use some food colouring. I enhanced the decoration further on a few of the muffins by adding some freeze-dried strawberries.

 

But the icing bag was an absolute mess and I was not in the mood for cleaning it last night so the icing for the carrot cake muffins would have to be spooned on. This was a classic carrot cake icing with cream cheese and is really yummy. I should have made it even better by putting a bit of orange zest into it. But it was still really yummy – I know this because I personally cleaned out the bowl.

That should have been it for the evening. The sandwich toaster had still not been deployed. But Matt emerged from his DIY and suggested that I could make a batch of muffins with some chocolate caramel sweets. We have quite a few packets of these as Matt’s grandad gives them to him when he cuts his toe-nails. So I chopped up the chocolate caramel sweets (easier said than done even with a really sharp knife), added these to a mixture of “basic” muffin, reheated the oven and located another packet of muffin cases. It was pretty obvious that these would taste okay but by the time they were cooked I was hungry (sandwiches still untoasted) and tired so thought it perfectly acceptable to test one myself. It was good.

I was too tired though to risk any more icing. So I sort of cleaned up. Matt made the toasted sandwiches – they were delicious. Much more delicious than if I had made them because he was very generous with the cheese.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of the whole exercise was packing all the muffins into boxes for transfer to mine and Matt’s places of work. This required extraction and redeployment of the camping box (the big plastic box with miniature supplies of tea, coffee, sugar, salt, ketchup etc. from hotels, motorway services etc.).

We divvied up the muffins between us and took them off to work this morning. And the results of this multi-centre, non-placebo controlled, non-blinded muffin trial?:

• our colleagues like muffins
• one participant described the strawberry muffin as “a mouthful of loveliness”
• the chocolate caramel sweet muffins could have done with more chocolate caramel sweets
• the carrot cake muffins were the most popular in all locations. Matt informed me that they had been met with “great acclaim”

Monday's medley of soup

After a leisurely start to the day it was all systems go to equip the garden. The leisurely start included reading an old book – I’m sure I’m enjoying it more because it smells old.

The equipping of the garden first involved removal of junk from the boot of my car at the dump. This included:

1. An enormous and cute, but slightly mouldy teddy bear, that had been freed from our loft by my cousin, Alastair, in January. It had been sat around in a black sack in various locations since as I had been intending to fettle it up with a trip to the launderette but finally thought better of it.
2. A whole load of VHS tapes which I had discovered whilst spring re-arranging (more enjoyable than spring cleaning) yesterday. Both mine and Matt’s and none of them viewed in at least the last 7 years.
3. My condemned sandwich toaster.

Items 1 and 2 disposed of according to plan. Item 3 disposed of causing Matt great hilarity. Today I was fulfilling the role of dumping whilst Matt watched from the car. This is often beneficial as the men at the dump are generally quite keen to help ladies with their dumping. I was duly assisted with items 1 and 2 but today the electrical waste was unmanned.

Taking health and safety seriously I called out before throwing the sandwich toaster into the skip to check that there was no-one inside it. There was no response so I went ahead with the launch of the sandwich toaster. Unfortunately I didn’t launch with quite enough force and the sandwich toaster rebounded from the side of skip, plug flailing and narrowly avoiding my head. It was whilst I was picking up the bits that Matt wound down the car window and told me, between fits of laughter, to walk round the other side of the skip. Where the side was down and I could just place in the sandwich toaster with no risk of head injury.

A successful trip to the garden centre ensued and 8 terracotta, mosaic encrusted pots later we began the return journey. Matt had seat belted the larger pots into the back seats with the rest in the boot so there was limited capacity for shopping from a “luxury” supermarket. One of the best things about said luxury supermarket is that when they reduce things they do really good reductions. Today’s best bargain was watercress and I picked up 4 packets. I also picked up a packet of reduced salad which when put together with some reduced beetroot, the remaining salmon & prawn leftovers and a homemade dressing made a very nice lunch.

After lunch it was back out to another garden centre where we successfully equipped ourselves with garden tables (that sort of match the pots) and a hose. And what appears to me to be an extravagant hose attachment but Matt assures me that we will not regret it.

Once home I needed to turn the watercress into soup while it was still nice. I think that potato is the traditional thickening to go with this but I prefer lentils to add some protein.

Realising that we’d had watercress in the lunchtime salad I thought that I should mix up the day’s flavours, I decided to make another sort of soup too. I got a leek and potato one on the go. 

Then I thought: why stop at two? We had eaten the last portion of frozen soup yesterday (the parsnip and apple one) so there was scope for restocking.

One of my other luxury supermarket bargains was a pot of sun ripened tomatoes and I thought I’d try these with some slightly wrinkling peppers. Having started to heat some olive oil to sauté an onion I noticed that there was quite a bit of oil in the tomato pot and not wanting to waste this I got out another pan and heated that instead.

So now I had a spare pan with olive oil and the only logical thing was to use this to make another soup. I had used up nearly all of the fresh vegetables in the house but there were still some carrots. And I had a little knobble of ginger so decided to try carrot and ginger. To improve the flavour I oven roasted the carrots before adding to the onion and ginger. Whilst the carrots were roasting and I was pondering this creation I felt inspired to add orange juice. This would be the perfect opportunity to use up the oranges and satsumas etc that had been sat, unloved, for a good long while (some I fear since 2012) in the fruit bowl. This is because I love nice citrus and am often tempted to buy. But if I buy a pack, eat one and it’s disappointing then it puts me off the rest. But I hate wasting food so the citrus stay there. (If it’s nice the whole lot may well get devoured in one sitting.) Matt can usually be counted on to help consume food but he isn’t keen on oranges due to the peeling issue (not that I’ve ever perceived that as a particular issue). So I was pleased to be able to squeeze some semi-decent juice out of my languishing fruits, which I added with some stock and red lentils to the other ingredients.

The tomatoey-peppery soup was looking rather insubstantial so I added a tin of tomatoes to that. And some red lentils.

Once all the soups were blended up (separately) we faced the dilemma of which to eat tonight. Matt went for the watercress (with a dollop of crème fraiche) – I am told it was scrumptious. I went for the carrot / ginger / orange. It too was scrumptious. I think that I’ll call it velvet carrot soup as the lentils gave it a gorgeous texture (although I did miss a few bits of carrot in the blending process).

Now I’ve just got to find enough containers to freeze it all. And replenish the lentils.