Drowning in a sea of twee

(Photo: Woman & Home)

I’m more than a bit hacked off with the recent trend of lifestyle-over-content cookery programmes. I feel that less and less is about the recipes and the cooking, and more about what sort of vintage crockery I should be serving my desserts in, or what kind of salvage tiles I should be coveting for my kitchen. In the new series ‘The Little Paris Kitchen’ I’m so distracted by what Rachel Khoo is wearing that I actually forget what it is that she is cooking at all. (Yes, yes, I do covet all her lovely bright vintage dresses, so very annoying that I rise to the bait like this!)

I was lunching with friends P and M yesterday, and they urged me to watch this new show as they knew it would get my goat on many levels. So of course I couldn’t resist the challenge and watched two episodes as soon as I got home, and found myself so irked by the programme that I actually can’t wait to watch the next episode… hah! It’s not just the over-stylised way the programme is made (each and every piece of crockery is a beautiful and lustworthy vintage item, everything is cute and twee and pretty) but the premise of the programme is confusing.

Why on earth would you want to watch a British girl re-interpret French dishes? She makes very strange re-hashes of classics such as muffin-style Croque Madame (strange) and Coq au Vin skewers (why? Whatever next, a beef borguignon kebab?) She interviews people in a leaden and stilted way, asking a Moroccan tea specialist if he used boiling water in his kettle to make tea (really?) and showing off her matiness with the local fishmongers. I’d be more interested in watching someone French cook really great French food, instead of cringing while a Brit ex-pat tries to re-invent the wheel and demonstrate her palliness with the locals. Not to say that all of Miss Khoo’s food looks bad, and some of it does look tasty enough, it’s just a question of why would anyone want to make French-style food when the real deal is pretty much perfect and not difficult to make in the first place? As P said, ‘I want to hold her face onto her stupid hotplate’. It’s like someone going to Italy and teaching the Italians how to make pasta…gah…really rather bloody irritating. Even if she has done a Cordon Bleu course!

I haven’t finished…remember Sophie Dahl’s much-panned ‘The Delicious Miss Dahl’ cookery programme? She seems like a very lovely lady, but I found I was rather more entranced by all her chipped enamelware ladles, rustic chopping boards and the fabulousness of the kitchen, which had been over-styled to within an inch of its life to resemble a delightfully bohemian enclave, complete with ‘authentic’ travel knick-knacks, bunches of gnarly onions hanging from rustic twine, and gorgeous pottery plates (all mismatched and chipped, of course). I have very few memories of what Sophie actually cooked (apart from one roasted tomato soup), but do remember tittering while Miss Dahl went and sat on a vintage velvet chaise longue and read out some poetry or stared winsomely out of a window at the rain. I kept expecting Jamie Cullum (her husband) to pop in and start singing. Everything was incredibly stilted and smacked of fakery, especially as I then learned that the kitchen where the series was shot was completely mocked up to look as though Sophie lived there. (But of course it would be, what was I thinking!)

Nigella was probably the original vehicle for all the over-styled over-sexed lifestyle-mag cookery show trend, what with her lusty glances as she licked spoons batting her eyes to camera, while her gorgeous KitchenAid mixer twinkled under strings of artfully festooned fairy lights and beautiful bouquets of flowers drooped handsomely near her Le Creuset cookware. Not to mention her flirtatiousness with the camera – it could be so hilarious at times that the food really does take a back seat. You are either agog at Nigella’s brazen raunchy moves, or coveting that lovely salad bowl (from her product line, of course). When I found out that, unsurprisingly, Nigella’s beautiful home had been recreated on some industrial estate to enable filming of one of the more recent series, I still felt cheated.

All of these programmes and their ilk leave me wondering whether any of the people in them know anything much at all about food, and whether we should really be blaming the stylists and producers of such shows who appear to all be in league to make us feel inadequate for not living in chic and retro bohemian splendour – and all the while the food sulks moodily in the corner. What do you lot think? Am I just a dreadful curmudgeon? Or are you also sick of feeling like you’re being preached to by the home and style police?

Pineapple Tarte Tatin

 

Greetings. I hardly ever have time to blog anymore. I have a small baby and she has eaten up all my spare minutes. So you can imagine, it’s a miracle that I can actually sit down and type anything whatsoever, given that I am existing on roughly six hours’ broken sleep a night and consuming the equivalent of the EU wine lake in the evenings (parenthood needs its perks, ah oui). When I do get any inspiration for the blog, my baby has other ideas, and then when I finally get to my laptop, I forget what it was that I wanted to write in the first place as I’m so very weary…

It’s also incredible that I manage to cook any proper meals at the moment,  so when I do get a little window of time, it’s actually a real treat to make a proper recipe. Which is how this tart came about – we were having friends over for lunch on Sunday and the main course of coq au vin needed a nice French pud to round it off. Tarte Tatin is such a classic, but instead of sticking to the traditional filling of apples, I played around a bit with a mixture of recipes (Roux Brothers for technique, Thomasina Miers for the pastry) and used pineapple instead, as I was feeling a bit festive. It tasted pretty damned good, even if I do say so myself. I ate three slices that day. Enjoy.

Serves 6

You will need:

Pastry:
250g plain flour
25g icing sugar
125g butter
2 egg yolks

Filling:
1 ripe pineapple, skin removed, flesh cored and cut into large chunks about 3cms thick – you might have leftovers
100g butter
150 sugar

To make the make the pastry, whiz the butter, sugar and flour in a food processor and then add the egg yolks, using the pulse button intermittently until you have a mixture that is almost coming together, like big breadcrumbs. Add a tiny bit of water bit by bit until the mixture comes together into a ball. Turn out onto some clingfilm, press into a flattish disk, wrap it up in the clingfilm then chill in the fridge for 30 minutes. Preheat your oven to 220C.

Cut up your pineapple, then blot on kitchen paper to absorb excess juice. Grease a non-stick ovenproof frying pan (make sure the handle won’t melt!) that is about 20cm in diameter, then cut the rest of the butter up into cubes and dot on the frying pan bottom. Cover with the sugar, then add the pineapple chunks making sure you don’t leave any large gaps.

Roll out the pastry until it’s wide enough to cover the diameter of your frying pan, then cover the fruit, allowing for a 2cm overlap all round. Tuck the pastry in around the edges, then trim the ragged edge with a knife to neaten. Chill the tart in the frying pan in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Take the frying pan out of the fridge, then fry the tart on a fierce heat on the stove for about 10 – 15 minutes to allow the fruit to caramelise.

Then bake in the oven for 10 – 15 minutes, keeping a close eye on the pastry to ensure that it doesn’t over-brown, as the oven will be very hot, and everyone’s oven is different! The tart is ready when the pastry is golden brown.

Allow the pan to cool down for a few minutes, but when it’s still warm, very carefully (using oven gloves and tea towels for protection against burning yourself) tip the frying pan and the tart upside down onto a serving plate. Voila – you will see your beautifully caramelised fruits on top of the pastry. Some of the fruit will have come away, so reposition it on the pastry.

Serve with whipped cream flavoured with vanilla extract and sweetened with a little icing sugar. Cut the tart with a very sharp knife, as the pastry is quite short and prone to breaking when you cut it.

(I had tried sprinkling the fruit with cardamom powder and a little ground black pepper before covering it with the pastry lid, but I was too light-handed and you could barely taste it. Next time I’ll go at it with the big guns, ‘cause pineapple goes so well with spice).

Berry muffins

What spurred me on to make these here muffins? A near-disaster ending in almost-mutilation! Not to myself, I hasten to add. The other day my lovely friend N was blending ingredients for a butter chicken recipe using a stick blender, and accidentally whizzed her left thumb into the mix while trying to prise out a cashew nut from the blades. Aaaaaaarrrrgh. Thankfully, she has now been stitched back together again, and retains her thumb but sadly not her fingernail. I thought only one thing could bring a smile to her face. Muffins! Yes!!!!

For years I have searched high and low for a muffin recipe that would replicate those ones you get in upmarket cafes – basically, soft and juicy on the inside, crisp on the top with a bit of crunch, with a satisfying overhang over the muffin case. I never seemed to be able to make them that way, the muffins I made always had something slightly earnest about them…but then I found this recipe by Donna Hay. Donna Hay is a bit like an Australian Martha Stewart, but younger and trendier. She lives in a world of tasteful decor and food styling (she is, after all, a food stylist first and foremost, a cook second), and strikes me as the kind of woman who would take your head off if you DARED to be messy in her kitchen. In the series ‘Fast, Fresh, Simple’, currently airing on the Good Food channel, she serenely puts together recipes in the kitchen of her gorgeous magazine-spread of a lofty beach house that looks out onto the ocean, and her kitchen is white, white, white. Her gaze seems to X-Ray its way right through you, via the screen.  Check out ‘Donna’s Diary’ – yikes...I would be terrified to be one of her kitchen interns, for sure…

Anyway, any muffin recipe from the Hay style factory was bound to be perfect, accurate and good-looking. And it was! Plus, very easy and quick to make.

I have tweaked it a little bit and added a mix of frozen berries, plus lemon zest.

Based on Donna Hay’s Blueberry Muffin recipe

Makes 12 large muffins

You will need:

375 g self-raising flour, sifted
1 tsp baking powder
200 g golden caster sugar
125 ml vegetable oil
1 egg
Zest of 1 lemon
125 ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
300g mixed berries (blueberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants etc – Sainsbury’s do a great ‘Forest Fruits’ in their freezer section)
Granulated sugar, for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Place the flour, baking powder and sugar in a bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together the oil, egg, milk, vanilla extract and lemon zest. Pour this wet mixture into the dry ingredients and mix together with a wooden spoon until just combined – do not worry if the mixture seems fairly solid and almost dry. Add the blueberries and mix gently to combine.

Spoon the mixture into paper muffin cases placed into a 12-hole (125ml per hole) muffin tray (I use an ice cream scoop to measure it out which makes it really easy) and then sprinkle the top of each muffin with a dusting of granulated sugar. Bake for 30 – 35 mins until golden on top, and a skewer poked into the centre of each cake comes out clean. Remove each muffin from the tin and place on a wire rack to cool.

 

Anatomy of a wedding cake

 

I have recently completed a terrifying task – making a wedding cake for my good friends C and M. There was no way I could not take the bait – after all, C made my wedding cake four years ago: a towering edifice in deepest darkest chocolate, decorated with chocolate leaves. It was dangerously delicious, and I wolfed down about 16 slices on the day (I was never the bride who lost weight for her wedding)! Poor C had a total nightmare making the chocolate ganache icing, dispatching her ex boyfriend in his car to drive the length and breadth of the Kentish countryside on a quest for dark chocolate to make a second batch when the first failed. I still feel mortified about that…

Anyway, when C recently got engaged to M, I was incredibly flattered to be asked to make their wedding cake. If not a bit flipping scared. I had never made one in my life – and all my cakes come out of the oven slightly uneven and looking rustic. I am strictly a home baker. But am quite stubborn and like a challenge…

C wanted a lemon cake, so in November I made three different types of lemon sponge, ranging from a ridiculously buttery french lemon ‘Quatre Quarts’ cake, to a BBC Good Food lemon wedding cake, and then, the winner, an Annie Bell ‘Rich Lemon Curd Sponge’, from her book ‘Gorgeous Cakes’. C borrowed a massive tin from a chef friend for the bottom tier, and I made a final test cake over Christmas, because my oven has a mind of its own and I was terrified that such a large cake would never cook properly.

The sponge was to be filled with lemon curd and iced with lemony cream cheese frosting, so I used Nigel Slater’s lemon curd recipe and used C’s frosting recipe pimped up with some lemon. So, four test cakes later, this is how the final process went last week…with a little help from some ‘how to’ videos!

The big, bad-ass bottom layer:

 

  

 

Putting lemon curd into the middle of a big, gorgeous lemony cakey sandwich:

 

 

The bottom layer with its undercoat of frosting (to enable the top layer of frosting to go on smoothly):

 

Ta-daaaa! Complete with marzipan ducks (made bleary eyed at 1am the morning before the wedding, their heads held onto their bodies with cotton bud sticks):

 

 

I pressed flaked almonds onto the edges of the cakes and stuck fresh roses into the gaps between the sponges:

 

The big moment when C and M cut the cake (I almost couldn’t watch, was terrified that the cake would disintegrate or that it would topple):

 

 

Cake dissected, ready to eat:

 

 

 

And now, the recipes:

Cake, based on Rich Lemon Curd Sponge recipe by Annie Bell: (this will make a 20cm cake – NOT a massive wedding cake!)

225g unsalted butter, diced
225g golden granulated sugar
225g self-raising flour
2 tsps baking powder
4 medium organic eggs
50ml double cream
Finely grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 tbsps dark rum (I used Havana Club)

Topping:
Juice of one lemon
50g golden granulated sugar

Preheat your oven to 170C fan/190C/gas mark 5 adn butter a 20cm cake tin 9cm deep with a removeable base. Place all the ingredients in a food processor and cream together. Transfer the mixture to the cake tin, smooth the surface and bake for 50-55 mins or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Run a knife around the edge of the cake. Combine the lemon juice and sugar in a bowl, stirring evenly to distribute it, then spoon over the top of the cake. Leave it to cool, allowing the juice to sink into the sponge.

Lemon curd filling, based on recipe by Nigel Slater:

Zest and juice of 4 unwaxed lemons
150g sugar
100g unsalted butter cut into cubes
3 organic eggs and 1 egg yolk

Put the lemon zest, juice, butter and sugar into a heatproof bowl set over a simmering pan of water – make sure the bowl doesn’t touch the water. Stir from time to time until everything is melted. In a separate bowl, mix the eggs and egg yolk with a fork, then stir into the lemon mixture. Let the mixture cook over the simmering water, using a whisk to stir regularly, for between 10 and 15 minutes, until it thickens up like custard. Take off the heat and let cool down. As it cools, give it an occasional stir with the whisk. (If you can wait that long, it will keep for 2 weeks in the fridge)

Cream cheese frosting, recipe by C:

150g unsalted butter, softened
150g icing sugar
225g full fat cream cheese
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 tsps vanilla extract

Cream the butter and icing sugar together with an electric whisk. Then add the cream cheese and mix together. Finally, add the vanilla extract, lemon juice and zest.

To ice the cake, first do a thin layer of cream cheese frosting and chill the cake in the fridge. Then add another layer of frosting, spreading around with a palette knife. Decorate with flaked almonds.

 

YUM! Congrats to C and M who make the most amazing couple. I proper welled up at their wedding, it was just amazing…aaaaah you guys!

 

 

Salted caramel chocolate brownies

 

 

Who doesn’t love a good brownie? Purists out there might not like a brownie to be anything else but flavoured with pure chocolate, and I know that ‘salted caramel’ seems to be featuring everywhere on menus these days in tarts, ice creams and other guises, but it is a seriously awesome combination, trust me. I’ve been making these deeply dangerous salted caramel chocolate brownies for about three years now, and wherever people eat them they tend to go a bit weird. I’ve had people chasing me across a field at a rock festival where I’ve been selling them, and deranged drunken folk accosting me at a wedding where I made a big batch for dessert, all wanting MORE! (I’m very flattered, I thank you) I featured this recipe on the blog a long while ago, but I think that it deserves a repeat mention – you could make a batch of these for a Christmas present and the recipient would love you forever because these brownies are insanely good.

They are gooey, dark and rich (no flour here, just ground almonds) and also with the added dimension of having the tang of the buttery caramel chunks inside. I always make a large batch of these, cut them into squares, and freeze them – that way I always have a steady supply of these bad boys to hand, and there’s nothing quite like biting into a half frozen sweet/salty brownie. Double-yum.

The process is fairly time consuming, because you have to make the salted caramel first and have the chunks ready before you make the brownie mixture. But it’s a delicious way to spend half a day or evening, trying not to face-plant your head into the chocolatey mixture…

Makes 24 medium sized, or 18 large brownies:

First, you’ll need to make the salted caramel, which you can make a day or two in advance and store in an airtight container until you make the brownies.

You will need:

100g flaked almonds
100g golden caster sugar
50g salted organic butter
1/2 tsp sea salt, plus extra for sprinkling

First lightly toast the almonds in a dry frying pan over a medium heat, taking care to stir them regularly so that they don't burn. This will take about 3 minutes, and when you can smell that lovely nutty almond smell and see the nuts turning a light brown they are ready. Spread them out on a layer of non-stick baking parchment, and lay on a heatproof surface. Then put the sugar, butter and salt in a non-stick frying pan and add 4 tablespoons of water. Bring everything to the boil, then turn the heat to medium and stir frequently. Watch like a hawk as it bubbles away, and keep stirring to ensure that some bits don't caramelise before others. When the mixture begins to look creamy, you're nearly there:

You want the mixture to turn a light brown colour - this will take anything between 5 and 9 minutes. Then QUICKLY pour the mixture over the almonds - don't dally because the caramel solidifies instantly. Sprinkle over an extra pinch of sea salt. Leave it to cool down, then shatter into pieces holding a knife with the blade pointing downwards. You might want to do this over a chopping board so you don't dent your surfaces!
The result:

And now for the brownie mixture…you will need:

375g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids, preferably Fairtrade and/or organic)
375g butter
400g unrefined caster sugar
6 medium free range eggs
4 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder - again, Fairtrade and/or organic
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
250g ground almonds
1 double espresso-worth of strong coffee

Preheat the oven to 180C. Put the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl, set over a pan of cold water and bring the water to the boil (bain marie). Turn the heat down to a low simmer and stir the mixture occasionally with a spoon until the chocolate and butter melt. Put the bowl to one side to let cool for a couple of minutes.

Whizz the sugar, eggs, cocoa and bicarb in a food mixer or with an electric whisk, until frothy. Add this to the chocolate mixture, then stir in the ground almonds, the melted chocolate and the coffee.

Try not to faceplant THIS:

 

Pour in your chunks of salted caramel to the mixture, reserving larger pieces for decorating the brownies:

Pour the mixture into a large baking tray lined with greaseproof baking parchment and bake for roughly 30 minutes, depending on how deep your baking tray is, how fierce your oven is and how squidgy you want the brownies to be.

When you take the tray out of the oven, place it on a wire rack to cool down completely. Do not attempt to cut the brownies up until they have cooled completely - otherwise they might fall apart! They keep well in a Tupperware container for 4 - 6 days, and also freeze really well.

Anyone out there got any other pimp brownie flavours and combos they’re keen to share?