because there's always baking...

Easter holidays loom and it's STILL SNOWING. 

If you're trying to figure out how to entertain the children during the break, here's something that should resist the lure of the telly for an hour or so at least. My six year old can get on with this pretty much unassisted while I tape padding to the most accessible walls.

Because if it stays this cold she'll be bouncing off the walls and I'll be hitting my head off them. Repeatedly.

So, y'know, Happy Easter and all that. I shall be celebrating by printing off engineering vacancies in Singapore and using them as my husband's table mats.

sweet potato, sour cherry and pecan brownies :: a great random red nose day bake

Well, after questioning the omnipotent Twitter the other day, it only went and proved its worth in the comments section of the very same post, with the actual s'labrity baker answering a query I had about his recipe. I suppose that's me told.

I still don't understand Twitter, but at least I know a man who does, and that man is our Random Recipe host Dom. Who challenged us this month to pick from our bulging folders, toppling towers and sliding stacks of cuttings and clippings for this month's random recipe. This is my favourite kind of Random Recipe, because if you cut something out or jotted something down, you must have thought it sounded delicious - no risk of frog congee or sherry trifle here.

Well, I used a number generator to select page number 9/52 from my laminated book of dreams (no, not the Bill Bailey Argos catalogue, but my kikki.K baking folder).

Why the baking file rather than the recipe file? Because it was our local baking night in aid of Comic Relief of course!

And so, Dan Lepard's Sweet potato, sour cherry and pecan brownies were made. And I'm pleased to say every single one was eaten at the bake night (or tucked away in a tupperware for later).

They were everything a chocolate brownie should be. And a little bit more besides because:
a) sweet potato is a health food
b) the sour cherries symbolised red noses
c) they were gobbled in aid of Comic Relief!

Despite heavy snow and a modest turn out, we raised £70 on the night, and I understand there's more to come with a blind auction of some goodies.

So, what are you waiting for? Hashtag dosomethingyummyformoney, hashtag don'tevenknowwhathashtagmeans, hashtag don'tevenhaveahashtagsymbolonmycomputer

Hop on over to Belleau Kitchen at the end of the month to see Dom's wonderful RR roundup. Actually, it's only half way through the month - why don't you join in too? You must have a stash of clippings and cuttings kicking around somewhere, don't you...

Happy red nose day. Give all you can to a wonderful cause.

answers on a postcard please

Some of the many things I don't understand:

• Twitter. I just can't wrap my ailing braincells around it. I get lost in shopping malls, so I certainly can't navigate which bit of who said what and where it was answered and re-tweeted and, well, no. Just no. It's not going to happen.
• Multi-functional maternity'x'nursing wear. In my limited experience, these two states are mutually exclusive. The desire for something half decent to wear while nursing means I am obviously not pregnant anymore. The stupidity of this issue makes my head ache. (If anyone can recommend a company that does good-quality nursing clothes that don't make me look like a trog who's given up on herself and flung on an ill-fitting sack, I'd be very grateful.) 
• People who leave their dog mess in our street. Clearly cretins, they have to walk down the street everyday too, so surely skipping round various evacuations bugs them as well? I'm going to take affirmative action with some blue spray chalk. Sorry, that should be hashtag affirmativeaction hashtag turdwars. Or something. 
• Now I do actually really need advice on this last one. "200g baked sweet potato, flesh scooped out". What does that mean? A 200g potato baked and scooped, or 200g of scooped out flesh from a couple of potatoes? It's for this recipe, so I think it's kind of important. I'm veering towards that latter... Answers on a postcard please.

That is all. Thangyaverramuch.

almost parenting... gingerly

Turns out there's one real drawback to parenting a really brainy child. (That is in addition to the fundamental flaw of her being brainier than me, you understand. "Flight of the Bumblebee was written by a man called Rimsky-Korsakov you know Mummy." Erm, no. I didn't as it happens.)

No, as far as I can tell, the main issue is this. The brighter the child, the sooner they realise that you, as a parent, have absolutely no effing clue what you're doing.

Which is fine while we're bumbling along in our everyday shambles of Oxford Reading Tree, damp laundry and glitter glue. But when it comes to actual parenting (I'm talking discipline, behaviour, Ural maestri, that sort of thing) she can tell, without a shadow of a doubt, that I'm making it all up on the spot. And she's not convinced.

After a week of particularly feckless parenting, I'm working on a solution while she's at school: crystallised ginger, date and walnut cake. And while that's baking, a batch of Nigella's meatballs from the Kitchen book.

Why?

Because the former might trick her into thinking, for a valuable minute and a half, that I'm one of those awesome, capable Mums that knows what she's about. And the latter? Well, they're turkey meatballs, so presumably there's no dobbin in them. Though it turns out you can't be too sure...

Crystallised ginger, date and walnut cake (a variation on an old favourite)
Ginger is supposed to boost the immune system isn't it? So with the fibre-rich dates and walnut Omega-3s, you can pretty much convince yourself that it's good for you.

120g chopped dates
large pinch bicarbonated soda
170g sugar
50g  room temp butter
170g self-raising flour
50g chopped walnuts
finely chopped crystallised ginger to taste (I used 15g)
ground ginger to taste (depends how spicy you want it, I used just half a tsp)
1 egg
1tspn vanilla essence
1/2 tspn salt

• preheat your oven to 180*C and line your cake tin
• cover the dates with one cup of boiling water with a pinch of bicarb and set to one side while you weigh everything else
• blitz all the other ingredients together with a hand-held mixer
• mix in the dates and their juice (then put it in the oven for two minutes before realising you've forgotten the walnuts, so burn yourself whipping the tin out and stirring the nuts into the batter, like one of the more hopeless GBBO contestants you love to scorn)
• bake for 35 minutes or until the skewer comes out clean.

Joining in with April's 'Fred & Ginger' edition of Just Desserts over on Domestic Sluttery.

my child is unique :: just like everyone else's

Everyone knows that their kids are uniquely remarkable.

But it never hurts to get a bit of proof.

The Boss is now six. Which is reason enough for me to get misty-eyed and nostalgic this weekend, but chronic sleep-deprivation and a couple of glasses of celebratory prosecco certainly sped things along.

While I was looking for something totally vital and utterly lost yesterday, I stumbled upon this farewell letter from her Singaporean preschool teacher. It sums up everything we loved about our years there. It was such an affectionate, happy, joyous time, and I can't believe another year has passed!

Watch out blubberers, this one might make you wobble (or maybe it was just my delicate emotional state). It's awfully nice to have someone else say this sort of thing about your child (ignoring the strong probability that she writes the same letter to all the children).

In the past two years you have amazed me with your wisdom and knowledge. You are my sunshine girl who slowly became the apple of my eye. You have matured beautifully this year, more confident and self-dependant. It is indeed a joy to teach you.

You are doing extremely well in the understanding of phonics. I am confident that with proper guidance and support, you will soon embark on the reading journey.

It really breaks my heart to see you leave Singapore. Alas! We will not be able to see our little bud blooming into a beautiful flower. However you will always reside in the core of my heart and we have no doubt that you will be a pleasant addition to any institution you join.

Already missing you immensely, your class teacher, March 2012.

I know. I KNOW. Some teachers are worth their weight in marshmallows aren't they?

you say flapjack, I say flapjack

Everybody knows that in America biscuits are called cookies. And I'm led to believe that they call scones* biscuits. And by scones, I mean scones, not what sassanachs refer to as drop scones. Drop scones are pancakes. By which I mean pancakes, and not what the French call crepes or what the Americans have for breakfast. And then I heard that Americans sometimes call pancakes flapjacks.

So what do Americans call flapjacks?

Confused yet? Let's not even get started on macaroons...

The Boss' new best friend was coming over for tea after school, and I had no shopping in. What to do? The answer was flapjacks. Because every Scottish household has porridge oats, and everything else can be cobbled together.

While I knew the principles, I'd never actually made flapjacks before. So it might have been a bit of a risk to allow the quantities to be dictated by what I had left in various packets. But they turned out pretty good.

They are so quick too. I put the Dragon Baby in his bed at noon, and the flapjacks were in the oven with the dishwasher loaded twenty minutes later.

It might have been beginners luck. Meaning that I'll have to make these many more times. Just to be absolutely sure.

spiced seed flapjacks
makes 20

200g unsalted butter
2 tablespoons runny honey
6 generous tablespoons golden syrup
325g porridge oats
1 tablespoon pumpkin seeds
1 tablespoon sunflower seeds
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
generous pinch ground nutmeg

- preheat oven to 180*C
- roughly line a tin of some kind with parchment (mine is... hang on let me go and measure it... a 20cm x 26cm rectangle. A touch smaller might be better because the flapjacks will be thicker.)
- oil your tablespoon measure (this prevents the syrup and honey sticking to your spoon)
- put butter, honey and syrup in a pan to melt
- mix the dry ingredients together and pour into the pan with the liquids
- mix together and press into the lined tin
- bake for 20 minutes
- let your tea steep while you cut the flapjack into squares in the tin
- let them cool on a wire rack (except the warm one that you have with your tea)

*Scone rhymes with gone in my house btw. When scone rhymes with phone my skin crawls. No idea why.

crumbling resolve :: a random recipe

It's not often that Dom, our Random Recipe Host with the Most, allows us to positively select a recipe (normally our methods must err towards random selection). But this month it is a store cupboard ingredient that must be randomly selected - how we cook with it is up to us.

Dom's plan is for us to unearth a back-of-the-cupboard gem. But the combination of my new kitchen and this week's primary school harvest thanksgiving collection (Hurrah! Palm off all our old cans of random tat to the local elderly so that they can stuff them, cursing, to the back of their larders.) means that my cupboard is unusually bare of geriatric dried goods and crusty out-of-date jars.

So instead I closed my eyes and ran my finger over my "spice rack": more accurately described as a narrow shelf filled with a decade's worth of Bonne Maman jam jars. Their contents are varied (birthdays candles, baking beans, toothpicks, star anise, cupcake sprinkles - you name it) and, when I've failed to write on the lid, frequently a mystery.

My finger landed on half a jar of something crumbly and beige. Hmmmm. Too soft for sugar, too irregular for flour. Faintly foosty-smelling, but too mild to be a spice, and tastes of nothing. Ground almonds was my best guess. And if that were the case I knew immediately what I was going to do with them, having cut something perfect out of the paper a few weeks ago.

The preamble to the recipe read: "...we're now in the midst of a rather agreeable seasonal crossfire – the waning of summer and the waxing of autumn. This is a time of rich culinary potential, as the tapering off of some fine sunshine crops overlaps with the nascence of many others that come to fruition in the shortening days." Gah, to be able to write like that. I think it's just super lovely. Though, having not experienced Autumn since 2009, my susceptibility to romance is high and my resistance is low.

HFW* was talking there about the lovely few days when the berries overlap with the apples, and I've been waiting for that magical moment in my own garden. Yesterday it arrived, and I got seven James Grieve apples and about 200g of juicy raspberries from my little plot.

And so, while a contented little baby with a full tummy snoozed on his Daddy's chest, and on the radio someone played Tchaikovsky on a Stradavarius from the Usher Hall, I spent a Friday night making pastry. Because the state of the bathroom floor can wait, and the four piles of unwashed laundry will still be there in the morning, and (even though my scales say there's 10kg to lose) the calories simply don't count if you've grown all the fruit yourself... right?

By the way, I still have no idea if they were ground almonds or not, but the tart tastes lovely.

before...

...and after, the apple and raspberry crumble tart

*Now, as an aside, you might be forgiven for thinking that I am being paid by Mr H Fearnley-Whittingstall, because I seem to make so many of his recipes. I only wish that I were. (I want to be his friend. Big time.) Despite living on a small island, he's lucky we genuinely couldn't live further apart without getting wet, or I might become a stalker groupie. But the truth is, when I said a few months ago that I learned how to cook from the Guardian/Observer newspaper columns, I really wasn't kidding, and they remain my main inspiration. Hence his constant presence here.

late cake

If you're always at least 10 minutes early for everything, ALWAYS, does that make you obsessively punctual, or not? Either way, avoiding being actively late is something I inherit from my father. I am almost NEVER late, and if something makes me late I get ludicrously, blood-vessel-burstingly cross.

There was a perfect description of this in a novel I've just finished: 
I have a crushing fear of lateness. I would rather be an hour early than cause someone a minute's wait. Dev would always say, 'We're not late until we're late.' I knew what he meant and it was technically true, but it never worked for me. Knowing I'll be late is always bad enough. The least I can do is get the worrying in early.
(from Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace)

This is EXACTLY how I feel about being on time.

Which is probably why this baby being nearly a week late is so stressful for me. My last baby's labour kicked off at 9am on her due date. Very businesslike and precisely on time, I hadn't anticipated anything less. So what on earth has happened, why has my scrupulous timekeeping deserted me, what am I doing wrong this time around?

So I'm still filling the days with baking, and then writing about it for you here. Oh, and scarfing it down like a pig of course. Knitting aside, there's nothing better to take my mind off things. To that end, here is a recipe for the most sublime cake in my repertoire. It's the (ahem... late!) Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's favourite cake.*

Queen Mother's Cake
6oz sugar
2oz butter
6oz plain flour
1tspn baking powder
2oz chopped walnuts
1 egg
1tspn vanilla essence
1/2 tspn salt
4oz chopped dates
large pinch bicarbonated soda

• cover the dates with one cup of boiling water with a pinch of bicarb and set to one side
• preheat your oven to 180*C and line your cake tin
• mix all the other ingredients together in the usual way (ie use a hand whisk or wooden spoon to cream butter and sugar, add egg, vanilla and sifted dry ingredients)
• add the dates, their juice and the chopped walnuts and mix well (it's sloppy, don't worry)
• bake for 35 minutes or until the skewer comes out clean.

Icing
5 tbspns soft light brown sugar
2 tbspns single cream or full fat milk
2 tbspns butter

• Melt together and boil (constantly stirring) for 5-8 minutes before spreading on the cooled cake and decorating with leftover walnuts.

Unlike my Granny's carrot cake recipe, this one must have it's icing. It is literally the icing on the cake, and turns a date and walnut sponge into a bird of paradise in full plumage. This icing, on this cake, is the sensory distillation of my childhood.

My midwife was surprised (though not concerned) to find trace amounts of glucose in my samples this morning. I wasn't. I think taking the photos alone was enough to have caused that.

* I have no idea if this really was her favourite cake, or even where the recipe originally came from. I remember copying the list of ingredients from my Granny's book (a badly printed spiral bound charity pamphlet I think) at least 25 years ago. So if you own the copyright to this, perhaps you can forgive my lack of credit. And if you happen to know that Ma'am preferred another cake more, well, I'm past caring. In my house, this is Queen Mum's Cake, end of discussion.

treacle, caraway and apple muffins :: it's officially autumn

I have this lovely friend (you can see just how lovely here) who probably won't mind me telling you that she went into a fast, furious labour with her first child while a cake was in the oven. I remember listening, hand clamped over mouth in horror, as she explained that she was fine when the batter went in, but had to crawl across the floor in a painful rescue operation by the time the beeper went off. Her birth story actually got more and more dramatic (and slightly hilarious in the recounting!) as the evening progressed, but that's not what I'm here to share.

I am desperate for this bubba to arrive. DESPERATE. Despite there being officially a few days left on the clock, we're thoroughly cheesed off waiting. So I thought I'd do some baking and see if I could tempt Lou's jinx.

The marvellous Dan Lepard wrote a recipe in the Guardian magazine a few weeks ago that called for some slightly obscure ingredients (spelt flour and caraway seeds) as well as three small apples. Not only did I happen to have the spelt and caraway in the cupboard, but for the first time in its short life my adolescent apple tree was positively dripping with small and nearly ripe apples.

Daily I have wandered around the tree, checking the largest fruits with a gentle twist of the wrist. All the while wondering which would come first: ripe apples for muffins or a tiny baby.

Well, today I got my answer. 

This muffin recipe is as delicious as it looks, it's Autumn on a plate and I thoroughly recommend it to you. But evidently, the beeper has rung and I didn't have to commando crawl across the floor to rescue them. Turns out my second born won't be named after you Dan, sorry.

Humph.

trowel to table in three short hours

Four posts in one week? Yes, I'm staying rather close to home and need something to take my mind off impending labour. I thought last night might have been the night. Turned out it wasn't. Can't be far off.

So, let me share something tasty and seasonal with you instead.

A little over a year ago, my second ever blogpost was only read by one person I think (and she kinda had to, she's one of my best friends). A mawkish piece of navel gazing that we won't dwell on. But the subject matter, carrot cake, is very important and deserves to be revisited.

Yesterday, The Boss and I pulled up all of our remaining crop of Chantenay carrots, amounting to about 1.5lb. Actually, she pulled them up, and did the comedy falling over backwards thing when they popped out of the soil. That's why I left it to her, it's funnier on a leggy kid than a massively pregnant heifer. She bounces.

And so, here's a revisit of the yummiest carrot cake recipe I know (even better with homegrown carrots rather than jumbo imported Australian ones that we had to use in Singapore). Details follow the photos.

It's so delicious that I actually think icing slightly ruins it. And it's perfect for making with kids because a whisk and spoon suffices: no need for electronic gadgets with scary finger-chopping potential. (Though I do use the grater attachment on the food processor these days, turning the tedious carrot-grating bit into the work of mere moments.)

with homegrown raspberries - therefore virtually a health food

Carrot cake

6 oz wholemeal flour
3 oz self-raising flour
6 oz muscavado sugar
6 oz soft brown sugar
3 large eggs
6 floz sunflower oil
55ml sour cream
2 tspn vanilla essence
1 tspn grated nutmeg
2 tspn cinnamon
1 tspn bicarbonated soda
½ tspn salt
11 oz grated carrot
3 oz dessicated coconut


Bowl 1: Eggs, oil, vanilla, sour cream. Mix the wet ingredients together (by hand is fine, no need to whip it into a frenzy) and then sieve in sugars.

Bowl 2: Sieve the flours, nutmeg, cinnamon, soda, baking powder and salt together.

Fold the dry mix into the wet mix.

Fold in the carrot and coconut.

Bake in a large tin at 150C for 90-120 minutes. (I find 90 long enough, but test with a skewer.)

These James Grieve apples that are ripening so beautifully had better watch out. I've got treacle-y plans for them next... but in the meantime, I'm off to eat some cake.

almost impossible to believe these colours are straight out of camera!

Post Script:
So strangely it seems that today is THE day for blogging about carrot cake. What can I say, great minds thinking alike?! Here's a gluten-free version from the Domestic Sluts, and for something completely different, here's Shu Han's Singaporean carrot cake (warning: this stuff is seriously delicious).

a right royal (random) knees up

So it’s the Queen’s birthday tomorrow. Her actual birthday, as opposed to her public birthday in June. I’m not a rampant royalist, I’ve never really given the whole thing much thought... my inner little girl thinks that Kate’s awfy pretty and isn’t it a shame she didn’t bag the princess gig, but other than that they’re just elegant people in photos.

But I do like that the monarch is still allowed to do some arbitrary stuff, like having two birthdays. I mean what’s the point in being Queen if you can’t say “I’m tired of the rain on my April birthday, and I do likes me a good picnic, so I’m going to have one in June too – MAKE IT SO toadies!”

If I were Queen I’d enjoy the random powers. Apparently she can actually appoint whoever she likes to be the Prime Minister! I could have some fun with that one. I would definitely proclaim a national cake, and that cake would obviously be a Victoria sponge. Because Victoria sponge has inherently perfect style.

Let me explain…

I had this maths teacher at secondary school, and he was all about solving your quadratic or geometric problems with style. It was no use simply to arrive at the correct answer with lots of squiggly calculations along the way. With him you got the real praise for getting to that answer in a way that made your classmates gasp at the clarity of your solution. Spotting the slick common denominator at the earliest stage, rendering the most complicated of equations effortless, that was the key. I loved maths, and will never in all my days forget him, striving for style amongst the cosine curves.

A proper Victoria sponge has precisely that style.

Choose your eggs according to your sandwich tins (3 eggs for 18cm, 4 for 20cm tins works for me). Before you begin, weigh the eggs in their shells, and then use exactly that same weight of soft butter, caster sugar and self-raising flour. Isn’t it genius? Blend together, adding a splash of vanilla if you like, divide into tins and bake for 25 minutes.

Every time I make a Victoria sponge I relish the pure stylish clarity of the recipe. (For an inspired and seasonal filling, look at this gorgeous variation published today by GoddessonaBudget… now I think that's a Vicky sponge fit for any Queen.)

But I digress, this week I was baking for someone else’s birthday: not royal but no less dignified is Dom from Belleau Kitchen and his 2nd blog birthday. For the occasion he asked his random recipe followers to make him something celebratory and randomly selected from a baking book. Now a baking book I have! Just look at these bad boys…

hurrah! the first things rescued from the unpacking chaos : )

Using a random number generator I selected page 12, which was Apple Cider Pudding Cake printed out from the Joyful Baker last autumn. (Curiously, it seems to have been the last post she wrote since then, I hope it’s not something I said…)

It’s a very American recipe, and I’m afraid we parochial small islanders do tend to struggle with those. Inches? Fahrenheit? Cups? I had to find an actual ruler and an online conversion chart, and rescue my measuring cups from my daughter’s toy kitchen. And I just don't understand two cups of Granny Smith apples, why not just tell me how many apples? I wasn’t feeling any pure stylish clarity by the time I eventually got started, but that’s likely my fault not hers.

It’s a squishy, treacley, appley pudding with a delicious crunchy crumble topping. I served it with a dollop of natural yoghurt, which it definitely needed because it’s quite sweet. If I were to make it again, I’d significantly streamline the ingredients. Less salt, less sugar, and definitely smaller quantities of spices (mine had a distinct aftertaste of both salt and pepper which I'm sure wasn't intended). I’d probably use self-raising flour rather than all the baking powder and soda. And comparing my photos with the Joyful Baker's, my sugar was clearly a grade darker than hers, which probably wasn't ideal.

The crumble topping is inspired, definitely the best bit. But ultimately, if I knew you were coming for tea Dom, I think you’d right royally agree with my conclusion: stick with slick Vic. (or Vik?!)

Happy Birthday Belleau Kitchen, and Gawd bless ya Ma'am.

all cakes taste better with tea and a doily

it's been Wan week...

For the uninitiated, Chef Wan is the TV food king round our neck of the woods. Always cheerful, exuberant and energetic, Malaysian and other South-East Asian dishes are clearly his defining passion. If you're an eagle-eyed Rick Stein fan, you might remember Chef Wan from a hilarious cooking lesson in the Far Eastern Odyssey series, in which I think I remember Rick Stein describing him as "Malaysia's Delia and Jamie combined", or something to that effect.

I got a set of mini Chef Wan cookbooks for Christmas so when Dom, our gracious Random Recipe host, challenged us to cook something randomly from our newest cookbooks I immediately began salivating over all the exotic possibilities: asam chicken, beef rendang, mutton curry... chickity China the Chinese chicken, have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin' (sorry, can NOT get that song out of my head, and now you won't be able to either).

Alas, it was not to be. We randomly picked Spiced Pumpkin Muffins, and one Wan week into the New Year, me and The Boss whiled away a rainy Singapore afternoon making them. And I must say, they're very delicious and a lot like carrot cake, as you might imagine (but not in the least like a Singaporean carrot cake which is a very different kettle of ill-chosen metaphors altogether). You roast and mash the pumpkin before making something very similar to a basic (Western) carrot cake batter and throw in the pumpkin and half a cup of chopped walnuts at the end. Simples. But perhaps not as simple as an actual carrot cake.

Now I'm off to drool over the photos of curries and fried food on the other pages to decide what to make next.

this was taken on a plain white countertop, but it looks all cool and superimposed!
i'm starting to love the flash on my camera, after giving it a really hard time for ages

small chocolate nemesis

An affirming sort of thing happened this week.

One rainy afternoon, while twiddling about on the computer instead of paying my daughter the undivided attention she deserves, some music started to play. I was wrapped up in woeful confusion at not understanding a word of this blog tutorial, when I realised that The Boss (not normally a spontaneous dancer) was twirling, swirling and pogo-ing around the room to the soundtrack. She asked me to play it again and again and again. Dancing to YouTube was on the agenda the following day, and the next. Pretty soon, we were all at it.

Unable to find the tracks on iTunes, I figured there'd be no harm in emailing the musician to see if he could help me out. And within 48 hours he had replied, attaching ten of his songs to a generous and genuine email. In his words "I share all this in the hopes that (if you dig it, of course), you'll share it with others."

This ranked pretty highly on my random-act-of-kindness scale, higher still because it was a kindness directed towards my progeny, and all parents have a fondness for that. So, in the spirit of spreading the warmth I urge you to go over and check out Allen Cote's website and buy a few of his lovely tracks (some are on iTunes with more to follow I'm sure). His will be the soundtrack to our winter.

And so it was the soundtrack to our latest self-imposed random recipe evening (our official random recipe post for November is here, but we're nerds and try to cook randomly more often than Dom requests, because it's fun). My husband instigated another bizarre and unfathomable system for selecting the recipe. Somehow it involved me choosing lots of numbers (I still don't know how they featured in the selection process) and him hiding recipe books in loads of drawers. Don't ask.

The recipe in question needs a little introduction: years ago, in the halcyon days of lissome youth (aka the early 2000s), when we worked too hard to enjoy life as much as we should have, there was a recipe. A recipe that filled domestic hearts with fear, and newspaper columns with adjectives like unfeasible, infamous and disastrous. It was the River Cafe's Chocolate Nemesis from the River Cafe Cookbook. The stir it caused is described in this article by Julian Barnes much better that I ever could  (hardly surprising, him being the Booker prize winner an' a'thing). And as a (further) aside, if you're looking for a stocking filler for the man in your life, Julian Barnes' The Pedant in the Kitchen is a great little book if you can find it.

Anyway, the recipe is the Easy Small Nemesis, from the River Cafe Cookbook Easy (emphasis on the easy, see?). If you're not familiar with the River Cafe, it's probably suffice to say that it was the culinary training ground for Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall amongst others. Small Nemesis contains a whole packet of butter, five eggs, four large bars of chocolate and a heap of sugar. It's still not exactly easy (only because at numerous points we felt sure we were headed for a cowpat and that's a bit stressful) but this version of the recipe does actually work.

It's definitely a "grown-up" pudding, so densely rich that the tiniest slice beat me (and I'm blessed with a snout and trotters). And it's certainly a restaurant-y pudding, for reasons that I can't explain in any way other than it doesn't feel like something you'd normally eat at someone's home - certainly not in my home. If you're from a family of fruit-pud haters it would be a seriously impressive alternative at Christmas, especially for nut-/gluten-free households. It ticks all the rich, indulgent, over-the-top boxes that a good Chrissie pud should. And this small version could easily feed twelve. Our neighbours have just moved out, so quite what we're going to do with the remaining ten slices of ours is anyone's guess.

And so, here it is: our nemesis. Because there's nothing like getting a headstart on your Christmas weight gain while dancing to the strains of a distant ukelele.

cake: the origin of the species

ev·o·lu·tion
[ev-uh-loo-shuhn] noun. change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation

I have this cake recipe, no in fact, I'd go so far as to say I have the cake recipe. I expect most home cooks have one. It symbolises the purest essence of the art form. It needs no introduction. It's not Orange Cassava Cake, or Simnel Cake, or Lemon Drizzle Cake, or Date and Walnut Cake...

It's just cake.

It was provided by my Granny as the first recipe for my first cook book. It was the recipe my Mum used to teach me the basic principles of baking. It was the cake delivered by emotional parents for my eighth birthday, a month after I started boarding school. It was every birthday cake we ever had before or since. It was the cake that turned my older brother on to baking. It was the recipe that he was looking for on the shelf when he yelled at me for daring to taking my cook book away to university with me. I suspect it's the cake he uses to teach his new wife how to bake.

It's the cake that always welcomes us home from wherever we have been. It's the cake I've made over and over with my wee brother whenever we've run out of other ideas. It's the cake I make for my husband when he just needs cake. It's the cake I've learnt to expect when any of my close family says "I made a cake!". It's the cake I teach my daughter how to bake.

I must have made it a hundred times or more. Every motion is precious and memorable for me. But it does evolve through the generations. Slowly and in the most minute ways; but that's evolution for you. For example, where the recipe instructs 6 tbsp of boiling water, I've always opted not to stop the trickle of water from the kettle between spoonfuls - the inaccurate addition of "a bit extra" water making the cake moister.

While baking this cake together today, The Boss added another intangible detail to the recipe. When I was showing her how to test whether the cake was ready with a skewer, she said "it's like the cake is sick and you're taking it's temperature to see if it's better". I'll never be able to bake this cake again without thinking of that metaphor, and I suspect (and hope) that the image will stay with her forever.

When I was growing up, I had a penchant for coffee-flavoured buttercream icing, and it had to be smoothed on with a spatula and then run over with the tines of a fork in wavy lines. But my daughter prefers to go with Granny's original chocolate icing. With one small modification: in her eyes, real cakes MUST have sprinkles.

It's evolved.

If you don't have a good basic cake recipe, one that defines the very essence of the word cake, please be my guest. It's not big and it's not clever, it's just cake.

cake
no apologies for the imperial measures - that's part of the charm for me. If it matters, please feel free to do the conversion yourself

• 2oz cocoa
• 6tbsp boiling water
• 6oz butter
• 6oz caster sugar
• 6oz self-raising flour
• 2tsp baking powder
• 4 eggs
  

1. line a 7" round cake tin with parchment
2. preheat your oven to 325F
3. mix the cocoa and the water together into a paste in a small bowl
4. cream the butter and the sugar in a mixing bowl
5. sift in the flour and baking powder
6. add the eggs and the cocoa
7. blend
8. bake for 35-40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean

icing - beat the following together until blended

• 1oz melted plain chocolate
• 6oz icing sugar
• 2oz butter
• 1tbsp milk
• 1tbsp cocoa 

carrot cake for the soul

About eight years ago I quit my job in a blurry downward spiral of misery and heaving sobs. It was a bit more than a job actually, it was a serious bona fide career, for which I had spent six long university years studying like a fiend. I had lasted less than a year at the coal face and I felt dreadful.

I went to stay at my boyfriend’s flat in the city and tried to do useful things that would bolster my narrow and uniquely vocational cv. I bought manuals on Word, Excel and Access and spent hours at his tiny laptop while he went to work, trying not to get in the way of his flatmate.

To kill time during that Summer I made my first (grown up) personal recipe book; a plastic folder, plastic inserts and lots of coloured paper. I think it was probably a self-prescribed form of therapy.