Spicy parmasan crackers

  

It probably won't come as any surprise to anyone who's noticed the masthead that I rather like gin. The blog name comes from my twitter name, which in turn takes inspiration from a Dresden Dolls song, "Coin-operated boy", and was actually my husband's suggestion - the idea being that I come alive once gin is inserted. True, but in an emergency, wine, or even a nice cup of tea, will do.

But if I have a weakness for a nice gin and tonic, I have even more of a weakness for nibbly things to go with it. Although I like chocolate and enjoy cake, they're seldom my downfall. I am able, should I want to, to eat both in moderation.

When it comes to crisps and savoury nibbles, all moderation goes out of the window. These can't be kept in stock - they must be bought, a couple of packets on a Friday to last us the weekend. I've been known to hide packs of crisps bought on special offer in a different room so I don't see them when I'm opening the kitchen cupboards and become tempted. And while I love posh crisps, I love cheesy crispy things even more. You know the ones - the things that cost at least a couple of pounds a packet, where you look at the calories, go "that's not bad", and the realised it's per three nibbles. Who eats three nibbles?

So when I saw this recipe over at Domestic Sluttery, for parmesan and poppy seed crackers, I had to give them a go - especially as there was surprisingly little butter and parmesan in the recipe. (I am in no way suggesting these as a diet food. It's just they could be a lot worse.)

I liked the recipe, but made a couple of changes for the sake of ease - I didn't bother refrigerating the dough for ten minutes before rolling it into shape, as I have cold enough hands that it didn't go all sticky. And because it was slightly stickier than it would otherwise have been, I was able to roll it in the poppyseeds without needing to mess around with an egg glaze.

Because I wanted nibbles, I rolled it much smaller than recommended - roughly an inch in diameter. This meant that when I cut it up, after being good and putting it into the fridge for half an hour, I had hundreds of the things. Well, eighty.

After baking they certainly looked the part. Only thing was - they were VERY spicey, which was odd, since the recipe only described a "gentle warmth". I don't know if my cayenne pepper is particularly strong, but half a teaspoon was a lot, and they were perhaps more hot than was fun (still finished them all, natch). So next time I'll halve the cayenne. But there will be a next time. Possibly this weekend.

Embarrassingly easy: jam swirls

So, last week, after defrosting some pastry for a quiche, I realised I had a little extra.

"Never mind," I thought, "You've got five meals out of that pack of pastry, you can just chuck the rest."

Nope. For the next couple of hours, that pastry played on my mind. I couldn't bear to throw away good food.

I also had an idea - there was a jar of no-added-sugar jam in the fridge, which was bound to go off quite soon.

I combined the two, rolling out the pastry into an oblong, spreading it with jam, and baking the result for 15 minutes.

The result was delicious - light, and slightly chewy from the jam. I'll do it deliberately next time - and perhaps even make an effort to make them a bit prettier!

Makes 20 bite-sized swirls
90g puff patry
50g jam (the no-added-sugar stuff, made with grape juice, works well. I used raspberry)
Um... that's it!

Pre-heat your oven to 180C ish.
Roll out your pastry to an oblong about 10cm by 20cm.
Spread it thinly with the jam.
Carefully roll it up into a long, thin sausage.
Cut it up into 20 slices, and place on a baking tray, lined with baking parchment.
Bake for 15 minutes.
Allow to cool a little - jam gets VERY hot.
Eat. Try not to eat them ALL in one sitting. Maybe get up and make another cup of tea halfway through.

(I've tagged this one vegan as a lot of bought puff pastry is vegan - obviously, check your labels beforehand).

Recipe: Low fat and luscious strawberry pavlova

When Caroline from Second Hand Shopper told me she and her Dapper Chap were coming to town this weekend, I knew we just had to have them over for dinner.

It was a fantastic evening – as sore heads and the number of empty wine bottles lined up the next morning testified – and lovely to see Caroline after much too long and meet the lovely Dapper. (Who is indeed Dapper. I identified it was them in the taxi outside because I could see the perfect amount of shirt cuff appearing from a jacket sleeve.)

Because it was quite a short notice thing, and I’d been working all day, The Husband and I decided to keep the catering simple.

He cooked one of his signature dishes - a Nigel Slater recipe involving chicken thighs, herbs, white wine, slow frying and much licking of plates. It’s one of our favourites and I was embarrassed to discover we’d served it to Caroline last time she came to stay – enough to tempt me to start keeping an old-fashioned guest book! However, she was kind enough to insist that she’d loved it then, and certainly cleaned her plate!

But for all my insistence on simplicity, I had a new hand mixer to play with. Time to attempt meringues!

Everything needed to be made between me getting home from work at some time after half five, and guest arriving at half seven, so I went for a quick meringue recipe that gave a soft result, rather than drying everything out slowly in the oven overnight, which I’m planning to attempt last time. This meant the meringue did crack when transferred to the serving plate – but who cares, when it’s got stuff piled on top to hide it? It also that it was quite soft – lovely in the context, but I’m going to play at getting harder meringues.

I discovered using yoghurt rather than cream in pavlovas a few weeks ago, after going on Weightwatchers. I was expecting it to be a bit of a compromise – better than no pudding, but not as good as cream. I was wrong – I love the way the sharpness of the yoghurt contrasts with the sweet meringue and fruit.  I love this Total stuff because it’s so creamy and thick, despite being 0% fat. And also, yoghurt doesn’t need whipping – a major bonus if you don’t have a hand mixer, or you’re just washing-up averse!

Serves 4

Two egg whites

110g/4oz caster sugar (I used golden, for a pretty colour and a slightly more complex taste)

Two punnets strawberries or other soft fruit.

Quarter teaspoon cream of tartar (you can omit – it helps the egg whites puff up, though, so is handy)

Extra tbsp for macerating strawberries

One 150g pot Total 0% fat yoghurt

Turn the oven on to 140C (less if fan)

Line a baking tray with baking parchment.

In a large, scrupulously clean bowl (if it’s even slightly greasy it makes it harder to get the eggs to fluff up) whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks when you take the whisk out of the bowl. If you have a hand mixer this takes seconds. If you’re doing it by hand, it will happen eventually.

Arrange on the baking tray in a large circle. (I say arrange. I splodged it and then smoothed it out).

Bake for 45-60 minutes till the outside is crisp, and then leave the oven, turned off with the door open, for half an hour. This can be done ahead.

While the meringue is in the oven, or an hour or two before serving, whichever is later, core and halve the strawberries, sprinkle with a the extra sugar, and leave in a bowl to macerate.

Just before serving, place the meringue CAREFULLY on a serving plate, add yoghurt on top, and then arrange strawberries.

New toy: electric mixer

I can be a bit of a puritanical baker. Not in what I cook, but in the way I do it. Although I've had a food processor for years now, I tend to mix cakes by hand - it doesn't feel like I'm making it otherwise.

Although I do use the beaters on my food processor for some things, they're not very strong, and using them involves an unholy amount of washing up.

So generally, it's me and a hand whisk - even for meringues. It's good exercise!

However, recently I've been thinking how much easier life would be if I had a mixer - especially as I'm cooking more no-fat sponges, and they're just a pain by hand.

When I mentioned this idea to The Husband, he suggested I put some Christmas money we'd got from his grandparents towards it - because we both knew they'd be happy with us buying something for the kitchen with it. I also put some my birthday money from my Aunt towards it, as I wanted to buy something which has good reviews and a chance of lasting a good long while.

I went for a mixer in the Kenwood kMix range because it was good and heavy and had good reviews online – and, if I’m completely honest, because it's a fab almond colour and has a nice retro look. Until the day when I have the money and the space for a Kitchen Aid, I thought this would keep me happy!

It's good and heavy - so much so that my hand does start to hurt after mixing for a very long time, but no-where near as much as it does when using a hand whisk!

It also comes with a handy stand which keeps all its bits and bobs together - and means it can be kept out on display if you're not quite as desperately short of surface space as we are.

It cost just shy of £60, and I've already had a play with it, making both a very nice meringue and utterly failed mayonnaise. It made short work of both. In every sense, as far as the mayonnaise was concerned, but I suspect that was operator error! I'll blog both later in the week.

Tessa Kiros, and gingerbread hearts

For my birthday a couple of years ago my in laws bought me set of two Tessa Kiros cookbooks - Apples for Jam and Falling Cloudberries.

The books are stunning in themselves - beautifully shot pictures, full of intense colours. They're arranged along themes. Apples for Jam is full of family recipes, grouped by colour. Falling Cloudberries is more for grown ups, and that's arranged by the many countries Tessa and her family have lived.

And there you hit on the first reason why I don't use the books as often as I should. Does that seem to you an easily browsed format when you want a main course and a pudding for a dinner party, or a quick, cheap and lovely weeknight supper? Nope, me neither.

To me, although the books are a pleasure to flick through, they're a strange mix of recipes. Apples for Jam is full of deeply unshowy, even ordinary-sounding recipes, such as pasta with tuna, basil olives and tomato sauce, but made more complicated - but not necessarily much better. That one's the best example - we've made it a few times. To be honest, it had never occurred to me to cook that particular dish from a recipe until I saw it in the book, and I was stunned to find that, with the various faffing involved, it took more like 20 minutes to cook. It took The Husband a good deal longer than that. Now my version might not be as technically perfect, but the sauce is made in the length of time the pasta takes to boil, and tastes pretty damn good.

Other recipes do look lovely - little finger food canape things from all over the world, and an octopus, dried out on a washing line and then barbecued. But I'm not sure when I'd make either of those, or what the neighbours would think of an octopus on a communal washing line in the back yard!

But I realised I hadn't given the book a fair try and last weekend decided to make a cake or biscuits from it. There were lots of cakes, but most of them designed for puddings, or with so much fresh fruit or cream they'd need to be eaten on the day they were cooked - not ideal when there are two of you.

I found two possible recipes - a cake with olive oil, orange and pine nuts, and gingerbread cookies that were meant to be a Christmas recipe.

Always a sucker for gingerbread, I tried the latter, with the ingredients above (plus an egg, which I forgot to photograph).

I'd mixed it all up, it was smelling lovely and going well, and I was about to reconsider what I thought of the books. The oven was hot and I was all ready to go...

Until I realised the recipe said refrigerate overnight. At this point, I swore, lots. So much for having a house smelling of freshly cooked gingerbread for when the Husband came home from work.

So on went the clingfilm, into the fridge went the bowl.

The next day, I rolled out the biscuits. Or tried to. After a night in the fridge the mixture had become rock hard and it was a real effort to scoop it out onto a floured surface. But when I did it immediately became the stickiest substance imaginable, and near impossible to roll.

Which would have been forgivable if the end result had been delicious. But they're a bit plain, a bit too sensible tasting. They need darker sugar and more ginger to make them sing - at the moment, if anything they're bland. Not worth the fridge space overnight.

We're still eating them, mind - waste not, want not. But the real test? When I get home from work I find the husband has only eaten one or two of the tiny biscuits, if any. Just not up to Blondie standards.

I don't want to give up on the books - they're too pretty for that! And part of me wonders if they'll come into their own this summer as it warms up - once I've done something with a salmon fillet I run out ideas for summer dinner parties, and these books may help. But deep down, I suspect that they will be beautiful failures, and that they'll stay pretty - because they'll never have the splashes of oil, bits of flour and pencilled-in improvements that marks a recipe book which earns its keep.

Baking: Hummingbird marshmallow cupcakes, and a way to carry them

Last week I travelled down for a meeting in our Newcastle office. I wanted to thank my colleagues there for helping me out a few weeks ago, and I’d vaguely promised to bake.

I decided to make the prettiest cupcakes I could, partly to show off a bit but mostly because it’s hard not to smile when about to bite into a super pretty cupcake with a mountain of icing.

I spotted the recipe for marshmallow cupcakes in my Hummingbird Bakery book and it looked perfect (I’m squeamish about copying it here because of copyright, but it’s here).

Until I remembered my boss is vegetarian, and a strict one – she wouldn’t touch the gelatine in marshmallows.

So I made half with the marshmallow – on the right, pictured – and added a couple of drops of red, suitable-for-veggies food colouring to the other half of the icing to make it pink.

But the other problem was how to get them down to Newcastle on the train in tact. I’d been thinking about this for a while after too many experiences baking pretty cup cakes for cake sales, and having them get squashed and ruined on the bus.

So I sent the Husband to Lakeland to buy me this.

 

It’s huge, and would be a pain if you had too much else to carry, but it does the job. It has an indented space for each cupcake, can also hold 24 mini ones or one big cake, and clips together sturdily. I have never attracted so many stares when walking through Waverley station as I did when I was carrying this and the cakes, and I think if our train had been delayed I would have had to fight off my fellow passengers.

The cup cake caddy didn't work perfectly - when I got on to the train, some toppled and had to be rearranged - but they all made it down in tact and it survived most things - getting on and off the bus for example - just not the mad rush for seats on the 8am train down to London!

The cupcakes were very well received in the office - a horde of very happy gannets descended - but my colleagues were also intrigued by the carrier itself and wanted to know where I got it. If the Newcastle branch of Lakeland has sold out, I'm sorry, it's my fault.

Baking: Blondies

In a pretty inspired move for someone who doesn't know me all that well, the Husband's uncle gave me Nigella's Kitchen for Christmas. I actually whooped when I opened it, a few weeks into January (snow had disrupted the normal pattern of family present deliveries). I was delighted and touched he'd got me anything at all, let alone something I wanted so much. But although I've spent several evenings happily flicking through it, I hadn't cooked anything from it until Sunday.

I wanted to make a pile of treats for the Husband to pick at during the week. He lost his job in January, and he's so busy at home, applying for jobs and doing freelance work, as well as working shifts outside his profession to bring in regular money, that he's not brilliant at remembering to eat, let alone take breaks. But having cake in the house seems to help this. He finally finished the wodge of Christmas cake we brought back from my in-laws a couple of weeks ago and I wanted something to replace it -something that wouldn't come to any harm left in a cake tin for a few days, in the hope that it would inspire him to take a few minutes off every now and then, and something substantial enough to fill a little hole. And if I happen to have the odd one... oh well.

So when I saw the recipe for Blondies I couldn't resist. It was typical Nigella - simply written and easy to follow. I couldn't get chocolate chips in my local supermarket so had a fun few minutes chopping up bars of cooking chocolate. I didn't chop them up very finely, which meant that some of the finished blondies had HUGE chunks of chocolate in them. This was a Good Thing, so I'll do it again.

Mmmmmm

And here's the final result:

Obviously, I wanted to leave them all for The Husband. But I knew my reader(s) would need to know how they tasted. So selflessly, I had one for you - I couldn't not, especially as one crumbled as I was cutting them up.

And they're good. Lovely and sweet, chocolatey, but the oats make them substantial and means they taste ever so slightly healthy. And when they're still warm?... Excuse me, I just need to go and eat another one.

As for the Husband's final verdict? Well, yesterday, after he'd eaten his first, rapidly followed by his second, I got a text message largely made up of "mmm" and kisses. A success then.

Tea and cake

My brother-in-law gave me a mini Hummingbird Bakery cookbook for Christmas, as well as the prettiest pink cupcake cases.

I loved the look of the book instantly. Although I've made a lot of cupcakes in my time, I'd never got on to any flavourings more exotic than rosewater, and I'd made up my own techniques, using a classic sponge recipe which is perfect for a fairy cake but slightly too heavy for a cupcake. The book has ginger cupcakes and lavender cupcakes and the technique for capturing the more unusual flavours (soaking the ginger or lavender in a little milk for hours and cooking with the milk) looks transferrable. It also has some lovely looking savoury muffins I'll try later in the year when it's too warm for boiled eggs and soldiers for breakfast.

But I only got a chance to cook from the book this weekend.

This was baking on impulse, with ingredients from the store cupboard and the local supermarket, so I decided to go for the lemon cupcakes for ease. The Husband also asked for a baking lesson at the same time, so we baked together, in our tiny kitchen.

The process wasn't without hitches - without thinking I added the lemon zest that was meant to go in the icing to the cake mix and so substituted lemon juice for the milk in the icing, which worked nicely, but perhaps gave a sharper flavour. The book said to fill the cases two thirds full - but there wasn't enough cake mix for this, so I only filled eight cases. But then the cakes rose so much they were a little too high, so actually, the recipe would have been enough for 12, rather than eight.

And as it was The Husband's first time with food colouring, the cakes looked rather like someone had stuck a canary in a blender, rather than a nice subtle pastel yellow.

But the hitches weren't the book's fault - and the cakes were delicious with a cup of tea and the Sunday papers. So delicious, they're now all gone. Oops.

Madeleines and memories

On Thursday night, after dinner, I suddenly had an overwhelming craving for cake. Not just any cake, nor just anything sweet - it had to be a light, vanilla-scented sponge, full of subtle, clean flavours. I was seriously tempted to bake, but at gone 9pm, I decided I would be asleep before the cake was cool enough to eat, and had a glass of Cointreau instead. Not a bad cake substitute, actually. 

But by Friday morning the craving had crystallised. I wanted the almost-greasy stickiness of madeleines. A lunch hour mission to Lakeland provided me with a madeleine tin (and much more besides thanks to a 3 for 2 on bakeware) and, as soon as I got home from work, I started. 

At first I tried this recipe, as it looked by far the simplest, and I whisked the eggs by hand - quite an undertaking. Now, talking about madeleines and memories is now an unbearable cliché, and as I've never even read Proust, it's one I have no right to invoke. But whisking? That's a different story. And as I stood there, bowl in the crook of one arm, balloon whisk whizzing in the other hand, I remembered Mrs Harris standing over me when I was eight, teaching me how to mix a cake batter. 

My mum is a brilliant cook, but hates baking, and both my grandmothers lived a long way away and died before I was 12. So Mrs Harris - a short, stout, perfectly coiffed and rather glam 50-or-60-something who looked after my brother and me when my mum was at work in the school holidays, and who my father always said looked a little like Mrs Tiggy- winkle, stepped in. 

We were old enough not to need babysitters, and Mrs Harris didn't need the money, but as she once told me, she looked after other people's children out of love. She taught my brother and me how to play cards, with a pot of pennies as the stake 'so we would know not to gamble'. She kept her cards in an old B&H packet, and the gold looked so sophisticated - but she told us how long it had taken her to give up, and that we should never start. Not a hard lesson to take on board when both our grandmothers died of cancer. 

She taught us how to be Scrabble demons, with her official word book and refusal to let us 'throw away' high value tiles by not putting them on at least a double letter score square. And she supervised me baking, allowing me to be in charge, but gently showing me how to do things better, more intuitively - how to tilt the bowl in one arm while I mixed with the other. When my eight-year-old arms got tired, she would take over for a minute. 

She kept coming in, a morning or two a week, long after we stopped needing the supervision, long after we stopped needing the entertainment, because by then she'd become a surrogate grandmother, and we loved her as much as she did us. 

So it was probably only a couple of months since we'd seen her when she died of a heart attack in her sleep when I was 14 or 15. I was devastated - I was old enough to understand what it meant, and it was so sudden. But now, just as I hear my mother's voice when I'm making a bechamel (she's still going strong, by the way) I hear Mrs Harris when I'm whisking or beating and my arm gets tired, or trying to show the Husband the easier way to do it. I remember her best knitted red outfit, the B&H packet of cards, the smell of her powder, and the no-fuss unconditional love she gave two children she babysat. And I smile. 

Having said all that, those madeleines were actually a bit disappointing - light but anaemic, like a fat-free sponge. They disappeared quickly enough, so yesterday I could justify trying again, and I made this recipe - and used the beaters on my food processor rather than a whisk. The results are the madeleines pictured - and they're delicious, especially dipped into a cup of tea.