How to catch the Man

Many moons ago, I was at an exceptionally boring conference in Monaco. The one bright spot was a flourishing flirtation with an old acquaintance, who bought me a bottle of Becks in Jimmy's Bar, the most over-priced and unattractive venue I ever hope to drink in. €56 for two bottles of beer!
We speedily left for more amusing pursuits, but I promised to repay him back in London. The retirement of my Monegasque debt was done in a delightful Turkish fish restaurant round the corner from where I lived.
After a very pleasant evening, I suggested he should walk home via my house, where I had some leftover homemade cheesecake to be eaten.
He has since told me that this cheesecake was the decisive factor in paying me serious attention.
It's very, very simple.
Crust:
3 oz melted butter
8 oz biscuit crumbs (I use gingernuts and sometimes even add some ground ginger)
Mix well, then press firmly into the base of a 10 inch (26 cm) springform tin and put in the fridge.

First layer:
2 beaten eggs
12 oz cream cheese (340g)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp lemon juice OR 1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt

Beat these ingredients together until creamy, pour into the tin and spread smoothly over the base. Bake for 20 mins at 190 0C (gas mark 5). There is a frantic note in my personal cookbook to the effect that the tin should be put in the oven ON A BAKING TRAY (or it leaks and makes the oven filthy).
It should still be wobbly and jiggly when you take it out. Allow it to cool to room temperature.

Second layer:
Heat the oven to 220 0C.
1 1/2 cups sour cream (350mls)
2 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp salt

Beat this well, pour carefully on top of the cheesecake, which has probably got a few gaping cracks in it - ignore those. Put the whole thing in the hot oven for five minutes.

When it comes out, you must chill it for at least six hours, ideally several days.

Only serve to single men if you are prepared to deal with the consequences.

Belated Solstice Greetings

My parents-in-law send and receive around 150 Christmas cards every year. Because they are artists, many of their friends are artists, so they get some lovely cards.
We have received a grand total of eight Christmas cards this year. But that's ok, because we don't send cards at all. Slightly quixotically, we send little Christmas cakes. This year, I even made the marzipan myself. 150 would be ridiculous, but we manage around 30.
The drill is make a square cake sometime in November, then at the beginning of December, cut it into little squares, which then get marzipanned, iced and decorated before being posted off to all our friends and relations. (Well, those for whom we have addresses. If you didn't get one and you think you should, send me an email!)
Unfortunately this year I cut the little square cakes carefully to fit the boxes we had bought without allowing for the extra double thickness of marizipan and icing. Luckily the Kitchen Accomplice noticed and sliced off the necessary slivers. She then had the inspired idea of crumbling up the resulting pointless pieces of cake and shaping the crumbs into snowmen, to be held together with marzipan, snowed over with white royal icing and decorated a la mode.This was the only one I saw being eaten, having lovingly but not very carefully transported it home to Ireland for a family Solstice celebration. You can see the decorations didn't really survive the journey.
I was afraid the poor little snowman's insides would be similarly messy, as we hadn't mixed anything into the cake crumbs to bind them together, but they were a triumph.

See? How cool is that for a Christmas card?

Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake

Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake, Baker's man,
Bake me a cake as fast as you can.

Perhaps my parents sang this to me too often in my cradle. There has to be some reason for my compulsion to bake cakes.

Last night I decided my colleagues had gone too long with no cake or cookies, so I bought some blueberries and made Blueberry Streusel Cake from one of my favourite websites.

Streusel is a staple of American coffee cakes. It took me a long time to work out that coffee cake in American novels refers to cake to be eaten with a cup of coffee, not coffee-flavoured cake. They tend to be plain sponges with some keynote ingredient and the streusel.

It sounds exotic, doesn't it? It's basically just an aromatic and crispy crumble. It adds an interesting texture and a very pleasant, sugary-spicy flavour to an otherwise slightly dull cake.

Red velvet

Remember my valentine cake? Made (partly) out of red velvet cake? Well, I thought it was time to try out the cake properly.
It's a funny thing with baking soda and vinegar - surely they cancel each other out?
I used this recipe for red velvet cake - which I won't repost here - from one of my favourite baking websites.
The recipe calls for pints and pints of extraordinarily rich 'creamcheese frosting'. You make two normal layers of cake, then cut each laterally in half, so you have a four layer cake. That means four layers of icing - yum, yum! Although I must confess that my appetite for gooey icing seems to have been quenched somewhat with age.

Still, it looks good with the red stripes, doesn't it?

The romantic associations of tea-bread

I'm normally a staunch member of the 'Down with Raisins' fraternity, but there is one exception. Tea bread, which is really cake made with raisins soaked in tea, somehow persuades me it is acceptable. Perhaps this is something to do with having been introduced to it by a very close friend when a teenager - not a boyfriend (always so much less romantic than the imagination), but a boy nevertheless.

For years I carried his recipe for tea bread, written in his characteristically spiky handwriting, in my wallet. It was very slightly more complex than the one I use now, but came out very well too.

My current recipe has the beauty of extreme simplicity.

2 mugs dried fruit
1 mug brown sugar
1 mug hot black tea
1 egg
1 mug self-raising flour.

Soak the fruit and sugar overnight in the tea, mix in the egg and flour, pour into a greased and lined loaf tin and bake at 150 C, gas mark 2, for an hour and a half.

Unable to leave well alone, I add some pinches of spice - cinnamon and clove, even a pinch of star anise I ground earlier - but this is entirely optional.

The important thing is to serve it in thickly buttered slices. Yum!

One more valentine-ish post

The recipe for the elaborate Valentine's cake was a bit sketchy on some of the details, especially about amounts. This led to my making two layers of red velvet cake when only one was necessary and more than double the amount of cream cheese frosting.
So I had the inspired idea of slicing the second layer into two very thin layers, then using a heart-shaped cookie cutter to make lots of little heart-shaped cakes, which I then iced with the leftover cream cheese frosting. A few coloured sprinkles and you have perfect little Valentine's cakes. How's that for creative?
They made a perfect hostess gift for the delightful Sunday lunch I have just come home from (around 8pm), and were surprisingly nice. The only snag is that cream cheese frosting doesn't really harden at all, so they didn't transport perfectly and serving them was a bit messy.
And I forgot to photograph them, so you just have to imagine what they looked like.

Valentine cake

It's a little different from the Bakerella version. For a start, it's not as perfect or pretty. I'm not a perfectionist, which means that what I do is rarely to a very high standard. On the other hand, I do a lot of things, even if sometimes they are a bit slapdash.
Another excuse for its less than perfect appearance is that I used marzipan instead of fondant to make the cardboard box. I've never worked with fondant, so it may well be easier to manage, but the marzipan was very soft after kneading in the food colouring. While on the topic of food colouring, neither the cake nor the marzipan came out as red as suggested. I think Green & Black's cocoa may be darker than standard American cocoa, so it overrode the redness. The food colouring itself seems to come out pink rather than red - the whole concoction used a bottle and a half of food colouring!

Ambitious plans

I have very ambitious plans for a Valentine's day cake. Before you get all upset, I should reassure you that I haven't gone all soppy and conventionally romantic. This is pure self-indulgence as I take on a patisserie challenge. The Man will eat at most two or three slices, but if it works, I'll make it again the following week for a friends' wedding.
Anyway, the idea comes from a random blog, (I don't want to put up a picture because I don't want to follow that - you'll see my version first!), and it's based on an American recipe (as above) called red velvet cake. I've made the base cake and it smells gorgeous and looks very nice, but it's sort of dark chocolatey red rather than the scarlet of all the pictures. Despite two tablespoons of red food colouring!

Kitchen Rivals

I haven't been posting much on the blog, partly because things have been busy at work, what with the end of the world as we know it (I'm a financial journalist) and partly because I'm having to fight for space in the kitchen.
My wonderful stepdaughter is going through a manic baking phase, which has the unexpected consequence that she has a devoted fan club both in my place of work and her father's.
She will only bake cakes, muffins, cookies - sweet things all - and neither she nor her dad is greedy enough to eat all of them, and I'm not very keen at all. So every other weekend, when the Accomplice has spent three days with us, we bring tubs of chocodoodles, strawberry jam doughnut muffins, cinnamon cookies, honey and spice cake, into work and distribute them among our fellow-workers.
I have qualms about how wasteful the practice is, and I dislike being expected to eat so many cakes, but I can't bring myself to discourage her from such a wholesome, productive, self-empowering pursuit. I love coming home from work on Thursdays to a flat full of seductively sweet baking smells, being offered a still warm cookie while I'm taking my coat off, seeing her triumph when an experiment works and her determined analysis of failures.
But my belated new year resolution is not to let this deter me from writing about food - and to try to blog more regularly.