Perfect pound cake

This holiday weekend should have provided an opportunity to try out some new dishes.  Instead, I returned to something old for our Easter Sunday dessert.

I've received a lot of good recipes from both of my grandmothers over the years.  Indeed, Grandma's shortbread has already made an appearance on this blog.  However, nothing has been made quite so often in the Glennie household as the following recipe for pound cake, which comes down from family on my mother's side.  For such a seemingly simple recipe - a pound each of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, plus a few other bits and pieces - it is surprisingly hard to get it right.  Gramary is the only one who has managed to do it consistently, and I have spent years trying to live up to her standards.  If you don't follow the instructions to the letter, or leave it unattended in the oven for too long, you're likely to end up burning the top, or turning the cake out from the pan only to see half of it still stuck to the bottom.

However, the rare times when you do get it right - and last night was one of them for me - there is perhaps no cake so sublime.  It is light enough that you (almost) don't feel guilty having two or three pieces at a time, and has a lovely uncluttered sweet flavour that won't send you into a sugar shock.

There's a reason it is always first choice for birthdays and other special occasions in our house.

Ring-Mould Pound Cake

1 cup margarine
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1/3 tsp ground mace
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups sifted cake flour (I've never been able to figure out what cake flour actually is - something North American - but you can substitute with regular flour: just remove 2 tbsp for each cup)
3 eggs
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup milk

Sift the flour, mace, salt and baking powder three times.  Time-consuming and a little annoying, but whatever you do, don't skip this step. 

In a separate bowl, cream the margarine and the sugar.  Add the eggs to the mixture, beating after each one, and then do the same with the vanilla.

To this, add the flour mixture a little at a time, beating it in well.  As the mix starts getting stiffer, add in the milk and beat - alternate the two until the flour and the milk are used up and the mixture is a smooth and fluffy consistency.

Pour the whole lot into a greased and floured ring mould cake tin and spread it evenly - it should fill about 2/3 of the tin.

Here comes the hard part - judging how long and at what temperature to bake the cake.  Our original recipe says to bake it at 350 degrees for an hour and then at 300 degrees for a final five minutes.  But I'd keep an eye on it and check after 45 minutes to make sure it isn't burning.  Basically you're good to go when the top of the cake is golden brown and a skewer comes out clean.  Leave it in the pan for 5 minutes after it comes out of the oven, and then invert on a wire rack and allow to cool completely.  Serve with fruit, ice cream, or nothing at all.  Preferably accompanied by a little Van Halen. 

Et voila!  Happy Easter, dear readers.

Pitta rising

One of the main delights of reading a cook book is in how it demystifies cooking. Those dishes that seem so intimidating are made approachable with a recipe's few easy steps; just follow the instructions.

This works for the everyday items, too. Pitta bread, for instance; bought with a punnet of hummus, consumed with some haloumi cheese, available in food outlets high and low, so commonplace that one needn't try to make it oneself. Where would one start? Why would one bother?

First answer: looking in the Fabulous Baker Brothers book (again). Second answer: it's fun, quick and in my view the results are tastier than what's available in most stores.

Quick? Oh yes, surprisingly so. But first, the ingredients: mix a sachet of dried yeast in a jug with 20 millilitres of rapeseed oil and 300 millilitres of tepid water; add this combined liquid to 560 grams of strong white flour with 10 grams of sea salt in a large bowl. 

Mix and knead for 15 minutes by hand or for ten minutes by machine with a dough hook: any excess wetness from the liquid will soon disappear as you create a pliable bread dough. Cover with a tea towel and leave for an hour.

Pulling off the tea towel, the dough should have expanded up to twice its size. Now comes the cooking, so heat up your oven to 230º Celsius, or whatever your oven's maximum is (ours is a lowly 200ºC, but we love it so). Put a baking tray inside to heat up with the oven.

While the oven's warming up, pull off pieces of the dough of around 100 grams each. Shape each one into a ball and, on a well-floured work surface, roll the dough out into pittas, keeping both sides well-floured so they don't stick. Keep rolling until the pitta is as long as your arm, from knuckle to elbow.

Once ready, pull out the baking tray with oven gloves or the like and place the pitta onto it carefully. Now, place this in the oven. Within 30 seconds, the pitta bread will start rising... and in well under five minutes, the pitta bread will have not have just risen but ballooned, browned and baked.

Take this out and let dry on a rack; continue with the next ball of dough and then next and the next, until you've got a pile of warm pittas ready for eating or storing. Next? Buy some hummus or haloumi cheese or... actually, why not make some?

The breakfast club

In preparation for holding the first of what I hope will be many vintage tea parties, I bought a book to research precisely how to give one. The book, by Angel Adoree, is a delight: beautifully produced, with pictures of invitations, crockery, style tips... and recipes. Glancing through the brunch section, I found something I had to try.

What follows is something of a cautionary tale. In attempting a fairly simple Chocolate Coconut Granola, I got all a bit arrogant and changed quantities as well as following my own instructions. Don't do this. Miss Adoree's done this before and I will give her recipe verbatim (with one or two things I may have done differently, what I learned and how I'll cook it next time.)

What she advises you use is this: 240 grams of rolled oats; 175g of flaked almonds; 70g shredded unsweetened coconut; 70g dark brown sugar; 40g unsweetened cocoa powder; 90ml honey; 50 ml vegetable oil; 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon and 3/4 teaspoon of salt.

What I did was to say, "oh, that'll hardly be enough," and promptly doubled the amounts. As I say, don't do this: you'll double some measures but forget to do others; after a while you'll think, "does it really need that much?" You. Will. Get. This. Recipe. Wrong. Just do as the lady says. Which is this:

In a large bowl, mix the oats, almonds, coconut and brown sugar. In another large bowl, mix the cocoa powder, honey, oil, cinnamon and salt. Switch your oven onto 120ºC / 100ºC fan assisted / gas mark 1/2. This may not seem too high, but trust the instructions.

Then combine the two mixtures. This is slightly difficult: you'll be mixing your oat cocktail with a chocolate sauce that has the consistency of crude oil. You'll need to mix and mix so that all the oats are covered. Use your fingers rather than a spoon and wash your hands regularly. Pour onto two baking trays.

Now place the trays in the oven and bake the granola for 1 1/4 hours, stirring every 15 minutes to achieve an even colour. So doing, you may find that the granola looks and feels quite soft. Again, trust the recipe. On taking it out, the granola will cool and harden, whereupon you could either use the granola to serve up to eight people right there and then, or store for some delicious breakfasts for yourself over the coming week. Just add milk.

Once made (properly), by all means, throw in what you like next time. When I make this again, I may add raisins or more seeds. Either way, now I have this granola recipe I may never buy it from a shop again.

Disaster-Banana Muffins

On Shrove/Fat/Pancake Tuesday, my best friend Margi posted this tantalising recipe on her blog:

Makes 8 pancakes.

1/4 cup plain flour
1/4 cup oatbran
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 bananas
Nutella. 

Sift together the flour and baking powder. Add the oatbran. Whisk together the milk and egg and add to the dry material. Mix. Let sit for 5/10 minutes. Mash the bananas. Add to the mixture. Heat a lightly oiled frying pan until it's pretty hot. Use the 1/4 cup measure to drop the pancake mixture onto the pan. Cook until the mixture is bubbling. Flip over and cook until the other side is brown. Eat. Die of a foodgasm. You can spread them with nutella if you are being decadent. 

This recipe was originally from the Moosewood cookbook (well worth buying btw, excellent all round veggie and vegan cookbook.) The original was too stodgy and unhealthy for my liking to I took out the crap and substituted half the flour for oatbran. If you can't find oatbran (in the UK it's in the health food and 'free from' aisle) do 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup oats. If you don't have cup measures there is a conversion table here. 

Now, I *have* to make pancakes on Shrove/Fat/Pancake Tuesday. I'm not a superstitious person, but that is one tradition that is sacrosant. Tuesday nights mean dance class, so by the time I got started on these it was coming up on 11pm.

Pro tip: if, like me, you're going to use a potato masher to smoosh your bananas, use a bigger bowl.

For once, I followed the recipe to the letter. Or at least I think I did. It was late at night. I have no idea what I did wrong, but (as you may have guessed from the title of the post), it was not my finest culinary hour (although I take the BEST live action pancake flipping shots):

As you can see, this was burnt and misshapen. I think it was too runny to cook the middle before the outside burned. I have no idea. But I just couldn't bring myself to waste all the lovely batter, so I stuck what was left in some cupcake cases and popped them in the oven on a medium heat for about half an hour.

Did I mention the extremely cute cupcake cases? They were a much appreciated gift, purchased from Lakeland & Limited.

The recipe worked great as muffins, maybe a little bit overly dense but a really lovely flavour and delightfully sticky thanks to the bananas.

Flapjack-adjacent biscuit-type-things

I expect my consistent inability to provide clear descriptions or accurate quantities for my recipes is rather frustrating, but it's more than just laziness and bad record-keeping on my part: I genuinely believe that the best cooking is done by sight and flavour and texture (or sound: read this amazing article on that), with the ingredients you have to hand.

Today I needed something with sugar in it to help me through a very long day on very little sleep. After a quick sweep of my dwindling stocks, I made a batch of sweet oaty treats somewhere between biscuits and flapjacks. I didn't measure any of the ingredients or pay attention to how long they were in the oven (at least not in minutes - it was as long as it took me to get bored of Prime Minister's Questions and put on a load of laundry...).

I mixed roughly equal volumes of flour, sugar and margarine to about double that volume of porridge oats, until I got a mixture that was close to crumble topping but stickier. I then added runny honey, about the same volume as the margarine, a pinch of salt, a pinch of cinnamon, and a few drops of vanilla essence, and mixed until I achieved a doughy mixture that held its shape.

I spread it to about three-quarters-of-an-inch thickness onto baking paper on a baking tray, and baked at 200 degrees for about half an hour, which was a little bit too long. I then left it to cool quite thoroughly before cutting into squares:

Pizza joy

A pizza is very easy to get hold of. One can head to the local takeaway, or to a restaurant, be it a chain or single business, or pick up a slice from a street vendor, depending on which country one is in. Some may be disappointing, others may be delicious, but they're all just there in easy reach, a short distance from your home.

This pizza's availability is a little closer (in your own kitchen) and dare I say it, cheaper too. It's from Jamie's Italy by Jamie Oliver, a cook book I am working my way through in what is turning out to be a year of mainly Italian food. You should be able to make a batch of pizzas from this recipe.

Firstly, you make your pizza dough: get a kilo of strong white bread flour, one level tablespoon of salt (a tablespoon? [Really, you don't need to use that much if you don't feel like it]), two 7 gram sachets of dried yeast, a table spoon of golden caster sugar (ditto as per the salt. [I really haven't noticed the difference in the two attempts I've made at this recipe]) and a pint of tepid water.

Add the sugar and yeast to the water and leave for a few moments, while you place the sugar, salt and flour into a large bowl. Once the yeast and sugar have bubbled up, add this to the flour and get to mixing and kneading for a little over ten minutes. Roll this dough into a ball, cover with clingfilm or a tea towel and leave for at least 15 minutes, during which time you can make some tomato sauce.

Heat a saucepan, add a little olive oil and fry a finely sliced clove of garlic for a few moments. To this by now golden garlic, add a handful of basil leaves, two tins of plum tomatoes and a pinch of salt and pepper. Cook on a low heat for about twenty minutes, mashing the tomatoes as you go, after which, let it cool.

Now get back to your dough. Divide the slightly risen ball into six smaller batches. Take one of these, lightly dust your work surface with flour and roll the ball out until you have a vague circle of dough that is about half a centimetre or a quarter inch thick. Now, it's topping time; while you do this next step, turn your oven onto 200ºC.

Regarding toppings, the world is your oyster. You have the tomato sauce. You will have acquired some mozzarella cheese. Really, you could stop there, add both and make a lovely margherita pizza, but let's not stop there this time: this is a variation I could never quite trust in any establishment until now, as it involves an egg on the surface.

You will need: six table spoons of tomato sauce; two baby artichokes from a jar; three slices of prosciutto; a handful of stoned olives; one egg, 85 grams of mozzarella, extra virgin olive oil and salt and pepper.

Spread the tomato sauce over the pizza base. Onto this, scatter the torn artichoke pieces, over which you lay the prosciutto slices and the olives. Crack over the egg. Place torn pieces of mozzarella everywhere you see a gap. Drizzle with a little oil then season with the salt and pepper. The oven should be hot by now; place it in and cook until crisp and golden.

Before...

After! And lots of it, too...

You will have one delicious pizza. But then you'll look in your dough bowl and remember that you have five balls to go. No matter; continue cooking. You may feel that the first pizza didn't quite go as it should and you'd like another attempt. You may find that you are with others who may just want a pizza of their own. Or you may realise, like me, that you'd like to eat this all week. (This is how I tend to eat: one dish cooked in bulk, to reheat during the coming week, at home or work with little fuss.) While you're doing this, consider the may other toppings that you could try later.

In any case, you can set up a pizza production line, to be consumed right there and then, or to cool and be frozen, for defrosting and heating up at a later time. In any case, you now have your pizza; easy to get hold of, in your own kitchen.