Kitchen Diaries: Double Ginger Cake

It's spring, and there are good seasonal ingredients again! After last night's warm salad of Jersey Royals, asparagus and bacon with the world's faffiest artichokes, we were in need of a little extra somethin'. No chocolate or cream in the house to lift those pears in the fruit bowl out of obscurity, so we embarked on making a cake.

(Ok. So all my posts are about cake. Even the salmon was in cake form. I might have certain... proclivities. )

Yes, a cake. Listening to Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, I hauled the multitude of ingredients out of the store cupboard to make this near-perfect ginger cake. It's one of my favourites in the book - especially because I've never, never had all the ingredients it calls for in the right quantity, and substitutions never seem to ruin it.

In the past I've had to use plain caster sugar instead of dark muscovado, marmalade for the syrup, and possibly some dried apricots for the sultanas. It always tastes just as good. This time, a little treacle is required.

I think its advantage is that you don't need to cream the butter and sugar at the start. By melting the wet ingredients together, the whole thing seems a lot more incorporated and smooth - this must maximise air bubbles that give it such a beautiful lightness.

The top of the cake crisps to add seductive bite. I can only suggest you try a sizeable square, warm from the oven, with a dollop of freshly whipped cream on the top for a completely erotic experience.

But like the best lovers, this cake is still good the next day. Ok, the crispy edge has gone and its perfume isn't as strong, but it's mighty fine with a cup of tea in a sunbeam.

Please, make a date with this pudding. And get a whole bunch more by buying Nigel's Kitchen Diaries through our Amazon store. Now available in paperback for the weak-limbed!

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Kitchen Diaries: A Tale of Three Cakes

Lemon and Orange Cheesecake (April 22)
Really Fast Cake with Blueberries and Pears (May 15)
Strawberry Mascarpone Tart (June 24)


Three cakes? Well, it was my birthday party /baby shower at the weekend, and I'm one of those people who get as much or more pleasure from making my own cake as from eating it. So why stop at just one?

I've been a little suspicious of Nigel's baking recipes in the past - totally unwarranted, but I've had some rotten luck every time I try them out. Oven too hot, broken mixer, etc. But he's proven his cake chops with these rich, springtime puds.


I made the cheesecake and blueberry/pear cake the day before the party just in case my streak continued. Fortunate also because what time I saved in making the 'really fast' cake is totally taken up with the cheesecake. While combining the ingredients and making the crumb base is extremely simple, cooking the thing gets a trifle more complicated.

American cheesecake (my preferred style) is baked long and slow, to a consistency which could doubtless be used to smother a man. Last week, at the one good restaurant in Wood Green, we were served something in the European quivvery, moussey style that was tasty but unsatisfying. I worried, what with the gentle cooking in a bain marie, whether Nigel's would fall into the latter camp. Though it doesn't quite splinter and flake as a real NY brick, the mascarpone/egg/cream/cream cheese blend provides the desired suffocating density. It ends up being the favourite from those greedy enough to try all three.

While the oven cooled with the cheesecake inside (for a good hour or so), I set to work chopping pears and blitzing batter for the 'emergency' cake. The 'classic "equal butter to sugar to flour" base' recipe Nigel quotes isn't known to me, but I'm willing to try it out in the next few months. It makes a much stiffer dough than the sponge batter I would expect. I also increase the ingredients slightly to stretch it for more people. I don't know what the egg part of the ratio is, so I stick to two - might account for its texture.

The batter is pretty thin in the tin so I don't skimp on the fruit - squishing it into the batter in the hopes it raises up during the baking. It doesn't disappoint, but I expect it would taste nicer warm with a dollop of Greek yoghurt for breakfast.

Saturday morning is time to make the strawberry tart. I can't get behind the base as suggested. I use all butter shortbread rather than the super posh biscuits - I assume he means the Duchy ones? - to save pennies. And it is impossible to shape in the tart dish without really squishing it together, so no crumbly pebbly texture. This does help in serving it later, except for the first piece which came out looking more like an Eton mess (sorry, Dave).

The only problem with the recipe is that he underestimates wildly the amount of strawberries. I sliced closer to 500g onto the top than the 250g suggested. I doubt he was really paying attention at the time, just adding until it was covered. Oh, and could a tart look that good in a rectangular tin? I can't imagine it, and anyway I don't have one. Round is pretty enough.

Secretly, everyone's pleased that a few people haven't shown up. One person actually said, 'I had four helpings, and I'm not even a pudding person.' Well, if that's not praise enough for Nigel's cakes, I don't know what is.

Buy the book, be a domestic god(dess). Preferably through our Amazon shop.

Kitchen Diaries: Roast chicken wings with lemon and cracked pepper

My self-imposed finishing book deadline looms heavily on the horizon and I have a compulsory weekend of anti-sociability to try and make headway. But I write lists of other things to do, I try to make easter eggs, I think about cleaning the garden and wonder whether my CDs need reorganising. I decide on something easy for diner and for some reason, the sunny day, the need for comfort food, I settle on "Roast chicken wings with lemon and cracked pepper" (April 26).

The chicken wings at the supermarket look so pathetic, 12 bits of skin and bone squashed in together for £1.89 (how can that be financially viable?), that I can't bring myself to buy them and go for infinitely happier looking drumsticks. There are still no bay leaves in stock and the smell of a middle class uprising lingers around Camden Sainsburys herb section.

I squeeze lemons and crack pepper corns and mix olive oil and chuck the chicken in the oven to sit down and get sucked into About Schmidt. 45 mins later they're lemon fresh and peppery hot and roast chicken gooey. Cosy and pretty much perfect for a lonely Saturday night in an empty house. Nigel wins again.

Kitchen Diaries: Roast Pork With Lemon And Potatoes

My favourite style of cooking is the archetypal lazy bloke method – shove a load of meat and vegetables in a pan, with some other tasty bits and pieces, apply heat and some minimal supervision. The key is the choice of ingredients: not too many, keep it simple stupid, etc. This is a great meal for that: potatoes not even parboiled or peeled, just cut in half and thrown in along with some lemon wedges and fennel seeds. I didn't even know what fennel seeds looked like before yesterday but fortunately A (my better half) is working through a mild fennel obsession so we had some handy. Anyway, preparation time about two minutes. Top stuff.

I actually cooked it for half an hour longer than recommended, due to the roast being a bit slow to cook through (our oven isn't great), but it didn't seem to do any harm. Normally I'd parboil potatoes before roasting but these little new potatoes came out with a perfect texture: just the right amount of waxy resistance, and flavoured beautifully. I'd be tempted to do more than the recipe suggests just because they're so great and work well in salads the next day.

The fennel flavours the potatoes and lemons very nicely, but not so much the meat, as it's not swimming in the fennelly lemon juice. The recipe states that basting the pork isn't necessary but I'd actually recommend it as the flavouring on the pork by the end was perhaps a little on the subtle side, and though the juices left over made a fantastic gravy some could have been spared for the meat.

I ate the lemons as well. I wouldn't recommend eating more than a quarter of a lemon's worth of chunks as they get a bit sour, although the texture is great. Mr Slater doesn't say whether eating the lemons is expected, but this sort of decision is best left to the eater: I liked them, A didn't. Maybe rather than eating them in big chunks they could be chopped up and put in a little bowl as a relish (with the uneaten going in a jar in the fridge).

By the way, the smell from this meal cooking is amazing – if you're lucky enough to have a big kitchen/dining room, make this for guests while they sit around chatting: they will be drooling in anticipation (put some kitchen roll down or something) as the rich lemony aroma pervades the kitchen.

Buy Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchenfor cheap from our Amazon store and make some of this very easy and tasty Roast Pork with Lemon and Potatoes for yourself.

Kitchen Diaries: Lemon Ice Cream

So when I was preparing what I was to serve on Friday night earlier in the week, it appeared as if summer had arrived. The weather was balmy and, I thought, lamb meatballs (not from Nigel I’m afraid but delicious nonetheless) followed by Nigel’s lemon ice cream would constitute a perfect meal. Perfect for late (warm) March. Then the weather turned so we ended up eating ice cream at the end of a cold, miserable pea-souper of a day. But the meatballs definitely needed the zing of a light, refreshing desert, and this definitely did what was required.

An added bonus was that making this ice cream was an absolute synch. Ten minutes of whisking and the cream lay in “slovenly folds” (a beautifully apt, and beautifully sexy description for cream don’t you think?)

The rest of the ingredients – a tiny list of lemon zest and juice, yoghurt, store bought meringues and curd – simply folded into the cream before pouring the lot into a tub and bunging it in the freezer. Nigel suggests it only needs to be left 4-6 hours in the freezer. I left it overnight. It did need to be taken out a good 45 minutes before serving, however.

The ingredients, whilst a straightforward list, all available from my local supermarket at 8pm on Thursday evening, are not for the faint of heart in the dairy department. You need a whopping 500ml of the aforementioned whipping cream. And Nigel says you need “artisan-made” lemon curd. Well sorry Nige, but Painsbury’s (nice one, Nairn) don’t really run to artisan-made food. Prince Charles’ Duchy range was the best of a mediocre bunch and I’m sure it was good enough. Essentially, I assume you need to aim for a curd that actually tastes of lemons because that’s a lot of cream that you have to influence with flavour. Although you do use an entire jar of the stuff plus the juice and zest of two actual lemons, so it’d be quite difficult for the end product not to taste of the fruit. A final note on the ingredients: Nigel mentions 4 small meringues. Don’t go by this instruction – weigh them out. I actually used 8 of the medium sized meringues I had bought.

Apparently, this makes enough ice cream for 4 people. That would be 4 people who had either not eaten for a month or particularly craved dairy products or were just greedy. 4 people who had just eaten lamb meatballs ate about a third of the entire tub and that was in generous portions.
It’s not terribly exciting to look at – sometimes no bad thing – but I added pomegranate seeds and sprigs of mint which I think looked quite pretty. And quite Christmassy. Like I said, perfect for late March.
Naomi x