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!

e

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: Bramley Apple Shortcake

My first day of maternity leave and to commemorate my new role as 'housewife' (can it be true?) I mean to make a pie for the man of the house. I also need to try out my new uberblender on some pastry.

The last hand blender went smoking into the afterlife on another Nigel recipe: the lemon demerara cake which couldn't get a fair write-up what with the butter-sugar creaming ending abruptly. I'm not a natural at making pastry by hand, but this monster has an engine the size of a powerboat so I should be able to get it all combined before the butter goes greasy.

This pastry is unusual for it's cakey-style ingredients - heaps of sugar, an egg and baking powder. It doesn't fall into my experience of 'shortcake' which in America consists of a sweetened scone dough, soft inside and crunchy on top, cut in half like a sponge, filled with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. (Oops, drooling...) But the cookie taste and texture with the hot apples is gorgeous.

I don't ordinarily bother pre-cooking apples for a pie with a top crust - normally they steam inside, and the juice bubbles up through pretty slits on the top. But to ensure the crust stays light and crispy, it pays to take the extra time. And the smell of apples cooking in butter may be the smell of heaven.

I wish I'd erred on the side of generosity with the apples to balance it a bit more. Go for five Bramleys, even if it seems a lot for such a little pie tin. I'm surprised Nigel doesn't insist you serve this piping hot with ice cream, but I'll step in and recommend it.

On assembly, Nigel warns of the pastry's delicacy, and he's not wrong - keep your surfaces very well floured and work quickly. Roll it out fairly thickly... I ended up with a massive crust on the outer edge, while I could have had a more substantial middle. And don't roll your eyes when he says to brush the crust 'tenderly' with milk - once you've laid the pastry on the warm apples, it starts to melt!

The end result is lovely, even with its massive biscuit crust. Just don't eat too big a dinner beforehand! You can buy Nigel's Kitchen Diaries cheap through our Amazon store.

e

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