Something For the Weekend

So usually I don't bother much with cocktails - they're great to drink and I'm a sucker for vodka slush in summer, but generally speaking they always seem like a bit too much effort to make.

However, during a recent flick through of one of my old Sainsbury's magazines I discovered an appealingly simple recipe for a 'Raspberry Sparkle' cocktail which, I decided, must be made. As per usual, I'm unable to just leave a recipe alone, so here's my version...

Ingredients (serves 1):
- 25ml raspberry vodka (or normal)
- 50g fresh raspberries
- juice of 1/4 lime
- ½ tbsp honey
- soda water
- sprig of rosemary, to serve (optional)

The thing with this recipe is that, as well as being easy, it's incredibly adaptable. For example, I love the flavour combination of blackberries and thyme, which would be a great Autumnal alternative. Also: I'm currently in possession of raspberry vodka, but it's so easy to make your own with ANY flavour, and the internet is full of recipes telling you how. So there is absolutely no excuse!

Method:
1. Grab a stick blender a blitz the raspberries, then use the back of the spoon to push it all through a sieve (I love raspberry seeds, but I don't want a drink full of them). If you don't have a stick blender, then with a little extra work just use the sieve and spoon - you'll get the same end result, it'll just take a little longer.
2. Mix your raspberry purée with the vodka, honey and lime juice.
3. Pour the mixture into a glass, add ice cubes (and a couple of frozen raspberries if you happen to have some), then top up with more soda water. Garnish with the rosemary and an extra raspberry or two if you don't have any frozen ones. 
4. Repeat as needed and get gloriously drunk in our new-found sun.
 

Blackberry and Elderflower Cakes

Hello lovely people! I hope you all had a brilliant Christmas. Mine has been very busy (isn't life always?) - I was in Paris with Fraser for four days, then finally got back to Cumbria to weather-madness and frantic Christmas preparations. There hasn't been time for a great deal of cooking, other than Christmas dinner, of course, though I do know that Zosia took her annual gingerbread house to a new level this year and made a gingerbread castle. As you do.

However, it's my birthday party this weekend and we're doing an afternoon tea type-thing, so to the kitchen! I'm planning on making little lemon drizzle cakes and more spiced Christmas biscuits, but I'm also hoping to re-create something I did this term. Enter please blackberry and elderflower cakes.

Ingredients (makes 12):
For the cakes
- 150g butter
- 150g caster sugar
- 3 eggs
- 3tbsp elderflower cordial
- 200g self raising flour
- ½tsp baking powder
- 1 tin of blackberries, drained (or 150g fresh)

For the buttercream
- 75g softened butter
- 275g icing sugar
- 2tbsp elderflower cordial
- 1 tin blackberries (or 75g fresh)
- 12 fresh blackberries
- few sprigs of lemon thyme
- elderflowers (if in season)

Method:
For the cakes
1. First, preheat your oven to 180°C and grab some muffin cases. If you have a muffin tin pop the cases in the holes, but if not don't worry, you can just use a normal baking tray.
2. Beat together the butter and sugar until light and creamy. You want as much air in there as possible, so give it some proper elbow grease!
3. Add the eggs and elderflower cordial, then mix in so there are no streaks.
4. Carefully fold in the flour. You need to make sure it's all mixed in whilst at the same time not beating out any of the air you've worked in, so be gentle with it.
5. Add the blackberries. I think the tins are genius - they're so much cheaper (unless it's blackberry season and you can pick your own) and are great to have in the cupboard, but just use whatever you can find.

Most beautiful cake mix ever?

6. Divide the mixture between the 12 cake cases, then bake for 20-25 minutes (depending on your oven) until a knife stuck in the middle comes out clean. Allow to cool.

For the buttercream
1. Beat together the butter and icing sugar until thick, light and creamy. Pour in the elderflower cordial and stir through.
2. Add the tinned blackberries along with a splash of the liquid from the tin (just to give an extra hit of colour) and stir in. If your buttercream is a bit runny, you can just stir in more icing sugar.
3. Transfer the mixture to a piping bag with a nozzle of your choice. Don't have a piping bag? Use a plastic sandwich bag and cut off one of the corners!
4. Once your cakes are properly cooled, ice away! Start from the outside and swirl in towards the middle.
5. Adorn each cake with a fresh blackberry and a couple of thyme leaves. You can also sprinkle over some tiny elderflowers if they're in season (June) for an extra bit of pretty.

Afternoon Tea and Cupcakes

This refers back to December when we had afternoon tea of baked goats cheese with a festive salad to accompany, and lots of tea and cake. These are the cakes.

 

They're lemon and blueberry cupcakes, and are basically massive cheer-up cakes because they make you happy when you eat them. All of us had been struggling with work overload, so there was a need for something to make life that bit sweeter. It worked.

Ingredients:

- 6oz caster sugar

- 6oz butter

- 3 eggs

- 8oz gluten-free, self-raising flour

- 1/2 tsp baking powder

- 6oz blueberries

- zest 2 lemons

- juice one lemon

For the syrup:

- juice ½ lemon

- 2 tsp sugar

To decorate:

- more blueberries

- zest 1 lemon

- juice ½ lemon

- small mint leaves

- icing sugar

1. Beat together the butter and sugar until soft and creamy. My mum always says do it until you think it's ready, then do it some more, and this attitude is yet to fail me.

2. Add the eggs and incorporate into the mixture. Then sieve in the flour and baking powder, and fold it in carefully - using a metal spoon if possible.

3. Add the blueberries and lemon juice and zest, and stir carefully so everything gets properly mixed up. Stir this as little as possible, as you don't want to knock out the air you've worked into the cake.

4. Bake at 180°C in a preheated oven for 15-18 minutes, until they're golden and a cocktail stick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

5. While they're still warm, grab a small pan and mix together the ingredients for the syrup over a low heat. Using a cocktail stick, poke holes into the cakes and then drizzle the syrup over the top. Now let it all cool down and go drink a cup of tea.

6. Once it's all cooled, mix up some icing sugar with the lemon juice in a bowl. Dip the blueberries in, then use the icing to stick them onto the cakes. Stick a mint leaf in between them (looks awesome and gives a really refreshing taste), then grate over some lemon zest and finally dust over a sprinkle of icing sugar. Voila. Who needs to go somewhere fancy to eat fancy food?

Honey and Raspberry Cake: Guest Post by Lucy Allman

Hello there! I’m Lucy Allman, a uni friend of Bryony’s and an avid reader of this blog. This year I am doing an assistantship abroad in Pompei, which not only offers up many new and exciting ingredients to work with, but also means I have to manage without things like vanilla pods and actual cream that comes from cows. As it is, I’ve taken to inventing more recipes rather than hunting them down online and then finding that I’m missing a crucial ingredient that isn’t available here. 

I am really excited to be doing a guest post here, and hope that you find my honey and raspberry cake to be a recipe worth trying out! It’s a variation on a classic Devonshire honey cake, and while you will need to set a few hours aside in order to make it, the end result is fruity, moist and very, very moreish…

Honey and Raspberry Cake

You will need:

- 250g clear honey, plus about 2tbsp extra to make the glaze

- 225g unsalted butter, cut into cubes (luckily for me, all Italian butter is unsalted, but most English supermarkets have it too)

- 100g brown sugar (any kind is fine; I used Demerara, but muscovado works just as well)

- 3 large eggs, beaten

- 300g self-raising flour

- 125g raspberries

- 85g caster sugar

Preheat your oven to 140°C for fan, 160°C for conventional, or gas mark 3. Grease and line a 20cm/8 inch cake tin.

Please ignore my dirty stove!

Place the honey, butter and sugar in a pan and melt them together over a low heat, stirring occasionally. Once it turns into a delicious syrupy liquid, add about 10-12 raspberries and mix them in until they start to break down (it helps if you squish them against the sides of the pan with a spoon). Bring the mixture to the boil for one minute, and it will froth up like marshmallow fluff and then turn a gorgeous deep pink colour (this is my favourite part).

It is very important that you now let the mixture cool for about 15-20 minutes, so the eggs don't cook when you mix them in (top tip: with the weather as cols as it is - yes, even in Italy! - you can go outside with your pan or place it next to an open window to speed up the process.

While the mixture is cooling, sieve the flour into a mixing bowl. Then, feel free to do a dance or eat a sandwich while you're waiting.

Once the mixture is completely cool (or, you know, cool enough that you won't end up with raspberry-flavoured scrambled eggs), add the eggs and beat them in gently. Tip the mixture into the bowl with the flour and stir it all together. You batter will be quite runny; don't worry, that's normal.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin and bake for 50 mins-1 hour (top tip: utilise the cooking time to get the washing-up done, and then you won't have to worry about it later) until the cake is well-risen and golden brown. If you're worried that the top is becoming too brown, cover the cake with some tinfoil.

Check to see if it's cooked through with a skewer - poke it in the middle of the cake, and if it comes out clean then your cake is ready. Alternatively, you can poke it with your fingertip and see if it springs back completely, in which case you're good to go. For best results and to be absolutely sure, I like to do both.

Once the cake is cooked, leave it to cool for a little while and make the glaze. Warm the remaining raspberries in a pan with 2tbsp of honey, a little bit of water and the caster sugar. Bring it to the boil, then strain it through a sieve.

Turn the cake out onto a plate and prick it all over with a skewer or a fork, then drizzle the raspberry syrup over the top.

I like that my camera managed to capture the steam - I feel it adds a certain something.

This cake can be served while still warm, with a generous dollop of custard, or you can just cut a big slice and enjoy the sticky goodness.

 

The Culinary Christmas Spirit

Around this time last year, my dad took me to a gastro-pub-type-place in East Dulwich called The Palmerston to celebrate the end of term and get into the general Christmas spirit. We had a great time, and culinary-wise I tried a whole bunch of things I'd never had before.

This weekend, Jamie and I decided that we'd organise afternoon tea as a break from the ridiculous amount of work we both have at the moment, and I decided to recreate/adapt the starter I'd had and loved so much at the Palmerston last year. The result was pretty darn good.

The original was a breaded goats' cheese served with chicory leaves, chestnuts, pomegranate seeds and cranberry sauce. My version used walnut kernels instead of chestnuts (not in the picture because I forgot about them 'til we'd already started eating) and a mixture of spinach and pea shoots instead of chicory (as chicory was not to be found in all of Egham/Englefield Green). And it was awesome, as well as being incredibly easy to make with not much actual cooking involved.

Ingredients:
- a pot of soft goats' cheese each. I think the original probably used rounds, but actually I thought this was a more airy, less stodgy way of doing it.
- 1 egg
- white breadcrumbs
- few sprigs fresh thyme (dried would do)
- black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C and oil a baking tray.
2. Strip the thyme leaves from the stalks, then mix together with the breadcrumbs and pepper in a bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the egg.
3. Using your hands, mould the goats' cheese into flat cylinders. Dip it in the beaten egg, then into the breadcrumbs so the cheese is coated.
4. Place on the baking tray and stick it in the preheated oven for about 15 minutes, until the breadcrumbs are golden.

Serving (in case you're as persnickety as me):
1. Grab a teaspoon of cranberry sauce and dollop it on the opposite side of the plate, then use the back of the teaspoon to drag it into a cool curvy line.
2. Wash the spinach and place on the opposite side of the plate to the sauce. Half your pomegranate and use the tip of the knife to pick out the seeds, then scatter over the spinach along with the pea shoots and walnut kernels.
3. Whap on the baked goats' cheese and present to hungry guests.

Of course, proper afternoon tea requires cake as well, and not gonna lie - the ones I made were pretty darn good. So watch this space - they'll be following soon.

Pudding Explosion

When my sister came to visit me last month, she insisted I made sure I had all the ingredients in for her to make butterscotch sauce. She doesn't really cook usually, but she'd made that at home and was keen to recreate.

Of course, we had a fun but hectic time, and the sauce never got made. It seemed a shame to have all the ingredients in and let them go to waste though...

 And so a star was born.

For this, you'll need vanilla ice cream, some frozen raspberries, a pan of butterscotch sauce and a few pieces of honeycomb. That last one's where the literal bit of the explosion part comes in, 'cos you've got to break the pieces up quite small and you will end up with stray honeycomb on the floor.

The rest of the explosion is in the taste. This pudding is all about texture and contrast - the ice cream cool and smooth, the raspberries sharp, the honeycomb sweet and crunchy and the butterscotch silky and warm, while the citrus note in it from the lemon brings the whole dessert together. You really have to try it.

Plus? The quantity of butterscotch sauce the website gives makes enough for a few servings. So you can either get people over to share it with you or put it in the fridge for next time. I cannot see a downside.

Try it. Your tastebuds will never be the same again.

Pear and Blackberry Bread & Butter Pudding

Late as ever, but here's this month's food column in my university newspaper. Pretty proud of this one - I went home for a few days in reading week and made it for my Mum and her new boyfriend, which should give you an idea of the awesome.

More actual posts to come soon, promise.

It's less saturated in real life, I just wanted it to show up...

Birthday Food

I have always thought that what you have to eat on your birthday is very important. This most likely stems from Mum annually spoiling us with culinary delights, but it's not just a man's heart that can be reached through their stomach!

And so, when our dear Jamie came over a few days ago for her birthday I cracked the foody whip - and the birthday breakfast consisted of fruit, yoghurt, and homemade granola. Not difficult to make but so scrumptious you will spend the rest of the morning trying to get oats out your teeth just for the flavour. I kid you not.

To make enough granola for two, you need:
50g oats
25g demerara sugar
25g mixed seeds (linseeds, pumpkin, sunflower - whatever you like)
25g butter

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Put the oats, sugar and seeds into a baking dish and mix, then divide the butter into small pieces and sprinkle. Stick it in the oven for 15 minutes - BUT take it out at five minute intervals to stir, or it will burn.

Meanwhile, prepare your fruit. I used strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, but grapes or slices of banana are lovely too. Divide between two plates and add a generous dollop of natural yoghurt to each. When the granola's done divide that up too, and voila! If you're feeling super indulgent as we were, you can also drizzle over some maple syrup or honey (maple syrup is the best, but Tesco had none. Shame on them!).

You have to use plastic plates. To spend the day washing up instead of entertaining your birthday-having friend would just be rude.

For lunch, we took a picnic and skipped off to the Savill Gardens. There was lots and lots of food including my favourite ever Philadelphia cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches, and, of course - Birthday Cake.

Capitalised, because it deserves it.

Jamie opted for a coffee cake and I needed something wheat-free so Zosia could have some too, so Lorraine Pascale's Gluten Free Irish Cream Coffee Cake was the perfect solution.

I couldn't find the recipe anywhere online, so I took a photo from the book:

(I hope that's clear... I can post a bigger photo on request!)

I made the sponges the night before - mostly due to time constraints on the day - but also because the flavour of any coffee/chocolate cake will intensify the longer it's left for. Win-win situation. Also, I found with this recipe that the buttercream was just too runny after adding the Bailey's, so I stuck in extra icing sugar to give it more structure.

And here it is:

Would you LOOK at that. Amazing purple glitter courtesy of one of Mum's brilliant cheer-up parcels. Sadly the buttercream didn't stay quite so intact when confronted with a 20 minute walk at 28°, but it just made it all the more fun to eat. And to watch people eat. Like this:

Birthdays are fantastic.