Lancashire hotpot

As far as traditional English fare goes Lancashire hotpot never appealed to me. I think for some reason (probably some deep seated childhood trauma involving stringy green beans) I associated it with liver, which I loathe. Even the fondness for 'Betty's 'otpot' at the Rovers Return couldn't tempt me, but the recipe in Just Like Your Mother Made by Tom Norrington-Davies looked tasty and I found out recently the my Dad lived in Alderley Edge when he first came over to England from Ireland as an eight-year-old. Except I then realised that Alderley Edge is, in fact, in Cheshire, but my little sister lives in Manchester, so that will have to do.

Anyhoo, so I thought I'd give it a go and it was, if I say so myself, a triumph. It's the perfect recipe - a doddle to make and tastes a-ma-zing! In fact, my husband has just got back from work and is yum-yuming his way through his dinner as I type. Actually saying it was a doddle would be accurate if I'd been sensible and read the recipe properly. It uses lamb neck or shoulder, so I duly ordered lamb shoulder online with my Tesco order and forgot to make sure it was boned. So there I was early this afternoon trying to winkle off as much meat as I could. I was tempted to go to Tesco and buy some more lamb, I was also tempted to wrap it back up, shove it in the fridge and roast a chicken. But no, I persevered, stripped that shoulder bare and carried on.

Like yesterday's beef with stout it was didn't have many ingredients (lamb, onion, thyme, bay leaf, a dash of worcestershire sauce) but certainly didn't suffer from that. When it was cooked the potatoes were soft and creamy and the lamb was deliciously tender. Even Betty ate it! Definitely one to have again... and again... and again.

Beef with stout and dumplings

I love comfort food, and I especially love casseroles and stews. I love the idea of them bubbling away getting more delicious as the minutes pass. So I couldn't really resist the recipe from Just Like Mother Used To Make by Tom Norrington-Davies, especially as it meant I would have to make dumplings for the first time. (I say the first time, but I have actually made dumplings before. However, it was a Weight Watchers recipe and they tasted revolting. Talking to my husband tonight we wondered whether there was any point in making WeightWatchers dumplings. Surely if you're trying to lose weight you just cut something like that out?)

Anyhoo, the stew was simple to make, using few basic ingredients (stewing steak, onions, carrots, and stout), but with plenty of little extras to season it, including bay leaves, tomato puree and a teaspoon of cocoa powder. If I make it again I'll probably use less liquid (it took a pint of stout and a pint of water) and add more veg, but they're minor quibbles.

And the verdict? Betty turned her nose up at it (I daresay being awake since 4.30 this morning had something to do with that) but Henry wolfed it down. The dumplings were a big success and Henry even asked for more, having poked them a few times beforehand and asking what they were. Sadly my husband and I weren't that keen to share.

John Peel Tart

So the first book gets pulled off the shelf and pressed into action - The Jimmy Young Cook Book from 1968. This was one that I rescued from my mum's pile of charity shop books. It's a collection of recipes sent into Jimmy Young's BBC Radio show - for those younger readers, Jimmy Young was one of the country's best known disc jockeys, hosting a show on Radio 2 until as recently as 2002.

The book is really an artifact of its time containing lots of boiled (red) meat recipes, lots of mince and (in a book with 142 recipes) only four chicken recipes. There were a lot that sounded particularly unnappealing - Thursday mince, for example, contains unspecified minced meat, oxtail soup, 2 large onions and grated cheese. Ick.

One recipe jumped right out at me - John Peel Tart. How could I, as a late-'80s/early-90s indie kid, resist a recipe with that name? I also wanted to challenge myself as it was a pastry dish, and as I've mentioned before I've got a love-hate relationship with pastry. I decided to cheat, though, and bought frozen pastry which just needed to be defrosted and rolled out - success! It was brilliantly easy to make, especially once I'd purloined an enamel plate from my mum (I only have 10" tart tins). The resultant tart was delicious, tasting similar to a mince pie - we had two refusals from the kids but Simon and I had ours warm with ice cream.

JOHN PEEL TART
8oz short-crust pastry
4oz golden syrup
1oz butter
6oz currants
1dspn lemon juice
1oz chopped peel
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1oz ground almonds


METHOD: Melt the golden syrup and the butter, together with the currants, lemon juice, chopped peel, mixed spice and ground almonds. Mix all together over the heat, then take off heat and leave to cool. Line a greased 7-in fireproof plate with half the rolled out pastry. Fill with the fruit mixture. Cover with the remaining pastry, sealing the edges well and bake for around 40 minutes in a fairly hot oven, until golden brown. Serve hot or cold.

Cooking the recipe books

Like most women who like to cook a bit I have a lot of recipe books in my kitchen. From the right up-to-date (Jamie's America) to the ones I rescued before my mum took them to the local charity shop (The Jimmy Young Cook Book), and even my first ever cookery book, The Blue Peter Book Of Gorgeous Grub. I tend only to look at my books if there's something specific I want to make and need to find a recipe for. I try to refer to my books first and then go to the Internet if I can't find what I want.

But I've decided to challenge myself to use the books properly and my plan is to take a different book every week and to try at least one recipe from it. I'm also going to exclude recipes I've already tried, so I'm afraid Granny Lawson's Lunch Dish from Nigella Bites is going to have to take a back seat. It should be fun, and interesting, possibly frustrating, and God only knows what's going to happen when I get to White Trash Cooking books I and II!

Christmas cake

Every year I make a Christmas cake. I really enjoy baking it and I always do it at the same time every year, the last weekend of October, which is the same weekend my mum has always made hers. My birthday is also at the end of October so for me, much like Americans see the day after Thanksgiving as the start of the run-up to Christmas, I always see the my birthday as being the same (in fact, Christmas Day is exactly eight weeks after my birthday). For years now I've used Delia's recipe, just as my mum did.

The decorating, however, is a different thing. This is the part of making the Christmas cake that I find most stressful. As long as I can remember my mum has used Royal icing to top her cake, whipped up to look like snow and with much-loved plastic figures plonked on top to decorate. I tried this one year but I found the Royal icing too sweet and have otherwise always plumped for ready-to-roll fondant icing which is readily available in cake decorating shops and large supermarkets (or even small ones, I found mine this year in the Tesco Metro in Hammersmith station after the enormo-Tesco in Watford let me down).

So how to decorate? I wish I had pictures of past cakes but for some reason I either didn't bother or they're not on this laptop but I remember stars and silver balls, and holly and ivy. One of my favourites which I adapted from a design in a magazine was last year's (see above). The snowmen I already had but the Christmas trees, snow balls and snow were made from fondant icing. I dusted some edible glitter freely about - it looked much better in the flesh but just looks like dirt in the picture. And the path is made from chopped hazelnuts. I was pretty pleased with the overall result.

This year however, I just didn't have a clue what I was going to do. I thought, I pondered, but I made not definite decisions, didn't buy anything in and so was standing over the freshly iced Christmas cake on Christmas Eve thinking 'What now?!' In the end my Blue Peter watching of old came to the rescue and I decided to get creative. With just a piece of A4 paper, a pair of scissors and a large drink I started to cut, and cut, and cut! And I made a snowflake! I then used drawing pins to pin the snowflake to the top of the cake, brushed the holes with edible glue and then brushed over that with edible Magic Dust. When the doily/snowflake came off I was just left with the problem of the holes the drawing pins had made, so I painted a little edible glue over each one and plopped in a gold ball. Ta-da! Not the best decorated Christmas cake I've ever come up with but appropriately sparkly and rather festive.

Red velvet cupcakes

As I mentioned in my last post I've been thinking about Valentine's Day and so I thought it was about time I actually tried baking the cupcakes I am planning to sell. I decided on red velvet because of their name, their taste and their fantastic colour. They also seem a little bit more indulgent than normal vanilla, chocolate or lemon.

The recipe I used came from the Hummingbird Bakery via a telegraph.co.uk article and while a little more of a faff than my usual throw-everything-into-the-KitchenAid-and-turn-it-on recipes, it wasn't difficult. It also had more exotic ingredients than I'm used to with buttermilk, vinegar, bicarb of soda and, gasp, a whole tablespoon of red food colouring (of which more later).

My special little helper gave me a hand with the cakes, which mainly consists of pouring things into the mixing bowl. She gets very frustrated with me making cakes to sell because I've decided it's probably best if she doesn't help me with those. She's still much more keen on sneezing into the bowl than a tissue and I'm not all that keen on scrapping batches of cake batter. So today Betty got to play at baking with me. The biggest difference about these cakes to my usual all-in method was the careful mixing of a bit here and a bit there that the recipe demands. I'm sure at some point I'll think 'to hell with it!' and fling it all in the bowl and hope for the best but I decided to do as I was told for once and follow the recipe to the letter. This decision led directly to the most exciting part of the batter-making and the near-disaster of the frosting making, but again, more of that later.

At one point you have to mix the buttermilk with the vinegar, vanilla extract and food colouring. The vivid red of the resultant mixture was an absolute joy to behold. It was also a thick paint-like texture that was really, really satisfying. I only wish I'd been able to photograph it but my husband had taken the digital camera into work so you'll have to take my word for it until I make another batch . Honestly, I stood looking at the bright red mixture for ages until Betty tugged my arm and said, pointedly, 'Shall we mix it then, Mummy?!'

The cakes came out fabulously - just the right height in the case, springy to the touch. Ace! Then it was time to make the cream cheese frosting. I've only made this once before and it tasted great but was very gloopy. The recipe I used (which I thought was the Hummingbird one but have subsequently been told wasn't) said to stick everything in a processor and whizz it, so I did. BIG mistake. The butter had been out of the fridge all day but obviously wasn't soft enough because the frosting ended up with little lumps of butter in. Gah! It didn't affect the taste but it didn't look great. It was also still really gloopy, even after two hours in the fridge, and there was no way I would be able to pipe it, which is my usual decorating style. On speaking to other cupcakers I've discovered that cream cheese frosting is probably not going to be viable for cupcakes that I sell, so I've decided to use normal buttercream. But I got to use some of my new decorations on them and now I know that the sponge recipe is a winner.

RED VELVET CUPCAKES (from the Hummingbird Bakery book)
5oz/140g self-raising flour
2tbsp cocoa
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
4floz/110ml buttermilk
1tsp vinegar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1tbsp red food colouring
2oz/60g butter at room temperature
6oz/170g caster sugar
1 large egg

1 Preheat the oven to 170C/325F/gas mark 3. Line a 12-hole muffin tin with cases.

2 In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa, bicarb and a pinch of salt.

3 In a mug, mix the buttermilk, vinegar, vanilla and red food colouring.

4 Beat the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Beat in the egg a little at a time.

5 Mix in a third of the flour mixture, followed by half the buttermilk mixture, then another third of the flour, the rest of the buttermilk and finally the rest of the flour mixture.

6 Divide the mixture between the paper cases. Bake for 20 minutes or until risen and springy - don't overcook them.

CREAM CHEESE FROSTING (from who knows where?!)
11oz/300g cream cheese
2oz/60g butter at room temperature
1tsp vanilla extract
12oz/340g icing sugar

1 Whizz all the ingredients together in a food processor. Chill or an hour or so before using.

NB. If I make the frosting again (which I probably will, it did taste lovely) I'll play about with the measurements of the ingredients a bit. And I'll definitely blitz the hell out of the butter first, then mix in the cream cheese, then add the icing sugar and vanilla extract. Oh, and I was advised by others not to overmix it because that's what makes it really gloopy.

Happy Valentine's Day!

OK, I'm a little ahead of myself but in much the same way as M&S are already planning what pants that charming popsy is going to be wearing in next year's Christmas ads, I've got to think about what marketing I'm going to be doing for Valentine's Day.

I've decided to give myself as little work as possible in terms of different orders and will be sticking to one flavour of cupcake - red velvet (you can read about them here at my friend Mrs M's blog), and offering half a dozen for a tenner. Cheaper than anything you could buy at Tiffany's, I would imagine. I think the fact that I've never made red velvet cupcakes shouldn't be a problem... should it? But I've already started buying the sprinkles to go on top. They are, from the left, silver 'smarties', gold heart-shaped dragees, red heart-shaped dragees, silver heart-shaped dragees, sugar butterflies (which I probably won't actually use for Valentine's cupcakes), and at the front little red lips. I already have some fabulous little heart sprinkles and I'll be baking the cupcakes in my favourite red foil cases. The other alternative is just to make roses like the one at the top, but that's quite labour-intensive and making one of them can reduce me to crying and swearing. Not much fun.

The most important thing really is to get the name of the Terraced House Bakery out there a bit more. Since I started in August I've had three orders from people who Googled for cupcakers in my local area and one of these customers has pushed at least six other orders my way. I think I'm going to have to do a craft fair in the New Year but the thought of it makes me want to cry. I've already been to the one I think I'm going to do and although I didn't think the cupcakes there were anything I couldn't do (better!), I'd still feel a little bit of a fraud. It's almost like I feel that because I'm just baking out of my kitchen I'm not legit.

Anyhoo, I've got a cupcake order for Saturday and a cake to bake for my nephew's 3rd birthday on Sunday, so hopefully it'll be next week for the first test samples. Yum, yum, yum.