Sunday breakfast

Home made scones are lovely, but until I came across this recipe I was utterly unsuccessful at scones.

But now I’m not. Hurrah!

p.s. the dough freezes really well.

when the going gets tough

The tough get … cooking.

perlmonger has been up to his eyes today configuring servers; that’s not something that I can really help with, so I had a cooking frenzy.

I made

• Some soda bread for lunch - my Irish grandmother made a loaf of this every morning, and it’s delicious. I actually use a mix of plain flour, strong white, and wholemeal. Fab - I ate mine with some smoked cheddar, and red pepper relish. And now I want to make chutney.
• I cooked up half a huge gammon - I buy these from Costco, at about £18 a time. Half went in the freezer uncooked, and the other half was cooked up in my splendid new cast iron cauldron (conveyed from Forn Parts by that nice ccomley, cos they’re much cheaper there). It’s so huge we had to rearrange the kitchen to find somewhere to keep it, and I can’t actually lift it when it’s full, but ne’er mind - it is a splendid cooking recepticule. This (half) gammon was cooked with a quartered onion, two star anise and a slosh of maple syrup, and very nice it is too.
• Next up was a piece of top side, supplied by that nice Mr Rawlings. It was too small to roast, so I did it innapot, very slowly, and it’s nearly ready to eat. I put the potatoes in with it today for a change.
• Then a huge pot of soup was constructed for next week’s lunches - I chopped carrots, celery, leeks and courgettes, sweated them down in some olive oil, and added lentils and a carton of passata (something no larder should be without). Once the gammon was cooked, I stole most of the ham stock and bunged it in the soup pan. It will be gorgeous. I hope.

P is now requesting bananananana muffins, but I think I might be too tired. I’ll see.

[edit] Oh yes - I took the half of fresh pineapple that was left, liquidised it, and cooked it down with a little sugar and some cornflour. It’s gone in the freezer as a cheesecake topping or summat similar.

breaking with tradition

Every year, towards the end of December, I buy a bag of cranberries. I don’t know why - I don’t like cranberry sauce, and anyway, we always eat goose for our festive dinner, but there you go; it’s part of the Christmas Tradition.

And so, towards the end of February, we generally have an equally traditional Throwing Away of the Cranberries (Mouldy).

But this year, things were different. I found this recipe for Christmas Morning Muffins, and I did indeed make them for Christmas morning, and they were delicious, and we snarfed the lot. And then I made some more a couple of weeks later.

Earlier this week, I discovered the last of the cranberries at the back of the fridge, and last night we made *more muffins* with them. And now they are all gone (the cranberries, that is; there are still some muffins left), and I have none to throw away in a week’s time. I’m quite sad about that in a way, but I think now I can move on, don’t you?

I said I wasn’t much of a baker

But I’m quite pleased with this - it’ s a work in progress, but it’s coming along nicely.

it has a sort of amateur charm, don’t you think?

Go me!

I’m a good cook, but I’m not great at baking. And I’m lousy at pastry.

however, inspired by this recipe which claimed to be “easy flaky pastry”, I thought I’d give it a go.

I had to get perlmonger to come and grate for a while - it was hard work. But *I* rolled out the pastry, and rolled out the sausage meat, and brushed it all with eggy stuff, and put it in the oven, and baked them. And they were *gorgeous*.

The sage plant in the garden had died, so I made do with some rosemary, and a hefty grating of nutmeg.

Go me, I think. And we only ate three - the rest have gone in the freezer.

Stepford Wife

Today, I have been mostly baking. I made a fabulous gruyere and cracked peppercorn bread. Or, at least, it would have been fabulous had I had a decent loaf tin instead of the ancient old things I use. It wasn’t quite cooked through, but we toasted it, and it was delicious.

And I made some shortbread bikkies, and cut them out with my festering xmas tree and star cutters. And I made some walnut shortbread, and cut them out ditto, except the recipe said to leave the dough in the fridge for half and hour,and I left it in there for about 5 hours, and had to soften it all up again. But they’re out of the oven now, and they’re gorgeous. I’m going to bung a bit of icing and some glittery balls [fnaar] on the shortbreads tomorrow.

Tomorrow - marzipan the cake, have a bash at sausage rolls {dear god - pastry; I can’t do pastry …), maybe some banana muffins.

I got Pete to drive me up to the Kitchen Shop this afternoon (I can’t park the Thaab, try as I might) and bought two new loaf tins, and another heavy duty baking tray - now I’m doing lots of this stuff, I want better quality tins, cos it makes all the difference.

And we called in at the local off licence on the way home and picked up 26 bottles of wine (including some vintage Pelorus - hurrah, and some pink fizz just for kalunina. There are six assorted bottles of fizz on the top row of the wine rack, which should do us through to next year.)

Now I’m sitting here while perlmonger cooks me a lump of Dexter steak before settling down to the X-Factor (which the Tivo is recording.

yum

We had homemade walnut bread for lunch.

fancy a slice

of a Discworld cake?

pastry …

Pastry and I … we don’t get on. At all. I can barely manage with bought pastry, and if I try to make it myself it’s a disaster.

I’ve tried everything - food processor, mixer, by hand. It all goes grey and shrinks, and is as unappetising as you might imagine.

I’ve been hunting for one of these for a while, and found it at Lakeland [warning: do not go here unless you are of strong will-].

I used it once, and I don’t think it’ll work. I’ve just fetched it out to make some rock buns, and the handle had worked a tiny bit loose, and I didn’t feel comfortable with it. Pete has tightened its nuts (as it were) with his Leatherman mole grips and we’ll see how it goes.

And the rock cakes have just come out of the oven. They *smell* nice, anyway.

[edit] they taste nice too, but they’re not rock buns as I remember them.

Is it me, or is it my oven? [sigh]

victoria sponge redux

Well, I tried it again. I used the right size tins, I checked that the oven was the right temperature with a thermometer, I even softened the butter Just In Case.

And still, my cake was more like a biscuit. An uncooked biscuit at that.

My sponge making days are over. Gloom.