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Making Cinder Toffee

February 16, 2012 By 3 Comments

I don’t usually do spontaneous. There’s often no room for it for one, but in the interests of full disclosure : I don’t bloody like it.

So when I saw Nigella’s tweet about her recipe of the day, it was a surprise to find myself making it not half an hour later. Now, she calls it Hokey Pokey, but where I come from (oop north) we call it cinder toffee. You might also know it as the inside of a crunchie. I love the stuff. It reminds me of school trips, sitting crammed into a shambles of a coach, stuffing this stuff into my mouth until my tongue was raw.

I remember watching her make this on her telly programme, thinking I ought to do it. Who knows what happens to all those resolutions made in front of cooking shows, but here we are, better late than never. She was right, as well: it’s the work of moments and utterly delicious.

You know why she tells you to give it away too? Because if you don’t you’ll just carry on eating it until it’s all gone.

Filed Under: Making for Mothers - 3 Comments

Wolf Porridge

February 3, 2012 By 16 Comments

So I’m a good baker. I may not be the best baker, but I rarely have a cake that doesn’t rise. As a young girl I made a cake every Saturday before I went ice skating, usually chocolate, let’s be honest, and I’d have a massive slice of it when I got home, having first spent my 50p on a massive chip butty at the ice rink. Ah, the seventies – what a decade of fine childhood nutrition that was.

For Christmas I got the second best Christmas gift* ever – a raspberry red stand mixer. I finally went for the Kenwood Kmix, because a) British company and b) that Kitchenaid’s almost twice the price innit? Sheesh. Anyway, I’m sure they both make a fine cake, but I love my Kenwood, because it’s mine.

(Interestingly, before Christmas Mr J sent me a link to a different Kenwood, which had more attachments and more watts and stuff like that, thinking he ought to get that one, because technically it was better. It was only marginally more expensive than this one. But, as I said to him, this one is RED, a fact which is seemingly lost on him. Tsk.)

(*Best ever Christmas gift is still the kindle. I think it might only be toppled by a new and improved kindle.)

We’ve been baking a lot from Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard, which I love not only for its density and completeness, but also for the fact that it is the first cookbook I’ve felt compelled to scribble in, adding my own notes as I go along. I think perhaps it is something to do with the fact that, unlike a lot of modern recipe books, every recipe is not given a photograph or even a whole page to itself. There is more of a jumbled in feel to the collection. The paper is also very tactile, not shiny and smooth, and it takes pencil marks exceedingly well (I still can’t bear to make marginalia in anything but a pencil).

It was the turn of his cupcakes recipe today. Turning aside from my dear Nigella‘s tried and tested fairy cakes recipe made me nervous but kitchen gambles are never irreversible. Dan suggests throwing the butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract into the bowl of your delicious mixer all at once and beating for 3 minutes. Now the recipe does say to make sure the butter is soft, which it was, but I have added a note to say ‘do not try on extremely cold winter days’, or you will end up looking at tiny shards of butter being flung around in an eggy sugary mixture with not a hope in hell of coming together into anything like cake mix.

We started again, beating the sugar and butter together in a more traditional way, and everything was fine. And the cakes are fairly delicious, though I imagine if their liberation from the oven had not been held up by the liberal sprinkling of wolf porridge (a mixture of red lentils and pearl barley) all over the kitchen floor, they might be even nicer.

Baking seems to have become a staple thing in the house again, which was happening even before the arrival of the red beast, and this week was the first week in four that I actually bought a loaf of bread, as the dough hook makes chucking a loaf together a work of moments. Also it’s expedient with an impatient two year old, who likes measuring, flinging ingredients about, and licking his hands, but not so much spending ten minutes watching mum knead dough.

Our hours in the kitchen today were borne of desperation and necessity – stuck in the house with both snuffly colds and the bitter cold outside – but they were some of my favourite hours of this whole week. Finishing off by letting the boy pour lentils all over the place while I washed up from our cake adventure was delightful for him and me, seeing his growing confidence in pouring with small cups and bigger jugs, and inventing wolf porridge along the way. After all, it all sweeps up doesn’t it? It’s only a little bit of mess.

Nice to be back by the way.

Filed Under: Baking, book review - 16 Comments

Let Them Make Cake

October 10, 2011 By 8 Comments

After a blustery morning in the park I decided it was just Too Much to ask of my hair to spend more hours being flung about in the wind, so instead we stayed in to make cakes. What else?

Little cupcakes, frosted with buttercream I showed Fitz the picture in the baking book and he immediately declared that he wanted cakes. This isn’t unusual. Lately he’s been known to suggest cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so I’m left in no doubt he really is my son (need I say he doesn’t get it? Well, he doesn’t. I am mean, and consume unhealthy treats after he’s gone to bed). However, he did understand me when I said we had to make them first (scone baking sessions paying dividends), possibly hatching his plan to cover himself in flour from head to foot that very second.

It ended up being the most interactive baking session we’ve had so far, with him enthusiastically tipping the butter and sugar in, giving the eggs a beat, and getting way too excited with the flour bag. Note to self: when you’ve finished with the flour, put the bag back in the cupboard. I confess it was me who got the food colouring out but he wouldn’t have it, and I had to settle for making pretty buttercream icing instead.

The buttercream was an afterthought, just to use up the already softened butter that was left over. It’s a simple recipe:
use 1/4 butter to icing (confectioner’s) sugar – I had 50g butter, and around 200g of sugar. Beat the butter in a bowl until creamy in colour and texture. Add the sugar and mix in well, using 2-3 tablespoons of milk to loosen the mixture – add these gradually, as needed. Flavour with vanilla, rose, orange, coffee…, and add a bit of food colouring if you fancy it a bit pretty.
Then I went overboard, and piped it on. I’ve never piped icing before in my life, but now I want to pipe everything. I’m really excited by the baking possibilities for winter days. By spring my ass is going to be Huge with a capital Hu.

And the cakes themselves? Delicious as well as pretty, and there are even some left over for tomorrow.

Filed Under: Baking, Fitz Tagged With: , , , - 8 Comments

Mini Book Review: Sewing For Boys

September 18, 2011 By 6 Comments

I’ve had Sewing For Boys on pre-order since I first heard about it earlier in the year, and having tried a Figgy’s pattern in the meantime, my anticipation was set to High.

Then I started getting emails from Amazon, about the release date being moved back, and then back a bit more, and then back even further, and then forward a little bit, until finally I got a despatch email.

You’d think after all of that I’d have been chomping at the bit to get started, wouldn’t you? And I am, but in a low key sort of way that has absolutely nothing to do with the book.

I love the book already, you see. It has longevity, since the patterns can be made for boys up to about 7 or 8, depending on the size of your boy. The patterns are practical, and cool, but not twee. It has small projects (t-shirt refashioning, t-shirts, simple trousers) and larger ones (jackets, smart trousers). The patterns are printed on high quality thick paper, and are stored in a neat envelope inside the front cover. It’s also internally spiral bound, so it will store nicely and then lie flat on your worktable.

I’ve already picked out these treasure pocket pants as the first project I’ll make, since we’re coming home with my pockets laden with conkers and acorns and stones. And leaves. Except he doesn’t call them that – he runs up and thrusts a bronze leaf into my hand, saying excitedly “another fire!” And they do look like little fires.

Anyway if I’m so thrilled to finally have the book in my possession, why am I not sewing already?

Do I need to say more? This is where I sew. This is now officially known as the Room of Doom, and this is actually after an hour of tidying up. It was much worse. The downside of having a loft conversion is that everything that used to be stored elsewhere has been swept down through the house on an invisible tidal wave, and ended up swilling about in the little room at the back of the house.

I’m displaced. I wander around in the evenings saying “I’m sure I used to do things”, but not having quite enough oomph to sort it all out. This week I bought a shredder. If shredding is as much fun as I think it will be I can’t see much in this room surviving.

Anyway, all that aside, if you have boys to sew for, I think you should get the book. It’s exactly what you’re looking for, and I do know how long you’ve been looking. Come back sometime in January when I’ve managed to get near the sewing machine and I’ll tell you how I get on with those pants.

Filed Under: book review, Making for Mothers, Sewing Tagged With: , , - 6 Comments

Then there was Cake

September 14, 2011 By 4 Comments

I was overcome in the week before Fitz’s birthday when I found out that my friend was baking a Peppa Pig cake for her daughter, who’s only one day older than my boy (we were in the hospital at the same time. If I’d been quicker about it they would have shared a birthday. Oh if only I’d been quicker about it.). I panic-bought a book about icing cakes in the shape of tank engines, before remembering that my son truly is my son, and that a chocolate cake would be more than exciting.

Besides – imagine if you pulled out all your cake decorating stops when the child is only two. You’d have nowhere left to go by the time they were six…

So a chocolate sponge was born, and this week both halves made it out of the oven and onto the worktop, rather than the floor. The recipe was a Nigella one again, but she likes to bung hers in the food processor all at once – sometimes I don’t hold with her shortcuts. I did a sponge method instead, and yes, the effort was rewarded, by not one but two chocolate cake nay-sayers pronouncing it lovely and light. As light as it can be under the weight of chocolate butter icing, I guess.

You know, the most fun was sitting with Mr J and sticking on the chocolate buttons, and not just because you get to put one on the cake and then one in your mouth. It was our heady anticipation of the boy’s glee at being given an entire cake. It was talking about whether or not he’d do his excited hands (he did) and whether he’d say it was “amazin’!” (he did).

Next year we’ll even talk about whether he’ll have a huge sugar high and race around the house on his trike non-stop for half an hour once he’s eaten it. That is, if I’m not too busy sculpting a fire engine out of sugar paste…

Filed Under: Baking, Fitz, Making for Mothers - 4 Comments
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