Camberwell Tea (gin)

Saturday saw the resurgence of the celebrated Camberwell Ladies Institute of Tea, hosted at the lovely Hannah Osborne's flat overlooking the green. Such genteel surroundings for what would inevitably descend into a gin-soaked cake binge. And so it was, as 6 full hours after arriving, decked out in floral frocks and high hopes, we rolled out of Hannah's flat and onto the bus, cheeky bottle of wine in hand (sorry Boris), to hit the pub in epic fashion.

That's not to say that we didn't dutifully and enthusiastically observe the twin pillars of tea-party hosting: tea, and indeed cake. I can say with complete honesty that I had a lovely cup of earl grey before proceeding to slosh 14 bottles of cava down my throat. There was coffee too! Oh yes! However it is with shame in my heart that I admit to you that we splashed rum into our coffee, just in case it sobered us up too much...




But the cake! Oh what cake there was! From delicate caramel tartlets from Polly Button, to rich and chewy brownies from Ceilidh, a splendid angel's food cake in the shape of a butterfly, magnificent cinnamon buns and my own chocolate and peanut butter cupcakes. We also enjoyed a gin (yes GIN) and white chocolate cake, as it seems we are incapable of digesting anything that hasn't first been soaked in booze.

But not upon cake alone did we feast, oh no, for there were many and varied savoury delights for us to stuff ourselves with. Bruschetta,  tiny elegant sandwiches, baby sausages in honey and mustard, not one but two pasta salads, cheese scones and itsy-bitsy cheese and spring onion tarts. The weaker amongst us feared there would be no space for cake, but the more hardy struggled on, realising that this was a marathon not a sprint.

My cupcakes are from a recipe in Gizzi's Kitchen Magic and worked out very well, even if I do say so myself. I substituted the chopped Reese's Pieces for Reese's peanut butter chips, and placed a slice of peanut butter KitKat chunky on the top. These were imported from BULGARIA by my lovely friend Jess, as Nestle tragically stopped producing the bars in the UK the day after my birthday. What a gift Nestle, thanks very much. They were a bit on the large size as I made 12 instead of the recommended 18, so if you try them out perhaps you should stick to making 18 slightly smaller ones.

On a far less successful note, I attempted a hazelnut and passion fruit pavlova, because everyone always says that pavlovas are sooo easy to make and sooo forgiving if you cock them up, and they just look sooo spectacular, it really is worth making one.

Well, the people who said that are liars. My pavlova was an absolute disaster. I don't know why, again I followed all of the instructions to the letter, but still it ended up gungy and flaky and AWFUL. I can probably attribute the failure to two things; my eggs were not fresh enough and I am not very good at things like this. I should have expected calamity when I attempted a desert named after a ballerina, for grace and finesse are not my watch words in this life. I tried to claw victory back from the jaws of defeat by turning my failed pavlova into an Eton mess, as that's what people always tell you to do. Sadly mine ended up looking like a bowl of cold sick. But frankly everyone was far too drunk to notice.

Peanut Butter Cupcakes.
Ingredients:
170g softened butter
170g golden caster sugar
3 large free-range eggs
170g self-raising flour
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
3-4 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
handful Reese's peanut butter chips/ 6 Reese's cups, chopped.

Frosting:
200g peanut butter
170g icing sugar
150ml full fat cream cheese

Preheat the oven to 170C/ gas 3. Put 18 cupcake cases in the holes of two muffin tins. Place the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl and beat with an electric mixer for five minutes or until pale and creamy. Whisk in the eggs one by one until combined. You may find that the mixture curdles a little, but it should come back together when you add the flour.
Sift over the flour, baking powder and cocoa, and stir in. Loosen the mixture with 3 tablespoons of milk and the vanilla extract. The batter should fall off the spoon easily; if you think it's too thick, add another tablespoon of milk. Stir in the peanut butter chips/ Reese's peanut butter cups.
Divide the mixture between the cupcake cases and bake for 20-25 minutes. Check that they are done by sliding a skewer into a cake; if it comes out clean, it's done.
Leave to cool in the tins for 10 minutes before turning out onto a rack to cool completely before icing.
To make the peanut butter frosting, beat together the peanut butter, icing sugar and cream cheese until smooth and creamy. Use either a knife or a piping bag to ice the cakes. Top with chopped Reese's peanut cups.

From Gizzi's Kitchen Magic.

In search of a perfect club sandwich

A hangover borne of half-price drinks (anything! Even cocktails! Even champagne cocktails! Oh my head...) with our friend Jess in the bars of Bank propelled Polly and I towards the pub on the corner for a recovery lunch. Nothing recovers me more quickly or more effectively than a club sandwich. It is one of my favourite lunches, but it is so seldom done properly, that I've all but given up ordering it. The closest I've come to club perfection was at the now defunct Green at Goose Green. I almost cried when I arrived for a chicken fix one lunchtime, having walked 2 miles in the Peckham heat to find it closed. Forever.

I can be seen regularly in The Carpenter's Arms on Whitfield St, swilling vast quantities of wine down my throat and generally carousing a bit. It's a really nice pub, with three rooms, each more comfortable than the last, but the best thing about it is its proximity to my office. It's handy because it means I can slip out for a livener at pretty much any time of the day, and be back in time to pretend I just went to buy gum or something innocuous like that. The room at the top, The Belle Bar I believe it's somewhat pretentiously named, is my favourite bit, but it's a bit patchy in it's opening times. It has a good terrace for smoking on though, so do persevere.

The club sandwich won't win any awards, (especially not my coveted "chicken club sandwich gold star award for excellence") but it had a very good go at it. Not since the glory days of the Charlotte St Blues Bar have I been so satisfied by a chicken and bacon sandwich. I really do fail to see how meat, salt, fat and carbs can fail to set you back on your feet after a battering by the booze bandit. This one was on granary bread, which is a club-sin as far as I'm concerned, and also contained no tomato, again a poor show. But I was made generous by the fragility of my mental state, and I'd award the sandwich a 7/10. Chips were good but their main benefit was that there were lots of them.

Yummy Mummy

This weekend I went home to see my parents, something which I shamefully haven't done since Christmas, because I am a bad daughter. We had a lovely weekend with highlights including a visit to Petworth House, a morning coffee in a Tudor lodge and my mother attempting to vaccinate me against measles, yes really. My dad also held forth on several subjects close to his heart (I think he likes it when he has someone else to complain to other than my poor mother) including his hatred of seals "they're just fat lazy bastards" and the pointless nature of rugby "why don't they just ban rugby in this country, it's so pointless - I push you, you push me, we're playing rugby." He also leapt from his armchair on Sunday morning to dash upstairs and whizz off an email of complaint to the sports editor of The Times, for some perceived sleight or grammatical error. My dad has officially become a grumpy old man, but none the less charming for it. My mother rolls her eyes a lot.

On Sunday, as is traditional, my mother whipped up a lovely roast. She said that she likes me to have something good inside before I head back home. I think she's forgotten that I'm no longer a poverty-stricken student living on Kit Kats and wine, and that I have something 'good' almost every day. Still, a roast's a roast, and I know everyone says it, but my mum's really is the best. She cooked a lovely shoulder of pork, which is one of my favourite roasting joints, and served it with a cider gravy. She even let me drink the rest of the cider when I asked, and pretended not to notice when I stole little pieces of meat from the resting joint and burnt my mouth on them. Perhaps she's right in thinking I'm still a starveling student on the scavenge, I really do nothing to promote myself as a grown-up.

The best bit of my mum's roast is the 'stuffing.' I put it in inverted commas because it's actually just a bowl of breadcrumbs with fried onion and dried sage mixed through it then whacked in the oven for a bit until the top-crumbs go a bit brown. I think it's pretty much unique to our family, as everyone else in the land has proper stuffing that sticks together and has more than three ingredients, but I love it. You can sort of sprinkle it over the whole meal like a seasoning, or you can pour a little bit of gravy onto a pile of it so that it sticks together a little in a bready patty. I remember my Nana making this stuffing every Sunday, and apparently she learnt it from her mother-in-law. It's a sort of skewed hereditary stuffing; passed from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law rather than from mother to daughter. I guess I'll have to wait for an invite to my brother's wife's Sunday roast...

Mum finished in spectacular style with a world-beating apple crumble and custard or ice cream. I had both because I am a child. She uses a recipe from the Homepride Book of Home Baking, one of my favourite recipe books ever, filled with brilliantly retro dishes like mutton puffs (delish....) I really don't know why I don't go home more often, it's a great excuse to revert to being a scraps-stealing, two-deserts-please child.

Here, for no real reason is a picture of my cat, because I think he's pretty:

Famewhoring continued.

The result of a cold Thursday night spent squawking like a hormonal teenager at semi-clad men in a basement of the Hospital Club. At 3.16 I can be seen screaming theatrically and fleeing a giant looming head. Hollywood is calling...

Hot Chip - I Feel Better

Hot Chip | MySpace Music Videos

Peter Serafinowicz has done a lovely job directing I Feel Better, and the ever-charming Hot Chip boys have released another cracker. Please go and buy their album, they really are so nice and talented.

Canteen

My friend Naomi and I decided that now we are grown ups, it's about time we started having brunch on Saturdays. Because that's what grown ups do, isn't it? Sadly, I've still got a way to go, as I got a bit over-refreshed on Friday night after the ballet (started off so positively, descended into martini-madness by 1am) so I slept through brunch and had to shamefacedly call Naomi to make my excuses and reschedule brunch to lunch. One day I will master the art of just drinking a little bit, not so much that I stumble/slur/forget to take my clothes off before bed/sleep through appointments. One day, but not today.

So lunch it was, with Ceilidh in tow we took the train to Waterloo. I discovered that I can use my oyster card on the train that isn't the underground train. Did you know that? I've learnt so much this weekend, I should really spend more time with Miss Jones. The eternally wise Miss Jones had also chosen Canteen as the venue of our brunch/lunch and what an excellent choice it was.

For someone who was feeling a tiny bit delicate from the overindulgences of the previous evening, the responsibly sourced nursery food served by organically grown waitresses who look like they enjoy reading poetry and walking the cliffs in their spare time, was just what the Dr. ordered. I had chicken and chips with a little green salad on the side. There isn't much to say about chicken and chips, except that this was really very good chicken, crispy and salty on the outside and sticky and meaty on the inside and pretty passable chips (one or two soggies). I had a little dish of garlic mayonnaise on the side, which is one of my most favourite things in the world to eat with both chickens and chips. So that was good. My salad was, in my opinion overpriced at £3.50 for a saucer of leaves, but the same could be said of all of Canteen's dishes. Some may baulk at paying proper restaurant prices for food that your mum makes. But really, that's the point of Canteen, they cook food that feels like a hug, but in quite shiny surroundings so you remember you're in a restaurant and not your mum's house.

I want to go back to Canteen lots of times for comforting food and charming service. They serve breakfast all day too, so really we could still have had brunch, but we wanted wine, so it's more proper to call it lunch. You can drink more with lunch.

Canteen
Royal Festival Hall
Belvedere Rd
London
SE1 8XX
0845 686 1122

Please don't put potatoes on my pizza.

For a pre-ballet dinner we headed after work to Fire and Stone in Covent Garden. I was a little sceptical about the concept of 'worldwide pizzas' (Peking: Chinese Hoi Sin sauce, shredded aromatic duck, mozzarella & spring onions topped with cucumber ribbons. Marrakech: cumin spiced ground lamb, mozzarella, mint yoghurt sauce, green olives, raisins & sliced red onion drizzled with chilli oil) but the enormous wood-fired oven, the largest in the northern hemisphere apparently, swayed me a little. I was wrong to be swayed by a fancy oven, for if you do not treat pizzas with respect then it doesn't matter where you cook them, they will still be a bit rubbish.

I went for a Lombardia I think, which involved chorizo, POTATO and red peppers on a bit of a McCain base. There was a dollop of aioli in the middle of my pizza too, I'm not sure why. It wasn't very good, it was greasy and not very garlicky and very thick and cloying. It also did nothing for the pizza, which was also greasy, heavy and pretty flavourless. The fact that the staff automatically place bottles of chilli sauce on the tables with your order does not bode well. I had to use both chilli sauce AND salt (oh my arteries) to make my meal taste of anything at all, and then it just tasted like a salty-chilli-biscuit. Potatoes on a pizza should be outlawed, what is the need? 'We've noticed that pizzas just don't provide enough chub-making carbohydrate, what can we do about this? Bung some spuds on the top. For extra coronary delight, let's deep fry the potatoes before we sprinkle the tiny cubes of organ-slaughtering cholesterol onto a pizza base.' I'm just glad I didn't go for the cheese sauce base, or indeed the black pudding topped pizza, or I may have had to be wheeled out of there in a coffin.

Other items on the menu might be better than whatever it was that I ordered, but I'm still of the opinion that you shouldn't muck around with pizza too much: quality dough, stupidly hot oven, decent cheese and a good tomato sauce. Perhaps the novelty value of Fire and Stone will see it through, but really, if you want Thai chicken, you don't want it served on a coconut pizza base.

Fire and Stone
31-33 Maiden Lane
London WC2E 7JS
020 7257 8625

Review: Divine Butterscotch Chocolate.

The latest addition to the Fairtrade chocolate company’s range is a rich and delicious butterscotch studded milk chocolate bar, just in time for Fairtrade fortnight. Co-owned by the cocoa farmers, Divine is a company that likes to give back, so you can enjoy their indulgent treats and feel good about yourself at the same time.

The snack-sized chunky bar is a great combination of smooth milk chocolate and crunchy nuggets of butterscotch toffee which create a delicious burnt caramel after-taste. I can barely tell you any more than that, as it’s so tasty that I ate it embarrassingly quickly and then wondered what I would write about. Chocolate purists may rail against the crunchy butterscotch additions which compromise the smooth chocolate texture, but I’m delighted that two of my favourite flavours have finally come together in beautiful chocolaty harmony.

Divine chocolate is created from Ghanaian cocoa beans which are slowly fermented and dried in the sun to produce the most authentic chocolate flavour. Divine is also the only Fairtrade chocolate company which is 45% owned by the farmers themselves, meaning a share in the profits, improved financial stability for cocoa-growing communities, and a voice within the cocoa industry.

These are treats for the ethically minded chocolate aficionado who wants to make sure that their indulgences are of the highest quality, without compromising their values. They are also ideal for anyone who, like me, is just really greedy with chocolate.
Priced at 80p per bar and available from Wholefoods Market, Fresh & Wild, Oxfam and online from www.divinechocolateshop.com

Originally published at The Culinary Guide.

New Recipe Book

Yesterday I got home from work to find a lovely Amazon parcel of joy on my doorstep. My copy of Gizzi's Kitchen Magic had arrived so I made a cup of tea and settled down to read it all.

Gizzi is a terribly glamorous cook who you may know from Cook Yourself Thin and her new book is packed with lots of yum recipes which I can't wait to try out (luckily there is hardly any chat about staying thin in this book, which is good as I don't hold much truck with skinny food, as evidenced by my hips.) There are also trendy tattoo-style graphics on every page and little golden sprinkles printed about the place, which I can only assume are particles of 'kitchen magic.' In all it's a very attractive book.

However graphics and recipes aside, what's most exciting for me about Gizzi's book, is the tips and tricks section at the beginning of each chapter. As previous blog posts show, I lack a certain finesse in the kitchen, though I make up for it in boundless puppy-like enthusiasm, so these sections on everything from making pasta to which pans you really ought to have will be super-handy for me. Some more experienced cooks may find it patronising, but I know I'll be referring back to this book time after time when I'm unsure about pastry-making or meringues or any of the myriad other things which I cock up in the kitchen. Gizzi seems to be a sort of rock n' roll Delia.

I'm already thinking up reasons to make the Earl Grey Chocolate Fudge Cake and the impossibly calorific Bailey's Chocolate Croissant Bread and Butter Pudding, so watch this space.

Gizzi's Kitchen Magic is available for £20 from the usual places. Check her website for more information.

Review: Pulp Fruit Pouches.

Pulp: The easy way to eat fruit. But what is the hard way...?

The premise of Pulp fruit pouches is that they are an easy way to get one of your five a day. Aimed at busy people who are ‘always on the go’ the pouches of pureed fruit contain fewer than 80 calories each and come in three varieties: banana, mango and passion fruit, apple strawberry and blueberry and banana, strawberry and raspberry.

Personally I’ve never found it too difficult or time consuming to eat a piece of fruit. By their very nature, most fruits involve minimal preparation and are usually a self-contained snack in themselves, so I’m a bit lost as to why I would need a company to blend fruit in to a baby-food consistency so that I can suck it out of a pouch instead of eating the whole fruit.

As a snack in themselves, the Pulp pouches are neither satisfying nor particularly pleasing, having a pappy consistency. Having said that, stirred into yoghurt or porridge, they are much better, providing a quick and easy way of pepping up breakfast. Used in place of a compote or jam in this way, the pouches offer you a simple way of squeezing a portion of fruit into your diet whilst also reducing the amount of sugar you consume. Pulp pouches contain no added water or fruit juices, so you know that you’re getting nothing but the fruit which is a benefit over many similar smoothie-like products.

The pouches would be perfect for children’s lunch boxes; they are a good hand-size for kids and have a non-messy spout top for little mouths. I’d say that children are probably the only demographic for whom eating a piece of fruit as opposed to a fruity puree is a problem.

Priced at £1.29 each and available from Ocado, Harvey Nichols, Wholefoods and selected sandwich / deli stores.

Originally published at http://www.theculinaryguide.co.uk

The sad story of the broken tart.

This is my lemon tart. This is my lemon tart before I put it in the fridge over night and it developed a terrible fissure right down the middle, spoiling its pretty lemony face like a scar. The pastry is a bit mental too, as I'm quite ham-fisted. What else disappointed me about this tart? Let me count the ways: pastry too thin, resulting in custard leaking through a hole somewhere after it went soggy. If you look closely at the picture you can see that there's a weird jammy sludge around the bottom of the tin where some of the filling seeped out. I've worked out where I went wrong though, and I won't be discouraged. Next time I will roll my pastry out a bit thicker, blind bake it for longer and trim it before I bake it to avoid the raggy edges you see before you.

I'm very much a bought-pastry kind of girl. If it's good enough for Delia and all that. But this weekend as I mentioned before, I was determined to do everything by hand, from scratch with much sweating and swearing and disappointment when things you make yourself are not, in fact, as good as the packet ones.

Imagine my delight then, when shortcrust pastry is such a doddle! You just bung everything in the mixer and whizz it until it makes a ball. There's a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with chilling and rolling and chilling again etc, but it's quite therapeutic in a perverse sort of way. This is my fat little disc of pastry, fresh from the mixer. The work of about 30 seconds:
The next bit is the chilling and rolling part. Obviously this is where I started going a bit wonky, as I rolled it too thin. I thought this would make it crispier when I eventually baked it, I really hate thick slabby pastry, however all it achieved was the creation of structural weaknesses in my little tart. My next job was blind-baking it. Using baking beans made me feel very capable, a feeling which resonated throughout the whole pastry and tart making business (until the soggy miserable end obviously.) I think there is something about the kit you need for baking that makes you feel like a grown up. Wielding a rolling pin makes me feel a bit Deliaesque, which can only be a good thing?














I made a really lemony custard filling with the juice of six lemons and a really worrying quantity of double cream (400ml!) and seven eggs (SEVEN!) and tipped it into my blind-baked pastry shell. So far, so good, feeling pretty smug. I even sent an email to a friend about my pastry skills. What a fool I was. The tart turned out like many of the things I create at home; very tasty but looking like they were borne of a floury clash between a child and a performing dog. They never look like they do in the book, and I'm not sure why. I follow the instructions, I'm careful and delicate of hand, but somehow things always end up a bit smushed up and dishevelled. I think that's why I like making things that don't mind looking smushy and crap, like roast chicken, or pasta. Baking needs a bit more finesse than I'm blessed with.

The recipe I used was from Ruth Watson's Something for the Weekend which is a very fine book indeed.