Savoury cake a la mode de St. Aignan

What do you cook given half a pack of Emmental and some allumettes de jambon (bacon "matchsticks") approaching their "use by" date? I had already marked Ken Broadhurst's Cheesy bacon olive loaf as a favourite to try soon, having noted that it was one gigantic muffin and therefore reasonably straightforward.*

Just a big muffin

All I had to do was translate the ingredients from US measures into metric.

This is what I came up with.

A total of about 400g assorted tasty goodies (selected from cooked bacon lardons, diced ham, cooked chicken, cheese cut into 1cm cubes, cooked and diced sweet pepper, quartered pitted olives, chopped walnuts, peas, or what have you... according to the contents of your fridge / freezer)
450g plain flour
1 tbsp baking powder/bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp salt
a pinch of cayenne
1 egg
250ml natural yoghurt (two 125g pots )
125ml milk
125ml crème fraiche
3tbsp olive oil

My tasty goodies were 80 - 120g each bacon, cheese (Emmental), olives (black and green), and bottled red pepper (one pepper, dried with kitchen towel and cubed). I dry-fried the bacon allumettes in a small frying pan until they gave up a lot of their fat and started to go brown, then let them cool. The whole lot went in the mixture, and I reduced the oil a little. Instead of olive oil I used Fruitée et Noix oil produced by Vigean, a local product which is a blend of colza and walnut oil. This is somewhat lighter than olive and a golden colour rather than green, so my loaf crumb was a slightly different shade. I also used North African-style lait fermenté which is made from skimmed milk, instead of the milk and crème fraiche. The lactic acid in the yoghurt and the lait fermenté combined with the baking powder to produce a well-risen light loaf.

*the standard muffin method: assemble the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and mix thoroughly (this includes the tasty goodies). Assemble the wet ingredients in another bowl, and stir well. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry, and mix the two just to combine them - do not overmix. Half fill your chosen moulds (greased or lined) and bake at 180°C until well risen and the top is golden brown.

Colourful and tasty!

We made two loaves using paper liners in aluminium moulds [left over from a couple of UK ready roasts], and the papers peeled away with no fighting back. This can definitely come again - it rose beautifully and tastes excellent, with lots of appetising colours. We have a sheet with six miniature loaf moulds and we'll try that - excellent for a picnic or a dinner party starter.

Many thanks to Ken for his inspirational posts, food-related or otherwise. Thanks also to Jean for the gift of "Good Old-Fashioned Cakes" which has an extremely practical conversion chart.

For a further post about savoury muffins, see this recipe from a St Hubert (margarine) pack.

Fruit cake - melting method - update

Having blogged about my old Stork recipe here, I thought it was time actually to bake it. I couldn't resist a few minor changes - the dried fruit included chopped crystallised ginger and sliced dried apricots, I used tea instead of water, and I sprinkled a handful of flaked almonds on the top for the look of the thing. I used a teaspoon of baking powder with my plain wholemeal flour, as I didn't have self-raising. I cooked it for an hour and a quarter which was less than the minimum time in the recipe. This is the result.

 

Fruit cake by the melting method

It's definitely overdone, by at least a quarter of an hour. I would say start testing after 45 minutes. The mixture was very stiff, which may be a result of the ginger and apricots absorbing more of the water, and a couple more tablespoons of water would make it more workable.

We sampled the cake, and Tim thought it was excellent, but I thought it rather too sweet for my taste. The moist fruit means that the cake is not too dry. The fruit certainly did not sink!

Just a small slice please!

Boiled fruit cakes and things

My first shot at a Porter Cake led to a discussion on the origin of the method of cake making referred to as "boiled" - British, Australian? This procedure starts by boiling sugar, fat (butter, margarine or shortening), dried fruit and water (or dark beer) in a saucepan for a few minutes, cooling the mixture, adding a little bicarbonate of soda and eggs, stirring in flour with spices then baking in a lined tin for a good long time in a moderate oven. Sometimes the wet ingredient mixture is added to the dry mix, sometimes it's the other way round, and sometimes the bicarb is part of the dry mix, but the boiling bit is always the same.

The Porter Cake came from the BBC Good Food Cakes and Bakes recipe book (thanks again to Jean for this). It was published in the BBC Good Food magazine but is no longer on the web site. Lynn Burns's Fruit Cake is the only version I can find on-line. Needless to say it is wonderful. My dried fruit consisted of sultanas, giant golden raisins, currants and diced crystallised ginger. I reduced the sugar a little as the ginger was quite sugary. Like everyone else, I found that the cake needed another quarter of an hour to cook through.
.
To add my five penn'orth to the discussion, I recall my parents, not the most adventurous of cooks normally, making a boiled fruit cake in a state of high excitement, to an American recipe in a women's magazine (or the Radio Times perhaps). This would have been in the sixties, probably. Referring to my cooking bible (Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, 1966 edition) I find no recipes for such a cake. Indeed the gingerbread recipe states that the sugar and butter should be carefully melted together without allowing the mixture to boil.

However in my 1963 copy of the Stork classic The Art of Home Cooking there is a recipe for Fruit Cake (melting method).

Make that fifty years' service - we've knocked about a bit!

Cook books of this era tend to be rather less discursive than modern books of the Celebrity Chef era (although Celebrity Chefs existed in the 60s, such as Fanny Craddock, but does anyone remember Philip Harben? My first skillet, aka lidded frying pan, was Harbenware, one of the earliest non-sticks, and a real innovation in 1969). Anyway, there is no indication of the origin of the boiled cake in the Stork book. I reproduce the recipe as it stands, just with the addition of metric measurements.

Ingredients

100g/4 oz. Stork Margarine [other margarines are available, but it was propaganda for Stork!]
100g/4 oz. demerara sugar (4 rounded tablespoons)
200g/8 oz. dried fruit (currants, sultanas, raisins, etc.)
150ml/¼ pint hot water
200g/8 oz. self-raising flour (8 heaped tablespoons)
½ level teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 level teaspoon mixed spice
½ level teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 egg (beaten)

Oven

Pre-heated to moderate (gas 4, 360°F, 180°C)

Method

1. Line a 20cm/7-inch cake tin.
2. Put the Stork, sugar, mixed fruit and water into a medium-sized saucepan. Stir over a low heat until the Stork has melted and the sugar is dissolved. Bring to a boil and simmer for three minutes. Remove and allow to cool to luke-warm.
3. Sieve the flour, nutmeg, mixed spice and bicarbonate of soda into a mixing bowl.
4. Make a well in the centre of the flour. Pour in the cooled mixture and the egg. Stir quickly together, mixing thoroughly.
5. Turn into the prepared cake tin and smooth the top.
6. Bake in the pre-heated oven for 1½ - 1¾ hours 45 minutes - 1 hour.
7. Test [with a skewer] before removing from oven. Leave in the tin for 2-3 minutes. Turn out; remove paper and cool on a wire tray.

Let's travel forward in time from 1963 to the wonderfully-named Modern Fruit Cake from Baking with Stork (such exotic fruit! milk, not water! two eggs! but where's all the sugar?). Then back in time to Jean's 1940s  War Cake, a luxury at a time of rationing (so much sugar! lard! and water! no egg!). Then further back to 1920s Depression Cake, also called "Milkless, Eggless, Butterless Cake" and yet further to 1860s Civil War Cake. That refers to the American Civil War, 150 years ago. Yes, it's an American cake...or maybe German? Or Italian? The trail goes cold!

Many thanks to Susan for Daisy's Best Boiled Fruitcake (an Australian version).

Nuts in May

Here we go gathering nuts in May?  I wouldn't think that's a particularly good time of the year to guarantee success, in the Northern Hemisphere at least! Yet another highly suspect nursery rhyme.

The recipe, for Apple Cake in a Nutshell as blogged about by Jean in Baking in Franglais, required four ounces of blanched hazelnuts. We have filberts, fresh from the tree. This calls for - a gadget!

What is it?

My dad's wonderful nutcracker, with its tiny ship's wheel that you wind to extend the clamp as gently as you please, guaranteeing an undamaged kernel. Four ounces is quite a lot of cracking, even with giant filberts, so that was an evening's entertainment.

Cracking a filbert with precision

Now blanching - the method I learned for almonds - three minutes in boiling water - just didn't work. After five minutes futile scraping I gave up. The internet came up with the addition of baking soda (Bicarb) to the water in the proportion of three tablespoons to two US quarts. I used two teaspoons to a UK pint, again boiling for three minutes, then rinsed them in cold water. The method then said to rub the skins off in a teatowel. I'm sure that would work, particularly with more than my four ounces, but having seen the rich pink colour the water had turned, the subsequent cleaning of the teatowel struck me as a problem. So I rubbed the skins off with my fingers, dipping occasionally in a finger bowl. Success! Clean as a whistle. Not so clean Tim's hankie with which he experimented on the liquid as a dye.

Going...

Almost gone....

 Finally, how to coarsely chop them... the blender just chipped a few bits off them... we gave away our hachoir because we never used it... drat... Tim chopped them with a ceramic-bladed knife. Somewhere no more than a mile from here, a prehistoric woman or man did the same thing, with a flint blade like the ones we dig up in the potager. I don't suppose they bothered skinning them. Sometimes the old ways are the best.

The finished cake - cooked for 20 minutes longer than the recipe said, with foil on top

Coffee and walnut cake for the birthday boy

Tim has been agitating for a coffee and walnut cake for some time, so as the day after tomorrow is his birthday, I gave in.

Looks like a cake...

As it happens, Jean had given us The Hairy Bikers Best-loved Recipes (subtitled "Mums know best") just last week, and there was a delicious-looking version in there. I have at least four versions of the basic Victoria Sponge Sandwich recipe, almost exactly the same - equal quantities of butter (or Stork), caster sugar and self-raising flour, some eggs and "Camp" coffee essence. I used to make the Stork version as a teenager, until my dad commandeered the Stork recipe book I was given by a demonstration team at a school cookery class. I was always slightly disappointed by the result, because it came out rather like a large round biscuit. Four ounces / two eggs to a pair of 7" (18cm) sandwich tins is just not quite enough. The Hairy Bikers give eight ounces / four eggs to a pair of 8" (20cm) tins. Their recipe also called for additional baking powder. The end result was satisfyingly substantial! Thanks again Jean!

Since we have been here, a roll of Lakeland "Magic" non-stick liner has been languishing alongside the baking parchment, on the slightly spurious grounds that it was too expensive to use. As we didn't have enough baking parchment for two 20cm circles, I used this instead. You don't need to grease the tin, in fact it's better not to. It is reputed to last five years regular use - after peeling it off the cake, you just wash it in mild detergent, and dry it (have you ever tried to dry a non-stick disk? If you get too vigorous, it shoots across the kitchen).

Camp coffee and chicory essence, according to Wikipedia, so it must be true,  is a Scottish food product, which began production in 1876 by Paterson & Sons Ltd. in a plant on Charlotte St, Glasgow.

On the original label, the Indian gentleman is a Sepoy servant, standing beside the Scottish soldier and handing him his coffee. Since 2006, the two men are social equals, sitting side by side enjoying their coffee. I suspect in India at least until independence in 1947 the relative status could have gone either way ...

 
Camp is sometimes available on the "British foods" shelves of our local supermarkets, but we couldn't find any, though Super U had a basic chicory essence. I substituted a mixture of this and instant coffee (Nescafé Gold Blend) to the equivalent volume, but it wasn't enough and I'll use more of both next time.

Here's the recipe, as it isn't on their official web site.
For the cake:
65g walnut halves
225g softened butter, cubed, plus a little more to grease the baking tins
225g caster sugar
4 medium eggs (or 2 duck eggs)
225g self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp Camp coffee and chicory essence

For the icing:
150g softened butter, cubed
300g icing sugar, sifted
4 tsp Camp coffee and chicory essence

Substitutions:
For self raising flour, I used plain flour and an additional 2 teaspoons baking powder.
For 2 tablespoons of Camp, I dissolved 3 heaped teaspoons of instant coffee with 30ml water and a dash of chicory essence. For the 4 teaspoons, I used 20ml of water, 2 heaped teaspoons of instant coffee and omitted the chicory. Next time I'll double the coffee - and prepare it in advance with hot water so it dissolves.

Preheat the oven to 190C / gas mark 5. Butter the bases of two 20cm sandwich tins and line with circles of baking parchment.

Put the walnut halves in a food processor or blender and blitz them into fairly fine crumbs, but don't worry if there are a few large pieces remaining. Tip the walnuts into a bowl.

Put the butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder and coffee essence into a food processor and blend on the pulse setting until well combined and creamy (quite a stiff mixture, probably due to using duck eggs). You may need to push the mixture down with a rubber spatula. Take the blade out, add the blitzed walnuts and mix by hand until just combined. "If you don't have a food processor, finely chop the walnuts, tip all the ingredients into a big bowl and beat like hell!" None of this creaming butter and sugar, adding eggs one at a time and folding in flour business.

Spoon the mixture evenly into the lined tins. You can smooth it off, but I found the mixture was pretty much self levelling once it went into the oven. Bake on the same shelf in the middle of the oven for about 25 minutes or until the sponge is just beginning to draw away from the sides of the tins.

Remove the tins from the oven and leave to cool for about 5 minutes. Run a spatula around the edge of the cakes and turn them out onto a wire rack. Peel off the baking parchment and leave to cool completely.

To make the icing, put the butter in a food processor or mixing bowl, then add the icing sugar and coffee essence.  Blend until smooth and creamy. Taste and add more coffee essence if desired. (Tim does not recommend the food processor method, and I didn't fancy it either.)

Place one of the sponges on a plate or cake rack and spread with half the icing. Add the second sponge and spread the rest of the icing on the top.  Use the back of a spoon, a rubber spatula or a fork to make interesting swirly patterns (Tim's the expert at this, so I left that to him). Decorate with the walnut halves. Leave to stand in a cool place for at least an hour before serving to allow the icing to become a little firmer.

Serves 12.

Tastes like a cake!

Marmalade Gingerbread

Ready to cut

A couple of years ago I made Seville orange marmalade with crushed coriander seeds, but neither of us really likes the bits of seed in it, so I decided to try using it in a cake. Hilaire Walden in her book "Sensational Preserves" claims that, having once made Marmalade Gingerbread, she no longer uses black treacle or golden syrup, just marmalade. I substituted a few items, and it still worked very well. Instead of preserved ginger, I had some rather elderly crystallized ginger from Julian Graves, bought before we moved over here. It had gone a bit dry, so I soaked 14 pieces of it overnight and then chopped it. I also substituted a mixture of currants and sultanas for raisins, as all the raisins had been snacked!

Ingredients:
225g/8oz butter, cut in bits
225g/8oz dark brown sugar
300ml/10floz milk
225g/8oz marmalade
350g/12oz self raising flour (if you only have plain flour, add 2 teaspoons baking powder / 1 sachet levure chimique)
1½-2 tablespoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2 eggs, beaten
7 pieces preserved ginger, chopped
115g/4oz raisins

Method:
Pre-heat the oven to 160°C/310°F/gas mark 2. Butter a 20-22.5cm/8-9inch round cake tin and line the base with greaseproof paper or baking parchment.
In a saucepan (not a small saucepan....), gently heat together the butter, sugar, milk and marmalade stirring occasionally, until the sugar and marmalade have all dissolved. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the mixture to cool. Sift together the flour, bicarb, baking powder (if using), and ground spices. Make a well in the middle and pour in the liquid a bit at a time, stirring to make a smooth batter, and adding the eggs towards the end. Stir in the ginger and raisins. Pour the mixture into the cake tin and bake for about 1½ hours until the cake is firm to the touch and a kebab skewer inserted into the middle comes out dry. Leave to cool in the tin. Store in an airtight container. Leave for a day before eating, if you can bear it!

The first slice...

My 9-inch springform tin looked ideal, but the cooked cake turned out not to fit my storage tin! Somewhere in a box is my Tupperware cake box... Hilaire Walden suggests Tangerine Marmalade and Peach Marmalade work as well as orange. I wonder whether cherry jam would work?

A succulent texture

Can't give away walnuts!

Our walnut tree, which teeters on the edge of the millstream, gave us 10 kilos of nuts this year. Not a lot as walnut trees go, but plenty for our own use. We had to say "thanks but no thanks" to all those kind people who wanted to give us more walnuts!
We find a mole wrench works better than any nutcrackers to get at the meat inside. Today I made a Banana Date and Walnut cake to cheer myself up on a dreary drizzly afternoon. A little research told me that levure chimique is baking powder. One sachet contains two level teaspoons - perfect for this recipe.

Ingredients
180g whole dried dates, or 160g stoned dates
75 ml dark rum, or other alcoholic beverage of choice / what you have (I like Stroh rum best!)
175g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt
125g unsalted butter, softened (in the microwave, a blast of 30 seconds, beat thoroughly with a wooden spoon, give it a few more seconds if there are still lumps)
150g sugar
2 large eggs
4 small/2 large etc but about 300g without skin, VERY ripe bananas, mashed
60g walnuts (optional if you really are allergic)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Recipe
Prepare a 23x13x7cm (2lb) loaf tin, buttered & floured (or it won't come out!) or paper lined.

Stone and chop the dates to what ever size you like, put them in a small pan with the rum, and bring to the boil. Turn off the heat and leave for at least 1 hour, until all the liquid has been absorbed (otherwise the mixture curdles).

Set your oven to heat to Gas mark 3, 170C.

In a medium sized bowl or jug, thoroughly mix the flour, baking powder, bicarb, salt.

In a large bowl, beat the softened butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until blended. Sneaky tip - I microwaved the butter in this bowl, to save washing up / wasted butter! Beat in the eggs one at a time. Add the mashed banana.

Stir in dates, walnuts, vanilla extract. Add the flour mix, 1/3 at a time, stirring well after each addition. The resulting mixture is quite sloppy.

Pour/scrape the mixture into the prepared tin. Bake in the middle of the oven for 60 - 90 minutes, until a fine skewer or sharp knife comes out "cleanish". Leave the cake in its tin on a wire rack to cool before turning it out.

Enjoy!

This also makes a super winter dessert with crème crue and bottled cherries.