Eggnog

You know what makes alcohol really Christmasy? Boiling it up with stronger alcohol!

Gannet and Parrot, who I met at a Women in Food: Media event, posted Sussex jackut the other day. This is beer 'mulled' with brandy and spices. I can't say I'm convinced in any way by warmed beer, but I'm interested in old recipes we seem to have lost and my boyfriend's from Sussex, so I'll probably give it a try at some point.

Though there's no heating involved, it made me think of my great-grandmother's recipe for eggnog. I haven't seen it used in anger since about 1999.

There is a pint of spirits in it. A pint.

For eight people.

Here it is, via my aunt, via my mum:

'Nonnie's Egg Nog

Make only by the unit.   Do not attempt to double. 

6 egg yolks                                3/4 pt. Star Hennessy Brandy

2 egg whites

1/2 lb sugar

1 quart heavy cream                    1/4 pt. Hudson's Bay - Jamaica Rum

Beat egg yolks with electric beater until lemon colored.  Add slowly 1/2 lb sugar.  Add very slowly the 2 liquors.  Add 1 quart heavy cream.  Add egg whites - only one or two beaten stiff but not dry and fold in gently. 

6 times the recipe serves 50.  Served with Christmas cookies, hot mince tarts, fruitcake.

Pick up bodies as they fall!!!'

This must be an American pint, which is equivalent to 473ml, but I'm equally sure it doesn't really matter. 

I doubt Hudson's Bay make Jamaica Rum any more, but any (dark) Jamaican rum will do. 

I've not a clue what Star Hennessy Brandy is, as I'm guessing this recipe could easily date from anywhere between the end of Prohibition and the 50s... Use good brandy.

Heavy cream is double cream. That I do know.

Drink responsibly. Seriously. It's tasty but lethal. Don't go dipping too often into the bowl. 

Mint choc chip ice cream without a machine

At the risk of being repetitive, this is a Kavey Eats' Bloggers Scream For Ice Cream post. They're very effective at getting me to actually make and blog things.

Filling oozing out of the bittermints

This one is the easiest yet. And, no, you don't need an ice cream maker. You need a plastic container and electric beaters. You also need ten minutes, tops, and then a couple of hours lounging in front of Friday night telly, with a couple of breaks to beat the mixture and make your neighbours wonder what you're doing at 9pm on a Friday.

The challenge is herbs. I'm one of those people who likes my desserty things to taste sweet and my mains to taste savoury and never the twain shall meet. So I went for mint. Unimaginative, I know, but I'd had a busy week and once I'd thought about mint choc chip ice cream, I couldn't get it out of my head, or the taste out of my mouth.

Kavey mentioned she'd done fresh mint, After Eights and custard as an easy ice cream (and she's one of those people I actually trust when she says 'easy'. I know I'm not going to find myself 'just' bletting medlars or pitting 40 cherries).

However, I had overindulged at my brother's birthday party the day before. When I say 'overindulged', I don't mean I drank too much, I mean I snaffled as many After Eights as possible while the rest of Family Lee wasn't looking. So the thought of After Eights made me feel just a tiny bit sick.

Someone else on Twitter had been talking about Bendick's Bittermints, and when I thought of them, that was it. I couldn't get that icy mint taste out of my mouth.

I can tell you how to make it, in one simple tweet I sent Kavey:

@Kavey emailed Andy 'buy custard and bittermints', chopped mint and mints, stirred, froze, buzzed with beaters, froze overnight.
— Thunderstorm Bun (@thunderstormbun) June 8, 2013

That really is all there is to it. Just wait for the mixture to freeze to a sludge, then buzz with electric beaters above once an hour until you get a texture that's recognisably ice cream or get fed up and go to bed.

I think I chopped six mints into the mixture (and I really like mint). I'd also advise using very fresh mint. Mine had done Pimm's duty the weekend before and was showing its age a bit.

When you taste the combination of mints, oddly, you taste the fresh mint first, then it disappears and then you get the Bendick's taste. I suspect you could do it without the fresh mint, especially if you upped the Bendick's. And it essentially tastes like mint choc chip, but homemade, which is no bad thing at all.

Blueberry waffle Baked Alaska

I was raring to go after the Baked Alaska challenge, so I decided whatever Kavey's next challenge was,  I would do it.

When I saw it was wafers, waffles, cones, cups, biscuits and so on, I thought I could put my stroopwaffels idea into action. A baked Alaska of stroopwaffel, caramel ice cream and meringue. How could that not be good?

But when I read closely, I realised Kavey wanted the waffles to be homemade. Spoilsport.

I emailed a Dutch friend, hoping there was some sort of cheat's way to make stroopwaffels, but he said 'I only know of one kind, and it comes in a plastic bag'.

After stroopwaffels – or maybe even before – my favourite type of waffle is a Belgian one, preferably eaten hot from a street stand in Ghent and absolutely covered in chocolate.

Waffle on the griddle pan

So after casting my brain around for ways to make waffles at home without a waffle iron (I didn't get very far), I Googled and realised my grill pan was probably as close as I was going to get, short of welding some sort of grid.

All right. Now, apart from chocolate (too easy!), what goes with waffles? Well, if you're talking American waffles, blueberry syrup. Some people like maple, but for that real American taste, I think you need blueberry.

Still clinging to the baked Alaska idea, I thought 'why not make a waffle base, blueberry sorbet and meringue? It'll be like some ridiculously cracked-out brunch dessert.'

Then I thought of maple meringue, but I knew at that point I was working up to a sweet mingling of flavours that was frankly ridiculous. But whoever came up with the baked Alaska was not put off because it was a ridiculous idea, were they?

No. Mission Ridiculous was on.

Some grooves and crispiness

I used Always Order Dessert's waffle recipe on my griddle pan. The thing is, my griddle pan is really very shallow, and while we got attractive stripes and some crispness, it wasn't anywhere close to a waffle for me. I used medium eggs where the recipe says large, and I think I'd put another one in next time, as the batter was pretty solid. And we were looking at about 10 mins with my hob on 4 (bloody, bloody electric cooker) to start with, until it really got going.

(It's worth looking at Big Spud's blogpost for this challenge, where he cooked the same recipe on a George Foreman grill. That's some good thinking, right there.)

Half-mashed blueberries with lemon zest

Blueberry after being forced through a sieve - the dark stuff is skin pulp

I had actually made the blueberry sorbet the week before, using this recipe. I think I forced too much of the skin through at the end, because it had that slight antiseptic taste the skins give you. But I can generally take or leave blueberries, and Andy liked it, so take that with a pinch of salt. I would also possibly use less lemon next time. I also wish I'd thought of substituting maple syrup for the honey – I bet that would taste really good.

Pouring the maple syrup into the beaten egg whites and sugar

I was also sceptical about the maple meringue. I had thought the chemical composition of stiff-eggs-and-sugar would be destroyed by the liquid maple syrup, but it really isn't bad. I wouldn't do it with a hand-whisk, as you have to whip it back up to stiff peaks once the maple syrup has gone in. It is, of course, really very sickly, and I would use absolutely the best quality maple syrup you can afford.

Blueberry sorbet on waffle

The whole thing does work, narrowly. I can imagine how amazing it would be with a proper, crispy waffle. I also think each of the elements paired together would be great. Waffle and blueberry sorbet would make a great hot-day brunch dish, while waffle with maple syrup meringue nests would make a great end to a dinner party, as would the sorbet and meringue.

The yawning maw; I'm incapable of making an aesthetically pleasing Baked Alaska

This post is part of Kavey Eats' Bloggers Scream for Ice Cream challenge - check it out, it's a lot of fun.

Baked Alaska

I've been fascinated by Baked Alaska since I read my mum's make-your-own-yoghurt book (look it was the early 80s, alright?) as a child. Inside, the centrepiece was an extravagant yoghurt Baked Alaska, sliced open to show green, pink and brown layers (look it was the early 80s, alright?).

The first one I had, at some posh hotel in the States, was overly alcoholic and put me off for a long time. I had an orange one at Petrus for Andy and I's anniversary, which I found wonderful but sickly.

Then someone - and I'm really sorry I can't remember who; I thought it was Little Loaf, but I can't find it - did simple bought cake and bought ice cream one, where all you have to do is make the meringue.

That's genius. Effort: five minutes with an electric whisk. Spectacle and taste: off the scale.

I'd had in mind for a while to do Kavey Eats' Bloggers Scream for Ice Cream themes. I have made ice cream, which you can do without an ice cream maker, and it's surprisingly easy. In terms of churning it, you pull it out of the freezer and whack those trusty electric beaters into it about once an hour. The ice cream is still very hard, but extremely tasty and you can be inventive.

What I wanted to do for Kavey's Baked Alaska theme was something which would cut through the sweetness of the meringues, which led me to one of my favourite fruit flavours, raspberry.

The cake includes a layer of raspberries

I made a raspberry and almond cake from BBC Good Food, which my choir (for whom I do most of my baking) adore, so I thought I'd just layer those two flavours.

Despite a shocked tweet from a follower, Baked Alaska is so easy. I think the pre-baked cake fools you into thinking it's been baked at the same time as the ice cream.

Raspberry puree before being made into sorbet

I made the raspberry sorbet on Saturday, using Kirsty Wark's (!) recipe from BBC Food. It never properly set. I don't know if that was too much sugar, or my freezer, or what. Still, we only churned it twice and it came out with a good texture, rather than the flavoured ice the freezer sometimes produces.

I baked the cake on Sunday, which is a really easy blend-it-all-in-the-food-processor one that's useful to have in your arsenal.

I would not consider doing this without electric beaters!

Then - guess what? I made the meringue. Again, I cannibalised this from a more complicated recipe. Honestly, this takes five minutes with electric beaters.

Blurry - in a rush!

We had to work fast to put the Alaska together. I knew the sorbet wouldn't stay frozen for too long, so I spooned a few balls of it on the top of the cake and then quickly covered it with the meringue.

Spooning the meringue onto the base

As it's insulation, it's important to get the meringue to cover all of the ice cream and cake, and I wonder if we missed a bit as we were working so fast.

I put it in for less than the ten minutes advised. I'm not particularly bothered about my meringue being golden, in fact I prefer it if it's not, and the raspberry had begun to leak by that point.

Slightly sinister leakage

It also eased out of a couple of holes in the top, as if the meringue had been bitten by a vampire, and that makes me think the insulation was the problem.

Never going to be a food photographer!

How did it taste? Great. I definitely like the raspberry and meringue combination. The cake was a bit hard, and I think I'd prefer something spongier and perhaps lob some amaretto on it.

I've seen recipes with jam in between ice cream and cake, and I wonder if that's so the sorbet doesn't sink into the cake. We had it a week later (frozen, don't worry) and the sorbet had disappeared and the cake tasted mysteriously more like raspberry...

This post is part of the #BSFIC challenge

Cheese and onion bakes: 'Phlegm cakes'

Continuing my rifle through my mother's collection of yellowing, typed recipe cards to bring you our family favourites. (See cheese gunk).

I suppose I'd better explain the name first. The combination of melted hard cheese and onion does, I'm afraid, look a little bit like phlegm, and my brother christened them 'phlegm cakes' at the age of about eight. (He was very advanced). But if you wanted to keep your guests onside, I suppose you could call them 'cheese and onion bakes' or somesuch.

I'm writing this the same day I posted the cheese gunk recipe and musing that these family favourites are not at all what you expect from 50s American food - they're made from scratch, are very simple and taste GREAT. They really are both more than the sum of their parts. (Yeah, might've taken me a while to post.)

Should you be unsure what circles of bread  look like

First, use a small, cookie cutter to cut inch-and-a-half circles out of some white bread. The mix here made 16 cakes.

Then grate 1/2c of pecorino (other hard Italian cheese can be substituted if you like, but it tastes best with pecorino), grate 1 small onion (the worst bit!) and mix them together. I did grate the onion in my food processor, but it came out a little coarse. Add a 1/4c of mayonnaise.

As I've said, my take on American measurements is 'buy a cup measure', but I have weighed the pecorino and it came to 65g of pecorino. As long as they're in proportion, it doesn't really matter anyway. And you're just looking for enough mayonnaise to bind everything together.

Toast the bread in the oven for 8 minutes at 180C (or you could just eyeball it).

Rounds topped with mixture

Then top each one with about a teaspoon of the cheese and onion mix, and grill until the cheese is bubbly. You can top with some paprika, if you like, to provide a bit of colour and an extra taste.

The finished article

They taste fabulous and they're somehow addictive, too. Just a word of warning - don't bite them straight out of the oven. The superhot mix basically cleaves to the roof of your mouth and they're exactly the right size to burn the whole of it.

And here's the recipe card:

Cheese gunk

Ailbhe of Simply Splendiferous is pretending it's summer. A good idea, even as the weather drops its gloomy reminders that it is not so.

And dips are prime summer food. She has an easy cheesy dip on her blog, and my competitive instinct has led me to post one which is even easier and, I suspect, even tastier.

I took it to a Eurovision party, and people I didn't know came out of the kitchen saying things like 'Who made that? It's delicious! You have to tell me how to make it.'

The recipe in all its glory:

Packet of Danish Blue
Packet of cream cheese
Clove of garlic (optional)

Mash the Danish blue with a fork in a bowl. Mash in about the equivalent amount of cream cheese. Crush garlic clove with side of knife. Place in bowl.

It doesn't sound like much, does it? But it's utterly addictive.

It's another old family recipe known as 'cheese gunk', although @linderella29, whose party it was, misheard it as 'cheese dump'. We like slightly disgusting food names in our family – one day I'll introduce you to 'phlegm cakes'.

Looks awful, tastes fabulous

Chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies

Easy ways to make yourself popular on a long coach journey – get a cake tin, fill it with about 60 cookies and pass it round.

My lovely choir went on a trip to St Ives, Cambridgeshire (yes, yes, seven wives) and I decided to bake something. Partly, the church were providing 'refreshments' and as that can mean anything from biccies'n'tea to a four trestle-table blowout (Darwen URC, I'm looking at you), I thought I'd better bring reinforcements.

This cookie recipe is our family recipe. It has three main advantages: it's delicious, it's easy and it makes loads. It has one major disadvantage: it uses cup measures.

I grew up using cup measures in the UK. I grew up making this recipe, even. Just buy a cup measure and have done with it! I think mine came from Poundland, or it is possible to buy jugs with cups down one side and ml or fl oz down the other.

11/2 cup shortening (As I was once on Radcliffe and Maconie to explain, shortening is whatever marge or butter you have to hand)
11/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1tsp baking soda dissolved in 1/3 cup boiling water
1tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
4 cups rolled oats
12oz chocolate chips (ie 100g, or three bags)

Mix in large bowl in above order. Cover bowl and refrigerate at least 12 hours (I never bother). Drop by greased teaspoon onto greased baking. Bake at 325 F (170C) until lightly browned (that's about 8-10 mins).

The recipe says it makes 7-8 dozen. I've never got that much out of it, but I got 64 out of it on Friday, and I ate quite a bit of dough... (It was there! I was never going to fill another baking sheet!)

Members of the choir were very appreciative and a couple of people asked me for the recipe. I can actually recite the recipe, it's that easy and I've been making it so long, but they didn't have a pen. This blog post will hopefully serve instead.

(Apparently it's National Oatmeal Cookie Day today and I finally got my mother's permission to post the recipe...)

Chicory pakora

No matter how scrupulously one scans the veg box 'dislikes' list, something always gets through.

Chicory. Endive for my American readers. For the avoidance of doubt, those green/white leaves that, when laid out in threes, looks like the Prince of Wales' feathers.

I find its bitterness off-putting and its crunch over-powering. Yeah, I don't like the stuff.

So I posted on Twitter, wonderful wonderful Twitter, for 'recipes that make chicory not taste like chicory'.

I garnered a bunch of suggestions, including from one wag: 'Many, but none of them include chicory'. More helpful ideas were 'braise it in butter' or 'braise it in chicken stock'. The folks at @discoverendive suggested using it in a smoothie. I'm afraid I assumed they were a bot and wrote a rather derisive reply, but they took it in good humour and provided several more choices, such as wrapping it in ham and covering it in Mornay sauce.

Cookwitch, however, who is always good in a food crisis, suggested making pakoras out of it and gave me PukkaPaki's okra pakora recipe to alter. One utter failure to buy chaat masala later, and I gave it a go.

I didn't so much shred the chicory as whack a knife around on it a bit. It seemed to brown very quickly, so place it in what I once saw described as 'acidulated water'. That's water with a squeeze of lemon to you and me.

The batter, even including dry-roasting and grinding the spices, could not have been easier. I made it relatively thick, but it wasn't really thick enough. Go for a proper 'can barely move the spoon' style batter.

I just glumphed wooden-spoonfuls of batter-covered chicory into a vat of vegetable oil. I did wind up turning them, as the oil was not very deep.

I did it in two batches, so I know that cold and crispy is jolly good, as is hot and crispy. In the middle, not so much. Very little of it tasted like chicory, but when it did, the bitterness was a plus.

As I didn't have amchoor (mango powder) or chaat masala, I found myself wanting salt, but I'll try it with those seasonings first.

And now I know how to make pakora batter, I'm sure I'll use it when I want something fried that's a bit more interesting than onion rings.

PS I also made a chicken stew by frying onions and leeks, browning chicken thighs and drumsticks and lobbing cider over it while I messed around with pakoras. Turned out delicious. The cider was Green Goblin.

Roasted beetroot, trout and horseradish

I'm really getting along with beetroot. I first discovered it could be sweet and flavourful in this salmon and horseradish dish, which is a really useful dinner party recipe. (As if I give dinner parties...)

It's cropping up in my veg box a lot, and I made beetroot risotto from this recipe the other night. I put (clean) Marigolds on because I was going to a trade fair the following day and didn't want to do so with blood-red fingers.

We needed something simple, because the storecupboard is depleted. I knew 'pink' fish, like the trout we have out of the freezer, beetroot and horseradish was a match made in heaven, so I did a Google search.

This recipe from Tastebud Travels fitted the bill.

I've cut out quite a bit of it - I may yet do the smoked salt, pepper and lemon rub, but it'll have to be homemade with lemon zest. And I'm ashamed to say that neither of us can quiiiiite be bothered to go out to get cream or yoghurt. We were out till about 20 to 1 at Leluu's supperclub last night, to excuse our utter laziness.

So, essentially, it's roasted beetroot with trout and horseradish sauce ... it's the foodbloglondon difference! We've done the caraway and thyme, but we both think beetroot comes up pretty sweet roasted, so we skipped the honey.

I did do the smoked salt, pepper and lemon rub, partly because I do like crispy fish skin, and partly because I received some Maldon smoked salt as a freebie at Sabrina's French Launderette, which I've never used. As I was making it, I did think, this is a really useful idea just to flavour some fish if I have nothing else in.

The rub. If you think this one is out of focus, you should see the other.

It turned out very nicely. I could have used more rub. And if you wanted to, the rub and a spread of horseradish would do for a quick meal.

Look at the rainbow colour on those scales. Amazing!

The beetroot and caraway was interesting, and quite bitter - hence the honey no doubt. I'll definitely try that combination again, but I think I'd rather have simple roasted beetroot with this.

The finished dish, including an attempt at food styling. Beetroot looks good though, no?

Christmas Challenge: Gingerbread House

It seems Mum's and I's Christmas Challenge is now an annual thing. (See last year's Buche de Noel).

I rang her up a couple of weeks ago, basically hinting that I'd like to do something other than a buche. When I mentioned a gingerbread house, she said 'I've always wanted to do one of those!', so we settled on it.
I knew it couldn't be that hard, because I made one in Guides when I was about fourteen.

We used the simple gingerbread house recipe from Good Food.

The trouble with this recipe is that the roof is very, very steep. It worked without too much hassle, but I think next time I'd save myself the worry and use one with a shallower roof.

 First of all, we made gingerbread and cut out the pieces to the template. This recipe (I keep calling it a pattern) suggests sticking in almonds as roof tiles. Mum liked the idea, so we did it. I wanted to use Jules Destrooper biscuits for the roof, but in the end, we used them somewhere else. The almonds did fracture in our hands, and it's worth remembering to leave places to handle the gingerbread round the edges.

Then bake, allow to cool slightly and trim the pieces to the template. Slightly's the key. I left it too long and wound up chipping bits of solid gingerbread across the kitchen. Also, at the time, I was all 'if it's not exact it won't fit perfectly!', whereas in reality 'stick some more icing on it!' fixes 100% of all house engineering problems.

The recipe suggests piping long snakes of icing down the sides and then sticking the pieces together. Round about this point, I swore more volubly then I ever have in front of my mother, because I'd forgotten the icing set. I had to send Mum to a neighbour. (Thanks, neighbour!).

The icing (500g sifted icing sugar, two egg whites) is like putty, so rolling snakes and placing everything together would actually have been much easier. And I'm sure you can see my finger-dimples in this photo as I did everything possible to make sure it stayed up. If you're making this yourself, do bear in mind that the icing hardens, so you can cut down on the engineering and just hold-and-wait.

The roof, as I mentioned, is steep, and our gingerbread roofs had flared in the oven, so we had to pad the eaves with icing. A few nervy moments as Mum held the roof and I stuffed icing into every crevice, using a mirror to see under the eaves. That 'snow' across the top of the roof? Just a decorative device and definitely not an integral part of the structure...

The two yellow-ish circles in the pictures are acid drops. I thought they were clearer, so next year I'd use clear boiled sweets or Fox's Glacier Mints. (Or possibly gelatine sheets as used to great effect in Su-Lin's Mies van der Rohe Barcelona pavilion).

The chimney's a Cadbury's mini-roll, sliced and stuck on with icing. Mum and I agreed it's too big for the scale, and can we just not mention it's directly over a door?

Then we decorated with liquorice spogs (apparently, that really is their name!) and gumdrops.

Then we got really silly.

The thing I most enjoyed about doing this house is that it gave us free rein to do what we wanted, to say 'Hey, how about this?'. If we could think of a way of doing it, we did.

We knew we wanted front and back paths. In the sweet shop (Sweet Memories of Twickenham, who were patient with us and let us order 'four of those, six of those'), I'd seen the rainbow strips and decided they'd make a great path, while Mum spotted the Pontefract cakes and suggesting stepping stones. We used the Destrooper biscuits for the doors.

As we were laying out the stepping stones, I said 'why don't we make a river?' I used the chipped-off spare bits of gingerbread as banks (essential because I was using runny icing), coloured some icing blue and trailed it across the corner of our surface. Then we put a 'stepping stone' in it.

Mum's genius idea was a log pile. The recipe suggests using Cadbury's mini-fingers, but Mum bought Elizabeth Shaw Amaretto flutes, which taste and look better. As we were snipping off bits to fit the sides, Mum said 'I see a log pile' and constructed one from off-cuts at the back door.

Then I got carried away and daubed 'snow' absolutely everywhere, running down the roof, forming icicles on the roof, and so on.

I placed it on two sheets of baking paper, to save the tablecloth, and dusted everything with icing sugar. I also put 'ice' (clearish icing) in the river. The baking sheets made the house easy to slide around and work on.

Even my dad got involved. As we were all sitting around after the Christmas meal, he got his (clean!) knife, and drew ski-tracks and the marks of a snowplough stop, which you can just see at bottom right in this pic.

We're already brainstorming all sorts of ludicrous things for next year. My brother wants a yeti, so a yeti he shall have!

Picture special

I am quite, quite lousy at posting.
This has become embarrassing after meeting a lot of other food bloggers and definitely joining the food Tweetosphere (that really shouldn't be a word).
I cook quite a lot of interesting recipes, but I often don't write about them, or finish writing about them.
As I was looking for good photos on my camera to be the backdrop to the blog, I realised I had lots of rather nice looking photos but often no posts to go with them.
So this is a picture special.

This is a lemon meringue pie from, oops, LAST Thanksgiving. No view of the lemon, but this is the meringue before (top) and after (bottom) baking. I didn't make an extra pie this year (you have to have pumpkin obviously), because we were so bloody full last year.

This is a mint creme thing from, I think, the front of a Sainsbury's mag. One of the reasons it wasn't written about was the cream essentially turned to butter as we churned it. 

Pie! Quite proud of making pie. Steak and ale recipe from Delicious.

I went through a crumpet phase, starting with pikelets (top), which were way too small to be any use, graduating up to crumpets in my cookie cutters. It is ridiculously easy, but they always tasted a little 'short' to me, and the different ring sizes was a bit awkward. 

Wholemeal rolls. Probably Joy of Cooking. (Recipe not online)

Baguette. Again, almost certainly Joy of Cooking, because if you do everything it says, it will work. 

Must've burnt this one. The stuff that looks like kibble at top left is toffee chunks for toffee apple ice cream from BBC Food (which is highly recommended),

That's more like it. 

So, there's your picture special. No one say anything about 'making a virtue out of a necessity', ok?