Wholemeal apple & almond cake

Delicious, with a hint of cinnamon. Eat warm from the oven as pud, or cold for breakfast/elevenses. Much nicer than the appley-cinnamony pastry I had in Selfridge's yesterday. There's a strong taste of almonds, even though they're cut 50:50 with flour (so economical).

It's from Hugh FW's new book, Every Day; he made it with pears on his show last week (you may need to be in the UK for this link to work).

Apple and almond cake

150g butter
125g caster sugar
2 eggs
75g wholemeal self-raising flour
75g ground almonds

for the apples

4-5 eating apples
25g butter
1 heaped tbsp granulated sugar
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

20cm springform cake tin
pre-heat the oven to 170C

Peel and core the apples, cut them into wedges and fry gently in the butter and sugar. When they are nearly tender, add the cinnamon and take off the heat.

Beat the butter and sugar together; add the eggs, then the flour, then the almonds. Scrape into the tin, smooth over, arrange the apples on top, spoon over the juices from the frying pan.

Bake for 40-45 minutes (until a skewer comes out clean). Leave for a while before unclipping the tin (although this is probably going to fall apart anyway).

Notes:
* I made it on the spur of the moment to use up some apples that had been sitting around for a few days; there were six, not quite too many.
* I had only 140g butter in total; the apples were fine in 10g, and the cake was fine with 130g. So no need for the full 175g.
* My cake is a little stodgy ("but good stodgy", said Amy) because I used plain wholemeal and forget to put in baking powder.
* The apples sit nicely on top of this cake, but when HFW made it with pears, they sank down almost to the bottom.


Related posts

Apple tart - Alfred once ate half of this at one go
Hugh FW's wonderful ginger cake
Easy almond ring cake - another pudding-y cake, better served with a little fruit

Sticky ginger loaf

It's hard to believe that a simple two-egg cake could be so full of flavours and richness. I've been wanting to make gingerbread for ages, but have lost my cousin Rosemary's recipe - it's her signature piece. Sadly, she's too ancient to bake these days, and wasn't too sure about the recipe when I asked her a few weeks ago. So, time to try something new.

This one's from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's new book, Every Day, and it's good. Really good. Is-two-slices-enough?-good. Even if you think you don't like ginger, or black treacle. AND it keeps well.

Sticky ginger loaf

75g butter
150g dark muscovado sugar
150g black treacle
150g golden syrup
75g rum
2 medium eggs
225g self-raising flour
1 tsp mixed spice
1 1/2 tsp ground ginger
75g preserved ginger, chopped

Prepare a large bread tin. Heat the oven to 180C.

Melt the butter, sugar, treacle and syrup. Add the rum and beaten eggs. Sift in the flour and spices. Beat until smooth, then add the chopped ginger. Pour into the tin and bake for 50 minutes. Leave in the tin to cool.

If you like, you can brush the cold cake with a little syrup from the preserve jar.


PS Another time, I'd put in more preserved ginger. And I'd be happy to substitute the rum for ginger wine. It's just that I've got a bottle of rum no-one drinks that was old when my mother--in-law gave it to me, half empty, nearly 25 years ago.

PPS This would be good for cricket teas: one would be enough to make half slices for both teams. Great for a cold day at the start of the season.

Easy almond ring cake

This cake is based on one of Nigella's cheating recipes, using shop-bought marzipan as one of the main ingredients. I started by making the marzipan, which probably added about two minutes to the total time spent in the kitchen.

I'm taking it to give my hostess (and best friend) when we go out to dinner this evening, but I really made it to comfort myself with familiar kitchen rituals after a couple of pretty grim weeks. And it's worked.

Damp almond ring cake

250g softened butter
250g softened marzipan
150g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
6 duck eggs
150g self-raising flour

Preheat the oven to 170C. Blitz the butter, marzipan and sugar. When they are smoothly mixed, add the vanilla essence, and then the eggs, one by one. Mix in the flour. Pour into a buttered 25cm ring mould. Bake for 40-50 minutes.

St John caraway seed cake

I wish I could blog the eggy buttery smell in my kitchen since I took this cake out of the oven. Here's the recipe, so you can make it yourself - one to have and one to share. It's Fergus Henderson; this version once appeared in the Telegraph cookery section, and is not quite the same as the seed cake in Beyond Nose to Tail.

St John caraway seed cake

250g butter
250g caster sugar
5 eggs
350g self-raising flour
2 tsp caraway seeds
120-150ml milk

Preheat the oven to 170C. Line two loaf tins with paper (I use ready-made liners, which saves a lot of Blue Peter project work).

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs and beat until smooth. Sift in the flour, add the caraway seeds and stir until everything is well mixed and the seeds evenly distributed. Then add milk. In this recipe, FH says add "a splash", but this doesn't make the required pouring consistency for the batter. The recipe in Beyond Nose to Tail Eating has similar proportions and calls for 150ml of milk - more than a splash. You'll have to feel your way. I put in three splashes, probably about 90ml, which was not enough for a dropping consistency, although the finished cake is fine.

Pour the batter into the tins and bake for 40-45 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.

Old-fashioned parkin

At Beamish they were making Parkin the old-fashioned way:



































































Fabulous coal range .... and did you notice the bread oven to the right? If you want to make Parkin - a kind of north country flapjack - just mix the ingredients together, shape the biscuits (or spread into a tin to cut into squares when it's cooled), and bake in a hot oven. Mmm

Very rich chocolate refrigerator cake

Half way to London for lunch with Eleanor the birthday girl, I realised that I had forgotten the birthday cake. So, as we were meeting in Piccadilly, Lettice and I popped into Ladurée and chose a box of macaroons to stand in until Friday, when she's home and can eat the one I made last night ... these are, from left to right: lemon, coffee, blackcurrant, chocolate, mint, raspberry, vanilla, pistachio. Beautiful colours, fabulous tastes, birthday extravagence.

This recipe originally came from my mother-in-law, and I have made it for years. When the children were small and took cake with them to school to share at elevenses, teachers often used to ask if I would make it. Very simple, very good, tiny squares are enough.

Very rich refrigerator cake

These quantities will make enough to use a dinner plate as a mould

250g digestive biscuits
125g butter
125g dark chocolate
65g sultanas
3 dessertspoons cocoa
3 dessertspoons golden syrup

Bash up the biscuits. It's better if they're not reduced to a fine tilth, the cake has a better texture if the biscuits are lumpy. But I've made it with crumbs from the food processor too. Use the end of a rolling pin.

In a large saucepan, melt all the other ingredients. The chocolate has a tendency to catch on the bottom, unless there's a film of butter underneath. When everything is melted, take it off the heat and stir in the biscuit crumbs. Then spread them out onto tinfoil. If I want it to look neat, I put the tinfoil onto a plate, and use that as a guide, but I don't always bother. Wrap in tinfoil (the easiest is to use a piece of foil twice the size of the cake, spread it in the middle, and then pull up the sides), and put in a cool place for an hour or two. Or make a day or two ahead.


PS here's a photo of the birthday girl taken at lunch, which we had at Nove in Sackville Street - a nice, unpretentious and not too pricey Italian just off Piccadilly. We were almost the only people there, what a shame

Nigella's chocolate mousse cake

It's the birthday season in this house. Lettice wanted chocolate cake, but not the "usual" one. So I made chocolate mousse cake, not quite following the recipe in Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess ... very rich and delicious, quick to put together. Tomorrow it's Eleanor's birthday, and she's ordered up a different chocolate cake - I'm just off to buy the ingredients.

Chocolate mousse cake
for a 23cm tin

350g dark chocolate
175g butter
8 large eggs, separated
100g muscovado sugar
100g caster sugar
1 tbs vanilla extract

Grease the pan. Melt the chocolate and butter in a double boiler. Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks and sugar until it is pale and creamy. Stir in the vanilla and the coolish chocolate mixture. Whisk the egg whites until they are peaky, then fold in (best if you loosen the mixture first with one spoonful of white, but I don't always remember).

Pour the whole lot into your tin, then put the tin into a larger roasting pan. Put all this into the oven, then add hot water from the kettle so that you have an inch or two of water.

Bake for 50 minutes. The top should be dry, but the inside will still be gooey. Don't even think about removing this from the tin until it is completely cold. It will crack as it cools; if it looks too much, dust with icing sugar.













































Related links

Homemade vanilla extract
Jennifer Paterson's adult chocolate cake
Nigella's fudge icing for chocolate cakes
Rich chocolate refrigerator cake
Dense chocolate loaf
Tartuffo - very rich, very delicious chocolate pud

Yoghurt and lemon cake

I don't keep butter in the house when the young are away, which made it tricky this afternoon when I took it into my head to cheer myself up by making a lemon cake. But then I remembered Turkish yoghurt cake, and found a good recipe in Claudia Roden's Arabesque. It's a soufflé of a cake, no butter, not much flour, eggs, yoghurt and a lemon. Just the thing.

Turkish yoghurt cake - yogurtlu tatlisi

4 large eggs, separated
100g caster sugar
3 tbsp plain flour
400g Greek strained yoghurt
grated zest of a lemon
juice of a lemon

Beat the egg yolks and sugar until it is pale. Beat in the flour, then blend in the yoghurt, zest and juice. Whisk the egg whites until they are stiff, then fold into the cake mixture. Pour this into a non-stick baking tin - I use a 23cm clip-ring tin which I grease with olive oil.

Bake at 180C for 50-60 minutes, until the top is brown. Eat warm or cold.


PS you can serve this with a syrup made with 150ml water, 25og sugar, 1 tbsp lemon juice, and the finely grated zest of an orange ... Claudia Roden says she doesn't bother, and neither do I.

PPS picture to follow - I meant to save this as a draft until the cake came out of the oven, but hit publish instead ... I've been a little distracted for the past couple of weeks, which is why I need cake!

A very good ginger cake

Susie brought us this wonderful ginger cake at the weekend. The recipe came from the BBC Olive magazine site. She says it's a bit of a faff to make, but it's definitely worth it, lots of subtle flavour - dark muscovado notes. She made it in one of those rubbery moulds I'm always too mean to buy, which is why it bulges with voluptuous Ruben-esque curves ...

A week in Devon

To Devon for my brother-in-law's week-long 60th birthday party: walks on the beach, a recital of the Goldberg Variations by the harpsichordist David Wright, lots of talk, a little bridge, knitting - and no cooking.

I missed the party on the first night (I was at Lord's), but sent Lucius with a pudding, Jennifer Paterson's Adult Chocolate Cake ... and, unusually, several people enjoyed it so much they took the trouble to find out who had made it and remember to say something a day or two later. I'm not taking the credit, that belongs to JP; it's a very easy pud for a special occasion, a good one to have up your sleeve (so to speak).

Extra fruity Christmas Cake

I recently found myself promising to make a Christmas cake for the raffle at the cricket dinner. Fine, I'm good at making fruit cake (if I say so myself). But not so good at decorating them. So I took the easy way out, and studded it with almonds, as if it was a Dundee cake.


















This is the extra fruity Christmas cake I made last year, after lots of help from readers. I made two. I'll make marzipan for ours - it's a doddle, and much much nicer than anything you can buy. In fact, if I didn't have time to make a cake, I'd buy one and STILL make the marzipan, it's that good.

Icing? Well, I aim to crack that this year ... in the past, I've either bought very nasty ready-rolled, or made rough icing that slid down the cake, onto the plate and off onto the worktop. Can anyone give me any good tips on making Christmas cake icing?


Links to related posts

Boiled fruitcake my mother-in-law's foolproof and delicious recipe
Pistachio marzipan

Nigella's rich icing for chocolate birthday cakes

This is the time of year when there are a lot of birthdays, and I have to make a lot of cake. For years, I turned to my mother-in-law's recipe for very rich chocolate refrigerator cake, a great favourite, especially when there's a crowd. Four years ago Nigella's dense chocolate loaf took over - I can be precise because I write notes on my recipe books ... here it says, amongst other things: delicious, although all over the oven.

Yesterday, I thought I'd try something new, and Nigella's always a good place to start when you're thinking of making a chocolate cake. So I chose the chocolate fudge cake from Nigella Bites.

Big mistake. I mean, it was absolutely delicious, but it also took up the whole day, AND made me late for the dinner at which it was to be served. And the usual chocolate loaf would have been just as good. Especially if I'd put the buttercream icing on it. Or the delicious chocolate brownies from How to be a Domestic Goddess that Tom's mum made for cricket teas on Saturday - I only rejected them as I thought it was a little casual for a once-a-year treat.


















Part of the problem was that the cakes rose up spectacularly in the middle: all that baking powder and bicarb. I thought at the time there was rather a lot, but I'm always a little reluctant to mess with recipes for baking. But also there was a staggering amount of fuss - I felt like a Daring Baker having an off day. And I found myself thinking that the rich are different because they have people to wash up after them - it's a long time since I've used quite so many different bowls and pans.

But the icing is worth keeping - for very special occasions, as it's solid saturated fat ... yesterday we were celebrating Lettice's 18th birthday, which seemed like a moment to throw caution to the winds.

Nigella's fudge icing

This is enough to fill and totally cover a pair of 20cm chocolate sandwich cakes. Half would comfortably cover the top of a cake.

175g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
250g butter, at room temperature
275g icing sugar, sifted
1 tbsp vanilla extract

Melt the chocolate in a pan over water, or using a microwave. Beat the butter until it is creamy. Add the icing sugar. Beat more. Add the melted chocolate and vanilla.

Banana cake for Alfred's birthday

This is the cake Alfred asks for every year ... it's a really simple, quick banana loaf, absolutely his favourite. I've tried other, richer, recipes, but none of them is as popular as this. It was given to me by my friend Clare Pelling, after she brought one for a tea party here (probably before Alfred was born). I call it Clare's banana cake; Clare calls it Jane's banana bread.

This recipe is so ancient that it's in imperial, the last unconverted recipe I use (just as well I've got scales which do both). I think that the original idea was to use a pound unpeeled weight of bananas, but I've always taken it to mean the peeled weight, with the result that this tastes very banana-ry. And I use homemade vanilla essence.

Alfred's banana cake

1 1/2 oz Flora
6 oz light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 lb bananas
6 oz self-raising flour
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Turn the oven on to 180C. Line a large loaf tin. Mix the Flora with the sugar, add the eggs and vanilla essence. Add the flour and bicarb, then the bananas - I put them in whole and let my Kenwood do the work (which saves washing up, too). Sometimes I mix them very smooth, although my children like it best if I leave a few lumps of banana to discover, oozing, in the finished cake.

Pour into the tin, and bake for up to an hour. I start checking after 45 minutes.

Leave to cool in the tin. Keeps well; freezes well. Popular at cricket tea.


Links to related posts

Vanilla extract
Nigella's banana cake
Healthy banoffee pie

Links to banana cakes on other blogs

Nupur's peanut butter banana bread for Heart of the Matter
David Lebovitz's banana cake and banana loaf
Marbled banana cake from Baking Bites

Happy 3rd birthday!

Today is this blog's third birthday - and the first time I've ever managed to remember the anniversary. Lemon drizzle cake is in order.

I started Joanna's Food on a whim ... I'd made kedgeree in a new, heart-healthy way, which I knew could be improved; I didn't want to forget what I'd done, so I needed to make a note of it and my manuscript recipe book was already full to bursting. I didn't bother to think up a fancy name, but stuck to the purely descriptive. It didn't occur to me then that anyone apart from me would read this stuff, I just thought it would be easier to share recipes with friends because I'd be able to print them out. Ha!

I've always blogged principally to please myself (which is why there are periodic posts about flowers, especially tulips, sweet peas and dahlias; and about anything else that takes my fancy). I've been too lazy to venture beyond the Blogger template, although that's going to change in the coming weeks and months. And I'm not tech-y enough to make the most of the tools that exist to maximise traffic ... I am happy to have made some good friends in the blogosphere, to have had some fun days out with other food bloggers, to have taken part in some great blog events, and with Ilva (Lucullian Delights) and later Michelle (The Accidental Scientist) to have founded Heart of the Matter. Thank you all for reading this far - the community of food blogging means a lot to me, and has been very supportive at times over the past three years.

To be serious for a moment, this blog has always been principally about the journey our family made after my husband's heart attack. We were lucky, despite the terrific shock we all had, despite the intimations of mortality. We were given advice by the medics which was difficult to put into practice ... here is the record of our baby steps.

Proper food, cooked from scratch at home, mainly vegetables, more fish than meat, pulses (though I can't claim that any of my family love them as I do, frozen peas the honourable exception), plenty of olive oil, a little dark chocolate, not too much fuss. And, mostly, we've done it.

Cake, you may wonder? On a blog where no-one's supposed to eat butter, and everyone's supposed to be cutting down on fats? Well, it's not an everyday event here; this one's comparatively light; it's made with fruit, as are virtually all the cakes I make (lemon zest has lots to recommend it) ... and today we're following the 80:20 rule



















A few key posts

Looking through three years of posts, I see that there are gaps which need filling (for instance, I thought I had written about citrus zest, but no). Here, though, is a random selection of things I wish I had known when we began

Some basic rules
Salsa verde
Onions, garlic - and skordalia
Getting started - and homemade muesli
Rosemary citrus salt
Affordable superfoods (winterish)
Shaken hot water pastry
Mount Athos diet: chickpea patties
Butterbeans with lemon and maple syrup
Olive oil pastry

That list was compiled quickly, and, checking over it, I see that I haven't included any fish recipes ... every time I post one, I get an appreciative comment or email from Ed Bruske, the amazing DC gardener and Slow Cook who grows vegetables in his front garden less than a mile from the White House (and if you want to see a film about composting, you'll find he's got lots of sensible things to say on the subject). So here's a link to the entire fish section to trawl through if you feel like it ... you'll find lots of things to do with oily fish. And I'm pleased to discover that the fish section of this blog is the second largest, beaten only by the vegetable section. You'll also find my all-time most-read post, the extremely delicious baked scallops ... I hope that a few of you have made them already, and that, if you have not, you might give them a try.

Links to some of the blogs I love

Book the Cook
Bread Water Salt Oil
Figs Olives/Bay Wine (not active at the moment, but we live in hope)
Garlic Breath
Tanna at The Half Cup
Kate Hill's Kitchen Adventure
Lucullian Delights
Mostly Eating
Pomiane
Skybluepink
Venice Daily photo (not active at the moment, but what a back catalogue!)
Today I am mostly ... counting blessings and living in the moment

Those are filed in my feed reader under the heading blogs I read daily. I hate the thought of leaving out the section headed fantastic food blogs, and the one headed great garden blogs ... but I'll come back to them another day soon, or maybe even later today if I find another moment.

Issy made a wedding cake

This beautiful wedding cake was made by our lovely niece Issy for the marriage of her cousin Tom to Sarah. She took the day off work on Friday to make it. Beautiful AND delicious.


























































Related links

Wendy made a wedding cake, too, on the same day