Category Archives: Recipes

The Darkest, Dampest, Deadliest Chocolate Brownies of All Time

11 Monday Jun 2012

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I’m going to tell you a secret. The kind of secret that your friends will plead for, one that will make grown men fall in love with you and your enemies turn green with envy. This is hands down the best recipe for chocolate brownies that I have ever found. Milkshakes bring all the boys to the yard? Pshaw! These chocolate brownies work much better. Three thoughts that might help:

1. You must – absolutely must – use real butter and dark brown sugar. Not golden caster sugar, you want the most flavourful dark brown sugar you can find. Billington’s molasses sugar is the best, but Sainsburys’ dark brown soft sugar is surprisingly good.

2. You can replace part or all of the flour with cocoa powder for an even more chocolatey (and less sweet) result – and the more cocoa you add the softer the brownie will be. It will take longer to cook, and you will lose the crumbly, friable crust you get on brownies, but instead you will create something closer to a chocolate brownie fondant. It’s lovely either way – experiment and see what you prefer.

3. I tend to leave out the vanilla essence, and scatter in a handful of raspberries or morello cherries…

Fluffy slices of cardamom cloud

07 Thursday Jun 2012

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The rain is lashing the windows and the wind is howling round our little cottage here in Somerset, so – clearly – the only thing to do is to fill the house with warm and cozy baking smells. There’s a traditional Scandinavian bread called pulla, which I’ve always wanted to try making – it’s a standard bread dough enriched with butter and eggs and a little extra sugar and infused with cardamom, my favourite spice. Continue reading →

Curds of Prey

29 Tuesday May 2012

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I woke up last week and realised that I had a gaping hole in my life – cheese is one of my favourite foods, but I had never made cheese before! So this weekend I set about rectifying the problem. A simple curd cheese turned out to be surprisingly easy…
Put 2 litres of whole milk in a big saucepan and bring to a gentle simmer, stirring constantly to avoid any sticking or burning.

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Take it off the heat, and add the juice of two lemons

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Give it a gentle stir, and it should start to split into curds and whey. If it remains obstinately whole, add a little more lemon juice or heat the milk a little more. Leave it alone for ten minutes (off the heat) to split completely – afterwards it should look something like this:

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Pour the mixture through cheese cloth to separate the solid curds from the whey (reserve the whey for baking…), tie the cheesecloth up and leave to drain. The longer you let it drain, the firmer the resulting cheese. I find hanging the cheese from the taps makes life easier…

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And you’re done! Use it in cheesecakes, or mix with salt and pepper and chopped wild garlic to make your own version of Boursin, flavour with rose water and sugar and eat with strawberries… Have fun!

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As for the whey, well that’s another story…

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Glorious bacon

13 Sunday May 2012

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Bacon is, I think, one of the staple foods of mankind. Is there anyone in the world who can resist the smell of sizzling bacon? I know people who are vegetarian… Except for bacon. People who gave up being vegetarian… For bacon. An alien from outer space might wonder why – in the era of freezers and food flown to us in airplanes – we would possibly resort to the ancient preservatives of salt and sugar, but surely one bite and they would understand?

This makes it more surprising that I’ve never tried to make it myself. But, when a friend handed me a pot of sodium nitrite and said I wouldn’t look back, I decided to give it a go. I’ve had a large slab of pork belly curing in my fridge for the last week, and we unwrapped it and had some for breakfast this morning. I can honestly say it was the best bacon I’d ever eaten – better by far than the stuff from the local butcher or the farmers market, never mind the pallid, slimy wafer thin slivers that the supermarket calls bacon. It was so good that I ate every bit and completely forgot to take any post-cooking photos! So, to make up for it, I hot smoked a good chunk of it to be sliced into lardons and eaten in a salad, of which I do have some pictures. It was a real hardship….

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Chocolate and Sour Cherry Cookies

19 Sunday Feb 2012

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It’s been one of those weeks, so I thought I’d share the recipe for one of my favourite comfort foods. These cookies aren’t for the faint hearted – gooey on the inside and crisp at the edge, they’re as dark and rich and chocolatey as I could possibly make them. The inspiration came from a favourite cookbook of mine – Ratioby Michael Ruhlman. A wonderful book this – it gives you the tools to take almost any recipe and tweak it to be exactly the way you want it. It’s especially good for baking.

These cookies are really simple – 200g each of brown sugar and butter, 150g self raising flour and 50g of cocoa powder creamed together with an egg. Add about 75g good dark chocolate broken into big chunks, and 50g or so of dried sour cherries. Mix and chill until firm. The egg and the self raising flour add a little lightness – otherwise these can be overpowering!

Cut off pieces about the size of a table tennis ball, pop on a baking tray spaced ten cm apart. Bake for 10-12 minutes at 180 degrees, until they have spread a bit and crisped around the edges.

Let them cool a little or they’ll crumble when you try to take them off the tray, and enjoy! They’re nice cold too, but they probably won’t last that long….

Warm winter salad

22 Thursday Dec 2011

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This is one of my favourite midweek meals, salad with seared chicken and a warm dressing. Fruit in savoury dishes is one of the things I love, so in winter I usually add dried fruit and toasted nuts. Today I used apricots and pistachios with a balsamic reduction – warm and comforting, but pretty healthy too.

Since taking the photo, I’ve realised I was in such a rush that I’ve put the place setting the wrong way around – whoops!

Aren’t pistachios the most beautiful nuts in the world!

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Cardamom scented hot chocolate

18 Sunday Dec 2011

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Winter is my favourite season. I could claim it’s Christmas that makes it so lovely, or the fashion – long leather boots, hats and elegant floor length gowns… But I’d be lying. The real reason I love winter is because I can sit by a roaring fire, listening to the rain lashing the windows, with a good book and a large mug of hot chocolate. Bliss…

I’m fussy about my hot chocolate though, I like it very rich and very dark. If I’m in a hurry, San Cristobal’s rich drinking chocolate is the next best thing to the ritual of slowly melting dark chocolate into the milk.

My favourite spice to add at the moment is cardamom, and three bruised cardamom pods per cup seems to be about right. Pop them in the milk before you start to heat it up, and they’ll have infused nicely by the time you’re ready to drink the hot chocolate. A teaspoon or so of rosewater added right at the end is a lovely variation too – it makes the chocolate taste a little sweeter somehow.

I found this recipe for cardamom and orange hot chocolate today, and it is absolutely ravishing. The orange zest adds a lovely, subtle bitter note.

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