La Recette du Jour

This is that old French favourite, yoghurt cake. Good for cooking with children or Americans because no scales are required — you just use the yoghurt pot to measure your ingredients. Of course yoghurt pots may vary slightly in size, but then so do eggs, and anyway it’s all about ratios. For this cake it’s not critical. I found the mixture a bit sloppy, so I added a couple of extra tablespoons of flour. You might need to cook it for more or less time too, depending on how wet your mixture is.

You can bake the apricots into it — or if, as I did, you happen to have a whole trayful of baked apricots in the fridge, add them before pouring the honey over. Or use any other fruit you fancy. Cherry compote for example.
Recipe for Gâteau aux abricots et au miel »

This is March’s entry in my Cookbook Challenge, but I got a bit behind, because I had so much else to do. The book lay on the coffee table for weeks with a scribbled list of recipes next to it. I’ve had this book so long and used it so much that the copy I have is almost pristine; the first one completely disintegrated and had to be replaced.

First published in 1974 and endlessly reprinted since, it’s a true classic; unlike Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson wears her scholarship lightly and is a comfortable companion in the kitchen, rather than a somewhat alarming and superior presence. Nevertheless, there is a lot of historical information here along with authentic regional recipes from the Middle Ages onwards. It is a reminder of the regional traditions Britain seems to have lost; many recipes here are truly rooted in a place and its local ingredients, and Jane Grigson makes you want to cook them.

So, I love this book (along with Good Things and Grigson’s Fruit and Vegetable books it’s one of my all-time favourite cookbooks). There are already a few Jane Grigson recipes in my blog, including my best-ever pudding, Springfield Pear Cake, and the famous Chinese Yorkshire pudding featured in English Food — a must-try if your Yorkshires always flop.

I’d planned to do something I hadn’t done before, but time was pressing so I ended up plumping for one of my oldest favourites for the main course: pulled and devilled chicken. This is simplicity itself to make, and, says Jane, “there is no better way of using up the Christmas turkey with the glory it deserves.” You can use any poultry though, including pheasant, chicken, or guineafowl. You basically separate the leg and breast meat, tearing it into rough quills. The leg meats is spread with devil sauce, left to marinate, then grilled, while the breast is heated through in a thin, creamy sauce flavoured with lemon. The two are served together, with crispy toast. Don’t do vegetables with it, just serve a salad afterwards.

For the starter, I decided to make individual leek tarts, because I had some puff pastry that needed using up. “I’ve lost my Michelin star!” I wailed as I struggled to prise them out of the tart tins. They looked a bit of a mess on the plate, but they did taste good. I think if I made them again, I wouldn’t use a top crust, and I’d add more cheese (which was supposed to be Wensleydale or Lancashire, but hey, this is rural France — I had to use Gruyère).

For pudding, I’d have liked to make the gorgeous syllabub-topped trifle, but it’s just impossible to make syllabub with French UHT cream, as I have discovered to my cost. This book also has the original sticky toffee pudding, credited to Francis Coulson at Sharrow Bay. Then there’s the famous Sussex Pond pudding, heart-attack-on-a-plate stuff. In the end, I made Stuffed Monkey, which isn’t really a pudding, but I liked the name. It’s a very sugary, buttery pastry filled with chopped candied peel and ground almonds stirred into melted butter. As I slid it into the oven I realised the filling was supposed to have an egg yolk in it too. Oops. No wonder it wasn’t very spreadable. Still, the recipe worked despite this, a crisp browned crust surrounding a crumbly filling. It’s very rich even without the egg, so you only need small pieces served with coffee; the peel and almonds give it a Christmassy flavour. Although actually it’s a Jewish recipe, credited to Florence Greenberg.
Recipe for Vintage Feasts: English Food by Jane Grigson »

Thank you to Pam on the Cottage Smallholder Forum for this recipe. I took advantage of it to use up three mushy bananas from the freezer. It looks a bit “whole earth”, brown and speckly, but it is moist and tastes great either on its own or (better) spread with butter. And it costs almost nothing to make. I cut down on the sugar a bit here, because I found the original 150 g made it too sweet for my taste.
Recipe for Pam’s cheap-as-chips low-fat banana bread »

This is a patisserie staple in France. I love the look of these tarts, so dark purple they are almost black, glistening with juice, with just a sprinkle of icing sugar. They taste pretty good too I had a big bag of frozen bilberries in the freezer and 6 guests coming, so the conclusion was obvious. I googled, and found Clotilde’s recipe, so I started with that, but tinkered a bit to suit my own tastes. Frozen bilberries have lots of juice, which risks making the pastry soggy and purple even if you blind-bake it. So I added a layer of almonds, sugar and flour to soak up the juice. This worked really well; the tart was easy to slice and serve, and tasted gorgeous with a blob of crème fraîche on the side. Within minutes, there was none left, that’s why there’s no photo. You can take my word for it that it looked just like Clotilde’s.
Recipe for Tarte aux myrtilles, or bilberry tart »

I love lemon drizzle cake, a true Women’s Institute cake-stall staple. But I’ve never been satisfied with the ones I’ve made, no matter how highly recommended the recipe; they never seemed quite moist enough, and the crackly glaze didn’t work. I tried several recipes I found online and none hit the spot till I found this one. It’s lovely and moist and truly is luscious when split and sandwiched with home-made lemon curd. And as a bonus it’s really easy to make. The only thing wrong with Sylvie’s recipe is that it doesn’t make enough cake Certainly not for choir practice purposes. So I doubled the ingredients, converted it to metric, and made a nice large round cake; but you could make it in a loaf tin too.
Recipe for Luscious lemon drizzle cake »

Some left-over pastry from a tarte au citron, newly acquired dinky silicon tart cases — I quickly improvised these charming little tartlets with ingredients I had to hand. Makes six tiny tarts or four larger ones. You could of course use lemons instead of orange, adding a bit more sugar.
Recipe for Tartelettes a l’orange »

I’ve enjoyed a few things from other people’s blogs recently, and these two recipes are definite keepers.

First, Fiona’s Belgian pears. I made a mental note to try these ages ago, prompted by the rave reviews on her blog. When I looked more closely, the ingredients and method looked really strange — cook pears in vinegar and sugar for six hours??? Wouldn’t they be reduced to mush? But I have absolute faith in Fiona’s tried and tested recipes, so small pears from the market at 90 centimes a kilo seemed a good opportunity to try it. They sat at a bare whisper of a simmer on top of the woodburner, and the small amount of vinegary liquid slowly transmuted into a quantity of mahogany coloured syrup. After five hours, we tentatively tried a couple of the very soft pears with a little of the liquid and a blob of crème fraîche. Wow, they were good! As Fiona says, they taste alcoholic even though they are not. And they look most impressive bottled — they would make lovely Christmas gifts.

Although I hesitate to vary from Fiona’s tried and tested recipes, to be honest (having done two batches now) I think you could cook them for less time. You have to handle them very, very carefully when bottling because they are so soft after six hours, even at an almost invisible simmer. The necessary juice is produced during the first three hours’ cooking. So I think the uncovered simmering could easily be reduced to two hours without detracting from the final result.

Next up, the weekly conundrum of the pumpkin in the veggie box. The Open University group of foodies came up with loads of ideas, and one of them caused me to google “pumpkin and carrot cake”, which brought me here. Yes! My somewhat amended recipe follows — no photo because the light wasn’t good and the icing was a bit of a disaster. But you can always look at the photos on Meeta’s post. The cake is dense, with a lovely spicy flavour, and a dark brown colour from the sugar. Good with or without the frosting. Oh, and if you don’t have any pumpkin I am sure it would be just as good with carrots alone.

Recipe for Enjoying other people’s food: Belgian pears and pumpkin cake »

Another glut of carrots in the veggie box. I almost made Ivy’s lovely carrot cupcakes again. But then I realised I could knock off another recipe from Delicious Days, so I made Good Morning Muffins instead.

These are American-style muffins with toasted ground hazelnuts, grated carrots and some sliced apple. Verdict: they were OK, but I’d rather have made Ivy’s cupcakes! It has to be said I’m not that keen on American muffins. Still, it means we have something different to eat from breakfast instead of terminally boring wholeweat cereal.

Meanwhile, I also decided to have a go at making English muffins. These are something we do occasionally have for breakfast because you can get acceptable packaged ones in Carrefour. But I thought it would be nice to try making my own so I could put them in the freezer and have them whenever we like.

I’d always thought muffins were tricky, but I found a recipe at King Arthur Flour that looked utterly straightforward and even let me dust off the bread machine to make the dough.

I had to do some conversions and the initial batch turned out rather wet, resulting in oddly-shaped muffins, because the dough stuck to everything and was difficult to transfer from work surface to griddle. But I just added a bit of flour to the remaining dough and they turned out beautifully. I cooked them on my electric plancha, which is perfect for this and means you can cook them eight at a time. I split one and spread it with butter the minute it came off the griddle — yum! No more bought muffins for me!

Following is my converted recipe. If you don’t have a bread machine there’s a manual version here — though I’d have thought that with a bit of common sense you could simply make the dough in the recipe below by hand.
Recipe for Breakfast: muffins two ways »

I am an habituée of tuiles, since they are my go-to solution for an excess of egg whites. So this recipe from Delicious Days held no terrors for me. I had 6 egg whites in the fridge from making a prune and Armagnac tart, so this was a good opportunity to try them.

The paste was a bit more solid than I normally make, so they were slightly thicker than usual, but still crispy. And flavouring them with lemon zest and powdered Earl Grey tea is an inspired touch. They had an exotic perfume, and made a nice change from plain ones. Tuiles make a great accompaniment to any creamy dessert. If you shape them over cups or small ramekins, you can use them as containers for a filling of your choice — or just a scoop or two of ice cream.

The other day Steve bought about a kilo of organic carrots when I only needed a couple. So I was searching around for ways of using them up. I almost made Ivy’s carrot cupcakes, but I didn’t have any oranges, so I decided to try something different. I ended up with this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, but as so often with American cake recipes I ended up changing it so radically it was hardly the same recipe by the time I’d finished. The result was quite different from Ivy’s cakes, but equally delicious. I loved the spices, especially the ginger (I’d even add a bit more next time), and the cakes were both light and moist.

It was yet another cake recipe that specified 2 cups each of flour and sugar. Hey people, a cup of sugar weighs about twice as much as a cup of flour! I like my cakes to taste of something other than sugar, especially when they are topped with tooth-achingly sweet frosting. So I decided to go for pound-cake ratios — equal weights of sugar and flour — reducing the sugar content by half.

The recipe uses vegetable oil instead of butter. I thought this was a bit odd, but we’ve been eating an awful lot of saturated fat recently, one way or another, so I decided it was time for a change. Again, 260 ml of oil looked like a lot, so I reduced it to 220, and I think I could even have used a little bit less without ill effect. If you want, you can replace all or part of the oil with softened butter.

And finally, instead of the raisins and walnuts, I used some chopped candied orange peel. But I think they might have been even nicer with chopped candied ginger as well or instead (can you tell I really liked the ginger flavour?).

This recipe makes a large batch; I used muffin tins and got 16 cakes out of it, but they would have been better a bit smaller. I frosted them with Ivy’s mascarpone frosting, except that I added maple syrup to it instead of lemon zest.
Recipe for Carrot cupcakes with maple cream cheese frosting »