Lockdown improvised banana bread

The cliché of Covid lockdown! Given that we are halfway through moving to France, half of our kitchen equipment is in France and half here. Which means that we’ve had to be resourceful in coming up with recipes that don’t require weighing scales, or indeed loaf tins. The lack of a loaf tin was sorted when we realised that we had some large foil takeaway tins which were roughly the right size. The lack of weighing scales? Look up American recipes that use cups! One cup is roughly 240ml of volume, so as long as you use the same cup or small measuring jug to measure out all the ingredients you should be OK with quantities. This made two small loaves.

• 4 overripe bananas
• 1/2 cup neutral tasting vegetable oil (sunflower, rapeseed, etc.)
• 1 cup light brown sugar (or mix of white and brown)
• 3 cups self raising flour
• 1 heaped teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1 cup walnuts, roughly chopped
• 1 heaped teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon salt
• more brown sugar for sprinkling on top

Pre-heat your oven to about 180 degrees C. Smear some oil into your loaf tins (or clean foil takeaway tins). You could line it with greaseproof paper too, as long as you oil it lightly as well.

Peel the bananas, put them into a large mixing bowl, and mash them to a pulp with a fork. Stir in the sugar and vanilla until they are all combined nicely.

Add the flour, salt, cinnamon and bicarb and stir the entire mixture until it’s come together. Don’t beat it or you’ll have a flat loaf.

Add the walnuts and fold them in. For variation you could use sultanas or pecans. Split the resulting mixture between the two loaf tins and sprinkle the tops with a bit of brown sugar. Put in the middle of your oven and bake for about 45 – 55 minutes.

Take out of the oven, let cool for about 15 minutes and then turn out. The advantage of using takeaway foil containers is that you can just peel the foil down and cut the bread without turning them out onto a rack.

UPDATE JANUARY 2022

In the true spirit of “bung-it-in” cookery, I experimented yesterday with this recipe when I had only two mushy bananas but still wanted to make a cake. In France you can get squeezy pouches of apple puree called Pom’Potes, aimed at children but a very good substitute for apple sauce. I added two pouches to the mix as a replacement for two bananas, and it turned out absolutely fine. Each pouch contains about 90g of apple sauce, so that works out at 90g of apple sauce to replace each banana.

Gevulde Speculaas – Gingerbread/Marzipan slice

This is one of my favourite Dutch cakes, always in the shops around the pre-Christmas time, and you may have eaten some at Christmas Markets. Went down a treat with the neighbours last night at our Street’s carol singing session.

• Self-raising flour (250g)
• Salted butter (125g)
• Soft brown sugar (150g)
• A splash of milk
• 1 packet of marzipan
• A beaten egg.
• 2 tablespoons of Speculaas Spices (or half mixed spice, half cinnamon)
• Flaked almonds or whole blanched almonds – a handful

Chilling

Mix the flour, sugar, butter (just put it in a food mixer is easiest), add 1 tablespoon of milk at a time to get a soft dough, knead it into  a ball and chill for 30 mins.

While your dough is chilling, do the hard part: grate your marzipan, it’s hard because it gets really oily and sticky when you  handle it. If you’re fore-sighted enough, putting in the freezer first helps quite a bit. When it’s grated, or in as small chunks as you can manage add about 2/3rds of the beaten egg and mix it up so it’s quite loose and you’re able to spread it. Ideally, it’ll look a bit like scrambled eggs and be runny enough to spread evenly.

Cut the dough into two equal parts and roll out into a rough rectangle. Spread your marzipan/egg mix over it, quite close to the edges, if you do get a bit close to the edge, don’t worry, any of the marzipan that leaks out will get beautifully toasted and crunchy.

Roll out the other half of the dough and put it on top (Rolling it around the rolling pin helps)  if it breaks up, you can patch it up, don’t worry about it. Squidge the edges together to form a seal.

Brush the rest of the beaten egg over the top and either scatter some almond flakes over it, or if you have whole blanched almonds and fancy yourself as a Great British Bake Off kinda person, space them out with meticulous accuracy in a grid pattern representing where you will cutting the finished thing into squares.

Bake for 30 mins or so at 200 degrees

Let it cool! Give it good 30 mins or so, otherwise a) the red hot marzipan centre will burn your fingers, mouth etc and b) it’ll be a right mess when you cut it up, with liquid marzipan flowing out and sticking to your knife. Vrolijk Kerstfeest!

 

Nutty granola

This is my take on the excellent Jack Monroe’s peanut butter granola recipe. Please visit her blog detailing easy recipes for those on a budget, Cooking on a Bootstrap, and while you’re there pre-order two copies of her new book Tin Can Cook – one for you, and one to donate to your nearest food bank.  I’ve tried to cut down on the sugars and add more nuts and seeds. These are rough estimates of quantities I used. You could be adventurous and make up your own based on what you like. I might try marmalade instead of syrup next time, and mix in dark chocolate chips for a breakfast jaffacake kind of vibe.

• 30ml walnut oil
• 65g crunchy peanut butter
• 300g jumbo oats
• 50g golden syrup
• 25g Truvia brown sugar blend (half real sugar, half sweetener)
• 50g flaked almonds
• 80g raisins or sultanas
• 80g milled linseed (available at Aldi or Lidl these days)

Measure out the oil, peanut butter, syrup and Truvia into a big microwaveable bowl and nuke for about 30 seconds, stir, then nuke again for 30 seconds.  You want the ingredients to melt together but not get so hot that they bubble.  Meantime, measure out the oats.  When the liquid ingredients have calmed down a bit but are still warm, stir in the oats.  At this point you can also add the linseed and almonds (or you can leave them out until later).  Give it all a good stir so all the oats are coated in the liquid mixture.  Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper and spread the oats in an even layer on the paper, patting it down with the back of a spoon.  Put in a pre-heated medium oven (160 degrees C fan oven) and bake for about 15 minutes. The oat mixture should look only lightly toasted. If it’s dark brown, you’ve gone too far!  Leave to cool on the tray, then break it up and mix in the sultanas, plus the almonds and linseed if you kept them out of the mixture at the beginning.  Store in an airtight container and enjoy for breakfast sprinkled on fruit and yogurt, or with milk.

Coconut lemon drizzle cake

A vegan cake I’ve been trying to get right – and this is pretty much OK, but it still looks really odd when you’re mixing the batter!  Adding coconut flour means it soaks up way more moisture than if you were using just self raising flour.

• 200g caster sugar
• 175g self raising flour
• 100g coconut flour
• 1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
• zest of 1 lemon
• 100g coconut oil, melted
• 1x 330ml can of ginger beer or lemonade
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Melt the coconut oil gently, and set aside to cool a little.  Put all the dry ingredients in a big bowl with the lemon zest, and mix them thoroughly.  Put the melted coconut oil, the ginger beer and the lemon juice in another bowl and whisk them together, briefly, so that there are still bubbles from the ginger beer in the mix.  Add the liquid to the dry ingredients and mix them until it all comes together into a strangely fizzy and slightly grainy batter. If the batter looks a bit too dense, add a bit more water.  Speed is of the essence here, as you’re using some of the fizz in the ginger beer as a raising agent.  Put the cake batter into a greased 8 inch round cake tin. I use a silicone one for this recipe as it’s very easy to turn out.  Bake in a fan oven at 175 degrees C for about 35 minutes, or until a skewer poked into the centre comes out clean.  If it looks like it’s getting too brown round the edges, turn down the heat to 165 degrees and bake it for an extra 10 minutes.

Turn out the cake onto a cooling rack while you prepare the icing.

150g icing sugar

2 tablespoons lemon juice

Mix together the icing sugar and lemon juice to make a runny icing.    Poke the top of the cake with a skewer in several places, then carefully spoon half the icing over the cake. Most recipes will tell you to wait until the cake is cool before doing this, but if you do it while it’s still a bit warm, the icing will sink into the cake and make it much more moist and sticky.
When the cake has fully cooled, put it on a pretty serving plate and spoon the other half of the icing over it.  You can get fancy now and make the icing drip down the sides.

instant cherry gelato

How easy is this?  It’s also low carb – no added sugar – and totally delicious. This quantity serves about 4. Or just me when I feel like icecream.

• 350g frozen black cherries
• 250ml double cream

Put the double cream and frozen cherries into a bowl and use a stick blender to blend the two ingredients together until the mixture looks like ice cream. It doesn’t have to be completely smooth – having visible bits of cherry makes it more interesting.  You can either eat this straight away, or store it in the freezer, but if you store it then take it out and leave in the fridge for 20 minutes before eating.  It is lovely served with dark chocolate sauce (melt dark chocolate with cream – easy).

low sugar mincemeat

I know I’ve written about mincemeat before, but we’ve been on a bit of a dietary adventure over the past six months, eating a low carb/high fat diet to alleviate Chris’s Type 2 diabetes – and it’s worked!  So we’ve been thinking about adapting many of our favourite recipes to cut down on the carbohydrates.  This version of mincemeat contains only 50g of  added “half and half” sucrose/stevia.  It is not low-calorie, as the dried fruits contain high levels of fructose, but this is absorbed more slowly than other sugars and so is better for diabetics. In any case there’s only a heaped teaspoon of mincemeat in a mince pie anyway.  Oh, and it’s also suitable for vegans as it contains no animal products.

• 200g vegetable suet
• 300g cooking apple, peeled and grated
• 50g whole almonds, chopped into slivers
• 200g dried apricots, chopped small
• 140 g raisins
• 300g sultanas
• 225g currants
• 150g dates
• 150g prunes
• 50g brown sugar with stevia (by Tate & Lyle)
• 4 teaspoons mixed spice
• 1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
• Zest and juice of 2 lemons
• Zest and juice of 2 large clementines
• 6 tablespoons brandy

Put the dates and prunes into a food processor and blitz to a paste. Put in a big ovenproof bowl with all the other ingredients except the brandy, and mix it all together thoroughly. Leave it overnight, covered in a cloth.  In the morning, take off the cloth, stir the mixture well and cover it loosely with a piece of foil. Place the bowl in a very low oven (gas mark 1/4, 110 degrees C) for 3 hours, then take it out of the oven. As it cools, give the mixture a stir occasionally. When it’s completely cooled down, stir in the brandy (be generous – and maybe add a splash of Pedro Ximenez sherry as well; after all, it is Christmas…) and mix well, then spoon into sterilised jars and seal with acid-proof lids and wax discs, or parfait jars with rubber seals.

This makes just under 3kg of mincemeat (about 6 normal sized jamjars).

 

Prize-winning Eccles Cakes, 2016

So, OK, I only won the prize because no-one else entered, but I’m confident they would have stood up to any competition.

I’m usually disappointed by any Eccles cakes apart from the usual shop-bought ones which aren’t really ‘puffy’ puff pastry and these did turn out very like them: I used Delia Smith’s cheat method for puff pastry, because life’s too short. This recipe makes about 10 decent sized cakes, but you could make more if you go for a smaller size of pastry square. Don’t forget to adjust cooking times if you make smaller ones though – they’ll cook more quickly.

Ingredients:  Rough Puff Pastry:

• 1 pack (250g) salted butter
• 350g plain flour
• Water

Filling:

• about 100g currants
• 25g chopped apricots
• 30g butter
• zest of an orange or lemon or 2 limes
• Orange liqueur*
• two tablespoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon of ground cardamom

* NB. you can use any booze here, the original recipe used to have brandy it in apparently, but then those temperance folk came along and complained. You can use mixed peel but I hate it so usually substitute apricots.

Freeze the butter for about half an hour, measure the flour into a big mixing bowl and then grate the butter into it using a box grater – the side you’d normally use to grate cheese. If the butter’s getting a bit melty, dip it in the flour. When it’s all done, mix it up with a knife, chopping any big lumps until it’s the consistency of bread crumbs. Add the cold water a bit at a time until you get a reasonable dough.

Put the dough in a plastic bag or clingfilm and chill it in the fridge for an hour. Take it out of the fridge about 20 minutes before you’re ready to roll, or it can be too hard to roll out.

Meanwhile make the filling. Melt the butter in a pan, and add everything else. The longer you can leave this soaking in the booze, the juicier and more fabulous the currants and apricots will taste. Currants will soak up quite a lot. If you have some free liquid when you’re ready to use it, pour it off or you’ll get a soggy bottom. Actually drinking it is quite nice.

Roll the dough out, fold it up – all recipes seem to think it’s important to fold over a third into the middle and then the other third over that, so why not do that? Then roll it and do it again a couple of times more.

Finally cut out a square about the size of a CD case and put a dollop of the fruit mixture in the middle and fold in the corners – a bit of water applied to them will help them stick. Turn them over and nudge them gently into a more round shape. When you’ve done them all, make some slits in the top, wet the tops slightly with water and sprinkle them with some brown sugar.

Bake for about 20 mins in a 225°C oven, until they’re a nice golden brown. If they still look or feel a bit soggy and pale around the sides or bottom, leave them in for another 5-10 minutes. For god’s sake leave to cool before sampling. The insides are hotter than the sun when they first come out. They’re actually better completely cold.

To serve: Stuff them into your face as fast as you can before someone else gets hold of them. With clotted cream is nice.

 

 

 

French almond cake

5 eggs at room temperature
200g  caster sugar
half a teaspoon of salt
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
200g ground almonds
30g plain flour
Knob of butter for greasing your tin

Switch on your oven and pre-heat to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4.  Base-line a 23cm (9in) springform tin with greaseproof paper, and smear the insides with a bit of butter. Grate the zest of your lemon, then cut the lemon in half,. Get two large bowls ready. The one for the egg whites should be ceramic, steel or glass – trying to whisk egg whites in a plastic bowl is a recipe for disaster, as plastic is never completely grease-free and any trace of grease will mean you can’t get as much air into the whites as you need. Rub the inside of the bowls with the cut lemon halves (you can use them for putting in your gin and tonic later). Separate the eggs and put the whites in one bowl and the yolks in the other.  Add half the sugar to the yolks and beat together until light, pale and fluffy. Add the lemon zest and beat for a bit longer. An electric hand mixer is great for this – if you use a hand whisk you will get really tired trying to make this cake!

In the other bowl, beat the whites until they form stiff peaks. If you are using the same mixer for both yolks and whites, make sure that you clean the blades well before whipping up the whites – see comment above about grease and egg whites. Add the remaining sugar to the whites gradually, and keep beating until stiff and shiny.

Using a metal spoon add two big spoonfuls of the whites to the batter to loosen it then fold in the rest, using a cutting motion to avoid knocking out all the air you’ve carefully beaten into the whites. Weigh out the salt, almonds and flour and mix together thoroughly, then fold gently into the egg mixture. There’s really no need to sift the flour/salt/almond mixture, just make sure there are no big lumps of ground almonds and that the salt is evenly distributed.

Scrape the mixture into the springform tin and bake  for 40 minutes. The sponge should be coming away from the sides and the middle should spring back when gently pressed.

Leave in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn out and place the right way up on a cooling rack. Once it is completely cool, remove the paper. This cake does sink slightly in the middle as the only raising agent is the egg whites.

The image is of my entry for the street party bakeoff challenge – three layers of French almond cake, sandwiched with blueberry and raspberry jam, finished with white chocolate ganache, white chocolate fingers and white chocolate buttons, and topped with fresh strawberries and blueberries. It came second…

Cranachan

For Burns night (25th January), a traditional Scottish pudding made a bit lighter by the addition of half-fat crème fraîche. We ate it all before I could take pictures. This quantity makes 6 portions.

• 75g porridge oats
• 35g flaked almonds
• 300ml double cream
• 150g half-fat crème fraîche
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 tablespoons whisky
• 3 tablespoons clear honey
• 350g frozen raspberries, defrosted
• handful fresh raspberries (optional)

Take the raspberries out of the freezer at least 2 hours before you’re going to use them – they need to defrost at room temperature.  Put the oats and almonds in a large non-stick frying pan and dry-fry over a medium heat for 4-5 minutes. Watch it like a hawk, and keep stirring the oats and almonds so they toast to a golden brown colour. If you take your eyes off the pan for a minute you’re guaranteed to come back to a pan full of blackened almonds! Remove from the heat and leave to cool. Pour the double cream and crème fraîche into a large bowl and add the vanilla extract, whisky and honey. Whip to the soft peak stage – don’t over-do it, as the cream will stiffen further when mixed with the oats. Set six glass tumblers on a tray (you could use ramekins, but if you use glasses you’ll be able to see the lovely layers). Put a spoonful of the whipped cream mixture in the base of each glass. Sprinkle on some of the oats and almonds and about half the defrosted raspberries on top. Repeat the layers once more. If you’ve got fresh raspberries, put a thin layer of the oat/almond mixture over the top layer of defrosted raspberries and put the fresh raspberries on the top of that.  The oat/almond mixture can be made well in advance, and you can whip the cream mixture ahead of time as well, but the cranachan needs to be served as soon as it’s assembled.

tawny marmalade

Chris called this “mahogany marmalade” as it’s a fair bit darker than tawny!  An accident, but a tasty one, because I didn’t have quite enough demerara sugar to make up 2kg, so I improvised with what was in the cupboard. This made 6 1lb jars. If you put all the shreds of orange peel in you’ll probably need more.

• 1kg seville oranges
• 2 lemons
• 1.8kg demerara sugar
• 200g dark soft brown sugar

Wash and dry the fruit. Pour 2 litres of cold water into a large pan (it really does have to be the biggest one you’ve got, it WILL boil over…).  If you’re making a lot of jams and pickles then invest in a maslin pan, like this one: Lakeland maslin pans

Squeeze the juice from the oranges and lemons and add to the water.  Scrape out the pips and pith from the oranges with a teaspoon (don’t bother with the lemon) and put it all in a muslin square, tie it up and put in the pan with the juice and the water.  Now attack the orange peel. I cut it as fine as I possibly could, and put in only about two-thirds of the bits. If you like chunkier marmalade then put the whole lot in.  Add the peel to the pan, and leave to soak overnight.  

The next day, put a small plate into your freezer (you will be using this to test for a set later).  Bring the panto the boil and let it all simmer very gently for 1.5 to 2 hours until the peel is very soft.

Squeeze as much juice from the muslin bag into the pan as you can, and put it to one side.  Add the sugar to the pan, bring slowly to the boil, stirring all the while so that the sugar dissolves properly, then whack up the heat and boil it rapidly for about 20 minutes.

Test it for a set by spooning a small amount onto the cold plate you put in the freezer. Leave it for a minute and if the surface is wrinkly when you push it with your finger, then it’s set.  If it’s not wrinkly but just runny, boil the marmalade for another few minutes and try again.

Switch off the heat when setting point is reached, and leave it to settle for about 15 minutes. This is just enough time to sterilise your jars and lids. Either run the jars through the dishwasher, or wash them in hot soapy water, rinse well and put them in a low oven for 5 minutes to dry out.  Put your lids in a saucepan with boiling water to cover, and boil them for 3 minutes. Take them out and dry them thoroughly before you use them to seal the jars – kitchen paper is best. The jars should be warm when you put the marmalade in them or they may crack owing to the temperature difference.

Skim off any scummy stuff on the surface of the marmalade and throw it away.  Spoon the rest of the marmalade into the jars and seal with a lid. I don’t bother with wax discs if the lids are new or show no signs of discoloration- if the marmalade or jam is still pretty hot, just screw on the lid tightly and turn the jar upside down briefly.