Medieval lemon chicken

We’ve been to Les Medievales de Bayeux twice now – it’s a three day event with stalls, parades, music, re-enactments and displays of medieval crafts. One of the displays we saw this time was cooking, specifically for the upper classes. We got to taste a most delicious concoction of chicken in a lemon sauce thickened with ground almonds. I tried to follow all the instructions the demonstrator gave out but I probably missed something vital! Here’s an approximation that I cooked tonight – it was really good if not quite as delicate as the original, cooked in a ceramic pot over an open fire.

• 600g chicken breast or thigh, skinned
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 100g lardons
• 25cl chicken stock
• juice of 2 lemons
• 50g ground almonds
• pepper to taste (poivre long in the original recipe – it has more heat than black pepper, so I compromised with a mix of white & black)
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin

Roast the chicken parts and shred the meat (alternatively, chop into large chunks and fry in a pan). Add the lardons and onion to a large heavy pan and fry until the onions are translucent. Add the shredded chicken, the stock, the lemon juice, the spices, and the ground almonds. Turn down the heat and simmer for about 20 minutes until the liquids have reduced somewhat. Taste and adjust the pepper, and add salt if necessary.

If you’re interested in more medieval recipes (in French), check out Le Monde Medieval website.

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.

Christmas cake 2015

There are hundreds of different recipes out there, but having tried Nigella’s last year I think this is just about the easiest both in terms of shopping for ingredients and in baking it.  This is my take on it. Quantities below are for one small 18cm round or 15cm square cake.  If you double up the mixture this will make a 23cm round or 20cm square cake but will take much longer to cook.  Soak the fruit in any type of aromatic spirit (I used a mixture of Scotch and brandy as that’s what I had available!), or use bourbon if you want to go the full Domestic Goddess route. Make sure your butter and eggs are at room temperature before you start mixing – take them out of the fridge the night before. Nigella suggests adding a teaspoon of almond extract but I don’t think it’s necessary, especially if the cake is going to be covered in marzipan before icing. This is quite an easy cake to put together, but you do need to bear in mind that you need to start preparing the ingredients a good 24 hours before you’re ready to bake it.

• 350g raisins
• 150g currants
• 50g glace cherries, cut in half
• 75g chopped walnuts
• 200ml whisky, brandy or bourbon
• 150g butter
• 90g dark brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
• 1 tablespoon black treacle
• 150g plain flour
• 75g ground almonds
• half teaspoon cinnamon
• quarter teaspoon ground cloves
• quarter teaspoon ground ginger

Put the raisins, currants and cherries in a small saucepan and pour over the spirit of your choice.  Bring the mixture to the boil then remoove it from the heat, give it a good stir, then cover it and leave it overnight.

Preheat your oven to 150 degrees C or gas mark 2.  Line your cake tin with a double thickness of greaseproof or baking paper.

Put the butter and sugar in a bowl and cream them together until the sugar granules have disappeared. Then mix in the grated lemon zest. Now add an egg and beat it in well.  Add a spoonful of flour, mix that, then add another egg and beat well.  Now add in the black treacle.  A good tip to get treacle out of the tin is to heat up the spoon over a gas flame fora few seconds, or dunk it in a cup of boiling water, before putting your spoon in the tin.  The heat will help the treacle slide off the spoon more easily.

Mix the flour, spices and ground almonds together in a separate bowl (you really don’t need to sieve flour these days, unless you’re still buying it from a grocer’s shop where they scoop out your flour from a big sack on the floor….).  Add a big spoonful of flour mix followed by a big spoonful of the soaked dried fruit and mix well. Continue like this until all the flour and all the fruit is incorporated.  Then add the chopped walnuts and give the mixture one last stir to distribute the nuts evenly through it.

Put the mixture into your cake tin.  A silicone spatula is a great tool for getting the last scrapings out of the mixing bowl.  Level off the  mixture in the tin as much as you can, then put it in the oven. A small 18cm round cake will take anything between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours to cook, depending on your oven.  A larger 23cm round cake will take about 3 hours, give or take 20 minutes either side. The easiest way to test if your cake is done is to stick a thin metal skewer right into the middle, leave it there for a few seconds, then pull it out. If the skewer has some sticky cake mixture on it, the cake’s not done yet.  If it comes out and looks clean, the cake is baked all the way through.  Take it out of the oven and brush the top with a tablespoonful of brandy or whisky, turn it out of the tin and wrap it up in a double layer of foil (you can keep the baking paper on it at this point).  The next day, take off all the baking paper and rewrap it in fresh baking paper, then put it in an airtight container.

At this point, your cake is ready for feeding.  Every so often,  unrwap your cake,  prod it all over with a skewer and brush over a couple of tablespoons of whisky or brandy, then wrap it up again .

A small cake will need one pack of marzipan to cover it – anything bigger may require two. You should put the marzipan on the cake a few days before you want to put the icing on.  Use a tablespoon of apricot jam, heated up and sieved, to brush over the cake before you put the rolled out marzipan on – it will help to stick the marzipan onto the cake.  Icing?  I cheat and use ready-rolled fondant!

 

Limoncello

OK, this is a straight steal from the Channel 4 programme Superscrimpers, via our neighbour Teresa who made her own version of it. It’s not terribly authentic, but it tasted so good I was inspired to try it for myself. If it works it’ll be an excellent addition to our repertoire of home-made Christmas drinks.

Take the zest off 8 lemons (make sure you only take off the yellow zest, and as little of the white pith as you can manage). A very sharp knife or a speed peeler would be best to do this, or you could use a grater.  Put the zest in a large bowl with the squeezed juice of the 8 lemons, and pour over a 70cl bottle of cheap vodka.  Don’t throw the bottle away!  Add 500 grams of granulated sugar to 500ml of just boiled water and stir until dissolved, then add to the lemon/vodka mix. Cover the bowl and leave to steep for 5 days.  This is the stage the recipe has reached at the moment… After 5 days, strain the liquid. You could use a paper coffee filter or a piece of muslin in a sieve or colander. Pour the strained liquid into clean bottles (this is why you should keep the empty vodka bottle!).