Ashes brownies

I think that this blog demonstrates that I have a tendency to indulge random moments of enthusiasm for specialist ingredients. This explains the Liquid Smoke, the nori flakes, the wheatberries, sumac and berbere all tucked into our cupboards. Some of them have become welcome additions to our regular dinners, but others are a little, well, specialist. Another flight of fancy led us a merry dance around every specialist food shop we could find in Australia a couple of summers ago because I had read a few nice recipes which used wattleseeds. No matter that they were all for ice cream, and we don't have an ice cream maker; I thought that being Down Under was enough of an excuse to *need* some of those seeds. I am happy to report that we did eventually find some, but somewhat abashed to admit that two years later the jar has yet to be opened.


Wattleseeds grow wild in Australia, and their seeds form part of traditional cooking. Since acquiring my seeds I have collected several interesting recipes - for wattleseed damper, for example, and Gundabluey Brownies. The quality that had attracted me to the seeds in the first place was their coffee/chocolate flavour, so I particularly liked the idea of adding them to brownies. Something made me pick up the jar the other day and I realised that it was getting perilously close to its use by date. This prompted me, at last, to do something with it.


Fortunately I had a good opportunity. Munchkin Gramps and The Scientist share a love of cricket, and they generally go together to watch an international fixture at Headingley. This year they missed out on Ashes tickets in the ballot, but they did manage to get some for the fourth day's play in the first Test at Cardiff. Grandma S always sends them off with a tasty picnic, but since they were setting off from our place this year, the honours came down to me. Given how heated the competition gets at Ashes matches I thought that I would do my bit for spreading cultural amity and make them some Aussie Ashes brownie bites. The first Aussie chef that came to mind was Bill Granger, and lo and behold, I found a recipe of his for brownies in his bill's Food. It was actually an unusual brownie recipe as it involved mixing the wet and dry ingredients separately and then combining, rather than the usual creaming method. I also Aussie'd them up by adding a tablespoon of wattleseeds. I halved the recipe and chose a pan which would make them come out quite shallow so as to make little bites to nibble on through the day.


Knowing that the wattleseeds were in there I thought that I could detect a slight coffee note to the batter. Neither The Scientist nor Munchkin Gramps noticed it, but they both came back extremely enthusiastic about how good they were. I liked them particularly because they actually cooked through in the time they were supposed to - always a bonus with a brownie recipe, but an unfortunately rare one! Since the day's play consisted of the Aussies knocking the ball all over the place and then us fluffing a few wickets before the rain fell I was glad that I'd provided some sort of pleasurable diversion. These are the new go-to brownies in our house, and I will definitely add the wattleseeds again. After all, I have a whole pot, and only a few weeks to use them up!

Wattleseed Ashes brownies (based on bill's food)

I halved this amount. I also froze what wasn't needed for the picnic, and stored what was in the fridge overnight, just to give them the best chance to firm up. It seemed to work.

370g (2 1/2 cups) caster sugar
80g (2/3 cup) cocoa powder
60g (1/2 cup) plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs, beaten
250g unsalted butter, melted
2 tsp vanilla extract
200g chocolate chips (I used a cut up bar of dark chocolate)
1 Tbsp wattleseeds - or more

Preheat the oven to 160C/Gas 2-3

Stir the sugar, cocoa powder, flour and baking powder together in a bowl. Add the eggs, melted butter and vanilla and mix until combined. Mix in the chocolate chips and wattleseeds.

Pour into a lined tin (the full batch goes in a 9 inch/22 cm square one) and bake for 40 to 45 mins

Still testing those scones

Scones, family apple cake (which didn't photograph very well, though I'm hoping it will appear here at some stage), other assorted tea time goodies (the mustard was for the sandwiches; that is NOT an English teatime scone tradition)

I said a few weeks ago that I had found the definitive scone recipe. Then I thought I'd better check another one, just in case. Nope, Nigella still had it. Then Johanna suggested that I try her lemonade scones which I have to admit had attracted my attention already. She said that they were great - light, fluffy and inspired after someone brought them in to her work. What if they had something that Nigella just couldn't match (carbonation, for instance)? While Nigella swears by plain flour and lots of cream of tartar, Johanna's recipe uses lemonade as the raising agent. I've tried beer in bread - why not lemonade in a scone?


I made these for our Alice tea party which was a couple of weeks ago now, but I *think* I did it all exactly as the recipe stated. The only thing I wasn't quite sure about was whether my lemonade was cold enough. It had been in the fridge but only for a couple of hours. As Johanna herself said, these scones aren't quite as convenient to make as normal ones as they also use cream (which we don't have on standby, largely because The Scientist makes it his business to make sure it all gets used up straight away when we do have it). For that reason alone I wouldn't promote them to top of the list, but they were, again, very good. I quizzed our guests excessively but they were frankly too busy buttering, jamming and creaming to be terribly interested in finessing a review, and The Scientist, who is the only one who has tasted all of the scones, got confused about where the lemonade came in and assumed that we were back to Nigella. I don't think they quite hit the fluffiness of the Nigella ones, but they were definitely lovely and soft. I have to apologise for the photos - I had just got my new camera but not yet the new memory card, and so after using up all ten of my quota of pictures I was back to the Ecos' camera - which I never quite managed to work out properly. Not that I'm not grateful to them :)

My thanks to Neil for for crafting his scone so beautifully, and then waiting for ages while I tried to photograph it :)

I'm on scone duty again tomorrow for another event, and it will be back to the Nigellas for now. But I think there may still be room for further investigation. We had a lovely light scone while we were on holiday in the Lakes, for instance, which surprised us by being flavoured with blackberry and chocolate chips. Neither of us was a fan of the latter in a scone, but fresh seasonal fruit - now there's an idea.

Johanna's lemonade scones: recipe here

Lashings of treacle tart

When the Norse Goddess nominated treacle as a theme for our tea party last weekend she was thinking of the Famous Five and their habitual picnics. I loved these books too, although neither of us could think of any specifically treacley treats in the lunches Aunt Fanny used to pack up to accompany their adventures. Fruit cake, yes, sandwiches, yes, hard boiled eggs, yes, ginger beer - naturally. But treacle is clearly a very traditional English ingredient and so we went with our fancy. Treacle sponge was our first thought, but it's not very tea-party-like. Then we considered gingerbread, but that didn't quite hit it either. Finally we settled on treacle tart, which also made a nice contrast with the cupcakes we were making.


We didn't eat traditional desserts when I was little. 'Fresh fruit in season' was our usual, with the occasional boil in the tin steamed pudding (which we didn't realise was traditional anyway). I didn't eat school dinners either, and so only have one memory of eating semolina for pudding and finding it completely weird (jam on dessert - what was that about?). The Scientist is a connoisseur of all of these sweet treats though, and so I've tried out various recipes during my time with him. I remember being very surprised when I realised what went into treacle tart the first time I made it. Firstly, there is no treacle, but instead golden syrup, and secondly the filling gets its substance from breadcrumbs. I wasn't expecting that. And yet somehow, it works, making a goopily set, incredibly sweet filling in a tart crust. The Norse Goddess was pretty surprised too when she saw me making it, and it wasn't actually her favourite offering at the tea party (but then there were very nicely decorated chocolate cupcakes on the table :) ). A bit of cream on the side though, and The Scientist was happy.


Treacle Tart (from Martha Day's Complete Baking)
Serves 4-6 (apparently - I rolled my pastry out to fit a larger tin than the author suggests, although this did make for a fairly thin layer of filling)

175ml golden syrup
86g fresh white breadcrumbs (I whizzed sliced bread up in a mini processor)
grated rind of one lemon
2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

For the pastry
170g plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
85g cold butter, cut in pieces
45g cold margarine, cut into pieces
3-4 Tbsp iced water

1. For the pastry, combine the flour and salt in a bowl. Add the butter and margarine and cut in with a fork until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.

2. With the fork, stir in just enough water to bind the pastry. Gather into a ball, wrap in plastic or greaseproof paper and rest in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.

3. On a lightly floured surface roll out the pastry to 3mm thickness. Transfer to a 20cm pie dish [I used a larger one] and trim off the overhang. Refrigerate for at least 20 minutes, reserving the trimmings for the lattice top.

4. Preheat a baking sheet at the top of a 200C oven.

5. In a saucepan, warm the syrup until runny and thin. Remove from the heat and stir in the breadcrumbs and lemon rind. Let sit for 10 minutes so the bread can absorb the syrup. Add more breadcrumbs if the mixture is thin. Stir in the lemon juice and spread evenly in the pastry case.

6. Roll out the pastry trimmings and cut into 10-12 thin strips. Lay half the strips on the filling, then lay the remaining strips at a 90 degree angle over them to form a lattice.

7. Place on the hot sheet and bake for 10 minutes. Lower the heat to 190C. Bake until golden, about 15 minutes more. Serve warm or cold.

A healthy interlude: salad lettuce wraps

It's been dessert central round here recently and I fancied a change from bread and dips, and cakes for my lunch today. I was all alone for the first time in ages - the Norse deities have departed and The Scientist was working at his office today.


My lunch was inspired in an effort to use up some lettuce. We find it hard to get through a whole head of lettuce but I hate accidentally letting it go to waste. I was going to make gazpacho soup with some other salad ingredients, but then I thought I could wrap my salad up in lettuce leaves and make a fun and tasty little lunch with almost no effort.


I used a round lettuce with quite floppy leaves which made the rolling up easier. The salad was made of stuff I had in the fridge - raw broccoli, carrot ribbons, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, a bit of feta, some sweetcorn, with some pumpkin seeds scattered on the top. I bet adding a grain would be good too. I made up an easy dipping sauce of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and a tiny drizzle of agave nectar, though it turned out to be easier to take the sauce to the wrap rather than the other way round (my leaves weren't big enough to enclose the filling completely!)


It was colourful, crunchy and tasty, and a new perfect way to use up lettuce. While looking up ideas for the lettuce I found some great tips on making it keep longer at Pinch my Salt. Nicole swears by a salad spinner which we don't have, but it does apparently make a big difference. If only we had any spare space in our cupboards :( Next post, back to the desserts!

Chocolate chilli cupcakes: unexpected star of English tea party

Chocolate chilli cupcakes, mystery treacle offering, jug of the Norse Goddess's sangria. The cupcakes are sitting on a cakestand I inherited from my Grandad.

We hosted a tea party yesterday, in honour of our visiting friends, the Norse God and Goddess. It was the fourth of July so it seemed like a fitting time to get some friends together - what with it being Alice in Wonderland Day and all :) This is a very well known English event, which I had been planning to celebrate for precisely two days, ever since I saw a poster advertising it in the Covered Market in Oxford. Oxford is, of course, the home of Alice, since C. S. Lewis was a don there, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, the site of the famous Treacle Well is near the city [interlude: Roger Federer has just won Wimbledon. During the course of the match I have moderated some essays, read a magazine, read the manual for my new camera, downloaded some pictures and made some bread. But winning Wimbledon sounds pretty good as well]. It was a coincidence that the (Canadian) Norse Goddess had come up with treacle as her first thought for an English tea party, but a happy one. She associated it with the Famous Five, so we were covering lots of children's literature bases.

The Norse Goddess gets creative (and personalised) with the cupcakes

I'll write more about how we turned the treacle theme into reality later, but this post is about the unexpected and not very English star of the tea party - the chocolate chilli cupcakes. This was inspired by the very first entry on my 2009 Cupcake Calendar, so I've been waiting a while to make it. My fellow dairy-reducing friend Vicki has shamed me into also reducing the amount of dairy products I use to bake for other people , so I didn't actually use the recipe from the calendar, but instead adapted the chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World. The calendar recipe called for the addition of chipotle chilli powder to the batter; we didn't have that, so I used regular chilli powder, and some of the sauce from a jar of chipotle chillis in adobo in lieu of some of the vanilla extract. I did go with the orange frosting the calender suggested, just using vegan marge instead of butter.

The Norse Goddess's over-sized butterfly bun (verdict: nom nom - in a Canadian accent)

The cakes were a big hit. There was a good hit of chilli - everyone noticed it, but it wasn't enough to make your eyes water (I'd been a bit worried about this). Our poor friend Neil, who got ambushed by the salt on the margarita-ish cupcakes I made a few weeks ago was also surprised by the chilli, but it doesn't seem to have been enough to put him off my baking, fortunately. No one complained that they tasted of soya milk either, so thank you Vicki for inspiring me to ban the cow's milk and butter :) The Norse Goddess and I got creative with the icing, and when I realised that she'd never had a butterfly bun, I turned one of the extras into her own little English fusion treat.

Cupcake ready for nomming, modelled by Mike

Our Alice party was a lot of fun, and was only slighted marred by the odd raindrop, which just served to push us inside to watch the Wimbledon women's final. The Norse Goddess made us up some sangria, which I've just realised I was drinking without diluting with lemonade, and The Scientist repeated his sandwich-making triumph from the cricket tea. His egg mayonnaise got particular mention in dispatches. The Norse deities were able sandwich minions, and the Norse God made the decorative bunting (environmentally friendly - made from Sunday newspaper colour supplements). Everyone was happy apart from Bamber the dog, who was kept confined to the car to avoid cat spooking. He didn't get a cupcake (naturally - chocolate being very bad for dogs indeed), but he did get a walk once the tea had gone down a little.

Eco bunting (note Andy Murray on third flag from the right!)

Chocolate chilli cupcakes (adapted from Vegan Cupcakes...)
Made 12 fairy cakes and two big cupcakes with the leftovers

1 cup soya milk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup caster sugar
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp adobo sauce from a jar of chipotle chillis
1 cup plain white flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp chilli powder

1. Preheat oven to 175 C and line a muffin tin with paper liners
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the soya milk and vinegar and set aside for a few minutes to curdle. Add the sugar, oil, vanilla and adobo sauce, and beat. In another bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb and salt. Add in two batches to the wet ingredients and beat until there are no large lumps. Add the chilli powder and stir to combine well.
3. Pour into the cupcake liners, filling three quarters of the way (this will create quite flat tops for icing. If you want to make butterfly buns, put a bit more in to get a domed top). Baking 18-20 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. Transfer to a rack and allow to cool before frosting.

Chocolate orange frosting (from the 2009 Cupcake Calendar)
1 cup icing sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder
2 Tbsp Grand Marnier (or Tia Maria)
1/3 cup butter or vegan margarine

Blend all of the ingredients together in a processor. The instructions said to sift the sugar but I didn't bother. Pipe the frosting onto the cooled cupcakes. Or, slice the top of the domed cupcakes and halve the cut-off top. Frost the top of the cupcake and then balance the two halves on top so that they look like wings (see photo)

Scones - just testing

Oy but it's hot here. I realise that it's not hot in the wider scheme of things, but as is well known, Brits are not very good at being hot or dealing with being hot. We have our beloved friend the Norse God staying with us at the moment, and his beloved consort, the Norse Goddess (now also beloved by us), but it's been too hot to do much with them. Luckily we all like flumping with books, games and good cheer (and/or good cheese, depending on our various preferences). We are about to brave the heat to show them Oxford, but while everyone else is finishing getting ready I'm going to post another scone recipe.


I said a few weeks ago that I was never going to make another scone - I had found scone perfection in Nigella's recipe, and that that was it forever. But I wanted to test it alongside a recipe by Nigel Slater, who is another food writer I like very much. I had cut out a recipe from Sainsbury's Magazine last year, and with a willing band of tasters presenting themselves I made a quick batch for The Scientist's latest gaming trip. I didn't have any eggs so I subbed 1 Tbsp plain yogurt. And I also added dried fruit which Nigel doesn't. The scones were perfectly lovely, and even caused The Scientist's gaming friends to run out for jam and cream. Nigella they were not, however. I am told that they lacked the same light fluffiness - though without the comparison they would have done very well. I hate to make it sound as though I am being critical of one of Nigel's recipes, after all.


So, do make these. They are very nice scones. However, if you want to wow your friends, relatives and partner's cricket team, make these.

Nigel Slater's scones (Sainsbury's magazine, October 2008)
Nigel says that these are the first scones he'd made without plain flour and baking powder - they use self raising flour instead.

Makes 6 or 7 small scones

250g self raising flour, plus extra for dusting
40g cold unsalted butter
25g golden unrefined caster sugar
1 large egg (or 1 Tbsp plain yogurt)
about 150ml buttermilk, or 120ml normal milk with 2 Tbsp natural yogurt
handful of dried fruit (optional and not part of Nigel's original!)
a little egg and milk for glaze (optional)

Preheat the oven to 220C/fan 200C, Gas 7.

Sift the flour into the bowl of a food processor with a pinch of salt [he 'genuinely recommends' sieving the flour here]. Add the butter, cut into small pieces, and then the sugar. Blitz for a few seconds, until you have what looks like breadcrumbs. Break the egg into a mixing jug, whisk lightly, then pour in enough buttermilk to make the quantity up to 150ml. Pour the liquid into the food processor bowl and blitz very briefly. Turn the mixture onto a floured surface and knead gently for a few seconds, just until you can pull the mixture together into a ball.

Pat the dough into a large round, about 2.5 cm thick. Cut out as many scones as you can using a 5-6cm cookie cutter or upturned glass. Bring the trimmings together and press gently back into shape, then cut out a couple more until you have used up all the mixture.

Place on a baking sheet, brush with the beaten egg and milk to glaze, if using. Bake for 12-15 minutes till pale and risen. Serve slightly warm with clotted cream and jam.

Frozen raspberry delight

A little belated, but here is one of the desserts I made for my editorial board meeting a couple of weeks ago. It's another recipe from the Good Food Vegetarian Summer magazine and looked so amazingly impressive that I just had to give it a go. It's called a Crunchy Raspberry Ripple Terrine. Doesn't that sound classy? And yet full of the goodness of childhood as well - raspberry ripple AND a terrine. Surely this must cater for all tastes. In fact it's even better than that, as a perusal of the ingredients list reveals that it also includes crushed meringue bits. It's basically posh ice cream, tart with real raspberry juice and crunchy with meringue. The hitch must be in the amount of time it takes to craft this dessert - well, no - it's a cinch! All you do is mash up the berries and sieve them, whisk some eggs and sugar over hot water until it's all fluffy, whisk some cream and then combine both lusciously voluminous mallowy piles, fold in meringue, drizzle over the fruit puree, and then freeze. No stirring, no ice cream makers, just leave it alone. And it still slices perfectly when you take it out. I only tried a little bit since it features cream rather extravagantly (which I avoid as part of my carbon-output-lowering regime - the dairy industry is v bad for this) - but it was *really* nice. I especially liked the little crunches of meringue. I managed to save some for The Scientist and he loved it too. And Munchkin Granny was with me when I made it and she liked the look of it so much that she copied out the recipe to make for a party she's hosting. So, if you need a fancy but low effort summer dessert, look no further. The picture of mine sliced looks stripy because I used a knife with a serrated edge to cut The Scientist's portion - a smooth blade will make for a tidier finish (listen to me trying to pretend I know anything about presentation!)


Crunchy raspberry ripple terrine (from Good Food Vegetarian Summer magazine)
Serves 8

350g raspberries [I actually used more]
3 eggs
100g golden caster sugar
284ml pot double cream
2 meringue shells, crushed into small pieces

1. Mash 150g of the raspberries, pass through a sieve into a bowl, discarding seeds, then set aside. Line a 1 litre loaf tin with cling film. Whisk eggs and sugar with an electric whisk continuously over a bowl of barely simmering water, until doubled in volume and thick. Remove bowl from heat. Continue to whisk until completely cool; the whole process will take about 10 mins.

2. Whisk the cream until just thick. Fold the egg mix into the cream until completely combined, then fold in the meringue. Pour the raspberry puree over the mix in a zig zag, then gently pout into the lined loaf tin. Freeze for a minimum of 4 hours, then serve in slices with the remaining whole raspberries.