Steamed Loaf Take 1 - Date and Walnut

Comments: Fabulous result but not the one I wanted.  This recipe steamed into a soft, loose, moist, delicious ‘cake’.  Loaf it was not.  It was unslice-able (is that a concept?) and un-butter-able.  Crumbly implies dry, so I hesitate to use crumbly, but it fell to apart too easily to spread butter on the portions.

It would, however, make a fabulous steamed sponge pudding, which has given me an idea to continue this blog (after I reach the 50^th morning tea at work) with a dozen easy steamed puddings – especially as we will be heading into winter.  After that….. well who knows.

Date & Walnut Cake

6 oz chopped dates – soaked for a 2 hours in a cup (250ml) of hot strong tea.

1 tsp B Soda
dash of vanilla
6 oz soft brown sugar
2 oz butter
50 ml oil
1 egg
6 oz self-raising flour
3 oz walnut pieces

Once the dates have soaked and cooled, add the soda, vanilla, oil, and melted butter.

Sift the flour and sugar, add the nuts followed by the beaten egg and the wet date mixture.

You will need a deep tin (or tins) with a lid or a cover of aluminium foil and string, or a pudding bowl.  Grease it really well, fill it half way (to allow for rising) and cover it well.

Steam it for an hour in a deep, covered pot, with a trivet (metal biscuit cutter) or folded tea-towel under the bottom of the tin.  Make sure the water comes about 1/3 way up the tin.  Check the water level and top up if it looks like simmering dry.

I use a 10 litre hi-top pressure cooker for steaming.

Bake in Oven option:  Bake in a loaf tin for 45 mins to an hour at 180 degrees C  (170 degrees C in a fan oven).

Cool it in the tin – or serve immediately with custard if you are treating it as pudding.

Baking Powder Tins

That's a dessertspoon by the way

These are old baking powder tins. They're from the days when such containers were metal (not plastic) and the lids went over the top - not  inside it.  My grandmothers and my mother used to save them to steam a species of fruit loaf.

I’m not sure whether it was the dense loaf itself, the butter, or the novelty of it being round,  but I remember the childish me loving the buttered round slices of loaf with cups of hot tea. 

The tins came to light the other day while I was dredging around for preserving jars (for beetroot) and I mused over them for a while and recalled all the experimenting I did while living on yachts to try and make bread and cakes in a pressure cooker.  I must have been trying to reinvent the wheel because I had clearly forgotten that my pioneering forbears had ‘made do’ without bakers ovens for years and had been sufficiently inventive to create perfectly acceptable cakes and bread using steam.

I don’t have the specific recipe for the loaf that my memory conjures now that I look at the tins (if indeed there was only one), so I am going to experiment with oven bake tea loaf recipes that I do have.  I recall that such loaf recipes were rather plain affairs, very little leavening (soda), no egg, dry, hard, fruit soaked overnight in cold tea, and just a pinch of precious spices – and they came out dense and moist, a bit like slicing cheddar cheese….

Did dried fruit used to be drier?  I recall that dates used to come in blocks like building bricks, and sultanas were hard little nuggets.  Maybe that was just the effect of the extra distance travelled to NZ.  Anyway, soaking fruit used to be essential, but I am worried that soaking the softer, oiled, dry(ish) fruit  that we get nowadays might be overdoing it.

Watch this space…..

Pickled Beetroot - overflow method

My allotment is finally producing such quantities of veg that I can start preserving, pickling, making chutneys and jams, and filling the freezer.  I am also drying peas and beans for winter soups and stews.

My family call this 'bottled beetroot.'  It is relatively straight forward if you have the preserving jars to do it.  

Boil up some scrubbed beetroot.  While it is cooking, put your clean preserving jars on a tray in the oven and heat them up to 100 degrees C and keep them hot.

Prepare pickling brine in the ratio 1 cup malt vinegar, 1 cup sugar, and 2 cups water.  Combine, and bring this to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar.  Reduce heat to a slow simmer.  (That is a 500ml jar in the picture.  This quantity of brine fills approx 5-6 of these jars when they are packed with sliced beetroot.)

Separate the seals and put them in a bowl so that you can cover them with boiling water just before you start the actual bottling process. 

Make sure the screw bands (that hold the dome seals on until the jars cool and are sealed) are clean and wiped with a skim of vaseline on the inside.

Once the beetroot is tender put on a pair of heavy washing up gloves, lift each beet out of the hot water with a slotted spoon, squeeze them gently to wipe the skin off, slice them up and pack the slices into a jar.  I do this one jar at a time to keep everything as hot as possible to ensure they seal.

Pour hot brine over the beetroot to completely (completely) fill the jar, put a seal on top and make sure it is properly bedded with nothing between the jar the the rubber edge of the seal, and then tighten down the screw band.  Set it on a board to cool and get on with the next jar. 

Any that don't seal will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks (as will the contents of any jar you open to use later).

If you don't have preserving jars, you might be able to use any decent sized jar which had a lid with one of those pop up centres to show they are sealed.  If you do, make sure the inside of the lid is coated so that it is resistant to the effects of vinegar.

Sorry but beetroot is messy and there is no possible way I can photograph the steps in this process without a second pair of hands - messy but worth it.  My favorite pickled vegetable.

Sarah's Charity Bake Sale

Sarah (of the flapjack recipe) organizes the cake sale stall at an annual local fete to raise money for RNLI.  So I offered to donate some cakes.  After a bit if head-scratching I decided to make a range of vegetable cakes – you have seen them all – beetroot brownie, zucchini bread, parsnip and ginger, and the very first post on this blog – pumpkin and honey loaf.

 

As a result of doing that I have updated a couple of the early posts with photos (see No. 14, and No. 15).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cake sale was magnificent (Sarah’s baking is magnificent), and my strange vegetable cakes did sell. Remarkably, despite the name, slices of the parsnip one sold quite quickly.

 

Garlic & Apple - Doofer Sauce

Fantastic sauce that needs to be kept AT LEAST 6 weeks from making before you try it, but its better after 6 months.  I save a certain brand of beer bottles with those wonderful wire clip tops for this sauce.  Seal it up hot and it keeps indefinitely and just keeps getting better and better.


Apple & Garlic Sauce

750g apples
250g garlic
1.5 litres malt vinegar
3 chillies
piece of fresh ginger
2 Tb cloves
4 tsp salt
4 Tb peppercorns
500g treacle

Coarsely chop the apples (skin and cores included) and separate the garlic cloves without peeling.

Combine all the ingredients except the treacle.  Slowly bring the mixture to the boil and cook gently, uncovered, for 1 hour till apples have pulped and garlic is tender.

Rub the sauce through a strainer, return it to a clean saucepan, add the treacle and boil for a further 5 minutes.  Pour the sauce into hot clean bottles and seal.

Makes about 2 litres.

I hate rubbing this through a sieve; I prefer to squash the garlic with the flat of a large knife and extract all the skin, and core the apples, so that once the sauce is cooked I just whizz it up with a blender (one of those handheld wand ones).

(Doofer - short for 'do for anything')

Corn & Zucchini Fritters

Comfort food. What do you think of when someone says comfort food?  Most of my freinds seem to turn to chocolate in some form.  For me it is baked potato, or these fritters ,with lashings of homemade brown sauce.

 

The garden is producing well at this time of year and I have bucket loads of corn and zucchinis so this was Saturday breakfast - you know those weekend breakfasts when you have time not just to make, but also to enjoy and linger over.

 

Mum used to make these for a quick tea in the days when we ate our main meals in the middle of the day.  In my house they have become breakfast food - and my excuse to eat more homemade sauce.

 

There isn't really a recipe, more a 'combination of prefered ingredients' held together by a basic batter. 

Into these ones went chopped red onion,

cooked corn sliced off the cob,

grated zucchini (courgette if you prefer that name),

some finely diced up bacon ends,

chopped fresh herbs,

freshly ground black pepper

an egg,

1 cup of self-raising flour,

a dollop (say 3 tablespoons) of cooking oil or melted butter, and

enough milk to mix it into a batter that drops (rather than pours) off a big spoon



Shallow fry them over a medium heat.  It is not fashionable to use fat these days, but I prefer to skim some caul-fat over the skillet rather than pour in oil which spits and spatters about, then dollop the batter in.  Turn them over when bubbles start to rise in the top of the uncooked side, and when golden brown both sides serve and enjoy.

 

Next week I'll try to remember to share my brown sauce recipe

 

For those of you living in parts of the world where you can get tins of creamed corn, use that.  It makes them even better.



No 48 - Parsnip Cake

 

Nearing the end of this 50 baking challenge I threw the recipe book aside for this one and scoured around for more recipes for cakes with vegetables in them – parsnips for instance.  It turns out that there are loads of parsnip cake recipes, so I started with this one from http://www.bakingmad.com/recipes/cake-recipes 

You’ll love this website, and my colleagues just raved about this cake.

 

 

 

Parsnip and Ginger Cake with Ginger ButterCream

 

250 grams self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground ginger
125 grams golden caster sugar
125 grams light Muscovado sugar
2 stem ginger balls finely chopped
3 large eggs
200 grams finely grated parsnip
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
125 grams butter (melted and cooled slightly)

Preheat the over to 170 degrees C (fan oven), and line and grease 2 x 20cm round baking tins.

The original recipe says to sift the flour, leavening, ground ginger, and sugars and stir in the chopped stem ginger to coat it.  Then mix the eggs, grated parsnip, vanilla, and butter and pour it into the dry ingredients and mix gently.

My own experience is that Muscovado sugar does not sift, so I beat the eggs and Muscovado together before adding the butter and beating again.  I mixed the grated parsnip into the flour and then tipped in the wet mix.  It seemed to work. 

Divide the mix between two tins and bake for 25 minutes.

Let them cool a few minutes in the tins before turning them out.

Sandwich them together and ice the top with ginger butter cream:  150 grams softened butter, 300 grams icing sugar and 3 Tb syrup from the stem ginger.

Decorate the top with chopped crystallized ginger.

 

I have offered to help Sarah G with a couple of cakes for her RNLI fundraiser this weekend, so this is going on the 'to bake' list.  I think I'll double it, cook it in 3 x 23cm tins, and make a triple decker sandwich.