No 27 - Honey Fruit Cake

The bees have been looking for new homes.  We ran out of hives to put them in.  Meanwhile someone from Mr B’s beekeeping class, having had a run of bad luck with his bees, decided that perhaps this was not for him and offered us his three hives – sans bees of course, but still laden with stores that his bees had put away before departing his ‘care and control’ (if bees could ever be said to be within anyone’s control; as we have discovered).

The honey contained in these frames was set completely solid so the only way to ‘extract’ it was to cut the whole lot from the frames, pile it into a cauldron and heat it very gently.  At about the halfway mark I have bottled up about 6-8lb of very dark rich honey, and set aside a couple of good sized slabs of wax for soap making.  Because the honey has been heated I will keep it all at home for baking and making mueslei.

I thought I had a recipe somewhere for a fruit cake that used a lb (454gm) honey but I can’t find it, so searched the web and found a great selection of honey recipes on this website. I like to promote beekeeping and beekeeping websites, so you will find this in my list of links as well.

I modified this recipe to use only Mixed Dried Fruit, then doubled it, and I boiled my fruit (which was a bit hard and dry) in a whole 440ml can of Guinness, and proceeded from there.  The cake is definitely rich, with strong honey flavours and just a hint of Guinness.  Even sliced up and packed in a large plastic box it survived the motorbike ride in my backpack.

Honey Rich Fruit Cake

4oz. Mixed Dried Fruit

4oz. Sultanas

4oz. Dates

2oz. Dried Apricots

2oz. Cherries

 ¼ Pint Beer

4oz. Butter

6oz. Honey

2 Eggs

4oz. Plain Flour

4oz. Whole Self-Raising Flour

½ Tsp Spice

Cream butter and honey together. Beat eggs and add alternatively with sifted flour and salt to creamed mixture. Add fruit and enough beer if necessary to give a dropping consistency.

Turn into well greased 7 inch round tin (or 2lb. loaf tin) and bake on middle shelf for about 1¼ - 1½ hours in a pre-heated oven (300°F/150°C)

Allow to cool a little then turn out onto wire cake stand and leave to cool.

Toasted Mueslei

Tigger asked that I post more recipes that use honey.  His bees have started whizzing about the place again and in a couple of months he will be contacting all his friends and customers (or posting on his blog) to try and sell the next batch of honey.

Toasted Mueslei

5 cups of rolled oats (I use the jumbo rolled oats)

1 cup desiccated coconut

1 cup wheat germ  (wheat germ isn’t always available in my local shops so I substitute a cup of hulled sunflower seeds)

1 cup skimmed milk powder

1 cup of chopped nuts

½ cup honey

½ cup good cooking oil

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large flat roasting pan.  Heat the honey and oil gently, pour it over the dry ingredients and mix it all really (REALLY) well.  Toast it at about 125C until it is golden.  You will need to stir around two or three times during the toasting process. 

At the end add  1 cup raisins / sultanas / currants.  Store in an airtight jar.

The original recipe had a cup of oil and a cup of honey.  I found this to be overpowering but you might like your mueslei really sweet and stuck together like clusters, so vary that according to your own taste.

You can also add things like linseed, sesame seed, chopped dried fruit etc according to your taste.

No 2 - Sarah's Flapjacks

Flapjacks

This recipe came from Sarah G.

What little yacht racing I still participate in these days is usually on a yacht called ‘Scarlet Jester’ as she campaigns Hamble or Warsash Winter and Spring series regattas on the Solent.  Enthusiastic crew are sometimes in short supply but we are never short of sustaining sandwiches and one of Sarah’s comforting cakes.  (The skipper knows where his best interests are.)  Sarah is a superb baker and a confirmed advocate of the Aga.  Her kitchen is always a welcoming place full of colour, warmth and excellent food.  She is generous with her recipes but I have never produced anything as good as what she pulls out of that Aga.  Maybe it’s the circumstances in which it is consumed but these are the best flapjacks I’ve ever eaten.

Flapjacks

8 oz butter

8 generous tablespoons of golden syrup

6 oz sugar  (make a couple of those ounces light muscavado or golden sugar)

16 oz rolled oats

4 oz mixed nuts

4 oz sultanas

½ level tsp salt

Set the oven at 175 ^o C (that might be a bit less for the fan oven people).  Grease a 7 ½"  x 15" tin or used a Teflon sheet (don’t use ordinary grease-proof paper).

In a large saucepan on low heat melt the butter and syrup.  Remove from heat and add sugar, oats, nuts and sultanas, and salt.

Turn it all into the tin, and cook for 30-40 minutes until golden brown. 

Leave it to cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then cut into squares.  (Cut them while they are in the tin and still warm or they will fall to bits.)  Put them on a wire rack to cool.


Flapjacks and photo by Maryan Schuringa

No 1 - Denise's Mueslei Biscuits

Mueslei Biscuits.

Rather unusually I started my Odyssey with a new/newish recipe gleaned from the internet.  The inspiration for the search had been agreeing to join a team of work colleagues taking on the 3 Peaks Challenge http://www.thethreepeakschallenge.co.uk/ to raise money for the Ronald McDonald House at Guy’s Hospital – right next door to where we worked.  I wanted a high energy, no-holds-barred biscuit such as might sustain and fortify flagging (city type) hill walkers.  Mueslei is full of sustaining stuff and I had a packet of some commercial brand languishing in the breakfast cupboard at home.  (I make and prefer my own concoction, so my partner’s attempts to cater for my breakfasts, although gratefully received, were going to be ‘re-assigned’.)

I have no idea now where the recipes came from and at any rate I cobbled 2 or 3 of them together by trial and error to produce the favoured end result.  So apologies to anyone who thinks they recognize their recipe behind this.

The really important part of cobbling up a mueslei biscuit is to know what is (or isn’t) in your mueslei mix, what you want out the other end of the process, and what suitable additions and substitutes inhabit your pantry. I had a basic mueslei, wanted lots of slow release carbs , a dangerous dose of fat and flavour, and had a cupboard full of dried and glacé fruit, nuts, seeds, and spices .  Make them to suit your own taste.  I happen to like adding preserved citrus peel and some crystallized ginger, lots of cinnamon, cloves and allspice, and raisins.

Basic Mueslei Biscuit:

2 cups of mueslei

1cup flour

I tsp cinnamon

cloves, mixed spice, allspice, or nutmeg to taste

¾ cup brown (or raw) sugar

2 tablespoons  golden syrup

125 grams melted butter

1tsp Bicarb Soda dissolved in 2 tablespoons of boiling water.

Variations:

½ cup desiccated coconut, handful raisins or other dried fruit, sunflower or pumpkin seeds, or flaked nuts, zest off two oranges (or some preserved citrus peel like you would put in Xmas cakes), chopped crystallized ginger.  Replace the golden syrup with honey, or use wholemeal flour ....... anything else you enjoy in your mueslei or your biscuits.

Put spoonfuls on a greased baking tray (or baking paper) and bakes at 180^o C
(160 ^o C if you have a fan oven) for about 15 minutes.

They survive hikes up mountains and commutes on motorbikes, but get consumed fairly quickly.

No 14 - Pumpkin Loaf with Honey Glaze

Honey Glazed Pumpkin Loaf

This one came off a calendar from approximately 35 years ago in New Zealand.  Maybe it was WI or something.  We eat a lot of pumpkin in NZ – roasted, steamed and mashed, as soup, grated in salad – and of course in cakes.  They are easy to grow and we always had them in the garden and crawling over the sprawled compost heap (where they had grown from the seeds of last year’s produce, cross-pollinated aliens of the cucurbit world.)  They keep well through the winter and featured regularly at our table.

Perhaps I should digress here to say that the things I call pumpkin include a wide range of types not seen in supermarkets here and probably only recognized by people who grow their own (check out this seed merchant under squash and pumpkin: www.organiccatalogue.com).  They are all sweeter and more palatable than the orange ones that appear for lantern carving just before Halloween. 

So I suggest for this you use for this recipe a butternut squash – those pear shaped ones with the pale golden skin.  You can peel them with a potato peeler.







Honey Glazed Pumpkin Loaf

Prepare enough mashed cooked pumpkin to make 3/4 cup

 

 

In a basin cream until fluffy 125 g butter & 1 cup sugar
One at a time, add 2 eggs beating each addition well
Sift together
1 3/4 cups self-raising flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves

and mix into creamed mixture alternately with mashed pumpkin.
Lastly stir in 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Turn into greased and lined loaff tin and bake at 160C for approx. 1 hour

When cooked holes in the loaf with a skewer while still hot and pour over glaze made as follows: 1/4 cup honey warmed with 1/2 tsp cinnamon.

Leave in the tin until cold.