Bakercourt - Knitting, Sewing, Crafting.: January 2011

'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'

Sunday, January 30, 2011

I've been slowly baking my way through Nigella's recipe books. Like a lower-budget and less ambitious version of Julie & Julia, I plan to bake all of her earthly delights as we progress through 2011. I don't want to boil a lobster alive or tackle the famous beef bourguignon (although I might just, for the sake of adding it to my repertoire), but the baking... Oo ... the baking. It helps having an office full of friendly people who always appreciate a little baked good here and there.

I've had a good start, mind you.

Remember the Chocolate Honey Cake?

I've also baked her snickerdoodles:

Deliciously spicy baubles of soft-centred cake, perfect for the festive season.

... and her Lemon Gems:

The Lemon Gems were a particularly delicious union of shortbread and lemon curd, highly recommended. I must make these again soon!

I've tried her Baklava Muffins (picture pending) and her delicious chocolate chip cookies:

The cookies were so delicious that I had to make a second batch.

Freshly baked, the chocolate is still melted and the dough is soft and sticky - just the way it's supposed to be!

I ran out of chocolate chip chunks for the second batch (the recipe calls for a whopping 326g of milk chocolate chunks!) so I substituted 100g of chocolate with 100g of mini marshmallows. The results (above) were decadently sweet with gooey marshmallow gems hidden inside. Yum.

Here's Buki enjoying a chocolate chip cookie with tea. I'm not sure whether I'm more taken with her satin drapery or the fact that she posed for me, but either way - I love this picture.

So this weekend I tackled two more of Nigella's delights.

I baked her chocolate-orange loaf cake:

It's a deep chocolate loaf cake that has a zesty orange aftertaste. Like a grown-up version of Terry's Chocolate Orange, this cake is a delicious addition to the kitchen and we both grab a tiny piece of it every time we walk past! I find that it's not very sweet, but I did have to make a substitution: we seemed to have lost our golden syrup in the move so I substituted the two tablespoons of golden syrup for two (very expensive) tablespoons of Pure Canadian Maple Syrup instead. It still has the right texture but it's not nearly as sweet as it could have been. Perhaps this is a good thing? Graeme is notoriously anti anything particularly sweet and he helped himself to a second slice of this cake, so we may have hit on a winner here.

My second baking attempt this weekend was perhaps more significant; I've never baked anything bready before and I really really want to start so I thought what better place to start than with a Nigella recipe for my favourite morning pastry? Bagels.

You're supposed to knead it and beat it and punch it down to a delightfully smooth doughy mixture. But guess what - ? All this baking is not for naught; I've bought myself the much-coveted Kenwood Chef which seems to be a family tradition and I have to say, Robyn, you were right, I don't know myself. How did I ever manage before the Kenwood Chef? How is it possible that I would have made this dough by hand, beaten with my horrible little hand mixer? The same hand mixer that decided my fingers ought to be mixed into cookie dough, or the one which constantly tries to eat my silicon spatula? Begone, hand-mixer, I banish you to the back of the cupboard or perhaps more permanently to Freecycle.org.

But I digress, back to the bagels. In my excitement I got the maths wrong (halved the recipe but didn't halve the tearing-and-folding instructions) and ended up with fourteen miniature bagels when I wanted seven large ones, so I re-kneaded the dough to make seven balls. Unfortunately, the dough was already past the resting stage so the bagels didn't turn out as perfectly smooth as I would have liked. They didn't stick either; lesson learnt - next time, pinch the ends together harder! The end results, however, were spectacular.

They were crisp and brown and had the perfect bagel texture: chewy, dense and delicious. Perhaps the secret is in the pre-poaching, or the rope-rolled balls, but either way, this is probably the best recipe I've made yet. Nigella's bagel recipe yields fourteen or fifteen giant bagels so don't be afraid to halve it!

Here you can see how bitty the bagels turned out, but I must say, they're really delicious. I would have re-taken this photograph to include less croissant-crescent-shaped results, but Graeme has taken my camera with him to the Celtic Manor golfing event this weekend.

I love my new oven.

I have two of her books on my shelf at the moment - the acclaimed How to be a Domestic Goddess and Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home. so, seven more to go before I have the completed collection. With hundreds of recipes to each book and only two weekend days per week, I think we'll just tackle the first two this year... Come round for tea?

food

What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?

Saturday, January 29, 2011

The thing about Oxford - the thing - is that it is home to one of my favourite shops in the entire world. It's a bookshop, one I've mentioned here a few times before, where all books are £2.00. All books, any books - hardcovers and softcovers, new releases and classics, books on philosophy and books on food, biographies and war books, cooking books and childrens' books, books that have that new book smell and books that are still wrapped up in plastic or paper. Mm.

And so, here we are after our first stop in Oxford. Stuart has one book, all wrapped up in a brown paper packet. Granny has one too. And Graeme? Well, he's putting on a brave face as he carries all my bags full of beautiful new books...

...all around Oxford.

We celebrated our gigantic haul of nice new books with dinner at Jamie's Italian.

We've been to Jamie's before - the one in Canary Wharf, London - but it was an enormously rushed affair that made me think of Primi Piatti in Cape Town. This one, however, was cosy and comfortable as well as filled with attentive staff (with their ridiculous skinny ties) and delicious-looking pasta. Trust me to be difficult and order a burger (a dish which was neither here nor there) but at least everyone else got some very impressive dishes.

Here's Graeme's Scallop and Squid Ink Angel Hair.

...and here's Stuart feeling very pleased with himself - he's just flown home for two months of sunny South Africa and left us here in the freezing cold as the snow starts up again.

I couldn't possibly leave the restaurant without taking a photograph of their bread table. I'd love to have one of these in my kitchen! I think they display it at the entrance to the dining area so that you crave it and order some for the table. Ho-hum, coercive restaurant layout?

Edinburgh

Our Scottish Adventures

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Happy New Year! We're currently suffering from severe internetlessness after having moved house (yes, more on that later! I promise to post pictures of home once we've cleaned up nicely and we have sufficient bandwidth to upload an image or two), so my apologies for only sending out bloggy New Year wishes now.

We got to celebrate New Year's Day with a seven-hour drive up to the Land of the Haggis to meet Richard and Aaron who have been a-visiting from Sunny South Africa. The drive was heaps of fun, complete with many stops at 'services' (what we'd call 'rest stops'), hunting around for travel pillows, and hilariously awkward vending machines that indicate the particular nuances of the various areas we stopped in. We ate awful burgers, drank take-away coffee in the car and laughed hysterically at the ridiculous town names we passed by. There was a terrifying moment when I realised that we were out of mobile signal range for about two hours but I think I can be forgiven for my reliance on technology at that moment because we were winding our way along country roads with no lights in the middle of the pitch-blackness of nightfall!

Edinburgh was rather different from what we were expecting. It was dark, grimy and layered. The buildings were montaged to form a giant structure that rose and fell out of the earth in various shades of brown and grey, and the cars were constantly streaming around the oddly circular roads.

And just when you weren't expecting it, the world turned topsy turvy and in the middle of a busy intersection, a little stone house rose out of the greens and looked like it had grown out of a seed:

I wanted to have this little abode, but it wasn't very accessible nor would it easily fit into our car boot, methinks.

Aaron and I discovered the most fantastic vending machine in the world which certainly deserves a mention: a Ben & Jerry's vending machine in the hotel lobby. Yes - ice-cream. It involved a vacuum suction cup on the end of a robotic arm, a freezer, and tiny tubs of Ben & Jerry's goodness dispensed in the flavour of your choice. The novelty cost a whopping £3.00.

We did the sightseeing and touristy things in Edinburgh, like walking along Princes Street and visiting all the kilt-makers along the way. Here's Richard trying on some fun Scottish merchandise:

We also hunted down the best place to eat Scottish Food which happened to be the highly-recommended Monster Mash. Their speciality is sausages and mash. The décor was a bit uncomfortable with black and white contrasts, but it had a nice diner feel about it and the food was delicious! Here's Richard's giant Scottish pie:

... and Graeme's McSween Haggis!

Haggis, Turnips and Mash.

How Very Scottish.

We even made our way into the Edinburgh Castle which is atop a giant hill that requires much huffing and puffing. Here's the Castle from way down below where you can see it perched on its vantage point:

See? There it is... all the way up there.... and you have to walk there. Anyway, we got there nice and early, got our tickets without much fuss, and happily wondered around the castle buildings enjoying the history, the sights, the Scottish Crown Jewels and the Book and Whisky Shop. I thought it was particularly funny to have a shop in the castle dedicated to such apparently opposite products, but no! It was quite the norm inside, with patrons purchasing trinkets, tokens, whiskies and tour books.

Here's Graeme walking alongside the turrets of the castle. It's so very high that you get quite a sense of the sublime when you're standing at the top overlooking the expanse of the city.

It's quite terrifying to think that this castle was occupied in times when it was necessary to have cannons lined up alongside the walls.

... and they're not little cannons, either.

The view from the Castle top is rather spectacular, as you can imagine. Here you can see the remnants of the famous Scottish Hogmany celebrations:

The shopping centres and market arena were still in full swing! I love the juxtaposition of the architectural structures in this image. The massive gothic spires are sandwiched between neon-lit amusement rides, and are backed by a hodge-podge of commercial buildings.

It was alarmingly cold in Edinburgh, and even more so on top of the biggest hill! Here's Aaron and Richard, all wrapped up warmly while we mission around.

And here's us, also wrapped up warmly in our thermal scarves and jackets. We are both recovering from 'flu here, so we're not feeling particularly photogenic. Richard and Aaron chose the wrong time to be visiting the UK: the swine 'flu pandemic was at an all-time high, and poor Aaron ended up with Night Nurse and Lemsip!

This was almost a very funny picture but Aaron moved at the last minute :) The castle was finished off with regal elements like this in every nook and cranny, and it created a rather beautiful and loaded historic experience. I particularly loved the paintwork on the walls inside the castle (paintwork restored):

It's not as as elaborate or as gilded as the castle buildings in Cardiff, nor as Gothic and dark as the palace in Prague, but it's certainly majestic in its own right and is well worth a trip! Many of the museums in and around the castle were closed but we were all so very tired and 'fluey that we were quite happy to meander down Royal Mile to enjoy the spoils of Starbucks and other treats.

Edinburgh has a lovely Gothic feel about it - not just in the look of the buildings or in the architectural influences, but in the actual city itself. Perhaps it was just the time of year, but the whole city seemed alive with ghosts and spectres of a forgotten past. A bizarre comparison, but see what I mean here:

This enormous grave marker is magnificently dark, and the tree created the perfect backdrop for the enormous gravity I was trying to capture. This was alongside the castle walk, near the train tracks, and opposite some of the largest retail space in Edinburgh.

You pass this street as you walk down the Royal Mile with all the other tourists. It is, they say, where cows were taken to be slaughtered. It's particularly close to Mary King's Close, an underground street festering in Urban Myth.