Malt loaf

A traditional Kent oast house designed for drying hops

It is said that the world’s most popular drink, after water and tea, is beer. Whether or not this is entirely accurate is beyond my research but beer is certainly brewed the whole world over and the basic ingredients are always the same – water, a starch (usually barley), brewer’s yeast and a flavouring, such as hops.

Shepherd Neame bar

On a recent visit to Faversham, Kent, we toured the Shepherd Name brewery – Britain’s oldest – and were given an excellent insight into this independent family company. We went behind the scenes at the busy working brewery and discovered how history and heritage are combined with modern technology to produce their award-winning range of ales and lagers. It was truly fascinating – despite being, or so I thought, a non-beer drinker – to be introduced to the production process together with all the sights and smells. And, of course, they didn’t let us leave without us sampling three distinctly different types of brew.

To my amazement, I actually enjoyed the lager - named Whitstable Bay - and, much to my husband’s amusement, I asked for a pint of it!  However, I hadn’t realised that it was quite strong at 4.5 per cent and my walk back to the hotel is a bit of a blur! 

Well, that was last week and I haven’t touched a drop since! However, I have developed a longing for the taste of malted barley and so I used some Wessex Mill flour to bake a malt loaf. It wasn’t a particularly pretty result but it did produce a dark, chewy bread which, when buttered, was satisfyingly sweet and undeniably malty.

I think I had better stick to eating bread rather than drinking beer in future!  

Malt loaf

Madeleines

The summer fruit grown in our garden has been particularly good this year.  We have harvested blackcurrants and strawberries and the Tayberry - a cross between a raspberry and a blackberry - is currently producing abundant juicy berries. They are gorgeous, picked when they are fully ripe and still warm from the heat of the sun, served with cream, ice cream, or a low-fat alternative.

However, as they ripen in batches, we often have just a few at their best and so, this weekend, I decided to bake some light and delicious shell-shaped French madeleines flavoured with lemon and whole Tayberries. (There was actually enough mixture to also make a few containing tiny fudge pieces, as well as a final tray flavoured with orange chocolate).

Madeleines will keep for a day or so in an airtight tin but, as they have a somewhat ‘dry’ texture, they are best eaten fresh-from-the-oven and are perfect, dusted with icing sugar, and accompanied by a cup of tea or coffee. Bon appetit!

The basic recipe is as follows: 150g butter, 3 eggs, 150g caster sugar, 150g self-raising flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, grated rind of 1 lemon

Preheat oven to 220C/200C fan, Gas 7. Grease a madeleine tray, dust with flour and shake off any excess or use, as I did, baking release aerosol spray.

Melt the butter and allow to cool slightly. Place eggs and sugar in a large bowl and whisk until pale and thick (I used mixer). Sift in half the flour with the baking powder and fold in gently with the lemon rind. Pour in half of the melted butter around the edge of the bowl and fold in. Repeat using the remaining flour and butter. Spoon the mixture into the prepare moulds - do not overfill - and add flavourings into the centre if desired. 

Bake in oven for about 8 to 10 minutes. Ease out of the tin and cool on a wire rack. Regrease the tin and repeat until all the mixture has been used up.

Old fashioned bread pudding

Ingredients

Having been somewhat exuberant lately with my sourdough bread making, I had rather a lot left over this week. Numerous odd bread ends also languished in the freezer and so I decided in a flash of inspiration to make my mother’s favourite recipe for bread pudding.

It’s been ages since I made this and it’s good sometimes to revisit old ‘classics’.  The recipe, or indeed the look, may not readily appeal to today’s sophisticated palates but this was a staple of British home cooking in years past – leftovers then were always reinvented and used another day.  And now, when I remember to make it, it is still eagerly consumed by my family either warm with custard or I think, better still, sliced when completely cold and consumed with a large cup of tea or coffee.

Cooled and sliced

My lighter version recipe – I don’t know where it originated – uses butter instead of lard together with mostly store-cupboard ingredients. 

225g bread – it doesn’t matter whether this is brown or white but cut off the crusts

275ml milk

50g butter (melted)

75g soft brown sugar – if you don’t have any brown, you can use white caster sugar

2 teaspoons mixed spice

1 egg, beaten

175g mixed dried fruit

Grated rind of an orange

Freshly grated nutmeg

A small quantity of granulated sugar for sprinkling over when out of the oven

Preheat oven to 180c – gas mark 4

Butter a 2pt baking dish

Cube the bread and place into a bowl. Pour over the milk, then give the mixture a thorough stir and leave for about 30 minutes so that the bread becomes well soaked.

Now add the melted butter, the sugar, mixed spice and beaten egg. Beat the mixture until it is virtually lump free, then stir in the mixed fruit and orange rind.

Next spread the mixture into the prepared dish and sprinkle over the nutmeg.

Bake in a pre-heated oven for about 1 ¼ hours.

Once out of the oven, sprinkle over some granulated sugar. Enjoy!

An English Country Garden

With the sound of chickens clucking, dogs chasing each other, the happy laughter of children and the scent of herbs by the kitchen door, our Clandestine Cake Club ‘English Country Garden’ event could not have been held anywhere better than Vanessa Kimbell’s countryside abode, which is also home to her Juniper and Rose Cookery School.

It just wasn’t warm enough to use the garden as planned but Vanessa encouraged us to place our cakes in several rooms so that we could ‘circulate’ and, once everyone had arrived, the various tables bedecked with large cakes looked really sumptuous. 

To accompany our bakes, we drank premium apple juice produced by The Village Orchard. Sadly the owner, Jonathan Chaplin, could not be with us to introduce us to the drink but I thought you would like to know that the orchard, attached to his Flore home, includes an abundance of heritage apple trees. A couple of years ago, rather than see the apples just drop and be left to rot on the ground, he decided to press them and make them into juice. The resulting drink has now won several awards and it will be interesting to see whether other ‘forgotten’ orchard owners will follow suit.

It was really lovely for me to meet again our special guest CCC founder, Lynn Hill, and I’m sure she chatted to as many members as possible. As I said at the time, if it wasn’t for her inspired idea to start a cake club, none of us would be meeting and chatting as friends – thank you, Lynn, and I hope it won’t be too long before we get together again.

Despite the grey skies, we also managed to snatch a few moments in Vanessa’s kitchen garden - full to the brim with plants of all shapes and sizes, and all beautifully set out in beds and rows. Vanessa kindly said a few informative words about using various plants and herbs as decoration in baking, and many samples of flowers were handed around, sniffed and admired.

Thank you Vanessa, and all the Kimbell family, for hosting our latest CCC event - we all much enjoyed the splendid cakery and I hope we didn’t leave too many crumbs behind! 

More photos taken at this event can be seen here -  www.clandestinecakeclub.co.uk.

Open Farm Sunday 2013

Having enjoyed a visit to nearby Fallowfields Farm on this ‘open day’ last year – a business mainly specialising in the production of rapeseed and its by-products - we decided to visit another type of farm business in 2013. Only 15 minutes down the road is a company called Bedfordia, not a name I have read or heard about and one which we must have passed by without notice many times but, having now opened their gates to visitors, one which I will certainly now remember in the future. 

The Bedfordia group has many diverse operations. It owns and manages 5,500 acres of predominantly arable farmland and it has one of the largest, state-of-the-art, grain stores in the UK. We witnessed a lorry emptying its load of grain at the start of the process at the giant plant which cleans it, sorts it, dries it and grades it before another transport takes it onwards to other forms of production.

Another part of the business consists of several pig breeding units and we saw piglets in various stages of growth and, twinned with this, were displays showing the renewable energy achieved through pig slurry and food chain waste which is now produced by its Biogas plant.

All in all it was a fascinating afternoon and an educational insight into where some of the flour that I use in my baking is sourced and grown in my local countryside. I wonder where Open Farm Sunday will take me next year?

Pimms

Having declared summer this week, with warmer temperatures and bluer skies, it seems appropriate to look forward to Wimbledon at the end of the month and our British strawberry season.

On our recent holiday, we sat outside on a pretty restaurant terrace and sipped glasses of Pimms whilst soaking up the sunshine and waiting for our lunch to be served. At home today, the clouds have sadly returned – not a day to sit in the garden with chilled glasses - but I wanted to recreate something of that glorious moment of relaxation.

After a little thought, I decided to bake a cake for the weekend, containing all the flavours and aromas of a Pimms. I adapted a recipe to include all of the luscious sweet and sour fruity tastes, together with the tang of heady mint. It is a beautifully moist cake, perfect for a garden party, and so decadent when accompanied with fresh and juicy British strawberries. It will also keep, undecorated, for about 3 days although, once tasted, I don’t think it will last that long! 

Pimms cake

225g unsalted butter

200g caster sugar

4 medium eggs, beaten

225g self-raising flour

Finely grated zest and freshly squeezed juice of 1 orange

Finely grated zest and freshly squeezed juice of 2 limes

Handful of fresh mint, finely chopped

100ml Pimms

One extra teaspoon of caster sugar

To decorate:

Strawberries and fresh mint leaves

450g/2lb loaf tin, greased and lined

Preheat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4. Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the beaten egg, a little at a time, beating well between each addition.

Sift the flour over the mixture and gently stir to a smooth consistency, then stir in the orange and lime zest and the chopped mint. Stir in 50ml of the Pimms gently and then pour the mixture into the prepared loaf tin.

Bake for approximately 40 to 50 minutes (test the cake is baked by inserting a skewer into the middle of the cake – if it comes out clean, then it’s ready).  Turn it out onto a wire rack.

Mix 1 teaspoon of caster sugar into the orange and lime juices and the remaining 50ml of Pimms.

Whilst the cake is hot - using a skewer, prick all over the top of the cake, then slowly and very carefully pour the liquid mix over the cake. You will need to allow the liquid to slowly absorb, so have patience and add a little at a time, then leave the cake to cool completely.

Once cool, decorate the cake with strawberries and sprigs of mint.

Jersey

I wonder if others are like me in that when I go on holiday I like to taste and sample the local delicacies, i.e. what the ‘real’ people eat. Recently, we spent a lovely few days on Jersey and we hunted-down some of the rich pickings of the Channel Islands. 

Travelling around the island we couldn’t help but notice several herds of Jersey cows and, naturally, tested and approved the milk, cream, cheese and ice-cream from these beautiful and photogenic animals – it can even be bought with the high-fat content taken out! 

We also saw fields and fields of Jersey Royal potatoes in various stages of growth. To our astonishment, they were offered for visitors to buy when leaving the island at the seaport and airport – seems strange to me to bring home a 1kg bag of potatoes but ‘each to their own’ as they say.

What else did we find? Oh yes, a curiosity really – ‘Black Butter’. Not a butter at all but a preserve made from cider apples, sugar and spices and, occasionally, liquorice is added. I wondered whether I could replicate it during the apple harvest here in the UK and so brought a small, rather expensive, jar home to try. If my results in the autumn are worth reporting, I will blog about it here!

Of course, the abundance of fish caught in the waters surrounding the Channel Islands cannot be omitted from my tale of Jersey produce. Visiting the Fish Market, we saw every conceivable fresh and bright-eyed species on display and I have never seen such a multitude of shellfish, including oysters, lobsters, scallops and glorious, long-legged, spider crabs. 

Finally, true to my heart’s desire, what could I find at the bakers? The only traditional cake I found was something called a ‘Jersey Wonder’. These twisted pieces of dough are, according to local myth, made by the island’s housewives as the tide is going out. Rumour has it that if they cook them on an incoming tide, the fat will overflow the pan. The reasoning behind this is rather unclear but I can relate that these ‘Wonders’ are like scones that have been deep-fried, but are not covered in sugar like a doughnut and, for me personally, are not so very wonderful! 

However, we really did enjoy our Jersey adventure and hope to return next year in May for the Food Festival which is a week long celebration of the iconic produce for which this island is so famous. I can’t wait!