Beetroot cake

If you've ever had your house painted by a professional you'll know the consternation of The Undercoat. You pick a subtle, highly grown up, soft rose colour, and come home from work one day to find your walls coated in a neon shade of lollipop magenta. The painter reassures you. This is the undercoat, he says. You find it almost impossible to believe, you spend two full days convinced you are being completely conned by a guy who had 4 vats of leftover neon paint that he has just covered your interior house with, and then one day you come home to find your house magically transformed, radiating the warm and subtle rose tint you first saw in the Dulux catalogue (or Fired Earth, if you live in Tufnell Park). So it is with beetroot cake, only perhaps even more extraordinary, as the making of a beetroot cake, involving the grating of a vegetable that manages to bleed everywhere, literally EVERYWHERE - on your clothes, in your hair, over the work surface and every utensil, every bowl, the floor, even back into the garden (how? how?), then turns your cake mix into a brilliant shade of purple/pink that would have the R&D guys at Chanel slobbering with envy. I have never before baked a cake involving a vegetable. I've always eschewed carrot cake. I figure, if I want to eat a carrot, I will peel and eat it raw. I can't see the logic of putting it into a cake. Savoury is savoury. Sweet is chocolate. Never the twain shall meet etc and given how avid a reader I am of all the celeb food writers it's not like I have this view out of ignorance. But. Eventually needs must and in this case it was spurred by a close relative of mine, diagnosed with several food intolerances, challenging my culinary skills. And goodness knows I Love A Challenge. So when another close relative emailed me a recipe of a cake that was being sold in his work canteen with several emojis attached expressing the amazingness of the cake experience, I ran right out and stocked up on beetroot. A fabulous recipe this one, sort of based on Nigel Slater's most recent offering - a cake made without flour (hooray for the gluten intolerant) or butter (and the dairy intolerant - bam, kapoow!), deriving its sweetness from a subtle addition of light brown muscovado sugar and relying entirely for its damp, rich texture, on grated beetroot, that, in the making and mixing of the cake, is the lead billing - a rich purple/pink coloured mix that frankly looks as if it was meant for a Polish borscht - and then, gracefully, retires to the back benches in the oven, so that when you pull the cake out again, the egg white whipped and folded in to give it height and air, takes over the lead role, diffusing the colour, and the beetroot provides the cushiony dampness, the foil for the sweetness of the sugar. For extra smug healthiness this cake can have any seed thrown at it - in this case pumpkin, sesame and linseed - and I decorated mine with a lemon glaze, the taste and texture of which were the perfect crunchy contrast, while the one at my relative's canteen went straight for the jugular (and the arteries) with a classic cream cheese frosting. Guys, if you've never made a cake before, this one is for you. My food intolerance-wracked relative will love this, but this is a cake for the masses. Go get your loaf tin Right Now.

Paprika sauce

I had a bunch of people over for dinner last night. All lovely people, with interesting jobs or curiosity about things that transcended secondary school entrance requirements and the size of the queue at checkout no 7 at the local Tesco. Lots of random connections drew these people together, not just their friendship with me or my partner - they had kids at the same school, or they worked in similar professions. They also, all of them, had healthy appetites. So I turned out no fewer than 6 separate main course dishes - a tray of roasted halibut steeped in rosemary, a generous seared tuna salad, some fried quinoa with blanched beans, braised green lentils with a lime dressing, some roasted cauliflower with roasted almonds and lemon, a quite extraordinary sour cream mash. And a white chocolate and amaretti cheesecake with a raspberry and lemon frangipane, AND some homemade chocolate truffles (dark chocolate, the good stuff; espresso coffee; honey. Mesmerising to make.) And everyone tucked in with gusto and audible appreciation, and it was a lovely evening, and we had Leftovers. Multiple blogs have been written about what you do with leftovers. Make tortillas out of them, blitz them into soup, smoothie them, chuck them into a risotto...the possibilities are endless. When I grew up, my Mum had one route for leftovers. She made paprika sauce, in a big sauce boat, thick with cornflour, smokey with paprika, creamy with stock. I would take a piece of drying sliced turkey or chicken or fish or whatever the Leftover was, and pour sauce over it enough for it to revive and swim. I poured so much of it I could scoop it into a spoon and drink it (and frequently did. In fact when my parents were preoccupied with their own dishes I would occasionally dispense with the spoon and raise the plate to my lips. What clandestine joy). So, presented with the array of options marketed by a generation of hip TV chefs, I opted for the Tried and Tested. Paprika sauce. It's an art, getting paprika sauce right. You need enough paprika to achieve Hungarian smokiness, but not so much as to make it bitter and inedible. You need onion and tomatoes, enough to achieve that stock richness, but not so much as to overpower the paprika. You have the option of sour cream and since I had a half tub in my Leftovers it felt like a good way to put it to use. And then you stir, and stir, and stir. For at least 15 minutes. At around the 7 minute mark something happens and it is as if you are melting chocolate for a ganache. You stir and stir, and inhale the aroma, and watch the vegetables caramelise and melt and combine. You add the sour cream and the sharp red colour transmogrifies, smudges itself. And when it's done - anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour later (it's done in 20 but I think we've established that the making of paprika sauce is as transcendentally healing as it is gastronomically titivating), you  take your leftovers, lay some in a bowl, spoon your sauce over it, restoring richness to the dish. And you tuck in.

Making doughnuts

I booked myself on to a doughnut making class. It's not the first time I've put myself in the hands of a professional to learn how to bake something. The last one was croissants, and it was a fantastic experience (read elsewhere in the blog) and I've made them twice since, both times a total disaster. Evidently the only way to make the perfect croissant, I concluded, was to do it in a professional kitchen with proving larders (not drawers - whole ROOMS), and massive ovens set to exactly the right temperature, and huge butchers' blocks with vats of flour. So when I decided I wanted to learn how to make doughnuts, I figured this would be one fabulous afternoon making the perfect puffballs of sugary fabulousness, once and once only. I wasn't even going to try fantasising about making these at home.

So I turned up, and we put on white aprons with our names written on in black marker (presumably washable) and within seconds we were elbow deep in doughnut dough, scraping and kneading. Probably the stickiest dough I've ever dealt with. Kneading this stuff reminded me of detention at secondary school when I had to scrape chewing gum off the underside of the girls' toilets. And then it disappeared into the proving boudoir and then we took out another set of dough that had been made earlier because doughnut dough needs an overnighter to reach the perfect consistency and they didn't have beds in the cookery school. And we rolled out the pre prepared dough and made 10 balls and I found I was so excited about the prospect of 10 doughballs turning into doughnuts that my hands were shaking. Or maybe my blood sugar was low. We had to pair up to fry our proved doughballs, which by the time they came out of the proving mansion, were like beautifully crafted domes, surprisingly robust on the outside, fragilely light on the inside. We used professional fryers (you see?? Who has one of those in their homes??) and heatproof thermometers (nope, I don't have one of those either. One more in a series of reasons why I would never make it to the qualifying round of the Great British Bake Off) and then we took them out of the friers carefully with slotted spoons and plonked them straight into sugar. And quite frankly I could have eaten all ten right there and then, straight out of the sugar bucket. But this was a cookery school, not a corner shop doughnut pop up, and we were going to inject these suckers with filling. A creme pat (nobody who counts themselves as a serious baker would give this its full name...), made by the vat, and OMG it was another struggle not to dive straight into it. And we took syringes and injected it into each of the doughnuts and I had one of those sitcom moments where I attempted to inject as much creme pat into each doughnut as I could without them bursting their sides and of course two of them burst their sides. And we still weren't finished. We went off to another kitchen and learned how to make honeycomb, and my two attempts were horrendous - big lumps of the stuff that wouldn't crumble, but it was DELICIOUS, so I just chucked it into the crevices between the doughnuts, to the shocked derision of my perfectionist co-bakers. And then I put them carefully, cracked honeycomb and all, into a cake box and brought them home. I took a picture of the unctuous, gooey, riotous mess that they were (come on - homemade custard filled doughnuts on the TUBE? During RUSH HOUR? The only way to get them home in one shape would have been to have hired a private jet and had them couriered). And we ate them. And I've never made them since. It doesn't matter. I had the most brilliant doughnut baking afternoon.

Boston Cream Pie

I have a stressful job. I may not run a hedge fund or be an Olympic skier, I'm not a humanitarian navigating ungoverned spaces to deliver vital medicines, nor am I a postman (not stressful? My postman knocked on my door last week with blood streaming down his right leg after a particularly vicious bite from a resident dog). But still, my work has peaks of stress and this last peak has gone on for so freakin' long - 8 weeks and counting - that it is turning alarmingly into a very high plateau. Not helped of course by the daily low level stress associated with commuting on overstuffed underground trains etc etc. OK end of moan. Everyone has their way of dealing with peaks of stress - alcohol, long hot baths, whatever. No prizes for guessing my rescue remedy. It is not at all unusual for me to come in through the door, drop my bag by the stairs, head to the kitchen still in my work clothes, grab an apron and some flour and be elbow deep in bread dough within minutes. No question, this is my way of taking back control from a working day that has spiralled up and up, so many people involved in the busyness that I am limited in my means to bring it back within manageable perspective. But baking a loaf of bread? That is all about perspective. Pop it in the oven and serenity is restored. This last week or two though, even the bread hasn't quite done it. Without thinking about it, my baking has got increasingly, well, gooey. I've edged closer and closer to puddingy comfort, without really being conscious of it. And recently, I hit comfort baking gold. A particularly wearing day saw me head to the kitchen ready to make a nice dinner. But instead of taking out the ingredients, something clicked in my brain and I pulled out milk, flour, cornflour, butter, chocolate and cream. I stirred and combined and mixed and folded. I made the most heavenly smelling custard - light and yellowy white and smooth and utterly beautiful. I had to wait for it to cool and during that 20 minutes I just stood over the custard, staring at it and stirring it, before finally covering it with clingfilm and setting it aside. I made a milky, buttery, robust sponge and when it was out of the oven, I sliced it carefully in half, horizontally. And piled the custard on one half, and placed the other half on top. And then I combined double cream and dark chocolate and stirred, carefully, mesmerised by the consistency. It was so smooth and glossy I could practically see my face in it. When it was done, I poured it over the top of the cake. Ta-da. One Boston cream pie for dessert.  Baked potatoes and salad for dinner - pretty much all there was time left to make (thank goodness for potatoes and microwave ovens).  And when we got to dessert it was demolished in seconds by my jaw dropped family. I didn't eat it. I didn't really need to. I just wanted to make it. The actions required to achieve each stage of the creation of something so wonderfully comforting restored all of my equanimity, beyond what any glass of Rioja could do. Though the glass I had with the potato was very nice, thanks.

A loss is forever

When I was at secondary school, for a short but painful period, I was bullied by three other girls who until they turned on me, I had considered to be very good friends. It was a complete mystery to me why their behaviour changed.  In the course of that year I had lost two family members - two grandparents, my Dad's Mum followed by my Mum's Dad. My Dad's Mum was someone I didn't know all that well - she was in a home, she didn't recognise us, we had never had a close relationship, and when she died it was the first time I had lost a relative and I was more bewildered by the process than grieving for the loss. But I really loved my Mum's Dad. Her parents were younger, they had played a much more active part in my childhood, and as my Dad's Dad died when I was tiny, he was the only grandpa I had. He died shortly before I was due to sit some important exams, and as a result I withdrew a bit and buried myself in my studies to deaden the loss. Well, after enduring about a month of constant, cruel taunting from these three fellow students, I decided one night that I had had enough and I called one of them up. She was astonished to hear from me and asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to know why she and her friends were treating me so badly (even now, years and years later, I can't quite believe I had the bottle to do this). She seemed taken aback. After a pause she said, she didn't understand why I was behaving so withdrawn. I said, you do know I've lost two grandparents right? And she said, yes, but X lost her Dad this year and she didn't behave the way you are. She recovered much more quickly. And that was her DAD.

I was reminded of this fairly unpleasant period of my adolescent life recently when, in conversation with someone who was asking me how I was doing after the death of my eldest sister, asked me when she had died. I said, two and a half years ago. Oh well, she said. Things must be feeling better now. Has her husband met someone new yet? I was as sickened by this response as I had been to that of my ex schoolfriend. It is both a privilege and an arrogance to presume that loss has a linear progression back towards normality. Only people who have been through this gut wrenching experience, and don't think any of us wouldn't swap for those who haven't given half a chance, know that there is no return. You lose someone you love deeply and shouldn't have lost anywhere near when you did, and your normal life is over. It's gone. It is never. Coming. Back. This is not the same as "wallowing" or being "in denial". It is in fact the reverse. The sooner I understood that I was in a new and different world, the easier it was for me to begin to grow into it. My new world is one in which I think of my sister several times a day. Far more often than I thought of her when she was alive, in fact. It's one in which I adjust to a life in which I am an eldest child, not a middle child. In which I work through a changing relationship between myself and the children of the sister I have lost - relationships that, with all that we have invested in them, are beautiful and deeply rewarding - but wholly different nevertheless. It's one where I can weep at the drop of a hat when reading about potential cures for breast cancer, or if I see anything purple, my sister's favourite colour. Or where I might see someone on the street who looks so much like her that I will follow that person for a mile, even though I know it's not her. Or look for her in cloud shapes or reflections in the water. Or laugh out loud at the recollection of something she said or did, randomly as I walk up the street. None of this replaces any of the other things I do - work, bake, hang out with friends, spend time with my partner, my kids. It kind of all happens alongside my regular life. And, nearly three years into my life without my elder sister, I am really only just beginning to accept that this isn't a temporary phase. And I don't think that the aching loss, or the sadness or even anger that I experience perennially when I want to call her up on the phone and celebrate a family milestone with her and have to remind myself that I can't do that with her any more - well, that's also a part of my new life. That loss isn't going anywhere. It'll sit somewhere in my head and over time what will happen is, I will learn to regulate my reaction to it. But it won't diminish. She was my sister for too long for that to happen. And that is what living with loss is about. It's not a bad dream that you wake up from, or a predictable process of healing.  It's a lifelong thing.

Challah

Baking challah. If you are a traditional Jewish girl this is a skill demonstrated and taught to you in the same way that a baby is given its first inoculation. It's a non negotiable requirement of growing up in tradition. Various bewigged orthodox women attempted at various stages in my early adolescence to impart this skill to me but I wasn't interested. I was in fact entirely detached from any idea that I was going to do Girl Stuff in my adulthood. At that stage I was climbing trees after school - I mean, literally - with my mates who went to the local comp, something that would have had most of my religious teachers swooning with outrage. So for years I lacked the skill. When I began baking it was all about cakes, but a few years back I got into Bread. At this stage in my baking development, I will regularly turn out a sourdough (yup, I have starter brewing by my kitchen window day in day out - more on that in another post); bread made from potato peelings and bread made with the juice of dill cucumbers; a walnut and honey loaf, my family's fave Sunday breakfast treat, and of course I bang out a soda bread in minutes after a day at work if the house feels like a bread smell would cheer everyone up. Which it does, every time. But challah. There is something really, really special about baking challah. For a start, a bit like sourdough, it's not easy. I don't care what anyone says, there is serious skill involved in ensuring your challah dough rises, that it has the right honey to salt ratio, that it comes out light and fluffy but solid all the same...it's taken me several flat pancakes of challah attempts to get even close to right, but oh boy, when you get there, for any bread baker it's like Olympic gold. Recently I discovered the tiny spare attic bedroom at the top of the house was really nice and warm. You know, like PROVING DRAWER warm. The perfect temperature. It was my baking epiphany. Once I'd made my dough (and oh, one other thing: if you want the yeast to do its job the water you use has to be warm, not lukewarm, but not hot, because too much heat kills the yeast), I would cover it with a damp cloth, carry it up to my warm room and leave it there for at least 2 hours. Longer, in fact, than any recipe called for. Then I would carry it back down to the kitchen, punch it down, separate it into two doughs,  take each lump and make three thick strands out of each, plait them...and carry them back up to the attic. Much later, after egg wash and sesame seeds, time to go into the oven, from where it fills not just the house but the entire STREET with the smell of awesomeness. And if you calculate the amount of time and bother it would have taken me to produce the thing, you would get why the majority of people who go to such lengths are orthodox Jewish women whose major function in life is to turn out perfect Friday night food for hundreds, including challah loaves. I mean, if you have a job, or indeed a life, how do you fit in the perfect challah? Well I do work full time, in a  busy job with long hours, and I am telling you that this is a loaf worth taking a day off to deliver. This is a bread to turn road rage into campfire community love. And no, I don't just make it on a Friday. Why wait till the weekend??

Secret Recipe

How often do schools produce recipe books for charity, filled with parents' offerings with their versions on the national/cultural dish they have grown up with, made "with their secret recipe"? Sometimes I will buy one - what's a quid after all if it's for a good cause (though these days they are getting pretty pricey, somewhat ironic as chances are I'll find these recipes on the internet, set out on a food blog that looks suspiciously like mine, for example). And looking through them I will be awed by the bravery of so many people who will play around with a time honoured balance of ingredients. If you have a mathematician's mind, then the idea that you would mess with a carefully balanced set of ingredients designed to promote a specific chemical reaction, the idea that you might chuck in an extra ingredient, "just to see how it tastes", would be abhorrent. So I'm going to say that those who experiment with the received wisdom of food writers, are the creative thinkers of this world, the ones who will take risks on the basis of nothing more than their imagination - or their gut instinct (ho ho). Recently I was trying out a recipe by a very well known food writer - a household name in fact - and I couldn't get it to work. I tried it a few times, chucked out the appalling mess I had created (it would have tasted pretty good with custard dumped on it, which would also have hidden the mess - but I hadn't made it to eat, I was trying to Learn A Skill!!) when it occurred to me that just possibly, the food writer, my guru of gurus, had quite possibly Got It Wrong. Maybe an editing error. Or the amounts had not been double checked. I reduced the amount of water and hey presto. The perfect chocolate praline loaf cake. It was like a bolt of lightning. Food writers Are Human, and their cookery books are Not Perfect. Which means, they can be improved upon. A week later, I tried my hand at a chocolate mousse cake. Putting the ingredients together, I thought to myself, what if I substituted the recommended alcohol for another? What if I made the top layer with white chocolate instead of dark, what if I used redcurrant instead of raspberries...once I'd started, I couldn't stop. It was like a release from Colditz. I made my mousse cake and I'll be honest - it looked a bit odd. Tasted amazing, so my creativity matched up to my execution, but I needed to work on my presentation. I was a bit dizzy for days afterwards. Years I'd spent carefully making sure I kept within the boundaries, and the turn I'd taken - the "what if" - felt like nothing would be the same again. And it really isn't. Although the cakes, pies and puddings I'm making, the biscuits I'm cutting and the dough I am kneading all come out looking like, well, cakes and pies and puddings, biscuits and bread, they are just a bit more special - for each one,  I can now say, hand on heart, that I have made them with my Secret Recipe. A few months more and I could be producing charity cookbooks all on my own. Right, must sign off. I'm off to make my Secret Recipe broccoli and palm heart dolcelatte quiche.