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.