Ingredients

Serves about 8 people, each portion contains about 3/4 of a bajillion calories.

150g oaty biscuits
75g butter
1 can of Carnation Caramel (397g)
1 to 1.5 tsp of good quality sea salt flakes
200g dark chocolate, 65-75% cocoa solids. Extra marks are available if you use choc with cocoa nibs or bits of chopped up roasted coffee bean
400ml double cream
Half a packet of Maltesers

I use a 7 inch cake tin with a removable base, many people prefer modern springforms.

Method

Line the base and sides of the cake tin with greaseproof paper

Bash up the biscuits inside a plastic bag with a rolling pin, frying pan or half-brick. Melt the butter and stir them together, then press into a tight layer in the bottom of the tin.

Take two tablespoons of the caramel, stir through a teaspoon of cream and set it aside for decorating later.

Heat up the cream to 50-60 degrees, then break the chocolate into it and stir a lot until it’s all dissolved. After a couple of minutes of stirring, the mixture will turn a lovely smooth brown. Keep stirring until it’s cool enough to start to hold its shape.

Whilst that’s chilling down to 30-35 degrees C, you can stir the sea salt flakes into the caramel. It’s very easy to over-mix this, it needs to be able to keep its shape so you might have to chill the caramel for 5 minutes after stirring it. Dollop it into the middle of the buttery biscuit base and make sure you leave a clear inch around the outside so that you get a good chocolate finish.

Pour the chocolate ganache evenly and gently over the top and gently shake it to get a flat surface.

If you’ve got a sharp enough knife, cut the Maltesers in half and push them just slightly into the surface so they stay in place.

Chill it in the fridge overnight to make sure it’s fully set.

To decorate the top, put the reserved caramel cream mix into the corner of a freezer bag and snip the tiniest hole in the corner with sharp scissors. Gently pipe a pattern onto the top.

Cross section of the torte

A fully swirled torte

According to the internet, the yeasts we’re likely to come across for home brewing and home baking can be loosely grouped into two sets of behaviours. Top cropping and bottom cropping. Imaginatively, the name refers to whether the yeast hangs around at the top of liquid and does its thing, or sinks to the bottom of it. I can think of a couple of reasons why you might care about the difference, the first is whether you want all the detritus already at the bottom of the brew so you don’t need to filter it before syphoning and the second is how much alcohol the yeast will tolerate before dying off and metabolic activity ceases.

Yeasts occur naturally in the environment, they’re perhaps most noticable as the pale dusting on grapes skins. Evolution being what it is, the best yeasts for your unique environment will be the ones that are already in it, but it can still be fun to trade different sourdoughs with other people. There are those bakers who jealously guard a range of sourdough mixes that make some unique breads around the world, so it’s serious business. This forum post includes some photos of how people manufacture their own yeast mixes to bulk up enough of a supply to use in batches.

A fairly extreme example of natural yeasts is the Ginger Beer “Plant”, which is a combination of natural yeasts in symbosis with a Lactobacillus. The equillibrium is reached because the two strains of bacteria have sufficiently different tolerances to alcohol, the Lactobacillus consumes enough of it to keep the Saccharomyces alive, which in turn produces more alcohol from the sugars you feed it.

It’s most likely that the yeast you’ll have available at home is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is used around the world to give a reliably good result in most environments and is widely available as ‘bakers yeast’ in most shops. This is the stereotypical example of a top fermenting yeast, works best at room temperatures

Brewers traditionally used the same yeast as bakers, which is often referred to as ale yeast, but the beer and wine industrys have spent the past few centuries selectively breeding yeasts for traits they value, which is why any reputable homebrew shop will have a small selection of different yeasts that are optimised for brewing wine, cider and different beers. Of course, you don’t have to use these specialised yeasts, the basic biology will function just fine with any strain.

Since the work put in by Øjvind Winge in the 1880s, much of the world’s lager is brewed from Saccharomyces carlsbergensis. This is the stereotypical example of bottom fermenting yeast, works best when refrigerated slightly and is popular for a very good reason. This works more slowly because it’s colder, but it also has much less influence on the flavour of the drink, which makes the final product easier to sell to the mass market.

I’d love to make a claim about alcohol tolerances for the different types of yeasts, but I’ve completely lost my references and can’t find it in my books on beer or wine. I’ll edit it back in later when I find some data.

For the moment, I prefer to kepe things simple and traditional. Also, I already have a tin of bakers yeast, so I use that for everything.

Fun with yeast

The above photograph is from last weekend, featuring some home brewed ginger beer, normal bread and a sourdough cake mix named Herman.

Herman on day 1

To look after me properly, you need to follow these simple instructions:

Day 1 – you get a dollop of Herman, take my lid off, put me in a large bowl and leave me at room temperature, covered with a tea towel
Day 2 – stir me twice a day
Day 3 – Same as day 2
Day 4 – I am hungry! Feed me 200ml milk, 200g plain flour and 250g of sugar
Days 5, 6, 7 and 8 – Stir me twice a day
Day 9 – I am hungry! Feed me the same as day 4, then divide me into 5 equal amounts. Give some sons of Herman to your friends with a copy of how to look after me and keep the rest for tomorrow
Day 10 – It’s cake time!

Ingredients

Makes one large cake or 12 big muffins

Ready to bake!

Cake
1 portion of Herman
150ml vegetable oil
3 eggs
250g sugar
350g self-raising flour
1 tsp salt

and then any flavour combinations you like that add another 200g of solid to the mixture

I added 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon and 200g of grated baking apple, but you could also use things like nuts, chopped chocolate, rum-soaked raisins, raspberry and white chocolate, maple syrup and pecan nuts, black cherries and dark chocolate, or make lots of muffins and use all of the above!

Filling
75g very soft, room temperature butter
200g icing sugar
quarter of a teaspoon of vanilla paste, or the flavouring of your choice

Icing
100g icing sugar
3 tablespoons water
Half a teaspoon ground ginger

Method

Stir everything all together in a large bowl and decant into your cake tin or muffin trays.

A very firm mixture

This will make a very stiff mixture, but don’t worry about it not rising, it’s got both baking powder AND yeast in it, so it will comfortably double in volume when in the oven.

Baked to a golden finish

Bake at 180C for 40 minutes for muffin sized cakes or 75 minutes for a big cake. Everybody’s oven is different so always check whether the centre is cooked through with a skewer.

Leave it to cool for 10 minutes before turning out onto a rack to cool fully.

I then sliced mine in half with a breadknife and filled with buttercream filling (beat the butter with an electric whisk and gradually add in the icing sugar until it’s combined, light and fluffy, then stir in your colouring and / or flavouring).

The icing was a simple water icing with a hint of ginger, very very slowly add water to some icing sugar until it comes together into a pipable consistency, then squiggle over the top of the cake.

Share, and enjoy!

Frosted and iced up

Or baked as a loaf

Ingredients

Makes about 1.8 litres

1600ml water – w/o chlorine if possible, but the lemon juice should offset that
1/4 tsp yeast
225g sugar
juice of 1 lemon
3 big lumps of ginger – grated not chopped, you want juice
2 teaspoons of runny honey

Ginger Beer Ingredients

You need a sterilised 2 litre plastic bottle, the type that fizzy drinks and water come in. Rather than sterilising it, I just paid 17p at Morrisons for a new one and got the water thrown in too.

You also need a device to get the Stuff into the bottle. I used a rolled up piece of A4 paper, but many people favour plastic funnels. If your funnel neck is narrow, you’ll likely need a chopstick to poke the mixture through when it gets stuck

A 2 litre jug helps and you need some cheesecloth or muslin or something to use as a fine meshed filter. A fine sieve might also do it, but would be annoying to clean.

Method

You have a couple of variables to adjust depending upon how gingery you like it and how fizzy you’d like it to be.

If you like a mild flavour then chop your ginger (or blender it), whereas if you like a fuller flavour then grate it. Grating releases more of the juicy bits from the stringy fibrous bits of ginger root. If you like it fizzier, then use half a teaspoon of yeast, but please do be careful not to explode your bottle all over the place by over pressurising it. Do not use a glass bottle.

The method is essentially mixing up all the ingredients and get them into the bottle, I’ve found it easier and less messy if I do it in stages.

Grate your ginger into a 1 litre jug. To this, add the lemon juice, the honey, the sugar and about half a pint of water.

Mix it all up and pour it into your bottle, using more water to get the solids out of the jug and into the bottle.

Fill the bottle about half way, put the lid on it and shake it up a lot to get it all properly mixed together.

Carefully spoon in the yeast and top up the water until there’s 2 – 3 inches of air left. You need this space for the CO2 gas to expand into and to judge the pressure by seeing how squashable the bottle is.

Shake it up again.

All mixed up and ready to wait

Leave the bottle at room temperature for about 48 hours.

After about 12-18 hours, you should be able to judge progress by feeling the difference in pressure by squashing the bottle gently with your fingers. At the start it should be easily squashable. It’s ready when you can’t noticably squash it. You should also notice that most of the solids float to the surface, buoyed by all the gas.

Bubbly ginger beer after 48 hours

Very very slowly release the pressure. Take many minutes over this, unless you like ginger beer fountains.

Pour the mix through your cheesecloth back into your jug to remove as much of the solids and sediment as you can possibly manage, and then decant back into your now cleaned bottle.

Store it in the fridge until you want to drink it. Fridge means cold, so the remaining yeast will be much slowed down. A bit of yeast action is good though, because it will put the fizz back into your ginger beer after you let it all out when decanting it.

Enjoy over ice with a slice of lime, or mixed with some cheap blended whisky. I prefer it neat.

Finished, home fermented ginger beer

Last autumn was taken over by the idea that I had time to do two evening classes in a single term. It turns out that I could, but that it didn’t leave much time to write home about it afterwards. The dinner party cooking class was as good as ever, but the real wake up call was doing Stanford University’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class. I’ve never had much of a computer science background and yet I’ve made a career out of bending computers to my will, so this was wonderful opportunity to find out if I could still learn university level stuff after 12 years. The answer was yes I could, but it helped that I was properly interested in learning it and it was taught by two experts both in their subject matter and in teaching it to people. Whilst I am proud of getting an “84%” for my efforts, there were enough other people in the class of dozens of thousands who were distraught at the idea of not getting 100%, so that was a different idea of ‘normal’ I hadn’t met before. I could write pages and pages about my experiences, and perhaps I will, but this isn’t yet the time.

What has really rekindled my energy and focus was a game changing conference I attended in London last weekend, PHP UK 2012. I’ve been to a few techy conferences before, organised by The IET, vendors, or by the community of customers they serve. Scotch on the Rocks has been, and will probably continue to be my primary conference simply because it’s based on the language I’m most practiced in, but CFML will never have the same sized audience as PHP.

The London PHP user group has retained enough critical mass to host an increasingly awesome conference for 7 years now, attracting some top tier speakers and a good sized audience, but not so big that you can’t move or get close to the speakers or exhibitors. Who do I call a top tier speaker? You’ve probably come across names like eBay, the BBC, WordPress.com, Etsy.com and Rasmus Lerdorf, but there were some excellent talks from engineers closer to those I would consider my peers. I took home nearly as many points on presentation skills as I did technical ideas. I was able to speak with a few of speakers and many had spent weeks of their spare time preparing, practicing and refining their 40 minute presentations for this event, which is an inspiring amount of effort.

I realise that we were in the capital city, but I was surprised by how many people wrote on their delegate badges, or on their presentation slides “we’re hiring”. Some people even trolled the twitterfall (more on that in another post) to say things like ‘I’m hiring, DM me’. Thinking about it, it’s a great way to meet like minded people who might want to help you do whatever it is you’re trying to do, but I hadn’t encountered it before.

One of the more interesting debates was on release controls. How often should one release code and how easy should it be to release code? I’ve always been lucky enough to think that you should trust your developers, that you should have a team who’s not afraid to learn, and that you learn most quickly when you’re fixing a bug that you’ve just deployed to your application

Did you take more than 10 seconds to revert the change once you realised something was wrong? Did anybody die? Did your company lose a significant amount of trust, goodwill or money? If the answer to all of the above was ‘no’, then no harm was done and aforementioned developer has just learned some very valuable lessons and won’t be doing that again in a hurry. Clearly this approach only applies to a certain category of applications and user bases, you wouldn’t want to bork something like Amazon’s checkout system, or Google’s landing page for even a couple of seconds, but I believe that the person who best understands the implications of releasing some code is the person who’s just written it.

This approach works in practice if you force yourself to make lots of small releases, rather than fewer enormous ones, so it only really works for web-based projects. To quote Mike Williams (one of Erlang’s inventors): “Make mistakes on a small scale, not in a production project.”

I think the audience was split 50/50 between those that thought this approach was normal and why would you take the time to do it another way, and those that couldn’t believe somebody could even contemplate such a thing and how could they get away with such a cowboy attitude, but it can’t be all that terrible with services like Flickr and WordPress doing it. Some people call this continuous deployment, for me this falls into the mantra of ‘minimum necessary to get the job done well’.

From a personal point of view, the biggest ‘whoa’ moment came out of a panel discussion on scalability. Like most of the panel members, I think scalability is a function of systems architecture and how inspired your engineers are, not the programming language you use (assuming one’s code isn’t crap of course), so the conversation was widely applicable. It was a very good discussion and well worth the time to re-watch.

I’ll have to wait for the videos to be edited and published to check the exact words, but one question was about fixing technical problems when a bug only manifests for 1/4% of your 10^7 hits. Hugh E Williams from eBay said that if you hired engineers who were good at learning then they’d figure out almost anything, but it helped to be able to wheel out ‘that one guy’ who had that rare blend of curiosity, enthusiasm and doggedness who’s highly skilled in system operations and software engineering who could meditate on the problem (Amiga style) for a week and then fix it. Rasmus weighed in with a comment along the lines of ‘hire him. just hire him’.

A few people in the audience weren’t certain what they meant, isn’t this a really big single point of failure and anyway the split between programming and sysops exists for a reason. I think halfway through the explanation, Rasmus said something like ‘yep, we get it’. I don’t know whether it’s the weight of culture or if devops has taken sufficient root in The Valley for this to be normal, but whatever the understanding, it was like they’d just described me and what I do in just a few words. Whoa.

So there we have it, community conferences make you feel more connected with other people doing what you do. Who knew?

I consulted with both Delia and Nigella and whilst they both agree on a basic custard recipe, it was Nigella who added the top tip of keeping the kitchen sink half full of cold water, ready to plunge your pan into it if you’re in the slightest danger of it splitting and turning into scrambled egg.

Whilst apricots and raspberries do go well together, this was more of an excuse to use a handful of fruit that had been sat around ripening for a while

Ingredients

Makes about 750ml

200ml double cream
400ml milk
3 free range egg yolks
110g sugar

4 ripe apricots
50g raspberries

Method

Start by making your custard.

Mix together the cream and milk, put it in a pan and start it warming up. You don’t want it to boil, but get close.
Whilst that’s heating, whisk together the egg yolks and 100g of the sugar until it gets visibly lighter.

Once the milk just starts to bubble, pour the hot milk over the egg and sugar mix and keep whisking.

Put the mixture back into a pan and gradually heat it up, whisking or stirring all the while. It’s safer to heat it gently, but I gave it the beans (small ring on electric hob, I wouldn’t dare do that on a gas ring) and didn’t stop whisking. After about 5 minutes of this treatment, I could just start to see little bits of colour changes within the mixture, so it was straight into the sink of cold water and in with the electric whisk. The proper way to judge when it’s done is look for a velvety smooth texture that just coats the back of a spoon, it won’t thicken properly until it cools down to room temperature. Next time, I’ll give it 7-8 minutes on a medium heat and still lots of whisking.

Custard is just coating the back of the spoon

With your custard safe, it’s time to prepare the fruit.

Finely dice the apricots and stir them through the custard.

Pour it into a jug or tub to chill and cover it with cling film to prevent a skin forming. A skin isn’t the end of the world with this mixture, but it’s a quick way of wasting a whole lot of vanilla seeds if you’ve added a vanilla pod. Leave it in the fridge until it’s cold.

Preparing a raspberry syrup to swirl through the ice cream is easy enough, put a handful of raspberries in a pan with a couple of spoons of sugar and a couple of spoons of water. Let it slowly cook until the fruit starts to collapse, then finish the job with the back of a spoon. Some people sieve out the seeds for a purer look. Chill the raspberry syrup.

Churn the ice cream in a machine for 15-20 minutes and transfer it into your tub. Finally, spoon in the raspberry syrup and give it a swirl with the spoon or a chopstick and freeze it for a couple of hours before serving.

Apricot and Raspberry Ice Cream

Ingredients

Serves at least 6

Topping:
6 Apricots
25g butter
2 tablespoons apricot jam

Base:
100g plain flour
50g butter
50g sugar
50g Amaretti biscuits

You’ll need a tart or cake tin with a removable base

Method

Preheat an oven to 180C

Line the base of the cake tin with greaseproof or baking parchment

First make the base mixture by creaming together the butter and sugar, then rubbing through the flour to get a consistency of breadcrumbs. Use your fingers or a rolling pin or the bottom of a frying pan to reduce the Amaretti biscuits to small crumbs and stir them into the mixture.

Tightly pack the mixture into the bottom of the cake tin, trying to leave as few air gaps as possible.

Next slice your fruit, I used apricots because I think they go well with almonds, but bramley apples would also work well with a generous spoon of ground cinnamon. This is Italian inspired, so try to heap on the fruit generously rather than artfully arranging them.

To make it look better and hold together a bit, I used two glazes. The first was melting a spoon of butter in the microwave and brushing it all over the fruit (this is where you’d add the cinnamon if using apples), then I melted a couple of tablespoons of apricot jam in the microwave and brushed that all over the fruit too.

It’s now safe to leave in the fridge or freezer until you want to cook it.

Bake it in the oven for 40 minutes. The fruit will be done sooner but it’s nice to get a good crunchy base so that it holds together on the plate. I served it with a quinelle of creme fraiche.

Apricot and Amaretti

Ingredients

makes 2, scales well up to ‘big’

quarter of a packet of shop bought puff pastry
half a punnet of fresh strawberries or raspberries
200ml double cream
quarter of a teaspoon of vanilla paste or extract
4 squares of Bournville
Icing sugar
a few mint leaves to garnish

Pastry Cutters or ring moulds
Small sieve or tea strainer
Something to pipe with
Something to crush with
Greaseproof parchment or silicone sheet
2 oven trays or baking sheets

Method

The first element to sort out is the Pastry. The idea is to have the lightness of puff pastry but with none of its expanding height.

Preheat your oven.

Roll out the puff pastry so it’s fairly thin, then place it on a sheet of something non stick on a baking tray. Use a tea strainer or small sieve to lightly sprinkle about a teaspoon of icing sugar onto the pastry, then cover it with another non stick sheet and press it down with the second baking tray.

Put it in the oven for half of the cooking time indicated on the packet’s instructions.

Whilst that’s baking, you can get on with making the fruit coolis. For soft fruit, this turns out to be easier than you’d think.

I took 4 strawberries and bashed hell out of them using my wood mortar and pestle, then passed them through my tea strainer with the help of the back of a spoon. Clean your sieve then use it to gently stir in a teaspoon of icing sugar to the fruit.

Set your coolis aside in the fridge for later

By now, the oven timer’s probably beeping, so take out the half cooked pastry and sieve over another teaspoon of icing sugar. Put the pastry back between its sheets of parchment and baking trays and give it the remaining 10 minutes in the oven.

Whilst that’s cooking, you can get on with the next element, the vanilla cream. Simply add a couple of drops of vanilla extract or paste to some double cream and give it the beans with an electric whisk until the cream can just hold its shape. You don’t want it to be so solid that you can stand a spoon in it, or you’ll never pipe it out.

Now prepare your fruit. The quantity will depend on the size of your fruit and moulds (i used a medium pastry cutter for my mould). I took about a dozen strawberries and cleaned, hulled and sliced them in half lengthwise.

Take out the pastry and let it cool to room temperature. Once that’s done you can cut out 4 pieces of pastry for the tops and bottom of the dish. Make sure the sugar crusted side is upwards.

Now for the fun part, assembling it without making a splodgy mess.

Leave the first pastry circle in the bottom of the mould and place it in the centre of a flat plate. Now stand up fruit around the outside edge, I think strawberries look better with the cut side outwards. You may need to cut one down so that the circle doesnt overlap. Put a couple more slices in the bottom.

Now, using a piping bag or a pair of teaspoons, fill up the mould with the vanilla cream and top it with another piece of pastry. If you’ve got more than one mould, then great, leave it on until the last minute so the cream can get hold of the fruit and pastry so it holds together.

Next, melt a few squares of Bournville choc in the microwave or bain marie and pipe very very small decorative lines on the plate. The idea here is to make an edge you can fill with coulis, so don’t leave any gaps. Ignore the thickness of my choc in the photos, I’m rubbish at piping melted choc.

Give it a few seconds to set, then carefully spoon some in some coolis. The fruit coolis should settle into any gaps after a few seconds, so don’t be tempted to overfill it, it doesn’t take much to spill over.

You can now put the desert in the fridge until it’s needed. The pastry’s sugar crust should help stop it going soggy for a few hours.

Just before serving, sieve another half teaspoon of icing sugar onto the top of the pastry. Then, holding down the top pastry lid, gently gently lift off the moulds.

Garnish with a few mint leaves under some more fruit and serve.

Ingredients

Makes enough for at least 6

300g madeira cake
600ml double cream
200g Bournville choc
75g of nuts, I used almonds and pecan, others used macadamia and hazelnuts
75g of candied ginger, cherries or peel
a teaspoon of cocoa powder for presentation
25ml of brandy or another fruit spirit

1.5 litre bowl

Method

Line the bowl with a double layer of clingfilm

Very thinly slice the madeira cake and tesselate a layer of cake around the bottom and inside of your bowl, trying not to overlap or leave gaps. A thick layer makes for a stodgy dessert, this isn’t a summer fruits pudding.

Use a pastry brush or your finger or something to dash brandy evenly across the cake.

Roughly chop your nuts, not too small, you’re aiming for interest and crunch without breaking people’s teeth. Take a third of the choc and finely chop it, a coarse grater would do.

Loosely whip your cream so that it forms soft peaks, but they sink back down again after a couple of seconds. Split the cream into two approximately even portions.

Into the first half of the cream, whisk in the chopped nuts, fruit or peel.

For the second half, melt the remaining x00g of choc in the microwave or bain marie and whisk it into the remaining cream.

Take the white cream and dollop it into the bowl, spreading it up around the edges and leaving a hollow in the inside that you can fill up with the chocolate cream.

Make a lid with more slices of cake, top it with clingfilm and then put it in the fridge to set for a couple of hours with a heavy plate on top.

To serve, carefully turn it out onto a plate and very lightly dust half a teaspoon of cocoa powder over it with a small sieve or tea strainer.

The Peak District is easily the most visited of all our National Parks, and Dovedale in its South is one of the most popular places to go. It’s easy to see why when you see the photographs of the great scenery and how accessible it is to people who perhaps aren’t all that used to being in the countryside.

It’s owned by the National Trust, presumably administered along with the nearby Ilam Park, so its paths are well maintained and there’s a steady stream of information boards in case you missed something interesting.

If large, privately owned car parks aren’t your thing, the Trust has a modest and, above all, free car park in Milldale, at the North end of Dovedale. Whilst there’s just the loo block and 1 household doing a steady trade selling ices, snacks and postcards from their kitchen door, I’d thoroughly recommend starting at this end. It’s less developed, has way fewer people and I think it looks better too.

For a single valley, it’s entirely possible to walk a circular route, there’s a smaller footpath in the west that winds and climbs around the valley, though there’s one part of it in the North that would be underwater when the stream’s in spate.

We started mid morning in Milldale and walked south west to Ilam, where we paused for lunch at the NT tea rooms. Expensive but reasonably good food, unless you’re into huge slabs of cake then it’s good value. There’s an hour or two’s worth of wandering at Ilam if you’d like to look around, the archiecture of the houses in the village is quite impressive.

Ilam

Ilam

The return leg by way of the main path alongside the water in Dovedale is along the most popular part of the beaten track, you might need a spot of patience at busy times but don’t panic because most people don’t stray too far from the car park so it will get quieter soon enough.

Many people

Despite the paths being flat and well paved, I’d allow some time for sightseeing along the way. When we were there, there were a series of paintings on display near to the landscape features they depicted, there were plenty of orchids for spotting, if you like that sort of thing. The route back is straightforward, following the path of the water back to Milldale.

Dovedale

Ingredients

Serves at least 10

400g choc, at least 55% cocoa solids
2 tbsp golden syrup
75g sugar
200g glace cherries
250g digestive biscuits
300g butter
2 tbsp kirsche or brandy (optional)

Method

Put a couple of tablespoons of spirits into the cherries tub, give it a shake and leave it to soak overnight.

Line a 900g loaf tin with two layers of parchment or clingfilm

I used a mix of Bournville and hotel choc 70% dark for this. Scientifically break up the chocolate into chunks. I left it in its wrapper and smacked it a few times with a claw hammer. A rolling pin or hob nailed boot would also work.

Loosely dice the butter so it melts quickly.

Put the chocolate, sugar, syrup and butter into a pan and gently gently melt it together, stirring until it’s smooth. Do not let it get too hot.

Whilst the hob is doing its thing, put the biscuits into a plastic bag and gently use your fingers to break them apart. You want chunks, not crumbs.

Once it’s smooth, dump the cherries and biscuits into the chocolate mix. Stir it together thoroughly and pour it into the loaf tin, trying to not leave air gaps.

Choc cherry fridge cake

Leave it to cool to room temperature, then give it two hours in the fridge before turning out and slicing thinly with a sharp knife.

I hadn’t met sunblush tomatoes before, but they were going half price from the supermarket’s deli counter. They’re half dried so have a nice concentrated sweet flavour whilst being soft enough to eat. The oil-soaked jars of sundried tomatoes would also work, but you’d need to rehydrate fully dried ones.

Ingredients

Serves 5 – 6

900g of mixed fish. I used about 300g trout, 300g coley and 300g undyed smoked haddock
100g grated hard mature italian cheese. I used Parmigiano-Reggiano
Olive oil
2 hard boiled eggs, shelled and cut into wedges
75g peas
1 bunch of spring onions
250ml creme fraiche
200ml double cream
6 tablespoons of pesto. either basil or rocket is fine.
100g sun blushed or oil soaked sundried tomatoes

600g potatoes
400g celeriac
2 tablespoons yellow mustard seeds

Method

Roughly chop and boil the potatoes and celeriac until they slide off a knife. Drain nearly all of the water, keep a tablespoon or so in the bottom of the pan. Mash it thoroughly, stir in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, 75g of the grated cheese and season well.

Skin and bone the fish if necessary and slice into bite sized chunks, going across the grain if you can so that it flakes on the fork, not on the chopping board.

Put the fish into the bottom of your baking dish or dishes

Chop the spring onions on the diagonal and cut the tomatoes into quarters and evenly scatter them amongst the fish, and do the same with the wedges of egg. Add the peas.

Mix together the creme fraiche, cream and pesto and evenly spoon it over the top of the fish mixture.

If you did a good job with your mashing, you can try piping the potato mix over the top so it looks fun when baked. I didn’t and nearly exploded the piping bag so made do with dolloping it instead.

Sprinkle over the rest of the grated cheese and either freeze it or give it half an hour in a 200C oven until the top is golden and crusty.

Fish Pie

Vanilla pods can be hard to find and they’re certainly expensive. I’m lucky enough to have a couple of delis in town that sell pods that aren’t as dried and tired as the supermarket ones from the major brands of spice merchants. A fresh pod is one that flexes when you bend it in half, it shouldn’t snap. Some places are now starting to sell small jars of vanilla paste, which is better than vanilla extract because you still get the nice flecks of the seeds. A small jar is 4-5 pounds and one teaspoon is equivalent to 1 pod.

Gelatine is something that varies over time. Apparently, 1 sheet of gelatine used be enough to set 125ml, or 1/4 pint, or liquid, but some brands are more effective than others. I used 6 of Supercook’s sheets because that’s all the supermarket sells and it came out far too rubbery and my spoon nearly bounced off my forehead. Let them set slowly in the fridge over several hours. Whilst you can set them in an hour using the freezer, that makes them even more rubbery.

Ingredients

Serves 5, depending upon the size of your ramekins

200ml coconut milk, light or full fat is fine.
300ml double cream
5 gelatine leaves
75g palm sugar
1 vanilla pod
2 tbsp sugar cane rum

2 1/2 passion fruits
1 ripe mango
1 lime
2 tsp fresh mint
2 tbsp ginger syrup (think stem ginger jars)

Method

Soak the gelatine leaves in cold water for at least 5 minutes, until they’re soft.

Whilst they’re soaking, put the coconut milk, cream, sugar, the vanilla seeds and the pod itself into a pan and heat through until the sugar’s dissolved. Let it cool, discard the vanilla pod and mix in the rum.

Put the gelatine into the cream mix and stir until it’s dissolved.

Pour into your individual moulds and let it cool to room temperature before leaving it to set in the fridge.

To make up the mango salsa, finely dice the mango, halve and scoop out the passion fruit seeds and mix it together with the lime zest, a very small squeeze of the juice, the ginger syrup and the finely chopped mint. Give the salsa half an hour for the flavours to infuse.

To get the panacottas out of their ramekins, I put them in the steam from a boiling kettle for 20 seconds before turning them out. You might make a bit of a creamy mess from melting the outside layer, but you can wipe that up for presentation.

To serve, spoon the salsa back into the passion fruit halves and put a small sprig of mint in the top of each panacotta.

Tropical Panacotta

Ingredients

175g unsalted butter
175g sugar
3 eggs
250g self raising flour
25g oats
25g ground almonds
1 lemon
300g mixed dried fruit (better quality raisins are noticably better)
2 teaspoons mixed spice

2 tablespoons apricot jam or elderflower jelly to glaze
1 block of marzipan to cover and decorate

Ingredients

Method

Preheat your oven to 160C if it’s a fan, 180 if not.
Prepare your cake tin with a double layer of parchment

Cream together the butter and sugar with an electric whisk for a couple of minutes until they’re pale and light. Whisk in the lemon juice and zest along with the rest of the dry ingredients just until they’re all mixed through. Fold in the dried fruit.

Batter

Pour the batter into the tin and bake it for 20 minutes at 160C, before turning it down to 140C for another 60 minutes. Keep checking it every 10 minutes after that to see if it’s cooked. It’s done when the centre springs back when you touch it, or when a skewer comes out clean from the centre.

The edges of the cake will also just start to pull away from the edges of the tin. If it’s shrunk more than a mm or so, then it’s over cooked and you should have done it slower

Just pulled away from the edge of the tin

Leave it to cool for 20 minutes before turning it out to cool completely

Once it’s cool, roll out the marzipan so that it’s just wide enough to cover the cake. I didn’t quite have enough so mine was too thin. Aim for a good 3 or 4 mm thickness on top.

To stick the marzipan to the cake, take a small saucepan and melt two tablespoons of apricot jam or something similar. I used some of my 2008 vintage elderflower and ginger jelly which worked really well. Once it’s fluid, use a pastry brush to thinly glaze the entire cake.

Cooled cake

add a melted glaze

Makes a shiny glazed cake

Then roll over the marzipan, trim the bottom to fit the cake and use any remaining to decorate the top with little balls. I won’t enter into the discussion for how many balls one should have, theologically speaking.

Light easter fruit cake

Cherry and Almond Cake

Serves at least 12

Ingredients

225g unsalted butter
250g whole glace cherries, soaked overnight in 3 tablespoons of Kirsch or another Eau de Vie
225g self raising flour
150g marzipan
225g sugar
115g ground almonds
1 lemon
4 eggs
Icing Sugar

Ingredients

Method

Preheat the oven to 150C if it’s fan assisted, 170C if not.

Prepare your tin with a double layer of parchment. I used a circular tin with removable base and used some geometry to cut two circles of parchment from the roll, cut a rough square, carefully fold it into a triangle then hold the point in the middle of the tin and trim the edge so it unfolds into a kind of circle.

Roll out the marzipan between the two parchment circles so that it’s half a centimetre away from the edge

Cake batter, rolled marzipan, soaked cherries and lined tin

Zest the lemon and cream it with the butter and sugar with an electric whisk for a few minutes until it’s pale and light. Whisk in the eggs, almonds, flour and the juice of half the lemon.

Now for the messy part, assembling it.
Place half of the batter in the bottom of your tin. Take about 100g of the cherries and arrange them in a circular pattern across the batter, these will support the layer of marzipan that you put on top next. Try to avoid too many air gaps. Put another 100g of cherries on top of the marzipan in a wider circular pattern (so that you get one or two per slice) and fill up with the rest of the batter.

Assembled cake, I didn't quite get all the top cherry layer under the batter

Bake it for 50 minutes and then keep checking it every 10 minutes to see if it’s done. Mine took 80 minutes, but that was about 10 minutes too long. It’s done when the middle of the cake springs back when you touch it and when a skewer comes out clean (give or take the gooey marzipan)

Leave it to cool for 20 minutes before turning it out of the tin to cool completely.

Baked

Iced

I iced mine by mixing about 100g of icing sugar with the left over cherry syrup and kirsch and about a tablespoon of cold water so that the icing just coated the back of the spoon. I then topped it with sliced cherries.

Cherry and Almond Cake

It’s not all good news unfortunately, a number of my woody bush fruits were more dead than I’d hoped, including last year’s fun guavas. Apparently they’re not hardy to -Yorkshire after all, neither was the rose nor the goji berry. The Honeyberry coped ok, and the currants and gooseberries are roaring back into growth.

Gooseberries Before

I took the time to give the Gooseberries their bi annual prune, clearing out the mass of growth and restoring their goblet shape a little. I’ve put the prunings into some gritty compost in the hope that they will strike and I’ll have even more bushes. I tried that last year with one of my red currants and whilst only one of those cuttings rooted, that’s growing on nicely.

Gooseberries after their prune

I’ve done quite well for a breadth of varieties of Stuff this year. A friend at work generously gave me a pile of accidentally chitted Jerusalem Artichokes, so I’m hoping they do better than this time last year. The roots are in season at the moment, which is suitably tasty.

I had a really good seed trading session with another friend yesterday, who introduced me to the Real Seed Company who seem to be a good halfway house between Chase Organics and the HDRA’s Heritage library service.

The beds have been dug over and raked and are warming up nicely in the sun, so I’ve direct sown a few rows of Spinach, Chard, Beetroot, Strawberry Spinach (it didn’t germinate last time I tried it but hey, optimism!), French, Runner and Borlotti Beans, Mangetout Peas, and Unwin’s Rainbow Mix of Carrots that I got for Christmas.

My usual potato buckets have been potatoed, I’m going for a lazy earthing up approach by half filling them now and I’ll finish filling the up in a couple of months time. It worked last year.

I didn’t get on with Spinach Tarpy last year, I didn’t like its leaves as much as a traditional breed and it bolted too easily, so I’ve gone for Thompson and Morgan’s Heritage Bloomsdale this year.

I’ve pinned this year’s tomato hopes on an RHS stamped bushy variety called Vilma, another dwarf early, which I’ve paired up with another super early bush variety called Latah, I really associate with its description “The plants are quite untidy. To be honest, you can’t really train them or support them in any way – but if you let them get on with it they really will make ripe tasty tomatoes earlier than you thought possible”.

I’ve sown a few flowers as well, including my fourth generation of Morning Glorys, I’m not exactly following a breeding programme, more that they’re dead easy to grow from seed that you’ve saved yourself. I’ve also got a few clumps of Alyssum and some third generation Marigolds.

A couple of pots of Coriander and Basil from Suffolk Herbs of Kelevedon, Essex for the Kitchen Window Sill have completed the collection.

Sakushi has got something for everybody, it’s got bar seats at the conveyor belt if you’re after a casual bite, half a dozen booths and a handful of normal tables. I think you’d fit in about 50 people when it’s really buzzing. I won’t copy out its menu, but its variety makes it stand out from some other places I’ve visited.

We arrived early in the evening service, I think we were the second or third party in there, but it soon filled up with other couples and some young groups of friends. A few people stopped by to take advantage of their takeaway service, which seemed like a great idea if you happened to be nearby. Actually, I think Yo! do a similar takeaway service from their menu if you’ve time to wait for their kitchen, but not to sit down and eat.

The front of house staff are friendly, welcoming and knowledgeable. They were delighted to discuss some of the more interesting dishes on offer as well as advise on things like which order to eat things in and portion sizes. As one of them said “you keep ordering, and I’ll keep bringing it”. Challenge accepted.

This was the first Japanese place that’s had a specials board, where you get the entire roll of a maki if you custom ordered it, rather than just a couple of slices.

We started with a Miso Soup and Sashimi. Miso soup is Miso soup, but the sashimi was just meltingly fresh, I couldn’t choose between fish but luckily they do platters of different sizes. I had a collection of salmon, tuna, seabass and what was either yellow tail or butterfish, beautifully presented on some real seaweeds and salads and a real leaf (rather than the green plastic one normally come across).

Sashimi (slightly nommed)

We followed this up with a few maki from the conveyor belt whilst the kitchen prepared some Kara Age Chicken and a hand roll of their in house speciality, the ‘Sakushi Roll’. This is clearly aimed at a western audience, the only thing missing was the mayo, but it was just divine with such a mix of fresh and saucy, crisp and juicy with the grilled eel providing a real kick of flavour. The mix of salmon and avocado is traditional enough, but to this was added a prawn tempura (I have no idea where on earth they found these prawns, they were enormous) and a good slice of Unagi, with a dash of kabayaki sauce to hold it together.

Mixed tempura

I love Teriaki sauce, so we settled for a dish of Teriaki Duck with a bowl of rice and a mixed collection of tempura. I bagsied the squid really quickly but there were some more of these enormous prawns and some excellent vegetables. I particularly rated the fan cut aubergine and disc of sweet potato. These were served with a nice light soy vinegar sauce rather than a heavy thai style dipping gloop.

I didn’t think I’d stand a chance of fitting myself around either of the cheesecakes, but we were brought some really nice green tea ice cream with two spoons to finish with. Next time we’re trying the black sesame ice cream, apparently it’s even nicer.

Japanese food of this quality is never cheap, but our bill for two came to £55, which includes four soft drinks. Whilst we did get completely carried away, I thought this offered fantastic value for money and I would definately go again if I’m ever within sniffing distance of the city.

Like I said, this offers a lot for everybody, whether you’re a keen eater of raw fish, prefer your meat grilled or are an avid vegetarian. It’s got a solid wine menu, starting at just £12 a bottle, with cocktails available on request. You could pop by for a £5 light lunch, phone through a take away order, have a sensible quick dinner with a bento box or choose one of their 25 main meal dishes.

There’s something about Japanese cuisine that leaves you feeling refreshed, light and happy. And, apparently, it even cures headaches.

Can you tell I liked it?

The main event for me was joining some friends on a tour of York’s very own nuclear bunker, which is normally tricky to visit because it’s only open twice a month if you’re not a group. Our tour was conducted by one of English Heritage’s knowledgable guides and there was a huge amount of information to try to take in.

York Cold War Bunker

Until 1991, it served as the Yorkshire Regional Headquarters for the Royal Observer Corps, which I hadn’t really heard much about since their role in the Second World War.

This organisation was made up almost entirely of a rotation of volunteers, each of which had to spend two hours a week practicing and training, with occasional 12, 24 or 36 hour stints once a year. It’s role was redefined in the late-1950s to be a network of relatively low-tech observation stations that would monitor and track nuclear strikes.

The narrow corridor, imagine it with supplies stacked up along it.

The observers had three tools available to help with their task. Ionising radiation was monitored from inside the bunkers with a sort of periscope with a geiger counter stuffed up it. Any blasts or bombs going off were watched using a pinhole camera, which had four pieces of paper inside a metal box with four small holes drilled in it. A hypothetical nuclear blast would burn a circle into the paper, through the hole. The paper was marked with a calibrated sequence of lines to give direction and elevation. But mostly volunteers were expected to rely upon a standard issue pair of mark 1 eyeballs.

The bunkers were spread evenly across the entire country, which was quite an investment when they were built in the 1960s, but their equipment and processes received almost no upgrades since then. If you ever see a green metal trapdoor in a field, chances are that it leads down a ladder into a 20′ tin box. Within which there would be three volunteers with sufficient supplies to last 30 days underground. This doesn’t seem like my idea of fun, but then neither does Nuclear War.

Since they were stood down, ownership of almost all of the bunkers reverted to the landowner. Some have been put up for sale on eBay, others were dug out and demolished but most of them were ignored and left to deteriorate. If keeping track of them seems like fun to you, then the Subterranea Britannica would love to hear from you. They’ve visited all of them and mapped them out so that you can go exploring too. But try not to get caught trespassing when looking for your nearest one.

I think there were about 300 volunteers for the York HQ. If the warning went up, then everybody had to drop everything and leg it for the bunker. The first 60 people who got there were allowed in, then the blast doors were shut. There is enough living space in the canteen and bunks for 20 people, so it was a constant rotation between sleeping, living and being on duty. In addition to the volunteers, there was an RAF commandant, two mechanical engineers to look after the generator, water and air supplies, two BT engineers to look after the telephone exchange and three Home Office scientists who combined observations with Met Office data to predict where the fallout was going and who warned adjacent sectors and countries.

The larger of the two dorms. You can see the site's luggage storage shelf in the top left. Marked as the women's dorm, but I can't imagine people would have been that bothered about such distinctions if there were bombs going off.

Each volunteer was allowed the equivalent of a carry on bag to last them for the 30 days. There were no shower or bath facilities because there was nothing like enough of a water supply, so I shudder to imagine what it was like on day 29 with 60 people rushing around inside a sealed box who’s air supply was only refreshed every now and again to maximise the life of the external air filters.

SX2000 in a faraday cage

Originally, it was fitted with a patch cable style of exchange, but it was upgraded to a modern automatic exchange in the late 1970′s. Amusingly, it’s fitted with a Mitel SX2000, which I have a certain amount of professional experience with..

Plant Room

I appreciated the brutal simplicity of the generator room’s automatic firesuppressant system. If the room got too hot, then a single strand of lead solder melted through, which dropped the blast door over the only exit and then flooded the room with CO2, which smothered the diesel generator, the fire and anybody unfortunate enough to be in the room when it went off.

The one nod to upgrading the technology was in the early 1980s when there were a small handful of Met Office automatic detectors issued for trials. These were originally designed to monitor direction and intensity of thunderstorms, but with the addition of a top secret module that had to be removed before the public were allowed anywhere near it, they also did the job for nuclear blasts. Unfortunately, they also still detected thunderstorms, so caused any amount of excitement.

Triangulation maps

The main operations room was straightforward. If they were on alert, then a number of telephone and radio operators contacted each of that regions stations every four minutes to ask for updated observations. If one of them had noticed a bomb going off, then the operator would take down the numbers and shout out “TOCSIN BANG”. These would then be triangulated with other observations from the network on the local maps which gave the approximate area of impact, that was logged on a large piece of wood and passed onto the regional maps, whereupon the triangulators reset and waited for the next bomb to land.

Monitoring maps and the operations room

Nowadays, the ROC is a social organisation. You can read more about their history on their website http://www.rocassoc.org.uk/open/national/roca/hist_ng2.htm.

There aren’t many left, but the bigger sector bunkers included the necessary infrastructure to maintain regional government, until national government could be re-established. This included facilities like a BBC studio and transmission equipment that could play back the public information recordings. In the end, almost none of those recordings were transmitted. It was felt that asking the population to be prepared would have caused too much panic and uncertainty. One piece of trivia that amused me, apparently John Craven did most of the recordings in the 1970s.

How better to finish off a trip like this but with a pint and a lunch at the ever good Brigantes and a Punch and Judy show, courtesy of the city council.

Punch and Judy

We met in Levisham village shortly before 11. Luckily I was there quite early because we weren’t the only sizable group setting off from there,so we had to share the parking along the side of the main street with a group of mountain bikers. I’d forgotten just how steep the valley is between Lockton and Levisham, definately a job for first gear and I wouldn’t have stood a chance if it was muddy or icy. I bet that village was quiet during the winter snows.

Levisham Village

We left Levisham village at 11:00 am. Heading towards Lockton but cutting off before the steep hill down to head East past Levisham Mill farm to the A170. Our walk down the valley was enlivened by what might have been the local hunt passing by the other way, with one chap on a horse in a red coat and a pack of Hounds, being followed by a group of people in black coats. There was no hurry about them, as if they were just hacking out rather than going at full pace. We also heard the sounds from the local Shoot who we saw meeting up in the valley on our way in.

This is where we went slightly wrong because there is no footpath nor right of way through Mount Pleasant farm, it was changed over five years ago and all the diversion signs have long since gone, the correct route now is to pop up to Lockton and cross the A170 further south and take the footpath East along Green Dale, meeting back up with our the route in Stain Dale.

Bridestones

Bridestones

From there it was a straightforward trip North up to the Bridestones for some lunch, sheltering from the wind before heading East to the edge of the forest and following that path past Newgate foot all the way to Saltergate car park, taking in the views over Hazelhead Moor to Blakey Topping and RAF Fylingdales in the middle distance.

Panda Cows

Up to the North End of Hole of Horcum along Old Wife’s Way before completing the High route circuit of the Hole of Horcum via Seavy Pond and Dundale Rigg back to Levisham and a round of coffees at the Horseshoe Inn, which had a couple of reasonable beers on tap as well. Amusingly, we got back at exactly the same time as the cyclists. Despite the amount of mud we’d accumulated on our boots from the first half of the circuit, they were definately wearing more of the countryside than we were.

Blakey Topping

Hole of Horcum

If you’d prefer somewhere easier to park, then you could start the route at Saltergate and continue Clockwise, taking in a pub lunch in Levisham or possibly the Fox and Rabbit on the main road, before carrying on up to the Bridestones.

A good day out despite the chill wind, but we definately felt each of the 10 miles at the end of it. Next time, I might try calibrating Viewranger to display the distance walked in units of mince pies burned off.

You can get the full details from my Everytrail trip:

Levisham and Bridestones

I’ve already described my basic fudge receipe, but this was my attempt to take it to the next level. Provided one likes ginger, of course.

I made a single batch of fudge and split it evenly between rum-soaked raisins and a fun mix of ginger.

Fudge Ingredients

I wanted the fresh pungency from ginger root, stem ginger to occasionally come across and bite into and, of course, some of the Rochester Dark Ginger for good measure. The fresh ginger needs to be grated, you can’t just chop it up like you would for a stir fry because you need just the juicy essence, grating it leaves behind all the woody fibres. I used four finely diced lumps of stem ginger, a good inch of root and about 50ml of the wine.

Grating ginger root

The biggest problem was the wine, it was liquid enough that it offset the setting point of the sugar when I stirred it into the mixture. In hindsight, Ishould have added it with the cream at the start and simmered it down, although that’s not much use when it’s split with the rum and raisin.

In the end, the only way I got my fudge loaf to set was to make use of the professional-quality, walk-inblast chiller for a few hours. When I did, it was very smooth and tricky to cut through, but was just chewy enough to be delicious in small pieces. At room temperature, it would have been lovely with three or four layers of chocolate round it. It was still very popular with family and friends though.

Using the walk-in blast chiller

Interestingly, it didn’t stay that way. Normally, my fudge gets eaten long before shelf life becomes an issue, but after two weeks, it had absorbed sufficient moisture from the air to make the sugar crystals swell up and it went from a smooth chew to a coarse crunch. I can start to see why people add emulsifiers to the basic mix.

Cakes of fudge

I also made up some pies, which are always tasty and surprisingly calorific. To satisfy as many as possible, I did a mix of puff and shortcrust pastry, with mincemeat and apple with ginger and cinnamon.

pie way to heaven?