Strawberries!

This time last year, we had a bit of a problem with cherries - our cherry tree was massively productive, we didn't have a freezer and we couldn't even give them away because everyone else in the village had the same problem.

This year, we had a very hard winter and it froze too late for the cherry trees to be happy. Our tree has literally (and I use the word in the full knowledge of its meaning) no cherries on it (well, there were two, but something ate them before they had time to ripen). The neighbours are having the same problem.

The strawberries, however... now that's a different story! We inherited a fairly large strawberry patch when we bought the house, and, despite the slugs' best efforts, we've had 4.7 kilos (just over 10 pounds) of strawberries in five days.

So, what are we doing with all these strawberries?

This should give you an idea... :-)

Cake Thursday: Walnut

Today's Cake Thursday cake (well, it wouldn't be a Cake Thursday lasagne, now, would it?) was walnut, as you may have guessed from the title, with coffee icing, which you probably didn't. It was, I think, one of the best yet, so I'm going to post the recipe (as ever, approximative and haphazard, and if your kitchen's not a mess by the end of it, you're doing it wrong).


Ingredients


6oz (150g) Brown flour. If you don't have any in, it's not worth making a special effort to get it. Self raising flour is fine, just omit the baking powder.
3tsp (c.à.c.) baking powder 
6oz (I'm not going to keep writing 150g each time, I'm sure you can work that out for yourselves) margarine
4oz (100g) brown sugar
2 good-sized spoonfuls honey. I think a good-sized spoonful is probably a heaped dessert spoon. If you dip the spoon in boiling water first, the honey won't stick, but then you won't be able to lick the spoon afterwards. Hmmm. Tricky one.
3 eggs from happy chickens. Battery-farmed eggs just don't make good cake. Honest. They also hatch into Duracell bunnies if you leave them long enough.
6oz walnuts. Bashed up is fine. If you have walnut halves, bash about 4oz of them up into smaller bits.


Stick everything except the walnuts in a Big Mixing Bowl (R)- every home should have one! and give it to someone else to mix mix well with a wooden spoon or similar. Preheat oven to Gas 6 or Standard Oven Cake Making Temperature about now. Mix in 2/3 of the walnuts. I made mine in a standard loaf tin, but if you want to make it as a layer cake (yay! twice as much icing!), it will also fit nicely into two 9" Victoria sandwich tins. Stick cake in oven. Wait for oven to cook cake (yes, it does it for you! Now isn't that kind?). This make take anywhere between 20 and 45 mins, depending on the temperament (no, not temperature) of your oven and the size of the tins you used. Generally, thinner cakes will cook quicker. Basic physics, yes?


Once the cake(s) is(are- catering for all eventualities here) cooked, leave it/them/him/her to cool for at least an hour. Infuriating though this is, the icing will melt if you don't wait. Talking of which...


Icing ingredients


3oz (75g) butter. Take this out of the fridge while the cake is cooling to soften up a bit.
6oz (can you remember how much that is in grammes? I hope so...) icing sugar
2 dessert spoons very strong coffee. Like, REALLY strong. Undrinkably strong.
2 digestive or other relatively plain biscuits

Mush the butter up until it's soft and creamy. Don't melt it or the results will be disgusting. Stir in icing sugar, then add the coffee one spoonful at a time- keep an eye on the consistency, if you add too much liquid the icing will be too runny.


Put icing on cake, or on both layers if you're making a layer cake. This recipe will make a bit too much icing for a loaf cake. This is where the biscuits come in. Smear remaining icing on biscuits, sandwich together and eat. Om nom.


Press the remaining walnuts into the icing while it's still soft. This cake will be happiest in the fridge, especially in summer, because of the butter in the icing.


Happy baking!

P.s. New font size- better/worse/indifferent?

It's all relative

Hellyloes! Yes, I am still alive and functional. Just about.

I thought my life was relatively normal (note the "relative" there, it's important). And then, last Tuesday night, I found myself making chlamydomonas cupcakes. (I was going to put "Chlamydomonas" as the title of this post, but I decided it sounded a bit too much like an STD).

Chlamydomonas, for those of you who are wondering (if you're not, feel free to scroll down to the next paragraph) is a genus of algae, a member of the Volvocales order (algae which have their headlights on even in the daytime?) which Ze Boy has been studying for the last few months. It was his last day at the lab, so I made him cakes to take.

This is a chlamydomonas:

 

From http://plantphys.info/plant_biology/labaids/chlorophyta.shtml- 

credit where credit's due, I do not have the necessary algae-photography skills

Note the flagella (those things that look like antennae- it uses them for swimming) and the big round eye-spot in the middle.

This is a chlamydomonas cake...

It looks so unhappy, poor thing, like a chlamydomonas out of water

...and a whole colony of them!

 

Well, I say a whole colony, but I actually only made 16. A real colony would have about 3000 of them, but that would be one heck of a lot of cake.


Ze Boy and I then proceded to run round the kitchen pretending to swim with our flagella (ummm...the leftover liquorice bootlaces) while the cakes looked on in befuddlement.

And they're letting us get married?

Nutella Cakes, The Recipe

...Because I feel it's only right to share this one with the world.

As per usual, this is a Catherine-style recipe, i.e. relatively haphazard and fairly open to interpretation, but I'll try and be fairly precise!


Ingredients

3oz (75g) self raising flour (ou 75g de farine normale et un peu plus de levure chimique)

1oz (25g) ground hazelnuts (optional and fairly expensive, can be replaced by same quantity of flour)

2oz (50g) cocoa powder

3 eggs (medium? large? I don't think it actually matters)

6oz (150g) Marjoriiiiiiiiie! Erm, margarine, I mean, or butter

6oz (150g) sugar (white, brown, whatever). If you have treacle to hand, replace 1oz of the sugar with a tbsp of treacle. If not, don't worry about it.

3tsp baking powder, or 2tsp if you replaced the hazelnuts with flour


Stick all ingredients in a Great Big Bowl and whack the heck out of it with a wooden spoon (if you're feeling in need of exercise) or an electric whisk (if you're lazy like me).

This will fill about 12 small muffin cases, less big ones, more smaller ones (logique, quoi)

Medium ones will take about 20 mins at GM6, 180°, or whatever your oven thinks is the appropriate temperature for cooking cakes.

Wait for them to cool off a bit, then make the topping:

Put three tbsp of nutella in a bowl and then one in your mouth (this way round, please, the other way isn't particularly hygienic). Add 1 tbsp boiling water and 2 tbsp icing sugar. Mix well. Adjust quantities of icing sugar and/or water until it feels like thick icing. Spread on cakes.

Done!

There would be pictures, but my camera appears to have died. EIther that, or my 99p-for-four batteries weren't that much of a bargain. Come to think of it, it's probably the latter.

Fairy Tale of the Kitchen

Once upon a time, there was an evil jellybabivorous hedgehog. He (for it was indeed a he- the female of the species prefers jellytots, the older siblings of the jelly babies) roamed the Frozen North committing heinous crimes of gelloinfanticide. But, one bright and sunny afternoon (why does it always have to be dark and stormy? There will be no pathetic fallacy here) the beast met his match...
















The valorous, chivalrous, and otherwise greatly respected knight Zog slew the beast, moved by the cries for help of a jelly damsel in distress (yeah, she's the pink one. How did you guess?). The damsel, as damsels are wont to do (wonton damsels, at least) rewarded her rescuer with a kiss. In doing so, further woe befell her as she fell (lots of falling!) foul of the knight Zog's betrothed. Where hedgehog failed, girl succeeded. The jelly damsel is no more.

HA.

The knight Zog, whilst pretending to be chivalrous, in fact only slew the beast because it was on his jelly-baby hunting territory.

Jelly babies were hurt in the making of this blog post. So was the hedgehog.