Banana Bread

This is the cake that I probably make more often than any other. Not because I am particularly obsessed with it, but because I am fussy about how I eat my bananas. I will only eat them when they are yellow with a slightly green tinge at the ends. I know that's technically unripe, but that's the way I like them.

So when the bananas have passed that point, even if they have only one brown spot on them, I don't like them. Hence, this recipe. Its the perfect way of using up bananas, and it's really easy to eat. It's great at any time of the day because it's not ridiculously sweet or gooey, but just nice.

Ingredients

100g sultanas

175g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
125g unsalted butter, melted
150g sugar
2 large eggs
Up to 4 small, very ripe bananas (about 300g weighed without skin), mashed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

23 x 13 x 7cm loaf tin, buttered and floured or with a paper insert

Serving Size : Makes 8–10 slices
 
Preheat the oven to 170ºC/gas mark 3. Put the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt in a medium-sized bowl and, using your hands or a wooden spoon, combine well.
 
In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar and beat until blended. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then the mashed bananas.
 
Then, with your wooden spoon, stir in the sultanas and vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture, a third at a time, stirring well after each bit. Scrape into the loaf tin and bake in the middle of the oven for 1–11/4 hours.
 
When it’s ready, an inserted toothpick or fine skewer should come out clean. Leave in the tin on a rack to cool, and eat thickly or thinly sliced, as you prefer.
 
I have adapted this from a Nigella recipe, she soaks the sultanas in rum and adds walnuts. I prefer a simpler cake from time to time (plus I don't like walnuts).
 

Lemon Marscapone Cake

Its not often that I bake a cake of my own choosing. More often, I am baking for someone else, or to use up what we have in the house. But this week I am leaving my workplace of 5 years, and someone suggested I make a cake to follow the special lunch some of my colleagues are putting on for me. So this was my choice.

It is, as are most of my cakes, adapted from a Nigella recipe. I haven't tasted it yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Lemon Marscapone Cake

225g butter

225g golden caster sugar

225g plain flour

4 eggs

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

1 tsp baking powder

200g marscapone cheese

100g good quality lemon curd

Blitz all the ingredients in a food processor, and divide between 2 20cm cake tins. Bake at 180C for about 20 minutes, until the cakes are coming away from the sides of the tin.

Stand the cakes on a wire rack to cool.

When the cakes are cool, place one cake on a plate. Beat the marscapone cheese in a bowl so that it is smooth, and spread over the cake. Top with the lemon curd, and place the second cake on top. Sprinkle with golden caster sugar.

By the way, Tim completed the London Marathon in 4 hours, 28 minutes. I'm very proud of him!

Carb Loading

Tim is running the London Marathon on Sunday, so this week he (and therefore I) am carb loading.

Carb loading is a way of boosting endurance when exercising for longer than two hours. As Tim will be running for at least 4 hours, he thought it would be useful.

There are conflicting views about carb loading. This article gives the science behind it: basically, the body can only store a limited amount of carbohydrate, so carbohydrate loading trains the body to store the carbohydrate in the muscles and liver.

In the first part of the week, carbs are limited, and protein is high. As the week progresses, more and more of the meals are made up of carbohydrates, up to 75% in the final three days before the race. This is supposed to give optimum performance.

So far, we've had steak, chicken and tonight its salmon. I've got to say I'm not disappointed. I think the best part of it is that the foods that are recommended are really healthy, and the psychological effects are huge - even though the actual science behind carb loading is debated, Tim knows he is giving his body the best possible chance to do well.

Garden Plans

I know this is a cooking blog, but gardening and food are going so much more hand in hand in our society, and I have caught the gardening bug.

This being the first year I have had a proper garden of my own (I did grow courgettes last year in a pot on my front doorstep), and I've been sowing seeds like they are going out of fashion. Few have germinated so far, but I keep checking!

So far,  my garden contains:

• Mixed salad leaves
• Rocket
• Broad Beans
• Spring Onions
• Spinach
• Purple carrots

I'd like to grow things that you can't get easily in the supermarket, or that are really expensive in the supermarket - fresh peas, swiss chard, sugar snap peas and so on.

I've had some success with flowers this year - I grew some sweet peas from seed that came free with Gardener's World magazine, and they all germinated. This week, I've hardened them off and planted them outside - I hope they survive. A rose I bought a couple of weeks ago is flourishing.

This marks a real change for me - I've always been interested in food, and always had a sense of pride in what I cook. But this year, I've started planning trips to the garden centre, reading gardening books and even watching Gardener's World. I just hope some of my seeds grow.

Easter Biscuits

I have to credit this recipe to my mum. She used to make these biscuits every single year, and they were legendary. Then, when I moved out, I took the recipe with me. When I first met Tim, he couldn't believe they had to be restricted to Easter time, but they are now starting to become legendary in our home.

Oil of Cassia is a traditional ingredient in Easter Biscuits, which apparantly come from the West Country, where I'm from. It's really difficult to get hold of, mine is from The County Stores in Taunton, but apparantly you can also try chemists or the internet.

So, with all credit going to my mum, here is the recipe. Apologies for the metric measurements!

6oz Butter
6oz Castor Sugar
10 drops of Oil of Cassia
1 Egg
10oz Self Raising Flour
2 oz Custard Powder
4oz Currants

Preheat oven to 180C and line at least two baking trays with baking parchment.

Cream together the butter and sugar with the Oil of Cassia. Work in the egg, then fold in the sieved flour and custard powder. The mixture will become very stiff and you may need to bring it together with your hands.

Add the currants and knead together.

Roll out to 5mm thick. Using a round cutter, cut out 8cm rounds.

Bake in oven for about 8-10 minutes - you barely want them to colour, so keep an eye on them!

Sprinkle with more caster sugar when you take them out of the oven. Leave for 3-5 minutes for them to firm up, then transfer to a wire rack.

You will probably get about 25 biscuits from this mixture.

Lemon Almond Cake

Almond-based cakes are great for us because they last so much longer than a normal sponge cake. I made this three days ago and it will be good for the rest of the week. A sponge cake just wouldn't do that.

I made this on a bit of a baking frenzy, as I was so pleased to have the oven back, so almost every meal this week has involved use of the oven, and I have baked most days. That's why teachers need such long holidays!

Lemon and Almond Cake (based on a recipe by Nigel Slater)

200g butter
200g demerara sugar
90g plain flour
90g ground almonds
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 lemon
4 large eggs

Line a loaf tin with baking parchment. Preheat the oven to 160C degrees.

Cream the butter with the demerara sugar. It takes a bit longer than with caster sugar, but demerara gives a more complex sweetness to the cake.
Mix together the flour, ground almonds and baking powder. Zest the lemon, and add the zest to the flour mixture.
Beat the eggs and add them to the butter and sugar. Fold in the flour with a metal spoon (you need to use a metal spoon as otherwise it will knock the air out).

Scrape the mixture into the tin and then bake for about 45 minutes. Sprinkle with demarara sugar when you take it out of the oven, and leave the cake in the tin to cool.

Kringel

Finally, I can bake again! After over 2 months, our oven has been fixed, and although the thermostat is still very dodgy (the oven is generally 50 degrees above what it should be) I have been able to indulge in my baking passion once more.

Having no oven has meant that I've missed the last two Fresh from the Oven challenges. This is the one for March, and seeing as though the oven was only fixed yesterday, I thought I'd blog about it quickly now.

Kringel is an Estonian bread, and can be made sweet (with chocolate) or savoury (with cheese). Due to my previous experiences with bread and chocolate (see this post), I went for the cheese option.

The dough was fine, no problems at all there, although I did just use one whole egg instead of two egg yolks - mostly because I didn't want the egg whites hanging around. The problem, as you will see from the photo, comes from the shaping. This is what it should look like:

And now for my attempt (remember I went for cheese, not chocolate):

Hmm. Not what was intended. Actually, I had to put it back in the oven after this photo was taken because it wasn't quite cooked!

The bread was quite tasty, and I definitely prefer cheese bread to chocolate bread... Choosing savoury over sweet is a very rare occurance!

Kringel

Ingredients (Makes 1 Loaf)

Dough
•40g fresh yeast
•1tbsp sugar
•250ml milk, lukewarm
•2 egg yolks
•50g butter, melted
•600-700g flour

Filing

•100g butter, softened
•3 handfuls of raisins
•10 tsp sugar

Topping

•150g dark chocolate (at least 50% cocoa solids)
•75g butter


Method:

Mix the yeast and sugar in a bowl. Add the lukewarm milk and egg yolks, then mix in the flour and melted butter and knead well. Shape the dough into a ball, cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave to rise in a warm place for 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 200°c/Gas 6. Dust your work surface with flour. Take the dough out of the bow, knock it back and roll out to a thickness of 1cm. Spread the softened butter evenly over the rolled sheet of pastry, then sprinkle with raisins and finally sugar.

Roll up the dough like a swiss roll and cut it in half with a sharp knife. Starting from the uncut end, plait the dough, lifting each half over the other in turn. Finally, shape the plaited bread into a B shape and transfer to a buttered baking tray. Bake for about 25 minutes or until golden.
In the meantime, prepare the chocolate topping by melting the chocolate and butter in a bowl over boiling water. Once out of the oven, let the bread cool down a bit, place on a serving plate and drizzle with chocolate sauce.
Cheese Kringel
To make a savoury version, leave out the raisins and sugar and sprinkle the Kringel with grated cheddar instead. Add more grated cheese on top instead of the chocolate sauce.