Rhubarb Kuchen

Breakfast Baking.  Something I can rarely be bothered to do - I'd always rather plump for an extra half-hour in bed, and settle for a bowl of cereal.  But last weekend was different.  The weather was hot, really hot, and somehow as soon as I woke up and saw the sun shining outside, I couldn't stay in bed.  On Saturday morning we ate breakfast in the garden, enjoying the sunshine before it got too warm (yes, I know it's hard to believe, but I am still in England!), and this set me thinking that breakfast in the sun is a great occasion and should be celebrated.

Finding some slightly out-of-date packets of dried yeast, plus feeling guilty about the rhubarb that was languishing in the bottom of the fridge spurred me on to search through How to Be a Domestic Goddess, my favourite Nigella book...  I had a recollection of some kind of yeasted cake, or sweet bread, that used rhubarb - and there it was.

Kuchen is German for 'cake' but this is really a hybrid cake/bread recipe.  I did as Nigella suggested and made up the rich dough recipe the night before, leaving it in the fridge to rise slowly overnight.  I was a bit sceptical that this would work actually, but sure enough in the morning it had doubled in size.  I brought it out of the fridge, pressed it into the tin and left it to come up to room temperature while I made the topping.  The dough becomes easier to stretch as it warms up, so I didn't force it while it was fridge-cold.

I didn't have quite the required weight of rhubarb, so added some strawberries to make it up - rhubarb and strawberry are a great combination of flavours.

I also didn't want to make the crumble topping (just one step too far on a Sunday morning!) so sprinkled over some flaked almonds instead.

A mere hour or so after getting out of bed, this was baked and ready to eat.  The dough was browned and puffy, and the fruits had oozed their sugary juices over the kuchen and into the pan. 

 And perfect with a cup of coffee in the garden (pyjamas obligatory!).

The recipe, if you don't have the book, is as follows:

Rhubarb Crumble Kuchen (serves 8)

Dough:
350-400g strong white flour
½ teaspoon salt
50g caster sugar
3 ½g easy blend yeast (half a sachet), or 7g fresh yeast
2 large eggs
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
grated zest of ½ a lemon (I omitted this, with no ill effects)
good grating of fresh nutmeg
125ml milk, warmed
50g unsalted butter, softened


Topping:
1 large egg
1 tablespoon cream
grating of fresh nutmeg
350g trimmed rhubarb, finely chopped (I had just less than 300g rhubarb and made up the weight with strawberries, also finely chopped)
75g caster sugar (I used vanilla sugar)
¼ teaspoon allspice (I omitted this)


Crumble topping:
30g unsalted butter, cold and diced
50g self raising flour
1 tablespoon caster sugar
1 tablespoon demerara sugar

Put 350g of the flour in a bowl with the salt, sugar and yeast. beat the eggs and add them, with the vanilla, lemon zest and nutmeg, to the lukewarm milk. Stir the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients to make a medium soft dough, being prepared to add more flour as necessary. Nigella says she generally uses 400g but advises you start off with the smaller amount and just add extra as needed. Work in the soft butter and knead by hand for about 10 minutes (or using the dough-hook in the KitchenAid for about 5 minutes as I did).

When the dough is ready it will appear smoother and springier – it suddenly seems to 'plump up to glossy life' as Nigella puts it so eloquently.


Cover with a tea towel and leave until it doubles (1-1¼ hours) or leave to rise slowly in a cold place (the fridge is fine) overnight if you want to have this for breakfast (let the dough come back to room temperature before using it).

Punch down and stretch to line a swiss-roll tin (c30cm x 20cm) which you have lined with greaseproof paper. if you are struggling to get it stretch to fill the tin, leave it to rest for 10 minutes mid-stretch.  Leave to prove for 15-20 minutes while you preheat the oven to 200c.

When the dough is ready, beat the egg and cream together, grate in some nutmeg and brush the mixture over the dough. This gives a gloriously glossy topping to the Kuchen.

Stir the rhubarb together with the sugar and allspice but don’t do this until the last minute as the sugar makes the rhubarb release its water.  Sprinkle the rhubarb-sugar mix over the egg-washed dough.
To make the crumble topping (although flaked almonds are just fine!), rub the cold diced butter into the flour until becomes like sand and then stir in the sugars with a fork.  Top the fruit with the crumble.

Put in the oven for 15 minutes then turn down to 180c and cook for a further 15-20 minutes, until the dough is swelling and golden at the edges and cooked within.

Remove from the oven and leave in the tin for 15 minutes.  Slice and eat, still warm. In your pyjamas.

I can't wait to try this with other fruits!  I think it could work well with many other toppings.  I have a bag of foraged blackberries in the freezer, so I think that will be my next Kuchen, perhaps also with apple as Nigella suggests in this alternative Kuchen recipe.

Rhubarb

A New Adventure...

It's been 'on the cards' as they say for a while, but it's now finally confirmed.  We're off to Brunei this August, for two years, on Rob's next posting.

Before you rush to find an atlas, here's a map:

Plenty of travel opportunities, as you can see!  We'll be living near the capital city, Bandar Seri Begawan, and I will be teaching in one of the International Schools there.

(This of course is the largest mosque in BSB, not the aforementioned school!)

I have visited Thailand, but nowhere else in Asia, so can't wait to explore more and am excited to be able to experience living in a country so different to the UK.

I know that there are many things about England that I will miss, but I also know that we will go into this experience with an open mind... and an open mouth!  I can't wait to enjoy shopping for, cooking and eating Asian food on a regular basis.

I also can't wait to have visitors such as this in our garden:

With thanks to Paula, our neighbour-to-be, for the photo.

We're not off for a few months, but I am aware that the time will fly by.   I'm unsure as to how much foraging for food I'll be doing in Brunei, but I'm looking forward to posting about our experiences, foodie and otherwise.

Lardy Cake

I'm not sure that this is the most appetising name for a foodstuff.  But, it is what it claims - a 'cake' (or perhaps more properly a bread) made with lard.  And I'll not lie, it's made with lots of lard.  But strange as it may sound, the Lardy Cake is possibly the most wonderfully delicious baked treat EVER.  I urge you to seek one out.

Lardy Cakes originated in the pig-farming counties of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.  I guess they had to use all that lard for something.  When we lived in Wiltshire, on the edge of the New Forest, our local village bakery sold the most amazing Lardy Cakes - so amazing that they were locally rather famous and you had no chance of getting your hands on one if you turned up much after 9.30 on a Saturday morning.  However, it's a long time since we have sampled such a treat; indeed I had almost forgotten about their very existence... until we stopped in the small town of Burford on our way to a week's holiday in Shropshire after Easter.

I couldn't resist popping my head round the door of a lovely looking bakery on the High Street, and when I spotted a tray of spiralled, sticky, 'individual' Lardy Cakes, I couldn't resist going further and buying one.  And - oh my! - this was good.  I had never seen Lardy Cakes in this smaller size, or spiralled in such a way, but both of these things managed to increase the ratio of sticky-surface-area to soft doughy inner.  Which is a very good thing.

On my return home from Shropshire, I was inspired to try making a Lardy Cake myself.  I found many recipes online, but settled for this one, mainly because it used dried yeast as opposed to fresh, and I had some that needed using up.

The method is simple.  Make a basic bread dough, and let it prove before rolling it out and dotting it with butter, lard (of course), sugar and dried fruit (minus the mixed peel for me - yuk!).

A few folds, more dotting, more folds, more dotting, etc, etc, builds up a lovely loaf layered with sweet fruit and fat ready to melt into the bread.

Here's the finished loaf.  When I said that I had yeast that needed using up...  I think I was a little too late!  It had lost much of its raising-powers, so the Lardy Cake ended up quite flat.  It was also not quite sweet enough for my taste so we ended up sprinkling warmed slices of it with cinnamon sugar - a delicious plan.  The outer edges were however amazing.  It was almost as if they had been fried (which I suppose they had in a way) - a crispy contrast to the sweet bread inside.

I'm keen to try this again because, nice as it was, I think it could be better.  I'd love to experiment with a slightly different recipe, or perhaps adapt this one a little (better yeast, more sugar).  Watch this space!

Nettle Soup

When I tell people that I enjoy foraging for food, I am often asked if I have ever made Nettle Soup.  It seems to embody the very idea of free food from the countryside.  But the answer has always been no.  Last year I fully intended to make some, but left it too late - for the best results you need to gather the nettles when the leaves are young and tender - about now is great.

This year the unseasonably sunny weather kicked me into action, so Rob and I set off this afternoon, armed with gardening gloves, to forage for some nettles.

They're not exactly hard to find!  Once you start looking in any hedgerow or field boundary you soon find plenty - I think they're so common that I often don't even notice them.  We chose a patch that wasn't too close to any well-used footpaths (hoping to avoid nettles fertilised by dog-wee!) and got picking.

The gloves were, of course, invaluable.  Had I thought ahead I would have also worn boots but set off in sandals, only to find my ankle got stung.  But one sting from all those nettle-tops didn't seem too much of a sacrifice (although I had forgotten how much it hurts!)

When picking nettles, you need to pinch out the tops, so you end up collecting the 4 smallest leaves from each plant.  It's immensely satisfying, as foraging usually is, but this time with the added bonus of being able to feel that in some tiny way you're keeping the spread of these pesky plants in check!

We soon managed to gather the requisite half-carrier-bag-full needed, and rinsed them well in cold water (wearing washing-up gloves this time!).  They're really quite pretty leaves when you look closely at them - but it's those fine hairs that cause the stings.  Luckily boiling water neutralises them within seconds.

I found many recipes online, but ended up making up the soup using what I had, including a handful of the wild garlic leaves collected yesterday, making it a well-foraged soup!  This is what I did:

Nettle Soup

Chop one large onion and one large potato (unpeeled) and gently soften in a large pan (use olive oil or butter).

Add half a pan full of stock (I used chicken) and bring to the boil, simmering until the potatoes are tender.

Add the nettles (half a bag full) and a large handful of wild garlic (or saute a chopped clove of garlic with the onion and potato at the beginning of the process), stir, cover and bring back to the boil for 3 or 4 minutes.  The leaves will darken a little and wilt down, much as spinach does.

Blend the soup until smooth (I used a stick-blender), and stand back and admire the vibrant green colour!  Sample and season with salt and pepper as needed; I found that it needed quite a lot of both.

When I reheat it I will stir a little cream through each bowl just before serving, to make it a little more luxurious.  I have sampled some already of course...  the nettles don't have a strong flavour, it just tastes quite 'vegetabley' to me, but delicious all the same - and virtuously healthy too!

Whilst foraging, we were passed by a couple out on a walk who were intrigued by what we were doing.  I think foraging for food appears rather eccentric to those who don't do it..!  The woman said that she had once had Nettle Beer... could this be our next project?!

Wild Garlic Tips

For those of you who might be interested in sniffing out some wild garlic yourself, I have a few hints and tips.  I have found 3 patches of it in my local area.  All 3 are in deciduous woodland, and 2 of the 3 in places where bluebells are also found.

I have noticed that there seem to be 2 different varieties of wild garlic...   The one with long thin leaves that I blogged about recently:

And one with much wider leaves, which I think is possibly the more common variety:

Here's Rob collecting from the vast patch of them that we stumbled across on a walk yesterday.  From my nibblings, I think that the wider-leaved garlic has a stronger flavour...  Rob was certainly complaining about my garlic-breath for hours after I ate a mere half a leaf yesterday!

Both varieties have small white flowers, and the leaves begin to turn yellow and die back soon after the flowers have blossomed.  There's quite a short window of opportunity for gathering the leaves to eat.

We filled our sandwich box with them, and I have made another batch of pesto, as well as using them as an ingredient in a soup.

Here is a wider-angle view of the patch, to give you an idea of the kind of woodland in which you need to search:

In my experience you sometimes smell the leaves before you see them.  I did notice a few plants growing individually in the woods, but mostly I think the plant seems to grow close together with many others, creating these dense areas of garlicky leaves.

Happy Garlic-Hunting!

Wild Garlic Pesto

Winter has been a lean period for foraging - but one that has seen us enjoying the fruits of our labours.  For months now we have been eating homemade jams, apple chutney, hedgerow jelly, spiced damson sauce and chili jelly, to name but a few.  It's been great, but I've been keen to get out and find more wild food.
Last week I struck lucky.  We were returning from a walk and within 5 minutes' of home I suddenly smelt the unmistakable scent of wild garlic.  I first used this last year, and realised that the season is all-too-brief - the leaves quickly turn yellow, so need to be grabbed when fresh and green.  I raced home to get a bag, then came straight back out to gather some leaves.

Last year I had eaten them as part of a salad, and also stirred them through cooked pasta along with some homemade walnut pesto, but I wanted to try and make them a bit more of a feature in their own right this time.

I decided to turn them into a pesto.  Loosely following a recipe that I found in one of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's books, I blended the garlic leaves - 2 large handfuls - with about 50g of toasted pine-nuts and about the same amount of grated Parmesan.  I drizzled in EVOO to bring it all together, before seasoning with salt and pepper.

OK, it might look a little like alien-goo, but the garlicky smell wafting up from it was wonderful.  We ate it stirred through cooked pasta and topped with crispy bacon and shaved Parmesan.  Delicious.

I'm currently away on holiday (in Shropshire - about which more in another post) but I'm really hoping that that patch of wild garlic is still there when we return.  I'd like to forage further!

Easter Treats

I didn't do as much baking as I had hoped for Easter.  This was largely due to the fact that the school term didn't end until Maundy Thursday, so rather than the usual week-either-side-of-Easter holiday, we have the 2 weeks after Easter.  I'm not complaining of course - it's lovely now to have so much time after the Easter weekend - but it has meant less cake.  Oh well.

I've never got round to making my own Hot Cross Buns, but we have enjoyed plenty of bought ones.  Halved, hot from the toaster and slathered in butter...  sometimes with Marmite too.  Although everyone who've ever seen me spread Marmite (or even Bovril) on a Hot Cross Bun thinks I'm some kind of madwoman.  But it's nice, trust me!

The one thing I did manage to bake was a Simnel Cake.  I don't use a 'proper' Simnel Cake recipe, but instead make Nigella's Marzipan Fruit Cake from the recipe in How to be a Domestic Goddess.  Instead of the traditional layer of marzipan in the middle of the cake, this recipe calls for a block of marzipan to be cubed, then frozen overnight before being stirred into the uncooked cake mix.  This means that there are nuggets of marzipan throughout the cake - as well as the layer, plus 'apostles' (just 11 - Judas doesn't get one), I put on the top.

Looking at the finished cake I think I should have made the effort to make my own marzipan.   The pack I purchased, labelled 'Golden Marzipan' should perhaps have been renamed 'Scarily Vivid Yellow Marzipan'... although maybe that might not have made it a best-seller.   Our attempts to burnish the marzipan topping using our kitchen blow-torch nearly ended in disaster (Rob lost all the hairs on the back of one hand, and I consider myself lucky to still have my eyebrows...)  But, it's the taste that counts, no?  And this cake tastes good.

It's a very fruity cake, made with glace cherries, sultanas and, slightly unusually, dried pears.  These give the cake a wonderful fudgy graininess and help keep it moist, even when accidentally overcooked.

I think I left it in the oven for 10 minutes too long, but in my defence it was very hard to test its 'doneness' as inserting a skewer without hitting some gungy marzipan was impossible.  However, it was far from ruined as the marzipan and fruit kept it pleasantly squishy.

The recipe can be found here, on the Nibb'lous website.  I didn't change the recipe much, although I don't keep white rum in the house so ended up soaking the dried fruit in medium sherry, with a splash of rum flavouring and some extra orange-flower water (not, incidentally, an essential addition to the cake).

I hope you all had a very Happy Easter.