Week 21: Cappuccino and Walnut Cake

The book: Good Housekeeping Easy To Make Complete Cookbook

The recipe: p277, "Cappuccino and Walnut Cake"

Twenty-one weeks into this ridiculous project and finally something sweet! And an entire cake, no less! It's about time.

Now, I may be a hardened espresso-quaffer, but I'm not actually all that crazy about coffee cake (for, despite the fancy name, that's exactly what this is). Thankfully, this week also presented an excellent opportunity to cook for an audience of victims guinea pigs fellow parkrunners, as our local event at Hilly Fields celebrated its 200th run.

And if there's one thing parkrunners like, it's a bit of cake. Frankly, sometimes the prospect of baked goods is all that gets us out of bed on a Saturday morning and pushes us around the 5km course in the first place. So even in the knowledge that there would be plenty of competing cakesmiths (Hilly Fields on a parkrun anniversary day is a bit like Bake Off, only with more breathable neon clothing), this seemed like the ideal time to get my bake on.

The prep: Well, here's the thing: as far as I can remember, I haven't actually baked a cake since Home Economics lessons at middle school. As well as buying ingredients, then, this week's prep involves procuring a basic electric hand mixer from Argos, then embarking on a search for a pair of cake tins that aren't too wide, aren't too shallow, and (most pertinently) don't cost the best part of ten English quid each. Cue the mighty Poundstretcher, which comes to my rescue just as I'm about to bite an expensive bullet in BHS. Springform, seemingly sturdy and costing £1.99 apiece, you say? That will do nicely.

Ingredient-wise, I'm surprised at how much I have in stock already considering I never actually do the whole cake thing. The only new additions are a bottle of Camp Coffee for flavouring purposes, some walnuts (organic, don'tcha know - though only because the own-brand ones were sold out, obvi), a couple of tubs of mascarpone, and some white cooking chocolate. Those who know me will know it takes considerable effort for me to allow the horror that is white "chocolate" to cross the threshold of my kitchen - I really can't abide the stuff. But one must suffer for one's art, so cross the threshold it does.

Actually, there is another ingredient I need to buy, or at least I would if I were planning on using it. To quote the recipe: "Fresh unsprayed violets to decorate". AHAHAHAHAHA I'm sorry what now? Even if I knew where to source violets in central Lewisham, sprayed or otherwise, why would I want to scatter them over a perfectly good cake? In any case, since I'm making this not for beautiful, Bake Off-friendly presentation but to be divvied up into bite-size chunks and transported to the local park in Tupperware, it's ixnay on the iolet-vay.

Filth

The making: This is another one where the recipe is available online, so you can follow in my footsteps here if you wish.

Those otherwise reliable folks at Good Housekeeping have sneakily hidden a few cooking steps in the ingredient list (a reminder in the method would have been useful), so I make sure to melt some butter and toast a good wodge of the walnuts before doing anything else. Nice try, Good Housekeeping. Lucky I was paying attention.

To start, the cake tins are greased and lined, and the flour and baking powder are sifted in a bowl. Then it's time to wield my new piece of quality Argos kit, as four eggs and some caster sugar are whisked in a glass bowl over vaguely simmering water until "light, thick and fluffy". This, the recipe says, should take 3-4 minutes. And I know just how to pass the time!

By the time this musical war crime is over, the egg/sugar mix has become so airy it almost spills out over the rim of the bowl and all over the stovetop. (In't physics brilliant?) With disaster mercifully averted, the melted butter, Camp Coffee and chopped walnuts are folded into the mix, followed by the flour and baking powder. The general idea, as I understand it, is to keep things as light and fluffy as possible without knocking too much air out of the resulting batter - which is then poured into the tins and popped in the oven until it turns into lovely springy cake. Magic!

Making the icing involves melting the white "chocolate" (vom) and stirring it through the beaten mascarpone along with some more Camp Coffee. Two problems here: the resulting icing is really quite runny, and there's tons of it. Like, easily double the quantity needed to cover the cake. If it were thicker (e.g. if you refrigerated it for a couple of hours before use) then I suppose you could apply more of it to the cake, but it's quite rich and strong in flavour so I don't know if you'd really want to. As a cake-making novice, though, I'm happy to make sure any gaps in the icing coverage due to the aforementioned runniness are filled and basically leave it at that.

The recipe then describes a convoluted process whereby a mixture of blender-blitzed walnuts, sugar and cinnamon are supposed to be applied to the side of the cake by scattering them on greaseproof paper, then lifting the paper up to press them onto the side of the cake. In another "in't physics brilliant?" moment, you can probably guess what actually happens when you try to do this on a planet where gravity exists. Since I want more than just the bottom few centimetres of the cake to be decorated, I end up basically flinging the walnut crumbs at the side of the cake with a spoon in the hope that they'll stick, then giving up and scattering the rest over the top instead.

cep cep

Readers, the result is certainly not elegant. But it is a cake, and it looks fine once it's been sliced up and you can't see how haphazard the "decoration" once appeared. After all the stresses and strains of making the thing using (to me) largely unfamiliar techniques - or deciding not to use them, as the case may be - I'm calling that a qualified success.

The eating: I try a couple of offcuts myself the night before Saturday's parkrun, and I'm reasonably happy with the outcome. The cake is fairly moist, and while the icing is quite intense, the fact that I've ended up using it more sparsely than intended actually works in its favour. Violets or no violets, I feel reasonably confident that I won't end up poisoning any of my running friends, which - let's face it - is always a bonus.

And indeed, the cake meets with an enthusiastic enough response among the parkrun crowd, refused mainly by sensible people who don't like coffee cake (or nuts) and equally sensible people who know that eating cake immediately after doing a 5km run is unlikely to agree with them. Otherwise, though, it proves to be a decent enough addition to a typically well-stocked and well-frequented Bench o' Cake at our finish line:

Enormous thanks to the 235 finishers and 13 voluncheers who made #event200 such a special parkrun this morning. pic.twitter.com/3LNzUx2NmY

— Hilly Fields parkrun (@hillyfdsparkrun) May 28, 2016

...though obviously it's not a patch on Heather's lovingly iced chocolate Guinness cupcakes, because what is? She actually got to choose what recipe to make, though, and that's blatantly cheating.

One-word verdict: Stressful.

Week 20: Roast Pork

The book: How To Boil An Egg (Jan Arkless)

The recipe: p171, "Roast Pork"

It's the month of the descriptive recipe titles, isn't it? Following on from last week's epic "Vegetables For One", Jan Arkless and her How To Boil An Egg bless us with the similarly unromantic "Roast Pork".

In fairness, for all its intended simplicity, this book does contain some more interesting recipes involving the humble pig, from the rewarding (a promising-sounding rub for spare ribs) to the bizarre ("Pork In A Packet". Erm...).

Today, though, we land on the section entitled 'Sunday Lunch' Dishes and a simple method for preparing a pork roast. While essentially a glorified suggestion for how best to cook the meat in question, it comes under a dedicated recipe heading, covers a whole page of the book and contains various recommendations for cuts and accompaniments, so I'm taking that as a green light for some Random Kitchen action. If only as a welcome contrast to last week's plate of barely-microwaved veg. (Yes, it still hurts.)

The prep: After our first adventure with this book way back in Week 1, I'm naturally a little sceptical about just how basic this might end up being, but I suppose you can't go too far wrong with a decent slab of meat. And I don't really cook slabs of meat very often, so starting from the basics mightn't be such a bad idea.

Jan informs us that leg is "the leanest and most expensive" cut, while shoulder is "cheaper and just as tasty". Fortunately, a quick browse of the shelves at Sainsbury's reveals some exciting and relevant news: HALF-PRICE PORK!

 

So I think we'll splash out on the leg.

Jan informs her student audience that "pork is traditionally served with sage and onion stuffing and apple sauce". That can be arranged: the aforementioned supermarket does stuffing mix in two-person-household-sized packages nowadays, and I think we ought to have the leftovers of something suitably applelicious in the freezer...

The only other instruction on the prep front is "also serve it with roast potatoes and parsnips or other vegetables". Again, not a tough criterion to fulfil, particularly since we've been a bit lax in terms of using up the contents of the veg box this week. I decide to interpret "other vegetables" as "some carrots" because, well, because that's what's in the fridge. Radical, I know.

The making: No fancy business for Jan. The pork joint is rubbed with oil then sprinkled with salt, and into a hot oven it goes. It's about 90 minutes for this particular size of pig-chunk; some peeled, chopped, thyme-and-oil-tossed root vegetables join the tin with an hour to go, followed by the stuffing half an hour later, and that's about it.

For all I jest about the simplicity of How To Boil An Egg, it's actually useful for the novice chef to be told why things are the way they are: the tin needs to be coated with a bit of oil or fat because it stops the joint from sticking, the oven needs to be nice and hot so that the crackling is suitably crisp, you can cover the joint with foil once the crackling looks right so that it doesn't get too brown, and so on. This may be fundamental knowledge, but two thumbs up to Jan for covering all the bases.

 

Er, those aren't thumbs? Never mind, you get the idea.

Anyway, everything comes together nicely on schedule. Gravy is swiftly prepared (from granules, obvi, but with added meat juices), and our Sunday dinner is ready and raring to go.

The eating: With no actual seasoning other than salt, there's nothing particularly exciting about the meat (other than being HALF PRICE, which always tastes better), but it's cooked nicely and the crackling is suitably... crackly. Come on, it was always going to be a struggle to find anything particularly thrilling to write about "Roast Pork", wasn't it?

It even looks exactly like you'd expect, right down to the reassuring slop of the gravy.

The roasted potatoes, parsnips and carrots don't end up quite as crispy around the edges as usual, presumably because of being done in one big tray along with the meat rather than separately, but they boast the resulting fat-infused flavour, so it's a compromise worth making. Meanwhile, the much-maligned Apple Butter actually comes into its own here, with the flavour of cloves and cinnamon adding a touch of the exotic to a plate that could otherwise risk being a tad bland.

All in all, it's job done: a hearty meal has been enjoyed, I've come a step closer to conquering my irrational fear of (over)cooking a good joint of meat - though the pressure-lifter of knowing it was cut-price was probably just as important as Jan's simple instructions - and I'll know what to do to make things a bit more exciting next time. I'd certainly have been happy to make and eat this in my student days (hah! As if I'd have ever done anything that wasn't tinned vegetable curry or pasta with pesto).

One-word verdict: Satisfactory.

Week 19: Vegetables For One

The book: The Microwave Gourmet (Barbara Kafka)

The recipe: p277, "Vegetables For One"

Barbara Kafka is trying to ruin my life. It's the only possible explanation.

This week in Randomville, we make a regrettably swift return to The Microwave Gourmet, where any hopes of encountering something more tangible than Apple Butter are duly stomped on. Page 277 is the first page of a section entitled "Main Course Vegetables". As Babs herself puts it: "It isn't just vegetarians who from time to time relish making a meal out of vegetables." Hard to argue with that, right? And having just got back from a holiday where my diet consisted primarily of crisps, Cruzcampo Sin and Smash, the prospect of something fresh and healthy is a fairly enticing one.

What's more debatable is her definition of the word "meal".

I say that because this week's random pick is a dish called "Vegetables For One". Not even How To Boil An Egg would dare to come up with so demoralising a name. It conjures up visions of frozen ready meals placed on the Iceland checkout belt as, defeated in life, you try your hardest not to make eye contact with anyone around you.

Good start, then. On closer inspection, however, "Vegetables For One" turns out to be a culinary revelation, combining tasty produce with a unique... oh wait, no, it's just a load of vegetables microwaved for five minutes.

 

I'm not even kidding. The "recipe" (I use the word loosely) requires you to prepare and assemble assorted vegetables of your choice in a microwave-friendly dish, top them with assorted herbs of your choice, then zap them for five minutes on high. And that's basically it. Even the dots of butter are "optional".

And Barbara Kafka has the nerve to call this a main course. "Vegetables For One". Served with a garnish of salty, anguished tears.

*sigh* Fine. The random gods have spoken. Let's do this, I suppose.

The prep: The feng shui-like simplicity of "Vegetables For One" would obviously be compromised by anything as useful as a list of actual ingredients, so I'm left to interpret the "assorted vegetables" as I please. In her defence, Barbara does add a footnote about which vegetables are "slower-cooking" (carrots, green beans, red cabbage, broccoli florets, cauliflower florets, peas, mange-touts, cherry tomatoes) and which are "quick-cooking" (asparagus, red onions or spring onions, mushrooms, courgettes, red and green peppers). Not that that narrows it down much. We're talking about some very different flavours here.

Still, with our pretentious organic veg box delivery having arrived the same morning, I have no shortage of options, so I decide to go with some celery, red pepper, Swiss chard, carrots and mushrooms. Should be a tasty enough combination.

Similarly, Barbara offers very little guidance when it comes to the seasoning, satisfying herself with "2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh herbs, such as basil, chives, dill, parsley or tarragon". Again, those are not the same thing, Barbara. Using chives is going to give you a pretty different outcome to the one you'd get from a Scandinavian suffision of dill. I'm starting to think the author might not have my best interests at heart here. Regardless, I go with basil and parsley, mainly because they're among the few things Lewisham Sainsbury's hasn't run out of by the time I get there just before closing.

The making: The "trimmed, peeled and sliced" vegetables are arranged in a pie dish "with slower-cooking vegetables towards the outside". The chopped herbs are scattered across the top, salt and pepper are added and - because I'm feeling especially daring - the whole thing is garnished with the "optional" dots of unsalted butter.

The dish is then tightly wrapped in microwave cling film and cooked on full power for five minutes. On establishing that this hasn't really achieved much on the "cooking" front, I blast it for another two minutes. Then another two minutes. Then I give up. This is evidently how it's supposed to be, and who am I to argue?

Let's play a little game of spot the difference. Here's "Vegetables For One" before being cooked:

 
Here it is after being cooked:

And here it is, lovingly plated up:

Nope, me neither.

I had been naïvely wondering if the microwaving process would release some kind of magic, but it really is just some undercooked vegetables and herbs on a plate. Swimming in some watery butter.

I am fucking furious with you right now, Barbara.

The eating: Here's another thing I find particularly bizarre about this "recipe": there's no serving suggestion. At no point are we told that these underwhelming vegetables might go well with rice, or pasta, or even some crusty bread. It seems like we're just expected to eat them as is. So I do. Where this cookbook is concerned, I'm determined to take things as literally as possible, because it deserves nothing more.

Quoth Babs: "There is no simpler way to satisfy a craving for a dish of crunchy, assorted fresh vegetables, with absolutely no work involved."

Well, you could try not microwaving them in the first place, for all the difference it makes. And of course "Vegetables For One" is simple, because this isn't even a recipe.  

IT'S JUST SOME BUTTERED, SLIGHTLY SOFTENED VEGETABLES ON A PLATE. 

I mean, it's quite nice to eat, because the vegetables were nice in the first place, and I suppose it's weirdly reassuring to know that I can use the microwave to quickly make an inferior version of a side dish masquerading as a main course. But really, why is this even a thing? Barbara might as well have written "if you have any vegetables, blast them for about five minutes on full power then see if they're done or not". Even with the most generous of interpretations, this is a cooking tip, not a recipe. I am utterly bemused.

The front cover of my edition of The Microwave Gourmet features a quote from Jane Grigson describing it as "an extraordinary, comprehensive book". I'm only now starting to realise that "extraordinary" doesn't have to be a compliment.

One-word verdict: Vegetables...?

Week 18: Mozzarella & Parma Ham Wrapped Chicken with Roasted Tomatoes

The book: My patterned recipe folder

The recipe: no. 8, "Mozzarella & Parma Ham Wrapped Chicken with Roasted Tomatoes" (Bitchbuzz)

These are my trusty recipe folders.

They are home to the multitude of recipes I've printed out from the internet, been given by other people, snipped out of magazines and newspapers, and so on.

Specifically, the green one contains recipes from friends (because green is a friendly colour!), the red one contains curry recipes (because red is a hot colour!), and the patterned one contains everything else (because that was the other folder in the set of three from WHSmith!).

Despite not being actual cookbooks, I thought they deserved to be part of the Random Kitchen project all the same. While they do house quite a lot of things I've cooked before (I wouldn't keep a recipe without being fundamentally interested in it, after all), there are still plenty of recipes that remain thoroughly unexplored - "this looks interesting, let's print it out then forget about it for seven years!" - and plenty of old favourites that I haven't dug out for a while.

The latter category is where we end up today. I've made this one before (even for visitors). It's hardly reinventing the wheel - anyone can wrap a bit of meat in some other meat and stick it in the oven - but it's a really nice simple dinner and one that, frankly, we could use after last week's Spiced Cucumber debacle, so...

The prep: There's very little I actually have in stock for this one, so a supermarket sweep is required for some chicken, mozzarella, basil, prosciutto and cherry tomatoes.

I'm even out of olive oil, so actually pretty much the only thing I don't have to buy for this recipe is the seasoning. Totes worth the outlay though.

The making: This is the point where I normally talk in vague terms without referencing specific quantities or quoting the ingredients and method directly, because copyright and stuff. But the beauty of recipes from the internet is... they're from the internet. Which means I can share the full joy with you here. Let's celebrate!

"This is supposed to be some kind of prize...?"

This week's recipe, then, can be found right here. Yes, it really is from a website called Bitchbuzz (now defunct, apparently).

As you can see, two chicken breasts are essentially used as the meaty bread of a mozzarella sandwich. (Mmmm, meaty bread.) The mozzarella-stuffed chicken is then wrapped in basil-stuffed slices of Parma ham (or proscuitto, or whatever you can get really) and perched atop a bed of sliced courgette and not-sliced cherry tomatoes.

Lashings of olive oil plus some garlic, salt and pepper are added to proceedings, et voilà:

It really is that straightforward. Recipe ain't lying when it talks about "minimal effort". Into the oven it goes, and 35 minutes later we have an easy evening meal on our hands. Hurrah! But what about the end result?

The eating: Well, obviously it's ace. It's chicken, mozzarella, basil, Parma ham, oil and lovely fresh-tasting veg - what's not to like? The roasting process really brings out the best in the courgettes and tomatoes, and the wrapper o' meat means the chicken is lovely and succulent too.

As you can see, the recipe recommends serving this with buttered new potatoes. This would very much be an error. Oil, chicken and the veg mean there's lots of lovely juices swimming around the bottom of the roasting tin, so mashed potato is clearly the only way to go.

Oh, and a slice or two of Hovis to mop up the leftover juices once we're done, because we're northern.

So there you have it. On the one hand, this week's Random Kitchen choice has confirmed something I'd long suspected from my years of Eurovision blogging, namely that it's a lot harder to write interestingly about positive experiences than proper actual hilarious disasters. On the other hand, it's nice to actually get to eat some proper food for a change.

One-word verdict: Smashing.

Week 17: Spiced Cucumber

The book: Riverford Farm Cook Book

The recipe: p153, "Spiced Cucumber"

Being middle-class, reasonably adventurous and immeasurably lazy, I'd been meaning to sign up for one of those organic veg box schemes for a while, so when a charming Lucía Pérez lookalike turned up on my doorstep and extolled the virtues of Riverford to me, I was easily persuaded. It's been a good investment - yes, it's a bit wanky and more expensive than supermarket produce, but it's also better (I never realised that courgettes could actually taste of something), it makes us eat more healthily, and it's led to some entertaining moments of "what actually is this vegetable and what am I supposed to do with it?".

That's where the Riverford Farm Cook Book, a "free" gift with my subscription, comes in. It's packed with veggie recipes - some of which I've even used - but also plenty of photos, essays on food growing and general explanations of how to prepare and use the various fruit and veg that Riverford produces on its various farms in the UK and (whisper it quietly) further afield. Which goes some way to explaining why the random number generator had such trouble settling on something actually usable this week. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: *clicks "Generate" button*
Sam: That's just a picture of some blackberries.
Me: *clicks "Generate" button*
Sam: That's just a description of what Jerusalem artichokes are.
Me: *clicks "Generate" button*
Sam: That's just a courgette.
Me: *clicks "Generate" button*
Sam: That's just a description of some herbs.
Me: *clicks "Generate" button*
Sam: That's just a list of ideas of things to do with Brussels sprouts.

...and so on. Anyway, we got to a page with an actual recipe in the end, though (spoiler alert) I'd soon be wishing we hadn't. "Spiced Cucumber" may not be the most obvious combination of words, but it at least sounded like it could be ploughing the same furrow as the Chinese "salad" from a couple of months back. Sadly, I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying that it... wasn't.

The prep: With a bountiful supply of rice vinegar, caster sugar, sesame oil, groundnut oil, dried red chillies and salt in my cupboards (not a euphemism) (or if so, a remarkably contrived one), all I have to buy is the cucumbers. The recipe calls for "3 small or 2 large"; Lewisham Market can give me "5 stonking for £1". Sorted.

The making: The cucumbers are cut lengthways into quarters, deseeded, then sliced into 2cm pieces before being covered with no less than four teaspoons of salt.

Unlike in many of Madhur's recipes, though, it does serve a purpose: the bowl is left to stand for several hours, during which time the salt draws much of the water out of the cucumber. The magic of nature, there.

Salty water duly discarded, the cucumber is combined with a generous lug of Chinese rice vinegar and some caster sugar. Next, sesame oil and oil oil is heated in a small saucepan and several chopped and deseeded dried red chillies are sizzled for the briefest of moments. The recipe warns me to take care or else they might burn; they do get a bit blacker than they ought to, but not to the extent that I need to have a second go. I'm not quite sure why we're using dried chillies, though, when deseeding fresh ones is much easier and the damn things would be far less likely to burn instantly on contact with hot oil. Oh well.

Anyway, the chilli-infused oil is poured over the cucumber/vinegar/sugar mix and the whole thing is stirred together to attractive effect:

This goldfish bowl of yums is then left to stand "for at least 6 hours or overnight in the fridge". I go for the latter, if only because this has taken hours already and I'm not staying up until the middle of the night just to eat some marinated cucumber.

The eating: OK, let's get one thing straight here: the recipe does mention that "the longer you leave it the hotter the chilli flavour becomes". That's all well and good. But I haven't even used the maximum number of "according to taste" chillies here, and the thing is still prohibitively hot. The problem is that's all it tastes of. Cucumber and hot. There's a hint of interesting sweetness from the sesame oil, but otherwise it's just the gloopy viscosity of one of the world's less interesting vegetables paired with the flat dullness of dried chilli, and I don't see how less time in the fridge (or less chilli) could improve it in any way.

I give it a second chance a few minutes later, just in case my initial impression was a little hasty and my tastebuds needed time to get used to the concept, but no: still awful.

Aaaaand into the bin it goes.

They know what's what.

By this point, you might be wondering what the intent behind a dish like this could possibly be. The suggestion in the Riverford book proudly reads thus: "Serve as an accompaniment, or as a canapé with cocktail sticks for spearing the pieces." Seriously. If you served me this as a canapé, I'd turn on my heel and leave immediately. After spearing you in the eye with a cocktail stick. And burning your house down, just to be on the safe side.

I cannot stress how much this recipe upsets me. It truly is a terrible, terrible creation.

One-word verdict: Apocalyptic.