Christmas Brownies

Just over a year ago, I made a large batch of chocolate and sour cherry mincemeat. With it, I made normal mince pies and these mincemeat Eccles cakes. However the sheer quantity I made meant I still had two big jars left this year. It's not a big deal, as it keeps, but I do want to get through it so I can try something new, although that probably won't be till Christmas 2016 now!

I've thought about making brownies with mincemeat before, hadn't got around to it until yesterday. I thought they were really good, and you could use your own homemade or shop bought mincemeat- no need to make the chocolate and sour cherry one. I do like the cherries with the chocolate though.

There were a few changes I made from the basic brownie recipe I use. Because the mincemeat is sweet, I reduced the sugar down to a mere half kilo. I also used the juice of half a large orange in the brownie mix. Possibly because of the mincemeat, I found this took longer to cook than normal, just over an hour, and I had to cover them with foil mid-bake t stop them from getting too dark. Finally, I wouldn't usually bother, but as these are Christmas brownies, I gave them a  snowy dusting of icing sugar.

These would be nice for a pudding, especially if slightly warm- I would serve them with some lightly whipped cream to which I had added a slug of Cointreau or Grand Marnier.

Ingredients
200 grams butter
200 grams plain chocolate
500 grams caster sugar
4 eggs, large
250 grams plain flour
4 tablespoons cocoa
350g mincemeat


Method
Preheat oven to 180C, Gas 4
Prepare a small rectangular roasting tin or oven proof dish approximately 8 x 12" (20x30cm). Melt the butter and chocolate over a pan of simmering water. Cool slightly. Stir in the sugar and juice from the cherry jar.Add the eggs, one at a time, stirring until well blended each time.
Add the flour and cocoa and beat for about 1 minute, until smooth. Fold in the cherries. Pour into prepared tin, and bake for about 1 hour, covering with foil if it starts to look too dark. The mixture needs to be just cooked, so start testing with a cocktail stick at about 40 minutes - it should have moist crumbs, but not wet batter, still clinging to it.
Cool in tin until cool enough to handle, then turn out and leave until completely cold before cutting into squares.

Weeping Tiger (Suea Rong Hai)

Weeping Tiger is one of my favourite things to order at a Thai restaurant, but I recently found that it is very simple to prepare at home. It is just steak, marinated (what it is marinaded in seems to vary from recipe to recipe), grilled, sliced and served with jaew, a hot and sour dipping sauce.

Why the name? I couldn't find a clear answer, there are various suggestions for the name's origins- one is that the sauce is so hot it made the tiger cry, another is that it used to be made with eat so tough even a tiger couldn't chew it- hence the tears. It certainly doesn't seem to be made with tough meat now- most recipes suggest sirloin or rib eye.

As I said, it is a very simple recipe. The one bit that might seem a bit odd is making the toasted ground rice to go in the dipping sauce, but it isn't hard- just toast some uncooked jasmine rice in a dry frying pan over a low heat until golden, then grind to a powder. It keeps, so you could make enough for several batches of jaew. Which is certainly now a bad idea, jaew is really good with prawns and chicken too.


The recipe I used came from Serious Eats. I didn't cook this over coals, as the recipe suggested, I used my trusty cast-iron griddle pan.

You can find the recipe on the link above, but the sauce and steak recipe are on separate pages, which makes it a bit tricky to read- so I have copied the two parts of the recipe here, for ease.

For the steak:

• 4 rib eye or New York strip steaks, about 1 1/2-inches thick (about 12 ounces each)
• 2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon light or dark brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon plain vegetable oil

For the sauce (jaew)

• 1/2 cup fresh juice from 6 to 10 limes
• 1/2 cup Thai fish sauce
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons finely-chopped fresh cilantro leaves
• 2 tablespoons finely-chopped green onions
• Raw jasmine rice, to make 1 1/2 tablespoons toasted rice powder (recipe below) I used about half a cup raw rice, which made more than needed-but it keeps.
• 1 tablespoon dried red pepper powder- I ground up some dried birds eye chillies to make this.
• 2 plum tomatoes

Mix together the soy sauce, oyster sauce, brown sugar, and vegetable oil in a medium mixing bowl. Coat the steaks with the soy sauce mixture and let them marinate while you work on the dipping sauce.

To make the toasted rice powder, toast the raw rice in a dry frying pan over a low heat until the rice is golden. It's best to go slowly with this, so it cooks evenly and doesn't burn. Grind in a pestle and mortar to a powder.
Peel, deseed and finely chop the tomatoes, and put in a bowl. Mix with the rest of the jaew ingredient.

Grill the steaks, until desired doneness is reached. Remove from the heat and let rest for 5 minutes.

Cut the steaks into 1/4-inch slices and serve with the dipping sauce.

Kaiserschmarrn

Kaiserschmarrn, or as it translates, Emperor’s mess, is an ideal dish to make if, like me, presentation isn't your strong point. You make a thick pancake, tear it up, and re-fry the pieces. So there is no problem if you break it when you flip it, because you are tearing it up anyway.

This was the first time I have had or made Kaiserschmarrn, so I don't know if this was the best recipe I could have picked. Having looked at a few recipes, I noticed many people commenting recommended that the egg whites should be whisked to make the batter lighter, so the recipe I went for was this one from the Bavarian kitchen. As I said, I don't have anything to compare it to, but I liked the result.

The recipe from the Bavarian kitchen served it with a blueberry sauce, but for my first taste of Kaiserschmarrn I wanted to try it with the more traditional accompaniment of Zwetschkenröster, a plum compote. It was actually hard to find a recipe in English, so one of my friends translated a German recipe for me. This was the recipe I used, but to give it a brief translation :

Take 1 kilo of plums, and remove the stones. Leave the small ones whole, and quarter any large ones (mine were all of average size, so I halved most of them). Put 150g of sugar in a saucepan, and heat to turn it into caramel. Do not stir or agitate the pan, and don't let the caramel burn. Add the plums and a cinnamon stick. Some of the caramel will solidify again- don't worry, cook on a medium high heat for about 5 minutes and it will turn to a syrup. Stir occasionally. Add a shot of rum, and serve hot.

Pearl Meatballs

I have decided to do a little run of recipes with interesting names. I had intended to start off by remaking ants climbing the tree, but whilst looking at recipes, I got distracted by pearl meatballs- a Cantonese dim sum of minced pork studded with chopped prawn and water chestnuts, and rolled in sticky rice. The whiteness of the rice gives it its name.

For dim sum, these are not too fiddly to make at all. The meatball mix is a little wetter than the European meatball mixes that I am more used to handling, but not unworkably so. I would suggest using a pair of forks to roll the meatballs in the rice when you are coating them- it saves your fingers from getting glued up with pork meat and rice. Another tip I found when making these is to get the rice properly dry, after soaking and draining, I put it in the oven on a very low temperature for a few minutes.

They are pretty easy to make and very delicious- between three of us we managed to finish the whole batch.

The recipe I used was from Sunflower Food Galore, a seemingly endless source of recipe inspiration for me.

Pre-steaming

After steaming

Finished meatballs

Black Cake: The first of the Christmas recipes...

... Yes it is rather early to be writing about anything festive. But I wanted to get started on this year's Christmas cake, and it requires quite a lot of advance planning.

This year, I am not making the traditional British Christmas cake,  but instead am making black cake, which hails from the Caribbean. Instead of making the cake in advance, and then feeding it with alcohol, you soak the fruit for the cake in alcohol, for somewhere between 2 weeks and 6 months, and then mix it into the cake batter. The alcohol in question is different too, instead of brandy you use a mix of dark rum and sweet wine.

As I mentioned, this is a traditional Caribbean recipe, but I first heard of it in Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess, and she in turn got it from Laurie Colwin- a wonderful writer who I discovered a few years ago- if you like reading about food, I can really recommend her books.

It's quite hard to make Laurie Colwin's recipe, as it requires burnt sugar essence, which is not an expensive ingredient, but a very elusive one. Nigella uses treacle, but according to my internet sources, it's not really the same. I'll probably have to make do with treacle though.

In terms of soaking the fruit, I used rum, madeira, and also added a few dashes of bitters, which I saw suggested online, and liked the idea. The soaked fruit makes enough to make two cakes. I am planning on making one cake with half the ingredients, and leaving the remaining boozy fruit mix to macerate for the maximum six months, to see the difference.

Here is Nigella's recipe and here is a photo of some of the soaked fruit. There is loads of it- about 2 kilos of it- but a spoonful of brown pulp makes a slightly better photo than a tub of brown pulp.

So far, I have just got to the fruit soaking part- I will report back in few weeks when the cake is made!

23/11/15- Baking the cake
After about 6 weeks of soaking the fruit, I baked the cake. I stuck to Nigella's recipe, but added 2 spheres of grated stem ginger. The cake isn't as dark as the photos of black cake that I have seen, but I think without the elusive burnt sugar essence, it was as dark as I could have gotten in. I am leaving the cake now until Christmas, but tasting the cake mix, and the half baked bit of cake that clings to the knife when you check if it is ready makes me feel pretty confident that it is going to be a success. It has a complex, caramelly flavour, that hopefully will mature between now and Christmas. I am undecided whether or not to ice it. I don't especially like royal icing, but it does make it feel more festive- I shall see how I feel in December.

And finally! The difference between black cake (right), and the more British Christmas  cake (left)

Cornish Yarg and Cider Fondue

I got married a few weeks ago, which was wonderful. You might not be surprised to read that the food was an important factor (obviously not the most important, but up there). The caterer I opted for was Rose's Kentish Kitchen- she offers 'family style dining', i.e. each table has a shared dish and serves themselves, like you would at home. This appealed to me, as it felt much less formal than having something served individually. Also, crucially, she could source me a cheese cake- as in 5 whole different cheeses, stacked up to resemble a traditional wedding cake.

Photo by Oliver Facey

I ended up eating very little cheese on the night. But I did have about 3-4 kg of cheese to take home, including well over a kilo of Cornish Yarg. This is great, but a little tricky to get through when you only live with one other person. But it does give you a lot of scope for trying out different recipes. I came this Cornish Yarg and Cider Fondue from the dairy who makes Cornish Yarg's website.

I kept the recipe basically the same- I couldn't find specified cider, but just used another dry cider. Extras-wise, I used some sourdough rye bread that I had made the day before, instead of the suggested focaccia. As well as the prosciutto, I  sliced some cox apples- not to dip, but just to cut through the richness.

Recipe Revisit: Hazelnut Loaf Cake and Damson Curd

I recently remade the recipes from my most visited blog post, spiced damson curd- damsons have been in season, and I wanted some better pictures of it than they ones I have when I made it the first time around.

When I made it the first time, I had tried it with this hazelnut loaf cake. This also has some rather dark and blurry photos, so I wanted some new ones. It's also really good- with the curd, by itself, and also some buttery-cinnamony fried apples and cream