First Aid for Jam

Every so often, you just make a mistake.  After a lot of chutney-making, which involves a very long boil until a spoon drawn across the base of the pan leaves a trail, I lost my touch with jam.  After dad asked me to use up some plums, I created the most ridiculously toast-ripping plum toffee in a jar to be imagined.  Luckily, a little troubleshooting on the internet found a solution.

You'll need two saucepans, the offending jam, a butter knife and some water.  Half-fill one of the saucepans with water, and put the jam-jars inside, with the lids off.  Slowly bring the water to a simmer, and edge the butterknife down the edge of the blocks of jam inside until they are coming away from the sides.  If need be, clean and heat the knife in the simmering water as you go.
Upend the jam jars into the other saucepan, and prise the jam out.  Pour some of the hot water into this pan, and mush up the blocks of jam.  Now bring the watered-down mix to the boil again until you have acquired a real jam set.  Test this by dropping a blob into a cup of icy water, or onto an icy plate.

Make your own Skirt

A little while ago, my grandmother let me go through her boxes and drawers of fabric scraps and odd lengths.  I found bags of useful and lovely stuff, one piece of which happened to be a stylish 70s print in orange, green and brown on white (yeah, 70s).  The piece also just happened to be long enough to wrap around my waist and reach my knees, so I devised a suitable and simple skirt pattern to produce on my mother's ancient and dependable Viscount machine.

Machine-sewing on one of these bastards, or the more famous Singer models like the pic, is (I find) much easier than using an electric model.  Turning the gears by hand rather than battling the over-sensitive electric throttles makes a pleasant noise; they are also sometimes easier to thread, as all the moving parts are left more visible.  Not least, you never have to send off to Korea for parts if the tension screw falls off, but can stop into the nice man in Wimbledon who will hand-make a new one.

Homemade Simple Skirt
You Will Need:
Cotton/similar fabric, approx. 50 x 24 inches (more for more-ish people, i am teensy)
Six or seven appropriate buttons
Strong cotton thread, one reel
Machine
Tailor's chalk
Pins
Flat surface
Measuring tape
Sewing scissors

1) First take your own measurements: hip, and waist-to-knee.  Now measure your piece of scrap fabric to make sure you have plenty.
2) Lay your fabric on the flat surface, and mark out the following pattern according to your measurements.

The shortest edges of the four-sided shapes are half your hip measurement (allowing 1/2 inch seams, in dark brown).  The longer edges opposite these and the vertical edges are taken from your waist-to-knee measurement.  Joining these should give you a nice slant.  The smaller, triangular shapes can be as long along the bottom as your remaining fabric will allow - remember though that they should be the same size, and do allow for seams.  They give the finished garment a bit of swish.

3) Cut out the pieces, allowing 1/2 inch seams all the way round each one.

4) Pin the pieces together.  Join each triangle to the two large pieces, slant-edge to slant-edge, straight-edge to straight-edge, wrong sides together.  Check for a good fit.  If you like, adjust the seams at the waistband to give a more tailored shape.

5) About 5 1/2 inches down the seam between one large piece and triangle, make a chalk mark.  Cut two little snips out of the seams at this point.  This is a stopping-point to make a gap for buttons.

6) Make sure that your machine is threaded properly by running a test piece of scrap through it a few times.  When satisfied, join all the pieces together, removing the pins as you go along.

7) When you come to your snips, stop sewing.  Rotate the fabric by putting the needle all the way through, lifting the presser foot, swizzling the fabric and replacing the foot.  Sew back over the seam to strengthen it about 2 inches.

8) Above the snips, stitch the 1/2 inches of seam back independently of each other, making a hemmed slit.  This will be where you place buttons and buttonholes later.

9) Stitch the waistband seam.  Cut any obvious corners off the bottom of the skirt, and hem to a rough circle. It's nice to open out the seams like the pages of a book and hem across them, so that they're flat.

10) With tailor's chalk, mark places for buttons equidistant along the slit on the wrong side.  Sew the buttons onto the right side.  Hold the other side of the slit fabric over the buttons, and mark on the right side with tailor's chalk where the holes should go.

11) Outline these chalk marks with circles of backstitch, about 2mm away from the mark on all sides.  Now go over these circles with closely-placed short stitches perpendicular to the backstitch.  It's a buttonhole!

12) Fold the buttonholes in half, so that you can cut a tiny snip inside them with your scissors more safely.  Lengthen out these snips carefully until they are the right size for buttons.

Fin!

Trifle Catastrophique

Or, How To Rescue Ambitious Cakes Which Fall Over.

I have developed a habit of excessively baking for Dad's friend A, ever since Dad challenged me to make an Arctic-themed birthday cake for him.  This time I'd decided to make an upside-down-double-blueberry cake for our dinner party.  Method as follows:  Grease and line Springform baking tin.  Pour in 1 punnet blueberries.  Spread in 2 large eggs-worth of almond sponge mix.  Bake approx. 30-40 mins.  When cool, remove the outside of the tin.  Turn cake out.  Repeat the process and layer thin cakes together with mascarpone cream filling.

The trouble came at the turning-out stage.  The usual method for turning out a Springformed cake onto a plate is to put the plate on top of the de-tinned cake, grasp the plate and bottom of the tin with both hands, and deftly flip.  You can now remove the bottom of the tin, revealing a lovely smooth surface to ice, and in this case a lot of exploded blueberries.

What actually happened was that my impatience got the better of me as usual.  With a tin-bottom still warm from the oven, I grasped it with oven gloves on and fumbled the whole thing over the gas hob frames.  My delicious cake was fractured into several pieces.  At this point Dad's fiancé N came to the rescue.

'Eton mess it is then,' she says.  'Lucky we have lots of cream eh?'

Trifle Catastrophique
You Will Need: Failcake, large fancy bowl, small bowl, whisk, spoon, knife

half packet of mascarpone
1 large egg yolk
1 1/2 tablespoons icing sugar
300ml double cream
Grand Marnier or other brandy-like substance
(extra fruit to decorate)

1) Scoop the failcake into the bottom of the fancy bowl, breaking into smaller pieces if necessary or unavoidable. Chill in the fridge if still warm. Drizzle over the Grand Marnier, as much as you like.
2) Beat together the mascarpone, yolk and sugar with the spoon until smooth.  Pour in half the cream and whisk until very thick, but still pourable.
3)  Pour the mascarpone filling over the cake, and spread flat with a knife.  Whip the rest of the cream and add another layer until all the cake failure is hidden from view.  You may need more cream depending on bowl and failure size (oh noes :-P)
4)  Scatter any remaining fruit, and some flaked almonds if you have them, over the top.  Chill before serving.

N says that this must go down as one of the better Great Unregrettable Mistakes of the world, along with penicillin, as the trifle thus created was probably just as good if not better than the intended cake.  I rather like it because it's the first time I've produced a non-fail trifle (custards for trifle still escape me).  Try it yourselves!

Cloisonné Cake Decoration

Cloisonné is a jewellery-making technique used by the Anglo-Saxons (among others).  Small cut garnets, pieces of crystal, shell and coloured glass were laid on a gold backing, and walled around with gold to create geometric designs.  As a fun evening activity for some fellow medievalists, and a celebration for a succesful day's outing, we raided the Home Baking aisle of the local sainsbury's and made our own 'circular brooch cake'.  These directions assume that you already have a cake ready to be decorated; it could be any typical flavour, but shouldn't be likely to be overwhelmed by the taste of the jelly diamonds and other decorations.

Cloisonné Cake Decoration
You Will Need:  Small bowl, teaspoon, butter/palette knife, patience, dexterity, inspirational brooch image

cake, completely cooled and plated flat-side uppermost
icing sugar
juice half a lemon
yellow food colouring
'golden' marzipan
packet(s) jelly diamonds
packet candied cherries
(mixed peel, candied ginger, angelica and silver balls could also be used)

1) Mix the icing sugar, colouring and lemon juice to make a relatively thick, blonde icing.  Spread it over the cake in a thin layer.
2) Sort the jelly diamonds into colours and work out how you will arrange the design to be most like your inspirational picture.  Roll pieces of the marzipan into very thin worms and wrap them around the edges of the jelly diamonds.  Pinch the diamonds to affix the marzipan firmly and point up the corners.
3) Do the same with the cherries or pieces of cherries if you don't have enough 'garnet' jelly diamonds.
4) Place the 'jewels' onto the cake, working from the centre outwards and using more icing if necessary.
5) Surround features of the design with longer worms.  In the gaps between the main features twist more marzipan worms together into helices and curl artistically.  If arsed/have room, make one big worm all the way round the edge.

Happily, a cake so decorated will also look beautiful when sliced as the designs aren't ruined when the cake is cut.

WINNING! Chocolate birthday cake

The weekend just gone was my little brother's 21st birthday.  'You're too mature for candles,' I said, 'so I've made it in icing sugar - you can still blow it out.'
It *is* icing sugar, although we did make a lot of Charlie Sheen jokes at the picnic.  So here's a recipe for a Charlie Sheen cake, to be served with a generous glass of tiger blood - but only to Winners!  It's based on my mother's old brownie recipe, and an answer to my boyfriend's challenge that I tend to make rather dry cakes.  Eat this!
You can make this up to 4 days beforehand, but keep it in the fridge.  Do the sugaring stage just before serving, so that you can safely cover the cake with clingfilm without smudging the numbers.

Birthday Cocaine Cake For Winners
You Will Need: 24cm round springform tin(s), scales, wooden spoon, teaspoon, large bowl, small bowl, whisk, smaller bowl, fork, saucepan, dinner knife, chopping board and sharp knife, cheese grater, clingfilm, tinfoil, sieve or tea strainer, dessert spoon.

For the Cake:
100g dark chocolate
130g butter
350g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
130g self raising flour
80g walnuts
100g raisins or sultanas
4 eggs

For the Filling:
2 egg yolks
30g caster sugar
dessertspoon plain flour
1 teaspoon cornflour
140ml milk
4 squares grated dark chocolate

small pot whipping cream

2 punnets fresh raspberries

icing sugar

1) To make the cake.  Grease and line the tin with baking paper.  In a small bowl over a pan of simmering water, melt the chocolate pieces and the butter.  When melted, mix in the vanilla and sugar.  Take off the heat.
2) Chop the walnuts finely.  In the large bowl, mix the flour, nuts and fruit.  Beat in the chocolate mixture.
3)  Beat the eggs with the fork and mix into the cake mixture.
4) Pour half the mixture into the tin; bake approximately 15-20 minutes until risen and an inserted skewer comes out clean.  Lift the first half onto a tray to cool.  Re-line the tin and repeat with the rest of the mixture.  If you have two tins of course this becomes less faff-ful.

5) Assembly.  When the cakes are cool, put the first half onto a serving plate.  Now make the filling:
6) Separate the eggs.  Beat the egg yolks and sugar together.  Mix in the flours.
7) Heat the milk in the pan; grate in the chocolate like cheese by grating straight off the bar into the milk.  Stir to mix.
8) Pour the hot milk over the egg mixture and whisk briskly to mix.  Pour back into the pan; heat gently until well thickened, stirring constantly to avoid lumps.  Be aware that the custard will continue cooking off the heat, from the heat of the pan.
9) Pour the custard into the small bowl, and press clingfilm over the surface to avoid a skin forming.  Let it cool before spreading on the cake.

10) Spread cooled custard over the bottom half of the cake.  Cover the surface with raspberries.  Dribble any remaining custard over the berries.
11) Whip the cream to stiff peaks.  Spread it over the berries.  Place the top half of the cake carefully.
12) Put a small amount of icing sugar in a sieve or teastrainer, and scatter over the cake.  If you want numbers in it, twist tinfoil into tubes and shape into the numbers.  Place carefully on the caketop; scatter the sugar, then remove the foil, leaving gaps behind.

Sloe Gin

Sloes are a strange beast.  I always knew what they were, and that they existed, thanks to my Flower Fairies books, but had never noticed one until quite recently.  A bitter relative of the damson, they are only really suitable for flavouring alcohol - making the famous Gin, which is where most people encounter them.  We harvested ours from the boyfriend's dad's locality in the New Forest; there is a small tree near the railway into Wimbledon from Surbiton and also in the Christian Science carpark near my house.  They're around, if you keep looking.
The sloe season is October-November; sloe gin season is from Christmas that year to October next year.  It makes excellent G&Ts.  Depending on how sloey you want your gin, leave it to steep for 3-6 months to decant in Advent or Lent.

I'm afraid I can't offer you a proper proportion recipe to make Sloe Gin; everyone who makes it has their own ideas of how sweet, sloey or ginny it should be when it's finished.  I would recommend making a small amount to slightly different proportions and see which you like best. Here's how we did it:

Sloe Gin
You Will Need: Harvesting bag/box/bucket, freezer, £££, gin, caster sugar, empty bottles, weighing scales, patience, large jugs, sives, funnels.

1. Go to the supermarket and work out how much 'raw' gin - Gordons or other - you reckon you can afford. Then buy it.  Now have a stiff one and try to forget about it.  Gin is expensive.
2.  Armed with a gin-to-sloes ratio - the BBC reckons a litre wants a pound of fruit - go and pick your sloes! Beware of the large thorns.  Pick as many as you need; if you get a few more, they'll keep in the freezer.
3.  Freeze the fruit in shopping bags overnight.  This splits the skins and allows the juices to get out.
4.  Pour one bottle of gin into a jug.  Half-fill the empty bottle with sloes; fill the bottle a third of the way up with sugar.  Finally, pour as much gin as possible back in using a funnel.  Seal the bottle, turn it over and over a few times to mix in the sugar, and leave to stand in a cool dark place like a bedroom cupboard.
5.  Repeat until you've run out of bottles or gin, freeze any remaining sloes, and engage Patience.
6.  Wait 3-6 months before choosing a long afternoon to Decant.
7.  Open the bottles; with a sieve strain the berries out of the liquid into a large jug.  Pour the decanted liquid back into the empty bottles using a funnel.  If going for consistency, try to mix up the liquids from different bottles in the jug; if trying for taste, endeavour to keep batches separate.
8.  Home-made labels and a little purple ribbon can go a long way to making these products into a great summer birthday present, or (if waiting only 3 months) Christmas present.

Glug Glug Glug...

Rainbow Butterfly (Jew) Cakes

Yes, I know - the jew is a bit odd.  But a Hebrew-y friend of mine has always characterised herself as a rainbow butterfly, and given her imminent return from Israel, the existence of food colouring and of butterfly cakes, I promised her I would make a special effort for her coming-home party.   

This recipe gives you enough mixture for four or five of each flavour, and seven flavours to choose from, provided you dole out quite carefully.  I first learnt how to do butterfly cakes from the Winnie-the-Pooh Cookbook, although looking on Amazon it seems there are at least three different ones of those.

Rainbow Butterfly Cakes (with optional Jew)

You Will Need: Fairy-cake tin(s), large bowl, wooden spoon, scales, fork, small bowl, teaspoon, dinner knife, chopping board and small sharp knife, paper fairy cake cases.  For Jewyness or other customisation: piping bag.

6 eggs

2 packets of butter

plenty of caster sugar

plenty of self-raising flour

one lemon

one orange

glacé cherries

vanilla essence

4 lumps stem ginger in syrup (comes in a jar)

tablespoonful dark chocolate chips/chopped chocolate

tablespoonful white chocolate chips/chopped chocolate

blackberries

icing sugar

food colourings

1) Weigh the eggs.  It should come to about 12 or 13 ounces.  Remember the figure you get; weigh out an equal amount of butter and sugar.

2) Cream the butter and sugar in the large bowl until smooth and fluffy.  I am beginning to get used to the idea of using electric beaters for this, but as I didn't have one, elbow grease will do.  It helps if you cut the butter up into little cubes first, and it's quite soft.

3) Beat the eggs in the small bowl with the fork.  Add the egg  a little at a time to the buttery mix, stirring well until smooth.  Weigh out the same weight of flour as you had eggs.    Fold this in carefully; don't stir vigorously but scrape around the bowl with the spoon until it's all incorporated.

4) Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C and line the fairy cake tins with cake papers.

5) Wash the small bowl.  For each flavour, add one or two big globs of mix to the small bowl, stir in the appropriate ingredients, then spoon the mixture into the tin with the teaspoon.  Then wash out the small bowl and spoon, make the next flavour and continue until the tin is full.  Bake about 10 minutes, til well risen and golden brown.

Red cakes: add half a capful of vanilla essence, and about 8 chopped glacé cherries to the mixture.

Orange cakes: add the zest of one orange, and a dessertspoonful of orange juice.

Yellow cakes: add the zest of one lemon, and a dessertspoonful of lemon juice.

Green cakes: add 4 lumps of stem ginger, chopped finely.

Blue cakes: add the dark chocolate chips.

Indigo cakes: add a handful of blackberries, chopped. These will go a strange grey colour as they cook, but still taste good.

Violet cakes: add the white chocolate chips.

6) While the cakes are baking, make buttercream to fill them.  Using about half a pack of butter, cream the butter with icing sugar until it is a pale blond colour, and sweetened as much as you would like.  

7) Allow the cakes to cool.  When they are cool, very carefully saw a little 'tonsure' off the top of them with the dinner knife: break the golden crust with the tip of the knife in a circle around the top of the cake, and then lift out the middle.  Save the middles, cutting them in half to make 'wings.'  Scrape a teaspoonful of buttercream into each cake, then carefully position the 'wings' back on.

8) Make up icing in appropriate colours; for the orange and lemon flavoured cakes, use some more orange and lemon juice as the liquid for the icing rather than water; make it quite thick, like PVA glue.  You could even use booze for some flavours. Spread it on the 'wings'.
9) For optional customisation, make up some more icing and pipe stars of David, or other appropriate decoration, onto the wings of each cake when the base colours are dry.

Dopiaza Tart

This succulent, sweet tart uses onion pastry and brown sugar.  It could be a pudding, if you put some creme fraiche on it and were very blase about whether puddings are actually sugary.  It's a little too savoury for that purpose for my liking, but certainly tasty!

Dopiaza Tart
You Will Need: Sharp knife and cutting board, frying pan, 12ins tart dish, fork, teaspoon, rolling pin, baking tray

Flour for dusting
10 oz flour-worth onion pastry (see previous post)
Large lump of butter
12 oz peeled onions
4 eggs
6 oz cherry tomatoes
6 oz brown sugar
1 heaped tsp turmeric
1 heaped tsp ground ginger
1 heaped tsp coriander
1 heaped tsp cumin
1/2/ tsp garam masala

1.  Preheat oven , with baking tray inside, to 180 deg. C.
2.  Roll out onion pastry to line the tart tin, prick the bottom with a fork and pre-bake 10 mins. in the oven, putting the dish on the baking tray to distribute the heat to the base.
3. Finely chop the onions into half-moon slices, including any chunks left over from making the pastry.  Fry them gently in the butter until softening, and browned on one side.
4.  Stir the spices into the onions, fry 2 minutes and add the tomatoes, sliced into quarters.
5.  Beat the eggs, and gradually incorporate the sugar.
6.  Take the case out of the oven.  Fill the pastry with the onion and tomato mixture when it is very soft, then pour on the sugary egg.
7.  Bake the whole tart for approximately 25 minutes.  Serve warm.

Onion Pastry

The following recipe is intended to be used in a Dopiaza Tart, but could be adapted to any savoury pie or quiche recipe you care for.  Unlike proper shortcrust, you probably won't need to add any extra liquid to this mixture to make it come together.

A helpful hint I found on the interwebs is that 2ins less than the size of your tin is the number of ozs of flour you will need to make the right amount of pastry.  I shall be testing this theory whilst making the tart later.

Onion Pastry

You Will Need: Grater, sieve, large bowl, sharp knife, dinner knife, tissues :'( chopping board, clingfilm

10 oz strong white bread or plain flour

5 oz unsalted butter

pinch of salt

8 oz peeled onions, to get 6 oz grated onions.

1.  Peel and grate the onions on the larger holes (as for cheddar or carrot) over the chopping board, until you can't successfully hold them anymore, or you get 6 oz, whichever is sooner.  Put the gratings into a sieve and press out as much liquid as you can into the sink with your knuckles.  This is a weepy job, so have the tissues handy!

2.  Leaving the onions to drain, finely cube the butter straight out of the fridge.  Rub it together with the flour and salt in a large bowl, until the mixture resembles evenly-textured peroxide-coloured breadcrumbs.

3.  With the dinner knife, scrape the drained onions into the crumbs and mix.  Then get your hands dirty and knead it all together into a ball.  If you need to, add some water for stickiness, but you shouldn't need to.

4.  Wrap the pastry ball in clingfilm and chill in the fridge until you need it, for at least half an hour.

You could use red or white onions for this, but I recommend red as they have a sweeter taste.  Whatever you do, don't try buying what I always think of as 'student onions,' the small ones that come in packets of 20 - you will waste years of your life and much fingernail peeling them.

Patchwork Part 3: Housecoat Pattern (Body)

Here you see my (probably highly inefficient) solution to the problem of making an entire coat out of lots of little pieces.  It involves a lot of 'singles' i.e. hexes which aren't made into flowers, including some 'fourers' on either side of the central back flower, but I think it works.  

The diagram above shows the back of the coat (laid flat) at the bottom, and the front wings at the top.  The black line represents the shoulder 'seam'.  On either side of this seam, coloured flowers in the bottom half are matched by ghostly flowers in the top half - these correspond to each other and show where the two pieces should be joined at the sides.  For example, the green flower on the right of the back piece should join to the yellow and grey flowers at the front in the way shown.

The colours are chosen for ease of diagramming, not representing either your attempt or mine!  I managed to slightly co-ordinate my flowers so that the hotter colours were at the top and the cooler colours at the edges.  

Once I'd stitched all of this together, side-seams and all, I could wear it - and in fact had been doing so intermittently to check the length for a while.  You could easily make it longer by adding more flowers or singles to the bottom edges; I personally was getting impatient at this point and started on the next stage, which is taking all the paper out.  I left in the papers at the edges of the garment so as to make sewing in the lining and sleeves easier, but the rest I removed.  It's lovely to see the colours pure and unsullied by tacking stitches, and very easy to yank out said tacking in an afternoon.  SAVE THE PAPERS.  If you ever want to patchwork again you will save yourself a lot of bother if you already have all your templates handy.

When I have the time I shall look through the scraps my grandmother gave me and see if there are any pieces big enough to make a lining out of, or sleeves.  I'd like the sleeves to be slitted with poppers so that I can easily roll them up to wash up in.  Watch this space...

Teh Tarik teh easy weh

Condensed milk is a freakish and wartime-type thing, like powdered eggs or own-brand orange juice.  What do they actually do to it?  What is it for?  How old is that can?  Well, none of that matters.  Thanks to the wonders of student visas, I can now tell you why condensed milk was invented, even if they didn't realise it at the time.

My boyfriend's university was and is a happy home from home for Malaysian nerds, and where they go when they want to eat out is Bonda Cafe in London, which prides itself on its traditional cooking (they even have a plaque from the Malaysian government congratulating them for it).  The food is needless to say delicious; what is even more amazing is what they do with their condensed milk: put it in their tea and then make it into tea-a-chinos by tipping the hot liquid from one glass to another very very quickly, sort of like a cross between your gran and a qualified Soho mixologist.  It's called 'teh tarik,' which means 'pulled tea,' because of the tipping back and forth action.  I didn't bother to do that at home, because I feared getting it EVERYWHERE but I did make a nice hot cup of Yorkshire Tea Specially For Hard Water (the only way) and put 2 teaspoonfuls (ok 2 and a half) of condensed milk in it.  Om nom nom.  Now that's what you do with that tin.

If you are actually a Malaysian builder, I fear for your teeth.

Knitted kangas!

This is the first thing I knitted after I decided that I was going to learn to knit again.  I'm very grateful to my friend R for the pattern, which she kindly lent me the original copy of and which you can find a poor scan of in the previous post.  The wool I used for this kanga wasn't particularly snuggly, and I think I got the ears a bit wrong, but it made an excellent birthday present for an Australian stepmother...

Purple Kanga also came with purple baby Roo, who fits nicely in the pouch with a bit of a squeeze.  When I met a very little boy with two favourite kangaroo toys the other day and decided to give him another one, I thought baby might get lost so left him out.

Yellow Kanga was made with a linen mix from Kemps Wool Shop and proper cuddly stuffing (rather than cotton wool) which is why he is bigger and fatter than purple Kanga.  His eyes and nose are stitches of black embroidery thread rather than buttons, as the baby who is to own him is 18months ish and might chew his eyes off and swallow them.  

If you'd like to make your own kangas but can't read the pattern in the previous post, (and I think most will struggle), I make a vow of confidentiality now and promise to email the big scan to anyone who PMs me their address.