Tiramisu

At the end of last year work was still new and a bit overwhelming. Coupling that with the exhaustion of weeks of insomnia all I could really manage after work was drinking too much Cava in bed and watching Nigella Kitchen on iPlayer until I fell asleep.

I love Nigella Lawson so in many ways that was pretty fantastic. I know lots of people can’t stand her flirting, the way she makes eyes at the camera or how she tries to sex up cooking but that is, of course, why she’s known as the Queen of food porn. I think it’s a wonderful skill: I can’t think of anyone else who makes squeezing the meat out of sausage skins look anything more than vommy.

I’ve never watched, say, Jamie Oliver and his massive tongue and actually wanted to cook anything he’s made and I think that’s the beauty of Nigella Kitchen. Everything looks quite do-able – it’s easy to imagine planning a whole dinner party off the back of it.

After a week that including crashing a Bear Grylls photoshoot - which in turn saw me standing in a dark Harlsden car park, in the snow, ripping bits off bushes for him to whittle - and running around London with two large outdoorsy knives in my handbag (long story) I was ready to waste yet another weekend sleeping until three and spacing out in front of episodes of Friends I’d seen five times before. Thankfully though my cousin Simon was over from Zurich for Christmas and was popping in for lunch, which meant I had to actually get up off my arse and act like a real person.

Obviously this was the perfect chance to test out Nigella’s Frangelico tiramisu. Apart from the fact that Waitrose had run out of Frangelico and the recipe wasn’t on the BBC Food website.

Another hurdle was the fact that I don’t actually like tiramisu. I find it too rich, too coffee-y and just generally a bit blurh. But it just looked so fun to make! All that whizzing! All those creamy bits! And sometimes you just have to suck it up, look life in the face and say “Hey. Hey, this isn’t for me. This is for other people.” Or something.*

So I stuck my laptop on the kitchen counter, swapped Frangelico for Kahlua took a deep breath and watched Nigella all over again and cooked along.

I guessed most of the measurements here which is why this list of what you need may seem a bit vague:

Mascarpone
Sponge fingers
Instant espresso powder (not instant coffee)
Frangelico/Kahlua
2 eggs
75g of caster sugar
Cocoa powder
Chopped, roasted hazelnuts

Into a jug pour 250ml of whatever liqueur your using and top up with 250ml of boiling water straight from the kettle.

Handy little trick from Mummy Duggers here: to stop glass or plastic cracking when you add hot water stick a big metal spoon in first. I have absolutely no idea how or why this works but it does seem to.

Into this you dunk the espresso powder. I’m not a huge fan of coffee but this stuff smells amazing and looks much nicer than general instant coffee. The Nigella Kitchen recipe uses 15g, apparently eight teaspoons, but as a scaredy cat I only used six. I think this made the end result a lot lighter and (obviously) not as strong on the coffee front, which I saw as a bonus.

While that cools get cracking (ha!) with the eggs. Get two nice big bowls and separate the eggs, putting the yolks in the bigger one. Both times I’ve made this I’ve managed to put the whites in the wrong bowl on whisking-autopilot.

With an electric whisk get the whites all foamy and pillowy – but not stiff.

Add the caster sugar to the egg yolks and a good slosh of some more liqueur and then whisk that all together until it’s a lovely creamy colour.



The big trouble I had with doing this off a video and not an actual, written recipe is that how much mascarpone you need is never mentioned. So doing what I always do I over-bought. With 750g at my disposal I worked out you need around 500g.
Add this to the creamy, boozy, eggy, sugar mix dollop by dollop, whisking it in.

Now gently fold in the egg whites. Whenever I’ve left them sitting for a bit I always give them another quick whisk as the liquid that settles at the bottom otherwise grosses me out.

In a deep dish start making a little floor of sponge fingers. While these are called sponge they’re actually rock bloody solid, with one side absolutely covered in sugar. They’re disgusting. I’ve eaten a whole packet of them today.

I think usually you soak the sponge fingers in the coffee stuff you made earlier, but thankfully there are no fiddly bits in this. Once your bottom layer of fingers is done carefully pour some of the coffee and liqueur over them, letting them soak it all up. Nigella uses half of the liquid on the first layer but I have no idea how much I used but it wasn’t half of it at all. Then again my sponge fingers weren’t absolutely soaked.



I definitely did, however, use half the mascarpone mix on top of this. Spread it out with a spoon so it tucks in to all the edges, and covers all the sponge fingers.

And, simply, repeat! A second layer of fingers, more coffee and then more mascarpone. You’re meant to cover this with cling film and stick it in the fridge but I found it just got stuck all over the top. I’d used a casserole dish as we’re chronically lacking in the kitchenware department so just stuck the lid on.




After at least six hours in the fridge your tiramisu is ready to eat – almost.

I couldn’t find any chopped hazelnuts. Or roasted ones. Anywhere (Waitrose). So I resorted to my old friend the rolling pin. God am I glad I bought this thing. I’ve only used it as a rolling pin in about two recipes, the rest of the time I’ve just pulverised things with it and pretended to beat the crap out of people I don’t like while doing the washing up. Basically, it’s great.

I put the hazelnuts, in their bag, in a tea towel and proceeded to whack the living daylights out of them. This meant some of them were chucky bits and the rest was powdered but hey, perfections for, well, better men than me.



Coat these in two or three teaspoons of cocoa powder and then sprinkle over the top of your tiramisu. Do NOT do this before you leave it to sit in the fridge or it all sinks in and looks a bit yucky. You can sieve this over the top but I always find this a total pain in the arse. Everything just seems to fall through the sieve and end up in one big powdery pile on one bit of cake or tiramisu or whatever.



Anyway – tadaaaa! Tiramisu.



*I fucking loved it and Mummy Duggers had to fight to get a look in.

Scones

Long time no see. I haven’t been cooking at all recently as I’ve been living off whatever Mummy Duggers deems fit to stock the fridge with. (Unfortunately this isn’t lamb shanks, rabbit or quail. Unless it’s for the cats of course…) This is because I quit the Scary New Job which had become the I Want To Kill Myself Every Morning Job.

Unemployment is liberating and wonderful, though not stress free. Every time I get a letter from Lloyds I am convinced that as soon as I open it bailiffs will suddenly appear at the front door. Also coming up to Christmas it’s quite depressing to realise that your account balance is -£9.47.

I suppose that I’m technically freelance, though what I’m freelancing in is a bit of a mystery. I have been doing a couple of week’s work at a new iPad magazine, mainly getting the editor sandwiches as everyone is still trying to work out why I’m actually there and what I should really be doing.

Unneeded last week I raided the cupboards after finding a scribbled recipe for scones I must have got from somewhere. This didn’t take too long as all they are is:

300ml of milk (I used skimmed as this is all we ever have)
450g of self-raising flower
80g of unsalted butter
3 tablespoons of caster sugar
A pinch of salt

Cut the butter into little cubes. Weirdly this is something I really, really enjoy.

Sieve the flour, sugar and salt together and rub in the butter until it all looks like breadcrumbs. This takes a while but it’s so, so satisfying. My friend Alex has an odd phobia of getting things on her hands. She can’t touch flour. It’s very strange and completely irrelevant but I thought I’d mention it just in case you’re the same. If you are then you’ll have to live with shop-bought scones. I’m sure there is a way of rubbing butter into flour without actually doing it but I’ve no real idea.

It’s a very short journey from my favourite bit to the bit I find mind numbingly boring. With a knife mix the milk in splosh by tiny sposh. And when I say tiny splosh I mean tiny splosh. I made these again yesterday and my first batch was soaking. The dough ended up being like superglue and covered my hands when I picked it up to see if I could roll it into a ball. I honestly thought I’d be stuck there for an hour until Mummy Duggers got back from Tesco. Though I’d like to make it clear that I don’t actually know if this was because I added the milk too quickly. It could just be that I’m a bit of a moron and mucked it up God knows how.

Your mix ends up looking like lots of little bits of dough that will never come together until that magic last drop of milk at which point the whole thing will feel like mixing a big ball of cement.



Get your hands in and squish it into a ball. You can stick this in the fridge over night or start rolling it out immediately. I was worried that my dough was far too wet. It felt really sticky and I felt a little tantrum coming on. I stuck it in the fridge hoping that this would somehow suck the moisture out (no, I don’t know why I thought that either). Turns out it was fine, so don’t start chucking utensils through the microwave door just yet.*



Heat the oven to 220°c and flour a work surface. I find this an absolute pain in the arse. However neat I am I always end up finding flour underneath the kettle or neatly piled behind the toaster three weeks later.

Don’t roll out the dough too much – around an inch thick is about as thin as you want to go. While I expected these to rise an awful lot they, well, they just don’t. Use a scone-sized cutter. I’ve no idea what size mine is but it looks scone-sized. The dough is incredibly stretchy and elastic, which in my childish way I really enjoyed.

Once you’ve cut your scones out grease a baking tray and stick them in the oven for about 14 minutes or a bit longer if you’ve got a rubbish oven like mine, until the scones are golden brown on top.



Let these cool and eat before they go stale, which is unfortunately in about two or so hours.



*Obviously this isn’t the case with yesterday’s super-glue batch…

Pumpkin update

I think it's time these went in the bin.

Halloween

Not really a cooking post but Charlotte came round last night and we totally knifed some pumpkins.

Mine was hideously uninventive.


Unfortunately Charlotte's was rock solid and took forever.




But all fine in the end.

Alcohol abuse and lasagne

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. The demon drink. The evils of alcohol. After last weekend and my hideous behaviour at and after an anti-Bestival brunch I suddenly understand why drinking is bad for you. This revelation has nothing to do with the shakes that lasted until Tuesday or the kettle drum that boomed away behind my eyes but more to do with the huge scratch across my BlackBerry screen and the fact I am no longer in possession of an iPod*.

After heavy drinking on Friday with my ex-boss and people I used to work with, I rolled up late to the Windsor Castle in Notting Hill. It’s a lovely old pub but if you sit all day topping up your blood-alcohol level with bottles of Prosseco its tiny doors and steep steps prove difficult. They also seem to only have one ice bucket so knocked us up a makeshift one during a warm-wine emergency.


Booze flowed, cigarettes were smoked at an alarming rate, I knocked over two full glasses. Everyone else enjoyed their food but my burger was mediocre though that’s probably because all I could taste was the fur on my tongue. After at least two romantic indiscretions (mine) were accidentally revealed it was time to go. Unfortunately it wasn’t time to go home, it was time to go on to an old school friend’s where I proceeded to drink yet another bottle of fizz while everyone else sobered up. I think this is where I crossed the line from ‘annoying drunk’ to ‘please, when is she leaving?’

Lesson learnt. Sort of.

Anyway, this is where lasagne comes in. Benaisha, Cookie and Katie decided to whip up some dinner – I was far too much of a mess to do anything apart from really badly peel some squash so just got in the way and took photos instead.

Butternut squash and goat’s cheese lasagne
I’ll warn you now that most of this is guess work, ingredients gleaned from looking at the (mostly blurry) pictures. I wasn’t really in any sort of state to take notes.

Stuff you need:

A lasagne dish or similar
Pasta sheets or whatever they’re called
Passata
Goat’s cheese
Spinach
A butternut squash
Garlic (I’ll be honest, I have no real idea what they did with this so I’m going to improvise)
Salt and pepper
Parmesan

Heat the oven to (maybe) 180°c while you peel your squash, hopefully a bit better than I did. Scrape out the seedy bit in the middle – shown here in case you do this wasted and can’t remember where the seeds are…


Cut this into chunks and toss in some olive oil with salt and pepper. I think that the garlic, finely chopped, was thrown in here as well.



Stick this in the oven for about 20 minutes. I’m not sure what the green is – do whatever you think best.


Once this has cooked wilt a few good handfuls of spinach. It’ll seem like loads but it’s not, IT’S NOT!


Now comes the exciting bit. (It was all quite exciting for me, I was hammered and listening to Magic FM.) Start your first lasagne layer. It doesn’t have to be neat or tidy. Cookie realised later that you’re meant to semi cook the pasta first but it was fine so those instructions were clearly absolute bollocks designed to take up time that could be spent doing something more fucking interesting than half boiling pasta.


On top of the pasta shove on some spinach, some squash, a generous dollop of passata and a bit of crumbled up goat’s cheese.


More pasta.



Once you’re all layered up cover the top with some more pasta and then a big duvet of parmesan.


This went into the oven for about 20 to 25 minutes. I think. Anyway when it looks cooked it probably is.



*iPod has now found its way home though someone has clearly been listening to my “ironic” goldmine of novelty Cuban pop.

Egg fried rice

After a long absence brought on by spending all my time in a little house on Eel Pie Island being wined and dined by a lovely man, I put up an absolute flurry of blogs (four) only to go off radar again straight afterwards. I think my post on Sadness Cake explains most of this but another side to it is that cooking can be expensive and I need to save all my money for liver-damaging activities. (As I type this I am tucked into a corner of the pub one of my friends from school, Benaisha, works in, desperately trying to find someone to come and stop me looking like a lonely alcoholic.)

One thing that can definitely be made on the cheap though is egg fried rice. I love the bloody stuff but always found it a bit lacking when I made it myself. Then at work I stumbled across a recipe for a fancy version. As I’m completely disorganised and just generally not particularly good at forward planning I forgot to print it out and had to have a go from memory.

The original recipe suggested stirring in some chicken but as Mummy Duggers is a veggie I had to save that for another day.

You need enough rice for around two people, I used Uncle Ben’s boil in the bag long grain white rice. Classy as ever.
You also need some cooked frozen peas – maybe around half a cups worth.
And, duh, eggs. Three medium ones worked for me.
Little extras are soy sauce and a few spring onions.

Boil up the rice and heat up a nice large wok. Use nut oil to grease it as its tasteless – if, like Charlotte, you’re massively allergic to nuts and don’t love egg fried rice enough to risk your life over it go for wok oil.


Very finely chop a few spring onions, I think I used two or three, I think a couple more would have been a bit better. When the wok is hot enough stir-fry these for a couple of minutes before adding the rice.


Swish this around with a couple of good glugs of soy sauce. It’ll seem like too much but trust me, it isn’t.

Whisk up the eggs and then stir in. I thought for a good few minutes that I’d used one too many as I seemed to have a lot of very runny egg coating absolutely everything. It takes a while for it all too cook, far longer than I thought it should, but it was really, really tasty. Chuck in the cooked peas at the last moment as this leaves them tasting nice and fresh.


What I like about this is that you can just shove a load of veg in the wok with it to make a proper meal rather than a side dish.

Keaton Henson

Keaton Henson and I have been friends since I was 13 - nearly eight years.

When I was 15 and he was 16 we went out for a disastrous period that was mainly me being a stroppy, awful, shouty girlfriend and mainly him bringing me Skittles for breakfast while constantly being wonderful. One particular day sticks horribly in my mind: Keaton, terribly ill, after an argument – one of many - dragged himself to my house in the pouring rain to make up. I told him to turn around and go home and I can still picture him perfectly as I closed the door and stomped off. Years later and I’ve found out he remembers this pretty well too.

While we don’t see each other very often now he is still someone I consider to be one of my greatest friends. In the time I’ve known him he’s gone from being a gangly teenager with awful Charlie-from-Busted highlights, to a gangly young man with facial piercings, to what he is now: a hard working, incredibly talented illustrator, designer and songwriter (still gangly).

Last year he played me the song linked here for the first time and it is honestly the loveliest, most wonderful gesture anyone has ever shown me.

His album is out soon (I’ll update this with actual details when I have them) and I urge everyone to buy it as it really is astounding. Written for someone and never meant to be heard by anyone else it’s a melancholy love letter that I think we’ve all wanted to write at least once. So much of Keaton has clearly gone in to each song.

The album is a beautiful piece of work; musically and physically. There will be 120 CDs to buy, each with a case handmade by Keaton. The sleeves have been numbered and designed by him, even stitched together by the clever boy himself with each different copy featuring it’s own sketch. Mine will be something I treasure forever.

I know this post has been quite vommy but, with a risk of sounding patronising, I am so proud of the person Keaton has become and I’m incredibly glad to count him as a friend.


Sarah Minor by Keaton Henson

My personal favourites:
Nests
and You Don't Know How Lucky You Are by Keaton Henson


www.KeatonHenson.com