Rum & Raisin

23 Monday Sep 2013

Tags

Alcohol, Autumn, Dessert, Food, Fruit, Ice cream, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories, Travel

The last of the bewildering hot weather. Nights where one cotton sheet feels like being shrouded in carpet. Talking alone brings on the vapours, sweat beading on our foreheads as we nod sagely at someone we’re not listening to. Everyone drives like Vin Diesel, ramping up the volume on their car stereos, burning rubber as they overtake me on blind corners, tyres squealing like guinea pigs. And all I can think is how rude they’re being. That’s my version of a riot. Because I can’t complain. Because I’m English, and that’s all we do, while saying that we can’t do it. “I can’t complain” is our watchword. And I have been drawn to this detail of Englishness recently, perhaps because it’s so absent in LA.

Our English guests never complain either. We dance around each other in pained politeness. It must be akin to observing some ancient ritual – like conversational Morris dancing – with no one able to say exactly what the problem is, or even if there is a problem. “Do you have a parrot?” our English guest asked me today. “Er, no. Why?” “No, no, it’s fine. I just thought I heard a parrot at around five o’clock this morning.” I knew what it was because it had woken us too. “It was a coyote.” “Really?” “Yes, they live in the hills here and when they’ve killed a deer, they make a kind of ‘yipping’ sound. They do it with car alarms and fire engines as well.” “Oh right.” We all imagined a decapitated deer. “Great, well, see you around then! Thanks for breakfast.” “Don’t worry, it’s really safe here. They very rarely come down into the complex.” As I said this I remembered the coyote in the hallway and the mountain lion up by the tennis courts. They tranquillized it and carried it off somewhere. I wish I’d just said: “Yes, we have a parrot. We’ll kill it for you.”

I can’t imagine this conversation between Americans. I still don’t know what it was really about, but I felt in strange harmony with it. I’m leaving soon for England and it helped me get into the rhythm of things again. It was nice to talk to someone from Eastbourne, knowing that in a few days I will be walking the Downs, talking about the weather, bemoaning the end of summer, arms folded against the wind. And the guests were perfect – considerate, sweet, quiet to the point of absurdity. We really couldn’t complain.I would be happy if there were only five flavours of ice cream in the world: vanilla, chocolate, hazelnut, pistachio and rum & raisin. And raspberry ripple as a bonus flavour (for nostalgia purposes). But no cookie dough, rocky road or banoffee pie. And ‘sugar free’ vanilla – what’s that? Rum and raisin is a classic, and much underrated in my opinion. I know there are people who don’t like alcohol in sweets, but we will forge ahead regardless.

And this ice cream also lends itself to subtle doctoring: round and treacly Flame raisins, seeded Muscat raisins (sticky and crunchy and used traditionally in old bread recipes), meaty, soft, pale gold raisins (above) and Thompson seedless down below, still with their tails on, drowned in a saucer of rum – they are all so Californian, dried from the grape by our endless sun, and yet weirdly invisible, except for a few market stalls with their lumpen quarry. But I never gravitate there. Does one ever crave a raisin? But plumped up juicily in some searing alcohol and it’s quite a different matter. You could substitute the rum for sherry, if you like, and go for Pedro Ximénez if it’s available. This is a very ‘raisiny’ sherry, treacly and intense and good for a grown up ice cream such as this.Rum & Raisin Ice Cream

Adapted from Ice Cream! by Pippa Cuthbert & Lindsay Cameron Wilson

The soft brown sugar creates a darker, more complex flavour, but you can use caster sugar instead if you like. Sherry works well in place of rum.

100g (¾ cup) raisins

100ml (½ cup) dark rum or sherry

300ml (1¼ cups) whole milk

4 large egg yolks

100g (¾ cup) soft brown sugar

200ml (scant 1 cup) heavy/double cream

Put the raisins and 75ml (¼ cup) of the rum or sherry in a bowl and set aside to soak overnight or until the raisins have absorbed almost all the liquid.

Heat the milk and cream in a heavy-bottomed saucepan to near-boiling point, then remove from the heat. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together, using an electric whisk, until thick and pale. Loosen the egg with some of the milk/cream mixture, then pour the eggs and sugar back into the saucepan. Stir well to mix everything properly and then return to a low heat. Stir until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Remove from the heat, pour into a bowl and place over iced water to cool. You will need to stir it from time to time to avoid the custard developing a skin.

When the mixture is completely cold, churn in an ice cream maker, adding the remaining rum/sherry and all the raisins towards the end of churning. The raisins have a tendency to sink to the bottom before the ice cream can harden and suspend them, so you may want to give it a stir after half an hour or so in the freezer to distribute the raisins more evenly. Serve with a glass of either rum or sherry, or just pour it straight over the ice cream.

Other recipes with raisins:

Banana and raisin bread

Sticky toffee pudding

Topsy turvy

09 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Baking, Cake, Fruit, Ingredients, Los Angeles, Recipes, Stone fruit, Stories

Plums are everywhere and it seems futile to resist. Although I managed it. Something about the skins that pulls one off balance. You should eat them bare, gnaw around the stone and savour the juice as it cascades down your arm. In the end, I cooked with apriums. Yes, I know it sounds more like an edible food-like substance (paraphrazing Michael Pollen) but it is the real thing. They have the rich wateriness of plums, the sour, clingy skin, but then there is apricot. They taste like the sibling of nectarines without the solidness of the flesh. Are we all clear then?

I was hellbent on making an upside down cake, so here I am. And it’s been an upside down few weeks. If I was part of the Mister Men series I would probably be upside down (they would put me in trousers, obviously) as I went about my business. I lost my camera. This was a camera I had found about two years ago. I put up posters in the area advertizing its whereabouts and when no one claimed it, I adopted it. It was a happy union. I took all the pictures for the blog with it. It accompanied me everywhere. And then suddenly it was gone – it was absolutely nowhere. I returned to gaps and crevices hoping to feel its bulky angles. It’s true what the comedian Lee Evans said: when you lose something you keep going back to the same place to look for it, the mind refusing to acknowledge you’ve just been there. Hands run over surfaces, feeling blindly behind books, fingers slide into nooks, and slide out again. I retraced my steps like an amateur sleuth.

I went to the doctor’s and sidled up to the receptionist with my query – I had all the details ready: I may have left my camera in the bathroom on my last visit. But someone was having a panic attack. This news was relayed to the assembled company with the words “You f******g assholes, she’s passed out!” According to the receptionist, now on the phone to emergency services, this man’s girlfriend had been having a panic attack, had left and was now sitting in the car outside, unconscious. Doctors and nurses spilled through the doors with wheelchairs and stethoscopes; they ran as if out of a burning building. It was mayhem. Had any of them seen my camera? It seemed not a good time to ask.

The girl who refrigerates the stool samples ran past me. Nobody was left. A few days later I encountered a man who was dispensing free hugs outside the farmers’ market. That is not me with the cute butt and sawn-off trousers, by the way. It was me later. He grasped me like a lumberjack. He didn’t speak but I felt as if he knew everything. What a difference it would make, I thought, if they had people like that around, parked on street corners, standing by subway tunnels, in the waiting room at the doctor’s. Around for when everything turns upside down.

Upside Down Cake with Stone Fruit

Adapted (everso slightly) from Pastry Studio

There is such a dizzying array of plums about in LA at the moment that it makes sense to use them here, or you could go for the hybridized pluots or apriums (as I did). However, this recipe was originally intended for apricots, and I suspect it would work equally well with other stone fruit too; anything that gives up its juice in a charitable manner. Nectarines, peaches and the like. The use of honey in the caramel makes quite a difference to the overall taste, and brings out the piquancy of the fruit.

Serves 8

For the fruit caramel

3 tablespoons honey

1 tablespoon butter

½ teaspoon cinnamon

4 – 6 plums (depending on size)

2 – 3 tablespoons toasted flaked almonds

For the cake

140g (1 cup) flour ( this could be rice flour etc)

40g (½ cup) toasted flaked almonds

1½ teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

115g (8 tbs) butter at room temperature

150g (¾ cup) caster sugar

2 large eggs at room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon almond extract (optional)

120 ml (1/2 cup) milk at room temperature

2 tablespoons honey, to glaze

Preheat oven to 350F/190C. Lightly grease a 10 inch (25cm) cake tin.

For the fruit caramel layer, put the honey, butter and cinnamon in a saucepan and heat until melted. Pour into the bottom of the cake pan, then lift the pan and swirl to distribute evenly.

Slice the plums in half, remove the stones, and then cut the fruit into slices (or quarters), and fan them out on top of the honey butter mixture. Make sure that whatever fruit you use covers the bottom in a substantial layer, since it will cook down while baking. Fill in the gaps with a sprinkle of toasted almonds.

For the cake batter, place the flour, almonds, baking powder and salt in the bowl of a food processor or blender. Whizz until the almonds are ground but with some texture still. Pour into a bowl and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Add vanilla and almond extracts if using and blend. Beat in the eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl and mixing thoroughly after each addition.

Add a third of the flour mixture alternately with half the milk, beginning and ending with the flour. Don’t overmix. Spread the batter evenly over the fruit.

Bake until a toothpick tests clean, about 42 – 45 minutes. The sides of the cake will have started to shrink away from the sides of the pan and it will feel soft and springy to the touch. Place on a wire rack to cool for 15 minutes. Run a knife around the edge of the pan to loosen the cake. Invert the cake carefully using a plate – beware of any cascading hot juices.

Warm 2 tablespoons of the honey and brush on to the surface of the cake to glaze. Cool completely or serve at room temperature, as you would a pudding, with some cream of course.