Tag Archives: Almonds

a sad centre

14 Friday Apr 2017

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This is what happens to some cakes, the ones that rise and then fall. The ‘sadness’ occurs in the centre which slumps defeatedly. Tamasin Day-Lewis was the cook I learnt this term from. It is purposeful, the slump, and not a mistake. Although here there is a hole; cake has been gouged out. It is that kind of cake – bitterly chocolatey, with espresso poured into the mix and with it almonds and butter. I only had a Pyrex dish to bake it in, because I was at my mum’s and I’d taken all her cake tins, slowly, stealthily, over the years. But it didn’t matter because it rose and fell as it should, was luscious and divine, thickly glottal and needing no accompaniment.

This is the most beautiful surface to photograph on. I never do anything to prep it, it is simply the north light and a navy counter hastily de-crumbed. I have had many late afternoon sessions, far at the end of a long corridor, where it is quiet, away from the bashing sea and the compulsive view – long stretches of water fill the windows at the front. The sea disappears gradually, engulfed in mist and the sun’s dazzle. You can’t not look. At the other end there’s nothing much, except height. I have been coming here to this plain seaside town for the last twenty years. I have never found a countertop to better it.

Late afternoons when we’ve trailed huffily up the stairs (92 of them) desperate for a cup of tea, after (just) getting the little green bus from Alfriston on a Sunday. Or a late swim in stagnant August weather, or I’m despatched to make something for an impromptu high tea. I’m miles away from it all in the kitchen and there are never any scales. I make do with the ones my mum uses for throwing her pots, I use her Cheffette mixer bought from a charity shop. I make a cake I ‘shouldn’t’ eat. “Are you allowed that?” is always the question I’m asked. As if I need written permission from a doctor before I can eat cake.

The flat belonged once to the painter Augustus John and when my mum bought it, it belonged to a potter, who with her husband decided after a year that Seaford was too friendless a place, and moved on back to France. From the beginning there were troubles; the building had heroin addicts and pigeon feeders and lots of ‘structural issues’. Neighbours were non-compliant. But my mum was left with a kiln and a room converted into a studio, perched over the English channel – overlooked only by the sea.

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Seaford has no grand architecture. There are no great restaurants, food culture, no ‘scene’. It has a long and manmade shingle beach, is in a bit of a wind tunnel. It isn’t Dorset or those places in Suffolk that people flock to to eat organic ice cream and wear long ‘wraps’. It reminds me of the towns Paul Theroux visited in The Kingdom by the Sea, where he travelled by train and on foot round the coast of Britain during the period of the Falklands war. Seaford has a defeated, slightly belligerent air. It is true what he says here:

“The greatest advantage in this tour was that a country tended to seep to its coast; it was concentrated there, deposited against its beaches like the tide-wrack from the sea. People naturally gravitated to the coast, and they wore fewer clothes there – it was normal on the coast to be semi-naked, exposed”.

He writes a little bit well, doesn’t he? I’m always wary of inserting other people’s quotes into my pieces because it acts as a point of contrast – how well other people write! He is also a bit mean, though and I try not to be. It is easy to be mean about Seaford and I can see it through others’ eyes. But it is twenty years of my life, the branch line train, the wave goodbye (with a jar of something from the health store, something earthy), the two florists and their reasonable bouquets, Paul’s Plaice the fishmonger and the vinegary smell of the sea within, Sussex Stationer’s and the smell of new books and wads of paper, the long sloping road to the sea and then the sea, green or blue, smarting under the sun if it’s out. And then turning into my mum’s and the key under a pot and the note in the letterbox – I’m on the beach, bring down avocados. And then the cake that at some point must be made.

Chocolate espresso cake

 Taken from Tamasin Day-Lewis, Good Tempered Food

TDL is quite firm here on her use of whole blanched almonds, roasted and then ground, but having done it this way many times, I think there’s a real difference in the end result; texture and nuttiness are emphasised. 

Serves 8-10

185g (6.5oz) unsalted butter, diced, plus extra for greasing

185g (6.5oz) dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids) broken into pieces

50 ml (2fl oz) very strong freshly brewed coffee

6 eggs, separated

185g (6.5oz) unrefined caster sugar

185g (6.5oz) blanched, roasted and coarsely ground almonds

Heat oven to 375F/190C/gas mark 5. Melt the butter and chocolate together with the coffee in a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Resist the temptation to stir. While they are melting, cream the egg yolks and sugar in an electric mixer until pale and light, about 8-10 minutes. Continue to whisk, adding the now melted chocolate and butter.

Stop the machine, remove the whisk and fold in the *almonds with a metal spoon. In a clean glass or metal bowl whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks. Stir a spoonful into the chocolate mixture to lighten it before folding in the rest. Pour the mixture into a 10in springform tin with greased sides into which you have placed a circle of buttered greaseproof paper. Bake for 20 minutes, then turn the oven down to 325F/160C/gas mark 3 and continue cooking for a further 40 minutes.

Remove the cake and leave in the tin set on a rack until completely cool. Turn out of the tin and remove the paper. Delicious served with creme fraiche but also lovely on its own.

*I would recommend roasting rather than toasting on the hob as this tends to scorch the almonds – roasting in the oven (preheated to the above temperature) for a few minutes (5 – 10 min) will give them a burnished colour without burning, but you do need to check regularly.

 

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Staying put

13 Monday Oct 2014

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imageThis is tortilla, by which I mean Spanish omelette. Potatoes and onion sweated into a sticky mass and then flopped into beaten egg and then cooked at the lowest of heats until the top sort of coheres and then you flip it over and then it’s done. Better the next day. The recipe I use is by Delia. I somehow wish it wasn’t; someone less Spanish it would be hard to find. And yet it works.

We have been meaning to go on holiday. We were thinking of Mallorca, one of the Spanish Balearic islands. It’s apparently nothing like its previously sordid reputation and is actually really beautiful (and cheap if you use Norwegian Airlines and fly on a Saturday). But we didn’t go there. We flirted with Greece; Paxos, the place I visited when all I had was a few bin bags, a single bed sheet and £40. We didn’t go there in the end. Something about scrolling down a screen and picking a place at random was off-putting, as if all these places were somehow the same, Turkey, Toulouse, Lanzerote, Labia. I think by the end we didn’t know if they were countries or cities or what.

And it wouldn’t really have been a holiday, more a kind of fleeing. As if we were train robbers, when we were just waiting for our flat to become available, and needed somewhere to stay in the interim. But we became a bit heady at the idea of Europe because we haven’t had Europe for so many years; the idea of it, where you get on a plane that costs 10p and suddenly you are in Bosnia! Or you get on a train and you’re in Paris, city of dogs. A coach to World War 1! But I really missed going into a travel agent and being put into a trance. It’s not the same unless you’re frothing at the mouth and gently rocking while a lovely lady in a pink pelmet leafs through a catalogue and guides her gilded talon-shaped nails to some facts appertaining to you and your travel needs and then taps away at her keyboard for a while. The holiday always came to about £3,000 all in but it was like meditation. I always left with nothing but a few free magazines and a strange, limp smile on my face.image

So we didn’t go away. Instead, I decided to photograph conkers against a hessian background and throw away my hideous shoes. I bought a new pair from Clarks shoe shop, which was also a hypnotic experience. In the end I had no idea what I was buying. They’re cream leather with green laces and they look like little crimped pies. “They certainly make a statement!” the assistant said, while I walked up and down. Anyway, I quite like them. And we have just left LA. Maybe we’re not ready for Europe yet. It is autumn here and everyone is going away. We’ve arrived and everyone is going. Mystified by the weather, everyone talks about it, and their colds, which are measly and mainly consist of sneezing. But there are extraordinary changes afoot here, and it’s exciting. There are storms and dangerous fissures in the chalk Downs, the sea is wild but still swimable. There’s a colony of rare kittiwakes nesting in the cliffs at Seaford. On the seafront, some kind Lithuanian fishermen handed us some mackerel, which were a startling, shiny blue with eyes like little buttons. I don’t actually know that they were Lithuanian, because I didn’t ask. It was decided that they were, through some weird process to do with their courtly manners.

I was described as ‘the lady in beige’ today. There I was draped over a plastic chair waiting to have ‘my bloods’ taken by the phlebotomist and it made me inwardly smile. And a kind chef from my favourite cafe Front Room in Seaford gave me my own ramekin of Spanish almonds to go with my egg and chips. His gesture and the plate of food reminded me of the tortilla – a warm feast of piquant, oniony yellows and browns – which feels right for autumn, for rugging up in various shades of beige, for staring out to sea, and for staying put.

On the turn

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Food-wise, I’m waiting for peaches. That’s when I know I’m in Los Angeles. More than lemons and oranges, which have an all-year-round prolific, whoreish quality – if they’re not blossoming they’re bearing fruit, it’s a constant publicity machine – peaches can only mean early summer here. And they get riper and more aromatic and squishier as the weeks go by, the skin seemingly more paper-thin, the round globe of flesh beneath more sunset-orange, more dripping, before it goes over, starts to rot.

We have a nectarine tree which is coming into blossom and that counts as my stone fruit barometer of how things will be. The blossoms are pink and furtive still, with only a few little dazzlers. There is no point waiting for the fruit, which will be eaten by squirrels. Every year I have been thwarted by them and so I don’t bother now – they know the perfect moment at which the fruit needs to be eaten better than I do and besides they’re more likely to be up and ready. They demolished my sunflowers, full of nascent seeds. They eat all the bird food.

And we have B&B to do. We’re ‘doing’ B&B though sometimes it feels as if we are being done to, depending on the caliber of guest. Some make it easy. Our first guests since our return were from Amsterdam and behaved as if these were their last days on earth. They breakfasted early and then played tennis, swam in the pool and generally ran themselves ragged in a pleasant and contained way. They loved the place and we loved them for loving it all.

Then came a mother and daughter team – New Yorkers originally from Egypt – who alternated between days spent dragging around theme parks and long hours holed up in their room lobbing shrill and indecipherable insults at each other. They also filled our fridge with foodstuffs of no particular seasonal bias: Ranch dressing, a bumper box of strawberries, little dwarf tomatoes, chocolate milk, an enormous chocolate Bundt cake, boxed up. “Fresh,” the mother announced, “I need fresh.” As if this explained it. It may have explained their blocked toilet, which I had to investigate with a forced smile and a plunger.

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It was the Bundt cake that bothered me. They were passing up my homemade lemon shortbread, which languished to staleness. Five ingredients (lemon zest, butter, sugar, flour, almonds) versus – actually I lost count. They had me at sorbitan monostearate. I’m not against junk food in its place (a burger at midnight, fries, sweet fries for dipping into an omelette, a tranche of milk chocolate and a hot mug of tea), but if I’m being offered something home-made, I devour it. And I say thank you a lot. And where’s the fricking Ranch anyway? What is Ranch dressing? I need to know this before I leave.

Some strangers become stranger still, the longer you make their acquaintance; in this case, we were all mutually baffled by one another but tried for the sake of sanity to get along. They were nice people and kind in this instance: Joe did his back in and they gave us Tiger Balm and it helped. But it always happens in the first moment of meeting, the mould is set and there’s no turning back; the apartment becomes a set of enclosures, returning to rooms only when the keys are returned.

Back to blossoms. I will let you know when the peaches are in. In the meantime, there are rosemary blossoms (however, on the turn) to add to peach and nectarine and they are all edible. You could festoon salads with them, or adorn this cake with them if you are in favour of icing/frosting (they would need something to stick to, I should think). I immediately wanted to make chocolate cake; I wanted to make the opposite of the towering brown behemoth chilling in our fridge for seven days. So this is an austere, silken and rather un-American square of dark chocolate brownie spiked with rosemary. The herb gives it a silvery, savoury edge and the chocolate is dense and rather grown up. I also added a handful of almonds and two small clouds of cocoa.

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Nowhere but here

08 Saturday Mar 2014

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I’ve been here three seasons; a whole autumn, one full winter, the beginnings of spring. That translates as cold, long, dark, wet and angry. Gusty gales, the inexplicable (to me) spring and neap tides, the winter solstice and the darkest night. I’ve watched too many documentaries on BBC4, and I keep bumping into people who think I’ve already left. “Haven’t you gone yet?” “Still here?” or the weirdly judging “shouldn’t you have gone by now?”. And the sun is tepid – bright and cheerful but not warm. At the moment, and this moment is long, there is nowhere but here. Here is where I have a good doctor and no bills, no frightening and incomprehensible bills that have to be explained to me in a way that makes them even more incomprehensible.

Because Obama is still sorting out his healthcare, and for now we have no insurance and to be without insurance with a chronic condition in the US is scary. And people love to tell you how scary; a medical insurance broker in LA, over the course of a two-hour conversation, cheerfully painted a picture of precise Breugal-like horror at what would befall me if I continued to live an uninsured life. One of her client’s had walked out of the door one morning and dislodged one of her eyeballs – or her retina flew off. Or anyway, something happened to her eye and she had no insurance! I probably would have followed Francis Bacon’s lead in this case and popped my eyeball back in, which I read he used to do often after a few stiff ones at the French House.

So I’m here and it’s spring and I’ve already said goodbye at least twice to everyone. I am in that strange, drained nothing-doing state. An oddity in a world where everyone works, a permanent tourist, which is not half as fun as it sounds. And I don’t want to write about leeks or rhubarb, and I have tramped through enough Sussex undergrowth to know that the ubiquitous wild garlic leaves of which everyone writes are having an off year, or simply spring is late. So anyway I started cleaning. Sponging down the insides of my mother’s cupboards, shaking out the bowls and the bits of plastic appendage and the darkly mottled casserole dishes and the 70s colander. This bit was fun, discovering what was there and had been forgotten about. There were things that have followed me from Devon up to London down to Sussex, and sometimes even before my birth; some predate Woolwich!

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The pestle and mortar originally belonged to my Australian grandmother and came from her home in Sydney. I never knew her really, but I have her postcards and letters in her kind capitals and lots of photos, and a memory of brushing her long silver hair. Now that I am apart from my things, I can see how wonderful it is to hold something like this – its weight and shape, and to imagine fingerprints and palms. The beechwood handle has come unmoored from its porcelain head. There are marks from not sure where or what all over the bodies of both mortars. The very act of pounding is to replicate what she would have done, her hands under mine; a form of conjuring. Spices, herbs, pigments and powders – I know she was a natural alchemist. Maybe, who knows, if I pound away and for long enough I’ll get healed.

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Pounding herbs and garlic in a mortar is not nearly as arduous as it looks. It is actually very efficient – the whole thing comes together within a few minutes, the addition of oil is very satisfying, and then you’ve made it yourself and probably worked through a few grudges while you were at it. You are also ‘tempering’ the ingredients, putting them back into balance; in the Middle Ages, honey tempered vinegar, wine tempered fish and the mortar was the vessel to do it.* You are in control of things too, able to see and feel when particles become slosh (as it were).

The Catalan sauce romesco is still made in this way; peppers, nuts, oil, vinegar, bread and garlic are pounded into heady oblivion. As is pesto, skorthalia, the garlicky sauce from Greece, tahini, the Turkish classic tarator made with walnuts and stale white bread and Catalan picada, made with parsley and almonds (below).

It’s better to give approximations when it comes to pounding, because this is where feel is paramount, and it’s good to taste as you go; you can always add more of something. Add oil in very small increments to begin and then increase. I like herb/garlic sauces to have texture, with nuggets of this or that. If you don’t, pound on.

My version of a Catalan picada
1 small handful of blanched almonds (about 20)
1-2 garlic cloves peeled & a pinch of sea salt
4 big glugs of extra virgin olive oil
One big handful of roughly chopped flat-leaf parsley
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Crush the garlic with a good pinch of salt in a mortar until you have a smooth paste. Now add the almonds and keep pounding until amalgamated. Now add the parsley to the mortar, a small bit at a time, and pound until incorporated. Add the olive oil, trickling it in slowly and stir well before adding the lemon juice (add the juice after the oil otherwise it’ll turn the parsley brown). Lovely stirred into a fish casserole or simply served alongside mackerel or clams, sprats, lightly steamed veg or chicken, or stirred into salted yoghurt – really anything.

*Consider The Fork, a history of how we cook and eat by Bee Wilson, is a fascinating book and goes into some detail on the history of the pestle and mortar, if you wanted to read on…

Empty legs

20 Thursday Feb 2014

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I had my first shiatsu session the other day (along the same lines as acupuncture but using physical pressure instead of needles), and the man told me I had ’empty legs’. I had empty legs and empty feet, particularly my arches. This is nothing new – when I was a drama school student, the teachers’ main beef with me was that I had ‘dead legs and frozen eyes’. Someone else was described as having ‘no back’. It’s something to do with parts of our bodies being absent to us. The answer these days is to swim more, but I have not ventured into the English Channel since November and certainly don’t intend to now, with the huge brown swell, the sudden big lurching tide that would vanish me in a second. All I do is look at it from the balcony; a passenger on a boat that never docks.

But I know what he means about swimming. In LA I swam every day in an open-air pool. The area was fringed with merry red Bougainvillea, insubstantial as paper and smelling of nothing. My wet footsteps evaporated behind me making me handily invisible. It was all man-made and relatively new; units instead of flats, everything built for the purpose, everything clean. At first glance there is nowhere to hide, no nooks or crannies so you are exposed to the neighbours wanting to chat/complain about the perfect temperature of the water, the ‘chill’ in the air when there is none, the only thing fluttering being the leaf of a book or a butterfly. It feels an empty landscape.

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Until you take yourself off; behind the tennis court is a narrow pathway where there is a pendulous lemon tree; Eureka lemons that are thick and pock-marked and heavy in the hand and need a hoe to get a purchase. Sprouting like mad hair is wild fennel and the smell is strong and medicinal and follows you to the orange trees, their diseased leaves and strongly floral blossoms heady like some kind of deathly elixir. A wild peach tree stands anonymously with blossoms like any other and tough herbs lead the way round the complex. Yards from the pool is this alchemy of smell coming up from the dust.

For me the pull to this landscape is stronger, particularly now that I know about our own Meyer lemon tree and its rash of blossom and the ‘eight or nine’ hummingbirds that visit it every day. And Joe is there doing the B&B in my stead, greeting the guests, not making the lemon shortbread or jam or ironing the sheets (‘I’m not going to do it like you’), but feeding the stray cat and getting rave reviews and being lovely as only he can be. Here in England there is rhubarb and snowdrops and long cold doused days and the obscene trickle of rainwater as it finds the nape of the neck. Bay trees stand to attention outside glossy eateries but it rarely occurs to me to take a leaf and scrunch it up, and smell its warm spiky clove-ness.

Occasionally it feels like fun; the new roomy Circle Line and the hoards of children on half term holiday on the tubes and the buses up in London (‘hold on to the yellow, Imogen!’). A small boy in a bike helmet traces his F Words To Work On next to me with his finger: frightened, fallow, fall, fat. And suddenly I feel bereft that there’ll be no Imogen in LA, none of these terribly English moments. So I make myself think of the sun, like a huge melting pat of butter in the sky. The blue will be the most unEnglish blue. The herbs will be virulent, wild and prolific and the air will smell of them. I’ll stride out, lunge into water and then feel it evaporate on my skin. I’ll have my own bowl of lemons, the car, the pool, that constant sun again (always the same), a brilliant dry cleaner, empty streets. Hopefully no more empty legs.

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The B&B lemon shortbread began life as Jane Grigson’s shortbread knobs in her Fruit Book though I have doctored them with lemon zest and almonds. They are incredibly simple to make: melt 175g unsalted butter over a medium heat and add the finely grated zest of two lemons. Allow this to infuse and cool. Then add to the butter 200g of plain flour, 25g of ground almonds, 125g of sugar and a pinch of sea salt (all mixed together beforehand in a bowl). Make a sandy paste and then roll the mixture into little teaspoon-sized balls which you then press slightly to flatten. Bake on trays with parchment paper at 150C/300F for about 25 minutes. They’re done when they’re golden brown. Sometimes I drop a couple of torn bay leaves into the melted butter to infuse – is this wrong? I don’t know but I like the smell and fish them out before adding the flour.

Always winter

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

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Perhaps it’s because I have been spending a lot of time in the mud, but I’m drawn very much to muscovado sugar. Dark as earth, moist, crumbly and rich with minerals, it has sizeable heft. It is always winter with muscovado. And it reminds me of the eternal cold of Devon, before central heating, and the way our small fingers stuck to the inside of the windows and having to get dressed with our foggy breath snorting out of our mouths like buffalo.

As children we only ever had muscovado and we put it in our tea, which was like drinking turf. We sprinkled it over our porridge in the mornings and the strong malt-like aniseed depth of it was not always easy to take, though it helped if there was a moat of cold milk which the muscovado sweetened to butterscotch. If muscovado is turf then molasses is tar. It was sometimes given to us ‘for nerves’ in the same way that cod liver oil was administered ‘for bones’. And I can still remember the thick gluey strings of molasses making my jaw ache, the smell strangely reminiscent of tobacco and the colour which was like Victorian yacht varnish.

I was aware that other households didn’t have such things. My school friends had white sugar that was often mistaken for salt, and a wet dab of the finger was needed to ascertain which was which. I also remember that theirs were houses filled with neatness and pullovers and tank tops knitted in luminous artificial colours.

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My friends didn’t have to be wrapped in sheets stiff with heat from the storage heater just before bedtime. They didn’t know what they were missing, because being swaddled like this so you could barely move and feeling the starchy steam rise into the room was actually very satisfying. And then we were lowered into our beds like mummies. But apart from this one thing, I really wanted to be banal and suburban and have nothing unique about me at all.

This might be why I called myself Marian, which I did for a while, thinking it was a nice, quiet name. But the black sugar was too much of a give away. It marked us out as odd and therefore vulnerable to attack. And it wasn’t used for things people understood, like chutneys, marinades and fruit cake. It spoke of the chaos underpinning everything, that we used muscovado outside of its real purpose, that we didn’t differentiate. Eventually we left, dad to Exmouth and the rest of us to Exeter and later onwards to London. It has left me with a lifelong nervousness of parochial life, of so-called ‘country living’. Those small places can be tough. But muscovado put iron in the soul and molasses helped to calm our fraying nerves.

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The lowdown on muscovado

Muscovado (from the Portuguese açúcar mascavado meaning ‘separated sugar’) is also known as Barbados sugar, and is made differently to other brown sugars: instead of being white sugar to which molasses is added, it is boiled down from sugar cane juice, purified with lime juice, but then not refined any further. Muscovado is made in Barbados, in Mauritius, and in the Antique province in the Philippines, where it was one of the most prominent export commodities, from the 19th century until the late 1970s. It is nutritionally richer than other brown sugars, and retains most of the natural minerals – such as calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium and iron – inherent in sugarcane juice.

Muscovado brownies with almonds

Adapted from The Delia Collection: Chocolate

You can use whatever nut takes your fancy, but almonds always work with this recipe, and keep the skins on. This is on the ‘cakey’ end of the brownie spectrum – crisp on the outside and damp within, but no weeping chocolate or fudge. If this bothers you, use my earlier brownie recipe. I’m terrified now looking back at those ingredients; you will probably need a defibrillator standing by, just in case. This recipe is much more demure. You can make it gluten-free by using ground almonds/rice flour instead of the standard plain. The molasses keeps things dark and rich, but is not essential here. The salt, to my mind, is.

2 oz (50g) almonds (skin on)

4 oz (110g) dark chocolate (60-70% cocoa solids)

4 oz (110g) butter

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

8 oz (225g) dark muscovado sugar

1 tbs molasses (optional)

2 oz (50g) plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp sea salt (plus a pinch to sprinkle over the baked brownie)

Lightly grease a non-stick baking tin 6 x 10 inch (15 x 24 cm) and line with baking parchment. Allow the paper to come 1 inch (2.5 cm) above the tin. Heat the oven to 350F/180C, then chop the almonds roughly, put them on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for about 5-8 minutes, keeping an eye on them as they burn easily.

While the almonds are doing their work, put chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl fitted over a pan of barely simmering water. Allow the chocolate to melt without stirring it, then remove from the heat and gently stir to smoothness. Then mix in the other ingredients until well blended. Spread the mixture into the prepared tin and bake on the centre shelf for about 25 minutes, or until soft and springy in the middle. Leave to cool for ten minutes, and then put on a sheet of parchment on a wire rack. Cut squint, so you can eat the stray bits while no one’s looking.

Topsy turvy

09 Monday Sep 2013

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Three other recipes that involve stone fruit:

Chocolate and apricot tart

Peach and amaretti tarte tatin

Sauteed plums and chocolate pudding

Another use for honey:

Quince paste and Manchego

Lemon, almond, olive oil cake

14 Tuesday May 2013

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These are no ordinary lemons. They are Meyer lemons, big and blowsy, a deep yellowy-orange, the colour of fresh egg yolk. The smell and feel are both quite different to the pocked and gnarly Eureka, say: smoother, sweeter, riper, heavier in the hand. They are poreless, and at times almost round, and their leaves are dark and glossy. And they came from our friends’ garden. Before we got to the lemon tree, I was taken on a tour by their eight-year-old daughter, who picked me a posy of clover to eat (peppery) and we examined the orange tree we had given them as a present, which was actually two trees grafted on to one root. Their avocado tree was huge with leaves like big, green jazz hands. There were no more avocados though, so we stood and admired the foliage.

The lemon tree was matted with cobwebs. There was a birdhouse that hung from one of the branches which looked as though it had its own hammock, so cleverly had the house been divided by the spider’s yarn. When we brought the lemons home and lifted them out, spiders skittered over the surfaces of the fruit, unmoored. I liked the way that parts of the tree were still attached; bits of branch, leaves sprouting, as if the fruit was still in the throes of living.

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We are back to the stagnant heat again. All this week there will be nothing to break the seal. The air is utterly still where we are, and at night one feels cloaked in it. The only place to be is the coast where there is a sea mist and a breeze.  Inland we are engulfed; like characters from a Tennessee Williams play, we are bathed in a halo of glowing sweat. It seems the next logical step is a silk negligee and a bottle of scotch.

Although it may seem strange, being in the kitchen at times like this is actually a reprieve. Inside is cooler. Of course, if you have a glut of lemons, making lemonade would be perfect on days like these: a jug filled with ice and mint, frothing with syrupy lemon fizz. But this is a light cake and goes well with fresh seasonal fruit (the first apricots are in). I wanted to do something sufficiently involving and I liked the processes involved. I have made this flourless; it gives it a lovely dampness and it goes down beautifully. (In fact I wanted to call this post Rising Damp because the memory made me smile but I couldn’t fit it all in).

I blanched, roasted and ground the almonds myself – it makes a difference if you like uneven nuttiness in a cake, which I profess I do. It doesn’t rise and fall quite as dramatically as other ‘broken’ cakes I have featured, such as the chocolate marmalade slump cake and the bitter chocolate olive oil cake but it has the same softly flattened character.

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Lemon, almond, olive oil cake

Adapted (almost beyond recognition) from Pastry Studio

I am quite hardcore here about the almond preparation but using a packet of already ground almonds is totally acceptable. Give them a gentle toast in a frying pan beforehand to release flavour. If you are using regular lemons, the cake will generally be sharper and taste more lemony.

Serves 8

5 free range eggs, separated

150g (5½ oz) sugar, divided

175ml (6 fl oz) extra virgin olive oil

Juice of 1 lemon

Finely grated zest of 2 lemons

175g (6 oz) blanched, toasted and ground almonds

½ tsp salt

1 tbs sugar, for the top of the cake

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Lightly grease a 23cm (9in) cake tin with olive oil and line with parchment.

Beat the yolks and just under half of the sugar until thick and pale. Reduce the whisk to medium speed and drizzle in the olive oil. Then add the lemon juice and zest. The mixture may look a bit sloppy. Sift half the ground almonds into the batter and fold in gently. Sift in the remaining almonds until combined, making sure to lift up the batter from the bottom and sides of the bowl. Beat the egg whites with the salt until foamy. Slowly rain in the rest of the sugar until they hold a soft, satiny peak. Fold a third of the whites into the yolk mixture to lighten the batter, then fold in the remaining whites.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and gently tap the bottom on to a work surface to release any air bubbles. Sprinkle the 1 tbs of sugar on to the top of the cake (don’t omit this as it gives the cake a nice crunch). Bake until the cake is puffed and golden – about 30 minutes. Place on a wire rack to cool for 10 minutes. Release the cake and let it cool completely. Gently invert the cake and remove the paper. Serve with some crème fraîche and some poached apricots or other seasonal fruit.

Bitter chocolate olive oil cake

03 Sunday Feb 2013

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This is not a rant against butter. Far from it. But I am rather in love with olive oil and its peculiar affinity with desserts. And while butter highlights sweetness, is dense and comforting, olive oil is less weighty, making the crumb lighter, almost bubbly. Initially, I was scared of going for an extra virginal oil, but the fruity-pepper quality is reminiscent of spice. And good olive oil will have traces of bitterness and pungency, with echoes still of the actual olive. I know I’m probably a bit behind, but the notion of tasting fresh olive oil, sipping it like wine, was new to me, until I tried it. Weirdly, it’s not oily or greasy, but fresh and clean, spring-like.

And here in LA, it is spring; particularly early in the morning with the desert air still biting but with a still and steady sun above. After months of wet (it’s true what they say – LA in the rain is basically Slough with palm trees), it is good to remember the heat, the sharpness and dryness of the air. Things are budding again. Magnolia with its slip of pink just pushing through. Lemon trees a forest of blossom, with the first yellow fruit like tear drops. And everything is green, courtesy of the rain. Troughs of dried mud have appeared next to banks of luminous grass. It’s all very Hollywood.

Olive oil is big business and full of controversy. It’s a minefield, frankly. Here in California, olive trees were brought to the state by Spanish missionaries in the 18th century. Everywhere the silver-grey leaves, stark as bullets in the sun, remind you of the fact that despite its New World appearance, the terroir of this part of California is fundamentally Mediterranean.

I cannot begin to unravel the complexity of what makes a good olive oil, but apparently it has little to do with colour and everything to do with freshness; olives are a stone fruit and the oil is essentially the juice of the olive, and like all juice, it is perishable. Look for bottles with a ‘best by’ date, or better still a date of harvest. Early harvest oil will be generally much more pungent and more flavourful than late harvest. And the oil should be extracted by cold-pressing, using neither heat nor chemicals. This is obviously in an ideal world.

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Anyway, back to cake. Try not to be cowed by the robustness of the oil you are using here; the bitterness in both the chocolate and the oil is tempered by the delightful texture of the almonds and the fissured exterior of the cake once baked – the way it cracks like a dinosaur’s egg and sinks gratefully into a thick mound of cream. It is not as truffle-like as it looks – it’s glistening because I decided, erroneously, to fleck it with olive oil for presentation purposes. I also sprinkled it with flaky salt, but have a glass of water on hand if you decide to go this route.

Bitter chocolate olive oil cake

Adapted from The Bojon Gourmet/Alice Medrich

50g (1/2 cup) blanched whole almonds

1 tbs cocoa powder

150g dark chocolate (70-72% cocoa solids) broken into pieces

120ml (½ cup) extra virgin olive oil

Pinch of flaky sea salt, plus some for serving

4 large eggs, separated at room temperature

170g (¾ cup) caster sugar, divided use

¼ tsp cream of tartar

Position a rack in the centre of the oven and pre-heat to 325F/170C. Grease an 8 or 9″ (20cm) round cake tin with a bit of olive oil. If using whole almonds (which I would recommend) toast them for a minute or so over a medium heat until they start to smell nice and turn a little golden. Then grind them with the cocoa powder in a blender or coffee grinder until powdery but with a few stray bits of nut left, for texture. Place the chocolate in a heat-proof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Once it looks well on its way to melting, add the oil and the pinch of sea salt and stir.

Remove the bowl from the pan and whisk in 110g (½ cup) of the sugar and the almond mixture until combined. Whisk in the egg yolks. If the mixture starts to get cold, it may ‘seize’ or look grainy. If this happens, place the bowl back over the simmering pan and stir until it loosens again. Place the egg whites in a very clean bowl and whisk until just frothy. Then add the cream of tartar and continue until foamy. Rain in the remaining sugar, continuing to whisk until the whites hold soft peaks.

Without delay, use a rubber spatula to stir a small portion of the whipped whites into the chocolate mixture to loosen, then gently fold in the remaining whites until the batter is just combined and no streaks remain. Immediately pour mixture into the prepared pan, smooth out the top and bake until a toothpick inserted comes out with moist crumbs attached – 35 to 45 minutes. Let the cake cool completely, then remove from the pan and sprinkle with sea salt – this may not be to your liking, so omit if not. The cake improves with time, courtesy of the almonds. Keep covered at room temperature for 3-4 days for the full effect.

Read on Read Tom Mueller’s book Extra Virginity if you’re interested in olive oil intrigue. Also check out his website and blog truthinoliveoil.com for lots of fascinating facts.

Chocolate pots with cardamom

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

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I am often asked to “bring pudding” when we go to friends’ houses for dinner. I always enjoy this activity, although it can be nerve-wracking, particularly if there are people there that I don’t know. Will me and my pudding be judged? Will I be able to “bring it” as the young folks say here? It doesn’t much matter either way, except that I am not a particularly skillful cook and still I am asked to bring something homemade.

I know there are many cultures where you buy in dessert and LA is one of them. I wouldn’t gripe, but the bought stuff here is dazzling in its aesthetic perfection but tastes of nothing. And it’s incredibly sweet. Horribly sweet. So here’s what I’m thinking: I write a book (which will be read by about seven people, but to those people I say thank you very much) about what you can make or bring that is neither horrifically sweet nor terribly complicated. It may well look as if a donkey has been let loose in the garden and then battered its way through the post and pans before relieving itself in your cake tin. But it will taste good. And ‘afters’ need not be pudding or cake at all, but a rough cheek of apple and a chunk of crumbling Cheddar. Some toasted, spiced nuts. A bowl of sloping apricots with cardamom. Or a chocolate pot.

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Cardamom was imported from its native India in the Middle Ages by Arabic traders to the Muslim Mediterranean (Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt for example), where it now belongs to the sphere of cooking known as the saffron-cinnamon link*. Beloved of Scandinavians too, it does well in sweet things (including sweet vegetables like carrots and parsnips). It is strong, searing almost – as if you have found yourself in a clearing after a recent bonfire involving eucalyptus: charcoal, menthol, ash, smoke and the shock of clean air combine, particularly if you whizz up the seeds in a blender and stick your head in. It belongs with almonds, pistachios, rose water, oranges and lemons. Good in bread and cake, bewitching in a poaching syrup for fruit. Chocolate it loves, including the white stuff where it cuts through the sweet gloop with masterful directness.

Oh yes, and Happy New Year! Due to technical ineptitude, I was unable to get my head round the so-called interactive report I posted at the beginning of January and those wishing to use it would have been blocked. I would like to say thank you to everyone who has read and enjoyed me, followed me and either commented publicly or privately and generally cheered me on. It is also very exciting to be featured on Freshly Pressed. It’s a solitary business, writing, so any encouragement is my meat and potatoes.

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These chocolate pots have the minimum of sugar and no flour. There is cream though so forget it being good for you, except in the psychological, spiritual and sensual sense. As for chocolate, you can take the bitterness right to the edge, but try to keep it this side of fruity. I would stop at 70% cocoa solids myself. Though the recipe asks for an egg, I made it without and it was still lovely; a handy detail for the egg-intolerant.

This recipe comes from Lucas Hollweg’s so-much-more-than-just-good book Good Things To Eat. My take comes with a toasted almond or two, which gives the pudding a sort of carb-like purchase and is in keeping with its Moorish provenance. But go bare if you dare.

Chocolate pots with cardamom

Adapted from Lucas Hollweg, Good Things to Eat

Serves 6

15 cardamom pods

200ml (7fl oz) whole milk

200g (7oz) dark chocolate (60-70% cocoa solids), broken into small pieces

150ml (5fl oz) heavy/double cream, plus extra to serve

50g (1¾ oz) caster/superfine sugar

1 medium egg

“Crush the cardamom pods in a pestle and mortar, or roughly chop, squashing the black seeds inside as you go. Put in a small saucepan with the milk and bring to a simmer, then turn off the heat, cover and leave to stand for 1 hour.

Put the chocolate in a mixing bowl. Add the cream and sugar to the milk and bring to a simmer. Turn off the heat and leave to stand for a minute, then strain through a sieve onto the chocolate. Allow everything to melt for a minute or two, then beat together until smooth and silky. Beat in the egg until everything is well combined.

Divide the mixture between 6 espresso-sized cups or small glasses and put in the fridge to set for a couple of hours. Add a splash of cream to the top of each one if you feel like it.”

*Read Sam and Sam Clark’s beautiful cookbook Moro for more on this.IMG_1174

Sweet and salty almonds

David Lebovitz, The Sweet Life in Paris

Deborah Madison, Seasonal Fruit Desserts

Serves 2

1 cup (170g) blanched almonds

1 tbs (15g) butter

1 tbs dark brown sugar

A good pinch of flaky sea salt (fleur de sel) or smoked sea salt

A good pinch of freshly ground black pepper

Spread the nuts on a baking sheet and roast in a 300F (180C) oven for about 5 minutes to ‘tickle out’ their flavour. Try to avoid colouring them too much. Melt the butter in a pan over a medium heat and then add the warmed almonds. Sprinkle the brown sugar over them, and stir until the sugar has melted. Remove from the heat, then sprinkle with the salt and a fresh grind of pepper. Let cool to harden. Tap the almonds gently with a rolling pin to break them up or leave them whole.