Baking

Ecclefechan tart, for Burns Night

January 25, 2012 Food & drink

Ecclefechan, a small town in the Scottish Borders is famous for a few things, including being the birthplace of both the writer Thomas Carlyle and one Archibald Arnott, Napoleon’s doctor during his extended stay on St Helena, but also, and this is slightly more pertinent for a food blog, for the Ecclefechan tart, a rich concoction of [...]

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Apple bread, baking for cold weather

November 26, 2011 Food & drink

It’s nearly December, so all the apples are in and off the trees now. That leaves an annual problem…dealing with gluts. Luckily, I don’t have any gluts to deal with, but I do have friends who need to deal with theirs, leading to a slight over-abundance of Bramley apples. Apple pie? Too predictable. Baked apples? [...]

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Maple syrup, walnut and pear cake

October 17, 2011 Food & drink

This last week or so have been quite tough, and the coming ones aren’t shaping up particularly well, either. What to do? Well, baking a cake often helps. So, that’s what I did today, cashing in half a day’s holiday tucked away for a rainy day and heading off home in the wind and through [...]

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Gingersnap biscuits

September 25, 2011 Food & drink

These biscuits didn’t really come out as they were intended. They should have been thinner and much more fragile, but the slightly thicker and heavier versions I ended up with have a good heft to them. They’re not what they were meant to be, but they taste good and that’s all that really matters. Beat [...]

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Foosteeyeah, or sesame and peanut slices

July 8, 2011 Food & drink

It’s often said that simplicity in cooking is a virtue, that ingredients should be allowed to speak for themselves. This recipe has just four ingredients, and at a push, you could drop one of those, but they’re carefully combined into something quite exceptional, something that won’t hang around for very long once it’s cooled. The [...]

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Rhubarb and ginger cake

May 26, 2011 Food & drink

We’ve got a North facing garden, shaded by next door’s garage and four stories of Edwardian brickwork. There isn’t a lot of light back there, and the ground has a tendency to hold too much water because of the high clay content. I can successfully grow only two things – those Jurassic style ferns that [...]

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Wholemeal shortbread biscuits

May 18, 2011 Food & drink

This is a guest post from my son, Ethan, aged 8. Ethan has been learning about imperative verbs at school, and for one of his exercises, he had to complete a task and write a set of instructions about what he did, using words that connect each step and are very direct. We thought Ethan’s [...]

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Bagels, step-by-step

March 23, 2011 Food & drink

People often talk about bread making as a bug of some sort that people catch. Well, I’ve definitely caught it, and in an effort to move up a rung on the artisan bread making ladder, I made a batch of bagels. This isn’t a quick recipe. You need to time things carefully so that you’ve [...]

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How to bake bread

January 9, 2011 Food & drink

A lot of people are scared of baking their own bread. There’s a lot of misconceptions out there: It takes too long – not true. A very decent soda bread can be made in under an hour, start to finish. Granted, a proper loaf needs time for the yeast to work it’s magic, but even [...]

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