Tag: home baking

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Cranberry fest starts

It’s a dreich day here on the island – cold, grey and rainy – so I decided to make my annual batch of cranberry mincemeat for Christmas.

I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with mincemeat. Cranberry mincemeat, which I discovered about ten years ago, seemed to be the perfect antidote to that. Less clove-heavy and dark. More fruity and zesty.

However I’ve increasingly started to dislike the texture of suet in my mincemeat, even vegetarian suet, but most recipes use it for shelf stability and preservation purposes so it’s in most things. I could replace it with butter, and some recipes do, but I haven’t experimented with that yet.

Cooking down

I’ve found a recipe that doesn’t use any fat at all (I’m really not anti-fat, but it seemed worth a try) and although the cooked mincemeat will only last six weeks or so in jars in the fridge, I can always freeze any left after that time has elapsed.

The final result

And I think it’s going to be worth it for the fresh, zesty taste that it will add to sweet pies and crumbles. I tasted as I cooked and it’s delicious.

The recipe is here https://fromthelarder.co.uk/cranberry-cointreau-mincemeat/

I’ll start making my cranberry frangipane mince pies once we hit December and try and stash a bag or two of them in the freezer for walk-ins.

There’s always a flurry of baking activity when the fresh cranberries are for sale. I also made this cranberry traybake. Just because.

It should have been drizzled with icing but I’m afraid we showed all the restraint of a bunch of goats rampaging through a willow patch and it didn’t happen. ..

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Brambling

Ripe brambles (blackberries) always herald the start of autumn for me.

These days brambles can be bought year round from supermarkets – grown abroad in warmer climates, with big, blowsy berries. I think the small local ones taste better, collected a bowlful at a time from wild hedgerows.

Wind-salted and intense.

Our brambles ripen a fair time later than those further south. I’ve been waiting for them to ripen properly for weeks now, and spurred on by a kind donation of some locally grown cooking apples, Bramleys and Keswick Codlin, (thank you Wildlife Croft Skye) it was time to get picking.

Our access track down from the croft is incredibly steep. Every week husband bravely drags the big wheelie bin down the track to the collection point in the lane, and back up again afterwards. Just thinking about it makes my head spin a bit. But today I joined him after breakfast, walking with him down the track with the bin to forage for brambles.

They’re just starting to ripen. The next few weeks will be when the bulk of the harvest is at its best, but we managed to gather a respectable bowlful for a few apple and bramble pies.

Under construction

It was very quiet as we were picking. Just the sound of the rooks cawing overhead and the soft gurgle of the stream rushing through the culvert by our feet. The water was hidden by a tangle of brambles, yarrow, thistles and rowan.

I’m going to head down to the lane and the bramble patches every few days now to make the most of the free bounty whilst it lasts. Any excess can be popped into the freezer for later use.

There’s nothing like a crisp, sweet apple pie studded with little purple bramble taste explosions on the cold, dark days of winter.

Apple and bramble pie
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Baking baguettes

As my baking things are still in boxes, and making sourdough without a Dutch oven, baneton and all the faffy but essential equipment seems a step too far, I’ve started experimenting with baking baguettes.

Inspired by Mairi at Highland Seedlings, who makes baguettes a few times a week, I decided to give it a go.

I’ve been using this recipe from Taste of Artisan https://tasteofartisan.com/french-baguette-recipe/ which is simple to follow and produces good results, even for a novice baguette baker like me.

The dough proves for a few hours in a warm place in a covered bowl to get the yeast active then sits overnight in the fridge for a further 12 hours of “cold proving”. There’s no kneading, just a few stretches and flips, which definitely gets my vote.

It’s a very high hydration dough, nearly 70%, so it’s wet and quite tricky to work with. Luckily there’s not much fiddling beyond shaping to do.

The crust is good and the flavour is exceptional.

I’ve even been up early to switch the oven on and shape and bake the loaves first thing so that we can enjoy them for breakfast.

I’m not sure whether that’s true love or greed, but whatever it is it means that we have warm, freshly baked bread with our coffee, which is a joy.

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Caravan food

The caravan has a tiny kitchen, with three working gas burners and a very small electric oven. It’s lack of storage space has meant that we have no room for electrical appliances like mixers or blenders, making everything a manual process when it comes to food preparation . So, meals have to be simple.

But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be good. We’re working hard on the house and croft, and we need sustenance. An army marches on its stomach!

I’ve looked back at some of the meals that we’ve produced in the caravan with our one baking tin and I’m pleased to see that we’ve actually managed OK.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that we seem to be heavy on the sweet treats! No apologies for that. It’s true to say that this build is being fuelled by cake…

Bakewell tart
Sourdough from the Mallaig bakery with homemade houmous
Strawberry slab cake
Lunch butties with crispy chicken
Turkish bean salad
Chocolate cake
Teatime flapjacks
Cheese and chive scones
Local rope grown mussels
Lentil, garlic & veg soup
Pear pancakes with Greek Yoghurt & Honey
Soy marinated sesame salmon
Cranachan
Lentil dhal
Baklava
Thai salmon ready for baking
Local langoustines
Breakfast of champions
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Easter Bread – Tsoureki

Tsoureki is a sweet, soft, fragrant Greek Easter bread which I first made last year in lockdown, having been unable to get Easter Eggs delivered.

We loved it, and it seems to have stuck as a tradition.

Of course, last year I had a proper kitchen, and a kitchen machine with a dough hook to take the strain. It needs a good fifteen minutes of kneading! This year was rather different.

I think that this was the most challenging thing I’ve tried to make in our tiny caravan kitchen so far, but it worked well, and we feasted on it for breakfast yesterday morning with enough left over for today too.

Rich with eggs, orange zest and mahlep, a spice made from ground cherry stones, it’s sweet, fragrant, soft and delicious. And all the more enjoyable for being a time consuming thing to make, and a once-a-year-treat.

Husband enjoyed his straight with no embellishments, washed down with a cup of coffee. I decided to Northern Up my slice with butter and rhubarb jam, Yorkshire style. Which was unutterably delicious. No judgements, now!

Here’s a link to the recipe I used if anyone wants to try it.
Tsoureki https://www.mygreekdish.com/recipe/tsoureki-recipe-traditional-greek-easter-bread/

Happy Easter to you all!

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Slow days

Everything has dipped this week. I’ve noticed both husband and I gradually losing energy and becoming slower and more reluctant to do things.

I don’t know if it’s the short, cold days, the effect of this prolonged lockdown, or a combination of both, but we are drooping a bit.

Problems with the build and trying to find ways to correct the problems (thank you builders), the prospect of further supply delays and scarcity of materials, and costs going up steeply with new import taxes (thank you Brexit) have probably contributed to our general malaise and lack of energy.

We will get through this. It’s just a few slow days.

All I can do is keep morale up as much as I can for both of us.

I know that pear pancakes and lemon drizzle cake with tea later in the day won’t solve anything, but they’re sweet and comforting and do make us feel a little better.

So that’s what we’ve been doing this week. In between jobs we wrap up in blankets, drink tea and eat cake.

My way of getting through the dark days.

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Snow on the croft

We awoke this morning to a white blanket of snow over everything again. The temperatures had fallen overnight and it had snowed for several hours.

Getting up and started is the hardest thing when it’s cold like this.

Breakfast was taken by the fire with both of us wrapped up in a blanket, bobble hats and fingerless gloves until the fire gradually warmed the room.

We watched as the light changed constantly around us, the skies moving from thunderous grey to bright blue and back again as the storm fronts raced across the sky.

The snow is properly deep now, and the access track to the croft is icy and compacted and probably impassable for the moment, unless it was an emergency.

This would of course happen as I was about to replenish food stores with my regular shop, but we have plenty of stores, and bread flour and yeast to make rolls. The small oven here would struggle with a big loaf but it manages rolls and smaller breads just fine.

I’ve been baking every day, and making soup, curries and stews to make sure that we stay warm.

I know that this would send some people absolutely stir crazy, but I quite like it. It’s quiet and cosy. We have the work on the house, our books, cooking and seed planning and planting to keep us busy.

Contentment.

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Powered by Flapjacks

I have many half packets of nuts and dried fruits that travelled with us from London, and which I don’t really have space for in this little caravan kitchen.

Oatmeal, dried apricots, pecans.. So I made flapjacks.

I’m not going to pretend that these are healthy with the amount of butter and golden syrup that they contain, which is more than the oatmeal could ever compensate for!

But as a pick-me-up, elevenses, or snack when energy levels are getting a bit low, they hit the spot.

Powered by flapjacks.

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Apple and blackberry handpies

Before I put away all the baking stuff I had to make something sweet and seasonal to give us a bit of a lift through all this packing.

Apple and blackberry hand pies. They’re never going to win any beauty contests, but they tasted delicious.

Shortcrust pastry was enriched with egg, sugar and ground almonds to make it crumbly and crispy on the outside, almost like a biscuit. These were filled with lightly poached Coxes Orange Pippin apples and big, juicy blackberries.

We ate these over the last few days whenever we needed a lift. It helped.

Food can be medicine for the spirit, you know.

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Strawberry Cake

We love to celebrate the abundance of strawberries in season by enjoying them in as many ways as possible.

You can’t beat a simple bowlful of them, freshly washed and eaten with fingers. Their sweetness is delicious.

But another way to enjoy them, if you’re so inclined, is to make strawberry cake.

Strawberries tend to cook down to nothing in a cake, leaving only a stain of sweet, pink density which has always seemed vaguely disappointing.

But this cake cheats and adds extra strawberries pressed into the warm surface at the end so that you can enjoy the fullness of the fruit as well as the dense strawberry fudginess of the cake.

Just in case this wasn’t enough strawberryness, I gently simmer more strawberries into a loose compote and spoon this over the slices on each plate, so that what you get is a luscious, swooning, full-on strawberry sensation in each mouthful.

Because summer isn’t here for long and strawberries need to be celebrated.