Pig 'ole Door

Today my cousin Helen and I baked an old family favourite, pig 'ole door. It's a cross between a cake and a biscuit with raspberry jam in the middle and icing and coconut on top. It's absolutely perfect with a cup of tea and tastes of childhood as our Grandma used to bake it for us. It probably has a proper Yorkshire name but I've no idea what it is**. We call it 'pig 'ole door' because it's baked in a large slab that apparently looks like the weight used to block the pig's little door in a sty. If anyone wants the recipe*, feel free to ask. It's not a closely guarded secret.


Our Grandma redefines "stalwart". She is 95, registered blind and struggling with arthritis. She still lives on her own and is keen to keep it that way. Three weeks ago she fell and broke her hip, picked herself up and BAKED A CAKE. Two days later, she admitted she didn't feel all that good and had a sit down. She didn't want to make a fuss by ringing her alarm for help, so waited until we realised something was amiss. Grandma has had a hip replacement and is doing well with her physiotherapy.


We sent her a box of pig 'ole door to help her with her recovery and her first ever cake pops. 

* a few people have asked for the recipe, so here goes:


12oz plain flour
pinch of salt
3 tsps baking powder
6oz butter at room temperature
6oz caster sugar
1 large egg, beaten
raspberry jam
icing sugar
desiccated coconut


Preheat the oven to 190oC/375oF and grease a baking tray.


Mix the flour, salt and baking powder, then rub in the butter. Add the beaten egg to bind the mixture - if it's still too dry to roll out, add a little water or milk. 
Roll out half of the mixture to about 1cm depth and place on the baking tray. Spread with jam, then roll out the second half and place this on top of the jam. Prick it all over with a fork to make air holes. It will look like a big wobbly edged slab but don't despair, it will look pretty soon.
Bake for about 25 minutes until it is golden brown. Allow to cool, then ice and sprinkle on the coconut. Slice into squares and enjoy with tea. 


** my dad has tried and failed to leave a comment on this blog, so he's texted me some Yorkshire names and literary references: "Pig 'ole door is really called Yorkshire cake except in Haworth where it is called Stanbury cake. There are 18 references to it in the works of the Bronte sisters. Some experts think their brother Branwell took some to The Black Bull pub hoping to entice a young lady to join him in merry romp on the moors."


Tsk, the things some young ladies will do for cake.

Carousel Cake

I've been wanting to make a carousel cake ever since I bought a PME rocking horse cutter in January. This week I found several excuses to do so:

• it was my birthday on Tuesday and I could see no reason not to celebrate turning 39 by making myself a cake better suited to a small child.
• Renshaw have just brought out new regal icing colours including ruby red and my favourite duck egg blue and I was keen to try them.
• Wednesday saw the first Clandestine Cake Club in Newcastle with cakes themed as childhood summer memories (for all the summery cakes, see here).
• my alma mater Cakes4Fun are running a competition entitled 'What Summer Means to Me' that I wanted to enter. For me, summer is a travelling fair and here is why. 

New York has Central Park, London has Hyde Park and Newcastle upon Tyne has the Town Moor, home to a couple of hundred cows and little else. At the end of June every year since 1882 the cows clear off to Benidorm on a cheap 10 night deal while the moor hosts one of Europe's largest travelling fairs, the Hoppings. This short video neatly shows the contrast.

As a child the most exciting day in the year for me after Christmas was the day I went to the Hoppings. I remember almost levitating with excitement as we approached the rides. The smell of chip fat and candy floss blended with diesel generators and the throaty thud of pop music still plucks at my heart. I remember the time it was so wet when I was 7 that the mud came over the top of my wellies (I was undeterred - nothing kept me off a waltzer); the time aged 10 that me and my cousin slipped the safety bar inside an American Egg and rattled about inside it like a couple of tictacs; and the time we lost Yvonne inside the helter skelter on my 6th birthday trip and I loudly suggested that she'd been stolen by the gypsies, just as our mothers had warned.

Here's me 35 years ago by the dodgems sporting a little dress and hat that my mum had sewn.

Last year, Caroline and I took her girls Hannah and Becca to the fair and they loved it.

So my summertime theme was a fairground ride. I tried to tone down the out and out kitsch of a carousel horse but kept the mirrors, the gold and the garlands of flowers around the horses' necks. 

The cake could  even go round and round and I made a three second video of my cousin Helen moving the turntable of it springing into life. Watch here and be amazed!

After ten days of Hoppings fun, the rides are dismantled, the travellers move on and the cows come home with as much duty free as they could buy. In much the same way, my cake was dismantled. It didn't have far to travel and there was still some left for breakfast.

Clandestine Cake Club - Newcastle

Yesterday saw the inaugural Newcastle Clandestine Cake Club organised by Lisa Vincent.  The rules of Cake Club are simple: you bake a cake based on a theme, meet somewhere you can get a brew, eat the cakes, then take home any leftovers. You are allowed to talk about Cake Club, and you do not have to have a fight with Brad Pitt (more’s the pity). A few of us had watched with interest and envy as Clandestine Cake Clubs popped up all over the UK including Leeds, Manchester and London. It was time for the Geordies to get baking.

There’s something slightly daunting about turning up to a club where you don’t know anyone and the only thing you might have in common is a love of cake, but the lure of noms won over any shyness. We met at the lovely Settle Down Cafe, who kindly stayed open late for us.

The theme was childhood summers - I made a lemon sponge carousel cake (I’ll explain elsewhere why I made such a ridiculously ornate cake); Lisa made a strawberry layer cake with fruit grown at her own allotment; Carol made a banana rum cake with cinnamon frosting; and Val made a raspberry, almond and white chocolate cake that was neatly described as “like Bakewell tart but even nicer”.

Thankfully there were some non-baking guests to help eat it all. The cakes were truly delicious and as each contained fruit, we reckoned we’d eaten four of our five-a-day.

The next Newcastle Clandestine Cake Club is on Wednesday 24 August and the theme, pickpocketed from South Lancashire CCC, is “fantasy meets reality – the cake you’ve dreamed about”. The venue is secret – it’s not called clandestine for nothing – until you book a place.

And guess what I’ve had for breakfast? Mmm, leftover cake….

Pineapple cake

My Bulgarian friend Teo is on a campaign to get me to eat more fruit, in the belief that most of my meals consist entirely of cake. He is, of course, wrong as I also eat biscuits and chocolate. So far Teo has brought me half a dozen mangoes, a bag of grapefruit and this week, two pineapples. I thwart his five-a-day attempts by baking the fruit into cakes. I found a lovely BBC Good Food recipe for caramelised mango upside down cake and have rung the changes on it using apples and also my recently acquired pineapples.

The correct way to serve fruit: before and after

 

It's not the prettiest of cakes but it is very tasty and is great served hot (i.e. fresh out of the oven. Turns out mothers are fibbing when they say eating hot cake gives you tummy ache. Hot dinners don't, do they? I can't believe it took me 30 years to see through this foul lie). Looks can be deceiving. I worked many years ago in Maison Blanc and always wondered why the ugliest cake - apple tarte tatin - sold out first. When I finally tried a tarte tatin, I realised why. It's de-bloody-licious.


The pineapple cake would probably have stood me in good stead for several meals, but luckily half a dozen friends came round for tea and cake this morning after they'd done the Race for Life. I also made some Race for Life cake pops.

The cake was all eaten, but Kate brought me a bag of manky bananas left over at the end of the race. And we all know what happens to manky bananas, don't we? More cake. It's like Terrence Malik's Tree of Life, except easier to understand.

A Taste of Summer

When I go on holiday, I know I am going to miss my kitties. What I wasn't expecting was how much I'd miss my kitchen. It was as lovely to put my pinny back on as it was to be headbutted awake by William. Probably more so to be honest.


As it's been warm and I'm still officially "on holiday", I sunbathed in the garden. We are lucky to share a garden that is beautifully maintained by Terra Firma in Hexham. Rosie has planted the garden so that from April to October we always have flowers and as one plant wilts, another blooms, like a firework display in slow motion. Yesterday the smell of the lavender wafted over to me and reminded me to make lavender cupcakes.


Flower-infused confectionery isn't everybody's cup of tea ("ugh, Parma Violets") but over the past ten years, after a trip to Frinton-on-Sea when the spirit of a little old lady jumped inside me, I have been obsessed with violet creams. I also like rose and lavender creams, but my favourites are the violet ones, not least so I can make my little joke by calling them "violent". 


To infuse the cupcakes, you soak a few tablespoons of dried lavender flowers in milk for a day, then add it to the batter and to the frosting. The scent of warm lavender when the cupcakes come out of the oven is beautiful. The recipe suggested decorating the frosting with sprigs of lavender, but I didn't really want a little twig on my cake so I made some purple lavender blossoms. OK, they are way way bigger than a lavender flower and yes, I've used a jasmine cutter, but the colour is pretty close and look, I've even added a yellow centre with cocoa butter.  

The lavender in the garden is visited by bees, the big fat bumbling ones that look like they're about to suffer engine malfunction and fall to the ground. They are slow easy prey for the cats, who I worry might get stung on their mouths. I keep shouting "not the stripy ones!" as they sail through the air after an insect. When Mia was a kitten, she was stung on her paw and refused to walk on grass for the next six months, convinced it was this that had made her little foot swell up.

Poor baby

The safest kind of bees are made of cake and dipped in chocolate. It seemed the perfect excuse to bring out Callebaut's new honey flavoured milk chocolate. I was very excited to discover honey flavour chocolate, which is absolutely delicious. The bees' little wings are made of florist paste, which I picked off when I ate one, feeling like an evil schoolboy.

So that's my taste of English summer - lavender and honey. While William keeps a lookout for bees.

Bananas

I've come back from a week in the Lakes with some manky bananas in my rucksack. There are only two options for manky bananas: 1) the bin or 2) banana loaf. I don't like wasting food and I do like cake, so I ticked option 2.

While I was in the Lakes eating bananas, I noticed Fitz had a curious way of eating them. He peels the whole banana, throws away the skin, and then eats the fruit. Surely not even monkeys do this?

I decided to share this eccentricity with friends over curry at the weekend (an excellent South Indian meal at Rasa, I was thrilled when they opened in Newcastle) and was met with blank stares. It turns out that half of my friends, whom I'd previously thought were normal people, choose not to use the handy fruit-in-its-own-holding-device as Nature surely intends, but instead peel the whole fruit. One friend commented "the skin might flip over and put banana on my hand - ew!" But surely you're going to get more banana on your hand if you hold the entire fruit naked? And if you're an A&E consultant, is this really the most minging thing you might get on your hand?  

I was reminded of a piece of gossip about a chap at college. "So posh", whispered a friend, "that when someone visited him in his room, he was sitting on his own eating a banana ON A PLATE WITH A FORK". This upper class banana method is demonstrated here at 2.25 by my future husband Rowan Atkinson.

Anyway, back to the manky ones. I used to make a banana loaf with walnuts but after a colleague once asked for a nut-free banana cake, I've become very fond of the Hummingbird recipe with ginger and cinnamon. It's lovely on its own but can you jazz it up too.

For instance, if you've just come back from holiday and realised you've gained another half stone, why not slather a load of chocolate buttercream on top? Or if you've come back from holiday to find mammy has cleaned your flat, why not make two banana loaves and send her one as a thank you?

Post script: my aunt Kate has alerted me to a third option for manky bananas: " bananas freeze well in their skins, and can be hauled out and used later, thus eliminating the 'have to do something straight away' pressure. Canadian freezers tend to be full of disgusting looking, blackened bananas , which when thawed, slip out of the skin easily and work just as well." I'll certainly be giving this a go.


Lastly, William has asked if I can show everyone a photo of him doing his impression of a banana. He's a funny one. 

Aga cake

My friend Heather has asked me to make a cake for her sister Helen's birthday this weekend. We hummed and hah'd over which passion Helen would most like on her cake - her garden, her car or her kitchen and plumped for the kitchen. Heather sent me some photos of Helen's beautiful cream Aga in her kitchen decorated in hot pink and lime green and I came up with this cake. I'm not sure if fridge magnets really would stick to an Aga in real life, or if the top of the range is the best place to keep a vase of fresh flowers, but the great thing about the medium of cake is that it allows you a lot of artistic licence.

The cake is two 8" fruit cakes, dowelled and stacked, as it needed to serve 60. Heather is part of a large family. She is the youngest of five and has four children of her own, the eldest of whom is 15 (this seems ridiculous as it was only five minutes ago that we were 15 ourselves) and the youngest of whom is two and has the most beautiful head of auburn curls that you will ever see on a child.

Heather is my oldest friend (in terms of how long I've known her, not in terms of age. I have some friends who are MUCH older. Some are even in their mid 40s). We used to get the bus to school every day together and talk about boys, until Heather passed her driving test, at which point we would drive to school every day in a Nissan Cherry called Norman and talk about boys. Heather's family have also been very welcoming to me - some of my happiest teenage memories are of chipping off wallpaper in the Cheviots and listening to Paul Simon. Or drinking cider in Blyth park and wobbling back to Heather's house to stay the night. 

Heather emigrated to Canada a couple of years back with her husband and children (it would have seemed rude not to take them) so I don't see her as much as I'd like to. She's back this summer and brought me a little present from Canada. I mentioned turtles in my blog from Toronto and complained that my Canadian family have been hiding them from me all my life. Finally I have my own bag. Thanks Heather! And happy birthday Helen!