Newcastle Clandestine Cake Club - First Birthday

This week Newcastle’s Clandestine Cake Club celebrated its first birthday at the Settle Down Café, the very same café where a year ago eight of us gathered to share four cakes. This time there were 16 cakes and at least 30 people.

I’d be lying if I said I managed to eat all of these cakes but special mention must go to the hazelnut torte, the honey cake, the sticky toffee pudding cake and the summer trifle cake. And Rose, if you think I’ve forgotten you promised me the raspberry macaroon cake recipe, you are very wrong.

This month’s theme was a cake fit for a birthday or a cake that you’d made for Clandestine Cake Club in its first year.  I made a lemon meringue cake in February that I liked; I decided to make a few changes to the recipe to turn it into a chocolate and lime meringue cake. It’s mine now, Nigella, MINE! The recipe is below. It looks like a pain in the chuff to make but it’s really not that hard.

Huge thanks to Lisa for all her hard work making the Newcastle cake club such a success. There are now several cake clubs in the north east in Gosforth & Jesmond, Bedlington & Morpeth, Whitley Bay & Tynemouth and, if you don’t get a nosebleed heading south of the Tyne, Durham & Dales. There are 140 cake clubs across the UK and abroad. Check the website for cake events coming soon near you.

Here’s the recipe for chocolate lime meringue cake:

For the cake:

125g soft unsalted butter

4 eggs, separated

300g plus 1 teaspoon caster sugar

90g self raising flour

10g cocoa powder

25g cornflour

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Zest of 1 lime

4 teaspoons lime juice

2 teaspoons milk

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

For the innards:

150ml double or whipping cream

150g good quality lime curd

Buying a jar of the stuff is by far the easiest option but if like me you couldn’t find any in the shops, you can make your own. You’ll need:

• 2 eggs
• 120g golden caster sugar
• 25g unsalted butter
• juice and zest of 2 limes
• Mix the eggs, sugar, butter and lime juice over a low heat for 12-15 mins, whisking frequently. Once the mixture is thick enough to hold a trail from the whisk or to enjoy an episode of Geordie Shore, sieve it and stir in the zest. Allow to cool.

160g dark chocolate ganache

• 90g dark chocolate broken into little pieces
• 70g double or whipping cream
• Bring the cream to boiling point and then add the chocolate pieces. Allow them to sit there for a couple of minutes then mix it with a spatula into a smooth glossy ganache and allow to cool.

Method

• Preheat the oven to gas mark 6/200°C. Line and butter two 8 inch sandwich tins.
• Mix the egg yolks, 100g of the sugar, the butter, flour, cocoa powder, cornflour, bicarb, and lime zest. Add the lime juice and milk and mix again.
• Divide the mixture between the two tins.
• Whisk the egg whites and cream of tartar until peaks form and then whisk in 200g of sugar. Divide the whisked whites between the two sponge-filled tins, spreading the meringue straight on top of the cake mix.
• Smooth one flat, and with the back of a spoon peak the other and sprinkle 1 teaspoon sugar over the peaks. Bake for 25 minutes.
• With a cake-tester, pierce the cake that has the flat meringue topping to check it's cooked all through. Put the cakes onto a wire rack and let cool completely in the tins.
• Remove the flat-topped cake from its tin and place it meringue side down on a plate.
• Spread the sponge surface of the first cake with the lime curd, then the dark chocolate ganache. Whisk the cream and once it’s thick, spread that on top of the ganache. Lastly, place the second cake on top with its peaked meringue uppermost.
• If you want to go all fancy, zigzag a trail of chocolate ganache over the top of the meringue and sprinkle some finely peeled lime zest on the top.

Edinburgh: cake and comedy

There are three loves in my life – cake, cats and comedy. I’ve spent the last five days and all my monies in Edinburgh indulging two of them (the cats didn’t want to come).

The Edinburgh Fringe is so jam-packed with comedy it’s like standing in front of a massive dessert trolley and being told you can only pick one thing. Ironically, it also has a huge number of cake shops. You need to choose carefully in order to avoid disappointment:

• go to a venue that serves good quality stuff, like The Chocolate Tree or the Stand and you can’t really go wrong. I’d highly recommend the chocolate hazelnut tart or Tony Law
• stick with something you already know you enjoy, like a chocolate brownie or Richard Herring. 
• go with a classic, like fruit cake or Stewart Lee. Maybe not everybody's cup of tea but deeply satisfying if it's yours.
• ask other people for recommendations, particularly other comedians who you like – without this I wouldn’t have found  the chocolate tiffin at Kilimanjaro Coffee Shop, or Markus Birdman, Celia Pacquola, Marek Larwood or Eddie Pepitone
• if you simply can’t choose, go for one of those “three dessert” options or a sketch show like Pappys or The Three Englishmen
• stick to your roots (Geordie in my case) and go for something local like a singing hinny or Seymour Mace, Gavin Webster or Simon Donald (OK I’ve made that up, I never saw hide nor hair of a singing hinny though there was Greggs, our proudest son)
• remember that there are hundreds of Free Fringe shows, like Nick Doody or Trodd en Bratt. Picture that little biscuit that comes unbidden with a cup of coffee and remember to tip
• there's also fun for all the family - everybody can enjoy a Victoria sponge, or Dr Brown Brown Brown Brown Brown and his Singing Tiger
• avoid cupcakes.  A triumph of presentation over substance. The ridiculous hair topping does not compensate for the dull, slightly stale cake underneath
• remain respectful – don’t shout on that your scone’s a bit dry or that you’re now so drunk you’ve lost your appetite for cake. You’ll be spoiling it for everyone else
• don’t panic if what you want is sold out or padlocked, like the freezer full of Doddingtons ice cream at the Assembly Rooms or Daniel Kitson. They’ll make more

Clockwise from top left, going in a spiral like a game of Snake that’s about to end: Henderson’s vegetarian cafe on Hanover Street: also does vegan desserts; Bibi’s Bakery on Hanover Street: didn’t need a wedding cake but I liked their chocolate tray bake; Patisserie Valerie on North Bridge: there’s a reason they give you a knife & fork with the chocolate éclair - don’t try stuffing it in your face with your fingers; Kilimanjaro on Nicholson St: recommended by someone who knows his stuff as the best coffee in the city; The Square on the corner of York Place: if you see Tommy Sheppard in there, why not go up and tell him how happy you are The Stand has opened in Newcastle? I’m sure he’ll love that, Kate; The Elephant House: particularly good if you’re a fan of Harry Potter fans; Eteaket on Frederick St (the scone was a bit dry to be honest); The Chocolate Tree in Morningside: prepare to be dazzled.

Vegetarian food in Newcastle upon Tyne

This blog is usually about cake or at the very least something with sugar in it, but this time I’m breaking the rules and going savoury. 

The question came up this morning on Twitter, my main form of social interaction, on whether meat-eaters order vegetarian food in restaurants. I ranted as much as a 140 character tweet would allow that meat-eaters might choose a vegetarian option more often if we weren’t so poorly catered for in the north east. By this I mean NOT a Sunday “roast” that is just the vegetables or a bowl of tomato pasta, like I couldn’t make that myself. I’m also baffled by restaurants’ obsession with mushroom risotto and goats cheese tart. Come on guys, the 1990s were ages ago.

In fairness to local restaurants, the north east has one of the lowest ratios of vegetarians in the country so it’s not surprising there is less choice – even Greggs, one of the north east’s proudest sons, doesn’t sell its vegetable pasties up here because of a lack of “customer recognition and the demand for that particular food” (their words, not mine, in a polite email they sent me on this hotly debated topic).

So where IS good for vegetarians in Newcastle? Here are my recommendations for the centre of town and its immediate environs, particularly the ones I stomp about.

Cheap eats

Tea Sutra on Leazes Park Road offers all vegetarian food, tea and cake. It also offers a shoe-free area and complementary therapies that to be honest freak me out a bit, but the food is good and it’s one of the few places here that caters for vegans.

The Settle Down Café is a friendly café just off Westgate Road that does great pizza, sandwiches and cakes and caters for vegans. They also have the tiny Sugar Down Bakery on Pink Lane selling artisan breads, cakes and biscuits to take away.

The Polish Restaurant Krakow on Shakespeare Street has a surprisingly good vegetarian selection of soups, dumplings and pancakes in such hearty portions that you will definitely not go hungry and are perfect on a cold day.

Newcastle’s best comedy venue The Stand on High Bridge is open all day serving a small but excellent menu by a chef who knows his stuff. About a third of the menu is vegetarian - contrast this with a restaurant trip recently where one out of 15 main courses was vegetarian (that's you, Malmaison).The Stand even has a large outdoor courtyard for both of those days when the sun shines here. Hey, you could also see some comedy.

Crispy tofu with hoisin & pancakes; Pad Thai with sweet potato & peanut sauce; Sticky ginger pudding

A new addition to Newcastle is Kingdom, a 300 seater buffet above Haymarket Metro station that offers fine views and food from around the world, particularly Asia.

It is amazing value: £9 for lunch or £14 for dinner. There is so much choice that a vegetarian can't possibly go hungry. [WARNING: see the comment below] There is a also a large dessert buffet and an ice cream station. You can fill your plate as many times as you want.

Another new addition is Istanbul Cafe on Ridley Place near Haymarket, popular with international students. As its name suggests, it serves Turkish food and it has plenty on offer at cheap prices for vegetarians, including breakfast for £2.50. I had a hearty portion of  vegetable moussaka and Mexican potatoes for £10.

They also offer amazing homemade desserts - I've eaten a lot of baklava in my time and theirs is one of the best I've tasted, all for a mere £2.95. 

The latest addition is Aneesa's Indian buffet on the Quayside, offering a wealth of dishes for £11.95. As well as Indian dishes, there is pizza and a made-to-order stir fry bar. And lots of puddings.

Slightly less cheap eats

Generally as a rule the more expensive the restaurant, the poorer the choice for a vegetarian. This makes me a pocket-friendly date if nothing else.

I’ve yet to find an Indian restaurant that doesn’t cater well for vegetarians. For a start, they run the full gamut of protein from pulses and legumes to nuts and dairy. For good vegetarian Indian food, I’d recommend:

Dabbawal on High Bridge. An award-winning newcomer, Dabbawal offers street food and a range of vegetarian dishes that are a far cry from the usual “tinned veg under some sauce”. I could eat their vegetable samosa chaat every day and not tire of it. Dabbawal is fast becoming my favourite place to eat in Newcastle.

Rasa on Queen Street on the Quayside is a blessing. It started in London as a South Indian vegetarian restaurant and chose Newcastle as its first foray outside the south east. Its Keralan vegetarian feast of five courses is a mere £19.50 and could well defeat you.

I also like Komal Balti House on Brentwood Avenue in Jesmond – tasty, fresh balti dishes that use chickpeas, vegetables and paneer. Plus we get to laugh at my dad for ordering lamb bhuna every single time. For a cheaper night out, you could try Komal's unlicensed sister restaurant in Fenham.

Italian restaurants are also good for vegetarians and are myriad in Newcastle. My favourite is Caffe Zonzo on Goldspink Lane in Sandyford –  well priced, great food, friendly atmosphere and large enough for big parties. I was such a regular that I was asked to contribute an item of underwear to the “washing line” strung across the restaurant. Let me know if you spot it. Pasqualino's inside the Theatre Royal on Grey Street offers absolutely bargain two-for-one stone baked sourdough pizzas with a long list of vegetarian option. It is the latest opening from the De Giorgi family who run Populo, Paradiso, Intermezzo and Secco all of which are great, central and reasonably priced.

Slightly off the beaten track but the Lebanese Al Baik on Byker Bridge has a fantastic vegetarian selection. It’s unlicensed so you can take your own drink for a very cheap dinner at about £10 a head. Oddly enough, it’s one of my dad’s favourite places.

Plus if you’re small and cute, you get to wear a fez.

Lastly, David Kennedy’s Food Social at the Biscuit Factory did me proud on my birthday earlier this month. It has a good vegetarian choice and does a set lunch for £12.95, ludicrously good value for such high quality food. The Biscuit Factory is one of the largest commercial art galleries in the country so after lunch you can go and look at pictures and that.

  

I realise this is a very incomplete list and that I’ve not even mentioned the vegetarian cafes in Heaton like Jack Sprats and Sky Apple Café – nothing personal, I’ve just not been. If you’d like to recommend somewhere in Newcastle that is good for vegetarian food, I’d be very interested to hear from you. Particularly if you’re vegetarian yourself – I’ve heard “ooh look there’s a salad you can have” just one too many times...

San Sebastian

This week I ran away from cake-making to spend three nights in the Basque territory starting in San Sebastian, a beautiful old city on the coast. Its Basque name is Donostia.

I'd been told that San Sebastian was good for tapas, or 'pintxos' as they're called in Basque but I wasn't quite prepared for its full-on food orgy. I should have guessed when I read in the guidebook "if the people of San Sebastian didn't have to sleep, they'd be eating 24 hours a day". The choice was bewildering, particularly if you speak neither Spanish nor Basque, so we signed up for a pintxos tasting with San Sebastian Food. It cost €85 and was worth every cent. Our lovely guide Eli took us to half a dozen pintxo bars and explained the system - help yourself to the huge pile of snacks on the bar or order a house speciality from the board, have a drink, then move onto the next bar for more food.

Basically the locals eat in the way that northerners drink except their bar crawl involves a lot more ham. There were even some vegetarian pintxos available.

Patatas bravas; tortilla; pimientos di padron; gazpacho

The night ended all the same in pie-eyed exhaustion; I might look like Miss Prim in this photo but I'm off my face and have little recollection of the rest of the evening and absolutely no recollection of the next morning because we slept until 3pm.

The next day was hot and sticky, a bit like us. Luckily there was a massive choice of ice cream and I tried coconut, sesame and the winner ginger spice biscuit (Speculoos).

And of course there was cake. Tonnes of the stuff.

Here is a photo of Petra modelling a pastel di piñon along with the tarts we ate on the train to Bilbao - a Basque tart with almonds and a fruit & nut tart on egg custard.

In Bilbao we headed straight for the Guggenheim Museum and sat in their cafe eating pintxos. Luckily the David Hockney exhibition was on so there were so paintings I could understand and the Yorkshire place names sounded charming translated into Spanish, like Valle de Bugthorpe. There was also a massive puppy made of flowers which we had our photo taken with. We definitely did not make this photo into a postcard and send it to the dog back home.

Rhubarb, Ginger and Polenta Cake

Today I saw 500g of rhubarb reduced to 29p - God's way of telling me to buy it and bake a rhubarb cake. Who am I to argue? I make this cake every summer and it's a firm favourite. 

The cake is excellent served hot like a pudding (your mother was lying when she said hot cake gave you tummy cake. She was just saving it all for herself while you ran off to play). It's also great served with a cup of tea in the afternoon or for breakfast (ahem) apparently. The polenta - against man and God in a savoury dish - comes into its own in the cake as it lends a pleasing grittiness and helps soak up the juice from the rhubarb.


Here's the recipe:


500g rhubarb, cleaned and cut into 1 cm slices
8 pieces of stem ginger in syrup, chopped finely
5 tablespoons of syrup from the stem ginger
300g caster sugar
150g plain flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
150g polenta
2 medium eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
125g unsalted butter, softened
250g natural yoghurt


Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C/gas mark 4 and line and grease a 9 inch/24cm springform tin.


Mix the chopped rhubarb and stem ginger with 100g of the caster sugar.


Cream the butter and remaining 200g caster sugar until pale and fluffy, then add the eggs, vanilla extract and ginger syrup. Sieve the flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger and polenta and add this to the mix. Then add the yoghurt and stir in the chopped rhubarb and ginger.


Bake for about an hour until the cake is springy to the touch. After 35 minutes of baking, cover the cake with foil to prevent the top from burning. Let the cake cool in the tin on a wire rack. If you can...

Edinburgh CakeFest

This week cousin Helen and I went on a day trip to Edinburgh to see how much food we could cram into our faces before the 9pm train home.

We started at the legendary Hendersons which has been serving vegetarian food in Edinburgh for nearly 50 years. I I had vegan haggis and clapshot, a word that I’d never heard before and which means neeps and tatties. It was delicious and had a taste like Christmas. It was probably a mistake to fill up so heartily so early in the day, but it’s a mistake I’d gladly make again.

I’d asked Twitter carefully researched the best Edinburgh cake shops and it turned out that several were within staggering distance of each other in Morningside, a short bus ride on the number 11, 15 or 16 from the city centre. I’m slightly scared of Edinburgh buses with their exact money only tickets and the grumpiest drivers in the world, but the chap who cheerily dropped us off on Bruntsfield Place was the epitome of charm (to restore balance, the driver on the way home had a face like a bucket of shit).

We started at The Chocolate Tree, an artisan chocolatier and cafe with a slightly hippyish twist. They sell chocolates, chocolate cakes and tarts, ice cream, tea, coffee and hot chocolate, offering vegan and gluten free treats as well.

  

I had a hazelnut chocolate tart, Helen went for pear and chocolate and a huge mug of hot chocolate. Both were absolutely delicious.

A lady on Twitter alerted me to their dark chocolate sea salt caramel, vouching that after extensive research it was the best she’d ever had. It was amazingly rich. My dad, a northern man not given to over-enthusing, tried some and burst out “oh God this is gorgeous!’ The bar breaks up into a sticky mess like a large After Eight, so it’s a bit tricky to share. But who’d want to share? Certainly not my dad. Next time I looked at the plate the chocolate was gone.

  

Next on the list was Falko, a Konditormeister or master pastry chef bringing his passion for traditional German and Austrian baking to Edinburgh. There are a lot of things Germans really excel at: cars, cakes, Christmas, comedy (heh) and the focus here is on taste and quality.

  

We were too full to eat more cake but we bought delicious raisin breads for breakfast.

We crossed the road to France and La Barantine. Look how French it is! They even had French radio on. I found out that pain au levain means sourdough (Who knew?! You did? Oh.) and bought one to take home.

We didn’t have time for Loopy Lorna’s or Elephant House or Patisserie Florentin but needed to leave some places to try next time and some room for dinner at Calistoga, a taste of California on a cold wet day. Oddly enough, we didn’t manage pudding...

Pouring chocolate ganache

Recently I've become fixated with chocolate ganache. I don't know what it is about covering a cake with melted chocolate that is so much fun but I think it's got something to do with covering a cake with melted chocolate.

Here is the recipe - note that the quantity of chocolate varies on whether you're using dark, milk or white:


Dark chocolate (min 54% cocoa solids)
125g double cream, 30g liquid glucose, 175g chocolate


Milk chocolate (min 33% cocoa solids)
125g double cream, 30g liquid glucose, 250g chocolate


White chocolate (min 26% cocoa solids)
125g double cream, 30g liquid glucose, 300g chocolate


These quantities should be enough for an 8 inch round cake.


You can buy liquid glucose in the supermarket in the homebaking section, it looks like this

To make the ganache, break the chocolate into small pieces. Heat the cream and glucose to boiling point and pour it over the chocolate. Leave it for a minute to melt the chocolate, then stir well until you have a smooth, glossy mix. Allow it to cool for a couple of minutes and while it is still runny, pour it over the cake. It might need a helping hand with a palette knife to cover the sides completely.

I like to cover the cake first with marzipan but if you're one of those people who think marzipan is the food of the devil, you can use chocolate paste or just pour it straight onto the sponge.

I used honey flavoured chocolate on my dad's birthday cake.
The mix of honey, chocolate and almond tasted like a massive Toblerone bar.

I was so pleased with the honey-flavoured chocolate that I used it again on my cake for Clandestine Cake Club last week, which had the theme "a novel idea - inspired by a myth, fairytale, poem or story".

Lunchbox in John Lewis. I was not allowed to buy it as a) I don't eat packed lunches and b) I'm 39.

I took The Owl and the Pussycat as my inspiration because it mentions honey and it's a poem my dad used to recite to me a long time ago. It was the first single I ever bought on Blyth market, so cheap it didn't have a record sleeve. I made one myself and crayonned a picture. For a darker take on the same story, I'd recommend Stewart Lee's Pea Green Boat, available for purchase or download from the brilliant Go Faster Stripe. 

Honey cake from Marian Keyes' Saved by Cake; five pound note is printed on sugar by Eat Your Photo

If you'd like to try a dairy-free vegan chocolate ganache, use the dark chocolate recipe (make sure you have good quality milk-free chocolate) and substitute coconut milk for cream in the recipe above. The result is delicious - there is a slight taste of coconut under the blast of dark chocolate that I really like.

Vegan chocolate ganache

The chocolate ganache sets but remains tacky enough to hold decorations and not to crack when you move or cut the cake. It has a beautiful gloss and is useful for covering tricky shapes like numbers.  

If you have any ganache left over, you can make chocolate truffles: once the ganache has set, roll it into balls, chill them for half an hour in the fridge and roll them in something tasty like chopped nuts or cocoa powder. I hope this gives you as much pleasure as it gives me.