Tag Archives: Nigella

bea’s brownies

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I like to think that she’s been inspired by me, but I suspect that Bea’s sudden passion for baking is really due to her obsession with The Great British Bake Off. Over the past two weeks she has made two loaves of bread, cheese rolls and now these brownies.

Bea used the recipe from Paul Hollywood’s book How To Bake, and it requires marginally less butter and chocolate, and crucially, I think, fewer eggs, than Nigella’s brownie recipe which, despite repeated attempts, I’ve never made successfully (the squidge v cake balance is all out of whack – too wet and not cakey enough for my liking).

Bea doesn’t like walnuts so she used pecans instead and we had no cranberries so she made do without. I hovered in the background whilst she worked, biting my tongue. I was quite surprised by how controlling I am when it comes to other people using the kitchen. Matilda is also obsessed with The Great British Bake Off so I can see that I am going to have to learn to ease up a bit and just let them go for it.

a teenager!

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Birthday flowers for Matilda, who turned thirteen yesterday (I can’t quite believe we have a teenager in the house): roses Gertrude Jekyll and William Lobb on one side,

Gertrude again, alongside Ferdinand Pichard, on the other, and none of them smelling as lovely as they should because of the damn weather.

A birthday cake, the usual, Nigella’s buttermilk number filled with a layer of strawberry jam, a layer of sliced strawberries and then lots of whipped cream, and more cream and strawberries on top. It began as a tasteful, slightly Jubilee-inspired affair, and then…

And sticking with the Jubilee theme, I made Coronation Chicken using the original Rosemary Hume recipe via Rose Prince, from her lovely book Kitchenella (stuffed with great recipes – I highly recommend it). If you are interested, you can find the original recipe here, but I think Rose Prince’s version is more straightforward. And I simplified things further by poaching chicken breasts and thighs rather than roasting several chickens as I knew time was against me.

flapjack fail

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I was aware that I have a tendency to blame Nigella when things go wrong in the kitchen. And I admit that in order to blame her, it doesn’t much matter whether or not she had a hand in the recipe in question: a curse thrown in the direction of the Goddess of Domesticity always makes me feel a little bit better. But I didn’t realise that anyone else had spotted this ungenerous habit, until yesterday, when a sympathetic little voice called out: “bloody Nigella, mum?” as I was peering unhappily at some flapjacks I’d just taken out of the oven. Yes. Bloody, bloody Nigella.

With half term almost upon us, I decided that a bit of quick, batch-baking of the rock bun/flapjack variety was in order: fill those tins, stay ahead of the game and keep the whining at bay. Or at least that was the plan. I have a simple flapjack recipe, which I know almost by heart and, more significantly, the ingredients are all store cupboard staples.

Yesterday, however, in some sort of crazed, hey it’s the holidays mode, I decided that I was no longer satisfied with the tried and true and I wanted a new flapjack recipe instead. Apron on, oven fired up, I turned to my increasingly battered copy of Nigella’s How to be a Domestic Goddess. An hour or so later, when I tried to ease the cooled flapjacks out of the tin, it was clear that I was dealing with a big, flaky, flapjack fail – slicing sand into circles would have been easier. I really don’t know what went wrong. I have since compared different recipes, and all are so varied in terms of the ratio of oats to butter and golden syrup that I can’t identify what caused the fail. So having learned my lesson regarding change, I went for my default setting for culinary blame: Bloody Nigella! *

Anyway, today, normal flapjack service was resumed.

All this and I don’t even like flapjacks.

The girls do though, and the flap rubble / jack rubble, whatever, tastes very good with yoghurt, added to cereal and as a crumble topping.

* I do love her really. I can forgive the faulty flapjacks because her recipe for scones is fabulous and the Buttermilk birthday cake is central to all our birthday celebrations. 

wet walks and walnuts

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This morning, whilst walking the dog, a sudden downpour left me sheltering under a tree. As the dog whizzed around gleefully, I realized I’d chosen to wait out the shower under the wrong tree: its canopy, though wide, was far too open and offered no cover at all. But just as I was about to make a soggy dash for a group of large beech trees, the leaky tree redeemed itself  - all around me the ground was covered with walnuts.

A vision of coffee and walnut cake replaced all thoughts of staying dry, and I scrabbled around amongst the fallen leaves gathering as many nuts as my pockets would hold. Despite visiting the park on an almost daily basis, and photographing many of the trees throughout the seasons, I’d barely ever noticed this one – It’s on my radar now though, along with the plum trees at Narrow Ways.


Although I find their bitterness slightly off-putting, I love cooking with walnuts and often use them in cakes, biscuits and sometimes as part of a crumble topping. Although the idea of coffee and walnut cake is uppermost in my mind at the moment, I am feeling quite tempted by the idea of a date and walnut loaf as well. Perhaps some biscuits too. An early morning visit to the walnut tree is on tomorrow’s To Do list.

We returned home soaked. I don’t know who looked more bedraggled, me or the dog. Sybil won the prize for being smelliest though. She needs a bath.

N.B. The plate in the top three photographs is one of my favourites. It was made many years ago by my mother. The little scratches in the cream glaze seem to echo the colour of the walnuts and the grooves on their shells. I’ll use the plate again when I make the cake. But right now I’m off to bake a different cake – Bea is ten tomorrow, so only one cake will do, Nigella’s buttermilk birthday cake.

back

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On our return from France yesterday afternoon I was hit by a delayed panic about the garden: had it survived without being watered for two weeks? I braced myself for a scene of devastation – beds filled with scorched, parched vegetation, bare earth etc.

Instead, my nasturtiums have formed a hedge and the verbena towers over our heads.

The nigella has flowered and the sedums are starting to take on their autumnal blush.

And last, but by no means least, my anemones are looking rather lovely, better than they’ve ever looked before in fact. Phew!

Then again, perhaps it’s been raining.

pick of the week

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Back in May, when I planted up the newly terraced beds, I was worried that I’d left it all too late for there to be any chance of the garden looking interesting this summer. But three months later, although in no way finished, the garden is full enough to provide me with a daily fix of flowers. Not massive bunches for huge vases, but small posies just large enough to fill a stem vase, little jug, jam jar or tin can. The bunch above, which includes roses, fennel flowers, sweet peas, sedum and achillea (I was guided by the colours on the golden syrup tin), was picked at the start of the week for a friend’s birthday.

The next morning I gathered the slightly garish little selection above for the bathroom windowsill. It’s not the most tasteful affair, but something about the clash of the nasturtiums and achillea with the soft mauve of the Verbena bonariensis, and the hazey blue of the catnip pleases me – it feels slightly 70s for some reason, like a jolly wallpaper design for the kitchen. Later the same day, rather obsessed with the nasturtiums, which seem to be taking over the garden (more in another post), I picked the flowers below.

The need to keep the sweet peas producing prompted the picking of the next bunch, that and the desire to have the scent filling the kitchen. Incidentally, this vase is my best bargain ever – 25p in a charity shop. I don’t know anything about it, it has no mark, but I love its nipped in waist and the graphic grey, black and white stripes which are enlivened by little raised dots of orange and teal – odd and lovely in equal measure.

By midweek my inner Constance Spry had awoken fully, and I found myself tip-toeing through the flower beds in my pyjamas, scissors in hand. No plant was safe. Sedum in particular has been a regular target – fortunately I have a lot of it – and it has proved to be not only a very useful filler, propping floppier flowers up and bulking out the little bunches, but also a star in its own right. I like mixing it with knautia and fennel fronds -

and with verbena bonariensis, which I also have in abundance.

Yesterday I went all out and just cut a bit of anything I could reach without falling over: the last of the buddleja (Black Knight), more verbena, knautia and nepeta, sweet peas, again, some roses – Gertrude is in flower once more –  scabiosa and a lone anemone.

It’s not a great picture, but this little jug of flowers smells amazing – the combined scent of the musky, honeyed buddleja, the heady sweet peas and the fresh sweetness of Gertrude Jekyll is out of this world. The perfume curls up the stairwell from the kitchen so that every now and then you catch a little waft as you move around the house.

The jug, one of a pair, is a bit of junk shop treasure rather than a charity shop bargain, and it’s perfect for flowers. I’m planning to use it for the Nigella which is about to flower any day now.

preparations

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As the start date for the work on the garden draws closer, so my shopping list for the garden gets longer. Today I added Ranunculus, inspired by this beautiful bunch, which were a gift from friends who came to stay for the first weekend of the Easter holidays.

They have three daughters which works brilliantly, and usually all six children disappear to their bedrooms the minute they see each other. But the arrival of these heavy oak sleepers, which will form the retaining walls for three terraces, proved far more exciting than Sylvanians, nail varnish and videos. Instead of the usual disappearing act, the girls spent most of the weekend digging in the mud with Sybil and building dens on and around this huge oak platform.

Work on the garden starts next Monday, so this weekend I will start lifting and dividing the few plants that survived both my autumn cull and the winter. The list is not that long: nepeta, sedums, geraniums, poppies and a huge clump of macleaya which has already started its annual bolt towards the heavens. I’m not sure how well they will take being moved as they’ve all gone from dormant to turbo-charged over night. The lilac is probably my biggest concern: I like it, and want to keep it if possible (the flowers are already bursting open and filling the garden with the most delicious perfume), but it’s in the wrong place and I have a horrible feeling that now, while it’s in bloom, is absolutely not the time to move it.

Whilst I put my head in the sand about its future, Dan Pearson’s Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City is proving to be the perfect distraction. His account of the development of his garden in Peckham is incredibly inspiring, not least for his candour regarding mistakes and failures. I am also re-reading Beth Chatto’s fabulous book about her dry, gravel garden. Although Bristol gets far more rain than the South East, I still feel there are lessons to be learned about selecting plants in order to minimise the need for watering. Certainly, in my front garden in London I tried to get by with as little watering as possible and my experiments provided me with a good list of plants that could cope with limited rations. I am hoping to replicate the planting which included Euphorbias, alliums, california poppies, nepeta, Verbena bonariensis, a wonderful agapanthus, Nigella, a couple of roses, and on the railings an Akebia quinata intertwined with a beautiful rust-coloured clematis, the name of which I’ve forgotten. Typical. Though I expect it’s probably a long dead cardinal or bishop.

birthdays

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As you can see, this is a well-used cookery book. Although there are several recipes that simply don’t work (I don’t know anyone who has made Nigella’s Brownies successfully with only 25mins in the oven), it is the source of many of our favourite cakes – the dense chocolate loaf, the delicious gingerbread with lemon icing are two that I make again and again, both as tea time treats and also as puddings (the chocolate loaf is wonderful with raspberries and the gingerbread, without the icing, very good with homemade custard).

But the cake I make most frequently is the buttermilk birthday cake: a delicious vanilla sponge that can be tarted up in any number of ways. Matilda’s birthday is in June, so for her I usually pile it high with strawberries. Bea’s birthday is in September, and over the years she’s had several themed parties and the cake has been adapted to look like a snake, a dust and cobweb-covered witches’ cake and a castle. And Martha is seven this Sunday which is why the recipe is out once more.

I have been rather lax in my maternal duties, and completely failed to arrange a party, so I’m wondering what I might do to the cake to make up for this sorry state of affairs. Though I must explain, it is not as awful as it seems. When I realised that various other immovable events had conspired against us, I offered her a choice: we could do something very small this Sunday, or she could wait and I’d arrange a proper party during the Easter holidays. She plumped for the proper party of course. Although I love arranging parties for the girls (I even wrote a book about it), for a reason I cannot fathom, I always leave everything to the last minute. The knowledge that Martha’s party still needs to be sorted out has induced an odd sort of paralysis. I think this must relate in some way to my career in journalism – no matter how long the lead time on a feature, no matter how much research, I could never write anything very much until the deadline was nearly upon me.

And all this talk of birthdays brings me neatly to another birthday: Charlotte’s plot is a year old today (I marked the day with some banana bread, but not a Nigella recipe). And it feels like quite a milestone. I remember being concerned that I didn’t have a particular skill or any specialist knowledge to share, unlike many of the blogs I read regularly, but I had just finished a creative writing course, and I hoped that by writing on a regular basis, daily if possible, I’d keep on track with the novel I was trying to write. Well, that novel is still a random bunch on files on my computer, several notepads of illegible scrawl and no nearer completion.

Life got in the way. At the end of last April Matilda was terribly ill with a weird condition called Henoch-Schoenlein’s Purpura (HSP), and was twice admitted to the children’s hospital; building work started on our basement; the garden was off limits for weeks; and the summer was a crazy round of friends and family coming to stay. Then suddenly it was September, and everyone was back at school, including me, because in the midst of all the chaos I decided I wanted to do RHS level 2 in Horticulture. Fool!

But I’m glad I started this blog. During a lot of that time the parallel universe of the blogosphere (hate that term!) provided a wonderful escape from the drama and drudge of everyday life, just as it still does. That’s not to say that my blog is not a true reflection of my life, but more that it reflects the parts I feel like sharing. Frankly who needs to see the horror of my kitchen table at breakfast time? I notice that I didn’t write a single post about Matilda’s illness and yet it dominated our lives for over nine weeks. Instead I used the blog, and the self-imposed deadlines, to record my increasing fascination with with plants, photography and graffiti. With a little cake, knitting and other stuff thrown in for good measure.

This year of blogging has also enabled me to ‘meet’ so many really lovely people, and I’ve enjoyed reading all the responses to my posts. I’ve tried to reply to everyone, though I am a little haphazard about these things, so I am sorry if I’ve missed anyone out. I will do better this year!

PS If anyone reading this has a child with HSP and wants to know how we dealt with it, do please get in touch. Bristol Children’s Hospital was brilliant, and knew exactly how to deal with the various complications Matilda faced.