Victoria Sponge Cake and Spiced Victoria Sponge Cake

No birthday party is complete without a cake. I gamely volunteered to make one and by volunteered, I mean insisted. It seemed only right and proper that I should choose one from the Sandwich Cakes chapter of Good Housekeeping’s Picture Cake Making (Waverley, 1955) but as I realised I hadn’t baked a sponge cake for atleast a year, something simple would be advisable.

As we had a range of guests attending. I decided to make a two sorts of cake based around the same recipe – a classic Victoria sponge and a spiced Victoria sponge.

Notes

• Good lord, the icing took a lot of heating before it thickened – I would estimate an hour, no joke. When it had thickened however, it was very easy to spread. I used mostly basic dark chocolate and a little bit of Green & Blacks Maya Gold. (Thanks for the birthday present of the sugar letters. You know who you are.)
• Small disaster – my spring-sided cake tin leaked slightly so the bottom layer was slightly thinner than I intended (and I had to remove a  crispy layer of cake from the bottom of my oven. Thank God my oven is self-cleaning, it just peeled away.)

Results

For reasons I can’t quite fathom, the spice cake was lighter than the vanilla layer, although both were complimented for their moistness. Following the recipe exactly meant not doing any of the tricks I would normally use to make the sponge as  light as possible  (such as swapping a dessert spoon of the sugar for golden syrup or a heaped teaspoon of  the wheat flour for corn flour). It wasn’t a bad effort though and certainly, a fair amount was eaten on the spot despite how well we had all laid into the other dishes. The icing had an amazing  texture and flavour – definitely worth the time.

Caked by Elly

Sweet Corn Bread

Ah, sweetcorn. A controversial choice to some regular readers but a very popular one in my house, as those very readers will know. This recipe is from Lousene Rousseau Brunner’s New Casserole Treasury (1970, The Cookery Book Club for Harper and Row). A book in which a great deal of care and attention has been paid to the layout of recipes  – a lovely, calm sans-serif font and  recipes arranged so that the pages need never be turned during cooking. Thanks, Ms R-B, you bring order to a troubled universe and your use of booze is epic. (Seriously, one of these days I will make Parisian Chicken and then you will see – but this will necessitate a serious trip to the offy. Until then, you’re stuck reading about ‘Things I have made with things I have found in my fridge’.)

Notes

• I made half quantities, using 2 small eggs.
• I have never added wholemeal flour to hot milk before, rest assured that it does indeed instantly turn to mush.
• I have never bought creamed corn and didn’t have any at home, but according to my understanding, it’s sweetcorn in thin white sauce. So I slaked a little white flour with milk and added this to some ordinary tinned sweetcorn.

Results

This needed almost an hour to cook. It didn’t not begin to get browned and puffy until around 45 minutes. It was still rather damp in the middle and after cutting off a wedge to eat with sausages and peas, I put the rest back in the cooling oven to dry off. It was surprisingly light, more like a thick pancake than a scone or yeast bread. A half quantity made a circular bread of 9 inches diameter and 1.5 inches deep – how much this feeds is dependent on what you serve with it (and how hungry your guests). It reheated well in a dry frying pan or warm oven and went well with everything, but especially spicy foods and anything containing onions.

Bread by Elly

Pretzels

I love pretzels of all kinds (bread-y ones, crispy ones, OK, I like both kinds of pretzels) and was keen to make some more savoury snacks for our blog-day party. I bought ‘Scandinavian Cooking’ by Beryl Frank, (published by Evans Brothers, 1978) recently but have yet to cook anything from it – the bread section looks particularly good and I had high hopes for these based on the illustration.

Notes

• These were a lot of work – I had to calculate how long it would take me to make them, what with all the rising.
• I was very confused by the direction that the dough should be left in the fridge to rise. Shorely yeast needs heat to rise? Anyway, I don’t cook with yeast very often and on the  occasions (two) when I a) have and b)have gone un peu off-recipe, it has always been a disaster. So I decided to follow all instructions absolutely and completely.
• The dough did not appear to be rising much throughout the process but I carried on, blindly!

Results

They didn’t rise. They puffed up a bit in the heat but basically, they were just slightly salted pastry-like biscuits. Pleasant but boring and not worth the time and effort at all. I will have another go at these in future and let them rise at room temp and see if this is more successful.  For shame, Scandinavian Cookery, don’t let me down when 13th December rolls around and I have a go at  St Lucia’s bread!

Pretzeled by Elly

Coffee Marshmallow Spread

I cannot explain what kind of curiosity overtook me  when I decided to try this method from the Creams and Fillings section of the Good Housekeeping Cooking Compendium, volume 3: Picture Cake Making (Waverly, 1955).

Notes

• The recipe doesn’t state how long it will take to achieve the desired consistency and while all eggs are different, it would have been nice to have an indication that atleast 25 minutes of whisking is necessary. The mixture went from  runny and foamy to glossy and shiny, only after a concerted effort.
• I had a couple of sponge fingers leftover from this and decided to ice them.
• The amount stated in the recipe makes just over a pint. No, really.

Results

Absolutely insanely sweet. Too sweet even for me – I quite enjoyed the biscuits I iced but,  I’m ashamed to say,  ditched the rest as tooth-aching.  This icing/frosting/filling does not harden and while the texture is delightful, I think it would be better flavoured with something like lemon zest, or perhaps used as the basis for a pudding, a sortof coward’s soufflé.

Marshmallowed by Elly

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Date Drop Cookies

If you’ve never had a drop biscuit, imagine a rock cake, without the rockiness. As these went so well, I decided to try another variation, this time from The Complete Book of Desserts by Anne Seranne (publishers name, 1955) which has recipe for several kinds, including chocolate, almond and molasses (which is definitely on my list). This section of the ‘Small cakes and cookies’ chapter is called ‘Some Old Cooky Jar Favorites’.

Date Drop Cookies

1/2 cup butter [i.e. 4oz]
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups enriched flour
2 teaspoons double acting baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup dates
1/4 cup milk

Blend butter, sugar, egg and vanilla.

Combine flour, baking powder and salt and stir in the sliced dates. Add flour-date mixture alternately with milk to butter mixture.

Drop batter from teaspoon onto baking tray rubbed with shortening and bake at 350 degrees, for 12 – 15 minutes. makes 2 dozen 2-inch cookies.

Notes

• I decided to make the full amount – 24, yikes! The ingredients however made more than 24. Try 30, more like 32, if I hadn’t eaten some of the dough.
• I used slightly less salt as I was using rather salty salted butter.
• It didn’t specify what kind of sugar, so I chose crunchy demarara, as opposed to a soft, dark sugar. I also made a mistake when measuring, adding a 1/2 cup and then a 1/3 cup of sugar, rather than a 1/4.

Results

As you can see, they are a variety of shapes – the ones at the top and back of the oven flattened instantly as the butter melted in the heat, while those in the cooler parts maintained a domed shape whilst cooking more slowly. I decided to brown some more than other to compare flavours and I prefer the slightly crunchier, darker ones. They were rather sweet and in need of a bit of nutmeg or cinnamon but the full flavour and  moisture of the dates seemed a better option than chocolate chips.

My regular taster (not a fan of incredibly sweet things) pronounced them decent and managed to put away 3.

Update (12.10.09) These are still delicious after two weeks in a not-completely air-tight tin. They’re slightly softer and the flavour has improved.

Dated and dropped by Elly

Squash Pie

I roasted half squash a couple of days ago, having used the other half in a stew and, as these were so good, decided to attempt another, similar recipe from the same book, Potluck Cookery by Beverley Pepper (Faber and Faber, 1955).

Notes

• I made exactly the amount stated, again!
• Mashing milk-sodden toast into cold roast squash is not as easy as it sounds.
• After 25 minutes, there was still a lot of uncooked cream swilling around the top of the pie so I gave it another 20 minutes in the oven.

Results

Not a success, ladies and gents. Firstly, it is desperately in need of another flavour – cheese, bacon, tomato, peppers, herbs, anything. Secondly the onion, despite being chopped very finely,  was still rather hard after 45 minutes. The texture is pleasantly light and a good match to the courgettes in tomato sauce I ate with it, but it still seemed only half thought-through as dish. I’m not convinced of the point of the cream either – saving some of the bread as crumbs and topping it with them would be far more interesting.  I might try this again, slowly cooking the onions in the butter first (actually, I’d probably use olive oil)  and adding some other form of seasoning. As it is, I heartily recommend you do not try it.

Pie’d by Elly

Pirozhnoe Zavarnoye s Zavarnin Kremom (Russian Cream Puffs)

Baked for the Vintage Cookbook Trials Canapé Party by Cis NS.

“I realised in the run-up to the canape party that while I had a lot of “vintage” cookbooks, the majority of them were by writers like Elizabeth David and Edouard de Pomiane and somehow… not quite right. Luckily I was saved by the discovery of my mother’s copy of Nina Nicolaieff and Nancy Phelan’s 1981 Russian Cookbook, which promises that “all the romance and variety of th[is] vast country is contained in [Russian] cooking – a fusion of the exotic tastes of the East and the more familiar flavours of the West”. And so it is with this recipe! — okay, okay, actually these are pretty straightforward choux-and-crème-pâtissière cream puffs, nothing in the least exotic about them. But the name’s in Russian and that’s got to count for something.

I halved (and somewhat metricised) the original recipe and still ended up with too much crème pât– but, well, one can always find a way to use that up. (e.g. a spoon)“

PASTRY
half a cup of oil (i used a mix of grapeseed oil and unsalted butter)
1 cup boiling water
125g plain flour
half teaspoon sugar
pinch salt
three eggs

BOILED CREAM FILLING
two cups milk (i used whole milk)
two eggs
200g sugar (i.e. caster)
60g plain flour
half tsp vanilla extract
(50g butter that i forgot about)

icing sugar for dusting

First make the pâte à choux:
1. boil together oil and water, whisking; 2. remove from the heat, swiftly add the flour and mix it in, plus salt and sugar; 3. beat in the eggs one by one while the mixture is still hot; 4. Let it cool: let it stand in the fridge for a couple of hours. (a later attempt suggests you shouldn’t, however, let it stand overnight)

Then make the crème pâtissière:
1. boil up one and a half cups of the milk in a heavy-bottomed saucepan; 2. beat together eggs and sugar, then the remaining half-cup of milk, the vanilla, and the flour; 3. add sugar-etc mixture to the boiled milk, and bring the lot of it back up to the boil, stirring it as it thickens; 4. let it cool, then beat it until creamy, adding butter. Then fridge.

(I skipped the butter bit and the mixture did not suffer: on a later attempt at the recipe where I remembered this stage, the extra beating and butter made it go runny. I suspect that if you’ve been reasonably diligent about stirring it in the saucepan it won’t go lumpy and need the butter to smooth it out.

What I did add at this point was a few tablespoons of cocoa, because I thought the whole thing was way too sweet – not sure if I’d accidentally upped the sugar content or just don’t have a sweet enough tooth. )

Then make some CREAM PUFFS!
1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees centigrade, or a bit higher (i have a fast oven).
2. Grease a baking sheet: drop on here spoonfuls of the choux pastry, “about the size of half an egg or a large walnut”. You can make slightly prettier puffs if you use a forcer or piping bag.
3. Bake for 30-40 minutes and make sure you don’t open the oven at all in the first 20 minutes – even if they look cooked, they aren’t. (if they look burnt, you probably have the oven too high). They generally seem to be done after half an hour – the ideal we’re going for is “not wet in the middle or burnt outside”.
4. Let ‘em cool.
5. FILL THEM! This is another place where having a forcer or piping bag comes in useful: it’s kind of cute if there isn’t a visible place where they’ve been cut open and filled.
6. Dust them with icing sugar just before serving.

Ginger Shortbread

This recipe is from volume 3 of the Good Housekeeping Cooking Compendium (Waverly, 1955), Picture Cake Making from the Small Fancy Cakes section, which also, completely unpredictably, includes macaroons, several variations of  profiteroles and these.

Ginger Shortbread

6oz flour
2 oz castor sugar
½ – 1tsp ground ginger
4oz butter
1oz chopped crystallised ginger

Put dry ingredients into a bowl and rub in fat until mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add chopped ginger, knead mixture until smooth and then pack into a sandwich tin. Crimp edges, mark top into triangles and prick with a fork. Bake in a moderate oven (350 degrees) until golden and firm  – about 1 hour. Do not remove from tin till cool.

Notes

• This recipe uses a very large amount of butter, which started melting as the dough was coming together and made it seem almost pastry-like.
• 1oz didn’t seem to be very much ginger – I chopped it into pieces the size of long rice grains
• After baking, the triangles I had marked had almost vanished, so while it was still warm, I re-scored them with a knife.

Results

Although the worst sin of shortbread is that it is  dry and hard, I can’t help think there might be a little too much butter in this recipe. The shortbread are very creamy-tasting which doesn’t quite blend with the citrus notes in the ginger. Really, however, I’m quibbling. This had an amazing texture and perhaps if I had added a little less ground ginger (I went for the maximum teaspoon), the flavour might have been more mellow. I would make again but add some warmer notes to the flavour – like vanilla extract or dark chocolate chips.

Shorted by Elly

Curry Knots (savoury biscuits)

Although I referred to these disparagingly in another post, I secretly thought they would be quite nice and wanted to eat them. (Another dish for the party, this time from the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Cookery Compendium, Waverly 1955. You can see the desired result here in the bottom right-hand corner.)

Curry Knots

2oz butter or margarine
4oz flour
1tsp curry powder
A pinch of salt
Egg yolk or water to mix

Rub the fat into the flour, add the sieved curry powder and salt and mix well. Bind together with a little egg yolk or water, until a stiff but pliable dough is obtained. , Knead well, to remove any cracks, and roll the mixture into a long strip about 1/4 inch thick. Cut narrow strips about 6 inches long and tie each into a knot, as seen in the picture. Brush over with beaten egg yolk and bake in a moderately hot oven for 10 – 15 minutes, until they are golden brown.

Notes

• I made half as per.
• I have never bought curry powder so chose Schwartz Medium (as the company was formed in 1889), the ingredients on the container were the same as the contents of my spice shelf. I shall have to make some more ‘curry’ recipes now I am equipped.
• The curry powder has a slightly chicken-y taste, which I found slightly odd as I usually make vegetarian Indian food.
• The dough, despite my efforts, was far too dry to form as suggested, I used a flower-shaped cutter to cut them out and then cut them in half again.

Results

The result was savoury, definitely cumin-y pastry. I didn’t mix the curry powder as thoroughly as necessary so some were merely flavoured whilst others were noticeably more pungent. Almost all were eaten by the end of the night which surprised me. Not an unpleasant experience but not one to be repeated.

Not knotted by Elly

Savoury Éclairs

This was my entry in the ‘Guess the Decade of the Cheese-Based Canape’ contest, held at our party.

I am delighted to have an opportunity to make these, which I have fancied since my first browsing of Florence Greenberg’s Jewish Cookery Book. First published by the Jewish Chronicle Publications in published in 1947, I have the 6^th edition, from 1958, a family tome with a lovely range of recipes from  bloaters devilled to mock duck to nut frappe.

Despite having shrieked at countless episodes of Come Dine with Me, I didn’t manage to do a practise run of choux pastry earlier in the week, so at 1pm on Saturday, it was fail or fail time.

Savoury Éclairs

Make a choux paste (see page 297), omitting the vanilla essence. Put in a forcing bag with a half-inch plain tube and force into a greased baking tray – not too close together, and about 3 ½ inches long and bake in a moderately hot oven (400 degrees, Regulo 5) for 30 – 40 minutes.

Remove from the tin, slit down the sides with a sharp pointed and leave on a cake tray to cool; then fill with any savoury mixture.

Suggestions for fillings:

1. Remove skin and bone from some sardines, pound thoroughly with tomato ketchup, and season with salt and pepper.
2. Pounded hard-boiled egg and tomato, moistened with salad cream
3. Tiny roll of smoked salmon
4. Soft cream cheese, with chopped gherkin, olive, or chives.
5. Mix 2oz grated cheese with 4 pounded anchovies, a little mustard, and sufficient milk to make a soft paste.
6. Green peas or macedoine of vegetables mixed with cheese, in a thick white sauce.

So… I slightly re-interpreted suggestion 6, by making a filling of  very thick cheese sauce and adding some shredded spinach.

I also don’t own a ‘forcing’ bag and instead made buns. The amount of pastry made 12 buns.

Choux Paste

(for Cream Buns, Éclairs etc)

Flour 4oz
Butter or margarine 2oz
Water ¼ pint
Pinch of salt
Three eggs
Vanilla Essence

Use a saucepan  to make the paste, one large enough to allow the eggs to be beaten in. Put in the butter, pour over the boiling water, and when the butter has melted stir in the sieved flour, mixing very thoroughly with a wooden spoon, and stir over a gentle heat until the mixture-which is called a panada-thickens and leaves the sides of the pan quite clean. Cool slightly, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Beat very well and add the vanilla essence.

• I halved the recipe which made 12 profiterole-sized buns.
• Why doesn’t it say in the recipe that I’m supposed to boil the water?
• Please note this recipe has been copied out exactly. (I.e. Yes, it is punctuated exactly like this.)
• I actually beat the eggs together before adding them as I feared making a horrid mess if I misjudged the temperature of the ‘panada’.
• I wasn’t sure if it was thickening sufficiently so I cross-checked with the choux recipe from the Reader’s Digest Cookery Year, which has such excellent descriptions for the beginner. I was reassured by the instructions but that recipe had different proportions of ingredients. I found this very worrying.
• I baked the buns in the oven for about 20 minutes.
• I then left them to cool for about half an hour.
• Then I realised they were still a bit pale and gooey looking at the bottom so put them back in the oven on a low heat for another 15 minutes.
• Assembly at Alix’s involved slicing the buns open, forcing in some filling with a blunt knife and then sprinkling some more cheese on top and heating them in the oven.
• They may have ended up slightly over cooked.

Conclusion

Success! They were so tasty that I was glad a couple of our lovely guests had left to attend other events so I could eat two. Yes, I am a mean drunk. I was  interested (and pleased) to see that the consensus was strongly that they were from the 1970s. Probably if I had served them cold, they would have had a different effect. Anyway, they were worth the effort and I am no longer scared of choux pastry.

Chouxed by Elly