Tag: tin

Treacle tart

I mean, what the fucking fuck do you call this??!

I have for a long time thought that treacle tart is a thing I ought to be able to make, but I have always been scared off by this “baking blind” instruction.

That’s that thing, that I’m sure you’re all terribly familiar with and do it all the time, (in the evenings and weekends just for a laugh), where you roll out your pastry into a tin and then cover it with ceramic beads or beans and cook it before the filling goes in and then cook it again with the filling in it. A more pointless, time-wasty and stupid instruction I’ve rarely seen and so have always avoided it.

But tonight we’ve got some nice people coming round for dinner so I thought I’d break my baking blind, treacle tart duck and do it because the alternative is to cower in darkness – and that’s only hilarious for so long.

So off I went to Waitrose brmm brmm in my little car, and got some sweet pastry and a tin of golden syrup and some creme fraiche to go with it and came back and blithely stumbled into the worst and most useless recipe for anything I’ve ever cooked, ever. Except for that gumbo, remember that?

GARY RHODES I HATE YOU.

Just bad. Bad and wrong and unhelpful and stupid and ill and presumptuous and irresponsible. While the tart was doing its final cook in the oven I sat down for a bit with Waitrose Kitchen and had a flick through and alighted on a Fergus Henderson recipe for treacle tart that was far more detailed, complex and basically entirely different from the Rhodes recipe.

I experienced a terrible bumrush, of the sort you get when you turn over an exam paper and realise that you have spent the last week revising for a different, wrong module, or that the person you have just been massively bitching up is within earshot, or that your period is three weeks late.

I knew then. I knew in that moment that my tart was a bummer. And so it was. I can’t be bothered to start listing the catclysmic death roll-call of things wrong with it, but let’s just say that the BEST thing about it is that sides are burnt to shit.

FUCK! What a waste of my time! I could have been doing loads of other things! I could have been asleep.

I have nothing else to add. There is no nice ending to this story.

Dundee cake

“…by the way,” said next eldest sister as we wrapped up our telephone consultation about Kitty’s earache, “my friend Sarah says that she reads your blog. So it’ll now be spreading like wildfire through St Thomas’s prep school in Fulham.”

And I like to encourage these things so I thought I would do a special post to say:

HELLOOOO FULHAAAAAAAM!

(now you all stick your hands in the air and scream)

I must say I don’t really understand West London. That’s not to say I don’t like it, I just don’t understand it. Whenever I go there I always seem to end up at the wrong end of a very long road lined with identical houses, stopping shaggy-haired Sloanes to ask for directions.

I am assured by people who know these things that people who live in West London live there partly because they have houses in the countryside in a westerly direction and living so close to the M40 makes making a break for it on a Friday less hellish.

It is probably prejudiced of me to assume that everyone living in West London is a shaggy-haired Sloane who disappears to Gloucestershire from Friday-Sunday every week, but this blog is nothing if not a collection of sloppily-applied prejudices. If you disagree with me, feel free to express yourself in the comments section.

But I really do think that my new reader(s) might appreciate this recipe for Dundee cake, which is the technical term for the fruitcake that my mother has been making once a week for the last 20 years. It is very light and crumbly and popular with most children. It also keeps very well, so handy to make on a Thursday and take to the countryside for the weekend. You know. Just if you happen to be going.

Dundee cake

Pre-heat your oven to 150C.

For this you need an 18-20cm tin. This is important. I used a tin that was far too large and the cake came out quite flat and therefore slightly overcooked (although still delicious). So do, please, source a correctly-sized tin – or double the quantities for a larger tin. If you grease and line your tin, you will make your life considerably easier for yourself along the line.

170g butter

200g self-raising flour

140g caster sugar

3 eggs
1 cup glace cherries

500g mixed dried fruit – this can be anything you like, raisins, currants, mixed peel, chopped apricots and dates. Go wild.

1 Cream the butter and the sugar together.

2 Separately whisk the eggs and then add to the butter and sugar in short bursts. I have never managed not to curdle this and neither, my mother tells me unapologetically, has she. So if it curdles don’t worry.

3 Fold in the flour with a metal spoon.

4 Tip in the mixed dried fruit and glace cherries, stir to combine. As with any cake, only stir until the ingredient is reasonably evenly distributed and then stop so as to ensure a light and crumbly texture

5 Put this into your appropriately-sized tin.

6 Now put this in your 150C oven for 2 hours. If you, y’know, happened to have an Aga, you can cook it in the simmering oven for 2.5hrs. I know that seems like a long time but that’s the way with some kinds of cake.

7 This is very nice on its own, or it is extra-terrific with a lemon icing, made with sieved icing sugar (the sieving is very important) and the juice of one lemon.

Eat with a cup of tea while making a list of all the shite you need to pack up for the weekend, idly wondering if two houses is really worth all the bloody hassle.

Hairy Bikers’ chocolate yule log

Goodtoknow TV

Free & easy recipe video: Watch new how-to recipe videos with goodtoknow and Woman’s Weekly see all videos >

The Hairy Bikers’ make great comforting Christmas recipes and this chocolate yule log is no exception. Serve as an alternative Christmas pudding or as a Christmas Eve treat – no-one will be able to resist!

That’s goodtoknow

Decorating the yule log with desiccated coconut gives it an extra Christmassy look

Ingredients

Soft butter for greasing
6 large eggs, separated
150g caster sugar
50g cocoa powder

Icing and filling

200g plain, dark chocolate, broken into squares
200g icing sugar
200g butter, room temperature
2 tbsp Camp chicory and coffee essence

Decoration

Fresh holly leaves or leaves made from ready-to-roll coloured icing
Icing sugar or desiccated coconut

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C/Gas 4. Line a 23 x 33cm Swiss roll tin with baking parchment, grease with a little butter and set aside.
Put the egg yolks and sugar in a large bowl and whisk with an electric beater until thick and creamy. Sift the cocoa powder over the egg mixture and whisk in thoroughly. Wash and dry the beaters and whisk the egg whites until stiff but not dry. Fold a third of the egg whites into the cocoa mixture, then gently fold in the rest until evenly distributed. Pour the mixture into the tin and spread gently with a spatula. Bake for 20–25 minutes or until well risen and beginning to shrink away from the sides of the tin.
Remove the cake from the oven, loosen the edges with a round-bladed knife and leave to stand for a few minutes. Place a piece of baking parchment on the work surface, turn the cake onto the parchment and leave it to cool completely – 30–40 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the icing. Melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water, or in the microwave. Remove from the heat and leave to cool, but do not allow it to set. Put the icing sugar in a food processor, add the butter and blitz until smooth. Add the coffee essence and 2 tablespoons of melted chocolate, then blend until smooth. Make sure the chocolate is cool, or it will melt the butter.
Take just over half the icing mixture out of the processor and put it in a bowl to use for the filling. With the motor running, slowly add the remaining chocolate to the icing mixture in the processor and blend until smooth. This will be used for icing the cake.
When the cake is cool, trim off the crusty edges. Using a palette knife or spatula, spread the filling over the cake, taking it right to the edges. Starting at one of the long sides, gently roll up the sponge, keeping the first roll fairly tight so it forms a good spiral shape. Spread the icing evenly over the cake and drag a fork through it to resemble the ridges on the bark of a tree.
Chill for at least 30 minutes to allow the icing to set. Decorate with sifted icing sugar.

This recipe is taken from

The Hairy Bikers’ 12 Days of Christmas,

which is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20.00.

By The Hairy Bikers

Cooked this? Upload a picture to our Facebook page

Nutritional information

Guideline Daily Amount for 2,000 calories per day are: 70g fat, 20g saturated fat, 90g sugar, 6g salt.

Loved this recipe? Try these too!

Today’s poll

What’s your budget to spend on food and drink for Christmas this year?

£151+ 26%
£101-£150 17%
£71-£100 12%
£51-£70 9%
£31-£50 10%
Less than £30 10%
I don’t know yet 5%
I’m not setting a budget 11%

Thanks, your vote has been counted!

We’d like to let you know that this site uses cookies. Without them you may find this site does not work properly and many features may be unavailable. More information on what cookies are and the types of cookies we use can be found here