homemade

Distracting myself with bread pudding

Bread pudding
~ willowbough1 ~ Leave a comment

Bread puddingBefore Covid-19 you’d be forgiven for thinking that lounging around the house and not having to go to work for weeks, possibly longer, would be lazily wonderful, but sadly it really isn’t like that. Confined to the house with just one walk a day, and said house being my parents’ home in Surrey (I didn’t fancy self-isolating alone in a two bedroom flat when there was a five bedroom house with a large garden and the company of my folks available), worrying about family members with the virus, is not an easy task. But staying at home is an essential task and we do what we can to calm and busy our restless selves.

Bread puddingI’m missing work terribly and was heartbroken that I couldn’t go on with the baking, making and delivering of afternoon teas. I’m missing the little things I left in my flat in London before evacuating to Surrey. I’m missing the freedom of not being able to pop out to the supermarket because I fancied making huevos a la flamenco tonight and need chorizo and serrano ham. I’m missing drinking wine and dancing on our dining room chairs to Kylie with my housemate who has escaped to his family home in Ireland. But we do what we can to get through it. I’ve been going for my daily walk (10,000 steps), enjoying the sunshine, blue sky and spring flowers as I go. I’ve picked up a book I meant to finish ages ago. And of course, I’ve been busy in the kitchen.

Bread puddingThere is not much else that I find as calming as switching on Classic FM and rolling my sleeves up to cook or bake. Yesterday I distracted myself from some very difficult and worrying news by making bread pudding, using up some leftover end pieces with some dried fruit, some cinnamon and ginger (couldn’t just pop-out to pick up the mixed spices I’d usually use), some milk, brown sugar and a precious egg. It was simple, quick to make, and tastes delicious. We all enjoyed a slice with our morning coffee. This recipe is perfect if you have any leftover bread that’s not good enough for sandwiches anymore and if you can’t get hold of mixed dried fruit simply replace it with whatever you have (chopped apple, chunks of chocolate, raisins, glace cherries…). This lockdown is a time to get creative and try old recipes with new ingredients – let me know what you’re making and how you get on!

 

Ingredients:

This is what I used, but the joy of this recipe is that you can adapt it and use whatever you have…

600g bread

500g mixed dried fruit

140g brown sugar (plus a little extra to sprinkle on the top)

350ml milk

1 egg

A generous sprinkling of ginger and cinnamon (around a tea spoon of each)

 

Method:

Tear the bread into small, bitesize pieces. Add the mixed fruit, sugar and spices and mix together. Beat the egg into the milk, pour over the dry mixture and using your hands – this is the bit kids love! – squelch it together. Pour your mix into a baking tray, lightly oiled and lined with baking paper. Sprinkle the extra brown sugar on the top (I was rather generous with this as it makes the yummiest crust!) and bake on 150 for around 30-40 minutes or until brown.

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Apple and elderflower cake

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I can’t get enough of elderflower in the warm weather and this juicy apple cake is yet another delightful way to enjoy what has become a rather British taste of summertime. I would suggest enjoying a slice of this cake with a cup of black Earl Grey. Too delicious for words!

Ingredients:

8oz butter

8oz sugar

4 eggs

8oz self-raising flour

3 apples, roughly chopped

Icing sugar

Elderflower cordial

Dried elderflower petals

Method:

As with most of my cake recipes, soften the butter and cream in the sugar. Add the eggs one at a time, and then mix in the flour (make sure you don’t overmix, it’s important to keep as much air in as possible). Fold in the chopped apples. I like to keep the skin on for texture. Bake in a greased and lined loaf tin on 150 for around 40 minutes or until golden brown. Don’t forget to do the skewer test to make sure it’s cooked all the way though!

To make the drizzle add a couple of capfuls of elderflower cordial to half a mug of icing sugar and stir vigorously. You may need to add a tea spoon or two of boiled water to help it on its way – I would advise you to add a tiny amount at a time or you might find you need to add more icing sugar. Drizzle the icing over the cooled cake and lightly sprinkle the dried elderflower petals on the top. This pretty loaf cake deserves to be served on your finest china!

Cheers to cake!

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I love working with fruits and flowers all year round but there’s something about summer that makes me want to make and bake with them all the more. My birthday seems so far back now (although it was only in May) but I’m still thinking about the beautifully rustic Pimms-inspired sandwich cake I made for my party. Yes, I still have a party, even at my age! Although at my age the cake is allowed to include my favourite tipple…

I wanted a summery cake, something that summed up British summertime, so I reached for the Pimm’s. Now I have to admit that I was originally thinking of the original – Pimm’s No 1 – but in my haste I hadn’t realised that I’d run out of this at home. However, what I did have was Pimm’s Special Edition Blackberry and Elderflower, which is super summery and just delicious! And recently I’ve been doing a lot of baking with blackberries and, in particular, elderflower, and it seemed perfect to combine these two delicious flavours. And the final magic ingredient, which I love to add to so many of my recipes, alcohol, made this the perfect summer birthday cake!

Ingredients

12oz butter

120z sugar

6 eggs

12 oz self-raising flour

One punnet of blackberries (seven put aside for decoration)

For the buttercream:

A generous knob of butter

Pimm’s Special Edition Blackberry and Elderflower

Icing sugar

For the drizzle:

Pimm’s Special Edition Blackberry and Elderflower

Icing sugar

 

Method

Cream the butter (I always find this easiest if the butter is at room temperature when you begin) and then add the sugar, followed by the eggs one at a time. Then add the blackberries to the mix before sifting in the flour. Share the mix equally across two 8” cake tins (I use the ones with the removable bottoms). Bake the cake for around 40 minutes or until golden. As always, I’d suggest you do the skewer test to make sure the cake is cooked all the way through.

To make the buttercream icing cream the knob of butter, adding icing sugar a spoon at a time. Add a dash of Pimm’s. Keep adding and mixing until you have a beautiful purple buttercream. Spoon the buttercream onto the bottom cake and sandwich the top half on it. I usually squish it down a bit; don’t worry if it oozes out a bit, I always think it adds to the homemade look and makes it appear all the more tempting!

To make the drizzle mix a few large spoonfuls of icing sugar and a capful or two of the Pimm’s and mix until you have a nice drizzle. Pour this over the whole cake, letting it dribble down the edges. Finish the cake with a small handful of blackberries in the centre of the cake. I also dusted the cake with some dried elderflower to finish it off. Now, do you enjoy this with a pot of tea or with a refreshing glass of Pimm’s? Cheers!

Valentine’s Day rose creams

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I’m a big fan of homemade gifts; to me they show far more thought (they’re so easily personalised) and are made with love and imagination (although flowers and jewellery are still gratefully accepted ). These rose creams are pretty, easy to make and are as sweet as the person you’re giving them to!

Ingredients

1 egg white

14oz icing sugar

2 teaspoons of rose water

A dash of pink food colouring

 

Method

Mix the egg white with the icing sugar, rose water and food colouring (I like to use my Kenwood mixer) until it makes a pink paste – see, I told you they were easy to make! Lightly dust a rolling mat with icing sugar and roll out until its around 5mm thick and cut out into pretty hearts, flowers or any other shape you choose. Leave to dry for around an hour or so. These look so charming in a lovely gift box, or on a pretty vintage plate.

Chocolate orange Battenberg cake

~ willowbough1 ~ 2 Comments

This cake is for my Dad. He’s always loved Battenberg cake and the smell of an orange being peeled doesn’t remind me of him for no reason! So I decided to bring the two together for this delicious chocolate orange Battenberg cake.

Ingredients
Chocolate cake
6oz butter
6oz sugar
3 eggs
4oz self raising flour
2oz cocoa powder

Orange cake
6oz butter
6oz sugar
3 eggs
6oz self raising flour
The zest of one orange
Orange food colouring

Thin cut marmalade or marmalade
Marzipan
Icing sugar for dusting

Method
To make the chocolate cake:
Cream the butter and then add the sugar. Add the three eggs, one at a time, and mix well to give the mixture airy volume. Sift in the flour and cocoa and mix, but not for long (I usually mix for no more than 10 seconds building from a slow setting to the highest within that time). Put in a greased and lined tray bake tin and bake on 150 for around 30 minutes or until it passes the skewer test.

To make the orange cake:
Cream the butter and then add the sugar. Add the three eggs, one at a time, and mix well. Sift in the flour and then fold in the orange zest and orange food colouring. If you want to give it a bit of extra oomph add a capful of orange essence. Put into a greased and lined tray bake tin and bake on 150 for around 30 minutes or until it passes the skewer test.

Once the cakes are cooked and cooled, cut them both into four long strips. Build your Battenberg cake by placing an orange strip on top of a chocolate strip that you’ve already painted with the marmalade. Place next to another chocolate and orange ‘bunkbed’ cake, with marmalade between both – you need to make sure you’ve created a checkerboard effect rather than stripes! Roll out the marzipan on a dusting of icing sugar making sure you’ve rolled the icing into a size that will fully wrap around your stacked cakes. Paint the marzipan with the marmalade (I find it helps to warm the marmalade in the microwave first to get it to spread a bit thinner) and place the stacked cakes in the middle. Fold the marzipan up, overlapping slightly. You can seal the marzipan with either some marmalade or for something a little bit boozy – you know me, I just can’t resist! – run some Cointreau along the edge before sealing. Finally, roll your Battenberg in the icing sugar, making sure each side is lightly coated. Slice and enjoy!

Butternut squash and Stilton pasties

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It’s the time of year when we crave comfort food – generally anything hot and carby. And it’s also the time of year for pumpkins and the like. So my recipe for butternut squash and Stilton pasties was perfect for this weekend. They’re super-easy and fun to make, and fun to eat too! They’re perfect for Halloween or bonfire night.

 

Ingredients

Butternut squash and stilton pasties

1 butternut squash

1 onion

200g Stilton

2 sheets of ready rolled short crust pastry

Oil

1 egg

 

Method

Chop the butternut squash into small cubes and add to a roasting tin (oiled) and pop into the oven on gas mark 5 for 10 minutes. Chop the onion and add to the squash, returning to the oven for another 40 minutes.

Cut the sheets of pastry into 12 squares (six squares per sheet). When the butternut squash and onion are cooked and cooled, add a desert spoonful to the middle of each square. Be careful not to overstuff as this can cause the pastry to tear. Add the Stilton, having chopped

To seal the pasties dip your finger in water and run it around the edge of the pastry square. Fold the square over the filling and fold up the edges, crimping together (you can use your fingers, and don’t worry if it doesn’t look perfect, it will taste great and that’s all that matters!). Place on a baking tray and prick each pasty with a sharp knife before coating the pasties with the egg wash. Then pop them in the oven on gas mark 5 for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.

Enjoy while hot – perfect for Halloween or bonfire night!

A special cake for a special friend; chocolate and lavender cake

~ willowbough1 ~ 1 Comment
Me, with Helen, aged 18

Helen and I have been friends since our first year of secondary school. We first met when, after our last class of our first day (music), I asked her if she was getting the bus home. She was, and being bus buddies, it was a question that cemented our friendship. Twenty-eight years later and we’re still good friends and I am proud Godmother to her beautiful nine-year-old daughter.

This year Helen reached a landmark age and I was devastated that I couldn’t go to the surprise birthday dinner her husband had lovingly organised (I was off at the O2 dancing to all things country!). However, there was one thing I could do for her – make her a beautiful birthday cake to remember.

Chocolate and lavender cake

As you may know by now, I love to work with fruits and flowers and my initial plan had been to make Helen my delicious pistachio and rose cake (that’s a recipe I fully intend to share one of these days!). But I’m afraid that foolish me didn’t check the cupboard for rose water and so I had to improvise (sorry Helen!). For me, it’s when I have to improvise that I come up with my finest recipes. I had lavender but wanted to do something a bit more indulgent for Helen’s special birthday, especially as I wasn’t going to be there. So I decided to put lavender with rich chocolate. And thankfully it worked a treat! I’ve since made the cake a couple of times in the shop and at home and the noises that come from people when they taste it – well, what can I say? Simply tastetastic!

Happy birthday Helen, here’s to another 28 years of friendship and more x

 

Chocolate and lavender cake

Ingredients

12oz butter

120z sugar

6 eggs

9oz self-raising flour

3oz cocoa powder

100g dark chocolate, chopped

For the icing

3oz butter

1lb icing sugar

100ml milk

Lavender essence

Culinary lavender for decoration

Method

Cream the butter and add the sugar. Mix in the eggs one at a time. Sift in the flour and cocoa powder and stir in the chopped chocolate. Transfer into two 8” tins and bake in the oven (I bake mine at 150 for 30 minutes) until they pass the skewer test.

For the icing, cream the butter and add the icing sugar a bit at a time. Add the milk, again, a bit at a time until you get the consistency you want. Mix in the lavender essence – I use six drops but it’s personal taste, so add two drops at a time until you’re happy with the flavour.

Once the cakes are cooked and cooled off, sandwich together with the lavender icing and ice the top of the cake. Decorate with the dried lavender to make it look as pretty as it is tasty!

Rock n sausage rolls

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Ok, this is a long-winded explanation as to why I’m blogging about sausage rolls but please bear with me, I hope it’ll be worth it (or at the very least slightly entertaining!). 

Clare and Leigh with Charlie
Clare and Leigh with Charlie

Last March I went with my good friend Leigh to the CMA Songwriters Series – the opening night of Country to Country that takes place annually at the O2 in London. It was there that we discovered the fantastic talent that is Charlie Worsham; I’m not going to lie, all of us ladies went a little bit giddy for the weekend and we were lucky enough to see him four times (and meet him three times!). Through a couple of online fan groups I became friends with the lovely Anna Mac, aka Charlie-Anna (I have a few Annas in my life and I need to distinguish each of them somehow!). 

Clare and Anna
Clare and Anna

In early September Anna came to stay with me in south west London. This was a bit scary for both of us as we’d cultivated a great online friendship but how did we know neither was a crazy murderer?! Thankfully neither of us are and we had a lovely weekend enjoying some live music (thank you Lucie Silvas) and making Anna’s sausage rolls. Anna has a whole range of delicious flavours she makes but I’m such a fan of blue cheese I just had to go with the stilton and walnut sausage rolls. The joy of this recipe is that you can easily cheat using ready-made pastry sheets. It’s also a great recipe for anyone who likes to roll their sleeves up and get their hands in there! I recently made these sausage rolls again for a party I was catering for (but without the walnuts and parsley) and they were the hit of the buffet – I’m sure if I’d made twice as many they still would have all been eaten!

Next week I’m going back to Country to Country with Leigh and Anna; I think we probably should take Charlie a box of sausage rolls Anna – don’t you?!
Stilton and walnut sausage rolls
Stilton and walnut sausage rolls

Anna’s stilton and walnut sausage rolls

Ingredients

Two sheets of ready-made pastry (with the paper it comes with)

500g sausage meat

150g stilton

50g walnuts, chopped

Flat leaf parsley, chopped

Salt and pepper

1 egg, beaten

Method

Mix the sausage meat with the stilton, walnuts and parsley. Don’t be afraid to really get stuck but make sure you have a sink or some wipes close by! Season with salt and pepper.

Place one sheet of the pastry on a preparation mat leaving the paper on the underside. Take a small ball of the mixture and roll into a long, thin sausage shape. Place the sausage meat along the long side of  the pastry sheet one inch from the edge.  Carefully roll the pastry over using the paper to help you to wrap the sausage meat with a slight overlap. Trim above this and start again with the rest of the sheet to make another long sausage roll. I like to turn the sausage roll so that the pastry join is on the underside (top tip: this means you don’t necessarily have to seal the pastry with water).
Cut the long sausage roll into sections of around one inch and, using a sharp knife cut a slit in the top of each one. Brush with egg and place on a tray lined with baking paper. Bake on 180 for around 15-20 minutes or until they turn a lovely golden colour. Enjoy hot or cold, with friends or on your own, under a blanket, in front of a good film with a glass of something nice!

Well-seasoned soup; perfect for winter!

~ willowbough1 ~ 1 Comment

We sold a lot of our homemade soup in Willow Bough last week. It’s not surprising with the cold weather and the promise – or was it threat?! – of snow. What I love about our soup is that it’s so easy to make and there are an abundance of different varieties you can make; it really is just a case of what your favourite vegetables are.

The two tips I give for making soup are: firstly don’t worry about how neatly or small you chop the vegetables.  It’s going in soup and will get blitzed at the end so it really doesn’t matter what they look like; and for the same reason, I always buy the supermarket economy vegetables for my soups.

Today we made curried parsnip soup and Edie, who was working with me, was keen to take note of the recipe for when she goes to university in September. She’s conscious of cost and making sure she gets her five a day, plus Edie is a big fan of parsnips cooked in any way, and so this soup will be perfect for her once she moves into student accommodation. As with all homemade soups you can make a big batch of it and store in individual portions in the fridge or freezer. It seems obvious but I’ve learned over the years that it can be easy to get out of the habit of being organised in order to eat well on a budget. And the cherry on the top is, that this soup is so tasty it really is a win/win recipe!

 

Curried parsnip soup

Recipe

A knob of butter

1 white onion

2 packets of supermarket parsnips

2 vegetable stock cubes in 2 pints of water

2 teaspoons of mild curry powder

Salt and pepper to taste

Milk or cream (optional)

 

Method

Chop the onion and sweat it in the butter in a large pan. Chop the parsnips and add, handfuls at a time, sweating them with the onions. Once the vegetables have softened add the stock and simmer for around 20 minutes. Once the soup has cooled down blend it with a hand-held mixer (or similar) and add the curry powder and seasoning to taste. The soup can be decanted into individual portion-sized containers and put in the fridge or even frozen ready to be enjoyed on a cold day!

 

Burns Night delight!

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It’s Burns Night tonight so I wanted to share a new Scottish-themed recipe with you. I love Burns Night because I absolutely love haggis! Even though we’re not a Scottish family my Mum always serves up haggis each year with a side of neeps and tatties. As much as I love my mother’s Burns Night meal this year I fancied doing something slightly different and have taken my favourite Scottish ingredients – haggis, black pudding and whisky – and created this scrummy gnocchi dish. A perfect plate of comfort, I served it with green beans. It was so tasty, it had me and Lovely Livvie, a fellow food fan, going back for seconds!

Haggis, black pudding and whisky cream gnocchi

Ingredients

300ml double cream

A generous tea spoon of Dijon mustard

A generous glug of whisky

A packet of fresh gnocchi (or homemade gnocchi)

Haggis (available from any good butcher)

Black pudding

 

Method

First to cook the haggis; remove the outer plastic and place into a casserole dish, cover and bake in the oven as per the instructions on the packet. Fluff out the haggis half way through baking.

Unwrap the black pudding and slice. Grill both sides of the black pudding slices for two minutes and set aside.

Heat the cream on a low heat and add the mustard and whisky. I love the flavour of whisky so I tend to add a good glug but if you’re after just a hint of whisky add a couple of tablespoons. Don’t worry, the alcohol will burn out through cooking it. Turn the heat up and simmer the sauce for a few minutes.

Stir in pieces of the cooked haggis.

Cook the gnocchi as per the instructions on the packet (if you’re feeling more adventurous you can make your own gnocchi!). Pour the sauce over the gnocchi and garnish with a couple of slices of black pudding. This is a rich dish so I suggest you enjoy with green beans, curly kale or something equally as fresh and green!