BARGAIN COOK BOOKS AND OTHER STUFF

I have written before about the cost of recipe books.  I don’t know how many people ever buy them at full price these days but there are bargains to be had if you look for them.

These two came from a local charity shop in the UK, £2 for the Rachel Allen book and £3 for the Nigel Slater.  There is a slight watermark on the fabric cover of the book “eat” but other than that they both appear to be brand new with no signs of being used at all.  They are also both fairly recently published.

I am very happy to buy books from charity shops.  I tend to think of the cost as a donation to a good cause and if they turn out not to be very useful I give them back to the shop so they can sell them again.

These two came from my local branch of “The Works”.  I have hung my nose over the book by Miranda Gore Brown for a while – she was a contestant in the Great British Bake Off a few years ago.  The book looks promising and at £4 I don’t feel guilty about buying it. 

The Olive Magazine book is excellent.  I gave one away in a raffle earlier this year and have been on the lookout for another copy to replace it.

As with the secondhand books, if I find I don’t use them I will take them to the charity shop and feel very virtuous.

Compared to £4.20 for a magazine, all the books look like good value to me.  I hardly ever buy magazines nowadays, preferring to buy books instead.  I’m unlikely to save more than one or two recipes from a magazine and rarely pay much attention to the other content.

Another charity shop bargain is this 20cm ceramic pie dish for £1. Perfect for a pie, crumble or clafoutis.  Same rules apply – if I don’t use it I take it back.

Yet another recent bargain was this cake stand, 5€ (about £4) from a local French brocante.  (The two soap dishes came from the same place, 1€ each.)

These small side plates were a real bargain and a perfect size for a slice of cake.  I got six of them for a total of €1.04 in a closing down sale at a branch of Casa.  Casa is a chain of shops in France which is similar in style to The Range or Dunelm Mill in the UK.  I just happened to visit the shop in the last hour of the last day of the sale and everything was reduced by at least 90%.  I already have a matching cake stand bought from the same shop in a previous sale so I was very happy to find the plates at a give away price.

I’m a bit choosy when bargain hunting, whether the items are new or second hand.  I don’t do chips or cracks when it comes to crockery and books have to be clean and not scruffy.  One likes to get a bargain but one does have standards!

BANANA, DATE AND HONEY DRIZZLE CAKE

I have made a few different banana cakes over the years but this is one I keep coming back to.  The recipe is in a leaflet that came with a special offer that was in Sainsbury’s about six years ago.  A twin pack of Lurpak butter and a free loaf tin for £3.  I got two of them for myself and three more for colleagues at work.  The tins were of really good quality and understandably they soon sold out.

It’s the honey in this cake that makes it so good I think.  There is some honey in the mixture and you drizzle some more over it when it comes out of the oven and is still warm, much like a lemon drizzle cake.

Mine was a clear honey but still quite thick so in order to make it easy to drizzle I put the spoonful required in a small ramekin and into the oven when the cake came out and the oven was turned off.  After about five minutes the cake was still very warm and the honey was runny enough for drizzling.

As I was in the mood for using up a few storecupboard bits and pieces I used half dates and half sultanas this time, which worked very well.  The walnuts were some of our foraged walnuts from this autumn but pecans would be just as good instead if you had those already.

I have often pondered when a loaf is not a loaf but a cake.  To my mind a loaf is something you would spread butter on and a cake is something that doesn’t need any butter.  So although this cake is baked in a loaf tin and is described as a loaf, to me it is definitely a cake.  It’s lovely and moist and keeps really well for a few days.

The recipe used to be on the Lurpak website but it no longer is so I have given my version of it here.

Ingredients

2 medium ripe bananas, peeled

200g self raising flour

160g butter at room temperature, or spreadable butter 

80g caster sugar

2 tblsp clear honey

2 eggs

80g chopped dates (or half dates, half sultanas)

40g chopped walnuts (or pecans, possibly even brazil nuts)

1 tblsp extra honey for drizzling, warmed 

Method

Grease the tin and line it with greaseproof paper or baking parchment, or use a paper liner.

Preheat the oven to 160°C, 140°fan, Gas mark 3.

Put the bananas into a large bowl and mash them.  Add the other ingredients (except for the dates and nuts) and whisk together with an electric whisk until well combined.

Stir in the dates and nuts.  Pour or spoon the mixture into the tin and bake for 1 hour or until done (mine took 1 hour and 5 minutes).

When the cake is out of the oven, make a few holes in the top with the skewer and drizzle the warmed tablespoon of honey over the cake whilst it is still warm.  

Leave to cool in the tin before turning out.

Cuts into 10-12 slices.

OAT AND GINGER TRAYBAKE

It was Nick’s birthday the other day and I was just dying to bake a cake.  Any excuse.  Unfortunately he’s a bit fussy when it comes to cake and has definite likes and dislikes, which can narrow my choice somewhat.  Ginger cake is one of his few favourites.

So I spent ages leafing through my embarrassingly huge collection of recipe books to find the perfect ginger cake but most recipes were either too fussy and complicated for a man that just likes a simple ginger cake, or they were of the gingerbread variety that should have been made days before to enable the stickiness and flavours to develop.

With an enormous pile of books on the bedside table as I sipped my morning tea (retirement, I can recommend it heartily), I settled on a recipe in the gorgeous book, “Simply baking” by Sybil Kapoor.  This book is stuffed full of well tried and tested recipes from various kitchens of the National Trust and I really can’t understand why I hadn’t noticed this one before.

It’s described as a fusion of gingerbread, parkin and flapjack and I would say that’s very accurate.  It had the treacly gingeryness of gingerbread, the oatyness of parkin and the chewyness of flapjack.  Truly a match made in heaven and an absolute hit with Nick who thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Highly praised and very highly recommended.

In fact, it beat the Bonfire Night Parkin that I made for a large gathering last weekend well into second place.  The recipe I used for that was traditional but the end result was nowhere near as nice as this.

(You can no longer see this recipe and photo online as the website has, like so many, morphed into something else!)

Ingredients

150 ml milk (I used semi-skimmed as that’s what we have)

40g black treacle

80g salted butter

55g plain flour

1½ tsp ground ginger (Nick reports that this is plenty)

½ tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp bicarb

115g light muscovado sugar

40g dark muscovado sugar

100g porridge oats

Method

In a small saucepan, put the treacle, butter and milk and heat gently until the butter is melted, stirring every so often.  Set aside to cool slightly.

Grease and line a traybake tin that measures roughly 18 x 28 cm.  Preheat the oven to 150°fan / gas mk 2½.

Sift the flour, bicarb and spices into a large bowl.  Add the oats and sugar and mix well.  Add the treacle mixture and mix again to combine thoroughly.

Pour into the tin and bake for 45 minutes.  Cool in the tin.

Cuts into 8-12 slices, depending on how small or large you like your slices.

GLUTEN FREE PARTY CAKE

You may be forgiven for thinking that no baking has been going on in our house for the last two months but this is certainly not the case!  I can’t really explain why I’ve let the blog lapse as baking is very much a part of my life and indeed very good therapy in what is turning out to be my own personal “annus horribilis”. 

Anyway, I feel the blog is rested for long enough and it’s time to catch up.  I hate it when blogs just end, as if the writer died or just evaporated.  I like to know if someone has decided to give up.  No such thing here!

Friends of ours who lived over near Richelieu for several years have recently sold up, packed up and moved back to the UK.

It was family ties that took our friends back to the UK and we’re very sorry to see them go.  A leaving party was arranged once the vans were all packed and the legal formalities complete.  I offered to provide the cake, which needed to be gluten free.

I used an adaptation of a recipe that I’ve used several times before, which is basically a Victoria sponge recipe from Hannah Miles’ book , “the gluten free baker”. This time I baked it in a ring tin, which makes a cake which goes a long way in a crowd and cuts easily into small, manageable slices.  Most people don’t want a huge slab of cake after they’ve filled up on other party food, but everyone is usually pleased to have a little slice to go with the speeches and toasts.  This one worked well as the crumb was not too crumbly and the slices were easy to pass around and hold in the hand.

Finding something to decorate it with proved too much of a challenge in France. I couldn’t find any appropriate cake decorations as such and house warming cards do not seem to exist here, so I used one I had in stock*, cut it up and glued the pictures onto wooden sticks to decorate the cake, after icing it with simple icing and dotting a few halves of glacé cherries and bits of chopped almond on the top.  The candle holder in the middle was a 1€ bargain from a vide grenier this summer and fits perfectly in the hole in the middle of the cake. 

With the appropriate decoration this large gluten free cake lends itself to any and every party or occasion.

Ingredients

185g softened butter

185g caster sugar

4 eggs

200g ground almonds

125g gluten free self raising flour

150ml crème fraîche

1 tsp almond essence

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°fan/gas mk 4.  Grease and flour a large ring or Bundt tin.

Put the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl and beat or whisk until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time and beat well with each addition.

Add the other cake ingredients and fold in gently until evenly combined.

Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 40-50 minutes until the cake is firm and golden and passes the skewer test.  Remove from the oven, turn out and cool on a wire rack.

Make an icing using about 150g icing sugar, blended with lemon juice to the consistency of double cream.  Pour over the cake and allow to run down the sides.  Decorate as desired.

Serves 12-15 slices.

*Birthday cards and other greeting cards are incredibly expensive in France so I usually stock up on a random selection of all types of card in the UK and bring them with me.