THE BE-RO GINGERBREAD CAKE - the taste of my childhood

 

Nick is not really much of a cake person.  Although for someone who claims not to like cake very much he has made some pretty special cakes himself.  He often tackles the recipes I would shy away from because they're too fiddly  - he just gets the ingredients weighed out and gets on with it, head down and completely focused. 

 However, of all the cakes in the world, his absolute favourite is a ginger cake, and he waxes lyrical about the Be-Ro book ginger cake.

I got out my copy of the Be-Ro book and as I weighed out the ingredients memories of past ginger cakes came to mind.  My mum and my grandma used to make this same cake, using the Be-Ro book recipe, it was a family favourite.  It was made in a small oblong meat roasting tin.  We didn't possess a huge collection of different tins in those days.  There was a pair of sponge tins, a bun tin for fairy cakes, maids of honour and mince pies, a baking tray and a deep cake tin for the Christmas cake.  It was very much a case of make do with what we had and in fact a lot of old fashioned recipes didn't specify the size of tin at all.

This recipe uses the simplest of ingredients that would have been standard fare in everyone's pantry in the 1950's and 60's.  No fancy flours or the kinds of ginger that feature so often in modern recipes.  I doubt my mum would have ever even seen or heard of fresh ginger.  Ginger came dried in a jar.  (In fact I'm not sure that in the very early days if it didn't come in a tin.)

I hadn't made one of these for donkey's years.  Yet it's the best ginger cake you could wish for.  Just look at that sticky, glossy top and the dense, even crumb.  It has a spicy treacliness that's absolutely divine.  The taste of my childhood and just as way back then, the kitchen smelled wonderful all afternoon.

Ingredients

225g plain flour

a pinch of salt

2 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp mixed spice

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

50g soft dark brown sugar

100g margarine

175g black treacle

50g golden syrup

150ml milk

2 med eggs, beaten

50g sultanas (optional, I omitted them)

Method

First, measure your margarine, treacle and golden syrup directly into a small saucepan.  Heat gently until the margarine has melted, stirring all the time.  Remove from the heat, stir in the milk and set aside to cool.

Preheat the oven to 150°C / 130° fan / gas mk 2.  Grease and line the bottom of an 18cm square or 20cm round tin.

Sift the flour, salt, spices and bicarb into a bowl.  Stir in the sugar and mix well to combine.  Add the beaten eggs and mix well.  Stir in the cooled treacle mixture.  Add the sultanas if using and stir again.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 1 - 1¼ hours.  Mine was done in 1 hour so check early on.

Cool in the tin for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Cuts into around 16 slices.

BLUEBERRY AND LEMON CAKE

 

Internet shopping for groceries is a trial.  Some websites are easier to navigate than others but we usually get some surprises!  A recent one was an extra punnet of blueberries that we weren't expecting.

As well as the erroneous ordering there is also the phenomenon of strange substitutions.  Early in the lockdown last year I ordered a bag of caster sugar and was given this stuff instead.  It's granulated sugar with some sweetener added.  I was unsure about baking with it as most recipes specify caster sugar because dissolves more easily in baking, but have been using it to sweeten fruit in pies and crumbles.

When I was looking for a cake recipe using blueberries I turned up this one on the Baking Mad website and was intrigued that it used Half Spoon as the sugar ingredient.  I decided to give it a go, if only to use up some of the sugar!

It was dead easy to make, nothing complicated, and although I used my recently acquired Kenwood KMix, a bowl, a wooden spoon and a bit of elbow grease would be just as good.  It was quick to bake too.

The cake was lovely (although I was slightly miffed that most of the blueberries sank to the bottom).  I marked out the cream cheese topping in a pattern that would make the cutting of regular slices easy whether in oblongs, squares or triangles.  I was very pleased with it.

I did however make a mistake in placing the blueberries for decoration.

Something else I was very pleased with is this food cover.  I had seen one in use at cake club and eventually spotted them for sale on Amazon (the dreaded).  It comes in a set of three different sizes and will cover anything more effectively than the square tent shaped ones I normally use, which are often plenty wide enough but not tall enough to cover a cake on a cake stand.  This one easily fitted over the cake on its stand, keeping it safe from the attention of insects and pets.  Highly recommended.

Ingredients

For the cake

300g self raising flour (or ⅔ SR and ⅓ sponge flour)

1½ tsp baking powder

300g soft margarine (I used Stork)

125g Half Spoon sugar alternative*

5 medium eggs

zest and juice of 1 lemon

100g blueberries

a splash of milk if needed

For the topping

180g cream cheese

25g softened butter

2 heaped tblsp icing sugar

A handful of blueberries

Method

Grease and line the base of a 22 or 23 cm square tin.  Preheat the oven to 190°C / 170° fan / gas mk 5.  

Put all the cake ingredients except for the blueberries into a large bowl and beat well until combined. Beat in a splash (about a tablespoon) of milk if the mixture seems quite stiff (mine was but I now wonder if adding the milk is why the blueberries sank.  I might omit it and go with a stiffer mixture next time).   Fold in the blueberries until evenly distributed.

Spoon the mixture into the tin and level the top.  Tap the tin on the worktop a few times to settle the mixture and dispel any air bubbles.

Bake for 25-35 minutes until done.  Cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out onto a wire rack.

To make the topping, beat the cream cheese and butter together until smooth.  Sift in the icing sugar and beat in.  When the cake is completely cool, spread the topping over and swirl it or use a fork to create a pattern.  Distribute the extra blueberries over the top.  Dust with icing sugar before serving.

Cuts into 12-16 portions.

*If you want to make the recipe with caster sugar instead of Half Spoon, follow the advice in the link.  Essentially it implies that you would use twice as much sugar and less baking powder.  I haven't tried it!

BAKED EGG CUSTARD

 

Sometimes the simplest of desserts is just what you need and hits the spot just as much as other more sophisticated concoctions.

My neighbours had an excess of milk and gave us two pints.  After about three days we were still behind on the milk consumption and I was gleefully thinking of ways to use it up.  We are very fortunate in that we have milk delivered to our doorstep in glass bottles, two pints on Tuesdays and Thursdays and three on Saturdays, making a total of seven per week or one a day.  That's just the right amount for us and the milkman (a young man with alarmingly red dyed hair) also brings us half a dozen totally delicious free range eggs on a Thursday. 

We were behind on the egg consumption as well so an egg custard sprung to mind.  Not a custard tart but just a baked egg custard, just like Mum used to make regularly when she had milk to spare.  In fact even if she didn't have milk to spare.  I would request an egg custard and she would say yes but only if I went to the farm for some more milk.  The farm was called Splash Farm and I would trot joyfully down the road and knock on the door of the farmhouse.  The cows grazed in the fields opposite our house.  The farmer's wife always wore wellingtons and a floral pinny and there was a distinct whiff of cowshed as she opened the door (the only bit I didn't like about the farm).  The milk was in crates standing on the ancient cold stone flags just inside the front door, ready for the steady trickle of callers nipping down the lane for an extra pint or two.  Happy days.

I hadn't made an egg custard for at least thirty years and had only a scant recollection of how my mum used to make it.  I did a bit of internet research and came across this recipe which seemed the simplest and the most like how she would have done it.  Some of the others I found were much too fancy, using cream and flavourings that she would never have used.

I doubled up the quantities in the recipe and made two puddings, giving one back to the neighbours.  I did knock on their door and ask first (socially distanced) if they would like one, not to feel obliged to say yes.  Their eyes lit up and faces beamed.  

Although there is only half a pint of milk in each pudding it was enough for four portions.  There was however a great temptation to scoff the lot between the two of us in one go!

And here's one I made later, using four small ramekins.

They were done in around 30 minutes.

Ingredients

½ pint (300ml) semi skimmed milk

2 medium eggs

1oz (25g) caster sugar

a few drops of vanilla extract

grated nutmeg

Method

Preheat the oven to 170°C / 150° fan / gas mk 3.

Put the milk into a small saucepan and heat gently until hot but not boiling.  Put the eggs, vanilla and sugar into a bowl and give a light whisk to combine.  Pour a little of the hot milk onto the eggs and stir well.  Add the rest of the milk and stir together.  (I read on another website that adding all the hot milk at once can cause the eggs to curdle.)

Pour the mixture through a sieve into a suitable 1 pint ovenproof dish and sprinkle a little grated nutmeg over the top.  (I used a small Pyrex lasagne dish that I got from a charity shop for 50p.  I am always baffled that anyone would give such a useful thing away.)  Another alternative would be to divide the mixture between four ovenproof ramekins.

Bake for about 45 minutes until just set.  It should have a slight wobble and not be either still runny or completely set.  Allow to cool until just warm before serving.

Serves 4.

CRANBERRY AND ORANGE DRIZZLE CAKE

During the doldrums between Christmas and New Year I found myself near to Tesco when there were hardly any customers.  I made a quick dash inside and there were punnets of cranberries reduced in price.  They were an irresistible bargain so I swooped.

I had in mind the apple, orange and cranberry cake I made a couple of years ago which was lovely and you can see here.  Then just out of interest I did a bit of internet research and came across this recipe on the Waitrose website and thought I would try that instead.  I also fancied making a Bundt cake.

I am a fan of Bundt cakes and now have a small collection of lovely designs but the one problem with them is that they are all so huge.  They take a lot of mixture so I find myself having to seek out recipes written specially for them.  They also take a lot of eating - a lot of mixture means a big cake, much too big for just the two of us.  We end up with bits of cake filling up the freezer, or very happy neighbours (no bad thing).

When I spotted this tin on the Lakeland website it looked to me like it would work with the quantity of mixture you would put in a regular 8" round tin or a 2lb loaf tin.

I ordered one and it turns out I was right, it's exactly the right size for more normal cake recipes.

I was hoping the design of  the Lakeland tin would produce cakes similar to the beautiful Nordic Ware Anniversary Bundt tin (above).  It's the original Bundt tin and I have long admired its sharp angles and elegant lines.  It was a big ask!  But it's a well made tin and will be very useful.

The cake was yummy, had a good orange flavour with the sharpness of cranberries and the background of ground almonds.  I was also rather chuffed that my cranberries didn't sink to the bottom of the cake tin (therefore all ending up at the top of the cake).   

I can see me adapting this recipe for a lemon and blueberry cake, coconut and lime cake, and possibly even a cherry and almond.  It's a keeper for sure.

Ingredients

For the cake

225g softened butter (I used Anchor spreadable)

225g golden caster sugar

4 medium eggs

175 self raising flour, sifted

1 tsp baking powder

50g ground almonds

zest of 1 large orange

175g fresh cranberries, rinsed and dried

For the drizzle

50g granulated sugar

half of the juice of  the orange*

Method

Preheat the oven to 170° C / 150° fan / gas mk 3.  Grease and line a 900g loaf tin or prepare a 20cm Bundt tin using cake release.

Put all the cake ingredients except for the cranberries into a large bowl and beat until just mixed.  Fold in the cranberries.

Transfer the mixture to the tin, level the top and tap the tin on the worktop a few times to settle the mixture and prevent any air bubbles.  Bake for 50-60 minutes until done.  (Check after 45 minutes as my Bundt cake was done by then.)

Remove from the oven and here instructions differ depending on the tin:

If using a loaf tin, sprinkle the granulated sugar on top, pour the orange juice over and leave to cool in the tin.

If using a Bundt tin, cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack, sprinkle with the granulated sugar and pour over the orange juice.

Cuts into 10-12 generous slices.

* the recipe says to use all of the juice of the orange.  That seemed like a lot to me and I wondered if it might make the cake too soggy - my large orange produced a lot of juice.  So I used just over half of it and the cake was well flavoured with the orange and moist enough.

BLUEBERRY AND LEMON YOGHURT CAKE

 

This is a recipe I have had my eye on for quite a while.  Blogger and blog friend Angela posted about it last year as you can see here.  The original recipe comes from the Dairy Diary cook book.  Do you remember the Dairy Diary?  I definitely used to buy the occasional copy in the 70's and 80's but didn't keep them.  They're still being produced and every December our milkman leaves us an order form for one - we haven't been tempted yet although some of the recipe books look interesting (and I do like a new recipe book!)  

You will find the original recipe for this on the Dairy Diary website here along with lots of other really good ones.  This is one of those "just mix it all together and bake" kind of recipes of which I am a great fan!

On the website the recipe uses melted butter but in Angela's version she uses oil instead.  If it's a tried and tested old recipe, I wonder if it originally said to use oil and that butter is a recent change.  I have noticed before that recipes get changed on websites without any mention of it.  For example, my well used recipe for upside down cake using fresh pineapple on the Tesco website has been changed to use tinned pineapple - see here.

Angela also adapted the recipe to use some blackberries instead of the stated mixed peel which makes me think that this is yet another of those very useful recipes that can be adapted for whatever you have in stock.  I'm a great fan of those, too!

For mine I used blueberry yoghurt and some blueberries, with the zest of a lemon for good measure.  Annoyingly, my pot of yoghurt was 30g short of the required amount so I put a dollop of crème fraîche in as well.

The cake was beautifully moist and kept well for several days, the last few slices being used as a pudding with a good slathering of instant custard.  

However, I'm putting this on my list of recipes for tweaking, just because I'm curious to try it with butter instead of oil.  "Just because"  as my mum used to say when asked the eternal question "why?"!  There are quite a few on the list now, some of which turned out a disappointment but I thought they deserve a second try.    

The list goes like this:

The Dairy Diary yoghurt cake (in this post) - try butter instead of oil "just because".

The banana and apricot cake from the Trex website, see here - try butter instead of Trex to improve flavour.

The country apple cake from the Good Food website, see here - try more chocolate to get any kind of flavour!

The rose and coconut cake from the Whitworth's website, see here - try more coconut because not coconutty enough.  *This recipe has now been removed from the Whitworth's website.

The last three of these cakes were frustratingly not quite right but had elements about them that deserved a second chance.  With plenty of time on my hands due to the lockdown it could be now or never!

Ingredients

For the cake

150g pot of blueberry yoghurt

175 self raising flour

150g caster sugar

1 tblsp oil

2 eggs, beaten

70g blueberries

1 lemon, zest only  

For the icing

2 tblsp sifted icing sugar

lemon juice

Method

Preheat the oven to 180° C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Grease and line the base and ends of a 2lb loaf tin, or use a paper liner.

In a large bowl, mix together all the cake ingredients except for the fruit until well combined.  Fold in the blueberries until evenly distributed.

Transfer to the tin and level the top.  Bake for 30-40 minutes until done.  Cool in the tin for 15 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.

When cool, drizzle with an icing made from the icing sugar mixed with just enough lemon juice to make it runny but not too thin.  

Cuts into 8-10 slices.

PASTRAMI HASH - a Saturday brunch recipe.

I really do not like this internet shopping lark, especially for groceries.  You don't find out until it's too late that some of what you ordered is not available and when we have allowed substitutions they have sometimes been quite bizarre.  My brother for example recently ordered a cheap stew pack of veg to use in his new soup maker (see previous post - I treated him to one as an aid to getting more veg into his diet) and ended up with a hugely overpriced bag of pre-prepared cauliflower and broccoli florets instead.  Who in their right mind would pick that as a substitution?  Why didn't the picker pick one onion, carrot and turnip for him instead?  Because it was picked by someone who knows nothing about veg, that's for sure. 

We always over order to make up for the items that we can't get, otherwise meal planning is impossible, like Ready, Steady, Cook every day for half of the time.  How I long for the days when I could browse the supermarket shelves, use the shopping list as a guide and take anything else I fancied instead, just because I could.

Anyway, we always end up trying to use up stuff before it goes out of date or before the next lot is ready for collection.  On this occasion I was looking at an unopened pack of pastrami.  I love a pastrami and red pepper wrap for lunch but somehow ate other things instead this last week, leaving the unused pastrami on the shelf.

I googled how to use up leftover pastrami and came across this recipe on the BBC Good Food website.  It sounded delicious and a great way to use up a good amount of it.  I also decided to use some frozen hash browns in place of the potatoes.  (It occurred to me it would also be good with frozen sauté potatoes.  I have no idea if you can get them in the UK but we often buy them in France.)  

We never eat hash browns.  I bought them some time ago because I had spotted a recipe somewhere that used them as a topping for something like a shepherd's pie.  The moment passed, the recipe got forgotten and is now lost, and the hash browns languished unwanted in the freezer.  So I used half of them for this recipe and they were scrumptious!  The good part is we have exactly the right ingredients left to have the same thing again on Sunday!

Ingredients.

about half a bag of frozen hash browns (I used seven)

about half a pack of sliced pastrami (it would work with ham instead)

2, 3 or 4 large eggs (I used 3, one for me and two for him)

a handful of grated cheddar cheese

Method

Preheat the oven to 230°C / 210° fan / gas mk 8.  Line a baking sheet with baking paper and lay the hash browns in a single layer.  Bake for 12 minutes.

Remove from the oven and reduce the temperature to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Cut each hash brown into 3 rough chunks and tumble into a suitable ovenproof dish.  Aim for a single layer but with no gaps when choosing your dish.

Tear the slices of pastrami into rough strips and tuck in among the hash browns.  Sprinkle the grated cheese over and make a well for each of the eggs.  Break an egg into each hole and return to the oven.  Bake for another 8-10 minutes until the whites are set but the yolks still runny.

Serve immediately with mustard and gherkins.

Serves 2.

NEW YEAR, NEW GADGET

 

My friend Gaynor mentioned that she was having great success with a new gadget, a Morphy Richards soup maker.  Apparently she was served a delicious mushroom soup made in one by a friend (in the days when you were allowed to meet socially distanced in the garden) and was so impressed that she got herself one.  She now uses it two or three times a week.

I am very much a fan of home made soup but am not always well organised enough to make it in time to have for lunch.  (The recipe I normally use is a Nigella one which you can see here.)  When Gaynor mentioned how easy her soup maker was to use and how rapidly it made soup I was very tempted.  When she told me what a bargain hers was I needed no further convincing and dashed off to buy one.  Various models turn up on offer in the usual discount shops all the time.

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I was a bit concerned where it would live in the kitchen as worktop space is filling up with other gadgets (since I got my lovely Kenwood KMix food mixer - did I mention that already?) but it is not all that big, just a bit bigger than an average kettle.  My kettle that you see above is quite a small one.

In fact the soup maker is effectively a large kettle with a hand blender inside it.  The liquid you put in the pot cooks the veg and the blender bit processes it smooth.

All you have to do is put peeled and diced veg in the pot with the right amount of water and a stock pot or cube and switch it on.  You can choose to have the soup chunky or smooth and hey presto you have home made soup about twenty minutes later with hardly any washing up.

I was a bit concerned about the washing up part as the components, all two of them, are not immersible.  In reality I found that if I rinsed the top under the tap, filled and rinsed out the pot with clean water, wiped over with a clean cloth, rinsed again and dried, it was dead easy.  Quicker than  trying to wrestle the bits of a food processor into the dishwasher in fact.

For the first use today I used the recipe in the booklet that came with it to make my usual soup.  It was delicious.  There are numerous tweaks and changes I can do to experiment with it which I look forward to immensely.  Highly recommended.

There are several soup maker recipes on the Good Food website here.