Ciao bella! And some almond-lemon biscuits

I know, it's been a while. It's not you though, it's me. Guess what I've been up to?
Yup, moved to Italy!
(Don't worry, I have total faith you got that one. You got smarts).

I'm only going to be away for four months, but it's been all kinds of disruptive.  There's lots I want to share but, unfortunately, nothing in the food department. Yes, in a country famous for it's food, I'm currently sharing a dormitory kitchen with 150+ other people. I'm moving to Rome in a more stable, long term sort of way soon though, so keep everything crossed for me!

Zesty orange and white chocolate cookies

Remember this post, anyone? No? Well let me summarise. White chocolate and cranberries are beautiful, gorgeous lovers, in the style of Scarlett and Rhett or similar and must ne'er be parted.
Well, forget that. Orange and white chocolate is where it's at. 
'No!' I hear you cry. But sadly, when one forgets one's cranberries somewhere (there's a strong possbility I left them in North Wales) and it is raining very hard outside, one must make do. I'm sorry cranberries, but you just got cuckolded.

These are the chewiest, biggest and fattest cookies to come out of my oven. They're moreish, about the size of my face and I just can't stop breaking bits off them. The orange is strong but perfectly mellowed by creamy white chocolate. Yum yum. 

Blackberry-Ginger-Almond-Lemon Cake (or, why I took food to a food festival)

I blooming love blackberries, but I've always known them as a fleeting autumn treat, to be carefully predicted in order to perfectly time a trip down the road to the blackberry bushes. For years these lined an increasingly dark and overgrown cycle path near my house that I was absolutely forbidden to walk along at night in case 'strange men' were about. 
Well, my mother will be delighted to know that from this year, I have no reason to ever again tread the leaf littered walkway between brambles and wild garlic. The bushes have resolutely refused to blossom, and no blossom means no berries. Turns out eight foot high brambles need plenty of sunlight, and these are so dense they've been starving themselves out all summer. 
So it looked like me and blackberrying was destined to take a bit of a break in our annually renewed love affair. Until...
(If you've been reading back, you'll already know the plot twist I'm about to hit you with!)  
...Surprise! A beautiful fat branch from next door invading my garden to snag at my clothes, stain the towel on the washing line with fat drops of juice like blood and, most importantly, provide me with berries all summer. 
Not enough for a crumble, mind (although I did manage that once). Just a dozen or so at a time, too tantalising to freeze for later, but too few for anything I knew and loved from my years of filling plastic bags with the little beggars. So the 'what do I have in my cupboards' cake was born.

Blackberry-Ginger-Almond- Lemon Cake 

(all the quantities here are from the 'magic weight' method I described in all its simplistic glory here. This is a two egg magic cake)

1. Cream butter and sugar until soft, pale and fluffy.
2. Don't eat it with your fingers.
3. Add 2 eggs, beat like the devil between each one. Add a capful of almond essence.
4. Add the magic weight of flour. Don't beat.
5. Grate two pieces of crystallised ginger onto the flour, tossing it slightly to coat every so often so it doesn't stick in a lump. That would negate grating it from the big lump it was in before. 
6. Zest half a lemon, and plonk that on top of the flour. 
7. Mix it up to make it nice. (Pop goes the weasel). 
8. Kick yourself for not preheating the oven, then do it. 190 degrees seems to work nicely for me. 
9.Stir the blackberries into the cake mix. Give it a bit of welly so they break up a little and bits of the mixture goes pretty in purple. 
10. Line a baking tin with greaseproof paper. Here's the tricky bit. You know that rectangular baking tin? We're going to line it so that the paper folds up to make a wall partway across to make a square and a spare strip. 
11. Pour the mix into the square. Fill the spare strip with baking beans, rice, chickpeas, whatever you use. Just make sure it's baking beans, not baked beans. 
12. Bake for 40 mins, see if its done. If not, you know what to do. 


This tastes special to me, and unlike any cake I make on a regular basis. It has a rounded, full flavour from the almond, and a zing from the ginger that you can't quite place. I think any more would make this a proper ginger flavoured cake, and that's not what I was after. The lemon is sly, but lightens the spicy ginger and perks up the almond. The blackberries are a burst of sweetness between the teeth. Ginger and blackberry is a flavour I haven't had before, but it's a real winner.

Delicious yoghurt, shameful (freebie)second helping!

I was so proud of this, I took it to the Bristol Organic Food Festival for my discerning little sister to try. Accompanied by a basketful of strawberries and a mountain of festival free samples, we munched our way through a terrible lecture on sustainable fishing (I can't call it a cookery demo, they never got round to cooking anything), a potential Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall sighting and a brilliant day out, ended by taking a groaning carrier full of goodies back to Cardiff.
 

A cacophony of catastrophic grapefruit

What were you doing this week? I was impulse buying fruit. 

Now, it may seems that a shopping basket that costs less than £5 couldn’t really be classed as an impulse buy, but when you consider that my student loan is being spread more and more thinly over this last, endless term (I don’t finish until mid-July ), anything that’s not strictly necessary as a foodstuff needs to be regarded as an extravagance. Not to mention that every penny I spend now is a penny I can’t spend over my summer holiday, when it eventually comes, and we’re planning to go to Portugal. So; apples, yes, but anything more exotic, most certainly not. 

Except I should have known my own weakness for fresh summery fruits in almost all forms, which is why I found myself walking home with a big smile on my face and strawberries, grapefruits and a pineapple nestled in my bag. The scent coming from the grapefruits was intoxicating, a ripe, zesty wakeup call I could smell from across my room. I thought these little beauties deserved better than a sprinkling of brown sugar and a quick tan under the grill, so I scoured my favourite blogs for sweet grapefruit themed treats and came up with a promising recipe for grapefruit curd. 

Fruit curds, in all their manifestations, are lovely things. I’ve had success in the past with lemon and passionfruit curds, so I set out eggs, sugar, lemon juice and my pretty grapefruit confident I was onto another winner. Even the few direct hits of sharp juice I took to the eye couldn’t dent my enthusiasm and as the mixture started to cook, I threw open all the windows and turned the music up. 

Only then it all started to go a bit wrong. I began using the grapefruit curd recipe from honey & jam (it was one of the first to come up on Google), and it just didn’t work out for me. It didn’t call for any cornflour but after nearly half an hour of stirring, the mixture was still running around the pan like water. A quick survey of online lemon or grapefruit curd recipes suggested cornflour is a common addition and so I blended and stirred it in, and eventually (very eventually) the curd was thick enough for me to give up. Feeling beaten and a little forlorn, I seized upon the peel, carefully cut off in quarters and saved, as a way of salvaging the afternoon. Obviously, it just wasn’t my day, because after boiling strips of peel four times, as well as a good hard boiling in sugar syrup, drying overnight and a coating of my favourite golden caster sugar, the resulting candies were as catch-in-the-throat bitter as cheap, nasty marmalade. 

If only I'd given up here!

And to put the cherry on top of an already very disappointing cake, when I came to taste the curd- (because, hey, thin curd is still good for drizzling over meringue, ice cream, cake…) I discovered that while my tastings during the great non-thickening had been rather nice, in the meantime my temporary housemates had cooked a massive curry, which had spit into the cooling pan of curd. I scooped the flecks of rogan josh oil out, but the whole kitchen smelt pretty strongly of supermarket jarred curry paste and the sugar in the curd had done that trick sugar does so well of picking up and clinging to every aroma it’s given. It’s my own fault for leaving it out, but what can I say- I never realised I lived with people who would cook a curry at 10:30 pm, especially not so messily as to spatter a whole hob AND not switch on the extractor fan, or even open a window. 

You know, I think I may just eat the rest of my fruity haul quickly, before any more urges to mess with a perfectly good bowlful of fresh fruit take hold of me!