Weekly Bake Off : Apple and Almond Dessert Cake

This is a very late and rather short entry for this week's Bake-Off as Mr Soup and I have been away since Thursday in a cosy little cottage in North Yorkshire, celebrating my birthday.

As this recipe is more of a pudding than a tea accompaniment, I decided to make individual sized cakes, and jazz it up a little with toffee-coated apples in the middle. (Inspired by a lovely sticky toffee pudding eaten this weekend). To do this I melted equal quantities of sugar and butter in a frying pan until it went a nice golden colour, added the sliced apples, tossed them in the syrupy mix and cooked for a couple of minutes. I allowed the caramelised apples to cool, and then layered them as specified in the recipe. This meant that the middle of the spongey pudding had a gorgeous toffee-apple flavour.

I misjudged the depth of the sponge in the individual ramekins I used to bake them in, so had a few overflowing puddings, but a few turned out alright - just the thing for a Sunday evening treat!
That's Jack Ryan in the background - he wants cake! (and an end to the drug trafficking and high level corruption, but mostly cake.)

Christmas Pudding

Here is my super-easy Christmas pudding recipe. For some reason people assume that Christmas pudding is difficult to make and takes ages - the prep time on this is only about 10 minutes (with 6 hours cooking time) - once you've seen how easy it is I doubt you'll go back to store-bought!

This is an old family recipe - as long as I can remember this was presented at Christmas time, with flaming brandy (it's the only way!) and cold brandy butter to accompany. When I was much younger, there was always a silver coin in my slice - I suspect, with hindsight, that the silver coin was slipped in after dishing, but as a child it all added to the magic of Christmas!

(If you do decide to put coins into your pudding, pop them in a pot of boiling water and boil them for about 10 minutes first - also use largish coins - 50p pieces would be best - and warn everyone that they are in there! I would probably use a knife to make insertions into the cooked pudding and insert them after cooking to get an even distribution.)

I made this pudding as my contribution to my first Christmas meal with Mr Soup's family - I don't know who was most nervous about it (me, him or his mother!), and we're fairly sure there was a store-bought backup - but it was a resounding success, and even had people coming back for seconds (after the spread on offer that was quite a feat!) There will be a repeat performance this year by popular request.

I normally make this a month or two in advance, and do a lot of feeding with the remaining brandy, but it's quite possible to serve immediately after steaming it.

The recipe is from a Victorian Cookery and Housekeeping book, and the resulting pudding is considerably lighter than we are used to nowadays - don't be worried - it still tastes amazing. There is also no added sugar - all the sweetness is from the fruit. This recipe is scaled down from the original - which made 3 large puddings, and used every mixing bowl I had!) These quantities are just right for one large pudding.

Ingredients :
150g raisins (make sure you get deseeded!)
150g currants
35g sultanas
120g mixed peel
(This year I bought a fruit mix with raisins, sultanas, mixed peel, cherries etc and used 450g of that instead of measuring out the individual ingredients)
150g suet
115g bread crumbs
half tsp ground nutmeg (I've also used mixed spice in the past)
100g plain flour
165ml milk
3 large eggs
85ml brandy

Mix together the dried fruit, suet, bread crumbs, flour and spice. In a separate bowl beat the eggs, milk and brandy together. Pour the wet ingredients into the fruit mix, mix well and put the mix into your pudding bowl. Tie a cloth, or greaseproof paper over the top, and boil/simmer with the lid on for about 6 hours - I do this overnight on the low setting of my slow cooker. The pudding can be turned out and served immediately, or stored, with a bit of brandy poured over it every week or two till Christmas! If you store the pudding, all that's needed on the day is to boil it again (to heat it through) for half an hour to an hour.

Elderberry Scramble

So Team Tuesday (Team Soup doesn't sound quite as catchy, does it?) were out in the wilds of our local canal path, looking for berries and getting dirty looks from cyclists, and knowing looks form old ladies out for a Sunday Afternoon stroll (they know exactly what is edible, and also how to make the best pies and jams - ask one and see) and we found many, many Elderberry trees, with branches drooping under the weight of huge bunches of berries, all ripe and full of flavour.

In a flash, we had filled a plastic bag with bunches and headed home to prepare them.  As the main purpose of collecting Elderberries was to produce wine, the majority weren't too well cleaned and prepared - simply running a fork through the bunches to liberate the berries (and a few creepy-crawlies too) was enough for them, before they were put in a bucket with all manner of other things that start the alchemical processes involved in turning fruit into wine (a process I don't even begin to understand - I'll leave that to those members of Team Tuesday who have a PhD)

Having some berries left, I thought that I would whip up some sort of pudding, but I wanted to try something a bit different from the usual crumbles and pies, and then I found this interesting recipe which is a sort of a cross between a bread and butter pudding and a summer pudding.  It's a nice way to use up any left over fruit that you have lying around, and a nice way to celebrate the few remaining days of summer we have left before the nights draw in and I just want to hibernate (But at least I will have bottles of Elderberry wine to keep me company)

Ingredients
450g Elderberries
250g Pears
250g Plums
200g Bread (Crust Removed)
500ml Milk
50g Butter
3tbsp Plain Flour
2tsp Lemon Juice
Sugar
Cinnamon


Method
Make sure that the elderberries are clean and free of stalks, peel and slice the pears and pit the plums, quartering them.

In a large pan, heat the butter and then cook the fruit over a low heat for 5 minutes.  In a cup., mix the flour with some of the milk to make a paste, then add this to the fruit.

Next add the rest of the milk to the pan.  Cut the bread into small pieces and then add this to the pan as well, cooking until the plums are soft.

Season to taste with sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice, then serve and enjoy!

Bramble and Elderberry Crumble

Yesterday we went out looking for berries again, and ended up bringing back our largest haul yet - over 2 kilograms of the biggest, sweetest brambles that we have so far picked.  The branches were just groaning under the weight of the fruit, so it took all of 30 minutes to complete picking our haul.  Plus, we had a lovely walk in the countryside, all without seeing another berry-picker, or even much evidence that anyone else was even vaguely interested in the delicious things.  I have to ask again, how come no-one seems to be picking brambles?  Ah well, more for us anyway.

As well as brambles, we picked more crab apples, to make jelly with (recipe coming soon) and elderberries and some more wild apples - a bit sweeter and larger than crab apples.