Fruit - Retro Food For Modern Times

03
Oct
2020

Orange and Cinnamon Creme Caramel

categories: Desserts, Food Holiday, France, Orange

Happy Caramel Custard Day everyone! Yes indeed there is a day for every sort of food imaginable and October 3rd is Caramel Custard Day! I am celebrating with a Moroccan twist on the classic French dish with an Orange and Cinnamon Creme Caramel.

No one in my family, except me, is a great lover of sweet things. As a result, I didn’t have too many desserts growing up. The one thing we did have and which my mum cooked to PERFECTION was a creme caramel. So, I know what a good creme caramel looks and tastes like. The caramel needs to be a nanosecond away from bitterness, the custard smooth and silky, the top a shiny mirror glaze and the almost ombre effect of the darker caramel soaked custard at the top and the paler pure custard at the bottom.

My problem is, I have, up until now been absolutely terrible at making it myself! I tried to make a creme caramel recipe from Cantina THREE times. Twice the caramel went all crystally. Another time there was no sauce only a hard set toffee that was stuck to the bottom of each of the serving dishes!

Not so with this recipe which came from Lousie Frank’s Winter which is a fabulous book. I’ve made many great dishes from it and, as it was a Tasty Reads selection will no doubt pop up here again!

The Recipe

This version of a creme caramel was lovely. The cinnamon came through quite strongly, the orange not so much. When I make this again, I will sprinkle some orange zest over the top of the completed desserts to really ramp up the taste of the orange. You could, of course, leave one or both of them out completely if you are not a lover of orange or cinnamon and this would still be a damn fine Creme caramel.

So on October 3rd what do we say to Caramel Custards? We say…

Have a great weekend everyone!

08
Jun
2020

Simply The Best Carrot Cake

categories: Cake, Carrot, Pineapple, United States of America

I don’t think I have mentioned this before but I absolutely hate cooked carrots. I don’t mind them chopped up really small in a Bolognese or Shepherd’s Pie but to this day, if I go to my mum’s for a family dinner I get raw carrots on my plate instead of cooked. This hatred of cooked carrots meant that I did not eat carrot cake until well into my thirties and even then, my first taste was by stealth!

I clearly remember my first taste of carrot cake. It was someone’s birthday at work and I was too busy to attend the celebration but one of my friends brought me back a piece of cake. Still concentrating on what I was doing, I took a bite.

“OMG…this is delicious!!!! What on earth is this?”

My friend looked rather non-plussed. “It’s carrot cake…”

“This is carrot cake?”

“Yes”

“Is there any more?”

Since then I have been making carrot cake on the reg so I was a little surprised when I mentioned that I was going to blog my “Classic” carrot cake recipe and the fussiest eat in the world said

“I don’t think you can call it classic”.

“Why not?”

“Well….it has pineapple in it…It’s delicious. But it’s not classic carrot cake”

“Carrot cake has pineapple in it”.

“No other carrot cake I ever ate had pineapple in it”

“It’s based on a recipe by Tina Turner”

“That doesn’t make it a classic”

Well, I beg to differ. I think that absolutely makes it a classic. And you can argue with me all you want. Try arguing with her!

She will kick your ass all the way to Nutbush City Limits! Anyway, I changed the name so it homaged Tina a bit more!

The Recipes

As mentioned my recipe for carrot cake is based on a recipe by Tina Turner from the book “Cool Cooking” by Roberta Ashley. I have adapted it in minor ways:

My version uses butter not margarine
I leave out the currants
I add some rum. Pineapple and rum is a great flavour combination and the rum works really nicely with the brown sugar and cinnamon too! Plus, now more than ever, what isn’t better with a little bit of booze!
I prefer cream cheese icing rather than the cream suggested by Tina

The OG Tina Version

Here are the original recipe and the front and back covers of the book it comes from.

My Tweaked Version

Print

Simply The Best Carrot Cake

Print Recipe

A delicious cake, based on a recipe by Tina Turner. This cake is easy to make and keeps beautifully! This will last for a week if kept in the fridge – if you don’t eat it all first!

Author: Taryn Nicole
Category: Cakes
Cuisine: American

Ingredients

Scale

For The Cake

120g butter
1 1/2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
3 eggs, well beaten
2 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 400g can crushed pineapple (drained)
2 cups grated raw carrots
3 tbsp dark rum
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp cinnamon

For The Icing

80g icing sugar
250 grams cream cheese
Zest of a lemon
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
Additional walnuts, toasted and chopped to decorate

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

For the cake – Preheat your oven to 170C (150 Fan forced).

Lightly grease a 20cm (base) round cake pan and line with non-stick baking paper.

Cream the butter with the sugar until pale. Add the eggs one by one, mixing thoroughly between each addition.

Add the flour, baking powder, bicarb and cinnamon.

Mix again until all the ingredients are well combined.

Add the carrots, pineapple, walnuts, rum and vanilla.

Stir through so that all the ingredients are well combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin and bake for around 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.

Set aside for 5 minutes, before turning out onto a wire rack to cool completely

For the icing – place the cream cheese, icing sugar and lemon juice in a bowl. Beat together unitl well combined.

Spread over the cooled cake.
Top with addtional chopped walnuts and lemon zest.

Hope you all have a wonderful week!

Stay safe!

27
May
2020

The Clover Club

categories: Cocktail, Gin, Raspberry

I was walking Holly and Oscar in the park one morning when I found a four-leaf clover. That time feels like a million years ago but it was on February 10th so only about 100 days ago.

Whilst I am not superstitious by nature, this felt like an omen. Things were going pretty well. Holly was settling into her new home with us, it was a glorious summer morning, all seemed well with the world. What could possibly go wrong?

Within weeks if not days? Welcome to the shittiest year of all of our lives.

It’s enough to turn a girl to drink!

I was thinking about that day recently. One of the ways I have been idling away my time is to do a heap of Buzzfeed quizzes…you know the sort…”Tell us which pizza toppings you like and we’ll describe your perfect vacation”. Mostly these are terrible and I would be a little embarrassed to admit doing 1-5 per day but occasionally you find one that gets you right in the sweet spot.

Such was the case with the quiz “We know exactly what cocktail you are craving tonight”.

Turns out, I was craving a Clover Club. Now I had, up to that point, never tasted a Clover Club. But, I looked at the ingredients – Gin, raspberries and lemon – these are a few of my favourite things! And suddenly, yes, I was craving one!

I decided to break out the Babycham glasses I bought when I was in Rye last year. How cute are they? I have been saving them for a “special occasion” but you know what? If not now, when? I was inspired by this post on Foodie Crush to seize the day a bit more!

A Brief History of The Clover Club

The Clover Club is an American cocktail from the Pre-Prohibition era, dating all the way back to 1896. A group of men, who called themselves The Clover Club used to meet at the Bellevue – Stratton Hotel in Philadelphia. The Clover Club was invented for them to drink. I find the idea of those olden day men sitting around drinking foamy pink cocktails adorable!

We totally LOVED The Clover Club! The Fussiest Eater in the World said it was the best cocktail he had drunk since 1997! Who knew he was keeping a list….

I used the recipe for The Clover Club via Liquor.com which you can find here.

If you like sweet / sour fruity cocktails then the Clover Club is for you! It may not bring you good luck but it will brighten up your day!

Have a great week friends, stay safe! Let me know what cocktail you get if you do the quiz!

22
May
2020

Quince Salami

categories: Autumn, England, Quince

I bought a fresh quince to make the quince blancmange and then realised I did not need it. So, what on earth was I to do with a quince? I got out my recipe spreadsheet and searched for quince. In the end, I narrowed my search down to three things – Quince Salami, a Chocolate, Quince and Almond Tart, and a Chicken Liver Pate with Pickled Quince. Turns out I had everything I needed for the quince salami already in the house. Even with restrictions here easing a bit, we are still being told to stay at home as much as possible. So why go out to shop if you don’t have to?

The Quince Salami is a version of the membrillo or quince paste that you would serve on a cheeseboard. What makes it a little more interesting is that you can add the same fruit and nuts that you would serve on your cheeseboard into the “salami”. The idea of it is that when you cut through your quince roll, the chunks of fruit and nuts resemble the flecks of fat and flavourings that you see in a regular salami. The resemblance would be even closer had my quince turned the dark red that some quinces do when they are cooked.

The reason quince turn red when they cook is due to tannins in their flesh. Mine did not have enough tannin so only turned an apricotty colour which was quite beautiful but not that red I was looking for. It tasted so good though! And is a really cute and different addition to a cheeseboard.

I LOVED this with some blue cheese. The sweet fruitiness of the salami with a hint of crunch coming from the almonds was perfect against the salty blueness of the gorgonzola. I cannot wait to try this with some brie or Camembert when I venture out to the shops again! The fruit I used were dried sour cherries and some dried apricots.

However, if you are not a cheese lover and / or have a sweet tooth, another way you can serve a quince salami is to roll it in some sugar, then slice finely and serve as a petit-four with coffee. This is the serving suggestion in the recipe I used. I thought it was already sweet enough so took it in a more savoury direction.

The Recipe

The recipe for Quince Salami comes from the book Classic British Cooking by Sarah Edington. She traces the history of quince marmalade, upon which this is based to way back to Tudor times! Here it is:

Would you prefer this as a sweet dish or as a cheeseboard accompaniment?

Have a great weekend everyone. Stay safe!

11
May
2020

Quince Blancmange

categories: Desserts, Fruit

I’m fairly sure that Quince Blancmange was invented when someone put the names of the most old fashioned fruit and the most vintage of desserts through a random generator to see what came up. It could have been worse. We could have been eating Medlar Junkets. or Whortleberry Possets. BTW…just in case you are writing an academic history of quince blancmange don’t quote me on that origin story! For everyone else? That’s how it happened. Other people will tell you that blancmange originated in the Middle Ages and used to contain chicken and other meaty treats. That it moved from savoury to sweet in around 1600 and that the name is a portmanteau of the French words for white (blanc) and to eat (manger). And I’m not saying that they are wrong. “Quince” blancmange however? Random name generator. For sure. 100%.

Quince are one of the weirdest fruit around! If you are not familiar with them, they are those bright yellow fruit that look like large misshapen pears that you might see in your greengrocer in autumn. When you cut them open the flesh is white and so, so sour and a little bit bitter. But when you cook them that flesh becomes a glorious deep pink to dark red and sweet.

And blancmange? Is pretty much jelly / jello with cream or milk mixed through it. Who knew!

So, I bought a quince because I didn’t really read the recipe first and made the assumption that quince blancmange would contain quince. I mean stands to reason right?

Hmmm….wrong. The quince blancmange recipe uses the quince jelly you buy to eat with cheese. Now, for some reason we had a shit ton of this in our fridge. Well, one of them was Fig paste but for the purpose of the blancmange, it was all the same. I have no idea why we had so much of this. I suspect they came in hampers or were freebies with something because the only other time I have ever cooked quince was to make my own membrillo which is the proper name of Spanish Quince paste and we have been eating that. Delicious too I might add! If you do make it, a little splash of vanilla essence in the quince mix does not go astray. Trust me on that one.

Quince blancmange is so easy to make.

First, tip your paste into a sauce pan, add water and melt that jelly down. Taste. Add sugar if needed, or if already very sweet a dash of lemon juice. Add a splash of vanilla too. Then, turn off the heat, allow to cool slightly and stir through the cream. This looked so pretty as it made a beautiful marbled pattern. It was very soothing moving the spoon through the swirls of colour…

Then add some gelatine pour into the mould and you are done!

Print

Quince Blancmange

Print Recipe

A fruity dessert that tastes better than it looks!

Yield: 6 1x
Category: Dessert

Ingredients

Scale

200 grams Quince Jelly
100 grams water (Plus moe for gelatime)
1 tsp Vanilla extract
4 Gelatine leaves
Sugar, to taste
Lemon juice, to taste
250 ml Cream
Berries to serve (Optionaal)

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

Add the quince jelly to the water in a small saucepan and simmer over medium heat until the jelly melts.
Add the vanilla.
Taste and add sugar and / or lemon juice to taste.
Remove from heat. Stir through the cream.
Soften the gelatine leaves in a little cool water, then removeand squeeze out the excess water. Stir the gelatine into the warm cream andquince mixture.
Pour into a mould and chill until set.
To serve, invert the mould and garnish with the berries.

If I did not now know this was quince flavoured I would not have guessed that was it was. And I don’t think that was because of the figs because it did not taste overly figgy either. It tasted generically fruity sweet. The Quince Blancmange was much nicer to eat than it was to look at. Because it looked revolting. Really bad. It reminded me of being back in school and seeing a picture of some lungs with all the arteries and veins running through it.

Spot the Difference

So, not fail but not a total win. I probably will not make this exact recipe again but I am definitely going to experiment with blancmange a bit more to try to bring out the actual flavour of the fruit. I wonder if it would have been different if I had used fresh quince instead of the jelly?

Have a great week friends and stay safe!

Category: Fruit

The Recipe

The Recipes

The OG Tina Version

My Tweaked Version

Simply The Best Carrot Cake

Ingredients

Instructions

A Brief History of The Clover Club

The Recipe

Quince Blancmange

Ingredients

Instructions

Spot the Difference