A DUO OF RHUBARB PUDDINGS

When I was a little girl I adored rhubarb.  (I still do.)  My parents had two huge rhubarb patches at the top of their garden, one either side of the home-made greenhouse.  We had rhubarb pie or crumble every Sunday from May until August.  The rest of the year we had apple pie or crumble made from windfall apples or Bramleys bought from the shop, if they were in season – although every so often my mum would make a steamed pudding, usually ginger or golden syrup – she also made a lovely steamed apple dumpling from a suet pastry case filled with apples in a pudding basin. 

Rhubarb and strawberry crumble. 

In late summer our apple pies and crumbles would be enhanced by blackberries from the local hedgerows and occasionally bilberries picked from the moors above Baslow in Derbyshire.  My grandmother had a damson tree and my aunt had some raspberry canes and we would benefit from the annual glut of fruit, but my mother rarely made anything other than a pie or a crumble.  Crumble was favourite.

My mother’s rhubarb crumble was a simple affair.  The rhubarb would be peeled and chopped into large chunks, straight into the baking dish, and a good few spoonfuls of sugar sprinkled over.  The crumble would be made with self-raising flour and margarine, rubbed in by hand.  She never baked with butter, thinking it far too extravagant – except maybe for the Christmas cake.  Pastry was always made with lard.

I always used to make my crumbles the same way as Mum, but as time has gone by they have evolved into something slightly more fancy.  I discovered how well rhubarb goes with strawberries in a friend’s blog and somewhere else I read that including oats or ground almonds in the crumble mix can be nice.  And so it goes on, the continuous evolution of baking skills, constantly improving on the already perfect.

RHUBARB AND CUSTARD CRUMBLE PIE

A couple of weeks ago I spotted a recipe for this pudding on the Good Food website and was compelled to have a go.  The combination of so many comfort food favourites in one dish just had to be tried – a pastry base, rhubarb and egg custard in the middle and a crumble topping.

The recipe had a lot of good reviews and I took note of the comments that said the quantity of topping in the recipe was not enough and most people doubled it.  It worked well and turned out lovely. 

I will definitely make it again BUT I think that next time I will make it in a smaller diameter tin, which will make the custard deeper and then the original quantity of topping should be enough.  If you fancy having a go you can see the recipe on the Good Food website here.

I really like the method used for part cooking the fruit and used it the next time I made a crumble.

RHUBARB AND STRAWBERRY CRUMBLE

A crumble has to be one of the easiest puddings to throw together but it is always a favourite in our house.  And everywhere in fact.  If it’s on the menu in a pub or restaurant it always sells well and even the French have adopted it as a dessert – pronounced “croomble” – it’s amazing how often it’s on the fancy menus in France.

Here’s how I made my crumble ~ the ingredients are in ounces as that is how I have always remembered it, having learned the basics from my mum.

 Ingredients

8ozs SR flour

4ozs hard butter or margarine, cut into cubes or chunks

4ozs granulated sugar

2ozs porridge oats

3-4 sticks of rhubarb, probably about 1lb in weight.

a handful of strawberries

a sprinkling of flaked almonds (optional)

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160°fan / gas mk 4.  Grease a suitable baking dish.

Trim and wipe the rhubarb, cut into 1” pieces and put them into a frying pan with half of the sugar.  Heat gently, stirring occasionally until the sugar has melted and the fruit begins to soften.  Remove from the heat.

Put the flour and butter into a food processor and blitz to breadcrumbs (or rub together by hand).  Stir in the oats and the other half of the sugar.

Tip the rhubarb and any liquid into the prepared dish.  Remove the stalks from the strawberries, cut any large ones in half and scatter over the rhubarb. 

Spread the crumble mixture over the fruit and give the dish a little shake to level the top.  Scatter the flaked almonds on top if using and bake for 30-40 minutes until the crumble is golden and the fruit bubbling around the edges.

Serves 6.

MANGO BLONDIES

When I saw that the We Should Cocoa Challenge for this month, hosted by Shaheen of Allotment 2 Kitchen, was to bake with chocolate and mango, I was sure that I would not be taking part.  I’m not really a mango kind of person.

I do like mangoes, but I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have bought a mango in the last five years, maybe even ten years.  Then I remembered a bag of dried mango lurking in the cupboard, left over from baking a cake using “exotic dried fruits”.  As I was looking at it I remembered baking cranberry blondies a couple of years ago and wondered if I could use the dried mango instead of dried cranberries.  It was worth a try anyway.  Blondies are essentially brownies made with white chocolate instead of dark chocolate.

My original recipe makes a lot of cake so I hunted around and came across this one on the Stork website, which I thought I could adapt quite easily. It makes a smaller cake and is also quick to make.

The recipe states a baking time of 35-45 minutes.  My cake was slightly overdone after 35 and I was a bit annoyed with myself for not checking after 30.  The phone rang and I forgot until the timer beeped.  Still, although it was a bit crozzled at the edges it was still nice.  The cake was moist and crumbly and it was nice to get a bit of chocolate and chewy fruit with every mouthful.

I’m not sure I would rush out and by white chocolate and dried mango to make it again, but it was an easy cake to make and a nice change to have with a cuppa in the afternoon.

So it’s thanks again to Choclette of Chocolate Log blog, and Chele of Chocolate Teapot, for thinking up the We Should Cocoa Challenge in the first place.  Also to Shaheen for being this month’s host.  You can read the details here.

Ingredients

115g Stork block margarine

115g caster sugar

2 medium eggs

125g plain flour

200g white chocolate, chopped, or chocolate chips (I used half of each, as that’s what I had in stock)

115g dried mango pieces

Method

Preheat the oven to 190°C / 170° fan / gas mk 5.  Grease and line the base of an 18cm square baking tin, or similar.

Put the Stork into a small saucepan and melt over gentle heat.  Remove from the heat and stir in half of the chopped chocolate, reheating as necessary, until the chocolate has melted in and the mixture is nice and smooth.

In a large bowl whisk together the eggs and sugar with an electric whisk until thickened and creamy.  Sift over the flour and fold in with the chocolate mixture.

Add half of the remaining chocolate and half of the dried mango.  Stir gently until combined and pour the mixture into the baking tin. 

Scatter the remaining chocolate and mango over the top and bake for 30-35 minutes until nicely golden.  Remove from the oven and cool in the tin.  Cut into squares when cold.

Makes 16 small blondies.

HONEY CHOCOLATE CAKE

This month’s We Should Cocoa challenge, an event organised by Chele of Chocolate Teapot and, this month, Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog, is to bake something with chocolate and honey.  You can see the details here.

A browse through my collection of cook books left me uninspired but I found a recipe for a very simple honey chocolate cake on the internet.  I decided to give it a try even though it was written in cup measurements.

Cup measurements make me uneasy for some reason.  I find I somehow don’t trust myself to measure accurately and always wonder if I’ve got it right.  For example, if the flour or sugar is more firmly packed on one day compared to another the quantity is not going to weigh the same – is it?

I decided to convert the recipe to grams by weighing the ingredients as I measured them out using my cup measures, so that if I want to make the cake again it will be already written in grams, which I am much more comfortable with.  Once I had made the mixture there seemed to be quite a lot of it so I also used a slightly larger tin than suggested.

The cake was easy to make and turned out well - I added a few sprinkles, just for fun.  It was very chocolatey with a slightly chewy, almost brownie-like texture and the icing didn’t really set, staying wickedly sticky.   A nice change from my customary chocolate sponge with a buttercream filling and topping. 

So well done Choclette for leading me to bake a recipe I would otherwise never have found.  It was well worth doing and I am sure I will use the recipe again.

Ingredients

(I give here my conversion into grams but if you want to check you will find the original recipe here.)

125g softened butter

50g soft brown sugar

2 eggs

225g runny honey (I used Sainsbury’s own brand mild honey)

225g self-raising flour

60g cocoa powder

150ml milk

For the icing:

140g icing sugar

60g cocoa powder

75g runny honey

1 tbslp hot water

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Butter and base line a 23cm square cake tin.

Beat the butter and sugar together until creamy, by hand or in an electric mixer.  Beat in the eggs, one at a time.  Add the honey and beat again until well blended.

Sift in the flour and cocoa powder and fold in.  Add the milk and stir in.

Tip into the prepared tin and level the top. 

Bake for 25-30 minutes until risen and firm.  Cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

To make the icing, sift the sugar and cocoa into a bowl.  Mix the honey and water together then add to the sugar and blend well together.  Add a drop or two more water if necessary to get the right runniness for drizzling.

Cut the cake into squares and drizzle the icing over.  I did this by putting the cooling rack on a baking tray so as not to drizzle all over the worktop.

Add sprinkles, decorations, chocolate raisins, or anything you fancy before serving.

Cuts into 16 generous squares.

COCONUT CUSTARD PIE

My dad came round for his dinner one evening recently, which was nice.  We don’t see quite so much of him these days, now that he eats out two or three times a week with his lady friend.  Unfortunately he had had to have a tooth extraction so lunch out had been cancelled and he was feeling a bit down in the dumps. 

I decided to cook something which would be easy to eat and not require too much chewing, so we started with my Italian sausage casserole (minus the olives as he doesn’t like them), followed by this coconut pudding.

The true name of the pudding is “Impossible Pie”.  It is called this because you make a batter which separates miraculously into three layers when it is cooked – a pastry-like layer on the bottom, a custard layer in the middle and a lovely coconut crust on top.  I’ve made it before and wrote about it here but this time I used a slightly different recipe and thought it turned out even better.

This recipe comes from a Marks and Spencer book simply called “Baking” and the major difference between this and the previous one is the addition of some flaked almonds.  I omitted the almonds from the batter itself, thinking it might be wise in view of the dental problem, but sprinkled some on the top because it would look nice.  Which it definitely did.  I also used Stork Baking Liquid instead of melted butter.  I made a large pie and a small one in an extra dish, for my dad and his lady friend to enjoy together later.

The pudding puffs up a lot while baking but will shrink back down in a few minutes.  It also sets as it cools so it is better served only slightly warm rather than too soon after it’s out of the oven, because the custard can be slightly too runny or wobbly if it’s still very warm. 

It’s also very nice served cold and the last slice tasted lovely the next day.

Ingredients

75g plain flour

220g caster sugar

60g desiccated coconut

4 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

125g butter, melted (I used Stork baking liquid and it worked fine)

40g flaked almonds (I used only a few for sprinkling on the top)

500ml milk

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Grease a deep 25 cm pie or gratin dish.

Put all the ingredients (except for the flaked almonds) into a food processor or mixer and beat together to make a smooth batter.  Add half the almonds (I left them out) and mix thoroughly.

Turn the mixture into the prepared dish and bake for 35 minutes.  Remove from the oven and sprinkle the other half of the almonds over the top.

Return to the oven and bake for a further 10 minutes or until risen and golden. 

Remove from the oven and allow to cool.  Serve just slightly warm, with cream, custard or ice-cream. 

Serves 6-8 people.  Also nice cold, by itself.

CARDAMOM FRIANDS / FINANCIERS à la CARDAMOME

Dom’s Random Recipe Challenge this month involves using a random number generator to choose a book from your collection.  You can read the details here.  As we were in France when I decided to take part that meant I had a lot fewer books to choose from, most of them being duplicates of favourites from home.

The random number generator turned up the Women’s Institute book “Cakes”, written by Liz Herbert.  It’s a lovely book full of very cookable recipes.  I flipped the pages and came up with a recipe for “cardamom friands”. 

Friands are little cakes made with whisked egg white, icing sugar and ground almonds.  You can flavour them with all kinds of things, or add fruit before baking and they are a delicious little treat to have with a cup of tea or coffee.

Traditionally they are baked in special tins or moulds to produce the classic oval shaped cake.  I have one at home in the UK which I use for friands but this time I was in France so I had to use what was to hand in my little French kitchen.  They work perfectly well in a muffin tin or bun tin but I happened to have a mould for making little loaf cakes that I picked up cheaply when they were on offer in a French supermarket so I used that.

Thanks to Susan for reminding me that making them into little oblong cakes effectively turns them into “financiers”, the French name for the friand.  Apparently “financiers” were created in the late nineteenth century in a bakery in the financial hub of Paris.  They were made crumbless and in the shape of a gold bar to appeal to the financiers who frequented the baker’s shop!

They are incredibly quick and easy to make and these were lovely and slightly unusual with the hint of cardamom. 

I would definitely make them again, especially now that I have my rather expensive French jar of cardamom seeds in stock – it always amazes me that something that might cost very little in the UK can cost such a lot in a French supermarket.  It was the first time I had used cardamom in a cake and it worked really well.

I was also pleased with the loaf cake mould.  The cakes came out clean as a whistle leaving no bits stuck to the mould, which is always a relief. 

So thanks again to Dom of Bellau Kitchen for once more leading me to bake a recipe that I might otherwise have overlooked.  Which is the real purpose of his monthly Random Recipe Challenge I think.

I am also entering these little cakes into this month’s Alphabakes Challenge.  The challenge is hosted this month by Ros (otherwise known as Baking Addict) of The more than occasional baker and alternately by Caroline of Caroline Makes. You can read more about this month’s challenge here.  The letter this month is “A” and with almonds being a major ingredient of the cakes they fulfil the criteria perfectly I think.  Their buttery, almond flavour is the main characteristic of the cakes.

Ingredients

175g unsalted butter

5 egg whites

225g icing sugar

65g plain flour

115g ground almonds

zest of 1 lemon

6 cardamom pods

Method

Remove the seeds from the cardamom pods and crush them in a pestle and mortar.

Preheat the oven to 200°C / 180° fan / gas mk 6.  Melt the butter in a small saucepan and use some of it to butter a muffin tin, bun tin or friand tin.  Put the remainder aside to cool.

In a medium bowl, whisk the egg whites until foamy, which should take about 30 seconds.

Sift the icing sugar and flour into the egg whites and fold in.  Stir in the ground almonds, lemon zest and cardamom, followed by the butter.  Combine to make a smooth batter.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin so that each hole is ¾ filled.  Bake for 20 minutes until risen, golden and firm to the touch.

Cool in the tin for 5 minutes then transfer to a rack.  Dust with icing sugar before serving.

Makes 8-12 friands, depending on the tin you use.

CROQUE MADAME MUFFINS

The first time I attempted to make these it was a total disaster.  I constructed the muffins then as I put them in the oven I caught the muffin tin on the oven shelf, the whole thing fell out of my hands and landed upside down on the oven door !!

You can read about it here if you want to see how the disaster turned out.

Yesterday we had a visitor at lunchtime chez nous and I decided to try making them again.  It was either grim determination not to be beaten by mere muffins, or misguided optimism.  As it happened, they turned out fine.  In fact they were yummy.

A croque madame is essentially a toasted ham and cheese sandwich with with some béchamel sauce and an egg in it – croque monsieur being the same thing but without the egg.  The idea for the muffins came from the totally charming series that was on TV last year featuring the cook Rachel Khoo.

To make six muffins you take six slices of thin white bread – the Mother’s Pride type of sliced bread that my dad used to have for his sandwiches every day of his working life.  Much to my amazement you can buy this stuff in French supermarkets and in fact you can even buy it with the crusts already cut off, which is perfect for the recipe as that’s exactly what you need.

First you make a fairly stiff béchamel sauce by melting 1 tablespoon of butter in a small pan, stirring in 1 tablespoon of flour and cooking for a minute until the mixture (roux) is smooth, then stirring in 200ml of milk.  Cook until it thickens and add a good pinch of grated nutmeg and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard.

Next you melt some butter in a small saucepan and then brush it over both sides of the bread, having first made the bread thinner by rolling it with a rolling pin.  Use each slice of bread to line a hole of a muffin tin.

Put a bit of ham in the bottom of the muffin and add the yolk of an egg with a little of the white.  (If you use a whole egg the muffin will be too full of egg and there will be no room for the sauce.)

Spoon about a tablespoon of the béchamel sauce on top and sprinkle some grated cheddar, gruyere or comté cheese on top of that.  Brush the edges of the bread with more melted butter if you have any left.

Bake for 15 mins at 180°C if you like your egg runny or 20 mins if you like it cooked.

One muffin per person makes a small snack – it is after all only one egg and one slice of bread.  Two muffins with a little salad makes a nice lunch.  Two muffins each with chips makes a really good treat !!

If you want to see how it’s done properly here’s Rachel Khoo herself showing you how :

RHUBARB AND HAZELNUT HONEY CAKE

A little while ago I entered an “ingredient swap” baking challenge.  This is an every-so-often event organised by Ruth of the blog Makey-Cakey.  The idea is that Ruth pairs you off with another person, you exchange mystery ingredients via Royal Mail and bake something.  You can read all about it here.

This time I was paired with Jono, who has his own blog Four Ingredient Recipes and also happens to be Ruth’s other half, and he sent me this:

I had never seen or heard of dried rhubarb before.  He also included 100g of ground hazelnuts.

I did some internet research and drying is an alternative way of preserving rhubarb, the other popular methods being freezing and bottling.  There were however very few recipes for using dried rhubarb, only plenty of instructions on how to rehydrate it.  So I had a bit of head scratching to do in order to come up with something.

And this was it !!

I wanted to make something that used the dried rhubarb as a dried fruit rather than just rehydrating it and using it as if it was a fresh fruit, such as in a pie or crumble.  There are plenty of recipes around for fresh rhubarb with hazelnuts but that was not the point, I thought.

After a good deal of happy research (time spent browsing my cookbooks is time well spent and thoroughly enjoyed) I found a suitable recipe for a date and almond honey cake in the Rachel Allen book “Cake”.   So I decided to use that, following the recipe exactly but substituting the dried rhubarb for the dates and the hazelnuts for the almonds.  You can see it for yourself here – go to page 27 – this is the only place I could find it on the internet – and it’s just as well I did because I dropped a clanger when we came to France for Easter – I brought the mystery ingredients with me to do the baking but forgot to bring the cookbook !!

The recipe uses wholemeal flour and honey instead of sugar.  The mixture was stiff and sandy and I was expecting the cake to turn out rather dense.  I was therefore very pleasantly surprised to find that although the cake didn’t seem to rise very much it was incredibly light and moist.

The flavour of the honey and nuts came through beautifully and the pieces of rhubarb tasted just like……rhubarb !!

It went down well with our guests who had been warned to expect a different sort of cake – this is not your average chocolate cake or Victoria sponge and indeed not for the faint-hearted.  Nick said it was the sort of cake you would find at the little tearooms patronised by fell-walkers and folk singers !!

I’m not sure I quite understand what he means but it was delicious in its own way, not too sweet and definitely tasted as if it would be good for you.  If I ever see dried rhubarb for sale I would buy it and use it again, and I would certainly try the recipe again using the dates and almonds as per the original.

So thanks to Jono for providing me with a really inspiring challenge this time and for leading me to bake something rather out of the ordinary.  If you would like to see what he made with the mystery ingredients I sent to him, click here.

Ingredients

100g chopped dried rhubarb (or dates)

200g softened butter

200g runny honey plus 2 tblsp for drizzling

3 eggs, lightly whisked

100g ground hazelnuts (or almonds)

125g wholemeal flour

1½ tsp baking powder

25g flaked almonds

Method

Put the rhubarb (or dates) into a small saucepan with 50 ml water.  Bring slowly to the boil and cook for a few minutes until the fruit is soft.  Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Grease a 20cm round, deep cake tin and line the base with baking parchment.  If you are using a springform tin it would be wise to put it on a baking sheet to catch any leaks.

In a large bowl or food mixer, cream the butter and honey until soft.  Add the eggs, beating all the time.

Add the fruit, including any liquid in the pan, and mix well.

Fold in the ground hazelnuts (or almonds), then the flour and baking powder.

Tip into the prepared tin and level the top.  Sprinkle the flaked almonds over the top.  Bake for 45-50 minutes.

Cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a rack.  Drizzle the 2 tblsp of honey over the cake and leave to cool.

Cuts into 10-12 slices.