Annie Rigg’s Chocolate Prune Cake

April 10, 2012 12 Comments

Prunes.

Thumbs up?

Thumbs down?For me? Definitely thumbs up.  No question. No contest.  Sometimes I prefer them to the real deal (plums).  (Without me being to indelicate or unladylike, let me underline that my love of prunes has to do with flavour and texture only and not an other activities they may set in motion.)There are prunes and there are prunes though.  They have to have their stone intact and come from Agen.  Even then, not all packaging, handling is equal.  Recently, I found some extraordinary prunes at Galeries Lafayette, I can’t be sure but I think they were from Thorem.  Today I found a jar of St. Dalfour giant french prunes at Karstadt on the Kudamm.  I ate half the contents on the way home.For this prune cake, I use stoned organic prunes reasoning that they would be simmered in alcohol, pulverized and have ground almonds and 70% chocolate as bedmates.  It’s a recipe by Annie Rigg’s which I found in the Easter edition of BBC Good Food magazine.  Despite the unflattering picture (seriously, take a look at the link, did they photograph it on a paper plate?) the ingredient list  and method moved me to bake.  Rigg’s suggests whipping up the 2 eggs and 2 of the yolks with the sugar, folding everything in and then whipping up the remaining two egg whites and folding those in at the end to keep it light.   Read more of this post

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Rhubarb Crumble Cake

April 2, 2012 12 Comments

We were out this morning when our Amazon packet arrived. An office in the building accepted the parcel for us. When we saw the DHL notice Layla and I did an ‘Amazon dance’ – she because she knew she was getting some more ‘Harry and the Dinosaurs‘ books and me because I was getting ‘Relish‘ Prue Leith’s autobiography. Leith is the founder of Leith’s (imagine that) and a serious over achiever in life.

We skipped over to the office and handed over the DHL notice.  The girl handing over the box launched into a rant.  I could tell it was a rant because her cheeks flushed.  I asked her to slow down and repeat what she had said.“You should know.  This is the last time we are going to be accepting any packages on your or anyone else’s behalf.  Otherwise all we do is answer doors to give people their packages.”  She must have seen my perplexed expression because then she said “I realize that this is the first time we have accepted a package for you but nevertheless that is our decision.”

I shrugged my shoulders, smiled and said thank you.  But to you I say there goes another sufferer of the resentful martyr syndrome  and ”Don’t you need to know someone before you chew them out? Or at least – Hell I don’t know – be aware of their first name?’  I feel like I should walk around the city, depositing fortune cookies with nuggets of self-help ensconced inside.  She would get; “Doing the right thing has no value if done begrudgingly” or “Life is too short to be this anal and you are too young to be this bitter.” or “Smoke some of this green stuff, it will take the edge off”. Read more of this post

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Berlin Cooking Club, German Food (and a word in your ear about Supper Clubs)

March 12, 2012 13 Comments

Mel and Kelsie are probably strolling down a stretch of beach in Castelldefels as I write this.

It was their idea, the Berlin Cooking Club. The inaugural club had just 4 cooks and guests. Then it moved on to The Dairy. And yesterday it was hosted in Caroline and Tobias’s (of the famed Thyme supper club) spacious flat. 6 cooks, a cocktail girl and 11 guests.Included among the guests: Kristi and Dave who host a supper club of their own called Zuhause that is tearing its way to the top of the “Supper Clubs in Berlin you MUST visit” list.  (If the stunning photos on their website are not reason enough for you to go, Irish born Dave and Canadian Kirsti are immediately likeable, the kind of people you want to make dinner plans with within 10 minutes of knowing.)A cooking club is different from a supper club, it’s a group of cooking enthusiasts who meet regularly.  Each cook makes one dish, or perhaps pair up to make one big dish.  At our cooking club, we always set a theme (yesterday was German food, the time before Swedish, the time before that Lebanese) but with all those cooks in the kitchen, each with his or her own aesthetic, palette and idea of portion size, there are quirky variations between courses.  Unexpected sights in the vista occur, you know, you are driving by, pine trees whooshing past you, pine tree, pine tree, pine tree and then – oh, coconut tree.  Makes you want to stop the car and get out, or wake up (depending on which way you are inclined).  As a guest, the inevitable incongruity might appeal to you or not, the hook being the rock bottom cost (€15 per head yesterday including drinks) and the chance to meet other people’s vetted friends.As a cook, it’s as a convivial way as I can imagine to spend a few hours, utterly devoid of competition, replete with encouragement and ideas.

I volunteered to make dessert, I imagined a ‘schwarzwälder kirschtorte’ (black forest cake to you and me).  I love the combination of sour cherries and chocolate but I didn’t fancy the syrup laden, whipped cream plastered, chocolate shaving covered cake with gaudy glacé cherries perched perkily in yet more whipped cream.  I also didn’t want to be wrestling with a large cake or baking two cakes for that matter.  My vague idea was that I would make a sheet cake, use a circular cutter to portion it out (something that saved me when somehow our party increased in number from 14 to 18 in the last half an hour).  Syrup on top of that.  Sour cherry compote thickened with cornflour and flavoured with cinnamon, orange juice with a good glug of my grandmother’s homemade cherry liquor.  Mini meringues on the outside of that.  A small scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream on top of that.  Then a crazy wig of chocolate squiggles.Except the chocolate squiggles didn’t quite come to be.  I nabbed the idea from Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz’s Mission Street Food.  The idea being a homemade version of chocolate magic shell, made up of coconut fat and chocolate (ratio of 1.5 : 1).

“So I am supposed to squirt this chocolate into ice water and then it will set into squiggles.” I enthuse to some of the other cooks.
4 of us hunch over the bowl of ice water, I squirt, we hold our breath.  The chocolate sauce spreads out like an oil spill, not a squiggle in sight.
Tobias walks into the kitchen, finds us all huddled together, heads inclined over a large metal bowl.   He joins us to see what we were looking at.  ”Why are we all staring at a bowl of mouldy water?” he asks.
“It’s not mould, it’s chocolate, we are trying to make chocolate squiggles, it’s not working.” I reply.
“Try holding the nozzle underneath.” suggests Caroline.  I do, I squirt, the squiggles looked vaguely fecal.  We abandon that idea.
“Why not just use normal chocolate without the coconut fat?” Stephan asked “Or more chocolate?”
“No, you know what, let’s just do it as Smucker’s intended,  as a chocolate hat for the ice cream.” I resolved (although I’ve still got the stuff in a squeezy bottle in my fridge and believe you me, this isn’t over, I am going to figure out this squiggle business!)
That my friends, is the beauty of a cooking club.  It takes you from bumbling along silently in the kitchen, where mishaps are deflating and lonely, to part of a group of curious people pitching in to save your day or less dramatically your dessert.  And lets face it, would I ever make a dessert with 6 separate components for my family of 2 adults and 1 seriously fussy 3-year-old?  Umm, no.  For a dinner party of 6? Well if I’m also making, canapés, a starter and main course – then probably not (although sometimes I do it).  For 14 people and eventually, 18? Yes! I like that challenge, especially when people end up enjoying what I’ve made.

To attend the Berlin Cooking Club, you have to be invited by one of the cooks (so get to know us!) but of course you can always start your own.  I thoroughly recommend it, more fun than a book club!Supper clubs are open to all.  And you really do need to go to a supper club because some of the best food you will eat in Berlin may just be at a supper club!  Certainly that is where you will find people behind the stove that care about what they are cooking and the ingredients they are using, you will be treated nicely, usually you will meet interesting people and pay well under what you would expect to for a similar meal in a restaurant. Read more of this post

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Bulgarian Salad (Salată Bulgărească)

March 7, 2012 12 Comments

When I was doing my MA in London, I met a girl whose last name was Mihai.  Her first name was very Romanian sounding as well.
“Hi, I’m Suzy.” I smiled “My mother is Romanian.”
She answered me in English, “I don’t speak Romanian.”
“What?” I balked.  She was as Romanian as they get, I would have guessed she was Romanian even without hearing her speak or knowing her name.
As I got to know her better, she took the liberty to advise me “You know, you aren’t really Romanian, it’s only your mother after all and you have a Greek passport, just tell people you’re Greek.” (Obviously this all happened way before the current financial crisis) As if admitting to be a Romanian or even part Romanian was tantamount to saying “I like to pick my nose in public.”  And that people were going to give me wide berth once they knew.In spite of her advice, whenever I meet someone and they ask me where I am from, I hit them with the “I was born in Kuwait, my father’s Jordanian, my mother’s Romanian and I was raised in Greece.”

I am surprised by how many people don’t know where Kuwait is (over Saudi Arabia, invaded by Iraq in the first Gulf War, a country which in August can reach temperatures of 55°C).  And since the Middle East is like the dark side of the moon for most Western people (although I find overall perception of Arabs is improving since the start of the Arab Spring), the part they latch on to is the Romanian part.  (And Eastern and Southern

Europeans are now more than ever becoming the new target for xenophobia, see Simon Kuper’s article ‘Meet Europe’s New Scapegoats‘)

“So Romanian huh? They have a big problem with orphans? And stray dogs? And prostitution? And corruption?”  I am assaulted by a barrage of negative associations and I understand why Romanians often skirt around their nationality but it also really bugs me. Enough already!

There is a little bit of that going on in Berlin, sometimes when I am introduced to someone new at a party, the next comment, whispered with a shifty look is “She / he is East German.”  ”And?! So Freaking What! What exactly does that mean?  Hide my silverware?

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Apple Cake with Brown Sugar and Treacle Icing

January 30, 2012 5 Comments

There is an expected amount of causality in cooking as in life.  Want a nice body? Diet and exercise (or if you’ve got a wad of spare cash, lipo and pain).  Want to get ahead in the world? Work your butt off.

So it follows, want to make superlative baked goods?  You need a certain amount of skill (acquired over time) and some expensive kit comes in handy (Hello? Making marshmallows without a stand mixer? Much much harder.).   So when I come across a recipe that is easy and fast to make, I am skeptical to the extreme.  Regardless of my doubts, out comes a fluffy moist cake, not too sweet, enhanced by a spectacular icing that takes the cake from healthy tasting (think oven baked apples) to one of those cakes where you scrape maniacaly at any streaks of icing left on the plate.Frankly, it makes everything feel a little topsy turvy, like finding a €10 note on an empty street, making a show of bending down to pick it up.  Pivoting on your planted feet this way and that, note held up high (as proof that you attempted to look for the person to whom it might belong) before shrugging your shoulders and tucking it into your pocket.  You still feel a little guilty though, don’t you? That this good luck was bestowed on you while some poor sod is looking for his tenner (Unless it’s my husband.  Walk behind him. He loses money every time he reaches into his pocket.  Shall I describe him to you?) Read more of this post

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Baker & Spice’s Lemon Cake

January 22, 2012 20 Comments

Despite having a multitude of baking books, too many to count (Ok getting up to count: 28), I tend to return to the same two titles; Baking with Passion (Baker & Spice) and Breakfast, Lunch and Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery.  Both books are oldies but goodies, the first having been published in 1999 with numerous reprints and the second in 2006.

Both are books that came out of successful shops, which makes a world of difference when talking success rate in your kitchen.  One thing is to have a home economist who had a make over, a spin through a PR machine to emerge glistening from the other side with a collection of recipes she has pawned from her peers, substituting almond essence for vanilla here and cocoa powder there.  Quite another is to have a book full of baked goods based on those that people line up and part with their money for.Yet another distinguishing feature is that Baker and Spice was the brain child of Gail Stephens (penned by Dan Lepard – who everybody worships these days and Richard Wittington) while Rose Bakery that of Rose Carrarini (also one of the co-founders of Villandry in London) both women.  (Massive generalization coming – can one start a sentence with parenthesis? Does anything really go on a blog? Or have I taken it to far this time?) Shops run by women seem to share certain characteristics; food tends to be un-embellished, think of a male peacock with his attention grabbing tail versus the demure female; absence of gilding doesn’t translate into absence of taste, the spartan cheese plate at La Formagerie (Patricia and Danny Michelson) is the best cheese plate you will ever have in the world, anywhere, ever.  Shops conceived by women somehow feel like the equivalent of someone who uses a Dove soap bar to wash their face and Nivea cream as a moisturizer, producing shiny naturally rouged cheeks with a few life lines thrown in for good measure; practical, real, genuine, dependable, good.

A lot of words to say that the recipes from Baker and Spice always work, you won’t find a recipe for Crack Pie in here but then tell me, who wants to wait 15 hours for a pie? (I did have a look through Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook but it left me a little cold, like Heston Blumenthal’s books.) Read more of this post

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Building a Gingerbread House

December 5, 2011 9 Comments

Christmas is a bit of a pastiche at our house.  Mostly because I don’t have any family traditions to import from when I was growing up.  My father is Muslim and my mother is Christian.  They didn’t really have a holiday strategy  - you know the way Debbie & Danny made a dinner strategy in “About Last Night”:

“Two nights a week I cook. Two nights a week he cooks. Two nights we go out. And then there’s sandwich night.”  (Totally unrelated but in reply to that, Debbie’s acerbic friend Joan quips “I bet your sex life is a real thrill.  Two nights a week you’re on top, two nights a week he’s on top. So what is it you do on sandwich night?”)

There was no plan.  Christmas trees would invariably go up but it was furtive and short-lived, certainly not fun.  My father, who gives the best gifts in our family, would forgo taking part in the restrained festivities.  Mostly, my sister and I received sweaters – itchy ones.

Sometimes we celebrated with my Romanian grandmother, she is a talented cook and gifted hostess but her traditional Christmas dish is ‘Piftie‘, a medieval style dish of smoked pork leg in aspic (served cold).  Not exactly the roast-turkey-with-cranberry-sauce-bread-sauce-gravy-stuffing-sprouts-sausages-spuds-bacon-wrapped-prunes-with-plenty-of-leftovers-for-sandwiches Christmas spread that I make every year.

It was slim pickings at our house.  I would look enviously at what my American friends were getting, eating and doing for Christmas.  Or my Jewish friends “How come Angie Schwarz get’s presents 7 days in a row?!” I would complain to my parents?!

Not having and wanting as a child is the biggest impetus to have as an adult.

Since I moved out of my parents home, I have celebrated Christmas in a big way. Not for any religious reasons but because it’s excess at it’s best: so you put felt reindeer horns on the dog and roll your eyes good-naturedly at the lame joke in the cracker.  You eat too much and rent 10 DVD’s, you make a pillow tower to support your neck so that you can continue to eat christmas cookies while maintaining a reclined position.  After 15 minutes, you stop the movie and get up to make Christmas sandwiches. Read more of this post

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Steamed Apple Pudding (& trying to learn German)

November 14, 2011 32 Comments

The women’s toilette at Nopi is all mirrored, the door, the walls, everything. When you wash your hands and look at your reflection in the mirror you see yourself (obviously and hopefully) but behind your reflection, is another smaller you and another and another. I feel my brain’s mental eye expand until what it perceives is so large the edges of the picture wobbles, the picture implodes and then contracts into a tunnel, me hurtling through it into the tiny pinprick at the end before resetting to normal leaving an unsettling shadow of what just happened, in a fraction of a second.

I think German is having the same effect on me. Like a never-ending deck of cards, each with an answer, all furling out and laying on their backs, information bared as far as my eye can see and then just as quickly, *thup*, they get sucked back in, into a neat stack, contents impenetrable.When I say it’s hard to learn German people say, “Yes, the verb is at the end.” But where the verb is hanging out equates to a little Chihuahua nipping at my ankles, when the real problem is that I am locked in a cage with a hungry tiger.

Before melodrama overtakes me completely, let me explain (and also say to you all who have learned German as a 2nd language – hell even as a 1st language: RESPECT!).My grievances can be outlined in 3 main points:

1. The words are long. You will no doubt say to me “Ah yes, but they are mostly made up of words strung together, like ‘kugelschreiber’ which means pen – and could be translated as ‘ball writer’ because of the little roller ball in ball point pens. And I will answer back to you ‘Gänseblümchen’ which means ‘daisy’ but translates as ‘goose flower’.

And also,that my ability to stay concentrated is much like my ability to hold my breath under water, finite. So when I am confronted with something like this: ‘Verständlichwerweise, denn der Vogel war schon von Generationen von Köchen, die hier ein-und augegangen waren, getriezt worden -…”* my brain gives up and goes out for a smoke after the first word, which I think might mean ‘understandably’.

2. The capitals in written sentences are totally distracting, like visual Stolperstein (Stumbling Stones) without meaning. Equivalent to a news reader wearing a bright red clown nose. Anyone prone to distraction (me) will immediately think WTF? and not hear the news. Spoken German has a lot of consonants bunched up together (Someone help that man! He’s choking! Oh, no – my bad, he’s just speaking German), dipping down into vowels and then back up again. So that if I do manage to utter a sentence, I end up feeling like one of the Von Trapp kids crossing the Alps. It’s physical. Olivia Newton John would have not trouble working out to it.

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Cardamom Burnt Creams with Coffee Ice Cream (+ a short visit to Jordan)

October 31, 2011 23 Comments

Do you know what you are looking at? Banana fields through a mosquito mesh from my trip to Jordan last week.

We spent a lot of time at a private farm close to the Dead Sea, which to me is the most magical place on earth: 330 days of sunlight a year, low humidity, dry air, 1,200 feet below sea level – it all adds up to making it unique, I would go as far as to call it otherworldly. The light is tinged with copper and it makes everything look rich. Things that shimmer should, the pool for example but also things that shouldn’t. A stretch of date trees, looking like a bunch of fat ladies wearing overlapped necklaces of dates. Sometimes the farm hands put nets around the dates, to prevent the birds from getting at them and to keep the dates from falling to the ground. The fecundity of the land astounds me, eggplants that have been dried by the sun litter the fields, the pickers unable to keep up with the squat bushes production. There is more fruit in the citrus trees than there are leaves. I eat a pomelo a day, every day, for four days. I borrow from the Vietnamese and pick some searingly hot chiles, dice them up, toss them with salt and dip the pomelo segments into it. I set out to convert every person I meet and succeed. My suitcase back to Berlin is brimming with pomelos, as well as seedless pomegranates, chile peppers, cardamom pods, a quarter kilo of sumac, oh – and pine kernels in the shell from Afghanistan.These pine kernels, no relation at all to the soft, almost rancid specimens around here.  They are sweet, nutty with a good snap to them.  You can toast them sure but there is no need to.  If you know me, pester me to give you some of these, they are outstanding!

We spent one day at a house in ‘Ruman’ district (which translates as the ‘pomegranate’ district – don’t you love that?).  Everyone seemed to be dithering so I decided to make myself useful and pick the ripe olives, my father had said that if I collected enough, he would take me to a local press to turn them into olive oil. 2 hours of dedicated picking, yielded about 2 shopping bags full.  You don’t make a trip to the press unless you’ve got sackfuls, about 5.  My father comes out and sees me gingerly picking one olive at a time and starts laughing.  I instantly understand why olive picking is a group activity, that takes all day long and is treated like a celebration.  ”You know olive picking days are where the most romantic matches are made.” my father tells me.  ”Why? Because all the girls are bending over?” I joke.  He rolls his eyes at me and smiles, at this point he’s used to my humor I guess.We go to the press anyway.  It’s a heady mix of motor oil and olive oil.  The machines make a terrible racket. Read more of this post

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Slow Braised Chicory with Orange & Juniper (Happy Birthday to Me! And dark kitchen secrets)

October 18, 2011 11 Comments

I have these oven gloves.  They came free with Easy Living magazine (which I don’t normally read you understand, it was just that one time….).  They were obviously, cheap and thin (even though the tag optimistically announced they were Laura Ashley).  There was one novel thing about them: they were my size.  I wear a size 36 shoe, accordingly, my hands are little and finding oven gloves that fit is challenging.  In fact I’ve never managed to do it.  Which is why the Easy Living, Laura Ashley gloves survived and even thrived in my kitchen for many years, too many.  Plenty of essential kitchen items got culled but not these gloves.  They didn’t age well, their dubious quality ensured that I routinely sustained minor burns.  I did go out and try to find a replacement.  I even considered splashing out and buying myself a pair of Marimekko gloves and they don’t sell those babies as a pair, no, it’s per glove.  They were enormous though, I could have worn them on my head like some kind of a statement hat.All this to say that I have these gloves which are the kitchen equivalent to the gray granny underwear we all have, the one with the broken elastic, that look hideous but you can rely on never to ride up your bum, or leave imprints on your body (how could they with their malfunctioning elastic?).  You wouldn’t part with those for good money at the same time, you would never let anyone see them!  Same deal with these gloves, when I have friends over, I tuck them away in a corner and rely on kitchen towels.  Except last week, when I threw a dinner party for a few girlfriends and had enlisted the help of my friend Luisa.  I was off schedule to the point that the cold starter that was supposed to be served from the fridge, thereby allowing me to natter on with my guests, was not even started.  Luisa caught me off guard when she asked for the oven gloves, I nonchalantly surrendered their hiding place.  Then I realized and froze.Her eyes crinkled as she smiled and held them up to the light. “What are these?”
“My oven gloves.”
“Sooooo when you serve people, they get crumbled bits of oven glove in their food?” she teased.
“Umm, ya well, you see, I have small…” blah blah blah, all the stuff I said before but really in that moment I was BUSTED.She knew.
I knew.
She knew, I knew, she knew. (Say that fast 5 times)
“Well that’s what you can buy me for my birthday.” I tried to recover. But let’s be honest, there really is no way to recover from that.  All I could do was hope that she would find it endearing, a little like Daniel Cleaver when confronted with Bridget Jones’s ‘stomach holding underpants’. Read more of this post

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