Dinner party number five

The fifth dinner party was the night after the fourth dinner party, and I was not up to cooking much. Also, there were a lot of people, too many to fit round our table, so by necessity it was going to be a living room, eat-on-your lap affair. Hence, the menu:

A variety of ordered-in pizzas

Homemade Maldon salt-sprinkled brownies, with ice cream

and caramel sauce

I was going to make a salad to go with the pizza, but after consultation it was decided that we all really just wanted pizza and brownies. We ordered the pizzas from a nondescript little place close to our flat that, in all our years in the neighbourhood, we’d never tried. Turns out they make perfectly thin-based, crispy, chewy and flavourful pizzas. That’ll teach us to judge a restaurant on its nondescript cover.

Brownies! I forgot to take photos on the night; this
is a recycled photo. Same recipe, though.

I used my favourite brownie recipe. It’s a slight adaptation of the old classic Hershey’s recipe: simple and basic, with no melted chocolate in the batter and no specialty extra-dark cocoa powder. There is a time and a place for expensive brownies laden with couverture chocolate, but I think there is even more time and place for these simpler brownies. My only concession to fancying them up is to add more salt to the batter, as well as sprinkling Maldon salt flakes on top before baking.

Again, a recycled photo - there are hazelnuts in these.
Most nuts are a good addition to these brownies.

Basic gooey brownies

Makes 9 to 12, depending on your pan size and how big you cut them

¾ cup cocoa powder

½ t baking soda

2/3 c butter, melted and divided

½ c boiling water

1 c packed treacle sugar

1 c sugar

2 eggs

1 1/3 c flour

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp salt

180g chopped dark chocolate – I generally used Cadbury’s Bourneville

Maldon salt

Preheat the oven to 160 C. Butter a square or rectangular cake tin (20cm x 20cm is the classic size for this recipe, although I prefer a slightly bigger and more rectangular tin) and line with baking parchment, enough so that the parchment hangs over the sides of the pan and can be used to lift the finished brownies out of the pan. Butter the parchment and dust with cocoa powder and set aside.

In a medium-sized bowl, combine the cocoa powder, baking soda and half of the melted butter and stir to combine. Add the boiling water and stir until thick. Add the remaining butter, sugars and eggs, and beat for about two minutes till smooth and glossy. Add the remaining ingredients and stir until just combined, taking care not to over-mix – it’s fine to leave a few streaks of flour.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 30 to 45 minutes – the smaller the pan and the thicker your brownies, the longer they’ll take. The brownies are done when they’re starting to pull away from the sides of the pan a little, but still seem gooey and under-baked in the centre. It’s important not to over-bake the brownies, as they’ll end up dry, so don’t be afraid to take them out of the oven when they still seem a bit raw. Remember, they’ll continue cooking and setting as they cool.

(Tip: if you become distracted and over-bake your brownies, fill a larger pan than your brownie pan with some cold water and lots of ice cubes. Gently place the brownie pan into the ice and water, which will cool the brownies down quickly so they don’t keep cooking as they cool.)

Allow to cool for about an hour before lifting out of the pan and cutting up into squares.

These brownies keep well, covered, for up to five days.

Interruption for cake

The cake table

Upside-down berry maple cake

I interrupt the regularly scheduled dinner party posts for some wedding cake pictures (by our photographer, whose site I will link to once it’s set up).

Vanilla sponge cake with lemon curd,
pastry cream and vanilla buttercream

       

Hazelnut torte

Classic baked cheesecake

Chocolate chiffon cake with
chocolate buttercream

The red velvet cake that we used for cake-cutting photos and to feed the obligatory bite to each other has been my most popular cake while I’ve been a caterer. Whether as a large cake or as cupcakes, I’ve had countless red velvet orders. (Not true. I could go through all my invoices and count them, but I’m not going to.) On finding out I’d be making a variety of cakes to take the place of a separate dessert and wedding cake, many of the wedding guests hinted hopefully that there would be a red velvet cake. So there it was.

Red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting

Honestly, I’m confused by the widespread devotion to red velvet cake. I think it’s the cream cheese frosting that people like so much, and maybe also the velvet factor (the cake is very moist but still soft and light). The red part, being just red food colouring and a little bit of cocoa powder to make the red darker, is a bit of a gimmick. Nevertheless, here is the red velvet cake recipe, in all its red gimmicky glory.

Red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting

Makes one large two-layer cake

The recipe is easily adjustable to make a very good classic yellow cake, just by replacing the cocoa powder with flour and the red food colouring with more water. I’ve also tinkered further with the recipe to create all sorts of other version – coconut, lemon, orange and more. It’s worked well every time and is probably my favourite basic non-chocolate cake recipe.

A stand mixer or hand-held mixer is a big help and makes this an easy recipe. You can definitely do it all by hand, it’ll just take longer and be a bit more of an effort.

¾ c butter, softened

2 c sugar

3 eggs

2 bottles red food colouring (I just use ordinary food colouring, but you can use natural super-concentrated beetroot-based colouring, if you can find it and afford it)

3 tbsp warm water

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 ½ c flour

3 tbsp cocoa powder

1 ½ tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 c buttermilk

1 tsp baking soda

1 tbsp red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar

Preheat the oven to 170 C. Butter two standard cake tins, line with baking parchment, butter again and dust with flour. Set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar together till light and fluffy – this will take a while, up to ten minutes with a mixer. You might need to stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl a few times. When the mixture is light and fluffy, add the eggs one by one, beating as you add them and making sure to incorporate them well.

Add the colouring, vanilla and water and beat again to combine. The mixture will probably split, but don’t worry about it. Sift in the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking powder, add the buttermilk and beat to combine, no longer than ten seconds. The batter consistency should be smooth and it should drop easily from a spoon – if it seems too thick, add a bit more warm water and beat for a few seconds to combine.

In a small bowl, mix the baking soda and vinegar – it will fizz and bubble. Pour this into the batter and beat until just combined, no more than ten seconds.

Divide the batter between the two prepared pans and bake for 25 – 35 minutes, until the cake is firm to the touch and a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.

Remove from the oven and cool in the pans for about fifteen minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely.

(Alternatively, make cupcakes, filling each cupcake container 2/3 to the top and reducing the baking time to approximately 15 minutes. This recipe makes quite a lot of cupcakes, about 30 depending on how much of the batter you eat)

Frost with cream cheese frosting (recipe below). It’s a good idea to halve each layer lengthwise so that you have four thinner layers – it means the frosting is more evenly distributed, and it looks pretty when you slice it. Sadly, I’m lazy and usually just have two big layers of cake with one very thick layer of frosting in between. Further proof of laziness: I rarely trim the top of each cake to make them perfectly flat. When each layer is perfectly flat on both sides, the layers fit together well and your cake won’t be uneven and lopsided. It also probably won’t slide apart when you try to lift it, which is spectacular but disheartening.

Cake table again

Classic cream cheese frosting

Makes enough to generously fill and cover one large layer cake

2 x 250g blocks of cream cheese, Philadelphia or Lancewood (not the tubs, they’re too soft), left at room temperature to soften

¼ c softened butter

2 – 3 ½ c sifted icing sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

Juice of a small lemon

Beat the cream cheese and butter together until the mixture is completely smooth, with no lumps or streaks of butter. Add a cup of sifted icing sugar, the vanilla and lemon juice, and beat to combine. Now taste and add more sugar bit by bit, beating well after each addition. Stop adding sugar when you think it tastes sweet enough - some people like this frosting very sweet, others like it barely sweet. I'm somewhere in the middle and usually add around 2 cups.

The fourth dinner party

The menu

The fourth dinner party was not at our house. When you tell people you're leaving the country indefinitely, they become very nice to you and do things like take you to the Mount Nelson's garagiste wine pairing evening. Below are some photos of the food. Inexplicably, the photos become more and more blurry as the evening progresses. Strange.

The first course: beetroot, raw and marinated, with
mozzarella, fennel and orange

The second course: pepper cured duck with pickled persimmon

The third course: mushroom crusted hake in crayfish bisque

The fourth course: quail, confit and crown roasted, with
barley and Jerusalem artichoke puree

Talking! In the very pretty dining room

The fifth, very blurry, course: cheese mille-feuille 

The sixth, final course: a chocolate and banana dessert
with brown butter ice cream. Also very blurry

Thank you to our friends for the lovely dinner!

Dinner party number three

The third dinner party menu:

Spaghetti and meatballs

Garlic bread

Salad with avocado, nuts and seeds

Apple and plum crumble with ice cream

Meatballs cooking away

I have basic methods and ingredient proportions for things like meatballs, garlic bread, and crumbles, but no specifics. So no recipes. But! My own meatballs were recently transformed by one simple tip that I came across on The Kitchn, in a post all about making meatballs.

Previously, in all my extensive meatball-related reading, there seemed to be a consensus to not work the raw meatball mixture too much lest you end up with tough, dense meatballs. Ick. So, I accordingly fluffed my raw mixture lightly with my fingertips. I found that this meant liquid didn’t get incorporated too well, so as a result I ended up cutting my liquid additions (usually milk) quite a lot. But suddenly, in Faith Durand’s post, she mentioned that it was very important to get in there when you mixed up the raw ingredients, making sure it was all thoroughly combined so you don’t end up with pockets of either under-seasoned or over-seasoned mixture.

What?!

I decided to give this a try, although not for this dinner party; just a dinner for me and Andrew alone, an experiment. I combined my usual ingredients, but instead of lightly stirring with my fingertips, I got stuck in. In the process, the mixture quickly soaked up all the liquid I’d added, so I added quite a bit more, hoping the extra liquid would further lighten up the meatballs.

Then I went on with my meatball-making as per usual. I confess I was suspicious and thought they’d be tough and not very nice. But lo! they were tender, perfectly seasoned little balls of deliciousness. And thus I was converted, quickly making them again for the above-mentioned dinner party.

Moral of the story (obviously): mix your meatball mixture well. The end.

Yet another candlelit dinner table scene

The second dinner party

The second dinner party menu:

Roasted parsnip and carrot soup with sourdough bread

Slow-roasted springbok leg, with pomegranate-red wine-port sauce

Creamy risotto-style samp

Grilled, then braised, baby fennel

Triple ginger cake with hot lemon sauce and pouring cream

This was a good meal. But, although I took a few process pictures, I didn’t take single picture of any of the finished products. Behold:

Pomegranate-red wine-port sauce reducing

Grilled fennel ready for its braising liquid

Samp, before cooking

While I say it was good, I also don’t really think any of the recipes are worth repeating. The soup and the fennel were super simple things, and both the springbok leg and samp were things I’d never made before. Instead of finding good, reputable recipes, I winged it, cobbling together vague ideas and tips for the springbok and treating the samp as if it was Arborio rice, only bigger-grained. It all worked out well, but I’m sure I did many unacceptable things so I won’t risk embarrassing myself by repeating any of it here.

The ginger cake, though. That did work out very well, using a base recipe that I tweaked. And although I did make it two days in advance, knowing that most ginger cakes benefit from a few days’ maturation, it was even better three-four-five days after being baked. Maybe it could mature even longer, but by day five it was all gone. So here is the ginger cake recipe – but if you can, try to bake it at least three days in advance.

After clearing up, in the pretty new kitchen

Triple ginger cake

Makes one large cake (12 - 16 servings)

I made a tangy lemon pouring sauce to serve hot alongside, which was good, but to my mind detracted from the cake. I think this is probably at its best plain, alongside a cup of strong tea.

250g butter

250g treacle sugar

250g molasses

300ml buttermilk

2 eggs

100ml glace ginger from a jar, chopped, plus some of the syrup

2 tsp fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped

375g cake flour

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp ground cloves

2 tsp ground ginger

Butter and line a standard round cake tin, and preheat the oven to 160 C.

Place the butter, sugar and molasses in a pot over medium heat to melt and combine. Remove from the heat, stir in the buttermilk, then beat in the eggs one by one. Add the glace ginger, ginger syrup and fresh ginger and stir.

Place the remaining ingredients in a bowl, making a well in the centre, and pour the melted mixture into the well. Stir from the centre, gradually drawing the dry ingredients in until you’ve created a thick, smooth batter.

Pour the batter into the cake tin and bake for about 1 hour, until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. 

Cool completely in the tin, then turn out, wrap in clingwrap and keep in a cool, dry place for up to a week.

Dinner party number one

We got married.

I baked the cakes!

Wedding cake table

There was a honeymoon. Immediately followed by major flat renovations, turning our kitchen into a lovely space. 

Which was followed by the news that we’ll be moving to Singapore in August. 

Immediately followed by repeatedly having dinner parties so we can get good use out of the new flat while we slowly start saying goodbye to friends and family.

There are some rules for the dinner parties: they must involve red meat or pork sausages, wine, and dairy products (ice cream, custards, cream, cheese, anything), all things that are apparently available but insanely expensive in Singapore. Luckily it’s winter here, so the rules work with the weather. Not so much with what we’ll be wearing once we get to Singapore, but that’s a worry for another day.

This was our first dinner party menu:

Some leftover wedding bubbles (this despite earnest attempts on my part to make sure it was all drunk during the wedding reception)

Cheat’s cassoulet, meaning herby sausage, bacon and bean casserole with breadcrumbs on top

Crusty bread

Green salad

Sundaes made with sautéed apple slices, hot boozy caramel sauce and salty-sweet toasted pecan nuts

Ready to eat

I forgot to take any pictures of the food properly, other than the two badly-lit photos shown here. It's all for the best, though; cassoulet doesn’t look like much when dished up, being a mish-mosh of beans, sausage, bacon chunks and breadcrumbs. But it is delicious!

Crumbs! They weren't red in real life.

Cheat’s cassoulet

Makes about 6 servings

200g smoked lardons (I bought a big thick chunk of bacon and cut it up myself)

An onion, chopped

2 medium carrots, chopped

2 celery stalks, chopped

3 cloves garlic, crushed

8 good quality, herby pork sausages (or not pork; but why not?)

½ bottle red wine (plus more, if you like, which I do)

250ml crushed tinned tomatoes

750ml chicken stock

Few sprigs of thyme

Sprig of rosemary

A bay leaf

3 cups cooked white beans (preferably cooked at home, i.e. not from a tin)

1 medium loaf of white bread (such as baguette), stale and processed into crumbs

Preheat the oven to 160 C. Heat some butter over medium heat in a large, heavy-based cast iron dish and add the lardons, sautéing until you’ve rendered a lot of the fat. Remove the lardons with a slotted spoon, leaving all the fat in the pan, and add the onion. Saute for a few minutes, add the carrots and celery and sauté for a further ten minutes until the vegetables are all softened. Add the garlic and sauté for a further two minutes, add the wine and simmer for about five minutes. Add the tomatoes, chicken stock, thyme, rosemary and bay leaf and stir, then tip in the beans and sausages and cover the casserole with a lid or foil. 

Slide the dish into the oven. Cook the casserole for two hours, then cook uncovered for a further hour. When I remove the cover, I add more wine, but that’s optional; you can add more water or stock instead if you feel it’s getting too dry. There should be quite a lot of liquid, since the breadcrumb topping will soak up a lot of the liquid, so use your judgement adding sufficient liquid.

Remove the casserole from the oven, taste and season. I find that it doesn’t need much salt because of all the bacon, but it does need lots of freshly ground black pepper. I also add quite a big glug of red wine vinegar to brighten it up, but that’s optional. Once the seasoning is perfect, spread the breadcrumbs over the top of the casserole and return to the even for another 30-45 minutes. The breadcrumbs should be golden and crunchy on top, and soaked full of the delicious juices on the bottom.

Serve in bowls alongside sturdy bread for scooping and a green salad for palate-cleansing.

Citrusy rhubarb-polenta cake

When my grandmother died in September last year, she was 87. She was one of the happiest, most content people I’ve ever known, despite the fact that in the last twenty-odd years of her life her husband died, and six of her sisters, and her son-in-law, and so many of her friends. That’s just what happens when you start to go beyond a certain age, I guess. But my point is, as the cliché goes, she’d had a long and full and happy life, so there is no call to be sad for her on that front.

But of course I’m sad for myself, especially so now that my wedding day is drawing near and she won’t be there like I’d always dreamed. I prefer not to think about it too much; when I do, I inevitably start thinking about my dad who also won’t be there.

Sometimes the thoughts sneak up on you though, you can’t see them coming and avoid them. Just now I was zesting a mineola and two limes for a cake for book club tonight, idly wondering if I should make citrusy iced tea with the insides of the zested fruit. That made me think of homemade lemonade which I haven’t had for ages, and bam – my grandmother’s homemade lemonade. A thick sweet lemony syrup with lots of little bits of zest that we mixed with water, usually the fizzy water made with the ancient Soda Stream. I think that’s the last homemade lemonade I drank. It must have been years ago, she hadn’t made it for a long time, and now I wonder where the recipe is, if one of us still has it and if I could maybe make some.

And then of course within seconds, leaping and bounding on from lemonade, I’m thinking about the wedding and the outfit my grandmother had already bought for it and what my dad would have thought of it all. The lime and mineola zest lies forgotten on the kitchen counter.

The cake does get made eventually, zest and all. That’s after I remember that I was lucky enough to have had such a grandmother for so long, and that she was so happy for me and Andrew. After I think that my dad would have thought well of it all. Especially since so many times, little things about Andrew remind me of him, and I know how lucky I am that I’m marrying him. What a happy day it will be.

Citrusy rhubarb polenta cake

Serves about 16

I like the gritty texture of polenta cakes, and the fact that most of them aren’t too sweet. I wanted a loaf cake but had quite a bit of batter and rhubarb left over after filling my standard-sized loaf pan, so I made four little loaves as well. In a standard round cake tin you’ll end up with just one cake. The rhubarb is very tangy, so I balanced it with the sweet citrusy drizzle for the bigger loaf cake. I left the little loaves plain, though, so that I can justify eating them for breakfast.

Also, I followed all the rhubarb cooking rules and cooked mine in a stainless steel pot – not aluminium, copper or iron, which reacts with rhubarb and makes it brown. I still ended up with brownish rhubarb. No idea why, but it tasted good.

1 large-ish bunch rhubarb stalks

½ cup sugar

1 orange (or mineola, which is what I could find)

2 limes

1 ½ cups cake flour

¾ cup fine polenta

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

4 large eggs

1 cup sugar

¾ cup olive oil

1 ½ cups sifted icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 160 C. Butter your cake tin, line with baking parchment, butter again, and dust with flour (you probably don’t have to do all of this, but I was convinced the cake would stick otherwise). Set up a stand mixer with a whisk attachment (or alternatively, you can use a hand-whisk and large bowl).

Wash the rhubarb thoroughly and chop it into inch-thick pieces. Place it in a ceramic or stainless steel pot along with the ½ cup of sugar, and place it over medium heat. No need to add any water – as it warms, the rhubarb will release its own juices and dissolve the sugar, and cook down into an apple-sauce-like mixture. Stir it every now and then as it cooks, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, zest the orange and limes, and squeeze their juices into a small bowl. When the rhubarb has cooked down, add about half of the citrus juice and stir, then remove from the heat.

Whisk the flour, polenta, baking powder and salt together in a bowl until well-mixed. Add the eggs and 1 cup sugar to the stand mixer bowl and whisk on medium-high speed until the mixture is light and thick – this should take about 4 minutes. By hand it unfortunately takes more like 10 minutes. Add the orange and lime zest, and whisk again to mix thoroughly.

Add the flour mixture and olive oil to the whisked egg-sugar mixture by turn, whisking all the while – a third of the flour mixture, then half the oil, again a third of the flour mixture, the other half of the oil, and end with the final third of the flour mixture.

Now you have a choice: either spoon the rhubarb mixture onto the bottom of the cake pan(s) and cover with batter, or pour the batter into the pan(s) and drop spoonfuls of the rhubarb into the batter. In the first method, you’ll end up with an upside-down cake, and in the second, the rhubarb will peek out but will mostly be baked into the cake.

Bake for about 30 to 40 minutes (little loaves will take 15 to 20 minutes, a regular loaf about 30 minutes, and a big round cake will take 35 to 40 minutes), turning the cake 180 degrees halfway through the baking time so it bakes evenly. While it bakes, you can whisk the remaining citrus juice with the icing sugar to make a citrusy glaze.

The cake is done when a knife or toothpick inserted into it comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and cool in the pan for five minutes before either turning out (for the upside-down cake) or lifting out (for the baked-in-rhubarb version). Drizzle with the glaze, if you like, or leave plain for a slightly more virtuous cake.