Many wonderful and unlikely things have happened since Bake Off but I think my favourite job was going to Iceland to do an article on geothermal baking for the Telegraph Travel Section. The geothermal bread was an intriguing loaf quite unlike anything I had tried before… but there again not many loaves are baked in geothermal springs for 24 hours. You can read the full article here all about where and how it is made. Rather than just research and write up the bread they wanted me to come up with a recipe for my version of it. However given that most of us don’t have a geothermal spring in our back garden this was a bit of an intriguing challenge! In the end though I realised that a slow cooker was about as close as I could get. This recipe was a gorgeous surprise. The slow cooking process melts the sultanas into gooey loveliness whilst the sugar and milk gently caramelises. It is slightly different from the original Icelandic version with the addition of sultanas but these can just be omitted. If you do use them though it comes out rather like a fruit malt loaf. Once you have tried […] Read More
Although I bake sourdough a few times a week the satisfaction it gives never seems to diminish. Whereas as so many bakes are little luxuries, bread is an everyday staple so it’s totally justifiable to bake it all the time. There are a thousand and one recipes out there for sourdough, many of them I’ll freely admit will probably give you a better loaf however, the recipe below is one that I find relatively simple and thus I can fit around work and family life. If you want to spend hours or even a couple of days making a more complex loaf then google away but if you want to make a decent day-to-day loaf then read on. The first ingredient is the starter. I was lucky enough to get this from a local baker and have kept it going for a couple of years now. There are recipes and instructions online for making your own or you can buy it online or best of all, get some from someone who has a nice, well established starter. I keep my starter in a take-away plastic curry pot in the fridge. It normally contains about 70g of starter. On the day […] Read More
Apple cake – put enough fruit in and you can almost say you’re having one of your five a day. Pair it with a nice bit of caramel icing and then I think you have a perfect cake with both the slightly sharp fruit and the salty caramel contrasting and cutting through the sweetness of the cake. Making caramel is something that people are often worried about but with a little care there is very little to fear – possibly apart from washing up the caramel pan afterwards. However, I think this is more than offset with learning one of the best Get-out-of-Jail-Free tricks there is as putting a nice caramel on something always makes it taste so much better. The caramel here is obviously for icing a cake but alter the amount of cream or butter and you can use it for a tart, as an ice cream topping, a macaroon filling and much more. A lot of people asked me about the baby apples that I used to decorate the apple cakes in these photos. I bought mine from Infusions4chefs. I think you get just over 20 apples in a tin. Ingredients Cake 2 medium sized […] Read More
I’ve always loved haggis but have known better than to read the list of ingredients too carefully. So how better to test out my love for it than to make it from scratch?! Making a haggis requires a little bit more effort than going to Tesco and buying some lamb, oats and a sort of bag thing to put it all in. We’re definitely in the realm of specialist suppliers and friendly chats with your local butcher. It also requires a strong nose and a cool head with handling some of the more wobbly bits from inside a lamb. The first ingredient I tracked down was something called an ox bung from a company called smokedust.co.uk. As my kids would say it was a bad case of ‘first the worst’. Despite being in a sealed plastic bag it absolutely honked! It genuinely smelt exactly the same as the cat litter tray. It comes cured and salted but when it came to use it no amount of washing seemed to shift the bad smell – all in all not a very encouraging start. The next ingredient was the lamb pluck. Basically this is the heart, lungs and liver of the lamb. […] Read More
During Bake Off I decided I was struggling under what I ended up calling ‘the curse of cake’ as each time I was asked to make one something went wrong. In some ways this was no surprise as, strange though it may sound, I really hadn’t got much experience at making cake before putting in my application form. A bit of a glaring hole in my baking knowledge maybe?! However, my son George has no interest in cakes so otherwise I would just make birthday cakes for my wife and daughter. Week 1 in the tent was cake week and consequently I got off to a bad start when Paul Hollywood said eating my Madeira cake was like chewing on wallpaper paste! Luckily I redeemed myself with a passable Back Forest Gateau in the Showstopper challenge but I remember looking around the tent with all the other gateaux on the end of the benches and thinking that I was doomed and was sure to go home very soon. As each week went by I realised that if I did make it to the finals then inevitably I was going to have to make cake and sure enough we did. There […] Read More
