Whoopie pies

I had another go at macaroons, because I'm that needy for achievement and they went wrong again. So that's it for me and macaroons. It's over. It was never going to be love but now it's, you know.... a bit awkward and embarrassing to be honest.

So I turned to Whoopie Pies instead, because I'd heard that they were more accommodating, less tricky and demanding, less... French.

And if you are into a bit of performance bakery, these are definitely worth the effort.

I strongly recommend using a piping bag for this, as it will reduce the mess you make and the accuracy of your Whoopie discs by a factor of 10. But, unlike HATEFUL BASTARD MACAROONS they will probably work if you just carefully dollop out the cake mixture.

So here we go, Whoopie Pies, recipe courtesy of Lorraine Pascale. These are chocolate, but you could take out the cocoa powder and they would just be a sort of vanilla sponge. For the filling, I chopped up some hazelnuts and added it to the buttercream with a splash of Frangelico, which if you don't already know, is a hazelnut liquer.

But fillings and flavours are up to your imagination, really. Orange buttercream might be nice? For that you'd add the juice and zest of half an orange to the buttercream. Or maybe some chopped pistachios? Anyway, you get the picture.

The quantities below make about 20 discs, or 10 pies.
I halved the quantities and indeed made 5 pies.

For the pies:

120ml milk
190g demerara sugar
120ml sour cream
180g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
55g cocoa powder
pinch salt
1 egg plus one egg yolk (I just used one egg and it was v nice - if I was using these quantities, I'd use 2 eggs plus whites. I can't be buggering about with separating eggs in my condition.)
2 drops vanilla essence
115ml sunflower or groundnut oil

Preheat your oven to 170C normal and 150C fan. Grease and line as many baking sheets as you can fit into your oven in one go. Yes, you must do this.

1 Warm the milk in a pan and then pour in the sugar. Mix this round for 2 minutes and then take off the heat and add the sour cream. Set to one side to cool down to lukewarm - it won't take long.

2 Meanwhile, swizzle together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, bicarb and salt.

3 Once the milk-and-sugar slurry has cooled down, throw in the eggs, oil and vanilla. Give it all a gentle whisk until it has all combined. Then add this to the flour mixture and fold round until it's mixed it. It will be quite runny and will have some lumps in - this is normal.

4 Now the hard bit - piping out the mixture. I find that the best way to get mixture into a piping bag is to stand the bag in some kind of jug with the icing bag hanging over the sides like this:

Then pour or spoon in your mixture like this:

Then it won't go everywhere. I mean, it will go everywhere, but not as much as it might.

I think a small-ish Whoopie, and by that I mean no more than 3 inches diameter when cooked, is best because the sponge is quite rich and if you wolf down one any bigger than that you might be sick. This means getting a disc of mixture no bigger than 2in on the baking sheet and in the oven. This is a bugger because you think you've got the right amount out and then the mixture splurges out all over the place.

I ended up squeezing out the mixture of the piping bag at a slow, steady rate and counting "one, two, three" to myself and stopping when I got to three. That seemed to produce discs of about 2.5-3in. Leave at least 1 in between uncooked discs and between the discs and the sides of your baking sheet/tin.

Yes it IS a bit of a pain, but unlike BASTARD MACAROONS, you get the hang of it quite quickly.

If you're feeling unconfident about your sizing, do one and bake it to test it out - they only take 10 mins so it's not a total hassle.

5 As above, bake these in the oven for 10 mins. Do NOT use a skewer to test for readiness as then you'll have an ugly great hole in the lid of your lovely Whoopies. Just gently pat the top of the sponge with a finger and if it feels firm-ish, it's done. The cake will firm up as it cools, so err on the side of bouncy.

For the buttercream icing

200g butter at room temperature - it really must be, I'm afraid
400g icing sugar
1 tbsp milk

Beat together the butter and icing sugar. If you've never done this before and you're doing it with an electric handwhisk, I ought to warn you that it's quite an alarming process. First the icing sugar goes everywhere and then nothing seems to be happening and then after about 3 minutes with scary speed the whole thing gels and turns into buttercream. Once this happens, slosh over the milk and beat that in. Then add whatever extra flavourings you're into, or leave it plain.

Spread the buttercream between two Whoopie discs and sandwich together. Go easy on the buttercream because it can be a bit sickly.

These will keep in tupperware, somewhere cool, for up to 3 days. If you do want to store them, make sure they are interleaved with greaseproof paper because what they really like to do is stick to things.

Me and Alastair

I was nodding off at my desk the other day, when I got an email.

I was excited. I don't get that many emails. It was from Alastair, who is a boy who runs an in-your-own-home cookery school who wanted to teach me how to make pasta. Okay not a boy, he is 29.



He's more handsome than this in real life

 But  he really does run his own cookery school. He comes round your house with all the stuff and teaches you how to do it all, without you having to put your shoes on or anything.

"I saw on your blog you wanted to make pasta so I'll come and teach you how to do it," he said. My heart sank slightly at the prospect that I might have to do something, but then lifted slightly when I realised that what I could sneakily do was get him round to my house, feign exhaustion from pregnancy and get him to make me lunch.

"Ok," I said grandly. "But I get very tired. So we'll have to keep the lesson to one and a half hours."

Alastair arrived at 10am on his motorbike with all his kit. Then I talked about myself solidly for 3 and a half hours, while eating all the filling for the ravioli and all the cheese for the cheese sauce. He made the pasta, which I managed not to eat until it was actually cooked.

I'd explain how he did it but the thing is, it was quite complicated. Best get him round to your house to teach you how to do it. Or if you're doing a no-carb thing, he can teach you how to chop things, or fillet fish, or make sushi! Sushi-making is his most popular class and more details can be found here. I tried to persuade him to do a class in macaroons and one in whoopie pies, because that's all anyone seems interested in making these days. Apart from sushi.

If you don't have a pasta machine, you're not going to make pasta, probably. And if you do have a pasta machine, you're already going to have a good pasta dough recipe. But one or two of you have complained about Jamie Oliver's pasta dough recipe, so if you want Alastair's, which worked out great, here it is:

400g 00 pasta flour
2 whole eggs
4 egg yolks
2 pinches salt
1 tsbp olive oil
semolina flour for dusting
water

So we made the dough. Or rather, Alastair made it and I sat at the other end of the kitchen eating crackers and going "Uh huh, yup, yup."

I insisted that Alastair teach me (i.e. do and I watch) hand-made ravioli because I thought it would be nice for my readers to be able to make some pasta thingy without having to buy a pasta machine. But it would take you about 8,000 years to make a lot of ravioli by hand, because you have to roll out the dough so bloody thin, so we skipped over that quite quickly to rolling it out with a machine.

Alastair says that Kitchencraft make a good pasta machine for about £20. But he also said don't buy one on eBay because sometimes they're rusty.

So this is a ravioli tray-thingy, that Alastair bought from a cookshop called David Mellor, apparently not the former Minister for Fun who had an affair with Antonia de Sancha. You have to sprinkle a LOT of semolina in it to stop the wretched pasta from sticking.

Then you lay a super-thin sheet of pasta dough on the ravioli sheet, wipe water over the whole thing to stick it together and then add your filling (in this case butternut squash, pancetta and shallot, sauteed for 20 mins and then mashed) in little blobs. The you put another sheet over the top and press down. Sprinkle the top with semolina flour and with a rolling pin, sort of squish down on the jaggedy lines and then turn the whole thing upside down so it all come out, like the picture above.

The first trayload of these will be a disaster, and will get steadily better. By the end I, and by that I mean Alastair, was doing it like a pro.

The ravioli was boiled for 4 minutes and served with a pasta sauce made from melting some cream and the last scrap of dolcelatte that I didn't eat straight out of the packet with my fingers and some toasted walnuts (ditto) together and pouring over, finishing off with some basil leaves.

And here it is! It was fantastic. Even yummier for my barely having lifted a finger in its creation. That isn't normal, said Alastair. Usually his students are a lot more involved than me. I scowled. "But they're not pregnant obviously," he said hurriedly, as I posted a large spoonful of blue cheese sauce into my mouth and then shooed him out of the door so that I could have a nap.

I've got a limited number of promotional discount cards here, so if anyone wants a visit from Alastair (although he can't go much outside London on his bike), or to give a class as a gift, drop me an email and I'll post one to you.

Or if you'd like to pay full price, because that's the kind of person you are, email Alastair directly on contact@cookeryschool.com or join up at the website at http://www.cookeryschool.com/.

The best curry in the world

A thing I swore I'd do, when I decided to learn to cook was to stock up on stuff. You know what I mean - all those ingredients that you never have, like fenugreek, tamarind paste, white pepper and fish sauce. It would make the difference, I reasoned, between staying within a limited zone of recipes I could attempt, and really going wild.

Even then, I still hesitated often at the spice rack in Waitrose over a glass jar of coriander seed, or turmeric, thinking "Am I really going to buy this? I'll only use it once, probably."

But eventually I bought it all. I've even got some star anise, although I'm not sure when I'll use it. They all sit in my "Curry Box", which is a large tupperware box I put all my curry spices in so that they don't stink the place out or lose their zing.

And I'm so pleased I do have my vast collection of spices, because it meant that when I came across Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe for Murgh Makhani (that's Butter Chicken to you and me) I had absolutely eveything I needed to make it, despite the jaw-droppingly long list of ingredients and the instruction to marinade stuff overnight (BORING!)

And my GOD GOD GOD this is an amazing curry. Yeah, fine, my Curry without the Bleurgh is perfectly okay if you're looking for a quick, simple spice hit of a weeknight.

But in fact, this is what you really want.

This is what you're craving in those moments when you really, really want a curry. This is like the kind of curry that arrives at your door on a wet winter's night from the slightly-more-expensive curry place round the corner and you carefully lift up the white lid from the aluminium tray while someone else runs to the kitchen for plates and cutlery and beer and you look at what's inside and you think "Oh my god... this is going to be special."

So my advice to you, if you like curry that is, is to use making this as an excuse to go out and raid the spice rack of your local supermarket, because basically once you've got all you need to make this, you can make pretty much any curry there is, probably. And this curry is so gorgeous, so rich and aromatic and cosy and pleasing that you'll want to make it again, loads and to hell with whatever Madhur Jaffrey thinks she's got to say.

So here goes. Ready? Try not to be scared. Have lots of sits-down and drinks of water. This sauce makes enough to cover an entire chicken, or 2 small pheasants. But don't fret about making too much, because you can freeze the leftovers to have with lamb or beef or some more chicken or whatever some other time.

If you're using chicken, get a lot of boneless thigh and breast pieces, because you don't really want to de-bone them after they've been roasted because they'll be covered in curry marinade. Alternatively, leave the bones in and eat round them. Anyway, you get the picture, you're a grown-up. I'm just limbering up to patronise a child for the next 40 years.

For the Tikka Marinade:

1 tsp salt
2 tbsp plain yoghurt
1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice (this is about half a lime/lemon)
2 tablespoons garam masala (you can make your own, or buy it)
2 tsp chilli powder
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp mixed spice
2 tsp fenugreek
1 golfball-sized piece fresh ginger, grated
1-2 tbsp groundnut/sunflower oil
3 fresh chillies, finely chopped. Seeds in or out, up to you

Tired yet? Bit more to go...
For the Tomato Sauce:

2 x 400g tins chopped tomatoes and their juices
thumb-sized piece fresh ginger, grated
2 garlic cloves, squashed
2 fresh chillies, chopped, ditto thing about the seeds
5 cloves
1 tsp salt
175ml water

Last lap...

For the Makhani Sauce

125g butter
2tsp ground cumin
2 tsp tomato puree
4 tsp honey
150ml double cream OR yoghurt
1 tablespoon fenugreek
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 tsp black pepper

PHEWEEEEE. But please, please, I'm begging you - don't be put off. I know it's a lot of stuff but honestly, that really is the heavy-lifting over and done with. The rest is just an assembly job and it's an AMAZING curry.

So here's how it's done (if you're using chicken, I recommend taking the skin off first, because this is quite a rich dish anyway and you don't want the skin schmaltzing everything up).

1 Make up the tikka marinade and leave your chicken pieces in it all day or overnight.

2 Put the chicken in a roasting pan, marinade and all, cover with tin foil and roast for for 5 mins at 220C and then 20 mins at 200C

3 While that's happening, make up the tomato sauce and simmer on the stove for 20 mins

4 While THAT'S happening, melt the 125g butter in a pan or casserole big enough to hold all your chicken pieces, then add the 2tsp ground cumin and leave to foam gently.

5 Pass the tomato sauce through a sieve directly onto the butter-and-cumin mixture. Once the chicken's had it's turn, switch off the heat but leave it there while you finish off pushing the tomato sauce through the sieve.

6 Now add to the tomato-and-butter mixture the rest of the Makhani sauce ingredients and simmer together for 5 mins. Now take your chicken out of the oven and add that, tikka marinade and everything, to the tomato sauce. Cook all this gently for another 8-10 minutes.

Then congratulate yourself. You have just made one of the world's greatest curries.

Polpo's courgette salad

I don't like courgettes. Not usually unless they are deep-fried and covered in salt. Otherwise, they are just water in fancy dress.

But this salad really makes the best of them and it is really very delicious. I pinched it off Polpo, which for those who don't know, is like a tapas-y style Venetian restaurant in Soho, which is very hip at the moment. Raw and cut into strips, the courgettes retain a meaty, interesting flavour that you kill almost immediately if you boil them.

And (although my photo is typically shit, I'm getting my other camera fixed soon, I promise) it looks pretty, if that's your thing.

The ingredients look quite unpromising, but altogether they make a very delicious thing, which is simple to assemble and everyone likes it.

Polpo's Courgette Salad for 2

1 large courgette
about 20 parmesan shavings (you could also use pecorino)
the juice of half-to-3/4 of a lemon
salt
the best quality olive oil you can get your hands on

1 Cut the courgette into strips using a speed peeler or a japanese mandolin

2 Put in a serving dish and pour over a few glugs of olive oil, the cheese, salt and lemon juice. Mix around to combine - it's easiest to do with your hands although you do get them totally covered in olive oil

This is really nice with something rich, maybe a rose veal chop, or chicken schnitzl.

Rabbit with yoghurt and mustard



Yikes, sorry - this is surely a competitor for all-time worst photo on Recipe Rifle


What with me being the size of a small South American country and liable to fall asleep at any second, my husband has been doing quite a lot of cooking.

You always get something a bit bonkers when he cooks. He'll set off for the shops with a cheery wave, planning to get a few simple ingredients for supper and, after returning two or three times because he's forgotten his keys, or his wallet, or his shoes, he'll make it to the shops and come back brandishing a pig's head, or a side of venison. Or, like the other day, some rabbit and pheasant.

More about the pheasant later, but with the rabbit he turned to Nigel Slater. That's what he does, my husband, he comes home with something weird and flicks through recipe books until he finds a thing to do with it. I, on the other hand, flick through recipe books and then go shopping for whatever it is I need. I'm not sure whose method is better. We're probably both idiots.

Anyway, I was a bit wary of the rabbit. I'm a bit wary of game in general. I don't like the occasionally pooey, ferrous tang much. But this was great. And not at all rubbery as rabbit can sometimes be. My husband claims this is from the resting.

So here we go - Nigel Slater uses cream, but we didn't have any so we used yoghurt (a danger of reading recipes post-shopping), but it was delicious anyway. Using cream would have resulted in a "longer" sauce, but I thought the yoghurt added an interesting tartness to everything. Either is good. You can also do this with chicken. I mean, not instead of the yoghurt, instead of the rabbit.

4 rabbit joints (we ended up using boned rabbit chunks from Waitrose that were reduced)
3 cloves garlic
2 tbsp French mustard - one of Dijon and one of grainy if you can
olive oil
about 150ml of yoghurt or cream

1 Mash together the garlic and mustard with some salt and pepper. Stir in olive oil to make a thin paste (about 2/3 glugs). Rub the mixture over your rabbit.

2 Place in a shallow baking dish, drizzle over some more oil and bake at 190C for about 25mins.

3 Take the dish out of the oven and pour off most of the oil. Tip the yoghurt/cream over the rabbit and shift it all around so it's evenly coated. Bake for another 20 mins.

We ate this with buttered noodles. Then my husband went to play Fives and I watched 3 episodes of House back to back and painted my nails.

Chicken liver pate

Why does everyone go on about how much they hate January? I love January. It's my favourite month. There are so few expectations of joy and happiness that I, personally, love it. I can be as depressed as I like. No-one invites you out for dinner, or to a party, or anything. It's great!

And I always find the run-up to Christmas a tiny bit like the run-up to the end of the world. Quick, quick, quick... got to get everything done by this looming deadline. And you hold your breath and do it all and sort of expect the sky to fall on your head.  But then January 2 and 3 and 4 roll around in the usual fashion and you feel like you've been given a second chance at life.

My mistake in the past with January has been to leave Christmas decorations up. Now I take them down with great relish - all of them - on January 2. I throw away the cards, put everything else in a cardboard box, stash it away and forget it ever happened. And this year, we bought a living tree so we don't even have that sad throw-out-the-tree-carcass moment. It's just been moved outside in its little pot for next year.

My next move will be to go out and buy a lot of hyacinths, which I will do just after I've finished writing this and just before I go out and get a flu jab. My mother, who usually sounds surprised to hear from me when I ring, like: "Oh yeah! I thought there was another child somewhere. Which one are you again?", has gone mad and rung me every day for the past week asking if I've had my shot yet because she's worried about the baby. Not about ME, you'll notice.

Anyway, hyacinths are a key element to feeling good about January, if for some MENTAL reason you don't already feel good about it. Go and get some with your remaining pennies that you have not spent on cheap tat and mulled wine.

And then cook something frugal! Like this chicken liver pate. Easy peasy and very cheap.

In its most basic form, chicken liver pate is chicken livers cooked and then pulverised with melted butter and seasoned. That's it. (That's why it's always a starter in restaurants, because each serving costs the rezzy 50p to make, max, and then they flog it to you for £7.95).

Any extra seaonings besides salt and pepper are up to personal imagination. Below is a list of the stuff I usually put in my pate, but you can add extra things (mace? MUSTARD?) or leave things out if you don't like them/haven't got them.

1 400g packet chicken livers - I get mine from Waitrose, obviously
About 180g butter
3 shallots, chopped
salt
pepper
some thyme - 2 sprigs, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic
some brandy, about 2 glugs
some sage - 5 leaves, roughly chopped

1 Wash and sort through your chicken livers for any green or grey bits, which are gall bladder and will make you fucking gag and ruin the whole thing if any gets in your pate. Err on the side of caution and snip out anything that looks even vaguely suspect.

Heat some veg oil in a pan and gently cook your livers for about 4-5 minutes, turning often. You're looking for brown on the outside and pink on the inside - but not red. Snip the livers in half if that makes it more manageable. If you're a bit squeamish about offal, cook them for longer, bearing in mind that the longer you cook them, the more grainy your pate will be.

2 Sling your livers in a food processor and then fry the onions, garlic and any herbs you want together in the same pan on a very low heat for a good 10-15 mins. If you want a really garlicky pate, keep back one garlic clove and chuck it in raw later.

3 While this is happening, melt the butter - about 180g. Yeah, it is quite a lot. I've never really been able to get the hang of clarifying butter, but in theory if you melt it really slowly what ought to happen is that the clear part of the butter floats to the top and the milky part of the butter sinks to the bottom. That much butter takes about 10-15 mins to melt.

4 Once the onions and garlic are done, add them to the livers in the food processor. Then pour about 2 tablespoonfuls of brandy into your pan and turn up the heat to full bongoes. Cook this down and scrape at the bottom of the pan to get all the gack off and swizzle it into the brandy for about 2-3 minutes and then add it to the food mixer. Chase this with about 2 tablespoons of your melted butter. If you want it garlicky, add your raw garlic clove now.

5 Whizz all this up. Taste. Season. You will need quite a lot of salt, about two or three big pinches, and about 8-10 turns of the pepper grinder. It is normal for warm, pulverised chicken livers to smell a bit scary and pungent. You may wonder just what kind of hellish mess I've got you into. Fear not, when chilled this horrifying mixture will be unscary and tasty.

6 I like my pate quite rustic and don't mind the odd corner of onion, but if you'd like yours more of a smooth parfait, pass it through a sieve. This is messy and annoying and quite tough on the old triceps, but it's what you have to do. Decant, seal with a layer of melted butter and chill. If you're feeling artistic, gently press a sage leaf into your clarified butter lid.

My advice is to decant the pate into a number of small ramekins and top each with a layer of butter, rather than putting the whole thing into a large container, so that you can use one small ramekin of pate at a time and still have some fresh in the fridge, rather than feeling under pressure to eat a huge cereal-bowl-sized wodge of pate at one sitting.

Eat with toast and cornichons, while pretending that the letter from the bank about your overdraft that you just threw in the bin in fact got lost in the post.

Keeps for about 10 days (butter-seal unbroken) in the fridge.

I hate macaroons



Just marvel at how shit these are


A lot of you have been bothering me about macaroons - for months. How can you make them? What's the best recipe? The best method?

And my answer to you individually has always been: BUY THEM FROM A FUCKING SHOP. Because there some things that you ought to buy from a shop - turkish delight is one of them and the other one is macaroons. I'm sure there are other things. Croissants. Cheese. Gelatine.

The problem, people, is sugar. Sugar is hard to work with and although as a general rule I am quite disdainful of those who think that cooking is complicated, there are people who train for, like, days to become pastry chefs and chocolatiers. And when they come to make things like macaroons they have all the right kit - sugar thermometers and icing bags and silicon trays and special ovens and flavourings and all that shite that one doesn't neccessarily have in a domestic kitchen.

So I'd always say: buy them from a shop. They are a treat. They are not humble home-cooked fare - they are multi-flavoured, layered and coloured, designed for precious fashion gizmos and fizzy PR girls to send to each other and squeal over. They are not for the likes of you and me to knock up on a lazy afternoon.

But you're all such nags. Maybe you ought to give that up for January, yeah? Leave a poor pregnant girl alone. But despite making me hate you, the endless, endless pestering and nagging worked because like a chump I ordered some instant macaroon mix from some online shop and gave them a go. After all, not everyone, I reasoned, lives near a Laduree concession stand.

And it was, genuinely, the most boring and disappointing experience of my brief cooking career. Sometimes things that are a bit of a faff are worth making because they are, at the same time, fun and they work. But these things were both not fun to make and didn't work. I mean just look at them - cracked, discoloured, thin, wonky. Crap. CRAP!

Some of it was my fault (the whisk attachment on my food processor broke; I don't have an icing bag) but some of it was also the instant mix's fault (they didn't specify enough water but when I added more I added too much and it went sloppy; the food colourings I bought from the same online shop were cack and dull and actually came with a warning on the label that they might have "an adverse effect on attention and behaviour in children").

However the flavour was just excellent, as industrially-processed things containing Guar Gum, Silicon Dioxide, Lactic Acid Esters of Mono- and Di-glycerides of Fatty Acids usually are. So if you think you can do better than me, instant macaroon mix is available here.

Anyway, after that disaster I thought no more about the whole thing and wasn't even going to bother writing about them, until I had a nightmare last night about macaroons. It went on for ages - it really did. Don't tell me that in actual fact it only went on for three seconds or whatever, because I kept being woken up by my husband dithering about listening to the cricket and whenever I went back to sleep I'd still be dreaming about bloody macaroons. So it's a sign. I'm going to have to make them and master them. That, it seems, is my curse. Luckily I've found a couple of straightforward enough-looking recipes to have a go at. All I need is an icing bag. And some food colouring that isn't POISONOUS.

I hope your Christmas and New Year were okay and if you're back at work, I'm sorry. I don't even have a job and I'm depressed as hell that the holidays are over.

I was ill throughout all festivities. The highlight was when my husband got incredibly drunk on New Year and dived into the shallow end of a swimming pool and scraped his nose on the bottom and now he looks like he's been in a fight.

The next morning, (I was asleep at the time of the incident), I said: "Ha ha, you're such a dick" - and variations on that theme - throughout breakfast, until someone else said "My God - you could have broken your neck!"

I looked at my husband and felt more strongly than ever that my marriage is like an episode of The Inbetweeners - except that we are both that posh know-it-all one.