An abundance of apples!

The last recipe was about apples and I'm afraid the next few recipes are going to be about apples too. There's an apple and almond cake baking in the oven as I write this and a half eaten spiced apple cake in the fridge and we have an enormous bowl full of apples in the kitchen and more apples are falling off the apple tree outside. It's apple mania!

I think we're going to have to look into making some apple chutney and maybe even some apple cider (now that would be exciting though I'm thinking complicated too!) to keep these apples under control. The apple cake recipes don't use a lot of apples so next week's task is finding a recipe which uses an abundance of apples.

In the meantime, here is the spiced apple cake recipe which I found on the Channel 4 website and is one of Gordon Ramsay's recipes. Talking about Gordon Ramsay I'm still sulking about the fact that La Garrigue, the French Bistro in Edinburgh, didn't win the French restaurant heat in his Best Restaurant series. For me, they were by far the better French restaurant. I'm also sorry that we never got to go to the restaurant when we were in Edinburgh in August. Next time!

In the original recipe the apple mixture is divided up into small baking dishes and a piping bag is used to squeeze the sponge mixture on top but as we didn't have small baking dishes (or a piping bag!) we opted for placing it all into one large baking dish.

(Note: If you have self-raising flour you can substitute the 125g plain flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder and pinch of salt with 125g self-raising flour)

Spiced apple cake

Ingredients

For the sponge

125g plain flour
50g butter

1 tsp baking powder

Pinch of salt

2 tbsp caster sugar
1tsp vanilla essence

1 egg

100ml milk (or enough to bring mixture up to 110ml)

1 orange zest

For the apple mixture

4 apples

50g unsalted butter

2 tbsp honey

100g dates, diced

1tsp ground cinnamon

Flaked almonds for sprinkling

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.

2. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and caster sugar into a large mixing bowl.

3. Cut the butter into cubes and rub together into the flour mixture with your fingers until it resembles bread crumbs. (Licking your fingers after doing this is a very tasty treat!)

4. Beat the egg in a measuring jug with the vanilla essence then add the milk so the mixture reaches the 100ml mark. Add the milk mixture to the flour mixture, add a pinch of the orange zest and mix together.

5. Peel, core and dice the apples. Add the butter to a large deep frying pan and toss the apples into the butter mixture and then add the honey and mix through again.

6. Add the chopped dates, cinnamon and the rest of the orange zest to the apple mixture. Cook for a few minutes making sure the apples are evenly coated in the honey.

7. Add the apples to a baking dish and pour the sponge mixture on top.

8. Scatter the sponge with flaked almonds and bake in the oven for 18 minutes until golden brown on top.

9. Dust with icing sugar and serve with vanilla ice cream or double cream or custard!

Winter is here...

The clocks have gone back. That's it. It might only be a mild 16 degrees and the sky might be blue with bright sunshine and the garden might still be very green and the banana trees might still have their leaves but none of that matters because as soon as the clocks go back that one precious little hour at the end of October, that's it for me. It's winter.

Apart from sulking at the fact that it's dark at 5 o'clock in the afternoon it's also time to rake up all the leaves, clean out the greenhouse, plant violas, cyclamens and pansies and curl up with warm soups, hot chocolates and my early winter favourite - mulled wine! I think we'll have a go at preparing our own mulled wine this year instead of buying the usual sachet filled with cloves and cinnamon. Yes, this year we'll create our own little bundle of spicy goodness to place in a pot of warming red wine. Mmm...delicious!

Anyway, before I get carried away thinking about warm spicy wine, onto something not very warm  at all. A few days ago we decided to make a Waldorf salad with the apples from the apple tree. There are so many apples on there at the moment and so many shapes and sizes too. Some extra large ones to some tiny little baby ones and all sorts of shapes too as some have grown in peculiar places like squashed between small little gaps in the branches so they're plump on one side, skinny in the middle and plump again at the end. I suppose that's what happens when you try to grow too much in a tiny space like ours. So with an apple corer in one hand and a couple of unusually-shaped apples in another we decided to desert the sweet for the savoury and make a winter Waldorf salad.

This is one of the simplest recipes I could find. Some recipes use yoghurt instead of mayonnaise but having recently invested in a very large jar of garlic mayonnaise we decided to add a tiny twist to the recipe by opting for garlic mayonnaise instead of ordinary mayonnaise.

Wintery Waldorf salad


Ingredients
2 large (round or not very round) apples
4 tbsp garlic mayonnaise
1 tbsp French Dijon mustard
2 stalks of celery
1 tbsp freshly-squeezed lemon juice
Walnuts, generous helping
Watercress, a handful

Method
1. Core the apples and cut into slices and then mix with the lemon juice to prevent from browning.

2. Cut the celery sticks into chunks and add to the apples.

3. Mix the mayonnaise and mustard together in a salad bowl and then add the apples and celery and toss together until well coated.

4. Sprinkle the walnuts and watercress on top. Crunchy and delicious!

Tidying up

We said goodbye to the tomatoes, courgettes and runner beans yesterday. With temperatures dropping quite a bit over the last few days we thought the time has now come to prepare the garden for the long winter months ahead. We planted the hungarian grazing rye in the patch where the broccoli was (that part of the vegetable patch  also known as Caterpillar Heaven) a couple of weeks ago and it is doing well and growing steadily.

It's best to plant cover crops before the end of October so we decided it was now time to take out the courgettes as well as the tomatoes and make some more space for the cover crops. We hadn't been getting many large courgettes over the last few weeks anyway and the tomatoes were still being chewed by some stray caterpillars bent on re-creating another patch of heaven in our garden.

So we uprooted and chopped up the plants, which was quite sad seeing as we'd planted them all from seed and watched them grow and now we were banishing them to a big black garbage bag. However, they did well and we made some great meals and next year we'll be planting new seeds and watching them grow all over again.

We have a large bowl in the kitchen filled with tomatoes, peppers, courgettes and runner beans. We also picked some apples and there are many more to be picked.

The greenhouse and the vegetable patch is looking very bare at the moment.  It's a beautiful bright crisp morning in London and the plan for today is to plant the hungarian grazing rye mixed with some tares.

Summer flowers

With winter fast approaching I thought I'd warm up by thinking back on those sunnier days and looking at photos  of the beautiful and colourful flowers we had in the garden over the summer.

Heavenly homemade custard

This custard is indeed heavenly. No other way to describe it. Ready-made custard bought from the supermarket tastes nothing like custard freshly prepared at home.

We attempted to make some custard last night to go with our freshly-made apple crumble and though the apple crumble was delicious, the custard was runny and lumpy. Not quite the divine dessert we were anticipating.

So we decided to try another recipe tonight and Delia came to the rescue. This recipe appears in her book How to Cook Book One.  In the recipe she says you can use creamy whole milk instead of cream, however, having tried a recipe with milk last night, I'd say definitely go for the cream and if you don't want to be too indulgent use single cream instead of double cream but make sure you get the cream.

Ingredients
1 vanilla pod
275 ml double cream (or single cream)
3 large egg yolks
1 teaspoon cornflour
1 tbsp caster sugar

Method
1. Split the vanilla pod by cutting it lengthways with a sharp knife and scoop out the seeds using a teaspoon. Breathe in that beautiful sweet warming vanilla smell.

2. Place the cream in a small pot and add the vanilla pod and the seeds.

3. Gently heat the pot to just below simmering point.

4, While the cream is slowly heating, whisk the egg yolks, cornflour and caster sugar in a mixing bowl with a balloon whisk.

5. Once the cream has heated, remove the vanilla pod ( and put it aside - I'll come back to the pod a little later)

6. While still whisking the egg mixture in the mixing bowl, slowly add the hot cream mixture, whisking the whole time.

7. Once the egg and cream mixture have been well mixed together, return to the pot on a gentle heat and continue whisking.

8. Your arm may get a bit tired at this point so if you have help in the kitchen a good idea to take turns whisking. You need to keep whisking over the low heat until the custard is thick and smooth. I was loosing heart at one point thinking this mixture is never going to thicken but just below simmering point it suddenly gets all thick and gloopy. Mmm!

9. If you overheat the mixture you can return it to the mixing bowl, whisk until it becomes smooth again and then transfer back to the pot.

10. Once it's lovely and thick it's ready to serve with apple crumble...or trifle..or any other dessert.

If you want to enjoy the custard a bit later, place the mixture in a jug or bowl and cover with cling film. When you're ready to serve, remove the cling film and place the bowl in a pan with a small amount of simmering water.

As for the vanilla pod, rinse the creamy mixture off, place on a sunny window sill to dry and once dry pop it in your sugar bowl for  deliciously sensual vanilla-flavoured sugar!

Indian summer in London

So according to the weather forecast it's supposed to be 23 degrees and partly cloudy tomorrow. Considering we're almost into the middle of October and close to that dreaded time when there's no denying that winter is upon us, ie when the clocks go back, 23 degrees and partly cloudy is tropical!

We planted the Hungarian grazing rye in one of the vegetable plots last weekend and we can already make out some brown shoots peering through the soil. Are they our cover crops or simply weeds? It has been a very rainy week so it's no wonder something is shooting up out of the soil.

Courgettes, tomatoes and peppers are still fruiting and for some reason, we are STILL waiting for the apples to ripen. So much for that homemade custard recipe I promised a dear friend! Becoming a gardener is teaching me the art of patience...not easy.

So...heavenly homemade custard coming soon...

It's raining, it's pouring!

As a new gardener I'm learning to love the rain. Nothing like a good soaking especially for the banana plants; they love a good long soak. But it hasn't stopped for the last few days and looks like it's going to rain most of the weekend. Give us a chance to go out there and do a little gardening, rain!

We want to plant our cover crops in the vegetable patch this weekend. The plot where we had the broccoli is now bare and all the good nutrients in the soil get washed away in the rain so cover crops, or green manure, as they're sometimes called, help retain those nutrients and improve the content of the soil over winter. They also prevent weeds growing on your bare patches of land.

We've decided to go for Hungarian grazing rye and Tares, though there are many other varieties to choose from. Grazing rye is especially good for heavy clay soil, which is what we have, as it has fibrous roots which break up the earth. Among all these benefits the cover crops will also provide a bit of greenery at the back of the garden during the dreary winter months.

The best time to plant the cover crops is late September to October so best we get out there this weekend. Wellington boots and sexy anoraks here we come!