Recipes

Undoubtably the best health food is a good cake - at least, that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. A cake should look good, taste good and make you feel good - what better recipe for your health? So here's a few recipes that I've accumulated over the years that produce good cakes but which aren't difficult. My apologies to those of you still stuck in the middle ages, but all my measurements (except for spoon based ones) are metric, so they're in grams, millilitres and degrees Celcius.

Mrs Watson's Christmas Cake.

I first came across this when Gordon Watson, who was the janitor in the Music Department at that time, brought in a cake for his sixtieth birthday. I was so impressed I asked for the recipe and Mrs Watson was kind enough to give it to me. I have used it for Christmas wedding and birthday cakes ever since. Trouble is, I now get asked by all the family to make theirs as well!

250 gm butter
250 gm soft brown sugar - the unrefined sort, not white sugar coloured with molasses
1 tablespoon Dark Treacle
4 tablespoons Sherry or Brandy
125 gm self raising flour
200 gm plain flour
1 teaspoon Vanilla essence (half that if it's real vanilla)
1200 gm dried fruit of your own choice - I use a mixture of raisins, mixed fruit, dried peel, glacé cherries and sometimes I add some nuts such as blanched almonds.
5 eggs

Method

Mix together the butter and sugar then stir in the eggs and flour a little at a time. Add the treacle, sherry and vanilla essence and mix well. All this can be done by hand or in a food processor. Mix the fruit in by hand, do not use a processor unless it has a slow setting and blunt blades which will not damage the fruit. This will make a cake 20 x 20 x 7 cms in size, so find a tin of that size, grease it well, preferably line with greaseproof paper, then put the mixture in. Put in an oven at 150oC (140oC in a fan oven), It will take at least three and a half hours to cook, sometimes up to five. If it's going too dark a brown, drop the temparature and cook a little longer. After about three hours, check regularly by sticking in a knife. When it comes out clean, with just traces of grease, not lumps of mixture, on it, the cake can be taken out. Let it set for a while, then carefully ease it out of the tin and put it, right way up, on a cake rack to cool. The fruit benefits by being soaked overnight in the sherry/brandy before being cooked. It is improved even more if you replace the sherry or brandy with a good mulled wine.

Victorian Ginger Sponge Cake

I first came across this, which is surely the best ginger cake recipe there is, at a 'Victorian' Fair at Saltburn, many years ago. I love ginger and I was so knocked out by the sheer quality of this cake I asked the lady on the stall from which I bought it for the recipe. It is a remarkably resilient recipe, I have take several liberties with it (including once not using eggs) and it's always been fantastic. The following is essentially the recipe I was given, but with a few minor variations.

125 gm margarine
125 gm soft brown sugar (see above)
250 gm self raising flour
1 tablespoon golden syrup
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 egg
1 teaspoon ginger
1 cup warm milk

Method

Melt margarine, sugar, syrup and ginger together in a large pan. Put the flour and egg into a blender or food processor, pour the melted mixture over it then blend together. Put the milk into the pan which you used to melt the other ingredients in and warm it up, disolve the bicarbonate in it then pour over the mixture in the blender, blend quickly then pour into greased cake tins and place into a pre-heated oven at 150oC (140oC in a fan oven) as quickly as possible - as the mixture is hot, it will already have started cooking. It takes around 45 minutes to cook, but do not open the door in the first 30 minutes or it'll all go flat. Makes a cake about 20 x 20 x 4 cms in size but please be aware that the mixture is MEANT to be very runny so if the cake tin has a removable base plate, make sure it is well sealed with grease (butter or whatever) or it'll leak out all over the oven. For an "Industrial Strength" version, remove the skin from some root ginger by first blanching it briefly in boiling water then scrapping or rubbing off the outer layer. Chop into small pieces and add to the mixture before blending, if you want it chopped even finer or stir it into the mixture by hand after blending if you prefer larger lumps. Only real ginger afficionadoes should go for this option.

Mulled Wine

There are two great secrets to mulled wine

  1. Never, Never, NEVER heat the wine in an aluminium pan, even a non-stick one - in fact, avoid metal vessels completely, if possible. You can heat the wine in a glass, plastic or crockery vessel in a microwave.
  2. Keep the wine covered when hot to avoid alcohol loss. If you are making a big batch for a party, put all the spices in one or two bottles of the wine and heat only that to the full temparature, thus making a concentrate. Keep the rest in its bottles (but open) and warm them up by putting them in a bowl of hot water. Only mix them together with the sugar, orange juice and concentrate just before drinking.

For each 75 cl bottle of fruity red wine you need;

2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
some whole cloves
100 gm soft brown sugar (see above)
real orange juice to taste (say 125 ml)

Method

Heat the spices with wine until almost boiling (see notes above), strain through a sieve to remove the cloves and as much of the strange, polymerized gunk that the spices turn into as possible (don't worry, it looks revolting but I've been feeding people this version of mulled wine for nearly two decades and they're still coming back for more). Mix the liquid (not the gunk!) into the juice and sugar and serve with slices of orange floating on it - you can stick some more cloves in these if you like!

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Le Calvados de l'Hermitière - one of the world's best brands of Calvados (In my opinion)

Aagrah Indian Restaurants - simply the best (In my opinion)

www.slowfood.com, home for those who hate fast food.

Last updated 9thOctober 2001

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