Updated: Four Fruit Marmalade

What with the snow, I fully wasn't expecting Mr Ocado to turn up with my food delivery this evening so after a sleepless night (thanks to endometriosis pain - not at all pleasant), I was up at 4am, baking fresh bread like the good wife that I am.

On the subject of being a Good Wife, I've recently started following @GoodWifesGuide on Twitter.  I swear the husband secretly authors this.  Recent advice has included "When going to the chip shop a Good Wife will always pick the cheapest meal on the menu. To stay slim she will give him some of her chips", "A Good Wife will be looking for new lingerie for Valentines Day, most husbands would like this " and "A Good Wife will get together with other wives in the street to dig husbands cars out of the snow, it makes sense to team up."  Quite clearly, despite everything I do, I am not a Good Wife.

Anyway, Mr Ocado duly turned up with my shopping and a huge pile of citrus fruit that I'd ordered to have a go at Dan Lepard's Three Fruit Marmalade.  Except the couple of oranges that I had in my fruit bowl were quite small so I ended up adding in a couple of limes to make up the kilo of fruit that was required.

Chopped fruit, ready for cooking

Apparently, making marmalade Dan's way is far easier.  I understand that normally it involves a lot of faffy peeling of fruit, slicing the rind into thin strips and then putting the pips into a muslin square to go into the mix as the pectin helps the marmalade to set.  Instead, using Lepard's recipe, you just quarter the fruit, sling it into a pan with some water and leave it to boil for a couple of hours.



Once the fruit skins are soft, you scoop out the innards, slice or dice the skins and then boil with the liquid and sugar.  The recipe also has a lower sugar content because it apparently gives it the 'punchiest flavour and best set'.  I'm still waiting for mine to set having just bottled it.  The idea is to road test it on some of the leftover toasted bread in the morning.

Lepard also says to not use Sevilles in the recipe.  As I struggled for the kilo of fruit, I did have to throw in a couple of them.  They do add a slight bitter taste to the marmalade even now it's had 400g of sugar added to the mix.  Definitely wouldn't work with any more in there.

Boiled fruit skins

As for chopping up the peel, I went for chunky strips.  I didn't use it all - probably only about half.  If you look at the picture with the recipe, it looks to be almost entirely composed of peel.  That doesn't quite work for me so I discarded a selection of the skins.  The regular orange skins just disintegrated and it was really hard to scrape the inner fibres off so they got binned.  The I used one lime skin - one was nice and soft, the other quite firm.  But the most buttery of them all was the grapefruit skin.  I was surprised because before cooking, it seemed to have the most pith and I was a bit worried it wouldn't be of any use.

Getting the mixture up to final temperature took far longer than expected.  At one point, I began to think all the reviews about my Heston thermometer were right as it just seemed to stick at 102.8c.  But eventually, after deciding to catch up on few work emails while I waited, it hit the magic 104c allowing me to bottle it.

And now I'm waiting.  Roll on breakfast!

The original recipe can be found here.  To make my recipe, I used one pink grapefruit, two limes, two lemons, three oranges and one Seville orange.

And one top tip - the sugar goes in at the second stage.  I misread the recipe and put the sugar in the pan first with water and fruit.  What a waste of 400g of sugar.  No cake making for me this weekend.

Update 13th Feb 2012 - Sadly the marmalade didn't set overnight so nothing for my fresh toast on Saturday morning.  This was rectified, however, by reboiling the marmalade to 105c the following day with 1.5 tbsp of Certo pectin thrown in.  Tis very tasty (although it tastes better on something than straight from the jar).  Will try and post a picture of it soon!

Weekly Bake Off - Farmhouse Victoria Sponge

Yesterday was a bit of a sucky day so to cheer myself up, I decided to participate in the Weekly Bake Off which I discovered by Twitter.  In a nutshell, the lovely @WeeklyBakeoff decided to bake her way through Mary Berry's 100 Cakes and Bakes and has invited her fellow tweeps to participate.  Every Monday, she selects a recipe.  People bake it and submit their pictures by the following Sunday for a bit of fun judging.

It sounds a little bit odd as the judge only gets to see the cakes and not actually taste them.  In fact, I was a guest judge for the Black Forest Gateau and it was really hard.  Firstly because they all looked great, but secondly because you have to look beyond the skill of the photographer and judge things like the balance of cake to filling and factor in any unusual twists in decoration.  There were only four entries the week I judged as it was the week before Christmas and it took me ages to make up my mind.  I pity whoever is judging now everyone's back to normal baking.

So on to the actual bake.  It was an interesting recipe.  When I first read it I decided not to try it as I'm not really a fan of orange or Victoria sponge, but I needed some baking therapy and a second perusal showed it to be a really really simple operation that I could perform whilst Miss A ate her tea.

You literally chuck everything into a bowl and mix it for two minutes on high before putting into prepared tins, baking it, making the buttercream filling whilst it's cooking, then it's just a case of cooling, filling and dredging with icing sugar.

Mine took more than the five minutes the instructions implied.  The recipe uses light muscovado and I'd let mine get damp so I spent ages trying to beat and grate it back into some semblance of sugar grains.  I then chose to beat it with the butter first to make sure that it was a smooth as possible.  I also increased the quantities because Berry uses a smaller tin for this cake, but helpfully, her standard Vicky is in a 20cm tin so I stole the ratios from there instead.

It made a lovely soft cake mixture and the muscovado meant it was less sweet than a regular white sponge.  It baked really well - especially given my trouble on Friday and the general issues I've been having with my new cooker.  One rather stupid schoolgirl error was that I forgot to butter the tins so the edges are a bit raggedy - but I think it adds to the farmhouse charm of the cake.

If you don't have hardened sugar, it really is simplicity in itself to make, bake and fill.

Vicky sponge with an orange marmalade and butter cream middle

I've yet to do a taste test of an actual piece as I'm taking it in to work tomorrow.  Having tried the components though, it's looking good for a non-orange cake, non-Vicky eater such as myself.   The bitterness of the marmalade works really well against the sticky-sweet buttercream.

For the record, I used Waitrose Essentials Seville Orange Marmalade which I love.  It's so cheap compared to other Seville marmalades which is great when you have to watch the pennies.  Was hoping to get some Sevilles to try my hand at marmalade making, but I fear I've missed the boat this year.  Although I understand you can buy pre-prepared oranges from Lakeland.  But that's just a bit cheaty isn't it?

In the spirit of the Bake Off, I am following the lead and not publishing the recipe.  The book is only £4 or so on Amazon and is definitely worth a buy, even if you don't want to join the competition.

However, as I'm in a sharing mood, I will share with you my mum's Vicky Sponge recipe which she drilled in to me as a child.  I can't remember exactly how old I was when I learned this recipe but it's one of those things I'll never forget.  The chocolate version characterises my childhood and always reminds me of the Michael Rosen poem 'Chocolate Cake'.  Rosen is probably best known as the illustrator of Roald Dahl books in the Eighties but wrote and illustrated many books and poems of his own.  If you love cake and have never heard this poem, go read it now!

For every lovely new cake recipe I bake, there is still nothing like my mum's chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream (made with margerine, not real butter - just doesn't taste right otherwise).  If she ever ever gets round to reading my blog and this post in particular, I hope she takes the hint that she should make one next time I visit.  It's one of those comforting things to cling to like my Grandma's roast chicken dinner or her sausage and potato bake.  No matter how bad things are, the chocolate cake can always raise a smile.  Hint....hint...

Recipe - fills two 8" (20cm) sandwich tins

For the cake

• 9oz (250g) self raising flour
• 6oz (175g) soft margerine
• 6oz (175g) caster sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1tsp vanilla essence

1. Preheat the oven to 350F/180c/160 fan/Gas 4
2. Grease the two tins with butter or lard and base-line with baking parchment
3. Beat the margerine, sugar and vanilla essence until light and fluffy.
4. Beat in the eggs one by one.  If it looks like it's starting to split, add in a tablespoon of flour (this is my tip!)
5. Sift the flour into the bowl and mix gently until well combined.
6. Divide between the two sandwich tin.  Wet your hand and use it to smooth the batter evenly around the tin.  Make a well in the middle of each tin, exposing the tin base.  This will ensure you don't get a bump in the middle of your cake.
7. Bake for 25 minutes before turning out on to a wire rack to cool.

To make this a chocolate cake, replace 1oz (25g) of the flour with the same amount of sifted cocoa powder.


For the filling

• 4oz (125g) icing sugar
• 1.5oz (40g) margarine or slightly salted butter
• 1tsp vanilla essence
• splash of milk (optional)
• 4tbsp jam (raspberry or strawberry for a vanilla sponge; optional cherry for a chocolate sponge)
• icing sugar for dusting.

1. Beat together the icing sugar, margarine or butter and vanilla essence until smooth and creamy.  You may need to add a splash of milk if it's too dry.
2. Use the jam (if using) and buttercream to sandwich the cooled cake. 
3. Dust with icing sugar.

PS Mum, if you've read this, I hope you noticed I did the measurements in imperial first and then metric :)x

Red Onion Marmalade

I'm now trying to get into the swing of Christmas cooking.  This is the first time I've ever hosted Christmas for the family and it's a really big thing for me.

In my head, I know exactly what I want to cook and how things will go.  In reality, it will probably be a total disaster - although I must stop pondering that in case it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When I was younger, I was classed as fussy by my family.  My mum readily reminds me that when she weaned me, I'd eat literally anything.  That morphed into eating anything so long as it had mint sauce on it.  Then I learned to say no and became fussy.

The last bit of knowledge is a recent revelation.  For many years, she led me to believe that I got fussy when I went through my 'I-will-only-eat-crunchy-peanut-butter-and-celery' phase.  But she's finally conceded that I got fussy when I learned to say 'No'.  I think she's now realised the level of frustration I've reached since Miss A learned to say 'No' and how useless I feel that my daughter will only eat cheese and fruit despite my attempts to maintain her once cosmopolitan palate.

My family think I'm fussy because I don't eat pork and lamb and will absolutely not eat offal or tomatoes that have the slimy insides in.  They still don't quite know me as well as they think they do.  I won't eat pork or lamb that's been roasted to within an inch of its life and is covered in layers of chewy fat and gristle.  In the same way that at lunch today at work, I failed to finish my chilli beef soup on discovering a piece of solid fat floating halfway down the bowl.  Visible meat-fat in food turns my stomach.

Likewise offal.  The only time I remember being offered offal at home as a child was when my mum used to make stuffed hearts and they stank the house out.  And kidneys that tasted of wee spoiled the lovely sausage-y dish otherwise known as Kidneys Turbigo.  I love coating liver in flour ready for frying but once it resembles a slab of concrete, it somehow loses its appeal.

All of the above are enjoyed by most of the people I'm cooking for (my mother, grandfather and stepfather).  The other guests (the husband and Miss A) only eat cheese, fruit, fish fingers and chicken kievs (the husband).

Would Paddington approve??

On my list of things I would cook for my imaginary family are: sprouts with bacon, pancetta and chestnuts; Jamie's Get Ahead Gravy; citrus basted Turkey; mulled cider; orange crust mince pies; clementine curd; red onion marmalade; ham in coca-cola; and Dame Mary's Christmas chutney.  All of which will sound lovely to most, but I can guarantee you that not one of them would go down well with the family.  They don't do sweet and meat.  They like traditional Christmas cake or Dundee cake.  The husband will only eat shop-bought mince pies.  And what's wrong with boiled-to-death sprouts and Bisto?

Ah well.  I'm going to indulge myself with some practice anyway.  Today's was red-onion marmalade, served with goats cheese crostini.

The recipe for the marmalade came from Leiths Simple Cookery.  Very tasty, but when it was cooking, I thought I was going to suffocate from the fumes from the wine and the onions.  Luckily it was tamed by the addition of the honey towards the end.  Makes for a very tasty, light snack and I can see it being applied to a cold turkey sandwich on Boxing Day which I shall enjoy whilst everyone else just has turkey and butter in theirs.

Recipe

• 3 red onions
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 3 tbsps soft brown sugar
• 1 garlic clove
• 300 ml red wine
• 1 tbsp honey

1. 
   
2. Finely slice the onions.
3. Heat the oil in a pan over a medium heat and fry the onions until they start to soften and caramelise.
4. Crush the garlic clove and add to the pan.  Fry for 30 seconds.
5. Stir in the sugar and continue to heat for two minutes until the onions start to caramelise.
6. Add the wine and cook over a medium heat until almost all of the liquid has reduced.
7. Stir in the honey and season to taste.

For the crostini, I brushed slices of ciabatta with olive oil then baked at 200C (fan) for 5-7 mins.  I topped with slices of goats cheese and returned to the oven for five minutes until the cheese melted.