Mayonnaise

A simple mayonnaise really is a 10 minute job, and you probably have most of what you need about the place already. Essentially you need eggs, oil, an acid and a mustard. Here's a recipe for a simple classic mayo.

Ingredients

2 eggs

1/2 pint Vegetable Oil

1 tbsp White Wine Vinegar

1 tsp Dijon Mustard

Some salt and pepper to taste

Mix all the ingredients apart from the oil in a bowl and whisk to combine.

Adding the mustard and vinegar at this stage makes formally an emulsion easier. Start adding the oil, only about a teaspoon at a time at first. You'll start to notice the mixture changing colour and getting smoother and thicker.

As you go you can start adding more oil and whisking it quickly into the mayonnaise. The quicker you whisk the finer the droplets in the emulsion will be, the thicker and creamier you mayo will be. Eventually it'll thicken up somewhat.

You'll notice some resistance against the whisk and using one hand whilst the other pours the oil will become less practical. So the trick here is to place a folded wet cloth under the bowl to stop it sliding around on the work surface.

Once you're happy with the consistency season with the salt and pepper and maybe adjust the vinegar to your taste.

You should have a rich thick mayonnaise ready to spoon out and serve or use as a base for other sauces.

There's loads you can do with mayo. Hundreds of dip variants and salad dressings use it as a base. One day I'll go into a bit more detail on the blog about how easy it is to make 1000 Island dressing, or tartar sauce, or remoulade. Ok, so at this point you're no Richard Hellmann, but I bet your mayonnaise already tastes better than anything you've gone and bought.

Carrot Cake

When it comes to carrot cake there's plenty of opportunity to go mad with sultanas and nuts but for true carrot cake, classic carrot cake here is a no frills recipe that allows the natural sweet flavour of the carrot to come through. I've livened it up in the topping, but what you do with the decoration is up to you.

Ingredients

275g Plain Flour

400g Caster Sugar

4 eggs

1 tbsp Ground Cinnamon

1 tsp Baking Powder

2 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda

350ml Vegetable Oil

375g Carrots

Pinch of Salt

Sieve the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt together into a bowl.

Lightly whisk up the eggs and then add the sugar, whisking it all up until light and airy.

Now add the oil in a steady stream, whisking it all in. Then swap your whisk for a spoon and start adding the flour. Add it bit by bit, make sure it's fully incorporated into the mix before adding the next bit. When that's done add the mountain of grated carrot.

Divide the mixture into 2 tins and bake at 160degC for 1 hour or until springy to touch.

Then take the out the oven and cool in the tin.

That's it! Now it's time to get creative, although I've kept the finish deliberately simple again.

Ingredients

275g Icing Sugar

250g Mascarpone

50g Butter

1 tsp Vanilla Essence

1 Orange, I didn't have one to hand so I used 2 citrus.

Slice the top off the bottom half of the cake to give an even flat surface to spread the filling on.

Mix together the butter and cheese until fluffy and fully combined.

Add the vanilla essence and stir it all until smooth. Now add the sugar, bit by bit from a sieve until all is fully combined. Finally zest your orange and stir that in.

Spread half the mixture on the bottom layer, place the other layer on top and spread the rest on that. Finally decorate with walnut halves.

I was really pleased with how this turned out.

And it was wonderfully moist and flavourful.

A feast for the eyes as well as the stomach.

Courgette Cake

Unlike a recipe for courgette cake I've made in the past this one doesn't have lime in and I haven’t made a lime icing, but that would have worked well with it I'm sure. Like the recipe I've made in the past though one of the challenges was pressing out enough moisture from the courgette and apple so as not to make the mixture too wet.

Ingredients

200g plain flour

200g caster sugar

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

1 large pinch salt

2 eggs

1 small apple

60g pecan nuts

80g sultanas

200g butter

150g courgettes

I pre-heated the oven to 180degC and started by creaming the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Obviously if you've had your butter out of the fridge to soften a bit first this is easier.

Next I added the eggs 1 at a time, only adding the second after the first was fully incorporated. Then I grated up my courgette and apple and squeezed as much moisture out of the gratings as I possibly could. This is really important, get as much out as you can before adding them to the bowl and stirring. Even after this I was able to pour out a little excess moisture.

Next I sifted in the flour, salt, baking powder and cinnamon all together, stirred all that in and added my chopped up pecan nuts and sultanas.

I lined a loaf tin and poured the whole bowl in, smoothing and spreading.

That went in for just over an hour until I was satisfied that the centre was as well baked as it was going to be. Once the top was light and springy but I couldn't see any moisture rising up through the cracks in the surface I took it out of the oven and cooled it in the tin on a wire rack.

Despite my fears over the moisture content it was another success, although not quite as light as I was hoping.

I think this is a great use of courgettes, or zucchinis depending on where you come from.

Beetroot Cake

I haven't made this before but I do like beetroot so I thought it was well worth a go. Not only so I love the taste of the stuff but with the amazing colour and that root veg crunch what's not to love!

Ingredients
150 fresh Beetroot

150g Carrot

300g Sugar

250g Flour

230ml Vegetable oil

1 tsp Cinnamon

100g Mixed nuts

3 eggs

1 tbsp Baking powder

Some salt to taste

Sieve the flour, cinnamon, salt and baking powder together. Combine the oil and sugar and add to the flour.

Beat that together. Now chop the mixed nuts, separate the eggs (keeping both parts) and grate the carrot and beetroot. Preheat your oven to 180degC.

Add the grated veg, the egg yolks and the nuts to the mix...

and stir all that together well.

Pre grease and line 2 cake tins. Whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks and add them, folding them in with a metal spoon. Pour the mixture into the cake tins and they go in at 180degC for about 45-50 mins. If I'd had a deeper tin to hand then I'd have put them in that for more like an hour. Until they're springy to touch anyway.

Once done take them out and cool them on a wire rack.

I deliberately made a cake without any topping or decoration and just simply sprinkled some caster sugar over the top. Beetroot cake quite often has a chocolate element somewhere in the recipe but I really wanted the colour of the beetroot and its flavour to show through in the finished cake.

I was pretty pleased with it! Not as pink as I was hoping but you can clearly see the carrot and beetroot in there and it did taste great.

Anything that red must be good for you!

Ricotta

I had about 6 pints of left over whey from making a hard cheese and it seemed a shame to waste it. Having done this recipe now I will never throw away any whey ever again!

I heated it to just over 90 deg C and stirred in 20ml of cider vinegar. Proteins quickly began forming.

I ladled the curds into a muslin lined sieve and let them drain a bit before folding in half a teaspoon of salt and some wet mesophilic starter to add a bit of bite.

I let the bag of curds hang over the sink to drain for a few hours.

Once they had drained it was ready!

The hardest part of ricotta is deciding what to do with the stuff!

Hunan Sauce

I had some very positive feedback lately from my friends, particularly about the ketchup post. So I thought I'd show you what happened next...

Hunan is basically a hotter, spicier sweet and sour sauce. I'd just made the batch of ketchup and wanted to use some straight away somehow in the evening meal. So we had stir fry...

Ingredients
150ml White Wine Vinegar

2 tbsp Sake or Sherry

2 tsp Light Soy Sauce

4 tbsp Ketchup

2 tbsp Sweet Chilli Sauce

2.5cm Fresh Ginger

5 tbsp Soft Brown Sugar

4 tsp Cornflour

Chuck it all in a sauce pan (minus the cornflour), bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer for about 5 minutes.

Add some water to the cornflour to make a smooth paste and add it to the sauce to give you that nice sticky gloopy consitency you get from the takeaway. Simmer that away for another minute. I suppose you could let it cool and pour it into a sterile jar to keep for another day, but mine went stright onto the chicken as a cook in sauce.

The sauce is quite vinegary and has a reasonable amount of heat to it, but once I'd chucked the veg in as well that really mellowed it and it made for a really, really good sauce. Served it up on some egg noodles. This made just the right amount for 3 peoples' worth of chicken and veg.

A great example of Hunan cuisine.

Preserved Lemons

Without trying to give too much away, I have a recipe planned for the blog that I intend to use one of these in. Seeing as it's such a ridiculously simple technique I'm making my own. Look out for it in about 3 weeks time!

Ingredients

Lemons
Kosher salt

Cut the end off the lemon and quarter it lengthways, not slicing all the way through thou so as to leave it joined at the base.

Stuff it with salt and rub salt all over.

Squeeze the lemons tightly into a sterile jar so the juice comes out and covers the lemons. I managed 5 medium sized lemons in this 550ml jar.

See ya in 3 weeks time!

Bath Olivers

These were really easy! I was pretty pleased with how they came out too. Perfect with a bit of cheese and some chutney.

Ingredients


500g flour (I used bread flour because that was all I had)


25g butter


125ml milk


125ml water


1/2 tbsp dried yeast

I mixed the dried yeast up with a bit of the milk into a liquid. Then melted the butter in the milk. Once that was done I added the water and finally when it was cool enough (sort of luke warm/room temperature) I mixed the yeast in. I made a well in the flour and poured in the yeast mixture.

I mixed all that up into a smooth dough and wrapped it in some muslin (the recipe suggested a napkin but I had cheese cloth to hand).

After 30 minutes of proving it made quite a tight satisfying parcel.

Next job was to roll it out pretty thin and cut out the biscuits.

I arranged them on a baking tray and pricked them all over with a fork.

I gave them 10 to 15 minutes at 200 deg C (fan assisted). The mixture made 3 full trays and I could have squeezed another tray out of the off cuts if I had been bothered. The ones that browned a little more were the better ones.

Dr Oliver would be proud!