My Mum and Dad made Marmalade and it was too good a blogging opportunity to miss. It’s a very British thing, Marmalade – that combination of bitterness and sweetness – but frankly, toast is unthinkable without it.
It’s not hard to make; just time-consuming. Oh and you need a preserving pan. A saucepan just won’t take the quantities. Have a go – you’ll feel incredibly proficient and your friends and family will love you forever if you’re kind enough to share it round…
Continue reading 'Mum’s Marmalade!'»
Delightful Bread Pudding – not to be confused with its richer cousin, bread and butter pudding – is another way to use up stale bread.
As my Grandad pointed out to my Mum, the addition of dried fruit, butter, sugar, eggs and spices makes it a very expensive way of using up cheap stale bread, but it is delicious and filling. Just the thing to plug the vast, bottomless hunger hole that inhabits the space between coming home from school and eating dinner.
Speaking of children, this is a really good recipe for kids to make – the tearing of bread is laborious, but passes more quickly with someone chatting to you, little hands are good at squeezing water from soggy bread and they can beat it half to death with a wooden spoon because you can’t overmix bread pudding.
Interestingly, Grandad’s recipe book lists the recipe as a hot pudding to be eaten with custard, but we never ate it this way; no, it’s strictly left to cool and cut into slabs to be devoured as you would a piece of cake. A very substantial piece of cake, mind you, but still that’s our eating method of choice.
Yes, it’s a good rainy day recipe and it’s decidedly Autumnal here now. Sad for us to bid farewell to hot days, but great for good traditional bread pudding!
Continue reading 'Bread Pudding'»
An unchurned, non custard base ice cream that seduces anyone who tries it, this is not a sickly toffee/fudge sweet ice cream but the more sophisticated cooked caramel type.
It’s a creme caramel flavour- sweet yet bordering on bitter- a flavour to savour in the mouth long after the final swallow.
I have made this recipe countless times but we had it as an accompaniment to Tarte Tatin and it was a perfect match. Ice cream rarely stands up to the flavour of apple and caramel, but this, being of the same caramel technique not only stood alongside it, but enhanced and shored up the flavour.
It isn’t slow to melt due to its lack of custard base which is another point in its favour- you taste the caramel quickly and it lingers.
This is a John Torode recipe that I ripped out of an old Olive magazine and he says of this recipe that it has been a favourite for years and it’s not hard to see why; it’s easy to make, requires no specialised equipment, melts beautifully and is utterly delicious.
As an aside, I was flicking through a set of Marguerite Patten magazines that I rescued from the tip (and only paid £1 for to the man there) and discovered that this is her suggested method for making ice cream, although she uses the whole rather than just yolk of the egg. That opens up the opportunity for differing flavours whilst maintaining the ease with which it’s made.
Try this one first though; dinner party, simple dessert or evening solace, it’s an outstanding flavour.
Continue reading 'Caramel Ice Cream'»
Comments (3) 
