Norfolk Broads

It was a friend's sister's 30th birthday last weekend and a bunch of us hired a couple of boats on the Norfolk Broads for a little celebratory holiday. I figured that since they'd been nice enough to invite me along, I'd do something nice and make a cake in the shape of the boats we were hiring...

This was the initial design after learning that we'd be spending the weekend on a barge...

...except on further digging I found we were staying on something more like this so I had to go back to the drawing board with very little time left to make it.

Here's the basic sponge cake, all jammed-up and ready for the marzipan.

Marzipan layer added.

Iced and decorated.

In the end, the boat was small, cramped and very very warm at night. However the beer, boating and company more than made up for it, including the massive game of water-pistol pirates in small lake off the side of the main river, which the locals really weren't impressed with :-).

I also slightly overestimated the amount of cake for the number of people, so the leftovers were given to the swans that had been following us all holiday, but they weren't impressed either when it sank without a trace. Too much icing, maybe?

Lamb Chop 2

After going to Lamb Chop back in March, it seemed like a good idea to put our new-found butchery skills to use. Armed with a couple of pages of scrawled notes, some sharp Global knives and vague recollections of where to cut and in what order, we bought a whole lamb carcass from Borough Market and hauled it back to my flat. It took most of the day to prepare, but the end result looked pretty special laid out on the kitchen table. See for yourselves below...
Step 1 - cut the neck (scrag) off to cut into chops later.

Next, cut the whole carcass into three primal cuts. Cousin matt is demonstrating "The Forsythe" in the background.

My flat isn't temperature controlled like the processing plant was, so spare parts have to kept in the fridge when not working on them.

A good way through the process you'll have a load of lamb joints like this. Note the tenderloins near the middle of the picture - these are the most tender parts of the animal and are amazing flash-fried and served with some roast veg.

A bit more hacking and chopping later, and the result is a vast array of chops and joints. We used Cousin Matt's mincing machine to mince the offcuts.

Waste-not want-not. We used the bones to make a few pints of fresh stock. The end result was about 16kg of meat for £160. That's about the same as regular supermarket meat, but ours is certified organic Salt Marsh lamb from Rhug Farm in Wales, instead of anonymous prepacked produce.

FL Edge & Son - butchery course
Rhug Estate - butchers stall at Borough Market

Orange Cheesecake

Everyone knows how to make a cheescake, right? I won't bore you with the details then, but here's a few pictures of one I made...


Biscuit crumbs! I eschewed the traditional rolling pin and plastic bag technique in favour of a food processor. Boooooooring...

Mix with some melted butter, then press into the bottom of a greased cake tin.

Mix up some cream, philadephia, a couple of drops of vanilla and some other magic ingredients, then pour them over the buscuit base. bake in a bain marie until it wobbles very gently when rocked.

Most of the way there now, but not quite finished yet. The grains in the topping are orange zest, in case you're wondering.

The finished cake. I decorated it with some tangerine pieces, and made a syrup from sugar, water and some juice I squeezed from a couple of oranges.

Food porn!

Lamb Chop

Inspired by an episode of River Cottage where Hugh Fearnly Whats-His-Face gets a life-long vegetarian to butcher down a whole lamb, I recently visited a meat processing plant in Norfolk with Cousin Matt to attend an amateur butchery course.

Once the novelty of wearing a protective chainmail apron and glove wore off we knuckled down and spent a few closely-supervised hours butchering a whole carcass down into the primal cuts, then into joints and finally preparing them for a real butchers shop display.

We made copious notes on the train home to prepare ourselves for a bit of home butchery later in the year, although after spending a whole day in a meat locker I started to feel a bit queasy about halfway home. No mishaps, but it was a close call... There's some links at the end of this post if you want more info / contact details.


Cousin Matt suiting up into his protective chainmail apron. They're quite heavy although you get used to them pretty quickly.

The first primal cut removed from the carcass.

Skip forward a few hours and the carcass is reduced to a table full of joints and chops. Nom nom.

FL Edge & Son - butchery course
Rhug Estate - butchers stall at Borough Market

Gingerbread Ambulance

Rachael's working this evening (yep - New Year's Eve), fixing all sorts of drunken injuries at the local A&E, so I offered to make an A&E-themed cake for her and her colleagues to make things a little more bearable. I wanted to wire up a woo-woo siren and some flashing blue lights to a push-button on the cake board but I was told that might be a little bit near the mark...

Here's the model I based the cake on. It's a Mercedes Sprinter in case you were wondering. And no, I'm not an ambulance nerd - I had to look it up :-).

I like to draw my cakes before I start baking so I know what I'm trying to make (even if the drawings are a bit "industrial"). It sort of helps me to keep it in check if it starts going a bit weird half-way through.

To make the gingerbread, gently heat an unholy concotion of brown sugar, butter and cream. Stir until fully melted and combined.

Mix the dry ingredients - plain flour, baking powder and some ground ginger, then mix it into the treacle. I like to add a bit extra ginger so it has a little kick to it. Once it's all combined you have to work quickly as it will slowly harden as it cools.

Roll the mixture out into sheets about 5mm thick, cut them to shape and then bake them until they just start to darken around the edges. I'd made some templates for the individual parts so I cut them to shape before I put them in the oven. However, they spread slightly as they cook so I trimmed them up again when they came out. Again - work quickly because they harden very quickly as they cool down and you'll end up cracking the pieces if you're not careful.

Once the pieces have cooled, glue them together with a thick icing. I had to trim a couple of pieces down more so they all fitted together properly.

I made a chocolate sponge cake to mount the ambulance on, which also meant it would go further.

Christmas Dinner 2009

Last year me, my brother and my cousin cooked Christmas Dinner for the family. It went down pretty well so we were allowed to do it again this year. We took the safe option last year though, so we thought we'd mix it up a little bit this time around. We kept it traditional, but added some interesting twists.

The main centrepiece was a multi-bird roast - a grouse inside a poulette inside a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. It was pretty gruesome work preparing it, but the end result was unbelieveably tasty.

This was the starting point for the multi-bird roast, all bought from Borough Market a couple of days beforehand.

First step was to fully debone the birds since we're wrapping them inside each other. I left the bones in the legs and wings of the turkey so it held some of its shape.

The leftover bones. Gruesome, although they made an amazing stock to use in the gravy - even my vegetarian brother tried it!

Next, we stacked the deboned birds up biggest to smallest with a layer of stuffing in between. Yeah, I know - right now this doesn't look much better than the piles of bones.

Finally, wrap it all up and sew the skin together on the turkey. I.. I'm still not sure I really want to eat this.

However, after adding a bacon lattice and cooking for about 7 hours it suddenly looks pretty appetising. Fortunately it also tasted pretty amazing so it was worth all the effort.

Not to be outdone, Cousin Matt also cooked a joint of beef to perfection.

Sourdough Starter

So I was reading Wikipedia and somehow I ended up on a page about sourdough, and how the main ingredient is a living culture (some of which can be decades old in the right hands). I figured it'd be quite cool to have something like that hanging around as a fridge pet so I decided to make some.

It's started by making a flour and water mix which is left to grow natural bacteria. You can kickstart the process with a natural booster - in this case a bunch of red grapes from the local Turkish newsagents on Mare Street.

Give them a quick wash to evict any grubs living in them, then (and this is where it gets weird) stuff them into a stocking so you can remove them from the dough easier later on.

Mix up some strong white bread flour and water - I'm starting to think I should have probably sifted the flour here so it didn't end up quite so lumpy.

I *definitely* should have sifted it *before* mixing.

Add the grape stocking. It doesn't look very promising right now, but I'm really hoping it will sort itself out over the next few days...

A couple of days later I came home to this. Those bacterias have been busy little mischief-makers. The question now is: what to do with it?