The tyranny of Twitter

This is what I cooked for dessert last night, a bit of a treat after a busy, busy week.  Staff holidays and a full order book meant we all had to roll up our sleeves and get stuck in in the workshops.  A bit of baking was a great way to relax.

I was inordinately pleased with the result, this was some of the crispest, tastiest pastry I have ever made, so I could not resist posting a picture on our Twitter feed.
I am always (still) surprised and gratified by the response we get to our social media posts, after all, our food shots are quite simply what we eat at home.
The problem (ahem excuse me, don't pretend you're not flattered.  Oh, alright, the nice thing about this is....), is that when the photos turn out well, I frequently get asked for the recipe.
This is only a real problem when I have chucked together a few ingredients from the fridge or the cupboard, more in hope than expectation, and haven't measured anything.

However, this was based on classic recipes, so it's not too difficult to share with you, but I can claim no credit for originality.

Pre heat the oven to 180ºc
Grease a 10" prospector pan or a 10" pie dish

For the pastry shell
4 oz plain flour

2 oz butter

Water

Cut the butter into small dice and toss into the flour.  Rub together until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.
Add just enough water to bring it together into a stiff dough.

Roll out and carefully place into the prospector pan or pie dish, making sure there are no air bubbles trapped under the pastry.
I simply pricked it all over with a fork, but you can use baking beans if you prefer.
Pop into the oven for around 10 minutes, until it has dried out and is just turning colour.

Remove from the oven and lower the temperature to 150ºC

While the pastry cools, prepare the filling

10 fl oz single cream

2 eggs

3 dessertspoon sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract 

4 oz raspberries

Place the cream into a saucepan and heat gently, until just coming up to the boil.
Whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract together.
Pour the hot cream on to the egg mixture and continue whisking to dissolve the sugar.
Scatter the raspberries over the pastry base (it's OK to use frozen fruit and you do not need to thaw it first)
Pour over the custard and return to the oven for approx 25 minutes, until the custard is just set.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature before serving.

© Netherton Foundry 2017

www.netherton-foundry.co.uk

Inspired by a bee

We have some rampant lavender bushes in the garden, planted alongside some beautiful David Austin roses.  Together with the jasmine, honeysuckle and dianthus, these scent the warm evening air to an intoxicating degree and provide us with a summer long supply of cut flowers for the kitchen table.

Whilst providing an olfactory overload for us humans, they also attract all manner of bees and the sound of them buzzing their busy way around the stems is mesmerising and soothing.  As long as I can hear the bees I feel that whatever else is going on around the globe, in this small corner at least, all is right with the world.  There may even be hope for the rest of it.
The bees were particularly active earlier this week, when the sun was warm and the air still and it took ages to capture one of the busy bees bumbling around the flowers.

But as I waited patiently for the moment to click, I pondered the combination of lavender and honey and, having captured this fat fellow's picture, headed back into the kitchen to experiment.

Coming up with the idea of a honey based, lavender scented syrup, I decided on a denser style of cake, which would be drenched in the syrup and served as a dessert.
This also happens to be gluten free and you could quite easily double up the quantities and make a thicker cake, if you wished..... just turn the oven down by 20ºC and cook for a further 15 minutes.

For the cake
120g butter

120g sugar

2 eggs

60g polenta

60g ground rice

2 dstsp creme fraiche

For the syrup

100ml water

3 dstsp honey

8 lavender heads

Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC

Grease a cake tin and dust with polenta.  Tip out the excess (you can add this to the polenta you are weighing out for the cake mix).

Cream the butter and sugar vigorously, until very pale in colour.  Add the creme fraiche and beat again.

Add the eggs and mix thoroughly - don't worry too much if it separates.

Fold in the polenta and rice flour.

Spoon the batter into the cake tin and spread out evenly.

Place in the oven and cook for 20 - 25 minutes, until a skewer, inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean.

While the cake is cooking prepare the syrup.

Put water, honey and lavender in a pan, (our milk pan or 6" saucepan is ideal) heat slowly until honey is fully dissolved.

Bring to the boil and reduce by half.

Strain and set aside.

When the cake is cooked, pierce it all over with a skewer or fork.

Pour over the honey syrup, while the cake is still hot.

I strewed the top of my cake with lavender petals, thyme and hyssop, but a plain top is perfectly acceptable.

When the cake has cooled, gently turn out of the tin onto a plate and then invert onto your serving dish.  This pretty plate is from 1265 degrees north and the flower petals are from our garden.

 

Serve with a generous spoonful of creme fraiche and I reckon a few raspberries wouldn't go amiss.

A note of caution; flower petals are a very simple way of making your dishes look pretty and summery, but please, please make sure that the ones you pick are edible!!  

© Netherton Foundry 2017 ©

www.netherton-foundry.co.uk

A weekend on camp

We are privileged to be part of the worldwide family of scouting.
As leaders we experience a huge sense of involvement and family, a fair degree of responsibility and frequent exasperations, as much with the parents as the kids.
The meetings are markers in the week, starting the week with the young Beavers on Mondays and heading towards the weekend with Scouts on Thursday.  Life's too short for me to fit in the pesky Cubs too.
I will readily admit that some nights it feels like a real chore to drag myself out of the house and propel myself to our scout hut, all of 400 yards away.  But almost always this reluctance dissipates when greeted by the enthusiasm and expectation of a group of youngsters.
They are not all angels, they are not all future leaders of Scouts, councils, political parties or even criminal gangs, but they all have some potential to unlock.
A child who fell out of tree on one of our camps is now following in his aunt's footsteps and training to be a stuntman - you never know what skills you might pick up along the way, even if it's how to fall over.
The highlight of our year is the annual group camp, where all sections gather for the weekend to have fun and sleep under canvas.

Naturally this involves some organisation, and a good deal of winging it.  Whilst we never compromise on safety, we do have to have the flexibility to adapt the programme depending on the weather and the behaviour and demeanour of the kids.   It's no good plodding on regardless if they are clearly not enjoying something; they will only play up and make trouble.  Equally if something is going better than we could have hoped, we let it run.

The role of camp cook and "camp mother", as one leader dubbed it, falls into my willing hands.
I relish the opportunity to cater for a lot of people in a field with limited facilities. Mad.
We have made massive changes to our kit over the years, but the camp kitchen, for cooking and eating is a glorious old canvas marquee.  
We have progressed to pop ups for the sleeping tents;  there are no brownie points, excuse the pun, for making life difficult.
My cooking facilities comprise 4 gas hobs, with 2 mini if I'm being generous, micro if I'm being truthful, ovens.  That's very small, not microwave..... we are powered entirely by gas.
I do have some extra portable stoves, but there's not really anywhere to put them.
We also have Fiery Fred, a truly terrifying piece of kit.  Fiery Fred has been with us as long as anyone can remember.  He is a bitumen burner, as once used by road menders, a powerful gas burner that sounds like a rocket launch and which can boil a massive pan of water in the time it takes to sing a round of Ging Gang Goolie. Scary, but invaluable.

Last weekend, I made 1½ gallons of hot chocolate on Friday night, then offered 45 hungry, early morning risers a choice of 3 cereals, apple and orange juice and a full English of 2 sausages, 2 rashers of bacon, scrambled egg and baked beans for Saturday breakfast at stupid o'clock in the morning.  The dawn chorus was not the  melodic lilt of blackbirds and song thrushes, but a 4:30am alarm call from a rook colony.
This is where our frying pans came into their own. 4 pans on the go, 2 cooking bacon and 2 cooking sausages.  No need to add oil, superb heat distribution and a cracking all round performance.  Once I'd finished, we lit Fiery Fred, boiled a pan of water, sluiced out the pans and they were clean and ready to go again.

We have replaced biscuits with big bowls of fruit, to which everyone can help themselves and this disappears like snow in summer. Even allegedly fruitophobes get stuck in when they don't have to ask and there is no alternative.
By Saturday tea time they are all ravenous, a combination of lack of sleep, excitement, fresh air and adventurous activities are great for building up an appetite.
Saturday night tea was a chicken casserole with peppers, sweetcorn, tomatoes and onions that I had prepared in our cast iron casseroles at home, topped with "SFC", Sue's Fried Chicken -  a riff on Southern fried chicken, prepared at home in a 13" wok and heated/ crisped up in the micro-ovens.

All this was accompanied by dumplings fried in butter in our Netherton frying pans, a first for many that had them coming back for seconds.
Sunday breakfast is a repeat of Saturday, pans working overtime again.
Sunday lunch was barbecued burgers and the (few) leftover sausage and bacon from breakfast. You've heard of the cheeseburger, we did those; you may have topped your burger with bacon, we did that too and we also created the sausage burger - burger plus sausage (with ketchup, naturally) in a bun, so the sausage burger is now officially  "a thing", at least on Scout camp. That said, the group next to us were snacking on water melon and fruit kebabs ......... and all their Scouts were as clean at the end of the weekend as they were when they arrived. #missingthepoint

Scouts is a terrific opportunity for boys and girls, but it is also enormous fun and provides endless satisfaction for the adults who volunteer as leaders and helpers.
If you are interested, contact your local group and find out what's on offer and what you can do to help.

© Netherton Foundry 2017

www.netherton-foundry.co.uk