Orange Ginger Olive Oil Cake

People are going to think all I eat are cakes and desserts soon. People are going to think I look like all I eat are cakes and desserts; rolling about the place like a big, round cookie. But really, most of the time the meals I eat are simple and easy – salads, soups and what I call funny stove-top vegetable throw-togethers. There really are no boundaries with these sorts of meals. Last Tuesday night’s dinner was a fine example: Brussels sprouts halved, cooked in a tablespoon of oil and a knob of butter then two diced tomatoes thrown in, salt and pepper, fresh thyme and cubes of stale bread. The bread had been sitting on the kitchen table for a few days so I diced it up before I could think too carefully and threw it in with a “what the hell” flick of the wrist. Sometimes not thinking in the kitchen is a damn good idea; this dinner was very, very good.

The Brussels sprouts browned at the cut edge while the outer leaves softened into translucency and the tightly wrapped insides were sweet and toothsome. The tomatoes simmered down to a sauce, herbaceous and with a bit of tang. The pieces of bread, nestled amongst the red and the green, absorbed the sauce and the juices until almost cake-like in texture.

Occasionally I think people may want to read about these sorts of dinners; this funny, made-up on the spot sort of food. I could write about my mother and her funny, made-up on the spot sort of food. I think I learnt that brazen flick of the wrist motion from her. I love it when she says, while stirring a pot or searching through the spice shelf, “I have no idea what this is or what I’m doing, I’m just going with it.” I love that honesty in cooking, the thrill of being guided by instinct. Forget the recipe books for a while, I say, cook with abandon.

But then I bake a cake and it seems exciting and something of a revelation. The margin for error is greater in baking, I think, than simply throwing together vegetables and herbs in a pan. When a cake emerges from the oven golden and perfect there is a small sigh of relief and then a celebration to be had for this small victory. My kind of cooking, my week day throw-togethers, take place in the moment and without occasion so very rarely are they eaten by anyone but me. These meals are flavourful, yes, and healthy, yes, but they’re not pretty like a cake or uniform like a biscuit.

This cake, though, it’s a keeper. It has earthy, floral notes of olive oil and is sweetened with honey and fresh orange juice. The ginger and the orange and the honey; they go very well together. A honey sweetened cake is much more interesting than any white processed sugar counterpart. Honey feels balanced and produces a sweetness with a real flavour. Sugar is not a flavour. There are jubes of crystallised ginger in the batter and grated ginger throughout so there is a spicy warmth to the cake.

There appears to be a lot going on here – Orange! Ginger – ground, root, crsytallised! Olive oil! Honey! Wholemeal flour! But it works, perhaps it’s the wholemeal flours toning everything down a bit, maybe it’s the savoury of the olive oil. This cake is simple and honest. It’s wholesome, a quality I love in a cake. It feels approachable and user-friendly; it’s a scone cake, a Sunday morning tea cake, a snacking cake, a breakfast cake. It is not striving for centre stage or a grand feast, much like my on-the-spot dinners.

Orange Ginger Olive Oil Cake
I adapted this recipe from the Eating Well website – a very good reminder that sweet treats can be made and eaten well. I think this cake would almost be better with ground almonds instead of the mixture of plain flour and wholemeal. Let me know if you try this.

1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup mild flavoured olive oil
2 large eggs, separated
2 tablespoons freshly grated orange zest
1/3 cup fresh orange juice
1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger root
5 tablespoons chopped crystallised ginger
1 cup wholemeal flour
2/3 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

juice of an orange
1/4 cup icing sugar

Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Grease and line a 20cm round cake tin.

In a small bowl mix together the honey, olive oil, egg yolks, orange zest, grated fresh ginger and the crystallised ginger.

Into a large bowl sift the flours, baking powder, ground ginger and salt.

In a third bowl beat egg whites until soft peaks form, 1 to 2 minutes. Stir the honey mixture into the flours then gently fold in the egg whites with a spatula until the mixtures are well combined. Pour the batter into the prepared tin.

Check the cake after 20 minutes, or bake until golden in colour and a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Let the cake cool for 10 minutes in the tin before turning onto a wire rack to cool. Mix the orange juice and the icing sugar together and drizzle over the warm cake.

Skye Gyngell + Long Sunday Lunch

There was an open invitation to lunch at my flat last Sunday. The invite was worded something along these lines: “Harriet will cook. There will be food, the oven will be turned on, and Holy Crap, she will even make a trip to the market AND supermarket.” The occasion was so momentous it required me to refer to myself in the third person. I couldn’t quite believe I would enter my kitchen to do anything more than pour a bowl of cereal.

But it happened! I went to the market for fresh produce – even in the rain – enjoying the green of the spring vegetables. The people looked a little damp and and the market was quieter than usual but the vegetables looked fresh and bright. There is not a lot in the way of new season fruit at the moment – a few punnets of pale strawberries, early stone fruit yet to become juicy and fragrant and the last of the winter’s apples, their skins a little waxy from storage, but the vegetables are at their prime. Crisp asparagus spears, beautiful lettuce heads like open flowers, baby new potatoes, freshly dug, with their clear skins shining beneath the dark earth.

I wanted a simple Sunday lunch, one with easy ingredients, but one that still required actual cooking and preparation of food. I wanted to cook, to slowly put things together, to enjoy being in the kitchen. I planned my menu – a snacking sort of affair – with every recipe from Skye Gyngell’s book How I cook. This beautiful book is the latest addition to my cookbook shelf, a birthday gift from Ollie and Jason, so it is quite appropriate that Ollie was there to sample the first recipes.

Menu du jour:

Strawberries and grapes in a lemon ginger syrup
Pulled bread
Oeufs en cocotte
Lemon and poppy seed cake

I made the lemon and poppy seed cake first. Normally I avoid bagels and cakes and sandwiches with poppy seeds, preferring the stronger flavour of sea salt or herbs for savoury foods, and afraid of spending all day smiling with black dots between my teeth. But with poppy seeds on hand, I took a leap of faith, trusting Skye Gyngell’s recipe.

But a lemon cake should only be a lemon cake, I feel. The soft sweet-sharp of lemons is enough for me. It needs no crunch, or contrast in texture, no adjustment in any sense. The only crunch I like is the smallest shatter beneath teeth of a lemon juice and sugar crust.

I stand by my aversion to poppy seeds but if you enjoy this marriage then Skye’s recipe is light and moist, ideal for breakfast or afternoon tea. The cake is iced in How I Cook, but to pour a lemon sugar syrup over a cake fresh from the oven is the loveliest way to dress a cake.

Diced strawberries and halved red grapes in a ginger citrus juice were my own addition to the menu – a reminder to myself that fruit need not boring, or simply eat-in-hand. I sometimes forget that fruit, like many things, with the simplest of tinkering can be made better, can be made to sing.

The pulled bread is a recipe I am most pleased to have in my repertoire now, and to share here. Like this beer bread it comes together in a matter of minutes and is the ideal base for all sorts of extras – sweet and savoury. Cinnamon sugar woven throughout, or berry jam – sticky and concentrated in flavour – are ideas I’d like to try. Sun-dried tomatoes or black olives – strong and salty – would give this quick bread a little extra zing. Without these additions the bread is perfectly good; dense and with a good crust, it’s a mop-up-sauce, dip-in-soup, soldiers-in-eggs sort of bread.

Which brings us to our next course: oeufs en cocotte. I had been vaguely aware of this dish for a while, either known to me as oeufs en cocotte or baked eggs, I’m not too sure, but it wasn’t until I watched Rachel Khoo make oeufs en cocotte in tea cups did they jump from the periphery to the fore-front of my thoughts. Khoo used creme fraiche in her oeufs en cocotte, Gyngell, double cream. Possibly I went out on a whim, but yoghurt, strangely, was the link between each course of my Sunday lunch. I chose to use a generous dollop of thick Greek yoghurt in each teacup, atop buttered spinach, a few torn basil leaves and strips of prosciutto de parma (from Big Bad Wolf!).

The yoghurt cooked up beautifully, warm and salty and a bit like cottage cheese. Oeufs en cocotte is one of those dishes where the ingredients are so simple and so good in their natural state that it seems unlikely for anything overly wonderful to happen after 10 minutes in the oven, but that is probably why magic does indeed happen here.

Skye Gyngell’s Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake

The recipe calls for a 20x11cm loaf tin – I need a bigger loaf tin so made my cake in a 20cm diameter cake tin. Apart from the lemon sugar syrup I poured over the hot cake, and the choice of tin, this recipe is unchanged from the original. Perhaps half milk, half yoghurt would be a good idea next time, and lemon juice added to the batter.

115 grams unsalted butter
175 grams caster sugar
finely grated zest of 3 lemons
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
35 grams poppy seeds
275 grams plain flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
230ml whole milk
4 large egg whites

Syrup

juice of 2 lemons
2 heaped tablespoons caster sugar

Preheat oven to 170°C. Line a 20cm cake or loaf tin with baking paper.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and smooth. Add lemon zest, vanilla and poppy seeds, then sift flour and baking powder together over the mixture. Stir a couple of times, then pour in the milk and briefly stir again.

Whisk the egg whites in a clean dry bowl until soft peaks form. Fold a third into the batter using a metal spoon, then slowly fold in the rest of the egg whites.

Spoon the mixture into prepared tin and bake for 1 hour, or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. While the cake is baking mix the syrup ingredients together until most of the sugar has dissolved. Once the cake is removed from the oven pour over the syrup while cake is still in tin. Leave to soak in for several minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.

Cake best served warm.

Skye Gyngell’s Pulled Bread

This recipe was barely adapted from the original, save for an egg yolk wash and an extra scattering of rock salt on top before baking.

450 grams plain white flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
375ml milk

1 egg yolk plus a dash of water (optional)

Pre-heat oven to 220°C. Sift dry ingredients into a large bowl. Make a well in the centre and pour in the milk. Using one hand scoop the flour and milk around the bowl until a dough forms – the dough should be soft but not wet or sticky.

Turn the dough onto a well floured surface and knead lightly for a couple of seconds. Shape the dough into a long sausage, bend in the middle and loosely weave together. Make the egg wash by combining the yolk with a small amount of water.

Place dough on a baking sheet and brush egg wash over the dough. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes before reducing temperature to 200°C, then bake for a further 15 minutes. The bread should be golden on the outside and when given a tap with your knuckles should sound hollow.

Transfer to a wire rack to cool, but serve slightly warm with salted butter.

Skye Gyngell’s Oeufs en cocotte

Instead of a tablespoon of double cream in each ramekin, I used a tablespoon of thick Greek yoghurt placed on top of the spinach and beneath the egg. I also reduced by half the amount of parma ham, so 4 slices instead of 8, due to the size of my ramekins/tea cups.

200 grams spinach
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
knob of butter
a few torn basil leaves
4 slices of prosciutto de parma, or similar
4 large eggs
4 tablespoons thick Greek yoghurt
freshly grated nutmeg to taste
50 grams Parmesan cheese, grated

Pre-heat oven to 200°C. Thoroughly wash the spinach leaves and drain well. Place a large dry pan over a low heat and add the spinach. Cook briefly until the spinach has just wilted. Set aside until the spinach is cold enough to handle, then using kitchen towels squeeze all excess moisture from the spinach.

Place the blanched spinach in a frying pan with the knob of butter and heat through. Season with salt and pepper. Divide among the four ramekins then add the basil leaves. Place a dollop of yoghurt in each ramekin or teacup. Arrange parma ham on top of yoghurt, then a small grating of nutmeg. Crack an egg into each ramekin, and finish with a small amount of grated Parmesan cheese.

Place the ramekins in a roasting dish and pour hot water to come two-thirds up the sides of the dishes. Cook for 8-10 minutes or until the egg whites have set and the yolks are to your liking.

Lift the ramekins out of the bain marie and dry off. Serve on a plate with bread cut for dipping into yolks.

Serves 4.

Cuba Street Biscuits

My walk to university each morning takes me through Lambton Quay, Willis street, Manners Street and Cuba Street, the trunk line of Wellington. Lambton Quay at 8am is full of dark suits and high heels clipping on the brick paving. Men and women wrap their hands around take-away coffee cups, heads down, off to work. But on Cuba Street everything looks different. The sun is beginning to hit the top of the buildings at this time of the morning and the street is a patchwork of sun and shadow. On Cuba Street people drink their coffee indoors, some might even call this brunch.

I notice the people first of all. I smiled to myself when I saw the man who looked like he had stepped off the set of a Beatles video; he was bearded and had a certain swagger about him. He was eating a cupcake with mint blue coloured frosting which was falling through his beard. There was a man twirling and waxing his dreadlocks on a park bench. There is the sad looking woman who I imagined was beautiful at a point in her life, before whatever demons she now has took hold. The colourful hippies set up shop on a blanket selling their crochet hats and knotted bracelets. There are buskers – people are literally singing and dancing in the street. You might see men drinking flat whites from beer handles, or the American card trick guy, his black top hat visible above the heads of school girls gathered around him, or the woman who is dressed every day from head to toe in army camouflage.

I pass by the bucket fountain with its splish-splosh inelegance and clunky lack of grace. I walk past Matterhorn; the black sandwich board outside with a chalk drawing of a steaming coffee and an open packet of cigarettes appears a false representation of the top notch food served inside. Further up is Olive and Midnight Espresso. Then Logan Brown with its bright red door and Floriditas with their drooping lights and swirly wall paper: beacons of the Wellington culinary scene.

I look at the buildings now too. They took a while to notice, not because they aren’t beautiful – I think these buildings are some of the most beautiful in Wellington – but because we never seem to look up while we walk. So, look up, I tell you. I see a vast array of colours, the intricate details and a mix of past and present.

Near the top of Cuba street I look for the changing spaces. The new grafitti art, the new posters and footpath stickers. I watch every day as one shop begins to close down and a new gallery is built. Day by day I have seen this gallery space become whole – last week the floor tiles were unveiled and the walls are now a clean white.

As Cuba Street ends there is the Kreuzberg summer café. Their menu is titled Good Things and they sometimes have $5 Pimm’s cup during happy hour. I like that. The road here, for a long time, was artfully decorated in white paint splatters. Shooting drops radiated from a large splodge of paint. A paint can or bucket must have dropped from the construction site above. I would have like to have seen that.

Around the corner on Hopper street is the Supreme Coffee Factory. This is where my walk gets really good, for the air is filled with the most incredible scent. If the wind is right and its suitably early, the smell of roasting coffee beans drifts around you. It smells of melting chocolate, bitter coffee, burnt toast, baking biscuits and maybe a little bit of burning rubber. It smells hot and bittersweet and slightly acrid. I love it, it’s the high point of my walk, this smell.

During these autumn days, in the morning when the sun is low, I want to sit on the concrete wall by the Supreme Factory, near the electrician’s shop, the council flats and the abandoned bathroom showroom. I would sit there, not worrying about being late for class, because in this part of town, punctuality doesn’t matter. I would unwrap those biscuits you see up there. They have the air of an ANZAC biscuit, but with the heat of ginger and the sticky sweetness of dates and sultanas. They match the smell in the air, although, they would be equally well matched with a proper coffee, in a proper cup. But, hey we are near Cuba street, things are different here.

I’ve never been much of a biscuit person. My father makes a darn tasty chocolate oat cookie. Two batches are never the same but that is part of their charm. I like the idea of a biscuit – a single entity, everything you need, and everything that is good, in one spoonful of dough. And yet, I prefer cake, something which can be eaten with a fork and yoghurt or cream. Cake feels like more of an event.

But here are those biscuits. They have a bit of chew, a bit of crisp. It may seem like a lot is going on in these biscuits. But then, like Cuba Street, they just seem to work and to win your over with their slight eccentricities. They may very well become my biscuit of choice.

Date and Ginger ANZAC Biscuits

150 grams butter, softened
200 grams soft brown sugar
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup dessicated coconut
1 1/4 cups flour
6-8 dates
25 grams sultanas
1 tablespoon golden syrup
4 tablespoons warm water
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
sunflower seeds/pumpkin seeds/slivered almonds (optional)

Pre-heat oven to 180°. Line a baking tray with baking paper.
Cream butter and sugar together until smooth. Add ground ginger and beat for 2 minutes more. Add oats, coconut and flour. Mix through – it may be easier to use your hands at this point. Roughly chop the dried fruit. Place in a small saucepan with the warm water and golden syrup. Heat, stirring occasionally until just bubbling. Remove from heat and add the baking soda. Stir. Pour the hot fluffy mixture into the biscuit dough and mix well.

Spoon dough into walnut sized balls and place a suitable distance apart. Flatten ever so slightly with a wet fork. In the grooves from the fork sprinkle a pinch of sunflower seeds/slivered almonds/pumpkin seeds or a mixture of them all. Place in the middle of the oven for 10 minutes or until nicely golden. Remove from ovena dn allow the biscuits to cool for 5 minutes on the baking tray before moving to a cooling rack. They will feel quite soft but they crisp up as they cool.

Enjoy with coffee, in whatever form you take it, or tea. Or any other beverage!

A Simple Cake Base

 My mother is not much of a sweet dessert person. She enjoys the flavour of ginger, vanilla, lemon, raspberries and blueberries. If my mother has chocolate it is dark and bitter with cocoa. She would be perfectly happy with a strong piece of cheese, a few oat crackers and maybe a handful of grapes or slices of firm pear.

When it comes to cakes, simple is best. Fruits are the stars of these cakes: pears, plums, oranges or apples. They are very rarely big cakes, never the sort with a few centimetres of icing on top. They are of the understated flat variety, like wide discs. Perhaps with a drizzle icing, a shake of icing sugar, or nothing at all.

For my mother’s birthday last week I made Nigel Slater‘s English Apple Cake from his book, The Kitchen Diaries. This is perhaps my most loved cook book. It is simple in its progression through the year. A northern hemisphere year but easily translated. In February there is slow roast lamb with chickpea mash, a treacle tart, a recipe for sausage and black pudding with baked parsnips. In May there are orange and ricotta pancakes, a white bean and tarragon soup and salmon and dill fishcakes. The book is written like a diary, each recipe has an introduction; the inspiration for the recipe, or what occasion it marked. Some entries contain no recipe at all but are titled “A feast of plums” or “An extravagant supper of rare beef, red salad and cheeses.” I love that the word supper describes nearly every dinner dish in the book. Let’s have supper.

The English Apple Cake I made for my mother was perfectly fine. It was light and reasonably moist. The cake itself had the pleasing taste of a simple butter cake while the apples on top were slightly stewed and sweet all of their own accord. But I wanted something a little bit more. There is a reason why most apple cake recipes call for cinnamon, mixed spice, or ginger, or chopped dates, broken walnuts, or rolled oats and brown sugar; apple cakes are better with these flavours.

So I made another cake. The equal parts of butter to sugar to flour is a simple cake base to work with and embellish as you please. Apple and Ginger this time, perfect for a blustery autumn day. The warming smell of ginger and the sweet scent of apples was almost overwhelming. It was maple syrupey and slightly heady with spices. This cake was for our friend Jason on his birthday. We had a wonderful birthday dinner on Monday night: a Pegasus Bay riesling with blue cheese and brie to start, then Ollie and Jason’s famous roast chicken and this little cake for dessert with sloppy whipped cream.

We lit birthday candles, Jason made a wish, and then it was gone. This cake barely touched our plates. My mother (and Mr. Slater) would enjoy it.

Apple and Ginger Cake
Adapted from Nigel Slater

130 grams butter
130 grams brown sugar
2 eggs
130 grams plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon ground ginger, plus 1 teaspoon for apples
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 small knob of fresh ginger, finely grated
2 medium apples, un-peeled & diced
juice of half a lemon
2 tablespoons sugar, brown or white
1/2 cup roughly chopped crystallised ginger

Pre-heat oven to 180°. Line a small, shallow round or square tin of about 24 cm. Cream butter and sugar together until lighter in colour, about 4-5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time. Beat well after each addition. Sieve dry ingredients and stir through the mixture until just combined. Scrap mixture into tin. Set aside.

In a separate bowl toss together diced apples, lemon juice, sugar and the extra ground ginger. Sprinkle apples on top of the cake with the chopped crystallised ginger. Bake for 45-50 minutes until the batter is golden at the edges and the centre is no longer gooey.

Serve warm with thick yoghurt or whipped cream.

Rhubarb and Ginger

At the house where I grew up, behind our makeshift compost bins, was the most abundant rhubarb patch. Long, bright red stalks with forest green leaves flourished in the warm and rich soils of breaking down vegetable matter. A sink full of chopped rhubarb and water was a common sight on a Sunday night. While Mum prepared dinner, strips of ruby red bobbed about in the water, ready to be made into rhubarb crumble for dessert, or stewed rhubarb for our breakfasts, or a spiced rhubarb cake for our lunches.

The rhubarb my parents grow in their current garden is doing well. A single leaf is about the same size as a folded out newspaper and they often break under their immense weight. Most of the stalk is a pale green with small flecks of red. They smell sappy and perhaps of a crisp Sauvignon Blanc.

I took three stalks and they sat on my kitchen table for a day or so before I thought what to do with them. A rhubarb and ginger compote; tart and sweet all at once, and then, a soothing heat resonates around your mouth.

This compote took less than ten minutes to make and brightened little bits and pieces all week -  with lemon cupcakes, as a topping on thick Greek yoghurt, on crusty sourdough bread like a sloppy sort of jam and atop my morning porridge.

Rhubarb is one thing I can never bring myself to buy; it is a vegetable to grow.

Rhubarb and Ginger Compote
Next time I will double the quantities, three stalks doesn’t make enough to eat out of the jar with a spoon.

3 stalks rhubarb-about 250 grams when chopped
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
a small knob of butter
a thumb size (approx) piece of ginger, peeled and finely grated

Place all ingredients in a medium saucepan and bring to a gentle simmer, stirring occasionally, until rhubarb is tender and compote begins to combine, about 10 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and leave to cool. The colour of the compote will vary depending on the colour of the rhubarb.

Cheat’s tomato chutney

It has been a while since I studied and I have forgotten how to do it. (Though, past exam results would question if I have ever known how to do it.) Instead of re-reading and re-writing notes on topics I will possibly never ever contemplate again, even in the deep, dark recesses of my brain, I find myself pondering the deeper questions of life… what to get my sister for Christmas? Why didn’t I buy that lovely biscuit tin in France? Why did my mother not have me learn French In-vitro? What would I do if I won Lotto? What to cook for dinner? Coffee or tea?

And today’s question: could I make tomato chutney from canned tomatoes, a cheater’s tomato chutney of sorts? Could I? Is this a dangerous thought to be thinking right now? I am having wondrous visions of my business communication notes splattered delightfully in a sweet, red, juicy sauce…

A tomato chutney, I feel, is one of life’s staple ingredients. If made with the right ratio of brown sugar to vinegar to spices it really is the most versatile of condiments. A good tomato chutney can liven any dish. Take the corn fritters I had for lunch: palm sized, crisp edged, buttery yellow fritters with hints of coriander and pieces of red capsicum, well seasoned and kindly re-heated in the oven, rather than the microwave which makes all the difference. They were everything a corn fritter should have been. But, I couldn’t help thinking a sweet tomato chutney with traces of spice and ginger could have made these fritters truly exceptional.

This chutney, this chutney, you will be eating from the jar with a teaspoon. It is more like a jam, but don’t let that hinder its versatility. I think I will eat this on toast with a generous spreading of butter, or in rice dishes, or stirred through cream cheese for a dip, or atop baked potatoes, or as an omelette flavouring, or in any egg dish for that matter, or with cold roast chicken in a sandwich, or simply with cheese and a cracker.

This chutney-jam is very easy to make. Just mix everything in the pot until it reaches jam-like consistency. As it shimmers and simmers away the colours begin to change to richer and darker hues, the colour of ripe chillies, or smashed berries.

Ideal for dramatic note-staining. Or eating by the spoonful.

Tomato Chutney-Jam

Adapted from this recipe and this recipe.

1 800g tin of whole peeled tomatoes in juice plus 1 400g tin.
330-ish ml of white wine vinegar (or cider vinegar, or just plain white vinegar)
1 cinnamon quill
4-5 whole cloves
1 head garlic, finely diced
1 piece of ginger about the size of your thumb, finely diced
handful raisins
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
pepper
generous pinch of chilli flakes (optional)

Pour the tins of tomatoes into a medium-large pot. Chop roughly with a knife. Using the 400g tin, fill 3/4 of the way up with vinegar, swirl to gather left over tomato juice. Pour into pot. Add remaining ingredients. Bring to the boil. Reduce to a simmer and leave uncovered for 90minutes, or until liquid has reduced and the consistency is thicker.

Take 2 preserving jars and sterilise in hot water or the oven. When jam has finished cooking, pour into jars and place lid tightly on top. Leave to cool. The jar lid should make a ‘pop’ sound as it seals itself.

If you plan on eating the chutney within 2-3 weeks, preserving jars are not necessary, simply place in fridge.

N.B If you would like a less sweet jam reduce the white sugar content to only half a cup.

Plum Jam Scones

A good friend of mine, Ollie, gave our flat a huge mason jar of plum jam made by his mother, Anna. It is the deepest purple colour, thick with glossy pieces of plum smudged into a set syrup.

I have a weakness for condiments: jams, preserves, chutneys, pickles, conserves, jellies, curds and fruit pastes. A happy fridge is one with the top shelf full of interesting jars. An eclectic collection to be paired with cheese, slathered in sandwiches, or, eaten straight from the jar. One day I hope to live in a kitchen lined with shelves of my own home-made pickles, chutneys and preserves.

Anna’s plum jam is worthy of higher things than jam on toast. In saying that, this jam has such a rich plummy taste it is like spreading the ripest, juiciest, hot-from-summer plums on to your toast.

I thought a good experiment could be to mix some plum jam through a scone mix. This turned out to be a rather nice idea. More interesting than date or sultana scones and delightfully versatile. As a breakfast scone, consider it already pre-jammed; though for a morning tea, a spoonful of cream and more jam creates quite a luxurious scone.

These scones are nubbly, as if made with bran. Take a bite and there are twice cooked plums melting into molten pockets. They are a bit rough around the edges: I’m a dollop of scone mix sort of girl, instead of a rolled-and-cut scone girl.

I think these scones could be improved by a sprinkling of demerara sugar on top before going in the oven. I am also curious to try adding ginger, powdered or finely chopped crystallised, to the mix.

Plum Jam Scones

2 cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cinnamon
4.5 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
50grams butter
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup thick plum jam

Pre-heat oven to 220°C. Sift dry ingredients together. Rub in the butter until the flour is slightly crumbly. In a separate bowl lightly stir the jam through the milk until the milk begins to change colour and the plum bits are broken up a bit. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and roughly mix.
Spoon onto a very well greased baking tray-the plum pieces do tend to stick.
Bake for 15mins until lightly browned on top.