forageuse

It’s really hard to get here right now.  If I’m not deep deep down in the business of biscuits for bread (crumbs), all I want to do is be in my own kitschen, and that leaves no writing time.  I’ve had a weekend off and spent the entire time in there, after excavating the market detritus in my bedroom, which took approximately one day.  I made a very intentional visit to the farmers’ market (exactly $110 to spend, and I came out with a dollar left that I regret not spending on two more pears) and then scavenged around for the rest of the afternoon, and found some very special things.  The recipes I attended to for the rest of the weekend are as follows:

• Bittersweet Chocolate and Pear Cake
• Lemony Chickpea Stir-fry
• Sour Cream [Black Bean] Enchiladas

Do you have any idea how amazing (and easy) it is to make your own tortillas?  I will save this for another post, as I still have some very dramatic photos from the day I bought my tortilla press, but I’ll just say that everyone has a tiny Mexican grandmother in them somewhere, and the smell of masa harina will activate her.  And maybe she won’t actually be tiny.

These are the things that serve as the gravity of my food lifestyle.  A presence in my own kitschen and at my favourite market.  It’s gotten to the point now where I have made some friends, and there’s something about that boy at the Growers coffee cart who looks like he played in LOTR that makes me a bit more interested in non-monogamy than I have been of late.  The market, for me, is what the art supply shop must be to those kids who do, like art and stuff – only I get to talk directly to the person who crafted this thing that I’m going to craft into something else.  There will never be any substitute for this, and no matter how much business Nice Biscuits ends up doing, I never want to stop sourcing things like eggs and fruit there.  I love the conversations that take place around what’s there, I love the regularity of its sociality and the way it gets my brains moving like only psychedelics can.

It’s harder to get there now that I’m actually behind a stall of my own, and I really have to work to keep that from slipping.  Just being behind a stall is not enough of a market experience, and if I don’t work to keep myself on both sides, chances are decent this business will not be pleasurable – I’m already feeling a bit of bitterness beginning to creep in.  There are most definitely some growing pains taking place for Nice Biscuits.

Anyway, this market was very much about fruit.  Everyone’s got cherries at the moment, and there was one seller who had three varieties, which meant you got to choose the one that was right for you, which isn’t an experience you often get with cherries.  Stone fruit is slowly coming in, but the first stone fruit of the season is pretty precious and I just have this instinct that they’re not quite ready yet.  Or maybe I’m not ready for them.  A few buerre bosc pears and, holy shit, someone had blackberries.  I wanted to turn them into this but it’s too late, they’re half-gone and they almost seemed to precious to bake with.  I only hope they come again, and cheaper, because I want to share those with other people.  I love the chain of craft and pleasure that would come from someone growing blackberries that I scavenged and turned into dessert which was then distributed to, oh, 16 lucky ducks at another market.  Proof that produce can travel far whilst staying local.

Kitschen scavengings were also a great success.  This is one of my favourite things to do.  Slowly slowly, I am building my dream kitschen, the colours and shapes and materials that are so pleasurable to use, everything fossicked from dusty shelves and junk markets and sidewalk rubbish piles.

A Bessemer frypan, tape measure for cake tin sizes and measuring pastry, perfectly-sized flat white cup, and the coolest way to distrbute change a market stall has ever seen.

I don’t really know much about Bessemer, but after using it once I’m keen to find out more.  This was dug out of a rusting granny cart at the quirky sidewalk second-hand dealer just before the corner of Brunswick and York in North Fitzroy.  Everything that’s for sale is either in the window or on the footpath, and you ring the bell to make a purchase.  I have no idea how she doesn’t get ripped off.  Or maybe she does, but she doesn’t care.  She’s got some amazing things, usually pretty reasonably-priced.  The thing I liked about this piece is that, unlike my cast-iron frypan, this one heats evenly, and it has that ridiculous (but actually really sensible) handle.  $5.

I am always looking for an even more perfect coffee cup than the one I already have.  Most of mine are much larger than the amount of coffee I make for myself every morning, but they are beautiful and pleasing to hold or have some other personal meaning.  These were $6 and the size is pretty much exactly sufficient for my homemade coffees, and for those ones I want at about 2:30 pm, half-full of coffee and half-full of hot milk.  They do not have a name that is easily understood by all parties.  You can’t go to a cafe without a cup you want to fill, otherwise you have to explain how far you want it filled and it annoys them and makes you feel odd and you never really get exactly what you want.  And the colours…

So, point is: foraging is my subsistence style.  Given the choice, I would so much rather dig around in various hovels and corners and open-air communities than find all of the things in one place.  I love the slow of that way of living, I love that it forces you to cover some ground and have conversations and to engage in this big, intentional collaboration in getting your needs met, rather than letting them be dictated by what’s on a shelf.

taking shape

If you’ve typed in the URL for wooden spooning, that probably means you’ve seen it on brown paper.  This is my personal food blog, and the product website for nice biscuits is coming soon.  I’ll link to it when it’s up, but in the meantime I hope you enjoyed whatever it was you had (unless it was the Snickerdoodles at Pollen, an improved and less sour batch is on its way, good on me for fucking tasting them before I sold them off, nice start to nice biscuits, eh) and there will be so much to feast your eyes and your face upon very soon!

I am swimming in applications and spreadsheets and supplies and tiny loaf pans at the moment, but will resume more regular flogging as soon as possible!  Am really missing writing about food-fer-pleasure. But also way excited about seeing this little gypsy bakery really happen.

this is what 85 mermaid cut-out cookies looks like

One of my more ridiculous undertakings of late was a supplementation of the Jessie Ngaio experience with biscuitry.  Her ‘Cold Salt Skin’ exhibition opened on Friday, and we thought ‘what better way to enhance the already-psychedelic mermaid artworks than to pump its viewers full of sugar?’  There was also wine.

I know that there was at least one coeliac in the room, and for me that’s enough to make the whole operation gluten-free.  Dietary accessibility is the coolest.  And really, no one should be able to tell that they’re gluten-free, because they should not taste like your archetypal crumbly dry rice flour-y mess that is what most coeliacs are fed.  I’ve come to trust the Gluten-Free Girl as a good starting point for GF translations of classic recipes, and while I think her flagrant use of sorghum flour does impart a very particlar flavour to the products of her recipes that doesn’t always please me, I am very grateful for access to her approach to gluten liberation and I think she’s doing good work.  And so I used her recipe for cut-outs, substituting half white rice flour and half almond meal for the sweet rice flour, which I have not yet been able to find in Melbourne.  The frosting is a standard buttercream.  Edible glitter was also involved.

This, despite being one of the most labour-intensive things I’ve done for someone else, was totally fun.  It’s not exactly my style – or at least I’d like to think so – but anything with repetition is something I can really get into for its more meditative qualities.  Also, pastry bags are good fun.  It became quite an assembly-line process with a very definable rhythm, and seeing all of these little creatures take shape was a trippy process.  I tend to think that about all baked goods that are made to look like living things.  Putting faces on gingerbread koalas at Each Peach is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done.  Try listening to Bjork’s ‘Oceania’ and looking out over a sea of mermaids.  Freaky shit.

But the best good fun of these was watching a gallery full of folks take pictures of them with their phones or pick up a tray of them and serve them to their fellow patrons.  They went quickly with few casualties and they seemed to please people.  Especially the person they were most meant to please.

I can’t help but feel that they look a bit Communist.

starting slow

If there is one thing which I hope will always ground me in regards to my thoughts and activities with food, one principle I always anchor myself to in whatever culinary projects I undertake, it is slow.  Presently I’m in a state of frenzy, trying to get all of my food business in order and to fit in a bit of food pleasure here and there.  And lots of people want things and that is an affirmation but it’s also still a little unsettling that this will probably take right off out from under me and I’ll need to work out how to handle that.  Right now it’s pretty speedy, so it’s almost silly to talk about slow.  But I’m going to do it anyway, because it’s important to keep it present in what I’m doing.

This morning I had a chat with one of these kids which, coupled with their kick-in-the-pants roast, was an exhilarating start to my day.  They’re about 8 days young I do believe, but their foundations are much older.  They’re grinding their own wholemeal, using eggs from a friend’s farm, picking out their own produce, and keeping things small and slow, which is a big statement to make on Brunswick St, where ‘turnover’ has a lot of currency.  They’re interested in the nutrtitional value of what they make – half of the operation has a background in nutrition and ingredients are chosen accordingly, which is one of the most exciting things I’ve ever heard.  But it’s done in a crisp, brightly-coloured way – not the dim green-and-brown nuts-and-seeds nag-champa’d hippie standard I associate with that perspective on food.  Their doors are wide open and I’m sure they seem to be making stacks of friends.  I’m so pleased that they’re in the neighbourhood and I hope I get to bake with them someday.  Their presence on Brunswick St makes me feel at least 50% better about having to spend time in Fitzroy.

I guess what I liked most about the impression I got from Pollen is that they’re just going to do what they want to do, and if it’s not what you want, they’re going to tell you where you might find what you want.  And this is the sort of thing that is going to foster that ‘organic and complex’ nature that Bookchin has been telling me all about.  A whole bunch of small and specialised people creating a network which, as a whole, satisfies the needs of a community.  This, I suppose, is what I appreciate about the culture of slow food, or of a well-organised market, or any sort of food infrastructure which is based not on competition but on community and cooperation.

And in the midst of all of this setup and branding and showing my worth to the markets I want to be a part of (which includes ‘researching the competition’), this is something I need to meditate on.  I need to offer the things I am most in love with and curious about, not just the things I know I can sell.  I need to specialise and perfect my own creations and learn to pass people on when what I do is not for them.   I need to choose what I make carefully and experiment with intentionality.  Those are things that I already know, but sometimes I just need to repeat the mantra.

biscuits for bread

Hello.  Apologies for my absence.  I am probably just going through that thing I always go through as a blogger, which is that things move strongly forward with great excitement for a certain introductory period, and then something pulls me away from the project and I have to really work to pull myself back.  It’s not because I’m not making things – I most certainly am, like homemade oreos and roo & stilton burgers and anything with coconut milk.

In the oven presently is the biggest thing I’ve ever baked, and I’m working with no recipe.  nice biscuits is my latest project, which sort of just started making itself before I had time to reign in its fantastical ideas and its proclivity for floral prints.  With any luck (and speed of bureaucracy, where ‘luck’ is a non-thing) I will be at a local farmers’ or craft market near you with my nice biscuits and my floral-print aprons and my puff n stuffs (which is what The Peach calls the cereal posted below).

I wasn’t really ever expecting to ’start my own business’, particularly with this product, but I suppose after doing some commissions and upping my baking stamina by habitually doing it for 8 hours a day, it is something of a natural evolution.  I am in love with the marketplace and I can think of no better place to be at 6 am on a Saturday morning.  I am far too noncommittal to ever open a brick-and-mortar place of my own, nor do I have any resources to do so, so a gypsy bakery seems perfect (though having a proper gypsy cart would be even better, one with a hatchback and fold-down seats and an ability to make left-hand turns without the grinding sound made by my current urbanmobile).  It feels relatively low-risk and sure I’ll be in far over my head at the beginning but I think after the first market season I’ll get to the happy place.

So until then it’s mostly a matter of filling out forms and selecting all of the aesthetic and practical elements of the task.  It’s very lucky that I love to fill out forms – like I really get off on putting letters in boxes and on blank lines – because there’s one for everything.  Sometimes there are even two.  There’s a lot of scavenging involved in setting up a market stall, especially since I want most things to be second-hand.  If you know anyone with a tent / marquee, big old glass jars that might hold biscuits, a cake dome (or six), or a trestle table they’re looking to get rid of or loan, I’ve got treats to barter.  Also if anyone knows any local (Melbourne or just Australian) artists who do rubber stamps, I’d really like to give them some business, and I won’t even try to trade in cookies (not everyone sees them as currency).  I’ve got pretty much no capital, so I’m trying to make start-up as recycled as possible.  Oh, and if you know that your local food shop gets produce in those styrofoam boxes with lids, tell me where it is or grab them from their rubbish area in the cover of night!  Oh please oh please.

The process of setup makes me think about lots of things, like ownership / intellectual copyright of the recipe, the economy of the market and how that’s maintained (organised monopoly is often the rule, and that’s an interesting question for sustainable economy), dietary accessibility, and whether people are likely to buy six biscuits in a pretty bag.

Also, I think I might need a stand-alone freezer.  Any one have one taking up space in their shed?

So stay tuned, I’ll try to be updating more but I have a feeling it’s going to get worse before it gets better.  But in the meantime I’ll hopefully be creating a small living for myself.  I am taking Christmas orders at the moment, speak to me or wait for the website to go up (hopefully over the next 30 days) and buy things so that you don’t have to bake things.

Here’s what I’ve been making latley: Moreos!  They’re more than Oreos, or maybe actually less, my ingrediens list is much shorter than theirs and I don’t even know where to get Riboflavin.  The recipe, should you like to make them, is here (gluten-free here but I didn’t follow her exactly, email me if you want the mods).

make yer own: breakfast cereal

I have never really taken to the concept of ‘museli’ – doesn’t matter how much apple juice you soak it in, oat flakes are for cooking.  Now, ‘museli’ is not the same as ‘granola’, which is something I can get behind, but in Australia it seems to be but a fledgling concept.  You can only get one or two flavours at the grocery store, and often they’re over-sweetened and not gluten-free (or at least not wheat-free).  In the days when I had access to Cinnamon Toast Crunch I most likely would not have ever considered making my own cereal, but we all move on from something sometime.

There are a few cereal blends that look really exciting to me on the shelf, but they’re always $15 for 750 grams and that’s goddamned ridiculous.  You also have no idea how long it’s been sitting in that bag.  I like knowing how old things are, so I can celebrate their birthdays.  This cereal is not likely to last long enough for you to celebrate ages of more than 5 or so days, but if you made it and then went out of town and then came back, it would still be there for you to crunch on.  Also, if you use a bit of cinnamon, it smells like you’re baking something heartwarming.

You are totally in control of what you want in here, which is fitting because there’s often just one ingredient that makes or breaks breakfast cereal for people – sultanas, desiccated coconut, whatever your peeve.  I am going to tell you what’s in my cereal, and you build from there.  I’ve seen quite a few homemade cereal posts in my clickings, the most recent of which was here.  The ingredients are quite different from mine, but the concept is so very basic and I love seeing people re-tell it over and over again with different words.

Preheat the oven to 160 C (320 F).

Combine:

1 cup puffed amaranth
1 cup puffed rice
1 cup puffed buckwheat
1 cup puffed spelt (my gut can handle this, but it’s easily lost for gluten liberation)
1 cup puffed quinoa
1 cup sunflower seeds
1 cup pepitas (pumpkin seeds)
3-4 dates, pitted and chopped
1 cup dried muscatels (in Melbourne you can get organic ones every weekend at the farmers’ markets!)
2-3 handfuls flaked almonds

Toss all of that together in a great big bowl.  At this point I also add a sprinkle of cinnamon.  It suits these particular ingredients and the whole blend is all the more toasty for it.

Now you think about oil and sweetness.  Grapeseed, sunflower, whatever is on hand and is either flavourless or lightly flavoured.  Olive or avocado oils seem like terrible ideas.  Almond oil seems like a good one.  But the best idea, I think, is coconut oil.  I have some around the house because I use it to make coconut and sugar body scrub – it’s pricey stuff but it goes a long way.  The flavour of it just blends in really nicely, it’s easy on your belly, and it smells really nice.  It’s a natural way to add a little sweetness and it has such a great, thick texture.

For sweetness you’re better with liquid, and my favourite unrefined syups are maple and agave.  I tend to use a bit of both in this cereal which brings those mellow, buttery notes of maple and that light bright fruitiness of agave into the overall flavour.  Neither are overpowering and I would say that the sweetest thing about this cereal is actually the dates, and I have found that the elements I use blend really nicely to create a subtle and very natural sweetness.  You could also, by the way, add a bit of vanilla to the liquid mixure.

So, when you’ve chosen these elements, combine 3-4 tablespoons of oil with 1/4 cup of sweetener.  This is your starting point.  If your oil is already in liquid form, just combine everything in a bowl.  Coconut oil solidifies in cool weather so I end up having to melt off my oil by submerging the jar in hot water.  Pour the liquid over your cereal and toss it all together like you would a salad.  I use my hands because I prefer to use them for most things.  At this point you can do a taste test to see if you think the mixture is sweet enough and, if not, adjust.  Or you could just determine that when it’s done (which is a better indicator anyway) and modify next time.

Line a baking tray or two with parchment paper – I’d really recommend not skipping this step.  Then lay out the cereal over the paper.  I wouldn’t fill it more than 1/3 full toasting won’t be as effective and you’ll have to do it a lot longer to get an even crunch.  If you need to, do it in batches.  Toast it for about 30 minutes, checking on it every 10 or so and stirring each time.  You can check more often if you like, but I think if your oven temperature is right you can do with only 2 or 3 checks.  Test it at 30 minutes and, if it’s satisfactorily crunchy, leave it to cool and then store in an airtight container.  Fucken delicious.

If the cosmos should will it, this might be available next week at the Peach, so if you really can’t be bothered, I totally can.

kitschen taxonomy

Developing my kitchen style is an ongoing project, fuelled by op shops and the Camberwell Markets and the reinvention of objects.  When you share space you’re also sharing kitchen aesthetics with other people, but I’ve been fortunate enough to share with people who either have similar desires or are happy for me to commandeer most of the design efforts.  We have the problem of clutter – so many bottles of things and so few surfaces for them.  The kitchen is always on the verge of exploding with them, but somehow the table is always clear.  I do not know how this is so.

I have begun to deal with order and aesthetics using three tools: a typewriter, scissors, and a gluestick.  It’s like I’m zine-ing my kitchen, bit by bit.  I love the way this looks and my little typewritten word-book is spreading over the kitchen slowly, week by week.  I enjoy very much knowing what things are.  I’m also including translations for things which are commonly used in cuisine whose creators are non-English speaking.  So far the only translation in the kitchen is ‘frijoles’, but I plan to overhaul the Indian spices very soon.

on the shelf

There are lots of little things that you meet along your eatings that just slightly alter the way you know food and the tools you use to think about it.  I suppose this is what I was referring to when I talked in my last post about ‘elevating your game’, but it’s not just your ability to create with food that is elevated – it is your inner sense of what it means, your ways of talking about it, of filling out the space it can prospectively occupy in your life.

I’ve never made something for more than 10 people at a time.  A project like that, of course, is gratifying, especially when you know all of them and you can see the way it affects them.  Last week I moved out of my sort of private sphere of edible influence and into something a little bigger than myself and my friends.  So now people might be eating things I’ve made at their desks with their tea or at the table with their oldest friend or maybe if they’re like me they’ve scavenged something special they will share with a very particular person and at the time that it’s shared all of their attention will be on it.  That, of course, is a grandiose way to think about it, and I’m also feeding gingerbread to children who are only ‘hungry for biscuits’ and any biscuit will do, and a whole bunch of other slightly less calculated needs-based transactions.  But just having the option to feed someone something without the silly formality of having to know them first is, for this moment, a bit of a rush.

Last week I put some things on this shelf, and was a big enough douchebag to then go back and take photos of it:

Things were pretty much all good and no disasters.  I hesitated to tell many people about this job until I was sure I would still have it after the first day.  There is some part of me which does lack confidence in something I know I can do because I have no ‘credentials’ or place in ‘the industry’ or any of that rubbish.  I think there is some element of my perception of this general ’scene’ built around the cafes in the northern suburbs, which align with my perception of the art scene in Melbourne, which is that it’s primarily a matter of networking and that your craft and passion and integrity is a secondary element.  Then again, what the fuck do I know?  But there’s also just the part of me that steps inchoate into anything which brings my heart out of its private place in my chest and sits it, uncaged, in some sense of ‘public’.  Pride and fear and all that shit.

Thankfully, I’m somewhere where I like the people I am feeding, I like the space in which I’m feeding them, and I like the process of creation.  There’s a fair bit of slowmance in it all.  I’m making my own apple juice for spelt blueberry muffins and grinding my own clove for pumpkin pinwheel.  There’s an appreciation for backyard produce and for imperfect, even downright munted expressions on the faces of bite-a-koalas.  Well, it’s permitted, if not appreciated.  The kitchen doesn’t feel terribly unlike my own, and that seems affirming.

And so there are some new foodscapes, and therefore some ideas about how to read and navigate them.  I’m thinking about roles in urban food chains and about mobile food units (MFUs) and about the recipe as a piece of intellectual property and the matter of accessibility and how many delicious things are easily vegan and liberated from the gluten regime and more and more about the relationships built around food.  Like the ones I already have, and how I can bring some of them to Each Peach and make them try something they’ve already had and love it again in a different place.  Here’s a slice of pumpkin roll, and the way it can be finished so perfectly for the picture.

the merits of mindful extravagance

Alright, so.  I’ve sunken into a diet depression and have come out on the other side, which should account for the void here.  I’ve really never experienced anything like this before and have always had the luxury of reasonable proximity to most of the foods I crave.  So I’ve mostly just been coping.  I believe that my lowest point was when I tried a dahl at a different Indian takeaway, opened the container to find that it was made with much tomato, and ended up crying.  But not til after I went out and bought the safe dahl from Singh’s, and some coconut chutney (which they say doesn’t have chili, but I don’t believe them) and gave the tomato dahl to my concerned boyfriend, who was then asked to leave.   Since then things have mostly felt better.

I think one of the upswings was this Strawberry Custard tart recipe, which reminded me that it is quite possible to do this indulgently (though it may take about 4 hours).  I have developed, quite extensively, a sensualist relationship with the food that I eat.  I dive into those flavours which are rich and peculiar and old and complex.  I am a junkie for the experience of digging into a layered or gradated sensory experience, and then for discussing it immediately after (and sometimes during).  And I suppose the charge I get from that has become quite sustainaing, energising, with a degree of sustenance that I can’t ignore or discount.  It’s a part of the way that I eat, something I’ve shared with so many people, and I think I’ve decided that it’s something I want to continue to integrate into future food philosophies.  (If any vocab kids out there have a word for ‘way of eating in a particular age’ – something along the lines of ‘culinary zeitgeist’ but much more humble – hit me.  I’ll give you credit and, if you’re local or easily reached by domestic post, I’ll bake you something.)  I think the food that I cook for others has taken on this quality because I want to give that experience to other people.  I want them to be tasting a first bite for a long minute.  And so, when this came along, there was much rejoicing.

First of all, holy fucking shit: vegan custard.  With no rubbish in it.  No refined sugar, no gluten – just maccas and vanilla and my first dealings with agar agar powder.  And this entire recipe is easily liberated from gluten – a coarse buckwheat flour, some rolled rice (though I’m told that’ll need a bit of soaking beforehand to soften things up, not so much for your tummy as for your teeth), and you have a vegan, gluten-free, decadent, earthy dessert that’s got no refined sugar and also did I mention fucking good vegan custard.

also, sex appeal.

I think I loves this lady a little.  She may very well be a tool for survival.  She is on top of her game.

Speaking of which, I do feel that this situation is serving to elevate my cooking / baking game, which is another thing that is preventing me from booting it.  I can’t walk away from things like that, and I start to enjoy the engagement of that challenge and the way it keeps me thinking and aware of what I’m doing (ingesting).  It feels a little like how it feels to open up a romantic relationship.  You wanna keep at it because you just keep getting better at it.

Another little stumbleupon that is sure to test me is a new baking project.  Once a week I’ll be baking at Each Peach, a local cafe that I’ve been crushing on for months now.  This is the closest northern-suburbs thing to what I would do myself if I were so lucky – totally homespun and handmade and so totally at someone’s house.  I’ll be using their recipes and bringing in some of my own, and I’m also being called upon to do some veganising.  When I bake for myself it’s rarely vegan, but there are lots of good ways to veganise, and lots of good reasons as well.  I love making superspecial treats accessible and I don’t subscribe to the idea that the obnoxiousness often associated with vegan politics (whether or not it’s a suitable stereotype) should preclude those folks from feasting lusciously.  Unless they’re also straightedge.  Then they’re clearly not interested in indulgence.  I’ve no time for that.

ginger cake

I have considered the possibility that Nigel Slater is the only man I will ever need in the kitchen.  I am gagging to be proven wrong, because I think boys are hot in the kitchen, but so far, no one has exercised such a perfectly flirtatious, pragmatic, and sensual balance of both culinary and textual sensibilities.  Also, he takes pictures. Well, I think he takes the pictures, because he talks about them without crediting anyone else with their existence.

I read Toast when I first started cooking seriously in 2004.  It’s a beautiful book, smart but still fluffy, and very sentimental.  He does the same sort of ‘I am very smart and practiced at my craft but I am also sensitive and sometimes make myself quite bare’ thing that makes de Botton appealing to me.  I’ve had The Kitchen Diaries (above) about six months now and it’s got some oil stains and smears of chocolate in its pages, and still I have many more messes to make.  He’s got the localvore / amateur gardener thing built in, and this particular book is a close look at how he eats, day to day, and that’s the stuff I want to know about.  It’s also just rich, and that’s how I like food to be.  His ‘value for simplicity’ is about really tasty, fresh ingredients, so I think miso is about the blandest he gets in the entire book.  I admire this.

It’s a very British cookbook, and I quite appreciate that.  It’s totally about what’s locally available, and it’s eager to appreciate traditionally British food items carefully.  I didn’t realise how much I appreciated spice cake until I made this for the first time.  It’s since become a staple.  So very crowd-pleasing, warm and comfortable and surprisingly light for the ingredients list, which is full of very heavy sugars.  The scent of it baking has a radiance to it that turns the whole house warm.

I repeat his recipe by the book, because he wrote this book so nicely, and the text is part of the experience.

Nigel Slater’s ‘Double ginger cake’

I am rather proud of this cake.  Lightly crisp on top and with a good, open texture, it is light, moist, and delicately gingery.  It will keep for a week or so wrapped in paper and foil.

self-raising flour – 250g
ground ginger – 2 level teaspoons
ground cinnamon – half a teaspoon
bicarbonate of soda – a level teaspoon
a pinch of salt
golden syrup – 200g
syrup from the ginger jar – 2 tablespoons
butter – 125g
stem ginger in syrup – 3 lumps, about 55g
sultanas – 2 heaped tablespoons
dark muscovado sugar – 125g
large eggs – 2
milk – 240 ml

You will need a square cake tin measuring approximately 20-22 cm, lined on the bottom with baking parchment or greaseproof paper.

Set the oven at 180 C/Gas 4.  Sift the flour with the ginger, cinnamon, bicarbonate of soda and salt.  Put the golden and ginger syrups and the butter into a small saucepan and warm over a low heat.  Dice the ginger finely, then add it to the pan with the sultanas and sugar. Let the mixture bubble gently for a minute, giving it the occasional stir to stop the fruit sticking on the bottom.

Break the eggs into a bowl, pour in the milk and beat gently to break up the egg and mix it into the milk.  Remove the butter and sugar mixture from the heat and pour into the flour, stirring smoothly and firmly with a large metal spoon.  Mix in the milk and eggs.  The mixture should be sloppy, with no trace of flour.

Scoop the mixture into the lined cake tin and bake for thirty-five or forty minutes, until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean.  Unless you are serving it warm, leave the cake in its tin to cool, then tip it out on to a sheet of greaseproof paper.  Wrap it up in foil, and, if you can, leave it to mature for a day or two before eating.

I can’t.  Someday I’ll try though.

My only modifications to this include extra stem ginger – even half a bottle if you think the idea of many tiny chunks of ginger in a warm cake sounds really appealing.  I love it that way and I think that sentiment is shared by the friends I feed.  I also leave out the sultanas, which I try to keep out of most things. I have discovered that I like this more in a bundt pan because it does have a tendency to be unevenly baked if you have any problems with oven temperature.

It goes quickly, but if anyone is so bold as to allow it to mature, which is actually a very mature behaviour, I’d love to know about it.

Hopefully a certain someone (she’s in the upper right-hand corner, baking for that one in the middle) will offer a gluten-free version, and I’ll be able to provide it here.