Ode to Clotted Cream (A very lucky scone)

It's absolute crap outside.  What to do?

Bake yourself a batch of scones!  It makes everything better.  

Let's talk for a minute about clotted cream.  It was one of those things I would read about in Anglo-centric stories growing up and go, "ew, gross, what on earth are the Brits eating anyway?"  Clots are for blood, not for food.  Call anything "clotted" and you just don't have an appetite for it.

Don't let the name throw you.  This stuff is luxe, a true delight.  I found a brand called Rodda's which is excellent.  There is also some farmhouse stuff I get in my vege box from time to time that is quite good.  It's a specialty of the South West- Cornwall and Devon- and it is sometimes called Devonshire cream or Cornish cream.  

It's a richy fatty buttery cream spread.  The closest thing I could thing of would be Italian Marscapone cheese, but with a buttery crust.  

Traditionally, you serve it at tea time with scones for a classic "Cream Tea".  There is nothing better than slathering it on thick and topping with jam.  Or, if you are in Cornwall, you mangle this and put the jam on first and top it with the cream.  Either way, it is fantastically good.  English comfort food at its best.  

Scones are also one of those things that are super easy to throw together.  I usually make a batch for when we have guests, and pop them in the toaster whole to warm them up on demand.  I am a fan of berry scones, but it's still a little early in the season to go nuts and start baking with fresh berries.  What to do?  I used dried ones, reconstituted in hot water.  For this batch, I used a combination of strawberries and morello cherries.  You could go super-brit and use currants, or substitute frozen berries.  

Scones are not tricky, but working the dough as little as possible is key.  You don't want to kneed it like bread, but persuade it with the palm of your hand to hold together until it is just barely cohesive and not a moment more.  This will yield lovely airy flaky tender scones.  Work the dough too much and you'll get a lead puck.  

Recipe: Fruit Scones
yield: about 16 scones

150 g (3/4 cup) dried fruit
150 g (3/4 cup) butter, cold
500 g (2 cups) self-raising flour (or make it yourself with regular flour)
2 t baking powder
2 T sugar
pinch of salt
2 large eggs
4 T milk

If you are using dried fruit, soak the fruit in hot water to cover.  If using fresh, carry on!

Preheat the oven to 200c/400f.

Put the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in a bowl and whisk together with a spoon or a pastry blender.  Cube the cold butter and add to the flour; mix with your hands or the blender until it is crumbly in texture. 

In a small bowl, break the eggs and beat until blended.  Add the milk and beat until incorporated.  In the bowl with the flour, make a well in the centre and pour the egg mixture and begin to gently stir with a spatula, folding the drier outside edges in.  Drain the berries and add those once it starts to become cohesive, but its very important not to overmix.  If its looking very dry, add a splash more of milk.  

Turn the dough out on a lightly floured surface.  Pat it into an evenly thick mass, about 3/4 inch thick.  Use a biscuit cutter or a floured glass to cut perfect rounds out of the dough and place the scones on a baking sheet.  Now gather the cut-up dough, form another mass of even thickness and cut again.  Keep doing this until you have no more dough, or one giant lumpy misshaped scone at the end.  

Bake for 12-15 minutes, until the tops are golden and the perfume of baked goods lies heavy in the air.  

Serve while warm with clotted cream and jam or lemon curd and a pot of good tea.  

Boozy Oversimplified Banana Bread/Cake

I have a really complicated relationship with the Cavendish banana.  I can barely choke one down- the overly starchy soft texture that coats your teeth is just awful.  I know they are essential when on the trail- I can really push myself to eat half of one when my leg cramps start up- but I consider the banana more enemy than friend, even when it is magically making my cramping mucles feel like new again.

And don't get me started about artificial banana flavor. 

Somehow, banana in baked goods is really pleasing- any rage or anger about bananas pretty much melts away.  I realize it's the un-ripe yellow-skinned banana that is repulsive to me.  When the skins turn black and the innards turn to mush is when I come to terms and actually like banana.  It's rather a crap time trying to eat one in the leaky state, but the sweet, heady ripeness that borders on rot is just hedonistic.  

This is why I generally have a bunch plus a handful of loose bananas in the freezer- I love a good 'nana bread.  I've played around a bit with different versions over the years, and this is really the simplest thing to whip up in the kitchen.  I found that I don't like walnuts or dried fruit or anything else to roughen up the bread.  Feel free to add to your heart's content- about 60-100 grams of walnuts or sultanas would do nicely if you are into that sort of thing.  The recipe that I've adapted from the most comes from Nigella Lawson.  She soaks dried fruit in rum before adding it to the cake.  I took it one step further and added a shot directly to the cake.  I'm not a rum drinker and rarely have it on hand, so I reach for the giant bottle of scotch from the shelves of the duty-free shop.  

Finally, last summer while I was hiking across the Lake District on the Coast to Coast trail, I stayed at a great B&B.  It was a renovated farmhouse with bits of the ruined abbey down the street "borrowed" in the building process.  They had a fabulous breakfast spread and correctly identified banana bread as banana cake.  It has eggs, flour, and sugar in it.  Sounds like a cake to me!  Yet still, we insist on calling it bread either out of habit or stubbornness or misguided attempts to sell this as healthy because it's filled with banana goodness, and to sneak in a slice for breakfast without hesitation.  

Also:  cream cheese.  It's the best thing for this.  

Recipe:  Banana Bread  

1oz shot of rum or whisky

175 grams (1 1/4 cup) white flour (I have mixed in some wheat flour in mine)

2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

125 g (1.2 cup) unsalted butter, melted, plus a bit more for greasing

150g (3/4 cup) sugar

2 large eggs

4 overripe bananas, peeled and mashed into a puree 

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or the seeds scraped from half a pod)

Preheat the oven to 170c.  Grease a loaf tin, and then line with parchment paper if you feel the need.

Put the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder and soda, salt) in a medium bowl and sift together.  In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar and beat until blended.  Add the eggs one at a time, and then the pulpy mashed bananas, vanilla and booze.  Once a homogeneous mass, add the flour mixture a little at a time until it is blended.  

Scrape the bowl into your loaf pan.  Bake in the centre of the oven for about an hour- a toothpick will come out clean and the house will smell of comfort and calories.  Let cool slightly and serve with a healthy wedge of cream cheese or clotted cream.

Rhubarb Ginger Crumble

It's springtime!  Time for ludicrously priced precious early gems to start appearing at the farmer's markets.  The best of which might be the lovely pale pink stalks of rhubarb.  

I'm fairly unaccustomed to paying for this stuff.  Growing up, it's one of the few vegetables that "take" to Maine soil and climate.  Like zucchinis, by mid-summer, you are paying people to haul this away from you.  We would walk down to the end of the road where a nice couple with a large patch of it would indulge us and send us back up the hill with an armful of ruby-pink stalks, me impatiently nibbling on the end much like I would later do with the baguettes in Paris.  Getting home, we would be allowed to have a small bowl with sugar in it, dip the chewed end to coat, and then chew as much of the ultra-tart rhubarb as bearable before returning to mash the chewed end into sugar once again.  Why yes,  I did buy my dentist a boat, why do you ask?

Most of the rhizomes would get chopped up and frozen as there was usually just too much to handle all at once.  The obvious choice for it was to be paired with strawberries into tarts and pies.  This is still just classic and a favorite.

I started experimenting with this tart vegetable that we treat as a fruit in recent years.  It works well in savory dishes- stir-fried with pork belly, made into a chutney and spooned onto roasted duck breast.  The tartness complements fatty and rich dishes like no other, the flash of pink gives dishes a cheerful boost.

I found a new favorite courtesy of Ginger Pig.  This is a fantastic (and fantastically expensive) high-end butcher over in Borough Market.  They raise all the animals free-range on their farm in Yorkshire and are famous for almost everything they produce (I find their homemade pies irresistible).  They have a nice (although much more meat-heavy than what I usually go for) series of cookbooks that focuses on charming farmhouse-rustic-chic cooking where I found a recipe for a rhubarb ginger crisp.  This was a dashingly good combination.  The rhubarb cooked down to be submerged in a deeply caramelized syrup of spice and sweet-tart that I couldn't get enough of, especially when you have a half-melted scoop of vanilla ice cream to lovingly mop away at with the topping.  We licked the dishes clean- a perfectly wicked preview of good things to come from the garden.

Added bonus: this would work nicely with lots of fruit combinations, so feel free to add some frozen berries that you might have lying around.  It also freezes quite well, so it wouldn't be inhuman of you to make a double batch and save some for a lazier day.

I share it with you here.  

Recipe:  Rhubarb Ginger Crumble
from the Ginger Pig Farmhouse Cookbook
Serves 4-6.  Takes about 15 minutes active time, 1 hour total.

125g (41/2oz) chilled butter, cut into dice
125g (41/2oz) plain flour
50g (2oz) ground almonds, or almond flour
50g (2oz) rolled oats
700g (1lb 9oz) rhubarb, cleaned and chopped into inch-long pieces with the tough strings peeled off
20g (3/4oz) fresh ginger root: peeled and grated with a microplane or diced finely
50g (2oz) unrefined caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180c/350f

Combine the butter and flour together in a bowl with a pastry cutter or your fingers until coarse crumbs form.  Add the almonds, sugar and oats and mix to combine.

Place the chopped rhubarb into an oven proof dish.  I am a bit poor in the baking dish department and used two, and then froze the smaller one for later.  You could use a pie or tart dish, whatever!  As long as all the rhubarb fits and you have a bit of clearance for the topping.

Add the ginger and the sugar to the rhubarb and mix the whole mess together.  Spoon the crumble mixture over the top.

Place the dish(es) on a baking sheet (this is pretty important if you don't want a smoky sugary syrup mess on the bottom of your oven).  Bake for 40 minutes, until golden brown and bubbly.

Let cool for a minute, if you can wait.  Molten sugar is not pleasant to be slinging around your kitchen!  Serve with ice cream (strawberry comes to mind, but vanilla was just grand) and a sprig of mint.