Creative Insomnia Part 2 / La Grande Eloise

As I've already mentioned, I had a few sleep issues last week which seem to be creeping in to this week too. However, as I also mentioned, I've learned to milk the most from those witching hours. In the dead of night, I feel like I've beaten something. Beaten myself? I'm not sure. But that pedicure I'd planned to do the following evening, the pile of delicate clothes that needed hand washing and was scheduled in for that Saturday morning right before sewing the hem back up on my trousers and washing the floor? Well it's all done now. So I've gained that evening spot and that Saturday morning. I can do whatever the hell I want with them. I could go to the early morning showing of a film, I could get to the swimming pool before the hoards of screaming children arrive and start dive-bombing the water. I live alone, which means that I can pretty much do what I want when I want anyway, but I do have a habit of imposing schedules on myself (okay, so I'll be home by about 5:45 which means that I will have showered by 6, I'll clean the bathroom and that'll take me to about 6:20, then I can paint my nails, 6:45, clean the windows, 7:00, read for an hour before the news which will finish in time for me to make a cup of tea before whatever's coming on at 8:45 that evening.) And somewhere in that dictator-esque schedule, there'll be some sort of food of course. Do I sound like a freak? Well I should do, because I am. My name is Kate and I'm a freak. Nice to meet you.

Anyway, all of that to say that the hours I'm awake in the middle of the night are free from schedules. It's gained time in which I can either get ahead in order to gain a chosen morning/afternoon/evening, or I can use it freely to do whatever I want without interruption by myself or anyone else. Sometimes, I just watch television until it's time to get up. Sometimes I mess around on Facebook. Sometimes I stare at the ceiling and think. Occasionally, I call a friend (those who will definitely still be awake for entirely more cool reasons, i.e. they just got home from a night out in the latest fun place to be.)

Sometimes..........I. Make. Cake.

This is called La Grande Eloise because it basically takes its shape from the Eloise cupcake recipe I did for Lauren's daughter a few weeks ago. This is the big girl's version though. This one's for you a bit later on Eloise, but in the mean time, your Mama can enjoy it on your behalf.

For the cake:

200 grams plain flour
150 grams caster sugar
200 grams unsalted butter, softened
2 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
90 grams dark chocolate
2 tbsp crème fraîche
*I've highlighted where the recipe differs from the cupcakes with italics

Preheat your oven to 190°C and grease two 7" cake tins, then line the bottoms with baking parchment circles.

Sieve the flour into a mixing bowl and add the sugar and baking powder. Cut the butter up into cubes and add to the dry mix. Mix together with your hands until the mixture is slightly soft and starting to blend together a little.

Melt the chocolate.

Add the chocolate to the mixing bowl and stir in with a METAL spoon (a wooden one will mess everything up.)

Add the eggs and stir in.

Add in the crème fraîche and stir everything again with a metal spoon.

Split the mixture equally between the two cake tins.

Place in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes, or until you get the clean-knife go ahead!

For the filling:

Follow the instructions as for the topping on the Eloise.

Make sure the cake layers have cooled before adding the filling and topping.

For the topping:

100 grams milk chocolate
2 tbsp crème fraîche
50 grams white chocolate, shaved

Melt the chocolate and stir in the crème fraîche. Leave to cool slightly before spreading it over the top of the cake and letting it run down the sides.

Sprinkle the white chocolate shavings over the top and it's ready for eating!

Creative Insomnia Part 1 / Rochers Coco

Last week, from Monday right up until Friday, I woke up at 3am every single night without fail and every single night without fail I couldn't get back to sleep again. I go through phases like this and learned many years ago to embrace them rather than fight them. The middle of the night is, in fact, a wonderful time to be wide awake. Everything is quiet and time feels sort of...suspended. It's the perfect time for reading, sewing (I'm currently making a fabric rug but won't bore you with the ins and outs until I have a finished product to show off) writing (except for this blog which I totally neglected last week) cleaning and also, of course, cooking. I think it was Wednesday night at 3am when I woke up with my first thought being 'desiccated coconut.' Yes I did. I really can't say why, but that's the first thing I thought of. So, upon realising that this night was going to go the same way as the previous two, I jumped out of bed and headed to the cupboard to dig out the coconut. What should I do with it? Make a coconut cake? No, all my butter was in the fridge and I'd have to wait a good hour for it to soften before being able to start. At this point, I turned the packet over and whaddyaknow? There's a recipe for 'rochers coco' on the back! Okay so it's cheating because it's not really a recipe of my own, but they were so good and so very quick and easy to make that I wanted to share it. I modified it a little because I was a little scared of how sweet they'd be so here's my version:

40 grams Acacia honey
125 grams caster sugar
150 grams desiccated coconut
30 grams plain flour
2 egg whites
1/2 sachet vanilla sugar

Preheat your oven to 150 °c.

In a small pan over a low heat, melt the sugars and the honey together until they form a smooth paste then take off the heat.

Add the flour and coconut to the sugar and honey and stir until you have a thick mixture. Mix in the two egg whites.

Take a teaspoon and place evenly sized blobs of the mixture on a greased baking sheet.

Bake for 15 minutes until golden.

Serve warm (but not straight from the oven, all that sugar and honey can and will take the roof of your mouth off...I found out the hard way by helping myself to a little stray blob) or cold.

Happy Fish update

This weekend, Felix had the great idea of adding a couple of chopped fresh tomatoes and a few shallots to the Happy Fish recipe. Just add them both in a couple of minutes after the salmon has hit the pan and continue as normal with the rest of the recipe. We ate it with rice and a salad of frisé lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumber and fresh figs and it was delicious.


* This dish tastes soooo much better than it could EVER look in a photo!

Layered Lemon Drizzle Cake

I've always loved making cakes at home with Samik but it is only recently that I've dared to really go it alone as far as baking is concerned. I was always worried that my little oven just wouldn't be up to the job, but so long as you have time on your hands, anything is possible with that little monster. I have to bake one layer at a time, but normal people will be able to just do it in one go. It doesn't bother me that much really, since it makes a whole evening out of the baking process and I get quite the sense of achievement as I assemble the whole thing and look at the fruits of my labour!


Lemon Drizzle Cake has always been one of my favourites. Generally, it is just a single layer with a sweet lemon frosting but I decided to thicken it up a bit and do a lemon cake Victoria Sponge-style. It's the simplest thing in the world, just a two layered sponge (with lemon zest) with a little buttercream filling and an easy-peasy frosting. Here's how:

200 grams plain flour
300 grams unsalted butter, soft but not melted (200 grams cubed)
250 grams castor sugar
50 grams muscovado sugar
100 grams icing sugar
3 tsp granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 tbsp crème fraîche
1 tsp baking powder
2 lemons

Start by zesting the two lemons. Once zested, juice them both and leave to the side. In a mixing bowl, put the flour, 150 grams of castor sugar (you need the rest for the frosting) and the baking powder. Add the zest and stir everything together. Add the 200 grams cubed butter and mix everything together with your hands until the mixture is soft and crumbly. Add the three eggs and the crème fraîche and stir in with a metal spoon until you have a smooth cake mixture.

Grease two 7" baking tins with butter and line the bottoms with greaseproof paper. Split the mixture between the two tins and bake in the oven for 30 minutes at 190°C.

Once you have removed the cakes, leave one of them in the tin and prod the top several times all over with a fork.

In a saucepan on the hotplate, bring the remaining 100 grams of castor sugar and the 50 grams of muscovado sugar to a fast boil with the juice of the two lemons. Keep stirring as it boils then turn down the heat for a minute or so before removing from the hotplate. Keep stirring for another minute or two until it is a slightly sticky, syrupy mixture. Drizzle the syrup over the cake still in the tin (with the fork prods!) and smooth it in with a knife, letting it soak into the cake.

Immediately sprinkle the 3 teaspoons of castor sugar over the top of the syrup and leave to cool until the top is set and 'frosted.'

In a small bowl, beat the remaining butter with the icing sugar until you have a smooth buttercream. Once both cake layers are completely cool, spread the buttercream on the flat side of the bottom layer then place the frosted one on top. Serve alone or with a spoonful of crème fraîche as a dessert.

If I don't dedicate this post to Flopsy he'll kill me, so...for Flopsy

Okay, I promise this will be the last Parma ham/goat's cheese/fig post for a while, but as I mentioned in my previous post, it's leftovers time again. So this evening I did some fridge-diving and came up with the following:

a bagel
a fig (yes, I've been eating a lot of these recently, there are too many good ones at the local market)
goat's cheese (see 'fig')
Parma ham (see 'goat's cheese' and 'fig')
ricotta
mixed leaves

...these things were made for eachother!

The thing about bagels is that they don't seem quite right when there's no cream cheese. You try finding cream cheese in France. I saw it once, in a bagel shop over in the 6th, in pots that you could buy and take home. The bagel shop near me doesn't sell it though which is too bad because I'm not getting in the metro and schlepping over to the 6th in this heat (despite yesterday's dreams of Autumn, today is a very unacceptable 29°C) in the name of a sandwich. And anyway, newly bought cream cheese for the occasion would not count as leftovers so what I've got will have to do.

Here goes then, with how I assembled this little gem:

Cut the bagel in half and toast.

Spread ricotta on each slice. Top with goat's cheese and put under the grill for a few minutes until the cheese has melted and bubbled a little.

In the mean time, tear up the Parma ham, slice up the fig and prepare a little honey mustard (easy enough, honey and mustard in equal quantities, stir around and there you have it!)

Place the Parma Ham over the cheese on one slice, place the fig on top of that and then cover with as much honey mustard as pleases you.

Top with a few mixed leaves and sandwich it all up with the other bagel slice. It's not cream cheese, but it's good.

Love Autumn

Autumn is my very favourite season for so many reasons. I love the seasonal fruit and vegetables, the colours of the leaves and the evening light and mostly, I love the temperature. I am very fair-skinned and the summer sun and heat really doesn't agree with me. I know that September 1st is still a few days away and that the temperatures probably won't drop to anything respectable (by my standards anyway) for at least a couple more weeks yet...BUT, in my excitement, I've already started on the soups.

Having done a lot of food shopping, a lot of cooking and a lot of eating this past week, I decided that the first half of the coming week was going to have to be all about leftovers. Since soups are the perfect way to use up vegetables that are perhaps past their best and I just happened to have four carrots waiting around in the bottom drawer of the fridge and a couple of apples that weren't quite crunchy enough anymore, that's what went in the pot!

Carrot and Apple Soup

4 good sized carrots
2 apples (any kind, mine were Pink Lady)
2 tsp of ginger (unfortunately I didn't have any fresh to hand, but this would be better)
1 litre of vegetable stock
2 shallots
1 clove of garlic, crushed
1 large tbsp crème fraîche
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Walnuts to serve

Finely chop the shallots and cut up the carrots and apples.

Sauté the shallots in a little olive oil then add the carrots and apples and sauté for a further few minutes.

Add the ginger powder, the garlic, a pinch of salt and a little ground black pepper. Stir as you sauté so that nothing catches or burns.

Add the vegetable stock and bring to the boil for 10 minutes.

Turn the heat right down, cover and simmer for an hour.

Take the soup off the heat and leave for 10 minutes before adding the crème fraîche and blending.

Serve with a handful of chopped walnuts.


*I just had a bowl of soup before posting and it was yummy!

Nothing to do with food, but while I was baking...

One of my several pet hates is crispy feet. I can't stand them. As soon as I feel slightly dry feet rubbing against each other under the covers I have to leap out of bed and moisturise them. This is yet another thing passed down to me by my mother and indeed her mother before her. Samik has always spoken with great affection and concern about feet with a look of real compassion on her face as she announces to me "Yes but Kate, your poor little feet. They carry you around all day for the whole of your life, you stub your toes, you cramp them into shoes, you tramp them around the swimming pool...your poor feet, they're really just trying to help you and we're all so mean to them." And I promise you, she speaks with real conviction. She really loves her feet, and a sweet pair of feet she has too. Always soft, always sparkly clean and lovely little toes that descend in correct size order.

As for my grandmother, well she broke her hip and wrist a few months ago and spent a long time in hospital. Gaga is 90 years old and still does her own garden, lights her own bonfires, cleans the house, sets the fire, cooks for whoever's visiting and so on. She was most upset to be out of order for such a long time. However, she did not let a mere hospital stay get in the way of her general upkeep. Samik took in her favourite moisturising cream and various other potions and Gaga saw to it that she was clean and polished every single minute of every single day during her stay. Her nails were painted, her hair was brushed. The day after her operation in fact, we went to visit her expecting to see her looking pale, washed out and a little dishevelled. No, she was beautiful. So pretty. She even made the baby pink hospital nightie look good. By the time I last went home, she was back in her own house and busying about as much as is possible whilst still a little incapacitated. Because of remaining swelling and soreness in her hip joint, it is hard for her to reach her feet so I offered to do her a pedicure. She slipped off her little slippers and presented me with the softest feet in the world. Feet that have been trotting about for 90 whole years, feet that chased a teacher down a corridor with a whip when the teacher unjustly accused her of talking in class and tried to beat her, which walked 3 miles to school each day and back and padded down the stairs in the dead of night to steal cakes from the pantry, feet which took her aboard a train to London in her late teens and danced the night away in a city she was just discovering then walked away from her first fiancé into the arms of a young serviceman on a train who would be my grandfather, feet that have been hidden from her sight four times by pregnancy and which trod the boards of bedrooms rocking her children and in turn her grandchildren...those feet! So much of her life was in my hands as I soaked them, scrubbed them, moisturised them and painted the dainty nails which are still in such good condition, that had it not been for other company, I could have sat there for hours and asked her to recount again all those stories of hers she told me as a child on her knee.

I look after my feet. I couldn't look myself in the eye if I didn't, silly though that may sound. Each time I see them looking a little worn and tired I think of my mother's little foot speech, of her perfect toes and my grandmother's dainty nails. I have no excuse not to take care of them.

So very early this morning, while these were baking away in the oven, I made the most of the pre-dawn quiet to sit down and perform my weekly pedicure. You don't have to spend loads in a salon to have decent feet, you just need to invest in a few essential products and set aside half an hour. Once you're done with the feet, you can follow exactly the same procedure for the hands and then voilà! your extremities are at least half near worthy of an admiring glance from a 90 year old lady.


Recipe for luscious feet

Wash your feet and make sure that they are thoroughly dry before using a Ped Egg or other such instrument to remove old skin.

Fill a washing up bowl with warm water and add a few drops of Weleda Rose Oil or Bio Oil. Soak both feet for 5-10 minutes, massaging the oily water in as you soak.

Take an exfoliating foot scrub of your choice (I use Scholl Foot Smooth Shower Scrub) and rub it well into both feet, working around the toes, the heels and the ball of the feet. Rinse in the oily water then shower them off with cold water.

Dry thoroughly.

Rub in something like Balm Balm Rose Geranium all over, again concentrating especially on the balls of the feet, the heels and around the outside of the big and little toes.

Treat your nails as you see fit, by pushing cuticles back with a cotton bud on a cuticles stick and then rubbing in nail hydrating cream, my favourite is by Flexitol (excellent results.) Leave your feet and nails to absorb the cream for at least an hour then paint a pretty colour!

The muffins were delicious.