Apple and rhubarb crumble...

We really are coming into apple season now and as there's a nice cooking apple tree in my parents' garden, we made good use of the apples while I was at home! There was also still a pretty big patch of rhubarb left, so we turned some into jam (but that's for another post) and made some into crumble.

I just used a classic crumble recipe - I chopped up the apple and rhubarb (three or four decent stems of rhubarb and a couple of big cooking apples) and layered it in a baking dish with some sugar and a couple of lumps of chopped stem ginger, and then the crumble was 8oz of flour and 4oz of butter, which I rubbed together before adding 4oz of sugar. I also threw in a large handful of oats and a couple of tablespoons of chopped nuts, and then the whole thing went in the oven at 180C for about 45 or so minutes, until the top was golden brown and the fruit was just starting to bubble up at the sides. We had it with custard but it'd be equally nice with some vanilla ice cream. Or with custard and ice cream!

Maple cake...

I've been down in Somerset for the last week, and you know what that means - lots of baking! It's so nice to have people to bake for, and there's a bit of a tradition in my family of making sure there's always cake available when people come to visit.

I'd already decided what to bake first - I'd stumbled upon the Baker's Daughter blog (which sadly doesn't seem to have been updated for a while, but there are some amazing recipes on there) via Pinterest, and as soon as I saw the Maple Cake recipe I knew it was one to try. Having spent four years in New England as a child, I developed a serious love of maple syrup, and it's a love my mum also shares, so I had to make this gorgeous cake for her.

The original recipe calls for one 9" tin, but we decided to bake it in two 8" sandwich tins and use the lovely maple icing to fill and top the cake. It worked really well and the sponge is beautifully light and delicate. It doesn't keep quite as well as an ordinary Victoria sponge, but the buttercream keeps the cake moist and it's so delicious it won't last long anyway - we devoured most of it in one sitting (although there were five of us...!)

I think it would make the perfect cake for an autumn birthday, too...hmm, wonder who's got a birthday coming up in the next few weeks...!

Finland Finland Finland!

I'm back from a fab five-day trip to Finland to visit my sister and her chap. It was great! I'd been to Helsinki twice before, but only ever in the winter, and they now live in Turku so there were all sorts of new things to explore.

My sister and I started off with lunch in Helsinki on Thursday before getting the train to Turku, which only takes a couple of hours, and then we all went out for dinner to a really lovely restaurant on a boat. All the food was local and seasonal and there were lots of traditional Finnish flavours - I had smoked salmon with beetroot mousse, white fish with tiger prawns and chive mash, and then the most amazing sea buckthorn pannacotta with spruce syrup and caramelised bananas. It was fab - I'm going to do a whole post on food later! We also had a few drinks in various bars around the town...and found the brilliant cow sculpture I've posted up there! Although we're a bit past Midsummer now, the evenings were still really light - this is midnight:

On Friday Suze and I had a potter around Turku - there's an amazing fruit and veg market in the summer, and an indoor market hall with yet more stalls selling just about everything you can think of. And we saw the building where they make the Declaration of Christmas Peace every Christmas Eve!

Then we went to a little country cottage on one of the islands of the archipelago near Turku, and the weather was amazing. We sat out in the sun watching the boats go past on the Baltic sea, we had a huge barbecue, and I went in the sauna!

And then on Saturday we went to another island and another country house, owned by my sister's boyfriend's parents. We went out on a boat trip around the islands, had another sauna, and ate a ton of gorgeous food. Lots of salmon and new potatoes and dill - fantastic!

It was a seriously brilliant little holiday and I loved exploring a bit more of Finland and seeing how gorgeously green it is in the summer!

Many mini muffins!

I'm off to Paris for the weekend for a hen do, and what do you do when you go to Paris? You bake things and take them with you. Because they really don't have nice baked things in Paris.

What? Oh.

Anyway, I made these mini blueberry muffins because we're all arriving later this evening and the plan for tonight is a girly night in with drinks and nibbles. The theme of the whole weekend is 'something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue' and the blue bit for tonight is the food and drink! Hence blueberry muffins. I used this recipe from A Bitchin' Kitchen, although I used buttermilk instead of sour cream because it turns out one carton of buttermilk is just about exactly 1 1/4 cups. Perfect! I used a silicone mini muffin pan (£1 from the pound shop near work!) and got 24 mini muffins with enough batter left over to make one normal-sized muffin, which may or may not have been eaten straight out of the tin.

I've also made yet another batch of coconut meringues - but with added blue food colouring! They're more of a very pale teal on the outside thanks to the gentle browning of the oven, but I think they're going to be nice and blue on the inside!

So I'll see you on the other side of the weekend with some photos from Paris! By the way, I'm on Instagram now, so if you fancy following me just search for alliesolskjaer.

Rhubarb and custard cake...

My parents still have tons of rhubarb growing in their garden, so while my dad and I were painting on Saturday afternoon, my mum made a rhubarb and custard cake for that evening's pudding. She used this recipe from BBC Good Food, and it was seriously lovely - definitely more of an indulgent puddingy cake than an everyday one, and it was absolutely delicious with ice cream. Mum thinks she'd drain the rhubarb more thoroughly next time, as it all ended up at the bottom of the cake, but then that's how it looks in the photo on the Good Food website as well, so I think it's fine. The sponge is incredibly moist, buttery and rich, so the tart pieces of rhubarb are perfect with it.

It was gorgeous straight from the oven, just as good cold the next day, and still perfectly lovely last night, so it lasts really well (if there's any left...!)

DIY and Father's Day...

I popped home to Somerset to visit my parents for the weekend, and lots of progress is being made on the new house! It's all coming together now - the gorgeous slate tiles for the kitchen and dining room should be fitted next week, the new bathrooms are done, the kitchen has new cupboard doors and beautiful granite worktops, and they've painted the dining room a lovely warm cream colour with new curtains. The sitting room was next on the list, and as I was home I became part of the painting party!

Wearing the most attractive and flattering outfit in the world, obviously...! I did all the cutting-in bits around the edges (very fiddly going round the beams!) and discovered a hitherto untapped talent for filling cracks using decorators' caulk. We spent the whole of Saturday painting, and it looks fab! The walls used to be a pale grey/lilac sort of colour, which was quite nice, but we didn't realise how cold and dark it made the room until the fresh cream paint went up.

An added bonus of going home for the weekend was that I got to spend Father's Day with my dad. My sister and I got him this brilliant mug with a biscuit dunkability guide (my dad does love a cup of tea and a biscuit!) and we put a little selection of biscuits in the mug so that he could conduct his own dunking experiments. We had amazing home-baked croissants from the farm shop up the road (they're absolute genius - they come frozen and you defrost them overnight before baking them to flaky golden perfection in the morning) for breakfast, and then (after a bit more painting) took Dad to our favourite local pub for a delicious Sunday lunch. I'm a bit knackered today after all that DIYing, but it was a lovely weekend!

Jubilee eating!

As you might expect, I've done rather a lot of cooking, baking and eating over the holiday weekend!

First off, I made coconut meringues on Saturday, to take to yesterday's barbecue. The thought of throwing away a load of egg yolks always puts me off making meringues, but now some genius people have come up with the idea of selling cartons of egg whites! Fabulous. I used this recipe by Miss Igs and it was perfect...

Then I was inspired to make some scones by a conversation I saw on Facebook! I used Delia's classic recipe, but having read on the egg white carton that you can use three tablespoons of that to replace a whole egg, I decided to give that a go, and I didn't have buttermilk so I just used almond milk instead. And the scones were lovely! I had one as a cheeky afternoon tea, with some caramel apple jam, and froze the rest (I got eight scones out of my dough rather than the 10 Delia suggests).

And then there was the barbecue itself! We had salads, beetroot and carrot slaw, grilled halloumi, veg kebabs (and some lamb bits and sausages) and I made baked falafel. Everything was totally delicious and we even had red, white and blue crisps!

Boats and Beacons...

In case you hadn't noticed, this weekend we've had the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations. I've had a lovely weekend doing all sorts of things - including going to see the Jubilee Pageant on the Thames (in typically British drizzle!) and going to another fantastic towpath barbecue before seeing one of the Jubilee beacons being lit in Mile End.

The flotilla of boats that made up the pageant included the Spirit of Chartwell, which had the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and the other senior royals on it, but there were also hundreds of ordinary boats involved - rowing boats, working boats, narrowboats, military boats, all sorts. We probably would have been slightly more comfortable and warm watching it on TV (and we'd have had a slightly better view!) but it was great to be there on the banks of the river with over a million other people.

The beacon lighting was lovely, too - I also went to a little street party in Ealing before heading off to Mile End, and both that and the beacon really felt like proper community events, which was nice after the huge crowds of the pageant. There were fire-dancers and flares, and then the beacon was lit and everyone sang God Save the Queen!

Coming up...a whole blog post on the weekend's food!

Holidays, random acts of culture and gluten-free pastry...

Crikey, I've neglected my blog for a rather long time! First I had a particularly nasty bout of tonsillitis, and then (on a happier note) I went off down to Somerset for a week's relaxation and pampering with my family. It was my sister's birthday last Wednesday so the week was packed with celebrations and days out and, obviously, lots of food and drink.

We went to rainy Lyme Regis (where my sister comprehensively kicked my bum in a hilarious moose-shooting arcade game...)

...and rainy Bath, where we went to see the Roman Baths and where I found the Oasis butterfly-print pleated dress I'd been lusting after for months HALF PRICE. I actually jumped up and down and squealed in the shop.

Then, on Friday, the weather suddenly improved and we wanted to get out and enjoy the sunshine. Reading the local paper the evening before, I'd spotted that Antony Gormley's Field for the British Empire was on display at Barrington Court, a mere 15 minutes or so from my parents' house. None of us had ever been to Barrington Court before, despite having lived so close by for 25 years, and I'm so glad we went! The house and gardens were beautiful, and the exhibition (which unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos of) really was quite spellbinding. According to one of the guides, the most common reaction from children on seeing the rooms full of little clay figures was 'Meerkats!', while several adults had remarked that it reminded them of concentration camps. It's amazing how different people react to things!

In other exciting news, the lovely girls from Domestic Sluttery very kindly asked me to do a guest post on gluten-free cookery, and I had a great time coming up with a truly simple and delicious recipe for gluten-free shortcrust pastry. My sister was absolutely over the moon with the curried potato pasties I made, and we're already planning lots of other ways to use the pastry!

And finally, here's a photo of the gorgeous Lily of the Valley that's growing right outside my mum and dad's front door!

Easter Food Fest...

I'm back from my Easter weekend in Somerset feeling absolutely stuffed - we made all sorts of gorgeous things to eat!

First off, my mum finally got the ice cream maker for her (beautiful) Kenwood Chef out of the cupboard - it was her birthday present from me and my sister last year, but she hadn't used it! It's really clever, with a bowl that you freeze, a larger plastic bowl, and a paddle attachment to complete the transformation from Chef to ice cream machine. We used this maple syrup ice cream recipe (we love maple syrup in our house thanks to the four years we spent in New England when my sister and I were little) and unfortunately we were far too excited about watching the ice cream churning to remember to take photos, so you can have a sneaky pic of the finished product instead!

We used more maple syrup than the recipe suggested, and rippled some through the soft ice cream before it went into the freezer to fully set, and it was amazing. Really smooth, really creamy and incredibly delicious!

We then revisited the chocolate pie I made a couple of weeks ago, but as my sister wasn't around we didn't have to worry about making it totally gluten-and-dairy-free. While shopping for biscuits we spotted some almond ones in Waitrose, so we used half almond biscuits and half ordinary digestives. Great idea! The chocolate filling was the same as before, except we used almond milk to carry on the almondy theme, and we decorated it with some edible gold leaf just to make it posh!

(Can you tell I was let loose with my mum's smart Nikon DSLR camera?)

And finally, we made a lemon drizzle cake - but it was a bit of a disaster! When it came out of the oven looking seriously misshapen and a bit odd, my mum remembered that she'd tried the recipe before, a couple of years ago, and had ended up with a weird cake then as well. But we sliced it in half, sandwiched the two halves together with buttercream to hide the wonkiness, and topped it with lemon icing, fluffy chicks and Mini Eggs. You can't go wrong with that, and it did taste far better than it looked! A bit of clever photography also helped...!

I'm not going to post the recipe, because it's so impossible to get right that it's been banished from my mum's recipe file, but at least we made it look half decent in the end!

Christmas 2011: Done

Once again, sorry for disappearing for weeks on end! I did mean to post a few times over the festive break, but as it was I had such a lovely time eating, drinking and being merry that I barely touched a computer! So here's a recap...

Christmas Day started like this:

...and continued in a similar vein all day!

Here I am looking very excited about my presents:

...and here's our lovely tree (Dad had a slight tree-rage incident at the garden centre when he turned his back for five seconds and someone else nicked the tree he and Mum had chosen, but we ended up with a gorgeous tree nonetheless!)

And finally, here's all the food...

Holiday lowdown...

So, I'm home after two gorgeous weeks in Portugal! I have a feeling tomorrow morning will come as a bit of a shock, given the fact that my daily routine has consisted of getting up at about 9am, having a leisurely breakfast outside in the sunshine, reading, shopping and lazing around.

I have quite a tan (unheard of for me!) and I even managed to get into swimming - only rubbish breaststroke, mind you, but I did at least half an hour's swimming a day, if not more! Unfortunately the sheer amount of food and wine I consumed outweighed the swimming (I honestly feel like I've put on about three stone!) but it was seriously lovely food and wine, and eating and drinking a vast amount is what being on holiday is all about, right?

And here are some of my favourite photos. I spent most of my time here...

...but we did occasionally venture out for the odd coastal walk in the evening...

...and to the old Moorish capital of the Algarve, Silves.

I also indulged in some traditional pasteis de nata...

...and there's always plenty of wildlife in our house!