I had a baking day last week - I think it was Tuesday, and didn't even get started till 4 p.m. and took the last thing out of the oven at 7.30, which is most unlike me. I am a morning person.
This is Lemon Meringue Pie - now, I haven't made one of these in many a long year, but by golly, was it GOOD. Made with Duck eggs, the colour of the lemon part reminded me of those Sherbet Lemon sweets we ruined our teefs on back in the day. I have to say, this got demolished in fairly short order. I made it because we had LEMONS in our greengrocery order (imagine my disappointment the previous week when we found they had put Onions in, having heard me wrongly on the phone). Just 3 Lemons, and one of those was soft at one end, but I wasn't going to waste ANY of it, so I cut that to third off, put it on the glass juicer, and then wrung the rest of the juice out by hand! I managed to get some zest and the juice from the other half, so nothing went to waste. I also got lots of juice from 2 very elderly Lemons I found beneath the apples in the fruit bowl - I bunged them in the Popty Ping (Microwave) for a short while and they exploded with juice. I used my original Margeurite Patten cookbook for the recipe, as it cannot be improved upon, but there are doubtless many recipes out there on t'internet. I cooked it in a very slow oven for an hour to get a crispy meringue topping.
More Lemony-ess - a Lemon Drizzle cake, which went straight into the freezer to remove temptation! I used the recipe for Tangy Lemon cake from one of my Farmhouse Kitchen cookbooks:
Now, this is a complete and utter blast from the past which I haven't made for probably 20 years. It is Georgia Blackberry Spice Cake and was a failure - and I seem to remember it being Very Heavy in the past which, given it has 1 1/2 lbs plain flour and only 1 tspn, baking soda, is scarcely surprising! I will put the recipe, you can try it with (lots) more baking soda (8 tsps?), or use Self-Raising flour (what I'd do another time, post-Pandemic). It needs heating up in the Popty Ping just to get a spoon in it (for dessert, with cooked fruit). Having used all those ingredients, I am NOT going to chuck it. It came from an American penpal, whose full name now eludes me - and I have a note beneath my written recipe which says "this "receipt" is well over 150 years old and has been a well-kept family secret for much of that time". I can see why!!
Nigella's tip: To create self-raising flour from plain flour - for 150g/1 cup (5.3 oz) plain flour use half-teaspoon baking powder and half-teaspoon of bicarbonate soda (also known as baking soda).
GEORGIA BLACKBERRY SPICE CAKE
1 1/2 lbs flour, sifted
6 oz butter
1 lb sugar (I halved this and it's sweet enough)
1 tspn baking soda
1 tspn cinnamon
1 tspn ground cloves
1 tspn ground allspice
4 eggs, beaten
4 oz buttermilk (if you only have milk, add a tspn Lemon Juice)
1 wineglass Blackberry Wine (I used Hay Car Park Small Plum Gin!)
8 oz bramble jelly (which I had some home made jars of in the cupboard)
Add soda and spices to flour and sift. Cream butter, add sugar and beaten eggs. Add alternately flour mixture, buttermilk, wine and jam. Mix well. Pour into floured cake pan and bake at 350 deg.F/180 deg. C/ Gas Mark 4 for about an hour.
(Sharon, is this a recipe you've ever heard of?)
I'd be interested to see other people's results with a proper raising agent, but this is probably best left until we aren't running on a Pandemic supply system for flour - which is like gold dust in some places.
This tasty Toad in the Hole was super that night - with the batter, even when cooked, a bright primrose yellow from the free ranging ducks.
Right, off to go and listen to the Archers Omnibus and bake some biscuits.
Let me know if you can't read the print for the recipes and I'll type them up for you.
