Wherefore art thou, boneo?

Two years ago, we took Barney to his first puppy class. A rather tightly-wound woman pulled a little bag out of the pocket of her quilted jacket, explaining that she only gave her poodle puppy organic liver treats she made herself. I whispered to Séan ’If I ever start baking for my dog, shoot me.’ Well, I’m still here. He’s a very kind man.

This isn’t something I tell everybody. A visit to Unconfidentialcook’s blog, with her daughter’s charming recipe for pupparoni pizza, has nudged me out of the closet, or kennel.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’m going to tell you I first made these for the Dog Christmas Party in our park. I know. While I was making chocolate crackle cookies and chorizo sausage rolls to share with the human revellers, I found myself eyeing the larder – a big bunch of parsley, a dried up end of Cheddar, half a bag of spelt flour. Before I could stop myself, Doggie Breath Bones were born.

One particularly blustery morning last December, a couple of dozen people and even more dogs assembled by the ponds for mince pies and carols. Rachel even brought a camping stove so we could warm up with mulled wine. Food and gossip were shared, bones were handed out.

Suddenly, I understood how the Pied Piper felt. Grateful, often drunk, friends sometimes say my cooking makes them drool. On this occasion, it was true. I was ridiculously, pathetically touched by the dogs’ seal of approval. Ridiculous, as they’re hardly discerning. Between them they have been responsible for the ingestion of many socks, several shoes, bits of vacuum cleaner, cat litter, sofa cushions, ipods, mobile phones, countless remote controls, money (they’re not fussy, they take cheques, cash, credit cards – that’ll do nicely) and enough Lego bricks to provide Battersea Dogs’ Home with a sizeable extension.

I’ve cooked for lots of happy people but Jess the Great Dane, Linus the Beagle, Gomez the Basset, Polly the Labradoodle, Tigger the Toy Terrier, Duffy the black Lab, Elliot the Cocker Spaniel, Malcolm the Schnauzer and the rest of their cheerful, unruly gang are perhaps my least knowledgeable (though that’s debatable) but most enthusiastic audience. They loved them. I hope your dog does too, but let’s not tell anyone about it, shall we?

Doggie Breath Bones

Parsley is very good for digestion and sweetness of breath. Apparently.

Makes about 32 bones

A big bunch of parsley, about 120g, finely minced, stalks and all
1 large carrot, grated
60g Cheddar, or whatever cheese you have left in the fridge, grated
3 tbsps olive oil
300g wholemeal flour- I used wholemeal spelt
2 tsps baking powder
130-200 ml of hot chicken stock or water

Preheat oven to 180C/350F/Gas mark 4 and line a couple of baking sheets with baking parchment.

Stir together the parsley, carrots, cheese. Trickle over the oil – at this point it looks like a rather attractive salad. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour and baking powder. Tip the parsley mixture into the flour and mix everything up with your hands until well combined. Gradually add half of the stock or water, mixing until you have a nice dough – you may not use all of the liquid, you don’t want it to be too sticky. Knead it together gently with your hands, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and roll out until it’s about 5mm thick. Cut them out with a 4-5cm pastry cutter (ok, so by now I have invested in a bone-shaped cutter. This means that I am officially barking). Knead the offcuts together, roll them out and cut them out too.

Bake for about 25 minutes until the biscuits have browned and hardened a bit. Cool on a wire rack. If you have a tall dog, make sure the rack is on a high shelf. Stored in airtight tin, they’ll keep for quite a while.

Crybaby, it’s cold outside…

Well, that’ll teach me. After getting so skippity-la-la last week I was practically pinning on bunny ears, spring has come decidedly unsprung. When I took Barney to the park on Saturday, I couldn’t wait to let him off the lead so I could cram my hands firmly into my pockets and perfect my optimal tipping into the wind, hail and rain angle without the encumbrance of an excitable terrier.

As children, when my brother and I moped around the house feeling sorry for ourselves on rainy days, our indomitable grandmother would say ‘What you need is a good floor to scrub’. A while ago, I scored a stack of 1940s British and American women’s magazines in a junk shop and I thought a few hours flipping through pages of wartime make-do-and-mend would jolt me out of my gloomy state. And give me an excuse to ignore the shamefully grubby kitchen floor.

This is what I learned:

Making ‘Spanish Fillets of Fish’ involves tipping a tin of tomato soup over the wretched little fillets and baking them in a hot oven until they submit, or the war is over, whichever comes first.
To make woollens look ‘gay and smart for spring’, sprinkle them with powdered magnesia.
How to knit my own powder puff.
Two ounces of bones will keep one hen happy for half a day.
‘Putting a very little curry powder into French dressing causes folks to do likewise.’ Really? A diet of powdered egg and Spam must have made people very suggestible.
‘Hot soup on cold days produces that tropical feeling.’ Why splash out on a couple of weeks in the Seychelles when a few cans of cream of mushroom will do the trick?

I found a recipe in American Ladies’ Home Journal from February, 1941 for something called Delaware Crybabies. How could I not make these intriguing cookies? I have no idea why they’re feeling so miserable; they’re filled with the good stuff – butter, dark, fudgy sugar and spices. They also contain New Orleans molasses. This is pretty low on the ground in Stoke Newington and the nearest thing I could scrounge from my larder was Golden Syrup. Not ideal, but I was sealed up in the house like an oyster in its shell at this point and the lady was not for shucking.

By the time I sat down to start planning the menu for my friend Paula’s wedding in September, I was thawed out and happy. You will be pleased (or horrified) to know that no floors were scrubbed in the course of this cheering up.

Delaware crybabies
These were pretty good – cakey, spicy, fragrant – good with coffee, even better with ice cream. If anyone has a recipe for Macaroon Melancholia or Passive-Aggressive Peanut Butter Cookies, do get in touch.

I’ve listed the American cup measures used in the recipe here and given metric equivalents. For the rest of the recipes on my blog, I thought it would be helpful to give a link to the fantastic metric/imperial/measuring cup conversion chart and glossary of cooking terms on Nigella’s website.

Makes about 60 cookies, so you’ll probably need to bake these in two batches

1 cup (160g) light Muscovado or brown sugar
1 cup (225g) butter, melted and cooled
1 cup (320g) New Orleans molasses (or Golden Syrup – I used 280g Golden Syrup and 40g black treacle, as I ran out of the golden stuff)
2 eggs, beaten
4 cups (530g) plain flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp grated nutmeg
½ tsp salt
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 cup (225ml) boiling water
1 cup (100g) pecans, roughly chopped
1 cup (140g) raisins

Line three baking sheets with baking parchment. Preheat the oven to 190C/375F/Gas mark 5.

Mix together the sugar and butter then stir in the molasses or syrup. Beat in the eggs. In a separate bowl, sieve together the flour, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. In a small bowl, dissolve the bicarb in the boiling water and add in two parts to the buttery batter, alternating with the flour. Stir in the raisins and nuts. Drop tablespoons of the batter onto the sheets – about 5cm apart as they spread a bit – and bake for about 8 minutes until golden and puffed up. Allow to cool for a minute or two on the sheets then put onto a rack to cool completely.

Remembrance of cakes past

On Sunday, we went to Columbia Road Flower Market . It was so crowded, it being both gloriously, unexpectedly sunny and Mothers’ Day, I swear that at one point in the crush someone was trying to remove my kidney.

I jostled through the bouquet-toting masses (or should that be, massive) to Carl’s stall where I buy my cut flowers each week. His rows of jewel-coloured tulips, ranunculus, hyacinths and anemones looked tempting as an old-fashioned sweet shop and there, right in front, yellow and fluffy as day-old chicks, were armfuls of mimosa.

Mimosa’s sweet, clean, slightly briny smell always pulls me back to the Easter when I was 13 and staying with Laure, my French exchange. Each morning, I unwrapped myself from the cool linen sheets and stumbled in inky darkness to the windows. I opened the heavy shutters and the brilliant light of the South West flooded the room. The scent of the mimosa tree below was the first thing I smelled each day. Heady stuff for the girl from County Durham.

As you know, food was not the most important thing in our house. And yet there I was, cheating on my parents by falling so willingly, so wantonly in love with this home where dinner formed its beating pulse. I was the first to volunteer to collect the bread from the bakery, wandering back along the dusty path with the baguette under my arm, nibbling a few crumbs from its end as I went. I happily whisked vinaigrette for the salad, carefully measuring out three spoons of olive oil to one of red wine vinegar and just the right amount of mustard. I watched carefully when, after dinner, Madame threw together a chocolate cake for the following evening’s dessert.

A few months ago I found the little exercise book I’d filled during my trip. I wanted to hug my sweet, earnest 13-year-old self when I read this:

‘I wonder what I really will do! And I wonder what the me of 5 years time will think of this dreamy 13 year old who has many ideas but whose main fault is lazyness. Next term at school I will try to work harder. I say that every term.’

Intoxicated by my mimosa-madeleine-moment, I thought I’d make Madame Sarrodie’s chocolate cake and it was just as good as I remembered – rich and fudgy, with a crispy top, like the best brownie. I did tinker with it a bit (I can’t help myself), replacing margarine with butter and adding a little vanilla and salt.

I was also inspired by a great article by Xanthe Clay in The Telegraph on how to make killer brownies. In her quest to create the perfect, dense interior and crackled top, she gleaned a great tip from American Queen of All Things Chocolate, Alice Medrich. She advises taking the brownies out of the oven and immediately plunging the tin into iced water to stop the cooking process. I wanted to try this with my cake and was all ready to go, the sink bobbing with ice cubes, when I remembered I’d used a loose-bottomed tin. I managed to stop myself just in time, but if you use a simple cake tin, or next time you make brownies, do give it a go and let me know how you get on.

Madame Sarrodie’s chocolate cake

80g unsalted butter, plus a little more for greasing
180ml whole milk
125g dark chocolate, about 70%, broken into small pieces
175g caster sugar
3 eggs, separated
150g plain flour, seived
½ tsp vanilla extract
A good pinch of salt

Cocoa or icing sugar for dusting if you like

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas mark 4. Butter a 22cm, loose-bottomed cake tin then lightly dust it with cocoa.

In a saucepan over a low heat, melt together the butter and milk. Remove from the heat and add the chocolate. Leave it for a minute and then beat until smooth. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each addition, then add the vanilla and salt. Next, gently fold in the flour until just combined.

Beat the egg whites until stiff then gently fold them into the chocolate mixture with a spatula or metal spoon. Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it. Leave on a rack until cool enough to handle, then remove the tin and cool completely before cutting. You can dust it with icing sugar or cocoa if you’re having a fancy day.

TIP
When I’m baking chocolate cake, I dust the baking tin with cocoa rather than flour – you get the non-stickability, without the whitish floury film which spoils the look of your cake.

LICKED
Most sweet things benefit from a pinch of salt, and when I’m cooking with chocolate, I love to use this beautiful vanilla sea salt from Halen Môn , in Anglesey, Wales. It’s good, in very small doses, with scallops, too.

Highly SPRUNG

I was in Devon yesterday. The lanes were speckled with primroses and two-day-old lambs wobbled on unsteady legs in the fields. Back in London, the trees are dusted with blossom and the fat buds on our magnolia are just ready to burst into pale pink, starry blooms. My God, it’s spring.

On my kitchen counter, I have a bowl of beautiful lemons. I wanted to make something as sharp and fresh and sweet as the season. These thumbprint cookies fit the bill – perfect for a CSI convention, or just for a solitary treat, sitting in the chilly sunshine with a cup of tea.

Lemon thumbprint cookies

If I don’t have a jar of my own lemon curd, I use Duchy Originals – so deliciously, exquisitely lemony, it’s almost enough to make me into a monarchist.

Makes about 36

225g unsalted butter, room temperature
225g caster sugar or vanilla sugar
2 egg yolks
Finely grated zest from 3 medium-sized, unwaxed lemons
2 tbsp lemon juice
¼ tsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp salt
280g plain flour

6 tbsps lemon curd

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas mark 4. Line a couple of baking trays with baking parchment. Beat the butter and sugar together in large bowl until light and fluffy then beat in the lemon zest, lemon juice, vanilla extract and salt. Next, beat in the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add half of the flour and stir in gently, then add the rest of the flour until it forms large pieces – be careful not to over work it or the cookies will be tough. Gather dough together gently with your hands until you have a smooth ball.

Chill the dough for 15 minutes in the fridge then roll it into 2.5cm balls. Place the balls on the baking sheets, about 2.5cm apart as they’ll spread a bit. Use your thumb to create deep little wells in centre of each ball. Bake the cookies until they’re firm to the touch and slightly golden on the bottom, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from oven then immediately fill each little well with a bit of lemon curd. Transfer the cookies to wire racks and cool completely.

TIP
This is quite a sticky dough, so it’s easier to make the little wells in the cookies if you dip your thumb into a glass of water first.