It is my birthday and I will eat cake for breakfast if I want to

It was just a question of which cake.

Here is an example of the kind of recipe I hate, full of shortcuts like ready made shortcrust pastry - nah can't buy that in my local supermarket, Victoria sponge mix - nada - not in France!

So you take a quick and easy looking recipe like this one and you have to go back to basics with it and it becomes very very long winded instead.

But that was what I wanted to eat for my birthday breakfast.


BLACKBERRY BAKEWELL TARTS

So I started yesterday with picking 3 kilos of blackberries! - also not in this recipe I know, but blackberries are what I've got.

This is my waste not a drop way of using blackberries, which can be quite labour intensive not to mention painful to pick.  We had to squeeze in our picking between storms yesterday afternoon, than a quick run back indoors to light the Rayburn and get on with the cake making.

Start by making sure all the stalks, leaves and bugs have been rinsed off then throw all the blackberries into a large pan, pour over enough water to cover and then a splash more and start simmering.  I left mine for 30 minutes or so while I got on with making the shortcrust pastry.

SHORTCRUST PASTRY

125g plain flour
pinch salt
55g cold cubed butter

rub with your fingers to create breadcrumbs then using a palette knife start cutting through the breadcrumbs as you add 2 or 3 tablespoons of cold water.  

Work it together into a dry dough with cold hands, don't overwork it, you want it stay dry not become greasy, roll into a ball, cover with cling film and throw into the fridge for half an hour.

By this time your blackberries should have cooked down into a thickish stodgy mess but a complete sludge.
 I love my big witch's hat colander - I am sure it has a fancy name, but we call it the witch's hat, the tiny perforations let all the juices through but keep even the smallest pips out, and because it is metal you can bash the fruit against the sides to get every last drop out, not that you need to do this for this recipe, just get the majority of the juice out.

Drain the juice off into a large jug and keep the fruit bits to one side.

While the juice is still hot, add some sugar and stir well to dissolve it, no actual measurements here, just add sugar to taste - then decant into a couple of bottles and add vodka - well, every birthday girl needs a birthday cocktail!

Now take the fruit pulp, stick it back on a low heat and add sugar - again no measurements just add enough to make a sweet mixture.  You are not making jam so no need to watch the temperatures or anything like that, just stir until the sugar has dissolved.

While that is cooking away, take the pastry back out of the fridge and roll out on a floured surface.  Prepare a pastry case with butter and some flour sprinkled in, then add the shortcrust and bake blind for 20 minutes.

A top tip I read recently or saw on the TV, use tin foil instead of baking parchment when baking blind as it makes the pastry crispier instead of soggy.

So while your pastry is baking, and your fruit pulp is cooking, time to make the sponge.

VICTORIA SPONGE


As you can not buy this is in ready made packs here in France, here is a basic and easy recipe.

250g unsalted butter
250g sugar
4 eggs beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
250g self raising flour

Beat the butter and sugar together first, basically this means mash the sugar into the butter with a wooden spoon against the side of the bowl repeatedly until the mixture is soft and creamy, then add the beaten eggs, vanilla and flour.

As this is a bakewell tart and not a victoria sponge, now add the 50g of ground almonds required in the original recipe at the top of the page, ignore the additional egg asked for.

The resulting mixture should be quite dry and not runny.

Take your pastry case out of the oven, remove the baking beans and tin foil and allow to cool.  Use the space in the oven then to sterilise a couple of jars.

As you can see my oven is doing double time here sterilising jars having baked the pastry, and also has a couple of trays of roast patty pan squashes on the go too.  Did not want to waste the oven space so shoved them in quickly.

Why the jars - well we started with 3 kilos of blackberries, and even with having extracted the juice you can't put 3 kilos worth of fruit pulp into a bakewell tart.

Back to the recipe (wow I'm rambling today!).

Spoon some fruit pulp into the pastry case, add your sponge mix on top, then throw on a couple of handfuls of sliced almonds on top to finish.

Bake at 200°C for 25 minutes.

Then eat!

Oh yes and the rest of the fruit pulp, stick it in your sterilised jars ready to use next time as a pie filling.

My not so secret, secret addiction. (updated)

My name is Monika and I am a Rayburn-a-holic.

It started when we were in the process of talking ourselves into buying a permanent home in rural France as opposed to a fixer-upper to use in our summer holidays, in amongst all the mental bargaining and deal making we had decided on wood fired heating incorporating a stove and a means of meeting our hot water requirements.  The perfect solution was a Rayburn (ours is a no.3 built in 1953), with an integral back boiler, multi fuel so coal as well as wood, and a kitchen classic from the 1950s, right in keeping with a stone rustic farmhouse from the 1850s.

We bought the carcass of a Rayburn from ebay for 99p.  I still remember clearly the guy's face when we turned up with the Land Rover and trailer and he asked us how we thought we were going to lift three quarters of a tonne of cast iron onto a trailer and we replied that we were going to dismantle the Rayburn first!

The Rayburn we bought had excellent enamelling however it was pretty rotten on the sides and back, but the back boiler was in good order and it had all of its door handles, hinges, plate rack and stove tops.

So started the restoration.

We had the good fortune to be living about 50 miles from the home of Aga and Rayburn (a Rayburn being the solid fuel incarnation of the more well known Aga), so finding replacement firebricks was a doddle, then the rotten sides and back were replaced by shiny stainless steel, the gaps filled with Rockwool, a few screws and some fire cement and my beautiful stove was reborn.

This is the point at which some photos are called for but the battery is on charge again.

My beautiful Rayburn now runs two bedroom radiators, provides our winter hot water, kitchen heating and I do the majority of my cooking in it.

So why am I telling you all this? -  because I was going to light it today to get started on my beetroot pickles and marrow jams, and then went and got all distracted tidying up my greenhouse instead - it was a bit Day of the Triffids in there.

 Having cut back all the tomatoes, weeded and harvested those lovely little cherry tomatoes ready for cooking I then came back inside and tackled all those housework things that Brendan had been blind to whilst I was away, hence the stairs got swept, dusting got done, floors got mopped and bathroom had a proper clean round.

If this wet weather that I have bought back from the UK persists I may light the Rayburn tomorrow and start pickling then.



So - updated - Saturday afternoon while I was busy hacking away in the greeenhouse it started to persist it down, coupled with Brendan declaring all the plums being ripe, I decided to light the Rayburn and get on with the first lot of autumn harvests - feels a little odd to be doing this in August but hey ho - funny old weather.

We picked a row of beetroots and set them to boiling for the pickled beetroots.  I always scrub mine very clean before boiling because I preserve the water afterwards to make Barszcz for Christmas.  This beetroot soup is a good old fashioned Polish addition to our menu.

To preserve the juice, once I had claimed all the beets out of the water, I simply poured it into a freezer bag held upright in a measuring jug and put it in the freezer, then I can remove the jug and just have a solid block of purple-y beetroot stock ready for use.

 With 7 jars of beetroots pickled, I also managed to bottle up 9 jars of plum and elderberry jam, delicious.

This is only the second year that our plum tree has fruited, they are small dark purple plums but so juicy and tasty.  I have no idea what variety they are as the tree was already here in the garden when we arrived, and even our neighbour does not know what sort it is - although he has told me on several occasions that the tree won't fruit.

It overlooks the chicken pound and as they get ripe and fall the chickens fight over them.  They wolf them down to the point that they end up with discoloured poops everywhere - today all the poops are a virulent shade of red due to them eating beetroot peelings and drinking the last of the beetroot water, then scoffing elderberries and plum skins.

We also had a go at pickling some of our quail eggs - but in red wine vinegar to stain them pink - no I don't know why it just seemed a good idea at the time.

And of course in the background you can see some plum syrup heavily doused with vodka ready for autumnal cocktails!