Banana Hazelnut Loaf Cake

Mmm! Cornish sea salt how I love thee! When we were staying in Cadgwith Cove in Cornwall this summer we picked up a pot of salt and pepper from The Cornish Sea Salt Company, and had to keep on buying from them. They also supply a smoked salt which I used for my scrambled eggs for lunch:

 Yum!. Smoked salt and a good bit 'o pepper in scrambled eggs with a toasted bagel. It made such a difference to my lunch; pure heaven.

Anyway, after that, I decided to use up a couple of bananas so ripe that only my Father would eat them. I based the recipe on the Hummingbird Bakery's with a couple of tweaks to the flavour.

Ingredients

• 250g soft light brown sugar* -or 270g if you're not using the syrup
• 2 eggs
• 200g bananas (about 2-3 medium), peeled and mashed
• 2 tbsp hazelnut syrup
• 285g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1-2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• pinch of nutmeg
• 140g butter, melted

*if you don't have brown sugar, add a teaspoon of black treacle as you weigh out the sugar. Black treacle is the product of refining sugar into the white form, so you're just adding back that lovely butterscotch-y flavour.

Preheat the oven to 170 C, gas 3. Grease and line a loaf or cake tin.

Put the sugar and eggs into a bowl and beat until well mixed. Then beat in the mashed bananas, followed by the syrup if using.

 Add the flour, baking powder, bicarb and spices into the mixture (slowly!). Mix well, making sure that there are no 'pockets' of the flour mixture. Pour over the melted butter, and give the mixture another good whisk.

 Pour the mixture into a tin -ideally a loaf tin, but ours is in a box somewhere, so I used a large, loose-bottomed cake tin.

 The recipe recommends a baking time of one hour, but as my tin was quite deep, I turned down the temperature slightly, and baked for a good half hour longer. It's easy enough to tell if the cake is ready, as you just need to insert a skewer and check that it comes out clean. This is a rich cake, so it may look as if it is a little damp, but don't worry. If the top is starting to get crispy, cover in foil.

 When the cake is ready, leave for ten minutes or so before removing from the tin (but do feel free to just stand by the counter, breathing in that delicious smell!). This cake also goes really well with a little evaporated milk drizzled over.

Back South

This last week I traveled back down to my Grandma's where I used to live. I came to see off my cousin Jeffrey, who is emigrating to America, where he was born. He was supposed to leave Monday, but then a little thing called hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast and airways went to standstill. At present, the plan is for him to leave tomorrow, assuming the weather conditions become a little less hostile -even so, he will be without electricity for a few days.

On the 26th, Jeffrey and I went to see Skyfall, which was incredible. I'm under strict instruction not to slip any spoilers, but I will say this about one scene: Home Alone. With guns.

I spent the first half of this week catching up with friends. I met Miriam all the way from Devon for lunch, and decamped along with my girls Sophie and Katie to a girl's night in at Lauren's, who is just about the coolest person you'll every meet. Watching the Hunger Games at Lauren's had me totally inspired to get active in a different way; I may not be able to practice weaponry and fire dodging at stunt school, but I can try kick-boxing or climbing. My issue with exercise is being engaged. I love the endorphin-filled rush of a good sports session, but much of the time I get bored. Aside from the odd handful of fitness-inspired weeks, I find doing lengths at a pool, or going for runs dull. Maybe I need a new route or a running partner, but I can't get motivated. I love dance classes, so I'm gearing myself to have a go at Zumba, but anything that will get me using my body has to be good.

Like an idiot, I continually forgot to take my camera out without me over the week, and as much as I like instagram, ipod-quality  photos aren't really blog worthy. However, this did mean that my Grandmother's neighbour's adorable puppy got my full photographic attention:

Albert, a name so old fashioned that it is cute, is a Jug, a cross between a Jack Russel and a Pug, and he is just the littlest ball of energy. He's so tiny that in the colder weather he needs to wear a little jumper or coat, which is beyond sweet.

I only ate dinner at my Grandmother's a couple of times. There was just the two of us, and my challenge was to find two different uses for a packet of pork meatballs. I cut each meatball in half for both recipes:

Meal One: Last of the summer vegetables pasta  -serves two
1 onion, chopped
1/2 packet meatballs
2 carrots, pealed and chopped
1 medium courgette, chopped
1 pepper, chopped
1 jar pasta sauce -homemade or from a shop.
100-200g pasta such as penne, depending on how hungry you are -this is pretty filling; I didn't need much

1. Cook the onion in a frying pan over a medium high heat with a little olive oil for a couple of minutes. Add the pork balls and brown then for a few minutes.
2. If you have any red wine pour in a small glass at this point. Tip in the pasta sauce and the chopped vegetables and bring to a boil. Leave to simmer.
3. While the sauce is simmering, add the pasta to a large pan of salted boiling water, and cook according to packet instructions. Try to get it 'al dente' so that there is just a little bit of a bite to it when you eat it.
4. Season, add some parmesan cheese if you fancy. Dish up and enjoy!

Meal Two: Pork stew with apple -serves two
1 onion, roughly chopped
1/2 packet meatballs
2 carrots, peeled and cut into large chunks
2 sticks celery, chopped
2 small apples, peeled and cored
Couple of spigs of thyme
300ml chicken stock
New potatoes

1. Preheat the oven to 200 C/gas mark 6. Lightly grease a casserole dish
2.  Put all the meatballs vegetables and apples into the dish. Season with salt, pepper and the thyme. Pour over boiling chicken stock.
3. Chop the potatoes if they're a little large and lay them on the top of the casserole. Cover and cook in the oven for 50 minutes.

I like to make use of the oven and serve up some baked plums for pudding:

Cut four plums in half and remove the stones and place in a small baking tray. Warm a tablespoon or so of honey. If you have any flavoured syrups, brandy or rum, add a little to the honey and pour over the plums. Sprinkle over a pinch of brown sugar, and bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes.
Serve with marscapone cream: to do it properly, you add double cream and whisked eggs whites, but I substituted this for 2 tablespoons of low fat Greek yogurt stirred into 4 tablespoons of marscapone. Sweeten with a little icing sugar. Delish!

Bake-Off and Flapjacks

Last week saw the final of The Great British Bake Off, leaving my Tuesday nights with a fondant fancy-sized hole after 10 full weeks of sugary pleasure. In the final -the first ever to feature only men -the challenges set the bar so high that in one challenge neither John, James nor Brenden could quite pull off culinary perfection. Surprisingly, this nigh-impossible task was actually to create something seemly innocent: the little fondant fancies of the 'exceedingly good' origin.

The final challenge took the contestants right back to week one -cakes. The cakes had to be chiffon though, which are cakes that use oil over butter, and only beaten egg whites as a raising agent. The theme was about "your" 2012; Brendan made a love-heart shaped caked, flavored with almond to show a family reunion, John made a heaven and hell cake, with an uber-glossy chocolate ganache topping to represent the highs and lows of his year; and James went all out with five cakes to represent the coming together of the countries of the United Kingdom in the Jubilee and Olympic year.

I was so happy when John won; as he was the contestant who wanted to travel to Paris and study Patisserie. Unbelievably, both John and James were in the middle of their university exams and Finals-for Law and Medicine respectively -throughout the later stages of the competition, and both came out with amazing grades.

In the aftermath, I'm not worried about the Bake-Off gap in my week, as I am currently being bombarded with foodie programs, including, I believe, Mary Berry's new show next week. Meanwhile though, I've been baking up some flapjacks as a thank you to my Dad for buying me some lovely new wellies at the weekend. All our existing wellies have various holes and seem splits in them; perfectly adequate for walks; not so good for wading through rivers in the name of Geography A Level next week.

I based my recipe on The River Cottage's Family Cookbook. Flapjacks are one of the easiest recipes to adapt to what you have or what you fancy, and mine turned out like this:

Ingredients
Zest of a lemon or/and orange
50g (2 tbsp) golden syrup
175g butter
150g sugar, ideally soft brown
200g of oats (cheaper is better here, as expensive jumbo oats will make a very crumbly flapjack)
70g raisins
30g chopped dried apricots
100g chopped nuts -I used a mixed bag of almonds walnuts and peanuts and some pumpkin seeds that I had left from roasting a pumpkin earlier on in the week.

Optional -150g chocolate, for melting over the top.

I also added a handful of plain granola for added crunch, and I replaced around 5g of the sugar for a slosh of hazelnut syrup -the type you buy to add into coffee. Gorgeous!

Preheat the oven to gas 3/160'C. Grease and line a tin with butter or a spay of oil, and some greaseproof paper.
Add the zest of the orange and lemon to a large saucepan. Dollop on the golden syrup, using a warm or oiled spoon to help it off. Add the butter and sugar, and melt over a low heat, stirring occasionally, until everything is mixed, dissolved and melted, adding any hazelnut syrup if using. Remove from the heat.
In a large bowl, combine the oats, fruit and nuts, before adding to the saucepan and giving it a really good mix.
Spread evenly onto the tin, making sure that the edges have plenty of flapjack mix -and don't forget to save yourself a little mouthful, as this warm, syrupy mix is heavenly.
Bake in the middle of the oven for 30-35 minutes, until it's golden and making your kitchen smell delicious. Leave to cool on a rack or board for ten minutes so that it can hold it's shape as you lift it out using the parchment. After that, carefully mark out where you are going to cut your flapjacks into squares.
While my flapjacks were cooling, I decided to add some melted chocolate. I don't usually do this, but sometimes you just fancy an extra treat. I heated around 150g of milk chocolate over a bain marie until melted. Then, taking individual squares of the cooling, but still warm, flapjack, I spooned on the chocolate diagonally, so that half of the flapjack was dipped in a cheeky layer of bliss. Leave to cool at room temperature, to help the chocolate to cool slowly in order to get a shiny, tempered, finish.
YUM,

What's in my World

Before I launch into recipes and madness, I thought I'd share a little of what is inspiring me in the kitchen right now.This year I've acquired a few new recipe books, most recently Ching's Fast Food by Ching-He Ling.

Taking a bit of a step away from the more traditional English foods, I've been trying out stir fry's. Admittedly, this is a little tricky with no woks availble for the present, nor is the electric oven that I've got to get to grips with until February. This book is great however; at the beginning is a list of essential South-East Asian ingredients, so you know what is worthwhile on stocking up on, the recipes are easy to understand and read, even at the fast pace that stir frying dictates.


My other favorite, which I have mentioned in previous blog posts is Rachel Khoo's The Little Paris Kitchen. Darlings, I want to BE Rachel Khoo. I want to fly away to Paris and spend Summer training at Le Cordon Bleu, and create petit dinner parties in my apartment. The sections are refreshing; based on picnic foods, entertaining and everyday snack and meals rather than the traditional starters-mains-desserts. The recipes vary in difficulty, so it's a great book for building up confidence.

As for the T.V.... well I've mentioned the Bake-off, which sprinkles even the most technically difficult and stressful bakes with bunting and nostalgia. Compared to the high-octane pace of Masterchef, another program that I love, watching the GBBO is pure pleasure. Baking is something all of us have grown up with, from punching out biscuit shapes at home, to creating the first batch of fairy cakes at school, and in true British style the Bake-off had tuned into this, with an extra dose of cute and kitsch.

On more glamorous side, Lorraine Pascal and Nigella Lawson have oozing kitchen goddess appeal with dinner party-worthy creations. Lorraine Pascal's Cooking Made Easy has brought a girly touch to entertaining, with every half hour episode featuring at least one sweet treat... possibly dangerous considering my sweet tooth... On the savory side of things, I can certainly recommend Lorraine's sweet and sour pork balls, which I made for my family as the eventual buyers of our old house came for a viewing.
Nigella on the other hand, has been presenting me with far too many pasta dishes to dream about. I love Nigella's old-school presentation style. It's not always for everyday cooking, but whenever Nigellissima is on, I can't but help toss my hair and flirt with an imaginary camera, and dream of becoming the next Nigella.

I've also started on Nigel Slater's Dish of the Day, which is the opposite style to Nigella's. The food is simple, with adaptable ingredients, and loose directions to suit everyday cooking. There's something really homely about Nigel's cooking, and it never fails to have my mouth watering...


That's it for my inspiration round up; but now my marinated chicken tikka requires some attention, a little rice, and salad. Chio xx

Welcome Back: the Reboot

I haven't written in a while, partly because I've been wrapped up in moving 250 miles north and settling into sixth form, and also because I have been reconsidering my blog's direction.

Over the Summer and particularly the last few weeks I've come to realised how much I enjoy cooking. Without fail, each week I've tuned into the Great British Bake-off, spent Monday evenings cosied up with Lorraine Pascal and then Nigella in their respective half hour slots of culinary indulgence. Anyone who follows me on instagram (@EleanorMay_C) will have seen my numerous snaps of my experiments, although God knows now I am suffering from the off-puttingly poor lighting in our temporary kitchen.

So my plan is, along with continuing to post up some of my usual musings, to focus on the heavenly world of food -what I've cooked, eaten, seen and experienced. I've got a lot of dishes saved from Summer to share, so with a bit of luck I'll be able to keep you all entertained.

Until then... enjoy! xx

...And it all ends

Well that was a stunner of a couple of weeks. I've seen Team GB pull in the most medals in over 100 years; cheered on the fastest people on land and water in the planet; covered my eyes at death-defying acts and in all, like 80% of you, have been very proud to be British.

On Friday, I headed down to Weymouth to watch both the men's and women's 470 medal race. The weather was utterly gorgeous, if a little light of breeze, and everyone was walking around with a huge smile on their faces. I'm not too sure if it was the 'oh-my-god-we-actually-got-tickets' atmosphere or the sun, but the crowd sure were basking in it. I was really impressed with the efficiency and cheery attitude of the many volunteers who made the event run so smoothly.

As we settled down on the slope of the Nothe -which currently has several Ben Ainslie related names such as Ben's Nevis, Ben's Bum and Big Ben - I couldn't help but feel smug as the screens showed a tour of the Weymouth Sailing Academy Center, where I went for race training in April.(Cue lots of of talk on "oh yes I've been there. Yes the training hall is rather large isn't it?")

Despite the light wind conditions, the two main races were exciting, helped by the coverage on the screens, and by our use of binoculars. In both events Team GB won a silver. As the men's team, sailed by Luke Patience and Stuart Bithell, crossed the line, they celebrated in typical British style by capsizing the boat and lighting a flare. The two golds were secured by the Australians for the men's, and by the New Zealand team in the women's. 

I managed to *just* snap a photo of the two British teams passing each other inbetween the races. The women's boat was sailed by the lovely duo, Saskia Clarke and Hannah Mills.

Aside from a slight mishap where I realised that I was wearing a t-shirt saying "Paris Je t'aime", I managed to keep myself looking pretty patriotic, right down to the nails...

Oh, and I also managed to get sunburnt. But that's because I am a pale person not used to sun, haha!

And then that was it. With a final medal sweep during the weekend, the London 2012 Olympic Games... ended. The closing ceremony was incredible; it had to be without the support of an anticipated nation. It celebrated 50 years of British music, all linked together with a subtle theme of Shakespeare's The Tempest. From digitally reconstructed musical legends to real life performers being transported in, the show sparkled. But as I watched I had to hold back tears as I screamed "Don't hand the flag over! Don't extinguish that torch!!" 

Truly though, I am proud to be British. Putting the seemingly pointless two-week gap aside, I am now looking forward to the Paralympics (why aren't the two events shown together??) and I hope that Channel 4's coverage will be as good as BBC's has been.

But until then... Good evening Mr. Bond. This has been the Queen.

Packing!!

I haven't really blogged over the last few days, as I haven't done much except packing. Lots of it. A couple of days ago, I was watching the Sex and the City movie and laughed as Carrie Bradshaw stated her apartment was packed up in "38 boxes". Pah! Sister, the contents of your wardrobe would take up 38 boxes. Our house is on box no. 44 and aside from a few empty bookshelves you wouldn't know anything was missing. Got to say though, one advantage of not having a walk-in wardrobe is that clothes do not need to be packed. They stay nice and happily in drawers and on hangers and don't budge. That will save me one hell of a headache!

Packing hasn't been too bad though; there have been chocolate-filled group packing sessions with Bridesmaids, and I have been kept company by all our fabulous athletes on my TV screen. :) This is good as for much of last week, this was the outside world:

I also hit the cinema with my lovely friends Sophie and Katie. We went for pure, crude humor and opted for Ted. The one problem is though, that if you have the trailer for Ted on muted when someone's (in this case Katie's) kid brother is in the room (PLEASE do not let anyone under the age of 12 see the trailer with sound!) they will want to see it. This applies for all under 10's.

Tomorrow though, the excitement starts back up again, as I am off to Weymouth for the women's 470 sailing medal race. Saskia and Hannah are guaranteed at least a silver, so good luck and maybe we'll see another gold! In the meantime, I've painted my nails in an appropriately patriotic way, hehe.

It took all day, but I still managed to find time eat a gorgeous slice of caramel and apple tart... not *quite* so in keeping with the healthy Olympic image...