Looking for a recipe for a delicious warming festive drink that the whole family can enjoy? Then look no further than the joys of mulled cider! And before you panic that I’m suggesting junior gets stuck into a bottle of Buckthorn, rest assured that this can be made as an alcohol free drink too!
You can’t have failed to notice that it is absolute brass monkeys out there. With bells on. I’ve certainly never seen snow this early in the winter in London and I’m immensely grateful that I don’t really have anywhere to be for the next few days so I can stay indoors and stay warm. I could either run the heat all day or I could make a bowl of serious soup to banish the chills. It was time to break out the family recipe for Scotch Broth…
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As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit of an Americanophile with a particular penchant for all American foods, so imagine my glee when I discovered an online recipe for graham crackers. Forget Oreos, these are the archetypal American biscuit. Golden and honeyed, they are light and crunchy and nothing in the British biscuit family, even the digestive, quite cuts it for me.
Graham crackers are hard to describe if you haven’t had one. Their unique texture comes from the the type of flour usually used to make them. Graham flour is the brainchild of one Reverand Sylvester Graham who believed processed white flour was a devilish abombination and that bran would cure all ills. He created a type of flour that had the wheat germ and endosperm ground separately from the flour and then added back in to create a coarser flour that none the less makes exceedingly light crackers.
This flour is difficult to come by outside the USA and so I was resigned to the fact that I would only be able to indulge my graham cracker love while on holiday or when friends brought me boxes back in their suitcases. But this recipe uses regular plain flour! Time to go crackers methinks and risk the fact the use of processed flour might inflame my carnal desires…
I was originally planning to use these crackers to make a base for a pumpkin pie. They would have been crushed and mixed with butter to make a crumb based crust somewhat like one can do with a digestive or two when making cheesecake. However on first reading the recipe seemed too complicated to start baking something just to destroy it again and I decided to go with a traditional pastry pie shell instead.
I was also pleased that upon thorough reading to see that the recipe for the crackers is actually incredibly easy. I was just thrown by the talk of different mixers with a large selection of attachments making it lot trickier than it is. I don’t have a mixer so I assembled my ingredients (all easily found in the store cupboard, nothing fancy) and decided to give it a go by hand. Apart from it taking twice as long to crumble the butter because it was frozen rather than chilled, this is was so easy I cannot understand why anyone would bother making washing up by using a mixer.
About five minutes after I started mixing it all, I had a gorgeous golden dough flecked with sugar and stiff enough to wrap easily in clingfilm and chill in the fridge overnight. The recipe mentioned it would be rather sticky, but I didn’t find that at all. I wonder if this was because I used golden caster sugar rather than a muscavado or because plain flour is slightly different to all purpose flour? Either way the dough was a dream to handle and I ddin’t need all the flour I put on the clingfilm or the work surface.
Next morning I had a well chilled dough that was still easy to handle. Deb mentions in her recipe using a pastry wheel to cut the crackers into traditional rectangles, but since no graham cracker has ever lasted long enough in front of me to notice the shape, I decided to go off piste and cut them in star shapes instead. The dough cut easily and the scraps came back together well too. I used half the dough, rolled out to about an 1/8 of an inch and got around 40 biscuits from it.
I placed them on lined trays and sprinkled the sugar cinnamon topping over them before popping the trays in the fridge for around half an hour. Cooking the dough from chilled should make the crackers even lighter and crispier so it’s not worth skipping this stage. They then went in the preheated oven at 180˚C for about 12 minutes before they were perfectly cooked. I cooled them on a rack and lasted about 3 minutes before I snaffled one of them.
And they were fantastic. Buttery but light, beautifully crisp and infused with honey, they crunched gorgeously when I bit into them. The scattering of sugar on top made them even crunchier and the hint of cinnamon was perfect with the flavour of honey. It took such willpower not to stuff my face with one after another until they were all gone (and then admit that to my now biscuitless friends what I had done). I managed to get some on a plate and serve them up.
It probably says a lot about how delicious and moreish these graham crackers are that there was only one solitary biscuit remaining at the end of an afternoon so filled with baked goods we didn’t even manage to get round to one of the cheesecakes…they might be my favourite thing to have baked this year and I strongly urge you to try them immediately. I have no idea if they keep well, but I don’t think you’ll have any left to store!
Thanks to the lovely (and informative) iheartbrixton on Twitter, news reached me that the premises that used to be Honest Foods and latterly the Burning Bread Cafe on Coldharbour Lane has been reborn as The Duck Egg Cafe. So when hunger struck while the fridge was empty this Saturday morning it seemed like a good excuse to go and try it out…
The cafe is so newly opened that there’s no sign out front declaring it, but the whitewashed tables and chairs and light interior make it inviting enough that you’ll want to go in anyway. We went about 11.30 and had to queue for about 5 minutes for a table, but didn’t mind too much as it gave us time to peruse the menu.
There is a good choice between breakfast dishes (which I think are served all day) and an ‘everyday’ selection of dishes. I had my mind on breakfast though and now can’t remember what most of the other dishes actually were, but did note that they do a Sunday roast too which sounds promising.
The breakfast menus is extensive, but won’t be for you if you don’t eat eggs. Pretty much everyone comes with eggs, but the twist is that you can choose between hen’s eggs or duck eggs even with your fry up. I narrowed it down to a choice between eggs Florentine and eggs Forestier, having established I wasn’t in the mood for anything with scrambled egg or smoked salmon. A moment of rock, paper, scissors with myself meant I went for the eggs Forestier in the end. This is poached egg on English muffin and grilled Portobello mushroom with hollandaise sauce, grilled tomato and a hash brown on the side and sounded just the ticket for a Saturday morning treat, especially with a cup of tea on the side.
G went for a double Full English with extra hash brown and a cappuccino. The waitress was pleasant, but didn’t ask whether we wanted duck or hen’s egg. We forget to state that we wanted duck eggs and then had to go up to the counter to request them before she placed the order. Between all of us it seemed a bit disorganised. But our drinks arrived promptly. My tea was good and strong and G was very pleased with his cappuccino which was made with Illy coffee. We also rather liked the fact the cutlery came wrapped in duck egg blue napkins.
Although it was busy, we didn’t have to wait too long for our food, but we were disappointed to see that our eggs were hen’s eggs rathe then the larger duck eggs we had requested. The waitress was off serving someone else before we could complain and we decided to just go with it.
Both plates of food were attractively served, but I was a bit let down to see that my eggs had the shape of a poacher rather than being done ‘freehand’ in water. The yolks were also overcooked for my liking and the mushroom and muffin missed the extra lubrication a bit. Apart from this, it was a lovely plate of food. The big flat mushrooms were tasty and juicy, the hollandaise was appeared to be homemade and the grilled tomato was beautifully ripe and packed with flavour. If the yolks had been runnier, this would have been just a perfect breakfast.
G’s fry up looked great and the plate was groaning. The sausages looked to be good quality and he said they were very tasty, as was the bacon. His fried eggs were much runnier and more appealing than my poached numbers and he had lots of wholemeal toast on the side. The one disappointment of the fry up was the beans which looked rather watery and made the toast a bit soggy. He also thought the HP sauce wasn’t the real deal despite being in the square bottle and that the ketchup wasn’t Heinz (although it was a Heinz bottle). This wasn’t per se a criticism as he thought the ketchup was nicer than regular old Heinz and since G is the condiment king, I’m inclined to trust his word!
We both cleared our plates and enjoyed the food immensely, but we did remind our waitress as she cleared the plates that we hadn’t got the duck eggs to make sure we weren’t charged the extra for them. Each dish has a one pound surcharge for these larger eggs. She was pleasant and slightly embarrassed by the mistake, saying it had been a kitchen mix up.
When it came to paying the bill, we had been charged the slightly higher price and we decided to pay the £6.50 for mine and the £7.95 (plus £1 for the hash brown) for G’s double fry up, remind them we hadn’t had the duck egg and leave the £2 extra as a tip since they were pleasant about the mistake and we generally felt the food was good quality and the coffee was excellent (although note that only regular tea and coffee are included in the price of a breakfast). They apologised again and seemed pleased with the tip and lack of fuss about the small error. This was only the second weekend they’d been open so we felt kindly toward them finding their feet and since I enjoyed it so much I’ll be back fairly soon, I’ll be able to see how things progress.
If you’re in the mood for a breakfast that feels like a bit of a luxury of a morning then The Duck Egg is a great spot. It is more expensive than The Phoenix across the road, but the ingredients are better quality and the vibe is moe upmarket plus it offers fancier coffee and a range of fresh juices. I think the two will compliment each just fine, but I hope The Duck Egg doesn’t succumb to the bad luck that seems to afflict this particular spot as I think it’s a great addition to Brixton.
PS: I’ve been back several times since and had duck eggs every time. I love the poached eggs on toast as a simple breakfast, but can’t resist their homemade hash browns for a treat. I love The Duck Egg. It’s bedded in very well!
October’s Invisible Food Walk was themed around the autumnal joys of apples and pears (the real ones, not the Cockney version) and I was amazed to discover that I could pick both within five minutes walk of my house.
We visited the pear tree in the Loughborough Estate off Angell Road and using a fishing rod with a handy blade attached, honed our skills at cutting through the stems and sending the large green pears downwards, like a fruity version of a fairground game! I’m not sure what variety of pears these are, but they tasted pretty good after being slowly poached in wine and spices as a light autumnal dessert after some goat stew.
Further round the corner in the community herb garden at Angell Town we came across our apples. Beautiful little cherry sized crabapples to be precise. There are three decent sized trees and they were absolutely groaning with fruit. With a bit of concentration and time, I managed to pick 8lbs of the most perfect looking little apples and carried them home with glee, planning to work on the domestic skills I picked up making quince jelly a few weeks ago and make both crabapple jelly and cheese with them.*