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More contest winners!
It’s been a murky sort of day, both exteriorly and interiorly. Interiorly neither my brain nor my digestion is returning my phonecalls.* Exteriorly it’s been another dashing-among-the-raindrops day with slitty-eyed and grumbling hellhounds. This morning I eventually said All right! Fine! But if you think we’re going to play throw the tennis ball up/downstairs just because of a little rain** you are sadly mistaken! —And stomped back outdoors myself to stand with the rain running down my neck to deadhead petunias. Especially that frelling hanging basket at the foot of the front stairs, with the nonhanging petunias: gone-over petunia flowers are among the least attractive anyway, and even more/less so when sodden, and these are so awfully dranglefabbing conspicuous. Since the wretched plants insist on growing UP they are also getting harder and harder to deadhead. Even my gorilla-length arms eventually reach their limit. And getting smacked in the face with falling smeary wet ex-petunias is one of those remind-me-why-I-like-to-say-I’m-a-gardener experiences.***
I was lurking around the cottage in a restless and unable-to-concentrate manner because the Aga Man was due. Herself† has been cold for over two months because after a hot spell severe enough for me to decide to turn her off I couldn’t get her back on again and thought, never mind, it’s summer, we can wait till her annual tune-up and shampoo and get a refresher lesson on the proper ritual.††
My Aga is now on. I have an oven at the cottage again.
So what better day for an announcement about baking?
Anyone who’s been keeping an eye on the contest thread will already know that mayasings’ Bloody Doomsday Chocolate Raspberry Swirl (Vampire) Muffins won the recipe contest. Huzzah mayasings! Huzzah Vampire Muffins!†††
I also promised you‡ a random winner among the voters. And that winner is Stephanie, who very properly lists ‘baked goods’ among her interests, and while I will not breach her privacy by quoting her email address here, I wish to remark that it has a very pleasing and suitable Green & Black’s atmosphere about it.
Congratulations, you two! And now if you would please contact a mod—Ajlr, perhaps, since she’s done the actual work on the contest—with street-mail addresses and instructions for dedications, if any, I will go fish out two more glittery gold SUNSHINEs from my dwindling hoard and prepare to dispatch same.
Contests are good. Thanks, you lot, for making them good.
* * *
* Not that I have (i)Phones on the (missing) brain or anything. I had a seriously bad night last night. Sleep? What would that be again? And then the phone rang at 8:30 a.m. KrzzzznARRRRGHblhhhhhhhnnggg. I decided to go back to bed afterward anyway, despite the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings apparently going on across the road and the four-part dog chorus^ at the top of the hill, no doubt in response to Devil Cat sitting just on the other side of the (closed) iron gate from them and washing his paws thoughtfully. I could seriously do without Devil Cat. I could probably even more seriously do without the 1,712 vehicles belonging to his owner, who has one parking slot on our cul de sac and therefore has to be creative with the other 1,711.
Anyway. I went back to bed. Whereupon Pooka started erupting with sound effects. I’m sure it’s very clever and thoughtful of the programmer to give different ringtones to email, voicemail, texts, twenty-one gun salutes and elephants, but it’s not at all popular when you’re pretending to sleep. I have noticed that there’s the odd ping, pong or trill overnight in Pooka’s live and lively company, but it hasn’t been a big deal. Maybe I’ve had the pillow arranged over my head better. Maybe I had been sleeping lately. Maybe I suddenly became fabulously popular overnight. But this morning it was the Chinese water torture only with dings, chirrups and gibbles. So the first thing I did when I finally gave up the unequal struggle with the Normans^^ was figure out how to turn the sound effects off.
^ Three dachshunds and a Labrador
^^ Norman arrows caroming off the English shield wall sound remarkably like messages arriving on your Apocalypse.
** It’s more to do with almost losing four shelves of books and china that hang at the bottom of the stairs, the last time we played this interesting game.
*** At least there were no earwigs involved. Ewwwwww. There are almost always earwigs involved when you deadhead dahlias. Note: if you are harbouring any seven-foot dahlias this year, stand at arm’s length when you deadhead.
† You’re right, I’ve never named her. Shameful. I think it has seemed impertinent since she was here long before I was. But I hereby declare that five—no, wait, six years, big yeep—six years is enough to presume upon the company of a nameless Aga, and address myself to the lack.
†† No, no, no, not a black goat. A bowl of virgin popcorn, and don’t forget the butter^.
^ Which I’m sure ought to be from a virgin cow, but this might be a little hard to arrange, milk being tied to the non-virgin end of things.
††† I’m convinced it’s the fang holes that did it. Although as Ajlr says: . . . which, as a title alone, may be one of the most all-encompassing collections of ‘Words Likely to Appeal to Readers of Robin’s Books’ that we’ve seen here.^ Add that to the end result of the recipe and we have a very worthy winner. And I may say that the recipes assembled through this competition are probably one of the best gatherings of foodstuffs with few socially-redeeming features^^ that I’ve seen for some time…
^ I wish to observe that on the contrary, this is a SUNSHINE specific recipe, and very appropriate too. A truly all-McKinley-encompassing recipe would have to include something about dragons, swords and horses, at very least. Which might prove challenging even to this reservoir of forum members.
^^ Few? You mean there are any? Oh dear.
‡ That is, I promised after I had double-checked with Blogmom
Vote vote vote vote vote!!!!
(How did it get this LATE?!? I have a blog post to create out of a pumpkin and several confused mice. I swear I’ve only just got in from tower practise. The passage of the last four and a half hours is an illusion. It’s not even nine thirty yet. Really. And the hellhounds are settling down to stare at their dinner. . . . )
You’re right. There isn’t anything in it for anyone but the forty-four people with eligible recipes*, but there should still be at least forty four votes, plus eight mods, a Blogmom, and a hellgoddess. And a few disinterested philanthropists.**
We do not yet have sixty votes in the contest for yet another signed copy of the glittery new SUNSHINE. We want sixty votes. Here: http://robinmckinleysblog.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=1 453&start=0&
If actually reading the recipes*** is giving you blurred vision and an accelerated heart rate, nobody will know if you merely vote for the name you like best. If you pass by with a shudder Bloody Doomsday Chocolate Raspberry Swirl Vampire Muffins and Godzilla’s Green Tea Tiramisu, you might pause instead at the equally dangerous but more restrained Death Brownies or Death by Chocolate†. Or if you want something you can take home to mother there’s Chocolate, Cranberry and Almond Muffins or Lemon Tea Cake or Alan’s Cookies. If you’re a romantic, you might choose Rose Spirals or Midsummer Bliss or Honeycake. And you can ignore that middle-aged New England exile crying in her beer over the Old Fashioned Blueberry Cake. As I keep saying, Old England is my home, even if I don’t sound like it, and there isn’t a lot I seriously miss about living Stateside, barring not sounding like a foreigner every time I open my mouth.†† But there are one or two things I do miss, and little intense Maine blueberries are one of them. Sob.
But, speaking of beer, I feel that perhaps you need putting in the mood for voting for your favourite recipe. So here’s something else with chocolate in it. And beer.
This is an adaptation of a recipe on a newspaper clipping from my early days in this country, which makes it old enough it’s turning brown and curling up around the staples holding it to the page in my cooking notebook.
Sooty Cake
125g butter
2 c plain flour
250 ml stout or porter: you want the darkest, richest beer you can find. The kind that has echoes on your tongue long after you’ve finished swallowing a mouthful. I live near the Best Pub in Hampshire and it makes a porter to die for. Except they don’t make it all the time. Sometimes you have to settle for draught Guinness.
2c dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/4c + cocoa: I use about 5T. You could try 6. I probably will the next time I make it.
1 tsp baking soda
Grease and flour an 8” cake pan with collapsible/detachable sides, although if you line it with parchment paper I’m sure you’d be fine with the solid kind. Heat oven to 350°F.
Cream butter and sugar thoroughly. Add eggs one at a time, and beat furiously. It’s going to curdle the minute you add the beer, so you want it as homogenous as possible at this stage.
Blend cocoa with a little of the beer in a separate bowl to make a kind of runny paste, then beat the rest of the beer into the butter/egg mixture. Beat in about half the flour, then sprinkle the baking soda over with about half the remaining flour and beat all that in. Then beat in the beer-cocoa, and last the final one-quarter of the flour. Beer is variable, like so much else in life and baking, and if your batter seems excessively liquid, add some more flour. First time I made this it didn’t rise properly—or rather it rose and then fell in the middle—but it cooked through and tasted great and even the texture was fine. Once I cut it up (supposing you are a master at the craft of cutting up fallen cakes to not show their fallenness, which I am) no one would guess. Next time I made it I allowed myself to paranoiacally add about another ¼ c of flour, and it behaved itself, but beer varies, especially, I think, home-made beer from the Best Pub in Hampshire. You’ll get a finer crumb, the less flour you think you can get away with, but this isn’t necessarily a cake that needs to be very fine.
Pour into cake tin and bake for 60-70 minutes, till it’s risen but (you hope) fairly firm in the middle and pulling gently away from the sides of the pan. Let cool a good half hour before you even try to get it out of the pan.
It’s very good with Earl Grey tea (if you like Earl Grey. Good Earl Grey, not perfumed floor sweepings). Just by the way.
* * *
* Unless of course we award a random win to a random voter. We might. We haven’t decided. It depends on a number of crucial, high level technological factors, plus whether I can find another copy of the new SUNSHINE somewhere, holding up a short table leg or something. You won’t mind if there’s a minor crevasse in the middle, will you?
So you should vote. Just in case there’s still something to win. I promise if the random-picker widget picks me I’ll pass the slightly dented copy of SUNSHINE to the person on my left.
** Drooling optional
*** Ajlr has thoughtfully buried a link to the recipe thread in the vote box
† Mmmmm. Extreme is good. Personally I like the idea of vampire muffins. Although I might hang a nice little bundle of garlic over the bread bin till they were all gone.
†† Remember however that I’ve also said that I’m glad I failed to take on the protective colouration of a British accent. I am a foreigner, and it’s just as well that whoever I’m talking to knows this immediately so when he/she makes reference to Blue Peter^ or It Ain’t Half Hot Mum^^ or expects me to know where Yarm is I don’t look like a total dipstick for having no clue. Yes, it’s peculiar putting roots down somewhere you clearly don’t belong, but hey. Think of it as similar to putting Sequestrene plant tonic on your camellias. Give me enough chocolate and I can live anywhere.
^ Which I still think sounds rude
^^ What?
SUNSHINE contest II winners
Ajlr writes:
After a truly amazing outpouring of culinary talent and ideas over this last week, the winners – yes, two winners* - of a signed copy of the new and beautiful golden edition of SUNSHINE is cgbookcat1 for Chocolate Basilisk Balls with Kiss of Life sauce and DrRo for Berry Crumble Butter Cake. I can imagine happily eating the products from any cafe run by either of these forum members.**
If the winner(s) will PM me on the forum – soon*** – with the details of where their copy should be posted to, then all will be arranged. Many congratulations to both of them.
Now, where’s my mixing bowl…
Meanwhile . . . I was just explaining in a footnote† that one winner wasn’t enough. Well, clearly two isn’t either. So just as this contest is an addendum to the previous one, we are going to have an Addendum to the Addendum, to wit, a third winner of a signed shiny gold SUNSHINE is going to be chosen by popular vote, out of the recipes already posted for this contest.
I, of course, who can just about call up a new game of Fingerzilla††, have no idea how to run a vote on the blog. But ajlr seems to think it can be done. Since I kind of sprang the idea on her about twenty minutes ago she and her fellow mods haven’t quite worked out the details yet. But they will. And then I’ll post them here. So to get yourselves in the mood, here are our first two winners’ recipes. Then you can go cruise the Playing With Your Food SUNSHINE contest thread and think hard about who you will vote for. It will not be an easy choice. And when you go to bed tonight visions of sugar-plums (and chocolate) will dance in your head. Mmmmmm.
cgbookcat1
For the previous contest I said I would make “Chocolate Basilisk Balls with Kiss of Life sauce,” so I figured I’d better invent the recipe. These were inspired by the Indian dessert Gulab Jamun, although they are really nothing alike except that both feature spheres in sauces. The Basilisk Balls (basilisk eyes) are dark chocolate truffles, and the Kiss of Life sauce is a Cardamom Creme Anglaise. The truffle recipe is modified from Cooking for Engineers, and the sauce is modified from Epicurious.
The goal is to petrify the guests at the first bite, and slowly bring them back to life with murmurs of intense appreciation.
for the Basilisk Balls,
ingredients:
1 pound dark chocolate, cut into small pieces (not unsweetened — Ghirardelli dark chips are good)
1 cup heavy cream
about 3 Tbsp of a really good cognac (I used Hennessy)
unsweetened cocoa powder to coat
directions:
Heat cream in a saucepan until just boiling. Remove from heat and stir in the chocolate and cognac until your ganache mixture is shiny and smooth. Refrigerate until stiff.
Scoop truffles into small balls using a melon baller or tablespoon measure, and roll until smooth with your hands (this is a messy process). Place in refrigerator to harden for a few minutes. When solid, lightly coat with cocoa powder.* Eat a truffle to check quality control at this point.†††
for the Kiss of Life Sauce,
ingredients:
4 egg yolks
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup sugar, divided into halves
scrapings from 1/2 vanilla bean
1 tsp crushed cardamom seeds
directions:
Lightly whisk egg yolks and half of the sugar in a small bowl and set aside. In a saucepan, combine the cream, milk, vanilla, cardamom, and the rest of the sugar and heat on medium until almost boiling. You should stir almost constantly (and scrape the bottom of the saucepan) for the duration of the heating process. When the cream mixture is hot, reduce heat dramatically and slowly pour the egg mixture into the cream, stirring as you do so. Increase heat again to medium and stir until the mixture becomes a custard. You will know this has occurred when you can run your finger across the back of the spoon and the track will remain. The mixture will also look very slightly grainy. Remove from heat, cool, and put through a fine strainer to remove unwanted bits of egg.
To serve, place two basilisk balls on a small plate and cover with sauce to taste. The sauce also makes an excellent ice cream if there is any left over.
* The cocoa powder will make the sauce run down the sides of the truffle without properly sticking. This can be solved in two ways — leave off the coating and use just the ganache, or keep adding sauce until it looks right. I prefer the second method, because you get to eat more chocolate that way. ‡
DrRo
Ok, I admit I just joined so that I could enter the competition‡‡… plus Robin said something about needing more forum members who bake [smiley omitted because Wordpress turns them into squiggles] ‡‡‡ Plus I’m rereading Sunshine, AGAIN… and it always makes me want to bake things.
This is an entirely original recipe in that the cake base probably originated from a golden Wattle cook book sometime in the 195/60s… my mum baked a lot of cakes (6 kids can eat a cake like locusts on a pea plant – gone in seconds) so I learnt it from her – using wooden spoon measurements – as in, 2 spoonfuls of butter! I’m trying to convert back to real weights. The rest came from one of those happy accidents of wanting to use something up and not knowing what to do.
Berry Crumble Butter Cake
Heat oven to 180 deg (C)
185g butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 cups self raising flour
~1/4 cup of milk
Berry mixture
Any combination of ~ 3cups of stewed berries. It works really well with stewed apricots or apples as well. The key to this is that the majority of the liquid is removed. Do this by sitting in a fine-ish sieve for several hours, or by sitting a heavy ladle in the mixture, and spooning out the fluid as it fills. The final mixture should be almost thick enough hold its shape when a spoon is drawn through the middle.
Crumble mix
2 eggs
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 cups dessicated coconut
Method:
Cream eggs and sugar, beat in eggs, then flour and finally mix in milk. Should be a nice smooth creamy batter consistency. Put mixture into a buttered and papered 23cm round tin (or about a 20 cm square one). Top with berry mixture.
Mix together crumble ingredients and strew over cake.
Bake for 1 to 1.5 hrs, until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. If the topping starts to over-brown, cover with alfoil
Yum!
* * *
* Yes. Well. There were so many amazing recipes, one winner hardly seemed enough. Is clearly not enough. And then Ajlr had the bright idea that since the Basilisk Balls do not, in fact, involve any baking^, maybe there should be a second drawing for something that involves baking. I’m not sure what we would have done if the second recipe didn’t have any baking in it either. Kept drawing possibly. Fortunately the second one did include some actual oven time.
But, speaking of extra winners . . . well, keep reading.
^ Although they are clearly something Sunshine would be all for. Maybe in the Sequel That Does Not Exist Paulie starts making truffles as a manifestation of his individuality. In which case he would certainly make not only these but also Magpie’s Cloud 9 white chocolate truffles.
** Okay, guys, I want to hear that you’re together at the negotiating table having a meaningful dialogue. Or the start-up counter at the bank.^
^ Don’t bother me with geography. Geography is boring.+
+ Except on Google Earth.
*** Let me put it this way: Fiona^ comes on Tuesday. If the books don’t go out Tuesday . . . gods know when they’ll go out.
PS: When you PM ajlr, be sure to include if you want them signed to anyone, or just my generic scrawl.
^ Fiona, who is not afraid of the post office and, furthermore, has not desired to murder any of our local postpersons this week.+
+ I say nothing about her attitude toward her own local postpersons.
† You do read the footnotes as they happen, right? You don’t just read them all in a lump at the end of the post and then have no idea what they refer to?
†† I have just bought an upgrade. Yes, to Fingerzilla. Six more levels. More stuff to blow up. Stay tuned.
††† Absolutely. Eat it slowly and thoughtfully, right? I can do this.
‡ Good attitude. Excellent attitude. An attitude that manifests the true spirit of this blog.
‡‡ Yaay!
‡‡‡ Yaaaaay!
SUNSHINE Ask Robins
Blast and curdle it, how did it get this late? I only got home from bell ringing . . . uh . . . well, four hours ago, now that you mention it. The wretched days are drawing in so frelling fast—you can only hurtle hellhounds after tower practise in daylight for a few weeks in high summer, and that’s already over.* The sun sets fabulously across a field from the South Desuetude church, which means (as I said to Niall as we strolled toward the bell tower this evening) that you can see it getting later and later every week. Which is how it feels.
And now I’m sitting here eating scrambled eggs** and reading through some of the suggested bakery items from the SUNSHINE drawing just past*** . . . and feeling increasingly hungry, scrambled eggs or no scrambled eggs. Okay, gang, there has got to be another drawing in this somehow, for those of you willing to share your actual recipes. Black Bear and I are working on this†. There are two immediate problems: a lot of people are not going to want to hang their favourite recipes on line, and there are even—brace yourselves, I know this comes as a shock—people who don’t bake at all. But . . . but . . .
Meanwhile, without moving away from the topic at all, let’s have an Ask Robin question.
Did you base the baked goods in Sunshine off actual recipes? And if so, would you be willing to share them?
(I did see all the lovely recipes you’ve already posted on your blog, but nothing Sunshine-specific. As a pastry cook, the absence of “Death of Marat” in this world makes me very sad!)
Some version of this question is probably the second-commonest I get about SUNSHINE.†† To anyone who is a baker/cook, the answer has to be yes, doesn’t it? Of course they come from actual recipes. But after that the answer gets a little gnarlier. I’m always a little surprised when the question is put like this, but it’s probably just a way of trying to be polite, rather than, Yo, Dumbface, you gonna give us some of these recipes or what? My editor and agent—both themselves serious cooks and bakers—attempted to discuss with me the possibility of publishing some of the recipes in the back of the book but didn’t get too far with me screaming, No no no NO NO NO NO NO THIS IS NOT A COZY BOOK!!!! I DO NOT WANT TO BE REVIEWED IN THE DOMESTIC SECTION OF YUMMY MUMMIES MONTHLY!!!, so after a while they gave up. I still think I’m right about this—recipes do not belong in SUNSHINE—but I’ve been surprised at how persistent the requests for recipes continue to be.
And I do toy with the idea of a SUNSHINE cookbook. But . . . Sunshine bakes rather like I do (ahem) plus she’s a professional, which means her hands and eyes know what they want and how to get it, and her brain, let alone her measuring spoons, are frequently left in the cupboard. One of the reasons I’ve never got round to posting my How to Make Yeast Bread (which I’ve been promising off and on now for almost three years) is because so much of it is based on feel—on experience. Every frelling bag of frelling flour is a little different, and what makes cooking fun and interesting and dangerous is learning to respond to your ingredients and when to ignore the recipe. There’s a reason why so many of us old, experienced, not to say self-willed and cantankerous, cooks say of ourselves ‘I can’t follow a recipe’. This is pretty hard to quantify. And—however you feel about the relationship between author and character—the idea of Sunshine and me, who are both self-willed and cantankerous, sitting down together, and you can define ‘sit’ and ‘together’ any way you please, and creating a book’s worth of clear, precise, works-every-time recipes is . . . pretty dranglefabbing funny.
Okay, it’s also true that because Sunshine is a professional, she has a lot of her recipes down pat, in her head if not on paper, and could probably be wheedled into writing them out—she lives to feed people, after all. So Sunshine’s recipes are still an open question . . . which I’m doing precious little to answer. Feh. Unh. Well. What I need to do in my copious free time is go through SUNSHINE again and write down the names of every decadent foodstuff she mentions, and match up the ones I know to the recipes out here in this world. A lot of the stuff I’ve posted, which you can find in Playing with Your Food, is unalloyed Sunshine however—Three Chocolate Truffle Brownies? She totally makes these, and she doesn’t swear at her white chocolate either. Oh, and Death of Marat exists—but even Sunshine admits it’s a ratbag. Back in the days when I still made stuff like this, it came out about one time in three—it always tasted good, but sometimes it was a puddle and sometimes it was a pudding.
First, what do mik-bars taste like?
For those of you still intent on SUNSHINE, mik-bars are from HERO. And they’re a chewy-crunchy, brown-sugar-fruit-nut-and-the-Damarian-version-of-oatmeal cookie bar. I’ve always meant to investigate what out of that category in this world you could safely feed your horse—I’m mostly an apple and carrot girl myself—since Talat gets through quite a lot of them. But it’s one of the things I still haven’t got round to.
And second (and probably more important), are there actual recipes for any/all of those baked goods from SUNSHINE (Killer Zebras, Bitter Chocolate Death, etc)?
Killer Zebras certainly exist. I’m also bemused that this, with Death of Marat, are probably the two that get asked for the most often. Death of Marat, as above, is vexed. But I can absolutely give you Killer Zebras, with perhaps some head-scratching and furrowedness of brow, because they’re really only slightly dressed-up what-you-call-’em, I think I first met them in an old Betty Crocker cookbook under the name Harlequin Cookies. You make a basic cookie dough, divide it in half, add chocolate to one, and then roll each out and squidge ’em together. But I’ll post that recipe. One of these days.
Frell. I’m doing it again. Okay, I was going to answer another SUNSHINE question, but I’ll save it. Because I want to show you the following, which came in today, while we’re talking about SUNSHINE. I know I’ve posted other book mail recently, but partly because I know I’m a crank and partly because if this blog is supposed to be the public manifestation of me as a writer-person, it should include book mail as well as bell ringing and hellhounds and roses and Dido’s Lament††† . . . because book mail really does get me out of bed in the morning and opening the work-in-progress file. I’ve said this many times elsewhere: I’d be a storyteller whether anyone was listening or not, because I can’t help it, it’s the way I’m built. But I have had this huge, huge, HUGE stroke of luck that I can write the kind of stories that strangers are willing to pay me to read‡ . . . and a storyteller really only exists if she has an audience. Otherwise she’s a poor sad lost shadow of herself. And the thing that any storyteller wants most of all is to matter to her listeners/readers. You can’t help it; it’s part of the storyteller make up. And here’s an email that tells me that my stories matter.
I first read Sunshine in the spring of 200-. That spring had been enormously difficult. . . . Books were one of the few bright spots . . . and Sunshine was nothing short of a beacon. It is a wonderful book for all of the usual reasons: it is well-written, beautifully developed, and has a distinct narrator who is easy to relate to, especially in her flaws. It is vivid to the point where you want to crawl inside the book and live there for a while. It features vampires as they ought to be–as dangerous predators, NOT as swoon-worthy dreamboats. The relationship between Sunshine and Con is a rare kind of perfect–an awkward bond/sort-of friendship that is constantly developing. I loved it and recommended it to anyone who expressed even a remote interest in fantasy.
Recently, I had to [revisit the situation of the spring of 200-]. I put ‘Sunshine’ in my overnight bag because I’d been meaning to reread it. All of its good points were still valid, but what struck me this time was Sunshine’s journey as a character. She was handed a whole lot of baggage that she thought she couldn’t handle, baggage that made her question her identity as a person. And maybe this sounds silly, but this is what got me through the past couple of weeks . . . Having someone, even a fictional someone, who was also unsure of her ability to handle the cards she’d been dealt made the past couple of weeks a little less lonely and a lot less dreary. There is much inspiration to be found in someone who can have doubts about herself and still manage to kill a vampire with a kitchen knife.
‘Thank you’ seems rather inadequate, but it’s the best I can do. . . .
Trust me: ‘thank you’ is never inadequate to a storyteller about her stories.
* * *
* And despite what I wrote last night I’m not sure it is such a good thing that it’s easier to get to bed before dawn than it was a few weeks ago. I’ve always been inclined to press my luck.
** Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely fond of buttery, gooey scrambled eggs. They are a Staple of My Existence. Like chocolate.
*** These are random pulls from the first Facebook column. I’m going into sugar shock just from reading: I’d bake a souffle with fresh summer peaches ready to explode in the center. A lava fruit surprise. . . . I’d bake my soon-to-be-notorious, Cranberry/Coffee/Choc Chip Just-Can’t-Stop Organic Cookies. . . . I would bake Extra-special Chocolate Porcupine Cake (with lashings of buttercream icing) and Chocolate Brownies of Extreme Temptation. . . . I would bake chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache filling and chocolate chocolate chip icing. . . . I’d bake beautifully light cupcakes made with butter, free range eggs and Earl Grey tea, topped with pastel coloured buttercream and decorated with lavender flowers, crystallised rose petals or violets. . . . I’d bake Descent into Oatmeal Madness Cookies. . . . I’d bake Bloody Doomsday Chocolate Raspberry Swirl Muffins. . . . I’d bake Persephone’s Peril – a dark chocolate torte with a secret layer of white chocolate and pomegranate mousse, smothered with dark chocolate ganache, drizzled with pomegranate syrup. . . . I’d bake a braid of lemon curd bread. AAAAAAAUGH. WANT. WANT.
† To the extent that either of us can focus. We both have a slight weakness in the Baked Goods direction.
†† The commonest, as regular blog readers know, involves the s-word. Has anyone noticed the mysterious disappearance of any noisy, obnoxious neighbours who go on too much about books needing to have sequels? Do you really want to know why so many of my roses are twice their normal size?
††† Which is playing right now, as I weep despairingly into my keyboard.
‡ Or at least post recipe suggestions
A SUNSHINE tangent suitable to the occasion
[Sorry, I never know which way around to post double posts. The WINNERS are in the FIRST of tonight's entries, which is to say UNDERNEATH this one.]
Clearly this calls for a sticky, gooey, mmmmm, baaaaad for you recipe. Or an Ask Robin. Or both.
Let’s start with the sticky.
I can’t remember the last time I made these, and I found a great rush of longing flooding over me when, leafing through one of my notebooks, this recipe caught my eye. I don’t make them because Peter doesn’t like coconut. Fie. And it seems mean to make cookies your spouse won’t eat. Maybe I’ll have a bell ringer party some night he’s at bridge. ‘No, no, dear, we just had, uh, pretzels.’
Chocolate Macaroons
8 oz dark dark dark chocolate
2 large egg whites at room temp
1/2 c sugar (you may want slightly more depending on your chocolate and your coconut)
1 tsp GOOD vanilla extract (no fake stuff!!!)
2 c shredded coconut
Melt the chocolate however you melt chocolate. They usually tell you bain marie/double boiler but I now usually put it on a spreader on the hot spot at the front of the Aga in the morning and then in the afternoon when I wanted to make cookies, having forgotten all about the need for melted and cooled chocolate, there you have chocolate that is only just barely melted–do beat yours smooth–and hardly needs any cooling off at all. I love my Aga.
Heat oven to 350F
There are still people who beat egg whites with a rotary beater, but they are living in one of those reality TV reenactments of life before the internet and contact lenses. Beat the egg whites on medium high till fairly opaque but still slushy and then start sprinkling in the sugar. Keep beating. Sprinkle quickly and lavishly, but don’t dump it in. Now beat in vanilla. Finish beating till almost stiff. At this point I take the electric beater out and do the rest with a spoon. Pour the chocolate into the bowl in a ribbon, and gently fold it in; your whites are going to collapse anyway, but don’t make it any harder on them than you have to. Then, again gently, stir in the coconut.
Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Drop the glop in big fat spoonfuls. They don’t spread, but you don’t want them touching each other. Bake till you can see the texture of the surface change–it’ll also go a slightly different shade of brown. This usually takes about 15 minutes. Let cool. There should be a kind of crust on the outside and the inside is adorably gooey and chewy.
. . . BLAH ARRGH. No, we’re going to have Ask Robin tomorrow. I started answering the standard question about whether Sunshine’s recipes exist in this parallel universe, and was getting carried away.* And I want to get back to the piano tonight** and get to bed before dawn.***
* * *
* That thing I do so well
** I have to face frelling Dido again in less than forty eight hours. And furthermore Oisin is starting to grow restive about my never quite getting around to using him as an accompanist.
*** Which is becoming easier, as the days start closing in again toward autumn. Siiiiigh. However it also makes it easier to say hi to my mums and toddlers group (as Penelope calls it) as they burst, cheeping and cackling, out from under my eaves^, and still make it down to the mews for supper before Peter wants to go to bed.^^
^ For non-regular blog readers, I have a bat nursery in my roof, okay?
^^ Peter goes to bed ridiculously early.
