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Guest post (mostly) by Jeanne Marie
My First Fruitcakes
B-Twin’s post on her luscious wedding fruitcakes, and some of the subsequent forum remarks on wedding cakes* in particular and fruitcakes in general, took me back to my first year living in Memphis, Tennessee. It was my first year living on my own post-college, and I was big into fancy experimental cooking. In that vein, I decided around August that I wanted to make some fancy brandied fruitcakes for the coming Christmas.**
I looked up a few recipes for fruitcakes, and found several options. I particularly wanted one that needed to soak in liquor and “age,” and at last decided on one that I thought would be a good choice. But, I was not a fan of lots of candied fruits, so I decided to sub out ALL the candied fruits the recipe included for simple dried fruits. I made twelve mini-loaf cakes, which baked up like little bricks. I wasn’t worried, though, the recipe had warned that they’d bake up very hard, but would moisten up over a few months with some brandy. I followed the recipe specifications, wrapping them in cloth and then pouring on “some” brandy (I think the recipe called for a few tablespoons, but I was feeling generous), and left them in the bottom of my fridge in ziploc bags. I checked them periodically, and usually when I checked them, I’d add more brandy. Over the months between August baking and Christmas, I added an entire fifth of brandy to those twelve mini-loaves!***
Finally, the first of many Christmas parties arrived – the faculty afternoon luncheon party for the elementary school where I was working as the music teacher! I took two of the loaves with me. At the time, I noticed that they were rather redolent of brandy, but mentally shrugged, and figured that they were supposed to be that way. When the time for the Christmas luncheon arrived, I ate a smallish piece of my fruitcake and was OVERWHLEMED by just how potent my little fruitcakes were! YIKES, I started worrying about breathing too close to the festive candles on the table! I myself was only able to handle a very small piece – I’m a bit of a light-weight in terms of liquor capacity – but, two other teachers in particular, a second grade teacher and a fifth grade teacher, were VERY happy that I had brought the “brandycakes”… and, they were even happier after dividing the cakes between them!! Both were decidedly flushed and wobbly when they headed back to their respective classrooms!!
I’ve wondered – if I had stuck with the candied fruit, would the cakes have been quite so potent? Did the dried fruit simply suck up way more brandy than candied fruit would have? Or, did I just overkill on adding way more brandy than any poor fruitcake needed? I’ve never tried to experiment with fruitcakes again, but at least those two teachers remember me fondly…if they remember that luncheon at all, that is!!
* * *
*HOLY CATS, I’m gonna NEED one of those!! gulp ^
^ Yes you are
**::cue ominous music::
***you see it coming, don’t you…
* * *
The hellgoddess continues:
Since Jeanne Marie has been so CARELESS as to lose this legendary fruitcake recipe and since of course reading about fruitcakes, with this audience, is going to lead to a lot of jonesing for fruitcakes†, I thought I’d offer one of mine. I seem to have quite a few. We had this conversation on the forum—most of us don’t like the candied-fruit-stuck-together-with-superglue style of fruitcake, but quite a few of us like the dried-fruit, brown-sugar-and-spices kind. I will spare you the defense of good candied fruit—the problem with maraschino cherries isn’t the maraschino, it’s the red food dye—and go (almost) straight to a dried-fruits-with booze recipe. I may post some of the others at a later date.†† The only way I like bourbon is in a pecan cake, for example.†††
And with reference to the conversation on the forum about fruitcakes for weddings, with several Americans saying they’ve never heard of such a thing and me saying er um, I’d have said at least half the American weddings I’ve attended had fruitcake under the white enamel and the plastic figures . . . my FANNY FARMER (copyright 1965) contains a ‘wedding fruitcake’ which is described as ‘the traditional dark rich fruit cake’, and even the alternative sponge cake (‘Bride’s cake’) is assumed to have a fruitcake top layer. Furthermore in my eternal quest to waste more time dorking around on the internet, I discover that good old bartleby.com has the 1918 FF on line and their ‘cake’ section is loaded with fruitcakes including not one but two ‘wedding cakes’ which are in fact fruitcakes. http://www.bartleby.com/87/0031.html (the wedding cakes are almost last, and don’t bother with the ‘search’, which is a baleful fraud and will keep trying to dump you in amazon).
Meanwhile.
I had been experimenting with mini fruitcakes for years before Judy Rosenberg’s Rosie’s Chocolate Packed Jam Filled Butter Rich No Holds Barred Cookie Book came out‡. I’ve got two sets of mini bread pans, half size and quarter size, and two or three little loaves of different varieties, wrapped up with different coloured ribbons around each of them, makes a very nice present for a whole lot less effort than making millions of frelling cookies.‡‡ Rosie took it a step farther and made her mini fruitcakes in muffin tins, which is also pretty brilliant, and that hadn’t occurred to me.
It was even more annoying when her recipe turned out to be a lot like mine—it amazes me how many drunken fruitcake recipes don’t tell you to soak your fruit in the booze first for example. She however dilutes hers with water. Bleh—and she likes pecans and almonds. The following recipe is enough like her mini fruitcakes you might think I started there but I didn’t. Great minds think alike in this case.
2 c assorted dried fruit (black and golden raisins, cranberries, blueberries, apricots, cherries, dates, whatever). The big stuff you want to chop to be about raisin/berry sized.
1 c chopped nuts: almonds, pecans and/or hazelnuts
1 c rum or brandy
1 c white all-purpose flour
½ c wholemeal/wholewheat/spelt flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp allspice
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp mace
12 T (1 ½ c) lightly salted soft butter
1 c dark brown sugar
1 tsp (GOOD QUALITY) vanilla extract or ½ tsp orange essence (NOT ‘flavouring’)
1 T grated lemon or orange zest (if you’re using orange essence, I usually use more zest too)
2 large eggs at room temperature
Put the dried fruit in a shallow bowl and pour the rum or brandy over them. Put a plate over the bowl and leave for at least 48 hours and up to about a week. If your bowl isn’t shallow enough that all the fruit is in contact with the booze, stir occasionally.
Preheat oven to 350°F, and grease well your two-loaves-of-bread equivalent pans: so four half-sized loaf tins, eight quarter-sized loaf tins, or approximately 24 muffin cups. (If you’re using muffin cups . . . use paper liners. Life is short.)
Sift the dry stuff together.
Cream butter and sugar thoroughly. Add zest and vanilla or essence, and cream again. Add eggs. BEAT THOROUGHLY. Drain the fruit and add any liquid (not the fruit yet!), if there is any, to the batter. Mix.
Add the flour mixture. Stir in well. Now add the fruit and nuts. Stir again. This is the moment you may have to use your judgement. Flour varies, as does how much liquid there is left after the fruit has been soaking in it. You may need to add a little liquid–orange juice, apple juice or water–or a little flour.
Pour into your pans: depending on the size of the pan your baking time is anywhere from about 20-25 minutes (muffin tins) to about an hour and a quarter (9 x 5 inch normal bread pans). When the middles puff up and start looking solid, stick a toothpick in. When the toothpick comes out dry, etc.
Let cool in the pans half an hour or so. An hour won’t hurt. But don’t try to get them out too soon, they’ll be too fragile. (They would be less fragile if you used less butter. But . . . why would you want to use less butter?)
These don’t need to ripen, although you can turn them into little leglessness bombs if you want to (in theory the baking will have removed all the alcohol) by wrapping them in cheesecloth and dripping a little further rum on them—in which case keep them wrapped up in plastic or tin foil in your refrigerator, like Jeanne Marie did with hers, till wanted. I did this once and . . . wheeeeee. Don’t use an entire fifth, okay? (They’ll probably fall apart if you do, and then you’ll have leglessness bomb pudding.)
And I feel that, when it’s time to eat it, the true perfect drunken fruitcake should also have frosting. Frosting that goes something like: 1 c confectioner’s/icing sugar, 2T butter, cream together till smooth, and then add enough rum/brandy (2-3 T) to make it spreadable. Go for it.
* * *
† B_twin has promised a fruitcake recipe, but at the moment she’s deep in the Australian bush somewhere—with no internet connection—becoming further educated in some arcane Australian-bush skill, so she cannot be applied to in this extremity.
†† I keep meaning to post more recipes like I keep meaning to post some favourite poems (other people’s poems) and I was going to start posting book reports/reviews again this year and it’s the middle of February already and . . .
††† If I’m going to get seriously wasted in some manner that does not involve champagne, it’s going to be single malt Scotch, probably Laphroaig.
‡ Which is the follow up to Rosie’s All Butter Fresh Cream Sugar Packed No Holds Barred Baking Book. If there’s a third one, I don’t want to know.
‡‡ She says feelingly. But I’ve made millions and millions of frelling cookies too. Home made food is the answer when you have too many friends and no money.
Lo-text hi-cal Monday
I got up this morning possibly a little later than I meant to*. The fact that once or twice I opened my eyes long enough to look out the window which was a solid grey blur** was not encouraging and with a pillow over my head I don’t have to hear the rain. Finally had to get out of bed because I started thinking which is fatal to sleep.
It was still raining.
I washed all the dishes.***
It was still raining.
I swept the floor.
It was still raining. The forecast had said there would be breaks in the rain. Well, it slows down a little occasionally. I haven’t seen any breaks.
I hoovered the floor.
It was still raining.
I took the hoover apart to see if I could figure out why the little flexy-hose thing that you get into the corners with has no suck. Discovered plug of hellhound hair in the weird ill-designed elbow of connection between the hose and the hoover, pulled it out with a shout of triumph, put hoover back together and . . . the hose still has no suck.
And it was still raining.
By this point it was getting hard to move around because I had hellhounds welded to various parts of my anatomy making muted but persistent noises of the our-sphincter-control-is-magnificent-but-we-would-like-to-go-out-please-no-not-the-back-garden-are-you-kidding-it’s-ankle-deep-out-there† variety.
The weather report had said that the day would improve. And—lo—there was an actual beam of sunlight. I can sure see how sun worship started. So I flung harnesses on hellhounds and we leaped forth.
About ten minutes later the sky cracked like a vase and the water started streaming—no, oceaning—down. Even turning around and bolting for home we were Beyond Wet by the time we arrived—we had discovered a new dimension of wetness. This is the kind of rain that laughs at Goretex. Chaos, who has a slight turn for the dramatic, was convinced that he had been damaged by being that wet. Darkness merely wanted to know why I don’t do something about it. I bundled them into the car and we went down to the mews, where there’s more usable space for fidgeting.
And we fidgeted.
By this time it was the middle of the afternoon and we all wanted our lunch. Except that we didn’t want our lunch because WE HADN’T HAD OUR HURTLE YET.
Eventually we went out in light rain.
And then had lunch, listening to the rain on the windows. Have I mentioned the wind?
We went squishily out again this evening. But it was barely raining at all. There was even a hazy moon. Made hazier by the light rain on my glasses.
The weather report says ‘a band of heavy rain will move in over night to reach all areas by morning’.
I need chocolate. And we haven’t had a recipe in forever.
Mint Brownies
1 pan’s worth of your favourite brownie recipe.†† Don’t use nuts, and do use a few drops of good peppermint oil. †††
Mint icing: 1 ½ c icing sugar
6 T soft slightly salted butter
Handful of crushable peppermint candy. Which you duly whack to crumbs with your rolling pin. The availability of crushable peppermint candy varies, I find, especially if you’re a nut case like me and want it organic and no weird dyes. I’ve had excellent results using sugar cubes and a few more drops of peppermint oil. Mix in a bowl and let sit while you make the brownies. Then when you’re ready to put the icing together, smash the cubes. You want it a little lumpy. Don’t put it in the blender.
Do the usual smushed-together icing thing with the confectioner’s sugar and the butter, and then when it’s all nice and smooth stir in the almost-crushed candy.
Spread on your pan of (cold) brownies. Put it in the refrigerator for the icing to set and melt about half a bar (50g) of Green & Black’s dark chocolate (or equivalent) and drizzle it over. You can melt a little butter in with the chocolate to make it smoother if you like.
Alternatively, if you’re feeling seriously in the need of cheering up, make the icing with 1 c sugar and 4 t butter, and then just barely melt an entire bar of G&B’s mint chocolate. Now their mint chocolate is dark chocolate with drooly mint centres. So this takes a little agility. My most successful attempt(s) involve using a biggish pan with a heavy flat bottom and breaking up the chocolate into its individual squares, warming it gently, while standing over it like an alchemist expecting gold, and the MOMENT it starts to go soft and lose its shape, whip it over to your brownies, dump it out, and rub it around with a knife. ‡ You want a nice swirl of icing, chocolate, and runny mint. Note: even if the result looks a little funny, it’ll still taste great. Supposing you wanted mint brownies in the first place, which I assume you did, if you’ve got this far.
Maybe the weather will change its mind.
* * *
* I was reading Elizabeth Moon’s HUNTING PARTY last night and I kept just wanting to know what happens. . . .
** Yes, all right, without my glasses on everything is a solid blur, but it doesn’t have to be grey.
*** Not that there were all that many. Two powerful reasons for eating as many meals^ as possible at the mews: Peter doesn’t merely do the cooking, he can’t bear not to do the cooking^^, and he has the dishwasher.
^ human and hellhound
^^ He’s sort of an interesting house guest.
† This is on gravel, mind you. The hellhounds’ courtyard is gravel.
†† I can recommend ‘gooey brownies’ already on Playing with Your Food
††† Be sure you get food quality. I believe a good aromatherapy peppermint is also edible, but check. Also peppermint oil varies in strength and flavour quite a lot, so you’ll have to experiment. But be careful—generally speaking a little bit goes a long way.
‡ I almost forgot. If you rub the tiniest smidgen of butter over the bottom of your pan first–just enough to slick the way for the chocolate–you raise your chances of success considerably.
Oven cloths and things to take out of hot ovens with them
You guys want a photo of an oven cloth?*
So. Fine. Your wish is my command.**
Happy now?***
Meanwhile, there is adventure afoot. Also acomputer. Or aforum.
jmeadows writes:
Black Bear wrote on Fri, 28 August 2009 23:02
http://converse.com. They didn’t use to ship direct to the UK; but it now appears they do? This could be the end of Robin As We Know Her. . . .
But she’ll be so happy all the time. I vote yes! to All-Stars.
Happy all the time I’m wearing shoes, anyway.† Well, I vote yes to All Stars too but postage and all the multicoloured and multifaceted nuisances of sending stuff back are inhibiting. It doesn’t happen often, for example, but it does happen the wrong shoes get put in the right box, and even that the right size is stamped on the wrong shoes.†† Also the fit is different from pair to pair these days—I don’t know if the variation is from factory to factory or country to country or Chuck Taylor relic to Chuck Taylor relic††† or what—but the lasts, or whatever you use for canvas, are different, which can make about a half-size difference in your choice. And amazon uk may ship postage free but the individual companies do not. You send something back, it’s your dime/shilling, and it’s your dime/shilling again if they send you another pair. One of the little sub-amazons was also going to charge me a handling fee to send another pair in a different size. No. Keep your frelling shoes. And getting one of these jokers on the phone doesn’t guarantee anything either: he says one thing and then the trolls in the warehouse do something else. Doing all this transatlantic makes me feel a little faint. And I guarantee Converse.com does not ship to England for free. Which is why I. Am. Fighting. The. Urge. To. Go. Look. At. Their. Selection. In. Case. Of. Accidents.
blondviolinist
| Black Bear wrote on Fri, 28 August 2009 23:02 |
| This could be the end of Robin As We Know Her… |
Nah, probably not. We already know she collects All Stars with almost the same dedication with which she collects roses. And she can’t buy a Fourth House with suitably reinforced attic until she becomes a best-selling author in the UK…
I plan not to need a Fourth House, thank you very much, but I would like to finish the job on Third. It still needs new kitchen cupboards, new carpet everywhere the builders didn’t tear up the old, new light fixtures,‡‡ and one or two other minor items like bookshelves‡‡‡.
However, I wouldn’t mind an acre in the country with a hellhound proof fence around it where I can also grow some fruit trees. If I’m going to be a best seller. If I’m a big best seller I will buy several acres and have a Home for Retired Gentlehorses.
jmeadows
I think we ought to have a forum field trip to the UK to show off Robin’s books and find her a few thousand new readers. We’ll start on the south end of the island and march north. Forumite with the most converts wins. Well, pair of forumites. Safety in numbers, after all.
As dedicated readers, I think it’s our duty — nay, our calling — to do this. For Robin.
Buyers. You want several§ thousand more buyers. For the Gentlehorses. And think of all the photos of bolting hellhounds I could get if I weren’t always looking in sixteen directions at once when they’re off lead and the last thing I want to do is blind myself with a camera lens.
blondviolinist
Road trip! I call shotgun.
Shotgun?‡ I’m not that hard a sell, am I?
Judith
We could pair up and go door to door, like missionaries, with the McKinley book of our choice under our respective arms, conservatively dressed except for outlandish All Stars,
Ooooh. Do I get to choose?
ready and eager to convert the masses…
jmeadows
| AJLR wrote on Sat, 29 August 2009 13:11 |
| The frustrating thing for those of us in the UK who like Robin’s books is that we know other people here would like them too, if the publishing industry would just get off its backside and make them more available. |
We’ll just have to stop in bookshops, too, and harass the employees until they agree to put Robin’s books on the order list.
We will make this happen! (Muahahaha.)
Okay. You do that. And when you come back from a hard month on the road, I will feed you these for tea:
Several Kinds of Chocolate Shortbread (sort of)
This has its origin in Rosie’s All Butter Fresh Cream Sugar Packed No Holds Barred Baking Book, which has graced these virtual pages before. But I don’t think this particular recipe has. The original is called Brownie Shortbread and has only one kind of chocolate in it. Really. That’s not No Holds Barred.
Base
1 ½ c all-purpose flour
¼ c sugar
12 T slightly salted butter (this is also a short three-quarters of a 250g block of butter)
1 c shaved, grated or fine-chopped dark, good-quality-eating chocolate. You can use chocolate chips but it’s nowhere near as satisfactory. And full-size chips are too big, and the shortbread won’t hold together properly.
Mix flour and sugar and then mush in the butter, which should be about half-soft. You want it workable but not gooey. I usually do it with a spoon but you can use a food processor. Stir in the chocolate evenly. Pat on the bottom of a 13 x 9” baking pan, or equivalent. You may conceivably want to grease it lightly first, but this has so much butter in it already I never bother. Bake 350°F about 20 minutes, till it looks almost done: faintly gold but not quite dry. Cool. The original recipe says ‘place in refrig for 15 min to cool completely’. Put an oven hot pan in your refrigerator? Are you nuts? It doesn’t have to be dead cold, but it’s true it needs to be a little cooler than it’s going to get if you make the topping right away. So go do the dishes or the dusting or read a chapter in a wonderful fantasy novel or something and come back.
Topping
4 ounces dark, good-quality-eating chocolate
8 T slightly salted butter
2 large eggs at room temp
¼ c sugar
2T flour
1 tsp baking powder.
Melt chocolate and butter over very low heat (or a bain marie). Cool enough not to curdle the eggs. Beat eggs, sugar, flour and bp together till fluffy. The bp will make it fizz, so don’t stop too soon: you want it thoroughly mixed. Then add chocolate and beat like mad. A whisk is best.
Spread over your barely-warm base. Bake till the top rises and forms a thin crust, about 20 minutes. The centre will still look faintly damp. You don’t want it quite dry but you don’t want it positively squidgy either: a toothpick in the middle will come out tacky, but the edges should be pulling away from the pan slightly. It will probably fall slightly as it cools. (It doesn’t always.) Cool completely before you try and cut it.
At this point, because I am of unsound mind, I like to melt a little more of your good-quality-eating dark chocolate and drizzle it over the top. I usually use plain chocolate for the two bottom layers and then something else for the drizzle: orange is good. Or mint. This is now a good time to put it in the refrigerator till it’s cold enough to cut neatly.
* * *
* Mmmmrmph. Represses various things that could be said about the hellgoddess’ opinion of communal sanity, most of them perhaps not very flattering.
** On the second to last day of August when the moon is waxing and there’s an early obscure Mozart opera on Sky Arts and the hellhounds aren’t eating their dinner^ and I’m in the mood.
^ Well that’s an easy one
*** I also have a second, back up oven cloth, but Peter is getting that for Christmas. It’s to encourage him to put one through the washing machine occasionally.^
^ I admit my heart leaped up when I saw a black oven cloth. The back up one, sadly, is not black. But it is amusing.+
+ And yes, anyone craz—I mean dedicated enough to remember to ask me at Christmas, I’ll post a photo of that oven cloth also.
† Still leaves the way open for Very Weird Dreams.
†† Yes. It’s happened to me.
††† The foot bones work the best, of course
‡ Not shotviolin?
‡‡ No one has forgotten the plastic baronial chandelier, I hope, of unsainted memory. Naked dangling light bulbs never looked so good.
‡‡‡ And if I’m a best-seller, I’m going to buy those cast iron radiators.
§ hundred
Ungleblarg*
The ME has been an ungleblarg** for two days now. I managed to stave it off a little bit yesterday because I wanted to go to my voice lesson*** but when the adrenaline of that encounter wore off I was a jellyfish.†
I’ve been squashy, semi-transparent and tentacled†† all day today. So let’s have a recipe. The blueberry season is starting over here. I’ve done my moan about domestic English blueberries as compared to wild Maine blueberries before. But even fat slow mild-mannered English blueberries are better than nothing.
Blueberry bread
¼ c lightly salted soft butter
1 ¾ c all purpose flour, although replacing about half a cup with wholemeal/whole wheat is good
1 T baking powder
½ c ordinary white sugar
1 large egg
1/3 c apple juice
¼ c port wine †††
2 c blueberries
Add dry to butter, smush well. Add egg, juice, and port, and beat smooth with your little electric mixer. Gently stir in blueberries. Pour in greased and floured 8” loaf pan; 350° about an hour. Let cool before you turn it out of the tin, and it’ll slice easier if you refrigerate it first. (Then toast it and put butter on it.)
And, just by the way, the apple-cornmeal muffins which are already in Playing with Your Food are good with blueberries. Replace the chopped apple with blueberries and use orange juice—and what’s really killer is if you use blue corn flour.
* * *
* Well, I’ve been overusing ‘frell’.
** And ‘ratbag’
*** There was also a dentist involved. Mr Prufrock may have measured out his life in coffee spoons^ but I am measuring out mine in dentists. Garrrgh. This was a needle-and-drill free visit however. Sometimes when there’s nothing too urgent going on they just bring you in to take new x rays and then threaten and menace you. What do I know about x rays? See that grey spot on the x ray? they say forebodingly. Sure. It could be the technician’s thumbprint or the ghost of Elvis trying to get a message through.^^
^ . http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html +
+ This is a great poem. I don’t care how clichéd it is or that the Sugababes have set it to music for their new album~ or that they’ve figured out a way to sell toothpaste with it or whatever. It’s a great poem. It interests me too that I liked it when I was 19 and I still like it at 57. And it’s about getting old. I perhaps understand the bemusement of the narrator better than I did (almost) forty years ago.
There hasn’t been any great poetry written about having ME though.
~ Now that really will be the end of their career
^^ Saying, Please! I’m dead! Leave me alone!
† I was a jellyfish on a piano stool. I realised that one of the things during my lesson that went Awfully Wrong—more Awfully Wrong than I was expecting—is that at home I’ve been singing Sebben Cruller and Panis Andronicus phrase by phrase and then stopping to regroup. I’m stopping to regroup because, Euterpe knows, I need to stop to regroup—because I’m trying to sing the wretched thing if not right, then let’s say recognisably, which is all very well except that this plan leaves me dreadfully unprepared for being dragged through it bar after bar after bar after bar by the sergeant-major on the piano. At home when I break down, my accompanist breaks down too.
†† And gosh don’t I sting
††† And please don’t believe all the nonsense about cheap wine being okay for cooking. Sure, it’s okay for cooking if you don’t care how your cooking tastes. You don’t have to buy top of the line, but you need to use something you wouldn’t mind drinking neat.
Immortal Muffins
I am ravaged by exhaustion. Today I have done house painters*, hellhounds, PEGASUS, A New Little Thing for Organ**, gardening, more hellhounds, and handbells.***
Meanwhile I am still mourning last weekend’s muffins, so cruelly sacrificed to the welfare of society.† I’d originally been going to post the recipes I used on the fete Sunday they were eaten. But then I thought I’d immortalise them here anyway.
Apple-cornmeal muffins
1 ¼ c plain flour
2T – ¼ c sugar
1 T baking powder
1 c yellow cornmeal
¾ c apple juice
¼ c bland oil or melted butter
1 beaten egg
1 c peeled chopped apple, something tart and crisp
Mix dry, mix wet, mix mix. Add apples last. Stir just till dry ingredients damp. Fill 12-15 muffin cups (greased or paper-cup lined) not quite full (they need room to rise). 400°F 20-25 minutes.
Lavinia’s lemon-currant muffins
2 c plain flour
2 T – ¼ c sugar
1 T baking powder
¼ c melted butter (I don’t myself feel you can get away with oil in this recipe)
¾ c apple juice
1 beaten egg
½ tsp lemon essence#
½ c currants
Mix dry, mix wet, mix mix. Fold currants in last.
12 muffins, 400°F 20-25 minutes
# If you can’t find lemon essence, you can mess about with lemon juice and grated rind. I used to do this, but I’ve forgotten the proportions (I’d start by subbing 2T lemon juice for 2T of the apple juice plus 2 tsp rind. That’s the cautious end though. I’d almost certainly decide I wanted more) and didn’t write them down. Just be sure you use FRESH juice and FRESH rind.
* * *
* And if one more nice helpful person tells me that dark colours are claustrophobic I am going to arrange that they have some nice dark blue and purple bruises! I have already yielded on the subject of the attic, because I think that all the three dimensional crankiness would give me vertigo in a more vivid colour, the little room that used to be the second bedroom till the stairs ate it is going to be covered in bookshelves so it doesn’t matter what colour it is, and I’ve agreed to the hall in neutral boring because I have no idea what I’m going to want to do ultimately, and I still have the sitting-room, the remaining bedroom, and the dining room–all of which open off the hall–to play with. So for now if I want a cobalt^ bathroom, to go with the fancy tiles, I can have it. Furthermore, I’m the one with the chequebook, you know?
^ It’s actually called ‘light cobalt’. Right. It’s in the same range as pale emerald and dark white. What it is is out of a catalogue of ‘heritage colours’ which the painter didn’t want to show me. No, no, they’re all too intense, he said. He and his crew, just by the way, are all kitted out in dazzling, one might almost say virulent, white.
** Music lesson tomorrow
*** The handbell wedding is now barely a fortnight away. I’m thinking of joining the French Foreign Legion under an alias. Can you bring hellhounds? I feel hellhounds would be an ornament to such a company.
† I can see the headlines: Small Hampshire Town Wracked By Intestinal Discord, Traced to Two Dozen Muffins at the Church Fete Teas. Perpetrator Rumoured to Have Left Town in a French Foreign Legion Direction.
