Bakery Cakery

I've been baking cakes for over a year now, that's on a professional level so I know a little bit about the subject, and it's unbelievable how many bad cakes are out there. 

It's jolly hard to find cakes which are made from traditional ingredients such as butter, but instead everything appears to have palm oil, margarine or some other disgusting hydrogenated fat. Many cakes are also made using eggs from battery farms, chocolate flavours and vanilla essence, all of which are contributing factors for producing a bad cake.

The best solution for bad cake is to make it yourself, but if you're like me and hate the idea of weighing out 234g of plain flour with 34g of self raising flour, 1 1/2 tea spoons of baking powder .......

Try cooking a brownie, so much better than any cake you can buy from the supermarket and probably the easiest thing to bake as it's not really a cake, more of a dense chocolate truffle slice.

I can't give out the recipe from work, because I would have my throat slit, so check out an adaptation of Mr Oliver's.

2 x 100g of dark chocolate (70% coco solids if you can)

250g  (1 packet) butter (at room temperature)

200g golden caster sugar (you can probably measure this by eye, if it's 500g bag of sugar then use a bit less than half)

6 level tablespoons of coco powder (you don't need this if you have good bitter chocolate)

4 heaped table spoons of flour (plain or self raising or ground almonds)

4 eggs
1 teaspoon salt


(optional ingredients or add nutty, fruity stuff you like or what you have in your cupboards, just play some jazz)


a handful of crystalised or stem ginger
a handful of pecans
a handful of dried sour cherries
1 clementine
crème fraîche, to serve


Smash the chocolate and chop the butter into small chunks, then put both into the food processor (if you don't have one then nuke together in the microwave, if you don't have a microwave then melt in a bowl over simmering water), mix in the sugar, coco (if you cheaped out on the good chocolate), the flour (sift if your not using the food processor), salt. Wizz together. While the food processor is still running, crack in the eggs (just beat them in if your not using the food processor).
Scrunch up a piece of grease proof paper under a tap. Flatten it, lay it in a baking tray (approx 32 x 26 cm) and drizzle it with cooking oil, then rub in. Spoon your mixture out evenly into the tray, about 2.5 cm thick. Sprinkle over the pecans and sour cherries (or whatever jazz your playing)and press them down a bit, finely grate over the zest of the clementine. Put the tray in the oven on the top shelf at 170 -180°C and cook for 12 to 14 minutes.


As Ottolenghi says "Be brave with your brownie", meaning take it out of the oven before it's done, it should have a little wobble as its coming out.


Brownie is good for breakfast, with afternoon tea or as a desert. You can eat it warm with ice cream or straight from the fridge. It will keep in an air-tight container for weeks and for years in a the freezer, I've eaten brownie which was in the fridge for over a year and it tasted great. Brownies rule, unless they are over-cooked cakey rubbish from the supermarket.




Here is the amazingly intricate website for where I work - The Exploding Bakery or find us on Facebook or Twitter.

Tesco

I know it's fashionable to dislike large food corporations such as McDonald's, Nestle & Tesco, but Tesco are just a disgusting virus.

Here is a completely unbiased article on their profits, after reading it I had a very bitter taste in my mouth.


It's been 3 weeks since I've spent any money in that greed grocers and I'm feeling pretty good about it.


Remember the huge amounts of money Sainsbury's gives to charity or the ethics behind Waitrose or how delicious all the M&S food is.


Every Little Helps.




I fucking hate any form of preaching so I'm not going to do any, this film will do the job for me - Tesco - The Supermarket that's eating Britain - Dispatches Channel 4

Viva La Sandwich

I'd pretty much given up on the sandwich. If the bread is shit, what's the point? Just eat the contents without the doughy fire blanket extinguishing the flavour.


I've just got back from a cycling trip around the the South West coast of Wales (West Celtic Trail), highly recommended if the sun is shinning. After having a some of the worst service I've ever experienced in the over rated and over priced Swan Inn (we actually struggled to get the bill and pay, it was that bad, and this pub is supposedly the AA pub of the year), luckily the next day we stumbled across a gem of a place in Pembroke called the Courtyard Deli Cafe. Here we had some smashing luncheon with a pretty good Botty Blanc. My hot chorizo & roasted red pepper baguette was a clear winner and the sandwich status began to elevate it's sorry head in my opinion. We sat for a couple of hours in this little sun trap cooling our genitals before rubbing them on a bike seat for another few hours.

The other little gem in Pembroke was a shop called WISEBUYS (shit name, M&S call their basics range Wise Buys). We bought some wise purchases from this little shop and cooked up a feast that evening in the most amazing location for any youth hostel I've ever stayed in .

The next day we made some sandwiches using up the leftover ingredients from the night before. We dressed some cooked sausages in chili, lemon juice & zest and some really high quality E.V. olive oil, with a couple of vine tomatoes stuffed in for sweetness. Even after being squashed in my pannier bag and becoming lukewarm from the baking sun, they still tasted amazing with a garnish of a few wild garlic flowers and washed down with a watery Danish beer.

Because sandwiches do have a tendency to mask flavour, this is due to the bread enclosing the ingredients, so the initial taste hit in the mouth is usually a little watered down (like my Danish beer), I find it's best to smash in some really big flavours or simply eat an open sandwich so the flavours don't get lost.


Luncheon was over, so onwards we went to Carmarthen with some more scrotal and vaginal abrasion.

Pizza Expression

It's been a few years since visiting this establishment, but on a sunny evening like tonight I thought it'd be a good idea to treat my girlfriend to some dining out, especially  after her horrendous university deadline, which she finished last night. So a bottle of NZ Sauvignon Blanc & a bottle of San Pellegrino and away we go. I'm a massive tight ass, so we had a go on some Orange 2-4-1 pizzas, which included free garlic bread and dough balls as a starter. I'm sure they would have been delightful, unfortunately they never reached our table for some reason or another. Because I'd taken advantage of their cheapskate offer I didn't want to complain. Anyway, who wants bread and bread followed by more bread for main course? So we soon forgot about that.

OK, so the anti-climax of a pizza arrived, I had a Giardiniera (which I suppose means Garden and therefore vegetablesbut traditionally means picked veg). Not only does the pizza look a bit rubbish is actually achieved rubbish status on the taste-bud's tasteometer. So I called the oral dustbin men to chuck it straight down the gullet of waste disposal with another swig of bin juice wine.


It's odd how I remember this place to be alright, but I suppose Mac Donald's was alright when I was 15. Anyhow, it does appear that the other mediocre pizza places do offer a superior product, such as an ASK calzone or the pizzas from Prezzo or Zizzi, still avoid Bella Italia total dogshitpiss.


Pizza Express did redeem itself when I convinced the waiter to make me an Affogato (Vanilla Ice-cream with espresso poured over it). Heavy Robusta Italian coffee balanced out with creamy, sweet, cold ice-cream actually works rather well.


So £40 for 2 people isn't bad for a 3 course dinner (- the missing starter) and a good bottle of average NZ wine. But next time I will go to ASK, as it really is better for the bins and feels like less money down the drain.

Consider the Scoffy Egg

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/apr/12/consider-the-egg

Fish & Chips Again

I managed to take a trip to Dartmouth on Saturday, a kind of belated Mother's Day. Obviously with my Mother. She was feeling sick from some bug she picked up on holiday so I had to eat alone.


Mitch Tonks is a successful fish restauranteur, when I heard he'd opened a fish & chip shop in Dartmouth called Rockfish, I got pretty excited. Sad I know. So off I went in search of my lunch with a rumbling tummy and a big hangover.


When I found the chip shop, to my disappointment, I realised it was actually a restaurant and not a takeaway. Yet I stepped inside and asked the lady if I could take away, as I wasn't going to eat alone seated at a table. The lady offered me the only takeaway option, Cod & Chips, I was happy with this. The Cod at Rockfish is line caught from a sustainable source, so it gets a big tick for ethics.

I handed over my £7.95 and sat for 10 minutes or so while my food was cooked to order. It arrived nicely boxed and in a brown paper bag with a tub of tartare sauce, slice of lemon, plastic knife & fork, napkin and sachet of vinegar & salt. Oh and for extra poshness a single leaf of parsley to show me that my £8 was money well spent. The whole package looked really good, but the illusion collapsed the moment I ate a sneaky chip. It appears they are using frozen chips or overly floury potatoes which fill your mouth like a sponge, although it probably helped soak up the booze from the night before. The batter was under cooked or rather the oil wasn't hot enough to crisp it up properly. The tartare sauce was good and the actual fish flesh was excellent, but just a massive let down that the basics weren't covered. I'd rather go to my local chippy in Totnes (The Silver Grill) or my favorite in Exeter (The Dolphin) or if you're looking for posh high end stuff try Rick Stein's chippy.


My comments are not fair on Rockfish as a restaurant, although I wouldn't eat there based on my chips being utter guff and the decor being rather shit. Sorry Mitch. But it really is shit.

Bread

I met these guys at a trade show this week. Seriously good bread  - www.hobbshousebakery.co.uk

Keep an eye out for it. Amazing white sourdough from a 55 year old yeast culture.