PANCAKE DAY

Jaimie very kindly made me and our flat mate James some pancakes. As is tradition on Shrove Tuesday, we ate pancakes with blueberry preserve, in rememberance of our Lord Jesus, or something.

Jaimie's highly succinct recipe for his batter is:

Half a pint of milk
2 eggs
4 oz plain flour

Combine all these together and Bob's your father's brother.



Easy as pie. And you can look super bored while you're doing it.

I'm quite surprised that we don't make pancakes more often to be honest!

I thought I'd capture Jaimie's culinary skills on camera for all to see. However, things didn't initally go to plan:



Pancake FAIL.

Let's try again:



That's better.



Blueberry conserve courtesy of Bon Maman.



Lemon & sugar. A classic indeed.

My Lucky Valentine

T'was Valentines Day yesterday. So I booked Pizza East for a little spot of Valentines lunch.



Pizza East is owned by the Soho House group, and is in fact underneath the infamous Shoreditch House. It's housed in the Tea Building in what used to be Tea Bar. It has an industrial, modern feel with exposed brick and plaster, lots of pillars and metal beams but still manages to feel quite homely with its leather seats and rustic charm.

We started with a Cauliflower Carbonara and a Mixed Beetroot, Pecorino & Horseradish salad. The Cauliflower Carbonara was pretty much and ever so posh cauliflower cheese and tasted delicious. But the real star was the salad, which included heritage varieties of beetroot. It was lovely and beautifully complemented by the cheese and horseradish.



We followed these with the restaurants staple; pizza. Jaimie opted for a slightly unusual choice, a 'white' pizza with veal meatballs, prosciutto, sage, lemon, parsley and cream. The white pizza came without the usual tomato base, and was actually quite delicious. It had a lovely freshness from the lemon zest along with the earthy sage notes. The inclusion of the veal meatballs were also very nice.

I followed a more traditional route and had a pizza with San Danielle ham, tomato, ricotta, pesto and baby chard. The pesto was course and really flavoursome, but perhaps used a little sparingly for my liking. The ham was beautiful. And obviously the people of San Danielle agree as every June they have a festival to celebrate it. More info here.

The pizzas were so lovely I forgot to take a photo of them.

We finished off with coffees and deserts of warm banana cake, toffee sauce and hazelnut gelato and a salted chocolate caramel tart. Both were very nice.

We didn't have anything to drink (well I had a grapefruit juice, but I don't think that counts) and the bill came to about £60 including service. Not the cheapest meal out I've ever had, but it was certainly very nice. It was Sunday lunchtime and Valentines day to boot, and the service was a little inattentive and slightly rushed. But it was nice that there wasn't that awkward Valentines, hundred of couples smooching air. It was mainly full of large groups of friends making the atmosphere lively and relaxed. Perhaps they'd saved all the cheesing dining until the evening. I'm pretty glad we missed that.


No thanks.

I'd completely recommend this place, as the quality of the food is high and consistent, they're accommodating of large groups of dinners and it would make a great destination for a birthday, or other such celebratory occasion.

A Birthday cake for Ms. Rose

So it was Rose's birthday on Saturday. But, alas, she couldn't celebrate as she had a dissertation to get written. Try as she my to go out for drinks, she just couldn't bring herself to do it. So instead she went out last night (a school night, ahem) so I couldn't go with her to celebrate.

To make up for it I sent my sister along with a cake I had specially prepared for Rose, with the accompanying note:


To be precise it was a Caramel Apple Loaf cake and it went a little bit like this:


175g soft butter, plus extra for greasing
175g golden caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
225g self-raising flour
½ tsp cinnamon
4 rounded tbsp Greek yogurt
2 eating apples
50g walnuts , very roughly chopped, plus 1 tbsp extra, chopped
50g soft toffees (I used Werther's chewy toffees)
2 tbsp double cream

Heat oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 3. Grease a 2lb loaf tin and line the base and ends with a long strip of baking paper.

Beat together the butter, sugar and vanilla until pale, then beat in the eggs, one by one.

Tip in the flour, cinnamon and yogurt.

Peel, core and chop apples into small chunks, then add to the bowl and mix everything together with a wooden spoon.

Scrape into the tin, smooth the top and scatter the walnuts down the middle.


Bake on a middle shelf for 1 hr 20-30 mins until a skewer poked in comes out clean. Cool in the tin.

To decorate, put the toffees in a small saucepan with the double cream.

Gently heat, stirring, until toffees have melted into a smooth caramel sauce.

Cool for about 1 min while you gently turn out the cake.

Slowly drizzle the toffee sauce over the top of the cake.

Scatter immediately with the extra walnuts - they should stick where they hit toffee.

And here is the finished article:


And off Sophie went to deliver it.

Cock-sized carrots, apparently...

Last year I pilfered some lunch off my boss Guy as it looked so nice.

This is Guy:

It was in fact his Thai Spiced Salad that he'd bought in from home. It really was 'mazin, so I asked him for the recipe. Here it is: (in the form in which I received it, cock sizes may vary)


If you cant see it, here is what it says:

8-10 people

(for the salad)

2 icebergs shreded
1 red small red cabage finely diced
half cucmber deseeded into ribbons
2 large cock-sized carrots into ribbons
3 bird's eye chillis deseeded finely diced
3-4 spring onions juliened
2 handfuls of coriander

(for the dressing)

1 part olive oil
2 part white wine vinegar
tblsp honey
1.5 tsp soy sauce
dash of fish sauce
juice of 2 limes
1 clove garlic crushed
finely grated ginger 1 knob of

I think the best way of tackling the salad part is to treat it like a chopped salad, and get the bits all small and mouth-sized. I used a mandolin to I made this. The dressing is a rough guide as it can be altered to suit your taste. I pretty much stuck to it though, but slightly upped the amount of soy that I put in. I had it as an accompanyment to some grilled chicken breast. It was well nice.

Chew the Fat...

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the marvelous CHEW THE FAT, a new culinary blog currently being written by my lovely friend Natali.

She is as barmy about food and cooking as I am. So go and have a look and what she's been up to. I reckon these snacks are definitely worth a try.

A tale of Gale's...

It was horrible outside yesterday. Like, really horrible. I was supposed to go out and do some rather more cultured things but the call of the warm flat and big sofa were too great. I just got the new March edition of BBC's Good Food magazine so decided to make their cover recipe for this month, a Lemon Curd and Blueberry loaf cake. They recommend it for Mother's Day, but yesterday seemed as good a day as any.



I've been baking quite a lot recently as it gives me a chance to use the beautiful cake dome I got for Christmas from Bert. This is a really easy recipe to make, I upped the quantity of blueberries I used (as I was being greedy) but they make have made the cake a little too moist. The original recipe calls for 85g of the little purple brutes.

So here is the recipe for the loaf:

175g margarine, plus more for buttering the tin
100g Greek yogurt
2 tbs lemon curd (I used Gale's)
3 large free range eggs
Zest of 1 lemon
200g self raising flour
175g golden caster sugar
100g of blueberries

Preheat your oven to 160/140 fan.

Grease up a 2lb loaf tin and line the base and ends with baking paper.

In a mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients except the blueberries.



Use an electric whisk to combine all the ingredients to a smooth batter.

Transfer half the batter into the loaf tin and scatter half the blueberries. Cover with the rest of the batter and finally grace with the rest of the blueberries.



Stick it in the oven for approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes (mine needed a little extra about 1 hour 20 minutes). To check the cake is ready insert a skewer. If it comes out clean then it's ready.

Allow to cool in the tin.

Whilst the cake was cooling, I made my icing. For this I used:

Juice of 1 lemon (the previously zested one)
140g icing sugar

Sift the icing sugar into a bowl and combine with the lemon juice to make the icing. Easy.

When the cake is cooled turn it out and drizzle the lemon icing on top. I let it drip down the sides for that rustic feel. And it looks nice.

Here's the finished article:



Wicked with a cup of tea.