The ten best things to do with blackberries

It's been a great year for blackberries. They seem to be everywhere - not just on country lanes and in fields but in London parks and alongside railway lines, anywhere in fact, urban or rural, where they can find a foothold.

A few days spent camping in Wales recently gave me the opportunity for lots of blackberry-picking - although coastal walks became rather slow and protracted when I kept getting distracted by new patches of shiny, juicy fruit.

The best chocolate mousse in the world

Usually I try to post recipes that are vegetable-centric, and healthy where possible. But we all need indulgences sometimes. On this occasion we were having people round to dinner and a dessert was required. In fact, a dairy-free dessert was required. But this dish is so rich and indulgent that it wouldn't strike you as free-from anything.

Chocolate mousse might sound complicated to make, but as long as you can separate eggs and have an electric whisk, it's not at all. The only slightly tricky part is mixing in the egg whites without knocking all the air out of them, but with patience and a gentle hand you should get there in the end. (It strikes me that this could equally be advice for bringing up children.)

Healthier brownies with a secret ingredient

A good brownie is a wonderful thing, but they can so easily be as disappointing as a broken promise. A dry, crumbly texture or stinginess with the chocolate are the most common failings. A brownie needs to be rich, with a big 'hit' of chocolate, and soft - perhaps even verging on gooey - in the middle.

Tropical trifle

Here's the last 'festive' dish of the holiday season. Normal (ie healthier) service will resume soon. Anyway, in case you're looking for some indulgence before grim January gets under way, I can recommend this trifle.

An apple cake for autumn

If blackberries are the fruit that speak of late summer, then apples sum up autumn for me in all its fruitfulness. There's so much generosity about a tree that's laden with fruit, especially a fruit as versatile as an apple.

On a walk last weekend I gathered an armful of windfalls scattered along a footpath. They were a bit bruised, but after a bit of preparation, fine for cooking with. But what to make? I've got quite a few ways of using up a glut of apples - everything from crumble to chutney and even a savoury pie with cheese and onion.

But my all time favourite is apple cake. I've made this cake most autumns for the last ten years, and it was a real pleasure to make it again. It's full of fruit and spices - not the most elegant kind of cake perhaps, but very good.

Wild berries and a healthy fruit crumble

I'm feeling replenished after a week on the beautiful Isle of Arran. And my timing was unintentionally brilliant. The blackberries might be on their last legs down south, but on Arran they were perfect. I don't think I have ever seen such a profusion of them. The bramble plants were everywhere, their thorny stems thrusting through fences and around bushes like an illustration of unstoppable life-force. And almost every hedgerow was studded with shiny black berries, most of them so large and plump it was almost impossible to pass by without picking a few.

The best millionaire's shortbread...ever

A visit to Brick Lane on a Sunday is a bewildering affair. So many things to eat...where do you start? A trip to one of the bagel shops or Bangladeshi restaurants is the traditional thing to do.

But the various markets are adding more and more options. American, Argentinean, Caribbean, Chinese, Ethiopian, Japanese, Malaysian, Mexican, Moroccan, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, all competing to display their wares in the most enticing way and attract the crowds of hungry young things.

Cake part 2: Ultimate carrot cake

This was a cake to mark a half-century. It had to look good. It had to taste better. Who does one turn to in these situations? Why, Delia, of course. I'm sure Nigella's and Lorraine's creations are wonderful, but I needed to know that it would turn out exactly as it was supposed to - and I reckon you can't beat Delia for that.

Cake part 1: Lower-fat lemon drizzle cake

I can barely remember when I last made a cake. I've admired the activities on Great British Bake-off with interest, but they haven't stirred me to create Sachertorte or Victoria sponge. I even met a man who takes pride in making French-style macarons, those dainty jewel-like objects in pastel colours, which possibly have the greatest ratio of effort to each mouthful of any food I can think of. All I could think of is, why? (Something about the need to master something really difficult, I think, although if I had that urge I'm not sure I'd use it for patisserie.)

Lower-fat lemon drizzle cake, with raspberries

The push for Christmas perfection

I'm just back from enjoying a friend's Christmas ale (brewed with nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon and cloves) and home-baked bread, including another guest's Christmas fruity walnut and beer bread. This was a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe, (this version made with a mix of Red Stripe and coconut porter, apparently) and was absolutely delicious. No kneading or rising time required - I'll be making it myself as soon as I get a chance.

Image: Freefoto.com

On the subject of Christmas television cookery programmes, I always have a burst of initial enthusiasm, only to start feeling slightly exhausted by them at some point in December.

Discovering the joys of fruit salad

I am growing to appreciate fruit salad. I'm not sure whether this is a sign of advancing years, or if it's that I've become a bit more health-conscious.

In the past I've mainly come across it in restaurants or buffets, and I've always considered it a poor relation to, well, any other dessert, or cheese for that matter. It's not cooked for a start, and therefore hardly a real dish (I don't consider salad to be a main dish either). And all too often it seems over-stuffed with pieces of hard apple, presumably because apples are cheaper than other fruit. Invariably I would go for any other option.

Photo: mrsmaxspix

Cooking with love and the best brownie recipe

We cook for so many reasons: to appease hunger, to tantalise the tastebuds, sometimes for money, sometimes to feed others, and to express love.

I have been cooking for my grandmother recently (one of my astonishing duo of 100-year-old grandmothers) which has prompted my thoughts about the last of these. Until her health declined a few months ago she would make me rice pudding every time I visited, remembering that it was my favourite dessert as a child. Even after she largely stopped cooking she still found the energy to make rice pudding for me, and I was always touched by it, even the time she forgot the sugar.

Not just a trifle

I'm not sure how I've reached my thirties without having made a trifle before now. The only excuses I can offer are that (1) I usually cook for two, and trifle seems rather extravagant and labour-intensive for two, and (2) I always think of trifle as containing jelly, and I'm not really into desserts derived from boiled pigs' feet.

I've now put right my omission, thanks in part to Delia, whose recipe made me realise that you don't need jelly at all. It always featured in my childhood versions (usually made by my gran) but quite a lot of trifle recipes omit the jelly. I think it's a more adult dish without, which seems quite appropriate given that it usually features lashings of sherry.

Simple but delicous raspberry souffles

Where has the last week gone? I wish I knew. Summer seems to be sliding away from under me.

Anyhow, one of the glories of late summer is raspberries. If you go to the market at the end of the day you can sometimes find punnets of them for £1, or even less if you are lucky. Mine are usually just labelled as British, but I guess they may well be Scottish by now.

Raspberries do freeze well, though they never look as good once defrosted. These raspberry souffles can be made equally well with fruit that have been frozen.

These are the first sweet souffles I've ever made, though I've done savoury ones quite a few times. They were somewhat borne out of necessity, in that I didn't have many ingredients, or an opportunity to go to the shops, but I did have some eggs, sugar and raspberries. Which is pretty much all you need for this dessert. I was astonished by how well these turned out, especially considering how little time they took to make. It's also a good way of making a single punnet of raspberries stretch around four people. 

The cleverest chocolate mousse ever...

A few days ago I was at an event at the excellent Wellcome Collection. You may have been there for one of their exhibitions, usually based around science or medicine (the last one, Brains, was particularly popular). Well, this event reached new heights as far as I was concerned, as it involved samples of chocolate mousse. I'm sure there's all kinds of physics and chemistry involved here, but the scientific details somewhat passed me by.

The mousse was created by Mark Greenaway, a top chef (you may have seen him on Great British Menu and the like) in Edinburgh, where he has an eponymous restaurant. His mousse was egg-free, thanks to a nifty device I haven't seen before called a cream whipper. You put your cream-based solution into a stainless steel device like a cross between a jug and a spray can, charge it with some canisters of nitrous oxide (laughing gas to you and me) and out comes an instant, light-as-gossamer mousse. (You can do this with savoury things too, eg to make salmon mousse.) The ingredients here were 70pc dark chocolate, melted with double cream and a little sugar.

Of course, Mark Greenaway didn't become a top chef by just making normal chocolate mousse, even if it is a particularly ethereal one. No, he also made caramelised Coco Pops (melt your sugar, stir in Coco Pops, allow to cool, break up into pieces). In case anyone was horrified by the use of mass-produced sugary cereal in his dessert, he explained that you could puff the rice yourself, but there didn't really seem to be much point. And the final magic touch was a layer of popping candy.

It was intensely chocolatey. It was airy. There were the caramelised Coco Pops to provide a textural contrast. And then there was the popping candy, producing tiny explosions inside your skull. Did I mention this was free? Living in London is great...

Sadly I didn't manage to photograph the chocolate mousse, but here's a picture of a cream whipper instead.

Two 100th birthdays and a special chocolate roulade

It was an unusual, tiring and mostly wonderful weekend. I'm in the unusual position of having two grandmothers who have both just turned 100 - one on Friday and one today. So it was a weekend of festivities, and it was really lovely to see them both enjoying themselves and celebrating with their families. I ate far too much throughout and probably need to eat super-healthily for several weeks to make up for it!

Today's highlights were both tarts - a super-zesty lemon tart, the punchiest I have had in a long time, and a savoury tart with tomatoes, goats' cheese and a hint of mustard.

On Friday we all ate a three-course lunch and then a huge banquet again in the evening, mostly cooked by my talented sister-in-law. I couldn't choose between her pear tart and her chocolate raspberry roulade in terms of sheer deliciousness, but here is the recipe for chocolate raspberry roulade. It looks amazingly professional but is not as hard as it looks, and it's flourless so it is very light, and gluten-free too.

We didn't even get to the birthday cake (also baked and decorated by Yarti) - at least not on Friday, anyway.

Yarti's chocolate raspberry roulade

Ingredients
175g dark chocolate
2 tbsp water
5 eggs, separated (preferably at room temperature)
175g caster sugar
300ml double cream
200g raspberries
2 tbsp liqueur of your choice (optional) - Grand Marnier works well

Method
Melt the chocolate together with the water in a small pan over a low heat.
Beat the egg yolks and sugar together with an electric whisk until pale and fluffy.
Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry
Fold the melted chocolate into the egg yolk and sugar mixture. Fold in the egg whites with a metal spoon - do this in three batches rather than all at once.
Line a Swiss roll tin with greased baking parchment and pour in the mixture.
Bake at gas mark 5/190C for 20-25 minutes or until the top is glossy and cracked and a toothpick or small skewer inserted inside comes out clean. (It's best to check after 20 minutes.)
Cover with a clean damp tea-towel and leave for at least an hour or until completely cool.
Whip the cream and fold in the raspberries and the liqueur. If you want to decorate the top, reserve a couple of tablespoons of whipped cream and five perfect raspberries for decoration.
Spread the raspberry cream all over the roulade and then roll it up gently from the shorter edge. Treat it gently to avoid cracks, but if it does crack it's not the end of the world.
To decorate, pipe five small rosettes of double cream along the top of the roulade, then place a raspberry on top of each rosette. If you don't have a piping bag, you can just put neat blobs of cream on using teaspoons, though this doesn't look quite as professional.


Unfortunately I didn't get to take a picture of it before it was eaten, but here are pictures of Elsie and Ruth, still going strong at 100, aided by champagne! Cheers both!

A Highlands odyssey and orange treacle tart

I'm back in London again after a trip to the Scottish Highlands: walking, cycling, marvelling anew at each new view. A lot of cake was eaten, as well as not a few scones. I seemed to notice scones a lot on this trip - if I associate them with anywhere it is with the West Country, but are the Scots even bigger scone enthusiasts, I wonder?

One of the foodie highlights was a brief stop at Glasgow farmers' market on the way further north. The hot offerings included home-made burgers, hog roast and excellent curries. I also bought the first cakes of the trip (ginger cake and banana bread) and crowdie (an traditional Highlands soft cheese, difficult to find down south), which I find irresistible on oatcakes.

One discovery in a pub near Fort William was an orange treacle tart. I loved the hint of zestiness which married with what can otherwise be a piercingly sweet dessert. Here is my approximation at the recipe.

Orange treacle tart

250g shortcrust pastry
450g golden syrup
150g fresh breadcrumbs (white is usual but you can use brown if you prefer, not granary please!)
Zest and juice of one orange
2 eggs, lightly beaten

Roll out the pastry and line a 20cm tart tin. Line with greaseproof paper and baking beans and blind bake at 190C/gas 5 for 10-15 minutes or until the pastry is lightly cooked. Take out the paper and beans and return to oven for 2 minutes more to dry out. Turn the oven down to 180C/gas mark 4.

Warm the syrup slightly in a pan, remove from heat and mix in the breadcrumbs, orange zest and juice, followed by the eggs.

Pour into the tart case and bake for 30-45 minutes or until lightly set. 

Serve with custard or cream. I would go for custard myself, though the slight tanginess of creme fraiche also works well with the sweet filling.

The wonders of zabaglione

This is a tale of how I have become converted to zabaglione. And made the useful find of a good Italian restaurant not far from the British Museum.

We had dithered over dessert, but were assured they were all home-made. The waiter's promise that the zabaglione would be whipped up especially for me was enough to sway me. I hadn't had zabaglione for years, and in fact only once or twice at all. On the last occasion I remember being underwhelmed by what seemed like a thin custard.

Now I am full of awe at how egg yolks, sugar and Marsala can be converted into a dish worthy of the gods. It was served warm (such was my zabaglione ignorance that I wasn't expecting this), thick and frothy in a wine glass, and full of the alcoholic punch of sweet wine (lots of wine, if the flavour was anything to go by). It was a bit like having a dessert and a liqueur at once.

I may be back to Il Castelletto just for the zabaglione.

As for the rest of the meal, it was all above our expectations. Round the corner from the British Museum, we weren't sure whether it would just be a tourist trap. There were a fair few tourists, to be sure, but the food was good. Prices are reasonable for the area - £4.50 to £8 for starters, around £9 for pasta main courses, and around £13 for meat or fish mains. (They also do a 2 for 1 with Tastecard, even on Friday evenings, and I think there is a cheaper lunch menu.) There were quite a few veal dishes, though I would have preferred some information about whether this was British rose veal, which is produced without cruelty, or something imported and reared with lower standards of animal welfare.

It maybe wasn't the best time to order chicken liver pate, having watched a programme about campylobacter food poisoning the previous night. Apparently chicken liver pate, made with undercooked chicken livers, is a prime source. Luckily the pate was delicious, and insofar as you could tell from the colour, the livers seemed to have been properly cooked.

Minestrone soup had a lovely, deep flavour to the broth. I liked the little contraption they had for grating parmesan onto it - much better than that weird ready-grated parmesan you sometimes see in Italian restaurants.

Moving onto mains, I thought the spinach and ricotta cannelloni was a bit small, but then I find that nearly every time I order cannelloni in a restaurant. It had a good flavour though, was generously topped with cheese, and came bathed in plenty of tomato sauce.

The other half had spaghetti marinara. This translates as sailors' spaghetti, but is not to be confused with marinara sauce made just with tomatoes, garlic and onions (the name comes from the fact that this sauce keeps well on sea journeys). In this case, as the menu explains, it was spaghetti served with seafood. When it arrived the seafood turned out to be mussels, baby octopus, calamari, and the odd scallop, in a modest amount of tomato sauce as well. The tomato flavour didn't come through strongly, though perhaps this was just as well to allow the seafood to be the focus.

We also had a tiramisu for dessert, though next to the zabaglione it seemed oddly lacking. It was pleasant enough, but could have done with more of an espresso kick to give it that "pick me up" quality. I personally think tiramisu should have an bit of a kick from alcohol too, though others may disagree.

Il Castelletto
17 Bury Place, London
WC1A 2JB
020 7405 2232

The last of the blackberries and a luscious baked cheesecake

I am a little distressed at how quickly the blackberry season is coming to an end.

Maybe this is because I live further down south now, but mid-September seems too soon to wave goodbye to this autumnal fruit. My recently-fertile hunting ground on Tooting Bec common is now full only of soggy or mouldy fruit.

A blackberry bush can actually be any one of hundreds of different species, some of which fruit later than others. So if you look carefully enough (or live further north than me) you should still find the last of the blackberries.

I can't think of much better to do with them than this cheesecake. (The ambitions I had been harbouring of making blackberry chutney may have to wait till next year).

I adapted the following recipe from a raspberry cheesecake recipe from BBC Good Food. It is actually the first baked cheesecake I have made. I was pretty proud of myself - it looked good and tasted even better, if I do say so myself. Baked cheesecakes can be prone to cracking when they cool, but this one didn't.

I have decided that baked cheesecake is the way to go when it comes to cheesecake. And all too often the uncooked style of cheesecake can be too creamy, without the depth of flavour you get from cheese. This one has a bit of extra richness from the eggs, and a touch of welcome acidity from the cream cheese.

Unfortunately I wasn't quick enough to take a picture before it all got eaten, so you will have to use your imagination.

For other blackberry recipes, see my earlier post here.

Ingredients
10 digestive biscuits
40g butter, melted
600g/ 1lb 5oz/ 3 standard tubs cream cheese
2 tbsp plain flour
175g/ 6oz sugar (granulated or caster will both work fine)
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
142ml / 1/4 pint pot soured cream
200g/ 7oz blackberries (plus optional extras for the top)

Method
1. Heat the oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4. Crush the biscuits to crumbs by putting them in a plastic bag and hitting with a rolling pin or similar heavy implement). Mix with the butter. Press into a springform tin (it needs to be somewhere between 20 and 25cm in diameter) and bake for 5 minutes, then cool.

2. Beat the cream cheese with the flour, sugar, a few drops of vanilla, eggs, the yolk and soured cream until light and fluffy. Stir in half the raspberries and pour into the tin. Bake for 40 minutes and then check, it should be set but slightly wobbly in the centre. Leave in the tin to cool.

3. Scatter any remaining fruit over the top. It doesn't really need any accompaniment - I personally feel cream would be gilding the lily, though you could have a spoonful of clotted cream or crème fraiche if you insist.

If your foraging mission has failed to yield any blackberries, you could use raspberries or blueberries instead. Blackcurrants would also work, although if using them I would be tempted to reduce the quantity to 150g/ 5oz as blackcurrants have a stronger, sharper flavour.

(A note on cream cheese: I used 1 tub full-fat Philadelphia and two tubs of a cheaper alternative described as medium-fat, which is about 11pc fat so similar to reduced-fat Philadelphia. You could probably get away with using all medium-fat, or go for all full-fat if you want a slightly richer flavour).