I have just designed the flyer for the Really Terrible Orchestra concert at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival!
Wednesday 13 July 2011
Monday 28 March 2011
A sugar-free birthday party?
Yes! I did achieve a sugar-free birthday party for a 2 year old fascinated about cake. Ok, so that means there were a good range of sweet things involved, like dates, honey and my first try at baking with agave syrup, but there was no refined white sugar.
A very old and very unique friend of mine dear to my heart called me outright "cruel" for attempting to do this and she wasn't joking. Initially I was hurt by this and questioned whether I was denying all sorts of fun things to my child with a puritanical manner and then adding to it with hypocrisy by scoffing sweet things when he's asleep. But hell, I'm not perfect but I was confident that nobody would leave the party feeling let-down, especially not the birthday boy and I tend to feel it turned out fine and that the utter worship of the refined sugar god has been successfully challenged.
Oh, I trawled the internet on and off for about a month before the day itself, looking for good recipes but I could not find anything that suited my taste. I did not want to use a Candrel type sweetener and I steered away from the completely vegan things you find as I'm quite pro-butter in baking and not as puritanical as all that. So in the end I found that there was very little choice and adapted ideas I had got but completely used my own twist for each one.
When you search for sugar-free online plenty of things come up which are gluten-free or everything nice'n'tasty free, and although this was not what I was looking for I'm also not a fan of refined white flour and its many many subsiduary products.
So here was my rule of thumb:
- aim to replace a lot of the flour with ground nuts of several varieties (whilst avoiding peanut for asthma connections!)
- don't be shy of butter or cream
- replace white or brown sugar, (whether fairtrade or not!) with dates/ honey/ agave syrup/ fructose enhanced jam (oh and in one case a bit of very very very dark chocolate).
Of the above, the ones I am the most skeptical about are the agave and the jam as they seem to me to be quite processed and the jam surely must end up just as sugary. But even so, I really do feel that the taste in your mouth after you eat any of the above is not as furry and bad as after a mouthful of straight down the line Tate n Lyle. Is this merely psychological? perhaps, but even so, nobody complained about the food being dull...
Here's what I made:
- Pistachio cupcakes with honey and orange
- Date and walnut muffins with banana
- Carrot cake with walnut and date
- A three-layer cake with almond sponge and dark chocolate swirl and raspberry cream filling
In my opinion the first and the last were the best, but I have ideas about improving the middle two which I will add here!
Rebecca's Pistachio cupcakes
100g pistachio whizzed up fine
70g ground almonds
160g butter
160g honey
3 eggs
seeds of 1 cardamon, ground fine
60g rice flour
zest of 2 oranges and juice of 1
Put all the dry stuff together and whizz in the wet stuff. I used silicone cup cake cases as I think it would be a nightmare to scrape out of metal cases or even to peel off paper ones. This is a wet mixture! I baked it at about 185 degrees and checked it after 15 mins, may need more but carefully touch the top and judge if it's too squidgy or not.
Rebecca's Date and Walnut muffins
5 oz butter
5 oz self-raising wholemeal flour
4 oz walnuts ground up as fine or chunky as you like
6 oz dates
2 over-the-top bananas
juice of 1 orange
2 eggs
4 fl oz milk
The dry stuff/ wet stuff rule applies here too. My twist was to simmer the dates in the orange juice until they have become a mushy pulp. I find that you get dates a lot in recipes used in chunks, but they are basically one of the world's first and most delicious forms of sweetness and if they disperse around the whole mixture extra sugar is totally unnecessary. Now these muffins came out flat and dense, a bit of a disappointment to me. I think this is because of about 3 reasons and maybe it can be solved! I twisted one of the recipes by almost halving the self-raising flour and replacing with walnut, and I should have added baking powder to make up for that - try at least 1 spoon. The bananas weigh it all down and might as well be removed or left in chunks rather than whizzed as it was not very banana-ish anyway. Lastly the dates have their own puply, papery mass which is a separate thing to their luscious sugar. When you make Haleg for Passover, a middle eastern sweet, you boil the dates in water until a certain temperature then sieve them overnight through a muslin to separate the juice from the pulp which is discarded. Time-consuming but utterly delicious and not gritty. You can shortcut this perhaps from getting a similar date syrup which is available from some middle eastern shops, I think it originates from Syria.
Rebecca's Carrot cake with Walnut and Date
200g brown self-raising flour
150g walnut ground fine or chunky
120g rice flour
half a teaspooon baking powder
300g dates
200g butter
100g oil
zest and juice 1 orange
4 eggs
270g grated carrot
All the other recipes were adapted from reading loads on the internet but were mainly me. I have to admit that this one adapts one recipe only, partly because my strength was waning, but when you hit an Ottolenghi recipe you can't be too far wrong. His contained four times the amount of oil (but no butter) and nearly double the sugar! Also I personally don't need any of the cinnamon, clove and nutmeg that normally goes into a carrot cake so a took it out. The icing was a disaster so let's forget about it. But this cake was great but the only slight fault was the pithy dates again (it's only me who picks up on this not anybody else). Lastly I cooked it for an hour which was about right but although the top was showing signs of being overdone the middle was barely just cooked. Old Yotam's tip if this is happening is to wrap the cake in foil, in the oven, and leave it in for longer. Sounds like a good plan.
Rebecca's layered marble cake with Almond, Chocolate and Raspberry cream filling
8oz butter
6oz agave syrup
4 eggs
4 oz white self-raising flour
4 oz ground almonds
half a teaspoon baking powder
4 oz melted dark chocolate, Lindt 90%
for the filling:
double cream, whipped up
raspberry and pomegranate sugar-free jam (think it's sweetened with concentrated apple juice)
Basically this is a very much adapted Victoria Sponge. Mix it all up in the usual way, dry then wet. Take half the mixture and mix in the melted chocolate. Then get 3 small tins and in each put 3 blobs of the almond mix and put 3 blobs of the chocolate mix in-between, then gently swirl them together. When cooked and cooled, stir some jam into the whipped cream and sandwich them all together. That Lindt chocolate had the least sugar content I could think of but maybe if I try it next time I would find ground cocoa nibs and use them instead, the real deal.
Mmmm, beautiful, yummy, not too virtuous and all eaten up!
A very old and very unique friend of mine dear to my heart called me outright "cruel" for attempting to do this and she wasn't joking. Initially I was hurt by this and questioned whether I was denying all sorts of fun things to my child with a puritanical manner and then adding to it with hypocrisy by scoffing sweet things when he's asleep. But hell, I'm not perfect but I was confident that nobody would leave the party feeling let-down, especially not the birthday boy and I tend to feel it turned out fine and that the utter worship of the refined sugar god has been successfully challenged.
Oh, I trawled the internet on and off for about a month before the day itself, looking for good recipes but I could not find anything that suited my taste. I did not want to use a Candrel type sweetener and I steered away from the completely vegan things you find as I'm quite pro-butter in baking and not as puritanical as all that. So in the end I found that there was very little choice and adapted ideas I had got but completely used my own twist for each one.
When you search for sugar-free online plenty of things come up which are gluten-free or everything nice'n'tasty free, and although this was not what I was looking for I'm also not a fan of refined white flour and its many many subsiduary products.
So here was my rule of thumb:
- aim to replace a lot of the flour with ground nuts of several varieties (whilst avoiding peanut for asthma connections!)
- don't be shy of butter or cream
- replace white or brown sugar, (whether fairtrade or not!) with dates/ honey/ agave syrup/ fructose enhanced jam (oh and in one case a bit of very very very dark chocolate).
Of the above, the ones I am the most skeptical about are the agave and the jam as they seem to me to be quite processed and the jam surely must end up just as sugary. But even so, I really do feel that the taste in your mouth after you eat any of the above is not as furry and bad as after a mouthful of straight down the line Tate n Lyle. Is this merely psychological? perhaps, but even so, nobody complained about the food being dull...
Here's what I made:
- Pistachio cupcakes with honey and orange
- Date and walnut muffins with banana
- Carrot cake with walnut and date
- A three-layer cake with almond sponge and dark chocolate swirl and raspberry cream filling
In my opinion the first and the last were the best, but I have ideas about improving the middle two which I will add here!
Rebecca's Pistachio cupcakes
100g pistachio whizzed up fine
70g ground almonds
160g butter
160g honey
3 eggs
seeds of 1 cardamon, ground fine
60g rice flour
zest of 2 oranges and juice of 1
Put all the dry stuff together and whizz in the wet stuff. I used silicone cup cake cases as I think it would be a nightmare to scrape out of metal cases or even to peel off paper ones. This is a wet mixture! I baked it at about 185 degrees and checked it after 15 mins, may need more but carefully touch the top and judge if it's too squidgy or not.
Rebecca's Date and Walnut muffins
5 oz butter
5 oz self-raising wholemeal flour
4 oz walnuts ground up as fine or chunky as you like
6 oz dates
2 over-the-top bananas
juice of 1 orange
2 eggs
4 fl oz milk
The dry stuff/ wet stuff rule applies here too. My twist was to simmer the dates in the orange juice until they have become a mushy pulp. I find that you get dates a lot in recipes used in chunks, but they are basically one of the world's first and most delicious forms of sweetness and if they disperse around the whole mixture extra sugar is totally unnecessary. Now these muffins came out flat and dense, a bit of a disappointment to me. I think this is because of about 3 reasons and maybe it can be solved! I twisted one of the recipes by almost halving the self-raising flour and replacing with walnut, and I should have added baking powder to make up for that - try at least 1 spoon. The bananas weigh it all down and might as well be removed or left in chunks rather than whizzed as it was not very banana-ish anyway. Lastly the dates have their own puply, papery mass which is a separate thing to their luscious sugar. When you make Haleg for Passover, a middle eastern sweet, you boil the dates in water until a certain temperature then sieve them overnight through a muslin to separate the juice from the pulp which is discarded. Time-consuming but utterly delicious and not gritty. You can shortcut this perhaps from getting a similar date syrup which is available from some middle eastern shops, I think it originates from Syria.
Rebecca's Carrot cake with Walnut and Date
200g brown self-raising flour
150g walnut ground fine or chunky
120g rice flour
half a teaspooon baking powder
300g dates
200g butter
100g oil
zest and juice 1 orange
4 eggs
270g grated carrot
All the other recipes were adapted from reading loads on the internet but were mainly me. I have to admit that this one adapts one recipe only, partly because my strength was waning, but when you hit an Ottolenghi recipe you can't be too far wrong. His contained four times the amount of oil (but no butter) and nearly double the sugar! Also I personally don't need any of the cinnamon, clove and nutmeg that normally goes into a carrot cake so a took it out. The icing was a disaster so let's forget about it. But this cake was great but the only slight fault was the pithy dates again (it's only me who picks up on this not anybody else). Lastly I cooked it for an hour which was about right but although the top was showing signs of being overdone the middle was barely just cooked. Old Yotam's tip if this is happening is to wrap the cake in foil, in the oven, and leave it in for longer. Sounds like a good plan.
Rebecca's layered marble cake with Almond, Chocolate and Raspberry cream filling
8oz butter
6oz agave syrup
4 eggs
4 oz white self-raising flour
4 oz ground almonds
half a teaspoon baking powder
4 oz melted dark chocolate, Lindt 90%
for the filling:
double cream, whipped up
raspberry and pomegranate sugar-free jam (think it's sweetened with concentrated apple juice)
Basically this is a very much adapted Victoria Sponge. Mix it all up in the usual way, dry then wet. Take half the mixture and mix in the melted chocolate. Then get 3 small tins and in each put 3 blobs of the almond mix and put 3 blobs of the chocolate mix in-between, then gently swirl them together. When cooked and cooled, stir some jam into the whipped cream and sandwich them all together. That Lindt chocolate had the least sugar content I could think of but maybe if I try it next time I would find ground cocoa nibs and use them instead, the real deal.
Mmmm, beautiful, yummy, not too virtuous and all eaten up!
Monday 16 August 2010
Have just tracked down a crazy good track from Late Junction last week
After a long trawl through Max Reinhardt's Late Juntion site on the bbc iplayer I have tracked down a crazy good track I heard round midnight last week. It is sung by a half-Armenian woman from Suffolk...
Cevanne
Cevanne
Thursday 22 July 2010
A departure from Annabel Karmel
I have never warmed to Annabel Karmel's work apart from the inspired combination of mashed banana and avocado. So I am proud to document today's suppertime success:
Rice-flour fusili with leftover beetroot sauce stirred with grilled mackerel and yoghurt.
Totally polished off.
Here's the beetroot sauce from a Jocelyn Dimbelby recipe scanned from A Taste of Dreams published 1976:
Rice-flour fusili with leftover beetroot sauce stirred with grilled mackerel and yoghurt.
Totally polished off.
Here's the beetroot sauce from a Jocelyn Dimbelby recipe scanned from A Taste of Dreams published 1976:
Monday 19 July 2010
The Really Terrible Orchestra at the Edinburgh Fringe
I have just designed the flyer for the upcoming RTO concert at Edinburgh's Festival Fringe:
No prizes for guessing that Carnival of the Animals is on the bill.
Thursday 15 July 2010
mrpeach the Architect performs at the Edinburgh Festival
How about that, I have been invited to participate in an ArtsAdmin event on the Festival Fringe in August. Artist Richard Dedominici will be coordinating a Human Library where human books will be lent out for 10 minute chats to library visitors to expostulate on the future of their profession. Subjects of the Edinburghian books include beekeeping, wrestling and now, Architecture, as I have been invited in that particular capacity. Borrow me between 3-4pm on 11th August at the Forest, Bristo Place, Edinburgh.
Tuesday 13 July 2010
Interactive ipad books for children
Are these the best thing since the invention of the printing press? Or are they to be viewed with a similar sneer as the one bestowed upon wall-to-wall C-Beebies by a certain tranche of middle class parents? So far I am torn on this matter.
A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune to be able to jump on a bicycle, alone, at midday, under the beating sun with no need for a coat on and cycle 15 minutes to arrive at the Hampstead ladies pond for an idyllic and ultra-refreshing swim. As the dragonflies flew past my head I had not a care in the world, it belied description. And as I savoured the glow afterwards, gazing down the meadow an apparent brainwave came to mind, to design Liberty print kilts for little boys and girls! R&D is underway, watch this space as they say.
I mention this as a preamble to another apparent brainwave, to harness skills for an interactive i-pad book for children. I thought this was a novel idea and tapped it straight into google where in a split second I had over 350,000 hits. (The kilts were definitely more original). Nevertheless, I guessed that very few of these would be an interactive book that I actually appealed to my critical eye. The book, or series of books, that I have in mind are remaining tightly under wraps, suffice to say it was published over 30 years ago and deserves an outing in the new millenium. But it has got me all in a lather about my stance on this.
Peruse Alice in Wonderland for ipad. It feels like you are the first to see this, no? but there have already been over a million viewers on that youtube video alone.
Why I am deeply suspicious:
Speed. The advert is over five times as fast as I would like to view it. This is purely a sign of my age and reminds me that since the fast cuts of hospital series ER first came on the screen I have been increasingly left behind by the ever accelerating trend for speed in editing the moving image. Somebody half my age has been brought up on this and has a brain that appears to tolerate watching such a storm of images and process it, whilst also processing music through and earpad (sic - I know) in one ear and corresponding on facebook with one eye. The trailer for the world cup was, for me, the latest in this Babel-like fantasy which shows no signs of slowing down. Since the 'Alice' advert is in this gear is then it seems like too much to hope for that the ipad book will provide a slow enough medium to discover the text at any real level of depth.
Sensation. Corny it is, but surely nothing beats holding the soft paper of a book. I could rhapsodise about the aged origins of a sheaf of papyrus, the world-changing democracy of Gutenberg's printing press, the well-chewed, well-loved corner of a board book for a 6 month old, and I have; it's all true. When holding an ipad I bet what you feel is a thrill of owning and touching the latest piece of MacSoftware worth £xxx and that the kudos is more than half about the zeitgeist and your utter coolness to be touching such a fancy piece of kit, rather than an engagement with the text it portrays.
Wholeness. This was pointed out to me by a friend but I'll claim it was latent in my mind. A piece of art has a beginning, a middle and an end, right? or thus it was drummed into me by a certain dragon of an English teacher a while ago. When I read a bedtime story to a child the child knows and I know that I'll be getting to the end and then that afterwards presumably that story can be digested in the mysterious drift off to sleep. Music and visual art also gain their own force in being made whole. When you open an ipad book I expect you select it from the sea of other files you own and that when you are in it there is no physical sense of its entirety, short of maybe a time-bar if you tap the screen. It leaves the medium open for abuse, for unsatisfying nibbles and tastes of artistry that may be abandoned at the moment that attention wanes. I'm all for long attention spans.
Why I am thoroughly seduced:
Fusion. I have a feeling that this format has created a whole new medium for art that is greater than the sum of its parts. What are its parts? Well, the written word, visual art, the spoken voice, music, animation and lastly, the empowerment to be able to bring about cause and effect in all of these. So, the talking book answers a need when you are in some long daily commute by car; the illustrated book is the current state of the art and is loading up your bookshelf, looking good; the music is there in the film version; the animation has been there in Walt Disney's Fantasia for well over 50 years; the web has been there for more than a decade and now we navigate websites at will. A toddler until a certain age that I have not yet had the glee to observe cannot navigate a website at will, but pressing on a throbbing potion which is audibly calling out "Drink me!" and then basking as the liquid plays some sort of trick may well be possible.
What else? That's about it for now. Ever cautious, the cons seem to have outweighed the pros at the moment. It's all a ruse to keep you from guessing what my ipad fantasy will turn out to be, but again, watch this space, the voice of the century has agreed to read it for me!
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