I have to show off these beautiful Burgundy Red potatoes, dug from the allotment yesterday. They're like little jewels, glowing ruby red. You have to watch them carefully as they boil, as they have a tendency to get very floury if they're left too long. They taste wonderful. What you lack in quantity you get back in flavour from this heritage variety.
On to pudding - this is adapted from a recipe in October's
Olive magazine.
Blackberry and apple cake4 or 5 peeled, cored and sliced apples
About 20-30 blackberries, but not to worry if you have fewer
150g soft butter
150g sugar - I used 100g castor and 50g light moscavada
2 eggs
125g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
a pinch of ground cloves
Heat the oven to gas mark 4.
Put the apples in a pan with a knob of butter and a spoonful of the sugar and cook gently until the apples soften. Don't worry if you have cooking apples and they go a bit mushy. Turn off the heat and add the blackberries. Once they've cooled a bit, bung the apples and blackberries in a sieve and reserve the juice. Put the apple and blackberries in a buttered 20cm round deep cake tin - or, like me, use a paper tin liner.
Add the remaining sugar to the soft butter and mix. Then add in the eggs, then the flour, baking powder and spice. Next, stir in the fruit juices. Put the tin into the oven and bake for around half an hour. Let the cake rest for about ten minutes, then turn out.
Because of the blackberry juice, the cake looks very dark, but it tastes delicious. Serve with custard or cream.
A tweet from Essex Gourmet has alerted me to apple day at Lathcoats Farm in Essex this Saturday. Lathcoats is a fruit farm, and their website has a magnificent list of the 40 varieties grown there, including Adam's Pearmain from Hereford and Essex native D'Arcy Spice, which I've never heard of, let alone tasted.
The oldest apples on the list are Ashmead's Kernel (1700), Ribston Pippin (1707) and Blenheim Orange (1740). Apparently all the varieties will be there to be tasted: a very juicy prospect. The only potential pitfall to my plan to get there was yet another shutdown of the Victoria Line this weekend. But hurrah! I can nip down to Liverpool Street by overland train and get to Chelmsford from there.
My apple tree finished fruiting at the end of August, so I think I'm going to have an apple cooking orgy over the weekend...
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