Blackberry and apple cake

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 cake

4 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.

This week - including Shropshire and a pizza

The first half of this week was consumed by getting settled into new offices in west London: arctic air conditioning and a longer journey into work. Meanwhile in the garden, my brugmansia is starting to bloom its head off.

I took Friday off and got up at 0500 so that I could catch the first Wrexham and
Shropshire train from Marylebone to Shrewsbury. It's a three hour journey and there seem to be a lot of speed reductions on the line. The rail company is very small and very friendly, and you can get a cooked breakfast if you want; all ingredients are sourced from the company's base in Wales. I haven't visited Shrewsbury for many many years, and I found that it's shrunk as my legs have got longer. My first stop was at the castle, bang next door to the railway station. Originally built in the eleventh century as a motte and bailey, it now houses the Shropshire Regimental Museum. All the staff are ex-forces, and one of the guys stopped to talk as I pondered a showcase full of artifacts from the first Afghan war. We didn't win that one either, and we wondered why we seem not to have learnt anything.

Then I walked down Pride Hill and up to the Kingsland Bridge. Next to the bridge is my old school, Shrewsbury High School for Girls. I spent two years at the junior school and one here, at the senior school - happy days. And the food was a lot better than at my next school...The school is a lot bigger now, and they've nabbed several of the adjoining buildings. And there's an indoor gym! In my day, we had monkey bars in the main hall.
Next, I skirted the old town walls and came down to the English Bridge over the Severn.

The river was running pretty high. Over the bridge is Shrewsbury Abbey - all the remains of the old monastery.

A good number of the buildings remained (although in a terrible state of repair) until Thomas Telford bulldozed most of them to make way for the A5. Much of the abbey has been rebuilt too, but it's still a lovely church and well worth a visit. Back into town, past the guildhall, to wander around, shop for a picnic lunch at a lovely deli, and nose into the town museum down by where the bus station used to be. Then home by the 1600 train. A great day.
On the food front, I felt inspired by Hugh F-W's article in the Guardian yesterday to make pizza.

The recipe is from Dan Steven's River Cottage Bread book, and you can get it from the link above. I gently fried off some mushrooms with a couple of cloves of garlic and some lemon juice, used some garden toms for a tomato sauce, and topped it with mozzarella and my dried Turkish black olives. Onto my pizza stone it went for ten minutes. Before digging in, I added some torn rocket leaves. Yum. And there's enough dough left over for a few more over the next fortnight.

This morning, I made my usual Sunday visit to the allotment. While Q dealt with the compost bins, I cleared the fallen apples, weeded and made the harvest: plums, apples, toms, Burgandy Red potatoes - then a quick visit to the Paddock for a few late blackberries. Birds and humans have had most of them, but there are a few lurking in the prickliest places. This evening, I want to make an apple and blackberry version of a recipe in Olive magazine. That's for after my Muck and Magic smoked gammon cooked in cider with potatoes, broad beans and parsley sauce. One of my favourite Sunday meals.

Preserves day

Up early this morning at the start of my preserves day...I snapped up Pam Corbin's River Cottage Preserves handbook as soon as it was published last year, but failed to make one of the most intriguing recipes - Pontack sauce. It's a mixture of elder berries, vinegar and spices. So I hiked up to Tesco to get cider vinegar and sugar, as I was planning a repeat of last year's fabulous blackberry vinegar too.

There's an elder tree in the garden, so armed with a plastic bowl and secateurs, I grabbed several bunches of berries and gently squidged them off their stalks. Next door neighbour Tom is has other plans for the berries - he's going to make some wine.

The first stage of the Pontack involves a very slow cook of the berries steeped in vinegar, so into the oven they went. Meanwhile I was on to stage 2 of the day - off to the Paddock for blackberries. The Paddock is a lovely little nature reserve tucked off Ferry Bridge Lane, and last year the blackberry crop was superb. It's pretty good this year too, but the first thing I spotted was sloes.

I think sloes are normally more a September crop, but there were quite a few ripe berries which I bagged to put in the freezer. I spotted some by the allotments last Sunday, so I'll gather more tomorrow and make sloe gin during the week. On to today's main harvest...

The berries looked really good. But I'd stupidly forgotten that nettles love growing round brambles and I was wearing sandals. But stung toes and scratched fingers make it feel like you've really worked. I picked for just under an hour, visiting my favourite bushes. And I noticed that my hands smelled faintly of vanilla - not a scent I'd ever associated with blackberries before.

Back home, there was a pleasant vinegary smell coming from the oven. My bramble harvest weighed in at 1.5 kilos - brilliant! Pam's fruit vinegar recipe calls for 1k of fruit which is steeped for 5 days in 600ml cider vinegar. You just press the fruit gently so that the juices mingle with the vinegar. I'll do a later post on what happens next.

The allotment toms are ripening beautifully - they look so pretty. The tastiest are the orange ones - I'm kicking myself for not transferring the labels into the ground. The mini cucumbers are doing well too.

Out in the garden, my oriental lily - an impulse buy from B&Q - is heavenly. Smells divine and the flowers are magnificent.