Fish in Lemon Cream Sauce with Hasselback Potatoes

My mother-in-law came to dinner recently and as she’s vegetarian and I don’t eat a lot of purely vegetarian food, that always involves a bit of thought around menu planning. Then I remembered that she is actually pescetarian, meaning she eats some – but not all – types of fish. She likes white fish and I had some in the freezer.

I don't eat fish as often as I should, as my husband doesn't like it and I find plain fish quite dull, so it needs a proper recipe - and during the week I don't tend to have time to cook complicated recipes from scratch. Of course, the recipes don't have to be complicated, but sometimes even getting out all the ingredients is more bother than I want when I get home from work!

It was a week night when we had my mother-in-law over but I was working from home. I always think that will give me plenty of time to make something a bit more elaborate for dinner but I usually end up logged on to work for far later than my official finish time (who doesn't?) so in the end it's still a bit of a rush. However on this occasion my husband was late home from work so we had quite a late dinner!

That gave me the opportunity to do some potatoes I've wanted to try for ages - have you come across hasselback potatoes before? They look a bit like mini hedgehogs - I think they would be a nice treat to serve on Bonfire Night (instead of jacket potatoes which a lot of people make then) as they are a bit different. They would also go down well at children's parties (so I imagine) - especially if you added little edible eyes to make them look like hedgehogs!

Back to dinner and sensible things.... to make these potatoes all you do is take a fairly large potato (not quite a baking potato size but a large standard potato) and make several slices into it, going two thirds of the way down, spacing the slices evenly apart by about a centimetre or a bit less depending on the size of your potato.

You can see the baked potato in this picture here:

Melt a little bit of butter in a pan or the microwave and brush the potato with the butter, getting into all the cuts you've made. Then put the potatoes on a baking sheet and bake at 180C for around an hour - it will depend on the size of the potatoes. The potatoes will be nice and soft in the middle when they are done and the slices you've cut will have fanned open a little and gone crispy. We really enjoyed these!

For the fish, I used this recipe by Nagi at Recipe Tin Eats - I didn't add the shallots/ spring onions at the end because I wasn't sure if my mother-in-law liked them (though in retrospect I'm sure she does - never mind!). It was a very easy dish to make and tasted delicious.

 

Toffee Apple Bonfire Night Cake

Today I'm combining baking with a public service announcement - please check there are no hedgehogs in your bonfire before you set it alight!

Actually, the reason I made this is because a hedgehog is a lot easier to make than a figure of Guy Fawkes!

I decided to go to my second Clandestine Cake Club and was pleased to see that this time my local Sutton group had joined forces with nearby Epsom for a bonfire night extravaganza - the theme was "gunpowder, treason and plot". Last year I made these ginger bonfire cupcakes using Cadbury flakes which I topped with popping candy. I was really pleased with them but didn't want to make the same thing again. The food I associate mainly with bonfire night - other than sausages, which wouldn't really work in a cake (or would it....?!) - is toffee apple. Which is funny as I've never actually eaten a toffee apple! I also wanted to find a way to decorate the cake so it would stand out - with 25 people expected at the Cake Club I knew I needed a showstopper! (Competitive, moi?). I thought about making a figurine of Guy Fawkes sat on a bonfire made of Matchmakers chocolate sticks, but realised I probably didn't have the time to make a person and it would be a lot easier and quicker to make a hedgehog. I also have a leaf-shaped plunger cutter which I thought I could put to good use by making autumn leaves to cover the cake. What do you think?

I based the cake partly on this one from All Recipes but added my own spin.

You need:

3 eggs

200g caster sugar

200ml vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla flavouring

375g plain flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp bicarb of soda

500g apples, peeled and chopped

100g pecans, chopped

For the toffee buttercream:

110g butter

220g brown sugar

250g icing sugar

pinch of salt

dash of milk (optional)





Preheat the oven to 180C. Cream the eggs and sugar then mix in the vegetable oil and vanilla.

Fold in the flour, salt and bicarb of soda.

Chop the pecans and add to the cake mix.

Peel and chop about 500g or so of apples.

Fold in the mixture, which will be quite stiff by this point.

Grease a large round cake tin and spoon in the mixture. Bake for about an hour, keeping an eye on the cake so the top doesn't start to burn.

The cake rose a lot in the middle which was perfect for the bonfire effect I wanted. Turn out of the tin and leave to cool.

Cut the cake in half - you can see the apple and pecan pieces clearly.

I decided to make toffee buttercream to go with the apple flavour in the cake. I melted the butter in a small pan and added the brown sugar, stirring until I had a fudge-like consistency.

Remove from the heat and allow to cool, then mix in the icing sugar. If the mixture is too stiff add a splash of milk.

When cool, spread over the bottom half of the cake.

Sandwich the cake together. This is a pretty big cake!

I have a set of three  leaf-shape plunger cutters in varying sizes. I used the middle size to make a pile of leaves out of fondant, which I had coloured green, brown and orange with gel icing colours.

I also made a hedgehog from fondant which I had coloured with two shades of brown. It was very easy to make. Make a large ball for the body and a small ball for the head, and pinch the head slightly so it is pointed. Roll sausage shapes for the arms and feet. I also rolled a circle of the paler brown colour to stick on as the face and also the stomach, and used tiny amounts of black fondant for the nose and eyes. I made him an orange scarf as well, from a sausage shape which I rolled and then pressed flat. To make the spikes, simply take a pair of scissors and make very small v-shaped snips all over the hedgehog's head and body - it looks like spikes!

To decorate the cake, I covered the top with plain buttercream as the toffee buttercream would have been too stiff. I then placed the leaves haphazardly all over the cake so it would look as if they had fallen from trees.

I sat Mr. Hedgehod in the middle of the cake, and took a box of orange Matchmakers and propped the sticks up around him to look like a bonfire. I placed some broken Matchmakers in front of him to look like logs.

Here you can see the hedgehog sitting in the bonfire, surrounded by leaves.

And here's the whole cake!

I am sharing this with Elizabeth of Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary for her Shop Local challenge as the apples I used in the cake came from my boyfriend's mum's garden - which means the food miles of that particular ingredient were less than three!

This might be slightly tenuous but as the Matchmakers are chocolate orange flavour, I am entering this into Alphabakes, the blog challenge that I co-host with Ros of the More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter we have chosen this month is O.

I took this cake to my local Clandestine Cake Club as the theme was "gunpowder, treason and plot". I had a lovely time chatting to new faces and people I had met before and tasting all the cakes. I took a few photos which I wanted to share with you; this is Maureen's cake with 'flames' on top that are hard caramel shards she says were very easy to make:



The organiser Hayley decorated the tables with Halloween and bonfire night themed decorations. I can't remember the names of all the cakes here but there is a bonfire at the back, and a very neat fondant-covered cake with flames on the right.

This spiced toffee apple cake was made by my almost-sister-in-law Ellie and was delicious

This creation was from Gemma, organiser of the Croydon CCC, who made a toffee apple complete with giant lolly stick and wrapped it in cellophane. It was very original!

Ginger Bonfire Night cupcakes with popping candy

I wanted to make something for Bonfire Night as we were going to watch the fireworks then back to a friend's house for some food afterwards, and for a long time have had the idea of popping candy in my head. Do you remember eating that when you were a kid? I used to love the way it would fizz and pop in your mouth, and hoped it would have the same effect sprinkled on cupcakes!

I also wanted to make my cupcakes fit the theme so decorated them to look like little bonfires. The cakes themselves are ginger flavour which I think also works really well for this time of year!

The recipe I used was from the book Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery, though the decoration idea was my own.

There is a separate recipe for the frosting below. For the cakes, you need:

200g butter, softened
175g brown sugar
3 tbsp black treacle
150ml milk
4 pieces stem ginger from a jar of stem ginger in syrup. Chop the ginger and reserve the syrup for the icing.
2 eggs
300g self-raising flour
1 tbsp ground ginger
pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 180C/ 160 C fan.

In a saucepan, melt the butter, sugar and treacle over a low heat. Take off the heat then stir in the milk.

Beat the eggs in another bowl, chop the stem ginger (reserving the syrup) and add the ginger pieces to the egg mixture. Beat this into the butter mixture- either still in the saucepan or you can transfer it to a bowl.

Add the flour, ground ginger and salt and mix well.

Spoon into cupcake cases - I had some Halloween ones as I couldn't find anything that would have specifically worked for Bonfire Night, though in retrospect I think a metallic red would have been good. But I did pretty well with this recipe and had all the ingredients in the house already - even the stem ginger and the treacle - so didn't want to go out and buy cake cases specially.

Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes then leave to cool.

Ginger buttercream frosting
280g butter, softened
8 tbsp ginger syrup from the jar of stem ginger
600g icing sugar

You can either make this in one batch then separate it, or in two as I did. If you want to make two batches, halve the ingredients.
Otherwise, beat the butter until creamy, add the syrup then the icing sugar and mix to make buttercream.

Take each bowl - or separate the mixture into two bowls - and colour one orange and one red. I used some orange Wilton gel colour that I had from Halloween last year, and it only needed a tiny amount to turn a lovely orange colour. For the pink, I used a few drops of liquid food colouring - admittedly it was one that was made from natural ingredients so wasn't neon pink like some are - but then I added a few more drops, and a few more, and still wasn't happy with the colour, so I used a tiny dab of Sugarflair ruby red sugarpaste colouring and that was perfect.

Spoon each icing into a piping bag. This is the point at which I started wishing I had the new duo colour piping bag set from Lakeland as it would have been perfect to use here - you can pipe two colours at once and swirl them together. That was the effect I wanted to create with the red and the orange icing, to look like the flames of the bonfire, so I took it in turns to pipe some of each colour onto the cupcake. I did a small blob of icing and drew the bag upwards so it stood up like a little flame. Unfortunately the red was a little softer than the orange (from all the liquid food colouring, I expect!) so it didn't quite stand up as well, but I thought it still looked nice.

Here you can see how I did one colour first, then the second colour in the gaps around it:

Next I cut up some Cadbury's Flake and arranged the pieces on the cupcake to look like logs on the bonfire.

Now for my favourite part: the popping candy!

I sprinkled a little popping candy on each cupcake in the gap at the top of the flake pieces. I wonder whether I should warn people before they eat the cake, or just let them have the surprise? I think the popping candy will mimic the effect of fireworks going off.

The finished cupcakes for tonight's Bonfire Night party