Rustic Apple & Blackberry Tart

The blackberry season is upon us again and I am one happy woman! I am extremely lucky to have a plentiful supply growing wild in the fields behind our house here in Roscommon and I will soon be out with a big bowl picking as many as I can before the birds get to them.

My very first memory of eating blackberries was in a jam made by grandmother from berries we had foraged in the Dublin Mountains when I was a child. My grandmother was a great preserve maker and we always had jars of homemade marmalades, chutneys, jellies and jams in the kitchen cupboard. She used to make the most amazing crab apple jelly with fruit gathered from the tree growing in her front garden and I keep promising myself that I must plant a crab apple tree so that I too will be able to use the fruit in the same way in years to come. The great thing about blackberries though, is that they grow abundantly in our country’s hedgerows and are free to pick.

Wild blackberries are much smaller than their cultivated cousins, but have an intensity of flavour and a perfect balance between sweet and sour. As such, they stand up to being sweetened without sacrificing their distinctive flavour.

Most years I use foraged blackberries to make jars of apple and blackberry jelly which I prefer to blackberry jam. Wild blackberries can be full of seeds and these remain in the jam unless you sieve the fruit, which is far too much of a palaver; I prefer to make a jelly which contains none.

 

But blackberries are worth so much more to the cook, than merely producing jellies and jam. They can be used in so many ways as an ingredient in both sweet and savoury dishes. I particularly love to pair blackberries with game. Duck works very well with blackberries, as do wild pigeon and venison, where the sharp but fruity sweetness complements the rich meat.

Today however, I have made what has to be the easiest fruit tart ever. The pastry stands up to a certain amount of handling and the only rile is that the butter has to be cold from the freezer before you coarsely grate it into the flour. You don’t have to worry about rubbing the pastry in – you simply grate it into the flour, agitate it a little so that the grated butter is coated in the flour and then add some cold water. There is no wastage here, no blind baking… you just thrown the fruit on top of the pastry and draw up the edges to encase the fruit. It’s a truly tasty tart!
 

Ingredients:

Pastry:
225g plain flour
135g butter, cooled in the freezer for 30 minutes

4tblsp cold water

Filling:

2 large cooking apples, peeled, cored and sliced thinly

100g blackberries

50g caster sugar

Pinch of cinnamon (optional)
 

Method:

Pastry:

1. Place the flour in a large mixing bowl and using a coarse grater, grate the butter directly into the flour. Once you have done this, mix the butter gently through the flour, trying to avoid it sticking in clumps so that it is coated in the flour and evenly distributed.

2. Sprinkle over the water and using a fork, bring it together. If the mixture is a little dry add a little more water. Bring the dough together into a ball, wrap in cling film and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

To finish:

3. Preheat oven to 200C/Fan Oven 180C/Gas Mark 5. Place some baking parchment, cut to size, on a large baking tray and set aside.

4. Remove the pastry from the fridge. Lightly dust your work-surface with a little flour and using a rolling pin roll the pastry into a rough circle about 30cm in diameter and ½cm thick. Transfer to the parchment lined baking tray.

5. Mix the caster sugar and cinnamon, if using, into the fruit and pile the whole lot onto the centre of the pastry leaving a 5cm border all around. Gather up the pastry to gently encase the fruit, leaving the centre of the tart exposed. Brush the pasty border with a little of the beaten egg and bake in the preheated oven for 35-40 minutes until the pastry is golden brown, cooked through and the juices of the fruit have been released a little and have started bubbling. Allow to cool on the baking tray for at least 10 minutes before serving.
 

Serves 6.

 

 

Cherry Cake inspired by GBBO

One of my favourite cookery programmes has just started its fifth series – the Great British Bake Off (GBBO) which is shown on BBC1. For anyone interested in baking or cooking this programme is an absolute ‘must-see’… I absolutely love it. Essentially the programme is a baking competition fought out between 12 amateur home bakers. The weakest baker is eliminated each week until one is finally crowned the champion. Along the way, the bakers face a number of baking tasks and technical challenges, some of which are quite tough and testing. Without a doubt, the Great British Bake Off has to be one of the reasons that baking has become so popular again and that more and more people are taking out the weighing scales, mixing bowls and spatulas!

Due to the phenomenal success of the programme in Great Britain, the format has been sold to a number of other countries including the USA, Australia, France, Belgium and many others. There is also an Irish version called the Great Irish Bake Off, which is great and the standard of baking every bit as high as on the British version.

 

Another favourite cookery programme is of course MasterChef and having been a competitor and eventual finalist on MasterChef Ireland, I have to say that it is my favourite version of that particular television franchise.

 

Anyhow, the GBBO is bake on our screens and I am thrilled to have something entertaining and inspiring to watch on a Wednesday night as the days shorten. In the first episode the judges – Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood set the bakers the technical challenge of baking a cherry cake. Given that I have recently been experimenting with fresh cherries in my baking and cooking, I thought it would be nice to bake an old fashioned cherry cake using glacé cherries. I have to admit that my very first experience of cherries was not of the fresh kind but rather of glacé cherries – the type preserved in a sugary syrup and used in cherry cake, rich fruit cakes and as an ingredient in my grandmother’s pineapple upside-down cake. As such cherry cake holds a certain nostalgia for me.

The recipe that I give here is not unlike that given by Mary Berry in the programme, but it is the recipe that I inherited from my grandmother and which I have been using for years. I really liked the idea of baking the cake in a savarin cake tin rather than the usual loaf tin that I use, so I have borrowed that idea. I also loved the idea of sprinkling some toasted flaked almonds on top of the iced cake, so I have included that element in my recipe.

This is a great cake which looks really retro but tastes fantastic.
 

Ingredients:

175g butter, softened
175g caster sugar

3 large eggs, lightly beaten

175g plain flour

35g self-raising flour

35g ground almonds

2tblsp Amaretto

200g glacé cherries, quartered and then rinsed in a sieve, sprinkled with 1tblsp flour

To finish:

125g icing sugar

1-2tblsp boiling water

25g flaked almonds, lightly toasted in a dry frying pan

6 glacé cherries, halved

 

Method:

1. Pre-heat oven to 180C/Fan Oven 160C/Gas Mark 4. Grease a 23cm savarin or ring tin with butter and dust well with plain flour, shaking out the excess and set aside.

Cake:

2. Place the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl and using a hand-held electric mixer, cream together until light and fluffy. Gradually add the eggs, mixing well after each addition. Sieve the plain and self-raising flour together and fold into the creamed mixture making sure that it is well incorporated. Add the ground almonds and Amaretto and mix through.

3. Finally fold in the washed, dried and floured cherries. Spoon the batter into the prepared savarin tin, levelling out the surface with a spatula.

4. Bake in the pre-heated oven for 30-35 minutes until well –risen and golden brown and a thin skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tin, before turning out on to a wire rack to finish cooling completely.

To finish:

5. Mix the icing sugar and boiling water together to create a smooth slightly runny icing. Place the icing into a disposable piping bag and snip a small it off the end of the bag. Pipe the icing over the cake. (You can also just spoon the icing evenly over the cake, letting it drizzle down over the cake naturally). Before the icing sets, sprinkle the toasted flaked almonds over the cake and arrange the halved cherries on top.

Serves 8-10.

 

Chocolate Cherry Cake with Chocolate Ganache

The fresh cherry season is almost at an end which means I will have to wait until next year before I can enjoy them again in their full glory. I was rather pleased with some of my culinary experiments with this wonderful fruit. If I say so myself, the cherry sorbet that I made is truly amazing and I will be making a much bigger batch of it next year, which I will store in the freezer and consume as winter approaches and the days get shorter to remind me of warm summer days past and those still to come.

 

Asides from the fact that it makes sense from and economic and ecological point of view, eating food seasonally, and ideally locally sourced, makes sense from a culinary perspective; you learn to appreciate food more and have a greater natural understanding of those flavours and foods that go well together. Mother Nature is very clever and has designed it so that many foods that are in season at the same time also happen to go very well together from a taste standpoint. To me, it seems absurd to eat fresh cherries in the middle of winter when they have had to be flown half way around the world, cost a fortune to buy and just don’t taste like cherries! You can apply this argument to a range of foodstuffs. And ultimately, what’s the point in buying and eating these foods if they don’t even taste good because they had to be picked under-ripe and were artificially ripened on the journey to this part of the world? Madness!

 

Anyway, I still had a large bowlful of cherries sitting on the kitchen counter, so I decided that I would keep it simple in flavour terms and would bake a chocolate and cherry cake. Although this cake looks quite elaborate, it is not as complicated as it looks. Essentially the cake is made up of three layers of chocolate sponge cake sandwiched together with cherry buttercream icing; the cake is covered with chocolate ganache and then topped with a pile of fresh cherries. The cake tasted divine and just looked so kitsch. I loved it. There’s nothing new about the chocolate/cherry combination, but sometimes, the old reliables are exactly what you need to eat… and you know what? The cake tasted fab! There are times when you want something familiar and don’t want or need your taste buds to be challenged or exposed to weird and wonderful flavour sensations. Sometimes there is comfort in the familiar...

 

Ingredients:

Cake:
200g butter, softened

200g caster sugar

4 large eggs, lightly beaten

265g self-raising flour

25g cocoa powder

165g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids), melted and allowed to cool slightly

50ml milk

Cherry buttercream filling:

3 heaped tblsp of cherry jam

50g butter

135g icing sugar, sifted

Chocolate ganache:

200g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids), chopped or grated into small pieces.

150ml double cream

To finish:

1 punnet fresh cherries
 

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180C/Fan Oven 160C/Gas Mark 4. Butter and flour the sides of three 15cm round sandwich tins with removable bases and line the base with non-stick baking parchment.

Cake:

2. Place the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl and using a hand-held electric mixer, cream together until light and fluffy. Gradually add the eggs, mixing well after each addition. Sift the flour and cocoa powder together and fold into the creamed mixture, making sure that everything is well mixed together.

3. Next add the chocolate and milk and fold into the mixture. Divide the batter between the three prepared sandwich tins and level the surface with a spatula. Bake in the preheated oven for 17-20 minutes until the cake are well risen and springy to the touch and a thin skewer inserted comes out clean.

4. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tins for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Cherry buttercream icing:

5. Place the cherry jam in a small saucepan with 2 tablespoon of water and bring to the boil, stirring all the time. Reduce heat and allow to simmer, still stirring all the time until the mixture thickens slightly. Remove from the heat and pass through a sieve into a small clean bowl and allow to cool. Discard any solids that have collected in the sieve.

6. Place the butter in a medium sized mixing bowl and using a hand-held electric mixer, beat until light a fluffy. Gradually add the icing sugar and keep mixing to create a stiff buttercream. Add the cooled and sieved cherry jam and mix again to create a fluffy butter cream icing. Set aside.

Chocolate ganache:

7. Place the chocolate in a medium sized mixing bowl.

8. Place the cream in a small saucepan and bring to just below boiling point. Immediately pour onto the chocolate and stir using a small whisk until the chocolate has completely melted. Set aside to cool and thicken slightly.

To finish:

9. Take the cooled cakes and remove the baking parchment and discard. It is important that the cakes are all level, so if they peaked a little during baking you will need to level the tops by cutting a thin layer off the top of the cakes. Use a sharp serrated knife to do this.

10. Place one layer of the cake on your serving stand and spread one half of the cherry buttercream over it. Top with another layer of the cake. Spread this with the remaining buttercream and then top with the final cake layer.

11. Take the chocolate ganache which should have thickened slightly but still be spreadable and using a thin palette knife, spread over the tops and side of the cake.

12. Arrange the cherries on top of the cake.

Serves 4.

 

Almond Cake with Port Roasted Plums

For something that is so simple to make, this cake is packed full of almond flavour with added textural crunch supplied by the flaked almonds which are scattered on top prior to baking. This is another example of the types of cake that I love so much, because they can be served as desserts with a soft cloud of whipped cream or some fruit on the side or can be eaten as a cake in their own right.

If served as a dessert, the great advantage of this type of cake is that it is prepared in advance and all you have to do is slice it and serve with your accompaniment of choice. In this way it is a completely stress free dish to prepare. Here I have paired it with the most fantastic tasting plums which are gently oven roasted in a rich port wine syrup.

I was worried that the plums would be too sweet, but the slight sourness of the plums that I had, coupled with the addition of some rosemary cut through the sweetness somewhat and created a dish that I thought was beautifully balanced. The inclusion of rosemary happened at the last moment and was borne out of a desire to further experiment with it in sweet dishes after the success of the pine nut and rosemary shortbread biscuits that I recently made. If you really aren’t a fan of rosemary, you can omit it.

Plums have a natural affinity with almonds and in fact all stone fruits can be successfully paired with anything almond flavoured. I know that I regularly use Amaretto in my baking but it is great for adding an extra almond flavoured kick to all manner of baked goods and I much prefer using it to almond extract or essence. It is too easy to add too much almond extract and if this happens it can result in a very artificial taste, which I find unpleasant. This is not an issue with Amaretto. Given how regularly is use Amaretto, I find it astonishing how long a bottle lasts…so go out and get some and use it in your baking and cooking – you wont be disappointed.

As I state in the recipe below, I like to serve the plums chilled with a slice of slightly warmed almond cake. To be honest, a dollop of cream also doesn’t go astray, but you can make your own mind up on this. The contrast between hot and cold works very well and creates a dish which is extremely delicious. This is a wonderful dish to serve as a dessert in late summer, but it also wouldn’t be out of place in autumn either.

The plums keep very well covered in the fridge and are also lovely served with hot rice pudding as a dessert or with natural yoghurt for breakfast. Basically, the roasted plums are hugely versatile, so let your imagination run riot!
 

Ingredients:

Cake:
115g butter, softened
150g caster sugar
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
100g ground almonds

50g self-raising flour, sifted

2tblsp Amaretto (or milk)

50g flaked almonds

Plums:

10-12 plums (Victoria), stoned and halved

200g caster sugar

150ml red wine

150ml port

200ml water

1 cinnamon stick

1 sprig of rosemary
 

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180C/Fan Oven 160C/ Gas Mark 4. Grease and line a 20cm round cake tin with a removable base with baking parchment and set aside.

2. Place the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl and using a hand-held electric mixer, cream together until light and fluffy. Gradually add the eggs, mixing well after each addition.

3. Next, add the ground almonds and self-raising flour to the creamed mixture and ix through. Finally, add the Amaretto and stir into the batter that you have created.

4. Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin and level out the surface with a spatula. Sprinkle over the flaked almonds and bake in the pre-heated oven for 30-35 minutes, until well-risen and a golden colour. Check the cake after 20 minutes and if it is browning too quickly cover the tin with aluminium foil to protect it for the remainder of the baking time. Once baked, remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes, before transferring to a wire-rack to finish cooling.

Plums:

5. Preheat oven to 180C/Fan Oven 160C/Gas Mark 4. Place the plums, cut side facing upwards in a roasting dish so that they sit snugly in a single layer. Place the roasting tray on baking tray and set aside.

6. Place the sugar, red wine, port, water cinnamon stick and rosemary in a medium sized saucepan and bring to the boil over a moderate to high heat, stirring occasionally to make sure that the sugar has dissolved. As soon as the mixture boils, carefully pour it on top of the plums and place the baking tray with the roasting dish into the preheated oven for 30 minutes.

7. Using a slotted spoon, carefully transfer the roasted plums to a separate dish and pour the roasting liquid into a medium sized saucepan. Place over a high heat and bring up to a rapid boil. Allow the liquid to reduce by two thirds until you are left with about 200ml of syrup. Discard the cinnamon stick and sprig of rosemary  and pour over the plums and allow to cool.

8. I like to serve the plums chilled so after they have cooled to room temperature, I then cover and refrigerate them.

 

Serves 6-8.