How to Eat (83 page)

• Lemon tarts, following recipe for Jam Tarts (see
page 449
) but substituting bought lemon curd in place of the jam. You need neither to heat the lemon curd nor add water to it before spooning it into the little tart cases.

• Cheese Stars, following recipe above, but doubling the ingredient amounts.

• Cocktail sausages or franks, see above.

• Several bowls of stalked seedless white grapes.

• Orange cheese-flavored corn-worm crisps.

THE CAKE

This is the children’s cake I make, easily, year after year. For a single large cake, use a 10-inch springform pan, greased and lined with baking parchment.

¼ cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

pinch salt

1½ cups superfine sugar

1¼ cups (2½ sticks) unsalted butter, very soft

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

5 eggs

2 tablespoons milk

Mix everything together in the processor. (To make a chocolate cake, add 2 tablespoons cocoa powder mixed to a paste with 2 tablespoons boiling water. For a pink cake, add pink food coloring and use strawberry icing.) Pour into the pan and bake in a 400°F oven for 20 minutes, reduce the heat to 350°, and continue to bake another 40–50 minutes or until the cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan. You may need to cover loosely with foil or greaseproof paper to stop it burning at the end. Allow the cake to sit on a rack in its pan for 10 minutes, then turn it out, domed side down, so its weight flattens what will be the base and you have a nice flat bottom to present to the world and provide a smooth base for the icing.

Because of the sheer volume of ingredients (and lack of air in a cake when you mix it in a processor), this cake doesn’t rise much. You could, therefore, also make it in the old-fashioned way, either by hand or with a mixer, creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs and flour, and thus beating a lot of air into the batter. Further, you can do the cake mixture in two layer-cake pans, or you can make two full cakes, one after the other, to create a super-layer cake, particularly welcome when there are 20 or more children to feed. For a pink birthday cake I did this and stuck the cakes together with strawberry buttercream because I felt a tall, more frou-frou-looking creation fitted the particular bill. (For the icing I used 3 cups of that compellingly vile strawberry-flavored confectioners’ sugar you can get now and 10 tablespoons butter, blended.) But in fact the cake, though it looked wonderful, didn’t cut very well. You might decide, after all, that you can live with a not-very-high cake.

On the whole, that last is the wisest way of approaching it. As I said earlier, the birthday girl or boy is going to be far more interested in looking at and eating the icing. And the all-in-one processor method (see
page 25
, too) is easier, especially when you’re up against time—as you inevitably will be. D. W. Winnicott, the distinguished pediatrician and analyst, wrote about being a “good-enough mother”; be satisfied with baking a good-enough cake.

For a chocolate cake—if I may backtrack—I make my own marzipan out of pistachios, but I now see that for what it is: an act of madness. Use ordinary store-bought marzipan and dye it green, or you can buy colored marzipan. You can use black food coloring, available from baking goods suppliers, for coloring a marzipan witch’s hat or similarly sparky design. For the animals, let fancy, imagination, or competence be your guide.

THE COOKIES

This is the recipe I always use (it makes good Christmas tree decorations, too, if you have those special cutters and remember to make a hole at the top before baking them). It’s rather like a gingerbread, only not as hot, and you can leave out the cinnamon if you like. Some fresh nutmeg grated in works well for a gentler spiciness. The dough rolls out easily. The cookies are not frangible when cooked and take icing well. Children seem to like them, as they eat the whole cookie rather than just licking off the icing.

If you want to make them chocolate-flavored, use 2¼ cups flour and ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa.

2½ cups all-purpose flour

pinch salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon powdered cinnamon (optional) or nutmeg (see headnote)

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, diced

½ cup light muscovado sugar or light brown sugar

2 eggs

2 tablespoons golden syrup

Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder into a bowl. Add the cinnamon or nutmeg if using. Rub in the butter, then stir in the sugar. With a fork, stir 1 egg into the golden syrup and add to the mixture, beating well. I like doing this by hand (or with a freestanding mixer), especially if I’m making it with the children, but you can just do it in the processor, mixing all but the last two ingredients and then pouring those together down the feed tube. If needed, add the second, beaten, egg a teaspoonful at a time.

When the dough’s come together, form into 2 discs and put 1, covered in plastic film or in a freezer bag, in the fridge while you get started on the first. Preheat the oven to 325°F.

Now, this dough is fairly sticky at first and there is a good reason for this—so that you can get a maximum amount of cookies, it needs to be able to absorb quite a lot of flour without becoming too dry. Be prepared to flour the surface, the dough, and the rolling pin well, and bear in mind that the dough will get smoother as you roll and reroll. Not a shred need be wasted. Anyway, this isn’t a difficult procedure, as you’ll see.

Roll out to about ¼-inch thick and cut the cookies out as you wish, reclumping, rerolling, and recutting all leftovers till you have no dough left. You may find it easier to leave some leftovers from the first disc of dough and then add them to the leftovers from the second—in effect, giving yourself three discs to roll out in total.

The cookies take 12–20 minutes to cook. They’re golden brown anyway, so you can’t tell when they’re cooked exactly by color. You don’t want them to burn, so keep an eye on the edges and prod them with your fingertips occasionally—they shouldn’t have any feeling of uncooked dough about them, but neither should they be rigid; they will harden as they cool. Don’t get anxious about this—as long as they’re not soft to the point of rawness, they should be fine.

Let cool on a rack and, if you want, leave in an airtight tin until you want to ice them. I find this makes on average 60 cookies, but naturally it depends on the shape and size of the cutters. (I don’t go in for novelty-shaped or ostentatiously childish food as a rule, but I do have a huge supply of cookie cutters in just about every form available: geometric, animals, modes of transport; all fads and fancies covered. And when I was rootling about a party shop with a specialty cake-decoration wing, I found that one of the pieces in the cutting set sold for fashioning sweet peas out of icing is the perfect shape for stamping out pumpkins.)

GLACÉ ICING

To make glacé icing for these, mix 2½ cups confectioners’ sugar with about 3 tablespoons boiling water and drops of food coloring strewn with sprinkles—don’t ask me how many.

FISH SANDWICHES

Fish sandwiches are much loved by children. If you want to make them, then just mix some mayonnaise, the bottled stuff, with some canned salmon. But I have come to the conclusion that sandwiches are primarily there to placate the parents; they act as a nutritional sop, making the grownups feel better about all the sweet stuff that the children are really eating—it thus looks like a proper meal, not the full-on sugar orgy it is. So I wouldn’t bother to do plateful upon plateful. But make sure you remove all crusts and, just this once, whatever your normal aesthetic, cut them into little triangles. Sometimes the proprieties have to be respected; a children’s party is no place for restraint or minimalist chic. Just provide what your child enjoys, what he or she dreams of, and you will enjoy it too.

Glossary

B
OUILLON CUBES AND COMMERCIAL STOCKS.
Most everyone knows what bouillon cubes are—chicken, meat, or vegetable stock (this includes porcini stock) in dehydrated and compressed form. It is important to remember, however, that not all bouillon cubes are created equal. Some produce stock of good flavor, others a chemical-tasting or overly salty brew. Always taste the stock made from a particular brand of bouillon cube before adding it to a recipe. (The cubes are rehydrated with boiling water, usually in the proportion of 1 cube to 2 cups water.) A wide range of alternative commercial stocks exists, from canned supermarket items to frozen or carton-packed, to be used as is or reconstituted, as instructed on their packages. These often yield stocks of flavor superior to that produced by bouillon cubes and should be investigated.

C
APERS.
The sun-dried flower buds of a bush native to Asia and the Mediterranean, these add piquancy to a wide range of dishes. They vary in size from sub-pea to as large as your little fingernail. They are available preserved in vinegar or salt; though salt-packed capers are harder to find, it’s worth seeking them out, as their flavor is deeper and their texture less squishy than the vinegar-packed kinds. All capers should be rinsed well under running water before using; the salt-packed also should be steeped in cold water for at least five minutes.

C
HESTNUTS.
Grown throughout the world, chestnuts are notoriously bothersome to shell and, once you’ve done that, you confront their bitter inner skins, which must be removed also. That’s why I rely on ready-prepared canned or bottled whole chestnuts. Packed cooked, dry or in water, these may be used interchangeably in the recipes. I also use canned unsweetened chestnut purée; do not confuse this with the sweetened variety, which is not suitable for savory dishes.

C
REAM, CLOTTED.
The British cream repertoire is much more diverse than the American and includes this thick, extraordinarily buttery type. Widely available in American specialty food stores, imported clotted cream (sometimes labeled Devonshire cream) comes in glass jars. The cream is taken from the top of fresh, unpasteurized cream when it is gently heated and then allowed to cool.

D
ASHI-NO-MOTO.
This is the umbrella term for Japanese instant dashi, the basic stock of Japanese cooking. It comes in two forms, granulated and liquid, and I call for both at one time or another. The granulated kind, often labeled hon-dashi (“true dashi”), is made from dried ground bonito and other seasonings and is prepared, generally, in the proportion of 1 level teaspoon to 4 cups simmering water—but always see the recipe I use it in for exact quantity information. Liquid dashi-no-moto, which is sometimes labeled “seasoning sauce” or katsuo dashi, is also made with bonito and seasonings; follow the instructions in the recipe for using it. Please be aware that both products almost invariably contain monosodium glutamate (MSG); those allergic or adverse to the substance might wish to prepare and freeze their own dashi, a simple process (see any Japanese cookbook). In a pinch, a concentrated chicken stock could be substituted for dashi-no-moto, but the flavor of the dish using it will, obviously, differ from that intended.

D
UCK, MALLARD.
A richly flavored wild duck, mallards make wonderful eating. Unless you are a hunter, however, or know someone who is and is willing to share a wild-duck catch, you will have to rely on commercial mallard distribution (see Sources). These farmed mallards are available seasonally from October through February and, unlike domestic duck varieties, are rather small—2 to 2½ pounds each.

F
LOUR
, I
TALIAN
00 (
FARINA DOPIA ZERO
). I’m a great fan of this low-protein flour (about 3 grams for every 4 ounces, as opposed to 8 to 14 grams of all-purpose flour for the same amount). Because it is softer than regular flours—contains less gluten and therefore produces less elastic doughs when worked—it yields tender cakes and pastries and velvety sauces. (You can, however, substitute all-purpose flour for it with fine results.) Incidentally, the 00 indicates the degree of sifting for bran and grain that the flour has undergone, according to Italian flour-production standards; 00 is the finest sift, 0 slightly coarser, and on through 1 and 2, the coarsest flour designation.

F
LOUR, SPELT.
Spelt is a cereal grain native to Southern Europe, where it has been cultivated since ancient times. The flour made from it has a mellow nutty flavor and is slightly higher in protein than flours made from wheat. Many people who find ordinary wheat flours difficult to tolerate have no problem digesting baked goods made with spelt flour, even though it contains gluten.

G
ELATIN, LEAF.
This is the only kind of gelatin I have luck with and I refuse to use any other type. I am, however, willing to admit that for other people, the granulated kind is more convenient and produces, under their care, completely satisfactory results. I therefore offer the option of using the latter in all the recipes calling for gelatin; the usual conversion is 6 sheets equals 1 package (¼ ounce) of granulated gelatin—enough to gel 2 cups of liquid—but see each recipe that requires the sheets for specific conversion quantities. Leaf gelatin is available in packages of thin, transparent sheets, usually imported, and needs a little longer soaking to soften it for use than the granulated kind.