One’s favorite book is as elusive as one’s favorite pudding.

P and I have been flicking through our dictionary of quotations recently, in order to find choice quotes that we can write Amelie-style, in window chalk, on our living-room window. (The people at the bus-stop below look so miserable every morning that we thought they needed some poetic inspiration or at least some humorous prose.) A few days ago I found the E. M. Forster gem which gives today’s title. Given that I had spent the previous hour trying to work out what to make for dessert at a dinner party the next day, I remembered how true it is.

I went for sticky date pudding. While I wouldn't call sticky date my absolute favorite, it is right up there. Sticky date is probably the culinary equivalent of Jane Eyre on my favorite books list: sweet, dark and rich, but just a little too sugary at the end. Lacking an appropriate square tin, I made my puddings in muffin moulds which probably helps prevent the usual over-indulgent finale.

170 g stoned dates
1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
300 ml boiling water
60 g unsalted butter
¾ cup brown sugar
2 eggs
170 g self-raising flour
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Chop the dates and mix them with the bicarbonate soda. Pour over water, stir and leave to stand. (I left my dates for most of the afternoon. As that seems to break them up really well.)
Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each. Fold in the flour. Gently stir in the date mixture and the vanilla.
Pour the mixture into 10 greased muffin moulds. Bake in a 180°C oven for 30 minutes.

When the puddings are nearly cooked, make the sauce.

400 g brown sugar
1 cup thick cream
250 g unsalted butter
½ teaspoon of pure vanilla extract (because I didn’t have a vanilla bean)

Bring all sauce ingredients to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes.
Once the puddings are cooked, use a butter knife to pop each pudding half-way out of its tin and spoon a little sauce underneath. Slip each pudding back into its tin and spoon more sauce over the tops. Return the tray to the oven for 2-3 minutes.

Serve with ice cream, cream and the remaining warm sauce.

Easter Cookies

The week before Easter, my mum and dad visited us in Edinburgh. As a present, my mum brought me four Easter cookie-cutters that she had picked up in Germany (where they had spent the previous month). She brought me a fat (woolly) sheep, a thin sheep with long legs, a leaping rabbit and an egg.

Hunting around online, I found a few recipes and this is the

Sugar Cookie that I made to try out my cutters:

500g flour
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
240g butter
300g white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Cream together the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract.
In a separate bowl, whisk (or sieve) together the flour, baking powder and salt.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, one cupful at a time.

Stir until you have a smooth dough.

Divide the dough in half and place each lump onto a piece of plastic-wrap.

Refrigerate for at least one hour.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC.

Remove one half of the dough from the fridge and roll out, on a floured counter top, to a quarter-inch thickness.

Cut out cookies and lay on a baking-sheet covered in baking parchment.

Place each tray of cookies into the fridge for twenty minutes.
Bake the cookies for ten minutes.

Leave to cool on the tray for a minute or so, before removing to a wire rack to cool.

I use the fingers of one hand to get the butter and sugar started, as I am often not organised enough to take the butter out of the fridge. Once roughly combined, I switch to a spoon to avoid melting the butter.
When refrigerating the dough for the first time, I press the lumps out into half-inch thick disks. This way the dough cools faster and more evenly.

Sugar cookies are not really very exciting. The icing is what makes the whole thing fun. This time I made white royal icing for flooding and used cocoa and different food colours for decorating. Quantities are rather inexact as I always seem to need more egg-whites and sugar than I expect I will.

A rough recipe for Royal Icing is:

350g pure icing sugar
2 egg whites
2 teaspoons lemon juice.

Beat together the egg whites and lemon juice.

Slowly beat in the icing sugar (mixed with cocoa, if you want brown icing for brown bunnies) a little at a time, until the icing is the appropriate consistency.

Consistency

For outlining and decorating the cookies, the icing should form peaks in the bowl.

For flooding the cookies, test the consistency by lifting the spoon and dribbling icing back into the bowl. The trail of icing should sit on the surface for a few seconds, before disappearing back into the mix.

I only have one piping bag, so I use baking-parchment to make icing cones. I find it easiest to fold a square of paper in half, then use the folded edge of the paper to form the point of the cone, by wrapping up and around at each side. I usually secure the cones with some tape. I also snip the smallest possible hole in the bottom and have a go on some paper before starting on the cookies.

I outlined and flooded the bunnies in white icing. Then I used coloured icing for the bows. On the sheep, I swirled the firmer icing in circles to look like wool and gave them bows too. The eggs were a bit of a mess: stripes, dots, squiggles and I even played with marbling (dipping cookies into flood-icing with food-dye only partially stirred through.) It was great fun, and extremely messy!

Brinjal (noun): An Indian plant cultivated for its large edible, ovoid, glossy, usually purple-skinned fruit.

Eggplant or aubergine, brinjal or baingan? Never mind what it's called, lots of men I know don’t seem to like this purple fruit very much. (Growing up, we ate moussaka and other eggplant favorites only on the nights that my Dad was out playing bridge.) Only Indian men seem to truly relish the eggplant. As the fruit is native to India, perhaps we had best look to that country for a tempting baingan recipe.


This evening, we made Baingan Bharta (Eggplant Mash), only we didn't just make one dish. We made the same dish twice, using exactly the same ingredients, but altering one cooking
technique.

The first step of every baigan bharta recipe is to cook the eggplant whole. This is done either by roasting the eggplant on a rack in a moderate oven or by sitting the eggplant directly on top of a gas burner. We’ve tried both in the past. Generally, P and I think that the cook top method is best. However, we decided to stage an objective test, so P invited Aashvin to dinner to be our blind judge. Aashvin sat in the lounge and watched The Apprentice while we cooked the following recipe in double quantities with each eggplant.

Ingredients:
1 egg plant
1 large onion – chopped
2 small tomatoes - chopped
2 green chillies – thinly sliced
1 tablespoon ginger - finely cut
1/4 tsp red chilli powder
1/2 tsp haldi/turmeric powder
1 tsp dhania/coriander powder
a handful of green peas (frozen is fine)
salt to taste
vegetable oil & ghee
fresh green coriander to garnish

Stage One
Eggplant 1
Place the whole eggplant on the centre tray of a moderate oven for 40-45 minutes. (You might want to stick a fork in a few times first, to avoid an aubergine explosion!)

Eggplant 2
Place the whole eggplant directly onto the wire, above a middle-sized gas burner on moderate flame (see left). Rotate frequently, until the skin is black and flaky and the whole fruit is soft and mushy.




Stage Two
Let the eggplants cool slightly and then peel of the skin and roughly mash the flesh.

Stage Three
Saute the onion and the green chilies until soft. Add the dried turmeric, coriander and chili-powder and fry for another 2-3 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes and cook on a medium flame for 7-10 minutes. Stir in the brinjal. Stir in the peas. Garnish with fresh coriander.


Aashvin was immediately able to pick the stove top brinjal (left). Indeed, it was vastly different to the oven-roasted dish (below). Not only did the stove version have a distinctive smoky taste, it was much sweeter than the other dish. (The oven-baked eggplant had a slightly bitter tang.) Surprisingly, the colour of the dishes was also quite different. While the oven-baked aubergine produced a greyish brown mash, the gas-cooked aubergine resulted in a golden coloured bharta. (How's the Hindi coming?)

Today, not only have I discovered a hithertoo unidentified link between lexemes and flavour, but I have come to one other conclusion:
Poor, poor people who only have electric cooktops.

If you’re in Edinburgh and looking for the ingredients used in the Baingan Bharta, I can recommend
Super Asian Foods (formerly PolyPack)
27 Jocks Lodge, Edinburgh, EH8 7AA
ph. 0131 661 4966
for ghee and all the necessary herbs and spices.