Cake, cake, cake!

My company has two offices in Edinburgh, about 5 minutes apart. For a while, I've been sitting in the developer office, which has been excellent (smart people, a great view and Playstation with SSX Tricky - all you want from an office, really!), but as duty called me back to my old office, I thought I'd mark the day (celebrate and/or commemorate) with cake in both places. So I baked!

Traditional Apple Pie

Pastry:
200 g plain white flour
110 g unsalted butter
2-3 tbsp cold water


Filling:
700 g cooking apples, peeled, cored and cubed
2 tbsp lemon juice
3-4 tbsp water
100 g sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
25 g butter

Rub the flour and butter together until they look like breadcrumbs, or mix in a food processor. Work as quickly as possible to avoid heating up the mixture. Add cold water until everything binds together. Wrap the dough in clingfilm and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.

While the dough rests, simmer the apples with lemon juice and water until soft, approximately 10-15 minutes. Add sugar and cinnamon, stir carefully until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from the heat, add butter and leave to cool.

Roll out half the pastry to cover a pie dish, adding a bit more if you're struggling. Roll out the rest to form a lid, or (like me) if you find you can't cover it all, cut thin bars for a grid pattern instead. If covering, ensure you cut air holes in the pastry, and decorate with leafed edges.

Brush with milk and bake at the top of the oven at 220 C for 20-25 minutes, until the pie moves when you shake the pie dish. Serve with ice cream.

Carrot Cake

(This really is the world's best carrot cake, incredibly moist and gorgeous. Never mind all the oil - with all the carrots, this is obviously healthy!)

4 eggs
300 ml sugar
300 ml flour
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla sugar
150 ml sunflower oil
450 ml peeled and grated carrots

Whisk eggs and sugar into soft, white peaks. Mix bicarbonate, cinnamon, salt and vanilla sugar, sift over the egg mixture. Carefully fold in oil and carrots until the mixture is even and smooth. Bake in a large, round cake tin for 50 minutes at 190 C at the bottom of the oven. Cool on a wire rack.

Cream cheese frosting

100 g cream cheese
50 g butter, softened
125 g icing sugar

Mix cheese and butter together. Add in icing sugar until smooth, even and spreadable. When the cake is cool, spread the icing evenly on top, and decorate as you like. (Marzipan carrots with parsley greenery is particularly fetching!)

Mamma's Perfect Brownies

125 g butter
125 g chocolate
2 ggs
250 ml sugar
250 ml plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
100 g chopped nuts

Melt butter and chocolate over simmering water in a pan. Whisk eggs and sugar until stiff. Fold in chocolate mixture, sift over flour and baking powder, and fold in carefully with the chopped nuts.

Bake for 20-30 minutes at 180 C.

Drizzle icing sugar on top for decoration. Serve with hot berry sauce and ice cream or whipped cream if you're feeling fancy.


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I also brought the leftovers of a quick, easy cinnamon cake, but that recipe will be for later!

Delivering Happiness

I tend to read more fiction than non-fiction, and I've always been somewhat sceptical (with good reason, I think!) of self-help, business and management books. I know that there can be a lot of knowledge in them, but most of the time it is packaged in self-obsessed wankiness, obvious duh-statements and quite a lot of waffle (not the good kind, obviously).

Even so, I read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, founder of LinkExcange and CEO of online retail giant Zappos. Zappos is famous for having great focus on customer satisfaction and a superb company culture, with lots of innovative ideas on how to ensure loyalty and enthusiasm about the brand from both employees and customers. The book is part memoir, about Tony's upbringing, family values and first entrepreneurial attempts, part company history, covering LinkExchange and Zappos, and part self-help guide in achieving high levels of happiness.

As literary qualities go, Delivering Happiness doesn't have much going for it, but I don't think that's what the book set out for either, so that's fine. It's written in a playful way, with a first-person narrative which only becomes preachy and slightly righteous towards the second half. Tony seems like a nice guy, he's fun to be with and has lots of crazy ideas (according to himself, anyway), and who wouldn't want to work in a company that is the best ever to work for - or number 8, as it were, on the list of Best Companies To Work For. And we don't just have to take Tony's word for it, there are lots of stories from employees and colleagues, about how they embrace and personify the 10 statements that they call the family core values. The book is playful with typography, layout and typefaces, making it look creative and cool, albeit a bit messy. It mixes the narrative with emails and other points of view, and is overwhelmingly easy and fast to read.

I actually really enjoyed the first parts, the funny and enjoyable stories about Tony Hsieh and his background, and about his time in LinkExchange and becoming part of Zappos. But what I had expected from the book was more an insight into why Zappos has been successful, and what lessons can be learned for others wanting to improve the way companies work. Too bad that the further into the book and the further into the philosophies behind it all, the worse the book gets. I was hoping to make lots of notes of great ideas, but I only had a couple of points scribbled down at the end of the book, most of which I had thought of already anyway.

The Zappos values set forth in the book aren't bad in themselves, and I admire any company that truly puts the happiness of employees and users first, but I do think the truth rings somewhat hollow throughout the book. While I agree with some points in Delivering Happiness, and I think all businesses should invest in training, focus on career and personal progression, communicate openly and be fun - it is still a company that sees work-life balance as making work your family and life as well as work, a company still driven by one man's vision and many people's hard work and efforts, and still a business focusing on profits at the top rather than a reasonable distribution of rewards and benefits which could drive more innovation, satisfaction and happiness beyond a capitalist business model. Guess we disagree on the foundations then, Tony!

Vegetarian feast

(This is such a delayed post, but I wanted to write it anyway! Also apologies for lack of photographic evidence on this one...)

My company has started up a new office in Singapore, which is our first venture outside Europe, and a huge excitement and opportunity for us. Not least because we have hired a bunch of new people, some of whom were in Edinburgh for a while a few weeks ago. We wanted to give them a taste of life in Scotland, and apart from visiting Loch Ness, trying the local drinking traditions and listening to bagpipes all day, I thought it would be nice to have them over for a dinner. Now, I'm not claiming any Scottish or even British cooking traditions here, but I am pretty happy with the menu for the night, which was a vegetarian experiment for me - three dishes I'd never made before:

Cauliflower and Gorgonzola Soup with Pickled Pear Relish (from Good Food Magazine, Oct)

Serves 4

Soup:

1 cauliflower
Butter
2 onions, finely chopped
5 sprigs of thyme
2 bay leaves
1 l vegetable stock
150 g Gorgonzola cheese
100 ml creme fraiche

Relish:

2 tbs dried cranberries

1 tbs dried currants
2 ripe pears
1 sweet eating apple
Unsalted butter
75 ml cider vinegar
2 tbs sugar
3 sprigs lemon thyme
1 cinnamon stick


Trim the cauliflower, discard the leaves. Break into small florets. Sweat onions gently in melted butter over low heat for about 5 minutes, until softened. Add the cauliflower and stir gently for a few minutes. Add thyme, bay leaves and season with salt and pepper, then add stock and bring to the boil. Simmer for about 20 to 25 minutes covered with a lid. Crumble in the cheese, and stir to melt. Whisk in creme fraiche, remove the bay leaves and any thyme stocks. Mix with a blender or food processor  until smooth.

Make the relish while the soup boils. Cover cranberries and currants with boiled water and leave for about 10 minutes. Core and chop the pears and apple into small cubes. Keep the skin on for texture. Melt the butter and add the fruit. Cook and stir for about 5 minutes until it begins to soften. Add all the remaining ingredients. Cook over medium low heat for a further 10 to 15 minutes. Season to taste. Remove the cinnamoon stick and thyme stems.

Serve soup in shallow bowls with a generous garnish of pear relish in the middle. Sprinkle with thyme leaves, and grind some fresh pepper on top.

Roasted Squash Risotto with Wensleydale (from Good Food Magazine again, this time online)

Serves 4

A big squash, peeled, deseeded and cubed

Pumpkin seeds

1 onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, crushed

25 g butter

300 g risotto rice

150 ml white wine

1.2 l vegetable stock

100 g Wensleydale cheese, crumbled

Chives, chopped

Toss squash in oil in a roasting tin, and roast for 15-20 minutes on 180C, until golden and soft. Add the pumpkin seeds and a sprinkle of salt in a corner for the last 5 minutes. Remove half the squash and puree, while keeping the remaining squash and seeds warm in a very low oven.

While the squash roasts, soften the onion in butter in a stock pot or wide casserole. Stir in the rice for 1-2 mins. Add wine and cook while stirring until the wine has evaporated. Add hot stock a ladleful at a time, stirring until each addition is absorbed. Once all the stock has been added and the rice is tender and creamy, stir in the pureed squash until warm, then season. Serve in shallow bowls, scatter over the roasted squash, crumbled cheese, roasted pumpkin seeds and chopped chives.

For dessert, we had Frozen Mississippi Mud Pie, which was so delicious I'll have to make it again - with photos this time... So, later!

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

After having avoided this book for a long time - I think I was put off by the little I read of Everything Is Illuminated - I've finally picked up and finished Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Written by Jonathan Safran Foer, and in the process of being made into a film starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock (that can only be good, right...?), it's been a big success after coming out in 2005. We follow 9 year old Oskar Schell, and his search for things to do with his father, who was one of the many dead after the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001.

It's been hailed as a sad but funny book, and seems to have a big following, especially in America. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close does a good job of relating a devastating tale of loss, longing and loneliness, while still managing to be funny and thought-provoking beyond the grief. It is full of clever devices, both the ones that Oskar invents in his head, and the ones Safran Foer has employed to tell the story in various acrobatic style decisions, including typefaces, imagery, interjected content and illustrations, and the excellent book cover.

On the other hand, it plays on all the loudest strings, and gets somewhat tedious or cliched after a while. Not only are we dealing with a fatherless child after 9/11, a love lost in the Dresden bombs during World War II, a pregnant wife left by her husband, several very lonely old people, a man who can't speak out of grief, and a mother and widow in need of a shoulder to cry on; we also get a heavily melancholic and forcedly uplifted first-person story of the bullying and loneliness of a child too intelligent for his years. It tends to get a bit much, and even if all the pieces are quite intriguing, they almost cancel each other out, and it starts to get harder to get emotionally involved with any one of them.

The stylistic experiments also start to seem rather put on, and while they keep an appearance of being related to the story, I suspect that a lot of them were employed out of an interest in 'what can be done' rather than 'what will help the book'. Towards the end, I was more interested in finishing the book than following the story to the end, but I still think it was a worthwhile read, and it will be interesting to see if the film will manage to capture some of the quirkiness from the book - or if it'll be a less than impressive Hanks/Bullock rom-com with a layer of kooky melancholia.

Happy birthday, Irish Writer!

I love birthdays! My birthday, other people's birthdays - I don't care! (Although mine is obviously the best...) Birthdays are so much fun, there's so much enjoyment in one day; so much cake, so many balloons, so many presents. How can anyone not love it? I've vowed never to work on my birthday again, if I can avoid it, because birthdays aren't like other days - they should be fun, special, and full of magical surprises. And cake - did I mention that?

Today is my Irish writer's birthday, and sadly, he doesn't share my enthusiasm for the concept of this celebration of aging. It was a sad day when I found out, and the first surprise birthday party I tried throwing for him didn't go down all that well. But over the years, I have done my best to convince him of the beauty of birthdays, mainly by way of cake and present bribes, and I think it is starting to work.

Creamy, delicious bursdagsbløtkake

Today I started the charm offensive in the traditional way - birthday breakfast cake in bed. In my family, we've done this since I can remember: a cream sponge cake with candles, served in bed to a 'sleeping' celebratee, with cards, presents and loud singing wholly out of tune.

The cake is always the same: Bløtkake, with lots of whipped cream.

Here's how you make it:

Bursdagsbløtkake


Sukkerbrød/sponge:
6 eggs
200 ml sugar
300 ml flour
1/2 tsp baking powder


Filling:
500 ml (or more) whipping cream
3 bananas, mashed
Raspberry jam
Orange juice or Fanta
Decorations - grapes, kiwis, walnuts, strawberries, chocolate or whatever.


Whip the eggs and sugar gradually in a big bowl until white-ish and stiff - it will become quite a lot, so make sure you have room! Carefully fold the flour and baking powder in, until it is evenly mixed. Bake at 180C for 30 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Cool in the cake form and then on a wire rack.


When the sponge is cool, whip the cream into soft peaks. Add a little vanilla sugar for flavour. Mash the bananas. Cut the sponge in three layers, and put one on a serving plate. Drizzle with enough juice or soda to make it fairly moist, then spread a third of the mashed banana and a good helping of raspberry jam on top. Cover with a fair bit of whipped cream (a fourth or fifth of what you have should be about right).


Put on the next layer of sponge on top, and repeat. Do the same with the third layer, but this time, cover carefully with the cream, and use any remaining cream to cover the sides and to decorate as you please. I like using grapes, kiwis or strawberries: remember that this is first served in bed, and as such constitutes a decent breakfast - as long as it has fruit, I reckon.

Success! Cake!

With a cake like this to start the day, and some carefully selected presents, even birthday grinches are likely to crack a smile.If you want to make the day even better, try decorating the house with flags, balloons and football paraphernalia, and make a success cake for dessert - you're almost guaranteed success. (Recipe another time!)