New Year’s Bake

My friend Gareth gave me a truly awesome gift a couple of weeks ago: The Great British Book of Baking

It’s perfect, not only because I like to bake things, but also because it really focuses on the kind of old, traditional recipes I’ve always wanted to master. Above all the recipes are very ‘social’ – the kind of things that are wonderful to make when friends are coming for afternoon tea. I recommend it!

Anyway, when he gave me the book, Gareth confessed that he’d been dying to try some of them himself, so we decided to meet up over the New Year weekend to make some goodies.

The first stage of this meet was brunch. I baked an apple scone round from the book and a loaf of my favourite yoghurt soda bread to go with kippers, scrambled eggs and pork and spring onion sausages. I halved the amount of sugar in the scone recipe and used light Muscovado instead of Demerara to make it more suitable for eating with cheese – the book’s recommended serving suggestion. I served all these goodies with some lovely coffee which another friend brought me from Betty’s in York.

After brunch, the baking!

Coffee and Walnut cake

Admittedly, my friend made most of this – I measured the ingredients and made the icing. The great thing about this recipe is that it comes out light without the flour needing to be sifted, which is great if you’re me and don’t have a sieve. I used ‘real’ coffee leftover from the brunch to give the cake a delicate flavour, but beefed it up with a small amount of instant for the icing. My housemate was delighted when she came home and spied one of her favourite cakes waiting.

Ham and Egg Pie

No, not a quiche! Basically, you line a pie dish with puff pastry, and fill it with chopped gammon, whole eggs and egg-and-chive custard before covering it with more puff pastry, glazing with egg and baking for 45 minutes. The whole eggs are put in raw, gently slipped into wells you make in the gammon. Ever so slightly fiddly, but really impressive once done. I have to admit it was a bit too salty for me, but my friend loved it and when I took the remaining half of the pie to my parents’ the next day, it only survived about fifteen minutes.

It was so much fun, I have decided to throw an afternoon tea party once a month to work my way through the recipes and spread baked cheer among all my friends.