Jameson Whiskey Cake

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Paddy Cake!

We stayed in Wexford in a big old farmhouse over New Years and Lu's birthday. Lu and I are kind of fans of naff 70s decor, which is just as well because the whole place looked like the house from Father Ted, In fact, I was watching Father Ted recently and Mrs Doyle has the EXACT same ceramic dogs as were in this place.

Anyway, I digress...
On the night before new years, which is Lu's birthday, we cooked a meal for 12 people and one of our guests, Camille, who had just arrived from the USA that day, produced the most delicious whiskey cake all the way from DC for dessert/birthday cake.

Here is Lu blowing out the candles on the original version We thought it would be the perfect thing to make for Paddy's day so after some advice from Camille I decided to merge the earlier ginger cake recipe from Nigel Slater with the recipe Camille gave me. It produced a heavier cake that really soaks up the booze. Its different to the original recipe, but its still pretty good, as anything that contains a whole shoulder of whiskey is bound to be! Here is the recipe:

Ingredients

300g self-raising flour

1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda

a pinch of salt

3/4 teaspoon ground cloves

3/4 teaspoon allspice

3/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

200g golden syrup

125g butter

1/2 cup Jameson whiskey

100g chopped walnuts

125g dark muscavado sugar

2 large eggs

240ml milk

For the glaze

1 cup jameson whiskey

4 oz butter

1 tbsp water

2 oz sugar

Sift the flour, bicarb, salt and spices into a bowl. In a saucepan melt the syrup with the butter and sugar until the sugar has dissolved. Add in the whiskey. It will bubble madly. Add this all to the flour and stir well. mix the milk with the eggs and whisk. Then add this into the four mixture. It will look quite sloppy but it will be ok! Pour this into a grease cake tin and bake at gas 3/160c for about 40 mins or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

While the cake is baking, combine all the glaze ingredients in a saucepan and melt until the sugar has dissolved. When the cake comes out of the oven and is still hot, pour 1/3 of the glaze over it. Allow the cake to cool and turn it out of the cake tin on to a plate. Pour a further 1/3 of the glaze over the underside of the cake. Wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate the cake for 2 - 3 days. When you are ready to serve, take the cake out of the fridge so that it can come back up to room temperature. Then gently heat the remaining glaze before pouring it over the cake and serving!!

Deicio! Our cake tin even is slightly reminiscent of a shamrock! Cant wait till tomorrow so we can eat it!

Thanks Camille

Lemon & Ginger Green Tea

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A kick for your immune system

If I ever feel a little yucky, I make myself a big pot of this and drink it all, beside the fire/computer/tv. The next day I'm feeling wonderful and dance my way to work! Well maybe not quite, but it's a big shot of vitamins and anti-oxidants and re-hydration that can't be bad for you. Sarah has a bit of a cold - so she added whiskey to hers, and said it was lovely.

Ingredients

makes one big teapot full

1 lemon - juiced

2 teaspoons of green tea

1 thumb sized piece of root ginger - sliced finely

Boil the kettle and heat your pot. Put in the tea leaves and ginger. Pour over the boiling water and leave to steep for 3 minutes. Then before serving add in the fresh lemon juice.

There's lots of variations for this, so if you like mint - add some fresh mint, add some honey if you'd prefer it sweeter - or have a sore throat. I've added cayenne pepper before and also a sprig of fresh rosemary makes for a nice brew also. Replace a lemon with a few oranges, the options are endless.

In other exciting blog related news - I bought a new camera - watch our pictures improve (I hope!) Big thanks to Kate and Brian for helping me out with the purchase - you guys rock!

Pie Off!!

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Food blogging friends
We got invited by Aoife from I Can Has Cook to enter a pie into the first annual pie-off, so I gladly accepted. I have been reading Aoifes blog for a good while now, by entering this competition I would be meeting her face to face - ha ha! Then we realised we’d already met a few years ago anyway, but that’s another story.

Lola and I thought long and hard over our pie choices, many pies were discussed at length, so thanks guys for indulging our endless food talk. We weighed up our options carefully, considered some bad and good pie puns.

We did make a great Beef and Guinness pie back in July, but we thought we’d need to push the boat out and go a little extra special for this one.

As I undertook the shopping I imagined a master chef style judging -’now this is a big disappointment guys.... hmm awfully bland....’ The pressure was on.
We chose a classic game pie, which we named

Granny Speed on the Game Pie
Now the story behind this was I borrowed a ceramic blackbird from my mum - which you ‘ bake in the middle of the pie’ and it holds the pastry above the filling preventing sogginess and also housing the vent to let out the steam.


This little birdy belonged to my great grandmother whose surname was Speed - get it!
Anyways the ingredients for the pie were sourced from Moore Street and also from Fallon and Byrne. We decided to cook the filing the night before so that the flavours could rest over night and develop properly.


So I wobbled home on Friday after a few Friday pints of Guinness and Rayne prob did most of the work - but I assisted. She even filleted two saddles of rabbit - hats off!Less rambling - More recipe

Ingredients
1/2lb of rabbit - filleted and chopped into 2/3 cm cubes
1/2 lb of pheasant, chopped into 2/3 cm cubes
1/2 pound of venison flank cubed
4 oz of streaky bacon - de-rinded and diced
2 red onions
2 cloves of garlic crushed
1/2 pint of wine
1 oz of plain flour4oz of shitake mushrooms
4oz of button mushrooms
1 bay leaf
a tablespoon of red currant jelly
Seasoning
1/2 pint of chicken stock
Zest and juice of one orange
Puff pastry (bought not homemade - sorry!)

With a little oil - fry off the pheasant and rabbit in batches in your pan to brown on each side. Dont brown your venison as apparently this makes it very tough. Set aside.

Cook your onion for a minute then add in the garlic and bacon - after about 2/3 mins add in the mushrooms. Fry until the onion is transparent and the bacon getting nicely cooked - but not too brown. Stir in the flour and cook for a few seconds before adding in the browned meat, unbrowned venison, wine, stock, bay leaf, orange juice, zest and jelly.

Mix well, bring to the boil and then lower to a gentle simmer. Cover and cook for about an hour and twenty mins. Allow to cool, before refrigerating overnight.

Next day - pop your mixture into a high sided pie dish, around your little birdy. Then cut your pastry to be a lot wider than your dish, as it will puff and shrink. Drape t over your pie dish - and cut a hole for the steam to escape. Brush with some beaten egg. Cook at Gas Mark 6 for 2o mins and then turn down to gas mark 5 for a further 30 mins or so - till golden and delicious on top and bubbly underneath.

The mixture when heated in the oven gets a lot more liquidy so don’t worry if your cold mixture appears a little thick.

The pie-off was a great idea for a fun night. All pies were marked on taste - creativity and presentation. The total scores were added together to determine the winner. We cooked the pies in rotation and then everyone had a little taste then - then a little taste of the next pie - - so nobody got stuffed but everybody was well fed.

Aoife created a shepherds pie with minced venison and juniper berries, which was the tastiest shepherd pie I’ve ever eaten.Darragh created a sumptuous Moroccan lamb pie with toasted cumin seeds rolled into the pastry - a fantastic idea! Nice big lumps of carrot in there too. He added in some 'ras al-hanout' which I've never heard of, so I bet this was the secret ingredient.

Beef and Guinness Pie

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Ohm nom nom As Alan has been in Singapore for the last year eating only foreign muck (joking, he has told me many a tale about the wonderfulness of food in Singapore) we decided that he needed a good auld Irish dish as a welcome home.

I was going to cheat and buy the puff pastry, but they didn't have any in tesco's (bloody tesco parnell street is sooooo bad) so i had to make it from scratch. This was my first attempt at puff pastry, and while it was not actually that puffy, it did taste very good and was nice and light and crunchy.

We made the filling the night before the party for two reasons: 1- less stress on party day (considerable factor when you are cooking for 14) 2- leaving it overnight makes it more delicious. You could do it all in one day if you wanted to though Again, bear in mind that this recipe serves 14 so you can reduce all the amounts accordingly Ingredients: 11/2kg good quality stewing beef, cut into cubes by your butcher.
20 shallots
8-10 parsnips
8-10 carrots
1 large onion
3 cloves garlic
1 can Guinness extra stout
ltr good beef stock flour
salt & Pepper

Heat some oil in the biggest pot you own. Chop the onion and garlic finely and sweat them in the pot, covering them with the lid so they don't burn or colour. Toss the meat in a generous amount of flour into which you have added salt and ground black pepper until all the cubes are well covered. Toss these in the pan with the onions and brown all over. Stir constantly to stop the flour from burning on the bottom of the pan.

When all the meat has browned, add the peeled and chopped veggies (leave the carrots and parsnips in big-ish chunks) and stir until everything is combined. Then pour in the hot beef stock and stir to dissolve all the flour that has stuck to the bottom of the pan. Pour in the can of Guinness, cover and simmer for 15 mins.

Preheat your oven to about 175c and shove the whole pot in there. Leave it for about 3 hours. When you take it out the stew will be melty and gorgeous. Adjust the seasoning at this point, adding more slat and pepper if necessary. If you have time, leave it overnight and let all those gorgeous flavours intensify.

For the puff pastry: (this recipe is from Delia, her complete cookery course is my bible for basics like this)
1 lb strong white flour
8 oz lard
8oz margarine
10fl oz ice cold water


Sift the flour into a bowl with a pinch of salt. Chop up all the fat into inch sized squares and add to the flour. Now add the water and, using a palette knife make a series of straight cuts (like you are cutting a big cake) to incorporate everything. The aim is to leave the fat as intact as possible and still bring everything together into a dough-like ball.

When you have a reasonable ball of dough-like substance, take it out of the bowl (don't worry if it doesn't use up all of the flour) and place on a floured board. Shape it into a rough brick shape, and using a long, floured rolling pin, make 3 depressions across the brick. Make sure the dough and the pin are well dusted with flour at all times.

Then roll the whole thing out into an oblong that is roughly the length of your forearm (not including your hand!) and about 1/2 as wide. Now fold the top third down and the bottom third up so its a bit like an envelope. Seal the edges with a sharp press from the rolling pin. this locks in air, apparently. The dough will now be roughly the same size and shape as your original brick, so make the 3 depressions again and repeat the process again 4 or 5 times. What this does is spread out the large chunks of fat into layers with flour that you have used to dust the board, dough and pin. Clever, eh!

Allow the dough to rest in the fridge for at least half an hour before you roll it out. When you cut the dough in half you will be able to see all the layers of flour and fat, like the strata of a cliff. Because we had so much stew we had to use 2 pie dishes (big rectangular lasagne ones) but if you are making a smaller amount you could use a pretty round dish. Fill your dish up to almost full with the stew filling. Then cover with the rolled out pastry and make nice decorations on top (not a big penis, like Alan did) and a few cuts to allow steam to escape. I was going to put an egg wash over the pastry to make it nice and shiny (just a beaten egg brushed all over the pastry) but I forgot. We served this with boiled new potatoes and steamed broccoli. YUUUUMMMM

Chicken Liver Pate

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Loads and loads of Lovely Little Livers for the Liver Lovers
(and by Liver Lovers we mean our friend Alan) My mum used to make this recipe for posh dinner parties in the early 90s. I LOVED it, but it always ran out too fast. Its not something that most people would allow themselves to eat much of, so for our dinner party I decided to make loads so that everyone could get a big generous slice. I made this a few days before the party (it keeps for up to a week in the fridge as long as you seal it with the melted butter) Ok, I wasn't sure how many people we would actually have to feed, but I knew it would be between 10 and 15, so I decided to err on the side of caution and make a huge batch. You could probably half or even quarter these measurements but actually, its so delicious that you will want to have loads. We even had some left overs and last night we benefited from a post pub midnight snack of pate on toast... It must have soaked up the booze good because this morning I am miraculously hang-over-less! I don't have a blender, just a humble stick blender but it worked perfectly for this and the pate was lovely and smooth. Ingredients:
2kg chicken livers
2 onions
(or 6 shallots)
3 cloves garlic
2 springs rosemary (other herbs like thyme or juniper berries would also work)
1/2 a wine class of hennessy (or similar cognac)
1 big block of butter

Method: Start by chopping the onions (shallots are better but they didn't have them in Tesco) really really finely. As fine as you can get them. Same thing for the garlic. Mely a big knob of butter in a frying pan and sweat the onions and garlic and herbs until they are translucent and soft. Don't brown them.

Transfer them to the bowl of a food processor ( or, if like me, you only have a stick blender, to a normal bowl) Rinse the chicken livers and trim off any fat or gristle (if you can possibly bear it... yek!) dry them on kitchen towels. Melt about an ounce knob of butter in the same pan, and gently fry the livers (i did them in two batches) turn them over, they should be browned on the outside and slightly pink in the middle (but not too pink! if you are not sure leave them in longer).

Transfer the cooked livers and the melted butter and cooking juices into the bowl with the onions. Then return the pan to the heat, pour in the cognac and allow it to bubble for a few seconds. Tip this into the bowl and whizz everything together until as smooth as you can get it. Then add about 1/2 of the butter you have left and whizz it all up again. The colour will go lighter and the consistency will be looser.

Line a bread tin with cling film and pour the mixture in. If you prefer, you could serve this in individual ramekins, in which case there is no need for the cling film.Using a palette knife, smooth down the top of the pate so its as flat and level as you can get it. Melt the rest of the butter in a clean pan or in the microwave. Pour the melted butter into the mold and make sure that it completely covers every bit of the pate. This will seal the pate so it will keep in the fridge for up to a week.

We served the pate with a little salad, a nasturtium each from the front garden (cause we're being wanky!) , and melba toast, which is great because it stops your guests from filling up too much on bread. To make melba toast, get a sliced pan of 'killer' white bread. Toast the slices as usual, then cut off the crusts and using a thin serrated knife, cut through the middle of the toast so you now have two thinner slices the same size. Toast the untoasted sides of these under the grill. Be careful, they burn quick!

Mustard & Brandy Scallops

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Get Scallops - throw in some brandy and some Dijon mustard onto the square of tinfoil, as well as some salt and pepper. Seal up your parcel and barbeque for ten mins on an medium heat. Dust in a little flour towards the end and mix around to make a super delicious gravy to dip your bread in. I have no idea how to cook scallops but this tasted pretty damn good These photos are terrible but I'll throw in one of sunflowers from the trip too to make up for it!

Cheese Fondue

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Cheesy 80's Party

We haven’t thrown a party in a while now, so we combined it with our love of cheese and our love of the 80’s. Perfect.
Matthew's Cheese Cellar on Baggot Street is an amazing place for any cheese fan, highly recommended as the palace of cheese, with silver finishing, red carpet and the largest range of cheeses this side of the Brittany

½ block of Edam Cheese (about 500g)
500g of Raclette Cheese
1 box of white wine
1 clove of garlic - skinned cut in half
Juice of 1/2 a lemon Grate all the cheese. Rub the cut side of the garlic all over the inside of the pan and discard - or use for salad dressing. Fill with about two glasses of wine - and heat the wine. Try not to let it boil.

When it's close to boiling, add in a handful of cheese. Stir well until it's smooth and lump free. Repeat a handful at a time, until you've Incorporated all the cheeese. Mine grew a bit thick so I added in more wine as I went, small amounts so that they combine easily. Add the lemon juice to cut through all that richness. Allow to reach a simmer and leave for two minutes.Then serve, it's just that easy and far more decadent that I had expected. As dipping material we used small bite size pieces of ciabatta, cooked sausages, mortadella, other cooked sausages, steamed cauliflower and broccoli florets and then more French bread. I was expecting this to be wonderful as I am a huge fan of cheese, but it surpassed even my cheesiest dreams - oooooh baby! Just after we took this photo - another few people arrived and the whole pot was gone in less then 10 minutes, next time I'll make seconds I promise. We invited all our friends to bring some 80's food with them, Pam made some great little vol-o-vents, filled with creamy chicken, bacon & mushroom. Thanks Pam Also produced were in no particular order, Angel Delight, After 8's, Refreshers, Galtee Cheese, Ritz crackers, Ritz the 'perry', West Coast Cooler (mmmmm) Black Forest Gateaux, Cheese & Pineapple Hedgehogs, Tayto crisps, the richest chocolate cake ever - Thanks Guys


Then it just turned into a party-job done!

Aperol in the Afternoon

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Noon counts as afternoon right?
Lola brought back a bottle of this from her recent trip to Venice. It's a delicious orange liquor, which you water down with sparkling water to make a very refreshing drink. The perfect accompaniment to our preparations for the party we were throwing that night. So as Lola slaved preparing two giant quiche lorraine, I knocked her up one of these babies, they taste as good as they look believe me.

From their own website 'Aperol's unique flavour and colour is achieved through a subtle blend of bitter orange, gentian, rhubarb and an array of herbs and roots - using a secret recipe that has been unchanged since its first creation in 1919.'

After these preparations we took a little wander down the road to watch and have a little march in the pride parade. Afterwards more refreshments were in order, so we headed to the hop house on Parnell st. for a pint in the sunny beer garden, and our friends sampled some of the lovely sushi. Even our pint got into the pride spirit!!