Bedruthan Steps hotel, Mawgan Porth, Cornwall

I was invited to spend a weekend at the Bedruthan Steps hotel and its sister, The Scarlet, in Mawgan Porth in Cornwall. These are two hotels catering for very different audiences, but sharing an ecological, food-loving ethos – and one of the greatest sea views you’ll ever wake up to.

Clifftop
Clifftop view from the Cornwall Costal Path, a few paces from the Bedruthan Steps

I don’t have kids. It means that I’m blissfully ignorant of things like baby monitors, the school gate experience, feeding times and other arcane kid stuff. So I was a wee bit worried about being invited to the Bedruthan Steps, which is heavily advertised as being family-friendly. I’d resolved to steel my way through a day of kids, then collect my reward at the Scarlet in the company of grownups the next day.

Bedruthan Steps from the outdoor pool
Bedruthan Steps from the outdoor pool

A total surprise, then to pitch up at the Bedruthan Steps, admittedly full of pre-vocal people accompanied by their carriers/feeders/cleaners, and find it weirdly tranquil. The management know that not everybody wants to spend their day being poked with a plastic shovel, so to that end, there are plenty of adult-only areas (and a teenager-only area which Dr W had a good old whinge about not being allowed into so he could play pool). This works well for parents, too, who don’t have to worry about their kids’ noise and play annoying the kid-free; the kid-free are all in the adults’ lounge, the bar, or the adult-only pool. Breakfast saw us and all the other childless visitors put in a child-free section of the restaurant. There’s also a no-children swimming pool and spa. And this place is beautiful. Externally – well, not so much; you’re looking at a white 1950s monolith stacked up the cliffside in steps. But inside, the Bedruthan Steps is a lovely thing: all marine colours, pale woods, sculptural shapes, Cornish artworks and handsome textiles.

Cornish cliches
Cornish cliches in Mawgan Porth village: clotted cream ice cream, pasties and surfing. All that's missing is a scone and some tea.

If you do have kids, then you are really the person this hotel is catering for. Baby monitors in the rooms; a children’s club; an adventure playground with scrambling nets and a kids-only zip wire (cue more howls of disappointment from Dr W, an 8-year-old in a six-foot microchip architect’s body). The spa offers those special pregnant-lady massages, alongside all the usual treatments. All the baby stuff that my baby-owning friends have to tote around with them is provided, so you’re not going to have to pack the car to the gills – you can use the hotel’s plastic baby cutlery, cots, bibs, reusable nappies and potties (four words which I hope never appear again on this blog) for free, and if you want, you can also rent strollers, sterilisers, bouncing chairs and bottles for a very small fee. Our room had a double bed separated from the rest of the room by a half-wall, and two single beds for our imaginary children to sleep in in the living area.

Hotel room
Hotel room - and that view!

There’s a lot of attention to detail in the child facilities, and I did feel that that same attention to detail was missing in small ways in the rooms (perhaps it was just the bad luck that comes with being assigned room 13) – I could have done with a towel rail and loo roll holder that stayed attached to the wall, and I could really have done without the half-used bottle of lubricant that a previous guest had left in the bedside drawer. But the view from every bedroom, of Mawgan Porth’s gorgeous little sandy cove and the impossibly blue Atlantic pounding up to the beach – that’s worth all the nasty bedside drawer surprises in the world. We opened the window in the night to breathe in the sea air, and to listen to the wind and the waves; better than any prescription sleeping tablet. There’s lousy cell phone reception up here on the cliff, which makes for a fantastic excuse not to pick up the phone to talk to work while you’re away.

Lane down to sea
View from the lane down to the sea

You can walk down to that beach in about five minutes. It has a dedicated lifeguard and makes for a perfect sandcastle-making spot. It’s also good for surfing, and you can arrange lessons with Nick via the hotel’s front desk. The hotel is only a few yards from the Cornish Coastal Path, and there’s some great walking in both directions along the cliffs.

Mawgan Porth bay
Mawgan Porth bay

Padstow, now entirely colonised by Rick Stein restaurants, gift shops and hotels, is just up the road. This has been great news for diners visiting this part of Cornwall – rather than allow him to have the lock on good eating in the area, the other hotels and restaurants around here have really raised their games. Dining at the Bedruthan Steps, overlooking the bay through the restaurant’s ceiling-height windows, you’ll find a menu that changes daily; mixing simple, traditional cooking with more exotic (but never unapproachable) flavours like sumac and green curry. The fish here is local, admirably fresh and carefully selected, but if you’re not a fish person, there’s lots of choice, from vegetarian dishes to some great locally, organically raised meats. Locally fished mackerel stuffed with cracked wheat, currants and pistachios had sweet flesh, rich with oil, underlined by a sharp, herby gremolata dressing. And a beef casserole, full of local vegetables, had a lovely dumpling floating in the middle, light and airy: this is family food just like my Mum used to make. Cornish plums and Mawgan Porth lavender in a tarte tatin – locavores can quite literally eat their hearts out. Cornish beers (I was there for a Harvest Festival celebrating local beers and produce) stand alongside some extremely good Cornish fruit juices – of course, if you’re a wine drinker, there’s also an extensive, non-Cornish wine list.

Mackerel stuffed with crushed wheat
Mackerel stuffed with cracked wheat
Beef stew
Beef stew with an ethereal dumpling and some terrific onion rings
Tarte tatin
Roast plum and lavender tarte tatin - and a compulsory dollop of Cornish clotted cream

Alongside this localism, you’ll see a real commitment to sustainable, ecological management of the hotel. The food and drink aren’t the only locally sourced things you’ll see here – soaps, stationery, and even the hotel’s building materials are all from the local area. There’s solar heating for the outdoor pool; the rooftops are planted with grass; and the hotel has a year-round commitment to keeping the beach clean. There is constant waste and energy monitoring, motion-sensitive lighting in some areas, and a slightly irritating towel rental policy if you want more than the one per person that you’ll find in the room for the pool or beach.

Spa
Bedruthan Hotel spa

If you’re a parent of children of any age, I can’t think of anywhere you’ll find a better mix of things for the kids to do and for you grown-ups to enjoy too. There’s so much to do in the surrounding area, but if you want to stay in the hotel, there are weekend activities for adults: shoe-making, bread-baking, beekeeping, toddler-management, yoga and so on. (Check the hotel website for what’s on when.) Summer in Cornwall is late in finishing; when we were there in early September lots of families with pre-school-age children were taking advantage of the final flush of the south-west sun. Older children appear in the school holidays. Just watch out for the contents of the bedside drawers in room 13.

Iced sugar cookies

These little cookies are delicious, easy to make, fun to ice, and will keep for about a week in an airtight tin. What’s not to like? Even I, who singularly lack artistic skill, a steady hand or any visual imagination at all, had a total blast making a big batch of these for Dr W’s birthday.

You’ll be using royal icing and flood icing to colour these in. Piped lines of royal icing make little reservoirs which you will later fill with flood icing – royal icing which has been watered down a very little to make it flow into the shape you’ve outlined. I like to use squeezy bottles for icing rather than an icing bag (much less messy). Bottles are available at most cookware shops for under £2, and they come with a plastic piping nozzle which is perfect for this job. The amount of icing in the recipe below should be sufficient for filling six bottles in different colours, first for outlining, then, with a little water, for flooding.

It’s important to use food colouring that won’t dilute and loosen your icing. Gel icings, which come in tiny round pots to be added to your plain icing with a toothpick, are simply brilliant. I got Wilton’s set of eight gel colours from good old Amazon, and used a licorice pen (from the Elizabeth David shop in Cambridge) for black detail like eyes and buttons. Eight colours will probably be more than you’ll need for any single project, and the pots, although tiny, last for a very long time; you only need the tiniest dot of colouring for a batch of icing. Make sure that you blend the colour with the icing as thoroughly as you can; you don’t want any streaky bits.

Sugar cookies
300g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
230g vanilla sugar
230g butter
1 egg
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Royal icing (see instructions below for flood icing)
1lb powdered sugar
5 tablespoons meringue powder (available at cookware shops and some supermarkets)
2 tablespoons water

Start by baking the cookies. Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Sieve the flour and baking powder together and put to one side. Cream the sugar and the room-temperature butter with an electric whisk. Add the egg and vanilla extract, and continue to whisk until everything is blended together. Gradually add the flour mixture, beating gently until it is all incorporated.

Roll the dough onto a floured board and use cookie cutters to cut out shapes. Lay out on greaseproof paper on baking sheets and bake for about 12 minutes. Leave the cooked cookies on the sheet for a few minutes to cool a little and firm up, then use a spatula to transfer them to a cooling rack.

While the cookies cool, make the icing by beating together the sugar, meringue and water with your electric whisk until the mixture reaches stiff peaks (this can take several minutes). The icing will keep, covered, in the fridge for a week, so you can make and colour it before making the cookies if you fancy. Colour the icing according to the instructions on the gel colouring pack. Divide the icing between squeezy bottles, and get to work piping outlines on all your cookies – make sure there are no gaps in your outlines for the flood icing to dribble out of later.

The piped icing should dry quite quickly, so you can start filling in with flood icing as soon as you’re finished outlining. To turn the royal icing you outlined with into flood icing, add water a drop at a time and mix well until you have an icing just loose enough to flow when drizzled onto a flat surface. Squiggle flood icing into each outlined area, and use a toothpick to encourage it into the corners.

You can drop contrasting colours of flood icing into flood icing that is still wet to create certain effects. Make lines of wet icing and drag with a toothpick for a feathered effect; or try dripping a single drop of icing in a contrasting colour into wet icing for neat dots.

Edible sprinkles are a lovely, lily-gilding addition too. To stick them onto the cookies, wait for the icing to dry, then mix a teaspoon of meringue powder with a couple of drops of water, until you have a sticky paste. Use a kids’ paintbrush to apply this meringue glue to the area you want to stick sprinkles to, and scatter the sprinkles over while the glue is still wet.

When the icing and sprinkly bits are dry, store the cookies in single layers between sheets of greaseproof paper in an airtight tin.

Coconut ice

This is a recipe that’s ideal for child-centric bake sales – school fêtes, church fairs, that sort of thing. Kids love making sweeties, and coconut ice is one of the few sweets that doesn’t require any cooking, so it’s a safe recipe for little hands to get stuck into.

If you’re making this with children, it’s worth buying pink food colouring rather than just using a teeny amount of red. Children let loose on red colouring can easily produce coconut ice that looks like the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, so spend 40p on the pink stuff for a reliably Barbie-pink finish.

I have found myself a little queasy around condensed milk since John Prescott announced his uncanny ability to “sup a whole tin of Carnation…just for the taste” (and then spew it forth again). Coconut ice a very good way to rehabilitate the stuff. The amount this recipe produces will help you erase any such nasty images from your mind via the diabetic coma you’ll fall into if you eat all of it.

To make just over a kilogram of coconut ice, you’ll need:

400g dessicated coconut
400g icing sugar
1 tin (397g) condensed milk
½ teaspoon pink food colouring

In a large bowl, stir the dessicated coconut, icing sugar and condensed milk together until you have a stiff, sticky mixture. Remove half the coconut ice to a clean bowl and add the food colouring, then stir again until the colour is blended in smoothly. (Stirring this is hard work because the mixture is rather stiff, so children will need supervision.)

Line a small rectangular dish with cling film, making sure there is plenty overhanging at the sides. (Later, you will fold these overhanging bits over to cover the coconut ice.) Grease the cling film with a few drops of vegetable oil. Take the white portion of coconut ice and pack it firmly into the lined dish, making sure you produce an even layer. Pack the pink portion into a neat layer on top of the white layer. They will stick together firmly, thanks to the amazing adhesive qualities of sugar and condensed milk. Fold the cling film over the top and refrigerate the coconut ice overnight.

When the coconut ice is nice and firm from the fridge, turn it out of the dish, using the cling film to help, and peel the film away. Chop into little squares (a serrated knife is useful here), dust with icing sugar and pack in greaseproof paper for the school fête.

Reach Fair 2006 – toffee apples

First of all, an apology for not having posted for a week and a bit. A visit from family, a series of busy evenings of unbloggable dinners (at the houses of friends who weren’t seeking Internet fame, at the University where the lights are dim and the meals a bit swillish) and finally a really, really nasty brush with salmonella all conspired to stop me posting. I’m better (and thinner – positively svelte, now I mention it) again now, and I and the seven colleagues who ate the coleslaw at the pub on Perne Road have called Environmental Health in.

Cast your minds back a week and a half.

Astute readers familiar with Cambridgeshire will have worked out by now that I live in Reach, a tiny village about fifteen miles from Cambridge, set around a large green. The village is complete with a Roman canal, a ruined Norman church (I’m looking at it out of the living room window as I type – see above for a picture taken at the end of March – the roundabout on the left is the view out of the front garden from the last week of April) and marks the start of the seven-mile Devil’s Dyke, a perfectly straight chalk earthwork which was put in as defence by Hereward the Wake’s lot. It is, you might gather, a village with a fair old bit of history.

In 1201, King John granted a charter to the village allowing it to host an annual fair on May 1. Historically, the fair had huge significance in the region, and was a big event for those wishing to trade in livestock and the goods which had come down the Roman canal (which, in 2006, is still navigable, although it’s not been used commercially for about a century). Back then, the fair was a three-day affair, drawing visitors from all over the east of England.

Eight hundred and five years later, the fair is still running every year, although now it’s an old-fashioned funfair which only opens for a day, with a merry-go-round, swingboats, hoopla, a coconut shy and a helter-skelter. The local schoolkids dance around a maypole, the village is infested with morris dancers and squeezebox players, mock battles are held on the playing fields, and there’s a hogroast.

There’s food everywhere you look; excellent local ice-cream, vans full of sweets, the coconuts nobody is winning because they appear to be weighted with lead. Our very splendid local pub also has a beer tent most years. These toffee apples are particularly magnificent, and they’re a staple of the fair. To make your own, you’ll need:

450 g soft brown sugar
50 g butter
10 ml malt vinegar
150 ml water
1 tablespoon golden syrup
6-8 medium-sized apples and the same number of good wooden sticks. (I’ve used pencils in emergencies – and no sticks for your toffee apple is, as far as I’m concerned, an emergency par excellence.)

Put the sugar, butter, vinegar, water, and syrup into a large pan with a heavy base. Stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved, then raise the temperature and then boil until the temperature reaches 143°C (soft crack on your jam thermometer). At this temperature a drop of the mixture in cold water will separate into hard threads which are not brittle.

Push the sticks into the clean apples. Dip the apples into the toffee and swirl them around for a few seconds until they are covered in the toffee. Leave to cool on a sheet of greaseproof paper.

I’ll leave you with a photo of the fair in the 1930s. See those people sitting on the verge on the left? These days, that’s my front garden.

Party cakes

Mr Weasel has just handed in his PhD thesis. This being a cause for celebration, we have spent the day baking and entertaining everybody we know. Savouries to follow – today I’m concentrating on the cakes.

We made some fairy cakes using my standby cake recipe – this light sponge works equally well in a large tin and as cupcakes. It’s extremely easy – all you need is 100g soft butter, 100g caster sugar, 2 eggs, 100g self-raising flour and a teaspoon of baking powder. If making cupcakes, beat the lot together with a handwhisk until pale and bake at 200°c for around 20 minutes.

I iced them with 350g of icing sugar mixed with 25ml rosewater and enough boiling water to make the mixture gloopy, then placed a crystalised rose petal on top. Gorgeous – the kids present particularly enjoyed them, probably because it’s impossible to be under five and immune to pinkness.

There is nobody on the planet who doesn’t like chocolate cornflake cakes. Take 100g of chocolate, 50g of butter and 2 tablespoons of golden syrup, and melt the lot together. Fold in cornflakes (about 150g – use discretion depending on your liking for chocolate), put in cases and chill. Easy as pie, and as delicious as they come.