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Rhubarb sorbet

Rhubarb sorbetLast winter, my friend Kate and her family moved into an enormous and ancient pile of a house in one of the nearby villages. You know the sort of house:  the street is named after it; it’s got medieval bits, Georgian bits and Victorian bits; there are wonderful corners all over the place for the kids to play hide-and-seek in; and there’s a huge, leafy garden I’d give my right arm for.

Part of Kate’s garden appears to have been looked after, a century or so ago, by a kitchen gardener with a fondness for rhubarb. Rhubarb crowns grow very slowly indeed, but Kate’s rhubarb patch, having been around for a good long while, is now about the size of a couple of transit vans. No one family can consume that amount of rhubarb in one year without severe intestinal upset, so a few months ago she gave me a few kilos of stalks. Since then, they’ve been sitting, chopped and cleaned, in the freezer, coming out occasionally to be stewed and consumed with custard. Time to ring the changes – here’s a non-custardy application of rhubarb which is grown-up enough to be wheeled out at your next dinner party. There’s a lovely balance of tart and sweet in this sorbet, and it’s a glorious colour. You’ll find it works well as an in-between-courses palate cleanser, or as a dessert. Leave any custard well alone; this stands up on its own.

To make about a pint and a half of sorbet, depending on your rhubarb’s age and water content, you’ll need:

1kg rhubarb
200g caster sugar
30ml water

Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and simmer very gently with the lid on until all the rhubarb has collapsed into a greenish mush (about 20 minutes). Remove from the heat. Strain through a jelly bag, a fine sieve or a muslin-lined colander for several hours or overnight and let gravity do its work, without poking at the mixture – you want the juice and only the juice. You’ll notice that the solid bits of rhubarb left in the jelly bag look a lot like wet hay; all the pinkness will be in your juice.

Eventually, you’ll have a bowl of pink, fragrant syrup. Chill the syrup in the fridge for at least six hours.

Follow the instructions on your ice-cream maker, or pour the syrup into a freezerproof box and put straight in the freezer, removing after an hour to attack with an electric whisk to break up the ice crystals. Freeze for another thirty minutes and whisk again, then keep repeating every thirty minutes until you have something that’s recognisably sorbet. This sorbet will keep in the freezer for months, but I doubt you’ll be able to leave it alone for that long.

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Rhubarb Pavlova

Rhubarb lemon pavlovaFor the last couple of weeks, I’ve been blogging from a Booklet laptop lent to me by the friendly folks at Nokia, who saw me mention on Twitter that my own laptop had died horribly. (It was a long and sad process, the worst part being the fortnight before it gave up the ghost completely, over which period it tried its damnedest to barbecue any lap it was put on.) The Booklet goes back to Nokia today, and I’ll miss it; while the screen’s a bit too small to edit photos and work through piles and piles of text on optimally, its portability has been an eye-opener, and the 3-G-ness is brilliant – it’s been lovely to work on a machine that’s small enough for a handbag, that fits onto one of those pathetic trays on trains, and that I can easily manage in one hand while waving a wooden spoon in the other. Adieu, little Booklet. I shall miss you.

So then. Pavlova. In the dark days of the early 80s, I was set a piece of homework for our “finding out” class, where I was meant to write a short essay on Anna Pavlova. Nobody in the family knew anything more about her than that she was a 1920s ballerina, and so I ended up submitting an essay about meringue instead, which, happily, was something that everybody at home was more than educated about. The Pavlova is a New Zealand dessert which was named after the dancer in the 1920s (a period when naming a dish after a celebrity was a signal honour – like Peaches Melba and Melba Toast, Omelette Arnold Bennett,  Eggs Benedict and other eponymous dishes). Being a reasonably easy recipe which looks so handsome, the Pavlova, with its ballet skirt of meringues, is a favourite at Christmas in NZ – I wish Christmases here were sunny, so we could do away with the leaden puddings and have meringue instead. Tart fruits are best as a filling – I’ve made a lemon cream using some home-made lemon curd (it’s quick to make, and it’s a good way to use up the egg yolks, but shop-bought curd will do the job just as well) and some roast rhubarb from my friend’s garden. I’ve used Polish cherry squash to pink up the rhubarb – if you can’t find any, use grenadine or another reddish cordial.

The inside of a proper Pavlova reaches that lovely marshmallowy texture thanks to the addition of a little vinegar and cornflour to the meringue – when you have meringue, which magically turns itself from yellowish, wet egg-whites into glossy clouds, then into a simultaneously crisp and chewy nest, who needs molecular gastronomy?

You’ll need:

Meringue
2 tablespoons melted butter
8 egg whites
330g caster sugar
1 teaspoon spirit vinegar
2 teaspoons cornflour, plus extra for dusting

Filling
450ml double cream
100g lemon curd
5 fat stems rhubarb
2 tablespoons cherry cordial
200g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 120°C (250°F). Lay greaseproof paper out on two baking trays, and brush each with melted butter. Dust the buttered paper with cornflour and shake off any excess – this will stop the Pavlova from sticking.

Beat the egg whites with an electric whisk or stand mixer, adding 330g sugar a little at a time, until they form soft, glossy peaks. Add the cornflour and vinegar to the mixture, and beat in gently.

Fill a piping bag fitted with its largest nozzle with the meringue, and pipe in a spiral straight onto the floured paper, starting in the centre, going round and round until you have a solid circle of meringue measuring about 7 inches in diameter. Be careful to leave some room around the meringue, which will swell as it cooks. Repeat on the other sheet of floured paper. You’ll have a little meringue left – use this to pipe a wall of meringue around the edge of one of the circles – this will be the bottom piece, and the lip of meringue will help to hold the filling in place.

Bake for 30 minutes, then turn the heat down to 100°C (210°F). Bake for another 40 minutes – the meringue should now be nice and dry, and should crack when you press it gently. Turn the oven off and cool the meringue in the oven with the door cracked open.

Once the meringue is cool, it can be covered and kept, without the filling, in the fridge – you can also freeze it successfully at this stage.

To prepare the filling, chop the rhubarb stems into pieces about an inch long, and put them in a large roasting tin, sprinkled with the sugar and cordial. (Use grenadine or another red cordial if you can’t find cherry – mine was from the local Polish shop.) Roast at 170°C (340°F) for 20 minutes, until tender and collapsing. Remove to a bowl and chill.

Whip the cream until it forms stiff peaks, and fold the lemon curd in with a spatula. Chill until you are ready to serve.

To assemble the Pavlova, spread half the lemon cream onto the base piece of meringue, leaving a bit of a hollow in the middle so you can really heap up the rhubarb. Spoon over the rhubarb (you won’t use all the juice, but it’s delicious, so keep it to one side to slurp at later), dollop the rest of the cream on top, and put the meringue lid on. Serve immediately.

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Rhubarb and custard cake

There’s one seasonal ingredient in the shops at the moment which puts a very jolly spin on February: forced rhubarb. I’ve been buying it at the market and the supermarket (for some reason, the market produce seems rather redder) to simmer with some sugar to go with yoghurt in the mornings, and with custard at suppertime. We also spooned it over pancakes on Shrove Tuesday – I’m sure I’ll be sick of it soon, but we’re not there yet, so I chucked some in a cake.

This recipe is based on one I found on Usenet in the mid-nineties. The original was very simple: a box of cake mix, a few handsful of rhubarb, some sugar, and some cream. This is my cake-mix-free version, which is just as quick to prepare. It’s lovely and moist, has a fantastic rhubarb and custard flavour, and disappears very quickly.

I don’t really understand why you’d spend the extra on a boxed mix, when it only takes a minute to measure out flour, butter, milk and sugar. This also gives your inner control-freak the ability to manage exactly what goes into your cake. A bit of googling revealed that the ingredients panel on a standard box of yellow cake mix reads:

Sugar, Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Vegetable Oil Shortening (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Propylene Glycol Mono- and Diesters Of Fats, Monoand Diglycerides), Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphat E, Monocalcium Phosphate). Contains 2% Or Less Of: Wheat Starch, Salt, Dextrose, Polyglycerol Esters Of Fatty Acids, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Cellulose Gum, Artificial Flavors, Xanthan Gum, Maltodextrin, Modified Cornstarch, Colored with (Yellow 5 Lake, Red 40 Lake).

Personally, I prefer an ingredients list that goes like this:

250g plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
125g softened butter
3 eggs
180ml milk
450g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4-5 stalks rhubarb
1 pint double cream

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F).

Sieve the flour into a large bowl with the baking powder and salt. Give it plenty of height, to get as much air into the flour as possible.

In a separate large bowl, use an electric whisk to cream the butter and 225g of the sugar together until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one by one, with the vanilla essence, at a high speed. Add the flour and milk a little at a time, beating as you go, until you have a velvety, light mixture.

Use a spatula to spread the cake mixture over the bottom of a metal baking tin – use a non-stick one, or line with greased parchment. Mine measured 30×35 cm; if yours is smaller, that’s fine, but be sure it has reasonably high sides and be aware that your cooking time may be a bit longer. Cut the rhubarb into small pieces and scatter it over the top of the mixture with the remaining sugar. Pour the cream over the whole arrangement and bake for 45 minutes.

Test with a skewer, which should come out nearly clean – if it’s still sticky or liquidy when you shake the tin, give the cake another ten minutes and test again. The top will be cracked and golden. This cake is good hot or cold.

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Rhubarb crumble with proper custard

The forced rhubarb is arriving in the shops at the moment. It’s a lovely delicate pink when raw, and can tend to lose its colour a bit when cooked, unlike the very red rhubarb from later in the season – but it tastes deliciously of spring and makes a great crumble (or crisp, as the Americans call it). The lovely buttery, crunchy topping is impossible to get wrong, and this is a good recipe to start kids on before they try to make pastry, so they can get used to the rubbing-in method.

The custard below is made in the traditional way with egg yolks, vanilla and milk, but also includes a spoonful of Bird’s instant custard. The Bird’s, full of cornflour, stabilises the other custard ingredients as well as adding some flavour, so you’ll end up with a supremely custardy custard, rich, silky and packed with vanilla. Alfred Bird, a chemist, came up with his custard powder in 1837, because his wife loved custard but was allergic to eggs: a romantic gesture that’s still going strong after nearly two centuries. Mrs Bird is no longer with us, so additional yolks are not an insensitive addition.

For this first crumble of the year, I wanted the buttery, clear taste of the crumble topping to shine against the fragrant spring rhubarb, so this is a plain topping with a rhubarb-only filling. If you want to jazz things up a bit, try adding a couple of teaspoons of ground ginger to the topping and two or three tablespoons of crystallised ginger to the filling. To serve six, you’ll need:

Crumble
225g plain flour
75g softened, salted butter
75g soft brown sugar
900g trimmed rhubarb
75g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Slice the rhubarb into one-inch chunks. Place in a saucepan and sprinkle over the caster sugar. Cook gently, covered (you don’t need any extra water because there is so much in the rhubarb) for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the rhubarb is cooked but still chunky.

While the rhubarb is simmering, make the topping in a large bowl by rubbing the butter into the flour gently, using your fingertips, until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir the sugar through the crumble mixture.

Put the rhubarb in a shallow cooking dish (I like my le Creuset tatin dish for this) and sprinkle the topping over. Scatter a few drips of water from the tips of your fingers over the surface – this roughens up the top and makes things even crispier. Bake for 30-40 minutes until the crumble topping is golden brown.

Custard
2 tablespoons Bird’s custard powder
1 vanilla pod
1 pint milk
3 egg yolks
2 tablespoons vanilla sugar

Mix the sugar and custard powder in a bowl with a little milk taken from the pint until you have a smooth paste. Bring the rest of the milk to a bare simmer (it should be giggling rather than chuckling) and pour it over the mixture in the bowl. Return the whole lot to the saucepan over a low heat and, whisking hard, add the egg yolks and the seeds from inside the vanilla pod to the mixture. Keep cooking until the custard thickens and serve immediately. (If you need to keep the custard warm for a while before serving, lay a piece of cling film directly on its surface to avoid forming a skin.)

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Rhubarb and ginger vodka

The rhubarb has come into season now. We don’t have enough room for a rhubarb crown in the garden, but when I was a kid, my parents had a large patch of it, the centre of which lurked under an upturned metal bucket in the early spring to force the pink stems. Gorgeous stuff, and I picked up a muddy armful at the market to make cake with this week, then found I had plenty left over. What better to do with it than turn it into a gorgeous pale-pink liqueur?

Here, much like the sloes in sloe gin, the rhubarb steeps for a couple months in sugar and alcohol, giving up its flavour and colour. I’ve also added ginger (rhubarb’s natural friend) and the zest of a lemon to the pot for extra zing. I’m afraid you’re going to have to restrain yourself for a couple of months before this is drinkable, but it’s well worth the wait.

For every litre of vodka you use, you’ll need:

600g rhubarb
300g caster sugar
3 inches of ginger root
Zest of one lemon

Pour the sugar into the bottom of a large jar (it should have at least double the capacity of the amount of vodka you’re using, and be airtight). Clean the rhubarb and slice it into 1-inch chunks and put it in the jar on top of the sugar. Slice the ginger (no need to remove the skin) into coins, and toss it in along with the zest of a lemon, pared carefully with a knife into wide strips.

Pour over the vodka, shake or stir well, and seal the jar up. Leave it at room temperature (it’ll be fine sitting on a shelf in the kitchen) for two months, at which point the rhubarb will look disgusting and grey, having given up all its juice and colour to the now pink vodka. Strain the mixture through a sieve lined with muslin into bottles. This liqueur is even better if you leave the finished bottles to mature for six months or so, but can be also drunk immediately.

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Rhubarb and cream cheese cake

Before we begin, an apology. The photograph accompanying this post is horrendous. Deciding to photograph dessert after a long and riotous evening in good company with good wine was perhaps not my smartest decision this week. I kept a slice back to take a picture of this morning, but on waking discovered Mr Weasel, an insomniac when there is cake in the house, had got up at 6am and eaten it. I’ll make the cake again at the weekend and take some pictures which make it look more like something you’d like to eat – in the meantime, please be assured that this is an alarmingly delicious cake.

Rhubarb is in season in the UK at the moment. Buy it now, while it’s cheap – there are many things besides fool and crumble you can do with it. This is another cake which is essentially a huge cheat; a quick cheesecake topping is pressed into and cooked with boxed cake mix, prepared so it’s very stiff to counter the gorgeously soft cheese. It takes minutes to prepare and tastes glorious.

You’ll need:

1 box American yellow cake mix
4oz melted butter
2 eggs
1 large carton full-fat cream cheese
Icing sugar (enough to fill the cream cheese carton)
5 stalks chopped rhubarb
3 tablespoons caster sugar
2 tablespoons water

Combine the butter, eggs and cake mix until you have a stiff paste, and pack it into the bottom of a springform cake tin. Use a fork to blend the icing sugar and cream cheese, and press the sweet mixture onto the top of the cake mix, working with a spatula from the centre to make the cheese layer a little thicker in the middle and thinner at the edges. Place in an oven at 180°C for around 40 minutes, or until the top is turning golden and the cake does not wobble when shaken. Leave the cake to cool. It should have a depression in the top where the cheesecake mixture was thickest – this will act as a bowl for the rhubarb.

When the cake is cool, simmer the rhubarb, caster sugar and water together until the rhubarb is tender, pink and coming apart. Spoon the rhubarb into the depression on top of the cake, sprinkle with icing sugar and serve immediately. Don’t leave any in the fridge – it’ll make your husband get up early so he can eat it in secret.