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 30x35 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.

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.)

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.

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.