Black Forest trifle

Black Forest trifleI was sent a lovely big jar full of Kirsch-soaked Griottine cherries to try a few weeks ago. The brand’s new in the UK, and they’re very good – big, boozy, stoned Balkan Morello cherries steeped in a heck of a lot of Kirsch for six months. These Griottines are available online in the UK; you can also use cherries you’ve steeped yourself in this recipe if you do a bit of forward planning in the summer.

I do love a Black Forest cake, but it’s the non-cake bits I enjoy the most: the cherries, the chocolate, a creamy filling. So I decided to use them in a Black Forest trifle, which also gave me the excuse to make a chocolate custard, stick it in a bowl and call it art. There are several stages in making this trifle, and making everything from scratch will, of course, give you the best end results; but you can cheat a bit if you want by buying a chocolate cake rather than making one, or by using a pre-made custard as the base for the two custard layers before you add the chocolate, vanilla and marscapone. I promise not to tell anyone.

To serve eight or thereabouts – this is a party dish – you’ll need:

Cake
85g cocoa powder
170g plain flour
240g caster sugar
1½ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
¾ teaspoon baking powder
2 medium eggs
180ml milk
60g softened butter
1 teaspoon almond extract

Custard base
2 tablespoons Bird’s custard powder
1 vanilla pod
500ml milk
4 egg yolks
2 tablespoons vanilla sugar

You will also need
75g good dark chocolate
750g marscapone
250ml whipping cream
About 400g (the contents of a Griottines jar) cherries and their very alcoholic soaking liquid. I say “about” because I found myself busily scoffing them as I put them into the trifle, so the resulting dish didn’t contain a whole jarful.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC while you prepare the cake mix. Grease a 25 cm loaf tin.

Sieve together all the dry ingredients in a large bowl, add the eggs, milk, butter and almond extract, and beat with an electric mixer for about five minutes until you have a thick, smooth batter. Scrape the batter into your prepared tin  bake for 1 hour. When the cake is done, a toothpick poked into the middle should come out clean. Cool for a few minutes and invert onto a wire rack to finish cooling.

Make up the custard base, which you will use for both the vanilla and chocolate custards, while the cake is cooking. Some purists abhor Bird’s custard. I love the stuff. If you can’t bring yourself to use it (or if you don’t live in the UK and can’t find any in your local shops), use 2 tablespoons of cornflour instead. Mix the sugar and custard powder/cornflour 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 remove from the heat. Transfer to a jug, lay a piece of cling film directly on top of the custard’s surface, and chill until cool.

When the custard is chilled and the cake is cool, melt the chocolate in the microwave. Pour half the custard into a separate bowl, and beat it with the chocolate and 250g marscapone with your electric whisk until smooth. Beat the other half of the custard with another 250g marscapone and set aside.

In a third bowl, beat the remaining 250g of marscapone with the whipping cream and sugar until the mixture is stiff.

To construct the trifle, cut the cake into slices and line a large glass bowl (mine broke a while ago, which is why the picture at the top of the page is of a single portion of trifle) with it. Sprinkle the liquid from the cherries all over the cake to soak it, and scatter over a quarter of the cherries. Smooth the plain custard layer over with a spatula, adding a few more cherries as you go. Make sure plenty of the cherries are pressed up against the glass sides of the bowl. Add the chocolate custard with some more cherries, and finish with the layer of cream and marscapone, scattering more cherries on top.

Cherry vodka

A quick and dirty one today – I’m in Cardiff to celebrate my sister-in-law’s PhD graduation. I am now officially the only Upton of my generation who can’t put the word ‘Dr’ in front of her name. Rats. (And congratulations, Stevie! I envy you the Tudor bonnet you get to wear for the ceremony like you wouldn’t believe.)

Cherries come into season just in time for you to lock them up in a cupboard with sugar and vodka until Christmas. Brandy is a traditional medium for fruit infusions; if you prefer to use that, the method will be the same. The five months between now and then will be just long enough for the liqueur to age into something nicely rounded and rich – an ideal tipple for Santa to enjoy with his mince pie. As always with fruity infusions, the making of this stuff is as easy as anything. You’ll need:

500g cherries
1 litre vodka
5 heaped tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon almond extract

Halve the cherries, keeping the stones embedded in the fruit for their almondy fragrance (I should pre-empt the inevitable “but you will die of cyanide poisoning!” comment – you won’t), and put them in a large Kilner jar or another large, airtight vessel. Pour over the sugar and almond extract, and top the lot off with the vodka. Seal, and forget about the jar for half a year or so, straining into bottles when the liqueur is ready. Note that the colour will leech out of the cherries, leaving them greyish and unappetising-looking in December; some like them with ice cream, but I prefer to just consign them to the bin and busy myself with the interesting part of this recipe (the vodka).

You can use dessert cherries (which is what I’ve used here), or sour bird cherries. I have a tree full of bird cherries in the garden, but they all grow so high I can’t actually reach any – plus, the birds seem to get a kick out of them, so I leave them where they are. If you’re using a sour cherry, double the amount of sugar in the recipe.

Cherry-marzipan Christmas cookies

This one’s for marzipan lovers. I love almonds and cherries, and there’s something undeniably Christmas-y about the combination. To kick the Christmas angle up a notch, I spent a while experimenting with marzipan, and I’ve worked out a method that makes marzipan pieces melt into the cookie dough in a gooey, puffy fashion.

I’ve used sweetened, dried sour cherries, which are now readily available in the baking sections of supermarkets in little metallised plastic packets. They’re a very different beast from glacé cherries, and retain a tart bite and juicy plumpness, which is a brilliant contrast to the sweet marzipan and sugary cookie dough. Ground almonds and egg whites give these a near-macaroon texture. They’re light and have a lovely crisp on the outside with a slightly gooey, squashy centre – absolutely irresistable.

The plan was to make 30 of these, to eat a couple for dessert, and spend the rest of the week eating a few a day so I could tell you how long they’ll last in an airtight box. Sadly, they turn out to be rather moreish, and I discover that as of this morning Dr Weasel and I have both been fishing surreptitiously in the box when we thought the other person wasn’t looking. There are only ten left. I think I need to get the exercise ball out before I start to resemble it.

To make about thirty cookies, you’ll need:

110g ground almonds
110g plain flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
150g golden marzipan
225g salted butter
225g caster sugar
1 egg white
½ teaspoon almond extract
80g dried sour cherries

Mix the ground almonds, flour and baking powder in a large bowl, and chop the marzipan into tiny cubes (about half a centimetre on each side). Mix the marzipan with the dry ingredients carefully, so each little cube is coated and separate, and set the bowl aside.

In another bowl, cream the softened butter and sugar together with an electric whisk in another bowl. Add the egg white and almond extract and keep at it with the whisk until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Use a wooden spoon to stir the flour and marzipan mixture into the butter mixture with the cherries.

At first the mixture will look as if it won’t form a dough, but if you keep at it you’ll find it will eventually come together smoothly (in part thanks to the oils in the marzipan and ground almonds). Bring the dough together into a ball with your hands and put it in a freezer bag, seal and leave in the fridge overnight.

When you are ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Take the dough out of the fridge and make neat balls of about an inch in diameter between your palms, ensuring that every ball has at least a couple of cherries in it. Arrange the balls on grease-proof paper on baking sheets with a gap of 2 inches between each one, and bake for about 25-30 minutes until the cookies are turning golden (see photograph). Remove from the oven and leave to cool on the baking sheets until the cookies start to firm (about five minutes). Use a spatula to move them onto racks to finish cooling.

Pineapple upside-down cake

Pineapple upside-down cakeTwo cake recipes in a week! This is blog democracy in action – many of you have asked for more dessert recipes, so in response, I have been baking like a demon.

This is a handsome cake. The caramel and fruit layer on a pineapple upside-down cake looks positively jewel-like, and tastes glorious, soaking into the cake to add a rich moistness to an already toothsome sponge. If, like me, you significantly lack cake-decorating skills, you’ll like this recipe, which produces a foolproof but rather beautiful piece of baking. If you can get pineapple tinned in syrup rather than juice, use that for an extra kick of gloss and sweetness; however, if all that’s available near you is the kind in juice, that will work perfectly well. (It’s what I used here.)

To make one pineapple upside-down cake, you’ll need:

50g salted butter
50g soft brown sugar
1 can pineapple rings (in syrup if possible)
Glacé cherries
3 tablespoons milk
175 g softened unsalted butter
175 g caster (superfine) sugar
3 large eggs
175 g self-raising flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
Vanilla essence

Pineapple upside down cakePreheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Begin by greasing and lining a 25cm round cake tin with greaseproof paper. Don’t use a springform tin – there is caramel in the pineapple layer which will dribble out of a tin with a loose bottom when heated.

Prepare the caramel by melting the salted butter, a couple of drops of vanilla essence and the soft brown sugar together in a small pan and boiling hard for five minutes. (Watch out here – the caramel will be very hot.) Pour the caramel into the bottom of the lined tin, and tip the tin carefully to make sure that it covers the base well.

Arrange the pineapple rings in a tight pattern on the bottom of the tin (see pictures), and put a glacé cherry in the middle of each one. Set the tin aside while you prepare the cake batter.

Put the milk, unsalted butter, sugar, flour, eggs and baking powder in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer for two minutes, until the batter is pale and stiff. Spread the batter out over the pineapple pieces with a spatula and bake the cake for 50 minutes, until a skewer pushed into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Allow the cake to cool for about ten minutes in its tin, until it is cool enough to handle (this sponge can be quite fragile when very hot), then place a plate over the top of the cake tin, hold it there firmly and turn the whole assembly upside down, so the cake slips out, upside-down, onto the plate. Slide the cake off the plate onto a cooling rack until it is completely cold.

Cherry clafoutis

This clafoutis recipe is great at this time of year, when cherries are in the supermarkets in superabundance. The punnets are enormous, and several places are offering buy one get one free deals – shop around for your cherries and make sure those you buy are juicy, dark and handsome.

Clafoutis is a traditional dessert from the Limousin region of France, made with fresh fruit (usually cherries) and a thick batter. I’ve made this dish out of season using cherries preserved in kirsch. It’s very delicious that way, but I can’t help finding a clafoutis made with fresh cherries just that bit better. Don’t bother stoning your cherries; they’re a pig to stone (although there is a tool you can buy to help), and the juice from the stoned cherries leaks into the batter. Much better to have a whole cherry burst juicily in your mouth, then spit the stone out, than have it sit there damply, having leaked all its lovely juice pinkly into the rest of the dish.

Credit is due here to Mr Weasel. This is my recipe, but he cooked it because I was busy swearing at a wok full of boiling oil – of which more tomorrow.

To serve six, you’ll need:

4 oz flour
3½ oz caster sugar
6 eggs
2 drops almond essence
½ pint milk
50 cherries (or enough to cover the bottom of your pan)

Preheat the oven to 210°C.

Grease your pan. I used a tarte tatin dish, which is about 10 inches in diameter. Put enough cherries in the bottom of the dish to cover it in a single layer.

Use an electric handwhisk to beat the sugar, almond essence and eggs together. Add the flour to the bowl and drizzle the milk into the mixture, whisking all the time until you have a smooth batter. Pour the batter over the cherries in the dish, and put it in the oven for 45 minutes.

When you remove the clafoutis from the oven, it will have puffed up, a bit like a souffle. Set it aside to subside for a couple of minutes, then dish it up. Serve with cream – and remember not to bite down on the stones.