Chocolate cake (yes, for real)

I've tinkered with the original recipe and I may tinker with it some more, but this is already coming out a treat.  I mean that literally.  A chocolate cake that I can eat is a huge treat; and this is genuinely chocolatey and has a moist, almost fudgey texture and even a trace of that classic top-crust that brownies get.  Mmm.

No-added-sugar chocolate cake

100g/ 4oz chopped pitted dates
1 teabag
75g/3oz No 1 baking mix
25g/1oz pure cocoa powder
100g/4oz butter or margarine
2 medium eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla essence
Generous pinch of salt
50g/2oz finely chopped very dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa)

The previous night, make a mug of plain black tea (NB no milk) and pour it over the finely-chopped dates in a heatproof bowl.  Leave to soak overnight.
Preheat the oven to 180C/160 fan/Gas mark 4.  Grease a sponge cake tin or similar (I used my wonderful new nonstick silicone baking tin from Lakeland - check it out, they're tremendous).  If you know that your tin tends to stick, line with a disc of baking paper or greaseproof as well, as the mixture you're going to make is on the gooey side.
Puree the dates and the remaining tea, using a blender if possible, then add to the butter in a mixing bowl.  If you don't have a blender you'll need to sieve them, which could be hard work.  Beat the pureed dates and the butter together.  It may be simpler to do this with a blender as well (pausing frequently to scrape down), or use a food processor if you have one.  I used one of those handheld blender gadgets and it did a terrific job.
Don't be put-off, incidentally, by how weird the date-and-butter mixture looks.  They aren't exactly natural companions (one being fatty and the other pretty watery) and they won't cream together the way butter and sugar would do.  In fact the mixture may very well curdle and look completely revolting at this stage.  Ignore it if so and persevere.
Beat in the two eggs and the vanilla essence, then the salt (adding vanilla essence and salt is a really good way to improve the flavour of any chocolate dish made with cocoa).  Now sieve the cocoa powder, cinnamon and baking powder together and mix them into the wet mixture.  Add the baking mix and stir that in well.  Finally add the chopped dark chocolate and mix in.
You'll have a fairly sloppy cake mix, noticably wetter than the classic "soft dropping consistency".  Don't panic, it's okay for it to look like this.

Uncooked cake mix, rather wet and shiny looking

Spoon into the cake tin and level off, then bake for 30-35 minutes.
Either serve warm from the oven as a dessert, or turn out and allow to cool, and eat as a cake.

Resulting cake.  The top's a bit cracked, it wouldn't win a WI prize for presentation, but it tasted fine

When warm, the middle is quite gooey and moist.  I suspect with a bit more tinkering I might be able to get this to do that "self-saucing" trick and have a molten bottom layer. 
The dates have a high-enough sugar content that the result is only slightly less sweet than a conventional recipe would be; but it's all slowly-digested fructose (not to mention having the considerable fibre whack of dates) so not so nasty for the diabetics!

Chocolate cake...

Edited, February 4 2016, to add; this also keeps well!  As in, almost a week in an airtight tin.  It gets steadily gooey-er and tudgey-er with time but doesn't dry out, go stale or grow grey furry fuzz.  It's a winner!

Low-carb short crust pastry; second attempt

I had another try at this over Christmas, tweaking the proportions and the method slightly, and managed to get a pastry that would roll out, although it's still very short and crumbly.

3oz/ 75g wholemeal flour
2oz/ 50g No1 baking mix
2 1/2 oz/ 65g butter or margarine
Cold water

Use the usual method; mix the dry ingredients, rub in the fat and work in enough water to bind into a firm lump.
Add the water slowly; once the mixture will hold together in a ball check if it will roll out without falling apart.  If it's too dry it will crumble and fray into pieces before it's been rolled anywhere near thin enough.  If that happens, crumble it up and add some more water and try again.
Try to avoid adding much flour to the rolling surface.  The pastry may stick a little and need to be removed from the counter with the edge of a knife blade, but if you flour it heavily it will just get even drier and more crumbly.  Bear in mind also that you'll probably need to re-roll trimmings several times, as it doesn't roll out particularly thin.
I know all of this man-handling of the pastry would not be acceptable with regular short-crust, but it worked okay with this recipe and the results weren't leathery at all (and made more-than-okay mince pies).

No-added-sugar mince pies

1 quantity of low-carb pastry, see above
1 small tart eating apple or 1/4 of a large cooking apple
About 3 tblsp commercial mincemeat - no-added-sugar if possible (Infinity Foods make one)

Roll out pastry and use to line the cups of a shallow greased patty tin (I have an ancient 9-pan one with patterns in the bottom, probably originally intended for madelaines but fine for small tartlets).  Core and chop the apple leaving the skin on.  Fill half each pastry case with mincemeat (approx 1 tsp per case) and then top-up with chopped apple.  Re-roll the pastry trimmings again to get lids, wet these on the underside and stick down onto the bottom cases and the fruit filling; pierce a small vent in each one with the tip of a knife blade.
Bake at Gas 6/ 200C (180 in a fan oven) for 15 - 20 minutes or until just starting to brown on the edges.  They'll probably bubble over as they cook, so remove from the patty tins as soon as they are out of the oven to prevent them sticking.
In the photograph, the thing on the left is what my family always call The Lump; the leftover pastry trimmings rolled round the leftover chopped apple bits and baked.  Shame to waste them after all!

Low-carb short-crust pastry - first attempt

I've been meaning to have a go at inventing a pastry recipe for ages.  Last night I had a try, and the results were surprisingly succesful  There's room for improvement, texture-wise, and it isn't gluten-free; but it is high-fibre and low-carb (about half the carb load of regular pastry) and it made a perfectly acceptable shell for a quiche, so overall I feel that's a good start.

Ingredients

3 oz/ 75g/ 3/4 cup No 1 baking mix (recipe for that is here)
3 oz/ 75g/ 3/4 cup wholemeal flour (I'm using spelt at the moment as I like the flavour)
3 oz/ 75g butter
Cold water

Method

Method starts pretty much as normal.  Seive the flour, mix thoroughly with the baking mix and rub in the fat quickly and lightly till the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.  Add enough cold water, splash by splash, to bind the mixture together and gather it into a ball.

This is where things stopped being normal.  The lack of gluten in the baking mix meant the dough didn't have the same ability to stick together as a regular short-crust pastry would.  It took more water than a regular pastry recipe before I has a mix that would bind at all.  But then the very different kind of stickiness of the milled linseeds in the baking mix started to react to the water, and the dough suddenly became quite odd in texture - the least-unpleasant word I can find for it is slippery - and turned a rather unappetising greyish colour.

I looked at this and thought various less-polite forms of "oh bother".

I'd already prepared my quiche filling (1 onion, cooked in a little veg oil, mixed with 1 chopped fresh tomato, 2 eggs, 3 oz/ 75g grated strong cheddar, some milk, salt and pepper and 1 tsp wholegrain mustard), so I figured I'd better do my best with this mixture, and try again another time to get something that looked and behaved more like conventional short-crust pastry.  I was anticipating eating something leathery in the extreme, though.  Still, all food is food (sometimes in the world of experimental cookery you have to say this to yourself!).

I slapped a sheet of baking parchment into the tin, in case that rather wet mixture decided to stick, and then I tipped the mixture onto this, and smoothed it out and pushed it up to the sides by hand.  As the linseeds continued to absorb more of the moisture, the mixture seemed to grow stiffer and less slimey, and I was able to get a rather rough and untidy-looking case shaped.  I poured in the filling, topped it with a bit more grated cheese and stuck it in the oven at 150 degrees C (it's a fan oven by the way).

35 minutes later I took it out, and discovered that despite my worries I'd produced a perfectly succesful, robust, tasty pastry case.

I'd eaten half before I thought to take the photos...

Because the pastry was rather wet and slippery when made, I can't see how this would work for the kind of recipes where it needs to be rolled out and cut. I need to work out how to arrive at a result that is firm and holds its shape enough to treat conventionally like that.

But until it came out of the oven I fully expected to end up with a supper that tasted as if it was made of plasterboard.  So to end up with a pastry case that was crisp and flavoursome, kept its shape, and held a standard quiche filling without leaking, pleased me no end.

I'll be working on improvements to the texture and will report any successes here.

Sugar-free garlic & chilli dipping sauce

Last Friday evening I had an overwhelming craving for a Chinese takeaway.  Of course, unlike Chinese home cooking, your average Chinese takeaway is pretty high in starch and sugar, and certainly not diabetic-friendly.  Compromise; a packet of veggie spring rolls from M&S, and some prawns which I marinaded and stir-fried.  And to replace the wildly sugary commercial sweet chilli sauces I cooked up my own.  The flavours aren't remotely authentic (it's more of an asian-hispanic fusion) but it's incredibly simple to do and pleasantly spicy, and it does the job.  Low-carb, low-calorie, and gluten-free unless you do the oatbran version.

1 medium tomato, finely chopped
2 tsp Marigold stock powder
1/2 cup boiling water
1 tsp mild smoked paprika
1/2 tsp chilli powder
2 cloves garlic, crushed or v finely chopped
3-4 tsp tamari
1-2 tsp cornflour or oatbran

Mix all the ingredients except the cornflour together in a small pan and heat for about two minutes, stirring.  Add a small amount of cold water to the cornflour to make a paste, stir into the tomato mixture and cook just until it clears and thickens.  Decant into a small bowl and get dipping those prawns!

Can also be made in a small bowl in the microwave; cook in 30 second bursts and stir between times.

If using oatbran (lower GI but obviously not gluten-free), add this by sprinkling it in slowly directly into the sauce; no need to mix to a paste first.  It may need slightly longer to cook afterwards and won't be a clear sauce, but will thicken just fine.

Muffins

The joy of muffin recipes is that most of them are based on the same principle, and once you’ve got the hang of that, the world’s your oyster.  Simply mix the dry ingredients together in one bowl and the wet ingredients together in another and then add the wet into the dry.

Basic low-carb muffins

The humble, ever-faithful and dead-easy muffin.  Ideal for mid-morning snacks, lunch boxes etc.  This recipe is also gluten-free, but does contain nuts and dairy.

125 g/5 oz/1 ¼ cups No 1 baking mix

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp xylitol

½ apple, cored but not peeled, grated

1 egg

1 tsp clear honey

3 fluid oz hot water

3-4 drops vanilla essence

3-4 drops almond essence

Sieve the baking powder and cinnamon into the baking mix and stir together, then stir through the xylitol.  Dissolve the honey in the hot water, stir in the grated apple, the flavouring essences and the egg, then beat the wet ingredients into the dry mixture.  Spoon into a greased muffin pan or bun tin, or into muffin cups (those non-stick silicone ones are great) and bake at 150 degrees C for about 35 minutes.  Makes around 6 small muffins.  Best eaten fresh but will keep for about three days in an airtight container.

As promised, Eggy Bread Variations...

Two bits of real comfort food, ideal for using up that slightly-elderly bread I was talking about a couple of days ago.  I assume you're already up on basic eggy bread (aka French toast). 

Bread frittata

This is one of those recipes that isn’t really a recipe, so much as a method for dealing with whatever you’ve got to hand.

Per person, you’ll need 2-3 eggs, beaten, a slice or two of stale bread crumbled up fairly small, and some chopped cold cooked vegetables – fried onions are terrific – and/or the kind of fresh veg that cook quickly (e.g. sweetcorn kernels, chopped-up tomatoes or canned pulses of some kind).  Plus grated or cubed cheese if you’re a cheese eater, and plenty of seasoning.  If you eat meat, something like chopped ham or corned beef would go well too.

Mix the whole lot together and let it sit in a covered bowl for at least thirty minutes, longer if possible.  Then heat a frying pan with a small amount of vegetable oil until pretty hot, as though you were going to make an omelette.  Tip in the mixture and level it out, then turn the heat lower.  Cook until set; if need be either finish the top under a hot grill or turn it out onto a plate and flip it over as you return it to the pan, to cook the other side.  Serve hot.

Eggy bread toastie sandwich

This is particularly good with “sandwich loaf” bread like Genius bread.

For each person, you will need:
2 slices of bread
2 eggs
Vegetable oil

Plus a choice of one or two of
Feta or some other cheese
A sliced tomato
Some flaked canned fish
A slice of ham
Some stoned olives, chopped roughly


Beat the eggs thoroughly with some pepper and pour over the sliced bread in a flat dish.  Leave to soak for half an hour minimum.  Sandwich the two slices of soggy eggy bread with your choice of filling(s) and press down hard. 

Heat a small amount of oil in a frying pan; get it good and hot to start with.  Pick up your gooey egg-soaked sandwich and slip it into the hot oil.  Fry for five minutes on a fairly high heat, then turn the heat down to fairly low.  Turn the sandwich over carefully with a spatula.  Continue cooking on the other side.  You’ll need to turn it two or three times altogether; gently does it each time.  The idea is never to let it burn but to get all the egg cooked and the filling thoroughly heated through and/or melted.  Serve hot.

The big bread question

The northern European diet is very bread-dependent, isn’t it?  Some of our most celebrated foods are breads or bread-based, or variations on the theme of yeast-raised-dough.  Think of a crisp fresh baguette, a springy focaccia or a dark, crusty rye loaf; think of pizza, think of home-made Danish pastries.  Or on second thoughts, maybe don’t think of them (I am making myself hungry, and I’ve already had my mid-morning snack).  

When I was a kid, in small-town England in the late sixties and the seventies, bread meant that white pappy stuff, ready-sliced sandwich loaves with a rubbery, rather gluey texture and no crust to speak of.  Wholemeal bread was referred-to as “brown” and probably wasn’t wholemeal at all; and it was if anything even more tasteless than white.  

The one exception, in my life at least, was when my mother and stepmum baked.  Mum tended to make white bread, but by an old-fashioned, slow process with three kneadings and three provings.  It was dense, golden-crusted and full of flavour, and a single slice with butter was as filling as a meal, and as delicious as cake.  My stepmother Jane baked knobbly wholemeal rolls, which she covered in poppy seed or sesame seed before proving and baking them; they were filling and flavoursome, and to this day any bread that tastes like Jane’s will take me back to memories of childhood.  Sometimes, for a really special occasion, she would make chollah, which was golden inside as well as out, and even more delicious.  

I’m hoping to work my way up to trying to create my own wholegrain home-made low-carb bread; but the ambition of that idea makes me quail a bit.  Bread-making is one of the few kinds of cookery that rely on accurate proportions and a degree of knowledge of the chemistry involved.  One can always throw a lot of random stuff in a pan and end up with a stew of some sort, but that just doesn’t work with yeast cookery.  Give me time, I’ll work my way up to it.

It isn’t too much of a problem, anyway, since these days there are plenty of decent, tasty breads available, for a price (though there’s still plenty of the squidgy pap around as well).  There are low-carb breads and extra-high-fibre breads, nut-free breads, dairy-free breads, high-protein breads, ancient-grain breads and even a moderately good choice of gluten-free breads.  Thank the gods for that, then.  It’s easy to romanticise the past as a more innocent era of organic agriculture, traditional customs and natural foods, but some aspects of it were rubbish, and British bread certainly went through a phase of being one of the rubbish things.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, one of the things I did straight away (besides cutting out all sugar) was to reduce my carb intake to an absolute minimum.  This got to me badly (I hated having cold hardboiled eggs for breakfast, but getting up early to cook fresh eggs was even worse as I am emphatically not a morning lark).  So I’ve been slowly re-introducing some carbs since then, starting with a home-made sugar-free muesli, and pumpernickel and its cousins sonnenbrot and vollkornbrot (which for a while I thought was called volkenbrot – ah, “the people’s bread”, how poetic – oops, no).  Oats are digested fairly slowly, as are high-fibre unrefined carbs in general, so don’t cause as much of a blood glucose spike as refined carbs like white bread.  Breakfast feels like breakfast again now.  

Proper German and Austrian pumpernickel is about as high-fibre as a bread is ever going to get.  Fortunately I’ve always loved the stuff.  Its flavour is a mighty thing.  But the pumpernickel family aren’t made in the UK, they’re imported, and they cost a pretty penny.  

Most other special-diet breads are even more ferociously expensive, which makes it particularly galling if they then get stale and have to be thrown away.  One can only derive so much consolation from feeding the ducks, when what they’re getting for their lunch is several quids’ worth of unusably-dry special bread.  So I find having some ways to use up elderly bread handy.  

Vollkornbrot and sonnenbrot both make passable toast, if you keep them under a low flame (or a lower setting on the toaster) and cook them for longer (full-blast pumpernickel, not so much, but luckily that keeps the best; that said, they’re all pretty good keepers).  They go wambly at first, and then they make a strange hissing sound, and then slowly but surely they crispen up.  Most of the gf breads I’ve come across also toast well.

They also (with the exception, once again, of pumpernickel) make a decent eggy bread, bread-and-butter pudding and strata, its Italian savoury cousin, if you give them long enough to soak before cooking them.  

Next post will be some variations on the theme of eggy bread.  Now there's another of the tastes of childhood.  Mmm, eggy bread!