I had an early start today with the BT Openreach engineer finally giving me back my broadband for the first time since I moved to the Haus Am Meer. The slot was 0800-1300h and he was here by 0900h and very polite, if a little bit standoffish as some engineers and so on always seem to be - it can't be an easy job - you have to be able to feel comfortable in other peoples' homes, which I would personally find hard as I find it hard to relax in someone else's house and so I'd be quite prickly too. So, whilst he was removing the old socket from the lounge and putting the new one in place, I busied myself reading stuff. I was right, that one was the Master, I identified it correctly! And I was also right that the wiring therein wasn't done properly - the Extension in the bedroom was connected to this socked but the actual cable from the street wasn't - weird huh?! He hooked up the phone line, went back to the Cabinet a few streets away and connected up the fibre optics at that end and then came back to replace my socket for the second time to the MK2 SSFP, which, thanks to Wikipedia when he wasn't looking, I was able to know all about and look like I knew what he was doing! So I now have a 70Mbps download speed and almost 20Mbps upload speed which is wonderful! No more awful Wifi on my PC after 2.5 years of it at Grey Gardens and, best of all, I can use the internet and apps on my phone in my own home as thus far I've been using the feeble GPRS signal - there's no 3G on this part of the West Hoe at all, unfortunately.
Whilst he was doing his thing, I enjoyed the beautiful morning views across the sea and tried not to jar my back which is still slowly healing from moving house - it hasn't been great to be honest and I'm still taking a lot of extra Methocarbamol to relax the spasms in the large muscles around my spine, which I've clearly done some damage to but rest and relaxation and hot baths are all I can do.
I had fishfingers for lunch which was lovely and attracted a lot of attention from Frederick who got out of bed just to see what the smell was and begged very sweetly but failed to get any. A bit later on, Josef climbed up onto my desk and got into the space behind the monitor where he's learned that it's warm but I took him out and played with him for a bit and noticed how bald his rear end is - presumably related to the lice and hopefully it'll grow back soon. I took him on an adventure over to the dining areas as I wanted to look in my recipe books and find some means to use up the 3 eggs I have left - I won't eat eggs "as is" other than at a huge push in an omelette that contains about a pound of cheese and a pound of vegetables and 1 egg or something, but I can bake with them! I went through quite a lot of books that I'd hoped would inspire me but that didn't really work out. I'd got a strong urge to cook with lavender, which I've only used in apple crumbles before now - I had procured a jar of lavender sugar about 3-4 years ago on a whim and never really used it other than making one batch of cakes about 3-4 years ago - so when I discovered how good it tastes in apple crumble a few months back, I used the whole jar! I bought some lavender flowers a few weeks ago and I've not yet had chance to use them - but nothing was very inspiring. Whilst Josef was busy wandering about on his own exploring the dining chairs and the bookcase (via my shoulders, which make a very good bridge, apparently) and giggling to himself mischievously, I started flicking through my copy of Icelandic Food and Cookery
by Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir (who I've just discovered has a blog and I've added her to my blogroll!). I bought it about 5 years ago and thus far hadn't cooked anything from it for no reason other than I just hadn't. I started eye-balling Nanna's biscuit and cake recipes and found two that would use up some ingredients I had lying around - namely those bloody eggs!The first item I picked out to cook is piparkökur (pepper cookies), which I've not actually cooked yet - I've made the dough and it's in the fridge overnight. Nanna notes in her book that these are pretty much the same as the Swedish and Danish equivalents and only came to Iceland relatively recently and goes on to give a lovely description of the recent traditions that have developed around it. Rather than just copy her recipe, I decided to mess with the spices used and what I've ended up with smells a little bit like soft lebkuchen, which made me want to glaze them as per lebkuchen, so I've found a recipe for that and I'll glaze some of them after they're cooked. Nanna mentions that pepper isn't always used in piparkökur, but can be - so I decided I had to add some and oh look, another opportunity to use some long pepper! It's a simple enough recipe but it doesn't use any eggs, so I needed something else! I didn't have any buttermilk, so I made some faux buttermilk using vinegar and milk which is pretty much the same in this kind of recipe.
Mömmudraumur translates to "Mother's Dream", which Nanna says has been widely cooked in Iceland since it appeared in home economics book The Young Girl and the Kitchen Tasks, which I can't find any record of online, unfortunately, as I'd love to read it. It's a very simple chocolate cake, essentially - nothing complicated at all. I've copied Nanna's recipe to the letter this time and filled it just as she instructs - with strawberry jam (the last of the strawberry and wild strawberry conserve, in fact) and with súkkulaðismjörkrem, which is an Icelandic chocoalte buttercream, that contains raw egg yolk which I think makes it set quite firm overnight in the fridge - to be honest, Nanna's recipe did not work for me! There was no way that could be used as it was - so I had to add water to it to make it smooth enough to work with and then add a bit more sugar to balance it out. I added extra cocoa powder as I felt it needed to be darker. Personally for this kind of cake, I would normally fill it with jam and a chocolate Chantilly but I was copying the "traditional recipe" (if 100 years is traditional?) of course.
Finally, after all the rich, heavy food of the last week, I wanted a very light dinner and I had some salmon fillets that I got on offer that go off tomorrow and felt I should use them! A little googling told me that honey and...lavender...go brilliantly with salmon! Fantastic! I also had some ras al hanout, which I love with fish, so I decided to use that too. The name means "head of the shop" or something similar and it's a spice blend from Morocco that I love to use with lamb and with chicken thighs - and it contains rose petals...so ideas started to brew about using this and lavender on the two salmon fillets I had - and a bit of honey would help them to adhere...now I abhor honey (bee sick) as a rule and can only really handle very clear, pale honey - so I picked up a jar of borage honey a few weeks back, which is beautifully clear though I'd not opened it yet. I was relieved upon tasting it to find it has a very, very mild flavour and smells deliciously of borage - a fresh, cucumber-y smell. I used to work at the University of Warwick, which is located (or was - I think the field has been built on now) next to a huge field of borage and I remember walking through it one summer and eating the petals right off of the plants - shhhh! I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out - it was exactly what I needed - light but flavoursome and floral and fresh - it would be great on a summers evening and could easily be expanded with boiled potatoes and green vegetables I guess.
Floral Salmon
(Serves 1)
2 salmon fillets
2 tbsp borage honey
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp lavender flowers
1 tsp ras al hanout
Preheat the oven to 180°C (160°C for fan ovens). In two separate bowls, mix half of each of the honey, oil, vinegar and salt. To one bowl, add the lavender and to the other add the ras al hanout.
Put a salmon fillet into each bowl and coat completely with the marinade and leave for 10-30 minutes. Put the salmon into an ovenproof dish and pour the marinade over it and bake for 10-20 minutes or until the fish starts to flake.
Gljáðum Piparkökur, Part I (Glazed Pepper Cookies, Part I)
225g butter (cut into cubes)
2/3 cup golden caster sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup (or maple syrup or agave nectar or whatever you want to use)
1/2 cup buttermilk (I used faux buttermilk, which is 1/2 tsp red wine vinegar and 1/2 cup 1% milk (UHT), left at room temperature for about 30 minutes)
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda (14g if you're pedantic!)
1 tbsp ground ginger
1" length of cinnamon stick
1 tsp peppercorns (I used Bristol blend)
1 long pepper catkin
2 tsp cloves
4 green cardamon pods
1 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp freshly ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp allspice berries
3 1/2 cups plain flour
Cream the butter, sugar and syrup. I used my foodmixer to do this and, after reading Julie's post the other day about the need to really whip the butter and sugar, I gave that a go and, once they were creamed, I kept mixing at a high speed for 5 minutes and yes, they do go very creamy and light!
Meanwhile, grind all of the spices thoroughly in a pestle and mortar.
Put the bicarbonate of soda into the (faux) buttermilk and add it to the butter and sugar, along with the ground spices. Keep mixing whilst slowly adding the flour until the mixture forms a firm but slightly gooey dough.
Give this a good mix with the foodmixer or kneed it by hand and then wrap it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge overnight. I will add the rest of the recipe once they're cooked!
Mömmudraumur Með Jarðarberjumsulta og Súkkulaðismjörkrem (Mother's Dream with Strawberry Jam and Chocolate Buttercream)
Mömmudraumur
115g butter (cut into cubes)
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp golden caster sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups plain flour
3 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt
1/2 cup of 1% milk (I used UHT, as always)
Set the oven to 180°C (160°C for fan ovens) and sieve the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt together. Butter and flour two 8" cake pans.
Cream the butter and sugar with the vanilla extract (I used the same approach as for the above recipe). Add the first egg along with about 1/2 cup of the flour mixture to stop it curdling and mix, followed by the second egg and another 1/2 cup of the flour mixture. Add another 1 cup of the flour mixture followed by the milk and finally add the rest of the flour in one go and mix. You end up with quite a viscous, dough-like cake batter that you then need to split between the two cake pans - I found this quite hard as the batter is a lot stiffer than I'm used to working with.
Once it's in the pans, bake it for about 20 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean as usual. Cool in the pans for 5 minutes and then turn out and invert and leave to cool completely.
Súkkulaðismjörkrem
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
3 tbsp cocoa powder
112g butter, cut into cubes
1 egg yolk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp hot water
Sieve the cocoa into the sugar and mix thoroughly. Add the butter and rub together with the sugar as though making a crumble topping or similar. Add the egg yolk and vanilla extract and start adding hot water about 1/2 tbsp at a time, mixing constantly until it is a smooth batter-like mixture that holds in soft peaks. If it's too runny, add more sugar.
To Assemble: Put about 75g strawberry jam (I used strawberry & wild strawberry conserve) onto one half of the cake and spread out all over the surface. Put the other layer of the cake on and cover the top and sides with the súkkulaðismjörkrem and spread out and smooth down. You can pipe this on if you want to but I can't be arsed. Put the whole thing into the fridge to set the buttercream - I went with overnight - hence photos tomorrow!
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