desperance | Conan! What is best in dinner parties?

Best in dinner parties is to have leftovers, and a relatively tidy house; but the greatest of these is leftovers.

Soup and apple cake for lunch: and you have no idea how glad I am to be able to type those words. Not just for the eating thereof, but apple cake and I have had a fraught relationship for a quarter of a century, tho' we'd ever only met the once.

In brief, I made one - at least, I followed a recipe for one - 'way back in the eighties, for a dinner party again, and it was a catastrophe. The batter split and would not cake, the apples didn't cook... Urgh. And yet the whole apple-cake idea still seemed lovely to me, in that way that unconsummated relationships so often do; so I have held it in my head as a treasured ideal ever since, but never quite dared to ask it out on a date again. As it were.

Until Friday night, when I just decided to be bold. I had found a recipe that - after being absurdly, impossibly particular about the proper type of rare Dorset apple to be used - more or less said "mix up your ingredients and bake your cake" when it came to the actual instructions bit. So I giggled cheerfully and poked around in the internets, and came up with a more-or-less consensus view on the Dorset apple cake (cream butter and sugar, add eggs and flour and lemon zest, a couple of tsps of baking powder to give it a little lift, mix in chopped apple, pour into tin and sprinkle with demerara, and bake same).

So I did that, more or less, and it was very nice. I am no longer scared of apple cake, and will do it again. Perhaps with a little ground almond next time, substituting for some of the flour.

It is absurd, though, how long these anxieties persist. I have a similar omigod-I-can't-do-that about stuffed aubergines, because I tried one recipe once thirty years ago and it was horrid. Really, the problem is that I have too much choice and I don't cook enough, so I need never repeat a failure. Concomitantly and contrariwise, neither do I often get to try interesting variations. I'd like to bake a dozen apple cakes, just to figure out which one is best; but I don't suppose I'll do a dozen in my lifetime, just because there is always so much else.

Also, I would like to revisit Harold McGee to determine the difference between baking powder and bicarbonate of soda, and test same with examples, just so that I have actual knowledge rather than needing recipes. But I don't suppose I ever actually shall.

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My apple cake recipe has never failed me. It's gluten-free, because I need it to be, and dairy-free, although I don't need it to be.

Ooh. Thank you! *prints out*

My agent, who is a foodie and by all accounts a very good cook, could not make an ordinary beef-or-lamb stew to save her life. Apparently they simply turned out disasterously every time she tried. So for some years her friend

mcurry would moan every time I'd mention making stew, and eventually I sent Jenn my recipe for stew with strict instructions to 1. follow the instructions, and 2. never, ever make stew again if she couldn't make this recipe turn out. It's exceedingly simple, and if it turned out badly, it was clearly God's way of telling her she wasn't to make stew. At all. Ever.

It turned out just fine. :)

Heh. Did I ever blog about the Week of Disastrous Rice Puddings, I wonder...? It's an anecdote I've told so often that all my friends are a-weary of it, but I forget whether I have yet a-wearied the internets...

Hard to imagine how you could disasterise a stew, or at least make a practice of it; but other people's blind spots are always baffling. Like their taste in books. Or, indeed, other people...

*laughs* I'm not aware of the Week of Diastrous Rice Puddings, myself. :)

Apparently Jenn kept trying to fancy the stew up. Stew should not be fancied. The funny thing is that she had a recipe for what was effective a rabbit stew, but, y'know, fancier than boring old beef stew, and the rabbit stew evidently came out brilliantly, but she still could not make a beef stew. I guess she ruined two or three, at least. :)

but other people's blind spots are always baffling. Like their taste in books. Or, indeed, other people...

*laughs right out loud* Indeed. :)

Isn't baking powder a mixture of bicarb and cream of tartar (as opposed to baking soda, which is US-speak for bicarb of soda)? At least, that is the misapprehension under which I have laboured ever since I began to cook bilingually.

Pineapple upside-down cake. Did it once, it failed disastrously in an apple cake kind of way, have not touched it since. On the other hand, I make a very nice guinness apple cake, and have a teatotal variation for teetotallers.

Also, this week's batch of marmalade has turned out as well as last week's did. Possibly slightly better, but only slightly.

I think you are right, about baking powder: but I don't know what difference it makes, when one should use one and when the other, or when indeed a spoonful of each...?

Plain bicarb needs a wet acid to react with to make CO2 and therefore bubbles. Buttermilk is traditional in US cooking, but yoghourt or fruit juice work fine. Baking powder has dry acid mixed in, in the form of tartar, so it will start working as soon as you get it wet. Which is why you can't leave sponge cake sitting around before you cook it, the bubbles go away.

I am never making Chinese Fishballs again.

Oh, thank you! That is clear and concise and I understand it. Yay.

Please to tell fishball story?

In 1977, knowing no better, I cooked a Chinese Banquet from a Marguerite Patten book. It seemed to all work, except the Fishballs. Which were some kind of raw white fish puree with cornflour, deepfried. It was either totally liquid or totally not, and once I started seesawing with extra cornflour and water it all went pearshaped in a bad way.

Now I buy them readymade from the Chinese grocery store around the corner from my office. I love living in civilised times.

My apple cake recipe uses ground almonds in place of some of the flour, and has shed loads of lemon juice. Oh and muscovado rather than demerara. It tastes good that way, too. Lately I've taken to adding nutmeg and extra cinnamon, as my apple cake tasters -- the marquis plus our friend D -- seem to like it that way. The 80s incident must have been the oven: ovens are usually the culprits....

My apple cake recipe uses ground almonds in place of some of the flour

Damn, I thought I'd made that up... What is that line about nothing, new, sun...?

Umm, I it's even a BBC or C4 recipe. Sorry.

Conan! What is best in dinner parties?

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