Who ate all the pies? ….. I did!

Whilst out in Switzerland, I pined for pies.  I had to make my own pastry most of the time.  I made my own shortcrust, as their rough equivalent; Kuchenteig, was too elastic for my liking.  Puff pastry there, despite even Betti Bossi’s best efforts, (Switzerland’s answer to Delia Smith, all the housewives there have at least one of her books on Swiss cuisine), did not puff very well. The Swiss just weren't pie people, they were too absorbed in their potato roesti and cheese fondue to notice. In England, pies are universally adored, whether at football matches or served up in the pub, everyone loves them.  Pies are the ultimate in comfort food when the weather gets colder too.  As soon as I was back in England, I bought a pie from the supermarket, even though it was an ordinary pie and nothing really special, having gone so long without pies in my life, this was all the more tasty....

When Steve and I first got to know each other, he introduced me to Sweeney & Todds in Reading.  It was an inexpensive night out, and the place had great character, much of it owed to the special waitress Joan.  She would stagger up to the spare chair that she positioned at every table, sit down and tell you in a broad northern accent, what pies were on for that evening.  They do amazing pies.  I have tried to unravel the secret of their pastry, whether its puff or flaky, but they always served it slightly soggy on the underside and crispy and flaky ontop.  You can buy some of their pies from their shop in Castle Street, and we did so on many occasions, freezing them to reheat later on another weekend with a cold pint of beer in hand.  They were always (and still are) wrapped in a paper bag with the name of the pie scrawled on the front, and to enable identification of the pies each has a little shape, heart, triangle, club shape etc., egg washed and stuck to the top. 

Steve and I had (and still have) our favourites.  For Steve, it was always Steak and Oyster Pie, for me always Pork and Apple.  The steak and Oyster pie has a solitary smoked oyster nestling in amongst the steak, and flavours the whole pie, it’s amazing.  I like the roasted pork and apple pie, but always found it had to be served with their cauliflower cheese.  However, the cauliflower cheese from Sweeney and Todds always tasted special, don’t ask me why!  Joan used to rattle off the pies at such a rate that you could make up your mind, then forget what other pie flavours had just gone by.  If you ever asked for a specific pie to be repeated, what was in Five Nations for example, she would sigh, then simply return to the top of the list of over 15 plus pies to start all over again.  I am sure it was a ploy so that any repeat customers would be sure to make up their minds more rapidly and she would then get the orders done more quickly!  So this weekend, we gave the girls Steak and Stilton, Steve the steak and oyster, and myself, yep, Pork and Apple.   I served it all A la Sweeneys with a salad garnish and some cauliflower cheese.  Sweeney and Todds have been going for ages, and so it’s lovely to come back many years later to rediscover them all over again!  I am yet to spot the Hare and Cherry pie on the menu, but the good old favourites remain!  

When I got back in the summer, I just had to eat a Melton Mowbray pok pie, also one of my favourites.  I love the fatty pastry and the jellied pork meat inside.  Some people detest them, but found that the girls also now share my love of pork pies J  These are also something very English, and of course,  you can make them yourself, but they are a ton of work, and so I am pretty happy trotting along to the supermarket to buy one off the shelf now I am back in the UK!

Wedding Cake Class: Faircake and Hello Naomi

Wow what a hectic weekend.  This weekend was the ultimate treat to myself that I booked in the summer, essentially a working weekend, but doing something I really enjoy.  For 4 years I developed my cupcakes in Switzerland, I learnt everything from scratch from tinkering with the recipes, to getting the best results with the sugarpaste that I had to source from London.  I had no or very little opportunity to attend classes, so I taught myself.  Towards the end of my time living in Switzerland, I saw ‘Hello Naomi’s’ advert on Flickr, an online contact of mine from virtually the beginning of my time with the Flickr community starting in about 2006.  There was core of bakers who started cupcakes all at the same time, and many of those members now have flourishing businesses.  Coming back to the UK, I start anew, however it gives me the chance to learn new and exciting techniques as there are so many sugarcraft experts here.  Seeing that Naomi was coming all the way from Australia to share her work with others in a class 8/9 October at the Vanilla Workshop, I seized the chance and booked a place on her Extended Tier Wedding Cake course.  Large cakes are something I really want to develop, but have been afraid to get into, mainly as I went down the cupcake line.  In my experience, it seems difficult to be good at both large and small.  I like working on small scale, and find the blank canvas of a large cake a little daunting.  However, I have always admired Naomi’s work for being so elegant, classic, but deceivingly simple in the design.  I now know that naked cakes are the most difficult, there is literally nowhere to hide, the final finish has to be flawless.

I got up early, after spending since last Wednesday cooking cake until Friday.  We had to take 5 cakes with us to class, and only having one of each tin size, I had to dissect the recipe down in terms of volume to get the right split for the tins.  I also decided that as this was to be a large cake, I would take advantage of multiple batch cooking and cook 3 different flavours.  This decision was pretty risky, as I was not only working with an unfamiliar oven, but also with unfamiliar ingredients, new flour and butter.  I learnt in Switzerland which were the favoured products and which gave me unreliable results.  Here, I had the potential to really stuff up.  I did worry ahead of cooking all the cake, worried that I may create really bad end result.  The first mudcake I made was to be a white chocolate and raspberry cake.  I used Lindt Excellence white (which strangely is cheaper in France than in Switzerland) as I know it melts fairly uniformly. It smelt wonderful, if a little sweet smelling, from the amount of white chocolate and sugar that had gone into it.  Then after 15 minutes beyond the cooking time, 3 ¾ hours later, the cake was cooked. Next I tried a chocolate mud cake, buoyed by the fact that the white one was looking good.  The chocolate one had a drastically shorter cooking time, and by the time I was checking my smaller of the 2 cakes, it had already overcooked, and my larger one was perfectly done.  Eeek, had to recook another small chocolate one, the small cake was too dry and cracked ontop for my perfectionist liking.  The final caramel cake smelt amazing, using brown sugar and white chocolate, I really thought that this would taste as sweet as it smelt, but oddly not, just an amazing caramel flavour, and one of my favourites (surprisingly).  Now I had all three flavours of cake and they were packaged up ready to go. I cooked them in dribs and drabs between Wednesday and Friday.

Saturday arrived, and I boxed the cakes in my cupcake carrier boxes (thanks Ponsi) and they went on my old ladies Swiss shopping trolley wheels into London.  Got into Waterloo, connected with the Jubilee line, then changing at Canary Wharf to get the DLR to the Cutty Sark, a five minute walk down uneven pavements, and my cakes arrived in one piece at the Fair Cake Vanilla workshop in Greenwich.

We were introduced to the attentive team at Fair Cake workshop, and of course the unmistakable Naomi.  It is often strange to meet people who you seem to know so well online, you are missing that personal element often, you can see some of it reflected in their work, but you never get the full picture until you see someone face to face.  The first day was pretty full-on, there was a lot to accomplish by the end of the day, and many of us stayed on an extra hour to complete making the petals for our flower that was to go on our cake.  We torted our cakes into beautiful even layers, ganached and smoothed, and before too long, a whole day had whizzed by.  Naomi had demoed a cake upfront, and then we set to work attempting to create something similar!  It did show me that it does not matter quite how your cake had turned out, after the cakes were ganached, they all looked amazingly uniformly smooth.  I did find that I was the only one who had done different flavoured cakes though, everyone else had made plain chocolate ones.  It was a revelation working with ganache, and not something that I had attempted before, probably because of my rather rocky relationship with it in the past.  Swiss chocolate is great to work with though, and even the most inexpensive own brand chocolate from COOP is really well tempered, and about 1/3 of the price of what I was using at the weekend!

Sunday was another early start, but my mind had been buzzing with all the new ideas that the previous day had brought with it. Slightly less to do on the second day, but mainly working with sugarpaste and covering the large extended tier.  We were shown one of the 2 methods explained by Naomi.  It is a tricky job, one where you really could do with growing an extra pair of hands!  It is a lot of sugarpaste to handle all in one go!  The last part of the session was spent putting together the wired petals (first time for me) and the stamens on the open peony flower, and then working on the piping.  Naomi allowed us to use some of her classic pipework designs for practice, and I look forward to creating something (hopefully as inspiring) in the future, but I need way more repetition before its really clean.  I was pretty pleased with how my first try turned out.  Fighting gravity on the top parts of the petals was really hard! The design looks easy, but believe me it’s far from it, I had to remove my pipework several times before I had to settle on what it is now on my cake.  Not perfect, but not altogether bad.

Naomi kindly helped me with the finishing touches, not quite enough time to do my board at the end, as I had a taxi all the way back to Wokingham, and could not delay my pickup.  But it was ribboned, adorned with my pretty flower, photographed and boxed by the Faircake team.  My cake made the journey all the way home with no damage, I actually broke a petal and dinted the sugarpaste when walking out the studio, and the extended box top blew off the top, and I used my chin to keep it from flying away!  Other than that, the cake travelled perfectly, did not move an inch in the boot, despite going over numerous speed bumps and going round roundabouts at good taxi speed!

Thanks to all the participants, organisers and to Naomi once more, I had a truly great weekend, and learnt heaps!

....now we have alot of cake to eat :-)

Naomi, thanks for featuring me on your blog too! http://hello-naomi.blogspot.com/

Great class: highly recommended if Naomi visits the UK again!

Food bills escalating...

When I was living in Switzerland, I always regarded the UK as the cheap food mecca, and rued the fact that 100CHF did not get me that many bags of shopping.  I must admit that I was looking forward to the huge roasts every day and the mountains of cheap fruit and vegetables.  This last 2 months here have been far from that.  Yesterday hit home that despite my best efforts at saving money on the food bills, I just have not managed significant enough savings.  I spent a total on groceries that was almost double the average food bill for a family of four, and that is just not good enough.  With our rental absorbing a large chunk of income, and high food bills, this is not a long term option for us..

Food prices have really escalated here, to the point I look at some of the basics and wince.  Some things are really surprising, and we pay way over the odds even compared with Swiss prices.  We could cope in Switzerland, as we had the salary to match.  Now we have a lower income, after Steve’s job move in line with UK salary, and we are still finding it a squeeze.  For example. I looked at the cost of a bag of plain flour.  In Switzerland you can expect to pay typically, 1.60 CHF a kilo which equates to 1.13 GBP.  Today, I bought a bag of plain flour for 99p a kilo.    Sugar I bought for 1.28 GBP a kilo, the Swiss equivalent, about 1.88 GBP a kilo in COOP.  Tinned tomatoes at 79p and Swiss tins 99p.  Unsalted butter, Swiss price 2 pounds a block, today in Morissons the cheapest unsalted was 1.39 GBP.  The food price gap between Switzerland and the UK has definitely closed, but salaries have not risen in line with the cost of living, so I think we will need some real lateral thinking to get the food bills down further.  I felt justified in querying a price this morning that had not gone through the till as half price....

It is a little depressing, considering I have already:

·         Made packed lunches for the girls instead of out-laying 17 GBP a week on school dinners
·         Used Morissons and Tesco in favour of Waitrose in town
·         Bought reduced items like sliced bread, whole chickens for freezing that day
·         Bought chickens for roasting and squeeze at least 2 or maybe 3 extra meals out of it
·         Buy using offers that are useful for products that I would be buying anyway
·         Planned the weeks meals ahead, to reduce impulse buying whilst in the supermarket
·         Padded out smaller amounts of meat with vegetables or pulses to make it go further
·         Not been tempted to buy any ready meals

·         Buy own brand products wherever possible and even stooping as low as
       buying Value Tesco ham and cheese in place of normal mid brand equivalents

Without going as far as really low price food, not sure where to go next really.  Increase vegetarian food? Buy even more Value stuff?  It seems to me that it is pretty cheap to live on unhealthy food if I wanted to, but the cost of basics being so high really affects the bill if you want to cook from scratch.  It’s no longer really inexpensive to do so.  This is when you start looking at the 1 pound pizzas……  It is quite understandable why people opt for the rubbish food on mega cheap deals, but nutritionally there must be so much salt and fat in that stuff, it is really not going to benefit my kids to feed them a diet of Value fish fingers for the next 5 years, is it?

According to an article by the Guardian in June of this year, average retail food prices in the UK jumped by 4.9% in the year to May – a 23-month high – driven by a surge in basic foodstuffs such as corn, wheat and sugar, which respectively jumped by 112%, 72% and 51% over the period. How an earth do you combat that?   In a BBC News article just today, the Prime Minister David Cameron was quoted as saying that:

‘’ economic pressures such as higher food and fuel prices had "probably had an impact on families and on many women".

He told Andrew Marr: "Britain faces a very difficult time right now as countries right across the world do.  "Families in Britain see petrol prices going up, food prices going up, electricity increasing.  "Many people who work in the public sector have had a pay freeze, and at the heart of many families are women who are worrying desperately about the family budget."

He said he "profoundly believed" he was taking the right decisions to secure a brighter future for Britain, but added: "I think that's probably had an impact on families and on many women and that causes great concern and I understand that."

I am glad that the P.M. feels good about the future, because right now, I am not sure that despite my best efforts we can feel comfy at our current level of outgoings.