The Kitchen Diaries II. Nigel Slater
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in a cake-decorating shop and felt guilty not making a purchase, but it is essential to read the packet. A few versions sold abroad are made with peanuts or cashews instead of almonds. I have yet to taste persipan, the version made from peach kernels. It sounds fun.
The marzipan from Lübeck in Germany is reputed to be the finest, partly because of the high percentage of almonds to sugar. A general rule is that the more gaudy the presentation, the lower the quality is likely to be. The cheaper brands tend to contain sugar syrup and a hefty dose of colouring and flavouring.
I sometimes make my own, combining finely ground almonds with a mixture of icing and caster sugar, egg yolk and a little grated orange zest. It’s a pleasing sugar and spice job, something for a frosty or even snowy afternoon.
Whilst in Norway, I came across some shallow, moist almond cakes studded with dark berries that had a little almond paste in them. Once home, I set about tinkering with my classic almond sponge mixture and some frozen blackcurrants and blueberries, but it was only once I added some crumblings of marzipan that my cakes approached those I had eaten rather too many of in Oslo. Recipes like this are trial and error, but I eventually got it to where I wanted it to be: the cake crumb moist and slightly squidgy, the fruit seeping its sharp juice, and here and there sweet nuggets of almond paste.
Almond, marzipan and berry cakes
My version of the sweet, almond-scented cakes I ate in one of Oslo’s most popular new-wave bakeries.
You will need six shallow round cake tins about 10cm in diameter or rectangular baking tins, about 8cm x 10cm.
butter: 180g
caster sugar: 180g
eggs: 2, lightly beaten
plain flour: 80g
ground almonds: 150g
marzipan: 100g
berries (assorted blueberries and currants), fresh or frozen: 200g
icing sugar
Line the cake tins with baking parchment. Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4.
Using an electric beater, cream the butter and sugar together till pale and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs, then slowly introduce the flour and ground almonds. Once they are incorporated, stop the machine immediately.
Break the marzipan into small pieces about 1–2cm in diameter. Stir these into the mixture. Divide it between the baking tins, then scatter the fruit over the top of each. Bake for forty minutes, till lightly firm to the touch. Remove from the oven, dust with icing sugar and leave to cool before serving.
Makes 6
JANUARY 30
And using up the marmalade
The opened jars of sweet preserves in the fridge seem to be multiplying. I don’t mind, I think of them as treasure. Right now there are blackcurrant, damson and mulberry jams; a pot of lemon curd and another of damson jelly; French apricot jam, some Lebanese rose petal jelly and three different marmalades. Three. One of these jars of orange preserve I proudly made myself last February from organic, green-tinged Seville oranges, the other two were gifts, finer than my own and with fewer strips of peel. I have the urge to use all three up, scraping out every last amber mouthful with a teaspoon, getting my knuckles sticky in the process, and use the sweet-sharp jelly in an ice cream. The recipe is an experiment, a marriage of shards of bitter chocolate and orange preserve. I end up with beautiful, custard-coloured, soft-scoop ice cream of which I am almost absurdly proud.
Ice cream, when it is home made, has a habit of setting like a brick. Many is the time I have sat, well beyond midnight, chipping off little shards and flakes with a teaspoon. The classical way round this is to add some glucose syrup to the mix, resulting in a soft-scoop texture. Adding marmalade turns out to work much the same magic, only in a way that seems more wholesome. The ice is the most silkily textured I have ever made. The flavours are stunning. If only cooking was always like this.
Marmalade chocolate chip ice cream
single or whipping cream: 500ml
egg yolks: 4
golden caster sugar: 2 tablespoons
marmalade: 400g
dark chocolate: 100g, roughly chopped
Bring the cream to the boil. Beat the egg yolks and sugar in a heatproof bowl till thick, then pour in the hot cream and stir. Rinse the saucepan and return the custard to it, stirring the mixture over a low heat till it starts to thicken slightly. It won’t become really thick. Cool the custard quickly – I do this by plunging the pan into a shallow sink of cold water – stirring constantly, then chill thoroughly.
Stir the marmalade into the chilled custard. Now you can either make the ice cream by hand or use an ice-cream machine. If making it in a machine, pour in the custard and churn according to the manufacturer’s instructions. When the ice cream is almost thick enough to transfer to the freezer, fold in the chopped chocolate, churning briefly to mix. Scoop into a plastic, lidded box and freeze till you are ready.
If you are making it by hand, pour the custard and the chopped chocolate into a freezer box and place it in the freezer, removing it and giving it a quick beat with a whisk every hour until it has set.
Enough for 6
FEBRUARY 4
It wasn’t, on reflection, the wisest of days to make marmalade. I had pruned the roses, the temperature was a degree or two below freezing, and the skin around my thumbnail had cracked open in the cold. Each drop of bitter orange juice, each squirt of lemon zest sent shots of stinging pain through my thumb. But the Seville orange season is over in the blink of an eye and sometimes you just have to shut up and get on with things.
Marmalade making is about as pleasurable as cooking can get. It isn’t something for those whose only reason for cooking is the finished product. If the process of peeling oranges, painstakingly cutting their skin into fine strands and constantly checking their progress on the stove is a chore, then don’t do it. There is enough exceptionally good cottage-industry marmalade out there. Go and buy it. Making marmalade is a kitchen job to wallow in, to breathe in every bittersweet spray of zest, enjoy the prickle of the fruit’s oils on your skin and fill the house with the scent of orange nectar (or, of course, screech with pain as the bitter juice gets into your wounds).
Each stage, and there are several, carries with it waves of extraordinary pleasure. I say extraordinary because it is not every day you get the chance to fill the house with a lingering smell that starts as bright and clean as orange blossom on a cold winter breeze and ends, a day later, with a house that smells as welcoming as warm honey. There is something heart-warmingly generous about marmalade makers. I can’t tell you how many jars I have been given over the years. In my experience they like nothing more than passing their golden pots of happiness on to others.
There must be hundreds of recipes, but it is the method that changes rather than the ratio of ingredients. Some cooks swear by boiling the oranges whole, then chopping them; others cut the fruit into whole slices, others still include the pith in the jam itself, while some nitpickingly remove it. I have met cooks who chuck their boiled peel in the food processor, some who add a lemon