Beetroot cake
The last two days have been a flurry of baking and making things in the kitchen. It’s been a particularly fulfilling flurry, too, as the products that we’ve made have had plucked produce from the house garden in them.
Tuesday saw my first cake baking experience. How this milestone has only now appeared this far into my life I don’t know, but it was fun. I was promised a beetroot cake a few months ago now, while schlepping and shopping in an upmarket Scandinavian furniture store. Back then, even a small slice sounded a particularly sweet treat.
And so it was two days ago that that long-awaited hot drink-accompanying slice of ‘fruit’ (or technically vegetable) cake, was enjoyed with a cup of tea. It was very easy to make, and used beetroot freshly pulled from the garden, along with self-raising flour, baking powder, soft brown sugar, sultanas, oil, and eggs.
We expected it to be much redder or pinker in colour than it actually is. Resembling a very moist fruit cake, the dark burgundy red flecks of root vegetable looked appealing (unlike the beetroot grater’s almost fluorescent cerise hands), and contrasted well with the dark brown colouring of the sultanas. Be warned that if you don’t like beetroot, then this cake is not recommended (you probably wouldn’t be making one on the first place, though, would you)…
The taste is very much that of beetroot, and even with the large quantity of sugar in the recipe, is only subtly sweet. It’s a bit strange at first, but a second slice is even more enjoyable than the first. I don’t know why we didn’t think it wouldn’t taste quite that beetrooty (the clue’s in the name after all), but there you go. A hit then, and going on that basis, I can safely say that we’ll make it again, when there is more of the crop to be harvested from the garden.
Today saw us turn our hands to tomato chutney making, which was new for both of us. Finding a simple recipe to accommodate our six kilograms of fruit wasn’t easy, but find one we did, and we set to turning the kitchen into a chutney-making conveyer belt.
Tomato chutney
Again, our list of ingredients was quite basic, but it’s surprising how many exotic-sounding tomato recipes there are flying around in cyberspace; foodies who want accompaniments for curry will be especially well-catered for. Our simple-sounding red tomato chutney recipe was adjusted for the quantity of fruit we had freshly taken off the plants in the greenhouse – even though a good half of them were actually yellow.
Added to the tomatoes were onions, more sugar, malt vinegar, salt, paprika, and cayenne pepper. The main preparation tasks were chopping the onions and tomatoes, but once we’d done these first steps – in a much longer time than the stated allowance - and added all of the other ingredients at the suggested intervals, we quite literally sat and waited for the watery mixture to reduce down, to a chutney-like paste.
It took much longer than expected. Here’s a tip for all would-be chutney makers. When reducing down the mixture, turn the hob up to a near-maximum setting and temperature; the mixture in the pan reduces down so much quicker. Willing the contents to turn thicker, we thought we’d be produce extra special chutney and left the jam pan simmering for over four hours, hopefully additionally allowing all of the ingredients to infuse together.
Resisting the need to add cornflour more than once, when the sloppy contents of the pan were of a thicker consistency, we had a tiny taste. Sweeter than expected (not just because of the sugar, but also of the home-produced tomatoes), we think it will be an ideal accompaniment to winter cheese boards, particularly if there’s a mature cheddar on them. That’s right, winter cheese boards. Once jarred and sealed with gingham lids, our day’s labours were put into the makeshift pantry to mellow and mature, ready for the season of shorter days.
