Forever Summer (26 page)

LEMON RICE PUDDING

There is nothing I can do here: you either love rice pudding or hate it; only you know which. Having said that, this is a rice pudding far removed from school-dinner hell: it’s cool, skinless, infused with lemon and lightened with softly whipped double cream. Decant it into individual glasses and eat almost like a lemon-rice fool, or serve out of one huge bowl. I like it pale, undecorated, unaccompanied, just as it is, though it certainly goes very well with blueberries, providing you can find ones that actually taste of blueberries. If you’re going the individually portioned route, tumble a pile of berries into the glass first and dollop the rice on top.

Towards the end of summer, or when it’s passed, when you might want to inject a little warmth into supper, serve alongside a dish of roast plums. Use any colour you want, for taste, but those fiery red ones look ludicrously magnificent: just cut each plum in half, remove the stones, place the plums to sit snugly in a buttered ovenproof dish, sprinkle a little sugar in each cavity and blitz in a hot oven, around 200°C/gas mark 6, for 20 minutes or so.

100g pudding rice

zest of 2 lemons and juice of 1

1 litre full-fat milk

3 tablespoons caster sugar

250ml double cream

few drops lemon oil

Put the pudding rice, lemon zest and milk into a wide-bottomed saucepan and bring to the boil over medium heat. As soon as the milk’s started bubbling, turn the heat right down and, if you’ve got one, put a heat diffuser underneath the pan; the more slowly you cook the rice, the more gloriously creamy it is. To stop the rice forming a skin – and I shudder even to mention the word – cover the milk directly with a piece of greaseproof paper. I will try and explain how I do this: I cut out a large square – slightly bigger than the circumference of the pan – and then fold all four corners in, rather as if I were making a kite, not that I’ve ever done such a thing in my life. Then I sit this piece of paper on top of the milk and rice in the pan and fold the corners back out so that they stick to the interior of the pan, above the milk. Let the rice cook like this for about 40 minutes, or until the rice is cooked and most of the liquid absorbed (the milk will continue being absorbed as the rice cools). Take the rice off the heat and beat in the sugar, then leave to stand for 5 minutes or so before beating in the juice of the lemon; if the rice is too hot, it will curdle as you do this. If you want you can use a few drops of lemon oil in place of the juice here; at any rate, you will be needing it later.

Turn the rice pudding into a bowl and, performing your kite-folding trick again, cover with greaseproof paper. Leave to cool, and then chill in the fridge. Once it’s really cold, take it out of the fridge, remove its paper lid and then whip the cream with a few drops of lemon oil until thick but not clumping and stiff, and fold into the rice pudding.

Serves 8–10.

LEMON CUPCAKES

I cannot resist, either in the making or the eating, a cupcake, and this is the perfect sunshine version, to be taken on picnics or eaten at home. Yes, I know the little jelly lemon halves that adorn the tops are fake and plasticky, but that is part of their charm. And you can find them, along with the lemon oil and the instant royal icing, at the baking aisle at most supermarkets.

250g self-raising flour

250g very soft unsalted butter

250g caster sugar

4 eggs

1 teaspoon lemon oil

2–3 tablespoons milk to bind

for the icing:

1 x 500g packet Instant Royal Icing powder

juice of 1 large lemon

24 lemon jelly slices

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6 and line a couple of 12-bun cupcake or muffin tins with paper cases. Take butter, eggs and milk out of the fridge in time to make sure they’re at room temperature.

Put all the ingredients for the cupcakes, except for the milk, into the bowl of a food processor, fitted with the double-bladed knife, and blitz till totally combined. Process again, adding enough milk to make a batter with a smooth, flowing texture, then remove the blade and spoon and scrape the batter equally into the waiting cupcake cases. Remember the cakes rise as they bake: there is enough mixture to fill each case adequately even if you panic when you first look at it.

Bake for about 20 minutes, by which time the sponge should be cooked through and springy to the touch. Remove from the oven, leave for 5 minutes or so and then arrange the cupcakes in their paper cases on a couple of wire racks to cool.

Once they’re cool, you can get on with the icing. Just whisk the instant royal icing with the lemon juice (using a free-standing mixer or electric whisk) until thick and smooth: you want the icing to sit thickly on the cupcakes not run off them. And you can aid this by cutting off any risen humps with a sharp knife first, so each cake is flat-topped, though be careful if you’re icing over any cut surface: you want no crumbs dislodged and left to besmirch the pale, sugary smoothness of the topping. I like the icing coolly white like this, but if you don’t mind an E-additive or two, and want to go out for full on sun, then add a drop of yellow food colouring as you make up the icing. No purist stance is intended here: after all, I now require you to top each cupcake with a miniature, sugar-jelly slice of lemon.

Makes 24.

LAVENDER TRUST CUPCAKES

There was a fashion, some time ago, for lavender-scented custards and creams. I always resisted it. But I made these a while ago, for auction to raise money for the Lavender Trust, which is the charity for young women with breast cancer, set up in memory of Ruth Picardie, and – you know – the lavender works: it immediately evokes the musky scent of summer without filling the mouth with soapy perfume. Of course, in Provence, lavender is routinely used in the most savoury of cooking, much as rosemary is, but I have yet to embrace my inner Peter Mayle. This, though, may be my first small step. To make lavender sugar, just cut up a few lavender sprigs and keep them in a jar of caster sugar for a few days. Or you can buy it, in jars, ready concocted; a company called Hanbury make a number of flavoured sugars.

125g self-raising flour

125g very soft unsalted butter

125g lavender sugar, sieved

2 eggs

pinch salt

few tablespoons milk

for the icing:

approx. 250g Instant Royal Icing

violet icing colour

handful of real lavender stalks

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6, line a 12-bun muffin tin with paper cases and get butter, eggs and milk out of the fridge in time to get to room temperature before you start.

Make the cupcakes as usual: put all the cake ingredients, bar the milk, into the processor and combine, adding milk to bind. Using spoon and rubber spatula, fill the cake-cases equally and
bake
for 20 minutes or so, until cooked.

Cool the cupcakes as for the lemon cupcakes, and slice off any humped tops. Make up the icing according to packet instructions, dyeing the mixture a faint lilac with a spot or two of food colouring: I like to use the solid pastes for which you may have to go to a specialist cake decoration shop, I’m afraid; the colour you’ll want here is generally labelled ‘grape violet’. Go carefully, though: we want pastel serenity here, not Seventies record-sleeve murk.

Top each pretty-pale cupcake with a little sprig of lavender before the icing’s set dry.

Makes 12.

SLUT-RED RASPBERRIES IN CHARDONNAY JELLY

You might think that no recipe could live up to this title. It’s a reasonable presumption, but thank God, a wrong one. This is heaven on the plate: the wine-soused raspberries take on a stained glass, lucent red, their very raspberriness enhanced; the soft, translucently pale coral just-set jelly in which they sit has a heady, floral fragrance that could make a grateful eater weep. If there’s one pudding you make from this book, please, please make it this.

This recipe was emailed to me from Australia from my erstwhile editor, Eugenie Boyd. I’ve fiddled with it a bit, but it is the best present a foodwriter could ever have. Now it’s yours.

1 bottle good fruity Chardonnay

300g raspberries

1 vanilla pod, split lengthways

5 gelatine leaves

250g caster sugar

double cream to serve

Place the wine and berries in a bowl and allow to steep for half an hour. Strain the wine into a saucepan and keep the raspberries to one side. Heat the wine with the vanilla pod until nearly boiling and leave to steep on one side for 15 minutes.

Soak the gelatine leaves – which you can find in the supermarket these days – in cold water for about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, after removing the vanilla pod, reheat the wine and stir in the sugar until it dissolves; allow to boil if you want to lose the alcohol. Add a third of the hot wine to the wrung-out gelatine leaves in a measuring jug and stir to dissolve, then add this mixture back into the rest of the wine and stir well. Strain into a large jug.

Place the raspberries, equally, into six flattish, clear glass serving bowls, and pour the strained wine over the top.

Allow to set in the fridge for at least 3 hours, though a day would be fine if you want to make this well ahead, and take out of the fridge 15 minutes before serving.

Serve some double cream in a jug, and let people pour this into the fragrant, tender, fruit-jewelled jelly as they eat.

Serves 6.

ORANGE CORNMEAL CAKE

This is one of those slightly Italianate cakes in form, by which I mean it is intentionally shallow and unspongey. It’s meant to be eaten, cut into wedges, as pudding – and the cornmeal makes it crumble deliciously into a cream and berry lined spoon. In fact, summer always needs plain, unshowy cakes like these: the perfect vehicle for red-glowing seasonal fruit. Orange itself is hardly associated exclusively with summer, indeed far from it, but its flavour seems to make any berry more intense. For this reason, in deep midwinter, I add the grated zest of an orange to a plate of frozen summer berries as they thaw; serve them thus, with this cake, whenever mood calls for a little summer lightness and the produce in the shops will not oblige.

You can get the orange oil at most supermarkets these days, but if you can’t get hold of some just add more zest. It won’t give such a pronounced orange flavour, but it will still be good.

250g soft unsalted butter

125g fine (yellow) cornmeal, plus some for lining tin

175g caster sugar

4 eggs

60ml plain yoghurt

zest of 1 orange, juice of half

half teaspoon orange oil

50g plain flour

1 and a half teaspoons baking powder

to serve:

raspberries, or mixed summer berries, and crème fraîche, mascarpone or whipped double cream

Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4.

Butter a 23cm Springform tin and line it with baking parchment, shake some cornmeal into the tin and let it stick to the sides and bottom. Tap out any excess.

Using an electric mixer for ease, beat the butter until light and add the sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time, followed by the yoghurt, orange juice then zest and orange oil. Fold in the cornmeal, flour and baking powder and blend everything together well before pouring into the Springform tin.

Bake for about 40 minutes or until the top is golden brown and springs back when pressed lightly with your finger.

Let it cool slightly on a rack before springing the tin open and letting the cake cool completely.