Nigella Bites (6 page)

Now, dip a pastry brush into the beaten egg mixture and paint on a golden glaze. Put in the oven and cook for 12–15 minutes, by which time they should be puffy and burnished. Remove from the oven and let cool a little before giving them to the children.

LILAC-OR CHOCOLATE-TOPPED CUPCAKES

What’s a children’s party without cupcakes? In truth, it’s better to make mini ones for smaller children; they just like the icing anyway, so there’s no point in majoring in the sponge. Since we’re going through a purple stage at the moment – pink, for us, is so last year – I go full out for their garish pleasure by tinting the icing a heart-stopping lilac with a minuscule blob of Grape Violet food-colouring paste. But since adults love cupcakes just as much, I suggest them also as a pudding for a grown-up party – in which case, though, make a chocolate ganache to be smoothed over full-sized cupcakes. In both cases, I decorate with gold buttons, but if you can’t find these, a conker-shiny Minstrel, plonked glossily on top, would seduce just as well.

For something a little more festive, in the case of the grown-up ones at least (and as an alternative to a traditional birthday cake), forget the central decoration on top and spike each cupcake with a cake-candle and leave to smoulder atmospherically for a while on serving. And to make chocolate cupcakes, which in either instance could be thought preferable, take out a tablespoonful of flour after weighing and replace with the same amount of cocoa.

for cupcakes:

125g self-raising flour

125g very soft unsalted butter

125g caster sugar

2 eggs

1–2 teaspoons vanilla extract

few tablespoons full-fat milk

for icing:

approx. 350g icing sugar, sieved, or instant royal icing

food colouring paste

gold chocolate buttons (or Minstrels)

12-bun muffin tray or 3 x 12-bun mini-muffin trays with appropriately sized paper cases

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6.

Put all the ingredients for the cupcakes except the milk into a food processor and blitz furiously. Then pour in the milk, and process again until you have a smooth batter. Divide the mixture between either the big muffin tray or the three small trays.

Cook the big muffins for about 15–20 minutes, and the small ones for about 10 minutes, although you might need to keep a closer eye on the little ones. Cool the cupcakes on a wire rack.

To ice the mini-cupcakes mix the icing sugar with a tablespoon or two of water from a recently boiled kettle or cold water (according to packet instructions) for instant royal icing until you have a smooth, spreadable paste. In both cases add water slowly: you don’t want this runny and nothing is more irritating than having to start sieving more sugar. The merest, tiniest blob of food-colouring paste – in this case, as I said, Grape Violet – will be enough to bring a dizzy and rich-toned intensity to the proceedings; you can always add more colouring if you want, but again the important thing is to guard against having to do any more sieving. And if you have been too heavy-handed and landed yourself with a batch of unusably dark icing, then just make up some more plain white icing and add to tone down.

Slice any peaking humps off the tops of the cakes with a sharp knife and then pour, from a dunked-in spoon, the icing over each cake until the tops are thickly and smoothly covered. Let stand for a couple of minutes until the icing has set a tiny bit and then dot a gold button or other decoration of your choice on top.

CHOCOLATE GANACHE

This is a very useful icing to have up your sleeve for any sort of cake. The quantities below make enough to ice, thickly and glossily, 12 normal-sized cupcakes, but since all a chocolate ganache is is an equal quantity of double cream and chocolate heated together, it’s easy to increase the volume of icing at your disposal.

I most often use, in cooking (and fall upon for eating), the most fabulous chocolate buttons made by a company called Montgomery Moore: the chocolate itself is incredibly good, and because it’s already in buttons you don’t have to chop it to make it easy to melt.

200g dark chocolate, with a minimum of 70% cocoa solids, chopped, or use chocolate buttons (see above)

200ml double cream

Put both ingredients in a saucepan and, over low heat, cook till the chocolate’s melted. Whisk together with a Magiwhisk (for ease and preference), watching the mixture become thick and glossy. Spoon and smooth over your waiting cupcakes. After a couple of minutes’ standing, decorate in whatever way you want.

BAGNA CAUDA

All good parties involve a lot of standing around gossiping and picking, and this is the food you want tableside to be picked from. I am loathe to say the word ‘dip’, but this is in effect what bagna cauda is, a ravishing Piedmontese velvety gunge of olive oil, garlic, anchovies and melted butter into which are speared raw florets of tight-budded ivory cauliflower, tightly furled chicory leaves, slices of courgette, fennel, chicory and red or (for aesthetic preference) yellow peppers and any other crudités that you want to provide.

Ideally, you want to keep the sauce warm, and for this you need either the traditional terracotta bowl that sits over a spirit burner or – oh joy of joys – a fondue bowl that can be placed over its candle-fitted stand to achieve the same purpose.

150ml extra-virgin olive oil

4–5 cloves of garlic, peeled and Microplaned

12 anchovies preserved in olive oil, drained and chopped

75–100g unsalted butter, cut into chunks

for dipping:

a variety of raw vegetables, including fennel, cauliflower, chicory, sweet peppers and courgettes

Put the oil in a pan with the garlic and anchovies and cook over a low heat, stirring, until you have a melted, muddy mess. Everything should begin to meld together. Whisk in 75g of butter, and as soon as it has melted, remove from the heat and give a few more beats of your whisk so that everything is creamy and amalgamated. Taste, and if you feel you want this dipping sauce – which is meant to be pungent but not acrid – a little more mellow, whisk in the remaining 25g of butter. Pour into a dish that, ideally, fits over a flame so that it does not get cold at the table.

Dip in the crudités and eat.

THE UNION SQUARE CAFE’S BAR NUTS

More picking food, and ludicrously easy to make. You might think that nuts, untampered with, are perfect picking food as they are, and up to a point you’d be right. But try these, modestly adapted from the recipe for the spiced nuts served at the Union Square Café in New York and you’ll truly know what perfection is.

500g assorted unsalted nuts, including peeled peanuts, cashews, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans and whole unpeeled almonds

2 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh rosemary (from two 8cm sprigs)

½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 teaspoons dark muscovado sugar

2 teaspoons Maldon salt

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4.

Toss the nuts in a large bowl to combine and spread them out on a baking sheet. Toast in the oven till they become light golden-brown, about 10 minutes.

In a large bowl, combine the rosemary, cayenne, muscovado sugar, salt and melted butter.

Thoroughly toss the toasted nuts in the spiced butter and serve warm. And once you eat these, you will never want to stop.

HALLOUMI WITH CHILLI

I love grilled or fried halloumi, that squeaky, salty, polystyrene-textured cheese. Not a very seductive way of describing it maybe, but that, indeed, is what it’s like. You should have no difficulty finding it in the supermarket, and this is a doddle to make. You don’t need to do it at the very last minute, but don’t fry the halloumi so far in advance that it’s totally cooled by the time it comes to the table. And if you prefer, by all means grill it. And again, this is the sort of food that you can sit on the table for people idly to eat as they stand around, drink in hand. It looks beautiful, too, which is always an aid to proceedings.

Makes about 30.

2 tablespoons chopped, deseeded fresh red chilli (about 2 medium chillies)

60ml (4 tablespoons) extra-virgin olive oil

2 x 250g packets of halloumi, sliced medium-thin (i.e., just under half a centimetre)

juice of ¼ lemon

Mix the chopped chilli and olive oil in a small bowl or cup and leave the flavours to deepen while you cook the cheese. I use a non-stick frying pan for this, without any oil, and just give the cheese slices about 2 minutes a side until they’re golden-brown in parts. When all the slices of halloumi are cooked, transfer them to a couple of small plates. Give the chilli oil a stir, spoon it over the cheese, then give a spritz of lemon. That’s all there is to it.

SPATCHCOCKED BIRDS

For that point in the evening when people need to hunker down to some serious eating, you do need to provide something a little more substantial than plates for picking from. This is what I roll out during a summer evening’s barbecuing. You can stick with just chicken if you want, but I’ve suggested poussins and quail as well, just because I like anything that produces that welcoming sense of the groaning board – and plus, it gives me the opportunity to suggest more than one marinade.

The marinades themselves are to be regarded as the loosest blueprints. Use the flavourings you like, remembering that you need oil of some sort to prevent the meat from drying out and an acid – vinegar, citrus fruit – to tenderise it. The spatchcocked birds don’t need to be cooked on the barbecue; an oven preheated to 220 or 240°C, gas mark 7 or 8, will do just fine. And because the birds are spatchcocked – that’s to say, cut on one side and opened out like a book – they need much less cooking than surgically uninterfered with poultry, which can be useful if you’ve got time in advance for the spatchcocking and marinading and not much time on the night for actual cooking.

Any good butcher will spatchcock the birds for you, or you could ask the butchery section at the supermarket to do it, but it’s easy enough for you to manage yourself at home. Just get a pair of poultry shears or tough scissors (I use a pair sold by someone on one of those door-to-door yellow-duster trails made for cutting through tins and tough stuff) and lay the bird, breast-side down, on a surface and cut all along one side of the backbone. Then cut along the other side and – hey presto – the backbone can be removed. You then turn the bird the other way up and press down as you open it out. You have in front of you a spatchcocked bird, ready for its marinade.

1 spatchcocked chicken, marinated in:

juice of 1 lemon

2 tablespoons black peppercorns, lightly crushed in pestle and mortar

100ml olive oil (not extra-virgin)

2 cloves of garlic, peeled and bruised

to sprinkle over:

Maldon salt

handful of fresh parsley, chopped

2 spatchcocked poussins, marinated in:

juice of 2 limes

2 tablespoons coriander seeds

100ml groundnut or vegetable oil

good grinding of black pepper

to sprinkle over:

Maldon salt

bunch of fresh coriander, chopped

4 spatchcocked quails, marinated in:

1 bunch of spring onions, sliced finely

100ml vegetable oil

dash of toasted sesame oil

2cm chunk fresh ginger, unpeeled and chopped roughly

1 tablespoon rice vinegar

1 tablespoon soy sauce

to sprinkle over:

Maldon salt

bunch of fresh coriander, chopped

Sit the birds in their marinade in a dish into which they fit snugly, cover with clingfilm and leave in the fridge, preferably overnight or for 24 hours, though even a couple of hours would have an effect.

When the barbecue is good and hot, lift the birds out of their marinade and cook on the barbie until the flesh has lost all raw pinkness but is still tender within and the skin is crisp and burnished and blistered. It’s hard to be precise about times, since barbecues differ even more than ovens do, but on my barbecue – a gas-fired Outdoor Chef, which I love to distraction and, since it has a lid, I use even in the winter rain – the chicken takes about 35 minutes, the poussins 15 and the quail about 7.

Along with Maldon salt, sprinkle freshly chopped parsley over the chicken and coriander over the poussins and quail, or use whatever other herb seems right for the marinades you’ve concocted.

So much emphasis these days is put on fast-assembly food and skin-of-your-teeth cooking – which is fine, good even, for every day, but if the point of cooking is the end product, its meaning has to lie in the process. And sometimes, on house-bound rainy weekends or when you need to savour a little domestic warmth, you want to inhabit your kitchen, not merely rush through it.

Pasta with Meatballs

Pasta

Soft and Sharp involtini

Pasta E Fagioli

Chocolate Cloud Cake

Raspberry and Lemongrass Trifle

Rainy-Day Biscuits

PASTA WITH MEATBALLS

This is definitely time consuming, but here I make no apology for that. And there is nothing like serving up a bowl of pasta with meatballs to make you feel like an Italian mamma out of a Hollywood film. I don’t mean one of those redoubtable types in amorphous black: think Sophia Loren in the kitchen. It works for me.

The trick to these meatballs is to keep them small. Don’t actually use a teaspoon, but use about a teaspoon’s amount of mince to roll each ball. If there are children around, so much the better; they tend to like making these. But otherwise, they’re easy enough, and the slow repetitiveness of the action can be rather calming.

Makes enough to sauce generously the pasta below, serving 6.

for the meatballs:

250g minced pork

250g minced beef

1 egg

2 tablespoons freshly grated parmesan

1 garlic clove, minced

1 teaspoon dried oregano

3 tablespoons semolina or breadcrumbs

good grind of black pepper

1 teaspoon salt

Just put everything in a large bowl and then, using your hands, mix to combine before shaping into small balls. Place the meatballs on baking sheets or plates that you have lined with clingfilm, and put each in the fridge as you finish them.