Their Method, My Madness - Ginger Honey Cake

The purpose of these ramblings, rants, blogs or embarrassing insights into our daily life as Mrs. Vino calls them, through gritted teeth, is to share my love for cooking and baking.

Any of you who follow me on twitter will see I hate this and hate that, I bake this and bake that and most of all drink this and drink all of that.

On Instagram you’ll be bored senseless with endless photos of what I’ve made and now on Vine you can see six-second videos of the cooking process.

It really is awfully dull and I can’t believe any of you actually look at or read any of it. To be honest I bore the arse off myself with it.

So this week to celebrate my passion for the culinary art I’ve decided to turn my attention back to recipes namely those of our celebrity chef friends.

I make no apologies for this, after all these people are meant to entertain, inspire and educate us.

However as Frank Costanza my favourite comic character says, "I've got a lot of problems with you people, and now you're going to hear about it!"

A recent report in The Metro stated "TV chefs 'adding to obesity crisis by encouraging us to eat fatty dishes'," with similar stories blaming celebrity chefs for our bulging waistlines in much of the media.

I kind of wished the story had been in The Mail, I’m sure they would have taken it to the nth degree characterising Worrall Thompson as a carcinogenic gnome.

This is not the issue I have though. Anyone that has watched a cookery programme or owns a recipe book can’t be surprised to find out that when on a Saturday our James, oozing manliness, adds 14 packets of butter to a pan of double cream to make a sauce to pour over his extra Belly Belly Pork, it isn’t particularly good for you.

With Nigella, yes I'm once again fixating on her, it’s more a case of being slightly concerned as to where her hands have been. Watching her seductively dip a finger in to taste the food rather than using a spoon may stir ‘those’ feelings but I’m surprised the council haven’t been round to shut her down or at least given her kitchen a low hygiene rating. 

I’m waiting for the day she dispenses with using her fingers altogether and simply dunks her left breast in, come on we all know that’s where it’s heading.

Now if you don’t realise that eating this 'celebrity way' all the time isn’t healthy then you’re probably already 38 stone. I actually look forward to watching the future channel 5 documentary about you. I’ll sit there with baited breath waiting to see if they can remove your front window so they can airlift you to McDonalds for your breakfast while a soundtrack of Elbow’s One Day Like This plays, “throw your curtains wide and stuff 24 McMuffins down your gullet before 8:30."

Please be aware this blog isn’t sponsored by Maccy D’s and in the interest of fairness and balance there are other fast food chains available who can make you equally as fat should you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner there every day.

No my issue isn’t with chefs making me fat it’s with their bloody recipes not working. They're meant to work, I've paid a fortune for all these posh ingredients.

A perfect Tag Line would be - You’ve seen the show, you’ve bought the book, you’ve thrown the bastard cake in the bin.

I’m obviously exaggerating a touch here, lumping all chefs in to this bracket, when really I have only one man in mind, Paul ‘the Hollywood’ Hollywood - I'm sure his real name is Paulo Avanti, he just fancied something altogether more ‘glitzy’.

I’ve tried to get on with his book, thinking I’d done something wrong. Was the oven too high? Am I using the right tin? Had I misread the recipe?

Yes I’m man enough to admit making a mistake or cooking something distinctly average. Case in point was this week I tried a new curry recipe out on the family. 

N marked it 4 out of 10 and then made me promise I would never ever make ‘that’ again. Everything in our house is bloody marked and judged out of ten these days, I blame Strictly, N loves it. I just find it a little off putting that Mrs. Vino has adopted this scoring system. I'm not telling you what I was given a 3 for the other day.

So with Paulo I have tried the same recipes numerous times and I’m glad to report that it’s definitely not me it’s him.

He makes it so bloody hard to dislike him though, sauntering on to our screens with his piercing eyes, chiseled good looks and well coiffured silver hair. Looking down the camera lens setting many a middle-aged woman’s knees a trembling. He might as well just open his shows with this line - “Before we get started I apologise for making you moist.”

Well Hollywood I’m glad something is because your bloody cakes aren’t.

One person I’d like to admonish from this piece and all future pieces I may write is Mother Delia. The woman can do no wrong. The funny thing is I have no ulterior motive with Delia, she’s one of the few women on TV that I don’t want to do unmentionables to. Maybe it’s because she’s a bit too Mumsy or Saintly. Now Mary Berry on the other hand, I’d give my left nut for a couple of minutes with her.

In my book Delia has indeed inspired a generation of people to cook and her recipes are foolproof. If she says it’s 100g of flour it’s exactly that, no more no less. As her tirade on the pitch at Carrow Road proved, you don’t fuck with Delia.

I toyed with the idea of using a Hollywood recipe and seeing if it worked for any of you. However I know one person who has no problem with them and I couldn’t bare the *smug face* comment that would undoubtedly follow.

So I’m going to go for a recipe from my current favourite baker – Dan Lepard. His recipes are usually in the Guardian each week. The fact that he’s replied to me on twitter, commenting that my cakes made with his recipes look good, may also have a little to do with this favouritism. What can I say, I’m fickle.

Ginger Honey Cake

This is quite a fiery little number with 3 types of ginger but not so much so that N & M didn’t enjoy it. To be honest though I’m yet to find a cake M doesn’t like.

Ingredients

300g Honey – runny

75g Unsalted Butter - Melted

50ml Sunflower oil

3 Medium size eggs

400g Stem Ginger – Chopped (the jar I bought was 350g and this had no ill effects on the cake)

2 cm Piece of Fresh Ginger - peeled and finely grated (this is what I like about Dan’s recipes they’re very prescriptive- most people would say a thumb sized piece but whose thumb?)

4 Teaspoons Ground Ginger

1 Teaspoon Ground Cinnamon

250g Plain Flour

2 Teaspoons Baking Powder

Extra Butter

Extra Honey to glaze the cake

Loaf tin – anything you’ve got will do

Method

Line the tin with Baking Parchment

Set the oven to 170c or 150c on a Fan Oven

Put the Eggs, Honey, Oil and Butter in to a bowl and beat until it is smooth and everything is incorporated. I used a hand whisk.

Stir in the Stem and Grated Gingers plus the spices. Finally add the flour and baking powder.

Stir really well the spoon the mixture in to your tin.

You then want to lay a thin line of butter centrally down the length of your cake. I cut a thin strip off the end of a pack of butter then cut that in half, repeating until the length of the cake was covered. Apparently this butter technique forces the cake to crack along this line and gives you an even bake.

Put the cake in the oven for 70-80 minutes, don’t touch it before 70 minutes as this cake will collapse if you as much as look at it wrongly.

Test it with a skewer after 70 minutes and it should come out clean. Mine was done after 70 minutes and didn’t need any extra.

The cake may look a little burnt on top – mine didn’t.

While it’s still warm brush the top with some honey to glaze and soften the crust.

Enjoy.

A