Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

My lovely friend Clare in Geelong is a busy young lady – she’s juggling a new bubba and writing a blog, all while building her first home with her husband J. Clare recently remarked that blogs and social media often show a “prettified” version of our lives, and asked to see our #thisisreal photos. Here are mine!

December in our house is always crazy busy. It’s also the most enjoyable time of the year – Small Man is off school, we’re entertaining family and friends, and I’m manically experimenting with ideas for Christmas gifts. My kitchen seems perpetually messy at the moment…

As a result, I’ll occasionally forget to cook dinner (sigh). Pete walked into the kitchen at 6pm a few weeks ago to find me whisking up Irish cream and tempering chocolate, neither of which counted towards the evening meal. So he came up with these toasted sandwiches – and even though they’re just toasted sandwiches, they were so good and so typical of my engineer husband that we made them again last week so that I could share them with you.

Hmm. Actually, that’s not true. We made them last week because I forgot to cook dinner again on Saturday night. But they really were very good!

We started with thin slices of sourdough bread, ham offcuts from our ever generous friend Johnny, Dorset cheddar, butter and backyard eggs…

The outside of each slice of bread was lightly buttered, then a wall of thick ham pieces was constructed. Make sure the bread doesn’t have any holes in the middle – if it does, cover them up with a thin slice of salami or ham. Note that the bread should be quite thin – what you see in the photo below is both slices stacked up, butter sides together…

Carefully crack the eggs into a bowl, then scoop out a yolk with a little bit of white (my pedantic husband insists that a bit of white is nicer than all yolk, but that a whole egg is too much)…

Carefully place the egg inside the ham walls…

Add a scattering of cheese – not too much, the engineer insists, and none on top of the yolk…

Carefully slide the topped bread onto the flat plate of a preheated sandwich press, then top with the other slice, butter side up…

This is the important bit – set your sandwich press to the widest setting – then carefully lower the top. This stops the egg from being squished out – if your machine can’t do that, then you might need to cook these in a frying pan…

The sandwiches only take a few minutes to toast to golden…

I spent too long taking photos of this first one, so the yolk set a bit more than desired…

…but the second batch were perfect!

I’ve told both boys that when they move out, I’ll be buying them each a sandwich press and a Römertopf. Then I’ll deliver bread and eggs every week and know that they’ll never go hungry!

I hope you’re all having a fabulous December! ♥

This week I’ve mailed out a stack of dried sourdough starter. I hope you all enjoy playing with them!

And whilst almost everyone who receives the starter might begin by making our basic loaf, within a very short time every kitchen will be producing their own “house” style, adapted and tweaked to suit their schedules and tastes.

I love that. The true joy of breadmaking is not in the fastidious reproduction of a set formula, but rather in the experimenting – playing with the hydration levels, testing out different flours, slashing creatively. Please don’t ever feel obliged to follow our bread recipes precisely, because I’m usually making it up as I go along!

After all these years of baking, I now read bread books for inspiration rather than instruction. Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf is a treasure trove of ideas, including one for a great loaf that involves adding walnuts in two ways – whole pieces and ground into a paste…

I didn’t follow Dan’s recipe, but rather took the idea and applied it to my standard formula. You could easily do the same with your own favourite dough – just add walnut pieces and reduce the water quantity by the amount in the paste. The ground nuts give the dough a gorgeous purple tinge…

Here’s the formula I used:

• 300g ripe, bouncy starter (fed at a ratio of one cup water to one cup flour)
• 500g – 550g water (start with smaller amount and add more if needed)
• 500g Semola Rimacinata di Grano Duro (fine durum wheat semolina flour)*
• 500g bakers flour
• 20g fine sea salt
• 200g walnut halves
• walnut paste – 120g walnuts, 100g water, 15g olive oil

Note: If you can’t find remilled semolina flour, substitute more bakers/bread flour and reduce water by 30g.

I ground up the paste ingredients in my small food processor and then added it with the walnuts to the other ingredients. Our basic instructions for making a nut sourdough are here.

Our standard bread dough weighs about two kilograms and produces two large oval loaves – just letting you know in case you want to scale the walnuts and paste to add to your own dough recipe. The taste and texture of the finished loaves was sublime…

This has instantly become one of our new favourite loaves – Pete, Big Boy and I all love it (Small Man’s not a walnut fan). It’s perfect with cheese, smoked fish and eggs, or just on its own, spread with a little butter…

Have a wonderful weekend, folks!

See those gorgeous little bottles in the photo above?

Fifteen years ago, when I worked part time at Reverse Garbage, I brought home 300 of them, complete with lids. They were brand new, French made, and like all items at RG, an industrial surplus that someone was considerate enough to donate rather than discard.

I have no idea what they were originally intended for, but they cost me just 10c each and I’ve used them ever since. Each bottle holds 125ml (½ cup) and they’re the perfect size for our homemade Irish cream. These are the bottles I used to smuggle into swimming practice to share with Cate.

The ones in the photo above however are filled with our newest brew – a dark chocolate and orange cream. It came about because I’d run out of whisky, so I went rummaging through the pantry and found a bottle of Cointreau instead. I’d originally planned to just mention this variation in my IMK round up, but it’s been so well received that I figured it deserved a post of its own. My friend Margot refers to it as “jaffa in a glass”, whereas Bethany and Ali both describe it as “liquid Terry’s chocolate orange”.

• 350ml Cointreau
• 125g good quality dark chocolate (I used Cacao Barry Tanzanie Origin Dark 75%)
• 1 x 395g can of sweetened condensed milk
• 1 x 375g can evaporated milk
• 300ml pure cream (35% fat, no thickeners added)

1. In a small pyrex or ceramic bowl, heat the chocolate in the microwave in 30 second bursts on high until melted, stirring between each round. Stir until smooth. Alternatively, melt the chocolate in a bowl over a small saucepan of simmering water.

2. Pour a small quantity of the Cointreau into a large bowl, then gradually whisk in the melted chocolate, then the evaporated milk, condensed milk, cream and finally the remainder of the Cointreau.

4. Pour the orange and chocolate cream into sterilised bottles (preferably through a sieve to catch any lumps of chocolate), seal tightly and store in the fridge. Best served over ice.

Oh, and as you can see, I’ve found a new use for our little Russian tea glasses!