Put some treacle in your tart, writes Hugo Arnold
Home baking lifts the spirits, calms the nerves and tickles the tastebuds. Flour, eggs, a raising agent or two and some flavour, vanilla, ginger, or the indulgence of jam and cream. My mother's cool hands make some of the best shortbread, and, like my grandmother, she understands the business instinctively.
Scones are a good place to start when learning to bake. They are so simple that you can, with a little practice, run them up almost as you make tea. Please take my word for it and bake a batch, just as an experiment. I would certainly favour baking scones over buying them. My local supermarket lists 20 ingredients in the manufacture of their own-brand version.
This is the time of year for afternoon tea, for sticky gingerbread spread liberally with butter, for fruit cake to warm your insides after a long walk. A simple sponge, sandwiching rich, whipped cream littered with seasonal fruits - poached pears, figs or plums perhaps - or jam, is always enjoyable.
Given how busy we all are, baking is an ideal wind-down activity: an occasion to relax into - celebrate even. In half an hour you can be spooning the ingredients into a tin ready for the oven. A quick 10 minutes of tidying-up, and the kitchen is back to normal.
FRUIT AND NUT CAKE
100g plain chocolate broken into pieces
175g unsalted butter
4 eggs
100g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
50g plain flour
50g ground almonds
100g seedless raisins
50g roughly chopped hazelnuts
half a tsp baking powder
Good quality vanilla ice-cream to serve
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees/gas mark four. Grease a 25-centimetre springform tin and line it with baking paper. Melt the chocolate and butter in a bowl over a pan of simmering water, stirring so they combine. Remove the bowl from the water and set it aside.
Whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla essence together for three minutes, or until frothy. Fold in the melted chocolate and then fold in the flour, almonds, raisins and hazelnuts, baking powder and a pinch of salt. Pour into the tin and bake for 30 minutes, or until just set. Remove from the oven, allow to cool and then remove from the tin. Dust with icing sugar and serve with the ice-cream.
A LIGHT FRUIT CAKE
230g caster sugar
230g butter
5 medium eggs, beaten
230g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
250g mixed whole candied fruit, roughly chopped
150g blanched almonds
1 heaped tablespoon caster sugar
Cream the sugar and butter together until they are pale. Fold in the eggs using a large metal spoon. You must do this a spoonful at a time. Sift the flour and baking powder over the mixture, folding it in as you go. The object here is to try and keep as much air as possible in the mixture to help it rise, so fold, that is cut the mixture, with the edge of the spoon, and try not to overwork.
Blitz the almonds in a food processor until they are ground and then fold into the mixture along with the fruit. Pour the mixture into a greased and lined 20-centimetre round cake tin. Sprinkle the sugar over the top and bake in a preheated oven, 180 degrees/gas mark four for an hour and a half. If the cake looks like being too brown, cover it loosely with tin foil for the last 20 minutes or so. Remove from the oven, allow to cool for five minutes and turn out on to a wire rack to cool.
TREACLE TART
200g plain flour
100g butter, cut into lumps
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp caster sugar
800g golden syrup
200g white bread crumbs
zest of two lemons, juice of one
2 eggs, lightly beaten
cream to serve
Combine the flour, butter, egg yolk and caster sugar in a food processor with two teaspoons of cold water and blend to a dough - don't overwork it.
Cover in cling film and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Bring back to room temperature - this will take about 10 minutes, and roll out to line a 22-centimetre shallow tart tin.
Heat the golden syrup until it is runny (don't overheat it) and whisk in the bread crumbs, lemon zest and juice and eggs. Pour into the pastry case and bake in a preheated oven, 180 degrees/gas mark four for 40 minutes, or until set. Allow to cool to room temperature and serve with a great deal of cream, after all, treacle tart is all about cream.