People's Kitchen cakes

I did a bit of cooking and baking over the last few days, for the new People's Kitchen in Glossop.

Recipes have now been requested and as I winged it fairly heavily I'm now going to have to do some serious thinking! Two were intrepid new cake experiments based on the old faithful chocolate cake (I made one of these too, just in case) - added to which, I made them all gluten-free (substituted Doves gluten-free flour blend), which I've never attempted before.

*Note on quantities - this makes a massive amount of batter so I recommend halving it for a normal 8"/9" cake tin. In which case also reduce the baking time by 10 minutes or so.

Ginger, lemon and treacle cake:

Ingredients
3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
3-4 tsp ginger depending on personal taste
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking soda (a bit more if you're using gluten-free flour)
1 tsp salt

3/4 cup oil
2 tbsp vinegar (any kind will do)
2 tsp vanilla essence
2 cups cold water
4 tbsp treacle or molasses

Lemon drizzle:
140g caster sugar
juice of 2 lemons

Method
Preheat your oven to 200C/400F/gas mark 6, and thoroughly grease and flour your tin.

Sift your dry ingredients (except the sugar) together in one bowl and mix them up, then mix up your wet ingredients, and the sugar, in a separate bowl. I recommend heating up the treacle or molasses before spooning it in, or you'll be stirring for hours! Add the wet to the dry and mix until just combined, pour it into your tin and bake for 30-40 minutes or until the top is springy and a knife inserted into the middle comes out clean.

While the cake is baking, mix your lemon drizzle ingredients together.

As soon as it comes out of the oven, stab it all over with a fork and spoon the drizzle on as evenly as you can. Leave it to cool in the tin. I warn you this cake was very difficult to remove from the tin! The drizzle made the middle of the cake so gooey that it has to be scooped out. I've therefore reduced the quantity of drizzle slightly in the hope of remedying this problem.

Pear and almond crumble cake:

Ingredients

3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
2 tsp baking soda (a bit more if you're using gluten-free flour)
1 tsp salt
(1/2 cup ground almonds would also be an excellent addition if you're feeling flush)

3/4 cup oil
2 tbsp vinegar (any kind will do)
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp almond essence
2 cups cold water

Pear filling:
Large quantity of firm-ish pears (10-15? depending on how full you want your cake tin), cored and roughly chopped
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp almond essence
1 tbsp treacle or molasses
1 tbsp cornflour
water

Crumble topping:
2 cups flour (this part is very rough as I just eyeballed it, but if you've ever made a crumble topping before you know how it goes!)
1 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
pinch salt
oil

Mix the cake ingredients as above and pour the batter into your greased and floured tin. Par-bake the cake at 200C for about 20 minutes, so that a bit of a crust has formed on top.

While the cake is in, stir together the treacle with a cupful of water to loosen it up, and then add the cornflour, stirring until smooth. Mix this in with the pears, then add the cinnamon and almond essence. When everything is coated, add some more water if needed (you want the liquid to be 1/4-1/3 of the way up the pears) and then bring to a gentle boil, stirring occasionally. Don't overcook it - the pears should still be relatively intact, and the liquid just verging on viscous.

Make your crumble topping - throw all the dry stuff into a bowl and mix it together, then add a glug of oil and stir. Add more oil bit by bit, stirring it in, until the mixture gets clumpy. Then get your hands in the bowl and rub it between your fingertips until it becomes breadcrumby. If it's too sticky just add more flour - too dry, add more oil. Taste it to check the sweetness level too if you want. (I actually would have used half oats and half flour for this stage, but then I remembered oats have gluten in them! But you can put whatever your please in your crumble topping.)

Whip your half-baked cake out of the oven and, working quickly so you don't lose too much heat, scoop your pear filling on top. It will be impossible to spread so distribute it evenly with a spoon as you go. Then tip out the crumble on top of this (be careful of the hot tin!), spread it out and smush it down.

The tin will be heavy now so be careful getting the whole shebang back into the oven! From this point I baked it for probably 40-50 minutes. It will be difficult to tell if it is done because the soft pears throw the knife test off! But by the time the crumble starts to colour you should be in business. Let it cool in the tin.

I hope they work...

Review: Sherlock Holmes

It's been a while since I felt compelled to write a review of something, so it seems a little odd that the inspiration should have been a disappointment. Speaking of which, those of you who dislike 'the book was so much better' reviews, look away now. Though I hope to remain above such a simplistic analysis.

Guy Ritchie's attempt to capture the excitement, adventure and subtle homoeroticism on Conan Doyle's marvellously dark and deadpan detective has somehow left us with something like an over-risen cupcake. It stretches too far, the top explodes, and by the time you've taken them out of the oven all you're left with is a structurally catastrophic mess with a hole in the middle you could drive a ten-tonne truck through, only edible due to the compulsive quantities of sugar contained therein.

What I really don't understand about adaptations like this (and there are many of them), is that the original material is so good one really wonders where you could possibly go wrong. Yet somehow - perhaps in the assumption that modern audiences lack the sophistication to appreciate the nuances of immaculately constructed dialogue and a watertight storyline - somehow, so many of our classic works of fiction are cinematically short-changed. This adaptation plays somehow like Sherlock Holmes as written by Chuck Palahniuk on a bad day. Robert Downey Jnr, much as I normally enjoy spending two hours admiring his visage, is not only no Holmes (he's American, for goodness sake!) but brings an extremely irritating, almost 'madcap' quality to the detective that grates the whole way through. Almost as excruciating as Johnny Depp's psychotic Willy Wonka. The frisson between him and the also totally miscast Jude Law as Dr Watson, is transformed into some sickeningly teenage 'bromance' as I believe it's termed. Whilst I did notice snippets of original text slipped in at inappropriate junctures - the set piece about the pocket watch, for example, was paraphrased from one of the books - much of the dialogue lacked the arch precision that makes Conan Doyle's stories so enjoyable to read. The action scenes were lengthy, pointless and distracting, verging on the slapstick; Holmes' periods of isolation and despair were played as comedy; and, most disappointing, there was not even a hint of the classic interplay between the two central characters. Not one single raised eyebrow, not one outburst of 'But my dear Holmes! That's incredible! How on earth could you deduce all that from this one tiny piece of evidence!'. I've made this up, but there's a lot of that sort of thing. I believe Watson is famous for such expostulations. Or he was, at any rate.

No. The campness was all there. And here it is, misinterpreted and misplayed, thrown in for kicks but missing the point altogether. What really disappoints me about this sort of thing, though, is not so much that they've made a slightly sub-standard film out of one of the canons of English Literature - it's not even that a generation of kids will thinks that this is what Sherlock Holmes is all about, a bareknuckle underdog with a neurotic demeanour and a tendency to wind up in destructive Indiana Jones-esque brawls. (And I can see how, if you have no prior experience of Holmes and Watson, that it is probably entertaining enough to satisfy.) It's that it could have been a really great film. Wasted potential is the key here. The styling is all right - the brilliant steampunked design, the cinematography, the costumes - Ritchie certainly cracked the look of the thing. And that might fool a lot of people. But not me. Sorry, Guy.