Mother Hubbard's caramel slice

Partly due to the exigencies of daily life (such as shortage of time to go shopping and shortage of money to go shopping with), partly due to the chaotic state of the pantry and partly due to the fact that we have just got a new fridge and don't want to fill it straight up with all the old (and I mean old; there's a bag of potatoes which recently celebrated their first birthday, a container of frozen peanut sauce from 2008 and a jar of senapsill in there dated best-before 2007...) crap stuff from our previous fridge, we have been having a Mother Hubbard month, which is where you try to use up things from your cupboard (and fridge and freezer) rather than buying new food.  It's amazing what you can make without having to go shopping at all!  Or perhaps it's just amazing how much random food I seem to accumulate in the pantry.  During the Manchester riots last year, I made some last-minute 'zombie survival' plans and calculated that we had over a month's worth of food on hand without even trying.

This is fine for regular meals on my own, when baked beans served over pasta, or miso soup noodles with cabbage and an egg three nights in a row, are perfectly reasonable food choices; I've also revisited, with more than a touch of nostalgia, the old standby of my student days -- HP sauce and mayonnaise on crackers.  These ingredients aren't only for trashy-food combos, either: Shrove Tuesday dinner was pancakes (made without milk, a recipe worth recording as we never seem to have any milk) served Japanese-style as a main course, wrapped with cabbage and egg and drizzled with (yup) HP sauce and mayonnaise; then with lemon and sugar, or strawberry jam and chocolate, for dessert.

But it doesn't really seem fair to inflict my HPSM fetish on others, when making food to share -- so what can one make, when the cupboard is bare?  Answer: caramel slice.

This is sometimes called "millionaire's shortbread"; I've no idea why, as the ingredients are dead cheap!  Unless perhaps you manage to save so much money on food during Mother-Hubbard months that you end up extremely rich.  I'm still hoping...

Caramel Slice

Base:
100g butter
2/3 cup SR flour
1/3 cup plain flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
2/3 cup coconut

Caramel:
1 can (397g) condensed milk
2 heaped tbs golden syrup
30g butter

Topping:
150g dark chocolate

Preheat oven to 180C.  Melt butter; sift in flours and sugar and add coconut.  Mix all together until well blended.  Press mixture into a lined tray (I used one about 18 x 25cm) and bake for about 15 minutes or until golden brown.  Set aside to cool for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile make caramel: add all ingredients to a small saucepan and cook over medium heat, whisking, until caramel is a nice light brown colour and seems a bit thicker.

Pour caramel over base and return to oven; cook for about 15 minutes until caramel is a deeper brown on top and is just set.  Cool for a couple of hours.

Melt chocolate and spread over top of caramel; make swirly patterns with a knife if you want to be artistic!  Cut into squares or slices when cool.

Makes about 30 pieces (2 inches square).

(Based on recipes from Butter Sugar Flour and taste.com.au)

Pancakes for people who never have any milk

Google was my friend and helped me to find this handy link; I halved the recipe, reduced the amount of baking powder and added a splash more water because I wanted pancake-thickness rather than pikelet-thickness, cooked some of them and then added another splash of water to make crepe-thickness ones for dessert.

1 cup plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1 tbs sugar
1 cup water
1 tbs oil
1 egg

Sift dry ingredients into a bowl; make a well in the middle.  Whisk together wet ingredients, pour into well,  mix in dry ingredients gradually with whisk.  Adjust to desired consistency (double pouring cream for pancakes, single pouring cream for crepes); leave to stand 10 min.

Meanwhile (if you have an electric stove like me) turn stove to medium so that it has reached a nice consistent temperature by the time you're ready to cook.  For each pancake, add a little dab of butter to the pan, melt and swirl round pan, then add a serving-spoonful of batter (amount depends on desired thickness and heat of pan), tilt pan to spread, and cook until lightly browned on each side.

Made 6 pancakes and 4 crepes, 18cm diameter.

How big is an egg?

(Or, "A mousse once bit my sister...")

No, it's not like "How long is a piece of string?" or other such silly questions.  The eggs I used to buy in Australia were usually what was called 'jumbo', and they were 67g.  The eggs I buy here are labelled 'large', don't have a weight grading on them, but seem considerably smaller; I think they're probably 55g.  The eggs called for in recipes often don't have a specified size at all, or if they do it's something like 'medium', which is not really much use.

This lack of technical information suddenly became relevant this weekend, when I was asked to three separate meals at friends' houses and offered to make dessert for two of them (I had to say I'd bring a starter for the middle one, just to avoid pudding fatigue).  Dinner One was a Friday night pasta meal for three, so dessert had to be something quick to make, not too large and not too heavy; Dinner Three was a proper Sunday roast out in the country, requiring a suitably lavish finale that could be transported easily by train.  The solution to both?  Mousse.

The first recipe on the second hit when you Google 'easy lemon dessert' is, sure enough, an easy lemon dessert recipe (I admit that the 'easy' and 'lemon' parts were what sold me on the idea, along with the fact that it only required five ingredients; the mousse theme emerged later).  So that was Friday sorted.  I thought something like a chocolate raspberry mousse would be just the thing for Sunday, and after looking through a few recipes, decided on this one (possibly seduced just a little myself by the accompanying prose testimonial).

And this is where I encountered my small problem.  Both these recipes call for eggs, the first cooked into a sort of custard before folding in whipped cream, the second separated, with the whites whisked (I assumed until they formed stiff peaks, and this seemed to be successful).  In each case, the quantity of egg is obviously somewhat important to the texture of the finished product; too little egg-to-liquid in the custard or too much egg-to-chocolate-and-cream will both result in runny mousse -- never a good thing, especially when you are transporting your creations on trains and buses.  So what size eggs did CM mean?  And what sort of 'jumbo' eggs did Mr Hulles use to make his "favorite dessert ever" -- Australian jumbo, American jumbo or some other size?  If they were 67g, then '3 jumbo eggs' is 201g of egg -- the equivalent of nearly 4 of my 55g eggs (assuming that's what size they even are).

In the end, I guesstimated and adjusted quantities based not only on approximate egg size but on the feel of the ingredients and the packet size of the other ingredients -- for example, both these recipes call for 1 cup (and is that an American or a British/Australian cup?  And as for tablespoons, let's not even go there) of cream, but cream here comes in 284ml (Aldi) or 300ml (Sainsbury's; Aldi was out of stock when I went back for the second batch of cream, grr) pots, and I know if I have 34ml of cream left in the fridge it's just going to go off, so may as well use the whole lot.  It seemed to work -- at least, there were no complaints!

Here are my versions of the recipes.

Light lemon mousse (serves 4-6)
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
zest and juice of two lemons
284ml double cream
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbs icing sugar
2 tbs Limoncello
5 digestive biscuits, squashed

Beat together eggs, sugar, lemon zest and juice.  Cook in double boiler (or right on the stove if you're brave; I used a Pyrex set over a saucepan, with the bottom of the bowl submerged in the water), whisking/stirring constantly until fairly thick -- the whisk should leave distinct trails behind it.  I'd probably add the Limoncello at this point; when I made this it was a last-minute addition, so I sloshed it in at the end, then was worried I'd added too much and it was going to make the whole thing collapse and liquefy; luckily this didn't happen, but even so...

Whip the cream; fold into the lemon mixture.  Put a layer of squashed biscuit in the bottom of 4-6 serving glasses or cups, leaving a handful for garnish; divide the lemon mousse between the cups and sprinkle with leftover biscuit crumbs to decorate.

Preparation time: I got home at 6pm and was out the door with this all made and packed plus a box of strawberries hand-dipped in chocolate by 6:45.  Not bad going.

Chocolate raspberry mousse cake (makes a 22cm cake about 2.5 inches high)
~1 3/4 cups raspberries (about 3/4 of a 300g pack, leaving a handful or so to garnish)
1/4 cup sugar
2 tbs Amaretto (I would have used Chambord but didn't have any)
300g chocolate
60g butter
4 eggs, separated
300ml double cream
10 digestive biscuits, squashed
Extra raspberries, white and dark chocolate shavings to garnish

Squash raspberries with a fork and macerate with sugar and liqueur for a while (I left them overnight because I started making this and then ran out of time and had to go to Dinner Two, along with my vegetarian antipasto selection of beetroot dip, teriyaki mushrooms and lemon-chilli fried halloumi).  Melt chocolate (2 minutes in the microwave worked perfectly) and stir in butter until smooth.  Stir egg yolks into raspberry mixture.  Whisk egg whites until they form stiff peaks; whip cream (don't make it too stiff or it will be hard to fold in, as I discovered).  Make sure chocolate mixture isn't too hot, then stir in raspberry mixture all at once.  (The italics are from the original recipe.  Why 'all at once'?  I don't know for sure because I didn't try doing it any other way, but I'm guessing it's to avoid the possibility that the chocolate mixture might seize.)  Fold in cream until well combined, then fold in egg whites in two batches.

You could just serve this in glasses or a big serving bowl, but I made a crumb base with the squashed digestives and another spoonful or so of Amaretto (just enough to make the mix damp) and spooned the mousse on top to make it into a cake.  After a few hours in the fridge, the mousse should have set firm enough to hold its shape reasonably well when sliced.  Dot any extra raspberries around artistically and shave white and dark chocolate curls off the block with a potato peeler, straight onto the top.

Preparation time: about 40 minutes this time round, but I think it'd be faster now I know what I'm doing.