Oaty cookies

June sunshine gave way to July rain, which I am not complaining about at all; better to be soggy than trying to survive temperatures of 40c+ like last year. It also makes allotmenting life that much easier if we’re not having to water several times a week.

I’m heads down on a complicated project up in Liverpool at the moment, but due to the vagaries of modern life it’s all conducted on Zoom, phone and email, and I’ve therefore never met most of the people I am working with. In some ways this is a wonder, but project management by proxy can be a challenge. What better way to de-frazzle than an escape to the hidden garden at Wilde Goose, up near Ludlow. A gorgeous and under-stated walled garden, at this time of year it is packed with late summer perennial colour, like a true Secret Garden. Even on a rainy afternoon the air was humming with bees, hoverflies and butterflies.

The restored glasshouse at Wilde Goose nursery
As we tip into late summer, reds, yellows and oranges take to the fore

There’s colour on the allotment too, albeit in a more scruffy and haphazard way. The dahlias are coming into their own now and this week I had the first gladioli stem of the year, a sparkling magenta-red. The amaranth is flowering too, shocking in its vibrancy; for me this is one for drying as in the vase it’s just a little too much.

Dahlias, lupins, cosmos and amaranth
Hiding at the back – red gooseberries and cerinthe

Fruit and veg are offering a slow and steady harvest, which is just as it should be. We’ve had a good picking from the red dessert gooseberries, and there’s several pickings a week of beans (broad, runner and French). All this makes for a full fridge and vases dotted around the house. There could be so much more, if I had the time to preen and prune and harvest to the plot’s full potential, but as we all know, enough is as good as a feast.

Getting a few colanders of beans and chard a week now
Froth in the vase

This recipe is a really useful bake to have up one’s sleeve for days when the cake tin is empty, time and inclination is poor, but the kids need something vaguely-not-terrible for lunchboxes or after-school snacks. It’s a cookie that uses oats and (if you want to) wholemeal flour, and can be stirred together in five minutes, baked in ten. I like to add dried cranberries or raisins to mine but if making it for Harry then chunks of chocolate get mixed in. Actually it’s that versatile a base recipe that you could add any kind of dried fruit, nut, seed or, if you wanted to, spice.

This isn’t my recipe at all of course, but comes from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s endlessly useful book, Good Comfort.

Oaty cookies, a very handy five minute bake to have up your sleeve

Oaty cookies
Adapted from Good Comfort by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall

125g butter
50g soft light brown sugar
125g flour – You can use either all wholemeal, or a mixture of equal parts plain white and wholemeal or spelt
75g porridge oats
1/2 tsp baking powder
A handful of chopped dark chocolate chunks or dried raisins/sultanas/cranberries

Preheat the oven to 180c and line a baking sheet with non-stick parchment. In a saucepan, gently melt the butter and sugar, stirring often. Leave to cool slightly. Add in the flour, porridge and baking powder and mix to a smooth dough. If you’re using them, stir in the chocolate chunks or fruit.

Place dessertspoon-fulls of the mixture onto the baking tray, patting them down slightly so they are smooth on top. Bake for 12 minutes or so, until they are turning golden. They will still be soft at this stage, but leave them to cool and they will harden up.

This recipe makes about 6-8 cookies, depending on how big your spoons are!

Also this week:

Harvesting: Runner beans, French beans, last broad beans, chard, new potatoes, kale, first courgette, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, gooseberries, first dahlias, first gladioli, amaranth, cosmos, lupins, echinops, snapdragons.

Also: Last of the midsummer blooms in the garden, tidied up the debris ready for Act 2 (late summer): Pots of perennial foxgloves, sanguisorba, helenium are waiting in the wings ready to go in. Rain has brought a chaos of weeds to the plot but I have not had time to deal with them, as was ever true.

Cooking and eating: Enormous pizza at Rudy’s to celebrate end of term. Roasting carrots and beets with cumin (Mum’s garden). Notable steak and ale pie from Ludlow Farm Shop.

Reading: Wilding by Isabella Tree, the story of the rewilding project at the Knepp Estate.

Viennese fingers

Helen Stallard Communications is 15 years old today! That’s one and a half decades of solvent self-employment, also known as not having a proper job. The fates have been kind. I really do remember the date 1 April 2005 for it marked the day when I decided to be bold and take a really massive leap into the unknown rather than stick it out in a miserable commute that was too long, a job that seemed ultimately pointless and, most importantly, the ludicrousness of having to spend 8+ hours every day in an office regardless of how much work I actually needed to produce. The world of work, to me, seemed (and still mostly seems) off its rocker. So I “went freelance”, which is what people in the cultural sector say when they don’t really know what they’re going to do with themselves, but it turned out to be absolutely the best choice to me and since then I’ve worked with artists, composers, musicians, dancers, festivals, major events… There have been plenty of downs and uncertainty of course, but ultimately, flexibility and self-direction are the cornerstones to me of gainful employment. That plus the ability to work on worthwhile projects with interesting people. 15 years is quite an achievement and I don’t take it for granted.

I say this now because I wonder if the disruption to the workplace caused by Coronavirus will lead many people to reconsider how they organise their lives. Working from home doesn’t mean slovenliness…far from it, in my experience it leads to greater productivity. Working around caring for children or relatives doesn’t mean that you’re uncommitted, it shows that you have a full life and are adept at juggling responsibilities. Really, it’s about time that the world of work caught up.

I was due to mark today’s anniversary with a day out to London, a trip to the V&A and shopping at the fancy bakeries in Marylebone and Soho. Obviously that plan got scrapped and instead, I stayed home and made a batch of Viennese Fingers from my favourite 1970s cookbook, The Dairy Book of Home Cookery. My mum has this book and I’ve known it all my life, although the copy I use now actually belonged to Matt’s Granny. If you ignore such delights as Sole with Bananas and Potted Kipper Creams, and stick to the basics of cakes, puddings, batter puddings, scones and pastry, then you can’t go wrong.

The Dairy Book of Home Cooking, a classic that deserves its place in any cookbook collection
The Viennese Fingers have been re-named as Butter Whirls, but the basic principle is the same

Viennese fingers are one of my favourite ‘traditional’ bakery items; I still choose them when I go to Cooks Bakery in Upton On Severn. They are a basic butter biscuit dough, which is piped into either a finger or a whirl, depending on how you feel, then sandwiched with buttercream and topped with chocolate. Given that the principle ingredients are butter, sugar, flour and chocolate, this is great store-cupboard cookery, but still feels suitably celebratory. If it wasn’t for the lockdown I would never have dreamt of making these – but I’m glad I did.

Viennese Fingers
Adapted from the Dairy Book of Home Cooking

For the biscuits:
150g softened unsalted butter
50g icing sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
150g plain flour

For the butter icing:
50g softened unsalted butter
50g icing sugar

For the topping:
100g dark chocolate

Preheat the oven to 160c. Line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.

Beat together the butter, sugar and vanilla until the mixture is incredibly soft and whipped. You may need to zap the lot in the microwave for a few seconds to reach the desired level of softness, but be careful not to let it melt completely. Stir in the flour to make a soft dough.

Using a piping bag with a meringue nozzle, pipe lengths onto the baking paper – mine are about 6cm long – or alternatively you could make whirls. (Ideally you need a star nozzle but I only have a plain one.) Place in the oven and bake until lightly golden brown – between 12-15 minutes, depending on your oven and the size of your biscuits. Check them often to be sure that they do not burn. Remove from oven and leave to sit for five minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool.

For the buttercream, beat the butter and sugar together until very pale and fluffy. For the topping, break the chocolate into chunks and melt in the microwave – I do this by turning the microwave on in 30 second bursts.

To finish the biscuits, match your fingers up so that each pair is roughly the same size. Spread buttercream onto the inside of one biscuit and press the other half on top into a sandwich, then either dip one half in chocolate or drizzle over the top. Place on greaseproof paper to firm.

Makes about 10, depending on how big your piping is!

Viennese Fingers

Also this week:
Garden and allotment: The ‘lockdown’ (does anyone else really LOATHE the lexicon of this pandemic?) means that work continues on the shed, which I am delighted by. Sowed beans, sweetcorn, watercress and delphiniums.

Eating and cooking: Not been shopping for days given the lockdown, which means that eggs and flour have become luxury items. I am still in storecupboard mode. We’ve made some dodgy but edible bread, plus hummus, chicken and ham pie and more muffins. Matt’s had a go at potato farls.

Also: Crafting, farms, trains and play doh with Harry.

Proper choc-chip cookies

The sunflowers have GROWN! The plants I grew from #SunflowerClub seeds are the tallest, as was expected, and now reach waaay over my head. The ones meant for cutting are shorter but with abundant stems – good timing as the soft pink and purple sweetpeas are coming to the end of their life and I need some colourful flowers for cutting.

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Sunflowers are now pretty tall…my head for reference

Speaking of colourful stems – finally, we have a dahlia. It’s a whopper. Interestingly, the tubers that I left in the ground over-winter (presumed dead) have now decided to send up shoots – and the remains of this year’s plants, post-slug-apocalypse, have also regenerated. Is it too late for them?

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At last, a decent dahlia!

I took a bunch of dahlia and sunflower stems home this week to decorate the house in preparation for hosting the Supperagettes. Our all-girl crew, who all happen to work in arts marketing, love grub. I fed them paprika-baked chicken with Matt’s cowboy baked beans, followed by a milk-based cinnamon-spiked vanilla ice. It was yum. It did, however, leave me with three unused egg yolks – and I didn’t want to make yet another pudding when I already had so many leftovers. So I hunted around the web for ideas using up egg yolks and only came across the best choc-chip cookie recipe EVER.

I take no credit, it’s by Claire Ptak and I found it on the Torygraph website. It’s very easy – cream butter and sugar together, add egg yolks and flour, work to a dough and add the chocolate. But two tips make these cookies brilliant: the first is that by using egg yolks rather than whole eggs, you end up with a richer, smoother texture. The second is that you freeze the dough for at least an hour before baking to firm the butter up. This means that the cookies don’t melt the second they meet the oven, meaning that you end up with a thick American-style cookie rather than a crisp flat little thing.

These cookies are the real deal. The dough can be kept in the freezer and baked from frozen, so fresh gooey cookies can be on the table whenever a fix is required.

Proper Chocolate-Chip Cookies

Makes about 16
By Claire Ptak in The Telegraph 

First, line a baking tray(s) with baking parchment – it must be able to fit in the freezer.

Then, using a wooden spoon, cream 250g butter (I use salted) with 200g light muscavado sugar and 75g caster sugar (use 100g if you want them sweeter). Don’t over-whip, just combine so there’s no lumps of butter or sugar.

Next, stir in 3 egg yolks and a splash of vanilla extract, then work in 325g plain flour and 3/4 tsp bicarb of soda to make a firm dough. Finally, work in 250g dark chocolate chips or broken up chocolate. Use the decent stuff, 55% solids minimum.

Use an ice-cream scoop to measure the dough onto the baking parchment, then pop them in the freezer for at least an hour. The ice-cream scoop gives depth to the dough, giving you a good thick cookie. (The shaped dough will sit happily in the freezer for a few weeks, so you could just bake as many as you need and leave the rest for another day.)

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Scoop the dough using an ice-cream scoop

Pre-heat the oven to 180c. The cookies need room to spread so re-arrange them as required, then bake – give them 15 minutes to begin with and pop them back if they’re still pale. Don’t overcook else you’ll end up with a crispy rather than chewy cookie. Cool for 10 minutes and then scoff!

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As big as a hand!

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Ultimate choc-chip cookies