Bramley Seedling apples are one of the most popular apples grown for cooking in the UK. They are an apple that stores well; if kept in the right conditions they should keep for 6 or 7 months. Even so, I will still be using some to make apple sauce, pie fillings and apple butter, processed in jars to stock the pantry. It is just really convenient to have some jars already to go.
If you have some Bramleys you want to store, choose the best unblemished fruit for longer storage and use up any bruised fruit first. It is usually a good idea to wrap fruits separately in tissue or newspaper, but there is no need to do this with Bramleys, simply arrange them so they aren’t touching each other by placing them in shallow drawers or crates. A dark cool frost-free shed, garage or cellar is the ideal place, preferably with an optimum temperature of 6 – 7 degrees C. Make sure to check them every few weeks and weed out any bad apples before they have any influence on the rest.

Here is another easy recipe that uses more of the same apple puree I made for the apple cake recipe posted yesterday. I’m very partial to cake recipes where the butter is either rubbed into the mixture or melted. Even though I have the help of my trusty vintage Kenwood Chef, I for some reason avoid the creaming the butter and sugar together thing whenever I can. Anyhow, this apple gingerbread cake is perfect for serving in the afternoon with a cup of tea and can be rustled together as quick as a flash if someone decides to call round. I have put a thin layer of ginger icing over the top of the cake. Another alternative that I think could work well would be an apple cider syrup poured over the cake after piercing the top with a skewer. Next time perhaps …

APPLE GINGERBREAD

First make the apple puree:
500g (1lb) bramley or other cooking apples, peeled, cored and roughly chopped
125ml (1/4 cup) of cider or water
125ml (1/4 cup) maple syrup or sugar to taste

Place the apples in a pan with the cider or water and bring to a simmer, then cook gently for around 20 minutes, until the apples become a fluffy puree when stirred with a spoon. Add the maple syrup or sugar to taste. Leave to cool. This will make slightly more than you will need, but it leaves a bit extra to serve with the gingerbread.

175 g (6 oz) plain flour
2tsp baking powder
1tsp ground ginger
3 cloves, 5 black peppercorns and the seeds from 4 cardamons, ground fine in a pestle and mortar
85g (3oz) brown sugar
100g (4oz) golden syrup (is this what is called corn syrup in the US?)
85g (3oz) butter
125g (5oz) apple puree
30g (2 lumps) stem ginger, roughly chopped
1 egg, beaten

Preheat the oven to 180C (350F, Mk 4). Grease a 20cm (8in) square baking tin and line with baking paper. Sift the flour, baking powder and spices into a bowl. Place the brown sugar, syrup and butter in a pan and heat gently till everything is melted and combined then leave to cool. Add the syrup mixture and all the remaining ingredients to the flour and spices in the bowl and mix together to combine. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 25 – 30 minutes. Remove from the oven, leave to cool for a short time until firm enough to turn out onto a cooling rack.

To ice the cake:
85g (3oz) icing sugar
1 Tbsp stem ginger syrup
1-2 tsp warm water, if required

Sift the icing sugar and add the syrup. Mix together, adding some water if needed to a spreadable consistency. Pour the icing over the still warm cake and spread evenly with a knife. I like a very fine layer of icing on my cake. If you like a thicker icing then double up on the ingredients and make it less runny so it doesn’t all run off the top of the cake.

On many afternoons recently, I’ve taken an hour or so out, to go for a walk foraging for ingredients. Some days this gives me a headache, as foraging can be a very intense activity and the level of ‘looking’ becomes a bit over the top. It is a brilliant way of discovering things though, when you look that hard you see things you would otherwise miss and find things you didn’t know where there. Foraging is not without its dangers however. I am forever getting my hair tangled in trees, ripping my legs through brambles and wacking my head on low branches when intently focused on something just out of arms reach. It is just too tantalising to go away from the path when you think there might be something to be found ‘off piste’. The other day I came across some windfall wild crab apples that required that I crouch down and crawl on all fours under low lying branches to gather them up to take home. Going forward wasn’t such a problem but backing out with my basket full and a camera round my neck wasn’t quite so easy.
A couple of weeks earlier I’d been to harvest wild damsons, from a place in the forest I’d found the year before so I already had plenty of damsons at home waiting for the jam kettle. One by one, as you clock another crop, you are able to add them to your own personal ordinance survey map of fruits and berries.

I love damsons anyway and the idea of mixing them with the crab apples, both wild fruits together, harvested on my doorstep, seemed a perfect pairing. Damsons can be quite a pain to stone and wild damsons being smaller means there’s even more stones to contend with. Making a fruit cheese is the perfect solution, as both fruits can be cooked with very little in the way of preparation and then be forced through a food mill to leave just the fruit puree and dispense with peel and pips, cores and stones. Though it does require considerable patience I like using a food mill, but last year I found a vintage attachment for my Kenwood Chef on eBay that does the same thing, so now I’m all automated.
Membrillo, made from quince, is probably the most popular fruit cheese, served with the cheese board at the end of a meal, but damsons and crab apples have a particularly appealing Englishness about them. Fruit cheeses are cooked down until they are really thick and will set solid as they cool. This means they can be turned out and served in slices as opposed to dolloped from a spoon. They need to be contained in jars or pots with slightly sloping sides that are wider at the top so they turn out easily. There are small glass jam jars around made for this purpose but I’m really lucky that Martin, in the pottery at Taurus Crafts made me some special hand-thrown stoneware jam pots, inspired by some vintage French ones I own. It is advised that in order to make it easy to turn out the cheese, you lightly oil the ‘moulds’ using ground nut oil or some glycerine if you just happen to have some handy.

CRAB APPLE AND WILD DAMSON CHEESE

Rinse and drain the crab apples. Chop them roughly and place in a pan. Add enough water to just cover the fruit, bring to the boil and simmer gently for 20-30 minutes, till cooked through. Remove from the heat, leave to cool then push through a fine seive or food mill over a bowl to remove the skins, cores and pips and leave a smooth puree.
Rinse and drain the damsons, place in a pan and add just enough water to barely cover the fruit. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes, till cooked through and the fruit has burst. Remove from the heat, leave to cool, then push through a sieve or process with a food mill to remove the skins and stones and leave a smooth damson puree.
I combined 800g (1.75lbs) damson puree with 400g (14oz) apple puree, so two thirds damsons to one third apple, but you can change the ratio to suit yourself and the quantities you have available. To every 600g (1.3lbs) fruit add 450g (1lb) sugar. Place the fruit and sugar in a pan and stir over a low heat until the sugar is completely dissolved. Turn up the heat and bring to the boil then simmer, stirring from time to time to be sure it doesn’t catch and burn on the bottom of the pan. Continue to cook until the mixture thickens considerably and when you pull the spoon across the centre it draws a line. This may take and hour or even longer to achieve and it is best to be patient and keep the heat really low under the pan. Pour the mixture into hot sterilised jars that are lightly oiled, cover with greaseproof waxed circles and seal. Leave till set and cold.

I had a boyfriend once whose sister made him a Christmas cake every year. When it came time to eat the thing, instead of cutting it with a knife into neat pieces or treating it with any kind of ceremony or respect, he used to pick at the cake with his hands, tearing off big untidy lumps. Any remaining cake would sit there for weeks afterwards, all hacked at, looking like a replica of the north face of the Eiger. He quite obviously had never made a Christmas cake himself.
It always surprises me that noone ever mentions just what hard physical work it is making this classic rich fruit cake. The idea that all the tools you need are a wooden spoon and a bowl is true of course but doesn’t take into account the quantity of elbow grease required. Today I made my Christmas cake, thankfully, with the help of my trusty vintage Kenwood Chef but I have in years gone by done the creaming of the butter and sugar, the beating of the eggs and the stirring in of the inordinate amount of dried fruit, all by hand and have been completely knackered by the end of it. As a consequence, seeing anyone eating this traditional cake without due care and attention is in my eyes unacceptable. (However, I don’t want you thinking that was the only reason my relationship with the boyfriend didn’t work out!)
As mentioned in my last post, I’ve decided this year to follow a handwritten recipe found in an old cookery book, with of course, a bit of tweaking. Everyone you ever speak too about Christmas cake has something to say about one ingredient or another that they can’t stand; be it the marzipan, the icing, the dried fruit, etc, etc. I decided that my cake should include everything but the kitchen sink and treacle. Along with the usual currants, sultanas, raisins, chopped candied peel and glace cherries, I added roughly chopped stem ginger pieces and a couple of spoonfuls of the syrup from the ginger jar (because it is fab with just about everything). I didn’t have any ground almonds so I chopped up some marzipan and creamed it in along with the butter and sugar as well. I will publish the recipe here in the next day or so.
As the cake baked for 3 or 4 hours, the house became filled with this amazing smell. A Christmas cake baking is not like anything else and then I realised it was the smell of Christmas as a child. My baking project then became something much more important than simply ‘making a cake’. I’m not really a great traditionalist, always preferring to do things that are new and different, but this made me realise why we bother year after year to do these things. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t help remembering the totally over-the-top childish excitement and fervour that Christmas once created and loved ones, no longer here, who cared enough to make it so.