Clandestine Cake Club: the book!

If you read this blog regularly, you'll know that I am a member of the Clandestine Cake Club. My local branch in South Lancashire meets regularly and whilst I don't make every session (less so now that husband works weekday evenings), I try to get to as many sessions as I can.

If you don't know what Clandestine Cake Club is, they are events all over the UK (and the world) that people sign up to and people bake cakes (big ones, not brownies, muffins and cupcakes) to a theme to bring along. The venue is kept secret until the last minute - the clandestine bit - and then you turn up, eat cake and chat with lovely cakey people, over coffee, tea or sometimes something stronger, depending on the venue.

What Clandestine Cake Club does for me is push me out of my baking comfort zone. For years, I continued to make my favourites that I know how to make. Having to bake to a theme has meant I have had to hunt for recipes or design my own and make something different. It's given me more confidence to try something different and it's improved my baking. It's been different and fun at the same time. Oh, and I've got to try some fantastic cakes made by some very talented bakers - and taken some of it home for the family!

There must have been thousands of cakes made for all the different cake club meetings. Now there is a cookbook featuring 120 of the best recipes that members have baked for meetings, written by Lynn Hill, the founder of the Clandestine Cake Club movement. I was kindly sent a copy to review, in advance of its publication today.

The best thing about the book is that I recognised so many names of bloggers I read and tweet with regularly who had all contributed fabulous recipes. Heck, I've even met some of them! Very exciting to know that I know proper published authors in real life. My second favourite thing was the "Cake Wrecks" section with advice on how to rescue your cake disasters - and everyone has them from time to time. The cakes are grouped into eight chapters and there is nothing standard or boring about any of the recipes. They all look fabulous, and range from the incredibly simple to the very involved.

Of course, the best way to try out any cookbook is to try a recipe so that is exactly what we did. Well, actually, Missy Woo did as she'd asked to bake with me. Despite there being an extensive chapter on chocolatey cakes, she chose one of her other favourite flavours and went for Lemony Lemonade Cake. Yes, that's right - lemonade. I think the picture of the cake with sweets stuck on top in the book was the clincher. It had nothing to do with the fact that she'd figured out that she'd get the rest of the sweets from the packet. Oh, no.

It was an easy cake to make and the recipe was easy to follow, although my icing came out thicker than it looked in the book. Ours was a soft spreading consistency whilst the book clearly shows the final result to be more of a pouring consistency. But it was lovely and despite some turf wars from the children over who had the pieces with the sweets and how many they'd each had, we enjoyed every single mouthful and it was gone in 24 hours. Good job I wasn't making it for a meeting!

I would definitely recommend this book if you enjoy baking cakes. Whether you're a Clandestine Cake Clubber or not, the recipes will add a new dimension to your baking and encourage you to try some things that are just that little bit different, and still taste yummy.

Pig - Cooking with a passion for pork by Johnnie Mountain

Johnnie Mountain is the chef and owner of a London restaurant celebrating the versatility of pork called, unsurprisingly, The English Pig. You might also know him as the chef who walked off Great British Menu in a tirade of beeps after he was (in my view) harshly judged by Marcus Wareing. If he's going to write a book, it can only be about pork, can't it?

Johnnie kindly arranged for a copy of his book to be sent to me to give it the once over. Even from a distance, there is no mistaking what this book is about!

The front section is full of useful and interesting information about pork, its different cuts, how to buy and how best to cook each part. I had never really thought too much about the different cuts so I found it very useful.

The pork recipes are divided into 4 chapters  - home favourites, cured, dried, preserved and smoked, spicy and aromatic and slow-cooked. There is an enormous variety of recipes - pretty much something for everyone. Some will be very inexpensive family recipes, others much grander for special occasions. They cater for every occasion, every budget and pretty much every level of cooking ability, whether you have a few minutes or several hours to cook. The layout of the recipes is nice and clear, with lots of lovely photographs which just make you drool.

I always worry that cookery books written by chefs will be, well, too cheffy. I have one book from which I have never cooked a single recipe - all the recipes are over a page long (and we're talking a large A4 book) and the list of ingredients is huge, with some ingredients difficult to find. I was glad to see that this was nothing like that. As you can see, the recipe is short and you can see at a glance how long it should take to make (although I always take those with a pinch of salt). For this recipe, the most unusual ingredient was smoked pancetta which I bought from a supermarket. I had a lot of ingredients already in my store cupboard.

The instructions are clear and simple, and easy to follow. However, if you need some extra help, some of the recipes (including this one, it's just out of shot) have QR codes which if you scan them, take you to videos that show you how to do some of the techniques described in the book. This is a brilliant feature of the book as sometimes, it's just so much easier to watch someone make something and then do it yourself with confidence. In this recipe, the video shows Johnnie moulding and wrapping the meatloaf. Here's my attempt.

The recipes really are mouth-watering. I have a list saved on my computer of things I want to make soon so I will be working my way through them over the coming months. They range from burgers to curries, stir fries to pasta dishes. And perhaps, one day, I'll try curing my own bacon or doing Johnnie's signature dish of slow roasted pork belly.

There's also a section at the end of the book containing recipes for standard accompaniments like mashed potatoes, gnocchi - even sticky red cabbage.

So far, I have cooked two recipes from the book. This is how my spicy pork meatloaf, which is served with a sauce a lot like home made brown sauce, turned out.

I also made a pork chilli which was very hard to determine was made from pork not beef, lifted by adding some dark chocolate near the end. Both dishes were very popular with all the family. Monkey particularly liked the sauce on the meatloaf but I feel this is just his northernness coming out. Missy Woo wasn't wild about the sauce but loved the meatloaf. Both were requested again by the children, which I always take to be a very good sign.

Quite simply, this book is THE definitive guide to cooking pork and turning even the humblest cut (pig's ears anyone?) into something delicious. Popular dishes are adapted for pork as well as the old favourites, plus some new dishes you want to try. If you love pork, or would like to love pork and cook it better, you will love this book.

(I was sent a free copy of this book.) 

My collection

When I was prompted to think about this, I thought I was averse to collections and collecting. This goes back to when I was about 10 or 11 and my mum was friends with a local hairdresser who I sometimes "babysat" for. (I'd be upstairs in their flat, watching her daughter, whilst she was downstairs in her salon.) She was a strange personality, and quite snobbish - which is some going for a hairdresser who lived above her shop. When she gave me this book - I can't remember the occasion - she told me, "I want to see something good out of this." My mind froze as to what I might collect but the book was pretty. I never started a collection. At home, a terraced house lived in by 6 people, there just wasn't the space to collect things endlessly, certainly not of any size. I may have dabbled in stamps at one stage almost as a rite of passage, but I could never say I actually collected anything. Mary would probably have not been best pleased but I'm not sure I cared.