The Sugar Bar

I’m running out of Fruit & Fibre cereal and much as I’m a true-blue need-cereal-and-caffeine-girl in the mornings, I’m getting a little bored and seeing that I’m no longer rushing to run into campus for long-haul revision sessions or exams, there was more than enough time and energy to whip something different up. Besides, we’d been in the park yesterday evening playing frisbee and volleyball (I missed volleyball so much it was real good to get out). So why not have a little treat. Diva needs to harness sufficient energy to whip those asses ya know.

We were Team Awesome against Team Smelly Crap. I think our score was 19-10? I would gloat and do a little victory dance but just to be on the safe side lest karma comes to bite me in my bum, I’d with great sportsmanship thank them for a good noisy messy game and look forward to the next one. Will have to run into town today to purchase a proper volleyball — we were, chhh!, playing with a football.

As much as I love English grub, I think the Americans beat the English for pancake making. English pancakes, although yummy as hell with lemon and sugar, doesn’t pack quite the ooomph with that thick eggy cakeyness so God bless the Americans for some culinary skill and genius with pancakes (and of course, there are other things but pancakes are more important, like seriously). I’ve 2 packets of poppy seeds sitting in the pantry cupboard and without the permission to make cakes or muffins, I have nothing to use them for. They look so sad just sitting there so I was glad to find this recipe on 101 Cookbooks. Didn’t have all the ingredients so a quick-fix and I was all set for a sleepy breakfast-making.

Pancakes don’t require much effort and you can do it sleepwalking, yawning, comatose, etc. Alright, you know I’m just jesting. Right then, with no further ado I present to you the recipe.

I shall save my post-pancake enthusiasm for my novel writing later. Yes indeed, I’m getting back to work on my moi novel! It’s time. My characters are calling out to me — they were getting a little annoyed with the cramped spaces in the back of my mind — and with so much time on hand (I can’t be cleaning my room all day) it’s the best opportunity to focus on gathering together my wits and putting my all into it.

Recipe has been reduced to yield 3 large fat pancakes and altered a little from the original one on 101 Cookbooks.

Poppy Seed Pancakes
Ingredients

1 cup wholemeal flour
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup milk
1 tbs butter, melted
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tbs sugar
3 tbs poppy seeds
pinch of salt
lemon curd, for serving

Whisk together flour, baking powder and soda, salt and sugar together in a bowl. Make a well. Pour the milk, egg and melted butter into the well and mix in. Mix in the poppy seeds.
Heat and butter a frying pan. Ladle the pancake mix in and spread out using the back of the ladle. Fry about 2min on medium heat or until the wet surface starts to bubble and you can see the sides of the bottom starting to brown and firm up. Flip and cook another 1-2min. Place cooked pancake on a plate that’s being kept warm in the oven.
Continue for the rest of the pancakes.

Thereafter, plate up and serve with lemon curd and lemon slices (for more Englishness).

Another one of my random trial & error moments. The first time I had okonomiyaki was in Tokyo and the okonomiyaki restaurant was quite a random one we found across the coolest popcorn shop ever. Not only did we find loads of stalls in Tokyo Disneyland selling all sorts of unthinkable flavoured popcorn – like curry, bubblegum and coconut! We stumbled upon a shop styled like an old sweet shop but instead of shelves of different types of sweets, it had different flavoured and coloured popcorn decorating the walls and shopwindow all the way to the ceiling. One of the coolest moments of my teenagehood I reckon. It was little me in popcorn heaven.

The okonomiyaki restaurant was an eye-opener as well. I love DIY cooking on the dinner table. So things like steamboat and Korean BBQ excite me very much and I tend to get rather bossy when it comes to cooking it at the table. What I found out at this restaurant was that the person who attends to you doesn’t just serve you your drinks or food, he makes it for you at your table! It was a strange experience but really good because he was so skilled and friendly, explaining to us the best ingredients to put together and so on.

Okonomiyaki is like a Japanese pancake with cabbage. In my opinion, it’s very good for you. Cake + egg + vegetables…yea, sounds exactly it! It’s name basically means ‘as you like it’ pancake so that really works for me. That’s 2 points already. The final scoring point: it’s simple enough to make at home and takes like 15min max including prep time. With that at the back of my head, I was out and about town just checking out some oriental shops. Strange to think I’ve never actually properly visited Birmingham’s Chinatown till this year. But now that I’ve discovered it, although it doesn’t stock the things that I usually want, it’s nice to observe the hustle and bustle the people working there and the way they interact with their regulars. Made a visit to the indoor market as well. Haven’t been back in about a year ever since I started relying a lot on supermarkets and online grocery shopping so it was good to go back and take a stroll about the shops. Kebab shop, city butcher, fresh shell fish and seafood, a chocolate shop, African food shop, Chinese & Asian food shop, shops selling the odd trinket and city souvenir. Had a pretty nice time just looking about. Bought a cabbage from the Chinese shop. The ladies running the shop were so busy chucking vegetables here and there and moving their stock about, I believe they got more annoyed at me looking around and getting in their way than my actual purchase of a humble little cabbage. Was even growled at by a rather large-nosed lady as I was searching the shelf of oriental sauces. Thank goodness whilst I was waiting to pay, a lovely lady struck up a conversation about cabbages with me because oddly enough it was only then that I actually felt like a customer rather than some annoying kid getting in the way of life. Well, you know what I mean! It was fun though, and it made me forget how cold I actually was in my lightweight cardigan. Indeed, I am a true idiot. Who, in their right mind, assumes that it’ll be nice and warm just because the sun is out when it was snowing yesterday?!

Anyway, this was so quick and easy to make. It smelled so good as I was cooking it too. There were times when I was awfully tempted to just pick off the hot pan. Only setback I believe was maybe the dough. Seemed slightly too doughy for me so that will need working on. The next time I make this, I’ll opt for a non-vegetarian one because I’d really like to have an okonomiyaki with more powerful flavours like say with bacon and octopus. Eew, maybe; but to me…oh my life. This makes one pan-sized okonomiyaki which can be sliced into 4 servings.

Ingredients

300g flour
2 eggs
210ml water
1/3 cup sliced cabbage
1/4 cup sliced leek
1/2 a red onion, chopped
1 tbs teriyaki sauce
some sliced beetroot for garnishing

Mix the flour, eggs, water together. Then add the sliced cabbage and give it a good mix so that the batter coats all of the cabbage. Add the sauce. Grease a frying pan and heat it up. When hot enough, add the pancake mixture and spread it out with the back of a wooden spoon till it fills the whole pan, its edges reaching out to the sides of the pan. As it cooks, add the other ingredients on the top. I prefer to add the ingredients but kind of mix it into the pancake as it cooks so that it doesn’t form an extra layer on the uncooked side as this will prevent you from getting an evenly brown side. This cooks about 4min each side on medium heat.

Apart from the cabbage which is an essential ingredient, you can vary your okonomiyaki with other ingredients like seafood, mushroom, seaweed, katsuobushi shavings, chicken, beef slices, bacon, octopus, etc. which would give it a lot more flavour than mine. Just remember to serve with a lot of Japanese mayo and okonomiyaki sauce. I couldn’t source all the ingredients that I would’ve liked so this was really quite a badly prepared dish. To make things less dismal than they already were, I garnished with beetroot strips on a bed of bistro salad leaves.

Think I made fish cakes? Or tiny burgers? Wrong again.

Never heard of Welsh Cakes? Well, if you’re not Welsh, you can still find out more about this teatime delicacy here. Originally cooked over a hot stone or bakestone over a fire instead of baked, they were a good alternative to bread (or when there was a shortage of bread). Not a surprise why it would have been labelled a poor man’s food. The welsh cake is similar to a scone and made pretty much the same way – with your hands. It is just as dense but more cake-like in texture and less crumbly. They are usually not eaten with anything else other than a bit of sugar and butter, warm or as it is, with a comforting cup of tea. What makes it so good is its unique flavour from the spices, rich butter and raisins in it.

It is so easy and quick to make this, although a note beforehand: you’ll have to get your hands dirty and greasy to make these lovely cakes. After they are made, you can wrap them up in a sandwich bag and keep them for a teatime snack whenever or breakfast the next day. The flavours will just keep getting better and stronger the next day.

Welsh cakes are usually quite light in colour. At first I thought I’d burnt mine but I think the dark brown colour of my cakes occurred mainly because I’d used dark brown sugar instead of caster. When you don’t have the right ingredients around, either go out and get some or find a suitable substitute! Don’t give up before the game’s over, is what I say. After these cakes are cooked, roll them about in caster sugar for extreme prettiness and subtle crunch as you bite into them. If you’re on a tight budget like me or am just very unprepared, leaving them as it is still works beautifully.

I’d been meaning to give this recipe a try for ages but had never bothered to get down to it. Very pleased I made them because they’re just so good. This really is about as close to one of the yummiest quick-fixes I’ve ever made. Bless Nigella for that! Recipe has been taken from Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess but I’ve halved it.

Welsh Cakes

Ingredients

250g cup self-raising flour
125g cold unsalted butter, diced
100g sultanas
1/4 tsp ground allspice
touch of cinnamon
75g caster sugar
1 egg, beaten

Right. To get started – sift your flour into a bowl. Add the cubed butter. Wash your hands, dry them. Plunge ‘em next into the bowl and start rubbing the butter into the flour. Raise your hands in an upward-downward motion as you do this to get some air into it. This will finally end up with a nice, light, crumbly mixture. Try not to leave any large pieces of butter because you want to really get it all into the flour to flavour it and get it altogether.
Next, add the spices in. You don’t usually need to add any cinnamon but I think it works beautifully with allspice. 3 good shakes is enough I reckon. Don’t forget the allspice. It’s really what makes welsh cakes welsh cakes. The sugar and sultanas goes in as well. Add the egg to make a soft but not sticky dough. Form a dough ball then press into a disc. If it’s a little too sticky, flour it a tiny bit. Cover with clingfilm and leave for a minimum of 20 minutes.

Put it in the fridge for a minimum of 20min. When the dough is easier to handle, flour your work surface. Get the dough out and flatten it to about 1 1/2cm thick. These cakes will rise slightly as they cook on the pan. Either using a cookie cutter or a round class, cut out the cakes. Preheat a frying pan – unoiled.
When it’s hot enough, place cakes gently onto pan and let cook about 3min each side. Careful not to let them get too brown and burnt or it’ll just ruin the flavours.

Remove from pan, roll about in caster sugar. Serve warm with butter.