Pecan and chocolate tart

My successful pie-baking attempt last weekend left me hungry for more (yes, that will be the last of the food-related wordplay for this blogpost). Funnily enough, being so adverse to anything pastry-related has left me with hardly any cookbooks that contain pie recipes. After a long search I found one in Paul Hollywood's How to Bake, one of those cookbooks I should really use more often. It was called a 'pecan and chocolate tart', but it did require sweet pastry. If I ever find the time I will have to look into the difference between a pie and a tart, because I thought I had all the baking lingo figured out and this should have been a pecan and chocolate pie (similar to the infamous pecan pie I made 5 years ago) according to my semantic weather vane. But let's not worry about that now!
Funnily enough, the sweet pastry (or 'pate sucree') recipe Paul Hollywood uses is different from the one Yvette used. I thought this would be one of those 'baking basics' that are universally the same, but apparently you can give this your own twist. Still finding myself somewhat in a pastry apprenticeship, I decided to follow Paul on this one.

Ingredients
For the sweet pastry:
180 g flour
120 g cold butter, cubed
55 g sugar
1 egg

For the filling:
80 g dark chocolate, in pieces
45 g butter, cubed
160 g sugar
235 g golden syrup
3 eggs
235 g chopped pecan nuts (or 220 g in my case, as they come in 110 g packages)

As always, first make the pastry. Combine the flour and sugar and rub in the butter with your fingers until you reach the magical 'fine breadcrumbs' stage. Try to work quickly to keep the butter as cold as possible. Add the egg, combine into a dough, and form into a ball. Wrap in clingfilm and leave to chill in the fridge for about 2 hours. Take it out of the fridge and leave for at least 15 minutes.

Grease your loose-bottomed tart tin. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface until it is big enough to fill the tin. Transfer to the tin and push it neatly into the edges, not stretching or pulling the dough (that is what causes the shrinkage). Trim off the edges and put back in the fridge while you make the filling.

For the filling, put the butter and chocolate to melt au-bain-marie, stirring to an even mixture. Set aside to cool.
Next, combine the syrup and sugar in a pan, stirring all the while, until it comes to a boil. Set aside to cool, but make sure it is still runny.
Beat the eggs together, add the melted chocolate/butter mixture and whisk until smooth. Now for the difficult part; while you keep whisking, pour in the hot syrup mixture in a thin trickle until it is fully incorporated. If you're smart, you let your KitchenAid do the whisking, or have someone else pour in the syrup. If you're unprepared like me, you hold the mixer in your left hand while your right arm cramps up from pouring in the syrupy mixture (or the other way around, if you prefer).
When the syrup is all incorporated, stir in the chopped pecans and set aside to cool.

Heat your oven to 180 C. Pour the mixture into your pastry case. If you're smart, pour the mixture in the case while it is already in the oven, as it fills all the way to the top and transferring the tin without spilling the mixture is a challenge. Bake for about 40 minutes or until the mixture is set and the pastry is golden (for me, this took more like 55 minutes). Leave to cool completely.

Tart pre-bake (and pre-transfer to the oven)

Funnily enough, on this particular pie/tart concoction, the filling was more difficult to make than the pastry. The pastry actually did everything I wanted it to do. And it came out sweet and crumbly, what we would call 'bros' in Dutch; one of those words that has no direct English translation.

Pretty pie with pretty pastry

Actually, the filling was a bit of a let-down. It is rich in pecan and chocolate flavour, but the golden syrup comes through too strongly for my taste. It makes the whole tart a bit caramelly and clingy. This may well be the way a pecan pie (tart) is supposed to taste, but it is not one of my favourite tastes. I will have to look into more fresh and fruity pies, perhaps with raspberries or more lemony flavours, as this somehow feels autumny to me.
But apart from the syrup overdose, this is yet another notch on my pastry-making and pie-baking belt! I may even secretly be getting the hang of this...

Camp NaNoWriMo

November has traditionally been NaNoWriMo month. Writing 50,000 words in a crazy frenzy without looking back, together with thousands of others from around the world. However, November is usually not a great novelling month for me. November is usually not that great of a month for me, period.
Luckily, the great people at NaNoWriMo also offer 'camp NaNoWriMo', which takes place in April. April is a good month. In April, you can actually see the sun for more than three hours a day, and there are birds and flowers and lambs all kinds of happy things. If you're going to sit down and write for 2-3 hours every day, you need happy things around you to keep you going.
So, I just signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo. Didn't think that would happen, but it did.
The great thing about Camp is that the rules are a little less strict (in the NaNo universe); you can write whatever you want, be it a novel, short story, film script, non-fiction, poetry, revision of something you've already written or 'other'. I'm not sure what the 'other' could be, but I'll be happy to look into that during one of my procrastination moments in April. Also, you can set your own goal. In November it's always 50,000 words, but here you can set anything from 30 to 999,999. And that number can be words, but also lines, hours spent, or pages. So one can feel done and accomplished after writing 30 lines of poetry, or one can attempt 999,999 words (999,999 hours is sadly not possible in the timeframe, as that would equal 114 years).
I have now set my goal to 'novel'  and '20,000 words'. I'm not really sure what I will be writing; my successful 2015 novel still needs its second part, but maybe I'll go for something completely different. Writing starts the first of April (Easter Sunday, great timing) so I still have plenty of time to come up with a plan. And if past experience tells me anything, I will probably change my mind 10 times on the 31th of March alone.
The main thing is that I signed up. I will be doing this, and we'll see how far I get!

Apple Pie according to Yvette

I've written about lots of apple pies and apple cakes here; apples are my favourite fruit. The latter are the easier ones; I am more of a cake-baker than a pie-baker. Put even stronger; I always feel like channelling Gargamel when talking about pies; I hate pastry. I've only ever made one pie in the history of this blog, back in 2013: a pecan pie. There is a reason for this.
Pastry is horrible to make. It is 'just' flour, butter, some kind of liquid, rubbed together and chilled, then rolled out and put into a case. Simplicity is very much not bliss. Simplicity can go wrong every step of the way. I've had my pastry break, stick, shrink, become chewy or simply reduced to crumbs. In a way, I'd already decided never to try and make it again. But then I read this article about 'flow'; that productive state of mind in which you are completely zen. People generally only achieve flow when they're at work, but you can get into that state with every task that is taxing but not too difficult in an area you are somewhat accomplished in. In my case; baking. More specifically; baking with pastry. So I decided to give it another go.

I picked a recipe from my new-found favourite Yvette van Boven. It is an apple pie recipe, according to her 'the way it should be'. Indeed, it is a far cry from the classic Dutch apple pie I like to make for my birthday (which doesn't count as a 'true' pie, as the dough is completely different). It contains blackberries and ginger, apparently some of Yvette's favourites, which can of course be left out. As this was my first try, I made it exactly the way it was supposed to be.

Ingredients
For the pate sucree/sweet pastry:
500 g flour
250 g cold butter in small cubes
6 tablespoons icing sugar
salt
2 eggs, beaten
ice cold water

For the filling:
about 1,5 kg apples in small chunks
150 g blackberries
a thumb of ginger, peeled and diced
175 g sugar
juice of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1 teaspoon of ground ginger
1 tablespoon of flour

Finally:
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon ground ginger

First make the pastry. You can do this in a food processor, but I like to work by hand. Put the flour, sugar and salt in a bowl. Add the butter and rub together until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the eggs and knead quickly into a ball. If the dough is too dry, add a few drops of water (or milk) to make it come together. Shape into a ball, wrap it clingfilm, and put in the fridge for half an hour to an hour. Take it out, and leave to rest for about 15 minutes.

Then make the filling, by combining all ingredients except the flour into a bowl. Let this sit for about 20 minutes, then drain off the excess liquid. Finally, add the flour and combine.

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Grease a pie tin; I used a 'normal' tin of 24 cm in diameter.
Now for the difficult bit: divide the pastry into three quarters for the case, and one quarter for the 'lid'. Roll out the big part onto a lightly floured surface, until it is large enough to cover the bottom and sides of your tin. Put it in the tin, leave the edges hanging over the side.
Fill the pastry case with the fruit filling. Divide the 3 tablespoons of butter over the top.
Roll out the pastry for the lid, cut into strips, and weave a nice basket shaped lid. Make sure there are enough holes in the lid for the excess liquid in the fruit to evaporate. Push the sides together in any shape you like (or can manage), so the bits hanging over the edge make a nice side to the lid.
Brush the milk on the top of the pastry. Sprinkle the sugar and ground ginger on top.
Turn the oven down to 180 C and bake for 1,5 hours.

Right, that is the theory. How did this work out in practise? Let's have a look:

Pretty apple pie

Not too bad. I would even dare to say that my cake looks quite a bit like the one in the picture (I was in no mood to shape strips of pastry in any kind of lattice work, so it looks a bit like a basket-shape, but upon closer inspection it is really a lazy piece of work).

However, when cutting into it, the pie turned into somewhat a bloody mess:

Pretty bloody pie

Ah, not all liquid had been properly drained off. The bottom of the pie was somewhat undercooked from all the moisture still in the filling. However, the pastry on the side was flaky and crumbly, a bit on the dry side, but all in all way better than I'd expected. Also, the moisture was trapped inside the pastry, meaning the case hadn't broken or shrunk. No patch up jobs needed to keep the filling on the inside.
The filling itself was moist, sweet, with a spicy heat from the ginger, with the blackberries adding another layer. I agree with Yvette that it is a great combination of flavours, but I wouldn't call it the best ever. However, it leaves lots of room for variation. And with this new positive pastry experience under my belt, there may be more pie baking in my future!

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Not tying myself up in silly rules like 'I can only read novels I haven't read before', like I did in my 2015 book challenge, gives me the peace of mind to reread novels I loved when I'm in between reading new things. When I finished The Sense of an Ending, I wasn't ready to dive into another new novel just yet. Some novels tend to stick in my mind, leaving no room for a new novel to take up enough space to really get into it. If I then do start reading a new novel, I unavoidably get lost somewhere around page 50 because I wasn't paying enough attention in the beginning, which can ruin an entire book for me.
So, rereads are a Good Thing. In this case, I wanted something short, but not too light; just a couple of days worth of reading before I could dive into the next novel on my list (The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, in case you're wondering). After digging around in my bookcases I came up with Neil Gaiman's last proper novel, which I was sure I'd written something about on this blog, but which turns out to be only a passing mention in my 'holiday reads' of 2013. Funny, how you can remember something as having a profound impact on you, but then cannot find any evidence of said impact when looking back.
Anyway, the novel in question is The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It is about a young boy in England, about forty years ago, who has a falling in with magic and otherworldly stuff and doesn't come out all that well. The story is told through the same character (now an adult), remembering things as he sits next to the ocean of the title. This framework sets us at some distance from the story, which works very well in this case, because we the readers at some point realise we know something the protagonist doesn't (I won't spoil the ending for you). However, the 'and then this happened, and then that happened, and then I said...' structure isn't the easiest read, and upon rereading I felt further removed from the action and emotional impact on the main character than I did on the first read. Maybe because I already knew what was going to happen, breaking the suspense I felt the first time around.
The great thing about Neil Gaiman novels, though, is that they are not starry-eyed, happy ending, the-hero-saves-the-day kinds of novels. His style is magic realism, and the magic and the realism are present in equal proportions. People do stupid things. People do not say important things because of legitimate reasons (and not as a plot device). People hurt one another and do not make up, or forgive, or forget. People are generally as real as they can be. The magic, on the other hand, is also as real as it can be. It is accepted as something that simply exists; not everything is logical, or explained, or analysed. Magical things happen, with a semblance of realism, and life goes on. They can be dark things, dark magic, performed not only by the 'evil characters' but also by the 'good guys'. This is also a fact of life; good guys do not only do good things. And magic cannot save everything. It is not the deus ex machina solution found in so many fantasy novels, but a means to an end that sometimes fails.
In short, you can disappear into a Neil Gaiman novel, finding yourself in a world that is connected to our own, but with some elements added that you can simply take for granted, without having to know every little thing about them. And this was exactly what I needed, going from one novel to another. Nice as this is, it somehow feels as if this isn't enough appreciation for a book I read with such anticipation and joy the first time around. Maybe the Julian Barnes novel was still roving around in my mind, or maybe knowing the ending somehow takes away the biggest emotional tension. In which case I envy all who haven't read it yet, as they will still have that experience upon the first read. As I will have with many other books to come.

The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending. Wow. Talk about a proper novel.
As I wrote in my previous post, I'd already seen the film about a year ago, which made me want to read the novel (also, it is a Man Booker winner). The story is about this old guy doddering through life, remembering his school days and a girlfriend he had during uni, while have an weirdly warm platonic relationship with his ex-wife and basically being ignored by his very pregnant daughter. During the course of the film, we discover that his memories aren't exactly honest, but you never find out whether he censured himself intentionally, or whether he was just forgetful.

The novel, on which the film is of course based, so I've been watching/reading the wrong way around, has basically the same plot, with the exception that it is written in chronological order (and his daughter has a husband and two kids, instead of doing the pregnant-soon-to-be-single-mom thing). The first part is about his school days, uni days, and the rest of his life until retirement, and the second part takes place during his old age, as he comes to terms with things. The fun thing about watching the film first is that you have a strong mental image of the characters; in my mind, the main character still was Jim Broadbent, talking in that high, whiny voice (I am a great fan of Jim Broadbent, by the way). The not-so-fun thing is that you already know the plot twist at the end. Although it still hit me, strangely. Maybe because the protagonist finally realises how much he has been deceiving himself ("You don't get it, but then you never did", as his former girlfriend keeps telling him), and how much his world has come undone around him, at which point the novel is suddenly all over and it feels like the blow to the head he must have felt coming to that realisation. Still having a reaction to a surprise ending you already know must be one of the characteristics of good literature.
Because that is what this novel is; proper literature. It is a novel you can pull out each year, read again, and still find new bits in it. I've taken pictures of several paragraphs, as I do with all great texts I want to remember later on. In these paragraphs, hidden between his other thoughts and actions, the main character muses on life, on the influence of the past on who we are, on memories, on character. All bits you can reread and spend the rest of the evening thinking about, or discussing with friends. A novel that makes you think, makes you reevaluate life, in only 163 pages.
Also, it isn't really about the plot, or about the ending. It is about a guy, thinking about life. Ironically, of course, the one thing he doesn't think about is himself, and the influence he has on other people (unless he tries to get them to do something for him). Which is exactly what he should be thinking about, but being the classic literary fool, he doesn't realise until it is too late. Too caught up in his own greatness, his own self image. He is a classic unreliable narrator, and having seen the film (in which you see other characters' reactions to him close up) I was prepared for this, but still you are swept along in his way of thinking, until somehow something doesn't quite fit, and you can see the strands of his stories come undone before he realises.
Read this novel, is all I can say. It will stay with you for a long time.

The English Patient

I can remember when the film The English Patient came out. Somehow, the film posters were everywhere. I must have been about 11, looking at the release date, but it feels more like I was 16 or 17. It went on to swipe almost every Oscar there was in the 1997 Academy Awards, but somehow, I never watched it. It felt too sappy romantic, with those typical sepia tones and the 'star-crossed lovers' lay-out of the poster. Not my cup of tea, at the time (again, I'm thinking of the 16-17 year old me. The 11 year old me went to Titanic with all the girls in her class and tried to be emotionally involved to fit in with the group, all the while wondering why anyone would bother spending 3 hours watching this).
Anyway, fast forward to 2018, the day I was scrolling through the past list of Man Booker Prize winners and discovered The English Patient (the novel) was on it. This came from even earlier, 1992, when I was just 7 and way too young to know anything about any of this. But, since reading as many Man Booker Prize winning novels as possible is one of my life goals, I decided this would be the perfect chance to redeem this lovey-dovey story. For that is still what I thought it was. I had absolutely no idea what this novel was about, except that there is an English patient in WWII, which made me think of the hospital scenes in Atonement. As I was about to discover, this novel was nothing like Ian McEwan's work, it was unlike anything I'd ever read before.
From the first page, the poetical language, the beautiful imagery, and the interesting style got a hold of me. This is a novel that challenges its reader. In the first part, nobody has a name. There is a woman, and a man, and then another man, but you're never sure whose point of view you're in, or when there is dialogue going on (there are no quotation marks around direct speech). Then an extra character is added, and you have the complete mix of the just four characters the novel comprises: the English patient, Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip. So much to be said, of so few people.
They live together in this desolate Italian villa, which used to be a hospital for the Allied forces, but before that was used as a headquarters by the Germans. Of course, I knew they had a WWII in Italy, but you never realise what was actually going on there. Same for the deserts of North Africa, where the story takes us in flashbacks; you somehow never realise that was all part of it because most of the stories you read are about the Western front; life in Britain, France, The Netherlands, Germany itself. I've read children's books about the war in the Dutch Indies, and several novels about the war in Asia (The Narrow Road to the Deep North being the one I will never ever forget (and another Man Booker Prize winner)), but none about Italy, or the African campaigns. As this novel taught me, it was just as big of a mess over there.
Anyway, I won't say too much about the plot, partly because it's not all that straightforward (lots of flashbacks, many parts where you're unsure whether someone is talking, and if so, who, unexpected time jumps, etc). There is a sense of mystery about all the characters, and we do not really get to know any of them, even though the novel wants us to think we do. Some of them turn out to be actual historical figures, although Michael Ondaatje fictionalised the events (which some people didn't entirely get, if the Wikipedia page is to be believed). But  it's not about these people. It's about the language of the novel, the way it flows, the way in paints images, the poetry of it.
And that is also the weak point. I loved the first part. Maybe because it was new, maybe because I was getting into the novel, but I really lost myself in the words and the ideas the novel wanted to portray. I thought; this is going to be one of those novels I finish in a weekend and think about for a month afterwards. But then it sagged. Somehow, the language was still beautiful, but it didn't grab me anymore. Maybe because I was used to it, maybe because the middle part of a novel is always the lesser bit (one hopes, a disappointing ending is the worst), but for a couple of weeks in the middle, I couldn't get through. Then the story got up to speed again, and I finished the last 50 pages in a mad reading rush usually accompanying better novels.
In the end, it is a deserved Man Booker winner. Not only because it let me experience a piece of the past I was vaguely aware of, but mostly because of the writing style and the characters. But it was not all that I had hoped when I started on that first chapter. Also, I am now very curious to see what they did with it in the film, as such a non-linear story must be hard to capture on film. Somehow, it feels like it can only disappoint, especially if it is the romantic drama my 16 year old self thought it to be.
Interestingly, I am now experiencing the exact opposite: I have already seen the film version of The Sense of an Ending, and am now reading the novel by Julian Barnes (another Man Booker Prize winner). Here, the novel is straightforward, while the film includes interesting flashbacks and time jumps. So far, the novel greatly outshines the film. I have a sneaky suspicion The English Patient will too.

Uncommon Type

Over the past few weeks, I've discovered that most people have a typical Tom Hanks reference character. Even if they sometimes don't know the name of said character, when asked, they will say "Captain Philips", "The one from The Green Mile", "That guy on the island talking to a volley ball", "The guy from Polar Express" or simply "You've got mail" or "Catch me if you can". One even mentioned Woody from Toy Story. My personal reference character is Forrest Gump, although Saving Private Ryan is never far from my mind (I try actively not to think about that film at least once a week).
Anyway, the point is; Tom Hanks has played some wildly different characters over the years. You may think he is 'the rom-com guy' due to You've got mail and Sleepless in Seattle, but you can't exactly call Saving Private Ryan a rom-commy movie. He is pretty versatile in what he does, making very different characters come to life, and somehow most roles tend to stick in someones mind (although nobody mentioned Robert Langdon from the Dan Brown film adaptations, which I quietly thought was a good thing). That is quite a gift, compared to many type-casts who only know how to play 'the love interest' or 'the villain' or 'the ex-CIA/FBI agent returning for one last rogue operation'. (His female counterpart in this, to me, is Meryl Streep).

So why am I going on about the various acting jobs of Tom Hanks, while this post is clearly labelled as being about 'books' and 'reading'? Well, mr Hanks turns out to be even more versatile than I thought, as apart from acting in, writing, and producing films, he has also written a book. Not a novel, but a collection of short stories entitled Uncommon Type. Wikipedia tells us that as early as November 2014, "Hanks said he would publish a collection of short stories based on his typewriter collection". Just let that sink in: the man has a typewriter collection, which he writes short stories about, which he says he will publish, and three years later he actually does publish a short story collection about his typewriter collection. I mean, it is a combination of facts one would never expect to find with one person. This sentence alone deserves its own film!
Anyway, I put the book on my wishlist for my birthday, got it, and then it spent about three months sitting on a shelf, because it's a short story collection about typewriters by Tom Hanks; who would waste their time on that? But the reviews were pretty positive, and I was curious to find whether this really was only published because the author is famous so it will inevitably sell well, so I decided to make it my second read of 2018. If anything, it would fulfil my 'more short story collections' goal of 2018.

But it did so much more than that. Mr Hanks knows how to write. Seriously.

Apart from the first and last story, all stories are stand-alone; they differ in time, location, main character, and above all; plot. The first is from about 1910, if memory serves, and the last is set some time in the near future. The main characters range from a billionaire wanting to travel to the past via a Bulgarian immigrant sneaking into the US to a small-town actress trying her luck in New York City. Apart from one film script, the stories are all of the conventional type: 10-50 pages, prose with a nice twist towards the end (there are some newspaper articley bits in there, which I did not like and did not read, so I am disregarding those). The twists are not of Roald Dahl's bitter or cynical quality; nevertheless, they are good. Some of these stories made me put the book aside for a couple of minutes just to think about them. Some made me speed up my reading just to know for sure the main character would end up alright. Some were forgettable, not downright boring but with less well-written characters or themes.
Because it is the characters that make these stories. The plots are not surprising or unique in any way, there are too many stories on the acting/filming industry and others also includes American Dreamy subject matter that we have all seen before (again; for great short stories, check out Roald Dahl). But the characters are great. I really felt I got to know them in the few short pages I spent time with them. They were distinct, well-written and had a lot of character depth and development. This should not be surprising from an actor who has made his living being so many different people himself (ah, and so the blog post comes full circle), but it is still nice to have.

So what about these typewriters? Mr Hanks himself said he would write "short stories based on his typewriter collection". Well, the one combining element in all stories is that they each feature a typewriter. Not in a forced way; in some stories the typewriter is simply mentioned as part of the inventory of a room; in some stories one of the characters doodles around with one while waiting for other things to happen; but in some, the typewriter is important and in one (These are the meditations of my heart) it actually is the main plot element. In almost all stories, we get the make, colour, shape and age of the typewriter. The page preceding each short story shows a picture of the typewriter used in that story, probably all typewriters from Mr Hanks' personal collection. All, except for the last story. That does not feature a typewriter, but a bowling ball. The picture shows an object (could be typewriter, could be bowling ball) in protective casing. Now I wouldn't put it beyond Tom Hanks to also have a collection of bowling balls, and of at this moment writing a short story collection based on it. We will see in a couple of years... In the meantime, this will do just fine, even for those without a fascination for typewriters...

Lemon and poppyseed cake: the sequel

So last week I made this very light lemon and poppy seed cake from a recipe by Yvette van Boven, and although it was great and lovely and light, it was a bit too much of a hassle for me to fit this into a quick Saturday afternoon bake. So I decided to try again, this time using a simple cake which I've been baking my entire childhood (the English would call it a pound cake), which requires only one bowl, a simple set of instructions, and no splitting of eggs. Also, no glazing. Let's see if this works just as well.

Ingredients
200 g butter
200 g sugar
200 g self-raising flour
2-3 eggs (combined weight should be about 200 g)
2 tablespoons poppy seeds
juice and peel of one lemon

Preheat the oven to 180 C and grease and line a baking tin. I used a loaf tin for this one.
Mix the butter and sugar together until creamy. Add the flour, poppy seeds, lemon juice and peel.  Finally, add the eggs one at a time, and keep whisking for about 4-5 minutes after the last egg has been added to add as much air as possible (I made this cake in the KitchenAid, so no sore arms from too much whisking).
Pour the mixture in the baking tin and bake for about 40-45 minutes. Leave to cool.
If you want, you can add a glaze, but my teeth were still recovering from the last cake, so I didn't. We just had a slice, still-warm from the oven, with our morning tea.

So, the verdict. Is this easy, run-off-the-mill cake just as good as Yvette's fancy one?
Sadly, or gladly, depending on your point of view, it isn't. It's a pretty nice cake, but it is quite heavy and stodgy compared to the 'light' professional one. The texture really is much denser. The lemon doesn't come through quite as well in this cake, it tastes more buttery. All in all, this makes you feel as if you won't have to eat anything for the rest of the day, while the other cake somehow floats away to an airy memory.
Funny, isn't it, how using almost exactly the same ingredients, just a few simple differences in the method leaves you with two so wildly different cakes? The lack of airiness is all due to the lack of separately beaten egg whites, of course, and it is good to know that that makes so much of a difference. And Yvette's cake would have been even lighter if I'd followed her recipe and used 4 egg whites instead of 2.
Anyway, moral of the story is; more elbow grease and bowls to wash also gives you a better cake. And as it turns out, Yvette also has a recipe for a pound cake, one that does involve two bowls and egg splitting and separately beaten egg whites, but is otherwise almost as simple as the one above. This, combined with the lemon juice and poppy seeds, may well be the holy grail of lemon and poppy seed cakes; stay tuned!

Very light lemon and poppy seed cake

My previous recipe by Yvette van Boven was a hit, so I decided to try another one this weekend. I made a lemon and poppy seed cake a long, looong time ago (turns out it was 2012... can you believe it?), so it was high time I made another! The poppy seeds took some time to get a hold of, but when those were in my possession, I was ready for the 'very light' lemon and poppy seed cake that Yvette describes. Technically the recipe isn't her own, as she describes a friend buying a lemon and poppy seed cake bought in London and recreated from the ingredients list. Whichever way she came by it, I decided to try it out.
Usually I try to follow new recipes to the letter, but this time I had some reservations against that. Firstly, the recipe required 6 eggs; 2 whole and 4 egg whites. I have nothing against baking with eggs, but 6 felt a bit too extravagant for 'just a cake' (must be my Dutch nature playing up). So I brought that down to 2 whole eggs and 2 egg whites. Secondly, if you follow this recipe properly, you need 4 bowls. I don't know how large your kitchen is, but I do not have 4 mixing bowls. Thirdly, the glazing required 250 grams of icing sugar, which is sweet enough to reduce your teeth to rotting black stumps. So I reduced that to more normal proportions. And finally, to whisk egg whites, you need a very clean bowl and very clean mixer. According to the recipe, I had to mix all the other ingredients first, then clean the whisks, and then whisk the egg whites. What with all the bowls and organisation going on already, this felt like too much hassle. So I whisked the egg whites before doing anything else, thus probably violating about 3 Main Baking Laws, but making my own life a little easier.
So, that brings me to the actual story:

Ingredients:
200 g butter, at room temperature
200 g white muscavado sugar
2 whole eggs
peel and juice of 2 lemons
2 tablespoons poppy seed
200 g flour
5 g baking powder
2 (or 4) egg whites

For the glazing:
juice of one lemon
120 (or 250) g icing sugar

You can make this cake in either a loaf tin or a round tin. I used a round tin, to get a more 'cakey' feeling, and because this gives you bigger slices to serve to friends (I always try to bake when I know people will be visiting, so I won't have to eat too much cake). Anyway, grease the tin and line with baking parchment. Preheat your oven to 170 C.
I started by mixing the egg whites together with a pinch of salt until firm enough for the bowl to be held upside down. Officially, this step is after the adding of the dry ingredients to the wet.
Mix the butter and sugar until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well in between. Add the lemon peel, juice and poppy seeds and mix well.
Sift the flour and baking powder together over the mixture, and spoon through until the mixture is smooth.
Add the whisked egg whites; first add one spoonful and incorporate this well, then add the rest and stir until combined. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for about 30 minutes.

This cake has a relatively high sugar content, so it will brown quickly. Do not be fooled into thinking it is more baked than it is; an underbaked cake will collapse (as mine did). Also, it will stick to the tin, so make sure to grease the tin really really well.

When your cake is done, take it out of the oven and let it cool for a couple of minutes before turning it out.

To make the glazing, simply mix the lemon juice and icing sugar until you have a runny consistency. Pour over the (slightly cooled) cake and leave to harden.

Not an optical illusion: that is quite a dip in the middle.

Now, as I mentioned, my cake had collapsed slightly in the middle. This meant that all the glazing pooled into the dip in the middle, making the first small bites from the middle very very lemony. Also, the 'crust' stuck to the tin when I took it out, so bits of the 'crust' were lost as trimmings

Pretty, pretty crumb structure!

But the texture of the cake came out perfect. Not just light, as the recipe says, but almost fluffy. This may well be one of the best cakes I've ever made, crumb structure wise. Even Mary Berry may have been impressed. The poppy seed taste came out well, although the lemon is a bit too strong in comparison. I will use less lemon juice in the glazing in the future, as it takes away from the actual cake taste. But otherwise, it was pretty close to perfect, and I won't wait another 6 years before making another lemon and poppy seed cake.

Lincoln in the bardo

So, the first novel of 2018 is a fact! Although, maybe it wasn't really a novel... I decided to keep up with the Man Booker winners and get started on Lincoln in the Bardo, the 2017 Man Booker winner and the second American novel in a row to do so. The first one, The Sellout, was a huge disappointment, and as this novel had beaten Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (which should have won, really), it had to be pretty good to keep me happy.
At first glance, it was mostly... weird. I'd been somewhat prepared to that due to a review I'd read, but still, it took me a while to 'get' it. The novel starts with someone recounting a pretty silly story, until other voices seem to burst into the conversation, and then the chapter is suddenly finished. The next chapter consists of snippets of (real?) historical sources, all recounting something about Abraham Lincoln. Which in no way has any relation with chapter one. Then more 'talk' from the characters introduced in chapter one, and then more historical sources. Quite puzzeling. And it could have been quite annoying, so much so that I might have put the thing down never to pick it up again, but there is something that kept me reading, something in the style of writing or the events described (everything is described by the characters, it is all dialogue, or rather intertwined monologues).
And as I got into it, a picture started to emerge. I won't give too much away, for the discovery of what is going on is half the joy of reading. But all these characters were so confusing because they didn't realise the position they were in, or were in denial of it. They were unreliable narrators, but unintentionally. And the historical sources were there to give some sort of a frame for the other events, ordered in such a way that they provide the necessary background information for the rest of the story. These 'historical' (I'm still not sure whether these were real sources) texts were pretty reliable, apart from the bit where they all gave Abraham Lincoln different coloured eyes.
The book has over a hundred chapters, but somehow I flew through them, feeling dazed and confused when it was all over. The pacing is somewhat off; the first chapters feel very slow and uneventful, and then suddenly everything is in motion and happening at the same time. The plot is equally unbalanced. Not in an annoying way, but it makes you wonder whether it couldn't have been done differently. There are some truly funny bits, and also some moving bits, with one slightly disturbing image that keeps coming back. The characters are flat as pancakes, but they cannot help themselves, there being so many and them only able to describe events and their own emotions. The style, the combination of monologue and historical sources, and the choice of words and language, is the main selling point.
So the overall verdict? Way, way better than The Sellout. A deserved winner over Exit West? No way. But as an experiment in style and subject matter, it is truly well done. It gives me similar feelings as The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton; a lot of preparatory work went into the 'framework' of that novel as well, and sometimes the story collapses under all that structure. This novel holds up on its own, mostly due to the author's writing style. Apparently, George Saunders said he's never written a novel, and Lincoln in the Bardo shouldn't be considered his first, as it is not a novel at all. I somewhat agree with him, but I also hope he will put his considerable talents towards actually writing a novel soon. That may, in years where there are no other favourite authors to compete, be Man Booker worthy.

Healthy fruitcake

So one of my favourite new baking-recipe sources is Yvette van Boven. If you aren't Dutch you've probably never heard of her, but she is a great and funny and down-to-earth baker/cook. I bought her baking cookbook Home Baked with the book coupons I got for my birthday.

Yvette van Boven combines classic Dutch recipes with Irish inspiration, as she grew up in Ireland. Since my baking style is also a mix of Dutch and English, influenced by years of watching The Great British Bake-Off, this suits me perfectly. Today, I didn't really know what I wanted to bake, so I let my boyfriend pick out something easy that didn't involve pie-crusts (my arch nemesis). His suggestion: almond-fruitcake.

Now Yvette also likes to include recipes that are gluten or 'fast sugar' free, and this is one of those recipes. As such, it includes almond flour, which turns out to be one of the most expensive things ever. You could probably get away with using wheat (or any other kind of) flour, but we shall see what the almonds add to the taste when the cake gets out of the oven.

Ingredients:

250 g almond flour (or wheat, probably)

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 apple or pear, cored and diced

100 g dried apricots (I cut these into smaller pieces too)

100 g dried prunes (cut, althoug the recipe doesn't tell you to)

50 g walnuts

4 eggs

1 teaspoon of honey

about 75 ml water

Grease a loaf tin with olive oil (if you want to be all vegan about it) or butter, line with baking parchment. Preheat your oven to 170 C (fun fact: Yvette also wants you to get an oven thermometer, so I now know exactly how hot my oven is. Turns out it is a lot cooler than it thinks it is).

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Mix the fruits and nuts in another bowl, and combine with the dry ingredients. Then, lightly whisk the eggs together with the honey and add that to the dry mixture.

Fruity cake filling mixture

Now at this point Yvette tells me to 'add water until the mixture becomes creamy. This may be 50 ml, this may be 75'. However, my mixture was already pretty creamy. I checkt again, and turns out my apricots and prunes weren't actually the dried-dried fruits she mentioned, but just semi-dried and stuck in a package. So I didn't add any water. But if you have proper dried fruits, I'd add some water.

Pour the mixture into the prepared caketin and bake for about 40-50 minutes.

Now the only raising agents in this cake are the bicarbonate and the four eggs (lightly whisked) while there is a lot of heavy fruit in there. I was very curious to see whether this would come out looking anything like a cake, or more a stodgy lump. Luckily, I need not have worried.

Fruity fruitcake

It was a proper cake, although not really the lightest cake I've ever eaten. Chock full of fruits and nuts, with sweetness from the cinnamon and honey coming through, while ate the same time feeling very very healthy. Not much of the almond flavour coming through, although the texture is a bit different than with a wheat flour cake. Still, I do think wheat flour would work.

The recipe picker declared this 'the best cake he'd ever eaten', so all was well in that regard.

Because I used so many large 'wet' fruits, the cake does somewhat fall apart when you slice it. If I'd known this beforehand, I would have cut the fruit in smaller pieces. So; dried fruits are okay to be a bit on the large size, fresh fruit should be cut. But that is mostly a logistical issue; flavour wise, it is great!

Books of 2017

Another year in books has flown by. After my book challenge in 2015, I've been keeping lists of all the books I read through 2016 and this year. As in previous years, I'm always surprised to find which books I read not even half a year ago; amazing how quickly you forget when it was that you read something. On the other hand, some novels I feel like I've just finished them while that turns out to have been more than a year ago.
No reading goals, just keeping up the numbers. I read 23 books this year, which is 2 up from last year. Mainly, I think, because I didn't tackle any big literary reads (like Anna Karenina last year) and there were some rereads, which are always faster. As always, some books have already been discussed at length, while others may have their first mention on this blog right below.

The complete list for 2017:

1 The High Mountains of Portugal
2 The Sellout
3 Juliet, naked
4 Black Swan Green
5 The Outrun
6 Last Orders
7 The Handmaid's Tale
8 How to be good
9 The Jane Austen book club
10 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
11 Hag-Seed
12 The Joy Luck Club
13 England and other stories
14 Mijn Meneer
15 The Light Years
16 The North Water
17 Marking Time
18 Here I am
19 Confusion
20 The Best of Adam Sharp
21 Cloud Atlas
22 Exit West
23 Casting Off

So, five rereads; Juliet, naked, Black Swan Green, The Jane Austen bookclub, Harry Potter, and Cloud Atlas, two of which are by the ever-popular David Mitchell. The Joy Fowler and JK Rowling were because there was a bit in the summer where I wanted to read but not invest actual brainpower into the reading, so I went back to some really easy rereads. Only one Dutch book, which is also the only non-fiction title on the list (although it is partly fictionalized, it is the autobiographical account of Ted van Lieshout's youth). Technically only one short story collection (England and other stories), although one could count The Joy Luck Club as short stories (I read one of the chapters as a 'separate' short story during my studies). No classics at all. I was going to say 'no Americans' until I realised both The Sellout and Here I Am are written by Americans; somehow they both disappeared from my mind pretty quickly. No new novels by Ian McEwan, or David Mitchell, or any of my other popular authors, simply because there weren't any. Actually, now that I think of it: no Ian McEwan at all this year. After the triple McEwan there may have been a slight overdose, but still; this must be the first time in about 10 years that I read no novel by Ian McEwan for a whole year. This will surely be rectified in 2018.

Let's break the novels that I did read down into some lists:

Best English novel
1 Exit West
2 Last Orders
3 The Handmaid's Tale
A difficult choice this year! Exit West is clearly the winner; another Mohsin Hamid novel that I dearly loved. It is a very contemporary novel, featuring a couple from a unspecified Middle Eastern country fleeing through one of the mysterious doors that keep opening up all over the world, leading to other places. It is both mystical and very realistic, and I'm sad it didn't make Man Booker this year, as it would have been a deserved winner (I've just started reading the novel that did win, and Exit West would beat it with its hands tied behind its back at this point). Do read something by Hamid!
Last Orders is Graham Swift's Man Booker 1996 winning novel, which gave me the combined emotions of a WWII novel and The Full Monty, with it's 'band of brothers'-like bantering and the emotions simmering under a surface of beer and beautiful language. Same goes for The Handmaid's Tale; it's old, it's great, I've written all you need to know when I read it. Funnily enough, both Last Orders and The Handmaid's Tale could count as my 'classics' this year; they are both over 20 years old, and still very current.

Best Dutch novel/classics
Non-existent this year. Strange, as I did get lots of new novels, and have a pretty long backlog in both these categories. They must never have been at the top of the to-read list.

Best non-fiction/best short story collection
Only one novel in each of these categories this year, so not really lists to speak of.

Best fantasy/scifi novel
1 Exit West
2 The Handmaid's Tale
3 The High Mountains of Portugal
Not a lot of these to go around either, but I would of course have put in Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green if they hadn't been rereads. Two of these also feature in my Best English novel list, but The High Mountains of Portual deserves special mention. Yann Martel, like Mohsin Hamid and David Mitchell, can capture you with a world that is very much like ours, but than turns out to be slightly unlike ours in a magical way, and your suspension of disbelief just goes with that until you find yourself in their made-up world still fully believing that these things could really happen here and now. Realistic fantasy, a true escape into literature.

Best 'new' author
1 Elizabeth Jane Howard
2 Graham Swift
3 Margaret Atwood
Only Elizabeth Jane Howard is really a 'new' author for 2017, and I've written enough about her novels in my previous blog post. But Graham Swift and Margaret Atwood are some of my recent discoveries of whom I want to read more. I'd read my first novel by Swift, Mothering Sunday, as one of my last novels in 2016 and this year I continued with Last Orders and his short-story collection England and other stories. I'd have wanted Wish you were here on the list as well, but it went into reprint just as I ordered it, so that will have to go for 2018 (when I wrote about Last Orders in March it had also disappeared from view in the bookshop, so I'll have to look into that...). Margaret Atwood is not really a 'new' author for me, as I read Oryx & Crake during my English studies, but she is one of the authors I've put on my 'must read more' list. This year I read The Handmaid's Tale and Hag-seed, both of which are great in their own way. I got The Heart goes Last a couple of weeks ago, so she will also feature in the 2018 list.

Most disappointing novel
1 How to be good
2 The Sellout
3 The Outrun
(4 The Best of Adam Sharp)
Wow, this was really the easiest category to fill this year. Not a good sign. I was looking forward to How to be good, one of the few Hornby novels I'd never read, but it was thoroughly disappointing. Moralistic, full of angry relationship issues, with a wavering plot and unlikeable characters. The Sellout was the Man Booker winner of 2016, so naturally I read it, but I didn't like it at all. It is supposed to be a funny social commentary on contemporary America, but I can't remember finding any bit of it funny. The main character struck me as pathetic, his backstory was unbelievable and the plot even more so. The Outrun appeared to be good at first; girl returns to small town Orkney life after her big-city London life blows up in her face, but in the end it didn't really go anywhere, the character didn't come to life for me as in so many of these 'woman retreats to find herself' novels. Special mention for The Best of Adam Sharp, again a novel by Graeme Simpsion that disappointed. It felt like a slight do-over of The Rosie Project, with some High Fidelity elements thrown in. He really turned out only one good novel, his first, and I will now stop reading whatever else he writes until the recommendations tell me it really is too great to miss.

Authors I read more than once
- Elizabeth Jane Howard (4x)
- Margaret Atwood (2x)
- Graham Swift (2x)
- Nick Hornby (2x, one reread and one new)
- David Mitchell (2x, both rereads)

Elizabeth Jane Howard

My 'books of 2017' list will be coming up shortly, and I'll already give a sneak peek at one of my absolute favourites this year: Elizabeth Jane Howard. Or more specifically; her series of novels about the Cazalet family. The first of these, The Light Years, was only this year translated into Dutch, even though the original novel stems from 1990. Due to the raving review of the translation, I decided to buy the original. Talk about hidden treasure!
The first novel is set in 1937 and follows the Cazalet family on the brink of WWII. "The Cazalet family" is not easily described, but in essence we follow two generations; the Cazalet brothers and sister, Hugh, Edward, Rachel and Rupert and their spouses, and the generation of their children. I'm now in the fourth novel of the series, Casting Off, which is set in the post-war time of 1946-1947. I don't know about the fifth part, which was published much later than the first four, but so far I've seen the 'junior' generation grow from 4-16 years of age to 14-26, which means some of them have children of their own now. The Cazalet family is ever-expanding, through marriage and child-birth, and some of the family friends have also become part of the Cazalet clan. As in any good novel, some of these characters have found their deaths, too.
The 'older' generation, having lived through yet another great War, have had their own fair share of developments, but it is really the younger one the first novels focuses on, especially the cousins Louise, Polly and Clary. And after having been with them for four novels and ten fictional years, it really feels as if I've gotten to know these characters, as if they are people who might live just down the street. Even though they are close in age, and clearly have inherited some of the more persistent family traits, the cousins are three very distinct personalities. They have each made some difficult life choices that have got them where they are now. It can get a bit chick-flicky (lots of relationship talk, lots of affairs), but there is more to these novels than that.
Apart from the characters, which are very well-developed and written, there is the language. Long, drawn-out sentences full of description, which perfectly set the atmosphere. Some of the characters are focused on interior design or clothes, and their chapters contain detailed descriptions of all the rooms and garments they see around them. In other chapters, a few sentences set the scene. The dialogue is also very well done, you can actually hear the characters talk, and even though there is very little 'she said sulkily' or 'he said pointedly', you can get the gist of the emotions simply from the writing.
Then there is the interesting fact that the author was actually born in the same year as the aforementioned cousins. She actually lived through these times. And it is in the small details that this becomes clear; having to get by on rations, getting creative with the small amount of food or clothes coupons that one had, the information about the Cazalet family's business in hard woods, and most importantly; the way people interacted with each other. The verisimilitude is very strong. The discovery of this series of novels coincided with my discovery of the tv series The Crown, which is set in roughly the same time. Both really let you drown in a time seventy years gone, making the past come alive.
Most surprisingly about the interaction between people is the position of women. Already, some of these characters who had maids and cooks and 'dailies' before the war, are having to fend for themselves in the post-war times, when young girls didn't 'go into service' anymore. You can see the class differences disappear before your eyes, you can see women try to carve out a position for themselves, either in a job, in their marriage, or in the new-found possibilities of divorce or emigration. The social change that the war brought about is really the overarching theme of the novel, starting with the Victorian attitudes of the grandparents, through the elder Cazalet brothers' defining experiences in WWI, and the upheaval WWII brought about.
But don't let these heavy themes fool you; these novels are really about people, people trying to find their way, in the light years, marking time, in confusion, and casting off, as the novels are so aptly named. They are one family, but apart from the family business they don't share all that many common goals, until the outside world starts to press in. It makes you feel privileged that you have been allowed to have a peek at their lives for so long.
As I said, I'm almost done reading novel number four. I could have finished all of them ages ago, but these are the kinds of novels you want to draw out, to read one or two other novels between subsequent parts of the series so you can go back and reconnect with these characters, so you won't gobble it all up in one go. I'm very curious about the last part in the series, All Change, but I won't get to that until we're some way into 2018. Hopefully, the best will have been saved for last. And otherwise, there are some more novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard to discover!

Blueberry cake

So I've had my birthday in October, and of course I did some birthday baking. Normally I plan this pretty far in advance, but this year that somehow didn't happen, so I had to make a rather on-the-spot decision about what to make. For some reason (because they were on sale) I had lots and lots of blueberries. So naturally, I made a blueberry cake.
Looking for recipes for a blueberry cake, I came to the conclusion that you can either make:
- a plain cake with added blueberries
- a blueberry cheesecake
As my other cake was a mon chou cake, I didn't want to go for the cheesecake option, but just a plain cake with added blueberries sounded dull. So my solution was basically to make one giant blueberry cupcake, and call it a blueberry cake. And it was quite the hit!

Ingredients:
175 g butter
175 g sugar
3 eggs
225 g self-raising flour
1 tablespoon lemon zest
blueberries (I can't remember how many, but quite a lot. I think about 200-250 grams? Use fresh blueberries, not frozen ones)

For the frosting:
150 g mascarpone (I'd use cream cheese, but we don't have proper cream cheese here)
50-75 g icing sugar (depending on how sweet you want the frosting to be)
some blueberries to decorate

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Grease a sandwich tin and line with baking parchment.
Mix the butter and sugar together until creamy. Add the eggs one by one, the lemon zest, and the self-raising flour. Finally, use a spoon to stir in the blueberries (if you do this by electric mixer they will get mashed up). Spread the mixture in the cake tin and bake for about 50 minutes.
Let the cake cool completely, turning it out onto a plate or wire rack about 5-10 minutes after opening the oven.

Make the frosting simply by combining the mascarpone or cream cheese with the icing sugar. Add the icing sugar in small lumps and taste in between. The cake is not very sweet, so the frosting shouldn't be too sour if you like a sweet cake. Spread the frosting over the cake in any way you like and decorate with the remaining blueberries.

Blueberry galore (I kept the most gigantic ones to decorate).

Final judgement? What works for small blueberry cupcakes unsurprisingly also works for large(r) blueberry cakes. The cake was very moist and not too sweet, the blueberries went well with the mascarpone, basically all was well with the world. A perfect cake for late summer or early autumn, when blueberries are actually in season (one of the perks of having your birthday early autumn: all kinds of nice fruity things are plentily available).
In the future, I will try more of these cupcake-turned-into-real-cake experiments!

Fluently flu-ish

Wow, time flies! This reads like one of those obligatory "I'm not dead!" posts after a long period of blogging silence, but it is also honestly how I feel. The last couple of days I've been under the influence of a very violent and persistant virus, having what is euphemistically called 'stomach flu', but which I like to rename 'a snake writhing around in your intestines trying to rearrange som organs'. It wasn't pretty. I won't go into more detail.
But! Lots of other stuff happened, since my last post and before I got the bug. I've been promoted, meaning I am now no longer a generic-sounding 'project manager' but rather a 'publisher'. Sounds posher, is significantly more tricky to fill in on an entry-card to exotic holiday destinations (the first time I went to Africa the steward on the plane suggested we were creative with our job descriptions, putting 'artist' if you were a photographer, or 'writer' when you were a journalist; it would save us lots of time at customs. Sadly, I'd forgotten that by the time I went to Morocco in 2016, and I put in 'publisher' as my profession as 'project manager' wouldn't fit in the teeny-tiny space, and the customs official grilled me for 5 minutes about what I did, who I worked with, what kind of books I published, until he decided that school books must have something to do with the government, I wasn't a radical self-publishing element, and could safely be let into the country).
Also, I had my birthday (more on birthday baking in a next post), I visited London for a week, staying at a great Airbnb and enjoying it more than I'd expected from a city I've already visited six times, and of course I did lots of reading (birthdays always mean more books!). All of that and more, still to come, when I feel more like a human being than home to an intestinal snake!