This is easily my favourite recipe from Deb Perelman’s first cookbook. You can read my review of it here. The texture is superb – rich, moist and very chocolatey. Depending on the wine you use it will either sit quietly in the background or be very prominent – adjust for your audience!

Red Wine Velvet Cake with Whipped Mascarpone
From Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, reproduced by kind permission of Square Peg.

Ingredients

For the cake
225g unsalted butter, at room temperature
400g plain flour
430g dark brown sugar
150g granulated sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
530ml red wine (any kind you like)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
130g Dutch cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon table salt

For the filling
450g mascarpone cheese
280g icing sugar
Pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Method

Preheat your oven to 160C/fan 140C/Gas 3. Line the bottom of three 23cm round cake tins with parchment, and either butter and lightly flour the parchment and exposed sides of the pans, or spray the interior with a nonstick spray. In a large bowl, at the medium speed of an electric miser, cream the butter until smooth. Add the sugars and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs and beat well, then the red wine and vanilla. Don’t worry if the batter looks a little uneven. Sift the flour, cocoa, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt together, right over your wet ingredients. Mix until three-quarters combined, then fold the rest together with a rubber spatula. Divide batter between prepared tins. Bake for 25 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the centre of each layer comes out clean. The top of each cake should be shiny and msooth, like a puddle of chocolate. Cool in pan on a rack for about 10 minutes, then flip out of pan and cool the rest of the way on a cooling rack.

If your cakes have domed a bit and you want nice even layers in your stack, you can trim the tops. use a long serrated knife, held horizontally, and use gentle back and forth motions with your hand on top of the cake to even it out. Share the cake scraps with whoever is around; no-one will mind helping you remove the ‘debris’.

For the filling
In a medium bowl, beat the mascarpone with the icing sugar, pinch of salt, and vanilla extract at medium speed until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 1 to 2 minutes.

Assemble the cake
Place the first cake layer on a cake stand or plate, and spread with one-third of the filling. Repeat with remaining two layers. Chill the cake in the fridge until you’re ready to serve it.

Blogging has undeniably changed the the way people think about, and enjoy, food. It’s democratized the previously restricted world of restaurant reviews and taught millions how to cook exciting new dishes. One of the first blogs to break into the mainstream was Deb Perelman’s ‘Smitten Kitchen’.

A self-taught chef, cooking in her tiny New York kitchen, she writes about food that even the most timid of readers can manage. It’s simple, honest and entirely delicious. Her eponymous cookbook was launched before Christmas in the US and is finally getting an outing in the UK.

The book includes a great range of recipes, from breakfast through to dessert. All the measures have been converted from American to British and most of the temperatures and ingredients too. The photography – done by Deb herself – is fantastic, and the introductions to each recipe are beautifully written.

Over the last couple of weeks i’ve been working my way through several of the recipes…

Crunchy Granola
Keen to try something from her breakfast section I baked this granola on a quiet evening. It’s delicious – like flapjack for breakfast. She uses minimal quantities of sugar and golden syrup to ensure that it stays in the same ballpark as healthy and it goes great with greek yoghurt and fruit.

Flat Roasted Chicken with Tiny Potatoes
This recipe didn’t work great for me – the instructions don’t really tell you how to spatchcock a chicken (chop out the back-bone and smash it flat) so it would be easy to get wrong. The tiny potatoes took quite a while to cook through and – given that you’ve got a pan that’s covered in chicken jus, not making a simple gravy is almost criminal.

Iceberg and Blue Cheese Salad
This is a great quick salad – tasty, simple and light.

Beer and Balsamic Braised Short Ribs with Parsnip Puree
I love short ribs. They capture huge amounts of beefy flavour and provided they’re cooked carefully have a fantastic texture. In this recipe the ribs are browned before being slowly braised in beer, balsamic and beef stock. It’s fall apart tender – the sauce reduces down great and the parsnip puree is a perfect side. I love that she adds horseradish – it goes really well with both the beef and the sweet parsnips.

Banana Tarte Tatin
I love tarte tatin, but i’ve never tried a banana one. Keen to take my shiny new (just seasoned!) skillet for a spin I gave this a try. It works brilliantly – the bananas go a lovely dark caramel, the sauce is rich and the pastry – well, who doesn’t like light, fluffy pastry!?

Red Wine Velvet Cake
I baked this for a colleague’s birthday. I really like the idea of replacing the red food colouring with wine – it adds a surprisingly delicate fruity note and ‘most’ of the alcohol gets baked off anyway. The result was fantastic – moist, rich and completely delicious. It caused a feeding frenzy – the entire three layer cake was demolished in seconds. Those too slow off the mark spend the rest of the day giving me baleful looks. I’ve posted the recipe here.

Conclusion
It’s a great book, if like me and many home cooks, you have a tiny kitchen and limited resources then this is perfect for you. It’s simple, unashamed home cooking and utterly marvellous for that. Almost all the recipes I tried were fantastic – I spotted a couple of printing errors which should be fixed in the next run, but otherwise it was very reliable. Ingredients are relatively easy to find and I love that she includes lots of variations and tips for preparing things in advance and saving things for later.

‘The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook’ by Deb Perelman, RRP £20, is published by Square Peg and available from all good bookshops

I love Hawksmoor. To me it represents everything a restaurant should be. It picks one thing – steak – and does it superbly. Everything else is designed to enhance and work with that ingredient. From the funky British starters, the red-heavy wine list to the serious puddings and relaxed atmosphere. I’ve been several times now and it never disappoints.

To start I had crab on toast – a fluffy mound of fresh white crabmeat on good bread. Simple, tasty and well seasoned.

For the main event we shared both a bone-in sirloin and a ribeye. The steaks were cooked beautifully – thick cut, well aged and with an excellent char. The rib-eye was medium rare (as requested) and the extra time helps soften up the meat. The sirloin was nicely rare and really showcased the texture of the meat. I can’t get over how good the fat is on beef that’s been dry aged this long.

The sides were great as ever – they’ve changed the beef dripping chips from mini-roast potatoes to French style fries – but the same beefy flavour works so well with the steak. Triple cooked chips were more traditional and as crunchy as you would expect. We also ordered some creamed spinach which was a great match, smooth and with a lovely mineral hit. Wine was a very reasonably priced Bordeaux: classy, sophisticated and with a lovely nose.

The dessert menu had also moved on since my last visit – my chocolate salted caramel tart was superb – the base was very crisp. The popcorn ice cream was a lovely touch, but could have done with some more crunch. My friends warm peanut butter shortbread was delicious with some excellent salted caramel ice cream.

The finishing touch was a couple of great whiskies from their extensive selection – a near-perfect meal. I can’t wait to try out their new site in Air Street which has started doing fish as well as meat.

I recently went out for dinner with my colleagues – given that we needed to cater for a couple of vegetarians, Asian food is a good bet and it’s proximity to our office made Crazy Bear a great choice.

We had their ten plate set menu – which runs as follows:

Steamed Har Gau, Prawn, Shiitake, Chive and Carrot, Bamboo and Taro
The dimsum was great, the prawn being a complete standout – deliciously moist and with a great casing.

Salmon and Avocado Tamaki
Sushi may not be their strong point – but the tamaki was very good. I’d have liked a little more salmon.

Cotswold Chicken Satay
The chicken was moist and the sauce sticky – I like my satay with slightly more of a crust, but this was still really good.

Crispy Gressingham Duck Salad
This was delicious – I like duck in salads and their choice of leaves added a great textural contrast.

Chargrilled Black Pepper Lamb Cutlets
The lamb was well cooked and the flavour of the pepper really came through.

Steamed Seabass Fillet
The fish was well cooked, if a little under seasoned.

Panang Beef Sirloin Curry
This was my favourite dish of the evening – good beef, nice sauce and well cooked.

Sides
Choi Sum
Stirfried Beansprouts
Jasmine Rice

Salted Butter Caramel with a Chocolate Sorbet
The caramel was very creamy and thick, while the chocolate sorbet was smooth and rich. Simple but effective.

On the whole, the food was very good, service was prompt and the staff friendly. They have a good wine list with some outstanding wines. Hannah’s pick of a Californian Merlot was just phenomenal – rich and classy like the best Bordeaux.

One of the great trends of 2012 was the explosion of ramen in London and it shows no sign of letting up in 2013. Tonkotsu and Bone Daddies have dominated the ‘most talked about’ lists for the last few months (you can read my review of Tonkotsu here). On a rainy weekday evening I ventured through Soho to one of their newer challengers – Shoryu.

Situated on Regent Street, just south of Piccadilly it’s a great location. When we turned up there was no queue but when we left people were waiting for 45 minutes in the rain for these noodles. Are they worth the hype?

Absolutely. The noodles themselves are beautiful, just the right consistency with a little bit of firmness. The broth in their signature ramen (there are over fifteen variations to choose from) was rich and salty – their miso base is very different to Tonkotsu’s. The toppings were generous with some great pickled ginger, nice nori and an average egg. The pork belly was very good with a lovely texture

What really sealed the deal were the sides. The special ‘Hirata’ buns are very reminiscent of Momofuku in New York, thick slices of pork belly with sriracha, pickled cucumber and a steamed bun. Heaven.

We also opted for their softshell crab – while the serving was pretty small it was phenomenally tasty with a nice chilli dip.

The staff were friendly and attentive and the atmosphere lively and communal – my dining partner didn’t care much for the sporadic drum banging and japanese greetings but they made me smile. How does it compare to Tonkotsu? Very well – I think Shoryu just has the edge, especially if you consider the sides which seem almost an afterthought at Tonkotsu. Early reviews I read of Shoryu were quite critical but it’s obvious they’ve listened because I didn’t recognise the food the bloggers described. I can’t say how it measures up to Bone Daddies but I hope to be completing my Ramen round-up soon!