With a rare quiet Saturday, I decided to try a couple of recipes that I’m hoping to use for a dinner party in a few weeks time.

Oysters

Oysters are great because they are quick to prepare, delicious, and help cleanse the palate. On a multi-course menu it gives you a little more time to prepare.

Sous Vide Lyonnaise
I’ve been looking for a way to show off what sous vide can do to my friends. This is what I came up with, a classical combination of poached egg, bacon, frisée and croutons.

I like the way that it looks like a nest, with the egg nestling in the middle – people wonder whether you’ve served them a hard boiled egg or a raw one. They don’t expect to break it and have a perfectly poached egg slide out, silky smooth and rich.

Steak, Mashed Potatoes and Onions purée
This dish is all about showing off amazing quality steak. It’s not fancy or clever, and its not meant to be, all I’m trying to do is showcase how much good carefully raised, well aged beef can be. The onion purée provides a great umami hit that helps cut the richness of the potato. Given time I’d like to try making a thick mushroom ketchup too.

Marmalade Pudding
This is one of my favourite desserts. Based on a Hawksmoor recipe, itself taken from a restaurant in Skye, it’s both modern and traditional. It was also supposed to be several small individual puddings until I couldn’t find the basins. I was sure I had them. Luckily it worked great on a larger scale. I’ll post my recipe up in a few days, but until then here’s lots of cool photos.

I completely forgot to get the ice cream out of the freezer so it could soften. It’s led to a quick head scratch and a light bulb moment. I have a pretty solid melon baller, so out it came. I quite like the result!

My adoration of Peggy Porschen’s fruit cake is well documented in my post here. I resolved then and there that this was a recipe I needed to try out for myself – thankfully Peggy has penned a great set of cookbooks over the years which chronicle her cupcake creations.

Boutique Baking is the latest in the series – it contains a wide range of treats, cupcakes, layer cakes and other sophisticated baked goods. The book is nicely set out, with great photography and separate guides explaining some of the more detailed techniques. In terms of difficulty there’s a great spread, from simple recipes you could do with children, up to complicated professional looking celebration cakes.

The real test for a cookbook is to use it, so what’s it like to follow?

Light Luxury Fruit Cake

Recipe reproduced by kind permission of Quadrille Publishing.

Ingredients
For the fruit mix:
150g raisins
65g dried cranberries, halved
230g sultanas
120g whole glacé cherries
80g dried figs, chopped
25g sour cherries, chopped
60ml whisky
50g golden syrup
Grated zest of 1 lemon

For the cake mix
120g eggs (approximately 2 eggs)
90g dark brown sugar
115g unsalted butter, softened
25g ground almonds
90g plain flour
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
Pinch of ground cloves
Pinch of ground nutmeg
Pinch of salt
30ml whisky for soaking

For decoration
1 tbsp apricot jam, sieved
600g marzipan
800g ivory sugar paste

Special Equipment
15cmx20cm oval cake tin
Newspaper and string

Instructions
Make this cake at least 3-4 days in advance and store it wrapped in a layer of grease proof paper, then aluminium foil, to preserve moisture and flavour. You can make it several weeks, if not months, in advance if stored in a cool dry place. For an extra-moist and boozy flavour, feed the cake with whisky on a weekly basis or several times before icing.

To make the fruit mix
Place all the ingredients for the fruit mix into a large bowl, stir well and cover with cling film. Leave to infuse overnight at room temperature.

To make the cake mix
Preheat the oven to 140°C/gas mark 1. Double-line a deep 15cm round or oval cake tin with greaseproof paper and wrap the tin with a double thickness of newspaper, securing it with string.

Place the eggs and sugar in a medium bowl and whisk by hand until combined.

In a separate bowl, cream together the butter and the ground almonds until just creamy but not too aerated. Slowly add the egg mixture until you have a smooth emulsion. If the mixture starts to separate or curdle, add 1 tablespoon of flour. This will rebind the batter.

Sift the remaining dry ingredients together and fold through the batter in two batches until just combined.

Add the infused fruit to the cake mix and combine thoroughly and evenly with either a spatula or clean, gloved hands.

Pour the cake mix into the prepared tin. Level the surface with the back of a spoon. Before baking, tap the filled cake tin on your worksurface a few times to release any large air bubbles. This prevents the surface of the cake cracking.

Bake on a low shelf for 2-3 hours, depending on your oven. To prevent the cake from overbrowning, place an empty tray on the rack above. The cake is cooked when the top is golden brown. If in doubt, insert a clean knife or wooden skewer into the centre of the cake: it should come out clean.

Allow to cool for 10 minutes outside of the oven. While still warm, brush the top of the cake with whisky. Remove from the tin and leave the cake to cool completely on a wire rack before wrapping in greaseproof and aluminium foil.

To decorate
Unwrap the cake and place it upside down on a cake board. Gently warm the apricot jam and use it to adhere the cake to the board. If there are any gaps between the cake and the board, fill them with small pieces of marzipan. Place the cake and board on a sheet of greaseproof paper. Brush a thin layer of warm apricot jam over the top and sides of the cake.

On a surface dusted with icing sugar, roll the marzipan out to a thickness of 5mm. It must be large enough to cover the cake. Using a rolling pin, lift the rolled marzipan and lay it over the cake. Smooth the marzipan over the cake, flattening the top and sides, using your hands. Trim away any excess marzipan using a kitchen knife. Flatten the top and sides of the cake using cake smoothers until even.

Brush some clear alcohol over the marzipan covered cake to create an adhesive. Roll out the ivory sugar paste and place it over the marzipan in the same way. Trim away any excess as before, reserving the trimmings for covering the cake board. Leave to set overnight.

Recipe abridged here, in the book there is far more detail on how to create a beautiful stag decoration with damask designs on the sides.

What does it taste like?
Like pudding, with cake the proof is definitely in the eating. This cake is moist. Soooo moist. It’s rich but not cloying, dense but not dry. A perfect fruitcake. I’m definitely going to make it again and on a larger scale.

Conclusion
The recipe was easy to follow and I’ve waxed lyrical about the results enough above, it is definitely my new ‘go to’ fruit cake. It’s representative of the book, a modern, sophisticated slant on a classic idea.

As far as the rest of the book goes – I really like the difficulty range. When a lot of recipe books are ‘dumbing down’ and providing ‘thirty minute meals’, it’s great to see one which offers challenges for all ability levels. The layout is great and there are clear, detailed explanations of complicated techniques. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it would make a fantastic birthday/Christmas gift for anyone who enjoys spending time in the kitchen.

Peggy Porschen’s Boutique Baking, RRP £20, published by Quadrille, is available from all good bookshops

My sister has long been a fan of her pizza stone. The idea being that you pop it in the oven and, because it is more efficient at transferring heat than air, you get a crisper pizza bottom faster. But I’ve never been that convinced. In his ‘In Search of Perfection’ series, Heston measures the temperature in Neapolitan pizza ovens – the magic number? About 700°C. No domestic oven will safely get that warm but using some common sense you can get close.

Metal is a much better conductor of heat than stone and by warming the base of a thick iron frying pan on a hob before putting it upside down in the grill you can get very very hot. I have a couple of very nice Debuyer frying pans which do this job admirably, but I liked the idea of taking the concept one step further. A kickstarter in America recently funded a trial run of pizza steels, a slab of metal that would do the same job, the price tag? Almost $120 for UK delivery. Being an engineer I snorted in derision and got a 6mm thick slab of mild steel delivered from a metalworking supplier for under £20. A few minutes tidying it up with a file and a perfect pizza stone was born.

The results speak for themselves – crisp, pillowy soft base and beautifully seared toppings. It cooked three pizzas in quick succession without blinking, each pizza taking about two minutes, start to delicious finish. Yum.

Over the next few weeks I’m hoping to see what it can do with a more American, New York style, slice.