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Marmalade and muffins are both time-honoured components of a breakfast, and are happily joined under the same umbrella in this clever recipe. Whilst in Australia I learnt a lot about a decent breakfast: muffins and cupcakes, savoury pastries and delectable coffees. I picked up this winner too. While we are on the subject of Australia, I swear by the Australian Woman’s Weekly books. They are not only reasonably priced magazine-style books, but really comprehensive and much more adventurous than you may think at first. They span national to mood foods, and are never too expensive if you fancy getting your head around a new issue in the kitchen.
These are magnificent breakfast treats packed with marmalade and are best straight out of the oven, first thing. So when I make them in the deli, they don’t last long on the cake-stand. They are particularly good with a well-brewed pot of tea. And the trick with muffins, for that lovely risen and cracking top, is not to over-combine the mixture in the final stages. This means that they are best made, really, in a slapdash fashion, which is lucky.
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
125g softened butter
300g self-raising flour
/
teaspoon baking powder
1 orange
2 medium free-range eggs
150g caster sugar
2 tablespoons thick-cut marmalade (preferably my mum’s dark one)
125ml full-fat milk
Preheat the oven to 160°C/Gas 2. Using a pastry brush or some oiled kitchen towel, grease each hole in a muffin tray with a little vegetable oil. Measure the butter, flour and baking powder into a big mixing bowl. Quickly rub them together, as you would when making pastry, lightly with the tips of your fingers. Now grate the zest of the orange into this. Beat the eggs together in a cup, and roughly add to the flour mix with a knife. Then roughly stir in the sugar, marmalade and milk with speed. Do not over-mix, or it will become too homogenised.
Turn the mix out equally into the muffin tray, but do not overload the holes, as they really do rise. Place in the oven for 20 minutes or until just firm and steaming. You can also check them by plunging a toothpick into the middle of one. If the toothpick comes out clean, they are ready, but if there is any liquid or cake mix clinging to it, they need a few more minutes. Remove to a cooling rack by releasing each muffin with a fruit knife, and cool for a few minutes before dishing them up with a big pot of tea.
Porridge with Golden Currants & Muscovado Sugar (#ulink_34cc8e49-b3a4-59bf-b3ce-e907dd6c7ef7)
For 2
Word has it that oats are a superfood (which means, for me, merely that it keeps the wolf from the door). And porridge is one of those delicious breakfasts that not only keeps your energy up but in winter keeps you warm on the inside too, rather like a hot bath. This is very useful if you start the day at the bus stop in the cold. When customers come into Rosie’s looking a little sorry for themselves, I usually suggest a big bowl of steaming porridge, to ward off the morning misery.
The golden currants are a sweet addition, and the muscovado sugar gives it that treacle-like rich depth. The timing of porridge rather depends on the oats. If you use the coarse nutty kind, it will take longer to homogenise. If you use finer, flourier packaged supermarket oats, it should take a little less time to achieve this comforting and maternal dish.
100g wholegrain rolled oats
500ml full-fat milk
a pinch of table salt
100g golden currants
2 dessertspoons muscovado sugar
Measure out the oats into a small pan along with the milk. Add a pinch of salt and put the pan on the smallest ring on the hob. Rapidly heat for 5 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon until it looks deliciously nutty and gluey. Take it off the heat for a moment to settle, before dishing out into bowls and topping with the light currants and dark sugar. You may want to wash the porridge down with a little extra cold milk.
Gazpacho for a Barcelona Morning (#ulink_d69a147c-ff2e-5654-ab18-5d47d4402e07)
Makes a big bowl or about 8 mugs
The first time I tasted gazpacho was at Laurie Castelli’s house. He was one of the first to discover my little deli in Brixton, and so then we were new friends. He now lives in Colombia with his beautiful son and wife, but at the time he lived on crack alley, Rushcroft Road. He lured me over to his stylishly minimal flat to try his brother Gian Castelli’s impeccable cold tomato soup. I left with the offer of a ride on his Moto Guzzi, a cinema date at the ICA, and a delicious taste for this perfect Spanish pick-me-up. As it’s a soup, it’s an unusual choice for breakfast, but trust me, this will wake you up, and cleanse you too. Because the vegetables are all raw, it feels incredibly medicinal.
The next time I came across gazpacho was in Barcelona. My friend Lovely Linda, who was heavily pregnant with Leo at the time, downed a carton of this each morning. And when I tried it too, it made perfect sense. But feel free to drink it at any time of day: in little glasses as a summer starter; in thimbles accompanying a light supper; or as a mid-afternoon reviver. And the trick with Gian’s gazpacho is the use of ground cumin, giving it a Moorish edge. Beware, though, I’ve bust a few blenders masticating this soup. It’s pretty hard to pulverise.
1kg ripe red tomatoes
1 red pepper
1 medium cucumber
1 medium onion
2 garlic cloves
120ml extra virgin olive oil (for posterity’s sake, Spanish, if you can find it), plus a little more for drizzling over at the end
2
/
tablespoons sherry vinegar
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons caster sugar
1 teaspoon Maldon sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
Find a really big mixing bowl to decant each of the ingredients into once they have been prepared: roughly chop the tomatoes into eighths; deseed the pepper and slice into strips; peel and roughly chop the cucumber, complete with seeds; peel and dice the onion and peel and chop the garlic cloves. Pour the extra virgin olive oil, sherry vinegar and cumin into the bowl and mix everything up with your hands. If you have a strong hand-held blender, give it a really good purée, but it’s better still if you have a Magimix, which you can decant the lot into and pulse away on.
When it is a smooth thick soup, you are ready for the next stage. Find a large sieve, place it over another large mixing bowl and pour the gazpacho into it (though Raf recently picked me up an amazing mouli-légumes in Barcelona, which is the real deal in blending a perfect gazpacho). With a metal spoon or a spatula work the soup through the sieve so that it becomes ultimately smooth. You will need to scrape the bottom of the sieve from time to time, to remove the thicker bits. By the end, you will be left with just the woody parts of the vegetables and seeds in the sieve, which you can then discard. Now give the silky gazpacho a thorough mix with a whisk, and season according to your taste, with a little sugar to bring out the flavour of the tomatoes, and also pepper and salt. Serve with a few ice cubes in each mug and a drizzle of excellent Spanish extra virgin olive oil.
Raspberry Risen Pancakes with Clotted Cream (#ulink_9979477d-2518-54ed-a876-7e81de197ee0)
Makes 10 pancakes
These should really be cooked on a griddle pan, like my mum has, but I’m still fruitlessly trying to prise it away from her. A griddle pan is one of those entirely flat iron pans that has a handle running up and over and round to the other side, almost looking like one half of a weight and measure. And because I don’t have this wonderful tool, and you probably won’t either, I just cook them in a big flat frying pan. The warm raspberries are absolutely delicious with thick clotted cream, and are reminiscent of a good old-fashioned cream tea. I’d just as easily cook these for pudding, with some delicious vanilla ice cream to serve.
British raspberries are in season during July and August, so this is naturally a summer brekka. If you stumble upon a good supply during these months, buy a fair few punnets and freeze whatever is surplus to your requirements. Raspberries lend themselves very well to freezing, and your conscience will be clear too. At other times of the year, you may choose to vary the topping. In deepest winter, try finely sliced ripe pears as a substitute.
1 medium free-range egg
130g self-raising flour
50g caster sugar
a pinch of salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
150ml full-fat milk
2 tablespoons butter
170g raspberries
a dusting of icing sugar clotted cream
Preheat the oven to 100°C/Gas
/
. Line an ovenproof serving dish with a clean drying-up cloth, and place in the oven to warm gently. You will decant each batch of pancakes on to this to keep warm. Thoroughly beat the egg in a mixing bowl. I use my lipped batter bowl, but a wide jug would also do. Add half the flour, the sugar, salt and baking powder, beating with a whisk. This will form a thick elastic batter. Then add the milk, making sure there are no lumps but that the batter is now light and smooth. Now add the remaining flour. It may need a little water to loosen it further. The consistency should be thick but creamy and entirely lumpless. Set aside for an hour if you can stand the temptation, as this makes for a better pancake in the end.
Heat 1 tablespoon of the butter, or some vegetable oil, in a large flat-bottomed frying pan, so that it is silky with fat but not verging into deep-frying territory. Allow the fat to become melted and hot and slippy when the pan is tilted, and then pour out some batter, or add a spoonful of the batter if you are using a bowl, and drop over this 6 or 8 raspberries. The pancakes should be about the diameter of a wine bottle. You will get 2 or 3 in the pan. Allow them to really brown and go golden on the bottom. They are ready to turn when the top side is bubbling and beginning to firm up around the berries. Flip each one over with a heatproof spatula or palette knife, and colour the other side. They should rise a little and firm up, and each side should take just over a minute. Remove to the warm dish before going on to the next batch. They are best after 10 minutes drying out in the warm oven. Finally dust the pancakes generously with some icing sugar if you like. Serve with a smudge of clotted cream on each.
Colombian Scrambled Eggs with Frills (#ulink_dcf30e5f-b21c-5dbc-b3b3-94413d10241e)
For 2
There’s a great bona fide Colombian restaurant in Brixton market called Como y Punto, and they do an epic breakfast. Their proud kitchen is reassuringly evident from the café, and little pots of salsa sit at every table for you to help yourself to. The last time I ate there, we entirely demolished the salsa, because it’s so jolly delicious.
Luckily there are wonderful shops in Brixton where you can buy and even see corn bread being made. Though in case you haven’t any Central or South American shops near you, I’ve added a cornmeal pancake recipe too, from Raf’s mum, Maggie, and her epic cookery book collection. This colourful and tangy breakfast is all about finely chopping everything. It is best with milky Colombian-style coffees.
The Salsa
1 big juicy tomato
a few stalks of fresh coriander
1 spring onion
1 big red chilli
2 teaspoons white sugar
3 dessertspoons white wine vinegar
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teaspoon table salt
First prepare the salsa by seriously chopping the tomato, coriander, spring onion and chilli finely with a large sharp knife. For best effects, you want to get a swinging rhythm going by holding down the pointed end of the knife and chopping all over the vegetables. However, if you have a little hand-held blender it would be helpful here to make this a thin and fine salsa. Then add the sugar, vinegar and salt. Decant this into a ramekin for the table.
The Corn Cakes
100g coarse or medium cornmea
40g plain white flour
/
teaspoon salt
/
teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 large free-range egg
200ml soured milk (soured by squeezing
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lemon into the milk, and leaving to rest for 5 minutes)
4 teaspoons vegetable oil
Measure out the cornmeal, flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda, and thoroughly mix together. Then beat together the egg and soured milk, and gradually whisk this into the dry ingredients. It should be a sloppy cake-mixture type of batter. Heat a teaspoon of oil in a medium frying pan on a high heat to bring the heat of the pan right up. When the oil is rippling and ready, turn the heat right down to low and wait a moment before pouring in enough batter to form a 12cm round. Fry for a few minutes, so that the edges are quite brown and crinkled and the surface is smattered with rising bubbles and is nearly dry. Release the cake around the edges with a palette knife or flat frying flipper, and turn it over. You will only need to fry the second side for a moment, to seal it. The cake should be speckled brown and a little risen if fried correctly.
Remove from the pan to a kitchen towel, to absorb any excess oil. Repeat this process with another teaspoon of oil until all the batter is gone.
The Eggs
1 green chilli
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 small onion
1 small fresh tomato
4 large free-range eggs
a pinch of table salt
Remove the seeds from the chilli and finely chop so that it is almost shredded. Heat the oil on a medium heat in a big frying pan. When it is rippling, add the fine pieces of chilli. While they’re sizzling, peel and dice the onion really small and add to the pan. Deseed the tomato, and again finely chop this before adding to the pan. Leave to sweat for a minute. Then crack the eggs into the frying pan. With a heatproof spatula, break the yolks and stir everything together, but so that the white and yolk colours are still quite defined. Turn the heat down and continue to fold the eggs over with the spatula. When they are quite firm and integrated with the vegetables, remove everything from the pan and lay it out on two plates with the corn cakes. Heap the salsa on top, and season with table salt if necessary.
Buckwheat & Banana Pancakes with Runny Honey (#ulink_d17817f6-53e4-5dc6-91e8-c3a0eaa9f4e3)
Makes 4 pancakes
I love making pancakes: so easy a child can make them, and super fun because of the theatrical flipping. I spent a good deal of my formative years making pancakes, so I have happy flipping memories, but I must admit I don’t always get it quite right. I loved making them so much that in my early teens my dad bought me a beautifully thrown pottery batter bowl with a perfectly sculpted lip for pouring. The best pancakes are made with a little patience, as the batter should really sit for an hour at least before it is used. And for some reason, the first one to hit the oil is always a bit dud. My grandmother calls the first the dog’s pancake, for that very reason.
Buckwheat has a really distinctive flavour and texture. It is almost sour but in a really good tangy way, and gives a much more delicate body to the pancake, as it seems more finely ground than regular flours. It is also dark with a malty aftertaste, which really suits the combination of the banana and honey. By whisking the egg white in these pancakes, you will achieve a wonderful lightness that perfectly contrasts the dense banana and sticky honey.
