Boing!

"Spring is sprung, der grass is riz,

I wonder where dem boidies is...

Der little boids is on der wing, 

Ain't dat absoid?

Der little wing is on der boid!"

'Spring in the Bronx' there, to welcome us into this glorious springtime.  Hurrah for all things spring-y: sunshine, daffs, the first flush of green on the trees, root veg going out, softer stuff coming in, not forgetting all that rising sap of course.  I'm not going to 'ahem' or pretend that I didn't just type that, no point in being shy about it - let's face it, the clocks go forward and everyone starts to feel a bit frisky.  I for one am yearning to do this.  Seriously, I am one full skirt away from breaking into song every time I open the front door.

However, this is not a blog about friskiness, this is a blog about food, so I will now turn my attention away from the bedroom and towards the kitchen.  Oh, come on now, don't act disappointed.  You know where you can get that if you want it and it isn't here.  Besides, my mum reads this.

However, that does not mean that I am not going to get a bit excited.  Food is doing exciting things at the moment, at least in the seasonal fruit and veg world.  A bit like blossom, you spend ages looking out for the new stuff and poof, there it all is at once.  I try to buy the majority of my fruit and veg from my local farmers' market in Bermondsey, for many reasons: it's cheaper, it's tastier, I can buy only what I need, it's friendlier than a supermarket and I'm middle-class.  I spent ages last year pestering poor Ted, the veg man, about when rhubarb was going to arrive, so I learnt my lesson and kept quiet this year, instead just waiting for it patiently and then getting distracted by the wild garlic.  Dear reader, when I saw it, I actually cried "Wild garlic?!  Woohoo!"  Yup, out loud, in public, the works.  Hey ho.  

I had high hopes for my wild garlic - maybe I'd do a frittata with it, see what it did in a stir-fry, wilt it in a risotto, something along those lines.  But I forgot about it.  The poor stuff went all sad and droopy, so I thought I should humiliate it even further by pounding it with pine nuts and parmesan to make pesto:

Just look at that rich green!  Mashed with goats' cheese and stirred through linguine, with the addition of some roasted tomatoes, it made a fine dinner.  Blimey, it was strong though.  I reckon it's probably better to temper it with basil, rather than all garlic, it was a bit full-on otherwise.

I was rather thrilled by a weekend lunch of steamed purple sprouting broccoli, boiled eggs and buttered soda bread:

Those eggs are from the market too and you can definitely tell that it's boom time in eggland - look at the size of them, fairly bursting out of the eggcups!  And the colour!

That's definitely the best thing about spring food, the reminder that colour exists.  Here's that rhubarb I was talking about too, after cooking it with orange juice, brown sugar and stem ginger to go in an oaty crumble, served with thick, pale yellow Jersey cream:

Don't tell me you can't feel that sap rising now...

Beats, Rhymes, Mirth and...Brownies

Chocolate haunts my dreams.  I close my eyes at night and all I see is my hand stirring bowls of it: molten with butter, like a glossy pool; cascading into beaten eggs and sugar, spreading through the yellow mixture like a good-natured atomic cloud; unctuously smooth after the addition of flour, chunks of white chocolate rising to the surface with each stir of the wooden spoon.

How have these images lodged themselves on to the backs of my eyelids?  Why does the smell of chocolate still linger, ever so slightly, in my nostrils?  Baking four batches of brownies, decorating them to look like boomboxes, cutting and transporting them in an assortment of unsuitably shaped tupperware to a nearby pub, a procedure taking about five hours in total, will do that to you.

Five hours?  Never, I hear you splutter.  Dear reader, it's true.  Admittedly, whipping up a batch of brownies, even four of them, does not take long.  Ah, but when you have been given your first Real Live Commission as an 'event caterer' (now it's my turn to splutter, at my own arrogance), then it becomes a different story.  Especially when that commission comes with a design brief:

The Boombox Brownie.  A sweet treat fit to accompany a night of jazz, improvised comedy, hiphop and improvised rapping, staged by Marbles and Furniture at The Miller in London Bridge.  Looks easy, doesn't it?  Bit of chocolate, cut it to size, boom.  Er, yeah.

I didn't take pictures of the slightly dodgier realisations of the designs: the first batch when I made the boomboxes so big that I could only fit six brownies in a tin as opposed to the usual twelve; the second batch where the mixture rose so much that it engulfed virtually all of my carefully placed chocolate chips; or the third batch when I realised that you couldn't really tell the difference between the cooked brownie and the decoration.  Quite lucky I'd taken the day off work to do all this really, there may well have been tears at this point otherwise.

However, I think I finally cracked it with Batch 4:

See how it works?  Giant chocolate buttons as the big speakers (incidentally, I could only find giant buttons, not regular ones, sign of the times or what), white chocolate chips as the, er, smaller speakers (do these even have names?) and quartered cubes of white chocolate as the control button thingummies.  You can see why I was on food duty rather than having anything to do with the music side of things.

Then, ah, then, came the sweet smell of success.  A smell that filled my entire flat and which I am sure I carried with me for the rest of the evening.  To exaggerate the sections that would normally delineate a boombox (I wonder if 'delineate' and 'boombox' have ever been used in the same sentence before), to enhance the white choc chips and to suggest a graphic equaliser wotsit, I used some squeezy white icing to produce this:

Multiplied by about fifty, of course.  Ah, now you're understanding why it might have taken five hours...

But I mustn't complain.  I'm not complaining at all, actually, I was pretty chuffed with how they turned out and pretty chuffed to have been asked to do it in the first place.  And they did look really rather tempting all spread out on display (Batches 1, 2 and 3 are nearer the back):

All of them were eaten as well, which I reckon must be a good sign (although I should think the fact that they were free helped with that a smidge).  I even got a review!  A real one!  Right down at the bottom there!  "Sensationally gooey".  That's me, that is, I did that.  Hurrah!

Oh, and just in case you're wondering how much chocolate goes into making that many brownies, it's this much:

You'd think all of this would put me off chocolate for a while.  Alas, no.  I've written this whilst eating the remainder of one of those packets of chocolate buttons.