Coconut and rum cake

Now THIS is a fucking brilliant cake. I made a Nigella chocolate cake the other day and wasn't that impressed. All that ganache and stuff. Eugh. Didn't like it.

This, on the other hand, is absolutely wonderful. Light, crumbly, moist, coconutty. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's also an absolute cinch to make, as long as you've got a food processor or an electric hand whisk.

The recipe is from The New Penguin Cookery Book by Jill Norman, which along with Delia's Complete Cookery Course, is a real must for the novice/amateur cook.

So here we go:

200g butter

200g sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

3 eggs

75g cornflour

150g plain flour

3 tsp baking powder

100g dessicated coconut

2 tbs rum

1 Heat the oven to 180C and grease your cake tin. You'll need a normal-sized one (don't roll your eyes, you know what I mean. Not a massive one and not a tiny loaf tin, okay?)

2 Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk with a hand whisk, or power round with a food processor for about 2 mins.

3 Turn the mixture out into your tin and bake for 1 hour. I know, seems a rather long time, but that's how long it takes.

4 For a very lovely, boozy icing, combine icing sugar with rum instead of water and pour over

Spiced pork belly

This is a nice thing to do with pork belly, as it can be quite rich and the spiciness of the coating cuts through the fat and the gloop and is really quite delicious.

So, get a boned piece of pork belly with the skin scored (again, you might have to venture to a butcher for this - but probably only the butcher counter at Waitrose).

Make up a spiced paste that consists of:

1 2cm piece of ginger

2 cloves garlic

3 tablespoons sherry vinegar

1 teaspoon of dried red chilli flakes (or more if you like it really spicy)

1 tablespoon honey

Chop roughly and then pound to a pulp in a pestle and mortar, or grind the whole thing up in a processfor for a bit. Put the pork skin-side up in a roasting tin and spread with the paste.

I bunged my bit of belly in the oven at 220C for 20 mins and then at 180C for 50 minutes with ten minutes' rest. If I hadn't had the paste on the top, which I didn't want to burn the shit out of, I'd have roasted it full pelt for maybe 30 minutes and then rested for 20 or something.

We had this with stir-fried long-stemmed brocolli, tossed with oyster sauce and it was a pretty cheerful protein-and-greens dinner.

Lamb sweetbreads

Continuing my occasional series on offal, today I'd like to talk about sweetbreads. Lamb sweetbreads in particular. These are the pancreas (I think) of a lamb and if you fry them and serve them with a parsely salad, I think you'll be very happy.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, because first you actually have to get hold of some sweetbreads, which isn't that easy. They don't, alas, do them in Waitrose, so if you want some you have to haul ass to a butcher. But they may very well not have any either, so you'll have to ring ahead and check.

I got mine, purely by chance, from Frank Godfrey, a butcher with two shops in North London http://www.fgodfrey.co.uk/. I went in for something else and they had sweetbreads on special, so I got some because they are Giles' absolute favourite. They do them at Tom Pemberton's place, Hereford Road and they are delish.

Once you have tracked down and purchased your sweetbreads, it's all quite easy. They have to be poached and skinned before frying, which I must say isn't an especially lovely job - it's for pretty hardcore animal-lovers only who are so pleased to be eating in such a nose-to-tail way that they can feel only love and gratitude for the piece of animal before them. Me? I just felt a bit queasy and Giles had to do it.

Anyway, you do this by washing and then placing the sweetbreads in some fresh unsalted water, bringing to the boil and simmering for 5 minutes only. Drain the sweetbreads and leave to cool - or at least cool enough to handle.

Then go over the sweetbreads, pulling off bits of grossness, grisle, connective tissue and all that other stuff. You can remove the thin membrane that covers the whole thing if you like, or leave it on. Hugh F-W recommends leaving it on but to be honest I can't really see what difference it makes.

If you encounter an especially large sweetbread you can cut it in half to cook.

This is what they look like raw and skinned. They smell faintly of fish. But don't let any of this put you off. Cooked, they are creamy and interesting and luscious.

There are a number of ways of cooking sweetbreads, but the way we did it was to coat the meat in heavily seasoned flour (just salt and pepper) and fry it for about 4-5 minutes in very hot oil until golden and crispy.

We ate it with a parsley salad that consisted of:

1 large bunch parsley

1/2 shallot, finely chopped

capers

lemon juice

Baba Ga-who?

I've started thinking that cooking is a bit like getting dressed. You CAN just wear a pair of jeans with a white t-shirt and some flip flops. Or you can wear a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt and some Christian Louboutins. OR you can wear jeans, white t-shirt, Louboutins, massive necklace, sunglasses and, like, a Kelly bag or something.

But that doesn't mean to say that you looked any the less fabulous in your plain jeans and t-shirt outift. It looks good, it's simple and it basically sends the same message.

I take this approach in the kitchen quite often these days. If I'm making something and I don't have all the ingredients specified in a recipe I just sort of gloss over it and make a more basic version of whatever the recipe is suggesting. Similarly, if I'm making something and I happen to have a jar of kaffir lime leaves, an avocado, or some sour cream hanging about, whatever I'm cooking takes on a more spruced-up, Louboutins-and-Kelly-bag attitude.

And so it went last night while making baba ganoush, which as you all know perfectly well is a mediterranean aubergine dip made with mashed grilled aubergines and tahini. But I didn't have any tahini. So I stood there looking at this damned aubergine that had been sitting in my larder for ages and needed to be eaten *somehow* and thought "Maybe I ought to just to a jeans and white t-shirt thing with this".

The resulting dip was so unbelievably delicious, although again apologies for horrible-looking photo - that I urge you to make it very soon, as soon as the sun comes out again.

Yes, okay, salting aubergines is boring but it's not labour-intensive and it's worth it.

1 aubergine makes more than enough dip for 2 people. I've split the ingredients up into things that are essential for this dip - the jeans and white t-shirt, if you like - and the added extras that will turn heads.

Jeans and t-shirt

1 aubergine

2 glugs olive oil

salt

lemon juice

paprika

Jeans, t-shirt and Louboutins

1 tablespoon yoghurt

1/4 teaspoon ground cumin

Jeans, t-shirt, Louboutins and Kelly bag

garlic clove
small bunch parsley
small bunch mint

1 So, you've got to salt your aubergines now - bad luck. I cut mine into rounds, but you can cut them lengthways if you like. Sprinkle both cut sides with salt, sandwich them between 2 chopping boards and then pile a few heavy cookbooks on top of the boards. Leave them for as long as you like, minimum 35 minutes.

2 Now grill your aubergines. I fried mine on a griddle, but you can also stick them under a grill. It should take about 20 minutes for them to be soft all the way through and burnt and sticky on the outside.

3 The recipe I was working to said to take the skins off but this was too fiddly, so I just chucked them in, skins and all, to a food processor with all the rest of the ingredients. If you do it, you may find that you need to add more or less of certain ingredients depending on how much you like paprika and raw garlic.

Not strictly baba ganoush, but totally great. And, hey - if Patricia Field taught us anything, it's that there are no rules in fashion.

Mushroom quinoa with goat's cheese

At a loss of what to make for lunch, I had to resort to re-creating a thing I had last night, which was mushrooms with melted goat's cheese on top. Anyway, it worked out quite well, with the addition of some quinoa to bolster it all up a bit. I didn't use garlic for this recipe because I didn't feel like eating it, but you can if you like. Sorry, crap photo again (although my manicure looks pretty good) but it was v tasty.

So, for one robust, practically carb-free lunch you will need:

1 handful of interesting mushrooms (I used shitake), roughly chopped

1 bunch parsley

1 shallot, chopped

butter

a round of goat's cheese

about 40g quinoa

1 Boil up the quinoa in some salted water for 15 minutes

2 melt a knob of butter in a frying pan and cook the shallot gently for about 10 minutes, then add the mushrooms and cook until soft

3 drain the quinoa and throw in with the mushrooms. Snip or chop in some parsley and stir round. Season.

4 Turn it out in to a small gratin dish and place disks of goat's cheese on top. I cut mine too thin and they dissolved in a boring way. I reckon you should aim for disks about 1 cm thick.

5 Slide under a very hot grill until the cheese is bubbling

Home alone

Giles has gone skiing until Sunday and I'm in the house all by myself. Actually, he hasn't gone skiing because he doesn't like skiing, he's just gone with some people to Switzerland who are skiing and he's vowing to stay inside and read books. But he also took some emergency ski kit with him. No, I don't understand either.

It's always the way when Giles goes anywhere: I rather look forward to having the place to myself without his constant clattering, singing, shouting, cackling and raging, conducting his professional feuds and world-domination strategies in his massive office next door, fielding phone calls and hammering away at his laptop, which always sounds, when he is in full-cry, like a troop of teenaged boys galloping down the stairs.

He leaves the house after consulting me eight times about every single thing he's packing "Are you sure? Are you sure the red socks and not the striped ones? Sure? They're going in... Sure?" and looking briefly miserable on the doorstep. After I close the door I punch the air and shout "YES" and vow to leave the bed unmade, do no washing up, watch Judge Judy all day and drink the kind of cheap white wine that burns holes through carpet.

Within an hour I'm a gibbering wreck, wide-eyed at my spooky, silent house and jumping at small noises.

And I don't don't know what the hell to eat. Working withing Giles' strict things-we-can-and-can't-eat thing means a trip to Waitrose is a logistical assault. Nothing non-organic, basically no fish at all because it's all endangered, nothing processed, nothing from abroad. It's why we're constantly eating roast chicken. Sometimes I think to myself "Gosh, wouldn't it be easy to go shopping if I didn't have to cook for Giles and all his arseholish ways" but then I GO to Waitrose as I did just now and I can't find, or think of, anything that I might want to eat. Not one thing.

So I'm going to make a chocolate cake instead. Definitely something I can't do with him around.

Last night

I sat open-mouthed through the whole of The Delicious Miss Dahl last night. I think she's lovely and she's only trying to have a career for God's sake - but was any of that show her idea? Was all that stuff about the mozzarella and saying "luscious" every ten seconds and that Fifties frock and all that really, really what she's like? If so, then I guess that's all just fine.

But I suspect from the way that she giggled in a slightly embarrassed way after delivering some of the more risque lines that there was a producer off screen going "Sorry, sorry - this is supposed to be a SELFISH day. Can you say selfish and indulgent a bit more, please? Thanks."

I don't know, there was just something a bit contrived about it, like telly people can't fathom that you could just have a show called "Cooking with Sophie" where she makes some stuff and says "This is quite nice for breakfast." It has to be a massive themed performance, like a giant fancy-dress birthday party with clowns and a bouncy castle and a present table, rather than just jammy dodgers and crisps and a run round the garden.

And the worst thing about it was that she doesn't know how to pronounce "bruschetta", which just made me feel sad.