Yule Tide Comebacks

Victorian philosopher James Ward, now widely forgotten but in his age, a much respected thinker, came from the East Yorkshire town of Hull. Much of his philosophical work was devoted to overcoming the self-contradictory problems of absolute idealism, the dominant philosophical movement at this time.
In honour of Yorkshire, forgotten philosophers, and forgotten recipes, I've made a traditional Yorkshire Yule Cake, brining a touch of Yorkshire to my Christmas at home in Norfolk.
The recipe is from 'Yorkshire Teatime Favourites'.

In keeping with tradition, measurements are given in imperial.

Ingredients:

1 lb self-raising flour

1 tsp salt

3 oz lard (I used vegetable fat as a vegetarian alternative)

4 oz butter

1/2 oz fresh yeast if you can get it (or 2 x 7g dried yeast sachets)

6-7 fluid oz tepid water (or 200 -ish ml)

6oz soft brown or caster sugar

1/4 teaspoon mixed spice

1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg

12 oz currants (I used halved and tea-soaked raisins)

1 egg, beaten

Grease and line a 7 inch baking tin, leaving a collar of baking parchment for removal. Or if you're really modern, the trusty square silicone baking 'tin' never fails.

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl, rub in the lard and butter till breadcrumb-like.

Cream/mix the yeast into the water till it froths (a bit of sugar will encourage the dried version). Add to the mixture, followed by the sugar. 

Bring together as a dough and knead on a lightly-floured surface for around five minutes. Flour the bowl and leave to rise for a good hour to an hour and a half (I used the airing cupboard). Once risen, knock back slightly, and add the beaten egg, currants and spices, and work them into the dough. It then needs to transfer to the cake tin, and prove again for a further hour or so.

Bake in the middle of a preheated oven on gas mark 6 for an hour at the most (check after 40 minutes) the top should be golden, but check the middle, as a skewer may come out clean but it could still be slightly raw in places. If the top cooks too quickly, cover it in some tucked in greaseproof paper.

Leave the cake to cool before turning out.

Tasting like the love-child of bread and butter pudding and fruitcake, this winner has a festive tang but can compliment a cup of (English breakfast of course) tea any time of year! Decorating with icing would detract from the unique doughy texture and flavouring, but I feel a sprig of holly and ribbon would be a non-excessive, seasonal touch.

Merry Christmas!

All wrapped up...

Here's the first of some festive bakes.

Mill's writing on Utilitarianism isn't all about the greatest happiness for the greatest number, like Bentham's. He focuses also on the distinction between the intellectual and base, or animalistic pleasures humans experience, the former being the morally superior. Mill saw the intellectual virtues that we possess as rational beings as tools to achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
So here's another kinda utilitarian bake: using the intellectual virtue of my love of baking, for the greatest good. I'm entering it into my university's charity 'bake-off' tomorrow...

Christmas Present Cakes

I used the basic sponge recipe for these, but to go that extra mile you could even decorate traditional Christmas cake like this, marzipan and all!

I used a whole packed of ready-roll icing to cover all four, which were composed of quadruple quantity (so 8 egg) sponge baked in a square tin.

The ribbons were made by various methods: colouring thin strips of ready-roll icing with thin red icing from food colouring, icing sugar and water. 

Another was made of beads from a Christmas sprinkles selection/

On the green present, a pink ribbon was squeezy gel icing. I used gold spray for the two large presents, and green and a just a dash of red (for the pink) food colouring.

Points to note: use jam to stick together both the bits of sponge you want to make the desired shapes and to get the rolled icing to stick to the sponge too.

Should be a very happy Christmas....

Ghost in the Machine

Descartes argued that the soul (or mind) controls the body like a puppeteer manipulates a puppet. Gilbert Ryle, refuting Descartes, argued that this would be like a ghost inside a machine, trying to control it. How could something immaterial possibly control the physical movements of the body? It seems that we either have to give up the notion that the soul is immaterial, or that it controls our body.

Outside of the argument, here's some ghosts with a body: another Halloween bake...

Gingerbread Ghosts

Ingredients

350g plain flour

1tsp bicarbonate of soda

1tsp ground cinnamon

2tsp ground ginger

125g butter

175g brown sugar

1 beaten egg

1 tablespoon black treacle

3 tablespoons of honey

Sift the flour, add the rest of the dry ingredients to a bowl then lightly rub in the butter (not quite to the extent you would for pastry).

Stir in the sugar, then add the egg, treacle and honey. Mix this until a firm dough forms.

Knead for a few minutes, you can then leave it to chill around 15 minutes in the fridge whilst the oven heats (to gas mark 4) to ensure the dough stays firm.

Grease at least two baking trays (you may need more). Roll out the dough evenly to about half a cm to a cm thickness. If you don't have suitable cutters, ghost shapes are easily made, and needn't be exact or uniform, just cut the dough with a butter knife into the shape you want. 

They'll need up to 15 minutes in the oven, dont worry if they aren't hard when straight out of the oven, they crisp on cooling, as long as the dough no longer seems raw and they have turned  slightly darker.

Once the biscuits have cooled, you'll need to mix up a thin white icing to form the edge and eyes, which can be done by dipping the end of a butter knife in the icing and running it along the edges fairly quickly. You can be quite creative ie. put currants in for eyes before baking, use piping icing or sweets etc.

A Halloween & Bonfire Night favourite, and not as scary to make as you'd think!

Shadow play

In the dark corners outside of mainstream philosophy there are some wonderful philosophical works on a wealth of topics. For the second year of my degree, I was introduced to Ray Sorensen's Seeing Dark Things, a philosophy of shadows. It reads like a popular science book, but with regular arguments against the current theory of perception. It references popular culture from the fact that light-sabres in Star Wars shouldn't have shadows to how the plot of Spielberg's first direction project demonstrates that we can indeed see in the dark.

The book makes much of the distinction between shadows and silhouettes, two phenomenons which are often confused. I wanted to use the ideas on the decoration of a Halloween cake for a party tomorrow, and have technically decorated the scene with silhouettes, not shadows. This is how...
The sponge uses the standard sponge mixture, with 50-100g of the flour substituted with cocoa, depending on how rich you want the chocolate flavour.

I covered the top in green icing then made the silhouettes with black sherbet, sprinkling the vague background of the house on a hill myself, then using cookie cutters as templates to form the animals in the foreground.

Happy Halloween!

Peace of pie.

Descartes argued in his Philosophical Writings that animals don't have souls, and by that he meant any mind at all separate from the body. Anotine Arnauld objected to this claim by the example of a sheep who sees a wolf and flees, and thus demonstrates the use of a brain process of perception and reaction.
I side with Arnauld. not just for the sake of argument, but due to my firm belief that if we were to have souls, animals would too, in that they appear to have a consciousness, just one less complex than a human's.
Therefore, I am vegetarian, and here is a vegetarian quiche recipe that my house-mate, who normally eats meat, described as "heaven in my mouth".

'Facon', carrot and onion quiche



For the pastry: rub 70g of cold butter into 150g of sieved plain flour, then bring together using 1 egg and any extra cold water necessary. Lump together and stick in the fridge for half an hour.

Filling ingredients:

4 eggs

200ml milk

dried herbs

50g (or more as desired) grated cheddar cheese

salt and pepper

4 or 5 rashers of quorn (vegetarian) bacon

a small onion

half a carrot

The pastry will then need to be rolled out evenly and carefully placed into a lightly greased flan dish, its important that it covers all edges or the quiche mixture could spill out of the base. The pastry should be about half a cm thick, enough to be opaque on the bottom.

Place the pastry base back in the fridge for a further half an hour, then blind bake in a preheated gas mark 5 oven by covering it with greaseproof paper and baking beans (or lentils, rice, any dried pulse will do). It will need twenty minutes. 

Meanwhile, fry the rashers of fake bacon, from frozen, on a low heat for about five minutes (you won't need oil). Remove and slice once cooled, then you can use the same frying pan to shallow fry the chopped onion. Peel and grate half a carrot.

Once the pastry base is blind baked, remove the baking beads and leave it another ten minutes to turn crisp and golden. Then leave to cool.

Once cooled, place the onion, carrot and bacon on the base. Gently beat the eggs, milk, half the grated cheese and seasoning in a jug and pour over the ingredients in the pie dish. Finish with the rest of the grated cheese.

Place back in the oven on gas mark 3 for 40 minutes to cook the quiche.



Ta-da! An impressive, tasty, but deceptively easy vegetarian dinner that will silence the critics.



Black Heart Treacle Tart

In books 8 and 9 of his Ethics, Aristotle said that a good friendship is between two people who recognise in eachother a virtuous character. The perfect example of this? According to Aristotle, between two men, preferably who have studied philosophy, and in order to do so properly will need to be aged above thirty.
Well, I tick only one of those boxes, but certainly have the capacity to be a good friend. A bit of an egotistical presumption, you might think, but after all, I do make my friends cakes like these all the time...

How to make this Treacle Tart...

Ingredients:

170g plain flour

80g butter

two or three tablespoons of black treacle

80g butter again

a couple of tablespoons of margerine

lemon juice

ground ginger

two slices of soft bread, or six-ish digestive biscuits crumbed finely. or a mixture of the two

a generous scattering of sugar (brown is best)

Rub the butter (cold, diced) into the flour until the mixture is fine crumbs, and gradually add small dashes of cold water till a stiff dough is formed. Cover with cling film and refrigerate for half an hour.

The given amount of pastry will fill five or six one-portion-sized loose-bottomed tart tins. Lightly grease them, roll out the pastry and fill the tins to the edges, aiming for even coverage, it must be thick enough to be opaque or the crust could break after cooking.

Pop back in the fridge to chill another twenty minutes.

Warm the butter and treacle in a pan on a low heat, add the margerine, sugar and bread/biscuit crumbs. Flavour with a few dashes of lemon juice and a sprinkling of ground ginger, tasting as you go along to see if you want more in.

Pour this mixture into the unbaked pastry cases, then bake on gas 6 for 15 minutes, after which its best to turn the oven down to gas 4 for a further 15-20 mins.

Allow to cool before eating..



 And now I'll take a slice of it up to my house-mate; never mind Aristotle, that's a good friendship.

Domestic Bliss



Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations delves deeply into my favourite area of philosophy: lingustic philosophy. He uses a vast range of analogies to challenge the foundations of our linguistic concepts, especially concerning meaning. For example, he asks: 'how many houses does it take before a town becomes a town?' challenging what we mean numerically when we diffrentiate between a town as opposed to a village or city.

 

I like this idea, and whilst I've been on this chaptre: all four of my second year housemates have moved in, and we celebrated with friends round for tea and cake today. So, I decided it was time I went back to landscape cakes. I've already done the North of England; time to go south. The other three all being from London, it made sense that the centre-piece cake was the grandest home in Britain, Buckingham palace.

 



 

 

To construct such a building from sponge: fill a square tin with double quantity cake mixture, once baked and cooled, divide in half, cut off a section for a garden or front road, and sandwich the two oblongs using jam (we had some Yorkshire-made cranberry & vodka jam from the food festival, incredible stuff) and quite thick blobs of icing on each corner, which act as a glue. You can then attach the slice to the front or back as you wish.

 

Rolled icing is better for a smoother facing on all sides, but as I had none, thick icing had to do, with green to emphasise the road. The windows and roof lining were shavings from a chocolate bar, and the London-themed decorations were from Morrisons.

 

 

The perfect welcome.