It has been a *very* productive weekend in terms of culinary endeavours: first there was the marmalade mishap and the marmalade recovery (I don’t have the energy to write about this tonight–but rest assured, its coming), then there was the marmalade cake (because I had to make *something* for valentine’s day) and last but not least, there was the dutch oven.

I suppose I should elaborate. The marmalade was something I’d been wanting to do for a long time, and a 3-day weekend seemed like a good chance to do it. Despite a rocky start we ended up with 6 lovely jars of normal marmalade, and 6 jars of looks-a-bit-like-molasses marmalade. I suppose batch #2 will be useful for cooking at least.

The marmalade cake is an old favorite. It got made because I had been leafing through Michael Pollan’s new book Food Rules, and feeling guilty about buying premade muffins, so I decided some baking was in order. Now the issue with the marmalade cake recipe is that it lives here, in Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries. This is a dangerous book. Everytime I open it I want to cook every recipe in it. I don’t think I’d ever have the perserverence to make it through Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking in one year, but Nige’s cooking is much more low-key, and given an adequate budget for organic meat, excellent cheese, and so forth, I would happily cook my way through his book.

But, as it was, I was already up to my eyeballs in marmalade fixin’s so keeping things minimal seemed like a wise call. I made Nige’s Marmalade Cake (picture below) as an tasty valentine’s day breakfast. It was the perfect thing to spice up a dreary Feb. morning.

Ingredients:

175 Butter, softened
175g Golden Caster Sugar (If like me, you live across the pond and the stores don’t carry Golden Caster Sugar, white, light brown, or cane sugar (also light brown in color) all work)
Zest of 1 orange
3 Large eggs, beaten
75g Marmalade
175g All-purpose Flour
Juice half an orange

Icing:
100g Icing sugar, sifted
2 TBSP Orange Juice

Method:

Step 1: Preheat oven to 355F (180c) and line a loaf tin with parchement paper
Step 2: In a mixer (or by hand) cream together the butter and sugar, add in the zest, eggs and marmalade and beat.
Step 3: Fold in flour and orange juice and pour into prepared tin
Step 4: Bake for 40 minutes then turn out onto cooling rack
Step 5: To make icing mix together icing sugar and orange juice then spoon over cooled cake.

This time round, I skipped the icing, because I had no icing sugar. The cake didn’t suffer.

So that brings us to the last item of orange: The new cast iron, enamel, 22lb, real deal dutch oven. I have been on the lookout for one of these for quite some time. In addition to stews, braised meats, briskets, etc. I’ve seen them used to make kneadless-bread, clay-pot like Asian foods and all sorts of other things. BUT to get a new one–a good one, not a cheap costo/target knockoff, you’re looking at upwards of $200. Yikes. So when I found someone selling them for $45 on craigslist, I called immediately. While not La Creuset, the one I ended up buying did come from a restaurant supplier and so was industrial quality, which is all that really matters, in the end. So stay tuned for Kneadless bread in a casserole dish (learned from a friend at McGill who made absolutely stellar, bakery quality bread this way), and at least one meat stew before the dreary weather is out — oh and also the play by play of the marmalade-mayhem, coming soon, I promise.