Iced chocolate whoopie pies

I kind of fell out of love with baking a little while back - there were no more occasions to celebrate and while it's a gorgeously peaceful activity, it isn't exactly kind to a healthy diet so my cake-output went right down. I was feeling quite uninspired anyway.


Then one day at work this book came my way: "Let's make Whoopies!" Cringe, what a title. Cupcakes have sort of had their hay-day, if such a thing is possible and everyone is desperately trying to cash in on the next thing which will be in 'vogue'. Macaroons had a while but being virtually impossible to recreate at home, everyone is pushing whoopie pies - essentially discs of cake sandwiched together and topped with icing or something more elaborate.
For St. Patrick's Day in mid-March, I decided to give these a whirl. They went down rather popularly, although I know for sure if I'd recommend the book (any book with a quote from Simon Cowell on the front cover should probably be avoided). The tone is a little bit too self-congratulating for a first time recipe book ("My husband's office manager described them as little drops of heaven....they have been tweeted around the world!") That said, I'm going to have another look through - the book is full of interesting recipes, and a lot of low-gluten or egg-free recipes, as well as savories - Gruyère-and-caramelised-onion whoopie pies, anyone? I found the whole baking process on the stressful side, but that may very well just be the first stab at a whoopie pie for me. And they didn't turn out like the picture!!!  No, I'm not sulking. 
I've come across buttermilk in recipes before, but have never bothered to buy it - I have no use for more than I use to bake, really, so I just make a substitution. With my soda farls I add a teaspoon of lemon juice to the milk but this book suggests putting in milk and Greek yoghurt at a 50:50 ratio. Very curious and interesting suggestion - and maybe to blame why my mixture was so thick! 

As you can see, I messed up slightly and ended up with too-tall pies, but they were still delicious, marvellously dense, brownie-ish cakes that were a bit messy but glorious to eat and went down astonishingly well at the St Patrick's Day party I took them to, even if my Irish-themed icing looks kind of minging on them!

Makes 12 or so

• 140g plain flour
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 40g cocoa 
• 1 tsp bicarb of soda
• 90ml buttermilk (or 45ml milk, 45ml greek yoghurt)
• 80g unsalted butter (softened)
• 140g light brown sugar
• 1 free range egg (about 50g - beaten)

Preheat the oven to 200C and line a baking tray - you're going to need quite a few, or do them in batches. They need to be able to spread out and I ended up making them too tall and thick and ended up with whoopie spheres rather than pies.
Mix together the buttermilk (or substitute) and vanilla and set aside. Sieve the plain flour, cocoa and bicarb. In your largest mixing bowl, cream the softened butter and the sugar until smooth and light.  When it's all nice and pale-ish, start very, very slowly adding your egg (which I always mix in a mug - so much cleaner!). My mixture is semi-dark as I decided to use up some darker sugar I had lying around. 

My mixture began to seperate here slightly, but it all worked out okay.  Add and mix through the buttermilk and vanilla, then carefully fold in the cocoa, flour and bicarb. My mixture was extremely thick as well here. I'm not sure if that's normal. In retrospect, trying to measure out Greek yoghurt in mls is a little challenging as it's quite form-holding, so you can use a tbsp if you prefer.

Start dolloping onto your tray (or three trays or so), or piping, if you think you'd prefer to do that and own a piping bag (I don't.) and cook for 8 minutes or so. The image below they ALMOST went a bit wrong, so do space them out generously, especially if you want flatter cakes than the ones I produced. 

NOW MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO CLEAN  UP! Look at the bloody mess I made. 

Meanwhile, you can make the filling and the topping. The filling is a delicious vanilla cream cheese mixture, while the topping is just a basic icing sugar plus food colouring.


Filling

• 50g unsalted butter (softened)
• 150g cream cheese
• 100g icing sugar (sifted)
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

Topping

• 140g icing sugar (sifted)
• 2 tbsp water
• Food colouring

For the filling, mix the butter and icing sugar until a nice smooth even paste, add the vanilla, then sift in the icing sugar and mix carefully with a wooden spoon so it doesn't puff out and settle EVERYWHERE. Be careful not to overmix as it'll get extremely runny and that's no fun.
With the topping, add water to the icing sugar drop by drop, stirring manically between drops - you may not need the entire 2tbsp as too-runny-icing is a problem that happens way too often with baking. Add as much food colouring as you like - a few drops normally do it.

Fresh out the oven!

Once the whoopie pies have come out the oven, it's not an exact science - simply smear a gluttonously thick spoonful of the icing between two cakes and squash together and drizzle over the icing, then if you want to add sprinkles, drop over while the icing is still wet.
Make sure you give them at least a few hours to set otherwise every time one gets eaten, 90% of the filling will end up on your hands! 

Lemonia, Primrose Hill, NW1

There's a reason I originally called this blog 'Hungry in Camden', and not something suffocatingly twee like “Nancy’s kitchen” or "My little cookery blog" (lol).  I've done a tiny bit of food writing before for a website run by my colleague, frequent a tonne of brilliant food blogs (which is intimidating to say the least), and love keeping up to speed as best I possibly can with all the various culinary-themed goings on – so want to start writing about restaurants in North London and beyond.

(But yeah, I'm not planning on dropping any side-splitting witticisms or clever, clever writing puns a la some critics, or come up with any groundbreaking new insight. And bear with my incredibly amatuer attempt to take photos without a flash in a restaurant. AlI that aside though, I can certainly tell what I like and what I don't…)

And I can definitely tell you that Lemonia, in Primrose Hill, I liked VERY much. I tend to find that Greek food, for me at least, has been a disappointing mishmash of boney fish (for some reason I always ordered the fish - idiot), lemon wedges and cloying feta. I've obviously never had properly nice Greek food. Which is a shame as I'm wild about Greek cheese, minty-citrusy flavours, yoghurt, hummus, pitta, charcoal - all that good stuff.

Enter Lemonia, widely-popular and massively well known.  We'd been planning to go to this one for over a year, but somehow never got around to it. We even got close enough to cancel a booking! Oh GOD how I wish we'd been sooner. On Wednesday, looking for somewhere un-fancy and relatively cheap but still special to celebrate our anniversary,  (we've just come back from Berlin so really no need to go all out in the slighest) we remembered Lemonia and sorted a table for the next night. Very little planning went into it - and isn't that always the way with the meals you enjoy the most? The NOPI soft opening was so rigourously planned by myself, booking online as soon as the system was announced, and all that jazz, but in the end it was just a little on the side of underwhelming in terms of a dining experience, although the food was marvellous (and massively overpriced if it had been full cost.) This was just a kind of, meh, we’ll see how we go endeavour, and oh boy, we went well.

Quick bit of research beforehand turned up this review from the very even-handed Jay Rayner from 2008, recommending to ignore most of the menu and just get the mezze for two, £18.50 each. Great advice – definitely do this. The menu is bloody massive and you’ll never get to sample so many of their excellent dishes.

Taramasalata

Within 10 minutes of sitting down, having polished off some lovely olive and carrot nibbles, we were tucking into a wide array of cold dips. I'm always a bit safe in restaurants, I like to choose my favourites, but if I'd done that, I'd never have had this oily, smokey aubergine dip before (and if you remember my sweet potato ratatouille post, I'm pretty anti-aubergine so this was a revelation to me.) And the weirdly-unpink but astonishingly delicious taramasalata, MY GOD, it was incredible. We were eating it with a fork by the end, having run out of pitta. Tabboleh, hummus, tzatsiki - everything was delicious. Although, I think I’d have preferred a stronger-tasting shop bought hummus, which I'm sure is sacrilege.

Five minutes into the cold starters, I realise I should have taken a picture.  

Onto the hot starters, which arrived swiftly like the cold starters. I love it when you're presented with an array of plates, tapas is one of my favourites for this reason. It just feels so brilliantly greedy and indulgent - clink, clink, clink, each plates goes down, and it's all for you, all for you! (And maybe the person you're eating with.) The hot starters included some slightly disappointing chewy calamari, which could have done with a crisper batter and a little more seasoning for me but I'm not the biggest fan of calamari anyway - plus deliciously zingy whitebait, sausage, halloumi, spanakofita (which had a weird beery taste, but it seems that may have been just me. ). Plenty to keep swapping from dish to dish, although not as universally delicious as the first course. Starting to get quite full at this point we realise we still had the mains to come. Shit! Oh well, we decided to 'power through', as the phrase goes.

The final course was thankfully simple and a reasonable size - a Greek salad that had a lovely, creamy feta which made my boyfriend go slightly mad with delight, a deliciously seasoned bulghar wheat side, with what I think were sliced onions, and a plate of chargrilled meats. Chicken kebabs, minty pork burgers and little lamb chops, all fantastically smokey. I feel the intense need to have a barbequeue now as soon as is humanly possible.

Main course

The food itself was pretty great, especially the cold starters, but the other main thing I liked so much about Lemonia was the atmosphere, the staff, the interior. On the cycle back from the restaurant (we were feeling daring - managed not to die on Camden Road) we passed Sardo Canale, a well-reviewed restaurant which we ate at but couldn't remember much at all other than that it was absolutely empty, silent and they sat the only other couple there right next to us. CRINGE. Any chance of having a nice meal, for both of us I'd imagine, ruined. But at Lemonia, the staff were wonderfully warm and attentive (we fell a bit in love with our grey-haired waiter because he was so nice), the entire central area is dripping with greenery and plants and feels airy and authentic, and the noisy chatter makes for a relaxing eating environment. 

And did I mention the price? £68 including service charge for a not-bottom-of-the -list bottle of Greek wine, tea and coffee, and enough food that we could burst, plus complimentary turkish delight and olive nibbles. Not bad, not bad at all.

Check it out. They don't have a website, but trust me, give them a call, order the meze (needs two diners at least though). I'm still thinking about that heavenly taramasalta. Oh jeez .They do lunch deals as well... argh.

Lemonia, 89 Regents Park Rd London NW1 8UY - 020 7586 7454

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Vietnamese Hot and Sour Salad

Soy sauce and tofu haters look away now - this is one hell of a zingy salad which is the perfect antidote to heavy, rich winter comfort food. Now that spring is here, this salad, teeming with lemon grass, coriander, mint, lime, soy sauce and beansprouts is the most amazing way to wake up your tastebuds. I kid you not, the first time I ate this salad, the main thing that concerned me was WHEN CAN I MAKE THIS AGAIN. It also falls nicely into the healthy territory, unless you're keeping an eye on your sodium intake or over-do the vegetable oil with the tofu.
This is also a pretty impressive 'entertaining' dish, as it looks gorgeous on the plate (you should assemble it yourself though, it's a bit fiddly.) And be warned, it is a little on the salad-y side in terms of portions. But so, so amazingly good. As I've said in my previous post on Tofu Sambal, tofu is something most people find a bit too weird to try to cook with but I'm a hell of a convert and at £1 it's pretty cheap protein. I do literally have to stop myself eating it as it's cooking now, I love it so much, and we usually have a couple of packs knocking around the cupboard for a stir fry.
That said I'm no wild evangelist of tofu as a dietary staple - I'm more aware of how the knock-on effect of mass farming of soya beans can be damaging to the environment,  (although nowhere near as bad as the energy that goes into farming a single cow), and additionally regular consumption of soy-products can interfere with your internal chemistry, oestrogen in particular. And I find it comforting that in places like China where the use of tofu is really common, it's often put alongside chicken and pork in dishes. Tofu's a brilliant alternative protein source and tastes really nice, but that said I'm making steak tomorrow! Everything in moderation! Hooray!
Enough out of me about bloody tofu already.


Vietnamese hot and sour salad
For the dressing (make while you're pressing your tofu - lets the flavours mix)

• 80ml of lime juice (about two limes juiced well)
• 80ml of soy sauce
• 3 tbsp grated carrot
• Pinch of chilli flakes
• 2 garlic cloves (crushed)
• 4 tbsp caster sugar (NEEDS to be fine sugar, otherwise whizz in a blender)

For the salad 

• One pack of tofu 
• 100g beansprouts
• 125g of rice noodles
• Large handful of mint 
• Large handful of coriander 
• 2 lemongrass sticks
• 2 spring onions
• 2 tbsp roasted peanuts (chopped)
• 7 or 8 nice cherry tomatoes, or equivalent in plum tomatoes
• 1/2 a cucumber. [I've made this for someone who hated cucumber and substituted stirfried pak choi, fyi, so don't write it off if you don't like cucumber, I know there's a surprising amount of you out there!]

Step one with tofu is always press it - which simply means carefully taking it out of its package, wrapping it in a single sheet of kitchen roll or clean tea towel, and leaving two dinner plates on top for half an hour to an hour. While that's happening, make the dressing.

Juice the limes, and measure out the juice in a jug to get 80ml, although it won't matter all that much. Add 80ml of soy sauce to the lime juice, bringing the liquidmark up to about 160ml. Crush in two peeled garlic cloves (I have no idea why Jamie Oliver always loves shouting about crushing garlic with the skin on, he maintains it's just a nifty trick but I always find I end up crushing in about half of what I should get, and end up picking bits of garlic skin out so I can get the whole clove in.). Grated and add the 3 tbsp of carrot, a pinch of chilli flakes and finally 4 tbsp of caster sugar. Whisk, whisk, whisk, then have a little taste. I like that really salty punch that soy sauce gives so add a bit more if you like, otherwise, maybe a little more lime, just go with what you think it's best.

After you've let the tofu press, and have drained off the excess water and patted dry with another piece of kitchen roll, slice into thin strips. Put a decent amount of vegetable oil in your best non-stick frying pan and get it quite hot, then delicately add in the strips. While they sizzle away, you can get to the chopping stage.

Using a large knife, if you have one - which it almost always is worth having even if you're only an occasional cook - finely chop the coriander and mint together. Carefully slice off the tough outer skin of the lemongrass, and chop them into thin slices, then add to the coriander and mint, chopping all the while, then chop and add the two spring onions. Put the whole fragrant mix of herbs in your largest bowl, which you'll eventually be mixing the noodles in with. 

If your tofu is still looking a little anaemic and is still not golden, keep frying, and turning every now and then, otherwise feel free to take it off the heat and leave to drain on a piece of kitchen roll. Put a large-ish pot on your kitchen counter, add the beansprouts and noodles and pour over the boiling water. Slam the lid on and leave until the noodles are soft.I used to be able to buy uncooked rice noodles, but now I can only find ones which are already soft, disappointingly. Still, let it sit for five minutes or so.

Using chopsticks to mix the noodles and beansprouts with the chopped herbs

While the noodles are sitting in water, slice your cucumber horizontally into long strips, and cut your tomatoes into halves or quarters, whatever's easier to pick up with chopsticks. Arrange the cucumbers in a round shape (like in the picture) on two plates, and dot the edge with tomatoes.

Drain the softened bean sprouts and noodles over the sink and try to let as much water drip off as possible. Then tip into the big bowl with the mint, coriander, etc. Use chop sticks, if you find it easier, to mix throughly, then tip into the centre of the two plates. Finally, add the tofu on top and sprinkle over some chopped peanuts if you like. Serve the dressing at the table, and enjoy!