Coffee and Walnut Cake

There are times when only a good old fashioned cake will do. The slightly bockety homemade cakes of my youth.

I always loved coffee cake and like my coffee, I like it strong and dark. It should taste of coffee. When we were young at home this was always achieved using Irel. Later we used a few teaspoons of instant coffee in a small amount of boiling water, cooled down. Now I use Trablit (liquid coffee extract).

Next walnuts. You can't be mean with them. This cake has a generous layer in the middle, on top of the filling. I toasted them for a few minutes on a dry pan.

Other than that it's a normal cake mixture - 8 8 4 of old.

Recipe
225g softened butter
225g sugar
4 eggs
225g plain flour sieved
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon coffee extract (reduce quantity if you prefer it less strong)

Pre-heat the oven to 180 deg (I60 deg fan). Line two 20cm sandwich tins with baking parchement or butter paper.

Cream the butter and sugar, add in one egg at a time. Add a tablespoon of flour after each egg to prevent curdling. Sieve in the flour and baking powder. Add the coffee extract.

Divide between the tins and bake for about 25 minutes or until springs back to a touch and has shrunk from the sides.

Leave in the tins for about 10 minutes on a wire rack. Remove and peel off the butter paper or parchement.

Cool.

To make the buttercream

300g icing sugar
100g soft butter
1 dessertspoon coffee extract
milk to adjust consistency

Whisk the butter and coffee extract into the icing sugar. Add milk if necessary.

Sandwich the layers together with half the buttercream. Sprinkle filling with toasted walnuts. Finish off top with remainder of buttercream and some whole walnuts.

Enjoy.

Gluten Free - No Knead

First attempt at no knead sourdough

It is not surprising that so many people say they are gluten intolerant. Admittedly there are many who have no idea even what it is, as seen on a video that went viral on Facebook recently. However, people are complaining about many of the same symptoms after eating bread.

If you are a cynic. Try this - eliminate all bread and bread products from your diet for a couple of weeks and then reintroduce it. Feel the bloating, the distention, the discomfort and yes even the diarrhoea!

I am not gluten intolerant but I am intolerant to something they are doing to bread now. I stopped eating bread for a good number of weeks. I eat my own sourdough. I die now after eating mass produced bread for anything up to five hours.

Bread should only consist of four ingredients. Flour, yeast, salt and water. But try finding commercially produced bread even from most artisan bakeries, that do. Many, if they are labelled, will contain considerably more ingredients.

Sourdough bread should only contain a sourdough starter (no yeast), flour, salt and water. And most certainly not a sour flavouring!

Mass produced bread has improvers, dough conditioners, hydrogenated fat, mould inhibitors. Wheat grains are soaked before planting in Round Up. (I heard this from a wheat grower). The wheat plant has been hybridised to give a higher yield and in doing so they have changed the protein makeup of the grain. Bread is made in jig time using modern production methods (Chorleywood process) which prevent the yeast from "digesting" the protein making it more easily digestible for us.When yeast is allowed to work on a dough it improves the flavours and the digestibility. Sourdough production makes the protein fragment in the bread the most digestible of all. This takes time. Commercial production is not interested in anything that takes time (time is money). So there are all sorts of "fake" sourdoughs out there. Sourdoughs produced with a sour flavouring but made in the usual manner.

Labelling is a major problem. Bakers can claim a bread is rye without having to state what percentage is actually rye. It would be very rare to have a bread made with 100% rye. Likewise with spelt. Spelt can be difficult to work with and is inconsistent in quality so many bakeries add wheat flour.

Even making bread at home with your own organic flour is not a solution, as the wheat used is still the hybridised variety which has had it's protein fragment altered. This is particularly true for those who are very intolerant to gluten. In some cases such people can tolerate spelt.

The only way is to find a reputable baker who uses old methods to produce bread or to bake your own sourdough. Sourdough takes the guts of two days to make. But very little work on your part. It just takes a bit of advance planning. And now no knead methods are being used. This means you leave the starter to do the work on the gluten for you and eliminates the need to knead so to speak.

To explain the techy bit - simply think of the gluten in flour as protein fragments that are all tangled up and clenched tightly. For the bread to rise you need these tangles to be broken up (by kneading) and changed into long straight lines which can puff up when the yeast or starter produces carbon dioxide to contain these bubbles as a foam. This is the crumb. The yeast or starter (which is a mixture of naturally occurring yeasts) metabolise the carbs and the proteins in flour and produce bubbles of CO2 as a by product.

These bubbles cause the bread to rise. If the yeast/starter is given enough time it also starts the digestion of the protein (gluten). With the no knead method you are allowing the sourdough starter to do all the work for you.

If you are feeling lethargic and bloated after eating a meal containing wheat, try to eliminate it from your diet for a few weeks. This allows your body to recover. Then begin by introducing sourdough bread from a reputable baker (or make your own). Recipe and method here.

Start asking your local bakery is the bread #RealBread.

Consumer power = pester power.

Are We Living Longer?

Donaghmore

I started to listen with interest to a topic on Sean Moncrieff's afternoon programme on Newstalk the other day. He was interviewing an expert on Alzheimer's and Dementia. As the interview progressed I went from interest to disbelief. He said that we were living longer since the 80's and this was why there had been such a huge increase in these diseases.

Now it takes significantly longer than 30 years for an evolutionary increase in age expectancy. I read recently that we were not living longer than our predecessors over a hundred years ago. In fact average life expectancy has hardly changed at all. What has changed is that there is significantly less infant mortality. A hundred years ago a large number of young children and babies would have died from something as curable as a cold or a flu. Similarly, lots of young adults and middle aged people died from diseases that are largely curable today. However, many many people lived well into their eighties and nineties. It would be interesting to research how many of them suffered from Alzheimer's/Dementia.

I would hazard a guess a lot less than are now. What this expert did say (which was interesting) was that there has been an explosion in the incidence since the 80's.

It was on my mind and when I was in Wexford recently and I climbed over the wall of a very old graveyard. I walked around and tried to make out the writing on the old lichened gravestones. What I did discover was that there were a large number of octogenarians and nonagenarians commemorated. There was equally a large number of infants, children, teenagers and adults aged in their 40-50s. All of these would probably have survived nowadays due to advances in medicine, antibiotics and access to better nutrition and health care.

I think it has to be a bit simplistic to say that had all those people lived longer that they would have also succumbed to Alzheimer's/Dementia.

My mother from a long lived family says she doesn't remember anyone in her town in the west of Ireland with Alzheimer's/Dementia. My mother was a nurse and worked in the local hospital there so I'm sure she would have been aware.  Her own mother died aged 94 in 1981 and my grandfather aged 88 in the seventies. Her grandparents (my great grandparents) were also well into their eighties. She has also insisted for years that there wasn't as much cancer then either or other degenerative diseases. There was no Autism, no Irritable Bowl Syndrome but there was one case of Multiple Sclerosis and the whole town knew about it. Now you can say that these cases were undiagnosed in that they were not named but they would have still been described. Not only were they not diagnosed or named but they were not described either. Which would indicate they hadn't occurred.......?

So what has changed?

Is it too simplistic to assume it's something as simple as food? Or overuse of antibiotics? Or pesticide residues, Or GMOs? 

I really wonder? Do you?

(My dad age 81 was diagnosed with vascular dementia a good few years ago so I have an interest in the disease.)