Happy Days

We finally finished Sam's birthday celebrations this Friday, six weeks to the day after his actual birthday, with a trip to see the cycling world cup in Manchester. I decided to use this as an excuse to crack open  Favourite Picnic Recipes, compiled by Carol Wilson and published by J Salmon Ltd, as it is a well established fact that food in sporting venues is never what you'd call delectable, and I wanted some birthday-worthy food to take with us. For first course we had 'Picnic Pie' which sounds much more complicated than it is, rather than being the entire contents of a picnic, sandwiches, cake, ginger beer, etc. encased in pastry, it is a layer of bacon, with six eggs on top, encased in pastry. The eggs go on top of the bacon unbeaten, so you aim to get a whole egg in each portion. Unfortunately, I managed to grill mine (the symbols have worn off our cooker and I was tired, alright) so it required the burnt bits to be scalped off before it was edible. Pies are not my strong suit, it seems. It was ugly (see pic), but it tasted better than the sandwiches at the Velodrome looked.

Cakes are much more my game. For our pudding I made the 'Fresh Cherry Cake' from the same book. The recipe uses ground almonds which make the cake dense and the cherries keep it moist; it's the ideal combination of chewy and sticky. I am sorry I didn't take a picture, for myself more than anything, its appearance did me more credit than the pie.

This week has been a bumper week. Yesterday I added two more recipes to my repertoire. My friend A came over for an evening of cookery and watching Absolutely Fabulous last night - - two of our favourite things. We used  The Silver Spoon, an Italian cookery book, to make potato gnocchi. I love gnocchi: a plate of potato dumplings is pure comfort on any day. They are also remarkably simple to make, from peeling the potatoes to boiling the finished gnocchi takes under an hour. The most complicated part is adding the flour to the potato and egg mix, too little flour and they fall apart, too much and they become very dense. We made a lucky guess as to when the dough was ready (there is nothing helpful in the cookbook to tell you what to look out for, just a warning that it might all go horribly wrong). We served them with a simple tomato sauce, also from the Silver Spoon, (I can't possibly count it towards my total as I have made so many tomatoey, basilly, garlicky sauces in my time) and a huge ball of artfully torn mozerella. Half a ball of cheese per serving is the ideal amount and no health-nut will persuade me or A otherwise. The gnocchi were very nice, and incredibly light, although A at some point mistook icing sugar we'd been using for pudding for flour so a few had a startling sweet aftertaste.

We'd been using the icing sugar to make French macaroons: the pink ones from this recipe. Up until now, almost all of my attempts at meringue type recipes have ended in absolute inedible failure. However, these worked a treat. Not even too fiddly to make (for me at any rate, A was so good at piping them out into little rounds I let him do nearly all of them, if you don't have your own piper, it might seem more labour intensive!). This week takes my tally up to 21 dishes. Even with time off for holidays/weeks when I just want to sit in my PJs and eat takeaway from the box, it seems I am ahead. Should I double my target?