On Saturday night I drove down through the frost'n'motorways to Brother Tobias's 3-in-1 cottages, where his partner cooked a wonderful supper for a motley bunch of us, with a particularly delicious apple pie. She's a very good cook and it was a really nice evening, sitting along a table with candles and very funny conversation that melted the ice outside around the cottages for at least six metres.
That day, I'd had a culinary disaster. I'd been reminiscing in my head about my art-college lunches of a massive plate of cottage pie and cabbage, followed by a huge rock bun and a cup of tea, every day, rain or shine.
So I decided to make rock buns, but I had the wrong sort of flour and no lemon zest. I thought optimism would make up for the lack of ingredients, but alas, what came out of the oven was flat and smooth and spongey, not craggy and mountainous as I had hoped.
They did taste nice, however, with that reassuring hint of onion that every cook knows who doesn't clean their chopping-board properly.
Thank you so much for the huge panatella. It was fantastic, but a bit hard to light.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it sounds as if when you meant to make rock buns, you subconsciously made stottie cakes, betraying your Northumbrian roots and a visceral urge to be oot doin some seasonal reivin' and plunderin'.
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