Fast Food and Carrot Cake

First, I wrote a little love letter to Pret a Manger. You know, a cutesy thing of how a casual acquaintance (rushed tomato, cheese and bacon croissant in the morning) grew into a full-fledged love affair (hoisin duck wrap and chocolate mousse pot for lunch). The back story here is that since I started working at my current company, whose London offices were just two blocks away from a Pret store, I've eaten the chain's food consistently for the last 5 years. Not only do I love their food, I am fully 'sold' on their aesthetics and their advertised brand values.

However, before putting my little note out into the world, I became a little hesitant. I am very aware of my weakness for ecomarketing - I will absolutely purchase a product that's packaged in a brown and green container, over a brightly coloured one. That is what my brain equates with concious consumerism.

Of course it is not. Concious consumerism requires much more than that. It requires an awareness of how the things are made and where they are shipped from. If it is food we're buying, a basic understanding of how it is grown is needed. What pesticides were used on my lettuce? What hormones were pumped into this chicken?

Problem is, I don't have all the facts and realistically, what I end up basing decisions on, is pure emotion. Even when I eat at a restaurant as questionable on all of those points as McDonalds, I can still forget the nasty bits by focusing on my emotional response. How happy I am that my salt and fat cravings can be quickly, and cheaply satisfied. How the never changing texture of the food takes me right back to eating that same burger as when I was a kid. Visions of Happy Meal My Little Ponies start crowding in my head.

So if I can be lulled into the red and yellow fantasy land of Micky D's, did I get duped into promoting (to my VAST and varied audience) what could amount to just another deceitfully unhealthy, ethically ambiguous, albeit cleverly branded fast food store?

And here's where I get to the end, and this week's recipe. When I was moving from London to San Francisco for work, I wrote an email to Pret's customer service. I professed my love, urged them to consider a swift expansion into Northern California and I asked for two recipes for my favorite Pret desserts - their double chocolate mousse and their carrot cake.

Within days I received a lovely note and my two recipes.

I will not question the online customer service skills of the good people at McDonalds Corp, since I have not had the pleasure. I will however, question their willingness to provide me with their Filet o' Fish recipe and my ability to recreate it faithfully.

I have made the below carrot cake several times. By no means can it be considered 'healthy', but it is absolutely delicious, the best carrot cake I have ever had and it tastes exactly the same homemade as in the store. This makes me feel very good about Pret, for a good reason.

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D'Oh (homemade) Butterfingers

Let's not talk about the fact that after three maiden posts, I have been absent from this here blog thingie.

Let's set aside my dissatisfaction with my current photography equipment and it's inability to produce clear, appetizing pictures.

Let's also ignore the fact that this post came about from a Google image search for Simpsons references. (Let's not even ask ourselves why that was happening).

Instead, let me tell you how to fashion a homemade Butterfinger candy.

Start off with this recipe.
Remember that you have butterscotch chips left over from your Compost cookie attempts.
Declare loudly and frequently to your roommate that you are a genius.
Purchase a box of square Ritz crackers and some Skippy smooth peanut butter.
Melt two handfuls of butterscotch chips in a microwave and mix the melted chips with twice as much peanut butter. (The ratio here is endlessly variable!)
Sandwich a dollop of the mix in between two Ritz crackers.
Put a plate of the prepared squares into the freezer to firm up.
Melt some chocolate chips in the microwave.
Spread or drizzle the melted chocolate over the cookies.
Store in an airtight container in the fridge and practice self-restraint.

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What's amazing about these: 

• They are salty, sweet, and literally melt in your mouth, leaving behind a taste of caramelly peanut butter and some bitterness from the chocolate cap - I strongly encourage bittersweet chocolate here.
• They have no spiky or chewy caramel that makes most candy bars feel like an assault on your teeth.
• They're tiny, and a few of them with a cup of tea or coffee feel like a fancy treat. 
• Considering the amount of preservatives in the original ingredients, they're likely to last for a long time in the fridge. 
• Leftover peanut butter/butterscotch mix can be reused as a sandwich spread. 

What's not so great about these:

• Nothing!

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The esteemed crumble

I underestimated the apple crumble.

I was arrogant enough to attempt a crumble without a recipe. After all, it's just some sugared apples, with a topping of flour, butter and sugar. Dump one on top of the other, stick the mess into a hot oven and take it out when you think it's done, right?

Wrong.

What I got was undercooked apples under soggy coat of sugary flour. It was edible but acted more as a topping to ice cream, rather than the intended reverse. I decided to give the crumble a bit more respect next time around.

Apple crumbles have an unmistakably British association for me. Never a fan of fruit-heavy desserts, I was first converted to the crumble by a London flatmate's girlfriend. Every once in a while she would effortlessly pull together a giant pan of the stuff in what seemed like seconds. We ate it for 'pudding' at the end of our Sunday dinners with vanilla custard out of a carton. Another friend worked at the Harrods food hall and if I dropped by at the end of his shift, one or two apple and blueberry crumbles would find their way into my bag.

I wanted to somehow recreate those two memories. Adding berries to the apples was a no-brainer. It brightens up the filing and makes it more interesting. (Thank you Harrods!) I then looked around for a fool-proof topping recipe. I'm pleased that I was able to find it on that side of the pond - in the Guardian.

Felicity Cloake is a recipe tester and developer at the Guardian's 'Word of Mouth' blog. I found it recently when searching for another English recipe, and became a fan immediately. For each project she consults the who's who of British cookbook authors and combines the best features of each into her final result. Essentially, she did all of the legwork for me, and all I had to do was follow her recipe, and enjoy the best (out of two) crumble I ever made!

Unmixed feelings

Not to overstate things, but when I first learned about egg pie in a New York Times article, it blew my mind. Apparently it is a New Zealand specialty. Most like a quiche encased fully in pie crust, instead of mixing the eggs with cream, they go in whole! When you slice the pie open you are confronted with a startling cross-section of egg whites and yolks. The very best part of the entire article was Melissa Clarke's bastardization of the classic recipe by adding Sriracha sauce to the filling.

The red and green Sriracha bottle is now beloved (by hipsters and foodies) everywhere. Compared to some fanatics I use it sparingly. My bottle has been around for so long that I'm not even sure where I got it from. I have a suspicion that it came with the fridge...

When it comes to eggs though, Sriracha is a necessity for me. Every single fried egg I have prepared in the past couple of years has been embellished with an artistic squirt of the sauce. It cuts the greasiness of the fry-up while distracting from that certain blandness of the egg with a tangy heat.

This is the long-winded way of saying that when I came across this crazy pie, I knew it was meant to be. This pie gets me, I thought.

There was no doubt that it would be fun to attempt this, simply for the novelty of the whole eggs, but would it be tasty?

It would, and it was. Fresh from the oven, the pie is warming and comforting. The crust is flaky and buttery without being oily. There's that heat from the Sriracha and scallions. Yes, the filling is just eggs, but in the funnest, most picnic-appropriate package ever. In fact, if anyone is planning a picnic in the warmer months - invite me and I'll bring one of these along. Your mind will be blown!

Chocolate and Peas - pantry essentials

Impulse buyers will sympathize with me. Well, some impulse buyers. I have good enough self-restraint to resist buying another bottle of glittery nail polish, or just one more cardigan (alright, fine, I still own too many cardigans, you got me). However, I don't have any self-control when it comes to super market aisles.

I'm not being precious here either, I'm not at Eataly every week picking up truffle oil and seasoned salts. Instead, I'd happily spend a morning browsing Fairway's shelves throwing this and that into my cart. (Shopping carts are essential for my kind of grocery shopping! Those handheld baskets get too heavy, too quickly and limit the amount of time you can linger in front of the deli meat counter). My biggest  tempters currently are the flour and the dried beans sections. I consider it a show of great willpower that I don't own every single one of Bob's Red Mill flours.

Anyway, what my impulse shopping has resulted in, is that I have one of those kitchens out of which one can extract a week's worth of meals without leaving the house. My baking projects usually start with a decision on whether I want to bake with fruit or not, and only if the answer is yes, will I go to the store. Well, that and whether or not we're out of butter - a terrifying prospect!

Having just come back to my apartment after a work trip to San Francisco, I settled into the kitchen with a cheese omelet and a cup of tea. Then, faced with another week of Whole Foods lunches, and Monday morning without any souvenirs for my colleagues, I checked my cupboards for suitable ingredients and then made some soup and cookies - using only what I had in the pantry.