Once upon a time, I went to Wales. Well, it was May to be precise but the faraway is for its fairytale feel. My memories are of lush green, soft sun and sea mist. There were single lane roads (taken up with travelling tractors), and leeks on toast and Sunday roasts and... Welsh cakes. They were everywhere in Cardiff and the countryside - in specialty shops, in supermarkets, pubs and road side stalls. Eaten equally by builders, children and toffs in tearooms, there's something charmingly democratic about the Welsh cake.
Like a cross between a scone and a pikelet, Welsh cakes are a friendly tea-time treat. The traditional type are studded with sultanas, but you can use whatever you like - chocolate chips, orange zest, or any sort of dried fruit... Easy to whip up at short notice, these will keep in a tin to sustain you through a week of school lunches, a month of middle of the night football matches, or indeed, just morning tea.
At times of high stress, sometimes the only solution is chocolate. The fastest way for a fix - other than buying a bar or a block - is the brownie. One bowl, no need for softening of butter or room temperature anything, just melt, stir, pour, bake, slice and serve. This Smitten Kitchen recipe doesn't even require you to have dark chocolate in the house - it uses cocoa instead - and so can be whipped up from pantry staples. My friend Joanna had recently made these with orange zest - to great acclaim - and I further freewheeled by substituting walnuts for cranberries. I used dried, but fresh or frozen would work just as well for that pop of sour among all the sweet. Serve warm, at room temperature, refrigerated or straight from the freezer. It all works.
In the United States, pumpkins mean autumn, and Halloween, and Thanksgiving. In Australia, we don't really have any of those things (though I did spy a few little skeletons on my street Friday night) but pumpkins, we have aplenty. Of all vegetables, it's the one I most often have in my fridge. I roast it in thin slices with olive oil, salt and pepper and eat it on sandwiches with goat's cheese, I sauté and blend it for soup, toss it in fat chunks into Thai red curries and on Saturday morning, for the first time I tried my hand at something sweet. We don't have canned pumpkin so readily available in Sydney supermarkets but boiling and mashing a little fresh (particularly in so small a quantity) takes no time at all. I swapped half the plain flour for wholemeal as I thought that grainy nuttiness would go nicely - a cosy complement to the warmth of the pumpkin and spices. If you can't make it over to see the pretty trees before they lose their leaves, this is a good consolation - the flavours and fragrance of American Fall in one delicious baked good.
