Fresher's Fun

A big thank you to everyone who came along and took part in our Fresher's week activities!

On Tuesday we started the week off in style with a social at Oddfellow's pub. We were so pleased to see so many people turn up to come hear, see and most importantly taste what Slow Food is all about. Our event was so popular that we filled up the entire conservatory and the courtyard!

Oddfellow's out did themselves, yet again, serving up two tables worth of gorgeous food - from olives to pizza, BBQ chicken, and roast potatoes we were really spoilt for choice!

Then on Wednesday we stepped out on our Food Trail of Exeter. We explored all of Exeter's need-to-know Foodie hotspots. Starting out in Princesshay we visited Chandos Deli, who as well as serving scrumptious sandwiches also stock local brands - their motto is something we should all live by "great food, pure and simple." After exploring Chandos we then headed via the cathedral to the capital of all thing's sweet and cake-y: Cake-a-doodle-doo. Tearing ourselves away from the beautiful counter of cakes, we cut across town to Gandy Street to check out one of Exeter's newer foodie venues called Chococo. If you haven't already guessed Chococo is a Chocolate House (yes those exist!), all the chocolate is locally produced in Dorset and there's a super intriguing cafe lurking upstairs that the Slow Food committee are very excited to try out!    

After introducing the Freshers to the joys of Gandy Street, we then headed off to explore Exeter's Farmers Market. A haven filled to the brim with interesting local producers. As well as your usual assortment of fruit, vegetables, meat and fish there were many more intriguing offerings including beer from Exeter Brewery, coffee from Crankhouse coffee, a smoothie stall, assorted cheeses and an Indian chutney stall. The market can be found on the corner of South and Fore Street every Thursday between 9.00am and 2.00pm - so be sure to stop by!  

To round off our food tour we headed down to Exploding Bakery to grab a mid-day snack and a cup of seriously good coffee. The Bakery's recent expansion means it's sure to become a hotspot for student's searching for the perfect flat white to drink while they work. As well as the cake, which is made fresh on site, they serve Monmouth Coffee - meaning as well as being beyond tasty everything you can order is also locally sourced. 

We've all had so much fun meeting you all this Fresher's and we're excited to see you all again this Saturday in the Great Hall for the Fresher's Fair!  

Beating the January Blues

Bored after the Christmas holidays? Have the January blues laid you low? If you’re like me and desperate to recapture some of that Christmas pizzazz and sparkle, then do I have the over-the-top, festive pudding for you!

As we all know Christmas dinner is but a warm up for the main marathon event that is dessert. If your family is anything like mine then at least half of the dinner table will swear blind that they’ve never liked Christmas pudding, they never will and will never eat one morsel. Every year this leaves you with a dilemma – what can I make that is fantastic enough to fill the flaming void left by Christmas pudding? This year Mary Berry descended like a primetime Christmas miracle and revealed to mine eyes the fabulous “Rosace a l’ Orange”.

This is a great recipe to try if you want to practice some French patisserie, and everyone does. Every time the Great British Bakers whip up a quick creme pat I go a little bit green! The flip side of this is of course that if anything goes wrong then you have all the key ingredients for a great trifle! 

For the full recipe please follow this link 

The star of this desert is the orange, so make sure you choose a really nice and fresh one - it makes up the majority of the decoration as well as the majority of the taste. If you don't have a mandolin (I didn't) then choose a really sharp knife, if it's dull don't struggle on, sharpen it. You need really thin slices, both to get the most out of your orange and to help with the candying later.  

As you can see we went through most of our knives trying to find one that was sharp enough. 

Once you've sliced your orange, make a sugar syrup (see recipe).

Then place the orange slices in the hot syrup and then leave them there - for as long as humanly possible. Mine was in the syrup for a long as Mary Berry recommended but I think I should have left them in there longer. Don't get me wrong the slices were definitely saturated, but for me they lacked a certain something.

While your orange slices are having a sugar bath make your creme patisserie. I've always been slightly in awe of this, anything with a French name automatically jumps up three places in my estimation. If you're like me then prepare for a slight disappointment because this is basically just custard. I know right I felt so betrayed. But on the flip side, it's not nearly as hard to make as you might imagine - as long as you stick exactly to the measurement and timings then you will not go wrong.

This is my finished creme pat. To this day, custard or not, I'm still proud.

 Whereas creme pat is much easier than I expected, the perfect genoise sponge still eludes me. If your not sure exactly what a genoise is, it's basically a sponge made with no raising agent. Any rise you get comes from the air you manage to whisk into the mixture. I first tried to make this about two years ago, I followed a Paul Hollywood recipe to the letter and  for all my effort was rewarded with two cake-y pancakes (the perfect fodder for a trifle). Mary Berry got me closer to the perfect sponge, but there were still problems! I really struggle with mixing in the flour into my egg and sugar mix (if you look carefully at the cake below you will see little spots of flour. I know.) The only thing I can suggest if you don't fancy a genoise faff is to just make a normal sponge - no one will know, and crucially no one will really care. That's what I'm going to do next time. 

 In case this is all getting a bit much, here's a picture of a Christmas dog.

Now the fun bit, the assembly! Find a suitably sized bowl and line it liberally with cling film - being careful to keep the film as flat as possible (you don't want the imprint of the film on the pudding) Then retrieve your orange slices, and arrange them as prettily as possible. Remember, this is what everyone is going to see - make sure they will be suitably impressed, you worked hard damn it! Slice your genoise in half (again being careful) 

Then layer everything! I forgot to keep some candid orange back for my middle layer, so I just used some fresh chopped up orange - but I think that a mix of fresh and candied would be interesting, so maybe try that? 

Lastly, leave your creation in the fridge.  I would leave it in there overnight, plus a couple more hours - I was really dubious of the creme pat actually setting, but as you will see below I was pleasantly surprised.  then hopefully you will have a suitably fancy French desert! I apologise for the quality (or lack of of the below photos - it was Christmas day).

 It's a really nice desert to eat on its own - a nice light alternative to Christmas pudding. But it also a great accompaniment for a chocolate tart - you can never go wrong with the chocolate orange combo!  

The Exploding Bakery

Unless you've had your head stuck under a rock for the past year, you'll probably be vaguely aware of the ins and outs of a big food debate occurring right now.

Fat, the scientists say, isn't actually bad for us after all; sugar is now the main culprit.

Considering that we've been fed this supposedly empirically-based information on fat for years, I'm beginning to feel a little confused about what I should and shouldn't be eating. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Despite half-hearted government attempts to get the nation back into shape and widespread knowledge on dieting programmes, weight-loss pills and hydrogenated fats, the fact is we're still in a spot of bother when it comes to our health. The conventional advice hasn't worked and now we're being told we need to seriously cut back on another food group.

Whilst I am far from being an expert on these things, I am beginning to suspect that our health problems have a lot more to do with the fact that quite often, we simply do not know where our food comes from or indeed what it is made up of. For an entire year in Italy I gorged myself on fat and sugar frequently - but it was fat and sugar that came from small, local businesses with no added nasties. 

Italy is famous for its food and quite rightly so. It is an incredibly important part of their culture with meals often taking place at a dining room table instead of slouched on a sofa and recipes being passed down through the generations. In miserable contrast, we quite often reach into the freezer and microwave our dinners which are poor, plastic versions of foods from all over the world.

In short, it's time to take food a little more seriously.

We need to start asking questions about what's in our food or even better, going out and seeking out the fresh, local produce ourselves.

Fortunately for me and other Devon-based dwellers, the Exploding Bakery takes food pretty seriously.

And it takes cake in particular very seriously.

The bakery opened in 2011 but by that time, they had already been making cakes for almost a decade. As demand for their cakes grew, they realised it was time to open a wholesale bakery space with a smattering of tables and chairs for eager cake-lovers like you and me to use whilst basking in the aroma of freshly baked goodies.

The menu is simple; there are regular options such as the beautiful croissants stuffed with ham and cheese or jam or the brilliant tortilla which will beat any other you've tried hands-down. When Magro comes to Exeter, a croissant and a piece of cake is an incredibly easy way to satisfy this fussy Italian's gastronomical needs at breakfast time.

As well as cake and croissants, coffee is a main attraction of the bakery. I don't know about you, but when you're told there's a particular way you're supposed to eat or drink something, I know I'm in good company. A year in Italy has taught me that the finest quality ingredients and dishes must be cooked or served up in a particular way. The bakery has an entire blackboard dedicated to telling you how to take your coffee.

The decor is simple and honest, much like the food which is made in front of you in their open bar and kitchen areas. There are no walls dividing the cafe area from the kitchen, meaning you can sit munching your cake whilst planning your next one depending on what's going in or coming out of the oven.

The Exploding Bakery is the only place I've ever visited with such an open and honest approach to serving up food. You can sit there with your coffee with the clatters of baking trays and the slam of oven doors all around you, warm and cosy in a cloud of cake; they have nothing to hide, both in their kitchens and in their cakes. Or, if the day is nice enough, you can take it outside and sit at one of the tables in the sunshine.

We went a couple of weeks ago for Lauren's birthday and tried the banana and chocolate loaf and the ginger and honey tea.

The bakery uses fresh, local ingredients and real Belgian chocolate in their recipes. Ours was moist and sweet, the light flavour of banana being complemented perfectly by the rich chocolate chips. In short, it was bloody beautiful and didn't last long at all.

I had a little chat with some of the people behind the bar whilst I was in there (mainly to reassure them that the girl who looked like she was about to rob their kitchen bare was actually just trying to get blog photos).

Everybody was more than happy for me to have a little snoop around and take pictures of them whilst they were hard at work.

With such an emphasis on good, simple food (their website explains that they like to bake only with the things you could find in your own kitchen), it's no surprise that they have links with the Slow Food movement - so Slow Foodies, get yourself down there asap!

Luckily for me, one of the cafes at the university now stocks Exploding Bakery cakes. I tried the raspberry and white chocolate bakewell during a lecture break and can confirm that it tastes just as good as it looks. Just look at that moist bakewell layer and the hit of raspberry cutting through the sweetness. Our lecturer's personal favourite is the Lumberjack below. In fact, it was he who alerted me to the fact that the cakes were being sold in the cafe downstairs. I pretty much ran down as soon as the first half of the seminar ended.

In short, the Exploding Bakery is the perfect place to treat yourself, whether you're in the town centre or taking a break between classes. You'll also bump into their cakes in various cafes and delis around the town (and I've seen that they also deliver to London and the surrounding counties... it's a £40 minimum order but I could quite easily justify that).

Find them next to Exeter Central Station or the cafe in the Queens building at the University of Exeter. I know I will be. (Especially as I have just joined the Slow Food on Campus Society as a blog editor! How exciting! This basically means I now have an official reason to eat food, take photos of food and talk about food even more. Plus, I will obviously have to go back to the bakery and try all of their cakes for research's sake and I will have an entirely justifiable reason to doing so! Watch this space...)