by Jenny Colgan
In memoriam, Mary “Moira” Colgan, née McCann, 1945–2016
Recipes
BANNOCKS
Bannocks are round, crusty, delicious flat rolls, best eaten warm and fresh. They’re not a million miles away from what Americans call “biscuits” (which aren’t actually biscuits, obviously, friends; a jaffa cake: that’s a biscuit).
You can either bake or fry them, and you can add fruit—blueberries are good, or raisins—or if you prefer a savory taste, some grated cheese in place of the buttermilk or even some chili and salt (skip the sugar for those obviously).
500 g self-rising flour
50 g butter
1 egg
250 ml buttermilk
250 ml natural yogurt
Crumb the flour and the butter together. Add the egg, buttermilk, and enough of the yogurt to make the dough sticky.
Knead, adding extra flour, until the dough isn’t sticky anymore.
Roll out until it’s about an inch thick, then cut into whatever shapes you like.
Bake at 320 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 minutes or sauté in a buttered pan until golden brown.
JAM
When I was growing up and would watch my mother making jam, it always looked like a kerfuffle with pots boiling and things bubbling over and a lot of steam in the kitchen. It isn’t at all! Jam is really easy. The trick is not to try and make too much at one shot. A couple of jars is fine; it only takes half an hour. And it’s lovely at the end of an afternoon bramble pick. If we don’t get enough brambles (blackberries), I just bulk it out with a couple of apples. Purists will balk, but I peel and chop the apples, add a touch of water, and bung them in the microwave for five minutes to soften them up.
The big thing is, kids want to help but it gets so hot that they really can’t. I make sure to buy stickers for the jars and send them off to decorate them while I’m doing the really boiling bit.
I use jam sugar, but I always add a touch of pectin powder at the last minute, for nerves. Also, running your jam jars through the dishwasher should sterilize them fine.
As much fruit as you’ve managed to collect plus apples if it isn’t much/the five-year-old has a suspiciously sticky face
Exactly the same weight of jam sugar, or slightly less
Lemon juice
A pat of butter
Rinse the fruit. Some people like to sieve out the seeds. I don’t—I like them, but I still have my own teeth, so maybe I’ll think differently one day.
Cook the fruit and sugar over a low heat, stirring constantly. Add a squeeze of lemon juice. As the mix comes to the boil, add a pat of butter to keep it glossy and smooth and to keep the scuzz down. Allow to simmer for ten minutes, stirring all the while. Skim off any fuzzy scuzzy stuff you get on top and wait for all the fruit to be completely soft.
Then bring the mixture to that most mellifluous of states: a rolling boil. You’ll know what this is when you see it: great big glorious bubbles popping. Keep like that for five minutes if it’s brambles, longer for strawberries. If you have a thermometer, it should be 225 degrees Fahrenheit. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter—it’ll be fine.
Take off the heat for five minutes—long enough to cool but not long enough to set!—then pour into jars. Very, very carefully.
STEAK AND ALE PIE
Yes, I buy the pastry.
500 g stewing steak
Butter for frying
1 onion
2 carrots
250 g mushrooms
1 can of ale of your choice. May I recommend the Swannay Orkney IPA?
500 ml beef stock
Rosemary
Packet of puff pastry
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Toss the steak in flour, salt, and pepper, and sear quickly in butter. Set aside.
Gently sauté the onion until golden, along with the carrots. (You can either just add the mushrooms to this or use another pan and sauté the mushrooms separately in butter with two cloves of garlic and white pepper, which is also super delicious.)
Add the steak, the ale, and the stock, and let simmer for an hour or two with the rosemary on top. Don’t let the steak boil hard.
Pour the mix into an ovenproof bowl and cover with the pastry, adding a hole in the middle for the steam and, if you like, some nice leaf designs. I think you should—this is a lovely meal.
Bake for 40 minutes or until golden brown on the top; serve on a cold night with mash and some nice dark green vegetable, cabbage or spinach or kale or something.
APPLE AND FRANGIPANE PIE
With huge and heartfelt thanks to my friend Sez, who is the best fruit pie maker I know.
Pastry
1¼ cups plain flour
A pinch of good salt
1 (or less) tbsp sugar
½ cup (about 115 g) very cold butter, cubed. It’s worth cutting it up, then sticking back in the freezer for 5 minutes, as the colder it all is, the crisper the pastry comes out.
⅛–¼ cup iced water
A spot of cream and a bit of sugar for scattering
Combine flour, salt, sugar, and butter and process to a coarse meal. Best done in food processor as it’s quicker so everything stays colder.
With the processor still running, very slowly add very small amounts of iced water till pastry holds together but is still on the dry side. The aim is to get it as close to shortbread as possible, but in pastry form.
Chill in the fridge for an hour before rolling out.
Roll out to fit your pastry pan. It’s quite prone to breaking, so a) make sure there’s a good, generous overlap round the edge of the pan and b) don’t worry about any tearing—just fill in any holes with little wads of spare pastry.
Brush with cream and scatter with a wee bit of sugar.
Blind bake with dried beans in for 15 minutes at 350–400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Blind bake without dried beans for another ten minutes or so, till it’s golden.
Frangipane
½ cup ground almonds
¼ cup granulated sugar (vanilla sugar if you’ve got it)
A pinch of salt
1 tbsp plain flour
3 tbsp butter
1 egg
½ tsp vanilla extract if using plain sugar
Process the dry ingredients and butter, then add the egg and vanilla extract and process to a smooth paste. Chill in the fridge for an hour before using.
Apples/topping
2–3 peeled, cored, and thinly sliced eating apples (not cooking apples) with the juice and rind of a lemon on them to give them some oomph (and stop them browning).
A jar of jelly of some sort: you can use pretty much any, but goosegage is my favorite for this. But plain old red currant from a shop works absolutely fine.
When the pastry shell comes out of the oven, immediately spread the frangipane on top so a bit of it soaks into the hot pastry and makes it go ngggh.
Arrange the apple slices all over the top so they look pretty.
Sling it all back in the oven for 10 minutes.
While it’s in the oven, tip the jelly into a saucepan and melt it gently over heat till it’s liquid. When the tart comes out of the oven, pour the jelly over the top. Leave it all to cool in the pan.
About the Author
JENNY COLGAN is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous novels, including The Bookshop on the Corner, Little Beach Street Bakery, and Meet Me at the Cupcake Café, all international bestsellers. Jenny is married with three children and lives in London and Scotland.
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Praise for Jenny Colgan
“This funny, sweet story is Jenny Colgan at her absolute best.”
—Heat
“She is very, very funny.”
—Express
“A delicious comedy.”
—Red
“Fast-paced, funny, poignant and well observed.”
—Daily Mail
“Sweeter than a bag of jelly beans . . . had us eating up every page.”
—Cosmopolitan
“Will make you feel warm inside—it makes a fab Mother’s Day gift.”
—Closer
“Chick-lit with an ethical kick.”
—Mirror
“A quirky tale of love, work and the meaning of life.”
—Company
“A smart, witty love story.”
—Observer
“Full of laugh-out-loud observations . . . utterly unputdownable.”
—Woman
“Cheery and heart-warming.”
—Sunday Mirror
“A chick-lit writer with a difference . . . never scared to try something different, Colgan always pulls it off.”
—Image
“A Colgan novel is like listening to your best pal, souped up on vino, spilling the latest gossip—entertaining, dramatic and frequently hilarious.”
—Daily Record
“An entertaining read.”
—Sunday Express
“Part chick lit, part food porn . . . this is full-on fun for foodies.”
—Bella
Also by Jenny Colgan
The Christmas Surprise
The Bookshop on the Corner
Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery
Christmas at Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop
Little Beach Street Bakery
The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris
Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams
Meet Me at the Cupcake Café
The Good, the Bad, and the Dumped
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend
Operation Sunshine
West End Girls
Where Have All the Boys Gone?
Do You Remember the First Time?
Working Wonders
Looking for Andrew McCarthy
Talking to Addison
Amanda’s Wedding
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE CAFÉ BY THE SEA. Copyright © 2016 by Jenny Colgan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This book was previously published in the UK under the title The Little Shop of Happy-Ever-After by Little, Brown Book Group in 2016.
FIRST EDITION
Title page illustration © Le Panda/Shutterstock, Inc.
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph: © plainpicture/Cultura/Lost Horizon Images
Print ISBN 978-0-06-266297-2
Epub Edition June 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-266298-9
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