In my house we have a lot of cookbooks, as you might imagine, but the most dog-eared are the ones by Delia and Mary simply because their recipes work and are seldom let down by incompetent editing or basic errors.
Baking is of course what Mary has always been most famous for, even more so since she started appearing on the TV next to Paul Hollywood whose moist sultana eyes seem to twinkle even brighter when she praises him.
So it was to Mary that I turned when testing out the last of the Lurpak Cooks range of butters we were gifted, one designed primarily for baking and called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Lurpak Baking Butter.
Now anyone who has, of a wet and miserable Sunday afternoon, suddenly decided to bake has invariably hit the butter snag. It’s too hard out of the fridge and faced with the choice of leaving it out to get soft or taking the risk of melting it entirely in the microwave, one tends to put it back and wander off to the sitting room to see if there’s a decent black and white war movie on.I like the ones with model boats tossing on a Pinewood sea and a young Attenborough almost invisible in his enormous overcoat best myself.
Lurpak has of course always been a first choice with bakers, its colour makes the results creamy looking and it has no salt. I lobbed the required amount into the mixer along with all the other ingredients for a Lemon Drizzle Cake from Mary Berry.
You need an expert to assess these things and my own favourite aunt is 87 years old and a veteran church goer. She’s attended more church bake sales to raise money for charities and missions than possibly anyone else in the county and she does love her cake. So putting my Lemon Drizzle into a Tupperware box, as form demands, I took some round for the ultimate test. At 87 my aunt no longer feels the need to spare anyone’s feelings and is a great believer in honesty and speaking her mind. In fact she’s just the sort of matriarchal English aunt beloved of authors such as Saki and P.G Wodehouse.
Lurpak Baking Butter, it’s not quite butter but I think it’s better than butter. And cheaper.
And here’s a great recipe from modern queen of baking Lili Vanilli. Banana Pecan Muffin Cakes