Chocolate Damson Cake for Nigel Slater Dish of the month

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by an old work colleague with the kind offer of plundering her damson tree's in her garden. So initially my thoughts were to store my plunder and make jam, which I have done even having enough to squirrel away for our WI winter sale later in the year, but I wanted to do something different with the small quantity I had leftover.

Well lucky me, as I spotted a tweet by same lady to Nigel Slater, mentioning his chocolate damson cake, so off I went hoping that I had the Nigel Slater recipe in my collection of  his cookery books. Fortunately I did, the recipe is in Kitchen Diaries II, his most recent publication to date.

Damsons are one of Nigel's favourite fruits and many of his book's feature recipes using this most English of stone fruits.

The resultant bake is very moist and gooey but also very delicious, ideal served as a dessert either plain or simply with cream. The damsons provide a fruity ripple to the brownie like cake and the cake went down very well with the staff at BBC Radio Lancashire as this was the bake I took into the studio. The slightly sharp damsons contrast beautifully with the rich chocolate flavours.

I am using this bake as my contribution towards Dish of the Month hosted by Farmers Girl kitchen this month.

                                                 

Cream of mushroom, mustard and tarragon soup

                                        

Two of my fellow food bloggers, Sue over at Heaven on a Plate and Janice at Farmersgirl Kitchen have launched a monthly cook along for any Nigel Slater recipe, I have quite a few of his books in my extensive cookery book collection, Nigel Slater is my style of cook, cooking seasonally and using what he grows and purchases locally, he is the only TV cook my husband will watch, that says a lot.

When I saw this challenge I knew I had to take part, so a quick rummage in the bookshelves and I came up with this hybrid combination inspired by mushroom soup from Real Fast Food ( a very early Nigel) pg 164 and Roasted mushroom with mustard and tarragon in Kitchen Diaries 1 Pg 279.

A delicious easy creamy mushroom soup with the great inspired additions of a touch of dijon mustard and the herb tarragon,  I didn't have any fresh tarragon as perscribed so I used dried and it worked fine.Nigel's recipes are of simple but always inspired and the mustard and aniseed back note of the tarragon combined well with the earthy mushrooms.