Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Sour cherry pistachio amaretti (an Ottolenghi recipe from, I think The Cookbook)

Although the vicar has formally retired, we do have people dropping in to say final goodbyes, so the church biscuit is still nice to have to offer. I was going to make Nigella’s Pistachio Crescents (from How to Eat, Chatto and Windus, 1999) but after a recent problem with another of her biscuit recipes (of which more in a future post), I decided to take the pistachio idea and marry it with an Ottolenghi recipe for Sour Cherry Amaretti which were fantastic when I made them previously. Ottolenghi’s recipe calls for lemon zest but (exactly as happened before) the vicarage kitchen didn’t have a decent lemon, so – also as before – I turned to a little chopped mixed peel. Of thee 180 g of ground nuts required by the recipe, I used 100g pistachios, to 80g ground almonds. (I ground the pistachios in a well-cleaned coffee grinder).  The pistachio flavour was paramount but you could play around with the relative proportions  if the fancy took you.

Sour cherry pistachio amaretti (an Ottolenghi recipe from, I think The Cookbook)

Ingredients

100 g ground pistachios

80 g ground almonds

120 g golden caster sugar

1 teasp chopped mixed peel

60 g dried sour cherries

2 egg whites from large eggs

1 teasp of warmed honey

icing sugar to dust the amaretti both before and after cooking 

Preheat the oven to 170° C/ 150 °C for a fan oven/325 ° F/gas mark 3

Line 2 baking trays with baking parchment.

Put the ground almonds, caster sugar and chopped mixed peel in a bowl and mix together. Add the sour cherries. (You could chop these more,  I left them halved.)

In another bowl whisk up the egg whites and the honey until soft peaks. Fold this mixture into the dry ingredients in the other bowl until a paste forms. Gather into a ball (dusting hands with ground almonds if sticky).

Pinch off walnut sized pieces of the paste, roll them into sausages and drop them in a bowl of sifted icing sugar. Put them on a baking sheet, flattening them slightly and pinching the top into a ridge.

Bake for 12-15 minutes, turning the trays around half way through to cook evenly.

Remove from oven and place on a wire rack to cool. While still hot, sift a little more icing sugar over them.

Makes about 30 little amaretti. Superb.

Under the biscuits, an empty plate – Coalport with hand painted flowers

The cat came in with a non-fledged blue tit, so she received the eye contact of displeasure and the turned back treatment of disapproval (practising for the toddler).

Empathy for blue tits is high as we are still recovering from  last week’s Spring watch where a mother blue tit, having successfully reared a nest full of 4 great tit chicks to near fledging standard came home to find 3 missing – picked off by an observant jay as they poked their heads out of their nesting box preparatory to their first flight. (Please don’t ask why she was rearing great tit chicks – possibly a cuckoo thing – the more we seem to discover about the wild world the more complicated it seems to be!). The final chick retreated to the top of the nesting box in a state of some stress. Having just seen the spring’s final episode, I can happily revealed No 4 is still alive.

Possibly even worse was the stoat attack on the woodpecker’s nest, where a mother stoat  climbedsome 30′ up a tree, disappeared into a hole in the tree and reappeared with,  one by one,  the 3 – or was it 4 – chicks.

We were relieved that this year the owls are doing better and – so far – have more food, so that as yet no owl chick has been edged into starvation and ultimately the subject of cannibalism by its stronger siblings.

Ipsden altar frontal: embroidered viburnum (Viburnum sieboldii ‘Seneca’

The week has flown by  – yes, time has definitely speeded up – as we’ve spent seemingly unproductive days showing removal firms round the house for quotes, taken snatched coffee in people’ s gardens as borrowed books were returned and even indulged in laziness for almost a whole day as we lingered over coffee, lunch and then tea in another local garden. Sorting out and sifting through possessions has filled in any gaps of time, leaving very little over for work on the altar frontal, A bit of a break has, however, been quite a good thing as I now return to it with a new surge of joy in my heart to be sewing again and less pressure as I have most definitely missed the somewhat random deadline I’d set myself. The problem now is to keep up some sort of momentum with the quilt at a time when doing other things exerts a siren call.  Where only a few days ago I’d felt guilty at NOT having the altar frontal on my knee, now I feel even more guilty when I do … Oooooh, the inextricable complexities of the human psyche.

Ipsden altar frontal: embroidered viburnum (Viburnum sieboldii ‘Seneca’

Fortunately, I do, however, have a backlog of embroidered flowers (and even biscuit recipes) to offer up to the blog.  This little shrubby spray I began embroidering thinking it was a hydrangea but as the flowers progressed I realised the shape of the little florets was much more like a viburnum – although not quite like either the one in the vicarage garden or that over the fence in our neighbours’ garden (which in all honesty has not been looking well for some time).

Viburnum rhytidophyllum in Ipsden vicarage garden

My viburnum is most like Viburnum sieboldii ‘Seneca’. At church a few weeks ago I asked round the gardeners in the congregations if anyone had one of these so I could photograph it in near full bloom. One person misheard me and said firmly that she wouldn’t have anything poisonous in her garden – I think she thought I’d said ‘laburnum’ and another said she hadn’t got one but really wanted one. On the laburnum tack, another cheerfully described how as children she and her siblings had played with laburnums and even made ‘tea’ with the flowers (little as they were, they knew that all parts of the laburnum were poisonous) though they never actually drank the tea. Well, hooray for that. With a heart often heavy with rebellion against today’s health and safety nanny state, even I was stunned to near silence by this (so too was her husband for whom this seemed to be news after well over 50 years of marriage).

Some varieties of viburnums are hard to deeply love with white flowers on the dirty side of the spectrum and dry looking ill-shaped leaves and while some fragrant forms can be irresistible, especially the winter flowers, others have leaves which can vary from outright foul-smelling to bacon-scented when crushed (although describing bacon as having a scent rather than a smell perhaps confuses the issue). The viburnum in the vicarage garden is very middle of the road with not much of any sort of smell and though pretty when in full bloom, quickly goes over to a sort of tea on the tablecloth weariness. It does, however, thrive on our chalky soil and as such should appear on the altar frontal. Its berries are very pretty.