Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

I had come across a recipe for Chestnut Brownies in a magazine some weeks ago and the cutting sat in a pile of patchwork pieces getting more and more dog eared. Time to put it to the test. Casually I scanned the ingredients and made a visual note of the tin of chestnuts pictured. In town I picked up a similar looking tin and at home, having read the recipe properly for the first time, realised that what was required was in fact a tin of chestnut spread. I had a tin of peeled cooked whole chestnuts –  the same brand in an almost identical tin, but very different contents.

Disappointed but not disheartened, I found this Dan Lepard chestnut brownie  recipe instead (The Guardian 23 October 2010). I used Amaretto liquer instead of rum but otherwise followed it to the letter.

Chestnut Brownies (Dan Lepard’s recipe but using Amaretto liqueur instead of rum)

240g tin cooked chestnuts
200g brown sugar
25ml Amaretto liquer
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 medium eggs, separated
200g unsalted butter
200g dark chocolate, broken into small chunks
100g plain flour

Line a deep, 20cm square tin with nonstick baking paper. Chop the chestnuts, and in a bowl stir them with 100g sugar, Amaretto liqueur and vanilla.

In a clean bowl, beat the egg whites until they form soft white peaks, slowly beat in 100g sugar until you have a soft meringue, then beat in the egg yolks.

Melt the butter and chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water, then remove from the heat and beat into the chestnuts and flour. Stir this into the meringue, then spoon into the prepared tin. Bake at 170C (150C fan-assisted)/335F/gas mark 3 for 20-25 minutes, until barely set in the middle, then leave to cool completely in the tin before cutting.

Chestnut Brownies (Dan Lepard’s recipe but using Amaretto liquer instead of rum); served on a Vietnamese pottery platter

These brownies had a lovely, rather truffly texture and smelt wonderfully chocolaty. During the second church service at the church by the Thames, I put the plate – by now half full of brownies – on an empty pew in front of me and my neighbour was almost carried away by the scent of chocolate. Would the plate even make it unmolested to the end of the service? In fact everybody seemed to like them – well several people liked them enough to ask for the recipe. However, for me the chestnuts didn’t hit the mark – a bit too soft for a nut and too hard for a fruit, they were also slightly bland and even soapy tasting for something so well soaked in a rather forward liqueur. The chocolate part of the brownie was, however, undeniably good and made me think that I should perhaps repeat this recipe with a real nut or a fruit like blueberries or raspberries.  Given my thoughts about chestnuts, I’m now undecided whether to have a go at the original recipe that caught my eye.

Red altar frontal (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

Sunday was Whit Sunday or Pentecost when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles on the seventh Sunday after Easter. Red is the liturgical colour for this festival and here it symbolises the appearance of the Holy Spirit in tongues of fire  described in the Bible as descending on to the Apostles’ heads.

Green altar frontal : detail (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

The Bible then describes the Apostles as speaking in tongues. Now Pentecostalists and some evangelical Christians take this  literally which in extreme forms can seem to crowd out other more important Christian precepts. But for other Christians, Pentecost is a reminder that we should be open to understanding lives and cultures different from our own – both on a national  and international level, but also domestically where tensions between generations or sexes can require calm wisdom and  creative thinking  just to keep channels of communication open. A mother of 4, I often felt the judgement of Solomon package should come as standard with the first baby, not some hard grafted, imperfectly grasped and part forgotten add on extra. It took me years to work out that if I gave one of my daughters a choice of clothes in the morning, she would get dressed perfectly happily, whereas if there was no choice, the dressing would not progress so smoothly. She just needed to feel she had a bit of control over her life, and I could go along with that – when I’d actually worked it out.

Green altar frontal: detail (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

The photographs here show North Stoke Church’s red altar frontal.  I have already blogged about the other 3 (for links, see below) and this is the last one. Like the others, this shows a very high standard of skill with the needle with fine, smooth goldwork and beautiful silk shading. Unlike the others, however, the background fabric is velvet rather than brocade. This is also in better condition than the other frontals, being the least used, only coming out for Pentecost.

Green altar frontal: detail (North Stoke Church, Oxon.)

There are some strange Whitsun traditions in England – quite a few of which seem to involve bread, cheese, or bread and cheese and Gloucestershire.  Up North this time of year meant Whitsun Walks, a tradition whose hold is now tenuous and in many places has altogether disappeared. A friend in North Stoke, born and raised in Rotherham, reminisced how she and her friends would have party dresses made for Whitsun (and in her case her gran was a bit of a whizz with the needle and made her a duster coat as well!). Gloriously arrayed in dresses, coats and white gloves(!) they would then climb on to the newly cleaned and sprucely sheeted coal truck and parade through the town along with other similar trucks bearing other children or brass bands.  She’s not yet 6o but suspects this tradition has lapsed or diminished to some sort of off the peg fair.

Interestingly, Onward Christian Soldiers began life as a hymn for a Whitsun Walk of 1865. Dashed off by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould  (whose name and reputation always brings a smile to our lips),  it was produced in a great hurry and put in the hands of local school children when literally hot off the press. A great folk song collector and prolific writer, one of his novels, ‘The Book of Were-Wolves, an account of a terrible superstition’ (1865),  influenced Bran Stoker ‘s Dracula’. While a curate in Horbury in Yorkshire, he fell in love with a mill girl much younger than he. His family felt the difference in social class and the  girl, Grace, was sent to York for 2 years to learn middle class mores and elocution. After such an apprenticeship it is a relief  to hear that Grace was accepted by Sabine’s family, that they went on the have 15 healthy children and lived together happily until separated by death. George Bernard Shaw is said to have based ‘Pygmalion’ on their relationship, translating the Yorkshire mill lass into a cockney. (See the Wakefield Express article here.)

So after a bit of a Whit peregrination and the fine needlework of North Stoke’s altar frontals, I’m head down and on with the altar frontal for Ipsden which I hope to post about later in the week.