The Sacred Art of Eating

Helen and Dougal decided to host a glamorous and exclusive cocktail party, with mixed results.

• Green Apple Martini
• Ginger Pom
• The Instant Canapé: Quick Crostini with Avocado and Green Pea Hummus
• Tuna and Crab & Avocado Wraps
• Butterfly Cakes

The plan was to have a short, sharp event – two hours of little nibbles and heady drinks, then a round of butterfly cakes for a finale. That even left time for people to hit the town afterward, should they be up for that kind of thing.

The two cocktails were pretty good, though requiring ingredients that were unusual enough that the local off-licence couldn’t meet our demands. But Peckham’s has quite a serious selection of interesting liqueurs.

By contrast the wraps were pretty disastrous. No matter how clever it sounds, wrapping things in tortillas is a recipe for tears well before bed-time. Not to mention how ridiculously over-filled the wraps would have been if we’d followed the recipe exactly. I was liberally applying cocktails sticks through all angles of rolled tortilla in an effort to hold them together but they looked pretty ridiculous. And fell apart the instant they left the serving plate.

The pumpernickel crostini were elegant and simple, though not to my taste. I’m not a great fan of rye bread, and there’s nothing more seriously rye than pumpernickel. I also made a batch of breadsticks, trying out another couple of recipes from Richard Bertinet’s Dough: sesame and aniseed breadsticks, and olive, parmesan and herb breadsticks. I’m not a great fan of olives either, but these latter were really good. Naturally they were the more difficult of the two to make but I guess that’s why you put in the extra effort, eh?

I don’t want to dwell too much on the party itself. In short, we had too many cancellations. But I hope our guests left with happy thoughts, as they got butterfly cakes with coloured cream just before we wrapped up for the night.

Alas, even the cakes were not a complete success. Would you believe that a significant number weren’t even cooked when they came out of the oven? Helen turned round after ten seconds and found a bunch of them had collapsed inwards like some kind of exuberant diamond mining operation had started up.

We might have to pay some proper attention to the temperature of our oven if the cakes really were so underdone. I’m not sure what we’d need to do to measure the temperature in the oven that won’t – as the guys at Kamikaze Cookery managed to do – melt the thermometer.

I hope our guests don’t think too badly of us. The drink was mixed in a good way, the food was mixed in a bad way, and maybe the invited friends felt a bit awkward. But the one thing everyone agreed was the Pama (that’s a pomegranate liqueur, m’lud) is the bees knees. Get some.

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