Guardian Girl

I took the ingredients for Dan Lepard’s carrot and cumin burger buns to my friends’ house the night before Latitude festival and cooked them by way of saying thanks for looking after my cat.  They  must’ve been chuffed, eh.

I’d got round there late and we started on some wine while I began my prep (more tearing, scraping and stirring than chopping, peeling and kneading). The recipe called for a considerable amount of rising time, which didn’t suit our appetites one bit, so in the end I just poured in rather more yeast than was required and hoped for the best. I forgot to bring butter so I simply poured in a randomly selected quantity of olive oil instead. I left the dough balls, which looked more like bhajis than buns due to my haphazard and occasionally dangerous chopping style, to rise for about 45 minutes, which was the length of time Adam and Thomas could bear to distract themselves with Youtube clips and yet more  empty-stomached wine drinking before they fainted. The ‘buns’ went into a muffin tray followed by a hot oven and came out 25 minutes later resembling cakes. Why does everything I cook turn into a cake? I’m like a slightly rubbish, less rich version of King Midas. According to DL the buns should’ve been bouncy, soft and moist. Moist was pretty much the only one I managed to nail this time. They actually tasted pretty good – if a little yeasty – filled with some herby burgers that were on special offer and a bit of wilting rocket out of the boys’ fridge. They were surprisingly filling, too, which is pretty much my number-one criterion for food.

Here’s how they should’ve looked:

Carrot and cumin burger buns

And here’s the result, photographed in a drunken state as my stomach digested itself in anticipation. As you could see I couldn’t even muster the energy to slice it properly at this point. I just tore at the thing with my claws until it sort of divided in two.

Carrot and cumin cakes

Conclusions:

• Where on earth Sainsbury’s keep their sesame and poppy seeds I don’t know. They must have them
• A point of interest: while I was looking for the seeds, a man standing next to me piped up: ‘Excuse me, do you know if you can make icing sugar by putting normal sugar in a food processor?’ I replied that I had no idea and had never considered it before, to which he replied: ‘Oh well, my cooking has so little hope of turning out right, there’s really no point worrying about it.’ If he’d been within 40 years of my age, I would’ve married him on the spot. Imagine the dinner parties!
• Olive oil seems to work nice in buns
• The further I get from following these recipes, the more fun I have
• Yeast probably isn’t among the many ingredients you can throw into the mixing bowl with gay abandon