Chocolate eclair
Claire, please sum yourself up in a few words?
I’m a beach dweller, shack living, cake barterer, frugal by nature with Rapunzel hair.
Claire Bruce in Dungeness
Please give us a little background, about growing up and becoming interested in cooking?
Claire. You’ll find me here on the beach at Dungeness, a place I’ve had a connection to, for almost a lifetime. Growing up along the coast, my childhood bedroom view was the expanse of Romney Marsh and the grey blocks of Dungeness Power Station. Just the sky above me and the beach almost within touching distance. Little did my seven-year-old self know that one day this would be my home.
I’m a 1970s child, and back then, my late Summer view was filled with fabulous plumes of smoke, as stubble fields were set on fire across the marsh. And the smell of soft Summer rain and blackcurrant leaves from sheltering in, yes in, a blackcurrant bush with my sister, while my parents carried on picking fruit at a farm in deepest Kent, fabulous times. But unfortunately, this year now in their nineties, my parents have stopped picking a gazillion buckets of fruit, I will have to plunder my freezer, not theirs for Summer fruit flavours. My food heritage is very much planted in my parent’s relentless growing and picking. Mum’s ability to cook for so many at a moment’s notice, often making a Sunday roast chicken stretch to feed more than a dozen people.
Unconventional some have described my life here on the beach. But I do a regular day job in global health and safety. Like any other, it is just a job, though as my work involves the UN or G20, I often wonder how I ended up here.
I just never knew when I was at school that you could make a living, a career, from cooking other than being a chef. Now I know you can!
Food has been ever-present, even more so during the last 18 months. I’ve kept baking, sending cakes by post far and wide to friends, and total strangers who’ve found me on Instagram. More recently, I’ve been keeping the local RNLI crew here in Dungeness supplied with brownies, from the ever-increasing launches, saving lives in the Channel.
It took the combination of being indoors over the last year or so, wanting to cook and be around for people, to apply to Masterchef. I had no strategy, I just wanted to cook delicious food, I didn’t even consider it was going to be on telly. Crazy eh? I was astonished when the production crew defined my cooking style so quickly. It seems daft that I’d never noticed or thought of it before, I cook with extraordinarily local ingredients, picked or purchased from land or sea from around my home. And as I loath food shopping, I eek out everything before I restock, so frugal living is everyday living to me, but with a good dose of lux at times with local lobster, caught just metres from my home.
• Offthe back of Masterchef I’ve been private cheffing in homes across the South East, bringing my favourite food to your dining table. Depending on the seasons, my menu is almost exclusively ingredients from Kent and Sussex.
• And in 2022 there’ll be spontaneous suppers at my kitchen table in Dungeness.
• Get in touch if you’d like to join the guest list.
Claire’s Recipe
1. Frugalicious Chocolate Cake
Afternoon tea or dinner party. The quickest chocolate cake you’ll ever make.
• Pre heat oven 175°
Ingredients
175g Self-raising flour
2.5 tbsp Cocoa powder
1tsp Bicarbonate of soda
175g Caster sugar (or soft brown sugar)
2 Eggs
150ml Oil....veg/sunflower
150ml Milk (whole, semi or skimmed works)
> In a bowl, whisk with a fork or whisk the oil, milk, eggs, and sugar
> Sieve in the flour, cocoa, and bicarbonate of soda into the wet mixture in the bowl. That’s it! It’ll be very runny
> Pour into a lined 30cm square cake tin, or whatever tin you have to hand! Just watch how long you leave it in the oven
> 23cm square tin takes about 30 mins
> Frugalicious this simple chocolate cake with warm chocolate sauce and coffee ‘ice cream’
Coffee Ice Cream (no churn)
Ingredients
480ml double cream
1 can (397g) condensed milk
60ml strong cold coffee
> Whip up the double cream to stiff peaks
> Whisk in condensed milk and cold coffee
> Dollop the mixture in a tub and leave in the freezer for 4 hours or until frozen
> You can even eat it semi-frozen
Chocolate Sauce
Ingredients
100g dark chocolate
50ml double cream
50ml whole milk
1.5 tbsp golden syrup
> Break the chocolate into chunks. Put all the ingredients into a saucepan and gently melt together, stirring the
ingredients together to be a shiny sauce. Add less golden syrup if you don’t want it too sweet.
> Serve in a jug, or even a jam jar, the warm sauce is delicious poured over chocolate cake topped with coffee ‘ice cream’
This is the perfect dipping sauce for madeleines, churros. And kept in fridge for 48 hours.
To serve sprinkle with nuts, your favourite crushed biscuit or praline. Frugalicious dessert.
It looks great doesn't it!
Follow on Instagram or email at: claires.kitchentable@gmail.com