​Guernsey Gâche Mélée (pronounced Gosh Mel Ahh) is a traditional Guernsey baked apple dessert, and one of the finest desserts ever in Paul’s humble opinion! In Guernésiais (Guernsey's local patois), gâche mélée simply means cake mix.

It's made with apples, butter, sugar, flour, a bit of milk and sometimes spices (mum used a quarter teaspoon of mixed spice), all mixed and baked to a delicious golden brown.

At this time of year, with apple harvests being brought in and the nights really drawing in, this is the perfect if somewhat rich dessert.  It can be served cold (great for a picnic) though Paul loves it with a generous trickle of Guernsey cream or large dollop of custard.

The recipe below was originally handwritten and gifted to cousin Tina by her mother-in-law.  Mum's recipe was similar though with the addition of mixed spice.

​We haven't done a video on this yet... though I have a feeling we may!!  

Enjoy!!


Ingredients

1lb cooking apples (weighted after paring and coring)
5oz Self-raising flour
5oz Sugar
2.5 oz Butter or Suet (vegan option)
3 fluid oz Milk or Oatmilk (vegan option)
1/4 tsp Mixed Spice (optional, and in mum's recipe)
Good pich of salt

Method

Chop apples into small pieces (1/2 inch cubes).
Place all ingredients into a mixing bowl and stir well with a wooden spoon until toroughly miced.
Place the mixture into a well-greased tin measuring 7" by 9" and bake on Gas 2 / 300F / 150C / 140 Fan for 1.5 hours, till golden brown and the apples are cooked.  Add an extra 15 minutes if needed.
Cut into squares and serve with cream.

Dessert in photo baked by cousin Tina!!  🤗

Gosh, it was a rather busy and unexpectedly emotional day yesterday!

I said to Richard on Saturday that I wanted to make a Christmas Pudding, as it was Stir-Up Sunday this weekend which is the traditional day that people in the UK would make their Christmas Puddings; families all coming together and giving the mix a stir, each making a wish as they did so.  It's obviously one of those traditions that is dying out swiftly now that we can go to any supermarket or corner shop and buy the pasty, sweet, microwaveable, unrecognisable Christmas Puddings that they sell these days.  However, I was absolutely sure there is nothing like the real thing that mum used to make, and I wanted to make it.  So make it we did!!

Now, I haven't made mum's Christmas Puddings for many decades.  In fact, I don't think I've made a traditional Christmas Pudding since I last made one with mum when I must have been in my very, very early 20s.

Mum had given me one of her old cookery books some years back.  It's an old Hamlyn cookery book with a pale blue cloth-like cover.  The dust sheet has long been lost, and various splodges of cake batter and gravy now sit comfortably alongside the jaded and faded fake gold lettering on the cover binding.  It wasn't actually the recipe for Christmas Pudding in the book that I was looking for though.  You see, I knew that mum's handwritten recipe of HER Christmas Pudding was on a piece of paper cradled between two of the leaves of the book.  I took Cooking In Colour off of my cookery book shelves (note... MY cookery book shelves, not OUR cookery book shelves!).  I found the slip of mottled paper with red writing, and then remembered what I had known all along... the list of ingredients used and their weights was for 16 puddings, and I certainly didn't want to make 16!!  So I set to and converted all of the ounces into grams and millilitres and then divided all of the total amount of each ingredient by 16.  In the end, looking at the full list of ingredients and their weights for one pudding, I decided that I would do one and a half times this reduced amount of mix.  It turned out that this was perfect for making 8 individual puddings; it was Richard's idea to make individual puddings rather than one large one, and I think that he had the right idea.

It was in the first moments of stirring this scented mix that the initial sense of the past came back to me...  Standing around the dining room table with mum at my side and a huge plastic Tupperware in front of us.  We would stir the mixture thoroughly, ensuring that everything was incorporated; no pockets of dry flour here, and no clumps of gooey, squidgy chopped prunes there.  Just one unctious flavourful dried fruit, almond, sugar, suet, rum and stout paste.  We'd have to take turns in doing the stirring as the quantity of mixture was so large it was really quite tiring on the arms!

My second sense of the past was when I could smell the puddings steaming.  The gentle spicy aroma filled the kitchen, then our middle room, the ground floor, then the upstairs until the whole house was engulfed in scented memories.  And boy did that aroma take me back decades again!  I've obviously smelt Christmas Puddings over the decades, though none have given me this sense of days of old.

And then we jump forward to the tasting, and wowsers... didn't that bang me right back to being a child!!  Sitting around the table at Christmas, with family and friends and some people that I didn't even know who they were.  Presents had been opened and played with and the turkey carcass was sitting under tinfoil on top of the fridge.  There we all were with our coloured paper Christmas cracker hats on, all feeling slightly boozy (even us youngsters as we were allowed Babycham!), terrible jokes had been read aloud, useless cracker gifts were spread around the tablecloth, some gleeful choir was singing updated carols and festive songs on the radio... and then would come mum's Christmas Puddings.  Glistening.  Flaming.  And beautiful.  In my opinion, heavenly.  😊

If you've seen the video of us making the Christmas Puddings you will see how I got rather overwhelmed by emotion.  It was simply because the taste of this pudding just sent me back decades to all the memories above - to the joys of those people, of which too many are sadly no longer in our lives today, though they will live forever in our hearts... dad, my brother Perri, Aunty Phil, Uncle Len, Aunty Betty and Uncle Mick.  Life is so short, yet it can also be so joyous.

And I guess that's the wonderful thing about food, along with many other daily necessities and luxuries.

​In the depths of our minds we have so many memories that are associated with a smell or a taste or a sight or a sound, and even a touch. It's in moments like these, sometimes decades later, when these special times are relived, most often unexpectedly, that we're just taken back to our childhood or back to special moments of remembrance.  It can be quite overwhelming, though it can also be so enriching too.  I for one am so pleased that we have these moments as they highlight time's gone by; for me many are wonderfully sweet and happy whilst some are more bittersweet.  However, these memories and events are part of the person each of us is today, and hopefully even more memories can be made for us to fall back to as we get older, and wiser, and remember.

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And... as I sat in our front room this morning quietly doing the final edit of this blog before posting it, something quite lovely, unexpected and extraordinary happened, though this story will have to wait for another day...

A Guernsey Gardener in London, Day 14

Dad never really liked pasta. If it was in a lasagne then that was a bit different as the pasta was all hidden. As dad got older he enjoyed penne with a nice rich tomato sauce... and cheese. But in my early years dad was not a fan of pasta... and especially spaghetti...

When I suggested to dad around the age of eight that there was a vegetable that I'd like to grow called Spaghetti Squash, the seeds never arrived. I'm sure I continued to ask to grow this same vegetable over a good number of years, though the seeds again never seemed to arrive. Lots of other seeds arrived: parsnips, runner beans, carrots, beetroot, French beans, lettuce, tomatoes, aubergine, peppers, sweetcorn, courgette, marrow, spinach, radish, celery and many more. To be frank, I sort of forgot each year about the Spaghetti Squash because of the abundance of other exciting seeds that were arriving and being sown. I got so caught up in the joy of what we had that I forgot and therefore didn't worry about what I didn't. It was only when I saw it in the annual catalogue from Thompson & Morgan that I would say again "Dad, can we grow some Spaghetti Squash this year?"

It was in this first decade or so of my life, filled with the joys a productive garden brings - veggies, flowers, soft fruits, and apples and pears in our orchard - that my desire to want to grow fruit, vegetables and some flowers really flourished.

Some four decades later, in January this year, we received a little parcel from Erica of Erica's Little Welsh Garden. As an extra Erica had also included a whole host of different seeds. There were loads of packets of her own saved seeds from last year's harvests, including a good number of different squash and pumpkin varieties. However, it was one little plain white packet that really caught my eye... it held six of Erica's saved Spaghetti Squash seeds. There were also other packets with some giant pumpkin seeds and some other exotic squash seeds, though my heart just leapt at the thought of these six little dried, papery and weightless Spaghetti Squash seeds.

Obviously, I sowed them as soon as I could. The seeds germinated well and grew strong. When they reached a healthy size I put them in at the Community Gardens; I wanted them to be away from our Cheeky Prince at the allotment plots. I admit to watering them, though apart from that I sort of left them to their own devices. And boy did they grow... not massive and spreading, though rather productive. In fact these Spaghetti Squash have proven to be our most prolific of any squash this year. There seems to be two distinct varieties. One is a mottled green (below) and the other is the yellow one (above).

Yesterday, with some excitement and trepidation, I went down to the Community Gardens to harvest the first Spaghetti Squash. It was quite a moment and did somewhat pull at my heartstrings. It's quite incredible that I have been waiting to sow, grow, harvest, cook and taste a Spaghetti Squash for almost 46 years!

I brought it home and found that the mellow yellow skin was actually extremely tough. Maybe I had just left it in situ ripening too long? I tried to prick it all over as it says on the cooking instructions that I had read online, though the fork hardly made a dent. I decided the best thing to do would be to cut it in half and then bake it in the oven with the cut sides down. After 45 minutes I turned the bronzed shells over so that the flesh was showing and popped a knob of butter and some cracked black pepper into the hollow where the seeds had been. Back in it went for another 15 minutes...

When I took it out of the oven it smelled nice, though nothing special. I used a fork to tease out the flesh, and sure enough the yellow lusciousness came apart and turned into little threads of buttery squash. Awesome!! I have to admit it was all a little bit wetter than I had imagined it would be, though with a little bit of salt added it was absolutely divine!

Finally, I had sown, grown, harvested, cooked and eaten a Spaghetti Squash!! A lifetime goal achieved, and a desire fully quashed (not squashed!!)!

Will I be doing them again? Most probably. I still have three seeds remaining from the six Erica sent, and will be saving some seeds from the mesh of threads and seeds I removed prior to baking.

All I need now is more space to have a huge squash and pumpkin patch, and to harvest the rest of these little beauties of Spaghetti Squash at the Community Gardens.

​I think even dad would have been happy with the outcome; he loved marrow with butter, salt and pepper and I'm sure this would have been one 'spaghetti' he would have happily devoured.

​A Guernsey Gardener in London, Day 4