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If I haven’t raved to you yet about my favourite place in London to get a cup of coffee then you are well overdue one and if you have heard what I’ve got to say, then why are you reading this and not at Scooterworks drinking their beautiful beautiful coffee?
This may be the pretentious coffee geek inside me screaming out in blatant disregard for my own social standing, but the best bit about the shop is their coffee machine. It’s a restored vintage Faema 3-group fully manual machine from 1957 (the year the company was founded) and it looks like something from an alternate reality of the Jetsons where they never really got past their industrial revolution era obsession with steam. (On a related note… why isn’t there a steam-punk version of the Jetsons!
“What ho, Elroy! Rosie’s running low on coal, here’s a sixpence.”
“Sure thing Pop, just give me two ticks and I’ll fire up the boiler on my space scooter and get some more!”
It would be the best thing on TV by several furlongs dammit!) On a technical geekery note I’m pretty sure it’s also the only cafe in London that has a manual machine (one where you have to pull the lever to apply any steam pressure onto the coffee rather than one where you just have to press a button or flick a switch) and although this could be a horrifically bad thing given that manual machines are much much easier to screw up and produce death instead of coffee it actually turns out to be great since it means that they actually go to the effort of training their baristas well. I’ve yet to have a bad shot from them and some of the better ones have been some of the best coffees I’ve ever drunk. Another geeky point it gains in its favour is that you can go in and ask for a ristresso and the person behind the counter doesn’t give you a blank look and a gormless “huh?” but instead grabs a different filter basket, fiddles with some knobs and pulls you a little cup of goodness that’ll take your eyes out of their sockets.
If the lure of great coffee isn’t already enough for you then the ambience of the shop should definitely tempt you inside. It’s slightly run down in a charming sort of way, is filled with a constant stream of suitably artistically bedraggled customers, there’s a constant background rumble of pretentious coffehouse chatter and snippets of Italian, the shop is littered with bits of things you would actually want to pick up and read and everywhere you look is covered with junky bits of Vespa paraphernalia. I’m sure most of the reason for this is that it was not and apparently still is not meant to be a cafe. Since everything in there has grown up around it as it transformed it just naturally became comfortable and charming without a hint of affectation. You won’t find any carefully-planned-for-the-yuppie-set decor or matching furniture and wallpaper here! To quote from their myspace page:
| We never meant to be a café. It just happened.When we open the shop in a cold December of 2000 the coffee we were serving was only for customers who came to buy Vespas, Labrettas, spare parts, helmets and whatever our messy shop could offer. But the italian 1957 Faema espresso machine brewed an excellent drink and soon the word was spread: people started to come to enjoy a good cup of coffee in the relaxed athmosphere of this hidden place called Scooterworks.We are still not a café. This is primarily our office and our shop, but we can’t deny any longer that something else is happening here. |
You can just see the hordes of people lining up outside the shop in the days when the espresso was for Vespa customers with problems like… “err… yeah that… bit… thing… gasket… nut… thing… it’s loose… maybe…. sometimes it makes a noise… CAN I HAVE A COFFEE PLEEEEEAAASE!!!!!!!”
Interestingly, they don’t use beans that are particularly fresh, it’s a fairly basic Italian blend that you can see piled up in the basement if you go downstairs to use their loo and manual machines have a reputation for producing wildly variable coffee on different days. However, despite these two technical problems, Scooterworks manages to produce a cup that is consistently better than anywhere else I’ve been for coffee in London. As I said before, I’ve never had a bad cup from them and that’s much more than I can say for some well established coffee houses. It might be that I’m infected by the atmosphere or entranced by the cute staff, but somehow coffee from Scooterworks just tastes great and I don’t care what it is that does it, just so long as they keep on doing it right.
It’s a little bit tricky to find, but Lower Marsh Street is pretty much just next to Waterloo. Just go out of station from the exits that aren’t on ground level, look for the slightly dangerous looking staircase and head down it and through the slightly industrial sideroads and then *bam* there’s Scooterworks and a lovely vintage clothes shop and a very reasonably priced Japanese restaurant all on the same road. I used to go there when I played the flute and needed spare parts/music since it also happens that the flautist’s paradise is also located on the same magical street.
If you haven’t been there yet then you have to go, it’s as simple as that.
Partly down to my great uncle having his 80th birthday and mostly, I suspect, because everyone wanted a bit of a get-together and a holiday we’ve had rather a lot of the family over. There’s been rather little news this week and what there is is incredibly depressing and pretty much consists of me signing my name down on waiting lists and being told that they will regrettably not be able to have me at their markets, but there has been a fair bit of cooking for the aforementioned family going on, which is much more interesting!
Coming up tomorrow is the last big dinner we’ll all have together and so mum wants to make sure that I show off m4 l33t haute cuisine skillz, or something like that. I’m pretty much set for all the main stuff, but I haven’t really got a fancy pudding that I do… they’re all pretty much treacle sponge, or bread and butter pudding, or chocolate cake, or ginger cake, or marmalade and poppy seed cake, or victoria sponge, or something rather comfort foody and whilst delicious, hardly high table.
So, I had the day off work today and I mostly used it to sit down and make myself a haute cuisine style pudding and here’s the result:
The FREAKTREE!!!! (actually I’ve only just realised how much that looks like blood veins or something… it’s sort of gross really, isn’t it.)
Now, not all the components of it are there just yet, but I doubt I’ll have time to take pictures or even make it into a half-decent shape tomorrow and it would be nice to have something to write about tonight too. That rosemary on the top should really be roasted and there’s some chocolate mousse that hasn’t quite set and should be sat in a little ball slightly to the left of the unearthly fruit. What goes into it is an earl grey tea bavarois, the super simple slightly sour chocolate mousse, raspberry coulis and a sprig or two of roasted rosemary.
If you’d like to create your own slightly grotesque and highly pretentious dessert then here’s how it goes (seves 10)
200g sugar
200ml milk
250ml double cream
1 vanilla pod
a tablespoon of earl grey tea leaves (or a couple of bags)
3 egg yolks
1 sachet of gelatin (yuck)
1 recipe’s worth of super simple chocolate mousse
2 punnets of raspberries
100g of icing sugar
dash of vinegar
dash of vodka
20 roasted rosemary sprigs or 20 fresh mint leaves if you’re feeling less adventurous
1. Make the Bavarois:
Slowly heat the milk with 50ml of the cream, the tea and a vanilla pod. Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks with the sugar until they go fairly pale. Once the milk mix is about as hot as a really hot bath, pour a couple tablespoons into the egg/sugar mix and mix it together until it’s even, then add it to the pan of milk. Keep on stirring the mix on a low heat until it thickens up to about as thick as melted ice-cream, then take it off, take out the vanilla pod (and dry it off and keep it in some sugar for later) and chop up the tea leaves if they look unappetisingly large.
Mix the sachet of gelatin in as little boiling water as you can make it dissolve in and try not to breathe in any of the nasty smell. Once it’s all dissolved, add it to the mix you made before and leave it all to cool. You’ve got enough time to make the mousse here, so look forward for a bit.
Now that the mix is at room temperature, take the remaining cream and whip it until it forms soft peaks and then gently fold the mix together. Grease up 10 ramekins and then divide the mix evenly between them. Don’t worry if you don’t have ramekins, you can always put it one container and then cut it later. Don’t forget to grease the moulds, I didn’t know you were meant to before I tried it out and I had to melt the outside to get it to come out.
Pop them in the fridge and leave it for at least 4 hours and preferably overnight.
2. Make Chocolate Mousse
This is the easiest recipe you will ever find for chocolate mousse ever, if you don’t like it sour, then you can use whatever you like, but I think this works well here.
3. Make Raspberry Coulis
Purée the raspberries with the vinegar and the vodka, then pour the whole lot into a pan. Turn the heat waaay up till it bubbles and then add the icing sugar, stir until it dissolves and then turn the heat down low and let it reduce for 5 minutes. Pour it through a sieve and eat what’s left behind. Once it’s gone cold you can pop this in the fridge for whenever.
4. Assemble the FREAKTREE
Spoon a little of the raspberry coulis onto a plate, then use a knife to start drawing. When you run low on painting sauce spoon a little more into the bits of the plate already covered in red… draw very very slowly, it helps. Once you’re happy with the shape turn out the bavarois onto a cake slice thingy or a knife then slide it into place on the plate. Use two spoons or an ice-cream scoop to make the chocolate mousse into a little ball, then pop it on the plate too. Garnish both with a little sprig of roasted rosemary and voila, you are a pretentious snob!
5. Quake in Fear…
for you have unleashed the ancient mystical force of the FREAKTREE and though you may laugh as you eat it now, it will come back for you in the night to rip out your internal organs and replace them with custard!
I had two remarkable revelations today that have made me realise that skimmed milk, far from being one of the great tragedies of our times, is a hugely necessary and thoroughly awesome part of the great cycle of fat. As they dawned on me I skipped gaily down the road singing about how much I loved people who drink skimmed milk and how they are the glue that holds society together. I think flowers actually bloomed in my wake and I could have sworn I saw a rainbow.
Revelation one came when I got back from work today and found that there was clotted cream in the fridge. This is of course in it’s own right an almost religious experience with its thick golden crust and thick velvety insides and I really can’t think why I don’t really buy the stuff myself much. I’ve now had clotted cream with a scone, with cake, on a mince pie, with some fruit, on top espresso and off of a spoon and I was almost so happy I just curled up and went to sleep. However, that wouldn’t have helped me write today’s blog and it wouldn’t have let me get to revelation one properly.
As I was putting the (greatly reduced) pot of cream back in the fridge I had a look to see what dairy products there were in there and after a careful rummage I found…
whole milk, gold top, double cream, creme fraiche, full fat greek yoghurt, fromage frais, salted butter, unsalted butter, unsalted French butter, parmesan, emmental and the beautiful beautiful clotted cream…
and I thought,
“Holy crap, do I eat a lot of dairy fat!”
Now I’m sure that doesn’t come as a shock to most of you as you’ve probably seen for the most part how much fat I eat, or at least how much goes into the recipes I list here, but for me to look around the fridge and see that pretty much every milky thing in there would give a dietitian uncontrollable shakes and a strong urge to hide behind the sofa sort of brought the point home. I would like to say that even for our house this is quite an uncommonly large amount of fatty dairy stuff and partly comes from my family being away for the past few days and me stocking up on heart-stopping goodies and partly comes from them all coming back and fearing that I might have somehow starved whilst they were away.
On it’s own that particular gem of knowledge doesn’t really amount to very much, but then I had my second startling revelation. As I sat back and admired the pile of heart-failure inducing packets and cartons I found myself thinking of how it all gets made. All together it’s a collection of fatty, super fatty and artery-cloggingly fatty things and normal milk is just plain old normal fatty. So, if I had myself a cow then I wouldn’t be able to make all this stuff without getting extra fat from somewhere else. Then it hit me,
“All the fat I eat is stolen from skimmed milk!”
The skimmed milk industry, far from destroying the soul of the world by polluting it with second rate milk is actually spreading love and joy by creating vast amounts of dairy fat for people like you and me to eat! Every litre of fat free milk that someone drinks gives a precious 3 or 4 grams of fat for all the fine upstanding butter and cream eaters to enjoy. After some quick calculations, I found that I eat about 50g or so of dairy fat each day excluding the fat from milk and so if it weren’t for somebody out there drinking the 15 litres of milk that that fat was skimmed from then I’d be doomed. I guess about half a litre of milk a day is fairly normal and so I’d like to extend a big thankyou to those 30 or so people who choose to have skimmed milk (no longer to be referred to as “the crappy white water stuff that sort of looks like milk”) and don’t use butter and by doing so support my lavishly fatty existence!
Starting from today, I’d like to completely turn around my position on getting people to drink full-fat milk! Full-fat milk is bad, don’t drink it! Skimmed milk has all the same nutrients as full-fat milk, just with fewer calories, it’s better for you! Skimmed milk is lower in cholesterol, cholesterol is bad! The talk of less flavour is all lies, skimmed milk tastes just the same as all milk unless you happen to like the taste of yucky yucky butter in your drinks! Drinking full fat milk will make you fat… really really fat and you don’t even want to think about gold top! Every time you drink full fat milk you make a pixie cry and a health fanatic kill a baby!
Drink skimmed milk today, it’s the only ethical choice.
