What's Not To Love About Home-Made Hill Food?
/WRITTEN by LOUIS WATERMAN-EVANS
There has never been a better time to be baking. Be it bread, brownies, flapjacks or anything else you feel like throwing together and putting in the oven, baking is a way of being creative, providing an ideal opportunity to share your inventions with others, both on the hill or left on the doorstep of your neighbour alike.
Beetroot brownie
Bring out your creativity
I enjoy getting things done: I’d rather go for a run than sit down and watch a film; I’d rather do the washing up than sit and read a book. I like the physical and psychological feelings of movement, as I’m sure most other outdoorsy folk do too.
So cooking and, more specifically, baking, is one of my only creative outlets. I think about food A LOT. From the moment I’m thinking about a trip, to the time where I’m out on the hill to the golden time when I return back to my vehicle/ tent/ accommodation, food is on my mind. Eating for me is one of life’s great pleasures; to not care about it seems to be lowering one’s life satisfaction, to limit the realms of enjoyment.
Food as the talking point
How much more enjoyable is eating food when you’ve put effort into it, and are able to talk about where it’s from, the ingredients you used and how you made it?
Imagine if for every trip you went on, everyone brought their own home baked treat to the table and shared it with the group.
Being nestled in behind a wee pile of rocks near a summit somewhere sheltering from the wind is greatly enhanced when a friend hands you a home-baked brownie. It brings joy to give, to share something that you’ve put time and energy into creating. Talking about how you made it can also provide a nice distraction from the (inevitably) challenging conditions that the British hills are so fond of dishing out.
Falafel in a home-made rye & spelt roll
Nutritious and (sometimes) delicious
Home-baking also gives you control and awareness of what goes in your food. It’s easy to end up with a diet consisting of palm oil, white flour, sugar and salt if we buy cheapo packaged supermarket products.
But when we have to physically spoon it into the mixture, would you ever contemplate adding that much sugar?
Baking your own snacks and hill food also means you can go as fancy superfoody or as budget-friendly as you like. If you want to add in goji berries and use buckwheat flour instead of plain white, you can; similarly, if you want to use a 30p bar of chocolate in the recipe, you can do that too. I like to keep my base recipes as simple and unfancy as possible (generally only using ingredients that I could find at any supermarket, cheaply) and then modify from there. In the beetroot brownie recipe, for example, you could easily substitute ingredients such as a different flour, nuts, seeds or dried fruit if you wanted to make it healthier or accommodate certain dietary requirements.
Time to experiment!
So in these challenging indoor times, it seems like the ideal opportunity to get experimenting in the kitchen. It should be noted that you’re bound to make lots of things that really aren’t that good, and that’s fine! I recently tried making some porridge bars and shared them with folk on my winter ML training. Justifiably, it was commented that, “They taste like the leftover porridge in the pot that you don’t particularly want to eat, but do so just to avoid throwing it away.” Brilliant... Now I know what not to do, and have ideas for how to improve them for the next batch!
Beetroot Brownies
Download & print the recipe here.
Ingredients
Makes 12-15 generous brownies
6-8 medium beetroots (depending on how large they are and how beetrooty you want the mixture to be!)
6tbsp ground flaxseed
100g dairy-free margarine
100g light brown sugar
300g dairy-free dark chocolate
200g plain, all-purpose flour
8 tbsp cocoa powder
4 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp vanilla
1 tbsp of salt
140g icing sugar
Method
Trim the ends off the beetroots and add the beetroot to a saucepan of boiling water, and boil with the lid on for 45 minutes or until soft.
Remove the beetroots from the saucepan (make sure you don’t discard the cooking water) and leave for a few minutes to cool long enough to touch.
Combine the flaxseed with 18 tbsp of water in a small bowl to make 6 flax eggs, and set to one side to thicken up.
Preheat the oven to 180°C / 356°F fan-assisted and grease a baking tin with margarine.
Once cool enough to touch, peel and discard the beetroot skins and add the flesh to a blender, along with 6 tbsp of water from the saucepan you used to cook the beetroot. Blend until smooth, then set to one side.
In a large mixing bowl, cream the margarine with the sugar. Then add the flax egg, vanilla extract and most of the beetroot puree (leave 2 tbsp for the icing).
In a separate mixing bowl, combine the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder. Then sieve the dry mixture into the beetroot mixture and gently fold it in, making sure not to ‘over mix’ the ingredients which might leave you with flat brownies.
Roughly chop the chocolate and add half to the brownie mix along with a pinch of salt. Gently fold to combine. Pour half of the mixture into the baking tin, then cover with a layer of the remaining chocolate pieces, then pour the other half of the brownie mixture on top. Smooth the top with a spatula, then bake for 45-55 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
Leave the brownie to cool for 5 minutes before turning out, then leave to cool further so the top is approximately room temperature.
Prepare the beetroot icing by combining the icing sugar with the remaining tbsp of beetroot puree and 4-5 tsp of water, until smooth and runny. Pour the beetroot icing over the brownie, then cut the brownie into 12-15 squares. Ideally these should be consumed immediately, but they’ll also last for a couple of days in the fridge. Absolutely delicious!
About the author
We met Louis Waterman-Evans when he came on our Mountain Leader Steep Ground Masterclass and Intro Winter Mountaineering course, both in 2018. He is a teacher by trade and student of the mountains. He once knew life as a hiking guide, but in these coronavirus times he finds himself now mastering the art of househusbandry and home-baking. Check out his website at louiswaterman-evans.com and follow him on Instagram @louiswatermanevans
Note from Anne
I make a lot of Chris’s hill food - he is gluten-intolerant and dairy-intolerant, and shop-bought items that he can eat are ridiculously expensive. We’ve made these excellent sweet rice cakes a couple of times, and they tick all the boxes - they taste good, they transport well in foil, they freeze successfully, and they are cheap!
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