Fine words and edible parsnips

I’ve blogged about parsnips before.

Parsnips are one of the more reliable crops on the allotment, as long as the frosts aren’t so long and so hard that we can’t lever them out of the ground. There’s a fine line between ensuring that the crop has experienced some frost to make them sweeter, and roots frozen into the ground until the earth finally decides to release them, generally after they have developed a core with a hardness of of 10 on the Mohs scale.

We have harvested some huuuugggggeeee parsnips this year. And although I love roast parsnips, parsnip soup and so on, my mind has recently been harking back to a certain failure from a couple of years ago. Yes – the parsnip cake experiment. Or chemical warfare as it turned out to be. It’s a confusing moment – seeing what smells like a delicious cake but not being able to eat it. It does strange things to the mind. The brain thinks “mmm – cake = lovely”. The taste buds, however, beg you not to take another mouthful.

Now, I don’t like to be outwitted by a root vegetable, and this culinary failure has been playing on my mind for some time. So, whilst idly searching the BBC Good Food website for parsnip recipes a month or so ago, I happened across another parsnip cake recipe. I put a link up when updating the seasonal recipes on my sidebar, but hadn’t plucked up the courage to actually make the cake. Until this weekend.

And so, it was with some trepidation that SomeBeans tried a small bite of the proffered cake. The poor chap – the last time I fed him parsnip cake, he accused me of trying to poison him (though not as effectively as I did with the Jerusalem artichokes…). But this time……

SUCCESS! A cake of delights. No acrid aftertaste. No vacillation of brain vs tastebuds. A moist, sweet cake. I have beaten the parsnip demon.

(We’ve eaten quite a lot of it, as you can see. Well, we do have a guest)