Ginger Écus

Yet again it's time for something else from my to do list, regular visitors may have noticed that this list has gotten longer recently as I've gained more magazines. I'm working my way through it slowly and having fun whilst I do it. This time it's the turn of the Ginger Écus which was number 75 on the list. Now from the name you might not be able to guess what it is unless of course your French is better than mine, having said that the magazine doesn't say whether this is French recipe or not. These are individual chocolate and ginger cakes decorated with icing and melted chocolate. I'm sure that gives you a better idea of what to expect. I made this at a request from a friend who was coming round to see me. She's been working hard revising for exams so I asked her what her favourite type of cake was, then I consulted my list and saw that I could make these.

The cake is a fairly simple chocolate sponge enhanced with a tea spoonful of ground ginger  made with 3 eggs and 175g each of flour, muscovado sugar and butter but only 25g of cocoa powder. Normally I would use more cocoa than this when making a chocolate sponge as I am a bit of a chocolate fiend when it comes to cake. But in the spirit of trying new recipes I followed the instructions and ended up with quite a light chocolate sponge that had a subtle background hint of ginger. Next time I think I would probably use more cocoa and more ginger, possibly even a pinch of chilli powder as well to give it a bit of a kick.

The cakes were baked in a muffin tin so they are a little bit bigger than cupcakes and instead of coming out nice and flat, mine were a little bit wonky but I think I disguised that under the icing. For the icing I just used icing sugar and water and made it thick enough to spread on top of the cakes. In the magazine the cakes were decorated with a nice, neat spiral of melted dark chocolate. I know I'm too cack handed to achieve that so I just drizzled melted chocolate off a fork in what I hoped was a fairly artistic, abstract kind of style.

Fruity Soda Bread

I've made basic soda bread a few times before when I've run out of bread and not had time to bake proper bread with yeast. It's generally turned out OK and I might blog it in the future. I use a dairy free recipe for basic soda bread mainly because I don't always have milk in the house as neither of us particularly likes it and it only ever gets used in cooking or baking. I drink green tea or black coffee and have yoghurt on cereal and my boyfriend doesn't like hot drinks, so unless I know I'm going to be making something that needs milk, I don't buy it. This version is not dairy free, it uses plain yoghurt instead of the traditional buttermilk and was inspired by a recipe in the March issue of Good Food magazine.  I've only used white flour here but you could also use some wholemeal flour as well to make it a bit healthier if you wanted to. I also used some of the dried fruit from that I won from my prize.  I baked this bread and then I found out about the Fresh From The Oven blogging challenge which is all about bread and this month the theme is breakfast fruit breads hosted by Sarah from La cuisine de Sarah. I thought this loaf would be perfect as I've been eating it for breakfast the past few days.

Ingredients - makes 1 loaf
 

400g plain white flour
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp mixed spice
75g caster sugar
300ml plain yoghurt
170g  mixed dried fruit - use your favourite fruits e.g. raisins, apricots, dates etc (I used a pack of 5 fruit mix from Natural Selection Foods ) demerara sugar for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 200C. Add the flour, bicarbonate of soda, mixed spice, sugar and fruit to a large mixing bowl and stir to combine. Pour in the yoghurt and use a butter knife to bring everything together into a dough. Tip out on to a lightly floured work top and shape into a round loaf then transfer to a lightly floured baking tray. Cut a deep cross into the loaf and sprinkle the top with demerara sugar. Bake for 30-35 minutes until golden, turn out onto a cooling rack and serve warm spread with lots of butter.

Meal Planning Monday - 21/5/12

Last week we were a bit naughty and had takeaway pizza on the night we were supposed to have had the river cobbler so that ended up going in the freezer. We both felt a bit fed up and in need of a treat. I also didn't get round to making the vegetable curry as I ended up making a lot of beef casserole so we munched our way through that instead. I will be making the curry tonight though.

This week Tesco have a lot of discount codes that can be used and some kind person (not me) has listed them online here, we got a supplement in the weekend paper with them on as well. There are quite a few discounts for fruit and vegetables if you spend a certain amount. The shopping is getting delivered today and I ended up saving £5 using these discount codes. 

As with last week there's not necessarily any particular order to this menu and I've linked it with Mrs M

Monday - Thai style vegetable curry
Tuesday - river cobbler, lentils and bacon
Wednesday - pork and apple casserole with mash
Thursday - vegetable curry
Friday - Indian style lamb curry
Saturday - pasta with tinned sardines and homemade tomato sauce
Sunday  - pork casserole

I've bought a big bag of bramley apples so there also be some apple crumble during the week as well, keeps the boyfriend happy.

Beetroot & Cumin Scones

Reading the title of this post you might think it a bit strange to have a vegetable based scone, trust me it works. Having been inspired by the scone recipes in Red Velvet & Chocolate Heartache by Harry Eastwood I decided to have a go at my own creation. I've made savoury scones from her book in the past and they've always turned out well, they tend to be a little heavier than normal scones and I think this is probably due to the vegetable content. Harry tends to use butternut squash and sweet potato for her scones which gives them a lovely golden orange colour when baked. I've gone for something completely different by using beetroot and as beetroot is purple you get beautiful purple/magenta hued scones. You might be wondering why on Earth I would want to try this, well this is my entry into simple and in season which this month is hosted by Urvashi from The Botanical Baker, and after looking at a list of seasonal veg I chose beetroot. I also thought scones made with beetroot would be something a little bit different and inject a bit of colour into what has so far been a rather dull spring.

Scones before they went in the oven

Ingredients - makes 11 scones using a 7cm cutter

435g raw beetroot, peeled weight
600g self raising flour
1 tsp salt
2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tbsp water

1. Preheat the oven to 200C. Finely grate the beetroot using the finest side on a box grater, this will take a little while but it's a great upper body work out. As always when preparing raw beetroot wear gloves if you don't want stained fingers. Also take care not to grate the ends of your fingers!
2. Put the grated beetroot, flour, salt, cumin seeds and water into a food processor and blitz until everything comes together into a dough. Turn out onto a lightly floured worktop and gently roll out to 3-4cm thick. Use a fluted cutter to cut out the scones and place them onto a non stick baking tray.
3. Bake for 18-20 minutes until scones are risen, due to the colour of the beetroot they won't really go golden on top but you can tell they're done when the tops and bottoms are dry.

You can serve these with a main meal as an alternative to pasta, rice or potatoes, we had them topped with a little butter to go with a simple spiced vegetable casserole. They also go well with cream cheese as an alternative to sandwiches for lunch.

I think the only colour missing is green

Fruit & Nut Chocolate Bites

This is my first creation using the goodies that I won recently from Natural Selection Foods and I'm entering it into the We Should Cocoa blogging challenge that is organised by Chele from Chocolate Teapot and Choclette from Chocolate Log Blog and this month is hosted by Laura from How to Cook Good Food. The challenge this month is to do something involving chocolate and almonds. Once again I'm doing something a little bit different from a normal bake, in fact this recipe isn't baked at all, it's raw. Don't be but off by this though, these little bites pack a powerful dark chocolate hit and because they contain fruit and nuts they are also good for you. I got the inspiration for this recipe from a book called Ani's Raw Food Desserts by Ani Phyo. As you will know from reading my blog, I am not a raw foodie but I do find the concept of eating raw food interesting but I would never be able to convert to it as I love my cooked food too much. I bought this book a couple of years ago as an attempt to try and make a few healthier sweet treats, although I haven't actually made much from apart from a couple of the 'raw cookie' recipes which the following recipe is based on. This is an American book so all the measurements that I had to base this recipe on were in cups so I've included both cup and weighed measures here.

Ingredients - makes 17-18 depending on size

1 cup or125g dried chopped dates
1/2 cup or 60g dried cinnamon cranberries (can use normal cranberries then add 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon or to taste)
1/2 cup or 40g flaked almonds
1/3 cup or 40g sesame seeds
1 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp water

Put everything into a food processor and blitz on high power until everything is combined and starts to come together into a sticky dough. You may need to stop and scrape the sides down to ensure everything is fully mixed together. Don't process to a pulp though, a bit of texture from the dates makes these bites more enjoyable. When you are happy with the consistency use a teaspoon to portion out into bite size pieces, you can roll them into little balls or pop them into small shaped silicone moulds like I did. These little bites will keep well in the fridge for at least a week or longer and can also be frozen. You could wrap a couple up in cling film and put them in lunch boxes as healthier alternative to the afternoon chocolate fix that we all need sometimes. The dark chocolate taste might be a bit much for younger palettes so it could be reduced or even left out if you want to make these for children.

Anglesey Cakes

Time for something else from my to do list and today it's the turn of item number 7, the Anglesey Cakes. These are sometimes better known as jammy dodgers. These were very easy to make and I don't really know why I hadn't made them sooner. The biscuit dough is similar to that of shortbread as it is made with a 3:2:1 ratio of flour, butter and sugar, very easy to remember and with that ratio you can make as much or as little as you want. I used 12oz self raising flour, 8oz butter and 4oz caster sugar and mixed it all together into a dough. I cut out 46 biscuits using a flower shaped cutter  I also used a flower plunger cutter to make the holes in the middle of the biscuits. I then sandwiched the biscuits together to make 26 Anglesey Cakes using my homemade lemon marmalade, it's been lurking in the cupboard since I made it but I am on my second jar now. I ended up giving a big jar to my mum and a smaller one to my brother. These biscuits brought a little bit of sunshine back into the world after the miserable weather we've been having lately.

As I've used lemons I'm entering this bake into the one ingredient challenge from Working London Mummy this month hosted by Laura from How to Cook Good Food. And as I  made everything from scratch including the marmalade I've also entered this into Made With Love Monday's.And because I've made these in the shape of flowerrs I've also entered into Tea Time Treats run by Karen at Lavender & Lovage who is hosting this month and Kate from What Kate Baked.

Meal Planning Monday - 14/5/12

I've seen a few of these posts recently on other people's blogs and as this is something I've been doing anyway for the past couple of years I though I might as well join in. I don't always do the plan on a Monday but I will try and stick with the day and post my plans regularly from now on. Since selling the car 3 years ago we've been getting the shopping delivered, the car hasn't been replaced as only I drive and we can't afford it. Although we have to pay a small delivery charge to Tesco we always try and get their cheapest delivery slots, these are usually on Tuesday or Wednesday. This week though we're having the shopping delivered on Monday.

When it comes to making the plan it's usually a bit of challenge because my boyfriend works shifts and he usually doesn't get the rota for the following week until Tues/Weds after we've bought the shopping. What makes it even more challenging is the fact that his working week runs from Fri-Thurs. This means that I end up planning meals that can easily be reheated if he gets home around 10.30pm after I've already eaten. If he gets a week of lots of late shifts i.e. home after midnight then he eats what I call 'freezer food' e.g. chicken burgers/pies and chips before going to work and I tend to do myself some kind of 'veggie surprise' depending on what's in the fridge. I do offer to prepare proper food for him as I'm working from home a lot at the moment but he seems to enjoy eating his junk. He's not fat and he gets fed properly when he is home for dinner so it could be worse. Generally he only tends to get 1 or 2 late shifts a week which is good.

So for this week we will be having the following - don't always follow the days usually depends on what we feel like having, also only know what shifts boyfriend will be working up until Thurs.

Monday - chilli con carne with rice left over from last week
Tuesday - pasta with ham and butternut squash - ham leftover from ham pie
Wednesday -  river cobbler (white fish) with green lentils and bacon
Thursday - beef casserole with sweet potato mash and leeks
Friday - kedgeree
Saturday - vegetable curry with rice
Sunday - beef casserole or vegetable curry

I've added this into the linky with Mrs M

Ham, leek and potato pie

This pie is my entry to the Alphabakes challenge this month which is organised by Ros from The More Than Occaisonal Baker and Caroline from Caroline Makes who is also hosting this month. Initially when presented with the letter 'H' for the challenge I thought I would make something with honey as that was the only thing I could think of that began with the letter H as my brain seemed to have stopped working. Then after a few days thinking about it I had the sudden realization that of course ham begins with an H and ham is a wonderful piece of meat to eat and just happens to work well in pie. This recipe is a variation on something that I usually make after Christmas with bits of leftover ham and turkey. However as it is not the festive season I went out and bought a small joint of ham and cooked it specially for this pie, saving about a quarter of the meat for sandwiches. It did seem a bit weird to be boiling a ham with the same spices that I would use for the Christmas ham in May. Originally I chose this because the weather has been so cold and wintry lately that I thought it would be something nice and comforting to warm us up. Typically on the day that I made this the sun came back out and it was quite warm, c'est la vie. Of course you can buy ready cooked ham but I wanted the stock to make soup with, although if the weather stays nice I'm not sure if I'm going to want much soup.

Pie filling in my heart shaped dish

Ingredients - for a 1.4 litre capacity pie dish - serves 4 generously

300g cooked, diced ham
3 medium leeks, washed and sliced
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
200ml ham stock if you cooked your own ham or use chicken stock
200ml milk
sunflower oil

For the pastry:
220g flour (self raising or plain, whichever you have/prefer)
110g butter
cold water

1.  Make the pastry by rubbing the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs, then add just enough cold water to bring it all together into a stiff dough and pop it into a food bag and allow to rest in the fridge while you make the pie filling.
2. Preheat the oven to 190C. Heat a couple of tablespoonfuls of oil in a large saucepan and add the leeks and cook gently for 5-10 minutes until they begin to soften, then add the potatoes along with the milk and stock and simmer for 10-15 minutes until the potatoes are tender. 
3. Stir through the ham and season to taste with freshly ground black pepper and salt if you think it needs it, I didn't add any as the ham and stock were salty enough.
4. Spoon the ham and vegetables into your pie dish and add most of the cooking liquid as well, depending on how saucy you like your pies to be, I used all of it as I like a saucy pie ;)
5. Take the pastry out of the fridge and roll it out so it is big enough to cover your pie dish, hopefully you can do a neater job than me, my pastry rolling skills are admittedly not the best.
6. Make a couple of steam holes in the top and bake for 35-40 minutes until the pastry is golden and the filling is piping hot. Serve with seasonal green vegetables. 

 My boyfriend bought me this heart shaped Le Creuset pie dish for my birthday in February after very extensive hint dropping. I tried dropping the same hints last year but for some reason they didn't work then, but they did this year.

Nigella's Buttermilk Scones

For this month's Forever Nigella challenge hosted by Nelly from Nelly's Cupcakes the theme is diamond jubilee. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about what I could do for this. I wanted to do something traditionally British rather than just decorating some cupcakes or biscuits with Union Jacks. Nothing against people who do want to do that but I wanted something a little simpler. I was originally thinking of doing some kind of pudding and was considering some of the strawberry and gooseberry things in Kitchen and Domestic Goddess. I couldn't get hold of any gooseberries so settled on strawberries. Then I started doing a bit more thinking and decided that the most quintessentially British thing I could think of was the cream tea, and as I live in Plymouth, on the border between Devon and Cornwall, this seemed like a good choice.

For the scones I used Nigella's recipe for buttermilk scones from Kitchen pg 283. I couldn't actually get hold of any buttermilk this week so instead I used natural yoghurt as it still gives the same tanginess that Nigella recommends for this recipe. When it came to making the scones I realised that I didn't have enough plain flour in the cupboard, stupidly forgot to buy more. So I ended up using an approximate 40:60 ratio of plain flour to self raising flour and reduced the amount of bicarb and cream of tartar required by half, otherwise I might have had monster scones! The recipe claimed that it would make 17-18 scones, I made 16 and put half of them in the freezer. As you can see from the picture below they turned out a little wonky and rustic looking but I think this adds to the overall charm of home baked scones.

My rather rustic looking scones

My original plan was to make a strawberry compote to serve with the clotted cream but then I decided that I did want to include an element of red, white and blue after all. I always have a stash of frozen blueberries in the freezer to have on my cereal or on my porridge for breakfast as they are cheaper than fresh blueberries. So I made a blueberry compote instead, a few spoonfuls of frozen blueberries heated in a pan with a splash of water and a drizzle of honey until they went jammy in consistency.

I know there is a big debate between Devon and Cornwall as to how a cream tea should be served. My first experience of a cream tea was on a family holiday in Cornwall when I was about 10 so I go for the Cornish way of putting the jam in first then cream on top (Devonians do the opposite). I feel like I can get away with this even though I live in Plymouth as I'm not native to South West England (I grew up in the West Midlands). Having said all that my boyfriend is from Plymouth and he also puts the jam on first which technically means he is doing it wrong. Whichever way you do it though scones are delicious with clotted cream. I chose to serve this with blueberry compote on the bottom, followed by clotted cream then topped with a slice of strawberry.

Jubilee themed scones

My Prize!

Just want to do a quick update post here. As some of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen, I won a competition recently hosted by Urvashi at The Botanical Baker and the prize was a selection of dried fruits from Natural Selection Foods. Also included was a copy of the Great British Bake Off book, an apron and 2 rolling pins. I already own the book so have donated my winning copy to my brother's girlfriend as I know she wants to start doing more baking when she finishes university in a few weeks. Over the next few weeks and months I will be working my way through this mountain of dried fruity goodness and will share my creations with you on this blog. I will try and come up with as many of my own recipes as I can, I'm especially looking forward to trying the cinnamon cranberries.

Parsnip and Nutmeg Bread

This week I decided to use some vegetables in my bread. I've already tried this once before with the beetroot bread and realised after someone asked me for the recipe that I probably should have included the vegetables at the beginning as they add moisture to the loaf rather than making the dough first and then incorporating lots of moist veggies. So that is what I did this time with a recipe adapted from the book that I've mentioned several times before. I would love to recommend this book but sadly it is out of print in the UK so I suppose the best I can do is show you my attempts at and modifications to some of the recipes. The combination of parsnip and nutmeg is quite an obvious one and it works well as the spiciness of the nutmeg compliments the sweetness of the parsnip.

Ingredients - makes 1 2lb loaf

500g strong white bread flour
175g strong wholemeal bread flour
15g dried active yeast or a 7g fast action yeast sachet
1tsp ground or freshly grated nutmeg (I only had ground in the cupboard)
2tsp salt
2tsp caster sugar
50g butter
225g parsnip (uncooked weight) boiled and mashed
350ml lukewarm water

1. Peel and chop the parsnip and cook in boiling water for 10 minutes or until tender, drain well and mash and then leave to cool.
2. Reacitvate the yeast in the measured water if using dried active yeast or skip this step if using fast action sachet
3. Measure flours, salt, sugar, nutmeg and butter into a large bowl and rub the butter into the flour, add sachet of yeast if using
4. Add the parsnip followed by the water and bring everything together into a dough and turn onto the work top and knead for 5-10 minutes until dough is smooth and elastic. Put into a lightly oiled bowl, cover with cling film and leave to rise for an hour or until doubled in size.
5. Knock back the dough and knead lightly then shape into a loaf, you can use a 2lb loaf tin or go free form like I did and make a round loaf. Cover with lightly oiled cling film and leave to rise again until doubled in size.
6. Preheat the oven to 220C and bake for 35-40 minutes until golden, risen and the bread sounds hollow when tapped on the base.

I know parsnips are sweet and there is sugar in this bread as well but after tasting a slice with butter I think it works well as a savoury bread as it's not too sweet and would be good with cheeses. I always use a little nutmeg when making cheese sauce and it elevates it to something better so cheese on toast made with this bread would be heavenly. 

Fresh from the oven with real butter, yummy!

American Chocolate Ripple Cheesecake

This was my first ever attempt at making a cheesecake for this weeks weekly bake off challenge. The recipe is from Mary Berry's 100 cakes and bakes book. I don't why I've never made cheesecake before. I always used to think I didn't like cheesecakes after having tried some pretty horrible shop bought ones in the past. But I had a look at the recipe for this one and showed the picture in the book to my boyfriend and the look on his face told me that I had to give it a go. He looked like a child who's just seen the best sweet shop in the world.

Before making the cheesecake I had already read another blog post about it from self raising flower so I had some idea of what to expect when it came to making the cheesecake. As she noted in her blog post the amount of biscuits used for the base didn't seem like very much and I was tempted to use more but I thought as I am a cheesecake novice that I'd better stick to the recipe. 

100g is not many biscuits

When it came to beating the cream cheese with sugar and then adding the eggs I found that the mixture had become very liquid. I'm not sure if this is what is supposed to happen but I found it impossible to spoon the mixture onto the base so just resorted to pouring some of the mixture onto the base before adding the melted chocolate. Maybe I should have used a balloon whisk rather than my electric hand whisk as I think it may have been slightly over beaten. I realised that I wasn't going to be able to recreate Mary's perfect looking cheesecake so I decided to add the melted chocolate to the rest of the mixture in the bowl. I then gently mixed it in the hopes of obtaining a marbled effect before pouring all the rest of the mixture into the tin. Before I put it in the oven I could see a slight marbled effect on top between the plain cream cheese mix and the chocolatey mix. 

The finished cheesecake

Baking the cheesecake was fine, mine was ready after 30 minutes in the oven, I then left it in there to cool down before putting it in the fridge for a few hours. I was a bit apprehensive about taking it out of the tin especially as it had leaked a little around the bottom before it went into the oven.  Fortunately it came out cleanly. The first piece I had was still a little gooey in the middle, I don't think it had been in the fridge long enough.  I don't have a nice picture of a slice of cheesecake because I couldn't get it to cut smoothly. The base remained stuck to the bottom of the tin and required a bit of hacking with the cake slice to release it. The actual cheesecake part was fine but instead of being marbled or rippled inside it was just brown. However it did taste really good. I was going to put half of it in the freezer as there is only 2 of us to eat it and I really should, but it tastes so good. I think we might just end up being a bit fat this week and eat all of it then just not have dessert for a few days afterwards. Now I've made my first cheesecake I think I will try others in the future. 

The inside of the cheesecake, apologies for messy plate but I wanted to show how awkward it was cut up

Iced Biscuits

 For a change I decided to try my hand at a little bit of decoration this weekend. I got a set of flower plunger cutters recently and I still had some left over coloured fondant from when I made the pepparkakor from my baking extravaganza post. I mentioned there that I am not a huge fan of fondant, but in small amounts it's OK.  I had 3 balls of coloured fondant to play with so I made 3 sets of coloured flowers. It took me a couple of goes to get the hang of how to use the cutter properly. I didn't really manage to get many of them into the 'cupped' shape that the instructions recommended, but for the smallest flowers I don't think that really mattered.


For the biscuits I used  a Mary Berry recipe from her 100 sweet treats and puds book, the recipe is for iced animal biscuits.  I don't have any animal biscuit cutters so I went for flower shaped biscuits as well. It is spring after all and as it turns out, the day after I decorated these the sun came out again. I had a bit of a problem with the biscuit dough but this was probably my fault. Mary's method was to rub the butter into the flour and sugar, then add an egg and some milk.  I was lazy and just put everything in the food processor and as a result the dough was quite wet and difficult to work with. I ended up adding quite a lot of extra flour. Next time I'll follow the method properly and see if it's any better. The biscuits turned out fine so I don't think the addition of extra flour was too much of an issue. 


After I made the biscuits I left them in a tin overnight so I could let the flowers dry out a bit so they wouldn't break as soon I tried sticking them on. I just used a little bit of decorating icing coloured yellow to attach the flowers and also piped little dots in the middle of the finished flowers. I didn't put icing on the biscuits as well as I thought the flowers would look good against the golden brown of the biscuits. I still have a few flowers left over which probably find their way on to some cupcakes at some point.