Herman the German

Some of you will already know that Herman is the German Friendship Cake that is currently doing the rounds.  Herman is a sourdough cake that gets given out in goo form (i.e. as a starter) and needs to be tended to for ten days mainly through a schedule of stirring well everyday and feeding with flour, sugar and milk every few days.  Then at the end of the ten days you divide him into four, pass three onto friends to care for and bake one quarter yourself.  It has recently reached my friends and we've all been feeding and baking Herman feverishly.  Looking after a growing, yeasty mass for ten days is a strange experience but a distinctly enjoyable one.  There is something comforting in the routine of coming home to stir Herman and as you know I'm all about feeling comforted.  The recipe that came with my Herman seems to be the standard one on the internet involving apples, raisins and spices such as cinnamon but I thought I would tweak it a little.  I assumed the apples were to keep the cake moist as well as for taste so swapped two apples for four pears which may have been one too many in hindsight but it was just a very pear-y cake and it did definitely stay moist.  I don't like dried fruit such as raisins and wasn't keen on buying a bag just to try and figure out what to do with the rest so I left those out as well.  A pear Herman sounded good but I was sure it could be improved so I decided to make it a chocolate and pear Herman and leave out the cinnamon as it's difficult to balance cinnamon with chocolate I find. This was also a cunning ploy on my part as if the pear didn't quite work or the cake was too dry I would be forgiven as I had provided chocolate cake and everybody likes chocolate cake.  To give my cake a chocolate flavour I used 1 3/4 cups of flour instead of the suggested two and used 1/4 cup of cocoa.  The recipe also said it should cook in 45 minutes but I found mine wasn't ready until it had been in for 1 1/4 hours.  
My tinkering with Herman went down very well and he didn't even last twenty four hours in my office.  

I don't own a cake stand so my classy version is an upturned saucepan.  

Leftovers paella

I am a secret hoarder.  But only when it comes to my freezer.  In the rest of my life and my home I am decidedly clutter free and organised but my freezer is my shameful secret.  Every tiny little scrap of leftover food goes into the freezer.  I was going through it at the weekend and found five parmesan rinds I had forgotten I have.  I keep them for when I make soup because they give it a nice deep and savoury flavour.  I last made soup two years ago but did I throw these tiny bits of barely usable parmesan away? No. I tidied them neatly at the back of the top shelf.  I have tiny smidges of sauces, less than one serving of mashed potato and conversely, eighteen mini meringues.  Which I only made because I didn't want my liquid egg white to go to waste once it was opened.  If someone can suggest something to do with these then I am all ears.


Now I've told you my little secret it explains nicely how I came to made this dish which I have called paella but every Spaniard on the planet would probably want to throttle me for it. As I was trying to bring order to the freezer I found myself with one chicken breast in one hand and about a four inch piece of chorizo in the other.  Staring at these two items led me only to paella.  I have made paella before and it was really tasty but I fancied something slightly different so decided to try and cook it in the oven.  I also had some baby vegetables knocking around in the fridge alongside a tiny dribble of wine so I was all set to use up some leftovers.  This was remarkably simple and really amazing.  I'm certain not everybody would agree if they tried it but it was my dinner and this is my blog so I'm entitled to call it amazing!  


Nothing was said but I have a feeling the husband would have liked more meat.  If it had been in the freezer he would have had it but if you are buying the ingredients fresh I would recommend adding another piece of chicken.  Maybe even some prawns if it takes your fancy.  


Even my shockingly bad photography can't make this look anything other than true comfort.  

The lemon looks like it's from another planet because the zest went into a bakewell tart.  I have parmesan rind in my freezer for goodness sake, I am so not throwing away a lemon just because it's without zest! I'm not going to give quantities below because aside from the rice and stock ratio, it's fairly flexible.  


Ingredients:


1 cup rice
2 1/2 cups stock
chicken
chorizo
vegetables
white wine
lemon
2 tbsp olive oil
pinch each of turmeric and paprika
salt and pepper


Preheat oven to 180 degrees centigrade
Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the chorizo and chicken until cooked. Add a glug of white wine and reduce.  
Add the rice to the pan and turn to coat in the oil.
Pour the stock onto the rice and add the paprika and turmeric.  Bring to a gentle boil.
Transfer the mixture into a casserole dish that has a lid, add the vegetables, some salt and pepper and put in the oven for 30 minutes.
Add lemon wedges to the top and dig in.  

Polenta

When I first started teaching myself to cook a long while ago (you would think I would be better by now) somebody gave me a copy of the Silver Spoon, the essential Italian cookbook.  One of my favourites in this weighty tome was the simple sausages in tomato.  Just brown off some sausages and then cover in passata, throw in a bit of salt and pepper and cook with a lid on for about half an hour.  It sounds too simple to be tasty but it really is.  I have not had this in a very long time but it popped straight into my head when I was trying to think of something that I could accompany with polenta for my first foray into making it.  It seems weird to me now that I have never made it as it really is my type of food.  It's easy to cook carbohydrate that benefits greatly from the addition of parmesan.  That's my main food criteria hit.  It's May already and I shouldn't be seeking the comfort of dishes like this but with all the rain we've been having lately I am craving comfort food.  This has just rocketed right to the top of that list.  Even above cheese on toast which is about as good as it gets.  I'm not going to write a recipe for this because all you do is cook some sausages in tomato, make up some polenta to the instructions on the packet and add a generous sprinkling of parmesan on top. It doesn't get easier than that.  Even making mashed potato is more effort for goodness' sake.  

Kung Po Chicken

My husband loves Chinese food and if both his jeans waistband and I would allow it, he would eat it every night for dinner.  Surprisingly this dish was a new one even on him and thankfully being home made is at least slightly healthier than the takeaway.  Trying to find a definitive recipe for Kung Po chicken on the internet was, predictably some might say, not an easy task. I was also hampered by not actually owning a wok and my one available frying pan being used for Ken Hom's egg fried rice (see earlier blogpost, I am now almost addicted to this stuff). It was also a weeknight meal so there was no way I was going to spend hours faffing about buying new ingredients I would use once in a blue moon, chopping, flavouring oil, deep frying etc.  In the end I took a few recipes I liked the look of and then combined them to make my own.  I was expecting it to be passable but require lots of tweaking but actually it was really quite good.  It wasn't a dish with a great deal of sauce and if that were a problem it would be easy to increase the quantities.  I know that no Chinese person or someone who knows anything about Chinese cookery would recognise this dish but we're pretty happy with it in my house and if anyone has a more authentic recipe they use please let me know.

Ingredients:

Two chicken breasts, diced

Vegetables knocking around in the fridge (in this case, mange tout, baby sweetcorn and a mushroom)

45g peanuts (non salted!)

For the marinade:

1 tbsp white wine

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp sesame oil

1 tbsp corn flour mixed with 1 tbsp water

2cm piece of fresh ginger, chopped.

For the sauce:

1 tbsp white wine

1 tbsp soy sauce

1/2 tbsp sesame oil

1 tsp white vinegar

2 tsp brown sugar

1 tsp chilli flakes

1 tsp garlic oil

2cm piece of fresh ginger, chopped.

Serves two

Mix together the marinade in a bowl, add the diced chicken and leave in the fridge for at least one hour.

Once the chicken has marinaded, heat the ingredients for the sauce together slowly. When the sauce is hot, add the peanuts and simmer for around 10 minutes.

Sauté the chicken and towards the end of the cooking time add the vegetables.  Once cooked, add to the sauce and simmer together for a minute or two.

Serve with egg fried rice and groans of happiness! 

Salted caramel shortbread

I first tried to make this last week after seeing this blog post and it went disastrously wrong.  I should have worked out that it would as it involved a) pesky conversion from American measures and most importantly b) a sugar thermometer.  I own a hell of a lot of kitchen paraphernalia, too much if you ask my husband, but one of those little blighters is not among the masses crammed into my cupboards.  I've never needed I one for making caramel so it didn't seem too important at the time. It all looked fine, looked like caramel and then in the flash of an eye it turned really dark, scary dark.  Out of nowhere.  Then due to what I can only describe as pathological clumsiness I proceeded to throw the saucepan of boiling hot sugar everywhere, namely all over my hands.  I won't repeat what I said but it really hurt.  My cries of pain could clearly be heard all over the house as the husband rushed to my aide and swiftly dunked the aforementioned limbs into cold water and then looked helplessly over the now solidifying toffee all over the kitchen.  I could do nothing but look a combination of pitiful and sheepish.  
Fast forward one week and now having full use of my hands again I decided I was not going to be beaten by salted caramel shortbread.  Macaroons had already defied me and there was not room for one more dissenter in the ranks.  I decided to wing it which is what I should have done in the first place.  I know how to make shortbread and I know how to make caramel, this should have been over a week ago rather than heading for round two. This time there was no injury to report, although I am having trouble typing this having burned my left hand on the oven earlier today.  I really am a waking disaster area. I may have slightly burned my caramel (it really does happen frequently) and have dark flecks spreading throughout but it tastes awesome and isn't really that unattractive so I'm happy.    It ain't too pretty but it is tasty:

Shortbread:
185g unsalted butter
80g caster sugar
270g plain flour


Caramel:
397g can of condensed milk#
50g light muscovado sugar
50g butter
1 tsp ground sea salt plus extra for sprinkling on top


Makes 20 small squares


Grease and line a 6in x 8in baking tin. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
Cream the butter and sugar for the shortbread together.  Then add the flour and bring together into shortbread crumbs.  Press into the tin and chill in the fridge for 15 minutes.
Bake the shortbread for 15-20 minutes until slightly golden on top and put to one side to cool.
For the caramel heat the condensed milk, butter, sugar and salt together on a very gentle heat until the sugar is dissolved and the butter melted.  Then bring to the boil.  The caramel needs a lot of stirring but take it from me you need to be really careful as it's getting hotter.  Once the caramel has boiled lower the heat right down and simmer for 2-3 minutes.  Pour immediately onto the shortbread, add extra salt on top and leave to one side to cool.


Eat with tea and glory in not making a mess of yourself and the kitchen. 

Cheese Risotto

Cheese really is one of my favourite foods and when I was leafing through some of my cookbooks this week I spotted a couple of risottos made with cheese and thought I would give it a go. Most of the recipes required fontina cheese which I really cannot find near me so I improvised heavily and I doubt any Italian would call this a proper risotto so I was a bit nervous about the combination but was really pleased with the result. It was cheesy and oozy but not too overpowering, really filling and comforting. As usual I forgot to check my ingredients before I started and was a bit short on parmesan so I used what I had and next time would use more like 50 grams.

Ingredients:


150g arborio rice
1 - 1 1/2 litres vegetable stock
30g strong cheddar cheese
30g emmental 
30g parmesan plus extra for sprinkling
30g butter
100ml white wine
Serves 2


Melt 20g of the butter in a saucepan and then add the rice, coating it in the butter. Add the wine and cook until mainly absorbed, stirring frequently.   Add the stock a small amount at a time, stirring frequently and adding more once it has been absorbed.  Each risotto seems to take a different amount of fluid, add until the rice has softened.  This should take no longer than 20 minutes.  Once the rice is cooked, stir through the remaining butter and the cheeses with some salt and pepper.  The residual heat of the rice should melt the cheese.
Sprinkle some additional parmesan over the top and serve. 

Finally a photo...

I caved in to my co-workers' requests this week and made another batch of cheesecake brownies.  This time I photographed them so that you can see their beauty too!

Escalopes

When I was growing up my mum was not the world's best cook and often dinners were of the ready made variety from the freezer*.  One of my favourite things that she put in front of us was chicken escalopes with cheese and ham covered in breadcrumbs.  They came out of  a packet and I dread to think how shockingly bad they were for you but this was the eighties before the food revolution and I didn't know any better.  Plus they really were very tasty.  Sometimes we would have a little variety and have turkey instead of chicken but the important thing was that it was a thin piece of meat covered in a slice of processed ham with some cheesy ooze all deep fried in breadcrumbs and then cooked in the oven.  Thanks to Tessa Kiros' awesome book Apples for Jam (which I am still going on about) I could recreate this little piece of nostalgia. I used chicken instead of beef as in the original recipe and cheddar rather than fontina which I cannot find anywhere.  Seriously, nowhere.  The original recipe was for four which I halved for two. The bechamel ingredients make more than is needed but it's hard to make much less.  


2 large chicken breasts
2 thin small slices of cheese
1 slice of ham, halved
Flour for dusting
1 egg, beaten
30-40g dry breadcrumbs
20g butter
2 tablespoons olive oil


Bechamel Sauce
20g butter
1 tablespoon plain flour
125ml milk


To make bechamel sauce, melt the butter in a small saucepan.  Add the flour and then put back on the heat for a minute or so, stirring all the time.  Gradually add the milk, whisking as you go.  When all the milk is added you should have a thick, smooth sauce.  Add salt and pepper and cook this for about five minutes to get rid of the floury taste.  Leave to one side to cool slightly.  
Beat the chicken breast out between two pieces of cling film using a rolling pin to get a flat piece of meat about 2-3mm thick.  It needs to be thin in order to cook in time but too thin and you won't be able to use it. If in doubt, I would err on the side of thickness.  
Put a slice of cheese on one side of each chicken breast and the ham over the this.  Spread some of the bechamel over the slices of ham leaving an edge of ham free from sauce.  
Fold the other half of the chicken over the bechamel and press the edges together.  
Put the flour on a wide plate and season.  Here you need an assembly line with a plate of flour next to a plate with the beaten egg on and then finally a plate spread with the breadcrumbs.  You put the chicken onto each of these plates in turn making sure you have both sides covered in each coating.
Heat the butter and oil in a non stick frying pan until sizzling.  Add the escalopes and fry until they are deep golden.  Turn over and cook on the other side.


The escalopes shouldn't need long as the meat is only thin but if you are worried or they are starting to burn then finishing them off in the oven is no great sin.  The original recipe doesn't say this but it's what I did and the meat didn't suffer at all.


Serve immediately to greedy people regressing back into childhood.


*I should add my mother is now a brilliant cook who never had the time with a part time job and two demanding and fussy children to feed every day.  She didn't even pay me to say that.

Easter cupcake strife!

 Every time I ask anyone what they want me to bake the answer is cupcakes.  I have really come to hate making them for other people.  Baking a batch for just me and the husband is fine because if they don't quite look right it doesn't matter as we're just going to shove them in our mouths anyway.  But other people expect cupcakes to look good and frankly mine don't.  Whether it's a lack of skill, patience or creative talent I don't know but they never seem to sing.  Feelings of dislike have been awakened this weekend as I was asked by my mother in law to make some for my brother in law's new girlfriend's birthday.  Being Easter weekend they had to have a seasonal theme so I turned Jamie Oliver's Velvet Cupcake recipe into an Easter cupcake nest type thing.  It was all going well as the cakes went in the oven, the mixture was really smooth and velvety and really easy to work with.  I wasn't boosted with confidence because things always go well with the cake itself.  The problem is in the decoration, they looked really good in my head but didn't quite turn out that way.  For topping the cupcakes I used a chocolate frosting recipe I've had written down on a piece of paper for ages and I can't remember where it came from. It calls for melting chocolate with milk and butter and then beating in icing sugar. It's really tasty but quite temperamental.  First it was lumpy and required quite strenuous whisking (not by me, these jobs are the domain of the husband) and then the consistency wasn't quite right so it started running all down the sides of the cake which is never a good look.  After leaving the frosting for ages so that it started to set, it sort of redeemed itself and went on the cupcakes without dribbling everywhere.  They're not all pretty though.  The husband isn't too upset as the ones with the dribbly icing have been designated as not passing quality control and he gets them all to himself.  With some careful positioning, I managed to make one of them look photogenic:

Happy Easter!

Snickerdoodle blondies

Last weekend was my friend Liz's birthday and she held a tea party to celebrate.  Liz is an incredible baker and her cupcakes are always beautiful and for her party she requested people bring cake.  This presented me with a bit of a dilemma as my baking is nowhere near as attractive as either hers or her friends and no one wants to go to the effort of making cake to be spectacularly upstaged which ruled out any form of cupcake.  I wanted to stick with something that could be cut into individual sizes just in case something went wrong and then I found these and the decision was made.  I'm a big fan of Americana when it comes to food and had been dying to try snickerdoodles for ages, mainly because of the name I have to admit.  This recipe seemed sufficiently cakey to pass muster but was still something different and interesting. Just to be on the safe side I also made a batch of homemade sausage rolls knowing I would gain points for this with the birthday girl and her husband! They may not have the exquisite look of a stack of beautifully iced cupcakes but they looked pretty good to me 

They are a little bit thicker than probably they're supposed to be as my baking tray is short and deep but I love the idea of blondies and these are really addictive so may invest in a better sized baking tray. 

Simnel Cake

It has become an Easter tradition at work that I bake a Simnel cake.  This benefits me greatly as I can use up the last of the dried fruit that I have in the baking drawer leftover from making Christmas cake (also something of an office tradition).  I don't like fruit cakes so my colleagues provide willing test subjects.  I always use the recipe in Nigella Lawson's 'Feast'.  It may appear from this blog that I'm a bit of a Nigella addict which may have some truth to it but I use her recipes generally because they are really easy to follow and understand and also very forgiving if things don't quite work, which happens quite often in my kitchen. Such as this time when I realised as I was about to decorate that I only had half the required marzipan.  Aside from  being a bit thin on top, it doesn't seem to suffer from a lack of it. Below is this year's offering, it would be traditional to burnish the top with a blow torch but neither owning one nor trusting myself with it even if I did means mine stays pristine yellow.  

Pizza in a hurry

I avoided calling this post pizza pronto having decided that it sounded a bit too clichéd, but only just.  Pizza made at home has become a regular fixture for us over recent months but generally only at a weekend.  Taking the time to make dough properly after a frantic day at work just seems too much of a feat so pizza was consigned to Saturday nights.  That is until I found this blog post via one of my friend's pinterest boards and the idea of weeknight pizza was no longer such a hassle.  I was a bit worried that the dough would be stodgy and chewy not having had any time to rise but it was brilliant, and all on a Tuesday too!  I just used the dough recipe and then added passatta, mozzarella, oregano and mushrooms for my topping.  

My much loved pizza dish that I received for Christmas is currently consigned to the cupboard as a massive crack has appeared but while I figure out how to send it back a flat, square baking tray worked perfectly for this.  My next experimentation with this will be to try and create a garlic butter crust.

Noodle soup for the soul

As a child I was an incredibly picky eater and as an adult I am getting much better at eating the food I should but there is still a long way to go.  No matter what I do with vegetables I can just never find a way to cook them so that I enjoy eating them, it's more a case of being able to tolerate them. I like to find my food enjoyable and comforting and healthy food never seems to have the same sense of wrapping a big blanket around me like a whacking great bowl of mashed potato and cheese does.  There comes a time when even my vegetable reluctance has to take a break, those days when I feel so run down and wiped out that only a hit of proper nutritional food will do.  On those days I am usually too tired to undertake any major cooking so enter my noodle soup.  Sometime about six years ago when I was teaching myself to cook for the first time I stumbled upon a recipe that became the prototype for this soup.  What it was and who it was by I can't remember as it's been through many incarnations since then.  Ginger and chilli infused stock with chicken, noodles and whatever vegetables are knocking around (in this case carrots, broccoli, cabbage and mushrooms) and in less than thirty minutes a steaming bowl of reviving soup is ready.  The chuck it all in one pot method also means there is very little washing up and more time for collapsing on a heap in the sofa.

Biscott-ish

I stumbled upon this recipe in the brilliant Soup Tuesday blog during the week and had to make these.  I love biscotti but the husband doesn't like ginger so it was going to be more baked goodies for people I work with. This works out will for me too as I eat less of them and can still get into my jeans!  I'm very organised in my life but for some reason not in my baking and true to form I started to mix all of the ingredients together before I realised I had several key things missing and would have to improvise again.  I only had about 35g of cocoa so topped it up to 75g with some hot chocolate which I also ran out of and had to add about 25g of flour to get the full 75.  They're still quite chocolatey so don't seem to suffer too badly thankfully.  More seriously I only had two eggs so I scouted around for whatever I had and in the end used some milk to bind it.  I have no idea how much I added but I kept going until it came together in a sticky but cohesive dough.   The result is a slightly more cakey biscotti but actually they're still pretty good and they're going down a treat in the office even with the slightly singed edges.  I'll probably make these again in the future but do a full baking drawer inventory before I start!

Marriage made in baking heaven

When I first saw cheesecake brownies on pinterest last week I let out a mini squeal of delight, two of my favourite things in one mouthful sounded awesome.  I followed this recipe and crouched in front of the oven, drooling slightly, waiting for them to be cooked.  Needless to say they didn't hang around long enough to be photographed but unusually for me they did look like the picture on the recipe.  They went down a storm with the husband too and got me thinking about other dessert mash ups. Doughnut muffins?  Angel delight cupcakes Cherry pie panacotta?  The hellish week at work I have coming up may well only be survived by dreaming of all the other combinations of loveliness that may be possible.  Can't wait :)

Freya Cake

I made a cake for my friend Freya's birthday this weekend and since she is bright and bubbly and loves a bit of sparkle, a pink sparkly cake was in order.  I give you...Freya Cake!

If only the sparkly bits showed up properly in the photo.


This was a tried and tested Nigella method but with a few adaptations to the ingredients of my own and I sort of made it up as I went.  I wanted a slightly chocolatey taste to this cake but not too full on as I find chocolate cake sometimes quite sickly and that gets in the way of me eating huge chunks of it! Inside there were pink swirls running through it but I have no photo as there was a multitude of cake and we left the party before this one was even cut.  One of our friends had made rainbow cake and it looked awesome.  There was also plate upon plate of fabulously decorated cupcakes, I have a lot of very talented friends when it comes to baking! 


Ingredients:
225g very soft unsalted butter
125g light muscovado sugar
100g caster sugar
4 large eggs
225g self raising flour
1 1/2 tbsp cocoa powder
Pink food dye (I use the colour paste but the liquid stuff would work too, you would just need more)


For the frosting:
150g soft unsalted butter
350g icing sugar
2 tbsp milk
Orange essence
Pink food dye
Sparkles and stars to decorate!


Preheat oven to 190 degrees C.
Put all of the cake ingredients except the cocoa and colouring in the food processor and blitz until smooth.
Spoon out half of the mixture into a separate bowl and add the cocoa to the mixture left in the processor and blitz again until combined and smooth.
To the mixture in the bowl add the food colouring and mix until evenly coloured.
In two lined 21cm sandwich tins add alternate blobs of the chocolate and pink mixture.  This will look a right mess but then using a knife or the edge of a spatula swirl the two mixtures into one another until you have a pink and brown marbled effect like so:

Clearly you can see I have great trouble getting the mixture into the tin neatly! 


Bake for about 25 minutes, they are ready when they start to come away from the tin and a knife comes out clean. Leave to cool completely.


For the icing, blitz the butter in the processor for a couple of seconds to get it smooth then start adding the icing sugar a large tablespoon at a time until all combined.  This may be fine as it is but mine was quite claggy so adding a bit of milk got it to the perfect consistency.  Add the food colouring and orange essence and you are ready to frost.  This made enough to sandwich the sponges together and cover the top.  If I had thought about it in advance then I would have added jam to the butter cream in the middle but it's not essential.  
Decorate according to how girly you want to be!


If you wanted a more chocolatey cake then you could add more cocoa but you would probably need to take away some flour to stop it getting too dry so you would need to play around with the quantities.  


As I made this up I decided I got to name it and 'slightly-chocolatey-and-pink-sponge-marble cake-with-slightly-orange-frosting' wasn't very catchy so it's called Freya cake, it's my gift to the world!

The Sun is Shining Sweetcorn Soup

I saw this recipe from Nigella during the week and thought I might give it a go for some weekend lunch.  When I read the recipe closely I wasn't keen on the idea of blitzed up sweetcorn so although it would make it far less like a chowder and more like a soup I decided to keep the corn more chunky and just rely on the semolina to thicken.  That is, I decided to freestyle with a recipe I had never even eaten before, much less made. The result was actually a pretty tasty lunch and the colour reflected the sunshine outside on this nearly-spring Saturday and not bad for less than 30 minutes work.  I accompanied it, as Nigella instructs, with toasted tortillas with cheese, it seemed churlish not to!

I used:


300g drained sweetcorn (either fresh or defrosted)
300ml vegetable stock
30g semolina
1 chilli, chopped
Tortilla chips 
80g sharp cheddar cheese
Salt and pepper


Turn the oven on to preheat at 180 degrees.
Blitz 200g of the sweetcorn in the processor with the semolina and then add to a saucepan with the rest of the corn and the stock.
Bring to the boil and then turn down to a simmer.
Add half of the chilli and 20g of the cheese to the soup and season generously with salt and pepper.
Simmer on a low heat for about ten minutes.
Meanwhile, lay as many tortilla chips as you fancy (we liked having extras on the side to dunk!) on a baking sheet, cover in the rest of the cheese and put in the oven until the cheese has melted.
Serve the soup with tortilla chips, which will sink and go slightly soft, and the rest of the chilli on top.


Serves two.


This has been deemed worthy of further experimentation and although this is perfectly tasty as it is and also not too heavy for a lunch time meal next time I think I will throw in some cooked bacon to the soup and maybe a bit more cheese too! 

Conquering the fear, Italian style.

I am an incredibly accident prone person.  You name it and I can break it, spill it, trip over it or get tangled up in it.  This has led to a perfectly rational fear of cooking anything in a lot of oil.  Visions of the entire house ablaze have kept me from attempting anything involving more than the tiniest covering of oil in a pan.  After discussing the strategy should the pan catch fire with the husband and only just stopping short of a full blown fire drill, I made arancini for dinner.  Arancini are little balls of leftover risotto rolled in breadcrumbs and fried in oil.  They usually have some kind of cheese in them but you can add almost anything you like really.  I kept mine simple and just added mozzarella and parmesan.  The husband and I are huge fans of these and usually have them whenever we hit an Italian restaurant which is sadly not as often as it used to be.  Never being one to do things the easy way I decided not to wait until I had leftover risotto but instead make a small batch at lunchtime with some stock and a few tablespoons of passata to give it a faint tomato flavour.  A friend had leant me a copy of Tessa Kiros' Apples for Jam this week and the inspiration to finally give it a go came from there.  If you haven't read this book then I thoroughly recommend it and I'll be trying out many things inspired by it in the coming weeks.  Stacked up with some gnocchi cooked in the oven and scatted with mozzarella and a tomato and chilli sauce for dipping, these little beauties were Saturday night heaven on a plate for me.  

I used:
300g cold leftover risotto
1 egg, beaten
breadcrumbs (I forgot to weigh these but they covered one dinner plate)
parmesan (to taste)
50g mozzarella cut into small cubes
Vegetable oil for frying


Makes 8-10 arancini


Add the egg to the cold risotto and combine, it should be firm but also sticky.  
Grate parmesan into the mixture, as much as you like.  I love parmesan so added a lot but you can do this to taste.
Take a small amount of the rice mixture and roll into a ball.
Poke a hole in the middle of the ball, add a mozzarella cube and then wrap the rice around the cheese sealing it in the centre.  Put to one side and repeat with the rest of the rice mixture.
The little balls should be sticky enough to take on the breadcrumbs without having to roll in egg again.  Roll each of the balls in the breadcrumbs and then chill in the fridge until firm. This took me about 30 minutes but it may be more or less depending on your mixture.
Put 2-3 cm of oil in a heavy based frying pan and heat slowly, preferably one with high sides to keep the risk of spitting and making a mess to a minimum.  A wok would also probably work here but I don't have one! 
Having your fire evacuation plan sorted, gently lower the balls into the oil using a slotted spoon and fry in batches of 2-3 at a time.  They should only need a couple of minutes on each side until golden brown then remove with your slotted spoon and drain on kitchen towel while the rest cook.


Next time I make these I think I'm going to go for a more punchy tomato taste, possibly with some chilli. There is definitely going to be a next time as these little wonders have vanquished my fear of hot oil for good.  

God Save The Cupcake

I decided to make these because last weekend I picked up some food colouring paste and I wanted to see if it was really more potent than its liquid cousin.  When rummaging through my baking drawer for some cupcake cases I came across some left over from the Royal Wedding last year so my red velvet cupcakes became Jubilee Cupcakes as it was sixty years since Elizabeth II's accession last week.  With the blue cases, red cakes and almost white frosting it seemed to just about work so I went with it.  I use Nigella's red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting recipe from Kitchen and this was definitely the best colour so far.  It's not easy to see from the picture but they really are bright red, it's glorious!  My piping has always been dire but the first outing of the piping set my husband bought me for Christmas definitely improved the process! Being bright red they would also be ideal for Valentine's day but I am rather fond of these as royalist propoganda in cake form. 

Soft peaks need not apply...

I had heard about a product that is liquid egg white which sounded ideal for making macaroons and meringues and I was keeping an eye out for it everywhere I went for a while.  When I finally saw it one day in a Waitrose near me I had to buy it purely because I had been looking for it for so long.  It then sat in the fridge for a while and is due to go out of date fairly soon.  Given the number of times I banged on about it to my husband, I feared for the state of our marriage if I didn't use it and simply threw it away. After the last time I made macaroons I was not in a hurry to try that again so it had to be meringue.  The problem with meringue is they tend to go best with cream toppings and I need to avoid cream where possible so I had to get a bit more creative than your bog standard pavlova.  Once again Nigella came to my rescue with a recipe for a chocolate meringue stack.  The meringue came out pretty much as expected but I didn't much fancy making the creme patissiere in the recipe, not least because my snazzy find meant I didn't have any egg yolks left over.  After what must be far too long for any one man to endure, I finally gave my husband a break when I stumbled across another Nigella recipe for chocolate peanut butter sauce that should usually adorn an ice cream sundae.  It's now drizzled over my three layers of chocolate meringue and again my shoddy photography skills don't come near to showcasing all its glory.  I really need a new camera. And also a cake stand rather than improvising with a plate and upturned bowl. A few more sweet treats like this and I reckon him indoors might cave and let me have one.  

I also knocked up eighteen mini pavlovas to go in the freezer and use up the rest of the egg white.  They came out a bit misshapen and really only good to be broken into pieces in desserts but that's good enough for me.
After a horrible week, a few days of following someone else's recipes to create something delicious was definitely what I needed.  Hopefully I'll have more energy to be a bit more creative soon.

Old favourites and new discoveries...

It's been pretty tough work wise lately so weeknight cooking has become less about experimenting and more about tasty home cooked food I can get on the table as quick as possible with minimum effort.  One of my favourites is chicken and noodle soup which is less than half an hour from entering kitchen to eating and with the addition of some vegetables knocking around is truly wholesome too.  Risotto is one of the best types of fast food.  I love the comforting ooze and it is twenty minutes from the liquid going in to finish. After many months of experimenting, I have also cracked a perfect fajita spice mix and if I slice the meat (usually turkey as chicken is expensive these days) thin enough and quickly fry in a hot griddle before resting then I can have fajitas on the table in less then thirty minutes too.  Then there is spaghetti bolognese, cottage pie (made with a sweet potato topping) and spicy meatballs.  All of these can take over an hour but after the initial prep and stirring they can sit quite happily either on the stove or in the oven until we're ready to eat and are truly comfort food without opening a ready meal or takeaway menu. This leaves the weekend as my time to play in the kitchen and try something new.  This week it was Chinese roast pork belly and egg fried rice courtesy of a recipe Ken Hom cooked on last week's Saturday Kitchen. It may sound like lots of effort and took over ten hours but most of that time was either sitting on a rack drying in the kitchen or in the oven.  It was my first time using Chinese 5-spice and I have to say that while I do like the taste I find it a bit strong and might use a bit less next time.  It was definitely a well deserved treat though and so good my husband apparently dreamt about it last night, high praise indeed!

Red velvet and white chocolate cookies

I have to confess to feeling pretty pleased with myself right now.  I'm sitting writing this with a cup of tea and a homemade cookie.  Not just any homemade cookie I should add but one from a recipe of my own creation.  I know I didn't invent the concept but not being able to find a British recipe (i.e. one that didn't require a cup of butter, as if anyone can get butter into a cup to measure it!) I thought I would just try and adapt a well-tested cookie recipe.  I didn't expect it to be successful the first time but to my surprise, it was!  These cookies have a special place in my heart as I first ate one last year while the husband and I were on honeymoon.  Since then I have often thought about their firm yet chewy texture, double chocolately taste and deep red colour but have been too afraid to try them for fear of spoiling the idea of them forever.  They may just be a slightly fancy chocolate chip cookie with some cocoa powder and red food colouring but they've certainly made my weekend!

I used:

100g soft butter

100g light brown sugar

1 tbsp golden syrup

135g self raising flour

15g cocoa powder

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

50g white chocolate, cut into fairly small chunks (or you could use white chocolate chips)

1 tsp red food colouring

Makes 20

Pre heat the oven to 170°C

Cream together the butter and sugar.  When light and fluffy, add the golden syrup and vanilla extract.

Add the flour, cocoa power and chocolate and mix until it starts to clump together then add the food colouring and finish bringing together by hand (I wore snazzy latex gloves so I didn't have to spend three days with red hands). I have said one teaspoon of colouring as this is roughly what I used but it will depend on how red you want the cookies to be and also on the colouring you are using. If you are using the colouring paste then you will need even less. I keep meaning to get some of that but somehow never get around to it so turn to the trusty bottles of colouring in my baking drawer.  If you're feeding kids then the paste is definitely a much better investment.   You are aiming for a deep burgundy colour to the dough as the colour will change during cooking.

Roll small pieces of the dough into a ball, don't flatten them, and put them on a greased baking sheet leaving at least an inch all the way around each ball of dough.  At this point they look like little meatballs on a tray but once in the oven they will flatten themselves and spread into cookie shapes.  

Bake in the oven for 10-12 minutes until they start to firm up at the edges.

I made smaller cookies but if you wanted bigger ones just make bigger balls of dough and leave more room around them. 

I say this makes twenty cookies but twenty one balls of dough went into the oven, I ate the other one the second they came out before they had started to firm up.  And I'm not sorry either.  

Almost angelic...

After last weekend's surprising baking success I decided that I would bake something every weekend as far as possible.  I spent most of the week thinking about what I could make and then found this blog post and could not stop thinking about rainbow cake.  I know that baking seven different coloured layers of sponge and sandwiching it all together is still beyond me but I could not shift the thought of gloriously coloured cake and this thought led me on a trip down memory lane.  I don't seem to remember my mum baking much when I was a child but if we were well behaved children, which was rare, then she would pick up some angel cake from the supermarket.  I know that cheap supermarket cake tinted with nasty food colouring is about as far away from real cake as I am from a prima ballerina but it still has a nostalgic feel for me plus it fulfilled the brief of having different coloured layers.  I hit on a snag that I only own two matching cake tins rather than the three I would need for the pink, yellow and white layers and decided to lose the white (how do you make cake white anyway?!) and give a nod to it with some white frosting.  Not just any white frosting but white chocolate frosting. So this is my homage to my childhood favourite, I'm calling it almost angelic cake:

I used:


225g very soft butter
225g caster sugar
200g self raising flour
25g cornflour
4 large eggs
1 tsp baking powder
3-4 tbsp milk
Red and yellow food colouring.


Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. This is so much easier since I took the plunge and bought an oven thermometer, it really does make a difference!
I am a convert to the Nigella method of making a victoria sponge which is all this really is and indeed this is her recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess.  Put everything but the milk into a food processor and blitz until smooth, the butter really does have to be very soft for this.  I put it in the microwave until it is nearly melting to get it soft enough for the lumps to blitz out easily.  Then pulse the mixture while adding the milk a tablespoon at a time until it has a dropping consistency.  
Divide the mixture into two bowls and add yellow food colouring to one and red to the other until the desired colour is achieved.
Pour into two greased cake tins (I think mine are 8" ones) and cook for 25 minutes until a skewer or knife comes out clean.


For the frosting:
140g butter
140g icing sugar
100g white chocolate, melted


This made a bit too much frosting but half would probably not be enough to sandwich the cakes together and have frosting on top so if you're not really greedy and addicted to frosting like us you may need to find a way to use up the leftovers rather than just slapping it all on like I did.  
Melt the chocolate in the microwave and leave to cool.  I saw on the Sport Relief GBBO last week that it's easiest to use melted chocolate if it's close to the temperature of the other ingredients.  I don't know if this is true or not but I let mine cool for a long time.
Cream together the butter and icing sugar, the Kitchenaid really is a godsend for this!
Add the chocolate and spread onto the cake.


Eat with a cup of tea and a big childish grin!

Lemon, thyme and prosciutto risotto

I can remember the first risotto I ever ate.  It was in a tiny little Italian restaurant in West Didsbury in Manchester and it was a chicken, asparagus and thyme risotto.  I loved the comforting ooze and the warm feeling that seemed to wrap itself around me while eating it.  Probably a bit over-dramatic for what is basically a bowl of rice but my adventures in risotto land took off from there.  Adventures is a bit of an exaggeration (not that I am prone to that at all!) as I prefer to keep it simple. I have even been known to have a make up some arborio rice with only stock and then throw in a large handful of parmesan at the end when I've been feeling lazy but in need to comfort.  Over complicated risotto just doesn't work, too many flavours compete and it doesn't seem to lull me into the same sense of security and comfort, plus it requires far too much effort for what is my version of comfort food. Last night's new experiment was another idea stolen from Jamie Oliver but again made up as I went.  I simply fried off some prosciutto in a little olive oil while I cooked the rice with stock and white wine.  Not long before the rice was ready I added the juice of a lemon and the leaves of a few sprigs of thyme and let it cook for a couple of minutes to permeate through the rice.  Once the rice was cooked I threw in a large handful of parmesan (although there really isn't any other kind of handful of parmesan in my house) and put the crunchy prosciutto on top and voilà, dinner in a little over twenty minutes.  My bad attempts at photography don't do justice to the magnificence of this bowl of food as both the husband and I scraped the bowl clean.  

Domestic Goddess at last!

Baking has never been my forte, the precision involved seems to flummox me every time.  I'm persistent however and today my persistence finally paid off.  I managed to create a gloriously delicious and soft sponge cake that actually resembled a sponge cake rather than the strange sponge-based burnt on top volcanoes I usually take from the oven. I may have slightly burned the caramel but the slightly bitter taste is actually not bad against the sweetness of the cake and all the frosting so I'm declaring it a success.  My new oven thermometer shows my oven is at best 20 degrees hotter than the thermostat so I'm hoping the thermometer will help me improve my baking even further.  I'm already searching around for next week's inspiration.

The recipe was taken from Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess and today, for the first time, I felt like one! 

Comfort food for a battered ego...

I have to admit the macaroon episode dented my confidence so this weekend I felt the need to return to something closer to my comfort zone: pie!  A couple of weeks ago I watched Jamie Oliver make a steak, Guinness and cheese pie on the TV and I had to have a go.  A friend coming round for relaxed Saturday night dinner was the perfect excuse to not only make the pie but to convince the husband to take a trip to the butcher's to buy some steak instead of relying on the supermarket.  I have to take a moment here to praise our local butcher, Crown Butcher's in Stourbridge. The quality and service is fantastic and you do definitely get what you pay for.  It's not every month we can afford to go, and frankly sometimes the supermarket is just far too convenient, but when we do it really is worth it.

I decided not to follow Jamie's recipe but sort of make my own up following similar principles and it was truly wonderful.  So wonderful in fact that we didn't wait to photograph it so you could see it but just dived straight in!  You will have to take my word for it looking nearly as good as it tasted!

I used:

About half a kilo good quality braising steak diced

One carrot, diced fairly small

Roughly 100g mushroom, quartered

One bottle Guinness

150g strong cheddar cheese, grated.

Fresh thyme

Salt and pepper

500g ready made block of puff pastry

I first of all put the carrots into a  frying pan and fried in a little olive oil until softened.  If you had a heavy bottomed casserole dish you could just use this and save yourself washing up an extra piece of equipment but mine's heavy and not easy to manoeuvre so I use a frying pan and transfer.  When soft, add the mushrooms and fry until they colour.  Transfer both of these into the casserole dish.

Add a little more oil to the pan and add the steak, browning all over.  You may need to do this in batches if the pan isn't big enough.  When brown add 1 heaped tablespoon of flour and mix in to coat the meat, this will help thicken the gravy.

Add to the casserole dish and pour over the Guinness.  Top up a little bit with water if needed which will depend on the size and width of your casserole dish.

Add some chopped fresh thyme and salt and pepper and put in a 100-120 degree oven for 1½ hours.  

After this time the liquid should have reduced slightly.  If not, spoon some off as you want a thick sauce for the pie.  If it is too wet then the pastry will never cook through.  You can always reduce this extra liquid on the hob and use as a gravy to serve with the pie so it won't go to waste (this is what I did anyway!).

Cook for another hour in the oven and if it is still a bit wet then put the casserole dish on the hob and reduce the liquid down  then allow to cool for a couple of minutes.

Turn the oven up to 200 degrees to preheat.

Cut two thirds of the pastry off the block and roll out on a floured surface to be the base of your pie.  Grease the pie dish and allow the pastry to fall into the bottom of the dish rather than forcing it and let the overlap hang over the edge.  

Add the cheese to the filling, stir through and pour on top of the pie base.

Roll out the remaining one third of pastry to be the lid.  If you have eggs in the house (which I didn't), the best way to do it would be to trim the base slightly, egg wash around the rim and then put the pie lid on top, crimpt together with your fingers and egg wash the whole thing to keep it stuck together and make it golden on top when cooked.  As I had no egg I put the lid on top and folded the edges all the way around like a cornish pasty to keep it all together.  Some of the pastry didn't quite cook but it didn't bother us!

Put two holes in the pie to allow steam to escape and put in the oven for 30-40 minutes.

We had this with mashed potato, peas and extra Guinness gravy that I took from the filling and there was not a scrap left.  This should probably be enough for four normal people or three greedy people like us!