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.
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.
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!
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 :)
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!
