Rainbow Cake with Chocolate Sour Cream Icing

I'm not the best at cake decorating. My birthday cake is all the proof you need of that, although putting the icing on this lemon cake before it had cooled probably shows an equal lack of skill. And this rainbow cake, from this recipe, doesn't look pretty great from the outside. The inside, however, is another story entirely. It's gorgeous. I love it. All you need is normal cake stuff and a bunch of food colouring - plus about a million eggs, particularly if you use the white chocolate buttercream from the original recipe. I had red, green, yellow and blue food colouring, and mixed them to make orange and purple layers too. The red came out pink, and the blue was disappointingly washed out - but seriously, when you look at this cake, that's not what you're thinking.

The icing, incidentally, is delicious and super-chocolatey but not at all cloying. Although you will obviously feel a little unwell if you eat too much of it, the sour cream reins in the sweetness and makes it refreshing. Well, you know. Refreshing for chocolate icing.

This recipe was all done by hand, but feel free to refer to the original recipe if you have a stand mixer.

By the way, if you're thinking "what am I going to do with six egg yolks?", I recommend mixing them with hot drained pasta, mixed herbs, and plenty of cheese. Objectively delicious.

Rainbow Cake with Chocolate Sour Cream Icing

(Printable Recipe)

Makes a 6-layer 22x15cm rectangular cake

2 and 1/4 cups flour

1 and 3/4 cups brown sugar

1 and 1/3 tablespoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

170g butter (12 tablespoons)

1 cup milk

6 egg whites

1 teaspoon vanilla powder

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple food colouring

1 cup sour cream

1 cup dark chocolate chips

1 cup cream

2 tablespoons butter

80g icing sugar

Chocolate-Topped Strawberry Cheesecake

I accidentally bought a load of strawberry-flavoured Philadelphia and turned it into this, based on Bakerella's recipe for cheesecake bars. I was hoping for a no-bake cheesecake but didn't have any (unflavoured) gelatin, which it apparently needs to be able to hold its shape later on. Good times were had by all.

Chocolate-Topped Strawberry Cheesecake

(Printable Recipe)

Makes one deep cake in a 20cm tin

For the base:

36 Oreo cookies

2 tablespoons butter

For the filling:

2 tubs strawberry-flavoured cream cheese

2 tablespoons icing sugar

2 cups flour

2 eggs

2 cups cream, whipped until stiff OR double cream

1 teaspoon vanilla

About 20 strawberries

For the topping:

1.5 cups cream

1 tablespoon butter

275g dark chocolate

1 tablespoon icing sugar

Minted Frozen Yoghurt with Chocolate Chips

My favourite ever ice cream flavour is mint chocolate chip. My second favourite ever ice cream flavour is raspberry yoghurt. As I'd been low on ice cream from a while, and as the weather's been getting warmer (today excepted, sadly), I thought I would combine them - without the raspberry, which is probably for the best. It's delicious. But remember to churn while you're freezing it. I accidentally left my ice cream in the freezer while I went out, so only churned once, and have ended up with crumbles of ice cream instead of scoops. It's tasty, but it's difficult to get out of the tub!

Minted Frozen Yoghurt with Chocolate Chips

(Printable Recipe)

Makes about 700ml ice cream

450ml yoghurt (I used goats' yoghurt)
1 cup cream
1 handful mint leaves
1 cup sugar
1 cup chocolate chips

White Chocolate Bread

Yesterday I promised you something brilliant. Here it is.

I've been on a baking binge. (Also, somewhat of an alcohol binge the past couple of days. Anyone got any paracetemol?) We've had brownies and lemon cake and even a savoury pie. I've simultaneously been on a white chocolate binge. In the past month, there's been my birthday cake and the white chocolate jaffa cupcakes, a small number of which are still sitting in the fridge waiting to be eaten. It shouldn't be too much longer.

Anyway, it was time to combine these two binges and create white chocolate bread. Yes, really. There's half a loaf sitting on the counter and another loaf, unbaked, slowly rising in the fridge. I even had a warm slice with butter yesterday. The bread is chewy with a hard crust and - well, it's real bread! Not 'it's bread, but not as we know it' which I made a few months ago and was heavy enough to kill someone. I made it by hand, and kneaded for a very long time (about 45 minutes per loaf) to try and get as much air into it as possible. I put Bridget Jones' Diary on and kneaded for the whole hour-and-a-half. And I don't regret it.

White Chocolate Bread

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 2 small loaves

4 cups flour

4g yeast

1.5 teaspoons gluten

2 cups water

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup white chocolate chips
Parchment paper

Salted Fudge Brownies

I've been desperately trying to post this for the last 24 hours but have had trouble uploading photos to Blogspot. The blog's link might change over the next few days because of this, but I'll warn you first.

I'd never heard of Lindt's dark chocolate bar with a hint of sea salt, but a few times over the last week it has popped up in my life on various websites. So when I came across this recipe for salted fudge brownies, the ingredients for which were sitting happily and variously in my fridge and pantry, I thought I would bake that dark chocolate bar with a hint of sea salt right out of my life.

I loved the glossy dark chocolate and melted butter mixture, so much so that I took picture after picture of it. Tom and I both were wary of the long refrigerating time, but after leaving them to cool all day - oh my god, they were better than they were warm. Such good brownies. I'm tempted to just keep on eating them until they suddenly disappear.

Salted Fudge Brownies

(Printable Recipe)

Fills a 20cm square pan: 12-16 brownies

1 cup butter

75g dark chocolate

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

1.5 teaspoons vanilla

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon sea salt

White Chocolate Jaffa Cupcakes

Only a week has passed and already I've cooked my second 'fortnight cake'! Strictly speaking I made cupcakes, not cakes, but I'm going to use the label anyway.

The icing wasn't as stiff as I'd hoped, even after cooling in the fridge and whizzing in the blender, so I just kind of drizzled it over the cakes - as you can see in the picture. It was highly disappointing as I'd bought a cake decorating kit especially for this recipe, but happily it didn't impact the taste. Which is as phenomenal as the reviews on the original recipe suggested. It is a perfect mixture of cloying and fresh, and surprisingly, one of the bite-sized, teeny tiny cupcakes that my silicone cupcake tray makes could be enough. Don't hold me to that, though.

I used Jaffa oranges for this, just so I could name the final result "jaffa cupcakes." I don't think the brand of orange matters too much, though.

White Chocolate Jaffa Cupcakes

(Printable Recipe)

Make about 40 small cupcakes

For the sponge:

3/4 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

Zest and juice of 2 oranges

4 eggs, separated

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

80g almonds

For the icing:

200g white chocolate

250ml cream, separated

Zest of 1 orange

Rustic Grape Butter

A while ago, we bought a kilogram of green grapes, reduced to half-price because of the sell-by date. And then we put them in the fridge and left them to go mouldy, like the good fruit-eaters we are. They were taking up so much space that eventually I agreed that something needed to be done with them (at least the non-mouldy ones), Googled "what to do with grapes" and found this page with a recipe for, amongst other things, grape butter. Which sounded amazing.

I had some of the butter this morning, with real butter on brown bread, and it was really good. Healthy. Fruity and not too sweet - I added much less sugar than called for in the original recipe. It's got texture to it, so it might not be so appleaing to young children, but I'm imagining it adorning all kinds of dishes. Especially savoury ones that call for a hint of fruit. Mmmm.

Tom kept the water than the grapes and apple were boiled in as a drink, but it could be discarded, or used in other ways as you see fit.

Rustic Grape Butter

(Printable Recipe)

Fills 1 jar

500g seedless grapes

1 apple

1.5 tablespoons brown sugar

Water

Butter Lemon Cake with Ginger Beer Icing

We've been a little lemon-obsessed here recently. Only a couple of nights ago we ate lemon and mushroom carbonara, and my 100th post meal was chicken with a lemon-basil sauced pasta. When Tom washed up this morning, he smelled the leftover lemon juice and declared that he wanted a lemon cake. Given that a couple of weeks ago I vowed to make cake fortnightly (and then completely forgot about it), this seemed like a good cake to start with.

Thin, subtle and buttery, with a completely-unintentional crispy bottom (and an icing disaster which turned out to be not-so-catastrophic after all), I could eat a lot of this cake in one sitting. It's not horrifically sugary or lemony, and there's a very slight tang from the ginger beer spice-mix. The spice mix, incidentally, is one my mother bought at Habitat and sent me. The ingredients list is "ginger, sugar, cream of tartar," so I imagine a tiny bit of ginger and cream of tartar would be the non-pre-bought-mix equivalent.

This isn't strictly an original recipe of mine, but I did have a very specific list of ingredients in my head  - coconut milk, butter, eggs, fresh lemon - which didn't match any recipe I could find. Hence the following is a hodgepodge.

Butter Lemon Cake with Ginger Beer Icing

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 1 20cm square cake

For the sponge:

1 cup butter

1.5 cups brown sugar

4 eggs, separated

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup coconut milk

1 lemon

For the icing:

1/2 cup butter

80g icing sugar

1 teaspoon ginger beer spice mix

1/2 lemon

2 tablespoons cream

Cake Batter Ice Cream

I was a complete fool yesterday and made a really nice dinner - the planned title of the blog post was written in my notebook at work - and completely forgot to photograph the final dish. Hence the yoghurt chicken with orange and clove shall wait for another day. In the meantime, let's have some ice cream.

The original recipe revealed itself to me on Tasty Kitchen's Valentine-themed (ugh) front page yesterday. I don't have any red food colouring (or any food colouring at all, which is the only reason I didn't make this cake for my birthday) but I thought it made a pretty good idea anyway. The ice cream tastes a bit unusual but is very nice.

It's also very easy. Not as easy as my other ice cream recipe, true, but I found the recipe half an hour before I went to work, and had enough time to make it and eat lunch.

Edit: Before eating, break some dark chocolate into shards and stir them through the ice cream. It improves the ice cream exponentially.

Cake Batter Ice Cream

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 6 servings

3 egg yolks

2/3 cup brown sugar

1 cup coconut milk

1 cup milk

2 teaspoons cocoa powder

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup cream

Birthday: Cookie Dough Truffles

Yesterday was my birthday, so half of this week was spent cooking up a storm in preparation. It was very exciting. I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings exercising my right arm and shoulder muscles by creaming butter and sugar together on the first two days, and beating single cream until it was softly whipped on the last. (I did cheat in the end and use the blender, but not until I'd been beating it non-stop for forty minutes. Dedication.)

The first recipe was Love & Olive Oil's chocolate chip cookie dough truffles. They looked easy enough to make in bulk for school; also, they looked delicious. They were pretty easy to make. I also bought 100 of the tiniest muffin cups known to humankind, so they were easy to distribute to students yesterday.

Cookie Dough Truffles

(Printable Recipe)

Makes about 90 tiny dough balls

1 cup butter

1.5 cups brown sugar

2.5 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/3 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

70g chocolate bar

For coating:

250g chocolate

Vanilla Ice Cream

It's January. And it's freezing. What's the point in an ice cream recipe?

Well, what's the point in eating homemade ice cream for breakfast?

This happened just because I got home at 9:30 after a day that was too busy for me to even think about dinner (shock! Horror!) and felt like making ice cream. Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus got me wanting to make this in a way that even Nigella's Forever Summer didn't, although that could be more to do with my experience as a cook than either of the authors.

It was the idea of thyme ice cream, specifically, coated in chocolate sauce, that was making me itch. I think, however, that that is something that needs to be done properly - I don't want to make a herbed ice cream with my dried herbs. Hopefully I'll soon be able to grow some, and have herb-infused ice cream just in time for summer. In the meantime, though, I went with plain vanilla on my first try, with information from The Guardian Food Blog to help. I'd also love to use the first method listed on this page one day, because it just sounds like fun.

The ice cream was delicious! And superb for breakfast. All I need now are some berries to mix it with.

Vanilla Ice Cream

(Printable Recipe)

Fills 1 sandwich-sized tupperware

1.5 cups cream

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla powder

Pour the sugar into a freezable bowl or tupperware, and pour the cream on top. Be a bit liberal with the cream - you want more like 1.6 cups (about 400ml).

Add the vanilla powder.

And stir! This should only take a couple of minutes. Cover the bowl and put it in the freezer, noting what time it is.

About half an hour after the bowl first goes in the freezer, take it out and stir it for about two minutes, making sure to pull all of the frozen bits away from the edges and bottom. If you over-churn, the final result will be lumpy-looking rather than smooth. If your arm gets tired, you're over-churning.

Repeat the "thirty minutes' freeze/churn" until you have churned the ice cream four times in total. Then leave in the freezer for at least another hour - I left mine for about eleven as I went to bed and then to yoga before checking on it again, so I can't comment on how good it would be after a shorter period of time.

Looks like ice cream...

Tastes like ice cream...

It's bloody ice cream!

Serve, with or without the sugar syrup that will have settled at the bottom of the tupperware.

Chocolate-Chilli Cookies with a Hint of Lime

First things first: this is not a recipe.

Oh, at first glance it may look like a recipe, but actually it's not. It's something that I threw together after coming home from yoga feeling hungry and fancying something more than just plain chocolate. I used the dregs from both the flour and sugar packets (I got through an entire kilogram of flour in the past week - something I'm oddly proud of) so have no idea how much any of that was. And I just cut off bits of butter off the stick rather than taking any measurements, so ditto there. Basically, here are some guidelines to making some awesome cookies.

Second: don't use parchment paper. Grease the bottom of a baking tray or something. Otherwise this might happen to you.

Cookies refusing to part from baking paper.

Why yes, I am sitting here eating around the paper on the cookies. And I don't recommend it.

These cookies are delicious and feel very adult, in a way that normal chocolate chip cookies don't. They tease your tongue slightly, and have a great depth to them, while the lime adds just a hint of fruitiness. I love them, despite the fact that they are partly made of paper.

Chocolate-Chilli Cookies with a Hint of Lime

(Printable Recipe)
Makes as many cookies as the recipe you use (13 for me)

Cookie ingredients from your favourite cookie recipe

(I googled "no egg cookies" and came up with this)

70g milk chocolate

1 teaspoon chilli flakes

Lime juice

Make your cookie dough. Bash the chocolate about a bit until it is in chunks, and add it to the dough. I put my chocolate in a plastic bag and hit it with the chilli tub until it was in bits, some of which were still quite large. Yum.

Add the chilli to the dough and stir it through again, trying to distribute it as evenly as possible. Take small bits of the dough and roll into balls before pressing them flat into discs.

Put each disc on a greased baking tray and sprinkle with a couple of drops of lime juice. Bake at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for twelve minutes.

Raspberry-Rum Shortbread

It's January and yesterday was the first time that I made Christmas cookies. In fact, throughout December, I made no cookies whatsoever. Sure, the jam-ricotta crescents were called 'crescent cookies' in the original recipe, but they were more like pastries and I made them after Christmas anyway. And there were the chocolate chip pie bars, but they were made with Thanksgiving in mind, not Christmas. (Funnily, I complained about the mess and stress of rolling out dough in that post. In the last five days, I have rolled out no less than four separate doughs, one of them multiple times to make it into puff pastry - a steak and ale pie which will come out of the oven soon - and actually enjoyed doing it. Maybe it's the use of a champagne bottle as a rolling pin.)

Anyway: personally, I blame the knitting - what with deciding to make knitted gifts in November, there was very little time for me to go on cooking adventures. If I ever decide to knit a gift again, I'll have to start at least six months before the due date. That's the plan at least.

So now that Christmas and the time of panicked knitting is over, I am very happy to put my needles aside and head back to the kitchen. Just to add to the oddity of making cookies right after Christmas, I even used our Christmas cookie cutters - only used once before, and that was by Tom who tried to make a fried egg in the shape of a snowman. It didn't work too well, as far as I remember.

The original recipe was for cranberry-rum shortbread from Everybody Likes Sandwiches. The dough was rolled by hand into logs and sliced for cookies, but I felt like more work. Either way is good. I also used frozen rather than dried fruit, which gave the fruit-rum mixture a whole different spin. The original recipe will give you shortbread with cranberries; mine, with its many adaptations, gives you purple, fruity, boozy biscuits.

Raspberry Rum Shortbread

(Printable Recipe)
Makes about 25 biscuits

1 cup of frozen raspberries (or other fruit)

1/2 cup of rum

1 cup butter

1 tablespoon lime juice

1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 cup icing sugar, divided into two 1/2 cups

2 cups flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Put the berries and rum into a pan and heat on the stove until the mixture starts to bubble. Turn off the heat and leave for half an hour.

Raspberries and rum, marinating.

Cream the butter with the lime juice, vanilla, and half a cup of icing sugar. I had had enough of creaming by hand so after five minutes of manic stirring, I squished the ingredients together with clean hands. Add salt and baking powder, and gradually add the flour while stirring, one half-cup at a time. If the mixture gets too thick, add some of the rum (which should now have taken on the colour of the berries) to loosen it slightly. Add the remaining rum and fruit and knead the dough for about five minutes.

The dough, pre-kneading.

Shape the dough either into a ball (if you are going to roll it out later) or into two logs, and refrigerate for at least two hours.

If you have shaped the dough into logs, slice thick circles from the log with a knife and bake in an oven at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) on a greased parchment sheet for thirty minutes.

Alternatively, roll out the dough with more flour and cut out biscuits with cookie cutters.

Cutting out biscuits.

Bake the cookies at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) on a greased parchment sheet for thirty minutes - mine took this long because the biscuits were still very thick. Thinner biscuits will take less time.

Using the remaining half cup of icing sugar, dust the biscuits. Taste first to see if this is necessary: you may find that it isn't.

Jam-Ricotta Crescents

This was the second baking adventure of the day (see the first here) and it was extremely successful. The dough was easy and the crescents are both delicious and gorgeous. The pastry is delicate, crumbly and slightly shortbread-y and it feels like cheating to make a pastry this light with barely any work. It is savoury (there is no sugar in the recipe) but the jam sweetens it enough. I made about 20 pastries, most with strawberry jam, some with marmalade. I found the marmalade much softer, so it squidged out from the pastry when I wanted it to stay in the pocket (I lost a couple of crescents that way, sadly) - hence I used less, and the marmalade crescents don't taste much of marmalade. Proper jam seems to do a better job.

Given that there isn't any sugar in the recipe, these could be redone as savoury treats. I think they'd be amazing with cream cheese and caramelized onions inside.

The original recipe calls for farmer's cheese but I made ricotta using about 500ml milk. Instructions for both will be included below.

Jam crescents with ricotta pastry

Jam-Ricotta Crescents

(Printable Recipe)
Makes about 22 pastries

1 cup butter

500ml milk with 1 tablespoon lemon vinegar or 1-2 cups ricotta

2 tablespoons cream with 1 teaspoon lemon vinegar or

2 tablespoons sour cream

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

Jam (I used strawberry jam and marmalade)

2 tablespoons milk

Soften the butter - I took mine out of the fridge while I was working on the bagel dough, then chopped it into large-ish chunks and microwaved on a low heat for ten seconds. Cream the butter, either with an electric mixer or by hand. If you are creaming by hand, it is best to hold the bowl against your torso rather than leaning over a table. This should take about ten minutes.

In the meantime, pour the milk into a pan and add one tablespoon of vinegar. Leave to curdle for one minute before turning the heat on (low). Stir every so often. After ten minutes the curds and whey will have separated - pour the pan's contents through a colander lined with cloth (as shown below, and as discussed before here). Leave to drip for five minutes. Alternately, skip this entire paragraph and use bought ricotta.

Fresh ricotta

In a separate cup, mix two tablespoons of cream with one teaspoon of vinegar to make sour cream. Allow to stand for a minute to curdle. Alternatively, use two tablespoons of sour cream.

Mix the creamed butter with the ricotta, sour cream and vanilla and stir everything through. Add the flour and salt. At this point I found that I needed to use my hands to shape the dough as it was just separating into small shaggy bits - I buttered my hands lightly and kneaded the dough in its bowl until it came together, which didn't take long. Shape the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic, and chill for at least three hours. My dough went in the fridge for two and a half hours, became rock-hard, and then sat on the counter for another hour and a half before I was ready to start on the next step.

Wrapped and ready to go in the fridge

Once the dough has been chilled, remove the plastic and roll it out on a lightly floured surface.

I only use the best equipment

I rolled the dough until it was about half a centimetre thick. Use a knife or a square cookie cutter to cut squares from the pastry - the closer to perfect the squares are, of course, the better, but getting the ruler out was a step too far for me. Fill each square with a scant half-teaspoon of jam, fold in half into a triangle, and press firmly on the edges to seal the pastry. Roll the right-angled corner over the hypotenuse of the triangle, and twist the ends into a crescent shape. Place on a greased baking tray.

Re-roll the dough scraps and continue cutting squares of pastry until all the dough has been used. Pour the two tablespoons of milk into a bowl and using either a pastry brush or clean fingers, daub each crescent with milk. (An egg wash could also be used here.)

Put the crescents in the oven at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit) for ten to fifteen minutes. Oddly, my jam crescents were done after ten, whereas some of the marmalade ones were barely browned after fifteen.

Fresh out of the oven

The original recipe recommends dusting the baked pastries with icing sugar but I skipped this step as I didn't feel it was necessary.

Mulled Wine & Christmas Cake (and a gravy note)

Posting has been fairly light of late - I'm spending most of my non-teaching time knitting rather than cooking. Hence we've had quite a few unimaginative, if nice, meals, and my attempt at something innovative last night went really badly. (I made pumpkin seed pesto, which actually hurt to eat. Pumpkin seed shards are no fun.) I did make a leftovers soup this morning from a roast chicken dinner on Sunday, with lots of white wine and half a teaspoon of ssamjang, which was delicious, but there's no point rehashing old recipes.

Speaking of Sunday's meal, I forgot my resolution to never be allowed near gravy again, and actually ended up making a really nice sauce. I roasted the chicken with one onion (cut into eighths) and eight or nine garlic cloves; to make the gravy I removed six garlic cloves from the pan, squeezed the others out of their skin back into the chicken juices, and put on a low heat. I added red wine, gravy powder, salt and pepper, and stirred. There wasn't much gravy, because I have finally learnt that when you're only cooking for two you don't need enough gravy for six, but what there was was thick, and delicious, and onion-y. Mmmm.

Anyway. We also made mulled wine on Sunday, using Jamie's recipe. Leftovers went in the ice-cube tray (without any of the peel) so we can have 'instant' mulled wine whenever we feel like it. We're also planning on putting a couple of the ice-cubes into Christmas Day gravy. Ooooooh. I also spent this morning making Christmas cake - I've never liked it so didn't even consider making one, but when Tom expressed his despair at the prospect of Christmas Day without Christmas cake, I had no choice. I went shopping after work last night (which is really late!) and picked up about a kilogram of dried fruit, and this morning I got up early to start. I used this recipe.

Mulled Wine
Makes 4 servings and 12 ice-cubes

2 tangerines
250g brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 tablespoon cinnamon
5ish gratings of fresh ginger
1 teaspoon vanilla powder
1 bottle red wine

Using a peeler, cut off the outer layer of the tangerine skin (the orange bit) leaving any of the white pith behind and put the peelings into a pan. Squeeze the juice from each tangerine segment into the pan (this part is time-consuming!). Add the cloves, cinnamon, ginger and vanilla, and enough red wine to just cover everything in the pan. Simmer roughly for five to ten minutes until the wine has reduced and is very hot. Add the rest of the wine and heat through before serving.

Christmas Cake
Makes 2 cakes

1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
5 eggs
2 cups flour
1 lemon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
5ish gratings fresh ginger
2 tablespoons honey
200ml beer
100g almonds
About 800g of dried fruit (raisins, cranberries, blueberries)

First of all, the original recipe says to preheat the oven before starting on the dough. It took me sixty-five minutes to get to the point where I was ready to use the oven, so I'm glad I ignored this instruction!

I let the butter soften to room temperature and then squished it together with the sugar with my hands. I then whisked it roughly for about five minutes.

In a separate mug, I beat one egg and then added it to the butter mixture, stirring it through. Repeated with each of the five eggs until the mixture was fairly wet. The original recipe warns against potential curdling at this point but I had no problems. Zested the lemon and added this with flour, clove, cinnamon and ginger and stirred through - I loved how this batter completely changed texture several times throughout the process. At this point it was very dry and stiff.

I bought two 60g packs of almond slices, and blitzed them in the blender to make an almond 'flour.' I added this to the dough along with the 200ml beer (I used the Korean brand 'Black Beer Stout', which is apparently quite similar to the original cook's Old Speckled Hen) which made the dough extremely wet again. It required a lot of stirring at this point to get the beer to assimilate entirely. I folded in the dried fruits.

After some difficulty, we managed to line two glass oven bowls with parchment paper. The first cake was big and took 70 minutes at 150 degrees C (300 Fahrenheit) until a toothpick inserted into the centre came out clean; the second was smaller and only needed an hour. After cooking, we tipped each cake out, removed the baking paper, and returned to their bowls. Poked some holes in the top and poured rum in and around them. Covered in clingfilm and they are currently sitting happily in our kitchen - tomorrow they'll be re-fed with more booze.

Chocolate Chip Pie Bars

It's the weekend! And last night I dreamt about chocolate chip pie. I read something about it in the week before Thanksgiving, when I was reading pretty much every recipe that has ever existed, and for some reason the chocolate chip pie one stayed in my brain and formed itself into a dream.

I actually have a history of baking things because I dreamt about them. In our second year, I dreamt that we had to bake a super chocolate cake to defeat the Nazis. Once actually made, that cake would have defeated the Nazis. It almost defeated us.

So this pie. I typed "chocolate chip pie recipe" into Google and clicked on the first link. Then I went on a pie dough hunt, which I think was eventful but which was probably just boring, and used the dough from this. I didn't roll the dough out to line the pie tray, because I am lazy and it makes so much mess, but luckily the pie turned out really well. We sliced it into ten bars and have been happily eating them all day.

Chocolate Chip Pie Bars
Makes 10 bars

1 and 1/2 cups flour (I originally used 1 and 1/4 but had to add more later)
1/2 cup brown sugar
10 teaspoons butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup cold water

1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup flour
2 eggs
1/2 cup melted butter
1 large pack of dark chocolate chips
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix the flour, sugar and butter in a blender until it forms a clumpy dough. Dissolve the salt in the water, add it to the blender, and pulse a few times more. Scrape the dough into tupperware and chill for one hour.

Mix the sugar, flour, eggs, melted butter, chocolate chips and vanilla in a separate bowl. Leave to stand until the dough is ready.

Flour the bottom of a baking tray lightly and drop the dough into it. Using the heel of your hand, spread the dough out until it covers the tray. Bake at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for fifteen minutes. Pour the chocolate chip mixture on to the dough and bake for forty minutes at the same temperature. My tray was about half an inch too big for my oven, so I had to bake it with the door open. I cooked it for twenty minutes, turned it around, and continued cooking for another twenty minutes.

Cut the pie into bars. If served immediately, they are gooey and lovely; later they are more like cookies. Both ways work!

Thanksgiving: The Rest (part 3)

This is the final Thanksgiving post today, and will detail the sauces, chutney, and dessert I made. All of which were really quite good, if I do say so myself.

Persimmon Chutney
From this recipe

4 persimmons
2 tablespoons ginger tea
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon chilli powder

I peeled and diced the persimmons before putting in a pan on a high heat with the ginger tea, honey and cinnamon. Once the mixture started bubbling slightly, I lowered the heat and stirred the chilli powder through. After about fifteen minutes the chutney was solid and sticky, and good to taste. Unfortunately I can't tell you much else about it as I completely forgot to serve the chutney and it is still sitting forlornly on top of the microwave.

Gravy
Makes about 600ml

150ml duck and chicken fat
100ml red wine
200ml beef stock
1 onion from the chicken cavity
Seasoning

We had a lot of fat reserved from roasting both birds, which had been added to a jug (and cooled) over the course of the day, so simply put it in a pan. It heated for a few minutes before the red wine was added, and a few minutes later so was the beef stock. The gravy was tasted and seasoned accordingly. It was still too thin at this stage, so we put it on a higher heat to reduce, and added one of the onions which had been roasted inside the chicken. There was way too much gravy but it was absolutely delicious.

Black Raspberry and Cranberry Sauce
From this recipe

2 cups black raspberries
1 handful dried cranberries
3 bay leaves
Rosemary
Thyme
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon chopped onion
100ml red wine
1 teaspoon spiced rum
Salt

I mixed the raspberries, cranberries, bay leaves, rosemary, thyme and sugar in a bowl and left to marinade for half an hour. Fried the onion in oil, added the wine and rum to the pan, and then set the alcohol on fire with a lighter - which was bloody scary. I shrieked. And panicked when I realized that I was using a wooden spoon. Surely it would catch on fire! Luckily it didn't, so I tipped the raspberry mixture into the pan with a little bit of salt (I added too much and had to remedy it with a bit more sugar), allowing it to heat through and reduce slightly. The original recipe suggests blending the sauce but I preferred it to remain thicker, so I settled for stirring roughly and bashing up the fruit a bit in the process. I removed the bay leaves before serving. This sauce was delicious but probably superfluous, as I was the only one who really had any of it.


Pumpkin Pie
From this recipe
8 servings

9 chocolate biscuits
1/2 cup butter
1 tablespoon milk
Pumpkin puree (made earlier this week)

I'd started this recipe on Wednesday morning by making the pumpkin puree; I continued it on Friday night, which I was actually quite proud of. I did something in advance! Anyway, I crushed the biscuits, mixed them with melted butter and milk, and used the mixture to line a pie dish. This went in the fridge overnight. I hate dough and pastry so a cheesecake base seemed to be the best way to go. On Saturday morning I poured the puree on to the crust and baked it for thirty minutes at 180 degrees C (360 Fahrenheit).

Rum Cream


2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons rum
150ml cream
1 teaspoon sugar

Imagine how stupid I felt after yesterday's post, when I realized that the Pioneer Woman's Hard Sauce is actually just brandy butter.

I had had a little bit of wine by the time it came to making the cream for dessert, so unfortunately the two tablespoons of rum became quite a bit more, and the cream became fairly potent. I had left the butter to soften out of the fridge for a while, and then blended it with the rum, cream and sugar before serving with the pumpkin pie. Absolutely delicious.

Happy Hallowe'en!

This food is too good to be eaten only at Hallowe'en. Both came from the BBC Good Food website, and were delicious. The toffee apple wedges were particularly spectacular, and so easy! We have leftover sauce and have frozen it to make into caramel-esque shards. The sticky chicken and pumpkin was going to be served with an attempt at Nigella's rostini (fried gnocchi as quick roast potatoes!) but our substitute had begun to grow mould, so we had it with pasta instead.

Toffee Apple Wedges
Serves 2; from this recipe

Large lump of butter
Lots of brown sugar
250ml cream
1 large apple
Lemon juice
Cinnamon
More sugar

I melted the butter over a low heat and added enough sugar to heavily coat the bottom of the pan. This mixture became quite mud-like but after some stirring on the heat, it starts to get more liquidy. At this point I added the cream and whisked quickly with a fork over high heat for about five minutes so it thickened a bit. The mixture was left to cool. The apple was cut into wedges and tossed in lemon juice, cinnamon and sugar. Once the butterscotch mixture had cooled a little, we dunked the apple wedges and ate them without grilling.

Sticky Chicken and Pumpkin
Serves 2, from this recipe (very much adapted)

2 chicken breasts
1 small pumpkin (ours was green and slightly avocado-esque - very odd)
2 garlic cloves
1 onion
2 sweet potatoes
Chilli powder and thyme
Between 1/2 and 1 glass of black raspberry wine
Balsamic syrup
Vegetable stock with added gravy powder
Small pack of walnuts
Honey
Seasoning

I chopped the pumpkin into bite-sized pieces, the garlic into teeny bits, the onion into about eight wedges and the potatoes into chunks. Mixed in a pan with the chicken, seasoning, thyme and chilli powder, and fried for just under five minutes. Added the wine and a lot of balsamic syrup. Mixed some dried vegetable stock with gravy powder, added 300ml boiling water, and poured into the pan. Added just enough water to nearly cover the vegetables. Brought to a boil and left to simmer for twenty minutes. Broke the walnuts into pieces and added to the pan, along with some honey. Reduced further until the sauce was thick and sticky and served with pasta.