An ungreedy pie

I’m still following Weight Watchers (over three stone gone now – nearly there!) and while there are many recipes that are adaptable for those of us who are shunning butter and fatty cuts of meat and even cake, one thing I am really missing is a good pie.  There is no comfort food like a proper pie with proper pastry – and that means the pastry has to go underneath the filling, not just on top.  Otherwise it’s just a stew with a lid.  My husband becomes most annoyed when we go out for a meal and he orders pie only to be presented with a stew with a lid, I’m pretty sure it would be a divorceable offence if it happened at home.

 This week I really fancied a pie, but I just didn’t have the WW points to “spend” on it.  There was also the fact that we are extremely poor this month due to having just spent more on flooring for the new house than I paid for my car three years ago!  So I had to come up with a pie that was tasty but low in propoints and only used ingredients that I already had at home.  So without further ado, here is my lovely pie; it’s meat-free but very tasty and serves four hungry people, with 11 WW points per serving.  I’m still using my iPhone to take photos as my proper camera is behind stacks of boxes and I can’t quite reach it, but bear with me.

Goat’s Cheese and Lentil Filo Pie

Ingredients:

1 270g package of frozen filo pastry

Olive oil (I use an oil spray)

150g goat’s cheese

100g red lentils

1 big white onion, diced

1 big or 2 small courgettes, diced

1 pointy red pepper, diced

A handful of chestnut mushrooms, sliced finely

1 stock cube (whatever type you have is fine)

2 big carrots or 3 small ones, diced

2 cloves of garlic, crushed or sliced

2 sticks of celery, diced

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 tsp dried thyme

Pine nuts (just a few)

Spray a large saucepan with some olive oil, and fry the fennel seeds briefly over a high heat.  Turn the heat down, and add the onion, garlic, celery and carrots, and cook gently for about five minutes until the onion is translucent.  Add the red pepper, mushrooms and courgette and cook for another minute or two. 

Add the lentils, thyme and enough hot water from a freshly-boiled kettle to cover it all with a little bit extra, and crumble in the stock cube.  Bring to a simmer, cover the pan with a lid and cook for 15 minutes, by which time hopefully the lentils will have absorbed most of the water (if not, drain off any excess).  Season with salt and pepper to taste, and let the mixture cool.  When it’s cool, dice up the goat’s cheese and stir it in.

[While my pie filling was cooling, I went to my Weight Watchers meeting and learned that I had lost another 4lbs in the two weeks since I was last there – hurrah!] 

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. 

Now you want to find a clean tea towel, soak it with cold water and wring it out.  Use this to cover your filo pastry while you’re not working with it, because it will dry out very quickly.  A Pyrex or similar dish is great for this, but a squarish baking tin would be fine – just grease it with a little oil or butter first. 

Use four sheets of filo for the base.  Lay out the first left to right, trying to push it into the corners without tearing it, and leave the edges hanging over the baking dish.  Spray or brush with olive oil (or indeed melted butter if you are not trying to be good).  Lay out the next sheet on top of the first, top to bottom this time, and spray/brush with oil again.  Repeat these two steps. 

Now pour in your lentilly goaty cheesy filling and level the top.  Cover it up with the overhanging edges of filo, and spray with oil.  You should have about three sheets of filo left in the packet, and what I do is just scrunch them up and stick them on top so it looks spiky.  You can be tidy if you like, I’m too lazy.  Whatever you decide, make sure you oil the top when you’re done, because this will make it crisp up nicely, brown prettily and taste lovely.  Sprinkle some pine nuts over the top.

Bake the pie for 30 minutes, by which time you should smell it from several rooms away.  You can serve it with whatever you like – salad, potatoes, a big glass of wine.

I’m not claiming that this is a substitute for a proper steak and ale pie with lardy pastry.  It’s not.  But it’s an awful lot tastier than a low fat ready meal : )

Fennel & Cumin Spelt Bread Rolls - adventures with spelt flour

As I mentioned in this previous post, we moved home recently and left our rented house with its nice tidy white kitchen behind.  The house we bought is a fixer upper and most of it is still a building site, covered in plaster dust, with half of the upstairs bathroom missing and no flooring anywhere other than in two bedrooms.  Most of our belongings are still in boxes (and have been since the start of June), and the novelty is wearing off very quickly – I just want it to be finished dammit!  I’ll be sharing photos of my “new” kitchen soon, and bragging about my husband’s recently-acquired DIY skills.

Soft-focus food porn? 

 
I actually made these bread rolls way back in June for a Jubilee picnic, but the memory card with the photos has been packed away since then and I’ve only just managed to find it.  Plus our broadband has been all over the place due to the move, and I’ve just managed to get my iMac set up again.  So I have a bit of catching up to do! 

 

First assemble your ingredients, Delia style

 

I made these to try out some new spelt flour from Sharpham Park, who have a lovely range of products made from organic spelt, including breakfast cereals with various flavours like bran flakes with berries (which I also tried, but it didn’t even make it as far as the blog because I scoffed the lot very quickly – it’s delicious), speltotto (like risotto – obviously – but using spelt instead of rice, which I do intend to try as I love risotto but like the nutty flavour of spelt) and of course the range of flour, which I was rather impressed with.  I get genuinely excited when I try out a new flour.  Is that a bit weird?  I’m sure I’m not the only one.

This recipe is adapted from one by Nigel Slater.

Fennel & Cumin Spelt Rolls

Ingredients:    

250g Sharpham Park wholegrain spelt flour
250g strong white bread flour

350ml warm water

Heaped tsp dried yeast
1 tsp Maldon salt, crushed in a pestle & mortar

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds

First add the yeast to the warm water and give it a bit of a stir about.  Leave for 10 minutes or so till it starts to foam up.  

Toast the fennel and cumin seeds in a dry frying pan over a high heat for a couple of minutes – keep them moving around with a wooden spoon to stop them burning.  Pour the toasted seeds into a pestle and mortar and bash them up a bit.  

A great stress reliever.

Now throw everything into a big bowl, give it a really good mix around until it all comes together, turn it out onto a worktop* and knead, knead, knead until you have a lovely smooth stretchy dough, which you then want to roll into a tight ball, place into an oiled bowl, cover with a piece of oiled cling film or a floury tea towel, and leave for an hour or so until it doubles in size.

 

Proving...

Now preheat the oven to 250 degrees C, and put a roasting tin or something similar in the bottom of the oven.

Turn the dough out, gently push all the air out of it, give it a quick knead and divide into 8 pieces.  Roll each piece into a little ball, place on a floured baking tray quite close together, and cover with a tea towel.  Leave for another 40 minutes or so until they’ve puffed up and have probably stuck together.  In the meantime, boil the kettle.

Now put your little rolls in the oven, and pour some water from the kettle into the roasting tin and shut the oven door.  The steam will give your rolls a lovely crust and help them rise.

Bake for about 15 minutes, or until they sound hollow when tapped underneath.  Cool on a wire rack for a bit, but do try and eat them while they’re still warm, preferably with some strong cheese and some cold meat like slices of pepperoni or chorizo.

---

I have to say I really did like these little rolls.  They are somehow chewier than bread made entirely from wheat flour, and despite being small are really quite substantial. 

Yum.

Sharpham Park products are available from selected Sainsburys and online at their website, and the bran flakes have been on my shopping list several times now. 

 

Sue's chocolate chip coffee muffins

This post is dedicated to my lovely friend and workmate Sue. When I first told her about Lavazza's Coffee,Set, Match challenge, she immediately decided that I needed to make some coffee chocolate chip muffins, and for weeks afterwards she regularly harangued asked me when they would be forthcoming. 

 

Sue is such a sweetie that I would hate to disappoint her, so coffee chocolate chip muffins were made and delivered to work, and while a few of them were shared with other workmates, most of them accompanied a gleeful Sue home - they were most definitely enjoyed! (I may or may not have eaten one for breakfast myself.)

I decided to use some cupcake cases I found in Poundland. I really love the 1960s style pattern on these, but unfortunately you do tend to get what you pay for and during the baking process they soaked up a lot of grease and went a bit see-through - not a good look. I'm on the lookout for some nice Jubilee-style cupcakes but I live miles from the nearest Lakeland - has anyone seen any good ones in the supermarkets?

Not the best quality but what a fab pattern.

Anyway, here's the muffin recipe. If you have unexpected visitors or a cake sale you've forgotten about till the last minute, these are ideal as you can be taking them out of the oven half an hour after deciding to make them! And like my fudge recipe, this is very adaptable. Leave out the coffee, use white chocolate, and add a big handful of frozen raspberries (don't defrost them first) for a lovely summery treat.

Ingredients:

280g self raising flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Good pinch of salt

90g caster sugar

1 egg

250ml plain yoghurt

90ml semi skimmed or whole milk

90ml vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 shot of espresso (I used a Lavazza Caffè Crema Lungo Dolcemente pod)

100g chocolate, chopped (I used milk chocolate as I wanted a bit of sweetness to counterbalance the coffee, but dark would be fine, as long as it's a fairly low cocoa content)

Preheat the oven to 225ºC and get your muffin tin ready with paper cases.

Sieve the flour, bicarb and salt into a large bowl (or tip it all in and give it a whisk to get rid of any lumps).

Beat the egg and sugar together in a big measuring jug. Add the yoghurt, milk, oil, espresso and vanilla, and give it all a really good mix with a fork or small whisk.

Pour the wet stuff into the dry stuff, and fold it all together with a big spoon. Don't overmix - you want it to stay lumpy. Finish by folding in the chopped chocolate.

Divide the mixture between the paper cases (you should get 12, but if you use smaller cases like I did you might end up with 14 or 15 - if so, and you can't fit two tins in the oven, you could bake a couple in silicone cases which will hold their shape in the oven without needing to be placed into a muffin tin).

Place in the oven, immediately turn the heat down to 200ºC, and bake for 20 minutes. Remove the muffins from the oven, let them cool for a few minutes till you can handle them, and then put them on a wire rack to finish cooling. They are lovely eaten while still a bit warm, as the chocolate chunks will still be melty and gooey!

Don't forget - you can win prizes  from Lavazza too!  Look out for instant win details on promotional cups of takeaway Lavazza coffee, or enter online HERE.

Prizes include pairs of tickets to Wimbledon, Lavazza A Modo Mio Favola Plus Wimbledon Limited Edition coffee machines and exclusive sets of espresso cups created especially for the tournament. 

 

1950s Royal Doulton espresso cup which is one of my favourites! 

Fat-free chocolate espresso brownies - for Coffee Set Match

As you may have seen from my previous post, I'm currently following Weight Watchers and have so far lost two stone. Now I have no intention of only creating Weight Watchers-friendly recipes for the Coffee Set Match challenge, but I thought I'd kick off with something a little bit less guilt-inducing than usual, so we can all save a few extra calories for when we really need them! It's our friend Mike's birthday on Monday and we are going for a yummy Indian meal so I'm trying to be good for a few days beforehand and save myself... anyway do give these a try, they don't taste anything like diet food whatsoever! 

Ingredients:

100g self raising flour

60g cocoa powder (I like Bourneville)

Pinch of salt

75g soft brown sugar

2 whole eggs, beaten

2 egg whites

1 shot of espresso (I used a Lavazza Appassionatamente capsule), left to cool a bit

Preheat the oven to 180ºC and grease and flour a square 18cm tin. I've been using Dr Oetker Cake Release Spray recently which is very good indeed and can be found in Tesco etc.

Sieve the flour, cocoa powder and salt together (or if you're lazy, like me, tip it all into a bowl and use a whisk to mix it all together which will get rid of 95% of the lumps). Mix in the two beaten eggs with a big spoon, followed by the shot of espresso. The mixture will be very thick.

Take a separate bowl and make sure it is free of grease. Rubbing a cut lemon over the inside is a good way to make sure there's no trace of grease - a little tip for you! Whisk the two egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Tip in the sugar and continue to whisk until the stiff peaks look lovely and glossy. Resist the temptation to eat the lovely beige-coloured raw meringue, difficult though it may be.

Add a third of the meringue to the rest of the mixture and fold it in gently. This will loosen up the mixture. Fold in the remaining two thirds, nice and gently, being careful not to overmix as this will knock all the air out of the meringue.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 14-15 minutes. The top should be set but still just slightly squidgey. Cool in the tin for a few minutes, then turn out and cut into squares. 

These are yummiest when still warm from the oven, but do try and eat them on the same day as you make them (yes, I'm sure you can manage this difficult task) as they do stale quite quickly. However they freeze extremely well, wrapped in cling film, and if you zap a frozen brownie in the microwave for thirty seconds it will be defrosted and warmed to perfection.

I hope you enjoy these brownies, but check back soon as I also plan to make some cappuccino brownies next week that are most definitely not diet friendly!

Don't forget to enter Lavazza's competition to win some fab prizes!

Boiled fruit cake - an oldie but a goodie

Lurpak recently got in touch to ask me to come up with a recipe for their website - they wanted an alternative to the traditional Christmas cake. So I thought of my favourite boiled fruit cake recipe - the recipe is years old (I think it was originally my mum's) and I've tinkered with it, and it's a great one for using up whatever you've got in your cupboards!

For the cake in the photo, I used glacé cherries, raisins, sultanas, cranberries, apricots and mixed peel. Best of all, it's incredibly easy and all you will have to wash up afterwards is one saucepan, one wooden spoon and the cake tin! So if you've left it to the last minute and haven't time to make a traditional rich fruit cake, or can't be bothered with the necessary care and feeding involved, this is the recipe for you. I used to make it regularly during my last chef job, and it was always a big seller.

Find it here, on the Lurpak website.

I don't know why boiled fruit cakes aren't more popular, but they really seem to have gone out of fashion, despite Nigella coming up with a chocolate version. They need a revival! Have you ever made one?

A gushing post about Danish pastry and Nick Malgieri

Disclaimer: This post is unsuitable for people on diets. If you are trying to lose weight, I accept no responsibility for the ruination of your diet and pounds you will not lose (or indeed that you may gain) if you act upon any of the information contained herein.

OK, small print over. This is a post about one of the most delicious and most unhealthy treats that has ever been invented. I am talking about the Danish pastry. That pretty little flaky bundle of buttery happiness, wrapped around some sort of equally lovely filling that might be lemony, or almondy, or fruity, or nutty, or just about anything you can wrap some dough around.

Nom.

Prior to this past weekend I had only ever made Danish pastry a couple of times, back when I was at catering college, and I found it an incredible annoyance. All that battering out blocks of butter, enveloping it in dough, rolling out and folding and turning, wrapping in cling film and resting in the fridge and remembering how many folds and turns you’d done and so on and so on. Not for me, sorry. I’m just too lazy. I did notice that Nigella had some sort of food processor method in How To Be a Domestic Goddess, but never got around to trying it.

Then I acquired (by which I mean I bought - but don't tell my husband) a copy of Nick Malgieri’s latest book, Bake!, and his method for food-processor Danish pastry looked so quick and simple that I thought it would be rude not to try it. I wasn’t convinced it was going to work. There was hardly any folding and turning – where would all the flaky layers come from? And the butter I was using didn’t seem ideal. Normally I use Lurpak or Country Life, but I had some Welsh butter that had a high fat content and seemed extremely soft even straight out of the fridge, so I had visions of the pastries melting in the oven and turning into fatty little flat things.

All rolled out and folded and ready to go

They didn’t. They were fabulous. Nick Malgieri is the new love of my life, and his easy Danish dough will stop me going to Waitrose and buying them there, because my home made ones are far more fabulous. Even my husband liked them, and he’s not normally a fan.

I filled them with the ricotta and lemon filling Nigella provides in her Danish recipe (only because Nick’s uses cream cheese, and I didn’t have any) and it was perfect.

With the ubiquitous espresso, in my new vintage 1950s china cup :)

You’re not getting the recipe, because I want you go to and buy the book. (Currently it’s only £4.99 from the Book People website, and there’s usually a free delivery code to be found if you search online, so you have no excuse.) It’s a beautiful book, with step by step photographs for every baking technique you will ever need, followed by lots of variations for each so what you are actually getting is hundreds of recipes (that really work). And there really is something for everyone here; both the complete beginner and someone who’s been baking for years and knows their way round a professional kitchen will be delighted with Nick’s helpful tips and ideas and the variations on old-fashioned methods (I can’t wait to try his puff pastry).

Nick's pastries and my pastries!

This is a completely unsponsored post, by the way, I just love this book immensely and want to see a copy on everyone’s cookbook stand!

Maple pecan bread - just to prove I'm still alive

Yes, yet again my blog is sad and neglected. Somehow the days just ran away with me in October, and I didn't get done anything I had planned. We seemed to be doing something every weekend and I managed to miss all the blog events I had planned to take part in. I am even more out of touch with everyone else's blogs than usual; currently in Google Reader I have 742 unread items. Shocking.

Anyway, just to ease myself back in to blogging, here's a recipe I made recently and actually managed to photograph. It's a recipe I got from my patisserie teacher in catering college (I have no idea where he got it from so if you recognise it, let me know) and it's one I particularly like but don't make very often because it's not exactly what you'd call healthy...

Maple & Pecan Bread

Ingredients

100ml milk (I use semi skimmed)

140ml sour cream or double cream

1 egg

25g butter

5 tbsp maple syrup

½ tsp salt

450g strong white flour

1 ½ tsp dried yeast (a 7g sachet is perfect, if you use those)

100g chopped pecan nuts

My method is to throw the lot into the Kenwood Chef/Kitchenaid and let it do the work for me, but of course you can do it by hand, in which case you should rub the butter into the flour and add the yeast and salt, mix together the milk, cream and maple syrup, add this to the dry ingredients and bring it all together to form a dough. Knead until it feels smooth, springy and lovely, and then knead in the pecan nuts (I find it easier this way than to add them right at the start).

Either way, when you've got your dough, form it into a tight ball, place it in an oiled bowl, cover with a tea towel, shower cap (top tip! Pinch them from hotel rooms), cling film or whatever, and leave to prove until it's doubled in size – roughly an hour.

When it's doubled, knock it back and divide the dough into six evenly sized lumps. Divide each of these lumps into three, roll them into thin sausages and plait/braid (depending on where you're from – in the UK we call it plait!) the sausages together. Place these on a baking tray, covered with a tea towel, and leave to prove again for around 40 minutes. Meanwhile pre-heat the oven to 200ºC.

When the little plaits/braids have almost doubled in size again, brush the tops with beaten egg and bake for around 20 minutes, by which time they should be a lovely golden brown and will sound hollow if you tap the undersides. Brush the tops with some more maple syrup while they're still warm.

You really need to eat these while they're fresh and preferably still warm as they do stale quickly, but a quick blast in the oven will freshen them up again the next day. Enjoy slathered with butter, obviously!

With a teeny tiny mug of espresso!

I do have some more posts planned for the near future, including showing off my Christmas cake, which I made a couple of days ago and have already fed with a generous amount of brandy, and some recipes for chutney which is my new obsession. Oh and I also want to show you my latest kitchen toy, which happens to be yet another way for me to get my caffeine fix...

Random Recipes - Marguerite Patten's Victory Cookbook

I'm sneaking in right at the last minute, despite having actually made this recipe and photographed it right back at the start of August! I just didn't have time to write it up, and then life got in the way, including changing jobs, a very last minute trip to Ireland to visit a new baby, a few social events and all sorts of stuff. Anyway I've hung up my chef's whites for the last time (although I've said that at least twice before) and now I will be strictly baking only for pleasure!

So this month's random recipe theme was completely random! Dom instructed us to lay out all our cookbooks and pick one but as I have far too many to do that with, I used a random number generator instead. It came up with The Victory Cookbook by Marguerite Patten, which is a book that I bought to read, not to cook from.


Marguerite Patten is one of my heroes. I'm fascinated by the Home Front, rationing and everything to do with the home during the Second World War, and this is such an interesting book - but I really never envisaged actually making any of the recipes! But I thought it'd be interesting. There are lots of small recipes on each page so I opened it randomly and then picked a recipe with a pointy finger and my eyes closed! And I got Beetroot Pudding, which was good as I had a beetroot that was needing to be used up.


Ingredients:

6oz wheatmeal flour (I used wholemeal)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 oz sugar
4 oz finely grated raw beetroot
1/2 oz fat (I used lard)

Method, in Mrs Patten's own words:

Just the job to make your sugar ration go further! First mix flour and baking powder, rub in the margarine, then add sugar and grated beetroot.

Now mix all the ingredients to a soft cake consistency with 3 or 4 tablespoons of milk. Add a few drops of flavouring essence if you have it. Turn the mixture into a greased pie dish or tin and bake in a moderate oven for 35 minutes. This pudding tastes equally good hot or cold.


And the verdict? Well, I was expecting it to be horrible. But it wasn't. It was okay, not gorgeous, not disgusting, just okay. Definitely nicer with a drizzle of custard though!

Vanilla Melting Moments - and I have some news

On Sunday, I had a fleeting visit from the in-laws in the afternoon and a barbecue at our friends' boat in the evening. I had to make something suitable that could be nibbled at with coffee AND picked at after a load of burgery type stuff. Probably something small and fairly light but really tasty.

When it comes to little pretty tasty things to pick at, Rachel Allen has yet to let me down, and one recipe from Rachel's Favourite Food at Home practically jumped off the page!


These are very crumbly, buttery little vanilla morsels, sandwiched together with vanilla buttercream, so small and light they probably contain no calories (although don't quote me on this) and so ridiculously quick and easy to make that you can whip up a batch in no time at all.


Ingredients:

For the biscuits
175g self raising flour
125g cornflour
50g icing sugar
225g butter, diced
1 tsp vanilla essence

Preheat the oven to 160ºC and line a couple of baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats (Rachel says not to bother but I reckon it makes the cleanup easier).


Place the flour, cornflour and icing sugar in a food processor and pulse for a few seconds. Add the butter and vanilla and turn the machine on until it all comes together into a ball of dough. Roll into small balls the size of a large marble and place, well spaced out, on the baking tins. Dip a fork in cold water and use to flatten the balls slightly.

Bake for 10-15 minutes (it took 15 in my oven). Rachel says remove carefully (these little babies are fragile) and let them cool on a wire rack, but I say just let them cool on the baking sheets - they're less fragile when they're cool and they don't go soggy as they dry.

Icing:

50g softened butter
125g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Just bung the lot in the processor (don't even bother washing the bowl after making the biscuits) and mix together till it turns into icing.

Spread carefully on half the biscuits (remember they are still pretty fragile) and sandwich together with the other halves. Dust with some more icing sugar to make them look pretty!


This recipe made about twenty sandwiched biscuits. There were six of us eating them and we devoured them all in a day, which meant we all had at least three each and someone probably had five (but I would never name names, oh no). They were universally adored and I will not be making them again unless I know there will be quite a crowd to help me eat them, as I know I would be capable of eating the whole batch myself.


In other, not-exactly-baking-related news, I decided a while ago that I really didn't want to be a chef anymore. The money is terrible,it's incredibly tiring, you have to work weekends etc etc. I've just had enough. So I decided I wanted to go back to my former life as an office worker, and I've been offered a job that I really like the sound of in a company that is apparently fantastic to work for. I'm leaving my current job, and starting the new one, at the end of August. I'll still be baking, but now it'll just be for me and my family and friends, so I'm probably going to have to bake even more to get my fix when I'm not doing it every day at work!

Random Recipes - My Favourite Cookbook

The theme for this month's Random Recipes really gave me a headache. Have you seen my cookbook collection?! How on earth was I supposed to pick a favouite? But I had a good think about it. Which ones did I use the most? Which recipes did I keep going back to, and which ones always worked? More importantly, which ones did I find myself reading in bed?

And after much pondering, I've decided that my favourite cookbook is...

*drumroll*

How To Be a Domestic Goddess, by the wonderful Nigella Lawson.



I've had this quite a few years now and so many recipes in it have become old favourites that I've memorised from making them so often. The American Pancake recipe is ridiculously good. The Easy Almond Cake on page 6 is amazing, and so easy that my husband managed to make it all by himself for my birthday cake this year. And Nigella's sweet pastry recipe is the one I've adopted as my own, choosing it over the likes of Michel Roux because it just works so well.

Once again I got carried away and made two different recipes for this challenge.



The unappetising stuff in this jar is pineapple chutney. Doesn't it look disgusting? Please don't judge by appearances. This stuff is fantastic. Put a great blob of it in a cheese sandwich (even better if it's toasted). It tastes of cinnamon and star anise and turmeric and all things nice. There is absolutely no better use for a mouldy pineapple, I promise.



And the obligatory sweet cakey thing. I don't know why I haven't made these before: Baby Bundts. Delicious little yoghurty lemony squidgey things that, despite my coffee fixation, really need to be eaten alongside a cup of tea.



I'm not sure if this book is as popular in the US as it is in the UK - can any readers across the pond enlighten me? Do you guys love Nigella over there as much as we do here?

Anyway here were the other contenders for my favourite cookbook, in no particular order:

Muffins Fast and Fantastic by Susan Reimer
Baking From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (even though I only started actually cooking from it last month!)
The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook by Tarek Malouf
The River Cottage Bread Handbook by Dan Stevens
Good Food: 101 Cakes & Bakes
The Italian Cookery Course by Katie Caldesi
Complete Chinese Cookbook by Ken Hom
Ursula's Italian Cakes and Desserts by Ursula Ferrigno

Upside Down Cake - about as retro as it gets!

Ages ago I made a pineapple upside down cake at work. The height of 1970s sophistication (or was it 1960s? before my time anyway), the upside down cake is sadly no longer as popular as it once was. Perhaps it's because fewer people eat tinned fruit these days? I don't know. Anyway I found the recipe in an old Good Housekeeping cookbook from the early 70s that used to belong to my boss's mother, and I liked it so much that I snapped a quick iPhone photo of it and was going to share the recipe on my blog.



Except I completely forgot about it.

Until today, when I went to a car boot fair and found a copy of the book (in much better condition, it even still has its dust jacket) for a pound. Obviously I snapped it up, and I remembered that I was supposed to share this lovely recipe with you. So here it is, in its original Imperial measurements because I feel it would be wrong to convert them, and in its original wording with my comments in parenthesis.

Pineapple & Gingerbread Upside Down Cake

Ingredients:

1/2 lb butter
9 oz demerara sugar
1 15oz can pineapple rings (the equivalent size can nowadays is 432g)

2 eggs
10 oz self raising flour
1 1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
4 tbsps milk

Preheat the oven to 350ºF/gas 4/180ºC. Grease a baking tin about 8" square. (I used a 10" round tin. Don't use a loose-based tin because it will leak!)

Melt 2oz butter, add 3oz demerara sugar and dissolve, add 3 tbsp pineapple juice from the tin. Bring to the boil and cook until a thick syrup is formed. (I did this in the microwave, by the way - it only took a couple of minutes.) Pour this into the tin and cover with slices of pineapple. (I also added glacé cherries in the holes in the pineapple ring, which is how I always remember seeing upside down cake.)

Cream the remaining butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs and fold in the dry ingredients to give a soft consistency. Pour this mixture over the pineapple and bake in the centre of the oven for 1 1/4 hours (in fact I found it only took about 50 minutes in a fan oven, so be careful).

This cake smelled absolutely gorgeous while it was baking; I reckon it's worth making just so you can have a sniff!

My boot sale find :)

There are lots of lovely retro recipes in this book, so look out for more of them in future.

Millionaire's shortbread. Better than birthday cake.

Yesterday was our friend Mike's 40th birthday, and his missus organised a surprise party for him at our local pub, complete with live band, helium balloons and a barbecue with the best fried onions EVER. I knew she'd ordered him a birthday cake, but I couldn't let a 40th birthday go by without offering the birthday boy some sort of baked product. Obviously. So knowing that Mike is a fan of millionaire's shortbread, I brought home a huge baking tin from work and made him a massive batch of it, all for himself :)

The recipe I use for this yummy treat comes from the Hairy Bikers Mums Know Best cookbook (the first one), which my lovely husband managed to get Dave and Si to sign for me when they visited his office. It's a great book, full of the sort of food your mum/granny used to make, real good family grub. It's worth buying just for this recipe and one for spaghetti carbonara, but really every recipe in it is a winner.


I doubled the quantities and filled my massive tin, but normally I make it in a Lakeland brownie pan which measures 34x20cm and it's just about perfect. I use different methods to make the shortbread base and caramel topping than the recipe states - my way is quicker and easier!

Ingredients:

Shortbread base:

125g butter
50g caster sugar
175g plain flour

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C. Line your tin with baking parchment. Put all the ingredients for the base into a food processor and turn it on until you get a sandy mixture. Pour this into the tin and press it down really well, making sure you get into the corners. (If you have no food processor, you can make sure your butter is softened and just mix it all together by hand). Bake for 20 minutes. It shouldn't really take on much colour, and should still be quite soft on top (it will harden as it cools). Leave to cool completely.

Caramel topping:

397g condensed milk
50g butter, cut into small pieces
50g soft brown sugar

Put all the ingredients into a large microwaveable bowl, and microwave on full power for around 7 or 8 minutes. Take it out every couple of minutes and give it a whisk. It will boil quite furiously and will rise up in the bowl (this is why you want a big bowl - but it's perfectly normal). When the caramel is ready, it will be thickened and fudgy-looking. DO NOT be tempted to dip a finger in to taste it, you will get a nasty burn! Pour this over the shortbread base, and let it set in the fridge.

When it's set firmly, melt 150g dark chocolate and pour all over the top. Leave to set again before cutting into squares. I like to melt a little white chocolate, drizzle it in lines over the dark chocolate and pull a skewer through it to make a feathery pattern.

Sorry for the lack of better photos, I had to snap these very quickly as I was already late for the party! I can tell you that the recipient was very happy to receive a huge tin full of this stuff :)