Delicious mocha fudge (for Coffee Set Match)

Our friend Mike, whose birthday it is today, is a big fan of fudge. I made some rum & raisin for a sweetie stall I was running at the local Christmas fair, and he devoured a bag of it in about five minutes. Normally I make him a birthday cake, but this year I thought I’d make him some fudge instead, and as he loves coffee and I’m trying to think of lots of interesting things to do with coffee for Lavazza’s CoffeeSet Match, instead of bogstandard vanilla (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), tonight Mike will be receiving a big bag of mocha fudge! 

Nom.

Whatever kind of fudge you’re making, I have a few little tips for you:

1. Use a big pan. Seriously. When you boil sugar, it bubbles up to quite a height. I started off with my biggest non-stick pan and it boiled over and made a horrible mess, so I poured it into my 6.5l pressure cooker to finish it off.
2. Use a sugar thermometer, and make sure it works (dip it into boiling water, it should say 100 degrees C, or 212 F).
3. If you overcook or overbeat the fudge and it goes too hard or too grainy, don’t fret. You can probably rescue it. Tip it back into a clean pan along with half a cup of water, heat it slowly till it all dissolves, and boil it back up again to soft ball stage (118 C). It might come out a bit darker than usual, but it’ll be fine.

This recipe is infinitely adaptable. You can replace the coffee with a shot of any booze you like, vary the type of sugar (granulated for vanilla fudge, dark muscovado for something like rum & raisin), leave out the chocolate or add a different type, add dried fruit or nuts or marshmallow or just about whatever you fancy. But for the purposes of Mike’s birthday, we’re sticking with mocha!

Ingredients:

1 large tin of evaporated milk (Carnation is 397g, the Co-Op own brand stuff I used is 410g – it varies from brand to brand but just get something around that size)

450g Demerara sugar

100g butter, cut into small cubes

120ml milk (full fat or semi skimmed, NOT skimmed)

A 30ml shot of espresso

100g white chocolate, chopped (I love the 200g bars from Lidl in the purple packaging)

Method:

Place the evaporated milk, milk, coffee, butter and sugar in your biggest saucepan and heat slowly over a low heat while stirring with a wooden spoon until everything dissolves. It will look very runny but don’t worry, it’ll thicken up.

It's not easy to stir boiling fudge and take a photo at the same time!  Keep your fingers out, it's VERY hot.

Turn the heat up and bring to the boil. Continue to boil while stirring constantly and scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon (important! It will catch if you don’t and you’ll have horrible burnt-tasting black bits). You need to keep it boiling until it reaches 118 degrees C or 240 F on a sugar thermometer – this will probably take about 15 or 20 minutes. If you don’t have a thermometer, you can boil it for about 15 minutes and then try the soft ball test – drop a little bit of the mixture into a glass of cold water. If it forms a soft ball that you can roll together with your fingers, it’s done. If not, keep boiling and check again in a few minutes).

 

Waiting for it to set... 

 

When it reaches the magic temperature, take it off the heat, add the chopped chocolate, stir till it’s melted in and let it cool for a few minutes. Then beat it and beat it and beat it some more with the wooden spoon. As you’ve already been stirring for about 20 minutes, you’re probably exhausted by now so if you have a willing helper, now would be a good time to enlist their assistance! Alternatively you could put it in a food mixer with the paddle beater on a low heat, but keep an eye on it as if you over-beat it will go very grainy. The mixture will thicken up. Pour it into a greased tin (I like using silicone bakeware for fudge) and put it in the fridge for an hour or two to firm up. Then turn out, cut into squares, and try to resist stuffing it all into your mouth at once as it’ll probably make you sick.

The recipe I’ve given here makes a cupful plus some… 

 

My lovely assistant

…although it’s a very big cup!

 

Let’s hope the birthday boy likes it.

Don’t forget to enter the competition at Lavazza to win lots of Wimbledon goodies, including 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.

Cake class

I just found these photos on a memory card and thought I'd share them with you, even though they're really rather poor.  

A month or two ago I attended a class at Sugar Celebrations in Swindon, which was a belated Christmas present to myself.  It was an all day class where we learned how to carve a cake, stack it up with dowels and buttercream, decorate it with sugarpaste/fondant as well as some royal icing, and do a bit of modelling.  Lots of techniques in one day.  I was quite pleased with the results; I just wish I had a close up of the little people to show you because I really liked their little faces!  I had to buy a 30cm tin from Lakeland to bake the cake in because I didn't have one big enough, but hopefully I'll get plenty of use from it.

The cake accompanied my husband to work on the Monday morning where it was devoured by his colleagues!

I've done plenty of very simple one-tier cakes, but now I have a better idea of how to stack them, I really fancy doing a wedding cake or multi-layer birthday cake.  Perhaps I should throw a party just to have an excuse to make a big, awesome cake - what do you think?

FoodBeats - the sound of crab risotto?

If you're anything like me, you probably like to listen to music while you cook (in fact if you're anything like me, you'll sing along loudly and dance around the kitchen). Recently I was asked to have a go at using FoodBeats which is a new online tool launched by Lurpak. It's based around Last.fm and uses Foodily to provide recipe ideas. It's very simple but really quite clever: you just type in the name of the dish you want to cook, and enter a time for how long you think you'll be cooking, and it will generate a playlist for you, as well as offering some recipe ideas and tips based on what you're making. 

Tell it you're cooking something Spanish, and it will let you listen to something Spanish!  Click for a closer look.

I was quite intrigued and was looking forward to trying it out, and I have to say I'm really quite taken with it. I was making a risotto and FoodBeats decided that people who cook risotto like to listen to Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole which suited me absolutely fine. It'll be interesting to see what it comes up with for all the coffee recipes I'm planning! Give it a go, it's really rather cool (and free, which is always good).

Risotto, by the way, is a staple in our house. If we can't be bothered thinking of something to cook for dinner, we almost always end up making a mushroom risotto - it's so simple that even my kitchen-phobic husband can make it without too many tears. Last night I really fancied risotto but wanted something other than mushroom for a change, so after a quick rummage through the cupboards this is what I came up with (and please excuse the Instagram photos, I just snapped them quickly as an afterthought).

Crab, chorizo and roasted red pepper risotto (serves two, but can be easily multiplied)

Ingredients:

140g arborio rice

2 banana shallots, or 1 small onion, diced finely

100g chorizo (the cooking sausage type, not the thinly cut salami-type stuff), diced into small cubes

About 8 roasted red peppers (eg piquillo) from a jar or tin, chopped quite finely

Approximately a pint of hot chicken or vegetable stock

A small glass of white wine (optional, but if not using you might need a bit more stock)

A 170g tin of white crab meat (I used John West)

Olive oil

Method:

Pour about a teaspoon of olive oil into a cold, heavy-based pan (I use cast iron), add the diced shallots or onions and chorizo, place on a medium-low heat and give it a stir. The chorizo will release lovely red oil as it heats up. Let the shallot sweat in the chorizo oil for a few minutes till it has softened.

Tip in the risotto rice and give it a good stir for a minute or so until it's coated in the oil.

Add the white wine, if using, or a ladleful of stock, let it simmer, and keep stirring and stirring with a wooden spoon until the rice has soaked it all up.

Keep adding stock, a ladle at a time, and stir and stir and stir until it's all been taken up by the rice, and the rice is looking nice and fat. I don't measure the liquid for risotto, I just do it by eye, but you're looking for the rice to still have just a little bit of bite to it without actually being crunchy. You can leave it a bit soupy if that's how you like your risotto, or you can cook it a bit longer so more liquid evaporates and you have a slightly drier risotto - up to you. I prefer something in between. 

When you think the rice is just done, add the crab meat and red peppers, stir them in well, and cook for a minute or to just to heat them through. Taste your risotto and season with salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper.

This is a great Friday night supper - it uses mostly stuff you might have lying about the kitchen and only takes about half an hour from start to finish with not too much chopping up of ingredients - and not too much washing up either!

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!

Coffee Set Match - a new challenge!

I'm so excited to tell you about a really fun event I'm taking part in! To celebrate Lavazza's second year as the official coffee of Wimbledon, it's running a challenge called "Coffee, Set, Match" - it has invited a group of bloggers (including yours truly!) to come up with lots of different coffee recipes, and just like Wimbledon we will be judged in different rounds and a lucky winner will eventually win tickets to Wimbledon or a trip to Italy - but to honest it all seems like such good fun that I'm happy just to be taking part - if you know me in real life, or read my blog regularly, you'll know that I am an absolute coffee fiend. 

It's not just us bloggers that can win awesome stuff though - so can you! More on that below.

To help me come up with lots of lovely coffee-based recipes, Lavazza have been kind enough to provide a shiny A Modo Mio machine, which uses pods and is simplicity itself to use (by the way, unlike another market leader which sells its capsules online only and charges for delivery, you can actually buy these pods in Waitrose!) and I have guzzled a few cups already. 

I have tons of ideas already for recipes, but I am happy to take requests, so if there's something you'd like me to make please let me know and I'll do my best to come up with a recipe for you. I've already made some treats and I will share the recipe just as soon as I've written it up - but watch this space for something that's delicious, gooey, chocolatey AND virtuous!

Now if you love your coffee as much as I do, you'll want to know how you can get your hands on some goodies too. Look out for instant win details on promotional cups of takeaway Lavazza coffee, or enter online at http://promotion.wimbledon.lavazza.com/. 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. 

 

Coffee tastes better with a piece of fudge! 

Look out for twitter hashtag #coffeesetmatch to see what other bloggers are up to!

My whereabouts!

Oh my goodness... I keep thinking "I really need to get back to my blog, it's been weeks since I last posted".  So I just signed in and realised that it hasn't been weeks - it's been MONTHS!  Five of them, to be precise.  That's terrible.  I am a neglectful blogger.  

Gone but not forgotten...

To be fair, there have been reasons why I've vanished from the face of the earth, with the main one being that I've been on a major diet (Weight Watchers, actually) and have been avoiding anything to do with baking, cakes, temptation etc - unfortunately this also has included staying away from a lot of my favourite food blogs for a while.  I've been doing very well, and in fact have lost about two stone (26.5 lbs, for the Americans), and am right now wearing the jeans I wore when we first moved to Wiltshire and that for a long time would not go past my thighs.  I still have a way to go, but I'm getting there.  However it's been occurring to me that perhaps people might actually like to see the nice Weight Watchers food I've been making.  I have some WW cookbooks, but I've also been adapting other recipes and old favourites to lower propoints versions, and I think I'm going to start blogging about some of them.  Now and then I have an occasional blowout, but hey - I'm human.

No more lovely deep fried churros!

In other news, we found out we were being kicked out of our current house by our nightmare landlords - and about two days later had an offer accepted on a house we wanted to buy.  We are hoping to move in at the end of June.  It's a real fixer upper and I'm really looking forward to putting my own stamp on it, assisted by my awesome husband who has always been very good at fixing stuff and finding ways to solve a problem, but he has also been taking classes at B&Q which are very good and very reasonably priced, and hopefully he will be able to do all the tiling, fit wooden floors, new bathroom etc.  

HOWEVER... the kitchen isn't in the best state, and we plan to build a small extension and fit a brand new kitchen, but we won't be able to afford to do it for a while.  So we are going to do a cheapo fix up job on the existing (tiny) kitchen so I can live with it for a year or so, and I've started to collect ideas on Pinterest.  Below is a photo of my kitchen-to-be, isn't it horrible?  If you have any ideas for what I can do with it, please let me know!  We plan to install a new (cheap) floor, new (cheap) tiles, and repaint the cabinets.

Anyway, now I've gotten over the worst of the weightwatching, and have almost finished my exams for now (Spanish and financial services, I am a glutton for punishment aren't I?) I'm hoping to pick up where I left off.  Except perhaps with a bit less butter.

New Douwe Egberts ground coffee range - plus decaff giveaway!

When Douwe Egberts asked if I'd like to try their new ground coffee range, I was genuinely excited. As you may know I'm a big coffee fan and in fact I have a cafetiere and a secret stash of Douwe Egberts in my drawer at work, so I don't have to drink the sludge that passes for coffee in our office. (Snob, moi?)

The new range comprises six brand new coffee blends:

1) House Blend – a smooth classic blend of the finest beans. Perfect for any time of day.

2) Time Together – a spicy blend with a hint of vanilla and nut. Perfect for when you are relaxing with friends.

3) Café Milano – a traditional Italian style coffee with a relaxing blend and a hint of spice. Perfect to relax and escape with.

4) Flavourful Decaff - a smooth blend with a hint of vanilla and chocolate using decaffeinated beans. Perfect for those who prefer a lower caffeine intake.

5) Morning Americano – an American style coffee with a strong blend of nutty flavouring. Perfect to kick-start your day.

6) Fired up – an espresso style blend with intense spice and chocolate flavouring creating with dark-roasted beans. Perfect for those who appreciate a rich flavour.

And lucky me, I got to sample them all! I was very impressed. They all tasted very fresh (sometimes pre-packed ground coffee can be a bit stale) and rich without any hint of bitterness. My favourite without a doubt was the Morning Americano, which is lovely brewed quite strong in a stovetop espresso pot and enjoyed black, but I also really liked Time Together. I'm not convinced by the name, I have to admit, but the coffee itself is very tasty without being too intense and is lovely with a piece of cake!

The range is available now in Tesco and other stores, priced around £3.14 for a 300g bag. The Morning Americano is definitely going to be a permanent fixture in my fridge!

I have a bag of the Flavourful Decaff to give away to one lucky person. Just comment on this post and tell me how you take your coffee. I'll pick a winner on Sunday 11 December. Make sure you leave your email address so I can contact you. Sorry but I can only post the prize within the UK.

Many thanks to Jessica for the yummy samples :)