Christmas, Gingerbread, and Lemon Curd

IT'S ALMOST CHRISTMAS! ONLY 2 SLEEPS TO GO!

I've been getting into the Christmassy mood by doing lots of baking. Last week I made Stollen for a Christmas party (it had its fair share of mishaps and I forgot to take any pictures); it didn't all get eaten so I ended up having stollen for breakfast for the whole of the last week of my uni term (living the life :p ). Then the other day I decided to have an experiment: I needed to make lemon curd as part of my Grandma's Christmas present, I wanted to make some biscuits so that I could play with icing, and I wanted to make some thing nice to take for dinner at my friends house. The result of these things ended up with the creation of gingerbread and lemon curd tarts (as well as some star shaped biscuits and a jar of lemon curd)! Then last night I iced the lovely gingerbread biscuits.

The Gingerbread:

I used a BBC Food recipe with a few tweeks: 4tsps ginger not just 2, 1tsp mixed spice added, a little bit of water added (as I didn't have enough golden syrup). These additions were largely personal taste: I'm a big fan of ginger, so I always add more to things :)

I managed to make 12 tarts (round) and a lot (I haven't counted, although I probably should in case they get eaten by one of my brothers) of star shaped biscuits.

If I use the recipe as a pastry again (for the tarts) I'll probably not include the bicarb as the biscuits rose a little bit and had to be squished before putting the lemon curd in.

The Lemon Curd:

I used a Delia Smith recipe for my lemon curd (but used half quantities). It made enough for a largish jam jar full, all the tarts, plus plenty of scrapings for my brothers to steal.

The Tarts:

On the Great British Bake Off, one of the contestants made Key Lime Pie with ginger pastry. Because of my love of ginger and knowing that shortbread can be used instead of pastry for some tarts, I decided to attempt to marry two of my favourite foods in little jam tarts.

They turned out amazingly. They might not look much, but they were delicious :-) and really easy to make too!

1. Roll out the gingerbread as thinly as possible. Cut into circles and place into a floured jam tart tin.
2. Bake for around 3 minutes at 180 degrees.
3. Put around a teaspoon of lemon curd in each tart.
4. Bake for a further 5-8 minutes until the lemon curd is bubbling and the gingerbread is crisp and golden

Icing:

At some point at uni, I'd bought a bag of royal icing sugar, which has dried egg in the powder already, which made making the icing stupidly easy: just add water, like normal runny icing. But make sure that it's stiff enough to pipe. I then had a good play around with my (barely used) piping set and decorated all the biscuits.

HAVE A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

V x

Miniature Victoria Sponge Cakes

I made miniature Victoria Sponge cakes as a present for my friend's Birthday! They were filled with butter icing and cherry jam, then dusted with icing sugar. Aren't they cute!

Recipe:

For the cakes -

4oz (100g) Self Raising Flour

4oz (100g) Granulated Sugar

4oz (100g) Butter or Margarine

2 medium eggs

For the filling - 

2oz (50g) Butter or Margarine

4oz (100g) Icing Sugar

1.  Preheat the oven to 190ºC, 375ºF, Gas Mark 5. Place silicon cases in tin ready.

2.  Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

3.  Beat in the eggs adding a little bit of flour each time.

4.  Sift the flour into the bowl and fold in.

5.  Half fill each case with the mixture.

6.  Bake for around 15 minutes.

7.  Whilst the cakes are cooling, cream the icing sugar and butter together (you can add flavourings like vanilla at this point).

7.  Once cool (unless you have asbestos hands) pop each cake out of their cases and cut in half.

8.  Spread a little bit of jam on the bottom half and a little bit of butter cream on the top.
9.  Sandwich the halves together. Once all of the cakes are finished, add a sprinkling of icing sugar.

I ended up with a bit extra butter icing, so made another batch of cakes which I turned into butterfly cakes. They're really easy to do: just chop a circle off the top of each cake, put a dollop of butter icing in the hole, then cut the top in half before putting back on top like wings.

V x

Durham Food Festival

At the end of October, I went to the Durham Food Festival – it was wonderful! I ate way too many samples and bought lots of nice things. I managed to get some lovely and gingery wine, and just look at this beautiful salted caramel tart (from Charlie’s Country Kitchen ), and it tasted as good as it looks:

 went to a couple of demonstrations. I’m not going to lie, we only went to the first one so that we could have a seat to see a certain Jean-Christophe Novelli. So I’ve now eaten a little bit of food cooked by a Michelin starred chef!  I was expecting his demonstration to be very aspirational and rather unachievable but it was really good – he made a tarte tatin and a tomato sauce with salmon. In fact, when I got home, I even attempted my own version of the salmon and tomato sauce.

Jean-Christophe Novelli

For the Sauce -

2 cans of tomatoes (though this made a little bit too much sauce)

Half an onion (chopped)

Salt and pepper

A sprinkle of sugar

For the Rest of the Meal –

1 red and 1 green pepper

A couple of handfuls of spinach

2 salmon fillets

Pasta or Couscous

1.       Put the tomatoes and onions in a large saucepan and simmer until well reduced. Then season. At this point I took a few ladles full out to freeze as a plain tomato sauce as I’d made too much for 4 portions.

2.       Add the peppers and salmon fillets. Simmer with the lid on until salmon looks nearly cooked.

3.       Add the spinach leaves, replace the lid and cook until they become a vibrant shade of green (I don’t like more wilted spinach).

     

4.   Mix together and serve over pasta or with couscous

V x

Halloween Bat and Ghost Clothes Pegs

As a Brownie Guider I’m always on the look-out for cheap crafts for children which don’t take much preparation. Unfortunately, I keep having to revert to having a good old nose in the Baker Ross catalogue (because who has time to cut out all the parts for a group of 20 girls), but every now and again I get my act together and do a proper craft, like these Halloween Bat and Ghost clothes pegs which I adapted from Martha Stewart.

I forgot to take any pictures of the finished crafts (or rather I forgot to take my camera with me to Brownies) so I can’t show you any pictures (Sorry!).

In total the craft cost £3.35, or 17p per girl for a unit of 20. This assumes that you have scissors, glue sticks and colouring pencils/pens already in the cupboard.

What you need (for a group of 20):

• 40 wooden clothes pegs (77p from Wilkinsons)
• 10 sheets black card (£1.29 for a pack from Yorkshire Trading)
• 10 sheets of white card (but can be done with less) (£1.29 for a pack from Yorkshire Trading)
• Glue sticks
• Colour pencils/pens
• Scissors

Preparation:

Using the following images (bat and ghost - the ghost is from here), make 2 cardboard templates of each per six.

Note: the ghost will need resized - I used the depth of the bat as a approximate guide.

How To:

1. Draw round and cut out one of each shape (a black bat and a white ghost)
2.  Decorate
3. Put plenty of glue on one side of a peg. Stick this to the back of the bat (the top of the peg should be level with the top of the bat’s head – this will leave ‘feet’ at the bottom of the bat).
4. Glue one side of the second peg. Stick this to the back of the ghost (the bottom of the peg should about level with the bottom of the ghost).
5. Allow to dry and then decorate the house!

You could easily make a pumpkin (with orange card) or a black cat as well. And the activity can be extended for older children by getting them to draw their own ghosts and bats.

V x

Baby Shrug

I've just wrapped up and sent my first knitted item for a baby! My cousin has just had a baby girl so I took it as opportunity to knit something really cute. I decided on this little shrug as it wouldn't take much wool and I thought it'd be a lovely easy pattern.

I bought some lovely wool from The Knit Studio in Newcastle - my cousin doesn't knit (as far as a know) so I had to weigh up ease of washing, price (as well as having turned into a bit of a wool snob and now hating acrylic).  It really nice to use and hopefully it'll great for the baby.

Rather than adding the embroidery that the Ravelry photos have (embroidery is not my forte), I left it plain but fastened it using a cute little plastic flower button. 

The original pattern was sized for 12-18 months but I knitted it up on smaller needles (which just happened to be the same size as the ball band) and did a couple less increases before the arms. I have no idea when it'll fit her but since it's a shrug, it should be fine :)

V x

Brambling

Despite being at university and only 20, I swear that I get more middle aged every day.  Today I went brambling!

There's a really lovely little wood near to where I live. It's right in the centre of the city, but completely secluded - you can barely tell that you're surrounded by houses (unless it's lunch time at the local secondary school). Last spring/early summer, I went on walks around the wood everyday as a break from the stress of revision. It kept me sane! One day I even went out and sat in the wood during torrential rain. 

When I came back up to University during the summer (for a placement), I decided to show one of my best friends around it - imagine my delight when I found bramble bushes dripping with unripe brambles which I estimated would be ready when term started. Lo and behold, most of them are now wonderfully ripe.  Today on my walk, I managed to collect two boxes full within an hour, and that's with tons of completely unripe brambles left on the bushes. I think that a weekly brambling trip'll be required!

I'm planning on making plenty of bramble pies and bramble & apple crumbles for my house mates (lucky them). Though it'll be on the condition that they accept that, up here in the north, we call them brambles, not blackberries.  I'm also hoping to try out Smitten Kitchen's recipe for Blackberry Gin Fizz, because everything can be made even more awesome by gin. To quote by best friend: 'I'm not an alcoholic, I just like gin'.

V x

Amaretto and Pear, Chocolate Upside Down Cake

A few weeks ago a friend and I decided (thanks to the inspiration of The Great British Bake Off)  to try our hands at making an upside down cake. It was our first attempt at making upside down cake, but it went quite well considering!

To make the cake, we used part of a jar of baby pears soaked in Amaretto However, if I make it again I'll just soak some normal pear slices in Amaretto and use the leftover juice in the cake.

As a warning, I've only made this once and didn't really measure anything other than the basic sponge mix, so any measurements here are estimates and you should things to your taste - I like chocolatey things and lots of Amaretto (hence it not rising very well).

To make:

• Make a normal sponge mixture (you  may like to double the quantity as my cake didn't rise very much) - 4oz self raising flour, sugar and margarine to 2 medium eggs - I always use the creaming method, but my Grandma does all-in-one - Just use what you prefer.
• Add 2 or 3 tbsp Amaretto and pear juice with the eggs (I used the juice from the jar of pears but you could use neat Amaretto). You can add more Amaretto to taste but it may make the cake more moist/soggy/less likely to rise.
• Add 1 or 2 tbsp cocoa powder (depending on how chocolatey you want the cake) with the flour.
• Grease a cake tin and place a circle of grease proof paper at the bottom. Arrange the pear slices on here before spooning on the sponge mixture
• Cook in an oven preheated to 180ºC, 350ºF, gas mark 4, for 20-30 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean
• Allow to cool then turn out carefully

Enjoy! x

Strawberry Cocktail

At the weekend I happened upon a stall selling 3 punnets of strawberries for a pound, could I resist? Of course not. 

The only problem is, how to use them?

My solution: make a cocktail (and happen to have a play with my new hand blender).

To make one large glass:

2 handfuls of strawberries, chopped and puréed 

A glug of tonic water

Equal parts Gin and Amaretto (adjust as to how alcoholic you like it)

Mix it together and add some ice cubes.

Enjoy on a summery afternoon listening to music out in the garden.