Leek Fritters

25th February, 2015

Today I fancied a challenge! I never got my pancakes on pancake day so this was the next best thing.

The recipe suggested to start by making the sauce but I decided to start sautéing the leeks and shallots first. Instead of using half Greek yogurt and half sour cream I used all Greek yogurt, and I just chucked in all the parsley I had left to make it extra tasty and mixed it together in a small food processor. I chopped the red chilli, spices and sugar to a large mixing bowl and added the leeks and onions to.

I separated an egg white into a mixing bowl and used the balloon whisk on the food mixer to make soft peaks. Apparently I need a lot more mixture in my bowl to create any effect at all, therefore I ended up whisking it by hand which really hurt! This was mixed into the leek mixture.

Next I made the batter mixture with flour, baking powder, an egg, milk and melted butter. I ended up using the hand mixer as I still don't own a sieve and it was pretty lumpy. This was then added to the leeks and we were ready to fire up the pan!

I spooned in two dollops of the mixture at a time until it was golden brown on each side. In total there was enough mixture to make six large fritters. I made a small green salad to accompany the fritters and drizzled the sauce over it all. 

It was very tasty, despite the sauce being seriously garlicky. It was a really fun dish to cook and its definitely increasing my cooking confidence!

Surprise Tartin

23rd February, 2015

This recipe from Plenty caught my eye quite early on. I decided to start the preparation the night before as there was no way I wanted to spend over an hour cooking after work!

First I dried out the cherry tomatoes in the oven for 45 minutes with oil drizzled over and seasoned seasoning. Meanwhile the potatoes boiled in salt water for 25 minutes before being drained and dried out. Then I chopped and fried the onion until golden brown. Here, all the ingredients were ready for assembling.

Next I made the caramel with sugar and butter boiled in the pan. I left this a bit too long whilst lining the tin and it began to solidify again. Note to self, re-heating caramel makes it go gritty. This was spread onto the base of the cake tin lining, followed by parsley leaves, the potatoes cut into 2cm discs, then the fried onions and cherry tomatoes pressed down into the gaps. Slices of goats cheese went on top and finally a circle of puff pastry slightly wider than the tin so the edges can be pressed down the sides and around the filling.

This is where I left it for the night. Admittedly I forgot to cover it so the pastry was a little dry on top this morning, and some of the onion juice was leaking out the bottom. Gross.

I baked the tart on high for 25 minutes, followed by 15 minutes on a lower heat. In the meantime I made a small salad to have with it. Once cooked and a lovely golden brown colour it was ready to eat and smelt amazing.

Finally came the tricky part: turning it upside down! A plate went on top and a quick twist and it popped out the bottom. It only started to fall a part a little bit.

Chelsea Buns

21st February, 2015

This is my first time making bread dough and I was pretty excited to finally try out the dough hook on my Kenwood. This recipe came from the Kenwood recipe book which is really useful in telling you which setting and speed to put the mixer on and for how long. Baby steps for my first time!

So it was all made pretty easy. Add all the key ingredients (bread flour, yeast, caster sugar, milk and an egg) and put the mixer on a low speed for about 5 minutes. And voila! I had myself some dough. This needed covering with cling film and leaving to prove for an hour. 

Meanwhile I weight out all the filling ingredient including brown sugar, sultanas, mixed peel and mixed spice and mixed them into a bowl ready to spread onto the dough.

After an hour the dough had indeed doubled in size which was pretty exciting. This needed to be "knocked back" (poor dough) in the mixer for another minute before being rolled out to approximately 30x30cm on a floured surface. And obviously I used a tape measure along one side of the surface to make sure this was as accurate as possible. This meant I got to use my new rolling pin for the first time too! My square was a bit uneven in size and definitely had a thinner side, but what are you going to do. The next part was when I realised I don't own a pastry brush! I had to use the back of a spoon to smear the melted butter over the dough instead, before scattering the filling over all but one inch of one edge. I'm pretty sure I left more than an inch, but my square was a bit bigger and therefore the filling had its limits. This was rolled up from filling edge to non-filling edge and cut into eight pieces. These were squashed into my round cake tin (because I didn't own a square one) and covered again to leave for around 40 minutes to rise.

Then came the baking part!

...And of course I forgot to start the timer and left it in a little too long... But I think its ok. Just a little browner than golden brown. It smelt incredible!

Whilst the buns cooled I made a glaze out of water, caster sugar and a splash of orange juice (instead of orange flower water, whatever that is) and boiled it until it went syrupy! Again, without a pastry brush, this had to be dripped over the top with a spoon and sort of smeared over the top.

I think that went pretty well for my first time! Without blowing my own trumpet, it was pretty darn good sweet bread!

Oh, and whilst that was cooling, I totally made another tray of Easter nests!

Chocolate Easter Nests

20th February, 2015

More baking and mini eggs are on sale! This means its finally time to start working through my stash of shredded wheat by making chocolate nests.

This is the easiest thing I've made so far:

• Melt chocolate
• Mix with shredded wheat
• Pour into cup cake cases
• Add mini eggs

Of course I got an extra pack of mini eggs to eat while I waited for them to set in the fridge!

Dark Chocolate Orange Bourbons

9th February, 2015

Its been a while. I felt a real need to bake this week. I've been craving chocolate all weekend so I found a nice chocolatey recipe for biscuits in Crumb.

Things started off well and was fairly easy. Mix the flour and cocoa powder, rub in the butter, and stir in the remaining dry ingredients caster sugar and orange zest.

Aaaaaaand with the next step I really messed up the recipe. I misread the quantity of milk as 300ml instead of 30ml. Fortunately I only added 100ml to begin with and immediately noticed my mistake. No biscuit dough should be that runny! Doh! In an attempt to save the recipe I mixed up a third more of the original dry ingredients to stir in but this only helped a little. I used a small amount of corn flour to stiffen it a little more and wrapped the runniest biscuit dough of all time into cling film as best I could. I resolved to leave this for an hour to chill.

In the meantime I mixed the butter icing for the middle of the biscuits, which consisted of butter, cocoa powder, orange zest and icing sugar. This, incidentally, is very tasty and I could have easily just eaten it all with a spoon.

As the dough was still quite runny I decided to bake one large biscuit on a tray and cut it up after baking. It was, however, firm enough that spreading it out onto the tray was slightly tricky. The "biscuits" baked for 12-15mins and were left to cool on a cooling rack.

I cut up the cooled biscuit into roughly bourbon sized pieces, noticing that some were really thin and some much chunkier. After another epic fail with the piping bag, (this time I at least assembled it correctly, but the mixture was far too runny and just came straight out the other side!), I just poured on the icing and shoved it all in the fridge to chill and set while I went out. I had no idea what to expect when I got in.

Sooooo, that happened. I got a B grade from my boyfriend. He said: 

"So this stuff is neither cake nor biscuit but the icing is delicious so I'm giving it a solid B grade."

And he's right. They're definitely satisfying my chocolate needs right now but I must do better next time!

Spicy Moroccan Carrot Salad

3rd February, 2015

Back from my holiday and back to cooking! I pick up where I left off before and try the second recipe in Plenty - Spicy Moroccan Carrot Salad. Something fairly straight forward I thought. 

The hardest and longest part was peeling and chopping all the carrots! I went for half quantities to the recipe to make fewer portions. I imagine I saved myself a lot of peeling and chopping time too. The carrots were simmered in salt water for about 10 mins until tender and then drained and left to dry.

The next step was to sauté the onions. This always makes me a bit nervous. Frying onions anything passed clear makes me think I'm burning them, especially with that gorgeous fried onion smell! However, I persevered for the whole 1 minutes until they looked delightfully tasty and browned. Then comes the fun part adding the spring onions and garlic and all the spices in their right quantities! Ginger, coriander, cinnamon and paprika. I ground cumin seeds in place of pre-ground cumin and used mirin instead of white wine vinegar (I still really need to get some of that). 

I boiled some water to make couscous, served a portion of the spiced carrots and added a few sultanas - I add these to all my Moroccan dishes - and topped with Greek yogurt. Yummy :)