Baking Day

On Tuesday I spent the day with my friend, Becky, having a bake fest at her place.  ;o)  It's such a long time since we've done this and it was great fun.  Cooking can be a solitary occupation and generally I don't have any problem with that at all, in fact I probably prefer it alot of the time to be honest, but it was good to bake and catch up with all the news at the same time.

So, first up was my previously mentioned mission to make oatcakes!  I found a Rose Eliott recipe using just oatmeal and we tried that.  It didn't work splendidly well as I had to add extra melted butter and water to make a dough but they did pan out ok and do taste delicious.  So, I will look for more recipes to try, I'd quite like to find one that uses oil as opposed to butter.  They look a trifle rustic but then I'm a rustic loving girl so that's fine by me!

Next up and still on the savoury biscuit line was digestives.  They're not at all like bought digestives but are yummy.  They're not crisp like a biscuit, more bready in a way, but they are delicious with a dollop of cashew butter.  ;o)  Our local Julian Graves became a Holland & Barratt recently and I popped in for a peep yesterday and found cashew butter which I adore but which hasn't been readily available until now.  This offset my disappointment at the fact that they don't sell carob bars as their larger shops do.  Boo!  Interestingly they also had pumpkin seed butter which I've never seen before and will be trying soon me thinks!

Then I moved on to a mini muffin making session!  Two dozen banana cinnamon and two dozen bacon rolled off the production line quite swiftly!  The banana ones are lovely with their sprinkle of demerara, cinnamon and oatmeal.

The bacon ones are a little bland and in my opinion could do with pepping up, maybe with some cheese.  That could of course be due to the fact that they were supposed to have cornmeal in but Becky didn't have any cornmeal so we improvised and used oatmeal!  They're still disappearing from the tin quite rapidly though!  ;oD

Reverting to biscuits, but this time sweet instead of savoury, we made Raspberry Almond Jumbles.  I think that's what they were called anyway but I seem to have temporarily misplaced my scribbled version of the recipe so I stand corrected if I've got that wrong!  I love almondy things and these biscuits hit the spot, a good whack of almond and a nice sweet dimple of jam although we used strawberry instead of raspberry!

All in all it was a great session, lots of laughs and baked goodies to boot!  ;o)

Spring has Sprung!

Well, as far as I'm concerned it has!  ;o)  Yesterday morning I sat outside eating my breakfast!  Ok, it wasn't tropical, 11 degrees I believe, but it was very pleasant in the sunshine in the sheltered corner I chose to park myself with my oatcakes and peanut butter.   I took the above pic of miniature Narcissi after breakfast, they looked so cheerful bobbing about on the gentle breeze.  ;o) 

I have oatcakes on my mind today, I'm off to a friend's later for a baking day (yay!) and I'd like to make some oatcakes.  I rummaged about and found several recipes I've never tried, some given to me and one torn from a magazine, and without fail they all include flour in their ingredients!   Now, call me pedantic, but I was under the impression that oatcakes were wheat free!  I trotted off to my pantry to check the packet I have in there and was relieved to find that they do indeed only contain oatmeal (with sunflower oil and salt), not a speck of flour in sight!  Now, I love baking and don't have an aversion to flour, nor am I intolerant of it but I do feel an awful lot healthier when I restrict my bread intake.  I will never be able to forgo bread totally, I do love it so but I do try and keep a lid on it so, I eat alot of oatcakes, which fortunately I also love, and thought if I could find a good home made version I can make them in bulk and stop buying them.  Always happy to reduce how much I line the supermarket's pockets!  ;o)  I need to have a better root through my cookery books and see if I can find any oats only versions.  

Last week I made another recipe from the Anyone Can Bake book I made Butterscotch Pie from recently.  This time it was Peanut Butter Bread and jolly nice it was too.  ;o)  I don't have a picture as it disappeared a bit too quickly!  lol  The picture shows something green in the sandwich, not sure what that is but I think it's definitely better with sweet things as a filling, it's lovely with jam.  ;o)

 

One day last week I made macaroni cheese for dinner, yummmmmmm, I love cheesy things!  ;o)  I don't make proper macaroni cheese very often so we all fell on this and romped our way through it happily!  I'm currently teaching my daughter lots of new things in the kitchen in preparation for when she goes to university this year and cheese sauce is one she wants to learn.  I don't know why some folk make such a fuss about making white sauces, I learn from Delia and have never had trouble, I just wield my whisk and away I go!  ;o)  With a basic white sauce under your belt you can make loads of variations of it and never be short of a dish to make.  My daughter loves pasta and I can see her living on macaroni cheese once she has the sauce down pat!  ;o)

Lastly, a little wander through a recent spell of guiltiness on the ethics front!  I hate waste, I love using leftovers creatively and try not to let anything usable get past me and into the bin!  However, last week I had a few busy days and at the weekend on deciding to sort through stuff in the fridge I discovered various things that even I couldn't save.  ;o(  Some went into the compost bin but there was other stuff I just to bin and it really pains me to confess to it.  Mind you, since I'm just chuntering to myself here it's just me I'm actually confessing to!  I try to be ethical, anyone who knows me knows that I'm a green kind of girl but I know have BIG holes in my ethics sometimes, boo.  ;o(  They need rectifying and I'm always on the case.  I've let my meal planning slip a tad of late and I need to get that sorted.  I feel a more in depth blog post on this coming on but for now I'm off to bake! 

Happy Springtime!  ;o)

Butterscotch Pie

A while ago I came across an old American cookery book in a charity shop and just had to liberate it!  ;o)  It's quite a slim volume called Anyone can Bake, published in 1929, it's a Royal Baking Powder book and is full of cool recipes.  The illustrations are really cute and it has some pages of photographic "how to" series. 

This evening I decided to make Butterscotch Pie for dessert after dinner.

I realised after I'd started that I didn't have any cornflour so used plain flour instead.  It was taking an age using the double boiler method so my Arian impatience gene kicked in and I bunged it in a saucepan and did it that way, much speedier!  I wasn't sure how much to beat the egg whites so went for the meringue on top option instead.  I have to say it was really yummy although pretty sweet!  My husband, who is a real pudding fan, had two slices, nothing is too sickly for him!

Catching Up (Again!)

Here we are in March already and it was early January when I last blogged here!  Boo!  Life rolled along in expected and unexpected ways and kept me from sharing any of my kitchen antics but hopefully I will now be able to post more regularly here.  ;o)

Yesterday I had a bit of a bake fest, my daughter has been baking alot of late (can't think where she gets that from!  LOL) so I've not done much and I reached the culinary equivalent of meltdown yesterday and just HAD to chuck some flour about!  ;oD  Nothing too exciting, I was just happy to have wooden spoon in hand, but here are some pictures of my makes....

My husband was complaining that there were no biscuits to go with his cup of tea so the first thing I made was Cornish Fairings, perfect dunking biscuits!  I had a little trip down memory lane whilst making these as they are a biscuit that my maternal grandmother used to make.  I can picture Nan's biscuit tin now, filled with deep brown, sometimes leaning towards black on the edges, very hard fairings!  ;oD  Don't get me wrong, my Nan was a good cook and an excellent baker (her scones were a legend in the local WI group!) but her Cornish Fairings never seemed to fare (ha ha!) very well!  

 

Next up was spiced cherry and sultana scones.  I have a scone recipe in a Pampered Chef recipe book (one day I'll fill you in on my Pampered Chef obsession!) called Create-A-Scone which I use quite often.  I like it because you roll the dough straight onto the stone it's cooked on so no fiddling about rolling out and cutting shapes, it's great when you're in a hurry.  I loosely followed the lemon sultana recipe in the book but omitted the lemon and added cheeries and mixed spice.  They smell delightful!

Last out of the oven were some chocolate fairy cakes which I topped with chocolate and sugar sprinkles.

So, baking craving appeased I moved on to make something savoury in the form of Curried Lentil Spread.  I've made this spread for quite a few years but it wasn't until I actually read the recipe yesterday, with a view to posting it here, that I realised that I don't follow the method at all!  LOL  I was browsing about foodie blogs the other day and found one (which I now can't find again so apologies for not being able to credit it) with the subtitle "because recipes are just a list of suggestions".  That really made me smile and have a little chuckle as so often my cooking is just like that!  I look at a recipe, or even start cooking it, and realise I haven't got all the ingredients or don't fancy some of them so I just improvise!  That's what cooking is all about!  ;o)  However, I digress....back to the spread.  It's from my beaten up copy of Rose Elliot's Complete Vegetarian Cookbook.  Here's the recipe as it stands:

Curried Lentil Spread

This is a good mixture for sandwiches or little savoury biscuits.

Serves 4

4oz split red lentils

7floz water

1 small onion, finely chopped

1oz butter

2 tsp curry powder

sea salt

freshly ground black pepper

Wash the lentils and cook them in the water until they're tender and have absorbed all the liquid (20 to 30 minutes), then mash them roughly with a fork.  Fry the onion in the butter until it's tender then add curry powder and fry for another 1 - 2 minutes.  Blend this mixture into the cooked lentils to make a fairly smooth paste, then season to taste and leave the spread to get cold before using it.

I suspect it's not the most attractive dollop you've ever seen but it is tasty!  Trust me, I'm an artist!  ;oD 

When I make it I fry the onion and curry powder first, add the lentils and water (sometimes stock) and cook until the lentils are tender, season and then whizz it all smooth. I don't suppose it makes much difference but does illustrate my random slackness in the reading recipes department! In the book, the recipe isn't marked as being suitable for freezing but I've whacked half the recipe in the freezer to see how it fares. As she says, it's nice in sandwiches and on crackers but I also love it on toast, with salad, as a topping on a jacket potato or just as a dip with cucumber sticks.