The Cookie Dough Cupcake Bake Off

Rather than dedicate another full-size post to cupcakes... find my latest experiment here.

Ready For Your Chocolate Fix?

This cake is something of a legend in our family. It was my gran's, back in the day, and we've had it with every Christmas tea for the past hundred years or something (OK, so I don't know exactly how many years. But before I was born, so a lot). This cake demands respect.

Don't let the name deceive you; it's called praline cake, so it must have nuts in, oui? Non. Just chocolate, and digestive biscuits, and more chocolate, and sugar, and chocolate on top, and butter, and chocolate swirled over that. And so on and so on. It occured to me while I was making this that it's basically what we would call 'chocolate fridge cake' now.

But shh! The sacrilege! Respect the vintage recipe, back from the days when they didn't have fridges, and kept their milk in bowls of water covered in a damp cloth during the summer. I may have made that fact up, but it's none the less effective. Although if you put this cake in a bowl of water and covered it with a damp cloth you wouldn't really get far, so probably my gran had a fridge.

We usually make this cake in double quantities (far easier), eat one and freeze the other for Christmas, so it's completely unacceptable to bring it out early if you're feeling a bit hungry - as my sister learnt to her peril this summer when she was home from uni (where she lives on the Starvation Diet) and -overcome by living in a house where people actually spend money in Tesco, rather than Topshop- set about doubling her body mass in the most efficient way possible.

We all arrived home after school and work in the evening to find my Dad in a state of total outrage:

'SHE WAS EATING A PRALINE CAKE!'
We all gasped.
'OUT OF THE FREEZER!'
Looks of horror were exchanged.
'SHE HADN'T EVEN DEFROSTED IT!'
Could it be true?
'IT WASN'T EVEN ON A PLATE!'
The ground juddered as my grandmother turned in her grave.
'SHE WAS JUST EATING IT IN FRONT OF THE TELLY!'
You mean not giving it her undivided attention?
'HACKING BITS OFF WITH A KNIFE!'
Not in neat, chocolatey slices?'
JUST ON THE TABLE, STILL ON THE FREEZER BAG!'

He turned on my sister and pointed at her dramatically with a wavering finger. 'I CAUGHT HER IN THE ACT!'

My sister remained unperturbed, obviously thinking it was worth it.

My mum was on the phone to my aunt that night, relaying the trauma in tones of shock. It took about twenty minutes before my entire extended family knew about it. ('HAS SHE TOLD RACHEL?!' -- she had, and Rachel had wept down the phone).

I exaggerate, but honestly only a little.

For a while we feared a family rift, before my mum created a new family rule. If my sister was going to eat her way through her university holidays, she would have to make her own food. No one touched our praline cake.

This is a cake to take seriously.

...Incidentally, we got home a few days later and found an empty, unwashed couple of baking tins left out by the side of the sink. We searched the tins to find the rest of the cake she had apparently baked during the day, but to no avail. Had she made and eaten a whole cake on her own, in one day? We will never know...

Praline cake

My Gran's recipe

Prep: Literally about 10 mins

Refridgerate: 48 hours

Serves about 8-10 (at a guess) if pieces are smallish, or 1 if you're my sister.

Calories: 2840 in whole cake. Serves 8 at 355 p/s.

Makes one 'small' cake (my gran was always notoriously vague). I use a round 18cm tin, but it must have a loose-bottomed base.

I've adapted quantities from the ounces my gran wrote it in, as well as I can, but included the original measurements too.

125g (4oz) butter

125g (4oz) caster sugar

125g (4oz) dark chocolate (we use Cadburys Bournville)

250g (8oz) Digestive biscuits

1 egg

1 tbsp water

125g milk choc and about 25g white choc for decorating.

1. Cream the butter and sugar together until pale. Melt the dark chocolate in a microwave (takes a couple of minutes) and add it to the butter and sugar, along with a beaten egg and the water.

2. Crush the biscuits by putting them in a plastic freezer bag, tying the end and whacking it with a rolling pin. They should be fairly well broken up into crumbs- no big lumps, but not so it's just dust. Add them to the rest of the mixture.

3. Pour it into your tin and refridgerate for 48 hours (it doesn't really need that long though. Until set). It'll look something like this at this point:

Phwoar.

4. Remove the cake from the loose-bottomed tin before melting the milk chocolate and whooshing it all over the top. Drizzle a few rings of white chocolate over the top of that and use a skewer to swirl them together.

Excuse the fact that there's far more white chocolate than usual on the cake pictured - my little sister melted the whole bar so I used what I could and we made the rest into a sauce for icecream.

I've also made this cake into individual chocolates one time by just rolling spoonfuls of the mixture into balls in my hands and putting them on a baking tray to set in the fridge, then drizzling chocolate over them. This led my friend Sophie to call them 'chocolate bombs' - she couldn't get her head round the fact it's 'praline cake' when it's not in cake form - as she likes to give odd names to things. You should hear some of the things she calls me. In fact, I'm taking this to her house tomorrow as part of a belated birthday present; god knows what she'll try and name it this time ^__^

Bloggers who made this:
20.02.08 Maria at The Goddess's Kitchen

Cause We Can Can Can...nelloni!

It's just one of those things that, every once in a while, I consider becoming vegetarian. I couldn't do it while I still live at home, cause it'd be too difficult with my family, but there's very little reason I shouldn't when I go to uni. By choice, my diet is practically vegetarian anyway (except for chicken, which I have fairly often at home, but chicken doesn't count. No, it doesn't. Cause chicken has, like, feathers. And the definition of an animal is that it has fur. So... fish as well).

Fine, alright. I eat very little red meat then.

But other than a tendency to point out my own vocabularic mistakes (on the subject, I'm not entirely sure that 'vocabularic' is actually a word . But it sounds like it should be. Alright, it isn't in my dictionary, but that just shows the inadequacy of my dictionary. I've conceded to red meat; vocabularic stays) the main thing standing in the way of any potential commitment is just the fact that I'm sort of... hugely greedy.

I am the person who sits next to you at lunch eyeing your apple crumble covetously until eventually I abandon my self-control and demand 'are you going to eat that?' when it looks like you're about to leave. By now, most people recognise the phrase 'are you going to eat that?' as really meaning 'because I am'. We often tell my friend Boy, who is thin as a rake and eats twelve times the amount I do , that he is going to be obese when he's twenty-one (He'll just wake up one morning and be morbidly obese. I cling to this hope), but to be honest, I've a feeling it's going to be me ^__^.

Boy is vegetarian, incidentally, but I'm sure that's nothing to do with anything. Now shush.

So basically it's not that I especially want to eat meat a lot of the time. I just like to know that I can, should the mood take me.

This recipe happens to be both vegetarian and absolutely gorgeous. The problem being that it serves four, very precisely, and so should you be as greedy as I am, there are no bits left in the pan to scrape out afterwards (working on the basis that if it doesn't come off a plate, it won't make you fat. No, really, scientists have proved that. Why am I so unconvincing today?)

Mushroom & Ricotta Cannelloni

Adapted from The Aga Winter Cookbook

Serves 4

240 calories per serving (but I changed the amount of pasta used)

Says it takes far longer than it does, but I'd estimate about 40-50 mins, including cooking. I'll stay vague, and then if it takes longer or shorter I can just say, 'well you must just be slow/super-speedy', and people won't hate me. So much.

15g dried mushrooms (soak them in boiling water for 15 mins beforehand)

15g butter

225g brown-cap mushrooms, finely chopped

250g tub ricotta cheese

4 sheets fresh lasagne

2 x 300ml tubs fresh tomato sauce

50g grated Parmesan cheese

salt & pepper

It also mentioned 1 tsp anchovy essence, which I missed out.

1. Drain and finely chop your soaked dried mushrooms. Lightly grease a large, shallow roasting dish with butter. You could use bakeaglide to stop it sticking but actually the butter helps you stick the cannelloni to the dish when it comes to it, so they don't unroll ^__^

2. Heat the butter in a large frying pan, add the fresh and dried mushrooms and cook on a low-medium heat for 10-15 mins (here is where I admit I have an Aga, so that's the simmering plate to me. I don't exactly know the ordinary-oven equivilant) until they are beginning to brown and any liquid has evaporated. Leave to cool.

3. Stir the ricotta cheese into the mushroms, add the anchovy essence if you want (I don't want) and seasoning, then mix until thoroughly combined. Eat quite a bit at this point out of scientific curiousity, should you so wish. Mmm.

4. The books says your fresh lasagne sheets should be 11.5 x 16.5 cm, but mine were twice that size. It also tells you to halve them widthways. Should you be using the smaller size, you don't wanna do that. That's just too small. Instead, use your 11.4 x 16.5 cm sheets as they are, or if they're like mine, cut them in half with some kitchen scissors. Place about 3 tbsp mushroom mixture along one edge of the lasagne sheets, then roll up to enclose the filling. You might want to sort of glue the edge with a bit of spare ricotta. Arrange the filled cannelloni seam-side down in the dish. You should get eight tubes out of it.

5. Pour the tomato sauce over (yeah, you do want it all) and sprinkle with all that lovely Parmesan. Huzzah. If you have an Aga, cook it on the grid shelf at the very bottom of the Roasting Oven; that's 190C to everyone else. The book says 30-35 mins but 25 was enough for mine. Keep an eye on it, anyway.

6. Serve it with a lovely green salad and garlic bread and tell yourself that it doesn't matter if you eat four cannelloni tubes yourself instead of two, since it's mushrooms and tomato, and they're vegetables.

Except actually tomato is a fruit.

Damn.

Sorry about these photos by the way; it's getting dark insanely quickly here now that autumn's drawn in and it's impossible to get good natural light for pictures. This was the best I could do. Sadface.

Un-seasonal Food

Firstly, massive apology for the silence yet again - serious internet problems going on. As far as I can tell, our provider is now going to ban us from going online between 4pm and midnight. What'cha gonna do.

As a result, this is an uber-quick post. Just so you know I'm still around.

In my absence, it seems to have become autumn (or so I have deduced, from the fact that I'm wearing four layers, a scarf, and a pair of Care Bear slipper socks) so naturally I'm going to post the least autumnal recipe I have hanging round, just to spite nature. Let me put it this way; I'm not a fan of the cold. Or dark. Or rain. Basically for the next six months or so I'm going to be walking round crying on the inside... so I'm putting this up now, before I get into hotpots and steamed puddings and all that jazz. Consider it a warning ^__^

Happy October everyone, by the way!

New Potato & Smoked Haddock Crush
Taken from Good Food Magazine (May)
Serves 4 (260 calories, 12g fat). Prep: 15 mins. Cooking: 35 mins.

Recipe can be found here.

Blackberry... Something

Well I promised we'd be seeing the blackberries from my last post again soon, and by chance I was messing around online when I came across this recipe at http://thepioneerwomancooks.com/. Full credit to this goes there, but I hope Ree doesn't mind if I put up the metric measurements for the recipe here.

Is this a blackberry cobbler? Well, er, not round these parts. But it's got blackberries in, and I supposed it doesn't look sort of... cobbled. So as long as you don't mind if you're not exactly sure what you're eating, try this. The smell of it baking alone is enough to knock you out for several hours ♥.

(If you're the sort of person who does mind a bit of uncertainty, you can probably get the same effect from a pair of old socks, but it's not quite as enjoyable. Then again, if you're that sort of person, you deserve it.

Blackberry Sort-Of-Cobbler

Serves about 6, probably

Preparation: 10 mins

Cooking: 50 mins (Ree said an hour, but mine needed less)

404 calories per serving (six)

245ml milk

115g butter

200 + 50g caster sugar

125g self-raising flour

120g blackberries

1. Place butter in a microwaveable dish and melt it. Put your 200g of sugar in a mixing bowl, dump in the flour and whisk in the milk. Mix it well then pour in the melted butter and whisk together. Now butter a baking dish.

2. Take your blackberries, rinse and pat dry. Pour the batter into your dish and start sprinkling the blackberries over the top of it, distributing them evening until they're all in there. Then sprinkle the other 50g of sugar over the top.

3. Pop the dish in the oven at 180C for 50mins-1hr, until it's all golden and bubbly and cor. I followed Ree's advice and sprinkled another teaspoon of sugar over it ten minutes before it was done.

4. Phwoar.

Got to say, making this was a lot less traumatic than getting the actual blackberries X__X

Indigo and the Bloody Great Blackberry Bush (and Other Stories)

I'm pretty sure I have some sort of mental problem. No need for sarcasm; it involves me getting bizarre concepts in my head and deluding myself that they're good ideas. Blackberry picking is one of those things. In my head, I had some Milly-Molly-Mandy -esque vision of myself in a summer dress with a basket on my arm, skipping down paths in the afternoon sunshine and plucking ripe, dark berries from bushes.

We used to go blackberry picking near where I live when we were little. We'd all get a bag and get as many as possible, and my mum would give us useful hints such as 'don't pick the ones near the ground in case a dog's weed there' (not very helpful as we were all about two feet high and couldn't reach any higher). This may sound idyllic (what, you mean dog piss doesn't appeal to you?) but in fact it was more a berry-picking frenzy than a peaceful afternoon in the fresh air; if we got enough my mum would make blackberry crumble icecream. Obviously we took it very seriously.

Anyway, it's been a few years since then, so a few weeks ago I decided to don my metaphorical summer dress and recreate my childhood. Perhaps this might be more successful if I tried it now, when the blackberries are actually out, but in my defence I had it on very good authority from my mother that there were some berries around. Last time I listen to her.

The first problem I encountered was a serious lack of bushes: someone seemed to have come along and chopped them all down. Right, I thought, probably someone's seen people skipping around picking blackberries and the council have come along to prevent this sort of merry-making (the council are a bit that way inclined round here). Ha! Try and stop me, killjoys!

My skipping picked up a bit after this discovery, to spite them.

The second problem was that time must have dimmed my childhood memories, because I'd forgotten one crucial berry-picking factor: blackberries grow on bramble bushes.

Well! I thought; at least my summer dress was only metaphorical and I was wearing my manly welly boots. I strode through the undergrowth, undeterred!

I then discovered that my mother had basically lied to me when she said the blackberries were out. What she really meant was that THIS blackberry was out.

That was the first one I came across (I had been striding through the undergrowth for about fifteen minutes then, and was starting to get a bit desperate). It was also the last one I came across, until about twenty minutes striding later. At this point striding had lost its novelty. As had the undergrowth. In fact I was starting to empathise with whoever had chopped down half the bushes in the first place. If I'd had an axe I'd have hacked them down myself.

No, I'd have hacked them down with a pair of scissors by that point.

...Actually, if I'd had a bloody nail file I'd have taken the bastards on.

(It was raining by this point, by the way. Just dropping that one in there).

Clutching my bag (complete with its two lonely blackberries) I decided that the time had come for a change of tactics. No more scanning the hedgerows; I tramped along, picked out the biggest, nastiest, prickliest bushes I could find and waded into the middle of them - I'd reached the conclusion that this was (typically) the only place that there were actually any berries to be found.

I don't remember Milly Molly Mandy ever having to do that.

Anyway, this led to success! ... Albeit not a lot of success. My mum's blackberry crumble ice cream calls for 500g of berries (and she usually makes double quantites), and once I'd staggered home clutching these and swearing under my breath, I found I had about 250g.

Yeah, well. It wasn't really ice cream weather, anyway.

You'll see these babies reincarnated soon, you have my word ^__^

Party Food

OK, so I'm kind of ashamed. I set up the shiny new blog... and then I went gallivanting off on a family holiday without a word to anyone, and with no regard for all the food bloggers of legend and other lovely people who left me birthday messages and comments (though in my defence, I genuinely expected people to just ignore me). So I really want to say a massive thankyou to everyone who left a comment, I was a bit shocked really touched.

What with having been in France for the past decade (if you're wondering what a holiday with my family feels like, bash your head against a brick wall a few times to get the same effect) I've not been cooking, so I'm just going to share something I made for my birthday (now an embarassingly long few weeks ago).

I don't exactly know where this recipe came from, as I got it from a handwritten book of my mum's - she writes down any recipes she uses. However she doesn't source them, so in the event of a legal battle it's my mother's fault if I go the prison. Just dropping that in there.

Salmon pesto pinwheels
Makes 18
Preparation: about 5-10 mins
Cooking: 15 mins

213g can red salmon (my mum's written to use more, but this was enough for me. Kind of fortunately, because I didn't actually have any more salmon)
Olive oil for greasing
375g ready-bought block of puff pastry
2 tbsp red pesto sauce

1. Drain the salmon, and remove the skin and bone. Use a fork to flake it. You'll probably find about a billion more bones at this point, cause salmon's a bitch like that. Heat your oven to 200C and brush two baking sheets with oil.

2. Roll out the puff pastry into a big rectangle (if you want to make this bit more interesting, you could be like me, and not let it thaw properly first). The long side should be about 25cm long, and the shorter side should be... a bit shorter.

3. Spread pesto evenly over the surface of the pastry and sprinkle the salmon over the top of that and roll it up from the long side into a sausage. Slice into 18 pieces - they should each be about half an inch (1.5cm) thick. Lay them on the baking sheets with gaps between them and bake for 15 minutes.

This is madly easy and you can do it in no time; just wander off to watch Neighbours or something while they're in the oven. They also freeze beautifully... as you can see if you look closely at the photos. I swear I will have the patience to let something defrost properly one day...