Christmas Day

27 December 2011 01:04

I’m a day late with this post but I don’t seem to have had much time to myself. As you can see we’ve had the family home for Christmas, our two boys and Laura, Gordon’s girlfriend who is as much like a daughter to us as anyone could be as they’ve been going out with each other since they were just 17 and she stayed a lot with us when they were students as she was an English student, coming from Rochdale but at Uni in Stirling so we were her local base.

We had turkey and ham with lots of roasted veggies and yes sprouts which Jack and I love anyway but this time I used the Jamie Oliver shredded sprout recipe with bacon.
Duncan, Gordon and Laura

How solemn do we all look? We had fun, honestly!

Christmas Day Table

Believe it or not, I had never made a trifle before and I put this one together, not bothering with a recipe. Next time I’ll use more jelly and less custard I think. I used a shop bought Swiss roll for the first layer then topped it with strawberries and jelly then custard and cream with strawberries topped with grated chocolate. Very tasty.

Strawberry trifle

Just so that we had a choice of puddings I also made chocolate cheesecake based on Lorraine Pascale’s recipe which you can see here. I tweaked her recipe slightly. Instead of all chocolate digestives I made a third of them Amaretto biscuits to make a more interesting combination and I did the cheesecake in two layers, the first of which was all mixed in very well and the second layer was just roughly mixed to leave some of the cream cheese unmixed which made the flavour better I think as I like a bit of a surprise in each spoonful. As you can see I had a bit of a disaster with my piping nozzle thingy and ended up scraping the melted chocolate out onto the melted milk chocolate instead of having a beautifully feathered decoration. In future I’m not going to bother faffing about with the melted chocolate on top as the cheesecake is nice enough without it I think.

Chocolate Cheesecake

Boxing Day is always a rest for me as it’s the leftover ham and turkey made into a pie which takes no time to throw together. For some reason the pastry has shrunk away from the edges of my pie dish but it tasted fine.

Turkey and Ham Pie

So that’s it all over for another year. Now for Hogmanay!

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Categories: BBC, Desserts/Puddings, Personal, Recipes

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Christmas TV

25 December 2011 00:19

Well that’s the birthday meal over with and it went down well with all five of us. Especially the Kinloch Castle Tomato Soup the recipe for which reached me in a convoluted way – via Peggy Ann’s Post, somewhere in the US but I’m not sure where exactly, maybe the Appalachians. Anyway thanks for the recipe Peggy, I’ll be making that soup regularly I’m sure. Don’t you just love the internet! Peggy is the only person I’ve ‘met’ who reads George MacDonald’s books, there don’t seem to be many of us about nowadays.

I haven’t had much time for watching TV at all but I did manage to watch all of The Young Victoria a couple of nights ago and I did enjoy it apart from the bit where Albert jumps in front of a bullet aimed at Victoria. There were quite a few attempts on Victoria’s life over the years but why add details which are just untrue. Then I saw that it had been written by Julian Fellowes, that man just can’t stop himself from embroidering history. Between Fellowes and Philippa Gregory the kids of Britain will be convinced of historical ‘facts’ which are just historical nonsense.

As usual the Christmas TV seems to be pretty dire. The one thing I hope to be able to watch is The Borrowers which is on on Boxing Day because I don’t think I’ve ever seen it from beginning to end, I loved the books by Mary Norton even although I didn’t read them until I was an adult.

Is there anything good on TV which you are looking forward to watching?

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Categories: Books, Recipes, Television

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Soup, Words and Doughballs

19 December 2011 00:27

We have a family birthday on Christmas Eve and I always cook a meal at home rather than going out to a restaurant because they’re always busy with works’ nights out at the moment, so I spend a lot of time in the kitchen around now. There really ought to be a law against people giving birth around Christmas time!

So I’ve been thinking about what to have for the birthday meal and as we’re all keen soup people I’ve decided to give Kinloch Castle Tomato Soup a go after seeing the recipe over at Peggy Ann’s Post. Have a look at her recipes here. It sounds tasty and should look nice and festive.

If you look at the Newfoundland Soup recipe above that one you’ll see a recipe for soup which I’m fairly certain originated from a Scottish soup because that’s the sort of soup that I make all the time – winter and summer. (What summer?! I hear you say.)

Mind you I don’t often put dough balls/dumplings in my soup, I tend to keep those for winter warmer stews. But you’ll see that the dough balls in Newfoundland have the name ‘dough boys’. That’s quaint and interesting I thought, and then a couple of days later I found myself having a bit of a smile to myself because it had come into my head that it’s one of those wonderful transatlantic mistranslations that happen over the years.

Obviously it was originally dough buoys! I think that in America those floating markers in the sea are pronounced boo-ies or something like that. But in English – bouy is pronounced boy and obviously dough balls/dumplings do behave like buoys in the sea as they bob about and float on the surface of the stew or soup. I think it was Winston Churchill who said: Two nations divided by a common language. Well I was always told that he said it anyway. Whatever, I’ll be thinking of them as dough boys now!

My husband tells me doughboys was a nickname given to US soldiers in World War 1. (He’s interested in that sort of thing.) Apparently it dates from an even earlier US war. Who knows what the origin was? But I like to think of them as markers in a sea of stew or soup.

If you watch the film of Annie Proulx’s novel The Shipping Forecast you can see that there still is Scottish influence in Newfoundland where they are keen consumers of Tunnock’s Tea Cakes and Snowballs. It shows up in the book too, lots of Scots seem to have gone there at some point and stayed, probably coming from Scotland helps you withstand the terrible weather they have there.

Anyway, if you haven’t already visited Peggy Ann’s Post why not hop over now! Her most recent recipe is for pizzelles, which I’ve never even heard of!

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Categories: Family, Recipes

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Sticky Toffee Tarts

3 November 2011 23:40

I decided to make a variation on the Better Than Butter Tarts which I baked a while ago using a recipe from the book How It All Vegan which you can read about here. I’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian but it doesn’t stop me from using the recipes. Niranjana explained that Butter Tarts are a delicious Canadian speciality and I did enjoy the vegan ones which I baked earlier, you can see them here. But – and it’s a big but, well yes I didn’t mean that in the US way but I would have a big bum if I baked them again because I would have to eat them all on my own. Jack doesn’t like raisins, currants or sultanas, which is a bit of a pain because they’re in so many lovely things. Apparently it’s the texture of them that he doesn’t like. They feel like blisters to him!

Anyway, with that in mind I decided to use dates instead as he loves sticky toffee pudding with dates. I tweaked the Better Than Butter Tarts recipe by adding more sticky toffee ingredients.

I used about four dried dates for each tart and I snipped them into three. For the syrup I used three or four dessertspoons of soft brown sugar, a teaspoon of coffee granules and a spoonful of ground flax seed and a sploosh of hot water. Really nice but it’s the sort of recipe that you can keep tinkering with and next time I think I’ll substitute some golden syrup or even honey instead of some of the sugar.

I baked four large tarts this time instead of lots of wee ones and I experimented with the pastry too. When I was watching Billy Connolly’s Route 66 programme I saw that one of the roadside eateries which he stopped had great looking pies and the chap who made them mentioned that he had made the pastry with oil and not fat. So I decided to have a go and I used:

6 oz plain flour
2 dessertsps of icing sugar
3 fluid oz sunflower oil
small amount of water to mix

It’s super quick to mix together but I wasn’t too hopeful while I was trying to roll it out. It might have been easier if I had added a bit more water but that may have made the pastry tough. I ended up dividing the dough into four pieces and rolling each one out separately until they were just a bit bigger than a tea plate, cut around the tea plate and fitted them into my tart tins.

As usual I was trying to do about five different things at once and that’s why I forgot to bake them blind. I just stuck them in the oven at gas mark 4 for about 15 minutes. It was only when I was taking them out that I realised what I had done but they were absolutely fine. I filled the pastry with the date mixture and put them back in the oven for another 10 minutes or so. They were a great success because the pastry is strong enough to pick the tarts up and they don’t even crumble when you bite into them. However they are crisp or should I say ‘short’ but not hard. You might want to adjust the icing sugar content to your taste, it is quite sweet.

Sticky Toffee Tart

I know that Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood of The Great British Bake Off fame would say oh they’re burnt. But we love the burnty bits – don’t you?!

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Categories: Recipes

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Chilli Chocolate Cookies

3 May 2011 22:27

I actually started to make Walnut Crisps from a Marguerite Patten recipe and then it dawned on me that that very awkward man that I’m married to doesn’t like walnuts. He does like pecans which to me are very similar, anyway that’s men for you! So I thought I would just omit the walnuts and add more chocolate. Then I discovered that the only chocolate which I had in my pantry was Galaxy Caramel and Turkish Delight filled chocolate, and chilli flavoured chocolate. So although I thought it might taste a bit weird in biscuits I decided to have a bash with the chilli chocolate anyway. And here they are. They tasted really nice, chocolate with a distinct afterkick of chilli.

Chilli Chocolate Biscuits

Chocolate Chilli Cookies

Cooking time 15 minutes.
Oven temp. 375F, 190C, Gas Mark 4-5

4oz self-raising flour
4 oz brown sugar
1 1/2 oz margarine
3oz plain or chilli chocolate
1 egg

Put the flour into a bowl and add the sugar and soft margarine. Give it a good mix with a wooden spoon. Cut the chocolate into small pieces and add to the mixture. Then mix in the beaten egg. By then you should have quite a stiff dough.

Spoon into rough heaps on a greased baking tray, allowing room to spread. Bake for about 15 minutes in the middle of the oven. Allow to cool slightly on the tray before placing onto a wire cooling tray.

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Lamingtons

18 January 2011 23:05

Nutters – please be aware that this recipe contains nuts!

Back in the dim distant past when Kylie was in Neighbours and I saw it because it was on just before the evening news, the folks in the cafe always seemed to be scoffing Madge’s Lamingtons. I always wondered what on earth they were, never having heard of them before. Some sort of Australian delicacy I supposed. In fact, because of the strong Australian accents I thought it was something to do with lemons!

But I bought an old copy of Marguerite Patten’s Every Day Cook Book recently, I only had her All Colour Cookery book, my husband’s first present to me!! – and – jings, crivens and help ma Boab – there’s a recipe for Lamingtons in it, so I just had to try it out, they’re very tasty and here they are.

5 oz butter or marg.
7 oz sugar
3 eggs
10 oz self-raising flour
4 tablespoons milk

For the filling:
raspberry jam

To coat:
7 oz icing sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
3 tablespoons boiling water

To decorate:
6 oz dessicated coconut

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs gradually. Mix in the flour alternately with the milk. Spread the mixture into a greased 8-inch square cake tin and bake for 50 – 60 minutes at Gas mark 4/350-375 F.

Leave it to cool on a wire rack and then split it through the middle and spread the raspberry jam on the bottom layer. Sandwich the layers together, then cut the cake into 2 inch squares, you should be able to get 16 pieces.

Put the icing sugar and cocoa into a bowl and add the boiling water slowly. Mix to a smooth paste adding more water if it is too thick. To stop the icing from setting too quickly place the bowl over a pan of hot water.

One by one dip the squares into the icing letting any excess drip off before tossing them in the dessicated coconut. Allow to set before scoffing.

The recipe says you should put the squares on a fork or a skewer before dipping in the icing but I couldn’t get them to stay on so I ended up getting my fingers very messy! Finger sucking good though. (Be careful how you say that!)

For a richer flavour you might like to add a few drops of vanilla extract to the sponge mixture.

BTW it’s a very good cookery book.

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Categories: Cakes, Recipes

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Toffee Cake

8 November 2010 23:14

This is the cake which I baked for Gordon’s birthday and it’s based on a Marguerite Patten recipe. It was a nice change from a completely chocolate cake. Although the ingredients specify using castor sugar I usually just use normal white sugar. The brown sugar can be any kind from Demerara to dark soft brown sugar depending on how strong you want the toffee flavour to be.

6 oz brown sugar
5 oz butter or marg.
4 tablespoons milk
2 oz castor sugar
2 eggs
8 oz self-raising flour

Put the brown sugar, 1 oz butter and 4 tablespoons of milk into a heavy based pan and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Then allow the mixture to reach the ‘soft ball’ stage.

Cream the remaining butter and sugar together until it’s soft and light then beat in the warm toffee syrup gradually to stop the mixture from curdling. If it does curdle just add some flour.

Beat in the eggs and then the rest of the flour.

Put the cake mixture into an 8 inch cake tin which has been well greased.

Bake for about 50 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 170 C, Gas mark 3 or 325-350 F. Remove from oven and run a knife around the edge of the cake tin, the cake should come out quite easily. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

This cake tastes lovely on its own but I decided to cover it with my own version of buttercream icing. This is quick and easy, no faffing about with butter and cocoa powder required.

Nutella Topping
Place about 3 heaped tablespoons of Nutella into a glass bowl with a sploosh of milk, about a quarter of a cupful, and microwave for about 30 seconds on medium or until the Nutella mixture has melted. It depends on the strength of your microwave.

Stir the mixture until the milk is well incorporated then add about 4 heaped tablespoons of icing sugar into it. Be sure to sift the icing sugar first otherwise the icing will be lumpy.

Mix well and quickly spread it over the cake and down the sides if wished. It sets fairly fast so I couldn’t get the top of my cake as smooth as I wanted and I ended up taking a rolling pin to a bar of Aero to disguise the top. No disaster. Chocolate on top of chocolate isn’t exactly a problem.

We were half way to Stirling before I realised that I had left the birthday candles behind. So we had to improvise with a tealight. Well, he could still make a wish, which is the main thing.

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Categories: Family, Recipes

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Better Than Butter Tarts

29 September 2010 21:01

I don’t think my tarts look particularly good because I didn’t have a deep enough tart tray and I should have made the pastry thinner, but they still tasted really good and I’ll know better next time.

I have to thank Niranjana for this recipe from Niranjana Brown Paper. You can see it here and view how the tarts should look! This one is from a cookery book for vegans. I didn’t know that vegans could eat margarine. Presumably butter can be used if you want but I just stuck with the marg.

The recipe calls for flax seeds and I managed to buy a sachet from Holland and Barrett health food store. It was very cheap for a 30g packet and I wouldn’t leave this ingredient out because I think it probably contributed a lot to the rich flavour.

I made the pastry from scratch but it’s a lot easier to just buy the frozen sweet shortcrust pastry. It tastes just as good, I think.

The next time I do this recipe I think I might put meringue on top just for a change because my pastry recipe uses 1 egg yolk, and I could use up the white in that way.

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Dutch Spice Biscuits

22 September 2010 23:18

6 oz plain flour
3 oz dark brown sugar
3 oz margarine
1 tbsp. chopped nuts (optional)
1/2 tsp. cinammon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
a pinch of nutmeg
a pinch of baking powder
a spoonful of milk or 2

The easiest way to mix these ingredients is to put everything into a food processor and whizz it until the mixture is of a doughy consistency. You might have to add a bit more milk. It only takes seconds in my machine.

Roll out the dough and cut out with a cookie cutter. Place on a greased baking tray.

Put the baking tray in the middle section of the oven gas mark 5 / 375 F / 190 C for about 15 minutes. Check the biscuits after about 10 minutes as all ovens vary. You should be able to make about 16 biscuits.

If you don’t have a food processor – rub the flour and margarine together then stir in all the dry ingredients and mix well. Add two tablespoons of milk and mix to a doughy consistency.

I’ve shown two different biscuits here. With one you can see that I have used a biscuit cutter. The other one was simply rolled into a ball shape in my hand and then flattened out before being placed on the baking tray.

I think I actually prefer the look of the hand rolled biscuit and it’s easier and quicker to do that kind, no messing about with a rolling pin.

This is a recipe which I was given by my Dutch sister-in-law years ago, apparently they are traditional biscuits in Holland.

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Christopher Lloyd Gardener Cook

22 August 2010 00:25

I bought this book earlier in the year at my local library book sale. As you can imagine I already have quite a few gardening and cookery books but this is the only one which spans both interests.

Sadly Christopher Lloyd died fairly recently and I didn’t get around to visiting his beautiful gardens at Great Dixter although I had planned to for years.

Christopher wrote a gardening column for The Guardian for years and they were always very enjoyable but I hadn’t realised that he was also a keen cook, which was a bit daft of me really as there’s no point in growing lovely fruit and veg if you don’t eat it.

The blurb says: Christopher Lloyd takes us from plant to plate, recommending the best varieties to grow, telling us where to grow and how to plant…. he also passes on over a hundred of his favourite recipes.

He tells lots of stories too, which are often quite funny. There are plenty of lovely photographs of plants but none of the cooked recipes. So, no food porn to gawp at but it’s still a lovely book to browse through.

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Categories: Gardening, Recipes

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