Sunday 15 September 2013
Monday 26 August 2013
Carluccios Raspberry Meringue
Carluccio's is one of my favourite chain restaurants. The decor is beautiful and the food full of fresh italian flavours and lots of mozzarella! I also love the giant pile of raspberry and chocolate meringues they have in their window display, and bought one for dessert!
Here we shared one giant one between myself, my mum and Scott!
Ingredients:
1 large meringue ( or little ones, broken ones, whatever you like!)
red-current jam, or a jam of your choice
Pouring cream
fresh fruit/berries
Method:
Crumble your meringue into three bowls.
Drizzle with the cream. Spoon a few teaspoons of jam into each bowl, and finally sprinkle over a few berries. I used raspberries and blueberries as they were what we had in the fridge! Raspberry's are my favourite fruit so we usually have a punnet of them to hanging round.
Chocolate Cupcakes
I love cake. I love sweet things. Ok I love food in general but sweet things in particular :) As you can see most of the recipes I post tend to be of the sweet variety! I don't usually bake cakes though, but yesterday I had a day off work and decided to try my hand at some cupcakes as a little afternoon treat :)
They turned out reasonably well, especially the violet buttercream icing! Heres what I did:
Ingredients:
100g Plain flour
20g Cocoa powder
140g caster sugar
1 1/2 tsp baing powder
pinch of salt
40g unsaltd butter
120ml milk
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla paste
Mix together the dry ingredients and butter using a electric hand whisk. In a separate jug, mix the egg milk and vanilla paste. Gently combine with the dry ingredients and beat until well combined.
Spoon into cupcake cases (this makes 12 cakes) and bake on gas mark 3 for 20 minutes or until a cocktail stick comes out clean when inserted into the cake.
Buttercream icing:
75g soft butter
125g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla paste
optional : food colouring
Beat the icing sugar and soft butter until well combined, You may need a tiny drop of milk to help blend together. Add the vanilla paste and food colouring. I used a ultra violet purple food colouring gel from Tesco. It was quite weak so I needed to use quite a bit even to get a faint purple tone.
Spread over the cakes once they are cooled. I topped mine with fresh blackberries and silver edible balls. :)
Rabbit Pana cotta
I made this lovely creamy dessert the other day using a plastic rabbit shaped jelly mould. The mould almost worked, all but the ear in fact! But the taste definitely made up for the shaping!
Panna Cotta
3 leaves Gelatin
250ml milk
250ml Double Cream
1 large teaspoon vanilla paste
50g sugar
Method:
Gently heat the milk cream and sugar in a pan, continuously stirring. Meanwhile soak your gelatine leaves in cold water in a separate bowl. Add the vanilla paste to the cream. Take the warm cream off the heat and add the gelatine leaves. Stir until they have dissolved into the cream.
Lightly grease the pudding mould with sunflower oil (I didn't do this step and regretted it as the mould didn't work as well as i'd hoped - so I recommend you do do it!) Pour the mixture into the mould and refrigerate for at least 2 hours!
I made a little blueberry and raspberry coulis to drizzle over the rabbit!
Gently simmer the fruit with some sugar until most of the fruit has broken down, but there are still fruit with shape. Leave to cool and drizzle over the rabbit!
Homegrown Mangetout
The Mangetout is ready!!!
I've just finished picking the first proper crop from the mangetout plants in our garden.
They are deliciously sweet and it feels so good to know Scott and I have grown them from scratch!
They are deliciously sweet and it feels so good to know Scott and I have grown them from scratch!
Saturday 17 August 2013
Picking berries
The other day I went fruit picking (again) with Scott. Scott's Nana Hazel, was kind enough to let us raid her supply of gooseberries and red currents from her garden. It feels so good being able to pick your own fruit, there is definitely something very caveman like about searching for your own food and then eating it!
We used the gooseberries to make a yummy crumble! And the red-currents we ate straight up, and I used the leftovers to make some other desserts look pretty by laying them over the top!
Labels:
berries,
crumble,
dog,
enamel bowls,
fruit,
gooseberries,
hazel,
nana,
ollie,
orchard,
pick your own,
red-currents,
scott
Greek salad with your feta?
I can not tell you how much I love a good Greek salad. It's something I could happily eat until it came out of my ears... well you know what I mean.
Whenever i'm on holiday I eat grotesque amounts of the stuff and it has become a real firm favourite of the family!
In Greece you generally are served with a slab of feta on top of your salad, whereas in Britain the feta is usually crumbed on top or cut into cubes! Here I crumbled ours but that would be up to you!
Ingredients:
Feta cheese
black olives
juicy tomatoes
cucumber
red or white onions
red or green peppers
Extra Virgin Olive oil
optional: vinegar
salt & pepper
Chop the vegetables until they are roughly the same size. I don't use many onions as I think they can be overpowering, but thats up to you!
Crumble the feta over the top of the salad, and drizzle the extra Virgin olive oil over the top. Top with a little dried herbs (oregano) and some vinegar if you like!
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