Hey Pesto!

Green is my favourite colour.  It's the colour of spring, grass, leaves and all things fresh and new. And I have always loved pesto ever since I discovered it. I don't remember exactly when that was, but it was after I had left home so I would be in my twenties at least... Ready made pesto is good (especially rocket pesto) but home made is a completely different thing entirely, and there is so much scope for experimentation.

Tonight I made sprouting broccoli and pea pesto to have with gnocchi (little potato dumplings).  I have made gnocchi before, basically they are just mashed potato and flour shaped into little mini-egg sized ovals and texturised with a fork so they hold the sauce better. But that's not a weeknight thing, so tonight we used ready made gnocchi. I got inspired by the photo in a foodie magazine, and my son was a willing helper, maybe because Italy is his school topic this term, so we gave it a go.  The reason why this particular pesto tasted so fresh is that the ingredients are hardly cooked.  Sprouting broccoli and frozen peas were blanched in a bowl of boiling water for a couple of minutes and then whizzed to a rough paste in the processor with a big bunch of basil, a big bunch of flat-leaf parsley, olive oil, seasoning, grated parmesan, a few anchovy fillets, the zest and juice of a lemon and a couple of cloves of garlic:

Then all we had to do was cook the gnocchi for a couple of minutes until they rose to the surface of the water, drain them, mix with the pesto, top with parmesan shavings (tip - use a potato peeler) and voila! Or whatever the Italian is for voila!!  I thought afterwards it might have been improved by pine nuts sprinkled on top, but my daughter isn't keen on nuts.  

In the past I've made pea pesto and used it to stuff chicken breast fillets or spread on top of salmon before oven baking.  I've also made the traditional basil and pine nut version; and an amazing hazelnut pesto that I drizzled on top of a caramelised carrot risotto.  You can vary the herbs, nuts and the level of garlic and lemon to suit your personal taste. It is much easier with a food processor.  Sometimes I use the mini bowl if I'm only making a small quantity.  You can also do it with a stick blender, but I've found a "goblet" style blender doesn't work very well unless you keep stopping it and shoving the herbs down with the end of a wooden spoon...

I do get the feeling there is more experimenting to do before I find pesto perfection!

Thank you for reading,

Caroline x

Made from Girders?

I'm not scared of much (I have children!) But one of the few things I really don't like is strong winds.  And to take my mind of the stormy weather recently, what better than a bit of therapeutic baking?  My daughter is a big fan of Irn Bru, and I have drunk it now and again since my childhood, when my Grandma used to have it delivered by the "Pop Man" in returnable bottles. In fact, along with prunes, it was a pregnancy craving both times I was pregnant! Anyway, when I saw a recipe for Irn Bru cupcakes, I decided to have a go.

To start with, you have a reduce the Irn Bru to make syrup, and a lot, 500ml of Irn Bru makes 50ml of syrup.  Basically you just put it in a pan and half an hour or so of boiling later, you get this, half a litre reduced to less than a shot glass full, and it got thicker as it cooled:

To make the cake mixture, mix 120g plain flour, 100g caster sugar and 1 and a half teaspoons of baking powder, add 40g room temperature butter and mix with electric mixer (the trusty kitchenaid) until resembling sand.  Gradually add 50ml milk; then whisk another 50ml milk with a large egg and half the Irn Bru syrup and beat into the mixture. Divide between cupcake cases (handy tip, use an ice cream scoop) - don't fill more than half full - I had an overflow situation going on with some of the batch later - and bake at 170 degrees C for 20 minutes. There was enough mixture to make eight rather than the quoted six.

Here's where I deviated from the recipe.  In the past I have used a sugar (or lemon) syrup to pour over the cooked cakes before icing, to keep them moist, as there is NOTHING worse than a dry cupcake. So I had the genius idea of pouring some (non-reduced) Irn Bru - only a wee bit - over the cooked cakes.  I made holes in them with a skewer first so it could get in properly.

After cooling, they were iced with butter icing (50g of butter to 200g icing sugar) with the rest of the Irn Bru syrup added. You could add orange food colouring if you wanted a deeper colour but I quite liked the pale orange you got with just the colour from the syrup.  The icing was a bit stiff so I added one tablespoon of the non-reduced Irn Bru to loosen it a bit. Finishing touch was the blue decorations to reflect the blue on the bottle label.

I was pretty pleased with the result, you can definitely taste the Irn Bru, but maybe next time I'll double the syrup and put extra colouring in the icing, and I might use blue sugar crystals for decoration.  A definite 4 out of 5 though.

My son liked them, but he is more of a Mountain Dew fan, and has asked me to invent Mountain Dew cupcakes next...

I'll keep you posted.

Thank you for reading,

Caroline :-)