Roll(o) with it.

When is a cookie not a cookie? When it's a mini Rolo pie! Earlier in the year, I made a giant decorated cookie for my partner's younger son's birthday. A few weeks ago it was his elder son's birthday and yesterday I made his treat, the recipe for which had been posted on my Facebook page by a friend. 

I was staying at my partner's house for the weekend, and not being in my own kitchen, I took a few extra utensils with me and I had to make the cookie dough by hand using a mixing bowl and wooden spoon rather than having the luxury of my KitchenAid but that wasn't too much of a hardship. I softened the butter in the microwave and mixed the other ingredients in, and the mixture came together well. Cookie dough always looks dry but when you squeeze it with your hands it does form a decent lump. 

The chocolate chip cookie dough was used to line the holes of a deep cupcake tray. It does have to be a deep one. An ice cream scoop full was the right amount, pressed out with the fingers. Three Rolos were added to each hole, and there were just the right amount for this in four packets, allowing for the fact that some "broken" ones had to be eaten beforehand. Then the rest of the dough was rolled out and lids cut out. One of my favourite Japanese tea cups was the perfect size. They were baked at 170C for 20 minutes, by which time the cookie dough shells were crisp and the rolos in the middle had melted to a delicious gooey, chocolatey, caramely sauce. The hot pies were topped with vanilla ice cream, an extra Rolo, chocolate sprinkles and toffee sauce. I forgot to take a photo of the middles at the time, but the next morning I microwaved the leftover pies so the middles re-melted and I could take a photo.

Both my partner's children and my partner agreed the pies were a success, the descriptions including the words "tasty" and "having warm chocolatey lava". They did suggest trying Maltesers instead of Rolos next time which I thought was a fab idea!  There was a little bit of dough leftover which was turned into normal cookies but sadly they did get forgotten and left in the oven a bit too long!  They were still edible, just not quite optimal.

The pies would also make a really good mince pie alternative, maybe just sprinkled with icing sugar. I'm aware that not everyone is a fan of mince pies (partner included) and though I don't normally think about Christmas until December 1st, mince pies are an exception to the rule. 

New recipes have been reduced this year for various reasons but I'm hoping to be inspired at least a little bit in the next month and a bit. Watch this space. 

Thank you for reading. 

Caroline.

It's all about the cool-down.

It can't have escaped your notice that the UK has been experiencing a bit of a heatwave just lately.  And what better way to cool down than with ice cream?  So here is a chilled blog post about ice cream based desserts.

I lost my new recipe mojo a bit recently but it is now firmly BACK! I had a fab evening with my daughter the other week, sitting on the kitchen sofa, fairy lights on, sharing a bottle of wine (now she's old enough - I am happy to have a wine-drinking companion again!) and planning new recipes.  She found a recipe on the BBC Good Food site called Club Tropicana Ice Cream Cake which we both immediately knew just had to be made.  Reminiscent of the 80s Wham! song with bright dayglo colours and strong fruity flavours it looked so pretty and my end result, though not as perfect as the BBC photo, was fairly impressive and the taste got 5 stars from the family.

To be fair it was more about assembly than actual cooking, but if you wanted to you could make the ice cream, sorbets and cake from scratch.  I didn't this time though. I started with a Madeira cake from Lidl which happened to be flavoured with zesty lime, I felt this really improved the recipe. I trimmed the dark edges off first and cut into 5mm thick slices.  The offcuts were appreciated by my son,no food waste in this family if we can help it! 

I had lined a normal sized loaf tin with several layers of cling film, and the first layer of cake went into the bottom, followed by a layer of mango and passion fruit sorbet, smoothed as flat as I could with a spoon. Into the freezer it went for 10 minutes, then a layer of good vanilla ice cream was added, and another layer of cake,  This was followed by a layer of melted dark chocolate and another 10 minutes in the freezer.  Next came a layer of raspberry sorbet and a final layer of cake.  All was covered in another layer of cling film and frozen until solid.

When it was time to serve, I turned it out and removed the cling film carefully, then topped with whipped cream and cocktail (maraschino) cherries.  The cherries have a story all of their own as they were the most difficult ingredient to find.  I finally found them by asking someone in Tesco,only to be told "Nobody can EVER find cocktail cherries! They're with the pickled gherkins!!" Readers may remember a blog post from several Christmases ago where I had a similar problem with cherries in Kirsch for a Black Forest Trifle.

Anyway, it was a great success, including with my Mum who came for dinner at just the right moment to help eat it.

Another new recipe made recently was Millionaire's Shortbread lollies.  I had some lolly moulds but had lost them, so we ordered  some more on eBay without looking carefully at the dimensions and they were tiny when they arrived.  Happily, however the larger ones had been found by then so we made two sizes.

They were pretty simple, a mixture of evaporated milk and double cream was frozen in the moulds, and when frozen decorated with a drizzle of melted chocolate, gold crunch,shimmer spray, caramel sauce and shortbread crumbs. The small ones were actually just the right size for me. The large one was a bit too much for my son but the cat loved what was left of it when he'd finished! They were meant to have edible gold on, but I had run out.  Next time...

Thanks for reading,

Caroline x

It's only sausage roll, but I Iike it.

Welcome to my first blog post of the year, and the story of the most deluxe sausage rolls I've ever made.  I know at least one of my readers, and very possibly more than one has a special affinity with sausage rolls. I've even delivered them to a hospital inpatient to speed recovery. And quite frankly, what's not to love? Unless you're a vegetarian... but even then, you can get some pretty special cheese and onion ones.  But this post is really for the benefit of carnivorous friends.  I made a mahoosive sausage pie for my uncle's wedding (even winning the prize for the best savoury dish in the process) but the traditional Christmas sausage rolls were always made by my Mum.  Now she doesn't cook much, she handed the baton to my daughter two Christmases ago so I hadn't really made actual sausage rolls myself for years.  Then, a friend of my boyfriend had an idea for deluxe, jumbo, pimped sausage rolls with bacon in as well as the sausage meat. The idea developed between her, him and eventually me. And so we came up with a definitive recipe which was cooked for the first time last night.

I used bought puff pastry sheets.  I'm of the opinion that life is too short for certain things,one of them being making your own puff pastry.  I know I CAN do it, because I did it at school.  But not any more. To give you an idea of the jumbo-ness of the finished delicacy, one sheet of pastry made four sausage rolls.  The width of the sheet of pastry was almost exactly twice the length of a sausage, which was super helpful and probably meant to be. I used two sheets, 12 sausages and 16 rashers of streaky bacon. If you're ok at maths, you'll have worked out that I used one and a half sausages-worth of sausage meat and two rashers of bacon in each one.  I skinned the sausages and formed the meat into a bigger sausage, wrapping the bacon around it.  Then two slices of redwood smoked cheddar were added on top.  The block of cheese was also the same as the length of a sausage. Also meant to be. Then the filling was wrapped in the pastry, edges sealed using egg wash (apart from the first one which got forgotten), crimped rather rustically with my fingers and more egg wash brushed all over by my helpful boyfriend/kitchen assistant.  Three slashes in the top, some seasoning and a little bit more grated cheese and voila!

Thirty minutes in the oven and they were browned and crispy. Served with a "chip garnish" (as we had pastry and there weren't that many chips left in the bag!) and broccoli, boyfriend and children agreed that they were a success.  After debating what to call them, "pigs in blankets in duvets" was deemed the best description.

I have no doubt that I'll be making them again, varying the varieties of sausage meat and cheese means the possibilities are almost endless.  You could add chutney or cranberry sauce in the middle, or sprinkle different things on top.  Herbs maybe? Crumbled pork scratchings?They were almost as good cold for lunch the next day too.

Hopefully more blog posts soon too.  Thank you for reading.

Caroline.

Decade-ance.

Ten years ago today, several years before this blog was conceived, I made a New Year's Resolution to  make one new recipe a week.  My daughter was eight years old then and my son was one. Motherhood took up so much of my time that I didn't have time for a hobby, but I really needed to be creative somehow.  I had always loved food and cooking, and my family had to eat anyway so this seemed like the obvious solution.

I noted down what each recipe was in a notebook, and asked my family to score them out of 5, though I always take the final decision on scoring my own food. A 5 is only deserved if a recipe has some kind of "Wow!" factor and you can't think of a way to improve it. As the weeks went by and I got more and more inspired, one new recipe wasn't enough. That first year, I made 114. Sometimes they were full-on and complex but sometimes only a dip, a sauce or a cocktail. Here's the first page:

I tried to write legibly, though neat handwriting isn't something I'm gifted with, maybe that's why typing was one of the few things I got an A for at school. Since then, more than 50 pages of the notebook have been filled.  Some years have been more full on than others, life events sometimes got  in the way, but I never stopped wanting to try new recipes.  And I never did it because I felt I had to.

This year I've made 72. To date, the grand total stands at 1040. Dividing by ten years and fifty-two weeks per year, that makes it exactly two a week over the ten years! Since 2014 the total for each year has been less than 100, partly due to the car crash and single parenthood, but I'm not stopping.

The percentage of five out of five recipes has varied quite a lot.  The first five-scorer, and the only one in the first year was lamb karahi. In 2009 there were 25 five-scorers out of a total of 126 recipes that year. By 2011 there were 52 five-scorers out of 141. In 2013 I started doing meat-free Monday and made 25 new meat-free main courses;  that year there were 61 five-scorers out of 120. My personal top five have been lobster soup (a labour of love and took forever but was so worth it), red Thai prawn curry using a friend's homemade curry paste made with her own home grown chillies, pink champagne cupcakes - of which a second batch was made for another friend's wedding, sticky Vietnamese pork meatballs with rice noodles and pickled vegetables, and iced berry and eggnog trifle cake. It was so difficult to choose though, my choices would probably be different tomorrow.

There have been triumphs, disasters and injuries that have scarred me for life along the way (I don't store baking trays on top of the fridge freezer anymore!) but it has been and continues to be a way of life rather than the hobby it was originally intended to be.  It will be interesting to see what the next ten years will bring.

Thank you for your support readers, and Happy New Year.

Caroline.

Comfort, joy and Pavlovian conditioning.

It has been a good Christmas, to the point where today I found myself Googling what to do with leftover caviar (answer: have it on scrambled eggs).  Even though I didn't cook Christmas dinner - for the second year in a row - I still managed to fill the festive season with a good few new recipes, so here is a flavour.

I started Christmas Eve with a visit to my sister's memorial bench, with my children, my friend and some insulated mugs of mulled wine for the older three out of the four of us. Christmas Eve was the day my sister moved into her house and to mark this she always used to have a party on Christmas Eve and I'll always remember them.  A few weeks ago I'd seen Gordon Ramsay do a twist on mulled wine which sounded really good so I gave it a go.  You have to use reasonable wine, bad wine doesn't get disguised just by mulling it, so a half decent bottle of Shiraz went into a pan with a muslin bundle containing cloves, green cardamom pods, cinnamon stick from the Happy Rooster, star anise and a stick of lemongrass, the end of which was squashed and the rest cut up with scissors.  Other additions were demerara sugar, an orange and lemon (pieces of peel gleaned with a potato peeler, plus the whole fruit cut into chunks), 2 balls of stem ginger cut into quarters and a splosh of ginger syrup from the jar. Heated gently it was delicious and the lemongrass gave it an extra dimension. She'd have liked it.

In the evening, the children and I took a buffet to my parents' house. My daughter had made sausage rolls (having been handed the baton by Mum last year), snowflake-topped mince pies and roasted a gammon.  I did macarons, there was an air-dried ham, cheeseboard and more including a Christmas cake made using nearly the same recipe as the wedding cake earlier in the year and using up the marzipan and icing leftover from it; but we started the proceedings with champagne and canapes.  These were made with the sloe gin and blackberry cured salmon I referred to in my gin post in the summer.  I cured the salmon in a mix of blackberries, juniper berries, clementines, sugar, salt and sloe gin (whizzed to a paste in the food processor) for a few days, then gently rinsed that off and added chopped dill and more sloe gin for the next few days.  Sliced thinly on Ritz crackers with soft cheese and the aforementioned caviar, Dad said they stole the show.

And it begins...

 Spot the salmon!

The cure part two.

I didn't get a photo of the finished canapes but you get the idea.

On Christmas Day, I went to my partner's sister's house for dinner.  It was actually quite a nice change not to be doing the main course and enjoy a delicious feast that I hadn't had to cook, but I had volunteered to do desserts, so I felt I had made a worthy contribution.  I decided on a trifle and a pavlova.  Regular readers may remember that several years ago I attempted to revive the "designer trifle" having been given a very deluxe trifle dish - which incidentally is no longer available in the  UK so it had better not get broken! I've done several Christmassy trifles in the past, including a black forest one but I wanted this year's to be different.  My daughter and I invented this one, very loosely based on a BBC recipe for an eggnog trifle. I started with some leftover cupcakes that I happened to have in the freezer, and drizzled them with cinnamon (and gold leaf) vodka.  Next a layer of lemon jelly.  Then a layer of orange jelly, clementines, and pineapple, with clementine slices around the edge. The next layer was a home made brandy and vanilla custard.  The custard looked a bit brown and unappetising (due to the brandy and vanilla bean paste) but the flavour made up for it.  Then came whipped cream containing icing sugar and clementine zest, topped with gold crunch, gold pearls and 23 carat edible gold leaf.  The final flourish was going to be a sprig of three holly leaves from the holly tree in my garden.  I found the perfect photogenic sprig, washed it (pricking my fingers in the process) and... left it on the kitchen window sill!  At least nobody ate it by mistake.  In fact nobody ate the trifle for a while anyway because they all went for the pavlova, but in the end nearly half of it went on Christmas Day and it WAS well received with favourable comments.

The other dessert was another tweaked recipe, a chocolate pavlova with melted white chocolate mixed into the cream and decorated with maltesers.  I added strawberries in a circle and some mint leaves to make it look a bit Christmas wreath-like. The pav won the dessert popularity contest hands down and almost disappeared in no time.

Watch out for my next post which will be an update on the new recipes resolution, a whole ten years after I made it.  I'm not stopping, and there will be more new recipes to come in the future, after all, I did get a new cookery book for Christmas...

Until next time.  Thank you for reading,

Caroline. 

PS Special thanks to the aforementioned partner for dessert photography, help with the title of this post, and just for being his lovely self really x

Snowflakes in the oven.

I know, it's not even December yet, however, today is "Stir up Sunday" - the day when it is traditional to make your Christmas pudding. I'm not making a pudding, because I'm not cooking Christmas dinner this year, but I did decide to make a cake.  I happened to have just the right amount of marzipan and sugar paste icing left over from the wedding cake - see my two "Tiers of Happiness" posts - and the recipe I used for the wedding cake was actually a slightly tweaked Christmas cake recipe so I think that was some kind of omen. I soaked the fruit in brandy and orange juice for a week and made the cake today.  I will be feeding it with brandy over the coming weeks and then sharing it with my family. Look out for photos of the finished cake in a later post. I'm planning on decorating it using my new snowflake cutters, of which more later.

My daughter has got me in the mood for Christmas early this year, and despite not cooking the actual Christmas dinner as I usually do, I seem to have a pile of foodie magazines tempting me into making all kinds of things, including a chocolate pavlova with salted caramel sauce, and a mulled berry snowflake tart, which most gratifyingly looked even better in reality than in the magazine. I bought the aforementioned snowflake cutters especially on eBay for £2.59 (free postage) which were a triumph!

I didn't make the pastry, though I could have if I'd have wanted to.  I lined my favourite loose bottomed tart tin with the pastry and blind baked it for 15 mins. The rest of the pastry was transformed into snowflakes of three different sizes and these were put on a separate tray and sprinkled with caster sugar. The filling was a mixture of fresh cranberries, frozen mixed berries (including blackberries, blackcurrants and cherries), apple juice, port, sugar, spices including nutmeg and cinnamon, plus cornflour which were cooked in a pan first before adding to the pastry cake and baking for 35 minutes.  For the last 15 minutes of cooking time, the pastry snowflakes were added to the oven.  When time was up, they were positioned on top of the tart, preventing the juice from bleeding into them and hence making for a more glamourous finish.  I added a dusting of icing sugar (a tweak from the printed recipe as agreed by my culinary aesthetic advisor - he knows who he is) and served with a dollop of extra thick cream. The cranberries gave it a fresh taste that wasn't too overly sweet.

I'm going to try a new recipe for mulled wine soon, including lemongrass and stem ginger.  The cold winter evenings suddenly don't seem so bad after all. There will be plenty of new recipes going on over the festive season so watch this space.  It's going to be a good one!

Thank you for reading,

Caroline.

The thinking woman's crumpet.

The last but one post started by mentioning optimism and hope for the future.  Speaking of which, I have met a lovely man (several months ago) who has been instrumental in my recent rediscovery of the crumpet.

A friend tried on Facebook earlier this month to settle the debate "crumpets n jam vs crumpets n cheese". 119 comments later, jam had 21 votes, but cheese won with 36. Many other options were suggested, including both jam and cheese at the same time, peanut butter both with and without jam, Nutella, Marmite, marmalade, golden syrup, fried egg, my personal favourite topping of fried bananas with Malibu... and of course there were the "butter only" purists. 

I've never made my own crumpets (maybe one day, my sister once did and she said they weren't all that difficult) but I got to thinking what creative thing you could do with a shop-bought crumpet apart from simply spreading something on it.  I'd previously seen a photo of a Full English Crumpet sandwich with bacon, egg, sausage and baked beans in the middle; but today I found a twist on eggy bread using crumpets, which I hadn't previously considered.  I beat two eggs with a splash of milk, seasoning, and a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg and soaked three crumpets in this mixture while I preheated the frying pan.  I cooked them on both sides in oil, pouring a little more egg mixture into the holey sides and in the pan to get a little "omeletty" effect around the edge.  Topped with grilled bacon and a drizzle of maple syrup they were a revelation!

Here's a photo of the full English crumpet:

As a little treat, here are a couple of crumpet-related videos for you.  You may need to copy and paste the links.  The first is the Wombles, a throwback to my childhood. I especially like Tobermory's exclamation at about 2 minutes and 10 seconds in:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwBibF-YfBY 

The other is the ever fabulous Muppets Warburton's giant crumpets advert:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp_WNfa7PGY 

Enjoy! And thanks for reading,

Caroline x

Tiers of happiness - part 2

At the end of part 1 - we had got as far as the wedding cake being baked and ready for it's posh dressing up.  Eventually it looked like this:

It wasn't really as wonky as it looked in the photo.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. The cake needed icing, and it needed marzipan before that. The cakes were almost flat so I didn't bother to trim them. I checked them with my culinary spirit level (yes really) and neither of the three were that far out so I thought it would all be fine.  The traditional glue for sticking marzipan to cakes is apricot jam, but I had some marmalade in the cupboard so I used that instead, two parts marmalade to one part water, warm in a mug in the microwave and apply with a pastry brush. The marzipan was rolled out, draped over each cake and smoothed down with icing sugar dusted hands and sort of massaged until it was as smooth as I could get it. Sort of like beauty therapy for cakes!  They were left to dry out overnight before icing.

The icing was applied in a similar fashion (nearly 2 kilos of it for the three cakes!) except that it was stuck to the marzipan with vanilla vodka rather than marmalade glaze.  Yes, the vodka happened to be hanging around too. I used ready made sugarpaste icing from the cake decorating shop rather than making it, which I don't think is cheating really... After some judicious trimming and much smoothing out, and a second beauty therapy for cakes session, the three cakes were suitably enrobed in their double cloaks of marzipan and icing and left to dry for a few more days.

My daughter had decided she wanted to decorate them, so one day while I was at work she spent most of a day being creative.  Using our new piping nozzles, and a LOT of red food colouring paste, butter and icing sugar, and an amazing amount of creativity and general cleverness, she ended up with several different designs of flowers in shades of pink and red around the edges of the larger two cakes, and completely covering the smallest one. At one point she diced with disaster by having the cakes overhanging the edge of the work surface, but didn't notice until she looked at the photos afterwards!  Meanwhile, I spent my lunch break buying two and a half metres of red ribbon.  The colour of the washing up water had to be seen to be believed!

After reading about it in the cake bible, we had decided to use shot glasses for pillars, which worked really well.  As the cakes were heavy, we had to order thick milkshake straws online which were cut down and inserted into the bottom two cakes to help support the shot glasses.

Assembly was left until the big day, just before the cake was cut. It wasn't perfectly straight, and in photos it looks worse than in reality (camera angles can be so unkind), but nobody minded, and most importantly the bride and groom were happy with it.  I nearly missed the cake cutting, being in the middle of a conversation with my uncle in the pantry, and everyone had to shout my name to find me!!  All was well in the end though. I was most impressed when the whole bottom tier was eaten on the wedding day; but then, this IS my family we are talking about! It was a bit crumbly due to the gluten free nature, but the taste and lack of dodgy tummies afterwards in those susceptible more than made up for it.

Thank you for reading.  Hopefully more soon.

Caroline.

Tiers of happiness - part 1.

I love weddings. I've even been the bride at two. It's all so lovely and fills you full of hope and optimism for the future.  And of course, usually there is plenty of eating and drinking as part of the celebration, including "the cake". My sister made both my wedding cakes, the second one was a drum kit, complete with sugar cymbal.  I've made three wedding cakes, two were three tier and one was two tier, if I remember rightly.  They were fairly simple and did look home made, and one I only iced and left the decoration to the groom - who did intricate painting for a living and covered his with several thousand tiny flowers - but I hope the flavour made up for the lack of perfection in appearance of the other two.

My cousin recently got engaged after a whirlwind romance; and the wedding is in a few weeks. I volunteered to make their cake as my gift to her and her lovely soon-to-be-husband. She particularly wanted a Nigel Slater fruit cake recipe, round cakes, and three tiers.  I asked her if she wanted pillars or not (as they are were all going to be fruit cakes they could be stacked without pillars) and she said "I think I want pillars because it's not sensible!"  I already had 8" and 9" round tins in the cupboard and borrowed a 10" one from a lovely lady in the village, thanks to the wonders of social media.

The first challenge was that the recipe was for a little 11cm square cake, and I needed to make three larger round ones. It was at the point of conversion that I nearly got my inches and centimetres mixed up, but thankfully I realised fairly early on.  In the end I used the ingredient quantities from my well-loved cake "bible" but tweaked them to match the Nigel Slater recipe by adding orange zest and juice,swapping whole almonds for hazelnuts, adding ground almonds, and changing the spice mixture (nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice).  I added a tweak of my own by adding vanilla liqueur to the dried fruit soaking mixture as well as brandy and the orange flavours.

After soaking raisins, sultanas, currants and cherries in brandy, vanilla Galliano and orange juice/zest in a big storage box for two days, I creamed nearly a kilo of butter and nearly a kilo of light/dark muscovado sugars and added 13 eggs.  The kitchenaid couldn't quite cope so I had to take some of the mixture out partway through and add the eggs to the remaining mixture as it was also going to be mixed again later.  Then I mixed the butter and sugar into the dried fruit plus ground almonds and whole hazelnuts. Then over a kilo of gluten free plain flour was incorporated (gf according to the bride and other guest requirements), plus baking powder and the spices.  

Mixture done and arm muscles protesting, I divided the mixture between the tins, which had been lined earlier and brown paper put round the outside to protect from burning.  You can't tell from the photos but I recycled a clean and opened out KFC bag for the biggest cake!

They were baked at 140 degrees C for 3 hours (small) 3 and a half hours (middle) and 4 hours (big) and left to cool in the tin.  The smell was amazing!

They are cooling as I type and will have marzipan,icing and decoration added soon... to be continued in Part 2... in which I will hopefully be having enormous fun with my new piping nozzles... 

Thank you for reading,

Caroline :-)

A Grand Celebration!

Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of my only sister's death from stomach cancer.  A sad day but also one for remembering happy times. It also happened to be that I had just got to the point of being about to make the long-awaited one thousandth new recipe since my New Year's resolution of 2008.  I think that was karma.  So I started thinking about what to make.  It had to be special and it had to reflect her.  She was a massive fan of eating and drinking, like me, and even though in the final fortnight of her life when she was in a local hospice and was surviving on little more than ice lollies, she still had tea and cake when people visited, just to be sociable, even though she only managed a few crumbs and sips.

One thing she was famous for was her tiramisu.  Even bona fide Italians raved about it!  I didn't make tiramisu for several years after she died because it wouldn't be as good as hers, but eventually I did make it, and also a Bailey's version. It WAS good, but not as good as hers.  So the 1000th recipe couldn't be that as I had already made it. I always have at least one friend round on her anniversary, to drink bubbly and eat cake, so I thought about doing a gateau, in the gateau chapter of my favourite cake book was.... a tiramisu gateau! Decision made.

Several adaptations later (using a normal sponge instead of a genoese sponge as I've found the latter to be a bit unreliable) and dark chocolate kitkats around the edge instead of chocolate cigarillo biscuits, all was planned.  Two Victoria sponges were cut in half to make a four layer cake. Each layer was drizzled with a syrup made from instant espresso powder, water, sugar and Tia Maria.  I was worried that there was too much syrup and that it would be too wet but in hindsight I could have added more.  In the end I put the extra syrup in a jug and it got poured over the slices of cake as it was eaten, depending on your preference for sogginess of cake and intensity of coffee and liqueur. The layers were sandwiched together with mascarpone cream (egg yolks and sugar whisked together over simmering water, then mixed with the cheese and double cream) and the whole thing was then refrigerated.  It didn't look all that impressive at this stage:

However, that all changed with the assembly.  A final layer of mascarpone cream was spread on the top and sides of the cake and cocoa powder dredged over the top. I used 22 two-finger dark chocolate kitkats around the edge and finished with a gold ribbon that my daughter had bought in her lunch break from college in Stamford.

Shared with friends, it was a great success, in fact my son actually gave it ten out of five!!  I think a fitting tribute to happy memories of an amazing person.  I still miss Friday "wine and crisp" nights with my sister, and often wish I'd been able to share my new recipe adventures with her.

The rest of the gateau was taken into work today and happily polished off by my two assistants, the IT team and several other highly deserving NHS workers in need of sugar and caffeine.  I'm not going to stop at a thousand recipes, even if my Jamie Oliver notebook which contains the list of recipes get full.  There's still so much inspiration out there.. so many recipes, so little time.  I really want to live to be 100 and see how many I've got to by then.

Thank you for reading,

Caroline x

Recipe Gin-spiration!

Gin drinking has suddenly gone all trendy, but I have always loved it. It may have started when when I was small, and came downstairs after bedtime once on my parents' wedding anniversary.  They were drinking gin and tonic and having smoked salmon sandwiches, and I interrupted their post-children-in-bed celebration, but they didn't mind!  It was such a glamourous and grown-up thing, and something I aspired to do when I was a grown up. When eventually I was allowed to try it I really liked the botanical flavours. Over the years I have learned a lot more about the history of gin drinking, the distilling process and the differences between the many types of gins on the market, and I've got a small gin cupboard with my favourite four (as below, plus my new bottle of my newest favourite the beautiful Brockmans), quality rather than quantity being all important.  I've also had a go at using it as an ingredient, and have found loads of gin-spiration for the future, such as using it when curing salmon.  In the past I've cured salmon with vodka and beetroot, but I discovered an amazing recipe for gravlax using a blackberry and sloe gin cure - I HAVE to try that soon.  

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/fish-recipes/sloe-gin-gravlax/ 

It's also great in desserts, I've made a gin and tonic granita with apple caramel drizzled over, which balanced the gin flavour really well.  This was a Tom Kerridge recipe, it's like a sort of grown-up slush puppie!!  Obviously you can make it look more sophisticated with the presentation.

Some gin-loving friends came for dinner last weekend, and they suggested a cherry and gin shortbread ripple ice cream recipe for the dessert.  I've been put off ice cream making in the past due to not having an ice cream maker but have recently discovered the amazing thing that is NO CHURN ice cream.  Basically it's just double cream, condensed milk and flavourings. Whisk together, adding flavourings before or after depending on if you want them broken up or in chunks, and freeze!  You need to let it warm up slightly before serving though. The aforementioned cherry and gin ice cream turned out fabulously, with maraschino cherries and shortbread biscuits in (see photo - not my image but mine did look the same), and I have since experimented with a vanilla bean paste flavoured raspberry and blackcurrant jam doughnut ice cream which got top marks from my son. He assured me that it really did taste exactly like jam doughnuts - probably because they were simply chopped up and stirred in...

I also want to try gin and tonic cupcakes - I'll keep you posted.  Don't forget to drink (and eat!) responsibly.

Thank you for reading,

Caroline.

The ultimate sandwich (and a festive picnic).

When looking at the festive issues of the foodie magazines this year, one recipe jumped out at me - and believe it or not it was a sandwich!  This wasn't just any old sandwich, but rather "The King Of Toasties", the ham, cheese and chilli beetroot chutney toastie.  Upon reading the recipe it wasn't even toasted, but fried and baked and contained an estimated 577 calories.  And I HAD to make it.

Sandwiches are named after John Montague, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an 18th century English aristocrat.  He apparently wanted to eat whilst playing cards without getting the cards greasy, so he ordered his valet to put meat between two slices of bread.  The sandwich can be a humble thing, or a culinary extravaganza, and are also very good for using up leftovers at this time of the year (cheese?  gammon? turkey? even roast potatoes and bread sauce has been known in our house).  In fact, you can make any meal into a sandwich, and any sandwich into a meal! Although it's not all that easy with spaghetti bolognese.  I speak from experience. Also I remember once at work we all tried to describe our lunchtime sandwich in the most "Marks-and-Spencer-like" way to make each one sound more grand than it actually was.

Anyway, back to toastie making.  My daughter makes great toasties, often involving ham, cheese and pesto, which I love, and she does them under the grill, but clearly the making of this particular toastie was not going to be a straightforward affair.  I started by making the beetroot and chilli chutney. This involved grating raw beetroot and cooking it in red wine vinegar with chillies, sugar, black mustard seeds, cumin seeds, salt, garlic and shallots until reduced and syrupy.  I did the chutney part a few days before and kept it in the fridge.

When it came to the assembly, I used chunky slices of "tin bread" from the supermarket and buttered them.  My daughter and I had a toastie each so two slices were placed in a hot frying pan butter side down and topped with chutney, ham and grated cheddar cheese.  I also added dolcelatte to mine as I happened to have some in the house, but my daughter doesn't like blue cheese so we left it out of hers. The other two slices of bread were put on top, butter side up.  After frying for 5 minutes each side while squashing with a fish slice to get them good and brown, the finishing touch of grated parmesan was added and a further flip and fry to crisp the cheese was had before they went in the oven for 5 minutes to properly melt the cheese inside.  And so the best "toasted" sandwich was enjoyed...

This year we didn't have a conventional Christmas dinner, but instead a relaxed "family living room picnic for eleven", enjoyed with assorted relations at my parent's house. It did include pigs in blankets though, as my daughter insisted it wouldn't be Christmas without pigs in blankets.  She was also handed the family sausage roll baton by my Mum, who was not up to cooking as she is recovering from surgery. All involved families contributed to the feast, including me, though only one new recipe was forthcoming this year, the red velvet and chocolate layer cake.  It was layers of red velvet sponge and chocolate sponge sandwiched (tenuous link anyone?!) together with cream cheese icing and topped with raspberries, pistachios and a flourish of glitter and gold.

Not having a roast or too many timings to worry about was great, we cooked the pigs in blankets, warmed up the sausage rolls and baked a camembert, and had the sprouts on boxing day.  It was a triumph! And there was a lot of left over cheese for more sandwiches, though the gammon seemed to have disappeared...

Wishing my readers every happiness for 2017.  I didn't get to 1000 new recipes since 2008, I've been busy having other adventures out of the kitchen, but I'll get there eventually.

Caroline x