Trash or Treasure Bargains

Yes, I was in Trash or Teasure again and found some beautiful bird plates. They have a lot of vintage plates in all sizes. The little ones start at £1 and the larger ones are a few pounds more. Every time I go there I saw some new wonderful things. At the moment I have my eye on a brown leather bag and also some Mary Jane shoes. And some jewellery cameos..and a hat stand. Ok, I'd really just like to buy the whole shop!

So next time you're in Maidstone...or would like some pretty plates, you know where to go :)

I made some cake balls (cake pops without the hassle of the sticks!) to go with the plates and because I felt like something sweet.

Sweet Saturday and a Dreary Sunday!

In contrast to today, yesterday was a day of energy, sunshine and sweetmaking.

First up was Victorian creams, which I have been wanting to try for ages, but had to wait to find some rose water.
They are very simple to make and require no cooking as such. You literally mix sugar paste icing with golden syrup, food colouring (if colouring) and some flavouring. I chose rose but the flavour was so subtle as to be indiscernible. You shape the mixture into balls and leave them for a few hours to dry.

I suppose you could leave them like this if you wanted to. I coated mine in melted chocolate. Luckily, I accidentally bought mint flavoured chocolate and that made up for the lack of rose flavouring. Just before the chocolate solidified, I decorated the balls with a sugar flower.

Next up. I realised I had the right ingredients to make honeycomb. Dangerous. It's very easy to make-you just melt caster sugar and some golden syrup together and after they've simmered for 5-10 minutes, you take it off the heat and add sodium bicarb which makes the mixture fizz (this creates the aerated texture!). You quickly pour the mixture into a dish to set and then you can break it into pieces when it's set.

Today spring seemed further away than it has done recently. Grey skies, rain and a general feeling of malaise have dominated my day. I have however had a chance to nearly complete two more crochet projects so perhaps today has not been a total waste of time. The flowers I received last weekend look as alive and cheerful as ever and helped lift my spirits. Now to prepare for a busy week before a few days holiday at the start of next week.

Taken with my iPhone. I never tire of experimenting with the camera :)

Happy 29th February!!

So today is an extra day in our year! It seems fitting to do something new or exciting. I'd love to have done something truly wild or lifechanging but unfortunately I'm not that extravagant.

I did however do two things I've never done before and have wanted to do:

Make shortbread.

Really, I've never made shortbread before so thought it was time to rectify that. I used a trusty Mary Berry recipe (100g flour, 100 butter, 50g caster sugar, 50 rice flour/semolina) and added cream and strawberries on top. The good thing is that they are so rich it's easy to limit yourself to just one!

Read a book in a day.

The books I tend to read are not often short or easy, also I work a lot so reading a book in a day is unfortunately not something I ever get a chance to do.

Today though I put my lunch hour aside to read A Song of Lunch, which is actually a long poem rather than a book. I really enjoyed it. The poem took about 40 minutes to read-literally a song for lunch if you like. For those who haven't read it or watched the television adaptation, the poem is about the lunch date between a man and his ex, whom he still loves. She is happy and married. He is decaying and full of regret. They meet in an Italian restaurant they frequented whilst together, shabby and past its zenith, the downturn in its fortunes seems to mirror the man's. The man gets increasingly drunk and as truths emerge it gets quite quite uncomfortable at the table. Witty and intelligent. Worth making 40 minutes for...

Enjoy the extra day!!!

Pretzels After Reminiscing About Germany

Many, many moons ago I lived in a town called Augsburg in Bavaria, Germany for a whole nine months. Uprooting yourself to live by yourself in a strange country is challenging but ultimately character building and I can definitely say that the me who returned from Germany was a little different, a little stronger than the me who left for Germany nine months previously.

I liked many things about Germany...but this blog is dedicated to just one of the those-the mighty Pretzel! I fell in love with Pretzels in Germany. Sweet, savoury, plain-they come in many guises in their homeland. My favourite was a savoury Pretzel cut open and filled with butter and chives and I have fond memories of eating them on the German trains when heading into the Alps. They certainly shame much of the fast food I've seen at many of the train stations in England.
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So today we made sweet Pretzels, based around this recipe HERE.

A picture (not mine) of Augsburg

Bavaria is incredibly beautiful

Farewell to Summer Cupcakes

Waiting for the bus in the morning, there is a distinctly autumnal chill in the air. A smoky scent lurks in the breeze, brown leaves skitter across the grass. Summer is breathing its last. I think that every season has something to offer...but spring and summer are my favourite seasons and I am always very sorry to see them leave. I made some summery strawberry cupcakes and also some orange cupcakes to acknowledge the start of the end of summer.

These are cupcakes flavoured with strawberry. The icing glaze is also strawberry flavoured.

Orange flavoured cupcakes with orange cream cheese icing

The Christmas and Hallowe'en cupcake decorations have already started to arrive in the supermarkets and I'm already plotting themed cupcakes for both...

Homemade Cheesecake

My sister has always wanted to make a cheesecake. I've always wavered as it sounded like a lot of effort but since the hedgerows are full of ripe blackberries, I decided it was the perfect time to succumb to the cheesecake. We used the Mary Berry Recipe here which worked well.

First up, the base

There is a lot of cream cheese but the lemon helps cut through the richness. Also, the egg whites folded in at the end make for a surpringly light cheesecake for all the cream, butter and cheese. Even my mum, who is not a fan of diary products, had two slices!

My sister ventured in the rain to the local park to pick the blackberries (alas no wild strawberries though). Not surprisingly, nobody complained about tart blackberries.

The base edge is not perfect but it was addictively good nonetheless.

Cake Pops-first attempt

First cupcakes. Then whoopies pies. Then macaroons. Now pop cakes apparently. In an attempt to keep up with the ever-changing baking trends, I decided to attempt to bake some cake pops. They're not difficult to make but compared with your standard sponge or cupcakes, a little more time-consuming and fiddly.

First off, you need to bake a basic cake. I chose a vanilla cake as I had planned to coat my cake balls with chocolate. I've seen cake pops recipes using chocolate sponge and even a red velvet sponge. (Though I suppose in theory you could bake whatever flavour of sponge takes your fancy.) After baking the cake I reduced it to crumbs. The recipe suggested using a food processor for this but I used elbow grease and it was no effort at all.

To the crumbs I added my cream cheese icing (cream cheese, butter and icing sugar) and chilled for 30 minutes. Once chilled I made little balls about the size of a ping pong ball-which were chilled for a further 30 minutes, (there is a lot of hanging around the fridge when making cake pops) .

After the final chilling the fun can really begin. 

We melted white chocolate and milk chocolate to 'dip' the cake balls in and set up plates of purple sprinkles and mixed chopped nuts to decorate the chocolate balls. I didn't get a chance to buy lolly sticks but reasoned some wooden kebab skewers could convincingly fill the vacancy. Pronging the cake balls is easy enough but, for me, getting the damn things to stay on the sticks was difficult. I browsed the internet to troubleshoot and learnt that the reason my cake balls kept trying to escape was probably because they weren't cold enough or because I'd used too much of the cream cheese mixture. I guess you can only learn from mistakes. A small number stayed on the sticks and for those that refused, we set them flat on a plate where they still looked edible and attractive.

I utilised an unemployed wide-necked vase to chill and display them in.

The final result. Well, the cream cheese mixture combined with the sponge makes them very moist and rich, albeit rather tasty. The consistency is quite unusual. The closest comparison I could come up with is fudgelike. 

My friend asked what the point of them is and it's a perfectly valid question. I think they are a gimmick myself. Perhaps invented by people trying to find a point-of-difference in the saturated cupcake market. Every new idea is the Next Big Thing. Cupcakes with icing are far easier and less time consuming to make. That's not to say that I wouldn't attempt cake pops again (in fact, I think I must because I really want to make some balls which will damn well stay on the sticks!), but if I wanted to whip up some cakes or a dessert I'd probably eschew the cake pops and make a few pretty cupcakes instead.

Rainy Sunday=White Chocolate and Mixed Nut Cookies

The BBC promised a day of light showers. The reality has been heavy, prolonged showers and weighty, overcast skies with only the occasional patch of blue to break up the cheerless nimbus clouds. There's only one thing to do on this type of rainy Sunday in my books: bake.

There is a great recipe for cranberry and white chocolate cookies in Nigella's Christmas which we adapted to mixed nuts and white chocolate cookies due to an absence of cranberries in the baking cupboard. We used a bag of mixed nuts (ours contained walnuts, peanuts-white-and red-skinned-almonds and hazelnuts). Satisfyingly crushed by my sister with a rolling pin.

The cookies are dead easy to make and take no time at all. They can also be enjoyed guilt-free for breakfast as they contain oats :D Recipe below.

Recipe

Makes 30Ingredients
150g plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
75g rolled oats (not instant)
125g soft butter
75g dark brown sugar
100g caster sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
75g dried cranberries (we used a bag of mixed nuts in place of the cranberries and pecans.)
50g pecans, roughly chopped
150g white chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 180oC/ 350°F/gas mark 4.

Measure out the flour, baking powder, salt and rolled oats into a bowl.
Put the butter and sugars into another bowl and beat together until creamy — this is obviously easier with an electric mixer of some kind, but you just need to put some muscle into otherwise — then beat in the egg and vanilla.
Beat in the flour, baking powder, salt and oat mixture and then fold in the cranberries, chopped pecans and chocolate chips.
Roll tablespoonfuls of dough into a ball with your hands, and then place them on a lined or greased baking sheet and squish the dough balls down with a fork. You may need two baking sheets or be prepared to make these in two batches.
Cook for 15 minutes; when ready, the cookies will be tinged a pale gold, but be too soft to lift immediately off the tray, so leave the tray on a cool surface and let them harden for about 5 minutes. Remove with a spatula to cool fully on a wire rack.