Andrew's entries on I'm glad it burnt

Chocolate mince pies with marzipan tops

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 21:16:42 +0000

Homemade mincemeat recipe (courtesy of peasepudding.wordpress.com)

2 tablespoons brown sugar
1/4 cup brandy
1 Granny Smith apple (peeled, cored and grated)
100g raisins
100g currants
100g sultanas
Juice & zest of 1 orange
1/3 cup breakfast marmalade
1/2 tsp mixed spice
40g dark chocolate
40g milk chocolate

I used shop-bought Dessert pastry. Of course, you can use pastry for the tops if you not keen on marzipan.

...and if you have a sweet tooth whack on a lump of brandy butter too! mmm.
Thoroughly mix Brandy, butter, icing sugar and muscovado sugar (optional) into a paste: Simplz.

Easy dulce de Leche cookies

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:55:35 +0100

I spotted these on TasteSpotting.com, a great website for cooking inspiration. Don't they look yum!?

Dulce de leche literally means "sweet of milk", and can be found next to condensed milk in the shops. It's pretty much the same but more caramelly.

Read the Wikipedia definition.

Here is the recipe I used (translated from American cups, into grams/mls). It differs slightly from other recipes in that, the cookie mixture itself contains Dulce de leche (where as usually it is just the filling).

http://buttersugarflour.com/2007/12/double-dulce-de-leche-biscuits/

Ingredients

200g unsalted butter, softened
64g brown sugar
64g caster sugar
397g tin of Dulce de leech (Nestle Carnation Caramel)
2 eggs
340g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt

Instructions

Preheat oven to 180°C. Prepare two baking trays with non-stick baking paper
Put the butter, sugar and half the tin of dulce de leche in a large bowl and mix
Beat in the eggs
Add the flour, baking powder and salt. Sifting the flour if inclined
Use a piping bag to squeeze the mixture on to the baking tray
Bake for approx 10 minutes.
Use the remaining dulce de leche as the fillings for each double cookie.

Tips:

If you don't have a piping bag, make your own using a sandwich bag with a hole in, or some baking paper rolled into a funnel shape.
No need to squeeze them out perfectly, as no matter when they look like raw, they always turn out nice and circular.
Alternate between your two baking trays (One in the oven, whilst you prepare the second batch).

Makowiec

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:24:01 +0000

Continuing on our journey into the land of bread... here is the second loaf, a Polish poppy seed swirl cake called Makowiec. We used the recipe from Taste.com.au - this is a great website, kind of like the Australian equivalent of the equally great BBC good food.

You can see from the photos that we decided not to smother it with lemony icing sugar. This was because, pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong! And when it came it, we couldn't be bothered (It was the right decision in the end anyway...)

We ran out of plain flour and had to use wholemeal flour - which made it look (and taste) much more bready than cakey.
We also used 50 grams too little of poppy seeds, which resulted in very sloppy innards
We had no rolling pin!
To add the chaos we were simultaneously cooking tea (Creamy pesto gnocchi)

We put the hefty lump of gloopy dough into the oven, and crashed out for 40 mins whilst it cooked, disappointed with our efforts and not expecting it to work out at all. But, despite appearences this rather ugly looking thing tasted much better than the Finnish Pulla bread.

Finnish Pulla Bread

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:31:20 +0000

First in a series of bread-related posts is the sweet and slightly over powering Finnish Pulla bread. The recipe is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's and was in the Guardian newspaper, but is also available online as part of his Cardamom recipes.

Hugh describes it as a brioche-style bread (Light and rich), but our attempt proved extremely dense and quite dry. Still delicious don't get me wrong - and the smell was amazing... enough to bring my housemates of their rooms!

Perhaps the reason it turned out so heavy is because I didn't knead the dough enough. That's something I hope to improve on over the forthcoming recipes.

Being quite stodgy, and not really knowing what the bread is supposed to acompany, we ended up using it to absorb some tasty tomato and basil soup. Even though I think it's a desert bread, the combination was yummy.

I'm not ashamed to say (as a bloke), that I platted with confidence. It's quite tricky because once you've stretched the dough to 40cm as described in the instructions - all it wants to do is retract to it's original size. So you have to work quickly!

Matcha latte

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:32:27 +0000

The other day, browsing the internet in a sleepy haze I discovered this Matcha Tea stuff. Apparently it will instantly elevate my mood and raise my energy.

It's a bright green, highly concentrated green tea powder full of antioxidents and nutrients, made from tea leaves grown in the shade (see the wikipedia page as to why). As well as for brewing up, it can also be used in things like cake and pastries, and mousses and ice cream.

The stuff I ended up buying cost £25, which was a shock. I got an even bigger shock when it arrived in a tin a mere 2 inches cubed. Not to worry though, apparently you can get about 25-30 drinks from it - about a quid a go.

Check out these interesting statistics on the Tea Pigs website where it came from, they claim ¼ teaspoon is effectivly the same as 15 cups of normal green tea!

All I did was mix the powder up and add some milk, then pop it microwave for a bit. If you were to dip your finger in the powder and taste it, it's kind of like... hay or straw or something. But mixed with the milk it was pleasant enough, could do with some sweetening though.

Stay tuned for future posts where I'll be using it in a dessert of some sort!

Coconut pyramids

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:17:38 +0000

My colleagues at work are aware that I'm a so called 'foodie', and 2 years on the trot they've bought me a book of recipes for my birthday. It's very generous of them, but I can't help but think it's just so I'll cook them treats :)
I'm fine with that!

One of my work mates has coeliac disease, and so every now and again I'm obliged to make something nice that doesn't have gluten in. So here is a really quick and moreish recipe called Coconut Pyramids, or coconut macaroons.

Things you need:

2 egg whites (whisked until stiff)
150g desiccated coconut
150g caster sugar
Edible rice paper (wafer-paper actually made from Potato starch, water and vegetable oil)

What to do:

Combine the ingredients and place in the fridge for an hour
Now place small dollops on the paper, and shape
Bake at 140°C for 45 minutes, but worth checking after 30.

Tip: If you can't be bothered making pyramids, you can push the mixture into a small funnel. Then, (although slightly unyhygenic) blow through the end which releases the funnel-mold from the mixture!

I made quadrilateral pyramids, shaped with a fork. Much easier than 3 sided!

Unfortunately, this time round, my pyramids sank! This is probably due to the fact that I was experimenting with the addition of some extra ingredients including: Ground almond; Almond essence; Vanilla essence; butter; and Agave syrup. Never mind.

To melt the chocolate, I added some Green & Blacks to a bain marie - but because the pyramids hadn't worked out shapewise (unlike these) - I didn't bother to neatly dunk them in the chocolate, as it wasn't really worth the effort.

Good luck if you have a go, they taste great!

Yummy haggis samosas

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:34:52 +0000

This evening I decided to try making these yummy haggis samosas (with a twist). As you can sea from the pic - they worked out just great!

I first heard about haggis samosas on The Hairy Bikers' latest series "Mum's know best". Apparently they're one of the featured mums' family favourites. The twist is: Instead of using the traditional samosa pastry, you use tortillas.

If you're thinking that the mixture of dry tortilla and claggy haggis is going to be a bit too much stodge - think again, they're just right.

Haggis isn't something I usually have lying around the kitchen, it just so happens I spotted it in the reduced section at Booths recently. Note: Booths is not my usual supermarket (waay too posh!).

You'll be amazed at how quickly these things come together, here's what to do:

Slice the tortilla into two strips, about 4 fingers wide, discarding the leftover edges.
With one of the strips, put your finger where the red dot is in the diagram, and fold each side across to make a cone shape, with a flap at the top.
Fill with haggis.
Brush the inside of the flap with egg and close it, squashing it firmly shut.
Brush the rest of the entire samosa.

I found that I had to microwave the haggis for a few seconds on medium before it was pliable enough to fit into the samosa.

If you don't have a deep fat fryer like me, you can just pour the oil into a pan and use that instead. Make sure it's deep though, better safe than sorry!

Kopparberg cake

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:22:07 +0000

A good friend of ours made a status update on Facebook saying she'd made Kopparberg cake. Intrigued, I asked for the recipe, and she obliged by uploading a mobile-phone photograph of the recipe page.

Hannah, I have no idea where you got the recipe from, but it's really tasty! Especially with vanilla ice-cream. Thank you!

In fact, my attempt at the cake had to be eaten with ice-cream because, it wasn't really held-together enough to be eaten as a normal slice of cake. Hopefully future versions will be more refined!

The great thing about this recipe is all the ingredients pretty much just get bunged into one bowl and mixed together.

Ingredients

6 tablespoons of butter
225g self raising flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
75g caster sugar
50g dried apple, chopped
75g raisins
150ml of Kopparberg or any other sweet cider
1 egg
175g raspberries / mixed berries

In translating the blurry mobile-phone photograph I noticed it said 6 tablespoons of butter. Would anyone in the right mind use a tablespoon to measure out butter?? No, I didn't think so. It's about 85 grams anyway.

Instructions

To keep this short, and sweet, (like the cider) just do this:

Put the flour and butter in a big mixing bowl
Get a sharp knife and fork, and chop it up as best you can
Now get one hand in, and smear the butter and flour through your fingers, making a dry, bitty mixture.
Okay, that's as bad as it gets. Next add all the ingredients to the flour and butter.
Mix, and mix well.
Bake for 40 minutes at 190°C

Kind of looks like puke after a night on red wine.
But I guarantee you, it smells amazing!

After 40 minutes, do the knife test - and depending on the depth of the cake tin you used, it might have to go back in for another 10 or 15 minutes.

The original recipe called for a 20cm/8 inch cake tin, but we reckon a shallow brownie tin would have been a much better idea. So that it gets cooked properly in the center.

The apple symbol is a tribute to my new Macbook Pro that I finally got this week after saving for many many months.

Macaroons, attempt #1

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:31:27 +0000

Pictures of Macaroons have been taunting me for a long time. Saying, “Make me, You know you want to. But, bare in mind - I'm a bastard to get right.”

They look so good. So perfect.
Being a perfectionist, I thought that meant I'd be able do it. Easy.

This weekend I finally made the effort and followed a recipe from Life's a feast blog, for the simple reason that it was on the first page of my Google Reader. In hindsight, perhaps I should have tried my usual trick of prefixing the search with "World's best" (there I go, trying to blame the recipe...)

I've got to be honest with you, the first batch didn't work - but I'm too proud to put up pictures of my failings. What happened was, I didn't whisk the egg whites for long enough, so when it came to piping them out - the mixture just ran out and spread into a liquidy mess.

I cooked them anyway, and although looking like little brown poo's on a plate, they actually tasted better than batch that worked.

A before & after of the good batch

Amongst the myriad of fiddly problems along the way, was the center mixture. It's made by combining melted chocolate with double cream - no mean feat. This also took two attempts, after the first one curdled.

Reality check

This was an expensive day, and I thought I was better than I actually am at cooking. Macaroons are off the cards for long while now. At least I have one decent photograph as proof that I can do it :)

Our pumpkin

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:21:30 +0000

Here's the I'm Glad it Burnt Halloween pumpkin for 2009.

We've very proud of our first attempt, although we did make a mistake. See if you can spot it, here's the template we used. Yup, that's right - it's missing a tooth.

But don't fret, the contents were put to good use in a Korma :)

We know it's a bit feable compared to some out there, but we blame Tesco for providing runt pumpkins.

Think yours is better? Show us!

Dolmio vs. The best lasagna in the world?

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:14:31 +0100

When growing up, whenever we had tea as children we could always tell if it had come from a jar. We called this "plop", mum would say, "Sorry I'm in a rush tonight we're having plop for tea".

Stuff from a jar, especially tomato based sauces, always have a distinct flavour that you can tell straight away is not home-made. Usually it's far too sweet and salty.

In the interest of science (and because there was an offer on Dolmio Lasagna sauces at the Co-op) I thought it would be interesting to make two and compare them under strict test conditions*.

The recipe that the Dolmio was up against is only The World's best Lasagna.

Unfortunately, a certain somebody accidentally burnt the second (home-made) lasagna. However, due to the name of this blog I can't complain and it does kind of make the pasta sheets all nice and chewy...

According to the World's best Lasagna serving calculator, 115g of mince meat was supposed to be used - but that didn't sound right, so for the test we used equal amounts (400g) for each recipe.

Dolmio:
This recipe uses equal amounts of red/white sauce and despite not having any proper fresh ingredients tasted pretty damn good, and again for breakfast. It did however taste like plop, but that is forgiveable as it came from a jar :)

World's best:
A bit too salty but extremely morish. It didn't reheat very well but that's probably because we nuked it in the oven. It was lacking in the white sauce department - the combination of Mozzarella and Ricotta didn't achieve the creaminess that the Dolmio had.

Verdict

Taste-wise the World's best lasagna definitely wins, I think the Italian salami in it just makes your mouth water! If you are going to make a lasagna, I suggest following that recipe, but keep some cheddar on standby because the red/white ratio was a little off.

I've had an offer from a friend who claims his mum makes a better lasagna, so I'll write a follow up post when my taste buds have made up their mind.

*Not really strict test conditions

The best flapjack recipe in the whole wide world

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:43:49 +0100

Due to the advent of a picnic in a park and my never-ending attempts to reduce the amount of porridge oats that have accidentally accumulated over time, I thought I might as well practice making some super-tasty flapjacks.

I've never made flapjacks before, but I've heard that it's often thought that adding more syrup makes for a gooier flapjack. I've also heard that this isn't the case, and in fact adding more butter makes it gooier.

I can see the logic that more syrup could would equate to a hard flapjack. So, I figured I might as well search on Google for 'the best flapjack recipe in the whole wide world', that way I couldn't go wrong.

As expected Google didn't let me down and the first result was for this brilliant, and brilliantly simple recipe: The Best Flapjack Recipe in the Whole Wide World

Just take a look for yourself! How many flapjacks do you know that can be cut into slices like a cake without either the knife not penetrating the mixture at all, because it's way too hard, or it all crumbling to bits because it's too soft!

(If you're wondering what the layer in the middle is - it's dates, mmm)

A Jamtastic charity painting!

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:46:11 +0100

Update: The painting sold on ebay for £1019, but the bid was upped to £5000 and bought by Theo Paphitis (from Dragon's Den).

Black current jam trees, marmalade pavements, mint sauce buildings and a tartar sauce sky all feature in a mouth watering new painting set to raise funds for The New Children's Hospital Appeal.

Artist Lindi Kirwin was commissioned by F. Duerr & Sons to create the painting, you can read more about it on the ebay listing.

Get bidding!

How to make chocolate go further

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:00:14 +0100

I bought some bargain, better-than-half-price cherries from the Co-op, but disapointed they weren't as tasty as glace cherries I decided to add them to a chocolatey concoction.

After a quick trip back to the Co-op I had myself 150g of fruit and nut chocolate, 150g of dark chocolate and some condensed milk, with the intention of mixing them all together...

This is a little trick I learnt from one of those student cookbooks whilst at uni - to help make chocolate go that little bit further, but frankly it's cheaper and less effort to just buy more chocolate!

Break the chocolate up into pieces and place in a Pyrex bowl
Make a bain marie with the bowl and a pan of water
Add the condensed milk and a big dollop of unsalted butter if you have any
Melt. Stirring as you go...
Add the cherries - or honeycomb toffee or whatever else you fancy!
Pour into a shallow container, then when it's cool put it in the fridge.
If you are lacking in the area of shallow containers like me, instead use a glass lid from an oven dish as a substitute (see pic).

Quorn on the hob

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:41:52 +0100

I'm getting to that point where a big shop is needed to fill the fridge, but as ever life's distractions pull me away. So, this evening I picked the last thing out the of bottom drawer of the freezer: Quorn mince.

Many of my friends mock the contents of my fridge-freezer, but I make no excuses for the stuff I buy! Why would I have George-Forman'd chicken strips on plain white bread every night (like my old flatmates) - when there is so much stuff out there!

I've tried Quorn 'Chicken style' pieces before now, and enjoyed them as they had some flavour (albeit an indistinguishable one). But this mince stuff - it's nothingness. I made a quick Bolognaise sauce using it, and it really doesn't compare to beef.

I thought I'd done something wrong when tasting it, that's how rubbish it is :) I had to put loads of stock in, and mass of herbs and spices before this meal tasted of anything.

It's not just about taste either, this stuff goes down like soup! At least the 'Chicken style' pieces had some substance.

In summary I'd buy the 'Chicken style' pieces again, because they are genuinly quicker and less messy to cook than actual chicken. But, not the mince.

How to make Kefir

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:13:11 +0100

Everyone I've spoken to about Kefir has just been grossed out. Usually because when asked what it tastes like, I respond with "Fizzy cheese!". It doesn't really taste like fizzy cheese, but I just can't think of a better way to describe it!

Basically, it's is a fermented milk drink, made by leaving Kefir grains in milk for 12-24 hours. These grains look like cauliflower and will grow with each batch you make. Once you have too many grains and are producing more kefir than you can drink, you can just eat them!

Here is the equipment you need to make the stuff...

All you do is put the grains in with the milk, and leave it. Agitate it now and again if you really want, but generally there's no need. In the picture below, you can see the separation of the curds and whey (the curds are the top layer, and the whey the bottom). When it gets to this stage, it's time to retrieve your grains and start again.

For some reason there are lots of videos on youtube of how to do this, but hardly any seem to use a funnel, it makes life much easier and less messy so I'm not sure why.

Once you've got your grains back out, you can either mix the curds and whey together, or use them individually to make cheese from the curds or sour bread from the whey.

You'll find that when the seperation starts happening in less than 24 hours and you are ending up with too much whey and not enough of the good stuff - then you probably have too many grains and not enough milk. So it is time to eat some, or find a second container.

In addition to the length of fermentation (which affects the sourness), you can also affect how fizzy the kefir is by leaving the lid screwed on tightly - this will be much fizzier than if you just lightly covered the container with clingfilm.

You may wonder why anybody would want to go through this rigmarole on a daily basis - well, the benefits are numerous and once you've got into the routine and made it an efficient one it's takes hardly any effort at all.

Has loads more beneficial bacteria than any of the commercial products like Yakult etc.
Contains an abundance of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and enzymes.
Easily tolerated by lactose-intolerant individuals, due to the bacteria eating up most of the lactose
Is antimicrobial and an immune stimulant
Tastes great as a smoothy when mixed with bananas etc.

Apple and oat cookies

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:05:27 +0100

Due to some miss communication amongst the household we ended up with too many boxes of porridge oats. Thankfully this evening, some cookie making solved the problem.

This recipe was made up on the spot, and as a result doesn't make the most amazing tasting cookies you've ever had. But, I thought it might be worth letting you know what was used, so you can rustle some up (if you ever find your self with an over-abundance of oats).

300g oats
100g plain flour
2 tbsps of milled flaxseed
270g of apple sauce
(you can use more or less, we just used the remainder of what was available)
250g plain yoghurt
100g butter/margarine
75g sultanas
...and for the topping: Ground ginger, cinnamon and xylitol

The process is simple, mix the oats with the flour & flax and add the melted butter. Stir.

Add the apple sauce, and keep stirring. In fact, you can't really stir the mixture as it's quite dry and and stiff. Use your hands to make sure the butter is well combined with everything else.

Plonk in some sultanas, raisins, currents or whatever is lying around and mix one last time.

Now all that's left to do is roll the mixture into little balls, cover them with the topping and squash them down into a reasonable cookie shape. Put them in the oven for a few minutes on a high heat and bobs your uncle.

If you have any suggestions for other oat-based cookies please comment!

These would be nice crumbled up with some vanilla ice-cream, think I'll try that now...

Jambalaya, like paella but better

Wed, 27 May 2009 10:40:00 +0100

This recipe is one of my child hood favourites, something that my dad would make and I'd go back for bowl after bowl - it's fantasticly morish!

The recipe is actually Delia's, but I made some alterations

I skipped the green chilli because none of the shops had any in.
Instead of 110g of chorizo sausage, I used 125g of Danish Salami.

I left out the Tabasco sauce, and instead added used some harrisa paste that we had in.
I also added half a tsp of ground allspice (not mixed spice)
then some ground ginger, ground cumin, ground coriander, and paprika to taste.

Because this was my first time re-creating the dish it actually took me 2 hours from start to finish, including eating.

Unlike Paul's cheap fishy Thai green curry it totalled in about £12. But that's okay, because there was enough left over to Tupperware-up two containers worth for lunch and tea tomorrow!

Mocha Tart, a good start to a new blog

Fri, 22 May 2009 18:47:19 +0100

Hi, welcome to our fabulous new food blog. So that we get off to a good start, we thought we'd write about this delicious dessert!

We've modified this mocha tart recipe to use a strange but tasty & seemingly limited edition Chocolate Cappuccino Cereal that we found in B&M Bargains. You don't have to use this, but if you can get your hands on it - we thoroughly recommend you do! If not for this recipe, then for the fact that it contains chocolate made to look like coffee beans.

Here's what you'll need...

300g of double choc chip cookies
alternatively, use the aforementioned Kellogs Chocolate Cappuccino Cereal
100g butter
300ml whipping cream
Instant espresso powder
300g dark chocolate

Measure out the cereal, and shake from side to side to bring the larger particles to the surface, then extract as many 'coffee beans' as you'd like - used to later decorate the top.

Crush whatever you are using as the base by any means nessecary.

To save washing up, just whack the butter straight in with this and pop it in the microwave to melt the butter. Stir these two ingredients together and press into a loose bottomed cake tin. Pop it in the fridge.

Make yourself a brew, catch up on your favourite blogs and eat 100g of the chocolate.

Melt the remaining 200g of chocolate. Add 2 tablespoons of espresso powder to two tablespoons of boiling water, leave to cool (We put this in the freezer to speed things up).

Whip the cream until light and frothy, then stir in the melted chocolate and espresso. Whip again until stiff. Retrieve the base from the fridge and spoon your mixture onto it. Now all you have to do is put it back in the fridge until its set - this doesn't take long, about an hour at the most.

Decorate however you wish, perhaps with chocolate curls. We used the coffee beans procured from the cereal: