Madeleine's

A French classic.... with a twist. The traditional Madeleine’s have raspberries and lemon curd, but the ones I made don’t as raspberries aren’t in season. I made honey and vanilla flavoured ones.  The recipe is very simple as all you have to do is sift together flour and sugar, then mix together melted butter, egg yolk and vanilla extract. You whisk together egg whites until stiff. Then all you have to do is mix them all together. However when I baked these I took them out to early so they were uncooked in the middle, I had to keep putting them back into the oven as the centre wasn’t cooking as fast as the outside.

 

This recipe can be found on the GoodFood website.

Chocolate Cheesecake

A few nights ago we had guests round so I got to make CHEESECAKE!!! Baked white chocolate cheesecake to be exact. Making the base was great anger management as I got to crush to biscuit to smithereens. This pudding was quite fattening as there is about 900g of full-fat cream cheese!

To go with this rich desert I made a raspberry coulis. It was sweet and had a little alcohol in it. I put in lemon liquor, it gave a lovely after taste.

Serving the desert caused a problem, the base decided to stick to the bottom of the tin, so everyone got cheesecake with a side of biscuit base.

This recipe came from a GoodFood magazine.   

Panzanella

Mum and I were watching a cooking programme on telly and saw that the chef was cooking Panzanella. So mum went to the shops and bought some bread, but I couldn’t make that day as the bread was supposed to be stale so I had to wait till the next day. You have to prepare it in advance so the bread can soak up the juices, so you had to plan ahead.

To prepare the veg I had to place tomatoes in boiling water for a few minutes until the skin started to crack and peel, then I took them out with a spoon and peel the rest of the skin off. You then had to scoop the seeds out of the tomatoes and pour it over the bread, along with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and garlic. The peppers and chilli had to be roasted under the grill until charred on all sides. The veg got chopped up and layered with the bread, along with black olives and capers.

French Fancies

For the past week I have been in France on a school trip, so when I got home I thought I might cook something to do with France... never cook if you get home at 4:15 in the morning, which I did. Mum showed me some recipes that looked nice but then we saw FRENCH FANCIES!!!!

First of all I had to make the sponge which was easy enough. While that was in the oven I made syrup to pour over the sponge when it came out of the oven. I cut the sponge and poured over the syrup, and then disaster struck..... Fondant icing.  At first I had no problem, the recipe told me to follow the instructions on the pack. All I had to do was mix water, the fondant icing mix and food colouring, all was going to plan until it was time to put the icing onto the cakes. The recipe said to put a blob on top of each cake and let it drizzle down the sides, but my mix was a little thick so I decided to spread it... BAD IDEA!!!  The icing just dripped off the cakes onto the kitchen work surface and then onto the floor. I had to make 3 batches of icing to cover all the cakes as most of the icing was all over the kitchen and not on the cakes.

They turned out beautifully, and I got my dad to help me tidy up.

This recipe was taken from the recipe book ‘Stacie Bakes’.

Bake sale

As my sister absolutely loves my baking, I hope, she asked me to bake some biscuits for her to take into school for a bake sale. I had just finished my dinner so I had to clean the kitchen which wasn’t the most appealing job, but who cares I love baking.

I started making chocolate Rolo biscuits and they were going great until I decided to make them way too big and then had to reroll them to a reasonable  size. Then I put chocolate nibbles on the top so that when they were baking the caramel would ooze out and make a lovely sticky topping.

When they were just about finished mum said I had enough time to make so flapjack, which I love making as it’s really gooey and tasty. For some reason my mind had gone to goo that day and i started to try and melt the oats, I soon realised my mistake and started again. This recipe is quite simple, you melt butter, sugar and syrup, then mix in the oats and bake.

The Chocolate rolo biscuits come from the recipe book: Biscuit, by Miranda Gore Browne. The flapjack is an old family recipe.

You should definitely buy Miranda’s biscuit book, I love all the recipes in it.

spanich style chicken and homemade ice cream with meringue's

Piper, my older sister and my mum went away to a book festival, so it was just me and dad. I was bored so decided to cook dinner.... Problem was is was 4:45 already so I was in a mad panic to get to the shops and get FOOD! He was busy cutting the grass in the garden so he couldn’t hear me calling him, so I called him on him mobile which I soon realised was inside.... You may be thinking why I just didn’t go outside into the garden but my dog was wanting out and the garden gate was open so he could get out onto the road. So I did the logical thing and took him out on his lead and dragged dad to the van to take me to the supermarket. We did a super quick shop and were back by 5:00.

I was going to cook Spanish style chicken but for us it was the veggie option quorn, which tastes just as nice. But of course I set myself a huge challenge of making a pudding as well. This was going to be hazelnut meringue and homemade strawberry ice cream... tasty.

I worked out what I had to cook when on the way home from the supermarket. Meringue first, then while they were in the oven I would cut up the veg to go with the quorn and make the ice cream in my lovely ice cream maker. But I didn’t exactly read the instructions very carefully and put the cream straight into the ice cream maker which had been in the freezer for a number of months, so it was freezing cold and the cream instantly froze to the bottom. I got dad to help me scrape the frozen cream out of the ice cream maker and the re melt the cream with a knife that I heated up in a bowl of hot water. The ice cream turned out great in the end and was really tasty.

The Spanish style chicken was from the recipe book: The Hairy Dieters. The ice cream was from the recipe book that came with the ice cream maker.

Lentil shepherd's pie

As all my family as vegetarian, apart from me, which sucks, I have to make vegetarian meals..... But they’re still tasty so it’s fine.

    So for dinner a few nights ago mum told me to cook, it’s quite the task to choose a recipe that will appeal to my whole family and usually mum tells me what to cook which is so much easier. I sat down at flicked through a couple of recipe books and couldn’t decide on what to cook, as all I wanted to cook was chicken.... So I asked mum and she said she had marked a page in a recipe book for me to cook. Great I had just wasted about 20 minutes on nothing.

 So mum had chosen lentil Shepherd’s  pie. TASTY. I have to admit I have never actually made mash potato, which seems strange so that was the new element of the recipe.

    Instead of putting in meat the recipe told me to put in lentils which were a nice substitute. First of all i had to boil the potatoes and then mash. Then I spent half an hour cutting and chopping and peeling vegetables, I managed to grate my thumb and finger.... Don’t worry, no flesh was actually put in the mix... then I cooked the veg and put in a big Pyrex dish. When the potatoes were ready I mashed them up, which I found amusing for some strange reason. Then it was all ready to go in the oven for 30-40 minutes. It was really good, you should definitely try this recipe.

The recipe above was taken from the recipe book: Gaia’s kitchen.

Friday Night Treat

After school I was in the baking mood, so I flicked through some recipe books and decided on s’more chocolate cupcakes.

The sponge was just a regular chocolate mix, but it was the marshmallow icing that was the real challenge. Firstly I didn’t have enough egg whites so I have to down size the recipe for the icing. You had to bring to the boil 150g of sugar along with 113ml of water. When it had reached the ‘soft ball’ stage (when a drop of the syrup is put in a bowl of very cold water and forms a ball, but when taken out lays flat in your hand) you had to add it 3 egg whites that you had whisked up so it was ‘foamy’, you too had to whisk the syrup and egg whites until the bowl was luke warm, also the mixture should have doubled in size.    

This recipe was taken from ‘The Hummingbird bakery cake days’ recipe book.  

Last night's dinner

Last night for dinner I decided to challenge myself, and cook something I had never made before.

I decided to make three different curries and a lovely dessert.

For the main I cooked - Ginger-chilli peanuts and potatoes, it had chunks of green chilli cooked in with the potatoes to give it some heat. I liked the spiciness of it but some of my family didn't, just depends whether or not you like heat.

I also cooked - Pea and cauliflower curry. It was delicious, you had to make your own curry sauce. The hard thing about this dish is it can't be prepared earlier in the day, it all happens at the same time, so timing is very important.

Item number 3 - Cinnamon-spice chickpea curry. It had a lovely tomato sauce going through the chickpeas. The recipe told me to use 3 - 6 chillies, but as my sister doesn't like spicy food I only used 3 and that wasn't too hot.

Finally the rice - Cumin-infused rice. This was truly delicious. You had to toast the cumin seeds in oil until they went dark brown and then you caramelized the onion in this. Then you added the rice and let it cook. The rice turned out A-MAZ-ING.

 

All the recipes above were from Kaushy Patel's recipe book for Indian vegetarian cooking.

Dessert - White Chocolate and cardamom mousse. I prepared it earlier in the morning so it had time to set. It was really nice. It had 8 cardamom pods in it which achieved a great flavour. It was thick and went really nicely with the dark chocolate decorations I had made, they just made it a little bitter so it wasn't too sweet.

This recipe was written by Nigel Slater.