won't cook, can't cook

Ginger bread and butter pudding

4th November 2015 by Jax Blunt 4 Comments

I have a habit of haunting the reduced shelves in the local coop. Recently they’ve been having some great deals on milk – we get through a lot anyway, but whenever there’s a big bottle (6 pints!) I bring it home and make some kind of milk pudding. Last night I grabbed a reduced price loaf of bread as well, knowing that we already had the other ingredients for bread and butter pudding, and that most of the family like it.

The recipe I use is based on one from The Dairy Book of Home Cookery (Amazon marketplace affiliate link). This is one of the books we inherited with the house, having previously belonged to Tim’s parents. I love using a book that I can tell was well used before us – there are slips of paper marking favourite recipes such as macaroni cheese. (Actually, must try that.)

I do adapt the recipe somewhat though. Where it calls for caster sugar, I use brown. And I’m very fast and loose with flavourings. I’ve done chocolate spread, used brioche in place of the thin white bread, even did one with marmalade. (Which was very good actually.) Last night I really pushed the boat out and made two separate ones, a normal with currants and a half one flavoured with stem ginger.

Where the original recipe calls for caster sugar I use soft brown. The ratios are as follows.

6 thin slices white bread

Butter for spreading and greasing the bowl.

50g flavouring (basic recipe calls for currants/ sultanas/ dried fruit)

40g caster sugar (I use soft brown).

2 large eggs

1 pt milk.

Method.

Butter bread, removing crusts and cut into quarters. Place half across base of buttered heatproof dish. Add flavouring (see above) and half of the sugar. Top with rest of bread, buttered side up. Sprinkle with rest of sugar. (Depending on your other flavours, cinnamon is a nice addition to the topping.)

Beat eggs and and milk together, pour over bread.

Leave it to stand for 20-30 minutes, basically until the bread is looking soggy. The cheaper the bread the faster this will happen. Bake at 160 degrees C/ 325 degrees F/ Gas no 3 for 3/4 to an hour. Basically until it’s risen and browned. (More sugar on top will assist with developing a crust).

For the stem ginger I used about half a lump – I think I’d go with a bit more if I did it again. And maybe add some dried ginger as well. Served with copious quantities of thick fresh custard (made with Birds custard powder).

The half amount made me three pleasant sized portions in case you’re wondering, so around a slice of bread a go.

And that’s my first contribution to Emma of Silverpebble jewellry Making Winter initiative. Focusing on crafting, making and baking our way through the darker days of the year, Emma is looking to help us join together to brighten wintry days. You can join in via instagram with pics of your make and the hashtag #making_winter or you can do like I’ve done, blog, and join the bloghop. Looking forward to seeing what winter holds!

Also linked with Recipe of the week.

Swiss chocolate marrow brownie

6th August 2014 by Jax Blunt 9 Comments

It’s marrow season. You know, when the courgettes go mad, and you’ve got to try to work out what to do with heaps and heaps of vegetables, brought from the allotment, that the kids won’t touch.

I’ve been making chocolate marrow cake for a while, but I decided to branch out, and went searching for a brownie recipe. I found an excellent recipe on Corner Cottage bakery for chocolate courgette brownies, and it provided the starting point for some experimentation. Because I’m all about Making it up 😉

I didn’t have any oil. Except olive oil, and I couldn’t see that working too well. And I’d run out of cocoa making two marrow cakes already. (It was a really big marrow.) But I did have a tin of Twinings Swiss chocolate drink, which is around 25% cocoa and chocolate. (I misread the ingredients at first and thought it was only 20%. My bad.) So I tweaked the ingredients around, and my recipe reads:

160g melted butter

250g Swiss chocolate drink. (This is the kind you have to add to hot milk, NOT instant hot chocolate.)

100g dark brown sugar

2tsp vanilla extract

250g self raising flour

250g marrow, peeled, coarsely grated, seeds removed

100g bashed up milk chocolate

I mix the melted butter with the chocolate drink and the sugar, very thoroughly, and then added the flour before doing more mixing. At this point it looks like dry bread crumbs. Bit scary. Don’t panic though, just add the marrow and chocolate.

Mix again, thoroughly. It should get a lot wetter at this point, and start looking like you expect brownie batter to look. Stickier than cake, thick, gloopy, all these adjectives spring to mind.

Spoon it into your pre lined 9 inch square tin. (Or in my case, 10 1/2 by 7 inch tin. Or if you use a smaller tin, be prepared for your brownie mixture to overflow all over your oven and burn horribly. Sigh.)

Bake. Mine takes around 50 minutes to an hour at 180 degrees in a non fan oven. Maybe I should be upping the temperature and baking it for a shorter time, but this means I get a really moist, fairly light brownie without the edges drying out too much. It’s really really good served still hot with icecream.

You’re welcome.

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Dunwich Heath Sconeathon – inspiring Stilton and Ale scones.

11th March 2014 by Jax Blunt 19 Comments

At the weekend we were invited up to Dunwich Heath National trust, who were having a sconeathon. I’d no idea what a sconeathon is, but it sounded like a good idea 😉

Dunwich Heath is just up the coast from us, and not a National Trust property we’d visited before. Then again, we haven’t done nearly as many outings over the last couple of years as I like to. Can’t think why. With the sudden weather change I couldn’t resist a day out, although with hindsight I should have insisted on slightly heavier outerwear for the older members of the group. The sun was warm, but the site is on a clifftop, with the winds you’d anticipate.

The bright spring day had certainly brought out visitors in strength, although I don’t think many were aware of the sconeathon. They were in for a treat.

The cafe usually serves a variety of cakes as well as soups and sandwiches. On Saturday they had 19 different scones on display, including a couple of gluten free recipes. There were sweet and savoury, with pots of cream and jam or chutney or cream. We tried a selection, including my personal favourite, Stilton and Ale.

I didn’t even get to try the malteser one I split between the two youngest – they devoured it. Big enjoyed a cheese and chive one, and we all shared the nutella and pistachio, which grew on me. (Was a funny colour for a scone though!)

I got to have a brief chat with Rob, who is the catering manager and the brains behind the sconeathon. I get the impression scones are big in his life 😉 There’s a scone club, and he does a scone of the day, alongside the other offerings, but this was a special event to try out some new flavours and see which ones to add to his regular repertoire. I did suggest he got on instagram, as I suggest scone of the day would play *very* well there. Lack of internet signal did make sharing our pictures immediately rather difficult.

Once we’d enjoyed our scones, we went outside to the little play area. The smaller children played as if it was midsummer, and Big mainly shivered.

The site is based around coastguard cottages and a lookout where people watched for smugglers according to the varioius signs. I wanted to look at the children’s nature trails and so on, but I think we’ll have to go another time for that – I couldn’t get small people out of the play area to do anything else.

We did go inside to the lookout area and use the telescope and binoculars for a while. That room also doubles as an overspill for the cafe, so you can take your cakes or scones and cuppas up there if you’d like a break from the wind. I was surprised by the number of people enjoying their snacks outside, but maybe if I’d had a thicker coat I’d have felt better about it.

Once home, we enjoyed the goodie bag Rob thoughtfully supplied of four extra scones.

Clockwise from top left, those are bacon and maple, banana and maple, apple and cinnamon and raspberry and white chocolate. Difficult to choose a favourite from those, although I think it would probably end up being bacon and maple if I took a poll. I was surprised that the raspberry and white choc wasn’t more popular, but maybe it paled beside maltesers 😉

And then this week I’ve kept on thinking about Stilton and Ale scones. So I decided to have a go at making my own version. Handily I had some stilton in the fridge, so I only needed to pick up some ale. Such a hardship.

My recipe as follows.

450g self raising flour. (Not flower, as I originally typed.)

110g butter.

pinch salt.

60g stilton.

8fl oz ale of choice (green king IPA for me).

2fl oz milk.

Flour in a bowl, cube the butter into it, add salt. Rub together until it makes breadcrumby type mixture. Grate or finely chop the stilton and mix through the flour mixture. Add ale and milk, stir in until it makes a dough. You may want to go steady with the beer – I ended up adding a bit of extra flour as it seemed quite a sticky mixture.

Knead a little until thoroughly mixed, then roll out to about 2 cm thick, and cut out. I ended up with 19 scones from this mixture. Brush tops with a little milk if you wish.

Bake in pre heated oven at 220 Centigrade (probably lower for a fan oven, I don’t have one, so can’t say.) Take approx 12- 15 minutes to bake.

Allow to cool a little, devour with butter and a little home made chutney.

Not bad eh?

Linking up to Country kids and recipe of the week 🙂

Disclosure – we were invited to Dunwich Heath and supplied with free scones. They were a bit fabulous, and I’m going to talk about them lots.

Cooking with kids using Dairy Milk Chocolate for Collective Bias

4th June 2013 by Jax Blunt 2 Comments

This week I shopped for Dairy Milk at our local supermarket as part of a sponsored shop for the Collective Bias community, to use in cooking with children. See how we got on.

First of all there’s the actual shopping. I went to our local East of England Coop, which is about 5 minutes walk from our house – handy for last minute shopping trips.

I took lots of photos, mainly recorded in this Google+ album. When I’m shopping I like to be sure I’m getting value for money, so I check the prices on all products – I do wish supermarkets wouldn’t do things like putting the informative price tickets with the comparison prices under extra shelf stickers. In this case it turned out that it was cheaper to buy a pack of 8 small bars instead of one big bar, which never makes any sense to me. I also picked up a couple of new types of chocolate, which happily were on offer – Dairy Milk Jelly Popping Candy and Cookie Nut Crunch.

Back home, time to employ my army of helpers and my favourite recipe book. I can’t link you to the book online – it’s a little pamphlet we inherited with the house and as it’s quite old, I don’t expect there are many copies lying around. Whenever I use it I like to think about the women whose recipes I’m using, and Tim’s mum, whose book it was. I didn’t know her for very long, so this kind of connection is important to me – that her grandchildren are still getting food she might have cooked for them, and that we’re touching and using things that she touched. I know that might sound a little odd, but it feels like I’m linking them to a grandmother only Big ever met.

Of course with this kind of activity, it’s good to actually get the children doing some of the cooking and having a good range of ages, I can have Big helping with Smallest. It’s great to have an activity that they can enjoy – there’s 10 years between them and obviously their interests are rather different. Something like cooking though gives a structure to the interaction.

When it came to the sharp knives, I got involved.

Looks good, doesn’t it? I was surprised at the uneven chunks. Is that odd? I expect my chocolate to be the same as it’s always been, regular sized bits. But there you go. I suppose everything changes. I don’t have to like it though!

Presentation is very important – even though Small was champing at the bit, Big was determined we were going to have a properly laid out plate of brownies.

Looks like it was worth waiting for.

And Smallest was very pleased with herself and the end result. Which kind of makes it all worthwhile.

Adding baking into the day was a great activity. We tried to have a family film night, but the film we wanted to watch wouldn’t download. So there’s no picture of us sitting around with popcorn as by the time we’d found an alternative, most of it had been either spilled (by the 15 month old destructabot) or eaten.

Having Dairy Milk Jelly Popping Candy brownies to finish the meal off rather rescued the day though, so thanks for that, Collective Bias 🙂

Home education or domestic servitude?

28th February 2012 by Jax Blunt 10 Comments

One of the reasons given by the labour government for their investigations into home education and proposed legislation about it was to protect children from domestic servitude. I wonder what they’d have thought about the two hour home economics lesson that took place over yesterday and today, and resulted in Big providing tea for the family tonight?

She looked through our recipe books and chose macaroni and cheese with an apple crumble dessert. She wrote out shopping lists (which we obviously then forgot to take out with us!) and came with me to do the shopping. We substituted reginette pasta for macaroni (neither aldi nor lidl sell macaroni as far as I can tell) and pancetta for bacon as it was pre chopped. That was the only thing that pushed the price up actually, but otherwise it was a pretty cheap meal.

She did all the preparation – I helped her work out what order to do things in, and sat in the kitchen offering what I fondly hoped were helpful words of advice. I remember my first home economics lesson way back when – we made baked stuffed apples. I also remember my sister’s at the local comp, they made angel delight. From a packet.

We had to adjust the recipe somewhat – the dairy cookbook advised 75g of pasta to feed 4 which seemed somewhat optimistic. And the half pint of milk was a bit miserly sauce wise. I’ve suggested that she uses an exercise book to write up her versions of the recipes after she’s cooked them, then she should end up with a really good resource for the future. And of course she has to adapt for the finicky vegetarian in the family (that would be me 😉 ).

The apple crumble didn’t require any tweaking. And was lovely. As was the custard she made to go with it.

Basically, the meal was a success. And as such she wants to do it every Tuesday (that being the day that she has no evening activity, so actually has time to be in the kitchen). Which sounds like a definite result to me.

Actually, it’s been an excellent education day all round. Small is learning about nutritional needs and how to do research and structure an essay around it. I’m hoping this might also improve his eating and drinking habits. Smallest did crafts with Big while I was at osteopath (yes, dp was in the house, I didn’t just abandon them to look after each other before I get a second black mark against my name…) and I also bought a pair of scissors with soft handles and she spent quite literally hours cutting. Meaning the kitchen floor could do with a sweep now 😉 I do love the montessori approach with that sort of thing, recognising that children will spend time on a new skill that interests them. I foresee lots of little bits of paper in my future.

So, apart from the fact that all of this structured organised education rather gets in the way of me loafing about online during the day, it’s all good. And it’s the way it’s going to be from now. Lists are already written up for tomorrow 😉

won't cook, can't cook

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