Taking (or giving) the biscuit

Biscuits are easy to make but also easy to jazz up into nice gifts. My favourites come from Holly Bell, on Recipes From A Normal Mum:

St Clement's Shortbread Stars - Super easy, and look very classy if you can manage to keep small hands away from the decorating. Of course, the splodges-and-sprinkles look is also great, especially for teacher and grandparent gifts...

Cut Out Vanilla Biscuits - the best for fiddly cutters.

Lemon Animal Biscuits - For playdough-style moulding rather than cutters.

I've previously done Nigella's Christmas Spice Cookies and they are good too.

Ikea meatball sauce

...allegedly (recipe here)

This was too thick. It's basically a white sauce made with cream and stock instead of milk. Pretty tasty, but another time I would make the usual white sauce with milk and a stock cube. Could benefit from mushroom stock, finely chopped mushrooms and maybe capers or gherkins.

The perfect tiramisu?

Taken from a Guardian article.

I made 1.5 times the quantity for a big-ish gathering, and there was definitely not as much as I expected, but then again it's quite rich. I put a quarter to a third of the mix in a separate dish (2 layers) without alcohol. In the one with alcohol, I used Kahlua as I didn't have the specified booze.

 Things I might change next time:

- make the yolk mix and then do the whites. The whites wept a bit when they were left and I think they weren't as fluffy after waiting.
- make sure the sponges are well soaked (and boozy!) without being soggy. There were dry bits.

On the mascarpone lid, there was an alternative recipe involving mixing pre-made custard with mascarpone... might try that another time!

Butternut squash casserole

An inevitably-tweaked BBC Good Food recipe. Ripe for slow cooker conversion but haven't done it yet - although it's so easy, as long as you have 30 minutes to really let it simmer it will be fine.

2 onions
1 clove garlic
500g each butternut squash and sweet potato (peeled, chopped, and handily frozen by Tesco...)
1 jar roasted red peppers (I buy them from the World Foods aisle where they are cheaper)
2 tins chopped tomatoes
1 tin chick peas
ground cumin
freshly ground cumin seeds
paprika
1 stock cube of your choice made up with about 100ml water


Chop the onion and fry along with the spices until translucent. Chuck in the peppers (chopped), squash and sweet potato, chick peas, tomatoes and stock then simmer until the squash and potato are soft.

Optionally, serve with grated cheese, fresh coriander, plain yogurt, and cous cous. But it's fine as a one pot.

Pork casserole

Didn't do this in the slow cooker but I think it is ripe for conversion to do so. One from Holly Bell's fab blog, it got the thumbs up in this house.

Lean pork shoulder (350g) browned in flour, an onion and a stick of celery chopped and softened along with a couple of carrots, sage and black pepper, chucked in a pot with a chunked bramley (or maybe two if smaller), a couple of bay leaves and pork stock (350ml) to round it out. I also popped in some chestnut mushrooms. An hour at 160°C (fan) did the trick.

Served it just with kale and courgette that we had knocking about and needed finishing. The kale worked especially well with the zingy sauce. There was a lot of liquid so at the end I also put in some leftover mash we had, which helped a bit. I think next time I'd put dumplings on the top, maybe made with a dab of wholegrain mustard, or serve with mustard mash. Savoy cabbage would be another good accompaniment.

Bonfire beauties

We had a really lovely bonfire party at friends' yesterday, lots of sharing dishes and cakes. Here's one recipe from me, and one from someone else that I tried on the night and loved.

Bonfire cupcakes (makes 24)

I made a standard 4-egg chocolate sponge mix (sub out 30g flour for cocoa powder). For me, this made 24 cupcakes with about 40g raw mix. I made them in muffin cases so there was a bit of freeboard, and they baked in about 20 minutes at 160°C (fan).

Once cooled:

Paint the top with marmalade and roll in, or sprinkle on, any chocolate/dark sprinkles, especially around the edge.

Pipe in a 'fire' of buttercream. I made one with 250g butter, 350g icing sugar, and milk to loosen (turned out there was about 20-25% too much for what I needed, but I don't like over-frosted cakes). I coloured it red, orange and yellow in three batches with gel colour, and placed it in the piping bag by alternating spoonfuls.

Add chocolate sticks for "wood" - I used posh Elizabeth Shaw things due to a lack of choice but Matchmakers would be ideal. There are 24 in a box and I had 2 boxes, so each cake got 6 bits. However, the sticks needed to be shorter than I first thought to look good (too-tall pyramid fires look silly) so I have a pot of snapped off ends to eat...

For a final touch I added two mini marshmallows on a cocktail stick to each :)

The other recipe I want to record before I lose it...

Delicious, rich-tasting, barbecue-y vegan baked beans from A Virtual Vegan. (Advice is to omit the vinegar.)

More slow stuff

Mixed bean chilli - left to bubble while we were out trick-or-treating.

I did my usual basic recipe (onions, courgettes, peppers, tinned tomatoes, sweetcorn, chilli powder, and whatever beans I can lay my hands on - kidney, blackeye, canellini, black in this case). Hard to reduce the liquid when there's no added water, and indeed this came out a bit soupy. Next time I think I will bung some red lentils in to thicken.


Slow cooker lamb curry (BBC Good Food)

Oddly this said to put everything in the slow cooker pot and refrigerate overnight. I didn't read that in time, but I don't have room in my fridge anyway, so I skipped that stage. It didn't seem to matter. I also used korma paste as that's what we had. The kale was OK but left a bit of a cabbagey aroma while cooking so I might consider a switch next time, maybe mushrooms for bulk and spinach for greens. And, ironically given the above, I forgot the lentils and it was again a bit soupy. But that meant plenty of sauce for naan breads to soak up :)