Tips

One day I will have a nice neat section for this but for now I am just going to publish them as they come to me. So here are two tips from this mornings cooking efforts...

1. If you have fruit on the verge of ripening, freeze it.
• If it is a citrus fruit, just chop it into slices, freeze it in a ziplock bag and use to cool drinks (no need for ice in that G&T if you have a frozen lime!).
• Apples and pears and the like can be peeled, cored, chopped and again frozen in ziplocks to be used in crumbles or any other stewed fruit recipe
• bananas freeze well when peeled and left whole
• berries can be frozen as is altho if they have a husk it's better to remove that before hand
2. Freeze butter (do you see a theme here?!)
• For any recipe that requires you to create 'breadcrumbs' (i.e.crumble, dough, pastry etc) I find that if you freeze the butter and then grate it, it is much easier to get that desired breadcrumb effect than from cubes of room temperature or even fridge temperature butter.

Butter

I bloody love butter. Real, proper butter. There is no place for margarine in my house.

EVERTHING tastes better if you cook it in butter. Steaming vegetables? Add a knob of butter. Roasting vegetables? Add a knob of buttter. Frying vegetables? Add a knob of butter. Scrambling eggs? Add a knob of butter.  You see my point.

But my favourite way to eat butter is in its purest form, on stuff. On toast, on baked potatoes, on sweetcorn, and of course on bread. On fresh, white, fluffy, beautiful bread. Deeeeeeeelicious.

Now, I realise that butter is somwhat not good for you. But you don't have to cook every part of every meal with it. You could just enjoy it occasionally, and sparcely. Pah! Take up running.

Baked Potato

As you might have gathered from the fact I have started writing a 'food blog' of sorts, I like to think of myself as a cook.

So it may come as a surprise to know that today, at 28 years, 7 months and 20 days old (yes I worked this out just now, it's not something I keep track of!), was the first day I baked a potato.

I was surprised by two things. 1. How easy it was. 2. How good it tasted.

I gave up eating potatoes years ago for the simple, if lazy, reason that I hate peeling them. I hate it. With a peeler, a knife, whatever. I hate it.

Anyway, tonight I put a couple of baking potatoes in the oven for 3 hours at 150 degrees centigrade and they turned out just scrumptious. With a generous knob of butter and a sprinkling of salt it made a yummy addition to our dinner. Skin and all.

Have you rediscovered anything simple but wonderful recently?

Mini Victoria Sponges

Some friends of ours got married recently and asked me if I would makes the wedding cakes. Of course I said yes, I would be thrilled to. And that's about where the simplicity stopped. It was a week of catastrophes but I will highlight the main ones for you.

The order was for a traditional fruit cake and then miniature victoria sponges. 140 of them. The fruit cake was done well in advance and all went to plan. The sponges, not so much.

I bought a new set of mini tins for the purpose as I thought it would be easier, neater and more cost effective than making a tray bake and cutting them out. The tray holds 16 mini cakes. I was unsure of quantities so I used the recipe for one victoria sponge to see how that worked out for me. The tins were about 2/3rds full so when I put them in I was worried about them rising enough to fill the tins. This is what happened...

Woohoo! I thought to myself. Perfect, I can just lop the tops off them and they will be just ideal.

But then this happened...

Not so ideal. But not the end of the world because they looked like they were rescue-able. So I took them out of the tins. And then this happened...

Have you ever seen such a strange shaped cake? They hadn't 'risen' in the middle. Or they had shrunk in the middle. I have no idea what happened but they were certainly not useable!

I baked a whole sponge to cut mini ones out of but that also failed and so I went back to what I know best. Cupcakes. I boshed out 12 dozen cupcakes in a couple of days. I took them out of their cases, cut them in half, piped buttercream (fresh cream would have spoiled) and spooned jam into the middle and put the tops on. I then put them into fresh cases. You would never have known that they started life as cupcakes, they turned out as perfect little victoria sponges. I had piped 200 (to allow for breakages) white chocolate hearts onto parchment. I piped an extra blob of buttercream on the top of each cake and stood a heart in it.

This was the final outcome

LESSON LEARNED: Do not leave your mixer running when breaking eggs into the cake batter. It will only end in tears - while you mustn't cry over split milk you are very much entitled to cry over beaten eggs, shell and all.

HINT AND TIP: If a small piece of egg shell falls into somewhere you don't want it, use the remainder of the shell to fish it out. It will cut through the white better than any spoon or utensil.

Some history...

So, I thought seen as this is a new blog I would explain why I started it and what it's about. I will not explain how I am going to keep track of two blogs when I cannot keep up with the one, that is something I myself am yet to figure out.

This is my first blog http://sprinklesandsprogs.blogspot.com/
It's about parenting but mainly about having a son with a hearing impairement and how that makes me feel. Yes folks, that one is mainly all about me. I thought I would blog about baking alongside parenting but there just does't seem to be room for it.

This is my new blog http://foodytofamily.blogspot.com/ (you don't have to click on it, you are already here!)
It is going to be about food. I LOVE food. I love eating, I love cooking and I love baking. I love making jams and chutneys. I love making spectacular cakes and I love making regular ones. I love meals that take 5 hours and 20 ingredients and I love meals that take 10 minutes and 3 ingredients. The man in my life loves growing vegetables and roasting entire animals so I might even get him on here to talk to you about that. I love feeding people. I have been called a feeder and to that I take offense but I love the pleasure that food brings people and that I can be the cook behind that pleasure. I want to share all of this with you.

So here we go, some tales of cooking and baking and sharing recipes and pleasure. I hope you'll come along with me for the ride.

Ali. x