Halloween cupcakes

I guess it's a bit late to be making a post about anything Halloween related. Supermarket stackers are no doubt already pulling all the Halloween confectionery from the shelves. Somewhere out there, hardcore Halloween enthusiasts are starting to realise that it won't be 31st October again for a whole year and asking themselves "Do I have enough energy to drag myself down to Sainsbury's to check out the half price chocolate witches and reduced vampire make-up which would really come in handy for fancy dress parties?".

I made these ones with a friend. At first orange seemed like a great idea because it meant we could make pumpkin faced cupcakes which worked for the one at the bottom in the middle but then confused us when we wanted to do anything that wasn't orange which is why every other one looks a bit naff unless you try to imagine another colour in the background.

To make the orange Royal Icing simply whisk an egg white for about 20 seconds until a little bit frothy. To get enough to cover about a dozen cakes, just use about a third of the egg white and then slowly keep adding sieved icing sugar with a couple of drops of red and yellow food colouring. When it gets firm enough to roll into a ball, dust some icing sugar on a clean surface and roll out. I used a cup to cut out the circles to go on top and some ready made tubes of 'writing icing' for drawing. Oh and I heated up about 2 tbsps of apricot jam with a tbsp of water to make a glaze which was then painted on the cakes to enable the icing to stick.

Chanelle has a tantrum on Ready Steady Cook

It's all too easy to bitch about this princess but seeing as she had never crossed over into the food/restaurant territory, I never had the means to warrant a good old Chanelle rant.

So imagine my joy when I saw her on Friday's edition of Ready Steady Cook!



What confuses me about this video is the number of opportunities Brian Turner has to head-butt Chanelle but turns them down. That's fair enough Brian. After all it's a family show and it's shown before the watershed but that really doesn't explain why you had to hug her instead. We'd rather be watching Deal or No Deal.

Slump in Italian wine sales

"Wine could make a good antibacterial mouth wash to fight tooth decay and a sore throat, according to Italian researchers." says The Telegraph.


Does that mean we can expect next weeks news to report that British researchers will recommend that you should gargle with cider?

The Anti-Borough Market

Have you had it up to your nostrils with trendy farmers markets? Are you sick of pretending that you like smelly French cheese? Do you want to spend your Saturday mornings anywhere BUT browsing organic foods you've never heard of surrounded by middle-class, half-arsed hippies? If the answer to any of these is 'yes' you may want to pay a visit to one of London's lesser known markets; Lewisham Market.


To be honest, I don't really mind Lewisham. I mean, it looks OK from the window when you pass through it on the train. That is until the day you pluck up the courage to get off the train and see the local shops and suddenly recall all the times you've heard bad things on the news about locals getting shot. Then comes the day when you finally visit the market on the weekend. It's then. That first visit to the market when you add up everything and start to realise why it has such an undesirable reputation. It is, in a nutshell, rough. But boy oh boy, is the fruit cheap!


Take a look at this lot for example. A massive bag of grapes, an equally stuffed bag of bananas, a box of mangoes, fourteen plums and two pineapples. All for £5!

Is it organic? No! Is it fair trade? Not likely! Is it at least fresh and of good quality? Hardly ever!


Look at those apples. OK, so they're quite pale compared to the ones from Borough Market (on the right) but then again, you're paying a pound for the whole bowl. So who cares if they've been on the pavement? I certainly don't!


Box of mangoes with strange black spots for £1? Yes please! And to think you could have bought the 'disease-free' variety in Borough Market for double!


And who needs all those fancy pastries and muffins when there's a perfectly good doughnut stand? They are fresh after all! I didn't see that man making that really delicious muffin before my eyes. Who knows where it could have come from?


We'll ignore that for now....


And don't worry if you couldn't find what you wanted at the market - Iceland will probably have it.

Nutella cake

Seeing as every other food blogger under the sun has done the Nutella cake (e.g. here, here, here, here, here and here) and not wanting to feel left out, I thought I really should do it as well. Not to mention the fact that I've been desperate to see how satisfying it would be to empty a whole jar of Nutella in one go.

Ingredients for the cake
400g jar Nutella
125g soft, unsalted butter
6 eggs, seperated
120g dark chocolate
100g ground hazelnuts
1 tbsp Frangelico, rum or water

For the ganache
125ml double cream
125g dark chocolate
1 tbsp Frangelico, rum or water

Beat butter, Nutella and Frangelico together until combined (BTW, I don't think Frangelico really exists. It sounds like it's been made-up, like Brangelina or frenemies which is why I used rum instead). Beat in the egg yolks one at a time, saving the egg whites for later. Add the ground hazelnuts and melted, cooled chocolate. Fold in whisked egg whites and bake in a lined 23cm springform tin at gas mark 4 for about 45 minutes or until a tester comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.

To make the ganache, you simply heat the cream over a LOW heat to which you add the chocolate then keep stirring until it has melted. I really stupidly started doing the stupid washing-up and didn't see the cream bubbling away with the chocolate inside, burning at the bottom of the pan. This, really unfortunately, led to this mess:

(Warning: Some readers may find the following pictures offensive and/or disturbing)


ARGGHH! How could I mess up something so simple? And what IS that yellow liquid? I obviously couldn't spread that on top of the cake and so had to go to the Co-op AGAIN and once AGAIN be convinced that their "dark" chocolate really does have a cocoa content of 63% and above. Why isn't there such a thing as a Waitrose Local? The second attempt went much more smoothly because I was actually paying attention. This is what it should look like:


Ahhh, much better! This was then lightly whipped and then spread on the cooled cake. I found that it took on the consistency of butter cream although judging by the other blogger's attempts, I'm not sure how ganache is meant to look.


Even though there's a whole jar of Nutella in the cake, I think perhaps it would have been better to add some extra sugar as it is rather rich and hence not great for children even though you might think that kids would be this cakes target demographic. It is ultimately a tacky but fun version of Torta Caprese which, after Christmas cake, is one of my most favourite cakes. And maybe if I didn't have such a stuck up view of chocolate nut cakes, then this one would soon be winging its way to my best cakes list for its fudgy, brownie-like qualities.

(And if you're planning on taking photos of the cake, it's probably best not to display it on that really naff Argos plate your Mum fobbed off on to you because even she didn't want it.)

Apricot jam

I thought there was some big secret behind jam. That it took days of preparation and then hours of cooking and required loads of sugar. Well, I was right about the sugar bit, in fact I was rather shocked to discover how much sugar goes into jam. The cooking bit however, I was wrong about. It took only a couple of hours from start to finish to knock up four jars of the stuff and now that I know how easy it is, I feel like I can't stop myself now.

I already tried out strawberry jam last week. Laughing, I put my half-price, half-eaten punnet of strawberries into the saucepan expecting to get two teaspoons worth of jam at the end of it:

"There's no way I'll make enough jam to make this experiment worthwhile. Aren't there like a million strawberries in a jar of jam? I'm sure I've read that on the label before!"


But no, I was rather pleasantly surprised to find a healthy sized jar-portion sitting in the bottom of the saucepan after my experiment. Which is why I've now moved onto apricots.

Ingredients
1.5kg apricots (after stoning)
1.5kg white granulated sugar
1 lemon
Approx. 10 almonds from inside the apricot stones

This will give you enough for four medium sized jars however you can make however much you want based on how ever many apricots you have. Basically, once you've taken the stones out, weigh the apricots and this will give you the weight of sugar you will need.

Half the apricots and place in the biggest saucepan you have with the sugar and juice from one lemon. Boil for about 30 minutes until the sugar has dissolved. In the meantime, you can get on with the almonds. That is, if you choose to put them in, as I only actually put them in one of my jars.

Crack open about ten of the stones to get the kernels and then blanch them for 2 minutes in boiling water. Skin them, halve them and place on a paper towel to dry out until you need them.

Now you're meant to do the Wrinkle Test on the jam which is now my most favourite test in the world! (And I reckon I passed it with flying colours). It involves eating warm spoonfuls of jam that have been spread on the surface of a chilled plate. If the jam wrinkles when you tilt the plate after a couple of seconds, then it's set and you can take it off the heat. If not, then let it boil for a few more minutes. You should really chill your plate in the freezer before hand but I did mine under the cold tap for a few minutes which is probably a bit of a waste of water and hence not very good for your Water Footprint - that's like your Carbon Footprint only muddier. Once it has been taken off the heat, Delia suggests dispersing the scum collected on the surface with a knob of butter but I found it easier to skim it off and disperse it in my tummy :)

After eating the scummy jam, leave it to cool for half an hour and then divide into sterilized jars. Sterilized jars, just to remind you, are jars that have been washed in warm, soapy water and then dried in the oven on a medium heat for about 30 minutes.

Apparently you should wait a few months to let the jam mature. If you're concerned that you won't have the willpower to go through with this, then I recommend getting your mum to come around and hide them. Just don't get your senile grandmother to do it or in a couple of months time, she would've forgotten where she'd put them.

Super headline

"Superfoods fly off shelves as Britons get healthy" according to The Independant.

Of course they can fly. They can also see through walls and save children from burning buildings!