Rococo artisan bar - pastilles pour chocolat

It comes in this fancy plastic wrapping similar to the packaging they put tobacco in so once you've finished eating the chocolate, you can fill it up with shredded toilet paper and carry it around with you pretending you smoke because smoking is cool.

Congratulations to me for managing to not eat it on the way home from Waitrose so I could take these photos.

In my tummy faster than you can say "£3.50 for 70g?!"

The weirdest carrot cake I've ever made

My Mum requested me to make her a carrot cake for Mother's Day. She was obviously referring to that really nice Nigel Slater carrot cake I often make. She would have really liked it if I had made her that cake. But no, I thought I'd be adventurous and try out this Josceline Dimbleby cake. She never requests me to make anything and after this, I'm worried she won't request anything again.

The recipe reminds me of that Moro Cake from Nigella's How To Eat. It has a light egg white base and is then covered with syrup. Hopefully it tasted as good as the Moro Cake but I'm still to scared to phone her to get her opinion on it.

Ingredients

For the cake
100g self-raising flour
1 tsp salt
175g caster sugar
4 tbsps sunflower oil
5 tbsps water
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 large eggs, separated
225g grated carrots
1 tsp cream tartar

For the candied carrot top
225g carrots
1 lemon
225g granulated sugar
4 tbsps water

Pre-heat oven to gas mark 3. Line a 7-8 inch cake tin (although in hindsight, I wish I had gone for a smaller tin) with baking parchment. Sift flour, salt and caster sugar into a bowl. Add the oil water, vanilla, and egg yolks and beat to make a smooth batter. Stir in the carrots. In another bowl, whisk the egg whites with the cream of tartar to form soft peaks. Fold into the batter with a metal spoon. Transfer to the tin and bake for 1 1/2 hours or until tester comes out clean. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

While the cake is cooking, make the topping. Peel the carrots and slice as finely as possible. Coarsely grate the lemon rind and squeeze out the juice. Put all ingredients into a saucepan and boil for 6-10 minutes until a blob of the syrup dropped on a cold plate sets. Leave in the saucepan to cool.

When the cake is cold, put it on a serving plate and spread the candied carrots on top. Serve cake with cream.

Naff foods I like but have always been afraid to admit liking #2

Sesame Snaps.


If there were ever a better reason to actually brush your teeth twice daily, then this is it!

The Ideal Home Show

Yes, I went there. Obviously only for the food and the promise of having my photo taken with a Jamie Oliver wax work.


I am biting my lip in that photo, probably from sheer excitement. I don't normally look that goofy.

I also saw some huge cinnamon sticks. They were so "giant" that their cinnamony-orange glow was radiating over the whole of Earls Court...

...Oh wait, that's just my dodgy flash :(

It cost £16 to get into the show and wanting to get my moneys worth, I thought I should pay a visit to the celebrity stand. Unfortunately, Ainsley Harriot had done his showcase the day previous. My consolation was Ed Baines who I'm not very familiar with but I have seen him on the telly so I guess he counts.

This cooking demonstration really threw me. It took a while to get used to the fact that I didn't need to look at the TV projection to see him and that he was in fact a real person and cooking in the same room as me. At the end of the demo, people were able to talk to him. Great! This is my chance to speak to an award-winning chef. I could ask him anything I wanted and finally get answers to questions which only someone of his culinary knowledge and experience could answer. So what did I do?

Hide behind some people and take awkward close-ups of him.

Apart from taking photos of Ed Baines, I spent most of my time looking around the food stalls. I managed to spend a large portion of my birthday money on an over-priced bag of really crap fudge, and some rabbit pate and sausages which I both have yet to try. Sadly, it hits me as I'm walking out of the exhibition through some stands about massage chairs, that I've ultimately just spent £16 to get into a fancy MFI.

But all is not lost. I did this on the train on the way home.



FOOD.

Rosemary loaf cake

It's been two weeks since my Nan got out of hospital after having an operation on her knee and I still haven't been to visit her. So what better way is there to offload some guilt than by making a cake?

The last time we had a knitting session, I remember her telling me about this carraway seed cake she used to make and how lovely it would be if I could make one for her. So this morning, frantically searching my cupboards for my jar of carraway seeds, it occurs to me that I had taken the jar to my boyfriends house after promising his mad uncle to make him a carraway seed cake. This begs the question - What is it with old fogeys and seed cake?

The graph starts at a peak because when you're a baby, you'll obviously eat anything your given, especially if it's got sugar in it. As we move down to number two, around the teenage years, you suddenly realise that it's not cool to eat cakes that your grandparents like. This further decreases at number three, in your twenties and thirties, when you're too busy buying Flavour Shakers and sipping americanos in Starbucks. Besides, you've just spent 45 minutes doing the advanced spin class and couldn't bare to think about how many calories would be in a slice of cake! This attitude carries on until early retirement when the likelihood of caraway seed cake taking your fancy increases exponentially after coming to accept that you haven't got many years left and would like to re-invoke some childhood memories.

But seeing as I don't have the main ingredient, it looks like I'm going to have to make something else.

I remember the day I discovered a rosemary bush in my neighbours garden. It was a revelation. I spent the whole day making rosemary roast potatoes, rosemary with lamb, rosemary infused oil, rosemary sugar and of course, rosemary cake. Because of its herby-savouriness, rosemary cake is the closest thing I can think of to resemble caraway seed cake and why I'm going to make it instead. The recipe comes from Domestic Goddess. I promise to use a recipe from a different book next time!

Ingredients
250g unsalted butter
200g golden caster sugar
3 large eggs
210g self raising flour
90g plain flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
needles from a 10cm stalk of rosemary, chopped small but not too fine
4 tbsp milk
1-2 tbsp rosemary sugar or golden caster sugar

Preheat the oven to gas mark 3. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, adding a spoonful of flour with each egg. Now add the vanilla. Fold in the rest of the flour. Thin the batter with the milk until you get a smooth dropping consistency and scrape into a lined loaf tin. Sprinkle the rosemary sugar or golden caster sugar on top before you put into the preheated oven. Cook for an hour or until a tester comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack then wrap in foil until you want to eat it.

The most amazing sausage sandwich ever!

These are not chipolatas. These are normal sized sausages placed on top of the biggest slice of bread which came from the biggest loaf of bread I have ever seen in my life. I didn't realise how burnt the sausages were until I looked at this photo the next day but lets just ignore that now and think about how nice an eating experience this was for me. That's right. This wasn't just lunch but an experience.

I was initially concerned about the herbiness of the olive oil and rosemary bread over-powering the innocence of the sausages but I honestly can't imagine having sausage sandwiches any other way now. I divided the sandwich into three and approached each one individually. Brown sauce was poured over two of the three sandwiches although, despite my valiant efforts, I only managed to eat two and a bit of them.

The 1600g loaf was purchased from the Blackheath farmers market which takes place on Sundays. The sausages, honey and mustard, also came from there. The place shall now become a a holy place for me. I shall make the pilgrimage every Sunday and take the bread and sausages into my mouth because that is how it is meant to be. This is the word of the sausage.

Thanks be to the sausage god.

Crap things celebrity chefs invent # 2

This has to be the most shameless non-invention to have ever graced eBay.

Jamie loses 50 credibility points for this one. That brings his total to minus 1,067,975.

Possible future Jamie Oliver inventions:

1. The PL8. It's like a plate but appeals to the younger generation. He'll be launching it with his next school meals campaign.

2. The Square-If-You-Dare rolling pin. It's like a rolling pin only square. For that perfect pastry!

3. The Make-The-Mosta-Your-Toasta. Its like a toaster only it toasts bread AND crumpets AND hot cross buns AND everything else a toaster does only I've put my famous name on it to make lots of money but don't care if I'll never be taken seriously every again because now I'm rolling in it.

Unbelievable recipes on the BBC Food website

After acknowledging my corned beef shame I thought it might be amusing to see what would come up if I typed 'corned beef' into the BBC recipes search engine because surely, an institution like the BBC wouldn't pay top chefs to write recipes using corned beef. Of course, I was wrong.

Before we take a look at the worst of them, there are the likes of Rick Stein, who's recipe for 'Irish corned beef with cabbage' specifies that you "preferably use a top rib (of corned beef) but silverside is good too". God bless him. Like the people most likely to buy corned beef even know what a silverside is. How about a top side of Princes or a silverside of Fray Bentos, Rick? But otherwise, you wouldn't believe the nerve of the other corned beef recipes let alone the fact that 'cheese on toast' brought up 26 hits. I tried a number of combinations in the search from 'corned beef' and 'bacon sandwich' to 'cheese on toast' and 'baked beans' for a good hour and have selected three of the worst to showcase for you now.


In third position we have Brian Turner with 'cheese in bacon'. He has years of experience under his belt not to mention countless appearances on 'Ready Steady Cook'. I like cheese and I like bacon. Sounds promising if not a bit minimalist but then that's all the rage at the moment anyway and I'm sure there's more to it than just cheese and bacon...

Ingredients
100g/3½oz mature cheddar cheese, cut into 4 baton shapes
2 rashers bacon, stretched and cut in half length ways

...Oh, so just cheese and bacon then :(

Method
1. Wrap the cheese in the bacon.
2. Heat a frying pan and add the wraps to the pan. Fry for five minutes, turning occasionally, or until the bacon is cooked through.
3. Serve warm.

The recipe is so basic that he's had to bulk out the steps in the method by telling us to 'serve warm'. Why didn't you add an extra one at number 4 instructing people to 'insert in mouth' or 'put on plate'? But really, does that even count as a recipe? What if I were to suggest wrapping a Curly Wurly around some porridge?


Runner up in this showcase is Nick Nairn. And let me just say thanks to Nick for spending all of 30 seconds flicking through 'Cooking for Students' to come up with this recipe.

Ingredients
140g/5oz corned beef
½ can baked beans
110g/4oz puff pastry
plain flour, to dust
1 egg, beaten

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 220C/425F/Gas 7.
2. Mix the corned beef and baked beans together in a large bowl and then place into an ovenproof dish.
3. Roll the pastry out on a floured surface and cut into a large disc, big enough to cover the dish. Use the pastry to top the dish and then brush with egg wash.
4. Place in the oven and bake for 10 minutes, or until the pastry is golden and risen.
5. Remove from the oven and serve at once.

Perhaps Nick should take some advice from Brian on last step instructions. 'Serve at once' seems a bit threatening. Not that you would need to tell a student to eat their food 'at once'. They're probably just grateful that they aren't eating the beans from the tin.


But winner for worst recipe has to go to James Martin for his 'take' on sausage, beans and mash. I know they want to appeal to people with a range of cooking abilities but are there really people out there who don't know how to make this?!

Ingredients
8 sausages
30g/1oz butter
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp
clear honey
1 can baked beans
225g/8oz ready made mash

Method
1. Heat up a non-stick pan with the oil and butter.
2. Once the butter foams add the sausages. Gently cook on a medium heat, rolling round the pan to colour and cook through.
3. While cooking, warm the mash up in the oven or microwave. Heat the baked beans up in a pan.
4. Once the sausages are cooked add the honey to the pan. Heat through to give the sausages a nice glaze.
5. Place the mash onto the plate with the baked beans on the side and the sausages on the top.

Sorry, perhaps I misread that. Did he actually specify READY-MADE mash in the ingredients?! Were you in too much of a rush to instruct readers how to peel a potato and boil it? Oh wait, it's OK really because we're placing the sausages ON TOP of the mash like they do in those fancy restaurants and that outweighs the stigma of using ready-made mash. Thanks for sharing that version James! And if Brian Turner had written this, what would've he added to the final steps?

6. Buy ingredients from Iceland because that's all you can afford.
7. Eat in front of TV, watching Emmerdale like you always do, you fat slob.

Naff foods I like but have always been afraid to admit liking #1

Corned beef.

Same goes for Spam. In fact any salty, tinned meat.

Cinnamon buns

Sunday morning usually brings two crucial questions to mind - can I get away with listening to Ben Folds new album without my boyfriend finding out and how many of these buns will he stuff in his face? Well this weekend, the answers were a) embarrassingly not and b) not-as-greedy-as-usual, five. As Saturday night was pie night, there was a significant amount of egg-wash left over and wanting to feel the satisfaction of using up one egg wash on two things (mother hen would've been proud), gave me even more incentive to use it up on the buns the following morning. The recipe comes from Nigella's Domestic Goddess but obviously I've adjusted it.

For the dough

600g flour
100g sugar
1/2 tsp salt
21g (3 sachets) of easy blend yeast
100g butter
200ml milk 2 eggs

For the filling
125g sugar (50g golden caster sugar, 50g demerara sugar and 25g regular caster sugar)
125g unsalted butter
2 tsps ground cinnamon
175g sultanas/raisins/dried blueberries
1 egg, beaten, to glaze

You will also need a 7 x 10 inch tin lined with baking parchment.

Bear in mind that the ingredients for the dough will give you two lots, one which I use on the day and the other to freeze for the next weekend.

For me, the addition of dried fruit to the filling really make the buns and I can't understand how Nigella or the Norwegians hadn't thought to add them. This week however, the cupboards are seriously lacking in any sultanas or raisins, so I am forced to use a tiny packet of really expensive dried blueberries I had forgotten to put in the Christmas pudding last year.

Combine the flour, sugar, salt and yeast in a large bowl. Melt the butter and whisk it into the milk and eggs, then stir small amounts at a time, into the flour mixture. You might not need all the liquid mixture. Mix to combine and then knead the dough either by hand or using the dough hook of a food mixer until its smooth and springy. At this point, I divide the dough into two and place one half in the freezer as one half will make twelve small/medium buns - enough for between two to four people. Place the half you're going to use now in an oiled bowl and leave it to rise for 25 minutes. Pre-heat your oven to gas mark 5.

Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface, aiming to get a rectangle of roughly 50 x 25cm. Mix the filling ingredients in a small bowl and then spread onto the rectangle. Even though we are only working with half the amount of dough you should not halve the filling ingredients. If you are using all the dough in one batch, then I suggest you double the filling ingredients and use a bigger tin. Sprinkle your choice of dried fruits on top.

Roll it up from the longest side until you have a giant sausage. Cut the roll into twelve 3 inch pieces and sit them in the lined tin swirly side up. Brush them with the egg and let them rise for 15 minutes. By then, they should have puffed out and filled the tin. Bake for 25 minutes in the pre-heated oven on the middle shelf and I can't stress enough how much you really should put them on the middle shelf.

Because I usually make these on a Sunday, it's customary for me to get back into bed for the time it takes them to cook. It is also customary for my boyfriend and I to have the same conversation:

"OK, bun's should be ready in about half an hour."
"Good. You won't fall asleep will you?"
"Don't be silly!"

50 minutes later, having weird dreams about buns...

And on the rare occasion when I have accidentally left them in the oven for 50 minutes (Spiderman was busy) I should admit that they still come out fine. Although next time, it probably would be better if they burned, then at least I would learn my lesson.

The cookery magazine section in WHSmith

Seeing as I've started this blog, I thought I might do some research and check out the food magazines at my local WHSmith which up until the age of 17, I thought was pronounced 'with-smith' :(

There are three shelves of them to choose from. But which one to go for? Well obviously I'm here to gain knowledge of cooking methods from different countries, pick up some tasty recipe ideas and read about how fair trade can help improve the lives of third world farmers.

I'll take this one please!

Saturday Kitchen in the news

Following Richard and Judy's competition phone-in scandal, it now appears that Saturday Kitchen is in the same shit and is most gratefully dragging Eamonn Holmes through it too.

Two thousand disappointed viewers eagerly rang in to send him to Hell only to discover that they were actually voting for him to eat his 'Hell dish'. Well, that's how I read it anyway.

"Viewers were asked to say whether Holmes should get his "heaven" dish (apple charlotte) or "hell" dish (poached pears). The BBC claimed he had been recorded eating both and that the winning entry had been broadcast at the end of the show."

Any keen follower of Saturday Kitchen should know that the celebrity guest deliberately chooses something bland for their Hell dish but really Eamonn, poached pears?! You might as well have asked them to make you some toast. We can only hope that James Martin served it with a sprinkling of mace then we can forgive him for wearing that seedy velour shirt the other week.