Recipe #5 of NEWrecipes52 ...

Bread. I absolutely LOVE it ... in all it's different varieties ... I'm a BIG fan of bread! Yet, it's something I've not baked before. Actually, that's not quite true, I have baked bread rolls before, when I was 13 yrs old, for a home economics class at school (do they still teach "home economics" at school these days?). I remember popping into the local bakery on my way to school to buy fresh yeast for the class. It was this weird smelling and looking substance, but from it, came some pretty tasty dinner rolls.

Anyhoo, back to the present day and for this week's recipe, I thought I'd try baking my own tear 'n' share bread. Cheese & onion tear 'n' share bread to be precise. The recipe I followed was from The Great British Bake Off - How To Bake recipe book and it required very little in the way of ingredients (just flour, yeast, sugar, salt, water, olive oil, cheese & onion) but what it did need was time and LOTS of it. Bread making is a slow, but rewarding process when done properly.

Here's my assembled ingredients for the bread (the cheese & onion filling comes later) ...


My local supermarket doesn't sell fresh yeast, so I bought a box of sachets (standard 7g size here in the UK) and that's the beige coloured grains you see below (along with the sugar & salt) ...


I sifted all my dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl, then mixed in some tepid water and 1 tbsp of olive oil. The best, if somewhat messy, way to mix the ingredients is by hand. Once mixed, I set the dough aside in a warm location for around 15 minutes or so ...


Then, I turned the dough out onto a lightly floured worktop and kneaded it for a good 10 minutes! You can do this bit in an electric mixer (with a dough hook attachment) if you like, but I look at this as good way of working away any stresses ...


Once the dough was soft and smooth, I popped it into a bowl which had been coated with some oil, covered it with cling film and left it in my conservatory (which gets surprisingly warm in the sunshine, even during the winter months!) for around an hour until the yeast had worked it's magic and the dough had doubled in size ...


Whilst the dough was rising, I grated some mature Cheddar cheese and gently cooked (until soft, but not coloured) a thinly sliced onion.

After the hour, I knocked the air out of the dough and kneaded it for a further 3-4 minutes to distribute the remaining air bubbles evenly throughout the mix.

The recipe I followed called for the dough to be divided into 19 evenly sized portions. Now, if I'd been sensible, I would've weighed the mixture, done some simple maths and got even and equal sizes for my dough balls ... but I wasn't sensible ... I simply pulled off bits of dough and hoped they'd be roughly the same size!!! I would describe my style as ... rustic.

Each of the dough balls was flattened and half a teaspoon of the cheese & onion mixture added ...


Then it was just a case of pinching the dough round the cheesy filling and forming it into balls, which were then placed onto a large parchment-lined baking tray ...


I left approximately 2cm between each ball and arranged them into a vaguely hexagonal formation, then set them aside in a warm place [again] for a further 30-40 minutes to "prove". The dough balls grew in size and eventually end up touching ...


I sprinkled them with some of more Cheddar cheese ...


And baked at 190oC for 30 minutes until golden brown and utterly delicious looking ...


It was hard to resist, but I let the bread cool completely before tearing it apart and enjoying all it's cheesy goodness. Yum!

Recipe #4 of NEWrecipes52 ...

A hearty, homemade soup ... you really can't beat it, especially when the weather is a bit chilly. I have a recipe book dedicated to all things soup, be it clear, crisp consume or wholesome, filling chowder. You name it, my soup book's got it! So this week, I plumped for roasted leek, garlic & bacon soup. The flavours appealed and the recipe looked pretty straight forward.

20g butter
1 tbsp olive oil
2 leeks
2 courgettes
1 stick celery
2 rashers bacon
1 litre chicken stock
2 cloves garlic
15g fresh parsley
2 bay leaves
splash double cream

1. Melt the butter together with the olive oil over a low heat, add the chopped bacon and cook for a minute or two before adding the chopped leeks, celery, courgettes and garlic. Cook gently for a further 2-3 minutes before adding the bay leaves, covering with foil and transferring to a warm (140oC) oven to roast for 40 minutes ...

2. Transfer the veggies from the roasting tin to a large saucepan and add the chicken stock. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 30 minutes.

3. Strain the veggies but don't discard the stock, keep it and return it to the saucepan. In the meantime, put the veggies into a blender, along with a ladle full of the stock and blitz ...

... to a smooth, velvety puree ...


4. Add the puree to the saucepan with the retained stock, add some freshly ground pepper, the parsley, a splash of double cream and heat through ...

5. Serve with croutons of crispy, grilled bacon ...

6. Enjoy!

Happy love day ...

For me, Valentine's Day is drawing to close but I wanted to post a couple of photos of the finished / packaged mini meringue kisses I made for friends and family.

I put 12-15 kisses into a cellophane bag, added a topper of patterned paper (Die Cuts With A View, I think?), plus a quarter section of paper doily and then finished off by stapling a punched out a love heart in a contrasting paper ...


I used three different papers for the toppers but my favourite by far, was the black & white rose one; soooooo stylish ...

I must say a big "thank you" to my friend Hayley. She very kindly agreed to be my glamorous assistant and posed for the above photo for me. Thank you sweetie, you're an angel!

So how's your day been? Did you get any special surprises from the one(s) you love?

Recipe #3 of NEWrecipes52 ...

As you know, I've been on holiday for a couple of weeks, so already I'm behind of my project of trying out 52 new recipes (i.e. 1 new recipe per week). But, instead of stressing about it and trying to catch up by cramming in 2 or more new recipes in a single week, I'm just going to take my time and change my post titles from week #1, #2, #3 etc and call them recipe #1, #2 or #3 ... that way, as long as I'm at recipe #52 at some point during 2012, I'll consider my little project a success!

Anyhoo, on to today's recipe. I saw these mini meringues on Bakingdom's website a little while back ...


Aren't they the cutest? As soon as I saw them, I knew I wanted to try baking these sweet little morsels for friends and family as a Valentine's Day treat. I know I'm technically too early for Valentine's Day but hey, it's only 2 days away and I'd read somewhere that meringues could last up to 2 weeks(!) if stored in an airtight container, so I've really got nothing to loose.

First thing I needed to do was convert the ingredients and oven temperatures to something I recognised (I don't have US cup measures and my oven is centigrade not Fahrenheit), so here's the recipe I worked from:

4 egg whites
225g caster sugar
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon raspberry extract
Food colouring (optional)
90g chocolate chips

One thing to note here is that I didn't have any raspberry extract. I did however have a bottle of Chambord black raspberry liqueur ...

gorgeous bottle design isn't it?

Apart from the measurements and substitution of the liqueur for the extract, I followed the rest of the recipe as stated on Darla's website.

I've NEVER made meringues before! I knew there was LOTS of whisking involved, I knew the oven temperature needed to be LOW and I knew they took AGES to bake. What I didn't know, was just how sticky and messy they were! Seriously, I couldn't even take any photos whilst I baked because my camera would've been one big pink mess if I'd tried! So you'll just have to take my word for it that I did bake these little goodies, from scratch and the results weren't too shabby.

Now I haven't yet prepared the treat bags I'm going to be presenting them in, with luck I'll update my blog after Tuesday with images of the end result, but in the mean time, here's one photo I was able to get, just after my third batch of meringues had come out of the oven ...


Sorry the picture isn't very good. My kitchen gets wonderful sunlight during the morning, but by midday, it's dreadful! Today's been particularly dull and overcast and when I tried using the flash on my camera, the picture was even worse! Still, you get the idea, right?

The pre-baked meringue mixture really was a beautiful baby pink colour. Unfortunately, it did dull a little during baking. So if you're going to try this recipe yourself, I'd say add more colouring. Add it so it's a vivid, almost shocking pink. It will fade! Also, I did bake 1 batch of white meringues, but despite my oven being at it's lowest possible temperature, they did change colour slightly. Instead of being bright white in colour, they were more of a very milky latte colouring. They still tasted pretty good though. Oh, and on the subject of taste, the raspberry liqueur flavour really didn't come through at all. I guess if I'm going to try baking these again in the future, I'm going to have to find somewhere that sells raspberry extract.

Lessons learned.

Brrrrrrrr, it's chilly today ...

Please can I go back to the Caribbean?

Dreaming of the Caribbean sunshine ...

Oh my word ... it's FREEZING here! We've had our first snowfall of winter, nothing major, just a light dusting of about an inch or so, but it was snow none-the-less and compared to the weather I've been enjoying for the past few weeks, the chill was still a bit of a shock!

So, do you want to see some photos of where I've been for the past 2 weeks? Sure you do ;-)

First off, the airline we flew with [to Barbados] was Virgin Atlantic and it was a fab flight. We were in a Boeing 747 (aka Jumbo Jet) and even though we were sat in regular economy class seats, it was still so much better than some of the other flights we're taken over the years. Here's a picture of our Jersey Girl ...


We stayed at the Sugar Cane Club Hotel & Spa in Speightstown on the north west coast of the island. This was looking out from the terrace of our room and where we ate breakfast every morning ...


The hotel pool was gorgeous! So cooling and refreshing and welcome relief from the hot Caribbean sun ...


The hotel gardens were immaculately kept ...


Our room was a garden view room on the ground floor ...


As they drive on the correct side of the road (i.e. the left), we hired a car for a couple of days so we could tour the island ...


Now the last time we visited Barbados was back in 1993 and at that time, the only town we visited was Bridgetown (the capital). This time as we had the car, we took full advantage and visited just about every "town" on the island. We also visited a new designer shopping mall called the Limegrove in Holetown and oh boy, talk about BIG designer names!!! Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Ralph Lauren to name but a few ...


A few people said we wouldn't need a map to get around, and in some respects they were right. The island is only 14 miles wide by 20 miles tall and so we were almost always by the coast and it was just a case of knowing which side of the car the beach was on to then figure out if we were on the east or west side of the island!

At one point we took a wrong turn and ended up at this gorgeous old mansion called St Nicholas Abbey. It's the oldest known Jacobean building on the island and also the location of one of the many original (and still working) sugar mills and rum distilleries ...



When we left the abbey, we were advised to turn left, drive to the top of Cherry Tree Hill and park in the lay-by for spectacular views of the islands Scotland District (so called because the original British settlers thought it had a striking similarity to the views of the Scottish highlands) and we weren't disappointed ...


This next one was taken from the opposite side of the bay, looking over the town of Bathsheba ...


The Barbadians really like their colours and everywhere you go, you see Chattel style houses and shops all painted in bright, cheery colour that just make you smile ...



Whilst on holiday, Iain celebrated his 40th birthday and we decided to splash out and booked a table at one of the best restaurants in Barbados called The Bajan Blue at Sandy Lane. Wow! This place is AMAZING, pricey but amazing and you only turn 40 once, right?


The food was delicious, the service was first class and at the end of the meal, all the waiting staff sang Happy Birthday and presented Iain with this adorable [and very tasty] little chocolate cake ...


Unfortunately, all too soon the sun was setting on our little Caribbean adventure ...


We both thoroughly enjoy our break away and hopefully we'll return again some day, who knows, maybe in another 18.5yrs ;-)


So now we're back home and getting used to the huge temperature difference. The average daytime temperature in the shade in Barbados was 32oC, whilst the temperature here in chilly Oxfordshire has been a frosty -1oC over the past few days ... brrrrrrr! Still, all I need to do is browse through my photos and I can feel the sun's rays warming my skin all over again. ~sigh~