Raspberry and Dark Chocolate Brownie

Finally summer was here few weeks ago. Vanished as quickly as it came, but that doesn't mean that we cant have summer delights! There are several summer recipes that I  am tempted to make but I somehow end up making something chocolate based. I love these chocolate cake recipe and the sponge cake but at the end I settled with these dark chocolate brownies with fresh raspberries.

These are very easy and quick to make, I managed to bake these with my toddler hanging around me, and they tasted divine.  Give it a try and you will know, what I mean (only if  you are a chocolate lover that is!).

Ingredients:

350gm dark chocolate (min 60% cocoa solids)

250gm butter

3 eggs

200gm dark muscavado sugar

100gm sifted plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

200gm fresh raspberries plus extra for decoration

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180 degree C, butter a square glass container or baking tin and place it in the oven. Now in a sauce pan melt the chocolate, sugar and the butter together gently on a simmering heat. once melt take it off the heat and mix well, let it cool so that you can touch it with your finger. This is important because if the mix is too hot then the eggs will scramble when you add them. Break one egg (preferably cold, just out of the fridge) at a time and whisk in the chocolate mixture. Now add the flour and baking powder and give it a good mix.

Take the warm cake tin out of the oven and pour half of the mix in the tin. Now scatter most of the raspberries on it then pour the rest of the mix on top of them. Bake in the oven for 40-45 minutes until cooked. Bring it out of the oven and  let  it cool for sometime. Serve with cold milk or freshly brewed coffee. Doesn't matter its sunny or raining you will love this.

Book Review - Tart It Up!

I am fairly regular in twitter and most social networking sites. So when Octopus Publishing Group tweeted a photo and asked if anyone can guess the source, I instantly knew what I was looking at. With full confidence I replied and guess what, now I own a copy of it and you are about to read my thoughts on it.

 

It was a bit longer wait then usual as I was eagerly waiting for it to arrive. Not only because it is a baking book but the thrill to have a book before it is released in to the market is amazing. Also this is a book I was expecting to have lots of baked dessert recipes which it does. 

“Tart it up!” is Eric Lanlard’s latest book on baking. BTW, I also own his first book “Home Bake” and I must say that is a fabulous book and a must have if you are into baking.

This is his second book of baking, mostly involving some kind of pastry, the book is clearly divided in to two parts - Savoury and Sweet, and contains nearly hundred recipes including the accompaniments. The book starts off with the recipe of shortcrust pastry, which is probably the most used one in rest of the recipes listed in the book.

The book is a box of treasures. As I flip through the pages I was realizing that how much baking I will be doing soon. Its difficult to choose from as each and every one is equally tempting. To add to that There are mouth-watering photographs which will not let you close the book.

This is not a book for people who are on diet or planning to loose weight. Also I feel this is a book from where you will cook for special occasions and for someone you care for. If you plan to do a Julie and Julia project with this book and eat them all, you better keep your hospital number in speed dial. The amount of butter used in the pastry which is the base for any of the recipe in the book is just a fraction. for the filling there is similar amount of butter, double cream and sugar. Having said that, all these ingredients are key to the divine taste of the dishes.This book is definitely for the celebrations and the dinner parties you will be hosting in future and not for everyday cooking.

This is a beautifully pictured by Kate Whitaker with step by step recipe given. Along with the textual description, some of the recipes have steps shown in pictures, which I thought is a huge plus point from readers perspective.

Tart it up! will be released on the market from tomorrow, and you can buy it online here at Amazon. P.S. All the pictures in this blog post are clicked by me from the book.

The 100th post!

I cant believe I am writing my hundredth post! A few years ago someone asked me ‘Why don’t you start blogging?’ and I laughed. Me? Blogging? And now look at me, completing my maiden ton!

I wanted to do something special for this post and as usual breaking my head over this for some time. Then on Twitter I saw a tweet from Bristol Bites that she was taking up a challenge to raise funds to support a very noble cause. It is called Live Below the Line. The charity that is fighting against the world poverty. They had a challenge for the participants to have at least three meals of the day costing no more than £1 /day. The event started on 7th May and went on till 11th. While taking up this challenge you can have sponsors who would sponsor you by donating money to Live Below the Line for this noble cause. I was really excited and immediately asked Emily (Bristol Bites) that I am interested to take part, how do I do it? She got back to me immediately with all details and an invitation to join her team. I signed up and accepted her invitation on T-2 days.

I had to plan my all 15 meals for the challenge and have on £5 to do so. Not only the main items I need to buy within that but also the other things like salt, oil , pepper or any spices I intend to use should also be included in your budget. So I measured roughly how much I need for the 5 days and calculated the price of them (salt, teabags and oil) and added in my list. Here is what my list looked like.

My shopping and item cost list for the 5 days challenge :

Price Items
-----------------------------
0.85 6 eggs
0.20 0.5 kg Potato @40p/kg (Local veg shop)
0.35  350 gm Mushroom @£1/kg (Local veg shop)
0.39 pasta (500 gm)
0.45 300ml oil @ 15p/100ml
0.20 0.5 kg Onion (Local veg shop)
0.44 4 Instant noodles @ 11p
0.52 1.5kg plain flour
0.35  basic jam
0.07 teabags 20 @27p/80 bags
0.47 basic bread
0.017 50gm basic salt @34p/kg
0.18 Ground Black Pepper, Basics 25g
0.49 1 pint Milk
-------------------------------------------------------
4.977 Total

Armed with my above shopping list and my fingers cross I started my challenge on 7th May.

Day 1 : 7th May 2012

Breakfast: 2 slices of bread toasted and with jam + a cup of black tea

Lunch: Mushroom and onion pasta (cooked enough for at least 2 meals, stored the left over for another meal )

Dinner: Made hand made roti and potato fry (I made some 10 rotis and enough potato fry for another 2 servings.)

Day 1 felt quite good, was very tired by the end of it because I also had to make food for my little one and my hubby, which was obviously different from my food.

Day 2:  8th May 2012

Breakfast was again the same as day 1 , Jam toast and tea. 

Lunch : left over roti and potato fry and a cup of tea with milk this time.

Dinner : I just had a packet of instant noodles. Easy and lazy meals.

Day 3: 9th May 2012

Breakfast : Same old same old, jam toast and tea. Three days in a row, so started to get a bit boring now! I consoled myself saying to morrow I will have something different.

Lunch: Mushroom and onion pasta, left over from day 1. So no cooking for me!

Dinner: I still had 2 rotis left but there were no cooked potato left so I cracked two eggs and made two omelettes with them adding quarter of an onion, salt and pepper to each omelette. Next wrapped the omelettes in the rotis to make two individual egg roles, to complete my dinner. A little bit of tomato ketchup would have lift the flavours but that wasn't in my budget.

Day 4: 10th May 2012

Still going on ok but started to feel the pressure. Still 6 more meals left, and I am already running low in steam. Especially because I am addicted to chocolate, and that wasn’t there in my budget! I tried a lot to fit at least some chocolate in my budget but it was just not possible. Now I know I have chocolate in my fridge and I am craving for it but can’t have it! Every time I open the fridge to take something out, I felt, that bar was staring at me and asking “why I am still untouched?” Ignoring such temptation was real tough for me!  

Breakfast: I made muffins. Her is how I did! I used 2 eggs, instead of butter I used oil (2 tbsp), I didn’t have sugar in my budget but there were lots of jam so used quite a lot of them and there were no shortage of flour and milk! They aren't the best muffins I had ever tasted but it was a change from my regular jam and bread. I had 2 of 5 muffins I made.

Lunch: Instant noodles. Made them slightly different! boiled the noodles in plain water and then fried them with little onion and mushroom and the taste maker it comes with. Wasn’t bad!  

Dinner:  Made Alu paratha. Ideally we would have it with yoghurt and spicy pickle but both were not not my budget so had them just like that! Trust me it was good on its own. Had 3 out of 12 I made.

Day 5 : 11th May 2012

This was the last day of the challenge and I was eagerly waiting for it. Finally after this day I will be able to eat what ever I want, when ever I want! Trust me that dark chocolate bar in my fridge was calling me like anything and I was doing the hours countdown..15, 14, 14.5…

Breakfast: My fabulous muffins I made yesterday! I guess any thing hot out of the oven taste much better than a day old! Anyway, just two more meals left to go.

Lunch:  Left over Alu parathas and cup of tea.

Dinner: I had two of the eggs left, so decided to make some French toast (savoury version, not the sweet one!) with the bread! Basically beat the eggs with salt, pepper and finely chopped onions, dip the bread in the egg mix and shallow fry them. 

Post Challenge: 12th May 2012 and onwards

I used most of the items in my shopping list. The thing I was left with was half a pack of bread, some flour, half a bottle of jam and 2 packs of instant noodles. It might not have shown in the above meal description but I did finish all the teabags and milk I had in my budget. Now, I am back to my usual routine. During the challenge, I was so tempted to eat chocolates, I thought when the challenge ends, the first thing I would eat is that bar of chocolate sitting in the shelf of my fridge door. Surprisingly enough I didn't. I just went on with my usual life and food and forgot about the chocolate!

Well, that didn’t last long! I received a pack of Billington’s sugar and a recipe to make some chocolate muffins from Baking Mad. I made the batter but due to this last week challenge and the fact that I was working with chocolate, I was running out of patience and instead of making muffins and I made a batch of chocolate brownies and before I know almost half of it was gone! 

I couldn't raise much, but after reading my story if you feel like donating for this noble cause you can still do it here.

Apricot and Pecan Bread–Easter Special

Easter holidays are about to knock on the door. I am sure most of you have already planned out what you will be doing or where you will be travelling for the holidays. I haven’t done any planning of that sort so far but what I did is baking. I love baking. I don’t know why, but I do. May be because I find it very satisfying and a good stress buster when I kneed or do a lot of whisking by hand. So, when I was approached recently to come up with some baked product with Easter in mind, I decided to make a bread almost straightaway. Of course there are the obvious Easter goodies like Hot cross buns, Simnel cake, cake pops, Easter cake, Easter Cupcake etc. etc. and may be I will bake some of these soon but for now I thought of settling with an apricot and pecan nut bread. I know its not traditional but hey some changes are good aren’t they! Especially if they are sweet treats like this. One thing you would notice on this bread that the cross I made, is with the whole pecan nuts instead of the traditional flour sugar mix. I was going off track anyway then why not push it a bit more. 

I love the orangey chewy little dried apricots just like that as a snacks or baked like this in a bread. The pecan nut brings a whole new dimension to the bread. As you bite into the bread you get both the chewy and crunchy feeling in every bite of it. We had it with my all time favourite freshly brewed black coffee.

One special point about this bread is I have used Splenda sweetner instead of normal sugar just to be guilt free while I am munching down, and it wasn't bad at all. With sugar of course you get the traditional taste but if you are watching your calories than this is not a bad option, give it a try!

 

Ingredients:

4 oz dried apricot (chopped in to small pieces)

12 oz boiling water

1.5 oz Splenda Granulated Sweetner or 1 cup of sugar

10 oz strong bread flour

2 oz butter

1 egg

1 tsp of pure vanilla

2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

2 oz Pecan nuts (mostly chopped, keep few whole nuts for the cross on top)

pinch of salt

Method:

Roughly chop the dried apricots and pour the boiling water on it and keep it aside to absorb as much water as possible. Leave it for 15-20 minutes. Meanwhile get on with the other ingredients. In a bowl melt the butter and add the sweetner ( Splenda ) and start beating the mix. Add the egg and the vanilla to it and mix it well.

In a separate bowl add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and give it a good mix. Now slowly add the dry mix to the wet one. At one point you will see that you need some liquid to make the bread mix. Add the water in which the apricot was soaked in to the mixture. I you are using a electric mixture and using strong bread flour like me then stop at this point and start using whisk and mix it with your hand. The reason behind that is the strong bread flour will react with warm water and become very elastic in nature and with electric mixer it will become impossible to mix (trust me on this!).

Anyway add all the chopped apricots and the nuts as well now and divide the mix in two greased loaf tins and start baking in a pre heated oven. Keep the temperature to 180 degrees C and bake it for an hour at least or more till you insert a skewer and it comes out clean. Once done, keep in the wire rack to cool it down and then enjoy with a cuppa. 

Valentine’s Day- Trio of Desserts

Every year on Valentine’s day I try to do something special. Last year it was chocolate. As you know that I am obsessed with chocolate and baking so this year it had to be baking. On top of that I got a chance to be one of the 15 bloggers who would take part in Baking Mad UK’s Valentine’s Day competition. Baking Mad UK had sent me a box full of baking goodies for this competition hence I had twice as many reasons to do some baking.

This year I thought of being brave and attempt to do not one, not two but a trio of desserts. Because I was making 3 different things I had to go for the low effort, high reward combination. After a brainstorm I decided to go for a shortbread biscuit, a cake and a combination of white and dark chocolate mousse.

Although it may seem like a lot but all of these are very easy to prepare desserts and the best part is you don’t need to make them all together. I made the chocolate mousse a day earlier and kept it chilled in fridge for overnight. Also the dough for the shortbread can be made in advance and kept in the fridge but I only kept it for couple of hours to set.

White and dark chocolate mousse

Let me begin with the white and dark chocolate mousse. Initially I thought of making white chocolate heart surrounded by the dark chocolate but wasn’t sure how will it turn out so as a back-up plan I went for the popular angular presentation. But when I finished making both the glasses, I couldn't decide which one to put forward. So here you go, both the glasses full of delicious white and dark chocolate mousse.

For white chocolate mousse I used:

100 gm Silver Spoon white chocolate

200 ml extra thick double cream

1tsp of Silver Spoon Vanilla Paste

Silver Spoon Sugar balls (optional)

Method:

Melt the white chocolate in the double boiler on a simmering heat. Keep stirring till it is a smooth mixture. Remove from the heat and keep it aside. Beat the double cream till it forms soft peak. Be careful while doing that as the cream become harder if you continue to beat. Now add the vanilla paste to the melted white chocolate and the add the cream to it and keep mixing until every thing is mixed properly and no lumps remaining.

For the angular presentation, I used a wine glass which I placed on one corner of an empty container and lean the glass on the other side of the container in a way that when the white chocolate is poured it covers the wine glass diagonally. Keep the whole arrangement, in the fridge and let it chill for 6-7 hours or even overnight.

When the white chocolate mousse is set, I started making the dark chocolate mousse. For this I used the recipe that I had made before only thing the I changed is the type of alcohol. This time it was cherry liquor, quantity was same.  Once ready pour the mousse on the wine glass by keeping the glass straight now the chill the glass in the fridge for another 6-7 hours or until set.

For the heart shape I simply placed a heart shape cookie cutter  in the glass and pour the white chocolate through it and filled it only half. Once set then pour the dark chocolate around the cutter and let it set. Once that is done then I took the cookie cutter slowly out and filled the heart shaped cavity with white chocolate mousse again. keep in the fridge till it is set.

For serving I used Silver Spoon Sugar balls and few orange peals on top. Trust me you wont be disappointed.

Shortbread Biscuit (makes 12 biscuits)

To go with this creamy mousse I made these shortbread biscuit which will provide the change in texture to the dish. I didn’t know making shortbread biscuit will be this easy. All I needed was four ingredients listed below.

Ingredients:

130 gm plain flour

115 gm Butter (at room temperature)

30 gm Icing Sugar (I used the lemon flavoured Icing sugar from Silver Spoon)

1 tsp of Silver Spoon Vanilla Paste

Method:

Beat the butter (I used an electric mixer) till smooth and creamy then add the sugar and vanilla paste and keep beating. Now add the flour and keep mixing till it forms a dough like consistency. Take it out of the bowl to make a round dough, cover it with cling film and chill in the fridge for couple of hours. This is also something you can make in advance. When you are ready to make the biscuits, take the dough out of the fridge and keep it in room temperature for 15 –20 minutes or until the dough is soft enough to roll and cut cookies out of it. Place the dough between two cling film and start rolling till the dough is quarter of an inch thick. Using the cookie cutter of your choice cut the cookies from the flattened dough.

Line a baking sheet on a baking tray and pre heat the oven to 180 degree. Bake the cookies for 12-14 minutes or until the cookies are lightly brown on the side. Cool them in a wire rack and they are ready to eat. I drizzled some melted dark chocolate from Silver Spoon which you can melt on bag and cut a small corner to drizzle on them but that is purely optional.

Coffee cake with Nuts and Chocolate Ganache

Finally to complete the trio of dessert I made this cake. Can’t think of celebrating Valentine’s Day without a cake and not just any cake, a coffee cake.

Ingredients:

2 eggs

75 gm flour

75 gm butter

75 gm lemon flavoured Icing sugar from Silver Spoon

1 tsp of Silver Spoon Vanilla Paste

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

For decorating the cake, I used:

Handful of mixed nuts pieces

Coffee and walnut cake Icing

50 gm Silver Spoon easy melt dark chocolate

25 gms butter

2 tbsp cherry liquor

 

Method:

Beat the eggs first until light and fluffy, to that add the melted butter and sugar and continue beating. Once you have a well combined homogeneous mixture add the flour slowly, little by little to the mixture while continuing to beat. Add the baking powder, baking soda and the vanilla paste to the cake mix and continue to beat. Pre heat the oven to 180 degree C, grease a cake tin/loaf tin and pour the cake mix in. Bake for 25 minutes, insert a thin skewer in the cake to check if it has baked properly. if the skewers come out clean then its done else if it comes out sticky then bring the oven temperature down a bit and bake for some more time until its done.

For building the cake I used a ring cutter to cut a round portion of the cake then slice in horizontally. Make the coffee cream icing then spread between the cake layers and sides.Now on a plate spread the nuts and roll the cake on it to cover the sides of the cake. Make the chocolate ganache by melting the chocolate with the butter and the cherry and pour on top of the cake and serve. Sending this to English Mum’s ‘baked with love’ Bakeoff and Teenz’ Yummy Delights Valentine’s Day Event.