Wednesday 9 March 2011

Baking Madness!!!

Now usually I blog about one dish I've baked per day and I'm about ten dishes ahead of the blog, but today I thought I'd tell you about my mammoth baking weekend which left me feeling all baked out.

Saturday Lunch: Toad in the Hole
These took a while to make because you have to cook the sausages first and then they take another 20 minutes to bake. Lorraine suggests eating them with gravy but just ran out of time and I did buy a bag of salad to eat with it to make it slightly more healthy but that got forgotten, oh well! They went down pretty well, and they became sausage cakes, according to Zoe.

Saturday Dinner: Trout en papillote with Sauternes and Almonds




I have to admit there were a few ingredients missing, the sauternes for starters and I refuse to pay £3.50 for a single fennel! Apart from that it was delicious, it has toasted almonds in it which I wasn't expecting to like but they were really tasty.

Pudding: Melting Puds
Any fan of Masterchef will know that these are the curse of the kitchen and they made me really nervous. These were cooked for a couple of minutes longer than suggested because they were really wobbly and what this photo doesn't show you is the whole thing collapsing seconds later. I was really looking forward to eating these more than anything else in the book and they didn't disappoint. I do wished I'd spent a bit more on some decent chocolate instead of Sainsbury's basic!, but saying that they still tasted pretty damn good.

Sunday Lunch: Omelette
I know, its an omelette, but this is no ordinary omelette, it's a lot more complicated. You have to separate eggs and whip up the whites then fold them into the mixture and bake it in the oven. This omelette was to serve 4, but of course we decided we might as well split it between the two of us. OMG I have never felt so full, so quickly and I was full for the rest of the afternoon. It was nice, but I'm quite happy to make normal omelettes.

Afternoon snack: Peanut butter cookies
Zoe wanted to make something and this recipe was chosen because we had everything we needed in the house. Lorraine definitely knows how to make cookies and shes generous. This recipe made 12 but they were huge!!! They are about 5 inches in diameter and like the chocolate cookies nice and gooey in the centre.


Sunday Dinner: Pastilla Pie
Now this is interesting. It's a Morrocan chicken pie made with honey, cinnamon, coriander and ginger. The chicken mixture is wrapped in filo pasrty and dusted with icing sugar. It took a few bites for my mouth to understand what the hell was going on, but then you get used to it and it's quite tasty. I think I will make it again because it was really easy. Arrgh just remembered the strange bit, before you put the lid on you whip three eggs and pour it over the chicken, so when your eating it you do get these strange bits of scrambled egg.

Sunday pudding: Ricotta Cake
Mark chose this cake for pudding, for the simple reason it was at the top of the list. Its ricotta with orange and cardamom. It's a proper dessert cake, really moist and a bit like a cheesecake. I didn't put at much orange zest in as the recipe said (4 oranges) and I wish I had because then it would have been really good. It's a good pudding to make, just mix it all together and stick it in the oven. This was another case of sharing the love. There were quite a few recipients, Kathryn who had no choice was given a couple of slices and a few cookies, then my parents had a couple of slices and a third of the cake went to school, and after all that there was still two slices left for me and Mark on Monday night. The cake that keeps on giving.


Since I started this project I have baked something from the book everyday, as you can imagine I was all baked out on Monday and I have to say I'm still not quite recovered. But I can now say that I'm at least 20% of the way through. Phew!

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