4am Essay Biscuits

So Rachel and I both had massive essays due on Monday; cue stocking up on tea and fizzy drinks as we prepared for the inevitable all-nighter. We made one big mistake though: there was no baking in the house. So at 4am on Monday morning I made Burnt Butter Biscuits to fuel us.

Yours will be much prettier than mine because it won't be 4am. Or maybe it will be - I'm not judging.

There are a grand total of 4 ingredients, and they take 5 minutes to make. I reckon they're the only thing I could've made at 4am, which should give you an idea of the ease! In terms of taste they're pretty special too: warm, buttery and melt-in-the-mouth, and the perfect accompaniment to a cup of tea.
The perfect biscuit? Maybe.

Ingredients:
- 100g butter
- 100g caster sugar
- 150g self-raising flour
- 1 egg

1. First, preheat the oven to 180°C. Then grab a saucepan and throw in the butter. Melt, and keep on the heat until it turns a golden brown colour (or is generally starting to burn the bottom). Put to one side to set a bit for 5 minutes while you weigh out the other ingredients and beat your egg.
2. Cream together the butter and sugar, then tip in the egg and mix. Stir in the flour 'til there are no white streaks.
3. Grab small amounts of dough and roll them into balls (put your index finger against your thumb knuckle: about that size) and place onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. They'll spread out a fair bit, so I'd say no more than 6 per baking tray (unless it's 4am, in which case just make random-sized balls and throw them all onto one tray...).
4. Use the back of a fork to flatten them slightly, then bake for 15 minutes until golden. Sprinkle with caster sugar and allow to cool and firm up, then dunk in cups of tea to your heart's content.

I'm not entirely sure how many the mixture should make because I didn't size them properly - but I'd guess something between 12 and 18. Also, I can't claim they're super-powered-biscuits until we get the marks back, but we both got our essays in on time. So that's definitely something.

Up (for) the Apples and Pears

I've spent the last few weeks at home thinking of ways to use up our giant 17lb bucket of plums (not even joking), so when I got to Dad's house in London and discovered their tree was full of pears that hadn't even been touched I just couldn't help myself. Cue climbing the pear tree in a mini skirt then spending the afternoon baking.

It looks super fancy and impressive, but it's the easiest thing ever and it barely costs anything to make. And it tastes SO. GOOD. Also the recipe is adapted from Mary Berry's apple tarte tatin recipe because it's really easy and she's amazing.

Ingredients:
- block of puff pastry (you can make your own if you want but it's sooooo much effort)
- 175g granulated sugar
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 2 cardamom pods
- 850g pears
- juice of 1 lemon

Method:
1. First, preheat your oven to 220°C. Then put the sugar in a saucepan along with 6tbsp water, the cinnamon stick and the cardamom pods. Stir on a low heat until the sugar's dissolved, then turn up the heat and STOP STIRRING. Seriously, do not touch that spoon. You're allowed to swirl the pan a bit, but no. spoons. Boil until it turns a 'golden straw colour', then take out the spices and pour into an oven-proof dish (a cake tin would work, just make sure it's deep enough).
2. Put the lemon juice into a bowl, then peel and thinly slice the pears and throw in with the lemon juice 'til you've prepared all of them (this'll stop them going brown, and it tastes nice too). Arrange the pear slices on top of the caramel and press down.
3. Roll out the pastry, then cut into a round slightly bigger than the tin. Cover the pears and tuck the pastry down the sides, then make a small slit in the top to allow steam out.
4. Bake for 40 minutes, then turn it out onto a plate and present to your amazed friends/family, before eating with lots of ice cream.

You may not have a fruit tree in your garden, but if you go to your nearest market you'll find that at the moment they have heaps of pears, apples, plums, blackberries, peaches, figs and more - so there's really no excuse. Think of your five a day! And try not to think about the sugar and pastry - just concentrate on the fruit.

Bonus: picture of me mid-mini-skirt-tree-climb:

#YOLO.

Little Lemon Drizzle Cakes

It's largely been a slow summer for me. I've spent months looking for a job to no avail and, as I can't drive (and there's very little in terms of public transport in Cumbria), I'm stuck at home a lot. It's very depressing. The solution as I see it is to eat my way out of it, which means BAKING.

   I made these initially for Mum's work to sell (all proceeds to Macmillan Nurses) as part of the Eden Food and Farming Festival a few weeks ago, and they went down a storm. Sadly this meant we at home were limited to half a cake each (not even joking, Shannon was NOT impressed). So I made more.

Ingredients (makes 20):

For the cake

- 200g unsalted butter

- 250g caster sugar

- 3 medium eggs

- zest of 2 unwaxed lemons

- 250g self-raising flour

- ½tsp baking powder

- juice of 1 lemon, made up to 100ml with milk

 For the drizzle topping

- 100g caster sugar

- juice 2 lemons

- zest of 1 unwaxed lemon

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C, and grab yourself 20 muffin cases. It obviously works best if you can put them in a muffin tin for support, but they do fine free-standing on a normal baking tray so don't worry.

2. Beat together the butter and sugar until creamy, then beat it some more. My Grandma used to say this was the most important part of making a cake, so pass the bowl around the house until everyone's arms are tired. This will also make you feel less guilty about eating the cake afterwards because it's basically a work-out, right?

3. Add the eggs and lemon zest and mix together, then sift in the flour and baking powder. Fold it all together slowly (mostly so you don't get flour everywhere), and when that's incorporated add the lemon juice and milk mixture and stir again.

4. Fill the muffin cases with the mixture so they're about two thirds full. Make it all as level as possible, then bake for 20-25 minutes, depending on your oven. 

5. While the cakes are in the oven, make the drizzle topping: you literally just mix everything together in a bowl so it makes a runny sort of glaze.

6. As soon as the cakes are out of the oven poke a load of holes in them with a cocktail stick, then add a generous teaspoon of drizzle to each one (you may have to do it half a tsp at a time to give them time to absorb it a bit), and voilà. Let cool, sprinkle with a bit more sugar for prettiness and enjoy your lemony flavoured clouds. They definitely banish the black ones.

Happy Birthday To Us (now have a cocktail)

A year ago today, we sat in the kitchen and wrote about how much we were kicking ourselves for not having blogged sooner. Today, we've reached over 10,000 page views, have a facebook page and twitter account and 148 followers that we're aware of, as well as a recommendation from the Vegetarian Society. LIFE IS GOOD. Now have a cocktail.

My Dad and his partner Andy just got back from a spectacular holiday in Brazil, which seems to me to have mainly consisted of drinking alcohol on a beach. And in Brazil, they drink Caipirinhas. Like so.

The recipe is a bit rough, as it's word-of-mouth from Dad who got it from his Brazillian friend Benjamin, but here goes...

Ingredients: (per glass)

- 1 lime

- 1½ tbsp caster sugar

- 4/5 ice cubes

- enough cachaça to fill your glass 

Also, if you can't get cachaça I think the closest match would be white rum (though then it's technically called a Caipiríssima. Yeah).

1. Give the lime a good scrub, then cut into eight pieces. Then go and find the nearest thing you can to a pestle and mortar. I suggest a jug and the end of a rolling pin.

2. Add the sugar, and smush. That's a technical term. SMUSH IT GOOD. Then add the ice and smush some more. 

3. Add the cachaça and mix, then pour into a tumbler and voila! You can obviously adapt all the quantities depending on how you like it. There's a chance that I like it A LOT and so am currently a bit tipsy. But I am a student after all...

The Best Treacle Tart Ever.

This year on New Year's Eve life was a bit different. My birthday's on January 1st so usually NYE is birthday party time, but I did NOT want to be 20 and so kept it on the ultra-low this time. Instead Fraser came over on my birthday, and for New Year's Eve Mum's boyfriend came for dinner and Mum and I did uber cooking. 

And I made this:

It has been the work of years, and started off as a recipe by Linda Collister in The Great British Book of Baking. And I'm pretty darn proud of it if I do say so myself.

Ingredients:
Pastry                                                                           Filling
- 220g plain flour                                                           - 9 rounded tbsp golden syrup
- pinch of salt                                                               - 3 rounded tbsp treacle
- 1tsp caster sugar                                                        - 150g white breadcrumbs
- 160g unsalted butter, chilled and diced                     - zest of 1 lemon and 1 orange
- 2-3tbsp ice-cold water                                               - juice of half of each the lemon and orange
                                                                                     - 1tsp ground ginger
                                                                                     - 1tsp grated nutmeg

You'll need yourself a 26cm-deep pie dish (or thereabouts), and some cold hands to work with the pastry - though that last one's probably not going to be hard to ensure at the moment (brrrrr)!

What to do:
Pastry
1. Sieve the flour, salt and sugar into a bowl, then rub in the butter using the tips of your fingers.
2. Using a round-bladed knife, stir in enough of the water to bind the mixture into a dough.
3. Wrap the dough in clingfilm, and chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes while you make the filling/pour yourself a glass of wine or suchlike.
4. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface into a circle 3cm larger than your dish. If you don't have a rolling pin, use a wine bottle, Genius or what?!
5. Use your rolling pin (/wine bottle) to transfer the pastry to the dish, then press the pastry into the base. Trim off any excess pastry using a sharp knife and put aside. Put the dish  into the fridge to chill.

 
6. You can either clingfilm the excess pastry and fridge it to make jam tarts later, or you can get fancy and use it to make a lattice top. If the former, skip to the filling bit below, but if the latter, keep reading folks.
7. Roll out the excess pastry so it's slightly larger than the pie dish, then cut it into strips of about 2cm each. You should end up with 12-14.
8. Cut a sheet of greaseproof paper larger than the dish, and place one of the strips onto the middle of it. Take another and lay it perpendicular to the first, so it lies across the top. Place another in the same direction as the first strip (leaving a gap the same size as the strip itself), between it and the first, and tucking it underneath the second strip. Continue like this until you have a full lattice and each of the strips are used.

Filling
1. This is super simple. Gently heat the golden syrup and treacle in a pan until runny, then remove from the heat and stir in the breadcrumbs, zest, juice and spices.
2. Leave to stand for 10 minutes. If the mixture seems loose then stir in more crumbs, or if it's too stiff then add more syrup until you're happy with the consistency.
3. Spoon the filling into the pastry case, taking care not to compact the mixture.
4. If you've made a lattice top, slide your hand underneath the greaseproof paper and lift it. Bring it close to the tart, and then flip it in one swift motion. Remove the paper and trim the edges of the lattice, then brush with a beaten egg.

 
5. Bake for about 30 minutes at 190°C, until the pastry is golden. And then enjoy thoroughly - with cream/custard/ice-cream if convenient. If inconvenient, do it anyway.

Pudding Explosion

When my sister came to visit me last month, she insisted I made sure I had all the ingredients in for her to make butterscotch sauce. She doesn't really cook usually, but she'd made that at home and was keen to recreate.

Of course, we had a fun but hectic time, and the sauce never got made. It seemed a shame to have all the ingredients in and let them go to waste though...

 And so a star was born.

For this, you'll need vanilla ice cream, some frozen raspberries, a pan of butterscotch sauce and a few pieces of honeycomb. That last one's where the literal bit of the explosion part comes in, 'cos you've got to break the pieces up quite small and you will end up with stray honeycomb on the floor.

The rest of the explosion is in the taste. This pudding is all about texture and contrast - the ice cream cool and smooth, the raspberries sharp, the honeycomb sweet and crunchy and the butterscotch silky and warm, while the citrus note in it from the lemon brings the whole dessert together. You really have to try it.

Plus? The quantity of butterscotch sauce the website gives makes enough for a few servings. So you can either get people over to share it with you or put it in the fridge for next time. I cannot see a downside.

Try it. Your tastebuds will never be the same again.

Bonfire Honeycomb

I made honeycomb on Thursday for the third time. Both previous attempts were made last year when we lived in halls of residence on campus, and were, as a friend would say, of questionable merit. The first time the sugar burned (the electric hobs took hours to cool down, so when I attempted to turn it off after the temperature needed for a 'rapid boil', it just kept on cooking. Cue making the whole of Runnymede JK smell of burned sugar. Still managed not to set the fire alarm off though, for which people should be thankful.). The second time I was overly cautious and it wasn't quite cooked enough. 

They always say it's third time lucky though.

I followed Lorraine Pascale's recipe because Zosia has her cookbook, but Nigella has a nice looking one too. Neither of them make loads, but that's probably a good thing as far as my teeth are concerned.

Ingredients (to fill a 20cm tin):

- 80g/3oz butter

- 160g/5½oz caster sugar

- 80g/3oz golden syrup

- 2tsp bicarbonate of soda

1. Grease the tin with vegetable oil (any flavourless oil is fine). The best way to do this is to pour in about a tablespoon and then use a pastry brush to distribute it and make sure there's no excess.

2. Gently heat the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a large heavy-based frying pan until the sugar has dissolved.

3. Turn up the heat and boil rapidly, WITHOUT stirring. Make sure the flames aren't licking up the sides of the pan, and if the mixture goes darker at one side then swirl the pan. Do this until it turns a golden-brown 'honeycomb' colour - Lorraine Pascale says this will take about 5 minutes, but I'd say it's more like 3-4. Don't let it go too dark or it will catch and become acrid, and no one wants that.

4. Add the bicarb and stir rapidly for a few seconds, then pour it into the oiled tin and leave to set. I tend to make mine in the evening, so it sets overnight. When it's all firm, you get to smash it up. I've found a really good one for this is our knife sharpener, but you could bash it with the end of a rolling pin or just about anything.

You can add it to puddings, or just put it in a tin and bring it along with you to watch the fireworks tomorrow. With a flask of tea. Or Baileys hot chocolate. I know what I'll be doing...