Nigella's damp lemon and almond cake

This cake is from How to be a Domestic Goddess. For once I followed the recipe exactly... The boys and I loved this cake, as did friends. H wasn't so keen as he said it tasted a little of marzipan (he doesn't like marzipan). I think that's probably the almond extract in it. Although it was really good, I have to say I still love and prefer lemon drizzle cake and lemon drizzle cupcakes, because it's just so easy and I can do it without weighing anything (only because I've made so many I can do it by eye)... I also make lemon cake using the old 4,4,4,2 method and add zest and juice of a lemon. May have to make them both at the same time and do a taste test, see which one wins with everybody else.

Cereal Bars your kids will love you for!

Edit: I swapped the cup amounts over for rice pops / oats - sorry - I've changed it to read correctly now.
I had a bag of dried cranberries and macadamia nuts that needed using up so I was looking for the recipe for the white chocolate, cranberry, macademia nut cookies. I was also in the middle of making Nigella's damp lemon and almond cake. In the end I decided not to make the cookies and make something up. I came up with these cereal bars.

White Chocolate, Cranberry, Macadamia Nut Cereal Bars
1 100g bar of white chocolate, broken into pieces
6-8 tablespoons of golden syrup
1oz butter
2 cups of rice pops/rice krispies
1 cup of porridge oats
175-200g mixed macadamia and dried cranberries

In a heatproof bowl over a pan of boiling water, melt the white chocolate, butter and golden syrup. While that's happening, roughly chop the nuts, if you can pick them out then great but if not just try not to cut the cranberries up too much. Even easier if you can buy the cranberries and macadamias separately. In a large bowl add the oats, rice pops, macadamia nuts and cranberries. Stir the chocolate, butter and syrup mix well then pour over the dry ingredients. Mix well then scrape it out into a lined tray. Press it down firmly with the back of a wooden spoon. Put it in the fridge to set and that's it.

Little tried some last night and asked if he could have some in his lunch, I don't think they're supposed to have chocolate in their lunchboxes but I thought if it's got fruit, nuts and oats in then it can't be that bad - surely?

Healthy Low Fat Spicy Roast Parsnip Soup

I'm missing the holidays... aren't you? It's freezing cold, we've had snow, we've had it so cold that the trees and ground remained in a permanent state of winter wonderland, now the grey, damp weather has arrived. The sort that makes all your joints sing that they're getting old. I still love it. The wood burning stove giving that gentle warmth that doesn't dry your skin out like the central heating does and what better way to warm up than with a bowl of spicy roast parnsip soup.

I made the best version of this soup over the holidays as I had a glut of parsnips. When the children were tiny in our old house, they used to sit in those stroller things and whizz round the house, sore ankles if they knocked in to you. I used to love it when the organic veg box turned up, because I never bothered to look up what would be coming it was always a surprise, a bit like Christmas morning. The boys would scoot up to the box and start pulling everything out "What iz der? What got we?" This Christmas Eve the organic veg box really was just like Christmas, possibly because it was Christmas I know, but you get my point. The doorbell rang late afternoon, just as we were heading to a party for a couple of hours. I answered to this very jolly and I have to say good looking guy who handed me a box. A box stuffed full of organic fruit and vegetables, a great Christmas gift from Abel & Cole.

I like a lot of things about Abel & Cole but the thing I like best - the delivery guys, they're always happy and helpful. Now either they get great training. I used to be a training manager so I can normally tell when someone has had good training OR - they're on something... Either way, it works...

Healthy Low Fat Spicy Roast Parsnip Soup - could feed 4
4 good sized parsnips
1 or 2 onions
1 large potato
A really good pinch of each - ground cumin, ground coriander, ground ginger, hot smoked paprika, (a little chilli powder if you like your food hot).
500-750ml skimmed milk
750ml of stock - (vegetable or chicken)

Pre-heat the oven to about 180-200C. Wash, scrub and chop (into rough 2cm cubes) the parsnips and potato. (If the skin is not at it's best then peel them). Peel and chop the onion. Place in a roasting tray and lightly spray with olive oil. Mix all the spices together and then sprinkle over the vegetables. Cook in the oven for about 40 minutes, until the vegetables have some colour. At this point you could let the vegetables cool and make the soup at a later time. Put the veg in a pan, pour over the stock and then blitz with a stick blender. Then start to add the milk, depending on how thick you like your soup. Heat through and serve. Lovely with spring/salad onion on the top though obviously they're not in season right now!!


When I just checked the Abel & Cole site for a link I saw that they're doing a paperback version of the Abel & Cole cookbook at the reduced price of £5.00. It's a good book, I like it - a lot, and for a fiver, you can't really go wrong.

What do you do when you're in somebody else's kitchen?

When you're in somebody else's kitchen do you ever...

open the cupboards?
sneakily open the cupboards when they're not looking?
peek in the fridge?
spy cookery books that you don't have and pick them up and start reading them?

I'm guilty of the last one and I very much want to look in other people's cupboards but the way I was dragged up stops me.

I love pie and you can tell I'm a food blogger because...

You can tell I'm a food blogger because... the only pictures I have of New Years Day are of food, albeit not very good ones!

Creamy Chicken, Bacon and Leek Pie made with love, as you can see from the hearts...

4-6 chicken thighs depending on size (4 large, 6 small)
one onion, peeled and finely diced
one small packet of cubed pancetta
one large leek, peeled and very finely sliced
1 teaspoon of dijon mustard
1 cup of double cream

1 packet of shortcrust pastry unless you're a domestic goddess and make your own. I need lessons!

Gently fry the onions in a little oil, add the bacon and chicken and cook for approx 5 mins, then add the leeks and cook for a further 5 mins. Add the cream and mustard and stir through, warm for a few minutes before transferring to a pie dish, then top with the rolled out pastry, making shapes if that's what floats your boat. Cook in a pre-heated oven (170C) for approx 30-40 mins.

Coffee Baileys, Baileys Coffee, Baileys with a hint of Coffee...?

Baileys very kindly sent me a bottle of Baileys with a hint of coffee before Christmas and I've had every good intention of making something with it but I can't stop drinking it. I've made everybody who has entered the house taste it (with the exception of children of course!), I wasn't that generous with my measures, using the excuse that I needed to cook with it... The verdict so far - very positive.

Being honest, I'd stopped drinking Baileys and hadn't really had a Baileys on its own for years, if I did have one or two, preferring it with sambuca, a cocktail known as (avert your eyes if you're of a sensitive nature) a slippery nipple, or Baileys with coffee flavoured liquers like Kahlua or Tia Maria, now produced by Pernod Ricard - isn't everything now?

By coincidence I had a very delicious Baileys cheesecake the evening before I got the e-mail from the lovely Baileys PR lady and had wanted to try making it at home, and I will, at some point, though having seen the efforts of Spitton Extra here and Trainee Domestic Goddess here, I think I may have to try making Baileys coffee cream pots first, (recipe by James Martin).

When drinking Baileys with a hint of coffee, instead of cooking with it, the coffee flavour is subtle and in my opinion better than Baileys with Kahlua or Tia Maria which I've had my share and somebody else's in the past so I am definitely speaking from experience.

WARNING: Too much alcohol can blurrr your vision,
just enough so you don't see the dust!

Well done Baileys and of course thank you!

I can't believe the holidays are almost at an end comfort food!

I've said it before but I really do hate it when the holidays end. We've just had the best Christmas ever, relaxed, good fun, the house full of love and laughter. The house is going to feel so empty tomorrow when the boys go back to school and hubs goes back to work. The boys have been adorable, even when they've been over excited and gone past the stage where you feel like stringing them up by their toenails. So to comfort food I called.

Creamy Chicken, Mushroom & Sundried Tomato (feeds 4)
4 chicken breasts, cubed, whatever size you prefer
half a packet of sundried tomatoes in olive oil
half a punnet of chestnut mushrooms, quartered
one onion, peeled and finely diced
one Knorr chicken stock cube (if it's good enough for Marco!)
one carton of creme fraiche
a little boiling water
a tablespoon of oil

Gently fry the onion in the oil, add the chicken and brown the meat, add the mushrooms, then add a little water (about 1/4 of a cup), add the stock cube and stir, then add the creme fraiche and the sundried tomatoes. Cook for about 10-15 minutes until the chicken is cooked through. We served with boiled rice and it got top marks. Excuse the rubbish photo - I was hungry!

Banana Blueberry Buttermilk Muffins

I seem to have found my blogging mojo again. I didn't want to say it until I was actually posting regularly but it's just sort of happened and I'm loving my little blog again.


Banana and Blueberry Buttermilk Muffins
This REALLY good recipe can be found at the BBCGoodFood website.
Hubs loved these as they're not too sweet. The only thing I did differently was put a lot more blueberries in (we had a lot of them that were on the verge of turning).

A brand new year and a chocolate peanut butter fudge brownie sundae to celebrate!

This is very loosely based on Nigella's chocolate peanut butter fudge sundae. I say loosely because I didn't look up the recipe in the book but went from memory and now I've looked up the recipe and got the link to Nigella's newly refurbished website for you, I realise that what we did was different. Though different it was delicious and uses fewer ingredients for the sauce, but it did have the addition of a brownie. Here's what we did...

What you need...
One large and very lovely trifle bowl. Though I'm pretty sure any old container would do.
Some delicoius chocolate brownies (made another day so there's no pressure). I used this recipe here at the lovely Backseat Gourmet blog.
Chocolate Ice Cream
Vanilla Ice Cream
Hot Chocolate Peanut Butter Sauce (recipe below)
Some indoor sparklers

Break the brownies up into mouthful size pieces and throw in the bottom of the bowl.
Using an ice cream scoop, make nice balls of ice cream and add to the bowl.
Pour over the warm chocolate sauce and quickly push the (unlit) sparklers into the ice cream or brownies. Light them at the table infront of everybody and then dig in with long handled sundae spoons. If I was eating this with people who are not my immediate family then I'd probably decant into individual bowls.

If there were a lot of you, you could make many layers of this but there were only 3 of us as Small insisted on going to bed early.

For the chocolate peanut butter fudge sauce, I broke up most (some went missing?) of one bar of Divine fairtrade dark chocolate, placed in a pan over a very low heat with a very heaped dessert spoon of whole earth crunchy peanut butter, added a few splashes of Waitrose extra thick double cream. Kept stirring until it went all gloopy then added 1/4 cup of milk and kept stirring over the low heat until it became silky smooth (with crunchy bits) again.... The whole process takes minutes.