Cook from a cookbook: Croque Madame Muffins

As we were stuck inside the house for most of the weekend thanks to the snow, we ended up watching a lot of TV. Jamie had the food channel on for most of the day, so we were subjected to an awful lot of food porn. On Sunday morning, we caught the beginning of an episode of The Little Paris Kitchen and watched Rachel Khoo make Croque Madame Muffins. Jamie immediately decided that he wanted them for lunch. Handily, we were given the cookbook from the series as a housewarming present earlier in the year, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to dig it out and give it a try.

I found the recipe inside and noted down the ingredients before we ventured out into the snow to get provisions.

It's a really simple recipe; the only complicated part is making the Mornay sauce, but as I have plenty of experience in making bechamel sauces, this wasn't a problem. Jamie had lots of fun preparing the bread (you have to cut the crusts off and then squash the slices of bread with a rolling pin, before slathering melted butter all over both sides), while I got to cover myself in egg white trying to reduce the amount of egg white that ended up in each muffin.

They were absolutely delicious. We left ours in the oven a bit too long, and the egg yolks had cooked through, so the next time we do them we will not cook them as long. A great side effect of cooking this dish is that we now own a muffin tray as well as our cupcake tray, so I can see lots of experiments in muffin baking on the horizon.

Cook from a Cookbook: Using up fruit part 1

Jam wasn't the only thing being made in my kitchen last weekend. Alongside the plums we'd harvested, we also found ourselves the proud owners of a mountain of apples and pears.

Fresh off the trees

My surfeit of fruit coincided with the need to bake cakes for a charity bake sale in work. Perfect! I went in search of cake recipes that needed apples and pears, and settled on two: a pear and ginger loaf cake and spiced apple cupcakes with maple buttercream.

We followed the loaf cake recipe exactly

The pear is soft and sweet inside a very tasty spiced cake. I still haven't eaten all of the large wedge I took off the end in order to get it into the box, but it disappeared in good order at the bake sale!

After puzzling over the quantities involved in the recipe linked above for the apple cupcakes, I decided instead to make more of the apple cupcakes my friend had made the same day, from a recipe book of hers:

The recipe is for toffee apple cupcakes, but we modified it slightly for my bake sale cakes. Instead of 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, we did one of cinnamon and one of ginger, to give the same flavour as the recipe I'd found.

They are gorgeous! Not too sweet, and the spices blend perfectly with the apple, which keeps the cake nice and moist.

The maple buttercream was to die for. This is the first time I've properly piped buttercream onto cakes, and it was so much fun! The super sweetness of the buttercream goes really well with the almost savoury flavour of the cupcakes. These also went down a treat at the bake sale.

Such a tragedy though, I couldn't fit them all in the tins I had, so we had to keep some at home for us to eat!

Cook from a cookbook: Double Chocolate Brownies

We've had an extremely stressful couple of weeks in work (year end) so I thought my team deserved a Friday treat. Out came the Good Housekeeping Baking Book! This time, I opted for the Double Chocolate Brownies.

I doubled the quantities because a shallow 8 inch square tin isn't all that big really. It was crazy! Two whole blocks of butter! Four big bars of chocolate! Eight eggs! I enlisted Jamie's help to melt the chocolate in the microwave, while I measured out everything else and got whisking.

Mmmmm gloopy

I found it very odd to whisk the eggs and sugar together without the butter (that gets melted into the chocolate).

Action shots are hard with an iPhone!

It did look extremely pretty once I had poured it into the tin and swirled the melted white chocolate in. No shots of the finished article though, it got a bit burned on the edges so wasn't the prettiest!

Look how pretty!

It was quite late by the time we finished baking, so they weren't cool enough to cut up. I left them out on the side overnight on a rack, and in the morning they were perfect. Crisp, cracked cake on the outside, squidgy and gooey but solid enough to cut on the inside. I had to trim the burned edges off to take only the nice insides to work, so I ended up with a large box of squares to take to the office, and a slightly smaller box of edge bits to keep at home!

It was very popular with my colleagues, and really helped keep us going through what would otherwise have been a really difficult Friday.

Cook from a Cookbook(ish) - Bread

So, it's been a while since I did a Cookbook challenge. Christmas kind of got in the way! There was nothing particularly new or exciting about our Christmas cooking (lets face it, the traditional dinner is just Sunday roast with extras), although I could claim the boiled and baked ham as a new recipe. We combined two different recipes found online (the boiling instructions from here and the glaze from here) to create an incredibly tasty joint of meat. It was so successful, we did it twice.

Gratuitous shot of the Christmas buffet preparations - 80 pigs in blankets
and a boiled but not yet glazed 3lb ham joint

But I am not here to talk about roasted pig product. No, I have a more exciting cooking experiment to regale you with. You see, every year we buy those part baked bread rolls to have in the house over Christmas (you know, because the shops are shut for *gasp* an entire day, so you have to stock up, in case you run out of something absolutely vital). This year, we were wandering round Tesco and somehow ended up in the home baking aisle. I stopped in front of the packets of bread mix on the shelf, and we both had a mini eureka moment. We picked up one plain white mix, and one fancy cheese and onion flavour.

We baked the white loaf on Boxing Day. I followed the instructions to the letter (pretty much add water, mix into dough, knead, leave to rise, bake) and ended up with a rather tasty, if overly large loaf of bread.

When it rose, it rose somewhat more on one side than the other.

We ate it with the left over ham, and it was delicious.

Just this weekend past, we re-discovered the other bread mix and gave that a go.

It smelled really cheese and oniony, right from the start

This one rose in a far more sensible fashion than the other loaf.

Look! Proper bread!

Arty farty shot of the slices, before I slathered them in Clover and pate.

So, not technically a cook book recipe, but our success has paved the way for some more experimentation using the recipes in my Good Housekeeping Baking Book!

Cook from a Cookbook - Scotch Eggs

The second thing we cooked on Sunday that we'd never made before was Scotch Eggs. Now, I'm cheating a little on the challenge here, as I don't have a recipe from my cookbook shelf for this, so we sort of looked up several online to get the basic idea, then made up our own!

I swear that gin is doing its best to be in all my Cookbook challenge photos!

We only boiled our eggs for 4 minutes, as we prefer them soft boiled, and figured they'd cook a bit in the fryer too, so we didn't want to overdo it. Most of the recipes we'd looked up involved adding all sorts of exciting extras to the sausage meat; we stayed simple, and seasoned it with salt, black pepper and dried mixed herbs.

I am amazed that I managed to keep the flour away from my clothes this time

Sausagemeat is far worse to handle than minced meat, so making up the Scotch Eggs was less entertaining than forming burger patties.

There's that gin bottle again...

I love coating stuff with breadcrumbs

But you don't half get messy doing it.

We had no idea what temperature to set the fryer to, since we had no recipe, so we hedged our bets and set it to about 130°C.

We cooked two at a time, for ten minutes, turning halfway through

Oh my God they were delicious. I love Scotch Eggs, but to have them fresh out of the fryer, still warm, with slightly runny yolks still inside.. it was amazing. We will definitely be making these again!

Cook from a Cookbook - Cinnamon Whirls

My final day of repose before starting my new job involved a lot of cooking. Two of the three recipes were new to me, so I'm including them here as part of Nat's Cookbook Challenge.

First up, it's the cinnamon whirls. I've wanted to make these for ages, as they are one of our favourite sweet treats. Luckily, my Good Housekeeping Baking Book had a very simple method for them.

So few ingredients!

It took us a little while to get our heads around the badly-worded instructions for how to fold and layer the pastry, but when we were done we had two really cute little sausages to cut up.

The best part of this recipe was using sugar
instead of flour to stop the pastry sticking

They smelled so good in the oven, and we couldn't resist tucking in as soon as they were cool enough to handle.

The recipe claimed it would make 34, but we only got 28 out of it. But they are tiny, so we didn't feel too guilty about eating lots of them while we cooked the rest of our lunch!

Cook from a Cookbook: Lemony Lemony Lemon Drizzle Cake

Yesterday I had the perfect excuse to break out my newest cookbook and have a go at a recipe I've never tried before. It was my last day at my current job, where tradition demands an offering of cake.

I did a re-run of the Chocolate Crispy Cakes I made for my birthday, since they had proven so popular with my colleagues, and selected the Lemon Drizzle Loaf from my Good Housekeeping Baking Book.

The recipe is actually incredibly simple. I did get a little covered in lemon from all the zesting and juicing, but getting messy is half the fun of baking, don't you agree?

I was ably assisted in my baking by my friend CJ, and copious quantities of Bombay Sapphire. The cake smelled divine when it was in the oven, and cooked to perfection in 40 minutes with a minimum amount of crust burning.

We had to cut the end off to fit it in the box. Honest.

As you can probably see in the photo, I made one small change to the instructions. I didn't have a grater capable of finely grating the lemon zest, so the two lemon's worth of zest that was meant to be grated into the mixture was actually just pared zest, the same as went into the drizzle. I actually quite liked having proper pieces of zest inside the sponge. Which, by the way, was light and delicious and Oh So Lemony. I had quite big lemons, so there was a lot of drizzle, and it soaked right into the sponge and made it all sticky and moist.

It was a real hit with my now-ex-colleagues and I will definitely be making this again!

Cook from a Cookbook: Welsh Cakes

So, I haven't had much chance to cook anything exciting from our cookbooks recently. We made cornbread again on Saturday morning, but added more sugar this time (maybe five times as much as the recipe states? We weren't really counting) so it came out sweeter. Not too sweet, but definitely sweeter. It was lovely.

I was idly flicking through my baking book on Sunday morning (because it was still out) trying to decide what I should bake from it to take into work next week, when I spotted the recipe for Welsh Cakes. Given that I was feeling slightly peckish at that point, it is no surprise my stomach growled make these now!

Luckily, I had all the ingredients to hand.

The recipe wanted me to use lard. Who has lard in the fridge these days?
Also, those are sultanas, not currants. I don't think it matters.

The trouble with welsh cakes is, like scones, they require all that pesky rubbing of butter into flour. I usually have quite cold hands, which makes me a natural at that sort of thing, but I wanted them now so decided to take the easy route.

I love my food processor so very much.

The only real downside to using the processor is it chops all the fruit up into little bits. I don't mind though.

They're so quick, only five or six minutes in the pan and they're done.

Just a light sprinkling of sugar to finish them off.

The recipe reckons it makes ten. I got sixteen out of it, plus a bit of left over dough to eat while I waited for them to cook. It think I might add them to the list of things to take into work.

Cook from a Cookbook - Steak Pie and Cornbread

A double dose of cookbook challenge for you today, as this weekend I have used not one, but two different cookbooks!

I'll start with the slightly cheeky one. I've had this Jamie Oliver book ever since the TV show first aired, because the recipes he featured on the show each week were all fantastic. 

I am ashamed to admit we've only ever cooked one of them, and it's the one I'm sharing today. Cheeky, because it's not a new-to-us recipe; this was the third or fourth time we've done it. But I don't think it's featured on the blog before.

Big pile of beef... packet of pastry.. can of Guinness....
what could it be?

It is, quite frankly, the most amazing pie we have ever cooked/eaten. Steak, Guinness and Cheese pie. You don't need the book to cook it, the recipe is available for free on Jamie Oliver's website here.

The cheese makes all the difference. You stir half of it into the beef stew before you pour it into the pie dish. The rest gets sprinkled on top to create a cheesey layer underneath the pastry lid.

I would recommend doing at least half again the amount of cheese.
You can never have too much cheese.

Mmmmmm pie.

As ever, it looks fab in the pie dish. Getting it to look fab on the plate is a different story. You end up with a pastry shape, and a plate covered in cheesey beef stew!

Very tasty indeed. Although do not make the same mistake that we did. Start cooking it EARLY. We didn't have dinner till 9pm, because I didn't start making the pie until half past five.

One of the reasons I was delayed in starting on the pie was to try out a brand new recipe. New book, new recipe, food I'd never eaten before in my life.

I got this cookbook from the book club guy that comes to my office. When I saw it there, I thought "that looks awesome", and did some investigating online. Amazon told me the book wasn't available until next January, and it would cost me £18.75. I got it this week from the book club for £8. What a bargain. It's an amazing book. When I've done a few more of the recipes in it, I'll do a proper review because it's worth one.

The recipe we chose to test out this time though was cornbread. As I say, I've never had it before, but Jamie has been going on about making it for a while now, so when I saw there was a recipe for it in my new book I had to give it a try.

You have no idea how difficult it was to find that bag of cornmeal
in our local Tesco.

Nice and simple, it mixes up really quickly (well, it does once you've finished mopping up the broken egg from the floor after you let it roll off the work surface while setting up your ingredients photo).

It's wonderfully gloopy, and wonderfully yellow.

It smelled delicious as it was baking, and looks fantastic once it's done.

Is it cake, or is it bread? Sure looks like cake...

...but you don't eat cake warm, in slices and spread with butter!

Oh lordy, it was delicious. I can't wait to make this again, and to experiment with sugar levels to make it sweeter.