Quick treats

Time is of essence now that I'm in the finish of studying for exams, so there has been not much cooking or baking for me recently. However, one needs to have a little break sometimes, especially when you're feeling like your brain was starting to explode when squeezing in some new fact. Now that is definately a time when you need: treats!

I guess everyone has a few treats that they enjoy making and return to in times of need. So here are a few of mine, interestingly a breakfast, main course and dessert :) Not made on the same day, though.

Porridge is not something we have a tradition of eating in Hungary. Actually, it took me quite long to dare attempt making a porridge because it somehow seemed odd: rolled oats soaked in water and/or milk, what on earth could that taste like?? Well, I must say, they taste awesome! Real comfort food. And it's healthy! Now I only feel sorry that quick porridge is not available here, because with the original method it takes too long to prepare on a work day - at least I'm too lazy to get up earlier to make this, no matter how good, I'm simply not a morning type of person: I guess Bill would drive me crazy with his morning "chirping" as he calls it LOL


The first time I made porridge I used Bill's recipe in Open Kitchen, and since it turned out lovely, I use this again and again.

Five-grain porridge with brown sugar peaches
(Serves 4)

250g mixed grains
600ml boiling water
600ml milk
3 peaches, quartered
80g brown sugar

Caramelize the peaches in hot oven with the sugar (about 15 min). Since I usually prepare 1 portion, I do this in a pan, not in the oven. Not the same, I know, but I feel it'd be too extravagant to turn on the oven to caramelize 1 peach LOL
Mix the grains with the water in a pan and leave for 10 minutes. Then add the milk and slowly bring to the boil, then simmer gently for 10 min, stirring often.

Serve with the peach quarters and some brown sugar sprinkled over, and warm milk (is that compulsory for a porridge, I wonder, because I leave that out and it doesn't seem to be missing). A great way to start the day especially if you have some brain work to do ;)

For the quick main course I turned to Bill again. His Warm tomato and ricotta pasta salad is my favourite pasta dish ever. I have changed it a bit, the greatest difference is that I use balsamic vinegar instead of the red wine vinegar, because it complements and highlights the sweetness of the tomatoes much more nicely and I don't always use ricotta, I find the crumblier and coarser curd cheese or the sharp, salty feta a nicer complement to this. And I sometimes leave out the bread crumbles.
This time I used wholemeal penne, feta and cherry tomatoes from my Grandma's garden, mmm. Oh, and I added some green olives, because I had a jar open.


Here's the original recipe, though:

Warm tomato and ricotta pasta salad
Serves 4
500 g (2 baskets) cherry tomatoes, cut in half
80 ml (1/3 cup) extra virgin olive oil
60 ml (14 cup) red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon caster (superfine) sugar
1 teaspoon sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
4 thick slices wholemeal or sourdough bread
1 garlic clove, sliced in half
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, extra
500 g (1 Ib 2 oz) rigatoni
60 g (1 cup) finely shredded basil leaves
250 g (9 oz) fresh ricotta cheese

Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F).

Place the tomatoes, olive oil, vinegar and sugar in a large bowl and stir to combine.
Season with salt and pepper.
Cover and leave to marinate while you prepare the rest of the dish.

Rub the bread on both sides with the cut side of the garlic.
Brush with the extra olive oil and sprinkle with salt.
Put the bread on a baking tray and place in the oven.
Cook for 20 minutes, or until crisp.
Remove from the oven and crumble into coarse breadcrumbs with your hands.
Set aside.

Cook the pasta in a large pot of rapidly boiling salted water until al dente.
Drain well, then add to the tomatoes.
Add the basil and toss to combine.

Divide the pasta between four serving plates, or put it on one large serving dish, crumble over the ricotta cheese and sprinkle with the breadcrumbs.

So, after a breakfast and a main course, what else does a girl want? Chocolate of course. And if she's as mad about baking as me, she has to do "something" with it, not simply get a bar of good quality chocolate. Especially if the following cupcake is the favourite of her husband ;)
The recipe is a marriage of Nigella's Night and day cupcake recipe from HTBADG and
the icing recipe for her Chocolate fudge cake from NB. The idea for using this icing comes from a fellow foodie, Jane in France, the swirling is my addition. It's a really complex recipe, you see LOL


Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate swirl icing

2 scant tablespoons cocoa powder
2 tablespoons boiling water
75g sugar
50g dark brown sugar
125g self-rising cake flour
2 large eggs
125g very soft unsalted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon milk

1. Preheat the oven to 200. Mix the cocoa to a paste with the boiling water and set aside while you make the cupcake mixture.2. This couldn't be easier: Just put the sugars, flour, eggs, and butter and vanilla in the processor and blitz to combine smoothly.3. Scrape the mixture from the sides and then pulse while you add the cocoa paste and milk down the funnel. You should have a batter with a soft dropping consistency: If not, add a little more milk.4. Dollop into the paper baking cups in the pan and bake for 20 minutes, until an inserted cake tester comes out clean.5. Leave in the pan for 5 minutes, then remove, in the paper baking cups, to a wire rack.

For the fudge icing:
90g dark chocolate (minimum 70% cocoa solids)
125g unsalted butter, softened
120-140g icing sugar, sifted
1 tbsp vanilla extract

To make the icing, melt the chocolate in the microwave - 2-3 minutes on medium should do it -or in a bowl sitting over a pan of simmering water, and let cool slightly. In another bowl, beat the butter until it's soft and creamy and then add the sieved icing sugar and beat again until everything's light and fluffy. Then gently add the vanilla and chocolate and mix together until everything is glossy and smooth.

Sweet weekend

I hadn't baked anything for weeks so I thought it was high time I took out my books to browse. I knew I wouldn't have too much time on Saturday morning and also, our friends invited over to their house in the afternoon, so that meant another batch of cakes to take over.
If time is of essence, the easiest to make are muffins or cupcakes. I chose the cappuccino cupcakes from How to be a Domestic Goddess. Even though I'm not a coffee drinkker, save the odd cafe latte once in a blue moon, I'm addicted to cakes, chocolates, sweets, etc. with a coffee flavour. I have once made these cupcakes for my mum's workplace party and got demands for the recipe but I didn't get round to tasting them.

Cappuccino cupcakes

125g self-raising flour
125g soft butter
125g sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking powder
1 heaped tbsp instant espresso
2-3 tbsp milk

for the icing:
160g white chocolate
60g butter
120g sour cream
260g icing sugar
cocoa powder for dusting

Nigella's instructions are to put everything in the processor (except milk) and blitz. I hate washing up the parts of the processor so I went with the traditional dry and wet ingredients method. The cupcakes needed 20 minutes in 200C pre-heated oven. While they were cooling, I made the icing. Last time I made a note that half the amount of icing is quite enough, so I halved these amounts. The white chocolate has to be melted together with the butter, then after a little cooling you need to add the rest of the ingredients. I don't usually add the amount of sugar stated in a recipe for icing, I added only 100g for the half batch this time. This of course means that the icing is runnier, but a quarter of an hour in the fridge remedies that problem, too.
When the cupcakes were topped with the icing I dusted some cocoa powder over them, which indeed made them look like cappuccino cups as Nigella said. As for the taste, the sponge came out crumblier and drier than I remember with the processor method, but it had a pronounced nut-flavour, which was lovely (nuts and coffee are such a perfect combination, mmmm). But this page got another note: "Don't be lazy to wash up the processor" LOL The result is much better using that nasty device.



Since one of our friends who invited us over doesn't like coffee at all, I couldn't make two batches of this cupcake, I had to come up with something else.
Risking my exclusion from certain foodie circles, I must admit something. I'm not such a great fan of brownies. I mean, the amounts of butter and chocolate a small tray of brownies contains has always made me turn to the next page in any cookbook. But I was craving some chocolate this weekend and suddenly I remembered the brownies in one of my Hungarian cookbooks. I made this quite some time ago and remembered I loved it. Also, the amount of chocolate and the substitution of butter to oil doesn't make this recipe so frightful for me. I'm not sure most people would call it brownies because of the latter but anyway, this was an appealing recipe.

Brownies (from Judit Stahl)

100g chocolate, chopped
100g flour
100g sugar
20g cocoa
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp instant espresso (only to emphasise the chocolate flavour, it's not noticable)
2 eggs
100 ml oil (with a neutral taste)
1 handful of chopped nuts

Combine chocolate, flour, sugar, cocoa and baking powder in a bowl. Mix the coffee with one tbsp water in another bowl, add the eggs and oil and whisk. Combine the contents of the two bowl and spread the batter in a 24cm buttered tart tin.
The batter turned out pretty little, I could hardly even it out in the tin. Then I sprinkled it with chopped walnuts and put in the pre-heated 175C oven. The recipe suggested 18-20 minutes baking, but it was pretty soft after that time, so I left it in for another 5 minutes.

The result was a really moist cake but I should have chopped the chocolate more finely, at least it was a bit disturbing to me. Anyway, it was devoured by our friends in no time and all you could hear was "umm" and "oh" so I guess it wasn't so bad after all :)

Courgettes again

I guess I'll be eating more courgettes this summer than during the whole year so far. My Granny's plant is abounding in these unnaturally yellow, longish veggies, so I will have to make a thorough research for courgette recipes to try.
When it's courgettes, though, one dish to make is a definite one: courgette fritters. The first time I saw Nigella make these in her Forever Summer show, I was lost and keep making them very often.
The best thing about these fritters is that they are easily alterable. I've tried many variations depending on what I had at home and I realised I'm not too keen on a pronounced mint flavour so either only add a tiny amount of those chopped leaves or only parsley. No sparing with that! Also, when I don't have feta, I love (perhaps actually prefer) using grated smoked cheese which gives another layer of rich flavour to the otherwise not too interesting courgette.



So even though it was Nigella who introduced this perfect light supper to me, I like trying new versions, too. This one comes from Bill's Food, and is basically the same as Nigella's but I needed an excuse to use my new Bill book, you see ;)

Courgette fritters

500g courgette, grated
1/2 tsp sea salt
8 spring onions, chopped (a small brown onion works just fine, too)
125g feta, crumbled
35g chopped parsley
15g chopped mint
2 eggs, beaten
60g flour
sea salt and pepper to taste
60ml olive oil for frying

Put the courgettes in a colander, sprinkle with salt and set aside for 30 min (When I'm in a hurry, I omit this stage and skip to the next. Works fine for me). Squeeze out any excess liquid and pat dry with paper towel.
Mix everything in a huge bowl, then heat the oil in a pan and add tablespoonfuls of the batter, flattening them with the back of the spoon. Fry for about 2 min on each side (or until golden).

Serve with mayo, yoghurt, sour cream or a combination of these.

Recycling

I'm not very good at using up leftovers. The reason might be that I can't really think ahead. Furthermore, I don't have a proper pantry and my freezer's not too big so my stocks of food are very limited. And I usually don't like to eat the same thing for days on end - another reason why a man comes handy at one's house LOL He doesn't mind doing that ;)

I buy a lot of food magazines and usually they are stuck with recipes recycling leftovers but I usually forget them the moment I read them. Not this time.
I saw these rolls in one of these magazines, made with bacon, right before Easter. Since I had some ham left over after Easter, I decided to use them up.


Ham rolls


a packet of puff pastry
leftover cooked ham
spring onions
parsley
Dijon mustard
pepper
seeds of your choice


I'm not giving exact amounts as I added these from scratch. I had some spring onions which I wanted to get rid of, some parsley and chucked these together with the ham, mustard and some pepper (the ham was salty enough) into the food processor for a quick blitz, then spread this mixture on the puff pastry, rolled it up and cut 1cm thick slices. I put the rolls on a baking tray lined with baking parchment, brushed the top with a beaten egg and sprinkled over some sunflower seeds. They were baked at 200C until golden.

A quick and delicious weekday supper.

Despite my saying I can't really plan ahead I must admit I had hidden intentions when I made so much milk loaf for Easter. I sliced the leftover and tucked them in the freezer to use them up later. I had Nigella' s orange scented brioche pudding in mind...

I took out the slices in the morning and by the time I got home from work, they thawed. I stuck two slices with a teaspoon of home made marmelade, lined them up in a pudding bowl and poured over a mixture of milk, cream eggs and egg yolks and sultanas soaked in orange juice. After letting it stand for 15 minutes I cooked the brioche pudding in a hot oven for 45 minutes. We got a lovely, yellow, melting pudding which took considerable efforts on my side to stop eating LOL

One thing I didn't like though were the sultanas. The recipe instructed to scatter them over the top but they got burnt and had a bitter aftertaste. So I'll either cover the whole dish with foil before they burn or will try to hide them among the slices next time. Or subsitute them with dark chocolate chips ;) YUM!

29 years together

Easter Sunday coincided with my parents' 29th wedding anniversary this year. So even though I never make a proper cake for Easter, this time there was an excuse to make one :) And again thanks to Kelly-Jane I had these cute Cadbury choc eggs to use up, so I decided to make Nigella's Easter egg nest cake from Feast. I checked the recipe twice and even read the choc cloud cake recipe, which is basically the same I was told, but still went on sceptically preparing this flourless(!) cake. It is very easy to make, you just melt the chocolate with the butter, then beat the egg whites with sugar. After beating the yolks with sugar,too, you add the melted chocolate and carefully fold in the whites. It took me longer to bake than the stated 35-40 minutes because I used a 22cm pan, that was what I had.

Since several people told me it was quite a rich cake, I only used some cocoa powder in the whipped cream for colour instead of another bar of chocolate.

The result? Hmmm, not bad, but I'm afraid it was too dense for me even without the chocolate in the topping. Everyone else loved it though, so no problem with that ;)

Easter preparations

This Easter has arrived so quickly, I hardly noticed and hardly had the time to plan beforehand, so I was just going with the flow, not really having an idea what to bake (me, imagine!). But yesterday settled it and today I started my happy pottering in the kitchen.

Since the lovely Anna sent me a bottle of lemon oil, I have been searching for an occasion to try the lemon cupcakes from Forever Summer and I was craving something lemony this Easter! So cake No. 1 was quickly settled, as the muffins were a breeze to make in the processor. Since I can't get royal icing, which the recipe suggests using and my favourite frosting is cream cheese, I just whipped up a batch of those, using 125g cream cheese, 50g butter and about 4 tbsp icing sugar, and I added some of the lemon oil, a tbsp lemon juice and some zest as well. Mmmmm, so heavenly citrusy! Now I'm thinking of making it as "blondies" in a pan next time, with some lime juice and zest added and the same cream cheese topping. Drooling just at the thought of it...
(Cupcake cases courtesy of Kelly-Jane, aren't they cute? Thanks again!)



I was so desperate yesterday about not having ideas I turned to my hubby for help. Guess what his answer was at the question "What would you like to have?". If you read carefully so far, you'll know it by now: curd cheese. Actually he named this cake but I wasn't giving myself so easily (what about creativity?), so I chose his all time favourite cake, which I've only ever attempted once in our 10 years together: curd cheese squares Rákóczi style. The reason for my not making it is not because it's extremely difficult or fiddly to make. It is simply that I don't like it that much. Or much rather that I can't find a recipe which reminds me of my childhood memories of this cake: soft sponge divided by a thin layer of apricot jam, curd cheese and a huuuuge, sometimes over 7cm(!) layer of marshmallowy soft meringue, sprinkled with chocolate shavings. Mmmmmmmmmm! Whenever I went to the cake shop, I'd ask for this cake, it was made so brilliantly in my hometown.

This recipe doesn't come any close to the above mentioned taste memory either, it is the traditional and home-made version but it did turn out to be the best of the kind I've tasted so far.
I followed the recipe faithfully except that I made 1.5x amount of the dough because it seemed too little for me for my pan and I used 4 extra whites (from the freezer) and proportionately more sugar, because we like a thicker meringue on top. The result: a few hours after the cake has come out of the oven, half of it is missing already. And this time it's not me getting nearer to a broader waistline ;)


In fact, I'm still craving that familiar taste...

Nigella's fresh gingerbread with lemon icing

I associate gingerbread with cold weather in general but somehow I tend to make it this time of the year, it seems, although this is only the second time I've made it LOL The first time was around March last year, simply because the black treacle I had bought months earlier was getting close to its expiry date. So far I know of only one single shop that stocks it, and that is almost 200km away so you can understand I was cherishing it :) Almost too long...

Anyway, I had to use it up and I didn't suspect what impact it would have on my life! If I was given the difficult task of choosing my favourite cake, this would be in the first three. Honestly, it is amazing. And you can imagine the odours filling your home when making this: treacle, golden syrup, fresh ginger and cinnamon... Mmmmmm! The lemon icing is really the icing on the cake: it counterbalances the chewy sweetness and velvety deep treacle aroma of the cake.

Since a friend of mine happened to visit the shop where treacle can be found and she bought me two tins(!) I had another long-awaited occasion to have a go at this recipe.

It is extremely easy to make as well. You just melt the butter, brown sugar, golden syrup, treacle, cinnamon and fresh ginger in a pan, then taking it off the heat add the eggs, one at a time. Stir in the flour and baking soda (dissolved in warm water), pour the mixture in a tray and bake for 3/4-1 hour.

The icing is made of icing sugar, lemon juice and hot water simply, though I find it always too little for the cake, you could easily double the amounts stated.

This is why I consider Nigella my baking queen: How to be a Domestic Goddess is full of these kinds of recipes which inevitably make you feel a Domestic Goddess yourself, with this little effort!