Blueberry Buttermilk Muffins (another version)

This is a slightly different version of blueberry and buttermilk muffins. The other ones I made contained demarara sugar and butter, while these have white sugar and oil.

Put flour and sugar in a bowl, and in a large jug put oil, buttermilk, egg and vanilla.

Add the buttermilk mixture and blueberries to the flour and sugar, and stir until combined.

Because of the white sugar, the mixture is very pale - I normally use brown or demarara sugar, so I was surprised at how white it was.

Spoon into muffin trays and cook at 200 C for around 20 minutes. My little muffins took 15 mins.
The cooked muffins have a golden, crispy top and are very light and fluffy inside. I'm used to the more solid, substantial and sticky muffins, so to me these are a bit like the 'white bread' version - not as tasty - more like a light cupcake.

But very popular with everyone else, and they come out of the muffin papers very cleanly with no residue, which is unusual for a muffin!

Ingredients:
2½ cups (375g) self-raising flour
¾ cup (165g) caster sugar
1 egg, beaten lightly
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2/3 cup (160ml) vegetable oil (I used olive oil)
¾ cup (180ml) buttermilk
100 g blueberries

Based on this recipe.

Mango and Sugar Plums

I had to take photos of this mango and the sugar plums and put them on here, because they're so beautiful!

Blueberry Buttermilk Muffins

I love muffins made with buttermilk - it seems to give them a slightly sour tang (as in cheesecake rather than off milk!) which goes especially well with blueberries.

The recipe started as a loaf, but now I use it for muffins instead, as it's more practical for school lunches.

Put flour, baking powder, bicarb, nutmeg and sugar in a large bowl. In a jug put egg, buttermilk and have melted butter ready.

(I don't put the butter in with the other wet ingredients to keep it warm and fully melted.)

Add buttermilk/egg and melted butter to the flour mixture, and stir in gently. When almost combined, add blueberries and continue to stir until everything is just combined.

Spoon into muffin pans and cook at 190 C for 15-20 minutes (my smaller ones took 15 mins, and the bigger ones took 20 mins).

I had about 4 tablespoons of mixture left over and didn't have room for another muffin pan in the oven, so I oiled my mini quiche dish and made a little muffin cake instead. I sprinkled some extra demarara on the top and we shared a mini cake for dessert.


Ingredients:
2 cups (300 g ) plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarb of soda
small grating of nutmeg
1 cup (220 g) demarara sugar
1 punnet (175 g) blueberries
1 egg, lightly beaten
60 g butter, melted
1 cup (250 ml) buttermilk

Minced Beef Wellington

I made this for dinner last night, and as it wasn't a spectacular success, I wasn't sure whether to blog about it. But I decided to add it anyway, if only to remind myself how it turned out.

When I say it wasn't a success, it wasn't that no one liked it, because it was eaten and enjoyed. But I wasn't sure the time and effort it took was worth the result. Although as I discovered the next day, it tastes much nicer when it's cold.

(This recipe is from Jamie Oliver's book Ministry of Food.)

Firstly fry all the chopped vegetables in a large frying pan, in a little olive oil. Add a generous handful of frozen peas - or sweetcorn, which is what I used. Put them in a large bowl and allow to cool.

Add minced beef, egg, salt and pepper; and I also added a couple of shakes of Worcestershire sauce because I couldn't see how this wasn't going to turn out to be very bland otherwise!

Roll out the pastry to the size of a small tea towel (according to JO) or if you've got the ready-rolled pastry, defrost 4 or so slices.

Shape meat mixture into a sausage shape - or if you've got the square pastry, it's going to be several sausage shapes. Put the 'sausage' at one end and roll it all up. (If you have a tea towel-shaped bit of pastry, place it along the long edge.)

Roll it up completely...

...and then seal the ends. I used egg along the edges, but in the end I decided I would have been better with no 'glue' as the pastry was quite gummy already and the egg was making things more slippery.

I ended up making some little pasties aswell.

Put them on a baking tray, brush with egg and cook at 180 C for an hour. In the photos in the book, there are no slits cut in the top to let out steam, but I thought it was better to have them.

The cooked pies aren't very pretty! There was quite a lot of leaking out of the holes. But they got eaten up, with tomato sauce, and were quite filling.

I suppose my problem with this is that the filling was a little bland (I know I didn't follow the recipe exactly but I don't think that would have made a lot of difference) but then I'm not a big fan of meat pie in any form - I find they often have an unappetising 'steamy' flavour - so maybe that's why it didn't appeal to me much.

Part of one of the long 'wellingtons' was left over, and I kept it in the fridge overnight. We ate it at lunch time, and it was actually *much* nicer cold. So I would suggest this would make a good lunch dish or picnic food, cooked the day before.

Ingredients:
1 onion, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 potato, finely chopped
1 stick celery, finely chopped
2 large flat mushrooms, finely chopped (I left this out)
2 cloves garlic, minced/grated - I chopped mine finely
4 sprigs rosemary, leaves stripped and finely chopped (I used one sprig)
a big handful frozen peas (I used frozen corn)
1 large egg, beaten
500g good quality minced beef
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
500g puff pastry, or 4 or 5 sheets of ready-rolled

Cypriot Orange Cake

I saw this orange cake on Anna's blog and decided that today - a cool and rainy Saturday - is the perfect day to try it out.

I actually got my eldest son to do most of the work, while I was making dinner - it's one of those cakes where you just mix everything together and put it in a cake pan.

Put the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, sugar) in a big bowl, and in a jug combine eggs, oil, vanilla extract and orange zest and juice. Mix it all together gently.

Pour mixture into an oiled bundt tin or a 23 cm round tin.

Cook for one hour (mine took 50 mins) at 180 C. Leave to cool in pan and then remove onto a cake rack.

As Anna says, it's light and fragrant - orangey and tangy and not too sweet, and very easy to make.

Ingredients:
3 cups self-raising flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup vegetable oil (I used olive oil)
3 tsp baking powder
zest and juice of 2 oranges
4 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla essence

Berry Sorbet

This was going to be Nectarine Sorbet, as I had some overripe nectarines that needed using - but when I went to cut them up I realized I'd waited too long and they had lost most of their taste. In the freezer I had some frozen mixed berries, so I used them instead.

Put 225 g sugar in a saucepan and add 150 ml water. Heat gently until sugar has dissolved.

When sugar has dissolved, increase heat and boil for 1 minute. Remove from heat and allow to cool. (I forgot to boil the sugar and it worked out fine - although it took ages to freeze, so maybe this was why.)

Puree or blend about 450 g fruit and then seive to remove any seeds. Stir fruit into the cooled sugar.

I heated frozen mixed berries in a pan, mashed them up and then pushed them through a seive.

Make in an ice cream maker. I stood my sugar/fruit mixture in the freezer for a couple of hours to make sure it was totally cold, and then churned it in the ice cream maker. It wouldn't freeze convincingly, but after a night in the freezer it was perfect - not too soft, not too hard.

Delicious! A beautiful colour and intensely flavoured.

Ingredients:
225 g granulated sugar
150 ml water
450 g fruit

Chocolate Cola Cake

This is a recipe I found by chance while I was looking for something else, and I had to make it straight away, even though it's hot here at the moment, and not really a good time to have the oven on!

I halved the original recipe to one I can fit in my 20 x 20 cm Pyrex dish, because it isn't anyone's birthday and I didn't think we needed to eat a whole cake between us. (OK so it's Australia Day, but that's not really enough of an excuse for us, as we don't really commemorate it in our house!)

Put flour, bicarb, sugar and cocoa in a bowl and combine. Beat an egg lightly, and add vanilla extract.

In a small pan, melt the butter gently, then add cola and milk. Turn off heat. Add egg and the butter mixture to the dry ingredients and mix in quickly and lightly.

Pour mixture into a cake pan - mine was a 20 x 20 cm Pyrex dish lined with a strip of baking paper. Cook at 180 C for 30 minutes or so until a skewer comes out clean.

Cool in pan for 10 mins before removing to a cooling rack. My cake was quite delicate so needed to be handled carefully.

The icing was made by melting butter then stirring in cocoa and cola. Pour the mixture into some icing sugar and beat together until smooth.

Pour onto cake and spread over the top. There was enough to cover the top of the cake and for some to dribble down the sides a little.

Cut into slices and watch it be demolished extremely quickly.

This was a very light, moist cake, with an interesting taste - the cola gave it a subtle flavour that was different to other chocolate cakes - it's hard to describe, so maybe you should make it yourself and see!

Ingredients:
Cake:
125 g self-raising flour
pinch of bicarb
2 tbsp cocoa powder
150 ml caster sugar
1 egg, beaten
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
125 g butter
100 ml cola
2 tbsp milk
Icing:
100 g icing sugar
50 g butter
1 tbsp cola
1 tbsp cocoa powder

Leek and Sweet Potato Quiche

I made this quiche the other day when our friends Lisa and Ailin were coming over for lunch. It uses the olive oil pastry (the easiest pastry in the world) that I always use for quiche, so it's really quick to make.

Sarah, my sister, has a friend who uses the recipe - and she says that instead of rolling out the pastry, she just presses it into the quiche dish with her hands. I tried this and it works well, so now it's even quicker and easier! It gives a slightly ragged-looking edge, unless you spend a little time tidying things up, but raggedy edges don't worry me.

I lined the dish with the pastry, then put in a layer of leeks that I'd sliced finely and softened in a little butter and oil. I was planning to use onion, but the leeks were very reasonably priced today.

Then I put over a layer of thinly-sliced sweet potato.

I scattered over some creamy fetta cheese - and a little cheddar too, as I wasn't sure I had quite enough fetta - and added some chopped parsley.

To the eggy/milky mixture I added a generous teaspoonful of wholegrain mustard and some salt and pepper. As usual I had enough to make a mini quiche aswell.

Then I poured the egg/milk over, and cooked it for 45 - 60 mins at 170 C.

It was very tasty, I thought - mildly flavoured but not bland, and quite filling.

The original recipe for quiche is here

Ingredients:
pastry:
8 heaped tbsp flour
1/2 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
8 tbsp olive oil
8 tbsp water
filling:
1 medium onion or leek
1 small sweet potato
fetta/cheddar cheese
eggy topping:
3 eggs
400 ml milk (approx)
wholegrain mustard
salt, pepper

Mango Smoothie Ice Cream

I read about this very quick and easy way of making ice cream on the Claytons Blog, where Coby made a banana version. It uses sweetened condensed milk and doesn't need to be churned in an ice cream maker.

I made mine with mango instead, as it's pretty warm here at the moment, and mango is such a summery flavour. Coby said her children called theirs 'banana smoothie ice cream' which is a good name, so mine is 'mango smoothie ice cream'.

Put the condensed milk and cream in a large bowl, then mash up the mango with a fork and add that too.

Whisk it up really well with electric beaters. (This was very splattery, probably because of all the little lumps of mango.)

Pour into a container and freeze for several hours. Take it out of the freezer 15-20 minutes before serving, because it will probably be spoon-bendingly hard at first.

It's a pretty sweet ice cream - not really surprising when you think that condensed milk is one of the sweetest substances known to man.

Today, for some reason I decided it needed biscuits and melted dark chocolate, but they weren't necessary at all - it definitely doesn't need accompaniment.

Ingredients:
Flesh of 1 mango
400 g can of condensed milk (I used skim)
Enough cream to fill the empty condensed milk can (about 300 ml according to Coby)

Peanut Brittle

I've never made toffee or peanut brittle before, but Stephen convinced me we should try, as brittle is one of his favourites and he hasn't made any for years - so at 1030 the other night, this is what we were doing.

Put 3 cups of caster sugar and 1 cup of water in a heavy-based pan and heat, while stirring, until sugar dissolves.

Once dissolved, boil for around 10 minutes until it goes golden.

That's what it tells you to do in the recipes - but ours was taking ages and we were waiting at least 30 minutes before we decided maybe we should turn up the heat and boil it more rapidly.

Once it was boiling more rapidly it pretty quickly went golden, and when a drop of the hot sugar was put into a glass of cold water, there was a distinctive 'crack' sound which meant it was ready.

We used a large baking tray lined with buttered baking paper, and spread roasted peanuts over. (Protect the table/work surface underneath the pan, as the whole thing gets very hot.)

The peanuts could have been spread more evenly, but the non-peanut edges were good for the children who don't like peanuts.

And we found for those who do like peanuts, the middle part of the brittle (with lots of peanuts in) was the best part - so maybe next time more peanuts would be better.

Allow to cool, then break into chunks/shards.

Ingredients:
3 cups caster sugar
1 cup water
200 g (or more) roasted peanuts (unsalted)