Lemonlight

Delicious elevenses + a recipe for perfect shortbread

You may have spotted yesterday that I had an overwheming urge to bake. One of those said items was shortbread, which turned out perfectly - light, buttery and crumby, but holds together beautifully well. All this and very simple to make. Look at how amazingly restrained I was this morning...

Shortbread
from Tana Ramsay's 'Family Kitchen' available here (I only tweaked recipe very very slightly - I didn't bother seiving anything and found I needed a tiny bit of water to get things going. You'll see).

INGREDIENTS

• 100g plain flour
• 50g cornflour
• 50g caster sugar
• 100g cold butter

METHOD

1. Preheat oven to 160ºC/310ºF/gas 2½. Grease and line a 20cm cake tin
2. Add the flour, cornflour and sugar in the bowl of the electric mixer, chop the butter into small cubes and add that.
3. Turn the motor onto lowest setting and watch as mixture gradually becomes crumbly and then begins to come together in heavy lumps. At this point turn the motor off and tip the cumbly lumpy mixture into greased cake tin.
4. Push the shortbread down firmly with back of dessert spoon. Flatten as much as possible and prick all over with a fork.
5. Bake for 25minutes until cooked but not brown.
6. As soon as it's out of the oven but still in the tin, but into slices and sprinkle lightly with caster sugar. Leave in tin until cooled.

Will keep for 2-3 days in air-tight container and also freezes well. Apparently.

*Mine wouldn't get lumpy so I added cold water a teaspoon at a time until it did.

Comfort food

It's a nasty old day out there - rain, fog, cold and blergh. Such weather calls for overloading on carbs and filling the house with the goodly smells of baking bread, quiche and shortbread...

Food for thought + a recipe for 'Hippie Banana Muffins'

The morning:
I had a lovely choc-chip muffin for breakfast today (brought from the coffee-shop at work along with a large capuccino + extra shot). I'm not sure if muffins are *supposed* to have a half-inch crunchy crust of sugar like this one did, but I found it rather satisfying coupled with the delicately soft (nicely over-sweet) vanilla middle and occassional studding of chocolate. Not as good as museli and yogurt for breakfast but not as bad as a 'full-english' - a good analogy for how I'm feeling today. Harumph.

The afternoon:
OK, I'm no scientist (I have the inconsequential school reports to prove it) however, I think I may be asking too much of my physiology to cope with the amount of unrefined sugar I'm consuming during these cold, dark days. Any excuse! Headaches. Lethargy. Carpal Tunnel flaring up. If only I could rid myself of this compelling need for baked goods. I'd give up all the other bad stuff (apart from coffee) if I could keep the bread, cakes, cookies, muffins and pastry. Sigh. Time to start googling for low GI recipes - I bet they are mealy and mean and bleurgh.

The evening:
Brainwave! I am sure my recipe for 'Hippie Banana Muffins' must count as being low GI - most of the sweetness comes from bananas - that's FRUIT for chrissakes, the little sugar that's used is brown - surely more virtuous than its naughty white cousin! I can't remember where the recipe came from originally, but it has evolved with every baking to become my very own type of pseudo-muffin that I wheel out to replace proper treats in times of tightening waistbands. Let's face it, Christmas is going to be a food-fest (I have a brand new book of Nigella Christmas recipes to try out), so I think I can manage a few weeks days of hippie food...

Hippie Banana Muffins | Makes 12

Dry ingredients

• 130g Self-Raising flour (or plain - they always turn out the same)
• 55g light brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground mixed spice
• 100g rolled oats (whizzed up in blender if too big and chunky)

Wet ingredients

• 3 medium very-ripe bananas
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoons corn oil
• 125ml milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Plus

• 100g trail mix (or raisins or similar)

What to do

1. Preheat oven to 200°C (400°F) Gas Mark 6
2. Prepare 12-hole muffin tin with papers (unless you like washing up)
3. In a big bowl, sift the flour and mix toether all the dry ingredients
4. In a smaller bowl mash up bananas and mix in all wet ingredients, then add the trail mix
5. Ad your wet mixture to your dry mixture and combine lazily until not spots of flour show, divide between muffin cases and bake for 20-25 minutes until a skewer come out clean
6. Cool for 5 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack.
7. Ignore the intoxicating smell, they won't be at their best until they are very well chilled in the fridge, preferably overnight.
8. Now you can eat them - enjoy! (Oh, they freeze well too).

Cute little bean pots

I love my new little Le Creuset bean pots! They were half the price of all the other coloured ones on Amazon, so I got all four for about £17. They'll be lovely with some thick beef stew and a big herby dumpling sat on top, steaming away under that cute little lid...

Blueberry Muffins

If you ever need a killer recipe for blueberry muffins I can totally recommend this one at allrecipes.com. I would suggest not converting the recipe to metric if this is what you normally work in - when I've done that before the results have been decidedly wonky. I dusted off my old 'cup' measurers and they came out dreamily good...

Minty brownies

Look at what I made. See how Nigella is looking on all approvingly...

These are Nigella's Snow-Flecked Brownies with my own patented and very classy(!) topping. Add a layer of After-Eight mints when the brownies are straight out of the oven, swirl and marbelize the squidgy, melted mints. Ta da! SO yummy, and very, very rich. Even I could only eat one of them|!!

Suck it and see

Hey, guess what I've just eaten? No, not a whole buffet tray of vol-au-vents and a family-sized black forest gateau, that was last night. No, I've just had some cough candy. Man alive they're weird sweeties aren't they? Herbal and aniseedy - a bit metally - and surely a throwback to days when we didn't have nice things to put in sweets (probably invented at the same time as dandelion and burdock and root beer). It's one of those tastes that isn't exactly bad, but it surely can't be good, can it? This is exactly how I felt about olives at first - now I love them to bits. I think I'm going to have another sweetie.

Oh, and I've updated my about page which was about 3 years out of date!

Feeling fruity

My diet last week consisted mainly of cornish pasties and clotted cream teas. Not that I'm complaining. Possibly there was a trace of nutritional value in the strawberry jam that accompanied the scones and the clotted cream, maybe even a touch of vitamin C in the swede in the pasties, but I'm thinking not. You'd think too much of a good thing would be great, but somehow I just felt blurgh by the end of the week. For the last few days though I have been overloading on vitamins and realising that what you eat makes a huge difference to how you feel. Today I feel tomatoey.

Of course general wellbeing is always helped along by yet another generous helping of beautiful September sunshine. So nice.

Blackberry muffins

Oh my goodness, I think I've invented the best recipe yet, even if I do say so myself.

There seems to be a glut of blackberries at the moment (not that I'm complaining), and rather than make an apple and blackberry crumble again (crikey, these trousers are getting tight, strange that), I thought I'd have a go at these.

It's kind of taken from a blueberry muffin recipe, and as I was worried the blackberries might be a lilttle tart by themselves, I added some of those mini white choc chips (as they are so, so sweet (yum)) and I had an orange so I added that too.

Recipe

Dry ingredients:

• 400g plain flour
• 175g caster sugar
• 1 tbspn baking powder

Wet ingredients:

• Finely grated zest of 1 orange
• 284ml buttermilk
• 2 eggs
• 85g melted butter

Tasty bits:

• 225g blackberries
• 50g mini white chocolate chips

What to do:

1. Preheat oven to 180C and line a muffin tray with pretty cases.
2. Mix together the dry ingredients in a big bowl.
3. Mix together the wet ingredients in a smaller bowl.
4. Make a well in the dry ingredients and gently and not too thouroughly mix in the wet things.
5. Carefully stirthrough the 'tasty bits'.
6. Spoon generously into the muffin cases and cook in oven for 15-20 mins.
7. Allow to cool for 5 mins then onto a rack to cool down properly.
8. Eat them all up as quickly as you can!

Very cheap and very easy apple and blackberry crumble

What could be better on the hottest day of the year than some apple and blackberry crumble! Happening to notice a very expensive (£2) tiny punnet of Dutch blackberries in a green-grocers shop we thought - hang on, we can go out and pick these ourselves - good local blackberries. And, there's only one thing I know how to cook with blackberries.

So, you take one small bowl of foraged blackberries (better give them a wash, especially if picked at dog height)...

Some apples, straight from the tree (in our garden - so convenient - otherwise consider scrumping)...

Peel, core and chop all the apples, not too small, then throw into a dish with a squeeze of lemon juice and few spoons of sugar, maybe 6 or 8 tablespoons (I didn't measure), stir it round then stud through with all the blackberries.

This is now where cheap and easy part company, on this occassion, feeling hard done by having had to peel and chop all those apples, I opted for the easy route and used this....

It's not as good as the real thing, but it's not bad at all, and you just open the bag and pour it over the fruit. Easy peasy.

Then, after baking it for 30 mins in a hot oven, you're treated to this. With vanilla ice cream. Heaven...