I’m so looking forward to this weekend! After a busy few weeks, it’s time to kick back and enjoy a lovely few days with the family. It’s Charlie’s birthday so we’re planning to head out on Sunday for brunch and I’m fully intending on spending Saturday baking hot cross buns and scoffing chocolate - let’s hope it stays nice and sunny! If you’re entertaining this weekend, I’ve got loads of recipes for you, including big roast dinners, delicious desserts, baking and - of course - hot cross buns! For this big Easter roundup, I’ve also picked a few of my favourite sweet treats, just in case you haven’t chosen your chocolate stash yet. Enjoy!
I’ve had this recipe for ages. It’s my go-to for any time when I want to make a quick Sunday lunch dessert (or if I need to take something relatively impressive to someone else’s house). Every so often I think that I should properly write the recipe out for you (piecing together the scribbles from my recipe notes), and guess what - I’ve finally got round to it! This easy biscuit pie crust is literally just pressed into the baking tin, and the filling can be as simple as a tin of cherry pie filling, or just some grated dessert apples (I’ve given some more suggestions below). Here’s how to make a really easy cherry pie with an easy biscuit pie crust.
I’ve always thought that music and food go hand in hand, but that could just be because we’re all huge music lovers in this house and, with the boys both studying music production, you can imagine there’s always a pretty strong baseline booming out of one room or other here at number one. If I’m in the kitchen, the radio will always be on. For me, the kitchen is the warmth and heart of our home, and it’s important to me that it’s filled with fun, bright colours and delicious treats, and there’s often someone having a little boogie around, so you can imagine how much we’re loving the new Sainsbury’s #fooddancing ad - it was basically just made for us - food and music are both just simple pleasures, and the kitchen’s the perfect place for a bit of dancing! If you haven’t seen it yet, the advert features families dancing around their kitchens while cooking and comes with a pretty catchy tune too:
I think when the weather is cold and bleak (let’s face it, January’s not the greatest month is it?), it’s even more important that there’s fun, laughter, music and good food all around, so to warm us up, I cooked up a delicious, warming spiced berry, rhubarb and lime crumble from the Sainsbury’s website:
Berry, rhubarb and lime crumble
You will need:
50gporridge oats
50ggolden caster sugar
100gunsalted butter, diced
125gplain flour
1 tspvanilla extract
200grhubarb, roughly chopped
500gfrozen black forest fruits, defrosted
Finely grated zest and juice of 1 lime
½ tspcinnamon
Firstly, preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4.
Weigh out the oats, caster sugar, butter, flour (I used a tiny bit more than the recipe suggests as I made one large crumble rather than four small ones), then rub them together, adding the vanilla in as well, until you get a breadcrumby texture.
Then just slice the rhubarb and add to the defrosted fruit along with the lime zest and juice and the cinnamon. Either pile into a large bowl, or divide into four smaller bowls, and sprinkle with the crumble topping.
Bake for 25 - 30 minutes until golden and bubbling. Serve with custard or double cream.
I guess as a writer, I should be more creative than most with my language, but when it comes to food, I’m pretty stuck with the old favourites and find myself describing things as ‘delicious’ and ‘nice’ probably more often than I should. According to new research by Sainsbury’s, as a nation, we now spend an average of something like 16 hours a week planning, talking, and thinking about food (that’s almost six years of our adult lives) and yet despite this, we’re still using the same old words, with most of us using about six to describe their meals each week. My chums at Sainsbury’s love their food, and to expand our foodie vocabulary, they’ve enlisted lovely linguist Susie Dent to help them create ‘The Taste Dictionary: 101 ways to describe each mouthful’. The dictionary includes some fabulous words, like ‘lickerous’ (meaning: sweet and tempting), and my own favourite: ‘uliginous’ (yoo-lij-uh-nuh s - say it slowly - it almost oooozes…), meaning creamy, soft and smooth to taste. So to celebrate my new favourite word, how about trying the very epitome of uliginous food, a soft, creamy, luscious (ooh, there’s another one!) chocolate and peanut butter mousse, decorated with some salted peanut brittle, for a little crunch.
Good morning, good morning! The sun is shining (well, it is at the moment - clearly if you’re reading this next November then it might not be) and this week’s Sunday baking has a lovely, summer strawberry theme, courtesy of Beko, who challenged me to create a perfect strawberry recipe, inspired by their Wimbledon strawberry recipes page (check out the strawberry, basil and goat’s cheese panini - yum). Our local pick your own farm has just opened again for the summer and the strawberries are ABSOLUTELY HUGE! I thought I’d do a bit of research into strawberry shortcakes and it seems they’re actually more scone-like than shortbread, so this one’s a bit in between: a shortbread mixture, but lightened up with baking powder and an egg. I love the little dots of green pistachio in there too - so pretty! Bash them with a rolling pin, but leave some big pieces which add a bit of crunch.
I’m a huge fan of rapeseed oil. The fields surrounding the house are ablaze with yellow every summer, and we have great local producers, Chiltern Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil, right on our doorstep. Rapeseed oil is really healthy - it has the lowest saturated fat content of any oil (6.6g/100g, compared to 14.3g for olive oil and 54.8g for butter), very high levels of Essential Fatty Acids (ten times the Omega 3 of olive oil) and is a natural source of vitamin E too. I use it for everything: roasties come out well as I think it’s quite pure so it heats to high temperatures quite well, it’s great for frying as it doesn’t smell too yucky, and I bake with it too. One of my faves is this rapeseed oil, lemon and almond drizzle cake - especially for dessert on a Sunday.
This week’s Sunday baking is steering into uncharted territory for me. I make pizza all the time and have a tried and tested dough recipe that always turns out well, so when the lovely chaps at Beko asked if I’d create a pizza for them, I was really happy to give it a go. Turns out, though, that Beko were after something a bit different! They have a sweet pizza recipe page on their website and my challenge was to come up with a new sweet pizza creation.
My baby was 21 yesterday - can you believe it? I feel SO old! Actually, I generally don’t really feel that old (except when I think back over those 21 years), which is quite good as we still have plenty of adventures to come - I guess that’s the advantage of having your kids really young.
For his birthday cake, Sam went a bit off piste and chose a cherry and berry crumble which I was very happy to supply. It’s barely a recipe at all, but I’ll share it with you just because it was SO DARN GOOD!
Okay, slightly cheating here as there’s no actual baking involved, but cheesecake is still cake, right? Anyway, yesterday was Charlie’s 18th birthday. How I came to be the mother of an 18 year old when I’m such a youngster is beyond me, but anyway it happened, and as usual, the Birthday Big Cheese got to choose the birthday cake of his dreams. No surprises here as Charlie basically always chooses variations of the same thing (which is a welcome change from the others who tend to devise me a GBBO-style technical challenge for every birthday) and this time chose an Oreo chocolate cheesecake. To make sure your cheesecake is smooth and silky, make sure you allow the cream cheese to come up to room temperature first.
You’ll probably remember that back in the summer, The Organic Trade Board challenged us to take the #thriftyorganic challenge and switch our usual weekly shop for a 100% organic one, all for £83, the average grocery shopping budget for a UK family of four. We ate really well AND stayed on budget, and it made me really think about what we eat, and made me plan our meals properly as well. Eating organic on a budget really is possible!
Did you know it’s National Apple Day today? To celebrate, I’m starting the day with a delicious bowl of spiced apple porridge. The spiced apple compote can be used for loads of things: spooning over ice cream, stirring through yoghurt, on top of rice pudding as a delicious dessert (add a splash of rum too, if you like), and it’s great with savoury dishes too like roast pork. But this morning, with the rain battering the windows, I chose a big, warming bowl of porridge. By the way, the spice I use is pumpkin pie mix from Steenbergs Organic, but you can use a couple of pinches of anything warming: nutmeg or cinnamon, maybe.
For the compote:
I’ve used English eating apples. I tend to make quite a big batch of this and keep it for other things, but you can make it with a single apple too - just with a dot of butter and a couple of pinches of spice
5 English apples - I used Coxes
25g butter
2 tbsps brown sugar
Couple of tablespoons of water
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
Peel and core the apples and chop them into quite small pieces. Butter an ovenproof dish, then tumble in the apple pieces. Dot with the remaining butter, sprinkle over the sugar and spices and dribble with the water. Give it a quick stir then cover and cook for about 20-25 minutes, or until the apple pieces are tender.
While the compote is baking, make your favourite porridge recipe. Stir the compote through the porridge and finish with a dribble of honey and a little extra spice. Delicious, and a really comforting start to the day!
For more information about English apples, visit Love English Apples.
How often do you throw out leftover bread? We used to be really guilty of this until a while ago when I did the Sainsbury’s advert and had to go through my freezer and explain why things were in there, and there, nestled at the back were some breadcrumbs I’d made and forgotten about.
So walking the dog yesterday morning in blazing sunshine in shorts and t-shirts, we were surprised to see big, fat blackberries already on the brambles. I wonder if we’re just not normally very observant, or if they’ve come in very early this year? Anyway, we thought we’d get picking before the birds get all the best ones, and had a decent sized pot of them without even really trying (they’re stabby buggers - I’m nursing a few nasty scratches).
So recently. The Organic Trade Board challenged us to take the Thrifty Organic Challenge and switch our usual weekly shop for organic. The average grocery shopping budget for a UK family of four is £83 a week. Could I switch everything we usually buy to organic , stay on budget, and still produce yummy, healthy food for my family? Here’s how we got on.
It’s been a mad week here at English Towers. The Sainsbury’s #loveyourfreezer campaign has gone live and it’s been really lovely receiving tweets, texts and Facebook messages (and AWFUL screenshots - thanks guys haha) saying ‘ooh, I’ve just seen you on the telly!’. I’m SO proud of this campaign - Sainsbury’s have been amazingly lovely to work with, and there are loads more exciting things coming up.
So tomorrow (23rd November 2014) is stir up Sunday. If you’d like to cook a Christmas pudding this weekend - or if it’s any other date and you’re arriving here from the future, in which case HELLO FUTURE PEOPLE! - here’s my easy peasy step by step way to do it.
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