yummeelicious

I remember when we bought our house first, we were thrilled to have a garden. After years living in tiny apartments, and especially the previous 2 years in a ground floor box of an apartment with no balcony or outside space, we were thrilled when we bought our house. It has no major front garden but has, what was to us at the time, a huge back garden with loads of potential. We had lofty dreams of vegetable patches, herb gardens, greenhouses, cherry blossom trees. We tried the lot, and then realised that neither of us are particularly green fingered. Gardening is hard work and the rewards require patience which I don’t think either of us have. In fairness most of the ideas were his but one that was mine was growing our own rhubarb. We grew it in a large pot and in fairness with got some nice rhubarb one season. By the time the next season came around, all the pot contained was weeds! So back to the supermarket to buy my rhubarb which is less hassle and while season is not expensive. Needless to say a number of years on in our house, the garden contains a rather oversized trampoline, a swing, multiple scooters, bikes, tractors, not to mention the 20 footballs and goal posts. The one thing that does remain from our original garden dreams is my cherry blossom tree.

I LOOOOOOVE RHUBARB!! Totally adore it, would eat it with anything for any meal or just for the sake of eating. One of the things I like about rhubarb is that is one of the few vegetables that you can only really get in season. So with the limited window in the year when rhubarb is a possibility I think the only thing to do is make as much rhubarb as possible. As  a child, I remember rhubarb stewed with custard and rhubarb tarts which are what I would call the usual things to do with rhubarb but this year I decided I would try out some other things to do with rhubarb and add it too as many things as possible.

Rhubarb and ginger cupcakes

I like making cupcakes, because they are quick and easy, there is always enough for everyone and they look pretty. Also, who doesn’t like cupcakes! However I wanted to incorporate my first purchase of rhubarb of the year and do something a little different. So I took out “The Flavour Thesaurus” and looked up rhubarb flavour combinations and happened upon ginger. I added a teaspoon of ground ginger to my usual cupcake recipe and then a cup of finely chopped rhubarb (1cup for a batch of 12). You need to chop finely enough that it will cook in the 12 minutes or so but big enough to know they are there! To decorate them, I used a meringue-type frosting made with a rhubarb syrup! They were Yummee but I did discover some people who don’t like rhubarb!! Strange individuals!

Moelleux au Chocolat with Rhubarb Compote

After watching the second episode of Series 1 of “Little Paris Kitchen” and seeing how simple a Moelleux au Chocolat with a salted caramel centre appeared, I decided I had to make one. Of course I realised too late in the evening that I had no cream to make the caramel. So to improvise, I decided to make a rhubarb compote to accompany my molten chocolate.

I made my compote with 2 cups of rhubarb, 4 tablespoons of brown sugar, 2 tablespoons of water simmered to 116oC for about 5 minutes. The result is a soft, sweet and tangy compote that I had to restrain myself to stop eating and wait for the accompanying cake. The cake was not the world’s greatest moelleux au chocolat but it still tasted good and the compote went fantastically with it. Of course, if you manage to have any of the rhubarb compote left over it can be used on any number of dishes. The Gastronomic Girls like theirs on yoghurt and in smoothies but I am sure the possibilities are endless.

I plan to continue my mission to find additional things to do with Rhubarb that are just as Yummee! Feel free to leave me some suggestions, maybe even savoury things

The Final Product

This weekend me and the boys headed to a friend from the day job’s house, so as my boys and her boy and the boy of another work colleague could play together for a Saturday afternoon. I have taught my eldest boy subconsciously that you  don’t go to someone else’s house to visit empty handed. So he flips through his favourite book of the moment, currently a book on biscuits and tray bakes and picks the most complicated recipe with the longest set of ingredients he can find for me to bake on a Friday evening after a long week at the office.

So I wait until he is gone to bed, and choose my own recipe! It’s the weekend, so I like it to be something a bit different but safe enough that I don’t make a total mess of it and have to go to said friend’s house via the local supermarket to buy a cake to bring. She does in fairness always suggest I just buy one and take it out of the wrapper but I just couldn’t. Also her child was the recipient of one of my novelty birthday cakes recently so I think he was probably expecting something homemade.

I flick through the book, while ordering take-out (it is Friday afterall) and land upon a recipe for a Turkish Delight Slice recipe. It has all the plus points I want, all the ingredients are in the press, its easy enough to make and it can be cut up for multiple portions without too much fuss. However, as more than 50% of my audience was under the age of 6, I was thinking that rosewater flavour wasn’t something they would appreciate. So decided on Lemon.

The base was a basic butter(185g), sugar(75g), flour (SR-50g & plain-225g combo) mix with a teaspoon of lemon extract for flavour baked on a tray for 20 minutes until nice and brown. I must admit it was more like 25 minutes as I got caught up eating my take-out.

While the base was cooling (in the fridge because I have little in the way of patience) I got to do the fun part. Anything that involves my sugar thermometer pleases me! You just know you are going to have a big gooey mess to play with. Also it reminds me of my younger days as a Chemistry undergrad.

116oC - The Magic Number

And Turkish Delight, (which was originally from Istanbul all be it made by a Turkish guy) with its gelatin(4tsp) disoolved in 2tablespoons of water, mountains of sugar(330g) and cornstarch(50g) all heated up and mixed together with water(80ml) and the lemon(1 tablespoon) does not disappoint.

First Half of Gooey Mess

Simmer the mixture for about 3 minutes until the mixture becomes opaque. You can add food colouring at this point if you like but I didnt have yellow to hand and I dont think purple would have looked very lemony.

Stirring up a storm

Once the base was cooled, the gooey mixture was poured over it and left to set. The recipe said 3 hours or overnight but I found it well set after a couple of hours. A sprinkling of icing sugar on top finished it off. Just to be on the safe side I put it in the fridge overnight. Otherwise we would have cut it up and ate it then!

After a lovely Irish BBQ, one where its lovely and sunny all day until the food is ready and suddenly the temperature drops about 10 degrees, we all munched our way through them. They were sweeter than I expected but they still retained the tang of the lemon. Will definitely make these again maybe with some more adventurous flavours.

Yummeelicious!

The things you can do with a simple heart shaped cookie cutter. A joint early morning effort with my mam and the boys.

A nice post dinner treat!

These are lovely for when you have someone popping over at the last minute for a cup of tea/coffee or if you just fancy something nice yourself, of course. These are simple to make…and eat.

Place 90g butter, 110g caster sugar and 1 egg in a bowl and whisk until light and fluffy (an electric hand whisk will do this in about 3 miutes)

Light and Fluffy

Stir in 35g self-raising flour, 100g plain flour and 1 tablespoon of the secret ingredient. Combine to make a fairly stiff dough.

The Secret Ingredient

Prepare a 20cm x 30cm rectangular baking tray by greasing and lining with parchement. Spread the dough on the baking tray. Its quite thick, so a butter knife works best.

Cover the dough with 220g of raspberry jam

Place 160g desiccated coconut, 55g caster sugar and 2 eggs i a bowl and mix together with a fork until you have a lovely sticky bowl of coconut.

Spread over the top of the jam (fingers work best for this bit). Pop into the oven for 40 mins at 180oC.

Fresh out of the oven

Leave to cool in the tin and cut up into individual slices (as big as you like).

Yummeelicious!

The Final Product

I generally like to make large cakes but every now and again I get an idea in my head to make scones or cinnamon buns and this week I decided to make Hot Cross Buns. I had seen a number of people on twitter commenting on the recipe in the April issue of @deliciousmag and they all said it was easy and their photos where yummee so I decided to give it a go. My mam loves them and I knew it was the type of thing I could send home with her and they would be eaten because only me and the 2 little men here will eat them (Himself is a paleo fan).

So I picked up a copy of the magazine with my grocery shopping on the Saturday morning and got stuck in after lunch. Now I have to say that I don’t do much with yeast. The odd batch of cinnamon buns but that’s about it. So as usual I got stuck in with great enthusiasm at trying something new. I followed the recipe closely and set my dough to rise. For all the giving out I do about the larger than normal espresso machine in my kitchen (belonging to www.otherblackstuff.ie) it is a great place to leave your dough to rise, as the heat from the machine is just enough to get it going.

After 45 minutes (which was the upper end of the time stated in the recipe) there wasn’t a huge amount of rise but I thought well maybe that’s all it needs. My inexperience with dough is glaringly obvious now, you would never think I was a chemist by training. Anyway, I proceeded to divide the dough up into 16 buns as directed and left them to rise for an hour with not much happening again! So anyway, “In for a penny, in for a pound”, I made my mix for the crosses and decorated them and put them in the oven. What transpired was what could only be described as Hot ROCK Buns. They were awful looking, weighed a ton and even my 3.5 year old who would eat anything I bake wouldn’t eat them. So I took a couple of photos and decided to call it a night on the baking. A thought struck me then and I checked the expiry on the dried yeast I had used. August 2011!!! Well that explained alot!

The Awful First Attempt

Sunday morning, up at 6.15 and decided that I wouldn’t be beaten by a few buns and I would try again, with different yeast, in date until 2013. Unfortunately, no rising again. Nothing, not a centimetre! No idea what went wrong this time. Himself suggested pouring some warm water over the dough and actually this did make a difference but it wasn’t working at any significant rate. So I gave up! I was defeated!

I couldn’t rest though. I had promised my 3.5 year old hot cross buns so I was going to do it. So I headed to the supermarket, bought some new dried yeast, unopened and in date and this was going to work!!!!

I followed the recipe again, it obviously worked judging by the number of tweets I’d seen about how great it was. Whilst putting all the ingredients into my standmixer bowl I realised I had forgotten the butter the last time too! (It still should have risen!) So with all the ingredients in the mixer with the dough hook I watched as the dough formed into a prefect ball in about 2 minutes. This already looked the best of the 3 attempts. I put in the dried fruit and zest and placed it on top of the espresso machine as before, this time with a little pep talk to encourage it to work, of course. In 40 minutes, the bowl was almost full!! I did a little dance around the kitchen. Who would have thought I would get so excited about some uncooked dough??

The Risen Dough

I divided it up into 16 buns with a little help from my little kitchen helper enjoying getting his hands sticky. Another 30 minutes on the espresso machine and they were lovely and plump and ready to be “crossed”. I was go excited about them having risen that my piping was a bit messy. 15 minutes in the oven and finally after over 24 hours, I finally had 16 golden brown Hot Cross Buns. A final sugar and spice glaze and they were ready for lashings of butter.

Just out of the oven - yummee

Alot more work than I had anticipated but in the end they were worth it and very yummeelicious!