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Reindeer Cupcakes

Reindeer Cupcakes

These are the Reindeer cupcakes we baked last year, we are intending to bake them again this year. Lots of fun to make and the salted pretzels add a little something different.

The first stage is to make some chocolate cupcakes, I have a simple recipe that I use for cupcakes and the quantity can be increased quickly and easily simply by increasing the number of eggs.

The recipe is based around a single egg.

Ingredients

One egg
Same weight of self-raising flour, butter and caster sugar
One tablespoon of cocoa powder

Cream the caster sugar and butter together until smooth.

Add the egg and a little of the flour. Mix until smooth and then fold in the remaining flour and the cocoa powder.

Place spoonfuls of mixture into cupcake cases and bake in a medium oven for ten minutes. Once cooked, cool before decorating.

The cakes are covered in chocolate buttercream icing. Pretzels are used for the antlers and marshmallows for the eyes, spotted with black icing. The noses are homemade biscuits with a giant chocolate button, except for Rudolph who has a red icing nose.

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Baking Biscuits

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I have a very simple recipe for some simple biscuits. The recipe is based around a single egg.

Ingredients

One egg
Same weight of cold cubed butter and caster sugar
Twice the weight of plain flour

Rub the flour and butter into breadcrumbs.

Stir in the sugar and then add the egg to bind the mixture into a dough.

The mixture should come into a dough quite easily.

I then form the dough into a large sausage shaped roll, about 3-4 cm in diameter. I then wrapped the dough in cling film and placed in the fridge for an hour or so. This is to firm up the dough and make it easier to manage when slicing into biscuit shapes.

Removing the dough from the fridge, I sliced it into rounds which are then placed onto a baking tray. Now you can placed them onto a greased tray, but I usually use baking parchment. One tip I picked up from Jamie Oliver was after cutting the parchment was to screw it up into a ball and then flatten the screwed up parchment. What this does is make it much easier to line the baking tray, otherwise the parchment as a tendency to roll back into a roll.

These are then baked in a moderate oven for about 10-12 minutes until film. I prefer my biscuits just cooked, not browned, so they have a softer crumbly texture. If you prefer a crisper biscuit then bake for a little longer.

Once baked, remove the tray of biscuits from the oven and place on a cooling rack.

Once cooled, you can then ice the biscuits or cover them in chocolate.

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Quick Chimichanga

Looking for a relatively quick lunch, but also wanting to sit down I was intrigued by the recently new branch of Chimichanga in Cabot Circus. Initially I was put off by the prices on the menu, well this was supposed to be lunch and I didn’t want to spend too much money. It looked like they didn’t have a special lunch menu, but then I noticed a board standing outside advertising 40% of mains by downloading a code. So a quick browse on the phone I had a voucher code so in I went.

Inside there was a modern clean feel to the place. There was a choice of booths or tables. There wasn’t much of a Mexican feel to the place, some browns and oranges, but not much else really. It reminded me somewhat of Giraffe or Coal, nothing distinctive that made it feel different or that you were eating food inspired by Mexico and the Deep South.

It was quite empty, but was greeted on arrival by friendly waiting staff. I was given the choice of sitting where I wanted to. This was a nice option, all too often when visiting restaurants you are rarely given the choice of where to sit. Sitting down I looked over the menu. Yes I was tempted by the Calamares, well I really enjoy squid, but I had decided that I probably didn’t have the time for a starter so straight into looking at the mains. The menu is split into Tex Grill and Mex Kitchen choices, as you might imagine with a place such as this, there were the usual choices. In the Tex Grill you found the ubiquitous burgers, ribs and steaks. The Mex Kitchen had burritos, enchiladas, quesadilla sandwiches and the signature chimichanga. There are quite a few vegetarian options within the Mex Kitchen menu, based around beans or portobello mushrooms. In the end I went with a fajita dish.

A sizzling skillet of sautéed peppers and onions with marinated fajita steak. With fresh guacamole, jack cheese, sour cream and fresh salsa. Served with warm tortillas.

It wasn’t quite sizzling, I remember having a fajita dish at TGI Fridays back in 1999 and that sizzled. There was a good lot of peppers and onions, topped with a sliced grill steak. Personally I would have preferred if the steak had been cooked with the peppers and onions, but even so this was very tasty. Alongside the skillet, came four small warm tortillas along with some really nice fresh tasting salsa, proper chunky guacamole, as well as grated jack cheese and some sour cream. I did feel the torrillas were a little small making it difficult to wrap around a filling, so despite the fact this was finger food, I ate it with a knife and fork, otherwise I could see it going all over my shirt!

Overall I really did enjoy the dish, and with the 40% off, thought it was quite good value for lunch. I didn’t think it was as good as the tacos (with soft flour tortillas) I have had at Mission Burrito or at Barburrito in Paddington, however they were takeaway and one of the key issues for me was finding a place to sit down. There is a van selling those kinds of tacos and burritos by Bristol Bridge which I may try on another occasion.

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Sorry, they also look disgusting…

These Kipling’s Witches Hat Fancies are described on the packet as: orange flavoured green sponge with a vanilla topping and black fondant icing.

These Kipling’s Witches Hat Fancies are described on the packet as: orange flavoured green sponge with a vanilla topping and black fondant icin.g

That whole combination really doesn’t appeal to me, but maybe that is the point..

In my previous blog post I said I wasn’t going to buy any, however on a visit to London, my sister-in-law bought some for the children as a Halloween tweet.

Now I didn’t eat any, but my son who did, said he enjoyed it, but then it probably just tasted of sugar! What put me off (apart from all the sugar) was that the combination of green sponge and black icing, meant after they were bitten into, they actually looked like they were mouldy French Fancies!

…and that may be the point!

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Sorry, these sound disgusting…

Sorry, these sound disgusting…

These Kipling’s Witches Hat Fancies are described on the packet as: orange flavoured green sponge with a vanilla topping and black fondant icing.

…and that may be the point!

These Kipling’s Witches Hat Fancies are described on the packet as: orange flavoured green sponge with a vanilla topping and black fondant icing.

That whole combination really doesn’t appeal to me, but maybe that is the point.. though I suspect they will taste like other Kipling cakes with just a hint of orange, with the usual over sugared taste explosion.

The name also annoys me, well that I am sure the grammar is wrong. In the box there are eight fancies. If these are hat fancies then surely one on its own would be a witch’s hat fancy. As witches is the plural of witch, then eight witches is fine, but I do think eight hats would be eight witch’s hats. Though is this like courts martial (the plural of court martial) as a result it’s eight witches hat, but that doesn’t sound right.. Adding fancies onto the end seems to worsen the situation. Personally I think it should be eight witch’s hat fancies, or am I wrong and Mr Kipling is right?

Did I buy them?

No!

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French Markets

Over on my “nowhere else to post, so it goes here” blog I have been posting some photographs from a trip I made to Normandy in the 1990s including visiting Honfleur and Caen.

I don’t recall which year I went, but one of my overwhelming memories of that trip, was a visit to the local market in Cane and the smell of tomatoes. You could smell them from some distance away from the stall.

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I remember thinking how on earth did these tomatoes actually smell of tomatoes, it certainly wasn’t like the bland ones you got from supermarkets in England at the time. My memory of buying tomatoes from my local supermarket was that you had the choice of one kind, they all looked the same, they were all the same size and they tasted of, to be honest, nothing. Today you do have a lot more choice and I certainly try and buy tomatoes for their flavour.

Even today I have never found an English market come close to those that I found in Normandy on that trip. Certaiinly the Italian markets I visited at the same kind of time were similar, full of fresh produce.

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There were things there that you would never find in the British markets (or supermarkets) at the time, but things have changed. There was vegetables and fruit that I had never heard of. As we were staying in a hotel I didn’t actually buy anything from the market, but I was so tempted…

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I wonder if these markets still exist? If they do, are they much different from what I saw back then?

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One thing we have much more now in the UK than we had back then are local farmers’ markets, full of local produce and great stuff you can get there too.

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Now that’s a bargain….

I thought it was only the “other” supermarkets that gave us unbeatable bargains, but it looks like Marks and Spencer is getting in on the act!

As you can see, the juice is £1 or three for £3...

As you can see, the juice is £1.. each, or three for £3… all the juices on that shelf were £1.00.

The point of the bargain is?

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It was supposed to be a macchiato…

espresso macchiato

So what do you think that was?

That is a small espresso cup by the way.

It was supposed to be an espresso macchiato.

From my understanding, an espresso macchiato, is simply a shot of espresso with some foamed milk. This was a single shot of espresso with a dollup of hot milk!

I have had a decent espresso macchiato from the Pumpkin Cafe chain at railway stations before, so was unimpressed with this effort. I was going to complain, but ran out of time as I was heading for a train.

Now checking the wikipedia, I can see that globally there is a fair amount of varation in how people interpret the macchiato, in some cases it appears to be more like a flat white than a small espresso based coffee.

Next time, I will be more explicit about what I want when I order.

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Time for a new pan

paella

I do quite like cooking paella, and though I’ve not talked about it for a while on the blog, it has made regular appearances on the dining table. One thing I have been thinking about for a while was buying a paella pan to cook it in. I have been using a regular frying pan, but the idea behind using a special paella pan, was to ensure a more authentic dish. This would be achieved by having a broader pan, the resulting paella would be shallower than using the regular frying pan. It would also ensure that I didn’t need to stir the paella, which I have been told now is something you don’t do with paella. So when I was out shopping in Bristol recently I treated myself to a new 40cm paella pan.

For my most recent paella and using the new pan for the first time, I took some diced onion, pepper, mushrooms and courgette. In addition I also threw in some diced chorizo to the pan. After heating a splash of olive oil in the pan, I fried the vegetables and chorizo until they were soft.

I use a variety of methods when adding flavour, from making my own seasoning mix using saffron and paprika, to using shop bought seasoning mixes or pastes. For this paella I used the Marks & Spencer’s paella paste, this contains saffron, but also gives the paella a rich fruity flavour. The paste was added to the pan and mixed with the cooked vegetables.

I then added the paella rice. It makes sense to use the right kind of rice when cooking paella, to ensure you get the right texture. This was coated with the rest of the ingredients and then I added some white wine, before adding the stock to cover all the ingredients.

This was then left to cook over a simmering heat for 30-40 minutes, and I didn’t stir. Though after 25 minutes I did add a little more stock to the pan.

In separate pans I cooked the chorizo and the squid. The chorizo I used was the cooking chorizo, sliced into 4-5mm slices. This was cooked off in a medium pan with a little olive oil. They certainly sweat oil out and this combined with the paprika can stain, so be careful. For this paella I used regular squid, this was scored with a sharp knife before been cooked just before serving in a hot frying pan.

The dish was then constructed, the cooked squid and chorizo was placed on top with chunks of lemon, then served.

Delicious, and went down well.