Apologies

Apologies to everyone who posted comments over the last few months, but didn't see them published promptly. Blogger stopped sending me emails informing me that there were comments awaiting moderation, and has only just recently asked me if I'd like to carry on receiving notifications. As  the number of comments has dropped off  over the last year or so anyway, it didn't occur to me to check if I'd missed any. Normal service should be resumed now!

I tried ruby chocolate for the first time recently; its supposedly fruity flavour seemed very subtle (too subtle, in fact) to me. In its favour, it wasn't as sickly sweet as white chocolate, but it's too expensive to buy regularly, and I still prefer dark chocolate, with or without added flavours.

Food Bloggers Unplugged

I've been tagged by Kate at What Kate Baked to take part in Food Bloggers Unplugged, a little exercise started by Susan at A Little Bit of Heaven on a Plate as a way of getting to know fellow food bloggers. The idea is that we answer 10 questions about ourselves, then tag five other food bloggers to take part, if they want to.

So, here are my answers:

What, or who, inspired you to start a blog? Other bloggers! I'd been reading food blogs for a while, and decided that it might be fun to join in.

Who is your foodie inspiration? I'd have to say my late mother-in-law. Until I got married food was just fuel. My mother wasn't a great cook, although like me, she was quite a good baker. However my M-i-L was a fantastic cook and showed me that there was more to food than just eating it.

Your greasiest, batter - splattered food/drink book is? The first cookbook I bought which was just about baking - Cakes and Cake Decorating by Zoe Leigh. It was published in 1974, which was probably the year I bought it, and I still use some of the recipes in it. Not only is it batter-splattered, it's so worn out that it's falling apart. The start of a well-travelled road!

Tell us all about the best thing you have ever eaten in another country, where was it, what was it?  I've travelled a lot over the last ten years, with good memories of the food in many places, including Japan (which had worried me a bit before we went) but the single dish that stands out as the best thing I've eaten was a dish of fried rice with chicken, lobster and egg, at a Thai restaurant in Montreal. We ate it with a whole fish served with sweet and sour sauce plus another dish I've forgotten, but the whole meal showed us that Thai food could be much more delicately spiced than we'd experienced up until then. That rice was sublime!

Another food bloggers table you'd like to eat at is? Foodycat, without a doubt. She is so knowledgeable about all aspects of food, an adventurous cook and even a food producer, having tried her hand at such things as cheese-making.

What is the one kitchen gadget you would ask Santa for this year (money no object of course)? As I get older I'm beginning to realise the benefits that a dishwasher would bring. Does that count?

Who taught you how to cook? I taught myself with a little help from Delia Smith and Good Housekeeping, although as a child I had learned basic baking techniques with my mother.

I'm coming to you for dinner what's your signature dish? I'm not sure I have one, as I don't like to serve the same thing twice to guests, but you're very likely to get a chocolate dessert!  Probably a variation of this one - Chocolate Ginger Torte

What is your guilty food pleasure? The first crusty slice from a loaf of white bread, thickly spread with lots of butter. And even the last slice, if it's still fresh!

Reveal something about yourself that others would be surprised to learn? Despite using it so much in my baking, I don't really like the smell of hot chocolate.

In turn, I would like to tag these 5 bloggers, although I hope they won't feel obliged to join in if they would rather not!
Foodycat, at Foodycat
Snowy, at Cookbooks Galore
Anne, at Anne's Kitchen
C, at Cakes, Crumbs and Cooking
and the entity that is hungryhinny

Pretty New Things!

New is a relative term for some of these - the three small plates were picked up at a local Antiques Fair. I'm guessing that they are all pre-1950s.

 When we got home from the Antiques Fair - hot and tired after the hottest September day on record - a mysterious parcel was waiting for me. I wasn't expecting anything, and couldn't initially find any trace of the sender on the box. Inside, well padded with bubble wrap, was another box and still no sign of a sender. This box revealed the lovely cake stand in the photo - a limited edition for Waitrose in celebration of Summer 2011. I vaguely remember entering a few competitions on the Waitrose website - this must have been from one of them, although I would have expected an email to let me know it was on the way.

It will take a lot of baking to fill such a large cakestand, although it could be assembled with just two tiers if necessary.

The Little Book of Treats - Part 1

The 'World's Biggest Coffee Morning' is an annual fundraising event run by Macmillan Cancer Support. This year the event is in it's 21st year, and will be held on Friday 30th September. For the second year running, Marks and Spencer is Macmillan's official partner and will be helping to raise money in several ways detailed below.

The aim of the coffee morning is to encourage people to take time out together with friends, relatives and colleagues over a coffee, and help raise £8.5 million to support much needed funds for Macmillan's vital work to help improve the lives of people affected by cancer.

As part of their support, Marks and Spencer are selling, in the M&S Café, the exclusive Macmillan's 'Little Book of Treats' (£3) which features recipes from supporters and celebrities, including celebrity cooks Gwyneth Paltrow, Sophie Dahl, Eric Lanlard, Lorraine Pascale and Antonio Carluccio, with all proceeds going directly to Macmillan. Until 4th October, they are also donating 10p of the sale price of a range of products to Macmillan, and for every coffee sold on 30th September, an additional 50p will be donated.

It's probably too late to organise your own coffee morning by now, but you can find one to attend locally on the Macmillan's website, or you can have a coffee break in an M&S Café, and/or buy The Little Book of Treats

I have been sent a free copy of the book to review by Michael at Macmillan Cancer Support, but I am giving an unbiased opinion:

This little book contains 31 recipes, covering a wide range of baking, most being suitable for beginners but some a little more challenging. Amongst the ubiquitous fairy cakes, victoria sponges and Lemon Drizzle Cakes there were a few recipes which caught my eye - Red Velvet Cupcakes from Eric Lanlard, where the rich colour comes from vinegar and bicarbonate of soda reacting together (no added colour), which are then decorated with a cooked buttercream based on a roux sauce, some crumbly piped Polenta Biscuits from Antonio Carluccio, plus several brownie recipes!

I'm not sure an experienced and dedicated baker will find much new here, but even one new recipe that you bake again and again is worth the price of a book, and in this case the profits are going to a very good cause!

My 7 Links

Kavey at 'Kavey Eats' has nominated me to take part in the '7 links' project, which started on the travel blog Tripbase. The idea, as explained by Tripbase, is "to unite bloggers (from all sectors) in a joint endeavour to share lessons learned and create a bank of forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again." Obviously the idea grew among the travel blogging community first, but as bloggers nominate other bloggers from within their wider range of interests, it is spreading into other areas.

We are asked to share posts from our own blog, giving a link to one post for each of 7 categories. Then we nominate 5 more bloggers to do the same. The categories are ~your most beautiful post, ~your most popular post, ~your most controversial post, ~your most helpful post, ~a post whose success surprised you, ~a post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved, and finally, the post that you are most proud of.

My blog is quite specialised, really only looking at the products of my baking sessions, and I haven't got so many followers that I get a lot of comments about most of my posts, so it was quite difficult to decide which posts to use in each category. In the end, the only way which worked for me was to choose the posts on the basis of the product in them, and relate why I thought they fitted that particular category.


My Most Beautiful Post - Chocolate Ripple Pound Cake

I don't often set out to make cakes which look beautiful on the outside - I'm not a cake decorator. I'm much more interested in the flavours and textures in the cake and if they look good when they are cut that is an unintended benefit. The exceptions to this are 'marble' and 'ripple' cakes, where perhaps fairly plain flavours are made more interesting by presenting them in two or more differently coloured batters. For me, part of the beauty of the ripple cake is the unpredictablity of the outcome - it's never exactly the same twice, as slight variations in the thickness of the layers of batter and the currents within the cake as it cooks will produce different patterns. It's like the natural beauty of frost patterns on a window pane, or the refraction of light from spilt oil on a puddle.


My Most Popular Post - Sticky Toffee Pudding

This was chosen as one of my posts with the largest amount of comments, not counting my replies to other peoples' comments! What's not to like about sticky toffee pudding - even people who don't like dates will usually eat this pudding, and I've never known it to be turned down! This version has a touch of black treacle in the recipe, to cut down the sickliness which comes from something being too sweet!


My Most Controversial Post - Phanouropita

In all honesty, none of my posts are really controversial! How can you argue about baking? At the most, you can discuss things such as flavour combinations you don't like, or whether plain flour and baking powder is better than SR flour, but in the end, I respect other peoples' views as it always comes down to personal tastes rather than something that is right or wrong. The controversy in this case was a personal one of whether or not one can make a decent cake without eggs. Up until this point I've always maintained that you can't, but this cake proved me wrong. It lacked the rich flavour that you get with butter and eggs, but it was light and well risen, and the flavours of the nuts and spices really stood out.


My Most Helpful Post - Apple Tart 'Maman Blanc'

I chose this post about Raymond Blanc's recipe for his mother's apple tart because the detailed instructions for shaping, rolling and resting the pastry gave absolutely perfect results - lovely short  pastry with minimal shrinkage and a crisp base. I've followed this method faithfully on other occasions and get equally good results, but it's very time consuming to do from start to finish, even if some of the time is only waiting time! So - this post could help you make perfect pastry!


The Post Whose Success Surprised Me -  Chocolate Brownies made with Mayonnaise.

This recipe was found in response to my son needing to follow a diet low in saturated fat, to reduce his cholesterol levels. By the time he had cut out bacon, butter, paté and cheese, and reduced his consumption of red meat, it hardly seemed fair to tell him he couldn't eat cakes and biscuits either, so I started to look for recipes lower in saturated fat, including those which used oil instead of butter. Although there have been one or two less successful attempts, on the whole I'm very pleased with this baking adventure, and I've found a few basic recipes which I can produce quickly, and be sure of success. This recipe, which uses mayonnaise instead of butter, was a surprise success, as the end result was better than some brownie recipes I've tried which had no claim to being healthy!


A Post Which Deserves More Attention - Rhubarb, Almond and Orange Cake

It's inevitable that posts during the early days of my blog have attracted less attention than later posts, when the number of followers has grown, and I've got more involved with the blogging community. This is one that deserves more attention as, quite simply, it is one of the best rhubarb desserts I have ever made! I'd usually choose a crumble as my favourite dessert, but crumbles aren't as good reheated or eaten cold, whereas this is perfect either warm or at room temperature, so will still be good for a couple of days.



The Post I'm Most Proud Of - Hazelnut Meringue Roulade

I'm not a brave baker - I'd rather ignore the things I can't do than keep trying to get them right. Part of this is a certain inborn thriftiness - I hate wasting food, so don't like trying things if the results are going to be inedible. However, joining the We Should Cocoa Challenge has persuaded me to test my limitations on occasion - using ingredients I wouldn't usually cook with, or techniques I'm not familiar with. The challenge for last May was to make a roulade using some form of chocolate as one of the ingredients. This coincided with needing to make lunch for a friend whose diet is gluten- and dairy-free, so I decided to make a meringue roulade. This was a real challenge, as I haven't tackled either meringue or a roulade for many, many years. It wouldn't surprise me if my last roulade was a Swiss roll in school cookery lessons! As an added bonus in the challenge stakes, I made a chocolate mousse with olive oil, for the roulade filling, to keep the dessert dairy-free. After successful baking the meringue, and rolling it up, I was really proud of the result.

So, those are my 7 links! I'd like to nominate these 5 blogs to take part in this project, if they are interested:

• Cake, Crumbs and Cooking
• Kates Cakes and Bakes
• Belleau Kitchen
• Foodycat
• Cookbooks Galore

All you need to do to participate is write a post with your own 7 links, using the categories listed above.

Rose Sugar and other things.......

I'm currently losing about 3 hours a day, as I take time to visit my mother in hospital. This is time that I would normally spend cooking or gardening. Consequently, the garden is over-run with weeds - although we have found time to harvest most of the vegetables that are ready to eat - and our meals are basic, to say the least. I'm not sure if things will improve much when mother is out of hospital, as I can't judge yet how much care she will need.

I have been baking a little, but it's old favourites rather than new recipes - I just don't have time to look for anything new! I've made the mayonnaise-based brownies and Dan Lepard's Marmalade Flapjacks and I've been thinking about this month's We Should Cocoa challenge - to use roses in conjunction with chocolate.

I'm not very inspired by this challenge - I'm certainly not going to spend over £4 on 4 tablespoons of rose water, which probably won't get used again once a few drops are taken out, and any other rose-based products are even less readily available or more expensive, when the postage costs of online buying are factored in! However, I do (or did) intend to attempt the challenge, and to this end, I've been trying to make rose sugar. I've had two attempts so far and neither seem very promising.

Both attempts were made the same way - rub the petals of one large, just opened, rose (either fresh or dried for two days) with 100g of caster sugar and store in a closed container. The sugar made with dried flowers (on the right in the photo) looks good, as it has flecks of dark pink petals throughout, but it smells awful - nothing like roses! The sugar made using fresh rose petals (in the left container) still smells like roses, but the petals have lost their colour and gone a nasty yellowy-brown colour! The sugar is also damp and lumpy, so I can't even sieve out the manky petals with the sugar like this.

I'm not sure what to do next - any suggestions? I'm inclined to use the sugar made with fresh petals and hope the smell survives the cooking process, as neither sugars seem to have taken on any additional flavour from the rose petals!  Perhaps I could sieve out the dry petals from the other sugar and hope the colour of those survives cooking too! But first I have to find time to make something!

Blog Comments

I'm still having problems with making comments on other people's blogs. I can only leave comments on Blogger blogs if the comment box is in a separate pop-up window, not if it's embedded within the blog. So if you have a blog on my reading list, and I haven't commented recently, that may be the reason why. I'm still reading them all!

In particular I wanted to say how much I've enjoyed Kate's (from Kate's Cakes and Bakes) French Baking Month. We've had lots of holidays in France, but not the sort where I've spent time baking - this makes me wish I had!

I don't imagine I'm the only one having problems, so if any of you have noticed that the volume of  responses to your posts has fallen off, you might consider changing to a pop-up window for comments!

Apologies

I'm having trouble staying logged in to Blogger - even on my own Blog. This means I can't easily post comments on all the delicious food I'm reading about on the Blogs on my reading list. Sometimes I can post if  there are facilities for leaving just a name to the comment, but this isn't always the case. So apologies to you all; I just wanted you to know that I'm not ignoring you! Hopefully someone at Blogger will realise there's a problem (if it's happening to others too) soon, and sort it out!

Thanks to C for trying to help, but I only have one web browser, and I'm not on IE9 yet!

Hello Again!

We're back from New Zealand -  more tired and heavier than when we went, which is odd because we sat on a coach most days, and some of the food provided was not the highlight of the trip, unfortunately. We also tried very hard not to over-eat, but the temptation of full breakfasts on most days was too much, even if we didn't eat lunch! Overall, it was a great trip, with some really breathtaking sights. Here's a photo of a bay on the east coast of South Island, just north of Dunedin.

As CT hasn't yet had his cholesterol levels checked, I'll be sticking with the low saturated fat baking for a while longer and my first choice, for speed and convenience, will be a double batch of these brownies made with mayonnaise.

Taking a Break

I won't be posting here for the next month, as tomorrow we are off for a three week tour of New Zealand, with stopovers in Singapore on each end of the holiday. The holiday is in a bit of disarray at the moment because of the earthquake in Christchurch, but I'm sure that whatever new arrangements are made we will have a great time. We really loved the whole country on our last visit, and are looking forward to seeing some different areas this time.

I'll be missing the March 'We Should Cocoa' challenge, but I look forward to seeing what the rest of you come up with. A month away from the kitchen should give me renewed energy to start again in April with lighter summer baking.

Wordle

Thanks to Joanna at Zeb Bakes, I've found a new pastime on the computer - making word clouds at Wordle. The picture above is what I made when I put in my blog address, and played around with the settings to get something aesthetically pleasing. I like the way the whole cloud stands on a chocolate stem - it sums up my baking philosophy, I think!

The picture below is from words associated with chocolate cake:

It took a while to find out how to publish them here. Long story short - screen capture, save in Paint Shop Pro, crop off unwanted bits, convert to a .jpg file.

My Chocri Prize

Chocri sell customised chocolate bars. Starting from a base of plain, milk or white chocolate, or a milk and white combination, the buyer can choose from a multitude of toppings to make a bar to their own specification. As well as dried fruit, nuts, seeds, and spices there are luxuries such as gold leaf, and fripperies such as tiny sugar flowers or gummy bears. According to Chocri, there are over 27 billion possible combinations. The chosen bar can then be further personalised  by choosing a name for your creation.

The average bar, with up to 5 topping choices, costs around £5.00, which is expensive for a 100g bar, but not so expensive as to make it prohibitive for special occasions such as birthday presents. If you think a recipient would prefer to chose their own favorite combination of flavours, gift vouchers are available.

Even if you don't want to buy, a chocoholic can have hours of fun making chocolate bars, looking at suggested combinations of toppings or seeing what people have ordered recently.

I was lucky enough to win a competion on the blog Kavey Eats, for a £10 voucher and free P&P. My competition winning suggestion was for my ideal bar, called Tropical Temptation; dark chocolate with ginger, dates, mango, macadamia nuts and cocoa nibs.

As my daughter's birthday is looming, I allowed her to choose one bar, then used what money was left to choose a bar for myself. Any money left on your gift voucher  can be donated to a German charity which supports homeless and orphaned children in the Ivory Coast, Africa. I can't yet comment on the taste but the bars certainly look very appetising. The chocolate was very well packed, to avoid the possibility of breakage, and the parcel also contained a cool pack to avoid damage by excess heat in transit.

My daughter chose a very classy dark chocolate, raspberry, blueberry and real gold combination, and I went with dark chocolate topped with sour cherries, pistachios, ginger and cocoa nibs. Unfortunately I didn't have enough money on the voucher to see how my competition winning suggestion would turn out!

I'm certainly looking forward to trying my custom made creation! Will I be able to resist temptation until Christmas?

Canadian Photographs

If anyone is interested, I've cut my photos down to the best 63 (from around 500). View them here.

My camera wasn't good enough to photograph any of the whales we saw, so Hubs is dealing with that part of the adventure.

I'm Back!

We had a great holiday, although the scenery of Nova Scotia is not as exciting as I'd expected. We couldn't see anything for the trees at the roadside for most of the time! The tour guide had us on moose lookout, but I think that was only a way of trying to make the journeys from place to place more interesting.

As a true foodie, eating was a large part of the holiday. We tackled a whole lobster for the first time ever, in Nova Scotia, and found the best Thai restaurant we've ever eaten in, in Montreal. Hubs had lots of dishes with scallops and mussels, which I can't eat, and we both had a lot of good fish dishes (including sweet and sour fish at the aforementioned Thai restaurant). We also ate in one of the Canadian Chinese restaurants which, I discovered later  in a newspaper article, are iconic remnants of a bygone age which are now dying out.

Foodie items found their way into my suitcase too - butterscotch chips, tins of maple syrup and maple sugar could perhaps be easily explained, but I also bought a neat salt pot and two jars of chili powder (ancho and chipotle) which aren't easily available here. Unfortunately I couldn't persuade Hubs that I needed a cookie scoop - he thought the ratchet design of the model I found looked too flimsy!

I'll be back to baking soon, so keep a lookout for new posts.

Au Revoir!

No cooking, baking or blog posts for a while - it's holiday time! Tomorrow, Hubs and I are off to the Canadian East coast for a tour of the Nova Scotia area followed by a few days in Montreal.

I've left my mother and the Chief Tester in charge of the garden - he waters and she harvests and eats the vegetables. It's the first time we've left the garden at the height of the harvest, and CT is no great vegetable lover!

We return on 6th August. Meanwhile keep an eye on  the blog Deb Cooks; a few days ago Deb interviewed me for her series of interviews with fellow food bloggers, and hopes to publish the results soon!