Flapjack with Dark Chocolate and Raspberry

 It has been a very busy week at work and is only likely to get busier as it is approaching that delightful time in the academic year known as coursework/exam season. Roll on the 11th June when it will all be over but until then we have to power through. To aid this, I decided to go a bit old school and make a baking classic, a good old flapjack.

Never underestimate the wonder of a well made flapjack, Golden buttery oats that are sweet, crunchy and chewy that can be eaten on the go or lazily with a cup of tea and your feet up, glorious.

A good flapjack should consist of 50% porridge oats with the rest made up of equal quantities of proper butter, sticky golden syrup and golden caster sugar. Various dried fruits can be added but these are strictly optional as is my final ingredient.

Now the flapjack is wonderful on it's own but it's even better with chocolate, but it has to be dark... milk is too sweet and white...well lets not go there.

I picked up a bar of Divine's Dark Chocolate with Raspberries to go on top, it's a delightful chocolate with little tangy bits of raspberry in it which go really well in cutting through sweet flapjack and bitter chocolate.

Ingredients
450g Oats
150g Butter
150g golden caster Sugar
150g Golden syrup

1 bar of Dark chocolate with raspberries (if using)

Method
Line your chosen baking tin, I used a 23cm Pie dish, about an inch deep.
Weigh out the oats into a bowl.
Add the butter, sugar and syrup to a pan and then melt and stir gently until fully combined and a lovely golden liquid is created.
Pour in the oats and stir well until all oats are coated.
Pour into the tray and flatten down and smooth over with the back of a spoon.
Bake for 30 minutes at 150C until golden on top
Allow to cool
Melt the chocolate gently in a bowl over a pan of simmering water then drizzle over the flapjack as you see fit.
Serve and enjoy.

Creme Egg Brownies

I am a broken man this weekend. My very soul has been shattered and my liver has packed its bags and gone on holiday in protest. Yes, I drank a little too much alcohol combined with a lack of food and now I'm suffering for it.
Don't worry though, I am on the mend, assisted by these little beauties, which I made today.
I have been wanting to make creme egg brownies for an age, yes they are all over the place but I worship at the alter of the creme egg and combined with a gooey sticky brownie then its all good my friends.

The recipe I used is adapted from Lorraine Pascale's Oreo brownies which has served me well in the past, obviously this time I omitted the Oreo's in favour of the creme egg.

Creme egg brownies
Ingredients
165g Butter
200g Dark Chocolate, broken up.
3 eggs
2 egg yolks
165g light brown soft sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp plain flour
1 tbsp cocoa powder
pinch of salt

Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the chocolate, set aside and allow to melt, stirring occasionally until fully combined.
Whisk the eggs with the vanilla until light and fluffy
add the sugar to the side of the bowl in two goes, whisk between each addition.
Pour in the chocolate and fold in gently.
Fold in the flour, salt and cocoa.
Pour into a lined tin, I used a large pie tin but a standard 20cm square baking tin will suffice.
Slice the creme eggs into halves or quarters and arrange over the top.
Bake in a preheated oven for 25 minutes at 170C (fan)

Allow to cool slightly then use the baking sheet to lift it out to cool completely.
Serve and enjoy.

I can already feel my soul healing... until next weekend.

Edinburgh

Last week Me and the OH went off on one of our food tours across the country, usually our destination is London but instead to break from tradition we headed North to our second favourite city, Edinburgh. Now when we go on holiday or go anywhere in fact, it is all about where we eat and drink, I tend to plan this very far in advance and then read menus up until the day we go. This post is about what we got up to and the excellent things we had to eat

The Hanging Bat

A new find and a lovely craft beer and gin bar. Below is the epic beef po'boy sandwich with mac and cheese and burnt beans and chorizo

The Bow bar/Queens Arms
Two of the finest whisky bars in Edinburgh. Many many whiskies were drunk.

Bramble Bar

Another new place, cracking well priced cocktail bar in a hidden location. If you find the laundrette, you've found it.

Labyrinth 

Vesper Martini

The Dogs

This place is amazing, simple food done incredibly well without fuss. plenty of offal for the more adventurous but 'safe options if you ain't, also one of the waiters reminds us of Richard o'Brien from Crystal Maze.

Devilled Ox liver, onions bacon and mushrooms

Pork belly with Skirlie (oatmeal, liver and kidney)

The Kitchin

A return visit to arguably Scotland's finest restaurant. This wasn't on the original plan having previously visited, but my dad was joining us for the day and there was no where else I'd rather take him. The lunch menu is a bargain, 3 course plus appetiser and bread for £28. I ordered a second pudding because I'm greedy and like puddings.

Pheasant Jelly with quail egg and Confit pheasant leg

Bouillabaisse with mussel and cod cheeks

Ox Leg with cannelloni of ox tongue and vegetables

1st Pudding - Pistachio Souffle

2nd pudding - Vanilla cheesecake with Yorkshire rhubarb

Circle Cafe

Epic breakfast at Circle Cafe

Under the Stairs

Another 'hidden away bar' serving one of the best meat and cheese boards I've seen.

Castle Terrace

Our final meal in Edinburgh, the sister restaurant to The Kitchin run by Dominic Jack.

We were very impressed with this place and it gave me the dish of the week with the absolutely stunning pork dish below, I've never eaten a pork dish as good. This was again £28 for 3 courses.

Canapes



Manhattan (not much of a wine drinker, me)

Tartare of Gurnard with Yorkshire rhubarb

Selection of Pork with Apple

The selection: Pork fillet, Pork cheek, Breaded trotter, Pork belly, Bacon, Black pudding and Chorzio. Unbelievable value for a set lunch option. I would have happily paid £28 for this alone.

Creme Brulee



Mini Cheese course

Petit Fours

Salted Chocolate Lime Mousse

One month I will not leave these blogger challenges to the last minute. I have had this recipe picked out since the start of the month with plenty of free weekends to carry it out in a leisurely manner but instead I end up cooking it right before the deadline, I'll never learn.

This month at Belleau Kitchen HQ our Lord Commander of Random Recipes as teamed up with Choclette over at Chocolate Log Blog with the always excellent We Should Cocoa blogger challenge. So as you can probably figure it out, this months challenge is a random chocolate challenge.

Also, the monthly Tea Time Treats Challenge, hosted by Karen and Janie and in residence this month at Karen's stunning blog; Lavender and Lovage has the theme of Chocolate, so I am entering this recipe to that as well. 3 birds with one stone if you will.

The book I chose is not random but it is a book I have not yet used and it is Our Hugh's River Cottage Fruit Everyday, the follow up to the brilliant Veg Everyday. The recipe I randomly chose was a Salted Chocolate lime mousse.

I was very pleased to land on this for a few reasons. I have never made a mousse before and I am keen to give it ago and the fact that it was salted chocolate was the other reason.

Salted chocolate is not a new thing, it's been around awhile but it is a fascinating piece of food science in which the actual salt does not make it salty (unless you pour it on) but instead suppresses the bitter notes of the chocolate and enhances the sweet notes, good eh?

The recipe itself was very simple but make sure you have three bowls ready as scrambling (not even sorry for that pun) around for a bowl whilst holding an egg yolk is a bit tricky. The end result was a bit unexpected and I think I may have gone wrong at some point, the picture in the book shows a dark chocolate mousse but as you can see, mine looks a bit different. Anybody got any tips?

The mousse, aesthetic qualities aside, was lovely, light and fluffy, very chocolaty combined with tangy lime. Rich but refreshing in a strange way.

The recipe is available here on the Guardian website, about halfway down, if you fancy giving it a go.

Haggis, Neeps and Tatties

Last Saturday, the 25th January, was the annual Scottish celebration of the poet and master wordsmith Robert 'Rabbie' Burns. Usually this event passes me and the OH by and we barely make any effort to join in the celebrations. It is a pity really considering the festival itself, whilst being a celebration of a Scottish writer, it mainly revolves around food, namely the noble Haggis.

Now the haggis, has got an interesting reputation, you either love it or you are immediately repulsed by the thought of it, with its use of offal as it's main ingredients. I was once in the latter camp until I tried a bit many years ago now at the Good Food Show and oh was it delicious.

Fast forward to last week and after seeing some lovely posts on blogs I read namely; Belleau Kitchen's Chicken Thighs & Haggis and Janice's at Farmers Girl Kitchen's excellent pie, I was determined to not let it slide by for another year especially as it would get me right in the mood for a trip to Edinburgh in a couple of weeks.

We couldn't attend a couple of Burns Night events that we wanted to at the weekend due to work and a visit to one of our favourite Leeds Supper clubs on the Saturday night.

So on Saturday we had a 'little' toast to Robert Burns in North Bar with an excellent pint of  Pale Ale from the Scottish brewery, Alchemy. We rounded this off with a wee dram of a very peaty Whisky from Adberg Distillery, which the OH practically downed in an effort 'to get it over and done with'.....

 

...and on Sunday, I cooked my very first haggis and served it up in the traditional way with Neeps (what we call swedes, combined with carrots for colour), Tatties and onion gravy.

A fine way to toast a fine poet if you ask me.

Address to a Haggis by Robert Burns

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Sticky toffee pudding has got to be one of the finest puddings known to humankind. Dark, chewy cake, drenched in sticky toffee sauce and lightened with a splash of cream, it's a pudding that has no qualms about it's 'unhealthiness' and as such rewards you with a bowl of pure joy.

Now you may think that it is as British as it comes, but the original recipe can be traced to Canada who gave it to a chef from Lancashire called Patrica Martin. A chef from my home county of Cumbria then got hold of the recipe and stuck it firmly on the map by serving it at the Sharrow Bay Hotel. Nowadays the unofficial home of the sticky toffee pudding is Cartmel, where the little village shop makes 2000 of the little beauties every week.

It is essentially a fail safe dessert, it's very rare that somebody around the table will not like it and if they don't like it then there is more for everybody else, win-win in my book. It has made its way on to my Christmas Dinner table and more recently on to the tweet up table of @ewanmitchell who invited a few of us round for a meal, of which I was placed in charge of the pudding.

The recipe I used  is a Nigel Slater recipe but it is relatively unchanged from the classic recipe.

Sticky Toffee Pudding
Ingredients
60g Butter
60g golden caster sugar
2 eggs
150g self raising flour
150g dates, stoned and chopped.
250ml hot water
1tsp bicarb.


Method
Cake
Line a 900g loaf tin and preheat the oven to 170C
Place the prepared dates into a bowl and pour of the bicarb and hot water, leave for ten minutes.
Beat the sugar and butter together until fluffy then beat in the eggs, one at a time, until fully combined.
Fold in the flour until combined.bat in the date mixture, the mixture will be very runny.
Pour into the loaf tin and bake for about 40 minutes, a skewer should remove clean when cooked.

Sauce
Place the butter and sugar into a pan and melt together, stirring continuously.
Once combined, pour in the cream and simmer very gently for 5 minutes.

Pour into a serving jug and serve with cream alongside cut up portions of the cake.

Enjoy.

I am submitting this for this months Tea Time Treats Challenge by Karen and Kate of which the theme is eggs. This month the challenge is guest hosted by Jane over at her lovely blog.

Chicken, Mushroom and Noodle Broth - A Random Recipe

A new year means a new month and with a new month comes many blogger challenges. I have my eye on two this month, Tea Time Treats and of course the usual Random Recipe Challenge from Belleau Kitchen.

The Random Recipe challenge this month is Christmas cookbooks. I got one book for Christmas which was a book about cake decorating, not really appropriate for this month with the cake I currently have to make and decorate taking up a lot of time. So I decided to go for the book I treated myself to over the Christmas period which was Nigel Slater's Eat.

Nigel Slater is not everyone's cup of tea but I like him. His recipes are usually spot on and work every time and they are focused on flavour and not complicated techniques. Eat is no exception, it's a hefty book, with a lovely cloth binding, filled with quick recipes and also suggestions around those recipes all written in an easy going style with no random hard-to-get ingredients. I highly recommend it.

As usual, I consulted the wise sage that is the random number generator to select my recipe which lead me to page 59, the home of a chicken, asparagus and noodle broth.

I am not going to post the recipe as it is in the book, I'm just going to tell you how I did it and what I changed.

Chicken, Courgette and Noodle Broth
Firstly, I seasoned 4 chicken legs with salt and pepper before browning them in oil a deep pan  until golden on all sides. I then sliced up some Chestnut mushrooms (about 4 large) and added them to the pan alongside a clove of thinly sliced garlic. I then added a chicken stock pot and 750ml water and left to simmer for 30 minutes. The recipe then states to add asparagus shavings but having checked out the dire specimens in the supermarket I decided to opt for a courgette which I peeled into thin strips using a vegetable peeler. I added these plus 200g of noodles to the pot. I then removed the chicken, shredded it, discarded the bone and stirred it back into the pan and then served.

The resulting broth was superb. it was akin to having a great big hug in a bowl, defending you from the winter chill. A deep chicken flavour with a undercurrent of garlic, bulked up with meaty chestnut mushrooms and soft noodles, I did feel it lacked just a slight kick of heat and next time I might slice up a mild chilli and add it with the garlic.  It was very simple to make and will easily serve 3 people. Another corker from the Random Recipe challenge.