A final bunch of Birthday cookies (and a desperate plea)!

It's taken me a while to get round to posting these, I'll confess that my ability to post regular recipes on here leaves something to be desired. Even so I hope that will do nothing to marr the excitement these rocky road cookies create! I made these for the same friend's Birthday that i posted about over a month ago (see I'm terrible). Just like the others these were met with much enjoyment. They weren't opened straight away because one of my friends is allergic to nuts but the response afterward was deifnitely a good one. I had a few left over myself after packaging he nicest of the bunch up and they were definitely tasty although i have to admit not my favourite out of the three types I made. I made few alterations to the original recipe which I found on crepes of wrath, most notably adding cocoa powder into the mix because I didn't feel it was quite chocolatey enough (when I think rocky road i think chocolate, chocolate, chocolate) but you can always leave the cocoa out if you want them to be a little less rich(and boy were they rich!). I also reduced the amount of chocolate chips in it (which probably counterbalanced my addition of cocoa powder) and couldn't find mini marhsmallows so ended up cutting up regular ones. If you can try try try to find mini marhsmallows. I found my chopped up mallows melted a rediculous amount and made a mess all over the baking try. It didn't affect the taste at all but they didnt look as pretty as I'd wanted. Overall these cookies were a lovely mixture of chewy and crunch. As I said before they were quite rich but definitely good as a tea-time treat! I think if you wanted to make them more true to real rocky road you could probably add in a few raisins too....

More Birthday Baking!

It's taken me a little while tyo get around to posting the second installment of my friend's birthday cookies but belive me they are well worth the wait! These were probably one of the first recipes I found on my favourite foodblog  The Crepes of Wrath, I loved the sound of them then but lemon biscuits has never been highest on my agenda to bake (I'm all about the chocolate) plus the recipe called for lemon extract which I didn't own and didn't know where to buy. So I put them to the back of my mind and the back of my recipe book and sort of forgot about them for a few months. Then when it came to my baking extravaganza for my friends Birthday I knew I wanted two chocolate based recipes, the oatmeal cookies from my last post and the rocky road cookies that will be my next post, but I needed something a bit different. That's when I remembered these lemon sugar cookies, they seemed pretty simple to make (aside from the lemon extract) and i thought they would make a nice different kind of biscuit to two the heavy chocolatey ones I'd already decided on.

The Best Chain-Mail I've Ever Recieved

Sometimes recipes can mean nothing at all. Sometimes they are literally words, spilled onto a page that put together make something kind of tasty. But the best recipes of all are those which have a story behind them, a little bit of human interest that tells you why a recipe is important.

It was another friend's Birthday this week so I decided to bake her three types of cookie as a present and the next three blog posts will be dedicated to those cookies. Weeks before the time to bake came I had decided on two of the three cookies but I was stuck for a third. Talking to my boss at work she mentioned the best cookies she'd ever made, some chocolate chip oatmeal cookies apparently from Neiman-Marcus' recipe. She offered to send me the recipe to look over and I said "why not?" I'm always in the market for a new recipe to try out, especially one which comes with such high recommendations. The email she sent me came in the form of a chain-letter. You know the typical send this on to everyone yadda yadda kind. But the recipe itself had an interesting little back-story explaining just how the originator had got hold of Neiman-Marcus' special cookie recipe.

"My daughter and I had just finished lunch at NAiman-Marcus Cafe in Dallas. Becuase both of us are such biscuit lovers, we decuded to try the 'Neiman-Marcus cookie'. It was so excellent that I asked if they would give me the recipe. The waitress said with a small frown, 'I'm afraid not, but you can BUY the recipe.' I asked how much, and she repsponded; "only two-fifty - it's a great deal!" I agreed to that and told her to add it to my bill. Thirty days later, I got my VISA statement, and the Neiman-Marcus charge was $285.00. I looked at ti again, and I remembered that I had only spent $9.95 for two sandwiches and about $20.00 for a scarf. At thebottom of the statement, it said, 'Cookie Recipe - $250.00'.

That was outrageous! I called Neiman's accountign department andn told them the waitress had said it was two-fifty, which clearly does not mean two hundred and fifty dollars by any reasonable interpretation of the phrase. Neiman-Marcus refused to budge. They would not refund my money because, according to them; 'what the waitress told you is not our problem. You have already seen the recipe. We absolutely will not refund your money.'

I explained to Accounting Department the criminal statutes whcihc govern fraud in the State of Texas. I threadtened to report them to the Better Business Bureau and the Texas Attorney General's Office. I was basically told: do what you want. Don't bother thinking of how you can get even, and don't bother trying to get any of your money back'. I said, ok, you've got my $250, and now I'm going to have $250 worth of fun. I told her that I was going to see to it that every cookie lover in the world with an email account gets a $250  cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus, for free! She replied 'I wish you wouldn't do that.' I said, 'well you should have thoguht of that before you RIPPED ME OFF!' and slammed down the phone."

Jessica's Birthday Cupcakes, a lesson in baking!

Last week it was my very good friend Jessica's birthday and I wanted to make her something really special to celebrate. All my friends know I love to bake so I decided what better way to wish her a Happy Birthday than to bake her some cupcakes... cupcakes from a recipe I made up myself, for once! I'm not a big one for creating my own recipes from scratch, I'm more of a find it and tweak it to my liking kinda gal but, in flicking through my vast array of baking recipes I discovered I don't have single one for just good ole fashioned choc-chip cupcakes. I'm not sure how this happened, I'm sure it can't be because there is a lack of chocolate-chip cupcake recipes out there... I mean chocolate chips and cakes go together like... well like two really go-y together-y things (mmmhmm go-y together-y, I said it). I'm pretty sure I must just have passed every single choclate chip cupcake recipe out there thinking "oh, chocolate chip cupcakes. How simple can you get? I won't bother writing those down." How wrong could one girl be? Very rarely do I fail in a baking endeavour (not counting the disasterous sinking banana bread incident which I fullly blamed my mother and some seriously out of date baking powder for) mainly because I stick fairly rigidly to a recipe. So perhaps with the pressure of my friend's birthday looming and the desire to make some seriously tasty cupcakes it wasn't the best time to start making things up. But I summoned up memories of my uni days when baking was a rather slap-dash what have I got lurkng in the cupboard that's no more than a month out of date affair and carried on regardless.

More fool me. They say pride comes before a fall and my first batch of cupcakes did exactly that. They fell hard. I mean we are talking on a scale of sinking larger than the Titanic here. There were many reasons for this sinking feeling. I surmised afterwards that my measurements were all out. I had added a little milk to thin the mixture down a little, it's my tried and tested trick for making cupcakes light and fluffy: replace one egg for a little milk. I forgot the bit about replacing the egg though. Consequentially my cupcakes were too light, the chcocolate chips didn't hold up, sunk to the bottom and burned. The cakes themselves tasted eggy and my addition of a little baking soda alongside the baking powder mixed with that extra egg meant they were anything but enjoyable. I also didn't cook them for long enough, (my oven is partly to blame for this, it's old and it's decided it doesn't want to heat evenly throughout anymore) so the cakes in the middle of the tray were raw in the middle. In short anything that could go wrong with these cupcakes did go wrong. However, I was down but not out. And with steely determination I soldiered on, adjusted my recipe (basically a little less of everything) and evetually managed to bake these chocolate-chip cupcakes with chocolate butter cream icing.

An unexpected haitus that really took the biscuit

Hello sports  food fans, apologies for my unexpected disappearance from the blogverse. I have no excuse other than being generally quite rubbish at keeping journals. It has been nearly a month since my last blog, and I'd love to come back saying I had been on all kinds of fun-filled crazy adventures which kept me from writing here but if I said that I would be lying. So rather than bore people to death with a drivvly excuse as to why I disappeared, something which will no doubt be made up completely on the spot and not exhonorate my crapness in any way, I'll cut this one short and get straight down posting this recipe for home made Jammy Dodgers.

Volunteering and Apple Crumble

Today I visited Dorich House, which is a house owned by the University I work for, preserved as a museum all about the sculptures of Dora Gordine and the collection of her husband Richard Hare (hence Dorich as the name for the house). The house itself was absolutely beautiful, from the outside it looks like a little castle set on the outskirts of Richmond Park high on a hill overlooking the surrounding area. Inside it was preserved exactly as it would have looked in 1938 when it was built. I loved the whole 1930's Art Deco style of the place and the fantastic history behind Dora's sculptures and the Russian artefacts collected by Richard. The house also acted as Dora's studio and gallery and although it was designed in the modernist style it was also created with the practical aspect in mind of display her works and lighting her studio. But aside from just purely historical  interest on my part (being a history graduate and all) there was a practical reason for my visit as I'm going to be starting volunteering on a committee working on a new exhibition for the house. All very exciting as it helps me get one step closer to getting on my masters course and qualifying to become an education officer in museums.

But that's all slightly off topic so let's get back on topic with my next recipe. Recently my friend moved into her new flat and to celebrate she invited me and a few other friends over for dinner. We each took a course, nachos, salsa, sour cream and guacamole for starters, vegetarian fajitas for main (two of my friends are veggies so i had to suck up my meat eating tendancies for one night) and of course I took dessert and made these delicious apple crumble bars which, as you can see, got thoroughly enjoyed before I had a chance to really take a good picture!

Pancakes and Tuna... not together of course.

So here it is, Lent has officially begun and we're all supposed to start giving up chocolate or going vegetarian  for the duration just so we can stuff our faces and make ourselves sick on Easter Sunday. I've personally never been a fan of this whole Lenten fasting malarky, similar to New Year's resolution I always find myself failing at the first hurdle then feeling bad for the rest of Lent as I gorge myself on all the chocolate you stronger willed folk can't eat. This year however, rather than shunning the whole Lent thing all together I've decided that instead of giving something up I'm going to take something up like we were always encouraged to do at shcool (yes I went to Catholic school). Now by take something up I don't mean drinking in the morning or casual sex, I mean something beneficial and this is why I have decided to join the gym. Not an entirely new venture, I've been toying with the idea since I started my new job which has a gym on site and offers a hefty discount for staff joining but for me joining a gym is a big step. As most people will vouch I've been pretty much gym-phobic since as long as I can remember, but now is time for change and taking on new ventures so as of next week I will be a gym member! Besides, it's not big secret that writing a food blog can be hazardous for your waistline, got to combat that somehow!

But before all the health kicks and gym regimes kick in we get pancake day, a day which I am a big fan of. Not a year goes by when I don't gather a host of hungry friends around and cook up a stack of pancakes. In fact, if ever a year does go by where I don't get to do this I get rather upset so it's better really just to humour me and act keen. I'm not sure why I love pancake day so much, it's certainly not to do with the eating as, actually, I really don't like pancakes but I do love making them. I think perhaps it's because pancakes were the first thing my mum ever taught me to cook that and the fact that, other than me, you're hard pushed to find someone who isn't quite happy to devour stack after stack of them. I always use Delia Smith's recipe for making them as they tend to come out a nice consistancy  (I prefer my pancakes to be thinner, more like crepes). Anyway, they went down well and the boys certainly had a lot of fun experimenting with toppings, although I didn't get any pictures of the most decorative ones they got eaten too quickly! Boys hey?

Finally, we get to the crux of the post! As I'm not one of the many people out there who are happy to have pancakes as dinner on shrove Tuesday I had to find myself an alternative evening meal before the pancake cooking began. This came in the form of a tuna loin found for an absolute barginous price in my local supermarket. There si nothing I love more than tuna fish. I mean seriously. I eat it at least 2 or 3 times a week, normally from a tin and normally mixed with mayonnaise in a salad or sandwich or stirred in with a pasta sauce. The price of tuna steaks means it's rare I get the chance to eat it how i love it best, just lightly seared and still very pink in the middle. To celebrate the bargin tuna find I made up a little caper and white wine sauce to go with it. Recipe and picture after the jump.