Recreating my favourite takeaways

Home-made onion bhajis and samosas (half meat, half vegetarian) - yum!

For the bhajis, I used this recipe, but with normal brown onions instead of red ones. I always feel uncomfortable at the thought of deep frying, but if the oil is at the right temperature the outside is sealed immediately and so less fat is absorbed. They were absolutely delicious and as good (if not better) than a takeaway.

The samosas were loosely based on a recipe from Rachel's Favourite Food at Home - she recommends using filo pastry as a substitute for samosa pastry. The recipe made 22 in the end, with half filled with lamb and the other half with potato, but I varied her filling as I didn't feel that it had enough flavour. For the lamb ones, I finely diced 1 onion and fried it in garlic olive oil until soft, before adding 150g lamb which was cut into small dice. I fried this for 5 minutes until it had browned, then added 1tsp curry powder, 1tsp garam masala and 1tsp cumin, before stirring in 50g frozen peas.

The potato filling was similar, but with 150g of boiled and cubed new potato instead of the lamb. The lamb filling was a little dry, so next time I'm going to add some potato as well to help bind it together. I'm also going to find a recipe for samosa pastry as the filo pastry was a bit floppy and delicate - it was hard to get a good amount of filling in without the pastry splitting and making a mess. They were a lot of fun to make though - I always enjoy trying something new.

Latest obsession!

Betty's have started making macaroons again! These are French style macaroons as opposed to the traditional coconut version. The texture is wonderful - light as a feather yet chewy and satisfying, and sandwiched together with buttercream.

My favourite flavours are chocolate and pistachio, but the raspberry and orange ones are good too!

I'm still working on my chocolate macaroon recipe - I can't get a small, neat shape like the Betty's ones, but they taste really good, particularly after leaving the filled macaroons in the fridge overnight which makes them taste like a (large) mouthful of chocolate fudge - yum yum yum!

Disaster!

My morning at work was horrendous, and two of the nurses were saying they wished they had some of my cake to keep them going, so I thought I'd use part of my afternoon off to make them a cake.

I recently got some loaf tin liners from Lakeland and wanted to try them out so decided to try Nigella's dense chocolate loaf cake from her How to be a Domestic Goddess book. The recipe looked easy enough. The only 3 things I did that weren't exactly to the recipe were adding cocoa powder for a more chocolately taste, reduced the oven temperature very slightly (as I have a fan oven) and only used 150ml boiling water as by the time this was mixed in, the batter was very sloppy.

By the end of the cooking time I opened the oven to test it, to be greeted by cake mixture overflowing from the tin - luckily I put the tin on a baking sheet, I wouldn't fancy trying to chip that off the bottom of the oven! I tested it with a skewer and it was completely wet in the middle, so I put it back in for another 15 mins. By this point, the middle was sunken, the top was burnt and at least half of the cake had overflowed onto the baking sheet.

I don't know what went so wrong but I won't be rushing to repeat this one!

Review: Kenwood Mini Chopper

I'm really busy at work this week and also outside of work with job applications so that means no time for baking - boooo!

So instead, I thought I'd do some reviews of my favourite kitchen gadgets.



I initially got the Kenwood Mini Chopper because I needed something to blend garlic and chillis to make a base for a curry, and I have a teeny kitchen with only 1 cupboard for everything so I didn't have space for a conventional food processor.

The bowl is about 15cm in diameter and has a volume of 350ml. Mine only has 1 speed but I note on amazon that the current version has 2 speeds. It is easy to take apart and dishwasherable - great if you're lazy like me.

In the last 3 months I have used it for everything from making pesto and curry sauce to grinding almonds to make macaroons. I even used it to blend a vat of roast veg for a pasta sauce in batches. Apparently Delia recommends it for chopping veg as well.

For someone like me with limited space, it is perfect. It doesn't have the other things that a conventional food processor would have like mixing/grating/juicing attachments but I already have a hand mixer and other tools for this purpose (which probably take up less space than a food processor would).

So in summary, this is one gadget that I would buy again in a heartbeat if anything ever happened to mine!

Birthday party

My family came over to my flat this weekend for a little birthday party. I decided to go for something easy with minimal preparation: roast chicken, a green salad, a potato salad, cous cous, bean salad, crisps and dips, olives and bread.

I bought the biggest free range chicken I could find in Tesco and it was lovely - made the flat smell gorgeous as well! I cook chicken very simply - a lemon cut in half and put inside, and salt and pepper on the outside. When basted the lemony juices make the skin crisp and caramelised.

For pudding we had cupcakes that Neil and I had made the night before, half with raspberry buttercream and half with orange flavoured glace icing and sprinkles. We won £10 from a new tub of sugar strands as well! I treated myself to a new piping set which was very easy to use - Neil had a lot of fun with it. It's dishwasherable as well - otherwise it would be a nightmare to clean!




My sister made me an amazing cake as a birthday present - Pingu! It was a (dairy free) chocolate and vanilla marble cake with chocolate buttercream filling.



Unfortunately now everyone has gone I'm left with 2/3 of the pingu cake to eat by myself - I might have to take it into work tomorrow and let the nurses help me.

Bettys

I am lucky enough to live in York, and I am completely obsessed by Bettys. Sometimes I go for breakfast after nights as a treat, I love going for afternoon tea and their cakes are both gorgeous and very tasty.

Two recent examples:



The frog is made from sponge with jam and buttercream in the middle and iced with marzipan. The mouse is made from white chocolate ganache on a sponge base, coated in white chocolate with marzipan ears.

They're also making a Yorkshire rhubarb loaf cake at the moment which is wonderful - rich buttery vanilla-y sponge with little pieces of tangy rhubarb on top. I accidentally ate half of the cake with a cup of tea yesterday, oops!

Possibly the best chocolate cake in the world...

It was my birthday this week so this gave me the perfect opportunity to make a cake to take into work. I had wanted to try this Good Food recipe for a while - it's one of their most popular recipes and has wonderful reviews.

Having made it now, I can see why! It was very easy - it took longer to line the cake tin than it did to mix. It has a lovely dense, almost fudgey texture and the perfect balance of rich chocolate and sweetness. I used instant espresso powder rather than instant coffee for a slightly stronger taste but it doesn't taste overly of coffee - the faint bitterness just cuts through the sweetness.

The icing is a simple ganache, but in future I would use a chocolate with less cocoa solids as it was quite rich and bitter. I added a few dollops of golden syrup and it was perfect.

The girls at work are already asking for another one!

Introductions

Hi, I'm Anna, I'm 27 and I love food.

I haven't always loved food, I was a particularly fussy child and went through a phase of eating only Heinz tomato soup and chocolate digestives. I refused to eat any vegetables until I was 10. As a result my growth was stunted and my younger sisters all tower over me.

However in the last 2 years I have started to discover a love for food; last year I discovered asparagus and ate almost nothing else until the British season was over. The year before it was rhubarb. And broccoli. And peas.

I love baking in particular, and anything chocolatey or cinnamony is just heaven to me. I intermittently have a dairy intolerance and so I spend quite a bit of time experimenting with making dairyfree food - the latest success story being a dairy free cheesecake.

This blog is intended to inspire me to step out of my comfort zone with food and push me to try new things, hopefully I will manage to keep it up!