The Ultimate Gluten Free Chocolate Brownies

In a previous post, I mentioned my love for all chocolate based desserts. I really am a chocolate fiend and that was my downfall when I stopped breastfeeding, I continued eating chocolate like it was going out of fashion and ended up a bit more "curvy" then I would usually be. I had to forgo the chocolate for a while after that.

Chocolate brownies are pretty high up on my list of nummy nummy treats and they have become my "thing" - the item I always bake for get togethers or dinners with friends. If I was on Great British Bake Off it would be my signature bake, if they weren't so ridiculously easy to make (you just melt everything and mix it up in a saucepan). Paul Hollywood wouldn't be very happy with me at all!

My brownie recipe is adapted from a BBC recipe I found a few years ago. I've just made a few tweaks. A good friend, Kristie has Ceoliacs disease and I used to make these for her all the time. I actually prefer the gluten free version myself.

If you are in any way watching your weight these are possibly the worst things you can eat, they are basically made of butter and sugar with a bit of chocolate and flour to hold them together. That's probably why they are so tasty, who doesn't love lots of butter? Also, I don't approve of nuts or anything like that in brownies. Why would you do that and ruin the chocolatey goodness? It's just wrong, wrong wrong.

Today I had a serious brownie craving. It was my birthday this week and as birthdays go, it was wasn't one of my better ones. Amongst other things, it was a day J was being difficult and this resulted in me being punched in the face and there may or may not have been blood. So, I think I deserve some brownies, all to myself - no sharing.

Ingredients:

• 450g caster sugar
• 225g butter
• 135g of caramel chocolate (dark or milk) - I use Galaxy caramel chocolate.
• 5 eggs
• 110g rice flour (this can be bought in some supermarkets and health food shops. Plain flour is fine for a non gluten free version
• 55g Cocoa - if you are making a gluten free version make sure the cocoa doesn't have any gluten in it. Some of them have fillers that do. I use Bourneville cocoa which is fine.

Method:

• Melt the sugar and butter together in a large heavy bottomed saucepan
• Add in the chocolate and when this is melted, take off the heat

• Add the 5 eggs to a bowl and beat until they are mixed well, add this to the chocolate mixture, a small amount at a time
• Sift in the flour and cocoa powder and mix very thoroughly (if you don't you will be left with brownies that look marbled with white and milk chocolate but in fact just have clumps of nasty flour in them)
• Pour into a high sided dish (you can use a cake tin either)
• Bake for about 35 minutes, checking every so often towards the end. A skewer inserted in the mixture should come out clean but if you overcook them the brownies will be horribly dry
• Allow the brownies to cool and cut into squares
• Dust with icing sugar if you want a bit of decoration. 
• Try not to eat the entire tray in one go

N

xx

Alice In Wonderland Sugar Cookies

I spent the last weekend at a hen party, so am feeling a little bit fragile today. My friends and I tend to go all out for these kind of things and this weekend was no exception. The theme of the hen party was Alice in Wonderland, one of the bride's favourite books. I, being a crazy cat lady, of course dressed up as the Cheshire Cat.

In my opinion, it's much more fun to be creative with a costume instead of buying one that is made already (and there is a lot out there you can buy for an Alice in Wonderland theme). I went online and bought two pairs of pink and purple striped knee socks and a pair of pink clip-on ears. I wore one pair of socks and used the other pair to make a tail and arm cuffs. The tail I made just by trimming off the end of the sock, sewing it closed with pink wool and stuffing with odd bits of material I had. I cut the other sock in half to create the arm cuffs. I wore a purple dress and shoes I already had and made a cheshire cat smile out of white card and a lollipop stick. I think it cost me about €8 in total to make this costume. I had some face paint on but I drew the line at having a white cheshire cat smile painted on my face all night. So much easier to have a smile I could hold in front of my face when I wanted to.

It was a brilliantly organised weekend and everybody made such an effort for the bride, who loved it. The bridesmaids had asked us to bring along some themed food for the party if we could so I made and decorated sugar cookies.

Sugar Cookies

Recipe:

100g butter
100g caster sugar
1 egg
175g flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method:

Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric mixer until the mixture is pale, cream and fluffy.

Add the egg and vanilla extract, a small bit at a time

Add the flour gradually until the mixture comes together as a dough (I found the mixture was very "crumby" so I needed to add some more flour and mix it by hand to get it to come together)

Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to a thickness of about 1cm.

Then, using cookie cutters cut out shapes from the dough and carefully place on a baking tray covered in baking paper.

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I used cat, bauble and circular cookie cutter shapes.

Bake the cookies for 8 - 10 minutes until lightly golden and allow them to cool on a wire rack before decorating.

I used writing icing pens to decorate the cookies and it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It was the first time I had used them and the ideas I had in my head for the cookies, didn't really transfer as well as I'd hoped in reality but they were not bad. I got better towards the end of the cookie decorating so as with everything, I think practice is needed.

I decorated the cat shapes with pink and purple icing to make Cheshire cats, the baubles became little "eat me" cookies and the circles became the white rabbits clocks. I really enjoyed the decorating part so it is definitely something I'd like to do more of in future.

We had a lovely evening tea party that included chocolate biscuit cake decorated with "eat me" icing, sponge hearts with cream and strawberries, top hats (marshmallows stuck in chocolate) and little custard strawberry tarts.

As for the rest of the evening, I can confirm that we drank out of the tea cups but they definitely didn't contain tea so the rest of the night was a little less civilised!

N
xx

Blackberry and Apple Jam

It is that time of year again when blackberries appear on the bushes all around (actually it's past that time but I did miss the boat a little bit this year). Last year I went blackberry picking with friends and we picked enough to make jam for the year. I still have a few jars left and it tastes great. I was all set this year to repeat this and add more jam to my cupboards. Jam is a lot easier to make than I thought and great to have homemade stuff to give out during the year (and to eat yourself of course)

After a bit of research as to good places to pick blackberries I went off walk about three weeks ago with my Mum and J in the buggy to see what we could find. The answer, not a lot. The bushes had been stripped by more enterprising blackberry pickers. I actually picked last year towards the end of September but it seems this year the early bird caught the worm, or ate the blackberries if you will. My friend and her mum went off to Wicklow, picking where we did last year and reported back the same news, the bushes were bare.

After 2 hours of walking, including a hairy moment with me climbing behind a tall fence we had picked a pathetic amount of blackberries but we'd done our best. There would definitely be no jam making this year though. Undaunted, I proceeded to make a blackberry and apple tart for my Dad, who is a huge fan. I hate fruit tarts, really they are just a waste of pastry. There are so much more delicious things you could make but Daddy HNW has a sweet tooth and needed his pie.

Here is the finished result. A rather sad looking pie as I had less than half the blackberries that the recipe asked for. I knew this going along so my pastry work got very half-hearted towards the end. I was tired and I wanted to be making something that I could sit down and eat afterwards! Paul Hollywood of GBBO fame would also have been disgusted at the soggy bottom on this bad boy.

So, I was all set to give up on my blackberry jam plans for the year but hope was not lost! Last week my father in law was visiting and we went up North for two days so he could see a bit more of the country. We had a lovely trip visiting the Giant's Causeway and around that area and also a day in Belfast. We stayed in a  little holiday home that was down a country lane and there were blackberries everywhere! I only noticed as we were leaving so was raging at myself for not going out earlier for a long walk to stock up. Still, I picked blackberries for about 20 minutes and got enough to fill a 1l freezer bag. Adding in some apples made a respectable amount of jam.

I picked 1.4KG of blackberries so made jam using these and 600g of Bramley Cooking Apples.

Blackberry and Apple Jam

Ingredients
Blackberries
Cooking Apples
1 Orange or Lemon
2 Cloves
Water
Jars

Method

First of all, wash your jam jars and lids in hot soapy water. Then put them all in the oven at 50C to sterilise them. I just left mine in while the jam was cooking.

Destalk all the blackberries and add them to a large soup pot or other heavy bottomed pan

Peel and core the apples and slice them into relatively small chunks and add to the pan.

Add about 150ml of water, the juice of one orange (recipes usually say lemon but I only had orange which I now actually prefer) and 2 cloves.

After this photo was taken I had to remove the apple pieces and chop them smaller, otherwise they never would have softened enough. You really need to cut them into small pieces.

Bring the pot to the boil and then allow to simmer until the fruit is smooth and has a fine consistency. I had to simmer for about an hour due to my big apple pieces. In the end I also had to add the mixture to my mixer to get the consistency fine enough.

Sieve the fruit to remove the seeds and cloves. I like the seeds in my jam so once the cloves were located I poured the rest back in the pan.

Add granulated sugar - you need to add the same weight in sugar that you had in fruit so I added 2Kg of sugar. (A lot of people think you need pectin to make jam but it's really not necessary - why complicate things?)

Let the mixture simmer for about 20 minutes then test to see if it is "set". You do this by taking a small amount of the mixture out with a teaspoon and dropping onto a clean, cool and dry saucer. If the drops do not run into each other when you tilt the saucer to the side then the jam is ready. If the jam is not ready let it simmer for a further 5 minutes and test again.

Pour the jam into the sterilised jars, close the lids tight and then tip the jar upside down and then upright again. This helps to create a seal. Then, Voila, you have lots of lovely jam!

Here are my finished products (excuse the messy counter behind them!)

It really doesn't look very attractive but I'm planning to get labels and some gingham material to make them look all pretty so I can give them to friends/family. I had some jars saved from when I had used them throughout the year but I'm planning on making more homemade preserves for Christmas presents so will need to buy some more. Allpack is a great place to stock up.

Lemon Drizzle Cake

Let me start this post by saying I don't approve of fruit in dessert based items. I'm not a big fruit person at the best of times but fruit in cakes and puddings just upsets me. There's nothing worse than getting cheesecake and it has a horrible tart lemon flavour or ordering sticky toffee pudding and it arrives filled with raisins. I love my sweet stuff and for me, desserts should really be made of chocolate. The richer the better. My husband, (Mr HNW) is the complete opposite and our dessert choices rarely overlap which suits me fine. I don't like to share desserts. This probably stems from growing up with a father with an even sweeter tooth than mine who would wolf his dessert down and decide it was time to "help" me finish mine!

However, recently we took J to visit a friend and we were given slices of lemon and poppyseed drizzle cake. We sat in their garden in the sun eating cake that was still slightly warm with lovely, creamy vanilla ice cream. It was heaven. Finally, we had a dessert we could both agree on. Two weeks ago I decided to make a nice dinner for Mr HNW. I haven't done much cooking since J was born and now that he is a little less clingy and will sit in his rocker for a while I thought I'd seize the opportunity to get back in the kitchen. I really love baking but really haven't done much in the last year, I unfortunately suffered from hyperemesis during pregnancy (which I'm sure I will discuss here in the future at some stage!) so cooking and baking took a backseat and I spent my time running to the bathroom to be sick all the time instead.

I used this recipe from the Hairy Bikers with a slight variation. The variation came about because I've made this cake three times in the last few weeks. One time I only had two eggs in the fridge so I used 1/4 cup of vegetable oil instead of the third egg. It made the cake much nicer, with a nicer texture and a bit moister.  I initially chose this recipe because it was so simple and I really didn't know how much time J would give me in the kitchen. The recipe basically involves throwing everything into a mixer (and I'm always looking for opportunities to get my Kenwood Chef out), baking the cake and then pouring a sugary lemon mixture over it and letting it set. It really was easy peasy.

Lemon Drizzle Cake

Ingredients:
2 small unwaxed lemons (I actually ended up using three)
275g granulated sugar (I used caster because I really hate the texture of granulated sugar)
175g butter
200g self-raising flour
½ tsp baking powder
3 large free-range eggs  or 2 eggs and 1/4 cup of vegetable oil

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180°C/Gas 4.

Line your cake tin and grease it well. The Hairy Bikers recipe says to use a loaf tin but I don't possess one, no matter how many times I try to remember to buy one when I'm out. I used a round springform cake tin instead and it was completely fine.

Grate the zest of the lemons. Put 175g of the sugar in your mixer with the butter, flour, baking powder, eggs and lemon zest and mix on a medium setting until the mixture is just combined.

Spoon the cake batter into the prepared tin and level. Bake for 35 minutes or until well risen and pale golden brown.Unfortunately the first time I made it J decided it was time for a feed in the middle of my cake baking so I took it out and put it back in when he was done.. Do not do this unless you want a cake that has sunk in the middle. It was not a good idea!

Remove from the oven and cool in the tin for 5 minutes. One of the cakes I made was a disaster because I a) didn't grease the tin properly and b) didn't let it cool before removing the outer springform tin part. My impatience meant a lot of my cake stuck to the tin and the rest basically fell apart.

The recipe says to squeeze one of the lemons to get about 3 tablespoons of juice. I must have had crappy lemons because I had to squeeze all three (they were small ones to be fair).Mix the lemon juice with the remaining sugar.

Turn the cake out onto a wire rack set above a tray or plate. Remove the baking parchment and
gently turn the cake the right way up.

Once the cake is cool, make about 50 deep holes in the top of the cake with a skewer (or a knife if you are like me and couldn't be bothered finding your skewers!)

Slowly and gradually, spoon over half the lemon sugar, allowing it to thoroughly coat the top of the
cake and drizzle down the sides. Leave this to stand for five minutes.

Then repeat this with the remaining lemon sugar. Leave it to set for at least an hour (I'm fairly sure we managed to leave it for only thirty minutes because we wanted it so badly and it was still delicious!)

(Apologies for the crappy photos - I was starving at this stage and just really wanted to eat the cake!)

Mr HNW could not believe his luck when he walked in the door to the smell of baking. He gave me a 10/10 and said that any chocolate cake I baked would only ever get a max of 7 - so all in all it was a great success. It really was delicious and has definitely been added to my baking repertoire of easy things to knock up quickly. Give it a try!

Having watched the recent episode of the Great British Bake Off (I almost wet my pants in excitement when I realised it was coming back)  I'm desperate to try Angel Food Cake. Watch this space!