Midweek bake - spicy carrot cake.

So last week I fancied carrot cake and when I eventually got my son down to nap I decided that it was time to make one.  So I tried the Spicy Carrot cake recipe in my Coffee and Cake recipe book, with a couple of adaptions to suit the ingredients I had to hand and my personal tastes.

This is it before I took it to work and it got demolished. I thought that throwing some fudge cubes on it might make it extra nice and while they were tasty they were kind of superfluous.  It was just very nice and moist, not bad for a bit of post park procrastibaking! (Obviously I should have spent this time tidying or writing... but hey I'm a rebel.)

What I've been up to recently.

You may have noticed I haven't posted much recently but fear not I'm not giving up on this blog!  It's more just a combination of being busy and my laptop starting to show it's age.... I went on holiday for a few days then when I got back it decided to black screen for a week and then after miraculously coming back to life again it's been temperamental to say the least, but I won't bore you with that!

This month I have been to see the Stone Roses at Heaton Park, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britian at The Botanical Garden's, helped my Nain celebrate her 70th birthday and had my first holiday abroad with my boyfriend Paul!

After much deliberating we decided to go to Brussels for Belgian beer, buns and waffles... oh and to see the home of the European Parliament!

The weekend after I helped my sister celebrate her birthday and went to Tramlines on the Friday night, Saturday and Sunday to watch local and not so local bands perform across my city.

It had a great atmosphere and went way too quickly! This week I've been trying to burn off my tramlines pints in the gym at work, whilst rehearsing for an up coming dance show or two, as well as helping some of my work friends celebrate their birthdays and going to my first burlesque show at The Greystones.

So I've been doing one or two things and should have a few more events to blog about in the near future!  Keep your eyes peeled!

Yet more things I've been doing when I haven't been blogging...

Over the few weeks I've found it difficult to find the time to try new recipes and at the start of the month I struggled to find the time to even cook home cooked meals!

In one week I was out with work for lunch and then I ate out for my Mum's birthday celebration tea, a few days later I was eating out again when meeting my boyfriend up for an election day lunch then the day after we had a takeaway once the count was done...  I even ate out for my tea that Sunday as well!

This year I took a few days off around the election and helped with the count which was enlightening and should soon be enriching my bank balance! I got to the English Sport Institute at 8am helped set out a few ballot boxes before going to my ward table after nine where I received my training, basically count things into piles of 25 on the desk in front of the party activists/candidates. This process took about four hours for the count of the local election and the mayoral referendum.

Despite it not taking too long I stuck around with my boyfriend a little after to help him pack everything away and left around three-ish.  By this point I felt shattered and not up for cooking so we ordered a take away.

The next day I woke up feeling a bit brighter eyed and bushy tailed so I met my friend up to sample cake's at Appetite Sheffield's Cake Break at Tamper Coffee.

Word had obviously gotten around and the little coffee bar was rammed! Eventually we managed to get seats and cakes, the biggest challenge was choosing from the many varieties!

All the cakes were on sale for between £1.50 and £2.50 a slice with all proceeds going to the M.S Society, nowt like eating cake for charity! You can find out more about it this event and Appetite here.

The rest of the bank holiday was spent visiting family and pottering before returning to work and preparing for our day trip to Cleethorpes!

Surprisingly on the Saturday of the day trip to Cleethorpes the sun was out and the rain stayed away for once.  There was a leisurely train ride to the coast, a trek to the smallest pub followed by a refreshing pint in the beer garden.

Some light refereshments for our journey!

Then a tiny train ride on the light railway.

Enjoying the sunshine & tiny train ride...

A ride on the lollipop train, fish and chips, more beer and all manner of other seaside treat based gorging.

After this successful excursion and a relaxing Sunday spent seeing relatives and putting my greenhouse back up after it fell down I've finally managed to find the time and energy to make a new recipe to put on the blog! Keep your eye's peeled it will be up soon.

More things I've been doing when I haven't been blogging...

Recently I realised that my blogging has become a little haphazard and obviously there's no one to blame but myself for this...

I did tell myself it was because I was tired adjusting to early starts at work or from going to the gym after work but it's probably from going to gig's like the Summer Camp gig at the Harley the other week.

  Or maybe because I was making dark chocolate and cherry fudge?

The rays of sunshine the other week were quite distracting too...

As was the eater bake off at work and the snow...

Maybe I'm a bit easily distracted? What's that? Sure I just saw something shiny then...

All that's really left to say is thanks for sticking with me and Happy Easter!

52 Recipe Challenge - Week 38

A few weeks ago, I gave in to a craving I had and dug out a recipe for a cheese soufflé. Unfortunately it's somehow taken me three times as long to write up and post this recipe... why this is remains a mystery to me!

The recipe I used was the Easy Cheese Soufflés recipe from Sam Stern’s Real Food Real Fast.

To make this you need:

Some butter for greasing your casserole dish with & 35g of butter for cooking with.

25g flour

Pinch cayenne pepper

Pinch of nutmeg

300ml/ ½ pint milk

A few drops of lemon juice

75g Cheese grated (I used double Gloucester but the recipe suggests cheddar, gruyere or parmesan.)

4 eggs separated

Salt and black pepper.

To start with, I turned the oven on to pre-heat and got out my casserole dish.  The original recipe says to use ramekins; however, I don’t own ramekins and as there are, only two of us it would be silly getting four ramekins for one meal... Anyway, I digress, I greased the casserole dish with butter and grated a bit of the cheese in there as it apparently helps rising.

I popped the casserole dish on one side and then melted some butter in my pan.

Sifted the flour into the pan and also added the cayenne pepper and nutmeg then stirred them together whilst letting it bubble.

After about a minute, I took it off the heat, added the milk a bit at a time, and beat it into the mixture with a wooden spoon. 

When I’d beat the lumps out of the sauce and was sure that it was smooth, I put it back on the hob and brought it to the boil.  I the kept the boiling mixture on a high heat for a few minutes and stirred it to ensure it wasn’t burning.

A few minutes later I removed the pan from the hob again and added the cheese, egg yolks, salt, pepper and lemon juice, then mixed them all together until they were combined. So once I did that I turned the hob off and put my pan to one side as I whisked the egg whites in my food processor.

As soon as I’d whipped the egg whites up until they were all cloud like I put the pan back on the hob, got a tablespoon of the egg white mix and stirred it into the sauce. 

After that was combined, I tipped the rest of the mix in and folded it together trying to be careful not to lose the air trapped in the whipped up eggs.  Once combined the mixture in the pan and the egg whites were combined I tried to fill my casserole dish with it but the casserole dish was too large so I just settled with getting it all in. I also ran my finger around the edge of the mix before putting it in the oven to encourage it to rise.

I then put the soufflé in the oven and turned the oven down from the maximum temperature to 200c/ gas mark 6.The original recipe said to bake for 11-12 minutes but that is for cooking it in ramekins so I set my timer for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes it appeared to have risen but looked a bit anaemic so I left it in for another 20 minutes until it had browned and a skewer poked in came out clean.  As I was confident that it would be ok, I started dishing it only to realise that one side was completely cooked and the other was undercooked.

Under cooked souffle.

I dished up the cooked side with some salad to my boyfriend and blasted the undercooked part in the microwave before tucking in myself.

Cooked half of the souffle.

After all the preparation, stirring and whisking the cheese soufflé just tasted like cheesy scrambled eggs to me in the end.  Due to all the work involved and the underwhelming result, I don’t think I’ll try this again... well not this exact recipe!

Things I have been doing instead of blogging...

Sometimes the time just seems to fly away from you like cats fleeing the sound of a hoover or a hairdryer.
This month has been one of those months where I've turned around and realised it's March already!

So I neglected the blog last month for a few reasons, the first being that I got a new full time job after just over a month of unemployment.

First payslip of the year!

This is obviously great news but it's leaving me a bit shattered in the evening and driving me to making my tried and tested fast dishes over new recipes. (This is something I need to counter!)  My new team are treating me well though and feeding me up with donuts.

I don't like pink but I am a fan of sparkly things!

 

 Things have started to get sorted a bit more with the house. (I've finally got a shower not just a bath!)

A shower at last!

I also started up a baking club... which I forgot to take pictures of.  Rest assured there was copious amounts of cake involved! 

At a similar time I came up with the idea of doing a payday tea post. My plan was to try out the food at The Great Gatsby next to my work but alas they only served crisps that night.  So I went back to my old favourite, The Wick at Both Ends and enjoyed a lamb curry & wedges from the Wick and Mix menu.

My boyfriend had his usual massive burger.

And I treated myself to a Dark & Stormy as well as a Bit of a Ginge whilst I was there too...

On the same night we went to see the rather good Standard Fare.

As well as the frankly brilliant Allo Darlin'!

This was in The Queens Social Club, a working man's club just out of Sheffield centre, complete with sparkly backdrops and an absence of stage lights. It was still a packed show filled with new treasures and old favourites like Dreaming and the Polaroid song.

I may have got excited and danced so much my bobble fell out of my hair... what of it?

So that's my excuse for being lax with my blogging, what have your distractions been recently?