Creative cooking with Courgettes (Zucchini)

Since taking on an allotment plot in May this year we’ve now started to enjoy lots of fresh produce. I grew 8 courgette plants from seed – 50% too many I think! We’ve had masses of courgettes so have being trying all kinds of recipes to use them up. Here are some of the results…

Suffed Courgettes – not my favourite way of eating courgette, I think these look nicer than they tasted. The recipe used ricotta cheese as the base which was a bit bland for me. Too fiddly.

Stuffed Courgettes

These, on the other hand, were scrummy. I love savoury muffins and these are packed with flavour – diced courgette and red pepper, brie, cheddar and chorizo. Packed with calories too!.

Courgette, Red Pepper, Brie and Chorizo Muffins

This cake recipe is so easy, I’ve made four already! I’ve tried freezing it and it works really well. The texture and flavourings are similar to carrot cake – a very satisfying eat. The recipe is from ‘Bake’ by Rachel Allen (it’s actually called courgette/zucchini bread). You can find the recipe at Maine{iac} Baker.

Courgette and Walnut Cake

Another muffin recipe, grated courgette and sesame seeds – not as tasty as the other ones but really good instead of bread to eat with cold meats and cheese (and homemade courgette chutney!).

Courgette and Sesame Seed Muffins

Mr Sock made this excellent courgette and cheese bread. It should have been a plait but unfortunately by the time the oven was free for it to get baked, it had spread itself across the whole tin! Not a bad thing, we had long thin slices rather than short round ones.

Cheesy Courgette Bread

We’ve also had them griddled with a coating of olive oil and seasoning, as fritters, in roasted veg tray bakes, as an alternative to aubergine in moussaka (that was very delicious – I like it better), thin strips raw in salads, I’ve even made spicy courgette chutney which goes very nicely with Indian foods.

If anyone has other suggestions please share them as the courgettes are still growing 🙂

Rhubarb & Orange Cake

 

After umming and ahhing whether or not to spend 3 quid on 400g of rhubarb (that’s an outrageous £1 per stick!) I decided to give it a go. And wow, this cake is so delicious, I’m glad I did. The recipe is in the May issue of Good Food magazine. Alongside the rhubarb some of the other ingredients you need are an orange, a 100g bag of ground almonds and almost a whole block of butter – naughty! It’s rich, fragrant, buttery, moist and very fruity. The rhubarb is chopped into good sized chunks and sits in sugar for about 30mins before getting stirred into the batter mix so you keep coming across lovely sweet pillows of soft fruit.

It took about 20mins longer to cook than the recipe stated but I think that’s more to do with our rubbish oven! That’s probably why it sunk a bit too much in the middle as I kept taking it out to do the skewer test.

We’ve been eating it with a dollop of mascarpone cheese sprinkled with icing sugar and a steaming cup of black filter coffee. Delightful – definitely one to bake again. I must keep my eyes open for a better deal on the price of rhubarb though.

If you fancy giving it a try but don’t want to buy the mag there’s a very similar recipe on the Waitrose site.

Fancy Fimo Buttons & Animals

Hello, just a quick post today. I wanted to show you one of my best Christmas presents. These lovely rainbow coloured Fimo buttons were handmade for me by my clever 8 year old god-daughter Lucy. Aren’t they fabulous!

And these brilliant little creatures are on display in our living room. You can see by my finger in the picture how small they are – I’m amazed at how much detail she’s managed. Mine is the lovely green frog with his own little present and Mr Sock is the the owner of the terrific tiger – who came with his own fimo cake! 🙂

Sock Creature Crafternoon

This week I had a lovely afternoon of Sock Crafting with my 7 year old god-daughter Lucy. Her twin brother went ‘new trainer’ shopping with Mom while we rifled through the sock stash.

Here are a few pics of our afternoon:

Naturally we started with cake. The one at the front is a slice of delicious Lemon Drizzle cake made by Lucy (which translates into made by Lucy’s Mom!). We had little coconut thingies, a big stack of millionaires shortbread and pop.

Lucy also came bearing gifts that she had made herself. This gorgeous little sock bird now lives in the big plant in my living room. I love how it’s got eyebrows.

How cool are these little sock creature drawings? Top row third one along is the little bird and bottom right looks just like the Sock Squirrel I made for her. She’s definitely got an artistic flair.

These two are great fun because you lift them up to reveal….

…little Sock babies, ahhh!

So after having a lengthy peruse through ‘Stray Sock Sewing’ by Dan Ta she eventually settled on us having a go at making the Teddy Bear (for those of you that have the book, it’s page 122).

There are similarities but Lucy’s has a few little twists to make it unique. Here’s the result…

The bear in the book had a cute little raised belly button with an X in the middle but Lucy decided she’d like her bear to have a bejewelled belly button. It also has a rather lovely pair of stripey pants and a red checked bow.

And the finishing touch is a paticularly dashing pink sock sunhat.

She did almost all of the work herself – I think she did a brilliant job – what do you think?

The next session will be with Matthew – I think we might be making a dinosaur or an alien 🙂

Sticky Saucy Orange Cake

Today was one of those rare days I felt like baking a cake, mostly fuelled by a disappointing purchase of a bag of not very juicy oranges from Tesco. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away so I hunted about for a recipe to use them up. Well worth the effort…

Ingredients for cake

3/4 cup of butter

1.5 cups caster sugar

1.5 tbsp grated orange rind (I calculated this as the rind of 1 orange)

4 eggs

1/2 cup plain yoghurt

3 tbsp orange juice

2 cups plain flour

1/2 tsp bicarb of soda

1. Preheat oven to 180c. Grease a cake tin.
2. Cream butter & sugar til fluffy, mix in orange rind.
3. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well.
4. Mix yoghurt & orange juice – add to mixture and blend well.
5. Sieve flour & bicarb into mixture and stir to combine until smooth.
6. Pour into cake tin.
7. Bake for about 40 mins. Stand in cake tin for 5 mins then turn out onto wire rack to cool slightly.

Ingredients for sauce

1 cup fresh orange juice

3 tbsp fresh lemon juice

1 tbsp grated orange or lemon rind (or a mix)

1/2 cup of sugar

…I added a big spoonful of delicious chilli orange marmalade made by my talented friend Mrs. Chutney

Mix all the sauce ingredients in a pan. Bring to the boil and boil for 5 mins. Then pour over the cake while still hot.

We tucked into a slice while it was still hot and added a dollop of honey and ginger ice cream. Gorgeous 🙂

Berry, White Chocolate & Coconut Muffins

Yes, there are only 11 on the cooling rack – I obviously had to test one!

Recipe is a bit of an adaptation from Australian Woman’s Weekly Kitchen…

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C

90g butter rubbed in to 375g SR flour

add & mix in: 220g caster sugar,  30g dessicated coconut, 1 egg lightly beaten, 310ml buttermilk, 150g frozen (or fresh) berries, 150g(ish) of chopped white chocolate pieces

Divide between 12 muffin cases (in a muffin tin),  sprinkle some dessicated coconut on top and cook for between 20-30mins

See if you can wait for them to cool before you tuck in!

Lemon Lava Volcano Cake

Original Cake Club has definitely come to an end as the second Cakemaster has now left the company. But what a good cake he left on – just look at the height of this!

It was a 5 egg wonder, lovely texture, very lemony, altogether delicious (and some of us greedy ones had 2 slices each!).

Thank you Cakemaster2 – goodbye and good luck!

Cake Club is now down to 3 members so we’ll be recruiting for another 3-5 in the new year… watch this space!

Naughty Lizzie forgot to bake!

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Bit of a boo boo this week. Lizzie completely forgot that it was her turn to bake for Friday Cake Club.

She had to dash into the Supermarket on her way to work to compensate with All Butter Carrot Cake and Victoria Sandwich. Nice but not a patch on her Elizabeth Sponge Cake!

Remember Lizzie – two ‘forgets’ and it’s Discommunicaketion!

Cake Club Friday…

Yoghurt, Lime & Pistachio Cake with Lime & Rosewater Syrup

It was my turn to bake again today. I have to admit I was only thinking of myself when I chose this recipe as it has all the flavours and scents I love! And it did taste as good as it sounds!

If you want to have a go you can find the recipe here it’s from Rachel Allen’s wonderful book called bake – she suggests putting rose petals on the top for decoration but it’s the wrong time of year for that so I had to cheat and use sugar flowers!

Go Bananas & Tart Thursday!

Today it’s a double entry for Cake Club.

Cake Club should happen on a Friday but as Cakemaster had elected himself to bake this week, and then booked Friday off, he decided to feed us today instead with this rather beautiful and tasty Apple & Cinnamon tart – he even made the pastry himself – impressive!

And what’s especially comforting is that he tests the recipes out on his flatmates first so we only get ‘approved’ cakes in Cake Club!

Last week we had to have an emergency volunteer baker as Cakemaster hadn’t done the new rota – Oops! So we had a squidgily (is that a real word?) delicious triple banana loaf…

I think it’s my turn again next week – any ideas?