Alphabakes Challenge: October 2015

 

 

It's my turn to host Alphabakes again this month as Ros has slightly better things to do like get married.... congratulations Ros! Though my baking experiments have been somewhat curtailed of late as I'm on a pre-wedding diet - not for her big day but for my own, which is next June! Which is a good opportunity for me to remind you all that you don't have to make a cake to enter Alphabakes -the recipe can be sweet or savoury.

 

 

The letter I've chosen this month isn't too difficult I hope.... W is the one this time and as we head into winter there should be plenty of good recipes and ingredients coming to mind.

 

 

Please add your entries to the Linky by the 25^th of the month and if you tweet @Caroline_Makes and @bakingaddict we will retweet all the ones that we see.

'); Here's a reminder of the rules:
1. Post your recipe on your blog and link it to The More than Occasional Baker and Caroline Makes, stating the relevant month's host. If you do not have a blog, email us a picture and a brief description of your entry which we will  include in the round-up at the end of the month.

2. You can use your own recipe or someone else's recipe. The recipe can be sweet, savoury or a mixture!  Anything goes as long as the random letter is predominantly featured in the recipe as one of the main ingredients or flavours or in the name of the bake itself (i .e . not as a garnish , or using 'flour' for the letter F!)  You can also republish old posts/recipes but you must include the information for this challenge as stated in these rules. 

 

3. Add the logo to your post and add 'alphabakes' as a label to your post. 

 

4. Please add your entries to the linkup on this page. If you want to email your entries please use alphabakes@gmail.com by midnight (GMT) 25th of each month. Please include: 

• Your name (that you want included in the round up or we will use the name of your blog)
• Your blog post URL
• Recipe title
• Photo of recipe (to be included in the round up).

 

5. You can submit as many entries as you like.

 

6.You do not have to participate every month to join in.

 

7. You may submit your entry to other challenges as long as it complies with their rules.

 

8. If you use twitter, please use the tag #alphabakes and mention @bakingaddict and @Caroline_Makes. We will retweet all those that we see.

Read More

Yellow Butterfly Birthday Card

Butterflies appear in my card making time and again. I’m not sure why – they are pretty and colourful and seem quite feminine, but younger somehow that flowers. I think a lot of people these days only send floral cards to their grandmothers!

This card was a bit of a cheat as it uses elements from a shop-bought birthday card (one I received)- but I do like to recycle! I used a tall thin card blank and covered it with a pretty yellow paper patterned with little flowers. I cut the butterflies and the flower off the other card – they are made of foam backed onto cardboard so were easy to cut out and look really nice as they are raised off the card. The ‘happy birthday’ banner is also recycled from another card!

I think to papercrafting purists this would be unacceptable but using pieces from shop-bought cards doesn’t mean you haven’t made an effort; the design is still your own idea, you can still be creative and you can still say you spent the time and effort making something yourself.

Read More

Restaurant Review: Vittoria on the Bridge, Edinburgh

 

Vittoria on the Bridge is in Edinburgh’s Old Town, on the George IV bridge not far from the university and many of the tourist attractions. I was in Edinburgh on business however, part of the team that was organising a conference. The night before the conference I went out to dinner with the team; it was a cold and rainy evening and we hopped straight out of a taxi into the restaurant, which had been booked by someone who had been there before.

 

The restaurant has an extensive menu of Italian dishes with a huge number of starters, various cuts of steak, some not particularly Italian main courses like liver and bacon and brie wellington but plenty of Italian specialities like vitello alla parmigiana and vitello alla Milanese (veral medallions in a parmesan sauce, or with spaghetti). There are separate sections for pasta, risotto and pizza – the pizza section is helpfully divided into meat, seafood, vegetarian, deluxe and calzone. There are 22 pizzas on the menu which is probably enough to rival the likes of Pizza Express – but so many other dishes besides.

 

I found it hard to choose so decided to try the lasagne; it’s such a traditional dish that I think you can almost judge the quality of an Italian restaurant by their lasagne. And it was delicious! Packed full of meat with the right amount of sauce (I hate lasagnes that are too dry) and really tasty.

 

We only had one course so weren’t in the restaurant long, but service was friendly and relatively fast given we were a large group; if you’re sightseeing in Edinburgh or indeed on business there, this would be a great place to stop and eat.

 

Read More

Meal Planning Monday 2015 Week 40

My post-holiday diet started well but then was slightly derailed by two days away for work, a client conference the next day and a hen night at the weekend! Still, Rome wasn't built in a day...

I'm feeling rather uninspired for breakfasts I can eat at my desk at work (we have a microwave, but no toaster) so if you have any ideas please let me know!
 

Monday

Breakfast: yogurt and pear

Lunch: salmon with salad

Dinner: ready meal as we have our residents association at 8am when we are usually still eating dinner

 

Tuesday

Breakfast: muesli with fat free yogurt

Lunch: chicken, salad and homemade houmous and carrot sticks

Dinner: curry to use up rest of sauce we had last week

 

Wednesday

 Breakfast: muesli with fat free yogurt

Lunch: chicken, salad and homemade houmous and carrot sticks

Dinner: mackerel with soy and ginger from Wagamama cookery book p.115 for me, chicken goujons for him

 

Thursday

 Breakfast:  yogurt

Lunch: out with a friend

Dinner: out at a blog event

 

Friday

  Breakfast: yogurt

Lunch: possibly tuna sandwich depending on what is left at the end of the week

Dinner: Slimming World nacho-style feast from this recipe

 

Saturday

Breakfast:  yogurt

Lunch: baked potato with tuna and plain yogurt for me, cheese and beans for him

Evening: at my parents for my dad’s birthday

 

Sunday

reminder to self: bake cupcakes for work tonight
 

Breakfast: at my parents for my dad’s birthday

Lunch: at my parents for my dad’s birthday

Dinner: something easy from the freezer depending on what I had for lunch

Read More

Wagamama Roasted Honey Pork Ramen

This weekend was the Japanese Grand Prix but I have to admit I didn't watch it - as I've said before, it's my fiancé who is the F1 fan anyway, though I've definitely gotten into it since living with him! I was busy today making the flowers to go on top of Ros's wedding cake (which has made me realise I won't have time to make my own wedding cake, a shame but it could be a lot of last minute stress!). I did make a Japanese meal for dinner though in the spirit of my blog challenge Formula 1 Foods.

I've had the Wagamama recipe book for several years but hardly ever used it; when I was thinking about making a Japanese meal I immediately took it from my bookshelf and was pleasantly surprised at the number of recipes in it I liked - I don't know why I never really used this book before!


 





















I chose a dish called roasted honey pork ramen - ramen are a type of Japanese noodle. It was really easy to make though I adapted the recipe slightly to use up some vegetable stock I had in the fridge (rather than the chicken stock the recipe called for) and I left out the bamboo shoots as I don't like them. The recipe also suggested that you cook a pork fillet and then slice it but I used two small pork chops (I was going to buy fillet but they were reduced in the supermarket and I thought I may as well get a bargain) which I sliced up first and then cooked. It worked really well and the pork had a similar taste and texture as when I've had char siu pork in Chinese restaurants.

So this is my version of the recipe:
To serve one, you need

1-2 pork chops, with the bone and any fat removed and the meat sliced
1 tbsp. bbq sauce
1 tsp runny honey
100ml vegetable stock
ramen noodles
2 spring onions, trimmed and sliced
broccoli to serve

Preheat oven to 200C. Place the pork slices in a roasting tin lined with foil, and toss with the BBQ sauce. Bake for 20 minutes; meanwhile start cooking the broccoli or any other veg you want with it. After the pork has been in the oven for 20 minutes, add the honey and return to the oven for five minutes. Heat the vegetable stock and cook the noodles - I used a packet of straight-to-wok noodles so they only needed a few minutes heating through. Add the spring onions to the vegetable stock and heat through.

To serve, spoon the noodles and spring onion into a bowl and add as much of the stock as you like if you want this to be more of a broth-based dish. Top with the pork and serve with broccoli or other green veg.

I'm sending this to Formula 1 Foods as the challenge this time is Japan.

Read More

How to use a Bead-Maker for Cake Decorating

For the finishing touch on a celebration cake, a row of beads or pearls is a great idea.

 

I recently posted detailed instructions for how to make a wired sugar flower. I will soon be posting the full wedding cake that I used the flower on, but first want to show you another element of that cake.

 

You can roll individual balls of fondant and stick them in a row around the edge of your cake; if you do this the way to make sure they are all the same size is to weigh your icing. This whole process takes a long time though so I thought I would introduce those of you who haven’t come across it before to a bead maker.

 

I’ve tried a rigid plastic one from Lakeland and a soft silicon one that belonged to a tutor in a cake decorating class and I found the latter much easier to use.

 

 

It’s best to use a mixture of fondant and flower paste as I found fondant alone too soft, but it can work.

 

Open the bead maker and rub the inside with a little Trex (shortening).

 

Roll a fat sausage of your fondant/flower paste mix and place inside the bead maker. Squeeze it shut – there will be excess fondant that fills over the side but that’s fine – you need to make sure you’ve filled the cavity inside so this is the best way. Simply trim off the excess while still squeezing the bead maker shut.

 

Open it up and you should see a row of beads. Before you remove them, brush the side facing you with a little lustre powder – pearl is nice if you are making white beads but you could do them in any colour. Gently nudge the beads out of the mould so they sit in the other part of the mould and then brush the side that is now exposed with the lustre power. Carefully lift out and you have a string of pearls ready to go around the base of your cake.

 

Read More

New Baby Boy Card

 

This is a bright, fun card that has touches of blue for a boy, but to me the feeling it creates is one of joy of celebrating a birth. There is quite a lot going on in this card but I think the new parents will find there is quite a lot going on in their lives now!

 

I cut off the corners of a square card blank to give a curved effect and covered the card with a jazzy star-print backing paper. I did want some element of blue though and had a cloud-shaped blue card die cut which I stuck in the middle.

 

I had a pack of wooden card toppers for a new baby that I had used most of, but I still had the word ‘baby’, a safety pin and a baby bottle left, which were all the right colour for this card. From another pack of baby card toppers I had some pram die cuts, which were pink. I covered the body of the pram with blue paper, but thought there was nothing wrong with leaving the other parts pink!

 

I also wanted a couple of other elements that jumped out to create the feeling of joy and fun, so used two multi-layered flower stickers – again I was using up the odds and ends of another pack.

 

Finally – because there is a bit of a traditionalist in me – I took a piece of blue ‘baby boy’ ribbon and stuck it along the bottom of the card. I then took another length of ribbon and tied it in a bow, and glued that to the middle of the straight piece.

 

Read More