Fruity Yogurt Brulee Two Ways

The letter for this month's Alphabakes is Y, never an easy one - I've already managed to enter my Yule Log I made after Christmas that I hadn't blogged about until now. I also wanted to make something else, but with wedding planning (four months to go and counting!) I've been far too busy to bake.

So instead I decided to go for an easy dessert involving yogurt. I found a recipe in The Fairtrade Everyday Cookbook for a yogurt fruit brûlée - passion fruit on the bottom topped with Greek yogurt, which you mix with a little pomegranate juice, then top with brown sugar which you caramelise with a cook's blowtorch or under the grill.

I had some pomegranate to use up so didn't want to buy passion fruit as well - I'm terrible at buying fruit and not using it before it goes off. I did have the pomegranate juice as I had just been sent vouchers to buy some POM Wonderful pomegranate juice to review. It's made from 100% pomegranate (made from concentrate) - did you know that pomegranates are a good source of all of these?:

• Vitamin C
• Vitamin K
• Fiber
• Potassium
• Folate
• Copper
• 
  I mixed a dash of pomegranate juice with fat free Greek style yogurt and spooned it into a ramekin on top of some pomegranate seeds.
  
  

I sprinkled a generous coating of brown sugar on the top but using my blowtorch didn't make the sugar caramelise, just burn in places- as you can see it was literally on fire at one point!

Once I'd stopped and scraped off the burnt bits, and added some more pomegranate seeds on top, it did taste quite good, but I decided I needed to make this again using caster sugar, which I know does caramelise properly with a blowtorch.

This time I cut up a ripe pear and placed pieces of it in the bottom of a ramekin and topped it with some flavoured yogurt - Onken's mango, papaya and passion fruit flavour.



I sprinkled caster sugar on top and caramelised it - properly this time - with my cook's blowtorch. It tasted delicious and would be great as a dessert or even breakfast!

I'm sharing my yogurt brûlée with Alphabakes, the challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter this month is Y.

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Meal Planning Monday: Week 7

 

I started following DietPlan.co.uk's 'feel fuller' diet plan which claims to increase the amount of protein versus carbs, and yet every day it seems to recommend I have porridge for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch, which is very odd! So now on my personal trainer's advice I'm going to eat more protein - eggs for breakfast if I have time, and chicken breast and prawns or smoked salmon for lunch with salad.

 

Monday

Dinner- was going to make vegetable or Quorn curry but got home late so did pasta instead.

 

Tuesday

Dinner- stuffed chicken with pesto and cream cheese. Followed by pancakes for dessert as it's Shrove Tuesday

 

Wednesday

Lunch- leftover pasta from Monday

Dinner – sandwich, at cake decorating class

 

Thursday

Dinner- balsamic pork steak

 

Friday

Dinner- burger and chips for him, with salad for me

 

Saturday

Lunch- soup and fresh bread

Dinner- will invite my fiancé's mum around and do Pad Thai for us, pizza for him. Followed by sticky mango rice for pudding perhaps.

 

Sunday

Valentine’s day

Lunch- bacon sandwich as that is definitely the way to his heart!

Dinner- not sure yet if we are going out (I suspect not at this late stage) or I will cook steak as that's his favourite.

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Snapfish Personalised Photo Placemats for Valentine's Day

We weren’t going to do Valentine’s presents this year, as we have a wedding to pay for – which seems rather more important! But when I was asked by Snapfish, the photo prints and photo gifts website, to see if there was anything I liked on their site I jumped at the chance.

 

I did some crafting with Snapfish products last year and was really pleased; I noticed then that they had a huge range of ready made gifts which could be personalised with photos, which would be ideal for Valentine’s day. You could do a photo book or a canvas print for your Valentine, or a mug and key ring. I love the photo cushions as well – my sister got my mum one of these with a picture of her dog on it for Christmas and my mum said it was her favourite present!

 

As we are getting married in June I didn’t want to do a photo book or canvas print yet as we will hopefully have some amazing pictures from the professional photographer and there seemed no point using holiday snaps now. I didn’t think my fiancé would appreciate a picture of my cat on a cushion (even though I’d love it!) and we have far too many mugs in the cupboard already – so I wanted something we would actually be able to use and enjoy.

 

Snapfish offers photo personalised coasters and placemats which isn’t something I’ve seen on many photo sites and I thought it was a brilliant idea – something you might use every day or keep for special occasions, that can be a real talking point around the dinner table. Also, they do a set of 6 placemats for £24.99 which I think is quite good value, but also handy – the placemats I’ve already got came in a set of 4 and I often find I need one or two more. You can also buy individual placemats for £8.99 or a pair for £14.99 – just right for a Valentine’s gift.

 

I decided to get the full set of 6 and knew straight away I wanted to use photos of holidays my fiancé and I have taken together. It was hard to choose which pictures so I decided to narrow it down – he loves to visit the US, and we’ve been there three times in the five and a bit years we’ve been together. I thought he would really like the gift if I chose a set of 6 pictures from our favourite USA destinations – you can put the same picture on all the placemats if you like, or a different one on each, which is what I did.

The top photo in this pile was taken when we went to dinner at a restaurant on the banks of the Mississippi in Natchez.
 

The top two you can see here are Chicago by night, taken from the balcony of our hotel, and Monument Valley at sunrise.

 

 The placemats aren't huge but there is plenty of room for a dinner plate and they look really good quality - robust with a glossy finish. I'm looking forward to using them!
If you order from Snapfish before February 9 your order should reach you in time for Valentine's Day :-)

Thanks to Snapfish for the voucher towards the products I chose. All opinions are my own etc.

 

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Spiralized Sweet Potato 'Pizza'

It's Spiralizer Saturday so for lunch today I made this recipe based on one in Ali Maffucci's book Inspiralized.

 

I changed it a bit to use different toppings and also to make the recipe quicker. Ali suggests pressing the spiralized sweet potato down inside a ramekin and refrigerating it for 15 mins, but I skipped this stage and just flattened the noodles into the frying pan and it worked just fine. It tasted really good too!

If you have any recipes that can be made using a Spiralizer, please add them to the linkup here.

To serve one, you need:
1 sweet potato, spiralized or grated
Fry Light
one egg
1/2 tsp garlic granules
salt, pepper
2 tbsp. passata
1/4 onion, diced
1/6 red pepper, diced
half a ball of mozzarella

Preheat oven or grill. Peel the sweet potato and spiralize.

 Spray a frying pan with Fry Light and add the sweet potato noodles; cook for ten minutes until softened. Add the diced onion and red pepper and fry until softened then remove from the pan.

Beat the egg in a large bowl and mix in the spiralized sweet potato.

Press the mixture down in the frying pan and fry on each side until browned. Place on a baking tray and spread the top with the passata and top with the red pepper, onion and mozzarella. Place in the oven or under the grill until the cheese has melted and enjoy.

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Sugar flowers: how to make sweet peas

Following the calla lilies I made in my sugar flowers evening class I want to share with you the next type of flower we made - sweet peas. These are very pretty though fairly small, so would look good with one flower on top of a cupcake or with a spray on top of a larger cake.

Once again you need a dedicated cutter - or can make your own template, but this only cost a few pounds from Amazon.

To start, you need to roll out some flowerpaste so it is very thin and then cut a small teardrop-shaped piece either using a small rose petal cutter or your own template. Use a balling tool to curl the edges by placing the shape on a foam pad and rubbing the tool around the edge, half on the flowerpaste and half on the foam pad.

Take a piece of florist wire - quite thin, so 26 or 28 gauge - and make a small sausage shape from your sugarpaste. Insert the florist wire and then wrap the teardrop shape around it, folding in half. This will form the centre of the flower.

Cut out two pieces of flowerpaste using the sweet pea cutter.

Take the piece with the notch cut out (the top one in the above picture) and spread a little edible glue in the centre. Then, holding the cut out notch at the top line up the notch with the centre of your flower and wrap both side pieces around it, leaving an opening, like you can see below.

Take the other petal and rub the edges with a balling tool as before to curl them. Carefully insert a thin piece of florist wire - 30 gauge is good for this - into the petal. I found it quite hard to do this without the wire poking through - you can try making your flowerpaste petal a little thicker if you are having trouble.

Stand the petal behind the ones you have already made, and bind the two pieces of wire together with florist tape.

 We then made the calyx with a calyx cutter. You either need to roll this out on a board with holes - known as Mexican hat holes - or you can manually pinch together some of the flowerpaste to make the part that sticks up, as you can see here.

Slide the calyx up through the wires and bend the leaves outwards. I think a little bunch of these together could look quite realistic!

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Restaurant Review: Crepe Affaire, Islington

Pancakes are great for breakfast - or lunch, or dessert. But particularly if you want something different for breakfast.

I was on business in Islington a little while ago and visiting a supplier but I was a bit early so decided to get some breakfast somewhere nice. I was passing Crepe Affaire and the fast casual appearance appealed to me - it's more like a café than a restaurant but with plenty of tables and waiter service after you've ordered at the counter.

They have sweet and savoury crepes and a separate breakfast section that has other items like porridge and eggs Florentine. But I was there for the pancakes - it had to be savoury rather than sweet at that time of the morning. There were some delicious and quite interesting flavours, on a whole spectrum from ham and cheese through to Mexican chicken with salsa, guacamole, cheddar and chilli sauce. I had one with goat's cheese, apple butter, red onion, spinach and walnuts, which was delicious. The prices are very reasonable with a lot of the pancakes under £5 - definitely somewhere good for breakfast or an inexpensive lunch!

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Less Sinful Chocolate Yule Log or Swss Roll

As a lot of people – myself included – are on a health kick this month, I thought I’d share a recipe for a slightly less sinful chocolate yule log I made to take to a friend’s house at Christmas. It comes from Lorraine Pascale’s book ‘A lighter way to bake’ and the recipe can be found here.

 

I didn’t feel the need to use the milk in the chocolate ganache; it would have thinned it quite a lot and I was worried it wouldn’t set, though in fact I also forgot to put the icing sugar into the ganache. So mine was just made of chocolate and low far cream cheese, which did taste really nice – like Chocolate Philadelphia if you’ve had that!

Mixing the dry ingredients for the cake

 

Adding the wet ingredients

Spread onto a Swiss roll tin

Just out of the oven

Spreading the ganache on top

Rolled up and covered with more ganache

I didn’t decorate the yule log as I made it the day before I needed to take it to my friend’s and was worried about any decorations going too soft or sinking in, as Lorraine’s recipe says to serve immediately. But I kept it in the fridge overnight and it was really good even if the presentation doesn't look all that great (it's rustic!).

 

The coffee in the cake is detectable but not overpowering and it was nice to feel that this dessert wasn’t as calorific as a traditional yule log!

I'm sharing this with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I run with Ros of the More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter I have chosen this month is Y. Strictly speaking this is a Yule log though you could serve it as a Swiss roll any time of year.

I'm also sending this to Love Cake, hosted by JibberJabber UK as her theme, 'a month of cake' will accept any cake entries.

 

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