Pransellknit

Here is the last of the quick family recipes that only get rolled out during Christmas. This one absolutely positively always gets made. Such is its importance, I was making it early on Christmas morning so we wouldn’t miss out on it!

I’m not sure how this one will be received because of two things; it contains a slightly strange ingredient and it’s really not a healthy recipe at all. But it all gets eaten so quickly that it can’t be too bad, right?

Nuts and Bolts

300g Nutrigrain

375g packet Salted peanuts (we use unsalted mixed nuts)

1 packet Cream of Chicken soup (we use cream of vegetable)

1 packet French Onion Soup

1 teaspoon curry powder

0.5 teaspoon mustard powder

0.5 cup of oil (usually vegetable oil)

Pour warm oil over dry ingredients, stir until oil is mixed through, store in an air tight container.

The recipe has been slightly vegetarianised (by using cream of vegetable rather than cream of chicken soup powder) for my and Matt’s benefit. It also tastes a lot better the next day as the oil has time to soak into everything.

My Mum also notes to keep the Nuts and Bolts away from my Dad. So if you have made it and my Dad comes round, make sure you hide it. He will eat it all.

I hope everyone had (or is continuing to have) a relaxing Christmas break, and I guarantee the next post will be about knitting.

Lots of blogable bits and bobs going on, but not enough time to post. It’s a busy time of year I guess.

It was lovely to read about the things people only make around Christmas time. Gingerbread was mentioned a few times which made me wonder why my family doesn’t bake gingerbread biscuits around Christmas time. We all seem to like gingerbread, so maybe it’s a tradition that can be introduced (next year).

Here’s another snacky thing that magically appears in my parents’ fridge around about this time of year, peanut clusters. I feel a bit silly posting a recipe for this, but there’s no harm in putting it up here.

Peanut Clusters

375 grams chocolate. White, milk, dark all works well
200 grams unsalted peanuts

Line trays with baking paper.

Melt the chocolate completely. Stir in the peanuts, coating thoroughly.

Place teaspoons of the mixture on the baking paper and leave to set.

The best aspect of this recipe is how flexible it is. If you want the mixture a bit stiffer, add in more nuts or less chocolate, and vice versa for a cluster with a bigger pool of chocolate at the base. Don’t like peanuts? Use another nut. Or dried fruit. White chocolate, pistachios and dried cranberries are a pretty nice combination.

I’d like to post one more Christmas recipe, but it’s likely to be just after Christmas Day. Seems a bit silly, but I don’t think anyone will mind too much!

While not a particularly festive person, I think it’s nice to hear about other family’s holiday traditions. Christmases around here are a very quiet affair, just the immediate family and a very low key lunch. However, we do tend to make a lot of snacky things that aren’t made at any other time of the year.

One of those is coconut ice. The smallest hint of it makes me think of Christmas. As mentioned in a previous post, the recipe we use is very simple; just desicated coconut, icing sugar, condensed milk and food colouring. Most years it was traditional white and pink, but sometimes Mum could be convinced to branch out to different colours.

Mooncalf commented that the coconut ice recipe in Hope and Greenwood’s book didn’t turn out too well. Even though I’m sure everyone has their own favourite coconut ice recipe, here’s the recipe I use.

Coconut Ice
3 cups desicated coconut
4 cups icing sugar, sifted
1 400g can condensed milk
red (or any other colour of your choice) food dye

Mix icing sugar and coconut together, then stir the condensed milk in thoroughly. Split the mixture in half. Press one half of the mixture into a lined tin (I used a 20cm by 20cm tin) and put in the fridge. Add a few drops of food colouring into the other half of the mixture and knead until the colour is even. Press the coloured mixture over the white mixture. Put in the fridge until set.

How many pieces it yields depends on how you cut it. I prefer smaller bits as it seems to go further and it’s pretty sweet.

In the weeks before Christmas, I might put up a couple more recipes that only get rolled out during the holiday period. Do you have many recipes that only come out round this time of year?

Alison recently mentioned a couple of cook books on her blog that piqued my interest. The one that piqued my interest the most was Life is Sweet by Hope and Greenwood.

The book’s byline is “A collection of splendid old-fashioned confectionary”. Having quite a sweet tooth, I was already sold, but beyond that, I like being able to make/cook/bake things that people take for granted. It’s too easy to go to the supermarket and buy a loaf of bread, lollies, jam or even beer without thinking if or how it can be made at home. I also find it a little frightening how many ingredients are listed in things such as simple butter biscuits bought from the supermarket. Having said that, I understand that people have time and space constraints and some people just aren’t interested in baking/cooking/brewing/making in general.

Anyway, enough ranting. There are a heap of fantastic fudge, marshmallow, toffee and chocolate recipes in this book. A sample of them can be found here. I knew this book was going to be useful as soon as I saw their coconut ice recipe; coconut, condensed milk, icing sugar and food colouring. That’s how I remember making coconut ice as a kid, and seeing more complicated recipes always leaves me bemused.

Today I tried chilli and lime chocolate shards. It’s now setting in the fridge, but small (ok slightly larger than small) samples of the melted chocolate mixture bodes well for the finished product.

I hope to use a few more of the recipes for Christmas gifts. Although Christmas is stereotypically a time of food overindulgence, I like giving home made food as gifts. As long as you know the recipient’s tastes and allergies, it’s hard to go wrong with food.

As a postscript to the last post, it seems I forgot a few pertinent details in my rush to post. The yarn I used is different to Cleckheaton Countrywide. It’s a yarn from New Zealand I picked up from an op shop a few years ago and is obscure enough to not have a listing on Ravelry (I figure if it’s not in Ravelry’s yarn database, it’s obscure). The blanket measures 115cm square, so not huge, but big enough to touch the floor when used as a lap blanket while sitting in my favourite chair.

Every room of the house seems to be filled with clutter. Old documents and bills, knitting paraphernalia, video games, boxes, clothes, you name it, it’s cluttering up my house. It’s also getting quite frustrating – I simply do not know how I managed to let things get this bad (actually I sort of do… my old house had lots more storage than this one). It feels very wasteful. So I’m having a good old fashioned stocktake and purge. Seeing the eBay, op shop and bin piles get bigger and bigger is kind of satisfying, but also makes me realise how little thought I put into some of my purchases.

Clutter has also found its way into the pantry. As a household, we’re really good at buying things we didn’t realise we already had, even when we plan weekly meals. Luckily, this tends to be mostly longlife or non-perishable stuff that I know I’ll use up one day. One of those things is desiccated coconut. Luckily (again) one of the ingredients that is used a lot in my Women’s Weekly Recipe cards is coconut (and ginger too, but that’s a story for another day).

Crisp Coconut Biscuits (from Women’s Weekly Recipe Cards, circa 1970’s)

Ingredients:

125 grams butter
1 cup caster sugar
1 egg
2 cups self-raising flour
1 cup desiccated coconut

pinch of salt
1-2 teaspoons of milk
Sugar, for dusting

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celsius.

Cream butter and sugar. Beat in egg. Add in sifted flour, salt and coconut and mix well.

I found the mixture too dry at this point, so added in milk until it was at a consistency where it could be easily moulded into balls but didn’t stick to my hands.

Roll teaspoonfuls into balls and press flat. Dip the top of the dough disc into sugar and place on a greased baking tray. Allow room for spreading.

Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, until lightly golden.

I got around 30 biscuits out of this recipe. If I were to make this again (which is highly likely), I’d use plain ol’ white sugar rather than caster sugar for dusting. While you can see the caster sugar on top of the biscuit, I think the coarser sugar would look better.

It’s been far too long since last posting about a recipe made from my box of Women’s Weekly Recipe Cards. This is not to say I haven’t been using these cards; there are some recipes I’ve made many many times. I’ve just not been very good at documenting it.

Today’s offering is Blackberry Swirls. They are like chelsea buns, but with berries. While they call for blackberries, being blackberry scrolls and all, I couldn’t find canned blackberries at my local supermarket. However, they did have cans of mixed berries, which seemed to work well. For a change, I’m going to include the recipe this time.

Blackberry swirls – the mixed berry variation (from Women’s Weekly Recipe Cards, circa 1970’s)

Scrolls Ingredients:

1.5 cups self-raising flour
400g can berries (drain, but retain the syrup)
0.5 cup milk
125 grams butter

Sauce Ingredients:

0.5 cups white sugar
1/3 cups sweet white wine
30 grams butter
0.5 cups berry syrup

Preheat oven to 200 degrees celsius.

Sift flour and rub in butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add milk, and mix to a soft dough. If you find the mixture is too wet at this point, add small amounts of flour until it’s at a consistency where it can be rolled out pretty easily.

Place dough on a lightly floured surface, knead gently and roll into a 25cm by 35cm rectangle. Spread berries over dough, leaving a small border around the edges. Roll the dough up lengthways (so the roll is the length of the shorter edge of the rectangle). Make sure the berries are being rolled up in the dough and not pushed along! Cut into 2.5cm slices and place into a greased, ovenproof dish.

Put sauce ingredients into a saucepan. Bring slowly to the boil, stirring constantly until the butter is melted. Boil for 3 minutes. Pour the sauce over the scrolls and bake for 30-35 minutes.

You’ll be excused for feeling sceptical of the recipe as you put the scrolls in the oven, as it sort resembles scroll islands in a berry sea. Well, it did for me anyway.

After coming out of the oven, the scrolls looked like this, making me instantly forget my scepticism. The sauce becomes a lovely syrup at the bottom of the scrolls, and gives a nice glaze on top.

The original recipe suggests serving it with cream or custard. I had it with a cup of tea and it was just fine!

This recipe has been given a run twice in two weeks and as it’s super easy and delicious, I thought I should give it a plug. As there weren’t any ingredient substitutions, I don’t feel comfortable reproducing the recipe here — the Hokey Pokey Biscuit recipe can be found here on the Taste website.

The first batch was just as described in the recipe, sans fork marks. For some reason, I associate one set of fork marks with yo yos, and two sets of fork marks with peanut butter biscuits. As such, fork marks would have been an very much a baking faux par in this kitchen.

The most recent batch, shown in the photo above, also included chocolate on top. Originally, I was going to dip half of the biscuit in chocolate, but was a little too lazy. Instead, I put a chocolate melt on top before baking, which seemed to turn out all right. It’s worth noting that the dough was barely wider than the chocolate melt – these suckers really do spread out when in the oven.

Next time, I’d like to expand on the chocolate idea a little by splitting the mixture and putting cocoa power through to make Hokey Pokey marble biscuits. That’ll be at least a couple of weeks away, as they’re so delicious I can’t stop at one and end up feeling like a glutton!

The last few days have been the hottest it’s been this summer, yet I feel compelled to bake. On Sunday it was bread, and yesterday it was molasses biscuits. I’ve had them on my mind a lot recently, due to the use of molasses in this soap I bought from Lush recently.

I used the Sparkling Chewy Molasses Cookies recipe from Not Martha. If you are even vaguely interested in molasses biscuits, I recommend giving them a try, for they are absolutely delicious. I was unsure what sanding sugar was, so I rolled the dough in raw sugar and it turned out fine. It’s also useful to know that 1.5 sticks of butter is equivalent to 170 grams.

The biscuits develop surface cracks as they are baking. The recipe calls for tablespoon-sized balls of dough, which seemed to developed larger cracks than if the dough is shaped into discs. The biscuit on the left is one that started life as a ball, and the one on the right started as a dough disc. I think I prefer the deep crackly look.

Even though the days are getting hotter, I still can’t get the urge to cook and bake out of my system. It’s not made any easier when delicious morsels like this are being created.

Next up, the girl who made a very warm slouchy hat in the middle of summer!

Being vegetarian, a lot of the savoury recipe cards aren’t really suitable, so savoury delights will be few and far between. I suspect that even if I didn’t mind eating meat, not many of the savoury offerings would really do it for me – tripe in parsley sauce anyone? I must get a scanner in the near future, and share some of these culinary delights.

This week’s offering is the french cheese stick. The french reference loses me a bit, as it contain curry and mustard powders, and the cheese is just good ol’ cheddar cheese. Perhaps it’s the mustard that gives its frenchness. As the title indicated that it was a french stick, I assumed it was bread, but it’s more of a scone dough with curry and mustard powders, and chunks of cheese.

I had never plaited dough before, so doing that was quite fun, and made the bread look really good. It was also nice to be able to put my many years of training as a professional my little pony tail plaiter to use. I had often wondered if it was time well spent as a kid. Let me assure you, it was.

I’m still in two minds on this one. The curry flavour and turmeric colour of the bread is kind of wrong, but kind of not. The cheese chunks are great, especially when it’s warm, because you get a nice surprise of melted cheese. I think it’s worth another chance, but next time I might ditch the curry powder.

There’s been a few things I’ve been wanting to blog about, but my blog got chewed up and spat out by my (now ex) hosting company. It seems a little out of date now, but I think I’ll still write about it anyway.

A couple of weekends ago, I was finally well enough to cook something else from the Women’s Weekly recipe cards. I opted for something a little different this time, apple gingerbread. The best way to describe it is a layer of stewed apples with a gingery cakey layer on top. On a slight tangent, I’ve noticed that the 70s (about when the recipe cards were printed) were very good to coconut and ginger, as a lot of the recipes contain at least one of those ingredients. Tis lucky I like both of them!

Getting back to the recipe at hand, besides nearly forgetting the brown sugar for the cake layer which no matter how hard I try, cannot really be blamed on the recipe, it was really easy. The hardest thing was peeling and chopping the apples, but if you were feeling really slack, you could use tinned apples.

It flew off the pie dish so quickly! I made it in the morning, and it was well gone by the evening, just between the two of us. We are piggies indeed. Next time, I think I might try stewing the apples with a cinnamon stick, to give the apple layer a bit more flavour.