Foodie Penpals: Liquorice love

I was thrilled with my foodie penpal box this month!

It was sent over by Lucy from Leeds. When she first emailed me about it she asked how I felt about liquorice. My experience of it was of crappy sweets from our village sweet shop that I never really liked. However, I'd never really tried proper liquorice.

Well, what came through in the post blew my mind. The box contained all sorts of goodies including an ice cube tray in tea shapes (iced tea!), which may have been the reason for our weather getting so good. The box also included hibiscus flowers and an accompanying recipe, Mexican fajita mix, organic bay leaves, olives and some amazing tea.

Firstly, let me talk about the liquorice. These Pontefract cakes were amazing. I didn't know that liquorice was so soft! I've found a new sweetie love. It took a lot of willpower not to devour these in one go.

Lucy also included some liquorice root. I had no idea it was grown. In her accompanying letter she said there used to be a huge field of it between Leeds and Pontefract and the roots are six feet long. I'm now a liquorice expert and lover. I'm hoping that because it's from a root it's healthy... maybe not.

I've been raving about this tea since it arrived. It's After Dinner Tea with fennel and peppermint to help support a healthy digestive system. Lucy also sent empty tea bags (!) because its loose leaf. However, I recently purchased a new teapot so it's been seeing a lot of action.

I was worried the tea might be a little too pepperminty for me but it is glorious. The routine in my house is cook dinner, eat, drink After Dinner Tea. It's only right.

If you weren't sold on Lucy's genius by now then please take a look at her fennel, chilli and black mustard oatcakes. For which she rendered her own lard! I was infinately impressed before I'd even tried them. They had a really moist and subtly meaty flavour but then the other flavours kick in. They're so wonderful they're had to describe.

It's safe to say these were gone almost instantly. They boyfriend got to try a corner of one before I scoffed them all.

Thank you, Lucy! 

You should all check out her blog Offally Good.

Guest Post: Foodie Swap

As part of the Foodie Penpal swap I got to send Dan a box of goodies from Norfolk. Here's his post about the experience.

First of all let me thank Jess for hijacking her blog, being blogless and this being my first foodie penpal contact I’m hesitant to start up a blog as I don’t feel I can commit my time to maintaining something on a weekly basis (unless the blog was exclusively about LoLcats, bikes and on account of having a four year old daughter, iCarly).

Jess’s package came through this morning and I was very pleasantly surprised with what I received, all exclusively products made in Norfolk.

First off I received an epic bar of Rocky Road Gnaw (made in Gnorfolk according to the packet). I’m saving this bad boy for a rainy day, it looks too good just to fritter away on anything but a Ghost/Beaches/Dirty Dancing marathon.

Next up was the delicious Norfolk Garden Rose Hip Extra Jelly Preserve. This was an amazing surprise, not normally a massive fan of Jam or Preserves the taste and consistency is amazing, sweet but with a freshness at the back, in some ways reminding me of when you bite into a toffee apple. I paired this up with a very crumbly Wensleydale on a Carr’s water biscuit and the combination was fantastic.

Finally in an already fantastic package was a bottle of pure evil called Inferno, a Smokey Naga Chilli Sauce. Needless to say this sauce is HOT, that said once the heat dissipates it gives way to a brilliant flavor profile of tomato, smokey chipotle and BBQ sauce.

Taking the Inferno for a spin I opted for my favorite brunch of Scrambled Eggs on Toast with smoked salmon, but instead of the compulsory Tabasco I opted to caramelize my smoked salmon in a small amount of the sauce, needless to say this is how I’ll be making scrambled eggs from now on.

Somewhat spicier than the standard I normally make the Inferno complemented the Eggs and toast really well, with an initial heat quickly toned down by the creaminess of the eggs as well as the other piquant flavors from the sauce elevating the butter (tip: always put too much butter in your scrambled eggs – your palate will thankyou for it!).

All that’s left for me to say sincere thanks to Jess for the package and I hope one day I can return the favor!

The first electric Rayburn

I thought that once I'd bought my own snazzy cooker I wouldn't be that bothered by all the others out there. Wrong. I'm obsessing again. At least this model is £1000s out of my price range.

The Rayburn Electric

Features

• Touch-sensitive controls and a single ceramic glass cooking surface
• Choice of induction or ceramic hobs with square or dome hinged lids
• With two 2.3kW burners, the induction hobs have excellent response times
• Ceramic hobs use the latest infra-red technology to give rapid heating and cooling
• Two thermostatically controlled ovens give a wide choice of cooking modes
• 43-litre capacity top oven
• Patented ‘Warmfront’ technology
• 3-year parts and 1-year labour warranty
• Standard 910mm x 980mm dimensions
• Available in a variety of colours – Cream, Black, Dark Blue, British racing Green, Pewter and Aqua

The end of the Christmas baking

Last post I introduced you to phase one of the Christmas baking. That was just the trial run. On Christmas Eve we spent all day cooking. We made, more or less, the same things as shown in the previous post and luckily it went rather well.

Benny rolling out the peppermint creme dough

We ended up using roughly more than 2 kilos of icing sugar

To make approximately 400 peppermint cremes you need six egg whites and a lot of icing sugar. We used about 2.5 kilos.

Pop the egg whites in a bowl then slowly add sifted icing sugar. Once it starts to come together add a little peppermint essence. About two cap fulls from a small bottle should suffice but feel free to taste it and add more if you want to. Keep mixing and adding until it begins to form a stiff dough. If it's sticky add more sugar.

Once it's in dough form you should be able to roll it out. We split it in two and added green food colouring to one half. This just made our Christmas bags of cremes look a little more interesting once we were done. 

Cover a flat surface with icing sugar so the dough doesn't stick and roll until it's around 5mm - 1cm thick. Then cut it out into pretty shapes. Pop the finished shapes onto grease-proof paper and leave to dry for around 24 hours.

We cut out some stars, holly leaves, circles and hearts.

I have to say, we didn't allow ours to stand for that long as we were in a rush to get them bagged up. In our warm kitchen they seemed hard enough within eight or so hours.

The green peppermint dough

We originally found a recipe for peppermint cremes that said to add double cream. Ben was adamant that his mum, who makes fantastic everything, didn't use cream. He was right so we omitted that ingredient and went with the above recipe which comes entirely from her!

Cheese biscuits

For this bout of cheese biscuit creation we doubled our original recipe to 200g cheddar cheese, 200g flour and 200g butter. That made around 70, a mixture between the big paprika'd ones and the little ones.

Honeycomb 

We normally really struggle with honeycomb but on attempt eight it went right. The perfect amount of crunch, sweetness and stickiness. 

The honeycomb went perfectly!

Our bagged up snowballs

The finished product filled with cheese biscuits, peppermint cremes, snowball cookies and honeycomb!

Christmas Baking

With a new oven we thought baking would be a doddle. No more uneven heat, eternal cooking times, burning or underdone food.

Well, the cooking part of the baking went well but we struggled with temperatures, dough and butter.

Sugar and Golden Syrup melting over a low heat

Here we attempt Honeycomb Toffee (like what you get in a Crunchie) from a Nigella recipe. We've attempted this six times and all times, including last night, we have failed. Last night's failures were first because the mixture got too hot and burned before we put in the bicarb then the second batch we panicked and took it off the heat too early. At least the second is edible. It is crunchy to begin with but soon turns to sticky, chewy toffee in your mouth.

It's lovely but not exactly what we were going for.

Benny, our new kitchen and, in the background, our wonky blackboard

We then made simple cheese biscuits, which I forgot to photograph. Just mix 100g mature cheddar cheese, 100g flour and 100g butter together until it forms a stiff dough. If it goes all crumbly like mine did last night just add a little more softened butter until you can roll it out.

Cut out shapes and lay on a greased baking tray, sprinkle with a little paprika for decoration and bake at 180 degrees for 15-20 mins.

Snowball cookies in the process of being rolled in icing sugar

We also made Snowball Cookies. These looked really simple to make just 100g of softened butter mixed with 75g of icing sugar to make buttercream (I was tempted to stop here and just eat the butter cream) then combine that with 150g of flour, 25g chopped almonds, 25g chopped walnuts and the zest of a lemon.

That should then apparently form a dough. No such luck. It was just crumbly and would not stick together. I ended up putting in at least another 100g of butter. It then has to sit in the fridge for 30 mins. Afterwards roll into little balls and put on a greased baking tray. Bake for 10-12 mins in a preheated over at 180 degrees.

We popped our fan oven to 160 degrees and kept checking them. The total cooking time was probably about 15 mins. 12 wouldn't have been enough but 15 might have been a little too long.

Then roll all the balls in icing sugar until they look like snowballs! They are quite delicious.

Messy work

I don't think I am a natural baker. I don't like getting messy and dough under my finger nails was a pain but I enjoyed this bout of cooking. Even if it was peppered with difficulty and failure. Also, I love our new kitchen, it's fantastic to work in!