A Rather Late Thanksgiving

I realize that Christmas is just around the corner and this might be blasphemous, but Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I love the food and the togetherness.  And the pumpkin pie!  This year we were in Rome and it went badly.  Very badly. 

I found a Scottish pub that had Thanksgiving on, they sold us tickets just as they ran out of turkey.  It was terrible. 

So, we decided to celebrate the weekend after we came home.  My MIL made the turkey and the trimmings, and I made the pumpkin pie.  I know this comes from a can, but this is what we do in the good old US of A!

I gathered my ingredients, the recipe is on the back of Libbys Pumpkin mix. We got ours from Waitrose. I found the graham cracker crust at Tescos a few weeks ago.

 I then threw everything into a bowl and mixed it up. 

 It was then poured into the pre made pie crust.

 About 40 minutes later it came out ready to go.

We added some whipped cream and both Mr Grumpy and his mom were really happy with it!

Peanut Butter Time

A few weeks ago Mr Grumpy, my mother in law and me headed up to Liverpool for a weekend away.  I'll be posting pictures and thoughts on that soon.  I knew that we would need snacks for the train ride so I made.... peanut butter cookies!

Now, I have a job that requires stupid hours.  Therefore I don't have time, full stop.  I found the recipe, made sure I had the ingredients and forgot about it.  

Now come to Friday night when I walked in my door at 8 pm.  I had laundry to do, bags to pack, a house to tidy and cookies to make.  It was daunting, but the cookies were not going to fall by the wayside.  So I started them first.

I gathered everything I needed. 

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 1 egg
• 1 1/4 cup flour
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Then I beat the butter until it was creamy, added the sugars and beat some more.

Next up I threw in the egg and peanut butter. 

I then mixed the dry ingredients.

And added it all together:

Then I found out that the next step was to leave the dough for 3 hours in the fridge.

Crap!

It was just after 9:30 at this point. 

Instead I stuck the dough in the freezer for an hour.  However, this is a picture of it in the fridge, before the idea dawned on me. 

Then I ran around the house, cleaning things up and taking care of a slightly ill Mr Grumpy.  When the hour was up I got my cookies spread out on baking sheets while the oven warmed up.

To make the pattern I used a fork:

Around midnight I ended up with this and headed off to sleep.

Mr Grumpy and his mom were very appreciative of the home made snack!

Trick or Treat!

I've been busy baking and thought I'd share!

I hope you have a very scary Halloween!

I'm linking up with Faith Hope and Charity Shopping!

Bit of a Baking Fail

My mom is an amazing cook and baker and she often sends me recipes that she thinks/knows that I’d like.  This is one that she sent me a while ago and I just got around to trying out, and sort of failing at. We're calling these Bordey Bars. 

First I gathered the ingredients:

- 2 sticks of butter (1 cup)

- 2 cups of firmly packed brown sugar 

- 2 tsp of baking powder

-1/4 tsp salt

- 1 tsp vanila extract

- 2 cups all purpose flour

- 2 large eggs

 

Pre-heat the oven to 350F, or about 180C.  Grease a 9x13 inch pan and put aside.  

Melt the butter and then mix with the brown sugar until totally mixed.

Add the baking powder, salt and vanilla and mix well.

Gradually add the flour and mix, this should make the dough very stiff.

Wisk the eggs in a seperate bowl and then add slowly, mixing well.

Spread the batter in the pan you prepared earlier and bake for about 30 minutes.  The edges should be golden brown and the middle still soft. 

Let it cool completly and then cut into squares and enjoy!

Mine tasted fine, but as you can see they were a bit on the burnt side.  What went wrong?  I think that part of it was that I halved the recipe.  I really think that the first time you bake something you should do it by the book.  I don't think this was my biggest problem though, I think it was the pan size.  I should have used my very functional, but slightly dull clear Pyrex dish.  The dough was just too thick to cook properly and it took ages, hense the burnt edges and top.

Mr Grumpy didn't dislike these bars, but he prefers some of the other things I make so I don't know if this will be on my to bake list again.  

 

Happiness is Homemade

I have been doing a lot of cooking and baking recently.  I have a bunch of recipe books, but have also been using the same internet found recipes over and over again.  I don't want to take the chance of losing my favorites so I needed a book.

I got in touch with Marysza of Marysza Handmade to see what she could make for me.  After a handful of emails and a TON of fabric options I ended up with this lovely handmade book. 

Isn't it brilliant?  There are five tabs, but I'm sure I'll never be terribly organized about it all.  I love the black sheep fabric.  Marysza must have sent me 30 to choose from and they were all really fabulous, but this just seemed more fun some how. 

Marysza doesn't just make books, she's very talented and I would recommend her creations to anyone. 

Now which recipe will be the first to go in?

Simple Banana Bread

Last week I had short notice about some guests.  We had about an hour to get our house clean.  As my husband and I were running around like headless chickens I realized that I didn't have any food in the house.  Just two almost off bananas and a lot of nothing else.  It was Thursday after all.

I took the bananas and quickly thru together some banana bread from this recipe. I only had two small bananas so I halved it and baked the whole thing in a round Pyrex  dish (as seen here) as I didn't have a bread pan.  I was shocked and surprised when the bread came out stunningly.  Everyone loved it. 

The following weekend I decided to give the full recipe a go.  So first I gathered my ingredients:

Then I mushed together the butter and the bananas:

After that I added the dry ingredients:

After mixing it up really well to evenly spread the banana bits I poured it into my new bread pan, which I forgot to get a picture of.  Just imagine it, the pan is pink!  The bread takes about an hour to bake, but I like to check after 30 minutes or so.

Lastly I served the bread for dessert.  It was scrumptious if I say so myself!  I didn't last long and there were only three of us, so I guess that's a better recommendation.

 

Beetroot Brownies

As the snow was coming down on Saturday my husband and I decided to give beetroot brownies a go.  We used this recipe.  I’m not going to repost it, but more so give a commentary on our attempt.

My husband braved the cold and snow to run to the corner shop (actually about a 4 minute walk away) to get the candy bar.  During that time I measured out all of our ingredients.  We didn’t have enough beetroot, so we had to subtract a third of the recipe.  I was really excited to finally get to use some of my Christmas gifts.  This was the debut for the ceramic nesting doll measuring cups and the nesting doll measuring spoons.  The Tala Dry measure also had its debut.  I’d been lusting after one of these for some time but didn’t want to spend the £7 or so on it.  Then I found it at Morrisons for £4.  What a steal! 

 

I don’t want to miss out the other tools I used to hold our ingredients.  The metal cup is something that I picked up when travelling in India. I have four of them and use them all the time to hold soon to be used ingredients.  The bowl is, of course, a Woods Ware Beryl soup bowl.  I just love fun and funky cooking and baking supplies!

After laying it all out we melted the chocolate and the butter a bit for easier blending.  We didn’t start with beetroots that needed to be cooked to soften, so we skipped that step.

 

While the Brit blended I mixed the eggs and sugar.

 Once all that was done we folded the very smelly beetroot and chocolate mixture in with the sugar and eggs, flour and coco powder.  The whole thing still smelled very highly of beetroot, so we mixed in a bit more coco powder.  We kept mixing it in until the color went from super red to more of a brown color.

 

We then popped it into the oven for about 25 minutes.

 

For some reason these pictures make the brownies look a bit burnt, they weren’t burnt at all.  I blame the lighting in our kitchen, it’s really very dark!

These came out super moist, almost more so than you would expect brownies to be.  I can’t taste beetroot much at all, which is good, because I don’t like it.  If we’ve got beetroot lying around again I can see us making these brownies again.  

Anyone else try any creative baking recently?