All posts filed under: Baking and Cooking

Cheese Scones

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Tonight’s recipe is inspired by the cheddar scone recipe in The Colman’s Mustard Cookbook but as usual, I decided to change a few things here and there, just to make things a bit more interesting 🙂 Ingredients: 225g self-raising flour 1 heaped teaspoon English mustard (the Colman recipe said mustard powder but I had none in the house) Pinch of salt 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder (my scones came out a bit flat so I would add a full teaspoon next time) 40g butter 60g grated cheese (I used sage Derby, the Colman’s recipe asked for Cheddar) 2 medium eggs Milk for the glaze 150 ml cream (I used clotted cream for texture) Instructions: Mix the flour, mustard, salt and baking powder in a bowl. Using your hand, rub the butter into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs. Add the cheese, one egg and the cream, to form a light dough (mine wasn’t coming together so I added a drop of warm water). On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough and cut …

Emma’s Halloween Buns

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Halloween week, can you believe it? This autumn has flown in for me, I can’t believe I have less than 3 months left of this pregnancy! Well, it’s also half-term officially. Emma will  be going to playgroup until Wednesday, when she will have a Halloween party with her friends there, so she has been asking from today for some “scary” buns for the boys and girls. I am not very inventive when it comes to baking so I had a wee look around the Internet and found this Hearty Spiced Carrot Muffin recipe which sounded quite straight forward and mentioned a “toddler who devoured her muffin all Tasmanian-devil style”. I thought this would be spot on if we were to take them to the party on Wednesday and if we adapted them a little bit to look more…spooky. So here is a list of my ingredients. I forgot to include the olive oil (of which I added half a cup) in the picture: 2 cups of self-raising flour(approximately 250 grams) 2 teaspoons of baking powder …

Cheat’s Cinnamon Rolls

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Good evening, everyone, a late post tonight but I promise you, a yummy one once again 🙂 The Brick Castle gave me the inspiration for this one on Monday. I do love cinnamon rolls but I find the bought in ones generally too greasy and heavy after a few bites so I have been forever looking for a good, semi-healthy recipe. I say semi-healthy because dough is generally seen as the bad guy in the nutrition game and if you add to the equation sugar and fat then things get one a bit…on the wrong side of the track. But since my appetite was whetted with the very visually appealing recipe mentioned above I decided to see if I can healthify it a bit and was very pleased with the results (read: I ate most of it myself over two and a half days. Blush…) Right, ingredients used: puff sheet, ready rolled,light version 55 grams of cane sugar (I am not for very sweet desserts, plus fruit in puddings brings its own sweetness and flavour) …

My first ever pumpkin pie!

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You must know this by now about me as I have said it so many times: I LOVE autumn and everything that is associated with it! When I still lived in Romania I loved the leaves changing colour and falling and the crunchy noise they made when walked upon. I loved my mum’s winter can and preserve-making and a good baked potato with plenty of butter. Since I moved to Northern Ireland I came to love everything that has to do with pumpkin: pumpkin soup, pumpkin carving and now, this year, for the first time, pumpkin pie baking! I researched a lot for the perfect pumpkin recipe last week. I pinterested, I Googled, I checked other mummy blogs for tips and advice. In the end, I decided to sum the knowledge I acquired into my own(sort of) recipe, taking bits and bobs of advice from here and there. But I will acknowledge the contributions: Mummy Alarm gave me the idea of decorating the top of my pie and reinforced the need to prebake my pastry …

Healthy Living Challenge: Day 36 – Happy Romanian Easter week!

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I know, I know, even my blog didn’t recognise me as its owner today and needed me to sign in. Total neglect would be the feeling it would have, if blogs had their own feelings 🙂 Anyway, I am back to say hello and enhance your cultural knowledge by informing you it’s pre-Easter weekend in Romania. Meaning that from Monday this week people in Romania have been cooking up a feast. Mentally and literally. As a child I experienced mixed feelings during this week. I dreaded the Monday before Easter because my mum would have gone into a (totally uncharacteristic for her) cleansing frenzy involving lifting carpets, washing windows (with a mixture of soapy water and vinegar and drying them with newspapers until they squeaked!!), dusting every crook and cranny in the house, washing curtains…etc. Tuesdays were generally reserved for beating the carpets. Oh yeah, that was waaaay before we owned a vacuum cleaner(by the way, she owns one now but she’s told me this week that she still doesn’t know how to use it…) …