Flower Stamped Birthday Card

I went a bit crazy with the rubber stamping on this card! I had a flower stamp that reminded me a bit of a geometric shape at the same time, and decided to stamp it all over a pink card to create a background. I used black ink, letting the pink of the card show through, and deliberately stamped in a fairly haphazard fashion. I had a pre-cut circle of pink card in my craft stash and stamped the flower again onto that, and secured the circle to the card with adhesive pads so it would stand out.

Finally I stamped the words 'happy birthday' onto a piece of pink card, cut the ends to make it more like a banner, and stuck that on the bottom of the card.

I'm sharing this with the Simon Says Stamp challenge as their theme is 'make it girly'.

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Restaurant Review: The Montagu at the Hyatt Regency London

Bakingaddict is really good at finding places for dinner that offer set menus for pretty reasonable prices, allowing us to eat in some very nice restaurants. I'm also really good at getting lost on the way (yes, despite a print out from Streetmap in my hand and Google Maps on my phone) so invariably keep her waiting!

We recently ate at the Montagu at the Hyatt Regency. The Hyatt Regency is a 5-star hotel on Portman Square in London hosting a famous Italian restaurant, Locanda Locatelli, as well as the Montagu.

Lobster and Devon Crab Bisque

At the Montagu you can book the chef's table - a special table where you can see everything that goes on in the open plan kitchen (restaurants generally charge quite a lot for the privilege). Our table was actually quite close to the kitchen anyway and while I couldn't see everything that was happening, it was quite interesting to be able to see and hear. We remarked to the waitress that the chefs were particularly quiet and polite (no Gordon Ramsay style shouting and swearing here!).

Pan Seared Chicken Breast and Crispy Chicken Thighs, Butternut Squash Puree, Quince, Almonds and Madeira Sauce

At the moment the Montagu is offering a high tea - or "haute tea" inspired by fashion icons so there were some beautiful dresses on display while we ate. We really felt like we were in a high-end restaurant and somewhere special, even though we had come straight from work.

Our set menu cost £35 for three courses including a glass of champagne and coffee, which isn't actually that cheap, and I worked out afterwards the food we'd had cost £35 (or £34.50 anyway) from the a la carte menu, so effectively the drinks were free. Which sounds like a bargain but without the set menu we may not have had three courses, so probably would have spent the same amount anyway!

Apple Sticky Toffee Pudding with Vanilla Ice Cream

The food was very good: I had Lobster and Devon Crab Bisque to start which was delicious, followed by Pan Seared Chicken Breast and Crispy Chicken Thighs, with Butternut Squash Puree, Quince and Almonds and Madeira Sauce. The butternut squash puree was a smear across the plate (would have been nice to have more!) and the pieces of chicken were small, as is often the way with fine dining - so perhaps we would have wanted three courses anyway!

For dessert I chose Apple Sticky Toffee Pudding with Vanilla Ice Cream - it was nicely filling and the apple flavour was subtle but recognisable. It came with a delicate piece of sugarwork on top, dn chocolate nibs on the side of the bowl that melted into the warm toffee sauce as I ate - delicious. My dining companion had the Praline Dark Chocolate Choux and I did wonder if I had chosen the wrong dessert!

Food, service and company were excellent - though next time we meet we are going somewhere my fiancé can have a burger!

Praline Dark Chocolate Choux

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Review: Keep Me Strong Cereal

Last year I reviewed a new cereal called Keep Me Going; the makers, Freedom Cereals, have now sent me their second product, Keep Me Strong.

This is a far cry from the sugary cereals I used to like as a child and I think is more likely to be eaten by a health-conscious adult. This product is a high-protein, low fat multi-grain cereal which is also low in salt and has 'reduced' sugar (overall it's 10% sugar - many cereals contain three times that, they say).

The cereal uses whole grain brown rice rather than wheat gluten which is commonly used in other cereals, but which Freedom Cereals say is one of the hardest types of protein to absorb, with a low digestibility. Whole grain brown rice is much better absorbed by the body as a protein source though it is more expensive. Freedom is quite upfront about this and say they have experimented with a dozen protein sources and found this one was much better and tasted good. It does mean the Keep Me Strong cereal is £2.65 a box (at Ocado); they say a box contains 11 servings so that is only 24p a serving.

I found this cereal tasted quite nice and I thought it was better than the Keep Me Going product that I previously tried. I also liked the bright colours of the packaging while not resorting to cartoon characters to tempt kids. Most of all though I like the health benefits, as my personal trainer has been drumming into me for years that the most important thing to eat at breakfast is protein!

Thanks to Freedom Cereals for the product to review. All opinions are my own.

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Meal Planning Monday Week 17

Monday
butternut squash quinoa risotto

Tuesday
Out at a work quiz

Wednesday
Out at a Waitrose event

Thursday
fish and vegetables for me, chicken and mashed potatoes for him

Friday
pasta with broccoli pesto for me (using spiralized vegetables instead of pasta) and pasta carbonara for him

Saturday
Lunch: quinoa cheese tartlets from this recipe
Dinner: Slimming World buffalo chicken from this recipe with homemade potato wedges

Sunday
at my parents' for my birthday visit

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Mini Kentish Pudding Pies

Back in the winter I was looking for a dessert that my fiancé would like that didn't involve chocolate, but where I could make individual puddings rather than something big like a sticky toffee pudding. I have a book called Desserts by James Martin and found in it a recipe for a Kentish pudding pie - an old fashioned  English dish consisting of a shortcrust pastry base, filled with a set custard made of ground rice and often citrus flavoured and topped with dried fruit and ground nutmeg. It's served cold, often at Easter.

The recipe is available online here.

Here I've brought the cream and milk to the boil and added the whisked eggs and sugar. It looks a little lumpy but it got better as it thickened!

Lining the tarts with the pastry to bake them blind. I got some great little loose-bottomed tart tins from Amazon.

Adding the ground rice, nutmeg and lemon zest and juice to the filling mixture

Ready to go in the oven: the cooled pastry cases filled with the lemon and cream mixture, topped with currants

They only take a few minutes to bake and can be served hot or cold - I preferred them hot

I didn't find these particularly sweet and they certainly weren't my favourite dessert, but an interesting change and a good English classic.

I'm sharing these with Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Janie from Hedgecombers. Their theme this month is local and regional recipes - and these originate from Kent, the "garden of England" (and not very far from Surrey where I live).

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Fashion Birthday Card for a 7 Year Old Girl

This is a card I made for my friend's 7-year old daughter who has decided she wants to be a fashion designer. I had a sheet of die-cut cardboard shapes of dresses and handbags in different colours and decided to make a fashion show theme. I chose a pink card blank and turned it on its side and cut out pieces from a darker pink piece of cardstock to represent curtains and the top of a stage. I stuck a variety of dresses and bags on the card and some stars in the top corners, and finished it off with a Happy Birthday topper.

I'm sharing this with Fab Funky Challenges as their theme is 'girly and pretty'.

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DIY Wedding: Handmade Wedding Invitations

 

If you’re getting married and are into crafts or baking it’s very tempting to decide you are going to make everything for your wedding yourself – but even the most ambitious bride (or groom) will realise they are just not going to have time. There is so much to do in the run-up to a wedding: OK, you’ve booked a photographer, but you have to give them a list of what family photos you want; OK, you’ve found a florist but you need to choose the flowers, find out who in the wedding party wants buttonholes or corsages, arrange when the flowers are going to be delivered, and decide what to do with them afterwards – every task on the to do list seems to split into multiple sub-tasks.

 

I realised this from the outset, but at the same time wanted some handmade elements for my wedding. As well as the personal touch, it also meant we could save money on certain things – though you have to be careful not to go overboard, thinking you’re saving money by making every guest a take-home gift when you can probably order a job lot from China on Ebay. But I do think that saving money is not the point of a DIY wedding – it’s about putting time and effort into something, making sure things are made with love, and getting exactly what you want because you’ve designed and made it yourself. Also, if you are into crafts it can be quite frustrating to buy something and think “but I could easily have made that myself!”.

 

As I’ve mentioned before, when I get married my name will be Caroline Cowe – pronounced cow. I’ve embraced my inner cow and am looking forward to being named after an animal (even though it’s a bit of a shame I didn’t ever meet a Mr Al Packer) so my fiancé and I felt that we needed to have a cow theme to the wedding. A subtle, elegant cow theme – we are not talking full on bridesmaid dresses in cowboy boots or a bucking bronco at the reception, but instead a few cow print touches here and there.

 

The wedding stationery was a good way to include cow print, we thought  - it would hint at the fun and relaxed atmosphere we are trying to create at our wedding (it’s mainly outdoors and the meal isn’t a formal ‘which fork do I use’ affair). I started thinking about how to include the motif and design something simple that I could make in bulk without it taking huge amounts of time, and this is what I came up with.

 

 

For Christmas I received a set of three heart hole punches of varying sizes, and I already had some cow print paper in my craft stash (when it ran out and I couldn’t find any more to buy, we just photocopied it!). I used the largest hole punch to cut out paper hearts and stuck them onto blank white cards I bought from Hobbycraft.

 

  

The words ‘wedding invitation’ came from a sheet of outline stickers that only cost £1 in Hobbycraft and had 22 sets of word, so I bought three of these.

 

 

 I stuck the words underneath the heart, but felt it still needed something else. After we first got engaged on a whim I bought some cowprint paraphernalia from a website called Cow Cool Stuff (can you believe there are other people obsessed with cows as well?) including some cow table confetti which I planned to sprinkle on tables at the wedding.

 

 

 I found that the little cows looked really cute in a row across the bottom of the wedding invitations, so glued them on. On some of the invitations I interspersed the cows with hearts cut from cow print paper using the smallest of the three hole punches I’d been given.

 

 

 

We printed out the wording for our wedding onto A4 paper, and bought a guillotine, again from Hobbycraft, to cut the right size so we could stick it inside the cards, which were 6x6 inches. I glued the inserts into the cards, and glued a piece of ribbon (which I bought from Ebay, in the same colour as the bridesmaid dresses) along the centre of the card, and tied it in a bow on the front. Each card didn’t take that long to make and even though they definitely look homemade, I was really happy with them. We have used the same motif for our order of service and menu cards as well.

  

 

 

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One-Pot Cheeseburger Chilli

I wanted to make spaghetti Bolognese for dinner but realised I’d run out of spaghetti, so instead of just using a different shape of pasta I decided to try out this recipe for “cheeseburger chilli”. It’s basically minced beef in a tomato sauce, served with pasta and topped with cheese. The chilli element comes from adding chopped red chilli and red kidney beans – I thought I had a tin in the cupboard but it turned out to be black eyed beans. I don’t really like those (it’s mainly the texture – I don’t eat baked beans either) so I pulsed them in a blender together with the passata to make a healthier tomato sauce with hidden veg. Both red kidney beans and black eyed beans are meant to be good to eat if you have high blood pressure, which I do, so that's another bonus.

 

The other thing about this recipe that stood out was the way that the pasta is cooked. This is a one-pot meal where you fry the mince and then add the pasta and water into the same pan. I used a bit too much water so it didn’t all get absorbed and I had to drain a little away, and I was worried that I was draining some of the flavour out of the meat, but it tasted really good. If you’re looking for a hearty, healthy meal that won’t mean a lot of washing up then I recommend you try this!
 

 

 

To serve two, you need:

half an onion, peeled and chopped

1 chilli or 1-2 tsp Very Lazy chopped chilli, to taste (err on the side of caution if you don't like it too hot!)

2 tbsp. olive oil or 1 tsp coconut oil which is what I used

300-400g minced beef depending on how big an appetite you have

100-150g pasta like penne or macaroni, ditto

300g passata

150g black eyed beans or red kidney beans (the latter is preferable)

2 tbsp. chopped fresh parsley

50g grated cheese like Cheddar or Emmental plus extra to sprinkle on top if you like

 

If using a whole chilli, carefully remove the stalk and seeds and chop it finely. Heat the oil in a large saucepan and fry the onion, chilli and mince until the mince has browned.

 

If you don't like the texture of the beans (or have children who won't eat it if they see them) then pulse in a blender with the passata and add to the mince. Or if you have more grown up tastes than I do, add the passata and beans straight into the pan. Season with salt and pepper.

 

 

Then - and this is the part I found weird - add the pasta to the pan and enough water to cover the pasta. Simmer until the pasta is cooked - you may have to drain off a bit of water. Finally stir in the cheese, and serve topped with fresh herbs and a sprinkling of cheese if you like.

 

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Celebrate Martini Glass Stamped Birthday Card

I made this birthday card for my friend Al. The starting point was a rubber stamp of a martini glass and the word 'celebrate' which I hadn't used before. I stamped it onto a small oval die-cut with a decorative edge and decided to use a tall thin card blank and centre this in the middle.

As the die-cut was blue I found a blue polka dot backing paper to cover the card. I also used a rubber stamp to stamp the word happy birthday onto another piece of blue card which I stuck across the bottom. The card still needed something at the top and I had the right letters to spell Al's name from a pack of silver stick letters for which there was just enough room at the top.

This card ties in perfectly with the theme for the Cards 4 Guyz challenge this week, food and drink.

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Meal Planning Monday Week 16

I was out for half of Saturday and all of Sunday so didn't have much time for food shopping or meal planning this week but there is plenty of food to use up in the freezer as well. However, I'm on a new diet which means overhauling what I eat to some extent: I'm supposed to be cutting out all sugar, including hidden sugars in everything from bread to potatoes which won't be easy! I've also been told to skip breakfast every day and that if I eat a little bit of fat in the evenings I won't be hungry in the mornings which I am dubious about. I only have to do this 5 days a week and can eat 'normally' on the other two days - I'm told people usually pick the weekend but I'm going to a restaurant that I'm really looking forward to on Weds so will make that one of my days off plan!

For lunches, I am going to have salad like last week but won't be able to have the tinned new potatoes I've been adding in, or probably the fat free salad dressing I bought as well. So I will have to have more protein and do things like cook some hardboiled eggs, or make some homemade soup and take that in.

Monday
fish en papilotte with spiralized butternut squash for me (Inspiralized p174), chicken en papilotte for him, based on this recipe (on meal plan for last week but didn't make)

Tuesday
chicken and vegetable stir-fry with a homemade sauce from soy and lime juice - nothing with any hidden sugars. If I have time and the right ingredients I will make some soup for lunch tomorrow.
 

Wednesday
out for dinner with friends - day off from the diet
 

Thursday
The other half will probably go to his mum's so I will have fish and vegetables

Friday
was going to have scampi and chips but on this new diet I can't... I will have the rest of the stir fry as a packet of veg usually does two meals.

Saturday
Lunch: just me as my fiancé has to go into work today ; to stick to the sugar free diet I think I might treat myself to a homemade seafood platter of prawns, smoked salmon, homemade mayonnaise and anything else I can find.

Dinner creamy coriander and minted chicken, p165 slimming world extra easy all in one

Sunday
Lunch bacon sandwich
Dinner Slow cooked gammon with cider from Slimming World Extra Easy all in one p198 (on the meal plan from last week but didn't make). There is sugar in the cider so I guess this will count as my other day off the sugar.
 

 

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Slow Food: Braised Lamb in Cider with Apple and Pear



This is a recipe I was asked to create as part of a campaign around “living slow”. This campaign couldn’t have come at a better time as I really do need to take time to slow down.

 

I’m always busy at work – my workload has at least doubled in the past year for various reasons -  I have a long and stressful commute (thank you, Southern Trains) and when I’m at home I'm running the house. I’m lucky to be able to afford a cleaner but between meal planning food shopping, cooking, tidying up, laundry, dishwasher, and all the little things – sending someone a birthday card, replying to emails, choosing a restaurant to go out to etc – I never seem to have any time to relax. On top of all that we are planning a wedding (there are so many additional things for the bride to think about than the groom!)- and linked to that, I’m now getting up even earlier before work to go for a run as I’m trying to lose weight for the wedding.

 

I’ve also found out recently that I have high blood pressure – some days it’s been extremely high. So I’m looking into ways to deal with that (including possibly medication) – but one thing that I know is important to reduce high blood pressure is to eat healthily, in particular eating less salt, and to do more exercise.

 

I took part in a ‘mindfulness’ session recently which was very relaxing – mindfulness has been shown to reduce stress and even mean employees take fewer sick days off work. But since then I haven’t felt like I’ve got the time to sit down and be mindful, even just for ten minutes – I am literally constantly on the go, and even when I am watching TV in the evening with my fiancé I am multi-tasking replying to emails or cutting out paper hearts for our wedding.

 

So before I keel over from stress I think it definitely is time that I ‘slow down and smell the roses’. I was asked by Simply Beef and Lamb to create a recipe for either beef or lamb, on the theme of ‘live slow’. You might already be familiar with their Red Tractor logo, which means you can find quality assured beef and lamb in the supermarket.

This doesn’t simply mean cooking something in a slow cooker – as well as being easy, one pot meals, it should be value for money and affordable, and reflect the ethos of ‘live slow’: stop living life in the fast lane and take it slow for a change.

 

That can relate to all aspects of our lives, whether that’s not rushing around trying to fit a million things in; spending time in nature or with friends; working on something handcrafted; travelling closer to home and enjoying the journey itself; sewing to repair or make your own clothing or being creative; and even spending your money wisely on things that really matter.

 

When I do feel able to push the ‘to do’ list to one side, I love to handmake greeting cards. I think (or hope) people really appreciate receiving something handmade as they know time and effort has gone into it. I also find it helps me switch off as I’m focused on cutting or stamping, and I enjoy feeling creative.

 

I also travel by train a lot – to work as I already mentioned, and when I’m lucky enough to get a seat I always read. Losing yourself in a good book is a great way to start the day or unwind after a day of work. I’m still a relatively new and pretty nervous driver, so when I have to travel longer distances on my own, I prefer to take the train. So again that gives me a lot of time to read; mobile reception is sometimes patchy so I resist the temptation to go on Facebook or reply to emails and instead pick up a decent-sized book I’ve been meaning to read but don’t want to carry on my daily commute (I do have a Kindle as well, but prefer actual books!). Recently I’ve been going to Salisbury by train a lot as it’s where my family live and also the nearest station to our wedding venue, and I always feel happy and relaxed to see the rolling Wiltshire countryside and the lovely views as we pull into Salisbury station. I’m sure that does help my blood pressure!

What does #slowliving mean to you and your family and what do you do to relax?

 

So finally onto the recipe. I was thinking about what slow living might mean in terms of cooking and came across the Slow Food movement, which promotes using local produce and eating less but better quality meat.

 

Thinking about what was local, I started with my own garden. I’m hoping to get a small vegetable patch started (I was growing peppers last year but slugs ate them all) but at the moment don’t have anything other than herbs. But what a good starting point for a recipe – I have rosemary and a lot of mint, and mint is of course well known as a pairing for lamb.

 

So that was my starting point: making a recipe with lamb and mint. I decided to braise the lamb, as that is a slow method of cooking that is fuss-free, but obviously there had to be more to it than that. Apples are abundant in a lot of areas – my late grandmother had apple and pear trees in her garden – and cider is very English (and to some, slow living might mean relaxing in the garden with a beer or cider…). Apple and mint does apparently go together – I found several mojito recipes online using those flavours! So my recipe was starting to take shape: spring lamb, mint, rosemary, apples and pears, cider. I used Pear cider in this recipe, and decided that because lamb is quite expensive I would go with a cheaper, bulking out ingredient: pearl barley. So you don't even need to serve this with potatoes as it's really filling and tasty.

Making the apples and pears at the start takes a little while but you don't need to do much; then you bung everything else into one casserole dish, put it in the oven and that's it - leaving you more time to relax and take it easy! This is what I came up with: I hope you enjoy it.

Braised lamb in cider with apple and pear - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

To serve 2, you need:

1 tbsp. butter
2 apples, peeled and chopped
1 large or 2 small pears, peeled and chopped
3 tbsp. sugar
3 tbsp. raisins or sultanas

4 lamb rump steaks
500ml cider
half an onion, peeled and cut into chunks
100g pearl barley
half a leek, trimmed and sliced
sprig of fresh rosemary
handful of fresh mint

First make the apple and pear accompaniment and pre-heat the oven to 180C. Melt the butter in a pan, add the apple and stir. Cook for 5 minutes until it has started to soften then add the pear and the raisins. Add the sugar and 50ml water; stew, stirring occasionally, until the water has evaporated and the fruit has softened. This can be made in advance and kept in the fridge or made at the same time as the meal.

Rub the bottom of a casserole dish with a little oil and place the lamb in the dish. Cover with cider and add the onion and leek, pearl barley and herbs. Put the lid on the casserole dish and put in the oven for 1-1.5 hours, until the liquid has been absorbed and the lamb is cooked through.

Serve with the apple and pear mixture on the side.

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The apple, pear and raisin mixture



The ingredients for the casserole

Ready to go in the oven

Just cooked



Close-up

Served with the apple and pear on the side

 

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Chocoholic Birthday Cake with Cadbury Twirl

My fiancé is a total chocoholic so for his birthday this month I wanted to make him an awesome chocolate cake. I have a lot of baking books and they pretty much all have chocolate cake recipes - so where to start?

I realised I hadn't baked anything from my Outsider Tart book, Baked in America, for a little while. Outsider Tart is a bakery in Chiswick that is meant to be amazing, though I've never actually been there (even though I live in a different London borough it would take me about an hour and a half to get there - but I'm starting to think it might be worth the trip!). The bakery is run by two Americans who have brought a lot of new techniques to their baking and new ideas to 'bridge the culinary divide'. What they have also done is provide some amazingly decadent, delicious recipes that approach baking in ways that you wouldn't necessarily have thought of.

The cake I made is called "Coke layers" and is on p175 of their book Baked in America. I know that it's possible to reproduce a recipe on a blog, because the original author can copyright the ingredients but not the way they have described the method, but in a way this cake is as much about the method as the ingredients so I wouldn't feel quite right reproducing it without their permission (if I get around to asking and getting permission I will update this post!). After all, have you ever made a chocolate cake using buttermilk, oil, AND butter and 5 eggs.... but more to the point, using marshmallows and Coca-Cola?

I'm going to share with you some of the process I went through. The recipe makes three layers of cake, and half way through adding the ingredients I realised I was going to end up with a LOT of cake -far too much in fact as I was only catering for a meal with my fiancé's parents, not a huge party (that will come next year, when he's 40!).

Starting off by melting butter with the Coca Cola

adding marshmallows and chocolate

Mixing the sugar, oil and vanilla

Here it is after adding the eggs - all 5 of them

Now adding in the cooled chocolate mixture

Two layers about to go in the oven

After baking - three giant layers of cake!

I made a ganache from melted chocolate and sour cream and spread it between two layers

I spread more on top and decorated the top with Twirl Bites

I then decided it needed ganache around the side and more Twirl Bites on top!

I actually ended up with all three layers of the cake baked and decided it was just too big and put one layer in the freezer! I also used self-raising flour rather than plain flour and raising agents, and milk chocolate rather than plain - which would have made the cake sweeter but actually it wasn't an incredibly sweet cake in itself, but the icing was. Mmm, the icing....

I made the chocolate sour cream fudge frosting from the same book to spread in between the layers and on the to, then ran out of sour cream so made a chocolate ganache with double cream which I spread around the sides. I then decorated the top with Cadbury Twirl bites as they were the perfect little chunks of chocolate - slightly unevenly shaped and 'rock' like which appealed to me for this cake.

My fiancé absolutely loved the cake and said it was one of the best I've ever made and I'm inclined to agree. It was light and moist; the cake itself wasn't too sweet but the icing was deliciously decadent.

As I used Twirl on top I'm sharing this with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker as the letter I've chosen is T.

I'm also sharing this with Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK. Her chosen ingredient this month is things you can drink, and this cake includes Coca-Cola.

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