For The Love of Berries...

Table styled by the talented Alexia Lenoir

After chocolate, summer berries are my next favourite ingredient in baking. They taste great with everything, buttercream, cream cheese frosting, cake and especially chocolate. And if that wasn't enough they look amazing. Berries, literally make any dessert look special.

In this post, I've put up pictures of two varieties of my favourite berry themed cakes. The traditional layer cake and a particular favourite, cakes in a jar! :)

Blueberries go very nicely with strawberries and summertime is when they are at their freshest. Cupcakes in a jar make great gifts. Depending on the size of the jar you can get the equivalent of up to 3 cupcakes in there. The one pictured has 2 cupcakes, perfect for that, 'I'll save a bit for later' moment! :)

Recipes & how-to's

(click the links for the details)

Vanilla cake recipe (double for a three layer cake and use 7" sandwich tins)

Buttercream recipe (double for a three layer cake)

How to do cupcakes in a jar by Cakies

Top liberally with blueberries and strawberries (sliced), there is also some fresh mint leaves on the cake and a sprinkling of icing sugar.

Peace & Love
xx

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Frozen Yoghurt Lolly Sticks, (FroYos)

Where is the sun?! A couple of weeks ago I was dusting off my summer wardrobe, surviving on a diet of frozen yoghurt and buying suncream, & now I'm snuggled under two duvets wondering where it all went wrong! Things can change so quickly!

So these bad boys (aka lollipop sticks), are a tasty and low fat alternative to traditional ice-cream. They are made up of crushed strawberries, a summer berry yoghurt and more crushed berries at the top. Pop them into a lollipop maker, freeze for a few hours and you have a quick and easy breakfast or snack. The best thing is that you can make so many different combinations it's great!

If there's one thing the British summer teaches you, it's to 'make hay while the sun shines'; in other words 'make good use of the chance to do something while you can'. There's an acronym going around at the moment - YOLO meaning 'You Only Live Once', I decided to adapt it slightly and call my frozen yogurts lollies, FroYo's as it's easier to say :)

Oh & if anyone knows of a sun dance to bring back the sunshine, please let me know!

Peace & Love

xx

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Portugese Custard Tarts

Today's offering of Portugese Custard Tarts come from my newest book purchase 'Recipes from my Mother for my Daughter' by Lisa Faulkner. I'm really enjoying this book, the recipes are quite simple and it's basically filled with things I actually want to eat. 

I amended the recipe in the book slightly because I didn't have all the ingredients. I went to the shops with a list of things I needed and came out with 3 bags of shopping and nothing on the list! This unfortunately is not a one-off for me, I actually love supermarkets. Like, really love them. There was a time that I'd sneak off to the supermarket at 2am and spend 1.5 hours just wandering around looking and buying. Plus I'm a sucker for the supermarket tricks that force you to walk through the whole store and pick up things you didn't go there for. They pretty much get me every time, I just get excited. I'm in recovery now and am getting better at sticking to the list but sometimes I have a relapse, like today :).

So without further ado, here is the recipe

Portugese Custard Tarts (makes 12)

Butter for greasing

250ml (8oz) double cream

150ml (1/4 pint) milk

1 vanilla pod, split lengthways

4 egg yolks

2 tablespoons of cornflour

125g (4oz) caster sugar

150g ready-made puff pastry (chilled)

Flour for dusting

Handfull of blueberries and strawberries

1. Preheat the oven to 190ºC (375ºF), gas mark 5 and grease a 12-hole muffin tin.

2. Put the cream and milk in a saucepan. Scrape the seeds from the vanilla pod into the saucepan as well as the empty pod. Bring to a simmer then take off the heat.

3. Whisk together the egg yolks, cornflour and sugar in a mixing bowl until it becomes a paste. Sieve the milk mixture into the bowl of egg paste and mix together quickly and thoroughly.

4. Return it all to the saucepan and heat over a moderate heat until it thickens but don't let it boil. Take the pan off the heat.

5. Whilst the custard is cooling, roll out the pastry as thin as you can, on a lightly floured surface. Roll it up into a sausage and cut it into 12 discs. Roll each one to about 3½ inches in diameter and gently press them into the holes of the muffin tin. Lightly prick the bases with a fork and fill to just over halfway.

Add 1 or 2 pieces of fruit per tart. (I added a couple of slices of strawberry and 1 blueberry per tart.)

6. Bake in the pre-heated oven for around 20 minutes until they are browned on top. (note - my tarts did not brown so I put them under the grill. You must keep an eye on them though or they'll burn, not that that happened to me or anything...)

Leave to cool in the tin, before carefully removing them and enjoy!

The original recipe uses lemon rind (add at the milk stage) and I've also seen recipes with cinnamon which I think would taste perfect. That said I LOVED these tarts. I probably ate 6 of them and then had to exercise some restraint and share them with the family.

Let me know how you get on!

Peace & Love

xx

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Happiness Is Bread & Butter Pudding

A friend of mine sent me a message the other day on Facebook asking for a simple brioche recipe to use in a posh bread & butter pudding. I couldn't help him with a simple recipe (there's nothing simple about making brioche), but I did ask him for his recipe as it sounded delicious. And it was! I absolutely love brioche, and to mix it with fruit and custard was so much better than I thought possible. I thought this was a dessert for cold weather but it actually works quite well chilled so is versatile. Perhaps the best part about it is that it's a simple assembly job so takes no time at all - you can get all of the ingredients ready made!

Fancy Bread & Butter Pudding

Ingredients

500g Vanilla Custard

400g Brioche Loaf

200g Blueberries

Steps

1. Pre-heat the oven to Gas Mark 5/ 375oF / 190oC

2. Generously butter the base and sides of an oven proof dish

3. Layer the base of the dish with slices of the brioche loaf, cover generously with half of the custard and evenly sprinkle a third of the blueberries over the custard.

4. Repeat the steps above for one more layer and finally add another layer of brioche and decorate the top of the pudding with the remaining blueberries.

5. Cook in the pre-heated oven for about 15-20 minutes or until the blueberries burst.

6. Remove from the oven and leave to cool slightly before serving warm.

Peace & Love

xx

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