Tempting Tuesday: Chocolate Fudge (Not)

Tempting Tuesday: trying not to kill my family with my experimental cooking.

As you can see, my attempt to make chocolate fudge hasn't been that successful.

It's super tasty, but I'm not sure it's fudge.

Saying that though, having left it in the fridge overnight, it is muchly improved.

he problem was that I couldn't find a straight forward recipe that wasn't in american cup quantities or used the ingredients I fancied using.

So I made it up.

Ingredients:

a tin of sweetened condensed milk

a 200g bar of dark chocolate

50g butter

pinch of sea salt

a handful of chopped pecans

Method:

Throw it all in a heavy bottomed pan, heat slowly until combined and a little bit longer to thicken it up.

Plonk it all in a greaseproof lined tin, try and spread it evenly but good luck. It's sticky and gloopy.

Leave for an hour or two in the fridge.

I found that it just didn't set.

So I scraped it all off the paper, but it back in the pan, melted it down again and added 100g icing sugar. I would have whisked it in but I didn't want to smash up my nuts, so I had to stir carefully.

I then put it back in the fridge for two hours (in new greaseproof paper, same tin).

When I came to slice it up, though it was much better than before, it was still really sticky and not how you think fudge should be, as you can see from my photo.

Most recipes seem to use twice as much chocolate, but I just don't have another spare bar and I'm unwilling to sacrifice one for something which might fail.

After it's night in the fridge, it was much firmer and more slice-able.

Oddly though, I managed to mould the edges I trimmed off back into squares. I'm pretty certain fudge shouldn't be mouldable.

After sharing, I think the general concensus is, it's tasty, but it's not fudge. I don't know why but it isn't.

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Tempting Tuesday: Orange Butterfly Cakes

Tempting Tuesday: trying not to kill my family with my experimental cooking.

I think I found this recipe in an Asda magazine one Easter. Never tried it until now.

As it stands, it only makes enough for 8 nicely sized cupcakes, which is not enough for my house. I'll be doubling everything next time.

Ingredients:

125g butter

125g sugar

2 eggs

Zest of 1 orange

125g self raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

Curd filling:

Zest & juice of 1 orange

40g sugar

2 eggs

50g butter

 Method:

Heat all curd filling ingredients together in a pan very gently and stir until thick. Just like with lemon curd, do not stop stirring.

Leave to cool.

Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C  fan).

Blend butter, sugar, eggs and zest together.

Then sift in flour and baking powder and mix well.

Bake in cupcake cases for about 20 minutes.

Once cool, cut out the tops, add curd filling and gently place the ‘butterfly’ tops on.

I totally baked mine too hot. The tops burnt before the insides were done. And the curd filling recipe originally had the juice of half a lemon, leaving it super runny, which meant that it didn't sit nicely on the tops.
Also, I decorated mine with candied orange peel, but if you want to do that, for goodness sake just freakin' buy some. I've spent days on a whole batch of the stuff and it's still rather inedible. No idea why.

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Tempting Tuesday: Lemon Curd

Tempting Tuesday: trying not to kill my family with my experimental cooking.

This one took a few attempts. Mostly because I'm really good at getting distracted and if there's one thing you don't want to do when making lemon curd, it's get distracted.
This is what happens...

It was a bit of a catalogue of errors. I hadn't stirred it enough, so the egg white cooked first which left it with some delightful white lumps. I tried to whisk them out (unsuccessfully), but then it was almost a mousse, so I popped it back to the stove, but then forgot about it and ended up with that black mess.

Never mind. Attempt two, with some lessons learnt, was much more successful.

This makes enough for almost two jars. Have them sterilised and ready.

Ingredients:

zest of 1 lemon

juice of 2 lemons

2 eggs, lightly beaten

50g butter

175g castor sugar

Method:

Put all the ingredients in a heavy bottomed pan and heat very gently on the stove, stirring the whole time. A silicone whisk is great for this. 

In twenty minutes it should be lovely and thick. 

Pour the hot stuff carefully into the jars and put the lids on. 

When they're cool, store them in the fridge.

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Tempting Tuesday: Makeshift Pasta

Tempting Tuesday: trying not to kill my family with my experimental cooking.

It has occurred to me that my tempting Tuesday's have been quite tempting lately and haven't really shown my experimental cooking for what it truly is: often disgusting. 

Dinner last night was the epitome of my experimental cooking. A food shop shy of a decent meal, my kitchen led me to this. 

What I found in my kitchen:

1/4 of a red cabbage

A carrot

A courgette

2 & 1/2 chicken fillets

Pasta (though I wanted rice or potatoes)

Paprika

Smokey BBQ sauce

I sliced up the chicken and while it was frying with a generous sprinkle of paprika, I grated the carrot & courgette and sliced the cabbage. When I was happy with the chicken, I threw in the veg and then a dollop of BBQ sauce. 

We ate it because we were hungry but it wasn't great. The soggy cabbage highlighted how soggy the breadcrumb coating on the chicken had gone. The sauce was tasty though. 

And Zander was keen to give it a try, though he's got almost two months to wait until I let him get any closer. 

Tempting Tuesday: 'A Gallant Effort' (a Bad Cake)

Tempting Tuesday: trying not to kill my family with my experimental cooking.
My new 'Tempting Tuesday' series is supposed to be for my cooking/baking experiments. However, this week's endeavour went a little sour, so I thought I'd include it regardless, mostly for comedy value but also as a 'how NOT to'.

 It's so not in my nature to give up but maybe I should give up baking, at least until I can be better prepared. I should have given up on this cake before it went in the oven. Before I wasted two bars of chocolate on it.

My baby sister turns 21 this week and she asked me to make her a chocolate cake for her tea party. Despite having a new baby, I decided to say I would. I should have said no, but it's my baby sister, how could I?

Even the ingredient are messed up, because as I was making it I forgot to exchange some of the flour with cocoa powder to make it chocolatey. Thankfully, I have a side note in my recipe book which splits the ingredients by a third, so I just added another third, making it a rather large cake. 

Large cakes aren't a large problem with my family. 

Unless it tastes like shit of course.

So, the ingredients were as follows; 

13oz plain flour

3oz cocoa

8oz sugar

6tsp baking powder

8oz butter

4 eggs

140ml milk

Filling; whipped double cream with 200g melted chocolate folded in.

Topping; (and this is where it goes completely awry)

150g butter

150g sugar (SHOULD HAVE BEEN ICING SUGAR but I had a brain malfunction)

200g melted chocolate

I got all my ingredients together at 5pm.
Zander, the four week old baby decided he didn't ever want to be put down, so my ingredients were sieved and weighed in sporadic intervals. Then I realised I had to cook the bigger boys dinner by 6pm and get them to bed by 7pm - alone as Mr Strawberry was working late. 

By 8:30pm, after three attempts at frying it due to the un-put-down-able baby, I had managed to have a bacon sandwich for dinner.
I finally found some cake tins of similar size and got this fucking cake in the oven by 9:30pm, when Mr Strawberry finally got home. At 10pm, it was finally yielding a clean knife when I poked it, so I threw a fresh tea-towel over both the tins and went to bed.
The next morning I set out to decorate it. Not putting it in a sealed box overnight of course meant it was a little dry. I should have known how bad it was going to be because when I was adding the whipped cream and chocolate in between the layers, it was all a bit too easy, with none of the tentative 'oh god the cake is going to split' as I lifted each cake layer.
I had already whisked the sugar into the butter before I realised the consequences of using the wrong sugar. Durrrrrrr. Gritty much. By then, it was too late, like running down a hill, there was no way of stopping now. So I threw the melted chocolate in regardless and chucked it on the cake. As I lovingly (begrudgingly) smoothed the 'butter icing' over the cake, my darling Mr Strawberry wondered in and kindly told me (knowing the issues I was having) it was a 'gallant effort'. I was going to make a nice cereal box cardboard stencil to use while sprinkling on the gold glitter sugar but by then there seemed no point trying to improve this monstrosity so I carefully sprinkled it on by hand, making a delightful '21'. 

Of course everyone at the tea party was very polite, those who weren't chocca full of party food and braved a slice, said it was lovely, but I tried some myself and I can honestly say, it wasn't worth the calorie intake. I was tempted to dollop on some cream to add some sense of moisture, but I never bothered. 

This cake and me, we're not friends, despite how much chocolate it contains.  

So, here's my how NOT to bake guide;
1. Don't bother to make sure you have everything you need before starting. 
2. By all means, attempt to bake while looking after 3 children, including a newborn, without another adult to help.
3. Always attempt to make a very special cake during dinner time or bedtime, or both for maximum effect.

4. Always bake past your bedtime. 

5. It's okay to substitute icing sugar for normal sugar, not gritty at all. 

6. Forget when you put the cake in the oven. 

7. Leave cake out overnight to dry. 

8. Decorate with glitter sugar sprinkles, those things will go a long way in disguising how gritty your butter icing is. 

Gritty butter icing.

Mmmm, so dry and crumbly.

Sorry Baby Belle :(

*****************UPDATE**************

 I just had to share the lovely thing my Mum posted on Facebook. 
"Actually, lots of us went back for seconds. The butter icing is a little, er, unusual but the cake is yummy & not dry at all. What really mattered to the birthday girl is that her big sister made her a cake, despite having a new baby. Loving people is what really matters & that's what you've done."
And she's right you know. It doesn't matter if we cock up, it's all about the trying and the loving people.

Lying to My Kids...

Yesterday Ed lost his third tooth. 

Last night the tooth fairy 'forgot' to visit. Caught up in working late & the adventures of Timmy the elf, it completely slipped my mind. 

He woke up this morning completely miserable. With claims that he'd been good and gone straight to sleep, he couldn't understand why she'd forgotten him. He was so sad and seemed so genuinely heart broken I couldn't tell him the truth. I couldn't simply hand over his £1. It seemed far more important to stretch it out, to push the 'story' to its absolute limits. 

You won't believe how far I pushed it. 

I told him I'd call the 'Mummy helpline'. 

With my phone to my ear, I made an effort to re-enact my usual phone call behaviour; I wandered around the house, tried to avoid noisy rooms, spent a fair amount of time on hold trying to get to the right department, remained polite and ensured one of them overheard the whole thing. 

It went a little like this;

(Phone to ear)

-pause-

"Oh hello, can I have the tooth fairy department please."

-pause-

"Hi. My son put his tooth under his pillow last night, and he went to sleep and everything but he hasn't been visited. His tooth is still there."

-long pause-

"Oh right. Okay. That's great thanks."

(Put phone down)

I told him that 200 kids lost a tooth last night and the tooth fairy was extraordinarily busy. Apparently there were loads of kids missed last night so she's doing an extra shift today while they're at school. 

He was shocked, I guess he never thought the tooth fairy could ever have too much to handle, especially when he's of that age when everyone is loosing teeth. 

Ahhh, it all made sense now. He was ok with that. 

He put his tooth box on the top of his pillow so she wouldn't struggle to find it & lives in hope she'll make it today while we're out. 

I can assure you, she has. 

My husbands reaction to this was;

"I wish you'd stop lying to him"

Which I of course understand but he was so dejected, I couldn't do the whole "oh, it's just a story anyway, here's a quid"

That would've been awful.  

And in fact, the more I think about it, the less I regret it. 

I think it's massively important to spend your childhood believing in magic and fantasy. Aside from the fact that it's the only time in your life you can put faith in such things, I think those dreams and fantasies are the foundations of creativism and free thought. 

Childhood is the only period of your life where absolute silliness can prevail. When while days can be spent making up your surroundings in pure, unadulterated play. What is imaginative play without magic? Without made up characters?

Obviously, at this time of year, we are well and truly amidst the story of Father Christmas, whose existence has been discussed greatly, but we are sticking to our guns and carrying on with the story for a little while yet. 

Why, at just six years old, would I take that away from him?

I found this interesting article on the Wall Street Journal website, about how important magical thinking is to kids, and how they use it to understand the world around them. It made me feel good (not something I often feel when it comes to my motherhood skills) about my decision to stretch the story. Like the article says, when he looked me straight in the face this morning, I assessed his level of doubt and found none, only sadness. We can go a little longer telling stories. And he'll need these skills to have a better understanding of history and people who live elsewhere in the world because the ability to imagine, to put yourself in someone else's shoes, is invaluable. I used to worry that imaginative play is so internal, because only they can see what they see, that it would encourage them to live in a bubble, but on the contrary, it will help them both become compassionate men.

One day they'll discover the truth and therefore the lies I've told them, but I hope they understand that I only did it to keep the magic alive. 

Unfortunately it does make my life difficult. 

Remembering the tooth fairy needs to visit a boy who often stays awake quite late and not neglecting the elf's activities every night for 24 nights in December is often more than I can cope with, but I'll battle on. 

The tooth fairy, in her angst, did leave the £1 coin but forgot to take the tooth. Ed decided her bag must have been too full and that actually he'd like to keep it anyway. So long as he's happy.