Deliciously Ella Brazil Nut and Rocket Pesto Pasta

I was given the Deliciously Ella cookery book for my birthday and have already made a couple of things from it; I’m never going to be as health-conscious as she is, and certainly don’t think it’s likely that I will ever switch to a vegan or vegetarian diet, but it’s definitely good to switch things up and every now and then eat some super-healthy meat-free meals.
 

 

 

I liked the idea of her zucchini noodles with a minted avocado sauce but I wasn’t quite brave enough to make the zucchini noodles – at least not at this point, because I don’t really like courgette but I also don’t really like avocado! But I do have a spiralizer and I reckon if I made a different sauce with the ‘courgetti’ (courgette spaghetti) it would be OK, so watch this space!

 

 

I decided therefore to cook regular spaghetti but make the sauce as I have a lot of mint growing in my garden and love to find recipes I can use it in.

 

As Ella says, this is a very rich, creamy pasta –I left out the mushrooms as I can’t stand them though Ella does say they add a “next level of deliciousness” so if you like mushrooms then do add them in.

 

I chopped the nuts in a food processor and added the avocado, oil, lime, mint leaves and salt and blended until I had a chunky sauce. The beauty is that this doesn’t need to be cooked so it is so quick. It’s nice heated through a little so when I drained the pasta I returned it to the pan with the sauce. It was surprisingly good given I don’t really like avocado and I felt very virtuous!

 

 

 I'm sharing this with Meat Free Mondays, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes.

Jen's Food is hosting Extra Veg this month on behalf of Helen at Fuss Free Flavours and Michelle of Utterly Scrummy; this is a great way to eat some extra veg almost without noticing!
 

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Restaurant Reviews: Guatemala

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Strawberry and White Chocolate Blondies

I had some strawberries that needed using up and it was that time of the month again where I was due to spend a whole day with the design agency I work with and I've got into the habit of taking cake.

I wanted something that would be easy to transport and thought that blondies - a bit like brownies, but without chocolate - would work really well as a way of incorporating the strawberries.

 

I found a recipe on the Good Food website for strawberry and macademia blondies but changed them to leave out the nuts. I also ran out of light muscovado sugar so used a mixture of half caster sugar, half demerera! They turned out well but I took my eye off the clock and overbaked them a bit which was a shame.

You need:
125g butter
200g white chocolate
2 eggs
50g caster sugar
50g brown sugar
130g plain flour
120g strawberries

Preheat oven to 180C. Line a 22cm square baking tin with greaseproof paper. Or if you have a brownie pan like I do, use that - spray with Cake Release.

Melt the butter and white chocolate in a small pan or in the microwave.

In a separate bowl cream the eggs and sugar then fold in the flour and the chocolate and butter mixture.




Chop the strawberries and fold in to the mixture. Pour into the tin and bake for 30 minutes.

 Leave to cool in the tin. Turn out of the brownie pan or if you have used a larger pan, turn out and cut into squares.

I'm sending this to Tea Time Treats as they have a theme of summer holiday baking; the strawberries make this quite summery and also this is an easy bake to make with the kids while they are off from school. The challenge is hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Jane at The Hedgecombers,

I'm also sharing it with the Vegetable Palette challenge, hosted by Shaheen at Allotment 2 Kitchen; the theme is 'more glorious reds' and she accepts fruits as well as veg.

 
These travel well so you could take them on a picnic; for that reason I'm sending these to Ness at JibberJabberUK for her challenge Love Cake.

In addition I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup hosted by Charlottes Lively Kitchen. There are plenty of things happening this month and time of year that these blondies would be good for, but one stands out in particular, Breast Cancer Care's Strawberry Tea fundraiser.



Finally I'm sending this to We Should Cocoa, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme; anything goes this month as long as it uses chocolate.

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How to Make a Zebra Cake - Duff Goldman Cake Mix Review

I take a lot of shortcuts when I'm cooking but packet cake mixes are something I don't usually do. I couldn't resist this one however - it's from Duff Goldman, the man behind Charm City Cakes - as seen in the television show Ace of Cakes. I went to Charm City Cakes when I was in Baltimore a couple of years ago but I didn't get to see Duff!

On the back of his new-found fame he launched a range of products including equipment, frosting and cake mixes. I got this packet cake mix from America and finally used it a few months ago - it's pretty unique, like Duff, as you can make a zebra stripe cake.

The box came with a packet of dry mixture to which you add - if memory serves - egg and oil, though don't quote me on that. It also has a sachet of purple food colouring, which you add to HALF of the cake mixture after separating it out into two bowls. This is how to make a zebra cake whether you are using a packet mix or not.

Simply take a spoonful of your first colour and place in the very centre of a greased round cake pan. Don't spread it out. Then take a spoonful of your second colour and place it on top of the first - again don't spread it out. The weight of the second colour (in this case white) will cause the first colour (purple) to spread underneath, but the white will stay in the centre.

 

Repeat until you have used up all the cake mixture, alternating the colours each time and placing the spoonful directly on top and allowing the mixture to spread out by itself. I did find it hard after a while to keep my spoonfuls of mixture exactly in the centre so the concentric circles aren't so even any more!

 

Here's the cake ready to go in the oven. Bake according to pack instructions or following your own recipe.

It started to crack slightly in the oven, so you can see that while the outside is golden brown cake, the inside is still bright purple and white!

Unfortunately I was so excited to see the cake I took it out of the tin straight away.. and it broke into several pieces! This was the lightest, fluffiest cake I've ever had - as I said I don't usually use packet mixes - and it was almost cloud-like in texture. You can hardly pick it up even when it's cool so definitely do not try before it has fully cooled or this will happen!

I made some buttercream and added the remainder of the purple food colouring and used the buttercream to stick the broken pieces of cake together! I also spread some on the top. You can see from this slice that the zebra effect goes right through - it looks a bit strange in purple but would be great in black and white or orange stripes for a tiger.

 

As well as being the lightest, fluffiest cake I've ever had, this was also by far the sweetest. I don't know if all American cakes (or packet mixes) are like that; after all US chocolate is very different on the whole to British chocolate. This cake was actually too sweet for me and I have a very sweet tooth! I do like the look of a lot of the products in Duff Goldman's range though and will be looking out for them when I go to America in September.

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More than Occasional baker, as the letter this month is Z.

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Meal Planning Monday Week 32

Monday

Out of the office with a supplier – will take lunch and almost certainly work late so will grab dinner on the way home

Tuesday

Dinner houmous chicken from meal plan last week I didn't make

Wednesday

Dinner – BBQ (sausage/burger as we haven't had that for ages) if the weather is nice. Had to abandon my mid-week BBQ intention for the last couple of weeks!

Thursday

Dinner - Yorkshire puddings filled with chicken pieces in a white herb sauce

Friday

Dinner - steak - also haven't had this in ages

Saturday

Lunch – at a friend’s BBQ

Dinner – home at some point in the evening though I doubt we will want much to eat. Will have chicken kiev and chips in the freezer on standby

Sunday

Lunch - beans/macaroni cheese on toast

Dinner - coconut prawns for me, chicken escalope with cheese for him

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Baby Shower Invitation Card

 

My friend P was pregnant - she just had her baby two weeks early - and as we were due to meet with my other school friends at my house for a barbecue, we decided it would be fun to combine the barbecue with a baby shower. I wanted to make a bit of effort for her so decided to make some invitations to send to everyone who was coming.

 

I had some card blanks in the shape of a pram which I bought ages ago, but have since decided I prefer normal-shaped cards. It can actually be quite hard to decorate a card shaped like a shoe for instance! I thought the pram cards would work really well though as invitations, and as they didn’t need to be proper cards I cut each one in half along the join, making two.

 

 

P didn't know if she’s having a boy or a girl so I wanted the cards to have a gender-neutral colour but at the same time didn’t want to go with yellow like I often do. I’d recently bought some lovely (and quite cheap) strawberry pattern paper plates and cups from a brilliant shop called Tiger which I thought I could use at the barbecue, then hit upon the idea of making it a strawberry-themed baby shower.

 

I’d also bought a pack of printed papers from Tiger (they sell all sorts!) that had several pages with strawberry prints. I covered the card blanks with the strawberry paper as the starting point.

 

 

I never do much rubber stamping but have realised recently that it can look really nice – and professional – if you stamp a message onto a small piece of card and mount that on top of the card. I had a look on Ebay and bought a ‘baby shower’ stamp for a few pounds which is gorgeous- I love the font and the size was perfect for this project (though it’s not something I expect I will use very often!). I knew that I had some wedding stamps from a job lot I bought once at a car boot sale so fished them out; I had three with the words ‘invitation’ (wedding and evening) but unfortunately two of them were so old and worn that you can’t read the words when you stamp. The third one, a wedding invitation stamp, did work, so I was able to stamp it onto red card (to go with the strawberry colour) and cut off the word ‘wedding’. You just need to be creative sometimes!

 

 

I mounted the ‘invitation’ and ‘baby shower’ words using foam sticky pads and then did the same with a couple of handwritten pieces so I could add the date and the mum-to-be’s name.

 

On the other side of the card I wrote the details of the party.

 

I was really pleased with how these turned out and my friends said they were very cute! I will shortly be blogging about the baby shower itself if you are looking for ideas.

 

I'm sending this to the Daring Cardmakers challenge as their theme is new beginnings, and that's exactly right with a new baby!

 

 

I'm also sending it to the challenge run by Lil Patch of Crafty Friends as this week it's 'anything goes'.

 

 

 

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Alphabakes challenge: August 2015

I don’t know about you, but I enjoy seeing difficult letters come up for Alphabakes – it means you have an excuse to go through your cookery books hunting for a recipe. When an easy letter comes up I tend to think ‘oh, I’ve got some apples that need using up’ or ‘c for chocolate’ – but when it’s a letter from the tail end of the alphabet it involves a bit more thought. And I haven’t yet gotten stuck – I have enough cookery books that there is bound to be something, like these Utah scones I made for U last month!

 

So you have probably gathered that it’s a difficult letter again this month – Z! Perhaps with a lot of people going on holiday or switching off the oven in August anyway there won’t be many entries. If you are really struggling, have a look at the last time we did Z, in February 2014 – we had zucchini (courgette), zest (lemon and orange), zebra (pattern, not the meat, but you could do that!), za’atar, a Middle Eastern spice, zabaglione, zeppole, and even Z for zombies!

 

Please add your entries to the Linky by the 25^th of the month and if you tweet @Caroline_Makes and @bakingaddict we will retweet all the ones that we see.

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Here's a reminder of the rules:
1. Post your recipe on your blog and link it to The More than Occasional Baker and Caroline Makes, stating the relevant month's host. If you do not have a blog, email us a picture and a brief description of your entry which we will  include in the round-up at the end of the month.

2. You can use your own recipe or someone else's recipe. The recipe can be sweet, savoury or a mixture!  Anything goes as long as the random letter is predominantly featured in the recipe as one of the main ingredients or flavours or in the name of the bake itself (i .e . not as a garnish , or using 'flour' for the letter F!)  You can also republish old posts/recipes but you must include the information for this challenge as stated in these rules. 

 

3. Add the logo to your post and add 'alphabakes' as a label to your post. 

 

4. Please add your entries to the linkup on this page. If you want to email your entries please use alphabakes@gmail.com by midnight (GMT) 25th of each month. Please include: 

• Your name (that you want included in the round up or we will use the name of your blog)
• Your blog post URL
• Recipe title
• Photo of recipe (to be included in the round up).

 

5. You can submit as many entries as you like.

 

6. You do not have to participate every month to join in.

 

7. You may submit your entry to other challenges as long as it complies with their rules.

 

8. If you use twitter, please use the tag #alphabakes and mention @bakingaddict and @Caroline_Makes. We will retweet all those that we see.  

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