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Fruity Friday

Challenge 46 of my Day Zero Project is to cook my way through a cookbook. It was a hard choice because I have quite a few cookery books, but given that I’m supposed to be losing weight (not doing very well at the moment….more about that in another post) I thought the best choice would be a book based on fruit. As you can see, the one I picked is a Readers Digest book and it’s called, Fresh Fruit & Desserts.
I was very, very tempted to cook my way through, Desserts to Die For but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. As the name suggests, all those calories would probably kill me off!

Anyway, back to the healthy recipes. We all eat quite a lot of fruit and vegetables in this house but we tend to stick to the same ones so I thought this book would vary our diet and make things a little more interesting.

I’m going to post a recipe, photos of the finished dish and the reactions from the family every Friday.
I’ve just been browsing the recipes and there are some that look absolutely delicious and some that I’m a bit nervous about getting the kids to try because I know they’re not very adventurous with new food!
It’s something they need to get used to though so this challenge should help with that. I’m sure if I get them involved in the preparing and cooking of each recipe, they’ll be more inclined to try the finished dish.

The first category in the book is breakfast recipes. Come back on the 27th Jan to find out what the taste testers have to say about a very easy first recipe… strawberry and yogurt smoothie 🙂

Christmas

Christmas Cake recipe

I made 3 fruit cakes on Sunday; one was a birthday cake for Granddad and the other 2 were Christmas cakes for Aiden’s scouts Christmas fair and the girl’s school Christmas fair.
I found this Quick and Easy Fruit Cake recipe and it’s the one that people seem to like the most out of the few recipes I’ve tried so we’re sticking with this one from now on 🙂

Ingredients

120g/4oz Margarine
170g/6oz Sugar
340g/14oz Dried Fruit – I buy the mixed fruit bags as it works out cheaper. We also add a full tub of cherries because Ant likes whole cherries and lots of them in a fruit cake!
225ml/8floz Water
1 teaspoon Bicarbonate of Soda
1 half teaspoon Mixed Spice
2 Beaten Eggs
120g/4oz Plain Flour
120g/4oz Self Raising Flour
Pinch of Salt

You will need a 7″/18ch square cake tin or a 8″/20cm round cake tin. The ones with the removable bottoms are easiest.
Coat the inside of the tin with margarine then line with 2 layers of greaseproof paper.

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F/180°C/Gas Mark 4

Ok, if all your prep work is done, we’ll make a start 🙂

Put the margarine, sugar, fruit, water, bicarb and mixed spice in a saucepan and heat gently. Bring to the boil then simmer for one minute.

Pour the batter into a mixing bowl and allow to cool. Make sure it’s cool before you add the eggs….we don’t want them cooking in the batter.
Once you’ve mixed the eggs into the batter, add the flour and salt and mix well.

Pour into your tin and cover the top of the cake with another piece of greaseproof paper. This helps stop the top from burning.

Cook in the middle of the oven for about an hour and a quarter. Check it’s cooked through by inserting a skewer into the middle of the cake. If it comes out clean, your cake is ready.

Allow to cool on a wire rack before covering with marzipan and icing.

I’ve used a Christmas cake frill from the supplies my Nan-nan gave me when she gave up cake making. I’ve recently seen them on sale in either Tesco or Asda, or perhaps both (I’ve been doing lots of browsing on both stores what with Christmas coming up and I’m starting to get confused as to which shop has the items I need!) and the price is quite good.

I bought the centre decoration from Asda. It came with ribbon but I wanted an old-fashioned frill! These kind of frills were always on Christmas cakes when I was younger 🙂
If you need some decorating inspiration, I have a couple of ideas on my Christmas Pinterest board.

Family

Thursday Lunchbox –

Today’s lunch:

  • Stick sandwiches
  • Potato Hoops
  • Plum
  • Fromage Frais
  • Apple juice

For the stick sandwiches:
I sliced some smoked sausage, cubed some bread, cheese and cucumber and slid them onto a skewer with cherry tomatoes.

The girls enjoyed their pinwheel sandwiches yesterday 🙂 Let’s hope today’s goes down just as well!
KayCee saw me making them this morning and seemed quite excited about it. She wanted to help so she did one of hers.
Now to get back to Google and find something fun for tomorrow!

Family

Wednesday Lunchbox – Pinwheel Sandwiches

The kids are getting fed up with the contents of their lunchboxes so I’ve been working on making them more interesting and tastier.
It has to be something that doesn’t take too long to eat because both girls complain about being the last in the hall and losing out on playtime.

Their lunch usually consists of

  • a sandwich, (ham or peanut butter and jam for KayCee, Ham or pate and cheese for Ella)
  • cherry tomatoes
  • cucumber
  • occasionally some cheese flavour tortillas or corn onion rings/cheese puffs
  • and either a yogurt or some kind of biscuit

Today they’re having:

    • Ham, cheese & carrot pinwheel sandwiches
    • Cucumber sticks
    • Cheese & chive dip
    • Ella’s having a couple of sausages and KayCee’s having a few cheese doritos.
    • Grapes
  • Blackcurrant juice

For the pinwheel sandwiches:

Tortilla wraps

Your favourite filling….we’re using:

Sliced ham
Grated cheese
Grated carrot
Mayo (KayCee doesn’t like mayo so we use sour cream and chive dip instead)

Spread the tortilla with the mayo/dip then layer the ham, grated cheese and grated carrot.
Roll the tortilla then tightly wrap it in cling film.
Refrigerate for at least an hour, or overnight then slice.

Other fillings that are popular in this house are:

Cream cheese, ham/chicken/turkey and cucumber
Peanut butter, jam and banana
Pate and cheese slices

What fillings do your children like? I’d love to get more ideas to keep lunches interesting 🙂

Recipes

Millionaire’s Shortbread

Image by David Greenwood-Haigh from Pixabay

We’ve never tried this recipe for millionaire’s shortbread before and for the life of me, I have no idea why not! I mean, it’s shortbread, it’s caramel and it’s chocolate. Three of my most favourite things all together!

This recipe is based on Nigella’s but we don’t have semolina so we left it out.

For the base we used:

225g Plain Flour
100g Sugar (it says caster sugar but we’re using granulated because that’s what we have!)
225g Unsalted Butter (it doesn’t specify that it has to be unsalted but again, that’s what we have)

For the caramel we used:

175g Unsalted Butter
175g Sugar
4 Tablespoons Golden Syrup
1 x 397g Can of Condensed Milk

For the topping we used:

200g Chocolate (the recipe says plain chocolate but we only have milk so that’s what we’re using)

Set the oven to 160C/Gas Mark 2

KayCee measured the ingredients for the base and mixed them all together until they formed a dough.

KayCee measuring ingredients for millionaire's shortbread
KayCee mixing ingredients for millionaire's shortbread

We had to add a bit more flour because it was a bit sticky.

KayCee mixing ingredients for millionaire's shortbread

I pressed the mixture into the tray and KayCee pricked it all over with a fork.

I put it in the oven and cooked it for about an hour then left it to cool. it says to cook it for 30-40 minutes but ours didn’t look done so I cooked it longer.

While it was cooking, we got the paints out ready for the hand and footprinting we were going to do when the cooking was finished.

When the base had cooled, Ella helped measure the ingredients for the caramel into a saucepan and I heated it on the cooker, stirring all the time until the butter melted.

Ela measuring the ingredients for millionaire's shortbread

I continued to constantly stir the mixture while it gently bubbled, for about 12 minutes. When it started to get thicker, I poured it over the cooled base and then left that to cool.

We had to leave it overnight because it was bedtime by the time the caramel had cooled so this morning, the girls broke the chocolate into squares and I melted it in the microwave.

KayCee breaking the chocolate
Ella breaking the chocolate
 

I poured it over the caramel and left it to set.
And here it is, our first ever Millionaire’s shortbread. It’s absolutely delicious and we’ll be making this again!

millionaire's shortbread
millionaire's shortbread
 
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