love those cupcakes

Quick and easy

 

I love stir fried vegetables and, after a day at work, find they're a quick, easy and colourful base for a decent meal.  I often serve them with slices of tofu (which have been marinated in soy sauce, ginger and garlic before cooking) along with some homemade spicy potato wedges. Like this.

Just as quick and easy are these biscuits, which I've been making rather a lot of using a recipe from Rachel Allen's book (one of my Christmas presents). 

Whilst they do contain butter, sugar and chunks of chocolate, they're also made with porridge oats,so not only crunchily delicious but good for you.  Well, ish.

 

Rachel Allen's Oatmeal and Chocolate (or raisin) cookies

4ozs (110g) butter, softened                    4ozs (110g) soft light brown sugar

4ozs (110g) caster sugar                          1 egg

2 tbsp water                                            1 tsp vanilla extract

9ozs (250g) porridge oats                         4ozs (110g) SR flour

1 level tsp salt (I used half)                       4ozs (110g) dark chocolate chunks or raisins

 

1.  Preheat oven to 180C, gas mark 4.

2.  Cream the butter in a bowl and add the sugars, beating until the mixture is light and fluffy.

3.  Add the egg, water and vanilla extract and beat in well.

4.  Gently mix in the oats, flour and chocolate chunks or raisins.

5.  Roll the dough into walnut sized pieces (I made larger ones and flattened them slightly with a fork) and place spaced slightly apart on 2 baking trays. (No need to grease and line).

6.  Bake for 15 - 25 minutes until light golden brown but still slightly soft in the centre.

7.  Allow to cool on the trays for a minute before transferring to a wire rack to cool.

Rachel reckons you'll get about 30 cookies from this mixture.  I made less but slightly bigger.

Birthday wishes

The Gorgeous Girlie is celebrating her 25th birthday today. It doesn't seem so long ago that she looked like this.....

 

    

Of course, the older she gets, the more ancient I am.  So I've ordered this, although I think I may have left it too late. 

Anyway, a birthday isn't complete without cake so here's one from the three dozen she took back with her yesterday after a weekend at home.

   

Happy birthday, GG, and Gung Hei Fat Choi.

 

Kitchen reveal

You've had the words so here are the pictures. Our little kitchen is now more or less finished apart from some final titivating. (I quite fancy some of those stainless steel letters for one of the walls but can't decide on the wording.  Bon appetit?  Eat?  Drink?  Be merry?).   I know the end result is not to everyone's taste, but then what is?  And a bonus is that it's so sleek and shiny, it makes me want to keep everything pristine. Well, so far it does.

Before (at the start of dismantling):

 

   

 

 

After (with some new gadgets including a temperature controlled wine cooler.  To keep the 28 botles of Krug at just the right degree of coolness.  Yeah, right):

 

 

 

 

The room is a backwards "L" shape and I haven't included a picture of the bit to the right as there are just a couple of cupboards (same black doors) where we keep the waste bin (now a big fancy stainless steel number) and cleaning materials.

So that's that.  Now onto the next project.

The Story of the New Kitchen (or Away With the Fairies)

Once upon a time, a woman living a mostly happy life in the north east of England decided she needed to make changes to the place she called home.  "That kitchen", she said one morning to her husband of many years (who, it has to be said, usually turned an impressively deaf ear to her seemingly endless improvement plans) "has to go".   She had an idea of what she wanted the little space in which she enjoyed creating sweet and sparkly confections to look like and,in due course ( after plying her husband with the sweetest, sparkliest, most buttery little cakes she could muster) the work to transform the old, no longer loved, kitchen began. 

Just as the husband had predicted (with words spoken only in his head, you understand), the woman soon began to have regrets about the chain of events that had been set in motion by the simple writing of a signature on a dotted line. She hadn't fully comprehended what life would be like, albeit in the short term,  without the (by now not always reliable) electrical gadgetry she had come to take for granted - the washing machine, the cooker, the dishwasher, the sink with the waste disposal, the fridge and the freezer.   

The jolly kitchen fitters, fuelled with gallons of Tetley tea and mountains of McVitie's digestives, tried their best to make her smile as they beavered away to the incessant strains of Century Radio.  But,  with the wrong sink being fitted, a mix-up with the handles being delivered and the granite worktop being dropped, the woman found she had lost her sense of humour. 

The weeks passed and she relied more and more on a couple of  old friends to provide sustenance of the ready meal variety.  As November turned into December, she had nightmarish visions of having to defrost a spinach and ricotta lasagne for Christmas lunch instead of serving her traditional home cooked Cashew Nut Roast With A Delicious Chestnut Stuffing Layer And Pinenut Topping (which even her non-vegetarian, and most definitely non-pasta eating, elderly Aunt relished). 

To cut a rather long fairy story short, there was, you will no doubt be relieved to hear, a happy ending.  The jolly fitters eventually departed to work their magic on kitchens elsewhere and, on Christmas Eve, the husband rolled up his sleeves to put a final shine on the beautiful new granite worktops and sleek cupboard doors, and to carefully position the old scales which the woman's dear dad had used to weigh sweets in his shop many years ago. 

And the woman smiled.            

The End.  

The last one

This was the last of the mince pies from the freezer.  Devoured yesterday.  So delicious.

 

Today I started Eating Like A Normal Person again.

These paperwhites have grown splendidly in a pot on the kitchen window sill. 

 

 But they don't half pong!

Ringing in the new

   

2008 was one of those memorable years for us, the kind you never forget because of significant events, and so it was good to ring in the new year.  Throughout the day, I've thought about following tradition and making some resolutions - the usual vague ones like eating more healthily, making better use of my time, reading the classics, generally being a nicer person - but I've decided not to.  Instead, 2009 will be the year I don't set myself any personal goals, plan to make any lifestyle changes or set out to turn over a new leaf.  So, I'll just go where the music takes me.  And see where I end up.  Happy New Year to you all.