There was no way I was going to spend £400 on a cake. So, I looked at different ideas to reduce the cost, while keeping it personal and special. Making a cake from scratch was going to be too impractical as I was planning the wedding long distance, so I came up with an ingenious cheat that I am very proud of. This is my secret top tip for having a lovely wedding cake at a real bargain price.

You will need:

• a cupcake stand I bought a 7 tier Perspex one from Exhibitz, but only used 5 tiers (£49 inc delivery, or cheaper if you win an auction)
  
• 8 packs of Asda Smart Price fairy cakes 12 per pack gives 96 cupcakes @ £0.48 per pack, this includes extras in case of mistakes (£3.84)
  
• 2 packs icing sugar (approx £1.50)
  
• sugar flowers in your wedding colours 90 small for the cupcakes, approx 4 large for the top (approx £35). Cake Craft Shop have a great selection for all budgets. Browse around for more colours and toppers as desired. Simple is more effective in my opinion.
  
• medium iced celebration cake (Asda, M&S, Waitrose, Tesco) approx £10
  
• water (free)
  
• 2-3 metres of ribbon (approx £1.50)

total cost: approximately £100 ! ! !

How to make

1. Assemble the stand
2. Make firm icing according to instructions, adding water drop by drop
3. Rope in Husband to Be and Father of the Bride to ice cakes, gently pushing the icing neatly to the sides of each cake wrapping using the back of a wet teaspoon dipped in water. With three of us it took about 3 hours.

4. Stick a sugar flower on top of each cake

5. Assemble larger sugar flowers on the top cake
6. Tie ribbon around top cake so that it drapes all the tiers
7. Take cakes to venue in tin
8. Get nice staff to arrange the cakes on the stand


9. Cut
10. Eat!
Only the cupcakes need to be served on the day. The top cake can be saved if you buy fruit.

No-body clocked that I could have made this myself, it looked professional, did the job, those who knew my secret were very impressed and I was very proud of my efforts. If anyone tries this, I hope you have the same success. Good luck!

Labels: cooking, crafts, wedding

In celebration of my birthday, the lucky people in my office are getting to feast on these Mars Bar Krispie cakes. Various recipes float around for these choccie chewy chunks, but this is the one my mum always uses.

Makes 12 approx
3 mars bars
3 ounces of butter or marg
3 cups (tea cups, not America cups) Rice Krispies

Chop up the Mars Bars and butter and melt in a large pan on a low heat. When both have melded sufficiently, add the cups of Krispies and stir in. Press into a baking tray (approx 7 x 10 inches) or even a small roasting tin lined with baking paper. Put in the fridge to set. Drizzle with melted chocolate if desired.

Labels: cooking

Serves 2
250g lean beef mince
1 leek split length ways and finely sliced
1 white onion finely chopped
good handful of frozen peas
2 medium sized potatoes
1 tblsp olive oil
1 heaped tsp dried thyme, oregano or mixed herbs
1 dessert spoon tomato puree
1 beef stock cube
4 tblsp water
1 tblsp grated cheese
1 tsp chopped chives

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Thinly slice the potatoes, boil in salted water for about 3 minutes until they start to soften, drain and set aside. Fry the onion and leek in the olive oil until soft. Add the mince, brown. Sprinkle over your choice of herbs, the stock cube, then add the water, tomato puree and peas. Stir on a medium heat for about 4 mins. Split the mixture between two 6x4 inch oven proof dishes. Layer the potato slices over the top, sprinkle over the grated cheese, some freshly ground black pepper, and finely drizzle with a little olive oil. Pop in the oven for 20 mins, by which time the potatoes should be browned. Sprinkle with chives if desired, and serve with vegetables.

Labels: cooking

It doesn't sound like a store cupboard recipe, but it was. Without celery or garlic for a risotto base I had to find an alternative and as for the tarragon, it was meant for something else, I didn't even know what it tasted like before now, but it was there and it worked.

Serves 2
1 small white onion, finely chopped
1 leek, halved lengthways and finely sliced
3 slices bacon chopped or 100g pancetta lardons
100g risotto rice
1 pint chicken stock
200g frozen large prawns
50g parmesan, finely grated
1 glass white wine
handful of fresh tarragon
knob of butter
tblsp olive oil

Heat the olive oil and a bit of the butter in a large shallow pan. Gently saute the onions and leek until soft. Add the bacon or lardons, and cook for another couple of minutes. Add the rice. Stir until it is coated with the oil and vegetable juices. Pour in the white wine. Once this has absorbed start adding the chicken stock a ladle at a time and stir continuously, waiting for the rice to absorb the stock before adding the next ladle. Keep adding the stock (and continue with boiling water if it runs out), until the rice reaches your desired texture. Some like it al dente, I like it soft.

Stir in a handful of the grated parmesan, keep some back for sprinkling on the top. Then stir in the prawns (if you are using frozen prawns, defrost first) and heat through (should only take a few minutes). Finish by adding another little blob of butter and about a tblsp of the chopped tarragon.

Serve sprinkled with black pepper, parmesan and more tarragon. Delicious.

Labels: cooking

The perfect easter breakfast. A cup of tea and a toasted hot cross bun with lashings of butter and my mum's homemade blackberry jam. Yum.

Labels: cooking

I have to admit I never really gave much thought to chicken welfare until I saw Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's TV programme, launching the Chicken Out campaign a few weeks ago. He conducted an experiment rearing some chickens as free range and some chickens in a cramped, smelly barn - the way we rear 95% of the chickens we eat. It was disgusting.

I wasn't shocked in the sense that I knew in the back of my mind that conditions were bad, but I was appalled and ashamed that we, as a nation of consumers have bought chickens for so long without questioning the lives they have led. How could we have let it get like this? It is disrespect en-masse.

Dom and I don't eat whole chickens often, but after the show we immediately started buying free range eggs. Then when it came to buying a whole chicken from Asda, they had ran out of free range. I refused to buy anything else and sent a complaint email to customer services.

A week later, I checked Morrisons. There were some chickens on the shelf, but myself and two others were questioning whether we should buy them. The labels said they were RSPCA approved, but when you read the small print, they were actually kept in barns.

It turns out that Hugh and Jamie approve of the Freedom Food label. So it's better than nothing (it's still not good enough). At least if people buy the RSPCA approved chickens the supermarkets might shift their supply to meet the demand for ethical food.

I finally bought a chicken yesterday from Somerfield. It was the last one on the shelf that bore the Freedom Food label.

Now, I don't know whether it was just psychological, knowing that the little animal had lived a better life, but that chicken was possibly the best roast chicken we had ever tasted.

Support the campaign. Get Chickens Out!

Labels: buying, cooking

We had lovely pancakes last night, with the traditional squeeze of lemon and sprinkling of sugar.

We got 8 pancakes out of such a small amount of ingredients (1 egg, 4Oz plain flour, 1/2 pint milk), why anyone would buy ready made pancakes I don't know. All the fun is in the flipping!

Is Pancake Day at risk of dying out?
Why do we eat pancakes today?

Labels: cooking, seeing_doing

It's been a while since we cooked for friends, but last night we had our mates Kevin and Caroline for dinner. On the menu was pancetta wrapped mozzarella with fig jam, followed by duck breast and mango salsa, with molten chocolate puddings for dessert.

Of course there was plenty to drink, and our hangovers were cured by a morning walk along the river and a fry-up in the very classy Asda cafe.

Then, Sharon and Andy came over to see us this afternoon with their beautiful baby Callum - he is soooooo cute! At seven months, he's not as floppy as he used to be. He's sitting up on his own and is smiling and kicking so I feel much more confident holding him.

It was a really lovely weekend.

Labels: cooking, seeing_doing

Dom has a week off before he starts his new job, so lucky me, I am getting my dinners cooked for me every night!

Monday was pot roast, Tuesday was spanish chicken with chorizo and last night was barbecue pork. All yum!

Labels: cooking

Nigella Express on Tuesday and Jamie At Home last night. Watching Nigella is not a nice experience. Some things are OK, like Monday's intense chocolate cookies but others make me feel sick, like the eggy-bread/doughnut concoction.

Jamie, on the other hand, has me salivating with every culinary creation:

Warm salad of roast duck & pumpkin with Asian-style dressing
Roast a duck for 2 hours at 180C, add a roasting tin full of squash, skin on, cut in wedges for the last 45 mins. Toast the squash seeds. Make a dressing from lime juice, olive oil grated chilli, grated garlic and spring onions. Tear the duck meat, put in a bowl with the squash, coriander and mint and dress. Construct the salad, sprinkle with the seeds, more dressing and finely sliced spring onion. Heaven on a plate!

Hearty winter pumpkin soup
Saute roughly chopped onion, celery, carrot (I think) and garlic in a pressure cooker/ large pan, add chopped pumpkin, fill 1 inch from top with chicken stock. Cook for 7 mins (pressure)/ 30 mins (pan). Blend, season. Serve with giant french bread paremesan topped croutons and crispy sage leaves. Easy.

Butternut squash muffins with a frosty top - so simple!

Labels: cooking

Dinner last night was inspired by Jamie Oliver's Wild Mushroom and Venison Stroganoff as featured on last week's episode of Jamie At Home.

We used beef instead of venison.

I haven't bought the book yet, but from memory, the recipe went like this:

Coat chunky strips of venison (or beef) in flour and smoked paprika (enough for 2 people), fry in a little butter and olive oil until browned. Remove from pan and, adding a little more oil if necessary, fry 1 finely chopped onion, 2 chopped cloves of garlic, the leaves from 2 sprigs of thyme and your chosen mushrooms (preferably wild) chopped in the same size chunks as the meat. When these have softened slightly, add about 3 tbspns of brandy (make sure the heat is high and take a minute to burn off the alcohol). Then, swirl in 2 tbspns of soured cream and add the meat back to the pan along with about a tbsp of chopped gherkins. Season with salt and pepper (I found it needed quite a bit of salt). Allow to heat for a couple of mins before serving on a bed of fluffy white rice topped with a dollop of sourced cream and a handful of chopped gherkins.

Nice, but perhaps a bit too rich.

Labels: cooking

Nigella has never been one to skimp on luxurious, high-fat, high-sugar ingredients, and generally I don't have a problem with this. She's the one I turn to for cakes, biscuits, pies and other sumptuous treats. However, last night I caught the second half of her new show and I cringed with disgust at some of her concoctions.

The squid was good, an easy coating, a quick fry and some simple garlic mayonnaise. More than acceptable as a starter or dinner party snack.

The pork chops with gnocchi - what?! - I thought the idea was to give us things that are better than pre-packaged convenience foods. Obviously she wasn't thinking better in a healthy way, as she fried the pork, coated it with cream, boiled the (ready made) gnocchi and coated it with cream. Better in what way exactly? The most negative aspect of convenience foods, for me, is the lack of nutrients, but where were they in Nigella's pork dish? To top it off she tried to look cool by balancing the pork plate on her knee and eating with a fork whilst reading a handful of pretend paperwork. It's a good job the camera turned away before she attempted the chops with the fork alone - not pretty.

As if this wasn't bad enough the show climaxed with Nigella creating a sorry version of a bread and butter pudding using some stale croissants, sugar and... wait for it... more double cream. After chowing down on the first bowl, she them came back in her dressing gown to polish off the rest of the baking dish, topped off with MORE DOUBLE CREAM!

Maybe I should be applauding her for defying the current movement for wholesome, nutritious food, but she wasn't doing anything imaginative enough to fly that flag. She was putting together lazy fodder that wouldn't even make the grade on Ready Steady Cook then taking it to bed with her in a way that conjored up images of Fat Bastard covered in chicken grease. "I'm dead seeeexxxy, look at ma seeexxxy body!"

Labels: cooking

After drooling over Jamie Oliver's BBQ on Jamie At Home last week, we just had to use the opportunity of what felt like the first and what could have been the last of the 2007 summer to try out his delicious marinade recipe.

I crushed the cumin seeds, cloves, paprika, fennel seeds, rosemary, thyme, garlic, pepper and salt, then mixed with red wine vinegar and tomato ketchup.

Unfortunately we do not have any independent butchers nearby so we had to settle with pork ribs from Asda (don't even get me started on the state of supermarket meat). I rubbed in the marinade and left in the fridge for a few hours. These were accompanied by my homemade beef burgers - yum!

We still haven't got round to buying a barbecue, at first we toyed with a gas one, then came back to the idea of traditional charcoal, looking at a classic Weber, but we didn't like the size and the circular shape, plus it would be good to have something we could take camping as well as our stove. The funky versatile Son of Hibachi would be just about right, and I've found one for £49 inc. delivery.

Our (very) brief summer is probably over now though, so a party sized instant BBQ had to suffice.

All in all a scrumptious outdoor feast!

Labels: cooking, seeing_doing

For some reason, out of all the herbs I have planted, my flat leaf parsley has really flourished. Trouble is, I have no idea what uses it has. As it turns out, someone else has the same problem.

Now, I have two good ideas: tabouleh and parsley pesto.

Labels: cooking

The other night I watched the first of the new series, Jamie At Home and boy was it good. Don't get me wrong, I fully support Jamie's mission with school meals and I enjoyed Fifteen, but it was much more satisfying just watching him cook instead. The first episode focussed on tomatoes and he really had me salivating. Can't wait for next week!

As if I hadn't had enough culinary inspiration, last night began Rick Stein's Mediterranean Escapes. WOW. Rick can sometimes be a bit fishy for me, but the Corsican goat kid with roast figs and tomatoes and the Sardinian pasta dishes were drool-city. The combination of travel and food around the Med is going to make for a great series.

Labels: cooking

When I was a child, sometimes my mum would make mince, served with mashed or boiled potatoes and vegetables. I had completely forgotten about this very unsophisticated, school dinner-style meal, but last night, I decided to make it. Boy did it bring back memories. What a wonderful hearty comfort food.

What has happened to this and other basic British staples? It’s so easy and quick to make it could be called convenient, yet it seems to have lost out to foods that are even more so. There is no doubt that the balance between convenience and good eating has tipped too far. Schools have some part to play in providing good nutritional food for children, but so do families. When I was growing up, pizzas and oven chips were only just appearing in the supermarket freezers, and other super-convenient oven and microwave-ready options didn’t exist. Now there are too many to choose from, but there is a choice.

Serves 4

800g good quality beef mince
2 onions
2 beef stock cubes
1 tin of baked beans
About 100 ml water
1 tblsp sunflower oil

Cut the onions in quarters and slice, fry in a little oil until softened. Add the mince, fry until browned. Crumble the stock cube over the mince and pour in the water, enough to almost cover. Add the beans (you could add carrots or peas instead), simmer for 10 mins.

Good with mashed potatoes, or dumplings, and vegetables e.g., cabbage or broccoli.

Labels: cooking

I've just baked these gorgeous chocolate brownies. It's the first time I've attempted brownies, as they've never really appealed to me before, but I decided to give them a go to see what all the fuss is about and they are pretty damn good I can tell you.

I used the recipe from my 'Cook With Jamie' book, but I see that he has also published the recipe on his website. I wasn't able to get any sour cherries, and I think they would add a nice tang, but they still taste divine!

Labels: cooking

When I have exams to study for I often find myself getting distracted by leisurely things like baking.

I have just baked a Lemon Drizzle Loaf. So I am loafing in more ways than one, when in actual fact I should be using my loaf and focussing on study.

Here is the recipe, taken from Olive Magazine

Heat the oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4. Line the base and ends of a 900g/2lb loaf tin with baking parchment.

Cream 200g unsalted softened butter with 150g caster sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the zest of two lemons. Gradually add 3 beaten eggs, mixing well between each addition. Sift 200g plain flour with 2 level tsp baking powder then fold into the cake mixture with 50g ground almonds. Add 2tbsp milk and the juice of 1 lemon and mix until smooth.

Spoon the mixture into a 2lb loaf tin lined with baking parchment. Bake for 1 hour 10 minutes or until golden brown and a skewer pushed into the middle of the cake comes out clean. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes.

Mix the juice of 3 lemons with 3 tbsp granulated sugar. Slowly spoon it over the top of the warm cake. Leave in the tin until completely cold. Serves 8

Labels: cooking

Dom told me he had gone up north with work yesterday, but when I got home, there he was, along with a lovely bunch of tulips (my favourite flower) and he cooked me the most gorgeous risotto (which is, I think, if I can possibly narrow it down to one, my favourite meal).

It was quite low key, because pressures of work and study are sapping both our energies at the moment, but it was very sweet.

Labels: cooking, seeing_doing

Found a new blog and a new recipe to try. Yum.
Farmgirl Fare: Savory Cheese & Scallion Scones

Labels: cooking

Life is a bit hectic at the moment. After a law exam in early Jan, I have a new job role to learn at work and it's proving challenging, plus, another law exam on 4th March just before we go to Thailand. I am in college this weekend, so there has been lots of prep for that and some coursework to hand in.

A couple of weeks ago we had some friends for dinner and I pulled off these amazing chocolate puddings for dessert, which are molten in the middle. We have more friends over next weekend so I will take some pics and post the recipe.

Dom knocked a wall out in our downstairs toilet yesterday so that he can replace it today in a different way that will give us a cupboard for coats, shoes and bags etc at the front door.

I cooked a huge pile of Chinese food last night in celebration of Chinese New Year(nothing special, but it hit the spot). On Friday night I cooked (what I thought was) an Austrian dish in celebration of Mozart's birthday (really not bothered about Mozart but was the bext distraction I could find from watching the final of Celebrity Big Brother). It involved braising sausages, cabbage, carrots, onion and apple in dark beer (I used Guiness) with caraway seeds. I remembered this flavour from when I was in Prague a few years back. I had no idea it was caraway seeds. As it turned out the recipe was German, but who cares, it was perfect to warm us up with this freezing cold weather we are having.

Labels: cooking

I made mince pies and brought them in for everyone at work yesterday. My mince pie recipe is, without doubt, the best in the world. We only have a half day at work today and then a nice long holiday, during which, unfortunately, I have lots of legal revision to do for an exam on 7th Jan. Poor me. There will always be time for wine though.

Labels: cooking

Yesterday I baked our Christmas cake. I swapped recipes half way through and substituted some of the the fruit and nuts for whatever I had left in the cupboard so I have no idea whether it will turn out OK.

I should have baked it before now, so there isn't time to feed it with brandy.

I will decorate it later in the week.



I decorated it on Christmas Day. Not my original plan, but it looks OK and tastes pretty good too!

Labels: cooking

Not only had I never carved a pumpkin (until a few days ago), but I had also never made anything with pumpkins. I found a recipe for pumpkin pie and until I read it, I have to admit I had assumed that it was a savoury thing, but no.

Sunday afternoon, with missing spices and the wrong sized tin I cobbled together something that looked convincing, but having never tasted pumpkin pie before, I don't know if I got it right! All I can tell you is that it tasted better with Creme Fraiche than with double cream. Yum.

Labels: cooking

Scrummy!

Labels: cooking

Dom's amazing giant Yorkshire pud and his delicious Sunday dinner lovingly served to me last weekend. Aren't I a lucky girl!

Labels: cooking