Category: FOOD

Soft cake with jam

This recipe is extremely easy to do, you can do no wrong! It comes from a famous italian cooking program called ‘Cotto e mangiato’ (meaning cooked and eaten). It was my cousin who gave it to me, and she’s no cook believe me! You can choose any jam you like to garnish; I used a berries and cherries preserve which is one of my favourite. There is a lot of butter in this cake, so it is a bit heavy to have it for breakfast, but it goes very well with an afternoon tea. One thing I would change from the original recipe is the amount of sugar, 100g are more than enough especially if you are using a very sweet jam.
 
 
We all liked this cake, and by the time it was cooled down completely there was only half left!
Happy baking 🙂

Hazelnut and raisin bread

Lately, I have been looking for recipes to use all those Christmas leftover nuts that have been lingering around my kitchen for too long now.
There are plenty of appetizing dishes over the internet and I couldn’t really decide if I wanted to use them to add flavor and texture to a main course or add some protein in a dessert type of dish.
I came across an interesting recipeto make bread packed with raisins and hazelnut. The ingredients were readily available (apart from the walnut oil, which I replaced with extra virgin olive oil), but the instructions were a bit fiddly, so I made some changes to make the recipe quick and easy to do, which is more to my taste. That’s what you need.
 
 
 
 

 The bread turned out to be great for our morning breakfast. Mr G is not a big fan of raisins and wasn’t overly excited about it, but Olivia and I loved it. We ate it as it is, but it should be delicious toasted and very lightly buttered, that’s for tomorrow to try!

Blueberry muffins recipe

This is a very quick and easy recipe, you can’t go wrong! I somehow managed to do the mixing and the baking while Olivia was having dinner last night, and that, believe me, it’s a proof of what I’m saying!
It had been a while since I made muffins, or baked anything for that matter…and really after the holidays it has been a relief not having any evening treat lying around the house. But last night felt like we needed some homemade cake and with only one egg in the fridge, muffins were the answer. We did enjoyed them in front of the tv last night with a glass of milk and at breakfast this morning with espresso.

Pumpkin, pine nuts & honey cake

My mum got us a big pumpkin from the farmers market last week. The intention was, as one would expect, to carve it, make a pumping soup with the flesh and maybe toast the seeds, in time for Halloween. But life had other plans, so the weekend passed and by monday morning the pumpkin was still waiting for some attention on the kitchen table.
Then yesterday I went to the supermarket after work and grabbed one of those promotional booklets which had an entire section dedicated to pumpkin recipes, and there it was…a new recipe for a pumpkin cake. But best of all, I had all the ingredients needed at home (except for the eggs, which I realised half way through the baking process and had to rush to the off licence!). So, after putting little miss O to bed last night, I did some long due baking and enjoyed a slice while watching the new season of Revenge. 
This recipe will definitely go into my book!

Wholemeal bread

        
We got used to eat amazing bread while we were in Italy, and now that we are back in the UK we can’t really get adjusted to the local one. So we are baking our own. I must say, we had a breadmaker for over three years now, but never really liked the results; it’s useful to do mixing, but the cooking bit is disappointing. So I started to use the oven instead, but with a little trick…..pizza stone! 
And it works magic!
No excuses for not eating fresh bread everyday now 🙂