In which I stuff 'shrooms and baconate my vegetables

Imagine this with toasty browned cashews on...Good, right?

If I lived alone all the time, my weeknight dinner rota would read something like this; baked mushrooms, stirfry (might include mushrooms), pasta (mushroomy potential there), risotto (a few lonely dried porcini in the stock at least) and a friday night empty-fridge-panic induced takeaway. 
So yeah, I like my fungi. My insides probably look like a fairy grotto. Actually they probably look gross, 'cause they're insides. But metaphorically, at least, they're all pixies dancing round 'shroom rings.

Buuut I don't live alone, I live with a man who considers mushrooms a strange and unusual, nigh on suspicious ingredient and their very use in dinner is tantamount to a poisoning attempt. You must see my predicament. 
When I do cook for just me, one of my absolute favourites is a stuffed mushroom. My stuffed mushrooms have five components, each endlessly customisable but all utterly delightful and each contributing something to the plateful.

Kale and almond pesto

I bought more kale than one person can reasonably be expected to eat. I colcannoned, I baked crunchy, deliciously savoury kale crisps. Then I panicked. Thankfully, I became reasonable and used the power of Google to sort my life out.

Kale and almond pesto is a good student food because it substitutes much cheaper alternatives for the pricey basil and pine nuts in traditional pesto recipes. It freezes well (just put into portion sized balls first- I froze mine in a muffin tin!) and is really very good for you too. I made my recipe up as I went, so all measure are a little rough around the edges.

Playing swapsies with white chocolate, macadamia and cranberry cookies

Yes, that’s right, my first ever cookie swap, (actually, my first time sending anything edible in the mail- must carry on correcting that!) went without a hitch. 

Chocolate orange

My swap experience kicked off before I’d even made a single batch with a parcel from foodiebob. His crunchy chocolate orange cookies were gorgeous with a cup of tea- the perfect texture to hold up to a good dunking! These cookies were moreish and so easy to nibble on, they vanished the fastest of all three boxes. Generally, I make cookies with a little more squidge in them, which could explain why Tom made four of them vanish lickity-split; variety being the spice of life and all that.

triple chocolate-ginger biscotti

Speaking of spice, the most beautiful package I received was from Soup Tuesday, ginger and triple chocolate biscotti. I’ve actually never had biscotti before but they’re definitely something I’d have a bash at now, they kept for ages in a tin and stood up amazingly well after a morning in my bag, to be ready, unbroken, to have with my lunchtime coffee. The ginger was totally delicious too and, although, as a non-milk drinker, I couldn’t verify myself how good they are with the recommended glass of milk, Tom was happy to test (with over half the box) and reckons the combo couldn’t be beat.

beautiful biscotti wrapping

The last package I received was from Bakery Cottage and contained what was voted the house’s favourite overall (although out of the three of us, each had a different top choice, how diplomatic of us!) This hazelnut cookie, dipped in dark chocolate and rolled in chopped nuts, was so smooth and rich that one really should have been enough. That totally didn’t happen though, so these disappeared faster than anyone could say ‘So, when’re you making these then?’ You could almost taste the butter that’d been worked into these, and they just melted away.

hazlenut melts

And me? I made my brand new favourite squishy cookie recipe. I did try very, very hard with Florentines, but with a success rate of about 60% and Tom on hand to tell me that if he’d gotten fruit and almonds on a bit of chocolate when he was expecting cookies, he’d call trading standards, I scrapped that idea two days before the deadline and mass catered with my favourite flavour combinations. White chocolate and cranberry is a partnership I can be boring about for a long time (and already have been on this site), but the added crunch of macadamias was something new and I loved it!

White chocolate, macadamia and cranberry cookies

(makes about 15, so I had plenty left over from 3 batches!) 

250g of the chocolate, nut and fruit mixture. 

 (I used a choc:nut:berry ratio of 2:1:1, but really start mixing in a

separate bowl and see what looks good.)

300g sugar

(a mix of brown/white- I used 200g light brown and 100g golden caster)

170g butter

250g self raising flour

1/2 tsp salt

2tsp vanilla extract

1 egg, 1 yolk 

1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees C

2. Melt butter with the sugars. Let it cool.

3. Add vanilla and egg

4. Drop in the flour and salt and fold it in. 

5. Add in the bits.

6. Bake heaped tablespoons of the mixture for about 15 mins.

The cookies firm up a lot after they come out, so don't let them bake til set. If they look too underdone to get off the tray, chances are they're just peachy!

Blackberry-Ginger-Almond-Lemon Cake (or, why I took food to a food festival)

I blooming love blackberries, but I've always known them as a fleeting autumn treat, to be carefully predicted in order to perfectly time a trip down the road to the blackberry bushes. For years these lined an increasingly dark and overgrown cycle path near my house that I was absolutely forbidden to walk along at night in case 'strange men' were about. 
Well, my mother will be delighted to know that from this year, I have no reason to ever again tread the leaf littered walkway between brambles and wild garlic. The bushes have resolutely refused to blossom, and no blossom means no berries. Turns out eight foot high brambles need plenty of sunlight, and these are so dense they've been starving themselves out all summer. 
So it looked like me and blackberrying was destined to take a bit of a break in our annually renewed love affair. Until...
(If you've been reading back, you'll already know the plot twist I'm about to hit you with!)  
...Surprise! A beautiful fat branch from next door invading my garden to snag at my clothes, stain the towel on the washing line with fat drops of juice like blood and, most importantly, provide me with berries all summer. 
Not enough for a crumble, mind (although I did manage that once). Just a dozen or so at a time, too tantalising to freeze for later, but too few for anything I knew and loved from my years of filling plastic bags with the little beggars. So the 'what do I have in my cupboards' cake was born.

Blackberry-Ginger-Almond- Lemon Cake 

(all the quantities here are from the 'magic weight' method I described in all its simplistic glory here. This is a two egg magic cake)

1. Cream butter and sugar until soft, pale and fluffy.
2. Don't eat it with your fingers.
3. Add 2 eggs, beat like the devil between each one. Add a capful of almond essence.
4. Add the magic weight of flour. Don't beat.
5. Grate two pieces of crystallised ginger onto the flour, tossing it slightly to coat every so often so it doesn't stick in a lump. That would negate grating it from the big lump it was in before. 
6. Zest half a lemon, and plonk that on top of the flour. 
7. Mix it up to make it nice. (Pop goes the weasel). 
8. Kick yourself for not preheating the oven, then do it. 190 degrees seems to work nicely for me. 
9.Stir the blackberries into the cake mix. Give it a bit of welly so they break up a little and bits of the mixture goes pretty in purple. 
10. Line a baking tin with greaseproof paper. Here's the tricky bit. You know that rectangular baking tin? We're going to line it so that the paper folds up to make a wall partway across to make a square and a spare strip. 
11. Pour the mix into the square. Fill the spare strip with baking beans, rice, chickpeas, whatever you use. Just make sure it's baking beans, not baked beans. 
12. Bake for 40 mins, see if its done. If not, you know what to do. 


This tastes special to me, and unlike any cake I make on a regular basis. It has a rounded, full flavour from the almond, and a zing from the ginger that you can't quite place. I think any more would make this a proper ginger flavoured cake, and that's not what I was after. The lemon is sly, but lightens the spicy ginger and perks up the almond. The blackberries are a burst of sweetness between the teeth. Ginger and blackberry is a flavour I haven't had before, but it's a real winner.

Delicious yoghurt, shameful (freebie)second helping!

I was so proud of this, I took it to the Bristol Organic Food Festival for my discerning little sister to try. Accompanied by a basketful of strawberries and a mountain of festival free samples, we munched our way through a terrible lecture on sustainable fishing (I can't call it a cookery demo, they never got round to cooking anything), a potential Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall sighting and a brilliant day out, ended by taking a groaning carrier full of goodies back to Cardiff.