Archive for Food and Drink

| 3 April, 2013
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Perfect Chocolate Brownies Recipe

Chocolate BrowniesI’ve had a go at making chocolate brownies many times over the years but the perfect chocolate brownies recipe has always eluded me. Last week though I came across a recipe which is absolutey brilliant and gives you the perfect brownies in less than 40 minutes! Just 15 minutes to prepare and 25 mins to cook!

Chocolate Brownies

75g plain chocolate (I used Bournville but it doesn’t matter if you use another one)

100g butter

125g caster sugar

3 eggs

125g self-raising flour

25g cocoa

1 tablespoon icing sugar

  • Heat oven to Gas 5 or 190C electric. Grease & line 20cm square tin
  • Put chocolate & butter into heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water to melt.
  • Whisk sugar and eggs together until frothy
  • Fold in the melted chocolate mixture
  • Pour into prepared tin and bake for 20 to 25 mins until risen and just firm. Cool and cut into 20 squares. If you want you can dust with icing sugar.

All that’s left to do now is eat them! Yummy!

Here’s another Chocolate Brownies Recipe which worked well for me.

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Category: Food and Drink | Tags:
| 26 January, 2013
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Afternoon Tea at The Park Plaza Cardiff

Champagne Afternoon Tea The Park Plaza Cardiff The Thumbs UpI’ve just come back in the house after a simply scrummy Afternoon Tea at The Park Plaza Cardiff! Such a civilised affair, oh so delicious and as Miranda’s friend would say ‘Such Fun!’. Mr. C was a bit outnumbered as the Laguna Kitchen & Bar  seemed to be ‘The Place‘ to go for girly gatherings and there were numerous tables where the glittery pink cupcakes et al were vying for attention amongst birthday presents and cards!

As soon as we arrived our smiley and efficient server Dylan showed us to our Afternoon Tea at The Park Plaza Cardifftable. We opted for the Veuve Clicquot Champagne Valentine’s Afternoon Tea which at £25 per person seems to be pretty average nowadays. My mouth was watering just reading the menu …. ‘Freshly Baked Warm Red Berry Vanilla Infused Scones‘  Mmmmmmm …. Put the ‘Cornish Clotted Cream & Strawberry Preserves’ into the equation and I was sold. The rose champagne arrived first and those first sips of bubbliness set the scene for a lovely hour or so.

Toasted Marshmallow & Coconut Lollipops sounded a bit different to your common-or-garden tea-time nibbles and they didn’t disappoint. And both of us were raving over the Welsh Cakes, which I swear were the nicest ones I’ve ever tasted. They were warm and buttery and The Thumbs Up to champagne jelliesalmost melted in the mouth. I’m not really into Macaroons but well when something chocolatey and cute is sitting in front of you you just have to try it, don’t you?

I know it’s the wrong way to do it but both of us ate our scones before dipping into the array of light finger sandwiches. They were warm and if we’d started on the sarnies first then our scones would have gone cold. Makes sense, yes?   Whoops – it’s tea we’re talking about and I nearly forgot to mention the actual ‘tea’. The usual suspects were on the Tea Menu and I predictably went for the Earl Grey which for me is the perfect accompaniment to afternoon tea.

The whole thing was a real 10 out of 10 affair and so it’s  definitely The Thumbs Up for Afternoon Tea at The Park Plaza Cardiff!

The Veuve Clicquot Champagne Valentine’s Afternoon Tea is available from now up until 17th February!

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Category: Food and Drink, Travel, Holidays and Hotels | Tags: , , ,
| 13 August, 2012
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Tesco Bakery Triple Chocolate Cookies

Tesco Bakery Triple Chocolate CookiesLoving the new cookies coming out of the Tesco Bakery.

The flavours include White Chocolate & Cranberry, Triple Chocolate, Dark Chocolate Chunk (YUMMY!!), Milk Chocolate, Oat & Raisin  and Fruit, Nut & Chocolate! At £1.50 for a pack of 4 you can’t go wrong. You pay more than that for one cookie in Starbucks!

Going up to Tesco for some bits and bobs later – reckon I might just have to pick up a packet of cookies at the Tesco Bakery while I’m there! Well, what’s a girl to do??

Some other Biscuit Reviews!

Category: Food and Drink | Tags: , , ,
| 28 May, 2012
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Olive Branch Olive Oil

OIive Branch Oilve OilTurns out there’s olive oil and then there’s OLIVE OIL – and Olive Branch do the latter version. Although I’ve been using olive oil for years, I don’t think I realised until recently how delicious a really good olive oil can be.

Olive Branch’s olive oil comes straight from the olive groves of Crete and as the people of Crete have one of the highest life expectancies in the world, then they are obviously eating lots of the right things & I think it’s safe to assume that olive oil is one of them! Olives are packed full of antioxidants so your free radicals will be banished with every mouthful.

The olive oil from Olive Branch is kind of peppery and citrussy at the same time and it tastes as good on its own as in cooking. Just dipping some nice fresh bread into it all on its own or with balsamic vinegar is really scrummy.

Apart from in cooking of course, olive oil has many other uses. After a Spring holiday in Sri Lanka, the skin on my legs went really dry. I had some reservations but thought I’d try a recommendation from a friend who suggested rubbing some olive oil on them. I did and it worked and No, it did not smell at all strange. Subsequently I’ve read about people who use it as a face moisturiser. Well I haven’t tried that yet but if I do, you’ll be the first to hear about it.

Category: Food and Drink | Tags: , ,
| 9 May, 2012
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Birthday Biscuits

Hearts BiscuitsCupcakes & macaroons are soooo last year!  Birthday Biscuits – that’s the way forward. It’s Maddie’s 21st this weekend and I was flicking through some recipe books looking for the most chocolatey, chocolate cake recipe I could find, when it struck me that I could make a load of fancy Chocolate Chip Cookies instead – way easier, a lot quicker & much more transportable for taking back to Uni with her!

Anyway there I was sitting at my computer and I absent-mindedly typed ‘birthday biscuits’ into Google and lo and behold, a whole new world of biscuits Cupcake Biscuitsopened up to me. I loved the biscuits offered up on the BiscuitVillage site and they seem to do biscuits for every occasion in the book.

Birthday Biscuits For Her are fun & fab! I looked there first for obvious reasons but I was well impressed with the tins of Thank You Biscuits, Anniversary Biscuits, Wedding Biscuits, Valentine’s etc. etc. …. you name the occasion and it turns out they do biscuits for it.

So if you’re wondering how you can surprise someone with something different, then BiscuitVillage.co.uk is well worth a sneaky peak.

 

Category: Food and Drink, Gifts | Tags: , , ,
| 30 April, 2012
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Sausages and Green Lentils

Sausages and Green LentilsAm planning on having Sausages & Green Lentils for dinner tonight. Who knows if it’ll turn out as yummy-looking as the pic but hey ho I can only try!
Here’s the Recipe.

Ingredients:
1 tbsp oil
8 sausages
1 large onion
2 garlic cloves
2 tbsp plain flour
900ml chicken stock
3 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp tomato puree
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
200g green lentils
2 bay leaves
Salt and pepper
Serve with some nice fresh crusty bread.

Method:
1. Heat a little oil in a frying pan, add chopped onion and cook till lightly browned & then add garlic and flour.
2. Stir in stock, sugar, tomato puree and vinegar, season and bring to the boil.
3. Put lentils and bay leaves in slow cooker, pour over hot stock mixture and add sausages.
4. Cover with lid and cook on Lowest oven setting for 5 hours or put in the slow cooker before you go to work.
5. Stir well then spoon into dishes, making sure to throw away the bay leaves.
6. Eat! (there should be enough food for 4!)

Some slow cooker recipes say you should brown the sausages first but it really makes little difference to the taste.

Category: Food and Drink | Tags: , ,
| 23 February, 2012
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YooMoo Fat Free Frozen Yogurt

YoomooJust a quickie to say who needs ice-cream any more now we know we can have oodles of yumminess with a fraction of the calories by choosing YooMoo fat free frozen yogurt instead?

We’ve got a YooMoo  near us in Cardiff, in the St David’s 2 Centre, and it’s kind of become as much of a fave shop for me and Mr. C as the Costa right next to it.

Every YooMoo is completely natural, fat free and probiotic as well. It states clearly on their site that ‘nothing has been taken out and no nasties have been added’ so good news all round really.

YooMoo has loads of different flavour combinations with names like SharingMoo, BabyMoo, MagnificentMoo and Berry TwistMoo to name but a few. I just had a ChocolateTwistMoo which consisted of scrummy belgian chocolate and Madagascan vanilla frozen yogurt, milk chocolate buttons & white chocolate buttons. I was tempted to go down the berries & granola route but once again chocolate won the day for me. Ah but I can console myself with the fact that at least the frozen yogurt was fat-free ……

Category: Food and Drink | Tags: , ,
| 30 January, 2012
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Aldi Chocolate

Aldi Choceur ChocolateI am not an OMG sort of person. In fact I’d go as far as to say I’ve never actually said or written it before. However Aldi Chocolate and  OMG seem to go together.

All the chocolate we’ve ever tried from Aldi has been really scrummy and believe me we’ve tried the lot!

Last year I bought their chocolate bunnies for Easter and at a third of the price of the Lindt ones, they looked and tasted just as good. Thing is. it’s cheap chocolate but it doesn’t taste like ‘cheap chocolate’. Can’t go wrong.

This Choceur Dark Hazelnut is less than a pound and is my all-time Aldi chocolate favourite!

Category: Food and Drink | Tags: , ,
| 11 January, 2012
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Chicken & Chorizo Stew Recipe

How scrummy is this Chicken & Chorizo Stew?! I was looking for some nice tasty recipes to pass onto my student daughters and you can’t get much easier than this!

All you need to make it is:

100g of diced,skinless chicken breastsChicken & Chorizo Stew
30g of chorizo, sliced
1/3 small red onion, sliced
1/2 small tin of chopped tomatoes
1 new potato (70g)
1 tsp tomato puree
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1/2 tin of chickpeas, drained
200ml vegetable stock
1 tbsp vegetable oil

And all you have to do is:

1. Heat the oil in a saucepan and fry the onion and garlic for 2-3 minutes or until the onion is soft. Add the chicken and cook for 5 minutes or until slightly browned.

2. Add the chorizo and cook for about a minute. Stir in the chickpeas, potato, tomato, tomato puree and stock and bring to the boil. Lower the heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes, topping up with a little extra stock if required. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve immediately.

This amount serves one, is dead simple to make and costs under £2!
It only takes 5 mins to prepare and 30 mins to cook.

Serve with some nice crusty bread!

Category: Food and Drink, The Kids | Tags: , , , ,
| 9 December, 2011
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Sally Lunn’s Buns

Sally Lunn's cinammon bunLovely visit to Bath Christmas Market yesterday ostensibly to buy some last-minute bits & bobs for Xmas but really just to get in the Christmas mood.

It’s one of the best Christmas Markets in The UK but I’ve been to lots of the popular German ones and I think it’s better than many of them.

Sally Lunn’s Buns though was one of the day’s highlights. Apparently it’s one of the oldest houses in Bath so it’s worth a visit for that reason alone. But to be honest history didn’t come into it for me. I had the Cafetiere & Cinammon which was possibly the nicest breakfast I’d ever had. Sally Lunn’s buns have a texture a bit like brioche but taste slightly sweeter. I read that they are the original Bath Buns and mine was served with a kind of light and fluffy cinammon butter bubbling on the top of it! It was so scrummy.

Planning on trying the chocolate one next time.

Category: Christmas Blogs, Food and Drink | Tags: , , , ,
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