Easy Veggie Nuggets

These veggie nuggets are aimed at children but I think would be just as good for adults - and I wonder if instead of shaping into individual nuggets or patties, it would work made into a log and sliced - a bit like a nut roast for Sunday dinner.

The recipe came from an Instagram account called @zaynesplate - it’s really easy to make and you can adapt it with your own vegetables. You can see the recipe here.

I used broccoli, carrots, chickpeas, rolled oats and cheese as the recipe suggests. I think if you were making this for adults or older children I wouldn’t blend it and would leave the texture more varied, and perhaps add sweet corn as well. My daughter enjoyed these and there was plenty left to go into the freezer for next time.

Sticky Ginger and Apple Flapjacks

When I was a child I remember my mum and sister making some flapjacks that were so sticky, we were picking bits of kitchen towel off them as we ate - they had been kept in a Tupperware dish lined with kitchen paper and were almost oozing with golden syrup.

I love sticky, soft flapjack, but not that soft - they need to hold together and be slightly chewy at the edges but soft and buttery in the middle. This recipe offers just that.

These were made in preparation of my sister and her partner coming to visit to meet their new niece, and even though I only made them the day before, about half the pan had been eaten before they even arrived!

The recipe is based on one from Good Housekeeping's The Baking Book; I halved the quantities but also added grated apple for extra flavour as I had a few apples that needed using up. The result was absolutely delicious and the texture was perfect.

Here's what I did:
You need:

175g butter or marg (I used Stork)
135g caster sugar
120g golden syrup
225g rolled oats
1 tsp ground ginger
2 apples, peeled and grated

Preheat oven to 175C. Grease and line a square cake tin.

Heat the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan over a gentle heat until melted. Stir in the rolled oats, ginger and apple until combined.

Spoon into the cake tin and press down gently to spread the mixture out and flatten it. Bake for 30 minutes until the edges have turned golden brown and slightly crispy; the middle will still be soft and sticky.

 

 I'm sharing this with Only Crumbs Remain
 and CookBlogShare.
 

 

Nutty Pear Crumble with Haagen-Dazs Honey, Walnut and Cream

I love crumbles - they are very wintery puddings, aren't they? Often served with cream, custard or ice cream, apple crumble is one of my favourite desserts.

When I was sent a voucher to try out a new flavour of Haagen-Dazs ice cream - Honey, Walnut and Cream - I thought a crumble would be a lovely thing to make to serve with it. I decided to try something a bit different and use pear instead of apple, and mirror one of the flavours of the ice cream by adding some nuts.

The ice cream is very creamy with a swirl of honey in the middle for an added hit of sweetness. The walnuts add a nice crunch and you get a different mixture of flavours in every spoonful. It's really good on its own, and works really well with desserts as it wouldn't overpower the flavour of the pudding you serve it with.

I remembered a Weightwatchers recipe for crumble I'd once made, that used rolled or porridge oats in the topping as well as flour and sugar as a way to use less of the latter two ingredients; I decided to add some oats and some chopped nuts into my crumble topping for a filling, warming winter crunch.

To serve 2, you need:
2 pears
1 tbsp. artificial sweetener (optional)
50g low fat spread
50g plain flour
25g caster sugar
25g chopped mixed nuts
25g rolled or porridge oats
Haagen-Dazs Honey, Walnut and Cream ice cream, to serve

 

Preheat oven to 180C (it's good to make this while you already have the oven on to make dinner - it's lovely after a roast!). Peel and slice the pears and place in a saucepan with 100ml water. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer until the water has evaporated and the pe
ars have softened. Add sweetener if desired.

Spoon the pears into an ovenproof dish and set aside.

Rub the low-fat spread and flour together in a bowl to make a breadcrumb texture then stir in the sugar, nuts and oats. Scatter over the dish with the pears and bake in the oven for 30 minutes until browned and crisp.

 

Serve warm, with Haagen-Dazs Honey, Walnut and Cream.

Delicious Alchemy Gluten-free, Dairy-free Oaty Cookies

One of my work colleagues is gluten intolerant but most of the bakes I’ve brought into work recently have been things I’ve made to have at home and had some left, and I thought it was about time I actually made something gluten free.

 

Every so often I purchase a Degustabox – it’s a monthly subscription service but you can dip in and out, which I have reviewed (after buying with my own money) before. I had one of their boxes a couple of months ago which included a packet of gluten-free cookie mix so one evening – given I’m always short of time after work – I decided to make the cookies.

 

The company behind these mixes is called Delicious Alchemy; they make cake and bread mixes and cereals as well and have a limited edition Christmas fruit cake mix available at the moment as well. It was started by a computer games producer who discovered she was coeliac and went off to university to study food science and marketing. They’ve launched products in Sainsburys and Waitrose and they are also available through their website. I’d never come across the company before but I love their colourful packaging and fun approach – the company history timeline has an anecdote about how the founder discovered she was coeliac (an ear of wheat down her sock!) and another about the time the company accountant got stuck in a lift.

 

The mix I had, the Oaty Cookie mix, was so easy to make. All you do is mix the contents of the bag with melted butter and water – you can also make these cookies vegan by using a butter-substitute which is what I did, after hearing that another colleague also can’t eat gluten or dairy.

 

I got 9 cookies out of the mixture and they were so quick and easy to make, and tasted pretty good too. I think they would have been better with butter and they were not particularly sweet – which is a good thing as it makes them feel a bit healthier. Also, my colleague said that often gluten-free products are packed full of sugar and she finds them too sweet, so she really likes these. In fact when I told her about the packet mix I’d used, she went on to the company’s website and ordered some herself!

I'm sharing these with Treat Petite, hosted by Kat the Baking Explorer and Stuart at Cakeyboi, as their theme this month is autumn, and I think there is something very autumnal and warming about oats.

 

Chocolate and Ginger Oaty Cookies

It's my Grandad's birthday and since I won't be seeing him for a few more weeks I wanted to send him home-baked something in the post. I also wanted to make something I could enter in We Should Cocoa, where this month's theme was ginger (and chocolate) so I looked online and found a recipe for chocolate and ginger cookies, which I adapted slightly. I probably should have halved the recipe as well as I ended up with a lot of cookies - about 20 large ones - and as there were too many to fit into the posting box, I had to sample a few. I can happily vouch for the fact that these cookies are very nice!

I got the original recipe from the BBC Food website. You can find it here.

For my adapted recipe, you need:

(And it may be worth considering halving the quantities)

225g butter

100g golden syrup

200g brown sugar

150g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

4 tsp ground ginger

2 tsp ground cinnamon

400g rolled oats

100g bag Dr Oetker chocolate chunks

2 eggs

175g crystallised ginger

300g dark chocolate

Heat the butter and golden syrup in a small pan until melted

Mix the brown sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, ginger and cinnamon

Stir in the rolled oats. It looks like a lot at this stage but trust me, it works!

Mix in the melted butter and golden syrup. At this point the mixture tastes exactly like Hob Nobs!

Though this wasn't in the original recipe, I decided to add in a bag of Dr. Oetker chocolate chunks I was sent for review. These come in a 100g bag and are widely available in supermarkets.

I was expecting these to be like chocolate chips but instead they are almost square-shaped chunks and made of a tasty dark chocolate. I like the fact that they are bigger than chocolate chips.

Next beat two eggs then add to the cookie mixture.

The recipe called for stem ginger but I couldn't find any in my local supermarket, so got this crystallised ginger from a health food shop instead.

Chop it into pieces and add to the cookie mixture

Shape into balls and press down onto a greased and lined baking tray

Bake at 180C for about 15 minutes; they may need longer depending on the size of the cookie.

Melt some chocolate; I used a small deep dish as this was easier for dippping.

Dip half of each cookie into the chocolate and allow to set on a wire rack

You can see how well the Dr. Oetker chocolate chunks hold their shape inside the cookie. I will definitely use these again!

I packaged these up in a box I bought from the Post Office to send to my Grandad

I also added some Palmiers I had made the day before, and of course a birthday card.

I'm sending these to We Should Cocoa, the blog challenge created by Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Tea Pot.  This month the guest host is Jen of Blue Kitchen Bakes and she has chosen ginger as the ingredient.

Jammy Flapjacks

I'm sure I'm not alone in having half-empty packets and jars at the back of the cupboard, whether it is an ingredient I bought for a particular recipe or something I've simply forgotten I had... so I was pleased when I saw this month's Random Recipe challenge from Dom at Belleau Kitchen. What's more, it's a thrifty challenge which is always a good thing!

He asked us to "open up the cupboard door, reach in deep and pull out the first thing you touch", and then choose a recipe using that ingredient. Now, I knew that I had neglected ingredients languishing at the back of the larder, and in the cupboard where I keep baking supplies, and in the fridge, and that if I had to choose one cupboard to root around in, I would be making a conscious decision already about what kind of ingredient to use (eg baking or savoury). So instead, I went through all my cupboards and made a list of all the long-forgotten ingredients I felt I ought to use up, and numbered them one to 31 (which made me feel quite guilty!). I then used a random number generator to pick one out, and discovered my random ingredient for this month was..... jam!

Now it doesn't particularly help that I don't like jam, which explains why I had a jar hanging around in the fridge drawer! I was racking my brains about what I could make using jam, and also whether there was another blogging challenge I could enter it in, to kill two birds with one stone. I then remembered that Homemade by Fleur is running a flapjack competition this month and I figured this would be a good way to use the jam.

I found a basic flapjack recipe on the internet to make sure I had the rough quantities right. To begin, I mixed 100g rolled oats, 30g plain flour and 50g ground almonds - another half-empty packet I had in the back of the cupboard!

Melt 75g butter and stir in, along with 1 tbsp golden syrup, mixing everything well.

Press about half the mixture into a greased and lined cake tin

Then spread over a thin layer of jam - I used strawberry.

Sprinkle the rest of the flapjack mix on the top and gently press down.

Bake in the oven at 180C for about 20 mins then cut into pieces. I had wanted to sprinkle some flaked almonds over the top but I couldn't find any. I'm sure I have a packet in the back of the cupboard which probably means I'll find them in six months time!

I did find the flapjacks didn't hold together quite as well as I'd hoped and next time I'd probably use more golden syrup but they didn't turn out too badly at all.

So I'm sending this to Belleau Kitchen for Random Recipes...

and to Homemade by Fleur's Challenge Flapjack

 

I am also sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Kate of What Kate Baked. Their theme for October is jam and preserves, and I originally thought that meant I would have to make jam or curd of some sort - which I've never done before, don't really like eating and haven't had time to do this month! But I tweeted and asked if a recipe including jam would count, even if I hadn't made the jam myself, and they very kindly said yes. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else made for this challenge!