Sticky Sausage, Carrot and Cous Cous Bake

Sausages are a great family food at this time of year, perhaps due to the association between bangers and bonfire night. It's also nice when you can just throw things into a pan in the oven at this time of year and enjoy some warming flavours.

I came across this recipe on the Tesco website for sticky sausages with carrots and couscous - not things I would have thought to combine, but it was really good and something I will definitely make again.

To serve 4 (or fewer, depending on how many sausages you want per person) you need:
8 pork sausages
150g Tendersweet carrots, halved lengthways - I used regular carrots though Chantenay carrots would also be good
1 red onion, sliced
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1 tbsp. olive oil
2 tsp clear honey

for the couscous:
200g couscous
1 tbsp. fresh mint leaves, chopped
1 tbsp. fresh parsley, chopped
1 tbsp. olive oil
1/2 lemon, juiced

For the harissa yogurt

1 tbsp harissa paste

150g pot natural yogurt

 

Preheat oven to 200C. Line a roasting tin with foil and put the sausages, carrots and onions in the pan and toss with the cumin, coriander and oil. Roast for 30 minutes, turning halfway, until cooked through.

 

 

 

Make up the couscous according to pack instructions and leave to stand until all the water has been absorbed. Mix in the herbs, oil and lemon juice.

 

To make the harissa yogurt, mix the harissa paste into the yogurt. When the sausages are cooked, drizzle over the honey and toss the sausages and vegetables until they are coated. Serve with the couscous and harissa yogurt on the side.

 

I'm sharing this with Charlotte's Lively Kitchen's Food Calendar challenge as it was British Sausage Week when I made this recipe.

Mango, Papaya & Passionfruit Yogurt Gluten-Free Cookies

I like to bake things to take into work but we are a pretty small team which, combined with the fact that I’m on a pre-wedding diet, means I’m not really making a lot of cakes for work. But recently I’ve heard a few people say they must remember to buy some biscuits to bring in or something so I thought it was a good excuse to bake. I remembered at 10pm one evening that we had a team meeting the next day so decided to do something very quick and simple, which also had to be gluten free for one of my colleagues.

 

I still had some Onken mango, papaya and passionfruit yogurt left from this fruity yogurt brulee

and wondered if you could put yogurt into cookies, since you can put it into cake. Turns out you can! I created my own recipe using basic ingredients plus the yogurt and they turned out well, though they were absolutely huge and looked more like rock cakes than cookies – they actually have a very cakey texture which is not quite what I was expecting but was really nice. The only gluten-free flour I had was self raising so I wondered if it would have been better using plain and I would have ended up with flat cookies, but I do actually like the way these turned out. These are great straight from the oven and also really good for breakfast!

 

Soft and fruity yogurt cookies – an original recipe by Caroline Makes

 

1 and ¼ cups gluten free self-raising flour

¾ cup caster sugar

1/3 cup Onken mango, papaya and passionfruit yogurt (or any other flavour)

50g butter or marg, softened

1 egg

 

Preheat oven to 180C. Mix the flour and sugar and stir in the yogurt. Then beat in the butter and the egg until you have a sticky dough.

 

 

Line a baking sheet with baking paper and place spoonfuls of the dough onto the paper, flattening them slightly. If you do them as big as I did you will have huge cookies, but then one of these and a cup of tea makes a very nice breakfast!

Bake for 15-20 minutes depending on the size - they should look baked but still be slightly soft.

 

I’m sharing these soft and fruity yogurt cookies with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker as the letter I have chosen is Y.

 

 

Fruity Yogurt Brulee Two Ways

The letter for this month's Alphabakes is Y, never an easy one - I've already managed to enter my Yule Log I made after Christmas that I hadn't blogged about until now. I also wanted to make something else, but with wedding planning (four months to go and counting!) I've been far too busy to bake.

So instead I decided to go for an easy dessert involving yogurt. I found a recipe in The Fairtrade Everyday Cookbook for a yogurt fruit brûlée - passion fruit on the bottom topped with Greek yogurt, which you mix with a little pomegranate juice, then top with brown sugar which you caramelise with a cook's blowtorch or under the grill.

I had some pomegranate to use up so didn't want to buy passion fruit as well - I'm terrible at buying fruit and not using it before it goes off. I did have the pomegranate juice as I had just been sent vouchers to buy some POM Wonderful pomegranate juice to review. It's made from 100% pomegranate (made from concentrate) - did you know that pomegranates are a good source of all of these?:

Vitamin C

Vitamin K

Fiber

Potassium

Folate

Copper

I mixed a dash of pomegranate juice with fat free Greek style yogurt and spooned it into a ramekin on top of some pomegranate seeds.

I sprinkled a generous coating of brown sugar on the top but using my blowtorch didn't make the sugar caramelise, just burn in places- as you can see it was literally on fire at one point!

Once I'd stopped and scraped off the burnt bits, and added some more pomegranate seeds on top, it did taste quite good, but I decided I needed to make this again using caster sugar, which I know does caramelise properly with a blowtorch.

This time I cut up a ripe pear and placed pieces of it in the bottom of a ramekin and topped it with some flavoured yogurt - Onken's mango, papaya and passion fruit flavour.



I sprinkled caster sugar on top and caramelised it - properly this time - with my cook's blowtorch. It tasted delicious and would be great as a dessert or even breakfast!

I'm sharing my yogurt brûlée with Alphabakes, the challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter this month is Y.

Low fat Banoffee Cheesecake

I made this banoffee cheesecake for a Slimming World food tasting, as I don't like bananas so it seemed a good opportunity to try out the recipe (as other people would be eating it!). I should have covered the top completely in sliced banana, I realise now, but I think it still looks OK like this.

The recipe came from the Slimming World website; it serves 8 and has 6 syns per serving on all plans.

You need:
10 reduced fat digestive biscuits, crushed
5 level tbsp low fat spread
2 x 12g sachets gelatine
250g quark
3 x 175g pots Mullerlight toffee yogurt
3-4 tbsp sweetener
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 egg whites
2 bananas, sliced

Preheat oven to 190C. Line a 20cm spring form cake tin with greaseproof paper.

Crush the biscuits in a food processor or a plastic food bag using a wooden spoon. Melt the low fat spread in a small pan and add the crushed biscuits and stir well to coat. Press into the base of the tin and flatten the surface. Bake in the preheated oven for 15 mins then leave to cool completely.

Dissolve the gelatine in 5 tbsp boiling water. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff.

Then whisk in the quark, yogurt, sweetener and vanilla and finally the gelatine liquid.

 Spoon over the biscuit base, smooth the top and chill for 5 hours or overnight until set.

To serve, decorate with sliced bananas.

Roast Chicken and Yogurt Sauce and Homemade Pitta Breads

This is one of the best meals I've had in ages at home and it's so simple. It's perfect for a sunny day when you don't want a barbecue but you don't just want a salad; it's perfect if there are just a couple of you or if you need to feed a crowd.

I went to Hobbs House Bakery and spent a day cooking with the Fabulous Baker Brothers last weekend, which was wonderful - I'm in the process of writing a lengthy post about it! We baked different types of bread in the morning with Tom and tackled butchery in the afternoon with Henry. One of the things we made was pitta breads, which were so easy and tasted delicious straight from the oven - if you've only ever had shop-bought pitta breads then you don't know what you're missing!

I wanted to make pittas at home so I used the recipe from the first eponymously titled Fabulous Baker Brothers cookery book. I made eight or nine pittas from this recipe.

You need:

560g strong white flour

10g salt

300ml tepid water

20ml oil

5g dried yeast or 10g fresh yeast

I bought a small bag of flour from Hobbs House; Shipton Mill is in Tetbury in Gloucestershire, near Hobbs House and this is the flour that Tom Herbert uses. I also had some fresh yeast, which I have never come across before - does anyone know where you can buy it? Tom had some left over from what we used in the class and he gave us each about 50g to take home.

You simply mix the ingredients and form a dough, then you have to knead it for a full 15 minutes. Or if you have a Kitchenaid or similar machine with a dough hook, leave it running for ten minutes and at the end you have a lovely pliable ball of dough.

Cover with clingfilm or put a plastic shower cap over the bowl so it has room to rise. Put in a warm place for an hour until the dough has doubled in size.

Preheat your oven to the absolute highest temperature it will go. Put a baking tray or baking stone in the oven to get hot - you don't want to put your pittas on a cold tray then put it in the oven. Interestingly, a baking stone - which I had never heard of - is the same as a pizza stone but rectangular. So if you have a pizza stone you can use that for baking bread. Unfortunately I am in the process of selling my house and buying another so my pizza stone - along with a lot of other things - is in a storage unit. So I used a baking tray instead.

Another tip from Tom: weigh out pieces of dough so you have 100g each then your pittas will be the same size. Roll out on a lightly floured surface to a pitta bread shape.

Place on the oven tray or baking stone and you will see the pitta breads literally puff up. They only take a few minutes to cook so keep an eye on them - they are done when they are risen and slightly brown on top. Place on a wire rack to cool.

 I got eight or nine from the dough.

I decided to serve these with roast chicken, which you could serve either hot or cold. On a whim I bought a whole chicken with a piri piri rub from the Co-op that morning and roasted it in the oven so it would be ready just before I wanted to cook the pittas.

I made a virtuous sauce from fat-free plain yogurt and a little garlic puree, and spooned this along with some rocket into my pitta bread, and tore off the chicken with my hands and filled the pitta.

I served my chicken, rocket and yogurt pitta with some lettuce and some potato salad. It tasted delicious and was a fantastic dinner for a summer's evening.

Slimming World-style Apple Creme Brulee

This dessert was inspired by one from the Slimming World Love Desserts recipe book but adapted to fit the ingredients I had in the house. I made it for a food tasting at my Slimming World group and was meant to use sliced mango for the base. I thought I had a tin of mango in the cupboard but the night before found it was mango puree, and I didn't have time to go shopping again, so I decided to use apples instead! It worked fine and while it isn't my favourite dessert I have ever made, it is pretty healthy and is a nice light alternative. The recipe I used was for individual desserts but I made this in one large dish as it is easier to share at food tasting.

Serves 4

3 apples, peeled and sliced

300g fat free Greek-style yogurt

4 tbsp sweetener

a few drops of vanilla flavouring

4 tbsp caster sugar

Each serving is 3 syns on all choices

Slice the apples and layer in the bottom of a dessert serving bowl.

Mix the yogurt, sweetener and vanilla and spoon over the apple.

Sprinkle the caster sugar over the top, and caramelise using a cook's blowtorch or a hot grill.

And that's all you need to do! The caramelised sugar on top gives a lovely snap when you dig in with a spoon and it's nice to have a slightly naughty topping on what is otherwise a very virtuous dessert.

I'm sending this to Dead Easy Desserts, hosted this month by Utterly Scrummy and created by Maison Cupcake, as this dessert is very easy and probably takes no more than about ten minutes to make.

Rosewater Mini Rose Bundt Cakes

These rosewater cakes were made in a mini bundt tin but you could also make them as cupcakes with rosewater buttercream frosting. The cakes have a surprise on the inside - they are bright pink! I made them for a colleague's birthday as I knew she wouldn't want a big cake and a lot of fuss but I wanted to make something. I received the Nordicware mini rose bundt tin for Christmas and wanted to try it out as well!

I thought rosewater would be the perfect flavour to go with the rose cake tin. When I want to find a recipe using a specific ingredient I am more likely to turn to the internet than a recipe book- books are great for browsing but it can take a long time to find a specific recipe if you don't know where to look! I found this recipe on the Australian website Taste.com.au but did not include the frosting, and I used vegetable oil instead of canola oil.

You need:

1 cup vegetable oil (250ml)

1 and 1/2 cups caster sugar (330g)

2 eggs

1 cup plain yogurt (280g)

2 cups self-raising flour (300g)

2 tbsp rosewater

pink food colouring

Preheat the oven to 180C. Mix the oil, sugar and eggs in a large bowl.

Gently mix in the yogurt then the flour.

I then added the pink food colouring.

Here's a close-up of the Nordicware bundt tin I got for Christmas, it's very pretty!

And here you can see the side view

I sprayed each indent in the tin with Dr. Oetker Cake Release:

Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes. The cakes came out of the tin perfectly thanks to the Cake Release, and you can clearly see the rose shape - I was really pleased with these.

I had enough mixture for a second batch but had run out of Cake Release so instead I used Fry-Light. I thought a spray oil would work better than greasing the tin with butter as it would get in all the nooks and crannies. I also thought that using Fry-Light would probably be no different to Cake Release, but I was very wrong! Fry-Light is obviously an oil for cooking and you can see from the picture below how dark the cakes using Fry-Light came out. They still came out of the tin easily, but they cooked for the same length of time - of course, the oven would have been hotter for the second batch, but I think using oil instead of Cake Release meant they were overdone. I'll go back to using Cake Release in future!

Despite everyone thinking the darker cakes were chocolate, they went down well at work. I sprinkled the tops with edible red glitter for a little extra pizazz. Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of the inside as they were bright pink from the food colouring! The rosewater taste was quite subtle but I think definitely there, and the shape of the cakes was a real talking point.

There are several blog challenges this month that this recipe is perfect for. Firstly, Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel at Dollybakes and Laura at Laura Loves Cakes, as their theme is l'amour. (That's love, for non-French speakers!)

Secondly, I'm sharing this with Cakeyboi for Treat Petite, as the theme is Valentine's treats for your loved ones.

Four Seasons Food is focusing on "food from the heart" this month so I think these mini rose cakes fit nicely with the theme. The challenge is hosted by Anneli at Delicieux and Louisa at Eat Your Veg.

Finally a new challenge, Love Cake, hosted by Jibber Jabber. Rose-shaped cakes are certainly evocative of love and passion - the theme this month is baking with passion.