All About Me

I figured my bio needed updating now that I've had this blog for a year and a half. But, I asked myself, what's the point in changing it if you don't notice I've updated it? My clever solution, if I say so myself? Post it here for all you lovely people to read! I hope you enjoy an insight into me.

My name is Lily and I enjoy cooking for family and friends, especially if it involves baking (even better if it's about midnight and not a sensible time to be cooking). This is sounding like an AA introduction. I'd better start again.

Hi, Lily here, I'm 20 21 22 years old and I read French at the University of Manchester (currently on my ERASMUS year in Poitiers, France). My gap year was spent in Singapore where I finally got over my fear of spice and embraced Asian cuisine, helped by cookery classes in exotic locales such as Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia. When I'm not talking about food, I'm not really sure what I talk about. Asia? Books? Food? Oh wait, that's the subject I'm not meant to get started on. I began this blog to connect with other foodophiles and have somewhere to direct friends and family to when they ask for a recipe. Thai green curry and gooey chocolate chip cookies seem to be the most popular with my friends.

I have lots of gadgets in my kitchen but the one I love most is a bright orange KitchenAid mixer that gets pointed out if people don't admire it soon enough. My kitchen is also stocked with all sorts of weird and wonderful ingredients that I'm still working out how to cook with. Dried barberries, anyone? My inspiration for recipes, sadly, isn't delivered to me by David Bowie flying in on a tiger made of lightening, but comes from food magazines, recipe books and my mum (who cooks sensible yet tasty food like this lentil bake. No barberries for her).

Tastebuds are funny things and everyone's are different so if you want to tweak a recipe to your tastes then I won't hold it against you, and I'd love it if you would comment your changes so that I can give them a go, so long as they don't involve mushrooms. I hate mushrooms. Email me (lily.helen.carden@gmail.com) with requests for recipes and stalk me on Instagram (@gorgeousgateaux), I won't bite.

Join me on my crazy journey to make the best food I can; laughing  when it goes wrong and celebrating when it goes right.

Pasta And Pesto . . . Take One

The pasta went really well, in fact, I love home-made pasta. The pesto, on the other hand, well, it was a bit, alright, very, tasteless and an extremely odd colour (see picture below). Which is a shame really, as proper pesto is gorgeous. I'll try to make it again soon, but to a different recipe, the recipe I used was Theo Randall's one and it involved tipping everything into a blender.  Possibly not the best of ideas as you end up with a thick paste. Having said that, I think his other recipes are great and I might not have followed this one correctly. Oh well, Sam Stern's pesto recipe next, I'll let you know how it goes!

Pasta Recipe

Requires a stand mixer with dough hook and a pasta roller/cutter as I like my recipes to be fairly speedy, especially as this still takes 2 to 3 hours!!!

Basically you need one egg for every 100g and then add as much water as needed to make it stick together, and that will feed one hungry flatmate!

You have to prove the dough for 30 minute or so

For 2 to 3 people

Ingredients

200g pasta flour, also known as 00 flour, plus extra to stop it all sticking together when you roll it out

2 eggs

Water - how much depends on your dough

Method

Put the flour and eggs in the bowl of your mixer and attach the dough hook.

Mix them together until all the egg has joined the flour and then add water a little bit at a time until the dough comes together in one ball without getting sticky.

Then leave the mixer to work the dough for 5-7 minutes, checking occasionally to keep the dough from trying to escape up the hook as it is wont to do.

Take out and cover your dough with cling film and leave to rest for at least 30 minutes, the dough should feel fairly smooth and almost leathery (it's hard to describe but you'll know it when you feel it).

Get out the pasta roller and pull off a fifth of the dough from the ball before covering the rest back up.

Flour the small ball and flatten into a rectangle.

With the pasta roller on the widest setting, roll the rectangle through and then fold it in half, adding more flour.  Pass this through the roller again.

Repeat the above step 4-5 more times, as this kneads the dough again and it important for the taste and texture.

Move the roller to the next thinnest setting and put the dough through.

Continue this process of moving the roller settings until you achieve the desired pasta thickness.

Now, to cut the pasta, if you want lasagne sheets then just cut it with a knife to less than the size of your pan.  If you want spaghetti then either send it through the spaghetti cutters (I have these and linguine ones for my KitchenAid) or use a knife again. Google pasta shapes videos if you want fancy shapes as I've yet to try them and I've got my eye on the KitchenAid pasta shapes cutter, maybe Father Christmas will give it to me? After all, Christmas is only a hundred and something days away!

Leave the pasta to dry out slightly on a clean tea towel, keeping the pieces from touching one another or you'll wind up with one big lump of pasta.

Repeat the rolling and cutting and drying steps for the rest of the pasta, using small pieces at a time.

To cook the pasta you need a large pan of boiling salted water and then put the pasta in for 4 minutes or so, tasting it to see if it's done or not (the lasagne sheets do not need to be pre-cooked).

Thank You Cookies

My family have lived in Singapore for the past three years but are sadly in the throes of packing up to return to rainy old England. I've had some amazing holidays in South East Asia and taken cookery lessons in many different countries during my gap year, but more on those in later posts. This summer I spent a month and a half over there, visiting Indonesia and Hong Kong for a few weeks, as well as getting a bit too click happy with internet shopping in the process! Back in Manchester the parcels were piling up for me and a friend who was flat-sitting told me the concierges were a bit grumpy about holding all of my parcels (it was like christmas had come early when I got back and saw them!), so as a thank you I decided to bake them some cookies.

One of these packages contained 2.5kg of Callebaut chocolate chips to stop me from searching the city for Green and Blacks every time I baked a batch of brownies (baking is an expensive habit!). They cost me about £13 from Amazon, and I think I have the 54% (or a number around that). They're delicious, and sadly for my waistline, if I'm not careful, just the right size to snack on. When I added them to my cookies (recipe below) and then baked them the chocolate remained viscous even once they'd cooled, which makes them a bit messy to eat but worth it! If you don't want the mess then add a different chocolate - I used to make them with Smarties or M&Ms, as the original recipe (where from I do not remember) told me to do. As a treat, or for a more upmarket cookie, I replace the regular chocolate with white chocolate and fresh raspberries. I've been making these cookies for years and they've always met with approval from friends and family.  They're easy to make, both by hand or, as I always do, with a stand mixer (cue my new KitchenAid!) or electric hand mixer.

I've tried in the past to make this recipe healthier with golden/brown sugar and brown flour but it just doesn't work. If you forget to use self-raising flour and use plain instead then it's fine, I've done it before and it doesn't appear to noticeably affect the quality. As there aren't any eggs in the recipe it is both safe and delicious to eat the dough without cooking it first. If you don't want to cook it all at once then you can wrap it in cling film and freeze or refrigerate it for a few days and just leave it on the work surface to return to room temperature before you separate it into cookie sized balls.

Cookie Recipe

Oven at 170˚C

Makes as many as you want, but I normally make 18, using 2 trays with 9 cookies on each (original recipe said 12)

Don't forget to grease the baking trays

Ingredients

100g butter (soft if possible, can be blitzed in the microwave for 10 seconds at a time to warm)

100g caster sugar (EDIT it's actually light muscovado in the original recipe and it as tastes really good but if you like a bit of a crunch in your cookies then keep the caster sugar. I promise you both work equally well)

1tbsp golden syrup

150g self-raising flour

85g-120g chocolate, depends on how much you like

Method

Beat together the butter and caster sugar until combined, soft and fluffy and light in colour

Then add the golden syrup and incorporate

Half the flour gets added and mixed in

Chocolate next

And finally the rest of the flour joins the mix

If using something to do the job for you then just put everything in the bowl at the same time and turn the mixer on

Once it looks like cookie dough and there aren't any left over bits at the bottom (if there are then add a smidgen more golden syrup) stop mixing and make as many balls of cookie dough as you want.

Don't flatten them!

Place your raw cookies onto the greased trays ensuring that they have space to spread

Pop into the oven for 8-10 minutes, then remove and leave them on the trays for 5 minutes or so until you can move them onto a cooling rack without them breaking apart (and if you do it too soon then what a shame, you'll just have to eat the broken ones!!!)

N.B. I'm not used to writing recipes so feel free to comment if you think it's too chatty or I'm missing information out etc.. Also, please let me know if the recipe works for you - I'd really love to hear your opinions.

What's your favourite cookie filling?

Red Velvet Birthday Cake

One of my friends came over for supper last night, and, since it's her birthday today (happy birthday, Grace!) I decided to bake her a birthday cake. The only flaw in this plan was when I realised, five minutes before serving said cake, that we didn't have any matches in the flat to light the candles with!  Cue a candle-less cake with an uninterrupted pattern.

I love to decorate the cakes I make but I often don't due to the amount of time and space it requires to do a proper job (halls of residence especially hindered my cake inspirations last year). However, I now have a lovely kitchen in my new flat with an orange KitchenAid mixer sitting in pride of place on the work surface; a fact that makes me keen to get out my toolbox and start decorating again.

My choice of cake for the occasion was a red velvet cake with cream cheese "frosting" (made from the Hummingbird Bakery recipe). Unusual ingredient of the day? White wine vinegar. Fortunately you don't taste that particular ingredient in the finished cake, it just helps the bicarbonate of soda to do its magic. To top the cake I used a curly stencil and filled it in with my new Callebaut cocoa powder (it smells so good!), which worked surprisingly well as only one bit of powder fell where it wasn't supposed to.

Grace was suitably impressed by the pretty pattern and white icing. Most importantly it tasted pretty good too!