Nutella Cupcakes

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This weekend was World Nutella Day (no, really) and since I have fond memories of Mister North and I sharing a jar of this hazelnut infused wonder on family holidays to Italy and then keeping the jar as a drinking glass, I thought I would have to do something to acknowledge the day. Since I had a group of friends coming round for tea and cake, cupcakes sounded just right!

There is a recipe for ‘chocolate and hazelnut cupcakes’ in The Hummingbird Cookbook, but since I really don’t like their recipes with their reliance on milk in the sponge, I decided to use this recipe which can be made gluten free as well.

Since I have no gluten issues, I didn’t have the makings for those cupcakes and decided to use the standard recipe instead, so I cannot comment on how the gluten free ones turn out. Both recipes look very easy and follow the standard method for making a cake. I followed it exactly apart from going freehand with the Nutella as I figure life was too short to measure out a 1/4 cup of it as it isn’t the most malleable consistency, and it’s unlikely anyone would complain about them being too chocolately or too hazelnutty!

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One is fun!

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We are very excited to tell you that we are one today! And what better way to celebrate than a cake? A proper birthday cake in layers, filled with cream and fruit, but given the grown up twist you’d expect from such a stylish food blog! It just had to be a no-butter sponge with forced Yorkshire rhubarb and rose petals for us…

Despite my love of baking, I have never actually made a basic sponge layer cake before, so I immediately turned to a recipe for guidance and my eye was caught by Rachel Allen’s recipe for a butter-free sponge on page 42 of Bake. It looked like the perfect chance to test my skills and use the new fancy electric whisk I got for Christmas. Plus I’d forgotten to take the butter out the fridge to soften in advance…

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Sprats, spuds and Swedish sauciness

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Miss South and I have a long-running appreciation of the herring family: from whitebait, the essential anchovy (in all its multifarious forms) through to sprats, pilchards, sardines and herrings; little silvery fish get a full-on thumbs up.

Curiously I’d come late to the pleasures of sprats… but once I discovered how cheap (and I mean cheap) a handful of good fresh sprats could be, I was a convert. Normally I’d have them very simply; tossed in a dusting of flour and smoked paprika, grilled whole and finished with a little freshly-squeezed lemon juice, then eaten with some fresh crusty bread. The fact these small fish also answered to the delightfully silly scientific name of Sprattus Sprattus only enhanced their place high up the canon of favourite, fast, fishy fixes. But I alliterate too much…

So I was delighted when Miss South gifted me a tin of Swedish sprats as a Christmas stocking filler, which she’d picked up on her previously documented mission to the wonderful Scandanavian Kitchen.  Read more

Never Fail Fudge…

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Among the many things Father Christmas brought for my kitchen last month was a stocking filler of very large jar of Marshmallow Fluff. A bit of an American classic, it is basically what they fill Tunnocks’ Snowballs (without the delicious, but fiddly outer coating of chocolate and coconut that goes everywhere you try to eat them.) You can eat it from the jar, as I used to as a teen when Mister North used to bring me pots of the stuff, make the legendary Fluffernutter sandwich if you mix it with peanut butter or you can do what I did and use it to make fudge.

As I mentioned before, I am nervous about hot sugar and therefore I have never tried to make fudge or toffee before, but this recipe describes itself as Never Fail Fudge. That sounded like my thing!

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Pleasant pheasant…

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It may have been noted by regular readers of the blog that Mister North and I do like a bit of game, but I have to admit to being rather challenged when he got a pheasant recently from Stansfields of Todmorden. Thanks to a childhood experience of a pheasant that had been too well hung and gone into a whole new realm of gameyness, I have been dubious about eating this beautiful bird for years, but the suggestion of using the tin of foie gras or libamáj that Mister North picked up in Hungary as a sauce with it convinced me otherwise!

Neither of us had ever eaten foie gras before and while I’m aware of how it is made and that a lot of people find it incredibly cruel, I have to say that I have always wanted to try it at least without getting into a huge debate about the stuff, so being able to test it out at home with someone with a similar mind set was ideal, because more than anything, I was worried it would be too rich and I wouldn’t like it…

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