Mmmmm! Meatballs!

This recipe has become a firm family favourite so I thought I'd share it. I've adapted it slightly from a recipe we use at work for Italian Meatballs. You'll have to excuse the photography, my eldest did her best to take pictures for me as my hands were somewhat messy! (I think she actually did quite well)
The recipe uses a mixture of pork and beef mince. You can either buy lean steak mince and pork mince separately and combine them or buy a ready combined beef & pork mince, which often works out cheaper.

Ingredients
Approx 500g pork and beef mince
1 onion
1 red pepper
1 green pepper
Tomato puree
Garlic puree
Ground Coriander
Grated hard Italian cheese (such as parmesan)
Carton of Passata
1 clove of Garlic
Fresh Basil
Balsamic vinegar
1 carrot
1 stick of celery
Vegetable stock cube
Pasta to serve

Finely chop half the red pepper, half the green pepper and half the onion (or whizz in the food processor if short on time)

Put into a bowl with the mince, 2 tsp ground coriander, 1 tsp of garlic puree, half a tube of tomato puree and about 2-3 tbsp cheese. The puree & the cheese will bind the meatballs. Mix with your hands to combine all the ingredients.

Mix well, a great job for the kids!

Roll into ping pong ball sized meatballs

Cook in batches in a large frying pan. If it's a non stick one you'll barely need any oil at all, as a little will come out of the meatballs.

Cook in batches

Brown on all sides

While the first batch are cooking or while your minion's children are rolling the meat balls, make a very quick tomato sauce. Into the food processor or blender put the carton of passata, the other half of the onion, red and green pepper, the carrot & celery cut into chunks, the stock cube, a good splash of balsamic vinegar, a handful of fresh basil and the clove of garlic. Whizz until you get a smooth-ish sauce. Pour into a large saucepan and put on a medium heat.

Once the meatballs are browned on all sides place them into the pan with the sauce and turn the heat down a little. Cook the next batch and place into the sauce.

Once they're all cooked and placed in the sauce leave to simmer.

Cook your pasta. You can use any type of pasta you like. I prefer spaghetti. But even though I'm convinced it was on my shopping list and made it's way into the trolley, I could NOT find it in the cupboard! Hmm???
So we had fusilli instead. By the time your pasta is cooked the meatballs will be too. You might like to give the meatball pan a little shake during cooking, but don't be tempted to stir, as this can result in broken meat balls.(not good!)

Serve the meatballs with the pasta of your choice & enjoy.

Don't forget the cheese!

This recipe easily feeds 2 adults and 3 children very generously and I think I can safely say it would feed 4 adults easily too. I hope you enjoy them.

Waste Not Want Not

"Waste not, want not." One of my Mum's favourite sayings and she had many! My parents were a good bit older than most of my friend's parents.They were eleven when World War II broke out. My Dad was evacuated to Brentwood, Essex and my Mum stayed in London with her family. Her father was of the opinion that they would stay together come what may, very 'Keep Calm And Carry On'. Rationing was in place until 1954, by which time my parents had met, married and had 2 children, my sister & brother. This meant my parents had grown up being very careful with food. They both hated waste and neither of them ever took food for granted. We never really had leftovers as Mum was really good at judging portion sizes (something I'm working on improving!) and she had a knack of stretching a dinner to feed one more. I can safely say no one ever left my parents house hungry!
 I learnt a lot from my parents and as a result I too hate food being wasted. My Mum was all for sharing recipes and tips, especially if they could save money!
So I thought I'd share one of her recipes with you.
 It's a recipe for Bread Pudding, not to be confused with Bread and Butter Pudding. It makes good use of stale or left over bread. My Mum made this recipe often, either with a stale loaf she brought home from the bakers where she worked or with scraps of bread she'd stored up in the freezer for making a Bread Pud. She made it in a large roasting tin and anyone who came to the house would get a slice, including the Window Cleaner or Postman. Neighbours would often get a knock on the door & receive a warm foil package containing a couple of slices, as would the man in the paper shop. When I lived at home I'd end up taking slabs of it into work to be shared with colleagues over a cup of tea. The church had a Christmas fair each year and by the time the doors were opened she'd usually sold out of Bread Pudding. This resulted in her making two tins every year, one to be sold to the helpers and one kept aside for when the fair was open to sell to the public!
Some bakeries make and sell Bread Pudding. It's a good way for them to recycle stale bread. But whenever I've seen it in a shop it always looks pale and pasty and you can see great chunks of bread, which I find off putting. My Mum's recipe ends up resembling something that looks more like a very rich fruit cake. I should point out that none of the measurements need to be exact and I have converted it to Metric (sorry Mum!) (She'd be rolling her eyes and tutting right now!!)

So here it is

Doris's Bread Pudding Recipe

Ingredients

About 400g stale Bread (white, brown whatever you have)

100g Sugar (caster, light brown, dark brown whatever is to hand)

175g Butter (or suet, as per Mum's recipe)

75ml Mixed Spice

350g Dried mixed fruit (whatever you fancy but I use a 'value' bag of mixed fruits including peel)

Juice and Rind of an orange and a lemon

2 Eggs

Mum's secret ingredient, about 2 Tbsp's

Tear up the bread and place in a mixing bowl

Brown, White homemade or sliced, it's all good.

Run the bread under the tap until every piece is wet. Don't fill the bowl with water or leave to soak.

Squeeze any excess water from the bread and leave to one side

Wet bread, but not soaking.

 This is where I get to use a family heirloom. A very large mixing bowl of my Mum's. The same bowl she made wedding and birthday cakes in and all the Christmas puddings I ever stirred and wished on, and of course countless Bread Puddings!

In a large mixing bowl place the butter, sugar, spice, grated rind, juice, mixed dried fruits and eggs

No need to be gentle here just give it all a really good mix until everything is combined, like this

My very large mixing bowl

Next add the wet bread to the mixture. Just like before give it a really thorough mixing. The bread should break down until you can see any chunks of bread at all.

Last of all, add the secret ingredient

Add a generous couple of tablespoons

Pour into a large oven proof dish or roasting tin. I use a Pyrex roasting dish that's roughly 28cm square

ready for the oven

Bake at 180c or Gas 4 for 1hr 45mins. Just like a cake, if you insert a skewer it should come out clean. It will have a little wobble to it but as it cools it sets. Leave to cool in the tin/dish.

Fresh from the oven

Sprinkle with a little caster sugar and serve warm with cream, custard or a cup of tea. It's also great cold and lasts a good few days in a tin, if it doesn't get eaten that is!

Perfect with a cuppa and great for sharing.
Enjoy!

Cheap & Cheerful

Organised as ever I left it quite late to purchase decorations and the like in time for The Royal Wedding. This resulted in me visiting several £1 shops and tat stores. I didn't actually find what I was looking for. It seems everywhere was sold out and all we ended up with was one Union Jack Flag from the supermarket.

While I was in one of the many £1 shops on the High St I came across these cotton bags

I thought they'd make a perfect quick and easy sewing project. They're 100% cotton & easily big enough for the girls to put a towel in for a day at the beach or a trip to the pool.

So on the Sunday afternoon after the excitement of the Royal Wedding and our visitors leaving I curled up in the chair by the window and set about decorating the bags.

It didn't take much to turn these simple little £1 bags into a pretty, personalised gift for my girls.

Seven pretty buttons and some thread
was all it took

Button Flowers and a bit of embroidery

Both girls loved their bag. I only wish I'd thought to buy more, they'd make great gifts.

Maybe I should go into £1 shops more often!! Who know's what little projects I might find!

Malteaser Cupcakes

Mr P liked the Oreo Cookie Cupcakes so much that he started making suggestions for other chocolate based ideas. Malteasers were the order of the day. But rather than make my usual chocolate cupcake recipe and just top it off with butter cream icing and a Malteaser or two, (which to be honest would feel like a bit of a cop out) I wanted to make the actual cake part of the cupcake taste malty too.

So I devised a new recipe for a cupcake and crossed my fingers that it would work! I added some crushed Malteasers & some Horlicks powder into the cake mix.

Ingredients
150g Butter/Stork
150g Dark Brown Soft Sugar
150g Self raising flour
3 eggs
75g blitzed Malteasers
3tbsp milk
50g Horlicks powder

I used a whole 230g Share bag of Malteasers in this recipe. Save about 15 for topping the cakes then freeze the rest for a while. I found this really helps when it comes to crushing them.
take out 75g of Malteasers from the freezer and crush. You can do this either in a food processor

Blitzed Malteasers in the processor

or just pop them in a plastic bag, place between a tea-towel and bash with a rolling pin. Such a great stress reliever!

Remove from the processor, if that's the method used and put to one side.

Cream the butter & sugar.

Add the eggs one at a time with a tbsp of flour.

Add the rest of the flour, mix well.

Add the milk, mix.

Add the Horlicks powder and blitzed Malteasers.

You should get a lovely almost toffee coloured cake batter like this.....

Pour into muffin size cases. I got about 15 out of the mixture and put an ice cream scoop of mixture into each one

Bake in a preheated oven at 180c/160c fan/Gas 4 for 20 minutes.

Test with a skewer, if it comes out clean they're done. (Don't forget they have chocolate in, don't mistake melted chocolate for undercooked cake!)

Golden cakes fresh from the oven

Put the cakes on a wire rack to cool.

Take the remaining Malteasers from the freezer and blitz using your preferred method. Make up Butter cream  with 250g unsalted butter, 500g icing sugar a splash of milk and the Malteasers. Fill a large piping bag & use a whippy nozzle. Pipe the tops of the cakes like this

Don't worry if you don't get perfect swirls, the bits in the icing make it tricky sometimes

Top with Malteasers

Malteaser Tower

You end up with a lovely Cupcake that gives you a malty aftertaste and a rich butter cream topping. Yum!

Enjoy!

Let them eat cake!

I love to bake & have done since I was very young. Cupcakes seem to be the in thing right now and were not something I'd really made until recently. I've made plenty of fairy cakes in the past, Top Hat cakes & Butterfly cakes etc, but cupcakes, I think, should be larger than that, more like the size of a muffin. But that's just my opinion! Mr P, my partner, had a significant birthday coming up. I thought it would be nice if I made his cake this year and I fancied trying my hand at cupcakes. I'd seem some on a website that looked like '99' ice creams. Knowing how much Mr P loves ice cream, I decided they'd be the ones I'd make. Being as organised as ever I left it until the day before his birthday to try and find a local cake decorating shop and purchase the needed equipment such as piping bags, icing tubes and a stand. This took up most of the day! I made chocolate cupcakes using this recipe. I increased the servings to 18 from 12 to get 13 cupcake size cakes, instead of fairy cake size cakes. I made up a quantity of butter cream using 250g unsalted butter, 500g icing sugar & a splash of milk and used my newly acquired Mr Whippy nozzle to pipe swirls of the butter cream and topped them off with half a chocolate flake. I have to admit I was very pleased with the results especially as A) it was my first attempt and B) I had no back up plan if they failed!

'99' Cupcake Tower

Everyone loved the cakes and of course I was expected to make more!

Next I decided to try Red Velvet cakes. I'd heard friends talking about them but had never tried or made them so I found a recipe on this blog and topped them off with cream cheese frosting. They have to be the lightest cakes I have ever made and they didn't last very long at all!

Next we went to visit some friends and family who had seen pictures of the cakes I'd been making. So I made a batch to take with us & I'm glad to say they survived the 200+ mile journey intact.

Chocolate with chocolate frosting and Vanilla with butter cream frosting

The cakes Once we'd arrived

Easter came next and the children asked if I would make some cakes for their teachers so.......

Individually boxed cakes

The weekend after Easter was The Royal Wedding and we had guests so I made these

Red Velvet Fairy cakes with Cream cheese frosting 

and these

Oreo Cookie Cupcakes

I'd seen cookie cupcakes on various websites and just used my usual chocolate cupcake recipe & topped it off with butter cream mixed with crushed Oreo cookies, with a mini Oreo on top. They turned out really well!
It seems I am now taking requests from the family for other cupcakes they dream up!
 The girls wanted coloured cupcakes but they couldn't agree on what colour so I made both

Pale Green & Bright Pink cake batter

Fresh from the oven

Finished cakes 

And Mr P suggested I make Malteaser cupcakes but I'll show you those another day!

Somewhere new

I felt the need to get out for a while on Monday. We'd had a lovely weekend but had spent most of it at home so we decided to try out somewhere new. I'd heard Heaton Park mentioned quite a bit recently and decided that would be the place to go.We weren't disappointed. It's a beautiful and huge park with lots of different areas. There really was something for everyone. Lots of open grass areas, paths to cycle along,landscaped gardens, horses & ponies to pet, play areas and best of all

The Bluebell Woods

there was a wonderful woodland area. Big enough to wander round but not so big you feared getting lost! There were paths and streams to follow and so many little hideaways. I think we could of happily spent the entire time just in that area of the park alone

Cloudless blue sky above

The sun just filtered through

Hidden tropical colours

Although it was a lovely sunny day we've been having strong, chilly winds. The trees sheltered us from them but allowed the warm sunshine to filter through.
We'll definitely be going back through the summer and I'm already thinking how beautiful it will look in the Autumn when the leaves are changing.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Well here I am, writing my first Blog. I've thought for ages about writing one, often sat with my laptop open looking at blogger.com & wondering where to start.
Which background, template, colour, font etc all running through my mind. "Will anyone read it?" I wonder and does it matter if they don't??! I'm guessing that none of it really matters. It's something I'm doing for me more than anything. It will be like keeping a diary, which I have tried on and off since childhood with little success, never keeping it up for more than a few months or weeks at a time, but with the best of intentions. Maybe this will be different. A Blog doesn't have a blank page with a date, expecting to be filled in daily, a blank page that if left uncompleted looks a little unloved. A Blog, I think will be more lenient if left for a few days or even a week or two, or so I'm hoping!
This will be the place where I record and share the things I make, do and see.
I have friends who write wonderful Blogs here and here. To me they're like reading a magazine article on a coffee break without having to flick through until you find an interesting bit! And I hope, once I get the hang of it that my blog will be a little like that too. So here I am!