I opened up my kitchen baking cupboard the other day and was met with a pile of packets falling on my head. That seemed like a pretty clear sign that it was high time I had a bit of a clearout and used up a few half empty packets of ingredients that had been in there too long. These chewy, no-bake peanut butter granola bars were my attempt to finish off a random selection of odds and ends of nuts, seeds, cereal and dried fruit….
It is no secret that I love tea; I drink about seven cups of tea a day but barely notice most of them as I am so busy doing something else at the same time; but sometimes it is good to stop for a moment, take a step back from whatever it is that you are so incredibly busy with and breathe. Take ten minutes for yourself to relax, regroup, savour the tea and come back to whatever you were working on refreshed and focused….
I often buy bananas with the intention of letting them go brown and overripe as I love to bake with them; they are horrible to eat as they are, but mash them up and mix them into cake, or milkshake, or pancakes and they become something truly delicious. The smell of banana bread baking is utterly irresistible; when I don’t want to wait for banana bread to bake though, banana pancakes are the next best thing. They are super quick and easy to make, taste amazing and are much healthier than cake!…
Vanilla almond milk porridge with honey roasted pear – smooth, creamy almond milk porridge with soft, juicy honey roast pear, cinnamon & hazelnuts. Dairy free & easily adaptable to be vegan.
I had never tried almond milk up until a couple of days ago when I saw that it was on offer and bought some on a whim. I didn’t think that I would really like it but was interested to try…and now I’m hooked! …
This bread should have made it onto the blog over a month ago but I had somewhat of an error of judgement when it came to the shaping of it… I was aiming for a spiral, but what came out of the oven looked, and there is no other way of putting this, like a giant turd…It was at once hilariously funny, and incredibly frustrating as the bread tasted amazing, but there was no way I could post it, it just looked too unseemly. I resolved to bake it again, with a little more thought to the shaping of the loaf…….
When I was sent an OXO Good Grips non stick frying pan (£50 from Lakeland) to review I knew exactly what to make in it to test it – pancakes! they are one of the best (and tastiest) ways to test just how non stick a pan is, if you can flip a pancake cleanly then it’s a goodun. The Good Grips frying pan was perfect for pancakes – I only had to use the teeniest smidge of butter to cook them in and they didn’t stick at all. It felt very solidly made, with the kind of non-stick coating that isn’t just going to flake off after a couple of uses (I’ve bought some very cheap and crappy cookware in the past…always a false economy) and I was impressed by the addition of a silicone handle in place of the usual plastic which means that the pans are oven-proof up to 200°C, a bonus for me as I didn’t actually own a single frying pan that could go in the oven… And if you are lucky enough to own a dishwasher, it is dishwasher safe and suitable for use on induction hobs….
I don’t know what the weather is like where you are, but in the UK it has been HOT (relatively…I know that some of you will sneer at our paltry 30 degrees, but we don’t do heat well in the UK, and being a goth I melt when exposed to bright sunlight…); I made the mistake of attempting to do a kettlebell workout yesterday…and I have never sweat so much in all my life…the floor around me was actually wet (pleasant I know). So obviously I have wanted to live off of nothing but ice cream….
I have been meaning for aaages to try baking with spelt flour, it is low in gluten, high in protein and supposedly very good for you, but I had trouble finding any where I live.
I managed to get some whilst visiting my parents ( Waitrose sell all the interesting things…) and decided that my first foray into baking with spelt should be bread.
I made a basic loaf of bread but added honey for a bit of sweetness and flavour, all of the ingredients in this loaf are ones that would have been used in ancient times, I quite like the thought of eating something that people would have been eating thousands of years ago….
