White Chocolate Cashew Cookies

I've never tried a recipe from Lidl before but they shared a recipe the other week for white chocolate cashew cookies and they looked too good to not try. Really easy to make and they taste really good.

 

Here's how to make them yourself if you fancy a go too:

  

Ingredients (for approx. 25 cookies)

• 200g butter
• 125g sugar
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 egg
• 200g plain flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 100g cashew nuts
• 150g white chocolate

 Method

Whisk the butter, sugar and salt until creamy. Add the egg, flour and baking powder to the mix. Coarsely chop the cashew nuts and the chocolate, and add two thirds to the dough. Mix the ingredients together and use a tablespoon to make small circles of dough on baking paper on a tray. Cover with remaining nuts and chocolate then bake in a pre-heated oven at 175°C for approx. 15mins. Let them cool on a grid.

Christmas Cake

 No Christmas pudding for us this year, made so many differne tbakes last year tha\t we struggled to eat it all before it went off. This year it's just a cake for the Smith household.

I made our cake back in the middle of October using an old recipe my Nan gave me, tried and tested always makes a good cake so why change the recipe I use.

 I gave it weekly feeds of whiskey and brandy, flipping it every week to ensure even soaking of the alcohol.

Finally a fortnight before christmas I covered the cake in marzipan and left it overnight to dry.

Then came the fun part of decorating the cake. I used my fimo penguins as decorations, which will no doubt be a regular feature on all of our Christmas cakes from now on.

 Funniest thing was a neighbour knocked at our front door while I was decorating the cake so I answered the door covered in glitter, red and green icing colouring pastes... had to show him the cake to prove I wasn't completely mad.

A Little Late....Christmas Bakes

 Sitting watching The Great British Bake Off and I've realised that I never shared the photos of my christmas bakes from 2013....so a fair few months behind but better late than never.

After 2012's cake decorating class I decided to be brave and go it alone. The side was done using a miniature snowflake rolling pin on the icing. Stars punched out of icing and snowballs rolled. The penguins took a fair bit of work as making icing black is not as easy as I expected it to be. I then handpainted the merry christmas sentiment using red food colouring gel. A lovely boozy cake, marzipan hidden under the icing and it lasted us for weeks.

  I then had a crack at Paul Hollywood's mince pie recipe and decided to make the lids star shaped. A little tricky to bake as each star top cooked at a different speed. An awful lot of these mince pies were made and eaten over christmas, almost every family member and friend that we saw over christmas has a few of these too.

Now to up the scale and design for 2014's christmas bakes!

Protein Baking

Recently we have been trying to really kickstart a healthier eating plan in our house.... so we have invested in the Protein Pow(d)er cookbooks and been trying out some of her website recipes too.

The first recipe I had to try was Powtella...the healthy protein bersion of Nutella, who doesn't love Nutella?! The link to the recipe is here.

A couple of days later Anna posted and idea of how to use leftover Powtella for something even better.... Dark chocolate protein truffles...another thing that I had to try immediately, had just about enough Powtella left to make 7 little truffles. The recipe is here.

Anybody else find cookies to be a major downfall in their healthy eating attempts? We certainly do in our house so finding a recipe for protein, low sugar cookies was perfect for us and they taste amazing. Chocloate and peanutbutter protein cookies are to die for and so tasty you don't even realise they are so much healthier than 'normal' cookies. Will definitely make more of these! The recipe can be found here.

Anyone that knows me knows I'ma  total coffee addict so the recipe for Coffee & Whey protein bars was just too good to pass up on...and with no baking and very little effort required to make these bars they were perfect as a quick make when I didn't have a great deal of time but felt the urge to make something. The recipe can be found here.

Totally in love with Anna's recipes and we both loved the items I've made so far... will be trying many more of them in the coming months and hopefully making our eating habits just that little bit healthier!

Gluten free, dairy free bread making class

  Last night a friend and I went on a bread baking class run by Mark of Blackbird Bread a microbakery in Twickenham that also runs local bread making classes. My friend is a coeliac and we don't get to do many baking classes together so we jumped at last night's class as it was perfect for her and a totally new baking concept for me to work with. Mark took the challenge one step further and made the evening dairy free as well as gluten free!

 Our first bake was a white gluten free soda bread, made using soya milk and soya yoghurt instead of buttermilk and then a couple squeezes of lemon juice to provide the tang that buttermilk normally provides.

Then we moved on to gluten free brown rolls, with a little gluten free white bread flour thrown into the mix too. These really are heavy and very filling, one small roll is enough for me in one sitting. Surprising how the dough just doesn't seem to increase in size as much as 'normal' gluten bread when it proves, still can't get my head round that one at all.

We finished up with a white loaf, made using a mix of gluten free white plain flour and white breadflour. This really is a heavy little loaf and the texture of it inside really does resemble cake...took Mark a while to convince me this was really what it should be like.

Here's how the finished bake all look together.. now to persuade my boyfriend that it's not too healthy him to help me eat some of it!

Been Baking Bread

I recently went on a bread baking course run by Blackbird Bread, I'd never made bread before so it was a totally new experience for me. Lovely chap, full of enthusiasm for what he does and willing to answer all our questions no matter how daft they were.

 We made a white soda bread just so we could see how quick and easy they really are to make. We even discussed how versatile the soda bread is and how the recipe can be tweaked for wholemeal, brown and flavoured varieties.

 

Then we had a go at making a traditional white loaf...the full 3 hr experience of multiple proving, kneading, shaping and patiently waiting. We experimented with different shapes of loaves and different slashing techniques for our final designs while we waited for the dough to finish proving. Mines the little round in the top left corner of the photo below.

  

Here's my 2 finished loaves..soda bread on the left and white round loaf on the right.

Here's a close up view of the slashing I did on my white loaf, didn't come out quite how I expected but it certainly tasted good!

 I've leanrt enough now to have a go at making my own bread and venture into tweaking recipes to change the grain and flavours too.