Maple and Pecan Biscuits

The other day my husband asked me to make some biscuits with pecan nuts. Inspired by some danish pastries that we had recently, I decided to add a bit of maple syrup to the mixture and play around a bit, and this is the final result. All the cup measurements below were made using a 250 ml mug.

What you’ll need:

2/3 cup margarine

2/3 cup light brown sugar

1/2 cup maple syrup

1 egg

1-2 tsps vanilla essence

2 cups self-raising flour

Pinch salt

1 cup pecan nuts, roughly chopped or crushed

What to do:

1. Grease a couple of baking trays and pre-heat the oven to gas mark 5.

2. Cream together the margarine and the sugar.

 

3. Mix in the maple syrup – to get measure it and get it out the mug quickly, rinse the mug out with boiling water before measuring the maple syrup.

4. Mix in the egg and vanilla essence.

(The black bits are vanilla seeds in the vanilla essence that I used).

5. Sift and fold in the flour and the salt.

  

6. Fold in the nuts and then put teaspoonfuls of the mixture on the baking trays, leaving a bit of space between each spoonful. Don’t worry about pressing down each drop of mixture before putting it into the oven – the biscuits will spread a little by themselves as they cook.

  The biscuits don’t have to be spread out as much as this – I just wasn’t sure with this first batch how much they would spread.

7. Remove the biscuits from the baking sheets and cool.

Exciting find!

Yesterday I found something that was, to me at least, very exciting! Olive oil from the Toplou monastery, which is in one of my favourite places on earth – East Crete. But I didn’t find it in Crete - I found it in Britain, in Aldi of all places. Sadly the camera battery was about to die so I couldn’t get a close-up picture of the designated origin sticker and write-up about it being from Toplou, so you’ll have to trust me on this one. Or find an Aldi and seek out your own Cretan olive oil.

Roast Onion Humous

A little while ago, I tried roast onion humous from a supermarket and I really enjoyed it. So, I decided to try making it myself. I’m not sure if I’ve fully got it yet but this is what I came up with…

You’ll need two onions, roasted, 4 tablespoons of tahini (creamed seasame seeds, available from most supermarkets), 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 11 tablespoons of lemon juice (I should have measured this in cups rather than tablespoons!), 2 garlic cloves, 2 x 410 gram cans of chickpeas, pepper and salt. Chuck everything into a food processor and whizz together – I did this in a couple of batches and then mixed it all together because my processor isn’t big enough. Finally, add a bit of water if the consistency is a bit thick and adjust seasoning according to taste.

Seven Randoms

1. I love chocolate way more than I should. Which is why I just picked all the chocolate confectionary out of some pick ‘n’ mix leftover from Saturday when J (my husband) and I went to a movie. It’s a good thing that we recognise in this household that I eat way more chocolate than J does.

2. Speaking of chocolate, one of my sisters made some beautiful chocolate ducks as favours for the wedding one of my other sister’s just over a year ago. They were awesome. And in the process she learnt to temper chocolate. I still don’t know how to temper chocolate.

3. But I do know how to play around with melted chocolate and various fillings, including a chocolate truffle type filling, to come up with filled chocolate things. Maybe one day I’ll get round to posting how to do that.

4. I’m due to finish my PhD in September. I don’t know what job I’ll do when I finish but I am nervous and excited about what God has in store for my life.

5. Speaking of the PhD, I’m currently working on the first draft of my last big chapter. And it’s taking a long time. And I am desperate to finish. Sigh. But for now I just have to keep plodding on.

6. My wonderful husband has bought me flowers twice recently, because he knows how much I’m struggling with my work. Here’s a peak at my current bunch:

7. Taking pictures of yellow flowers by the yellow light of our living room light does not work very well. That’s one reason to look forward to the long days of natural light in summer…

Chocolate Brownies

I’ve heard it said that brownies mostly come in one of three kinds – cakey, chewy or fudgy. My husband is more of a cakey-brownie person. I fall somewhere between chewy and fudgy, although ultimately, a brownie is a brownie and I’m certainly not going not going to quibble if offered a cakey one. In a rash moment of folly a number of months ago I decided to try come up with my own brownie recipe. I must admit to having peeked at other recipe ingredient lists and methods and I’m nowhere near completion. Starting such a project with nothing but a memory of good brownies and a yearning for more has led to some interesting results. Some were just too disastrous to chronicle, but so far, five index cards with brownie recipes (marked trial 1, trial 2, trial 3 etc) have made it into my recipe box. I got stuck on trial 4 for quite a long time but there was always a nagging doubt in my mind that its awesome taste may have been down to the crushed chocolate buttons and hazelnuts that I added rather than pure brownie goodness. Trial 5 followed not long after getting back from South Africa, where we were over Christmas, and where we had the most awesome brownies of a most fudgy variety. Sadly, trial 5 has not fallen into the fudgy camp I hoped it would but it is a pretty respectable chewy brownie, so I thought I’d share it today. As usual most of the time with my recipes, all the ‘cup’ measurements below are based on a 250 ml mug.

What you’ll need:

1 cup of margarine or butter (butter is probably nicer but I only had marg when I made these

200 gram bar of milk chocolate (I bought a 230 gram bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and ate made arrangements to get the required 200g)

9 rounded dessertspoons of cocoa powder (I know – pretty excessive)

2 teaspoons of vanilla essence

4 eggs

2 cups brown sugar (I used dark brown because it was all I had but any brown sugar, dark or light, should be fine)

1 cup self-raising flour

Pinch salt

What to do:

1. Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 5 and grease a pan (my pan is about 9 x 12 inches).

2. Melt the cup of margarine or butter in a small saucepan. Remove from the heat when melted.

(This picture is mostly to show the cup I use and how rough my measuring is; I forgot to take a picture of the melted margarine but really, you don’t need me showing you something as boring as that).

3. Roughly chop the chocolate and add it to the melted marg. Stir until the chocolate has melted. If it isn’t melting into the marg, put it over a low heat for a couple of minutes, stirring the whole time. Take the pan off the stove once the chocolate has melted, if you didn’t do so at the end of the last step.

4. Add five dessertspoons of cocoa powder to the melted marg/chocolate and stir vigorously until it is thoroughly mixed in – make sure there are no little lumps of cocoa powder. And try not to eat too much of it at this stage…

5. Crack the eggs into a new bowl and beat well. Then add the vanilla essence and beat a little bit more.

6. Add the brown sugar to the eggs and mix thoroughly.

7. Pour the melted chocolate/marg mixture into the egg mixture and fold in thoroughly.

8. Sift and fold the flour, salt and remaining four dessertspoons of cocoa powder into the mixture.

(Note to self: taking pictures whilst sieving flour is not a strong skill – need more practice).

9. Pour (interpret that in the loosest possible way – the batter is way to sticky to pour) the mixture into the greased pan and spread into the corners. Bake for 25-30 minutes until done.

10. Take the brownies out the oven and cool brownies. Cut into sizes that are just small enough to justify having two… or three …. Or wait about five minutes before giving into temptation and cutting them almost straight away so that one can enjoy hot brownies and cream. Yum!

 

Good morning beauty…

Sunrise over the North York Moors.

What’s it worth

The recent news of the death of an old friend has got me thinking. She was in her late twenties. Not that old in Britain, though old in some countries where life expectancies only reach the early to mid-thirties. About my age. Here’s my thinking though – if I died now, what would my life be worth. I want to get to the end of my life and to have made an eternal difference to people. None of us know when our time on earth will be up. We may think we are immortal, invincible, in good health. But tomorrow, today, anything can happen. And here’s my direct question – when your time is up, where are you going? We can be so easily deceived into thinking we have complete control over our lives and that we are ‘good’ so we’ll be okay when we die. But what is that apparent control really worth – lives that are broken, guilt, shame. None of us can ever really led lives that are perfect enough to get us into heaven on our own terms. That is why grace astounds me so much – because God’s grace is about us not being good enough. So He sent His son to die for us, to pay the price of our failures so that through Him we can be good enough. But, what we have to do, is give God control over our lives and accept what Jesus did on the cross. Our lives on earth are so transient – what’s eternal life, a life that isn’t transient, worth to you?

“You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. … You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord abides for ever.” That word is the good news which was preached to you.” (1 Peter 1: 18-19; 23-25)