Showing posts with label Nigella Lawson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nigella Lawson. Show all posts

Monday, November 5, 2012

Cranberry Clementine Muffins #MuffinMonday


Is there anyone who isn’t a fan of Nigella Lawson?  Okay, don’t answer that because I don’t really want to know.  This season of US election vitriol has left me weary of dissension and backbiting and intolerance.   Plus I adore Nigella so I would have to leap to her defense and, frankly, I have been traveling and staying up late nattering with good friends, eating good food and drinking good wine, and I just don’t have the energy for jumping about defensively.  Anyway, the point is she has some wonderful recipes and even if you don’t like her seductive manner or are jealous of her ample cleavage, you have to agree about that.  One of my very favorites is a clementine cake (originally from her How to Eat) which calls for boiling the whole fruit and then pureeing it.  When I got the recipe for this week’s Muffin Monday, I was mulling the options for a dried cranberry muffin and the friend I am staying with this week said, “Why don’t you add orange zest?  Orange and cranberry go so well together.”  And Nigella’s clementine cake recipe jumped into my mind and I responded, “You are so right, but I think I’ll go one better than zest.  I’ll add whole clementines!  (We happened to have some handy.)  And so I did and, if you are a fan of orange marmalade, you will like these muffins.  They are not very sweet so they are definitely a breakfast type muffin rather than dessert.  The original recipe is from Taste.com.au.

Ingredients
4 oz or 100g whole clementines (I used four of those little babies.)
1 cup or 140g dried cranberries
2 cups or 300g self-raising flour
3/4 cup or 155g brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup or 120ml milk
1/2 cup or 120ml vegetable oil
1 egg

Method
Pop your whole clementines into a small pot and cover with water.  Bring to the boil and then simmer, covered, for an hour.  Check occasionally and add more water to cover if needed.


Preheat oven to 400°F or 200°C.  Line your 12-cup muffin pan with paper cases or grease it well.

Combine flour, sugar, salt and cinnamon in a large bowl.


Whisk milk, oil and egg together in another bowl.


When the clementines are done, drain off the water and cut them open to remove the seeds.  Puree them in a food processor and allow to cool.


Add the cooled clementines to the liquid ingredients and whisk again.


Add liquid mixture to the flour mixture and stir until just combined.



Gently fold in the cranberries.



Divide your batter evenly among the muffin cups.


Bake in your preheated oven for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.


Turn onto a wire rack and allow to cool.  These are best served warm.


Enjoy!












Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Pecan Golden Syrup Bundt Cake




My house has been full these last few weeks, filled with family and good times.  Of course, it has kept me busy but it is a joy to have more folks to feed.  Since I am always looking for new ideas, I am delighted to take part for the first time in Belleau Kitchen's Random Recipe Challenge.  

Here’s how the Random Recipe Challenge works:   Number your cookbooks and choose one randomly.  Or make a big pile of them and pick one out with your eyes closed.  Then make the first recipe on the first random page you open.   Since I belong to EatYourBooks,  this was very easy.  Right now I have 89 cookbooks registered (Don’t ask me how many aren’t yet!) so I asked my daughter to pick a number and she said 11.  I counted down and the 11th book on my list is Nigella’s Kitchen.  One of my very favorite cookbooks!  The random page I opened to was her Pecan Maple Bundt Cake, which I had yet to make, so it was perfect.  I don’t have maple syrup in Cairo but thankfully the Random Recipe rules allow for substitutions for availability or dietary restriction.  So here goes.

Ingredients
For the pecan filling:
1 rounded 1/2 cup or 75g plain flour
2 rounded tablespoons or 30g soft unsalted butter
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup or 150g pecans (or walnuts) (I used pecans, of course.) 
125ml maple or golden syrup (I used Lyle’s Golden Syrup.)

For the cake:
2 1/2 cups or 310g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda or bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 rounded 1/2 cup or 125g soft unsalted butter
Scant 3/4 cup or 160g sugar
2 eggs
1 cup or 250ml sour cream or crème fraîche
1–2 teaspoons confectioners' or icing sugar, for decoration

Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C and grease your Bundt pan. 


First, make the filling.  Toast your pecans in a baking pan for about 10-15 minutes in the preheating oven.  Watch them carefully so they don’t scorched.  Chop the pecans roughly.


Mix the flour with the butter using a fork.  You want it to look like small crumbs.  


Stir in the cinnamon, chopped pecans and golden syrup.  This will be very thick, almost solid.   Set aside.





To make the cake batter, measure your dry cake ingredients into a small bowl: the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.  Mix well. 


Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl with beaters or in your standing mixer.   


Then beat in one tablespoon of the flour mixture, then one egg.  


Then add another tablespoonful of flour mixture followed by the second egg.


Add the rest of the flour mixture and beat while adding the sour cream.  The batter will be very thick.



Spoon just more than half of the cake batter around the Bundt pan.  Spread the batter up the sides so that you make a channel of sorts in the middle of the batter.  This is to avoid having the filling leak out while baking.


Use a tablespoon to fill the channel in the batter with your pecan filling. 



Cover with the remaining batter and smooth the top. 



Bake in the preheated oven for 30-40 minutes.   Check with a cake tester after 30 minutes.  Make sure to get the tester into the cake part because the filling will probably not come out clean, even when the cake is baked through.


Let the cake cool for 10-15 minutes and then loosen the sides with a small spatula or knife.  Turn the cake out.  


Cool completely and then decorate by sprinkling with icing or confectioners’ sugar.  This cake was gone in a heartbeat!  I think they even licked the plate. 




Enjoy!

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Click on the graphic to see how other bloggers have met the challenge this month!







Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Butterflied Chicken with Rosemary and Lemon


As I mentioned back when I wrote the post about Rosemary Lemon Chicken Stroganoff, this is one of my favorite meals to make for guests.  This is also one of my favorite meals to make when it’s just us.  My original post didn’t include photos of the first recipe since the focus was what to do with the leftovers, so I thought I would document making the rosemary lemon chicken itself as I made it the other night.  Two chickens so we would have leftovers again!  You should do the same.

Ingredients  
2 whole chickens, cleaned and trimmed of extra fat
6 long sprigs fresh rosemary or more to taste. 
2 lemons
2 purple onions
Olive oil
Maldon or other flakey sea salt
Black pepper

Method
Using a sharp knife or kitchen scissors, cut along the backbone of each chicken.



Turn the chicken over and press down on the breast to spread it flat.


Put the chickens into a large freezer bag.

The 2 1/2 gallon Hefty bags work great. (The link says 2.5 Qt. mistakenly.
The jumbo bags are really 2.5 Gallon.  Get your act together, Hefty!) 


Pull the needles off of the sprigs of rosemary and throw them in the bag with the chicken.



Cut your lemons in quarters and pop them into the bag.  Squeeze them from outside so the rinds and juice stay in the bag. 




Cut your purple onions in quarters and add them to the bag.


Sprinkle in the sea salt and black pepper.  Pour in olive oil and then close up the Ziploc and give the whole bag a good mix around.



Try to distribute the lemons and onions farily around and then open the zipper just a little and squeeze out as much air as possible, before closing the zipper again.


Marinate chicken for a couple of hours in the refrigerator, or overnight—even a couple of days.  (Or freeze it.  Just make sure to thaw and bring the chicken to room temperature before roasting.)

Preheat oven to 425°F or 220°C.  Once the chicken is at room temperature, dump the whole bag out into a baking pan which has been drizzled with a little olive oil.


Redistribute the lemon and onions pieces around the chicken and put some of the rosemary on top.  Drizzle the chicken liberally with more olive oil.


Roast for 45 minutes.  Serve with bits of onion and even lemon, if your fellow eaters are willing.  My mother-in-law is the only person I know who will eat the roasted lemons but there are surely more people in the world who would and I just haven’t met them.  Anyhow, they look pretty on the plate. 



I serve this with couscous and use all the lovely lemony drippings off the chicken to further moisten the couscous on the plate. 




Enjoy!

N.B. This recipe was created by Nigella Lawson. The original can be found in this book and you should buy one because it is full of wonderful recipes, written by one of my food heroes.