This isn’t actually rocky road for Christmas, but rocky road to make after Christmas when you have loads of lovely taste treats left over and nobody to eat them! The ingredients here can be substituted for anything you have lying around really. I used shortbread, which is so tasty with chocolate, but you could also use digestives, amaretti, biscotti, chocolate chip cookies, or any other left over biscuits. I used macademia nuts, partly because I absolutely LOVE them, and partly because the texture is so waxy and clean that it cuts through all the biscuit and chocolate really well. But any nuts will do; if you’re a fan of salt with chocolate, use some leftover salted cashews or almonds. You could also use dried fruit if you like it. I’m not a fruit and nut kind of girl! I’m sure some really nice dried figs cherries or some sticky dates would be delicious.
It goes without saying that the better the chocolate that you use, the nicer this will taste, but leftover chocolate coins or chocolate from your stocking would be fine.
Ingredients
200-300g chocolate
Handful marshmallows
Shortbread or other biscuits, chopped into cubes
Handful coarsely chopped nuts (macademia or pistachio, for preference!)
Handful chopped dried fruit (optional)
Melt your chocolate in a bowl over a pan of boiling water, and stir in all of your ingredients until they’re combined. You can’t really measure the ingredients, just put in whatever you like. If you like more marshmallows (like I do), then put more in. If you put them in while the chocolate is still quite warm, they melt a little bit and make everything lovely and gooey. And obviously, just miss anything out that you don’t like.
Then, just pour it into a small tin lined with greaseproof paper or foil, and leave it to set in the fridge.
Then eat it all!
Finally some time to write again! Although I love banana loaf cake and muffins, I’ve wanted a recipe for a long time that used bananas but didn’t go hard on the outside during baking. This is a fab recipe, really light and fluffy, and would probably make great cupcakes as well!
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I also made snowman cake pops! I used mini carrot decorations for the noses, ribbon for the scarves and black ready-to-roll icing for the hats and eyes :)
I made these cute cake pops at work! So easy but really impressive :D
So I finally had a bit of free time in between moving house and finishing my MA thesis to come and blog again! As a pre-amble to the Afternoon-tea fest, I made these cute little biscuits. Once again, they must have been easy to slip under the Caz-Biscuit-Burning radar! They came from Rachel Allen’s Bake! which, as always, comes highly recommended.
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So I’ve decided to try something new. Not that afternoon tea is new - I make it all the time. But this time I’ve decided to make it from scratch. Everything. Bread, mayonnaise, chutney, soft cheese, jam, as well as the cakes that I always make from scratch :P
So over the next month, I’ll be posting lots of different recipes from the following Afternoon Tea menu, which is meant to celebrate British flavours and ingredients. And of course, if the recipes don’t work, I’ll post it anyway. and maybe offer an alternative! As you’ll see, there are more savoury options than you usually get in a traditional Afternoon Tea. That’s just how I like it!
Sandwiches
Egg mayonnaise
Cotherstone cheese and caramelised onion
Savoury
Cheddar and sun-dried tomato quiche
Corned beef and potato pie
Scones
Ginger scone with sweet whipped cream and rhubarb compote
Cheese and chive scone with fresh soft cheese and tomato chutney
Cakes
Mini chocolate pudding cupcake with vanilla custard buttercream
Mini vanilla cupcake with strawberries and cream
Biscuits and other sweet things
Gooseberry tart
Brown sugar shortbread
Love
Caz X
Look at this lovely bread! My boyfriend made it, and it’s full of lovely olives and olive oil. Tasty!
Try making your own bread this weekend :) It’s easier than you think.
I’ve got over my hatred of peanut butter (partly fuelled by the fact that in the Netherlands they call it peanut cheese…), and fully embraced the PB fest! This is an american recipe (Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?) which I fiddled with a bit, and the result was ACE. They have a really open texture despite the heavy ingredients like PB and brown sugar, and they’re lovely and soft, and so easy! I’m going to put this recipe in cups because that’s how I used it. If you don’t have cup measures, then a cup is 250ml in volume, so you could use a measuring jug. Or just use an online converter to convert it into grams. Don’t forget that a cup of flour is a different weight to a cup of sugar, so you have to convert each ingredient individually!
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I baked for a buffet at a conference at Uni last weekend, and here are my creations! There are chocolate with chocolate buttercream, coconut with chocolate buttercream, vanilla with vanilla buttercream and strawberry jam, chocolate with peanut butter and vanilla with peanut butter :)
As promised, some more seasonal cake-based goods! The cupcake base is a Nigella recipe, which I used specifically because it is flat and sinks slightly in the middle because it’s a damp cake. Sinking in the middle is good in this case because it means you can fit more mini eggs in your Easter cupcake nests!
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