Category: Cookery

I haven’t done a Weekend Cookery post for a few weeks, so I thought it was about time I did.

My husband likes to cook and often cooks dinner, but he doesn’t bake. He’s a fan of Nigella and and also of Blondie. So, he couldn’t resist making Nigella’s recipe in the pullout in the Radio Times of Nigella’s Simple Treats.

Here are Dave’s Blondies – they are absolutely delicious.

He made them by combining 200g porridge oats, 100g plain flour, and ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda in a bowl. In another bowl he beat together 150g soft unsalted butter and 100g light muscovado sugar until pale and then stirred in 1 can (397g) condensed milk, then add in the oats mixture. When this was well mixed he added in 1 egg and 170g of dark chocolate, chopped into small pieces.

He then put the lumpy mixture into a 9in square cake tin and baked it in a preheated oven at 180°for about 35 minutes. As Nigella describes it, it was ‘quite a pronounced dark gold around the edges and coming away from the tin’ and was still  ‘frighteningly squidgy, not to say wibbly.’

He let it firm up in the tin and then cut it into pieces. You can see in the photo below that they are a lovely consistency and the chocolate pieces are softly melted into the  chewy oaty mixture.

Weekend Cookery is a weekly event hosted by Beth Fish Reads, where you’ll find more cookery related posts.

Edited 28 August 2021: The recipe is in Nigella Lawson’s book, Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home page 314.

Bread is one of my favourite foods. I’ve been baking my own bread for about 4 years now, using a breadmaker. I’ve tried making it by hand but all that kneading just defeats me and it is so much easier with a machine. It is very simple – you just put all the ingredients in the bread tin, choose the appropriate setting, press start and leave it to knead, prove and bake. My breadmaker has a little dispenser so you can add nuts, or dried fruit. Or there is a dough setting – doing all the hard work for you – and then you can shape the dough into rolls, baguettes, plaits, croissants or whatever takes your fancy and bake them in the oven.

I vary what I make, sometimes using a packet mix, which does give a very good result. My favourites are Cheese and Onion, Ciabatta and Mixed Grain. Other times I use fast acting dried yeast and the Very Strong White or Wholemeal flour, sometimes making half white and half brown bread. I recently bought a Country Grain flour – with malted wheat flakes, rye flour and malted wheat and barley flour and mixed that with the very strong white flour to make this loaf:

 

For this I used 1 teaspoon of yeast, 250 grams of the Country Grain flour, 225 grams of strong white flour, I½ teaspoons of sugar, 1¼ teaspoons of salt, 25 grams of butter and 340 ml of water and set the breadmaker on the wholemeal setting. It took 5 hours to make and bake. There is a rapid setting as well but I find that  the bread doesn’t rise as much and it takes more yeast.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs