Room Forty blog

Happy Halloween

31/10/2018

It's all hallows eve! Are you planning fun and frolics?

To me it’s such a beautiful time of year when autumn hits the peak of its glorious beauty. I adore the colour of the season and it looks like the evening will be a nice one with autumn sunshine.

It is as if nature is giving us a last technicolour golden treat before we hit the monochrome of winter. I’m not much enamoured with the cold it brings - in fact that is an understatement, but, wrapped up in a warm coat and hat, kicking piles of fallen leaves I become a daft eight year old again. (Some of my friends would doubt that I’ve ever matured from being a daft eight year old!)

When I was a kid Halloween wasn't such a big event, more of a warm up act for the thrill of Bonfire night, now it’s a huge event in itself for kids and adults.

This year rather than buy bags of sweets for the Trick or Treaters why not bake a few cakes? Here’s my recipe for easy gory looking fairy cakes. Great fun for baking with the kids!

Easy Peasy Dripping ‘Blood’ Halloween Fairy Cake Recipe This recipe makes 24 cakes and takes less than 30 minutes

Ingredients 110g/4oz butter softened at room temperature 110g/4oz caster sugar
2 free-range eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
110g/4oz self raising flour
1-2 tbsp milk

For the icing
300g/10½oz icing sugar
2-3 tbsp water or lemon juice 2-3 drops red food colouring

Instructions Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees and line 2 x 12 hole muffin tins with paper cases.

Cream together the butter and sugar until combined and pale.

Beat in the eggs a little at a time with the vanilla extract. Add a teaspoon of the flour with each addition of the eggs to stop them splitting.

Fold in the flour with a large metal spoon or spatula.

Add a little milk until the mixture is at a soft dropping consistency and spoon the mixture into the cases until they are half full (Tip: an ice-cream scoop will be better than a spoon if you have one)

Bake in the oven for 8 -10 minutes until golden brown on top and when you insert a skewer it comes out clean

Put the tins with the cakes to one side for about 10 minutes then remove the cakes from the tin and allow the cakes to cool on a cooling rack.

To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a large bowl and stir in just enough water (or lemon juice to give it a zing of flavour) to make a smooth paste (add a teaspoon at a time!). Stir in the food colouring, go steady, you just need enough to make the icing blood red!

To ice the fairy cakes, drizzle the icing over the top. Allowing it to dribble over the sides and leave to harden.

Kitchen confidence

7/10/2018

I’m sure that all of us have at one time invested in a food gadget of some kind; a spiralizer; a blender; a food processor; slow cooker; or ice cream maker, which sit in a cupboard gathering dust....

But how many of us can cook the basics well? Poach the perfect egg, bake a loaf, make faultless pastry, make a mayonnaise?

I have decided to go on a mission to encourage anyone and everyone to have a go in the kitchen, and I’ve begun by offering to teach classes with Warrington Wolves Foundation and Teardrops, the St Helens homeless charity. Why? Because I really believe that learning and mastering a few basics will equip you with skills that you can develop and grow, and it is so much cheaper and healthier to cook from scratch.

Basic skills create building blocks from which you can create a lovely meal, but that will, importantly, grow your kitchen confidence. As your skills and confidence grow you’ll start to be able to cook through instinct, look in the fridge, grab some ingredients and make a delicious scratch meal.

We’ll likely begin with bread and soup, after all, what can sustain you better for a day in the cold. And for just £1.00 you can feed the whole family healthily – if you know what to do.

Once you can make a basic white sauce (a roux) for instance, you can flavour it. Whack in some cheese and perhaps a dab of mustard and voila, you’ve created the ultimate sauce for a Macaroni Cheese, another great filler which I generally add cauliflower to sneak in one of the five a day.

Once you’ve learned to master how to bake a basic loaf (and we’ll gladly teach you at one of our classes) you will soon have the confidence to experiment with brioche or even sourdough. I don’t claim to be a perfect cook or baker, far from it, but I love learning, which makes food such an exciting hobby (and my hobby is now my job). Many of the best lessons are learned through making mistakes! So here are my tips.

1. Arm yourself with a good cookbook – the charity shops are a great source! Look for ones with clear instructions. The BBC books, Good Housekeeping, WI and Bake Off books are all excellent and the recipes tested and dependable. And of course let’s not forget Delia Smith, ten years ago she launched her How to Cook series of books which extolled this very same message. A word of caution - in my experience its best to avoid the celebrity cook books produced by actors, DJ’s, pop stars and the likes. Stick to the professionals!

2. Practice the basics starting with things like egg boiling and poaching and build up. In time, with practice, you’ll not need to refer to the recipe.

3. Make mistakes and don’t beat yourself up. Just work out what went wrong. Tweak recipes to suit your palate; add a bit more of this and a little less of that to make it your own classic.

4. Taste as you cook. Trust your senses. Allow your palate to guide you. Also trust your sense of smell. If it smells good it probably will taste good too. If it smells burnt it probably is!

5. Make notes in your cook book. If you don’t you WILL forget what you did. Trust me. Alter the recipe to suit you.

6. Book on a baking or cooking class. Or go to a foodie festival and watch the free demonstrations!

Take the fear out of cooking and baking. We love giving our students confidence. Have a quick search on the internet - there are cookery classes being run all over the locality. Have a look at our local College in Warrington, or perhaps travel a little further afield to St Helens College which runs a great series of evening classes Above all, don’t be afraid to have a go. Don’t stress out, just have fun!