Impossible Pie

I love Impossible Pie! I first saw the earlier this year on a cooking show called The Hairy Bikers.

It's incredibly easy - you just mix a bunch of ingredients together and as if by magic the coconut creates a nice layer on top and you get some yummy eggy custard on the bottom. Don't believe me? Try it! Even if you do believe you should really try it.

UK version that I use:

4 Eggs
½ tsp Baking Powder
2oz Butter
7oz Sugar
2oz Self Raising Flour
¼ Tsp Salt
1 Pint of Milk
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
3oz Desiccated Coconut
Method
1. Mix everything together and mix it pretty well, you don't want chunks of baking powder or eggs in your pie.
2. Pour into a greased oven proof container.
3. Bake in oven Gas Mark 4 for one hour.

US version of the above recipe (has not been tested):

4 Eggs
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 cup Butter
3/4 cup Sugar
1/2 cup Flour
¼ Tsp Salt
1 Pint of Milk
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1/2 cup Desiccated Coconut

1. Mix everything together and mix it pretty well, you don't want chunks of baking powder or eggs in your pie.
2. Pour into a greased oven proof container.
3. Bake in a 350 degree oven for one hour.

Apple Brown Betty aka sugar overload

So this week over in the bake-along (ravelry link) I've pulled rank and declared it free-for-all week (I didn't want to do a cherry pie) and this morning I just happened to have seen an old email from yet another bake-along I do over on swap-bot called 52 weeks of baking (we're on week 15), where someone had written about the apple brown betty she had made from a recipe by The Pioneer Woman.

One thing led to another, which led to me making some of the yummy (and really sugary) goodness tonight.

I have to say though that I can't see how I could eat more than a few spoonfuls if it had ice cream on it. And if I make this again I would cut down on the brown sugar.

And yes, this is coming from someone who loooves sugar.

Here's the UK version of the recipe with my notes:

3 whole Apples, she used Granny Smith, I used Braeburn
7 slices Wheat Bread
170 grams butter - she called for salted, I used unsalted (it should not be softened)
300 grams Packed Brown Sugar (mine was unpacked and there was still too much of it!)
3 Tablespoons (to 4 Tablespoons) Water

Peel and thinly slice the 3 apples. (If I make this again I might make it 4 and cover the bottom with apples). Dice or tear the 7 slices of bread into very small pieces.

Coat a small baking dish or pie plate with butter (ummm, I didn't do this, and it turned out fine, but if I were you I wouldn't skip this step, just in case). Then add 1/3 of the brown sugar, 1/3 of the apple slices, and 1/3 of the breadcrumbs (again, another layer of apple on the bottom might be nice). Repeat these 3 layers another two times, ending with breadcrumbs.

Preheat oven to 200 C. Slice butter and lay slices all over the top of the breadcrumbs. Sprinkle dish with water and a little more brown sugar (hah!), and bake, covered in foil, until done – about 40 minutes (should be bubbly). Remove foil and bake for a few more minutes until brown.

Serve with ice cream, whipped cream, or Reddi Whip, if you enjoy feeling sick from too much sugar.

And here is my Apple Brown Betty taken with my old crappy point and shoot in incandescent lighting.


(can you tell I have camera envy?)

Peanut Butter dance

Ok, so I didn't really dance when I made these, but I did do a little happy head sway.

I saw these on Joy the Baker's site, and fortunately no one else had any other suggestions on the lets cook group (we do a weekly bake-along).

There is seriously nothing to these.

Peanut butter, sugar, egg, and baking soda. That's it.

Last week I made Almond and Apple Cake. It was pretty easy (though I think it would have been better if I used more apples). All we had was wholewheat flour, but it still tasted great, and the wholewheat made it taste healthy, so we ended up eating a lot of it :)

I wonder what I'll be making next week ...

I hope the oven isn't tired

So I'm part of a weekly bake-along over on ravelry and last week's theme was pizza.

Yum! I used half the recipe for a smallish pizza, the other half was for bread.

I can't remember the last time I made pizza, and I was surprised how few ingredients and steps were needed. The hardest thing was the ten minutes of kneading, which actually felt like 20. But you know, it wouldn't hurt me to develop better upper body strength.

And then on Sunday J was having a bit of a bad day and requested a dessert, so I made Brown Sugar Chew.


This week's bake-along is Rice Krispies Treat (really easy, feel free to jump in and join us). I had to go to a large and slightly more upscale grocery store than the neighborhood ones to find marshmallows, apparently it's a US thing (like microwave popcorn)...

It was a test of willpower to wait until they were cool!


And that was all in the last few days, and I just might make another pizza very soon (have I mentioned already that it was really yummy?).

Has there been any baking lately in your kitchen?

Who kneads proper bread

This week's bake-along theme was bread, but I wasn't feeling like making a "proper" yeast/kneading bread.

Actually it isn't really fair for me not to think of this as a proper bread. Baking isn't a competitive sport, right? Right??

Instead, today I made Guinness soda bread. It was very easy, no kneading involved. It also tastes good and has a very interesting flavor. Doesn't really hurt that it has sugar in it too :)

Apple Cobbler!

I'm doing a giveaway this week!
This is the last day to comment here and on the past few posts for entries.

More info here.

******

Once a week I bake something new. Often it doesn't turn out perfect (or even that good), like my attempt at making pop tarts, but other times, like today, it turns out yummy.



Apple Cobbler with Oatmeal.

The recipe was easy, which I always appreciate.

If you want an excuse to bake once a week please join me on the Lets Cook group over on Ravelry. And you don't have have to worry about feeling intimidated, because for the past two weeks I've been the only one on there baking ;)

Come back cooking mojo, come back ...

I've lost my cooking mojo. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I've ever had cooking mojo (I kind of just wanted an excuse to use the word), but it's true that for the past three years the vast majority of our meals have been home-cooked by me.

This last month has been unusual though. We've been eating lots of pasta with jarred sauce, egg noddles thrown in water flavoured with a bouillon cube, and lots of burritos with not very interesting fillings.

But yesterday I officially became bored with all of that. I'm also probably lacking some essential vitamins from mainly eating wheat ...

When I see a problem, I like to try and solve it, so today I made Spinach and chickpeas and yesterday was Pan roasted broccoli. Both were very simple to make.

I've made a list of next few dinners I'm planning to make. They are vegetarian, won't take too long, have a minimal amount of exotic ingredients (I can't find a lot of the cool stuff at my local store), and don't look like they would suck. It actually took me a long time to find ones that fit those requirements, so I hope you can get some use out of the list too.

Roasted asparagus.

Really simple baked butternut squash.


Goat cheese toasts. I've made these several times. Slice a baguettes width wise (about 4 per person), brush the top with olive oil and put it under a grill. Take it out after a few minutes, then put a slice of goat cheese on the side of the bread that wasn't brushed with oil. Keep it under the grill until the cheese gets bubbly, serve on salad.

Lentil Curry.

Ginger fried rice


And speaking of loosing mojo, this week's bake-along is biscuits. Booo. Failed again.

I looked for over half an hour for a recipe for American biscuits in UK measurements. Half an hour at least, it might have even been an hour since I go into a time vortex whenever I "look up" something on the internet.

I never found one, though I did find some amusing sites discussing what is the British equivalent to a biscuit (the closest is a scone). It's hard enough finding recipes with measurements in ml and oz for American foods, but the term biscuit over here means cookies, so searching "American biscuits" brings up recipes for cookies that are made in America ...

Anyway, after my pop tart disappointment last week I was sure I was going to nail this one. I knew what went wrong last time and found a really good YouTube video on how to make biscuits, and announced on twitter "I think I can do this". It was going well at first, I had put the butter in the freezer, and was able to mix it with the flour just fine, and then I put in all the milk. It wasn't until it was properly mixed that I realized something was wrong. It was far too sticky. I'm kind of encouraged actually that I was at least able to tell what was wrong. In any case I added more flour and mixed it some more, and by doing that it got over-mixed. Sigh.

The lovely J says she likes them, but honestly they just don't taste right. I'm not going to give up though, in a few days I'll modify the recipe and try again!

Pop Tart disappointment

I had high hopes for this this week's bake-along, I really did. The recipe for the pop tarts looked simple enough. But it turned out it was beyond my beginner baking skills.

It tasted like it had too much baking powder. And there was no baking powder in the recipe.

I think I know what happened (over-mixing, mainly), and I have a few tips so hopefully your tarts of the pop persuasion will turn out like perfection.

1. Unless it's really cold in your house turn on your freezer. We're in Scotland, and the heater hadn't been turned on all day, but it was still warm enough for the butter to start softening as I was mixing it with my hands. I did put the dough in the refrigerator for a few minutes once I noticed it was softening, but a freezer would have been better (making it colder, faster).
2. Don't over-mix. I didn't print out the pictures, and I ended up mixing the dough into a gooey mass. From the pictures on SK's site though it seems like it needs to stay very crumbly. I've embeded a video where a baker talks about this type of dough, and gives a tip that I'll be using next time I try to make this. The relevant part of the video starts at 3:20.
3. After you divide the dough in half, each of the halves should be cut into 9 squares for a total of 18 squares (it makes 9 tarts since you need a top and a bottom square). I didn't figure this out until after I cut one of the sides into 6 squares ...
4. I only needed one egg for the "gluing" together of the pastry sides and for brushing the top before baking (the egg for brushing on top is in the ingredients list but not in the written instructions).
5. Leave yourself plenty of time to make them! I was wrestling with mine for three hours (but that doesn't necessarily mean yours will).



In any case I hope I'm not discouraging you from trying out the recipe, as I said I'm pretty sure it was mainly because I over-mixed. Live and learn ...

Biscotti

This week's bake-along is biscotti. This is my first time making biscotti, and I used a recipe from Cooking for Engineers which I choose because it goes into more detail than other recipes.





It was all going pretty well until this point. And then I realized that I didn't have almond extract. This made me a bit flustered and not too happy because I was so close to buying it at the store, but didn't because it wasn't on my list of ingredients which I had written down from "prepare these ingredients" part of the directions, and not from the actual ingredient list on the bottom of the page.

And then I put the vanilla extract in with the flour mixture, not the egg mixture. Arg.
And then I started to worry that I had overmixed since it seemed a little "stringy".

It's a wonder I do any baking at all with all this worrying.

But it ended up becoming a normal batter, of course.


Waiting for it's time in the oven.




And it's done!


I really like the texture of the biscotti, but sadly, and I'm pretty sure it's just because of my almond extract stupidity, it didn't taste like very much. That didn't stop us from eating piece after piece after piece of it though.

April, no fooling

Happy April!

You won't get any "happy April Fools" from me though, it's been on my my personal holiday (bad word) list since I was ten or so, when my mom approached me with a pack of gum, and me in my gullibleness, in sheer delight that mom was giving me something sugary, put my fingers in the wrapper only for there to be a little snap, a spring snapping on my finger instead of a stick of gum in my hand. I know I insisted afterwords, my cheeks streaked with the tears, that my fingers had been pinched, but I can't say now whether that was true, or whether I was just shocked, hurt, and crying from the realization that the world can be a cruel place. Oh, and hi mom, I look forward to getting your email where you tell me that was nearly 20 years ago and I should just get over it.

I'm a bit relieved it's now April, and that I no longer have the dead weight of the National Crochet Month Freeform-Along riding on my back, weighing me down with the sour anticipation of having to catch up with the project and continue creating useless ugliness. I suppose I am just hamming it up a bit, but really, I prefer my projects to be useful and pretty, thank you very much. I did however like learning new crochet stitches, so I might just do my own little one-person useful-project-with-lots-of-new-stitches crochet along.
At least I didn't bother weaving in most of the ends.
I did wake up yesterday with the intention of finishing it, but I felted around a bar of soap instead (I'll post pictures when it dries).

I've gotten a teeny bit further into J's gloves, and nearly finished knitting another finger. A few days ago I also pulled out of the closet my mostly done Twist and Shout sweater, the only long-standing UFO left of the ones I brought to England. The body is finished, but I've ripped out the (fortunately) not yet attached sleeves which weren't done very well, and they are now drying and hopefully unkinking.
The freeform along hasn't put me off crochet though. I really want to make this Super Mario Brothers Blanket. My sister says she wouldn't mind a blanket (didn't tell her what it'd look like though), so I'll be making it for her as a Christmas present. Is anyone else thinking of making it? We can have our own little crochet along...

Speaking of alongs, I'm still doing the bakealong. Last week was jam-filled baked goods, so I made vampire cookies (if you make it, don't forget to flour the rolling pin as well, the dough is very sticky, and leave plenty of room in between each cookie, they spread). This week is something with lemon. Not sure what I'm making this week ... maybe a cake? Feel free to join the bake-along thread on ravelry, you don't have to a group member or anything like that.

It's spring!

Yes, spring!


J and I took a walk on Saturday. It was one of those guide-book walks with tidbits of information that you have no recollection of after.


As per usual we enjoyed the architecture.

A cemetery was part of the walk itinerary. Supposedly there were some mildly famous people's graves in this cemetery, but we didn't go searching for them. Instead we pondered the meaning of life, and thought about how at one point in time the local gravestone salesman must have been pushing obelisks:



And I took more pictures of flowers.




We also visited the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh.


When I got home this felted bracelet was dry.

It's made of dyed merino, the white streaks are bamboo fibers I added.

Right now I'm working on some felted flowers.

They aren't done yet. I'm still not sure what they'll look like when they're finished.

A felted vase with a rolled brim. I'm quite pleased with the brim (had to needle felt that).


I'm also now caught up with the crochet along. I tried to follow Rocky's advice and stick with one color range. And I think it helped a bit. But it still looks like it's been hit with the ugly project stick.


And, to top off the nice weekend, I just made some shortbread (bakealong).

Along (s)

This month is National Crochet Month. I was considering crocheting some amigurumi, and I will probably still do so, but then yesterday I saw on ravelry the National Crochet Month Freeform Crochet-Along (CAL).

I had a little bit of catching up to do this afternoon, but I'm now caught up with the pattern until the 6th, and I'm ready for the "along" part.


Another along, a cheesecake:


Made for the Bake Along on the Let's Cook ravelry group, though it remains to be seen if anyone else was really interested in this week's project.

I think I've made a cheesecake before, back when I was living in SF over 5 years ago, so I don't really remember the process. I did however feel a bit silly buying 5 packets of cream cheese at the store. The cheesecake turned out good, despite the fact that the recipe and reviews/hints stressed to not overmix, which resulted in a few (small) blobs of egg whites amid the cheesecake goodness.

On Saturday I went to IKEA for the first time in over ten years. They have everything there! Including an English breakfast, and I was very amused that the occasional loudspeaker announcements about store products were done by someone with a Swedish accent. Is it like that in American stores as well?

Just in case you were wondering what an IKEA looks like over here:

Aint bad

Two out of three medals aint bad, I think.

Though ravelympics isn't technically over, there's no way J's gloves will get done.

My wrist started hurting late Friday night, so I threw in the towel, but not literally, because that would hurt my wrist. I don't have carpal tunnel, and I'd like it to stay that way.

So I took Saturday off of crafting, and this evening I made my first wet felting. I had checked out Felt by India Flint and Toyko Sugiwaka a few weeks ago from the library, but had been so devoted to knitting that I hadn't tried anything up until now.





The book had instructions for the flower, and for a gadget cozy, the holes for the screen and sensor were my modification. Not bad, I think.

I also made scones.


Scones are this week's bake-along over on the Let's Cook group on ravelry (cookies were last week). One of the members suggested this recipe. I was a little afraid that it wouldn't turn out since I don't own American measuring cups, and several websites had different conversions for cups to grams, but it turned out really good.

Anyone else do ravelympics this year? How did your projects turn out?

Day 3 of Ravelympics

Valentines Day 2010 has come and gone. And my lemon cake was baked ...

but is not yet entirely gone. But we did manage to eat about half of it last night, and I managed to not eat any of it today until the late afternoon. I'm sure we'll manage to eat the rest of it tonight. It was a simple recipe pattern, requiring mixing a bunch of ingredients then baking for an hour. It may not have tasted as superb as an expensive, pre-made one at a bakery, but it tasted sweet and was still warm, right out of the oven.

I'm into my third day of ravelympics. I finished one glitten around 1pm. Also known as a convertible mitten.

It's now 6 and I haven't started on the second glitten! I blame social networks and almost by extension random and interesting links (like this one about saving the gansey). I'm afraid that the wondrous thing that is the internet, without which there would be no ravelympics, will lead to my poor ravelympic scores.