Pesto Pull Apart Bread

This Pesto Pull Apart Bread is a real crowd pleaser, I think tearing big chunks of freshly baked bread slathered in pesto is just about anyones favourite thing to do. I took this bread along to The Secluded Tea Party Unbirthday this weekend as part of the pot luck spread, along with some sundried tomato palmiers (more on that soon). It looks kind of awesome, all big and gnarly on the table and tastes even more awesome.

This bread takes time time to make but if you are confident enough making a normal bread dough then you'll be fine here. It is quite a nice bank holiday activity, something you potter in and out of the kitchen at regular intervals to do the necessary stages.

I've seen this as a sweet filling before too, filled with cinnamon sugar, and also in other savoury ways - sun dried tomato, cheddar & mustard. 

Pesto Pull Apart Bread
based on the recipe from Miss Igs

For the dough
1 cup of warm water
1 packet (7g) of fast action yeast
2 tablespoons of olive oil
2 cups of strong white bread flour
2 tablespoon of sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg

For the pesto
Large handful of fresh basil
2 cloves of garlic
1/4 cup of toasted pine nuts (toasted in a dry pan)
approx 1/8 cup of grated parmesan or hard cheese
extra virgin olive oil

Mix together the warm water, yeast and oil in a large bowl. Leave for 5 minutes til the yeast starts to bubble.
Then add the bread flour, sugar and salt to the yeast mixture. Mix well with a wooden spoon (or a mixer if you have one, I have one on my wish list!) until all incorporated in to a dough, add the egg in and mix to incorporate again. Your dough might be a bit wet here so add in some more flour to form into more of a kneadable dough. Knead lightly in the bowl for just a couple of minutes. You'll not need to worry so much about kneading if you are using a mixer with a dough hook.

Cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave in a warm, dry place for at least an hour to prove. It should double in size.
You need to make your pesto now. Just blitz all the ingredients in a food processor or mini blender. Add some oil to begin with and then add more as you need to loosen the mixture.

After proving knock back the dough, flour a board well and roll out thinly in a rough rounded square. Spread the pesto over the dough.

Cut the dough into 4 long strips. Then pile the strips on top of each other, then cut into little square stacks. Then stack the little squares into a oiled and floured loaf tin. Leave to prove for another 30-40 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 170c / gas mark 3. When it is proved bake in the oven for 30 - 35 minutes until golden brown and cooked through. Keep an eye on it in case it starts to brown too much, you may need to turn your oven down, mine went quite brown in the end.

Remove from the tin about 5 minutes after it has come out of the oven. Cool on a wire rack. Tear into it when it is still slightly warm / as long as you can bear without eating it.

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Recent Eating

I was looking at my blog last night and realised how neglected it has been recently, poor blog. I've been busy with my new job (which is great) and making jewellery but I have still been cooking some nice things. I'm pretty good at snapping pics on my phone and putting them on Instagram, which has been about all the blogging I've been doing lately. Here are some of my favourite things from the last month.

Glazed sesame chicken, thai green butternut squash curry and fluffy basmati rice. 

This chicken is SO good, it didn't think it would cook in time and worried it would burn, but it was great. The skin was like fried chicken, ridiculously good. Chicken recipe courtesy of Jamie Oliver 

Bubble and squeak cakes with roasted fennel and squash warm salad. 

My first go at trying roasted fennel, I always thought the aniseed would be too overpowering but it is just right, adapted from River Cottage Veg, I missed out the spelt to keep it simple, the flavours were still there and it all worked together really well.

The bubble and squeak cakes were some leftover mash, shredded cabbage, an egg, garlic, lots of parsley and seasoning, fried til crispy on both sides.

Clandestine Cake Club! 

I was so pleased to make the latest cake club meeting at La Tasca in Cambridge. Lyn, the founder of Clandestine Cake, was our guest of honour, it was lovely to meet the lady who started it all off. There are now over 60 clubs in the UK and across the world, find your club here. I baked a rhubarb victoria sponge (unpictured, it tasted good but was pretty unphotogenic!). I love going to cake club, I always come back brimming with ideas and high off a sugar rush. 

Some other things that didn't make it on to my photo album but are definitely worth trying:

Crispy Baked Onion Rings - I made these twice in one week. Enough said!

Creamy Avocado Pasta - Avocado is one of my favourite things to eat, this pasta dish is super quick and I found I didn't even need to add parmesan, which is a first.

Crispy Tofu Strips - I am slowly learning to like Tofu, I think it works well in a handful of dishes. Silken tofu is normally my favourite, this is a great way of using firm flavoured tofu (I used basil, but you can also get smoked) in a healthy way.

Teacake in Shepreth - My new favourite tea room / cafe. And it happens to be 2 minutes away from my office. Win win.

Carrot Fries - almost guilt free chips. Almost.


Ta Da! A new blog post. That wasn't so hard :)

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Gujarati Recipe Series - Handvo, Savoury Cake

This post marks the first in my series of Gujarati recipes! This is something I've been meaning to start for a long time and I have been encouraged by many of my twitter followers to do so too. I think it is pretty fitting to start off with a cake, but this time a savoury, spicy vegetable cake.

Handvo, or Andvo, is made from chickpea and semolina flour with carrots, peas, onion and sweetcorn, chili and ginger inside with a crispy top with mustard seeds on top. We always used to eat this on Saturday nights, with other snacky food like samosas - although it is a pretty filling meal in its own right.

Handvo
Makes one 18 x 6 cm dish (though will work in slightly bigger or smaller dishes)
You need to start this the day before you want to eat it. 
My cups are American cups, teacups also work well.

Part 1 - the day before
Ingredients
1 cup of coarse semolina flour
1 cup of chickpea (gram) flour
1 tsp of grated fresh ginger
1 - 2 green chillies (to taste)
1 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
1 cup of natural yoghurt (my Mum said the cheaper the better as you want a nice tangy yoghurt!)
2 tbsp of groundnut, sunflower or mild olive oil
warm water - about 1/2 - 1 cup

Mix together all the ingredients except the water, add the water gradually to loosen the mixture til it is the texture of cake batter. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight (or up to 24 hours) when you want to use it remove from the fridge and bring to room temperature.

Part 2 - the next day
Ingredients
1 1/2 tsp of baking powder 
1 medium onion, diced
2 tbsp of frozen peas
2 tbsp of frozen or fresh sweetcorn
1 medium carrot, finely diced

Add all of the vegetables to the 'cake' mixture plus the baking powder, stir briefly (don't overwork the mix) to combine. Preheat your oven to 180c / gas mark 4. Grease and line your dish and pour in the mixture.

Mustard Topping
1 tsp of black mustard seeds (the yellow ones don't really work as well, try your local asian grocer or health food shop for black mustard seeds)
3 tbsp of groundnut, sunflower or mild olive oil

With your mixture ready in your dish and your oven heated up. Heat the oil in a high sided saucepan on a med/high hob. Put in the mustard seeds and quickly cover the saucepan with a lid. Allow the mustard seeds to pop for about 30 seconds. Turn off and remove from the heat and allow it to cool for about 1 minute. Then pour the oil and mustard seed mixture over the cake mixture in the dish.

Bake for 45 mins - 1 hour in your preheated oven. You want the top to be quite brown, possibly looking a little overdone (I erred on the side of caution here so mine is a bit paler than it should be). 

Handvo is supposed to be served hot so slice up as soon as it comes out of the oven, it is best served with a dollop of good old tomato ketchup! It is also great cold the next day

Am hoping to return soon with more Gujarati recipes, I've got lots of things I'd like to make next. I hope you might make this, its a great recipe to try if you like baking cakes.

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Bibimbap House, Cambridge

On what I think has been the coldest day of the year, or maybe the last decade, so far we made the most excellent decision to finally try the much raved about Bibimbap on Mill Road, Cambridge. And it was such a good decision.

Formerly a not very good Chinese restaurant (I had the misfortune of going there once) Bibimbap House has been open for probably just under a year, and I've heard lots of good things about it from fellow bloggers Nora and Ivana.
As the name suggests, has one type of dish that it serves. I always like simplicity in a menu, it excudes confidence! There are 7 different kinds of Bibimbap, some veggie, some meat. Some come with an egg, some with sweet potato or 'japchae' noodles. Each bibimbap comes with a bowl of miso, pickled vegetables (I'm sure I'm getting the terminology wrong), creamed corn, and for a couple of lucky dishes you will get kimchi too. You are presented with it on a tray and in the centre a huge stone bowl, which keeps the dish hot, you mix everything together - add a bit of their homemade soy sauce or chilli sauce, and then tuck in.

I had the pork bibimbap which came with the most tender marinated pork I have ever eaten. It had a little chilli kick and was mixed in with sweet caramelised onions. Mr had the vegetarian japchae noodle bibimbap, which was a mixture of veggies topped with sweet potato noodles.

Everything was very good value, with 2 bibimbap, a coke and a corn tea for £18. I can't wait to go back, and with a beautifully small menu I think it is achievable for me to eventually try every dish on it. Let's hope so.

Bibimbap House
60 Mill Road, Cambridge

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Cleaner eating - Cambridge Superfoods

In between all the cake baking and eating out I do fit in some healthy meals. I get a veg box delivered every fortnight so our meals are very vegetable focused and despite being a bit of a fruit phobic I am trying to eat more fresh fruit during the day. I do still have to have some chocolate at least once a day. Moving on to topic, I've seen a lot of diet food delivery services popping up lately although most of them seem to be ready meals which don't look all that healthy to me.

Recently Jenny from Cambridge Superfoods very kindly offered me one day trial of their healthy meal delivery service. They are quite different from the usual, all the food is made fresh the day before (the smoothies that morning) and ingredients are local where possible.

Your parcel of food is delivered to you each morning, every weekday for as long as you sign up to the plan. Jenny delivered to my work, I can tell you it is a very nice feeling having someone come and deliver all your meals for the day, one less thing to worry about doing!

I started off with a peanut butter, blueberry and banana smoothie, sweetened with agave syrup, the peanut butter made it very filling. Around 11am I got a bit peckish, and I had some lovely sweet pineapple slices to eat.

Lunch was a broccoli, pea, potato and goats cheese frittata with beetroot salad and mustard dressing (sorry about the awful photo taken in the office seating area). I warmed the frittata slightly and popped it back on the salad - a very filling lunch. I was feeling very virtuous at this point - and I hadn't eaten anything other than what was in the parcel.

For the inevitable afternoon snack attack I was provided with strawberries dipped in dark chocolate. I was feeling the lack of carbs a little by now, which I think is a sign that I need to eat less of them!

When I got home from work I had an extra treat which isn't normally included in the parcel - some gorgeous little raw chocolate hearts, sweetened with agave and flavoured with vanilla. They were really nice, they weren't bitter like normal dark chocolate. Lovely with a cup of redbush tea.

Dinner was definitely the highlight, and something I'll be trying to make for myself when I have some time. Prawns marinated in olive oil served with a vegetable packed tomato and paprika sauce with quinoa and lots of crumbly feta. I fried the prawns for probably slightly longer than I should have done but they caramelised and were soft on the inside and crispy on the outside as a result. It was very filling and felt all the better for being good for you.

I really enjoyed trying this out but I think I'm an experienced enough cook to take on healthy cooking myself. It is however ideal if you are stuck in an unhealthy eating rut because of lack of time or cooking experience. Everything is so fresh and each day and week there is a different menu.

For more information about Cambridge Superfoods visit the site, Jenny delivers to most areas in and around Cambridge. www.cambridgesuperfoods.com

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Easy Paprika Chickpeas

A little lunch idea for you which is ridiculously easy, healthy and cheap to make! It is in a similar vein to my recipe for Spiced Chickpeas and Peppers but I've altered it so all you need to do is chuck in some flavourings with some freshly boiled chickpeas.

I used dried chickpeas which I soaked and boiled with stock for 40 minutes before draining and adding the dressing. But because these are meant to be easy I'd recommend using tinned. All you need to do for tinned chickpeas is boil them for about 5 minutes. Having the chickpeas warm when you add the dressing really helps them to soak it up a bit more.

For the dressing - dresses 1 400g tin of chickpeas

1 tablespoons of good quality olive oil
1 teaspoon of red wine vinegar
1 heaped teaspoon of smoked paprika
pinch of cumin seeds
salt and pepper to taste
handful of parsley, chopped.
half a chilli, finely chopped.

Add all this to your bowl/pan of freshly cooked chickpeas, stir, cool, store in the fridge and then put into your tub for lunch. I put some fresh spinach on top of mine, the whole thing gets a quick 1 minute zap in the microwave to wilt the spinach and lunch is done! I have mine with a dollop of houmous.

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The Boy Who Bakes

I love a good food programme, I will watch most of them and feel very hungry afterwards. I really enjoyed watching the Great British Bake Off, mainly because they covered so many areas and it has given me loads of ideas.

I got  Ed Kimber's, the winner of the first series, book for Christmas. Looking for something simple to make one day with a large craving for cake that I wanted to quickly satisfy, I made the 'Peaches and Cream Cake,' but with some cooking apples I had in my fruit bowl.

It is a lovely cake, quite creamy (is it says) and the caramel and fruit is just lovely. I have lots of other recipes queued up to try, I think the PB & J bars are next.

It is a lovely book, beautifully shot (unlike my photographs) but not too arty and there are loads and loads of recipes inside. I'm going to try his macaron recipe too, see if I can improve on previous attempts.

You can buy the book from most bookshops, and do look at his blog too:
http://theboywhobakes.co.uk/

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