After the media sensation and critical acclaim of our ‘Celebration of Europe’ culinary road trip (‘A timely reminder of the beauty of cultural diversity’ – The Daily Mail), we thought we’d further defy the lockdown and travel the globe alphabetically in search of exotic treats and exciting flavours. Afghanistan seemed the obvious place to start as a, it starts with …
Biscuits
(WW2) Chocolate Oatcakes
The study topic for Yumblog Junior this term is The Great Patriotic War (aka WW2) and one of her assignments was to prepare and cook something authentic circa homefront 1939–1945. Eschewing the Mock Fish Cakes, Potato Floddies and Reconstituted Egg on Toast, she opted for something which, at least at first glance, promised contemporary chocolatey sweetness. As I said before, …
Marmite spirals
Yumblog Junior rarely gets involved in the cooking process, preferring instead to be the slightly ungrateful and generally underwhelmed recipient of a parent-prepared meal. However pandemics, close proximity, home education and a lot of time to kill, means times are a changing and she’ll be sharing her parents’ enthusiasm for the kitchen whether she likes it or not.
Chocolate Fudge Bars
What to do on a rainy day in Brighton when the girl can’t go to the playground for a solid two hours after school? Well, you make biscuits. Well you plan to make biscuits but then the girl chooses something biscuitesque from a giant biscuit compendium and you adjust it due to the presence of cream cheese in the topping …
Mr Muddle’s Melting Moments
“Oh Pater, dearest…” exclaimed Yumblog Junior from her preferred leather winged Bergere situated in the Soft Play and Cigar Lounge of The Junior Carlton Club, “It says here in the esteemed ‘Livre de Cuisine des Monsieurs Hommes’ that Chef Marcel Muddle has created the most divine cornflake encrusted Petits Beurres which evidently are the talk of Parisian society! Oh Pater …
Chocolate digestives
If you would like to keep a fidgety child amused for an hour AND at the end of it have something tasty to dunk in your tea, this could well be the recipe for you. If you don’t have a child of your own don’t worry, you could always rent one … we hire ours out for £20 an hour …
ChocChip™ Cookies
Needing as we did to both satisfy a craving for something sweet and shift some particularly average Christmas chocolate balls from Lidl, these ChocChip™ Cookies perfectly fulfilled both requirements. Obviously you don’t need to rush to Lidl and rummage through the ‘end of line’ slop bucket in search of the last remaining net of stale Yule Chocco Balls as they …
A Taste of Yorkshire: Sad Cake
Regular readers may be surprised to hear this but neither of us are trained psychologists and so wouldn’t presume to make a judgement on the mental disposition of this particular baked treat, melancholic or otherwise. However we do feel (humbly) that we are qualified to make an impartial assessment of its overall cakiness and, similar to the Barm Cake below …
Raspberry Flapjack
Bored with biscuits out of off of the cupboard? Want to eat a flapjack that will taste nothing like the dense sugar marathons that you can get in packets labelled ‘Mrs Futtocks’ home-baked country goodness treats’? Have you a spare half hour? I have the answer.
Chocolate & Honey Meringue
In our new guise as parents we have entered a world where being invited to someone’s house for lunch doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be leaving at midnight having drunk the Rhone valley dry. It’s novel and despite our underlying fatigue, sensible drinking on a weekend still seems inherently wrong. So we had been invited round for salmon barbecued …
Jme’s Double Chocolate Biscuit
In the lull between milk extraction and nappy changing I remembered the vast amounts of 85% plain chocolate I had bought and sought to put some of it to work. I was looking for a chocolate biscuit with a melty bit as I’d never made one before and none of my books could help. A quick google later and Jme …
Dr Yum Gourmet Crispbread
This recipe was the result of a pioneering scientific experiment to recreate something similar to Dr. Karg Crispbreads which, despite their medical honorific and Teutonic wholemeal worthiness are surprisingly tasty and addictive – especially if topped with a wedge of Extra Mature and a dollop of Branston. And so to the experiment…not being experts in this particular field, we first went …
Arnhem Biscuits
Another Simon Hopkinson recipe, although this time one he borrowed from a cookbook written by Roald Dahl, who in his turn took it from a nice man in Arnhem who made these tasties at his patisserie. Judging by the photo in the (subsequently purchased and truly delightful) Roald Dahl book, these biscuits aren’t quite the right shape but they are …
Langues de Chat Irregulières avec Ganache au Chocolat
Ok, so if your beloved pussy approached you for a friendly lick and offered a tongue as mis-shapen as any of the examples below, you’d probably recoil with disdain, bundle it into a sack and rush it to the nearest canal vet. In our defence, this was our first attempt at such butter-rich chocolate-filled biscuits, so perhaps these errant little …