Easy Chicken Pie

The best thing about a roast dinner is making an easy Monday dinner with the left overs.  In this case, roast chicken on Sunday means chicken pie on Monday.  The easy bit is a cheat with some ready made puff pastry.  Although I love making my own, a working week day is not the time to be trying to get puff made from scratch.

As I rarely manage to find the  motivation to make my own chicken stock, the sauce that goes in this pie is made from instant vegetable stock.  I use Marigold vegetable stock which has a great depth of flavour and the most funky bright yellow colouring thanks to the turmeric in it.  The sauce is a simple roux (40g of butter to 2 tablespoons of plain flour) cooked out to take the raw taste off the flour and then the stock is slowly added (about 450ml) until you get a thick consistency.  The low fat of this sauce is what soothes my conscience when using all-butter puff which is hardly health food.  Be warned though, salt is the highest ingredient on the list of contents for the stock powder so don't add any to the sauce!

It is then just a case of adding some softened shallot, the cooked chicken and a handfull of frozen peas to the sauce, pouring it into a suitable pie dish (mine is a 1 litre volume, 8.5 inch pie dish) and topping with the pastry.  Pop it in the oven at 200 degrees C and in  40mins or so it is all ready to be eaten.

From the Jaws of Defeat

I have a dangerous habit of logging on to Amazon late at night after a glass or two of wine too many.  This often leads to the buying of some interesting cookbooks.  As some of these come form overseas they can take a while to be delivered so when "Baking With Julia" turned up yesterday, I had forgotten that I had even ordered it.

A flick through made me determined to have a go at Cardinal Slice, a meringue and genoise layer slice made more complicated by the fact that the meringue and sponge mixtures are piped in stripes.  It is supposed to look like this when fully assembled.

I have had some trouble with American recipes before so I shouldn't have been surprised when this didn't turn out quite as planned.  The meringue, rather than being crisp was soft and soggy whilst the sponge was cooked through but had spread out into a flat covering.  It tasted OK but there was no way it was coming off the paper. What I ended up with was a flat mess.

I may have a go at this again in the future, but I think if I did I might try cooking the meringue a little first, before adding the sponge into the gaps in the piping.  This may make them crisper and mean that the slices may have half a chance of holding together and making themselves into a cake.I would also use my standard genoise recipe as it is less likely to leave three pints of mixture left over.  There really is only so much sponge mix you can deal with in one go.

Not one to give up, the book suggests that you use the left over sponge mix (there was tonnes of the stuff) to make ladies finger biscuits.  That sounded like a bit of a faff to me so I thought I would just bung the mixture into a swiss-roll tin and see what happened.  Well it has made a soft thin sponge which has made the house smell heavenly.  I thought rolling it was asking for trouble so took the easy route and cut it into three pieces and layered them with raspberry jam and fresh cream.

 Not quite a victory, but pretty tasty and at least means that the whole mixture didn't go to waste.

Love is all around (well nearly)

Preparations have been under way for a Valentine's Day bake sale at work on behalf of St Luke's Hospice in Sheffield.  Each year, the firm I work for chooses a charity to support and this year is St Luke's.  A strange coincidence as I did volunteer work there many year's ago,starting as a sixth form thing an then into my early twenties.

So, what to cook?  Having tried heart cookies last weekend, I went a step further and turned them into cookie pops.  using flood icing and taking the opportunity to practice some piping, this is what I came up with:

Valentines day also reminds me of the many single years I spent under the duvet each February 14th.  I know not everyone wants hearts and slush on this day so I thought I would come up with something a bit more light hearted for those singletons out there. What better than froggie biscuits?  The saying is, "Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your Prince".  Whatever shape, size, age or gender your prince may be, I made these as a sign that you should never give up hope of finding love - whatever form that love may take.

And finally, because tradition still has a part to play, a set of old fashioned, heart-laden chocolate cupcakes.  I got the Hummingbird Bakery cake Days cookbook for Christmas and this is the first recipe I have tried from it.  I was a bit sceptical as 80g of butter to 200g of sugar was very different to any other cake recipe I have come across but they turned out very well. Really light and much less faff than my previous go-to chocolate recipe from the Primrose Bakery cookbook.  I didn't abandon primrose completely though and used their buttercream recipe.

And finally, I have to show that it sometimes takes practice and a scatter-gun approach to getting a decent finish - piping hearts is not easy!

Self-Assembly Bread?

On a recent trip to Ikea for some new shelves (the cookbooks are now big enough to need a place of their own), I had a peek through the food shop at the end of the trip.  I wouldn't usually go for a bread mix as I am capable of making bread from scratch but I  couldn't resist this carton of bread mix.

Not only did it look as if it would make a lovely, dark, rye type bread, but who could pass up the opportunity try making a loaf of bread by just adding water and shaking it in the carton?  Self-assembly bread!

After a bit of shaking, the mix is poured into the bread tin and has the texture of a thick cake mixture.  I could see the oats and wheat flakes and it already smelled pretty good.  Forty-five minutes of rising and then into the oven for an hour.

And the verdict?  Well, it had a look and texture disturbingly similar to haggis but was really tasty.  It tasted a bit like an Irish soda bread with added oomph in the added oats and linseed.  Definitely not just a novelty. I would get another carton if I was at Ikea again but don't think I will be making the 30 mile trip just for this bread.  I also ended up feeling a bit of a cheat for using a mix so made some standard white to settle myself back down.