March 21 Veg Dish – Stuffed Peppers!

I always wanted to make stuffed peppers but thought it would be a really fiddley process! In fact, it wasn’t too bad! We had some left over rice from dinner and I had alot of vegetables in my fridge and thought I would give it a go for stuffed peppers. I looked up online for recipe suggestions but I was either missing one or two ingredients from the list so I decided to make my own using a combination of all the recipes that I have seen!

First, I cut the peppers in half and drizzle some oil and roasted them in the oven for half an hour or so at GM6. Then, I cut up the mushrooms, onions, garlic, courgettes and tomatoes and fried them with the rice, garlic and oil. It looked dry, so I added some tomatoe puree and chilli flakes and season the whole mixture. Once all cooked, I used a spoon to stuff all the peppers and added abit of grated cheese on top and put them all back in the oven again for 20 minutes at GM6.

I wasn’t sure how filling it was going to be and that’s why we had them with some salmon. I think next time, we would just have it as it is because they were really filling to eat only 1 of the peppers! 🙂 We were being too greedy!!

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Classic Victoria Sponge Cake

It was Mother’s Day last Sunday, and my mum loves a good old classic Victoria sponge cake! One of my favourite baker is Jo Wheatley and I always use her recipe from her book – A Passion for Baking as it never fails! The boys helped weighed all the ingredients and I just used my kitchen aid to mix it altogether. Simple! 🙂 Then, the boys decorated the cake with jam and buttercream and chocolate on top. They kept licking all the buttercream from the bowl! lol! I personally prefer this sponge with buttercream in addition to the jam because it adds abit of sweetness and it looks pretty! 🙂

Ingredients: Cake – 200g Self Raising Flour, 1 x tsp baking powder, 200g caster sugar, 200g soft butter, 4 x eggs and 1 x egg yolk beaten, 1 x tsp vanilla extract. For the Filling, jam – enough to spread the bottom of the cake and buttercream which is made of 500g icing sugar, 125g soft butter, 1 x tsp vanilla extract and 2 x tbsp of milk depending on your mixture.

Method:

Preheat oven to GM4, butter and line each the base of each cake tin. I normally used the baking paper that are already cut into circles which you can buy from Lakelands. This uses the ‘all in one’ method where you just tip all the ingredients into your mixture until it is smooth!

Divide the batter evenly a use a palette knife to smooth it over at the top. Bake for 25-30 minutes until the cake is golden and well risen. Remove from the oven and carefully turn the cakes out of the tin, peel off the parchment and leave to cool on wire cooling racks. I tend to leave it out for 5 minutes or so before taking them out.

For the decoration, turn 1 of the cake upside down and spread the jam and buttercream. It’s up to you which one you spread first as it doesn’t matter the order as it still taste delicious! I thought, i had a chocolate writing pen in my cupboards but i didn’t so i used an icing pen to write out the text and the boys did the filling and decorated the cake with chocolate sprinkles on top. Hundred and thousands would look pretty on top of the buttercream but i didn’t have any!

I think i need to restock my cupboards with decorations etc as i haven’t really been to the shops when the boys are being home schooled! Now, i have finally got freedom as the boys are back in school and they are very happy! 🙂 Hope you all had a wonderful mother’s day! 🙂

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Nutella Biscuits

For my February’s half term bake with the kids, we decided to make some Nutella biscuits as you only need a few ingredients. I saw this recipe from the Bigger Bolder Baking blog which seemed easy to follow and you only need 3 ingredients! My older son, Dee loves Nutella so he was super excited to make this but Gray didn’t want to touch it! He doesn’t like to get his hands messy especially when it’s chocolatey! I only let Dee have Nutella toast 3 x times a week or otherwise he would have it everyday for brekkie! 🙂

Pre heat the over to GM4. You will need a cup of Plain Flour (150g), a cup of Nutella (240g) and 1 egg. Mix it altogether, if it is too dry, you can add some more Nutella to the mixture. Roll them into small balls and put them on the baking tray and flatten them slightly at the top. Bake them for 8 – 10 minutes and let it cool for 5 minutes and then transfer them to a baking rack. I over baked our cookies as they turned out quite crunchy so next time, I won’t leave it so long in the oven as it still looked abit raw after 10 minutes but maybe when it cools down, they will harden. I think from this batch, we made about 20 cookies! Enjoy as we all did! 🙂