Recipe No. 24 - Chocolate Fudge Hot Pot Pudding

This recipe is the ultimate comfort food when its cold outside and you can't wait to get home to something rich and gooey.

The recipe is amazingly simple, all of the ingredients are combined and added to a well greased dish.
Then this next bit seems so odd to me, coca powder and hot water are combined to make a thin, watery chocolate sauce and it is poured over the mixture.

The dish is put in a hot oven for about 35 minutes so that it is still runny at the bottom and served with ice cream or cream.. This went down so well and served slightly more than recommended - and we were not scrimping on the portions! I'd say it served about 9, 5 the first day and then I kept it in the fridge overnight. The next evening I poured a little more hot water over the sponge to keep it moist and heated it in the oven at about 180c for 15-18 minutes and it came out just as nice as the day before!

Happy Baking! xx

Recipe No. 23 - Zebra Shortbread

Shortbread strikes me as tricky, It seems easy but its all in the baking time. Not long  enough and it could be soft, too long and it will be too hard.

This looked so nice because of the stripy pattern of dark and white chocolate.
First of all the dark and white chocolate are melted and left to cool, then meanwhile the butter, sugar, flour and egg are combined. The mixture is then split in half, half is mixed with the dark chocolate and the other half combined with the white chocolate.
Both of the clumps of dough are then sandwiched in between 2 sheets of clingfilm and rolled into rectangles and chilled.
After half an hour the 2 sheets of dough are pressed together. The edges are neatened and then the rectangle is cut into 3 and they are stacked up to form one large stripy brick, this is left for another 30 minutes in the fridge

I had to cook mine in batches and the second batch was chilled for about 10 extra minutes which made all the difference, the lines between the layers were much sharper.

The brick is thinly sliced, placed on baking paper and cooked for 10 minutes. Once cooked they must be left to cool on the sheets for a few minutes before being transferred to a cooling rack.

You can see the biscuit on the right at the front is smudged whereas the on the left the lines are clearer


I will definitely bake these again as I think they were slightly under baked, another minute would probably have made them more crunchy when they had cooled.

Recipe No. 22 - Carrot and Pistachio Cake

I love eating Carrot cake. I hate making Carrot cake.

The things I hate about it are:
1. Grating the Carrot, It takes forever and you keep thinking you've done loads more than you actually have. Also you always end up grating a little bit of your fingertips if you stop concentrating for me than a second.

2. Using oil instead of butter really brings it home just how bad it is for you. I think I hate using oil too is because it doesn't taste very nice on its own whereas butter does :)

So you pretty much just cream the butter and sugar as usual and then add all of the other ingredients to the bowl, mix and bake for 45 minutes. It is quite time consuming due to the grating but other than that it is very simple and easy. After it has cooled you mix the cream cheese, icing sugar, butter and lemon zest together and top the cake with it.

I cooked the cake in a round tin rather than a traditional square tin, I took some to work and the rest disappeared by the next evening. It was delicious and the pistachios made a really nice change to walnuts.

The only downside to this cake is making room in the fridge, It has to be kept chilled due to the cream cheese in the icing. xx