Easy No-Churn Banoffee Ice-Cream

Well, it appears that warmer weather has finally found the UK over the past couple of weeks (although I am nervous to say it for fear of driving it away again!). So to celebrate the warmth I thought I'd make ice-cream. I thought it would be nice to make something quite quick and easy and a little cheat-y too but that doesn't mean that this won't be delicious.

Inspired by Kavey's Bloggers Scream for Ice-cream challenge many months ago (July 2012) I have been intending to make no-churn ice-cream for a long time. Using sweetened condensed milk and whipped cream as the base for the ice-cream means that you don't need to churn it to get a smooth, crystal free ice-cream, perfect for people without an ice-cream machine.

Easy No-Churn Banoffee Ice-Cream
Ingredients
300ml whipping cream
200g (half a tin) condensed milk, chilled to speed the freezing process
150g Bonne Maman Confiture de Caramel (or use Nestle's Carnation Caramel)
2 small to medium ripe bananas (or large, depending on taste)
You'll also need a freezer-proof container or two depending on size

Method

- Whip the cream until it reaches the soft peak stage, don't overwhip.

- Whisk in the condensed milk until you have a combined mixture with soft peaks.

- Chop the bananas into the mixture.

- In order to get a caramel swirl you have two options

      - if your freezer-proof container is big enough you can pour the banana mixture into the container, then add the caramel and swirl carefully.

        - if you're going to be tight on space, swirl the caramel into the mixture in your mixing bowl but then don't mix too much more as you pour it into the container to freeze.

- Freeze for at least three hours or until solid. (I left mine overnight)

Serve with extra caramel (for more luxury) and extra banana (for more health!). If the ice-cream has hardened too much, allow it to soften a little in the fridge or at room temperature to make it scoopable.

I was recently contacted by Fruitdrop - a company who deliver boxes of fruit to workplaces and asked if I wanted to develop a recipe for them. I used bananas to make my ice-cream. They delivered one of their fruit boxes to my house (although the driver looked most confused - he said he'd never delivered to a residential property before!) and were very accommodating about having to work around me leaving the house at a rather early hour.

A Fruitdrop fruit box - with rubbish lighting - sorry!

I wasn't asked to review the contents of the box, but actually, I want to. As well as being very helpful to work with the quality of the fruit in the box was very high indeed - all of the fruit was fresh and unblemished - it had obviously been packed and transported with care (including nectarines!) and I think the quality was probably better than equivalent supermarket fruit. The box contents were as follows: 16 bananas, six pink lady apples, ten satsumas, two nectarines, three peaches, four gala apples, six packham pears and a huge bunch of grapes. The nectarines, peaches and pears were under-ripe, but this is understandable given that they cannot be transported ripe and given a couple of days would have been fine. You can find out more about Fruitdrop boxes for offices here - there is pricing information and I think my box was a 'Seasonal' one. 

Selection of fruit from the box

As I'm not such a fruit bat that I could have eaten all of the fruit before it went off I took the box to work to share with colleagues and quite a number of them commented about the high quality of the fruit. They were also very pleased to have a refreshing change from cakes!!! Sadly the organisation I work for does not have the capacity to take this idea on, but if it did I'm sure it'd be well received.

Thank you to Fruitdrop and Alice for the box.

This is a sponsored post, however I was not required to write a positive review; all views expressed are my own (or my colleagues'!).

Nigella's Chocolate Pistachio Fudge

I have been a little busy recently, both at work and with having the kitchen redone (there will be photos, but perhaps not yet, as it still needs to be tiled and redecorated) and my time and motivation to blog has fallen slightly by the wayside. I have still be making lots of things though, so the backlog (an ever-present problem for me) has been building steadily.

In line with needing to make something quick and easy, and not having all that much time, this post will be short and sweet, rather like the fudge it describes. I often flick through books I bought a while ago, and happened to be flicking through Nigella Express recently, not really with anything in mind, when the page with the chocolate pistachio fudge caught my eye. So pretty. So easy. And fairly quick too - just need to let it cool and set. It's the perfect thing for those in need of an easy sweet treat to make. No baking required, and only four ingredients too.

You can find the original recipe for Chocolate Pistachio Fudge on Nigella's website. Regular followers will be wondering about the pistachio of the title. No, I cannot magically eat them, but instead substituted dried cherries for the nuts. A different texture, I grant you, but not an unpleasant one. Admittedly, the contrast of the green nuts and the dark fudge is rather more photogenic than the rather unremitting brown of my fudge, but never mind. 

I adapted the recipe slightly and give my amounts here:
Chocolate Cherry Fudge
Ingredients
300g condensed milk
260g dark chocolate (I used G&B Cooks 72% chocolate here)
22g butter
90g dried cherries, chopped a bit smaller

Method
- Line a 20cm/8" square tin with clingfilm/wrap.
- Melt butter, condensed milk and chocolate in a large pan over a low heat.
- Mix in chopped cherries.
- Spoon into prepared tin and level. Allow to cool before refrigerating.
- When set, cut into 64 pieces and store in the freezer.

I have only one small gripe about this recipe - there seemed to be a slight fatty deposit on the top of the fudge which is really not very attractive. I don't know why this is, perhaps I overheated the mixture? It doesn't matter all that much because I know what it is, and it's only me that'll be eating this rather than my colleagues, but I'm not sure how to prevent it next time. 

Hmm, unphotogenic fatty bit....

That aside, this is beautifully smooth and rather more-ish to eat too. Not too sweet and the cherries add a good textural contrast. Having this in the freezer is pretty dangerous though... I wasn't convinced that it would be good to eat straight from the freezer, but it really, really is. Not too hard to bite into at all, and I can hear it calling me as I type. It'll make a great 'freezer-raider' snack!

When I thought about this fudge it fulfils the criteria for a number of the blogging challenges this month.

We Should Cocoa, hosted this month by Janice of Farmersgirl Kitchen, founded by Choclette of Choc Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Teapot. The theme this month is cherries and although I made a lovely cake with fresh cherries in it I haven't had chance to post it and we're at the deadline now.

Forever Nigella, hosted this month by Karen of Lavender and Lovage, and founded by Sarah of Maison Cupcake, where the theme is 'Fridge Raider Snacks'.

Bookmarked Recipes, hosted by Jac of Tinned Tomatoes, because this is a recipe I've been meaning to get round to making for ever such a long time now - I don't know what took me so long as it's so simple and quick to do.

Sarah of Maison Cupcake has also launched a 'No Bake' challenge, born from her lack of a kitchen for a period this summer. I can empathise with that feeling, although mine didn't take quite as long as Sarah's to change. I feel eminently qualified to enter the no-bake challenge!

Finally, I think this would make a good 'Sporting Snack' and am submitting it to Ren's Sporting Snacks challenge on Fabulicious Food. 

We Should Cocoa - Chocolate Peanut Butter Mega Flapjack

We should cocoa is one! Happy Birthday! To celebrate the first birthday of the best chocolate blogging event out there, Chele at Chocolate Teapot has invited us all to create a tasty chocolate treat that we would like to see at the virtual first birthday party. I can't believe it's been a year since the first we should cocoa was announced - how time flies. I do remember being very excited about the challenge though, and very pleased that the first ingredient was raspberries - I love raspberries and made them into this delicious cake.

It took me a while, but I eventually decided on these flapjacks. I think they'd be great to take to a party - lots of other people have made cake for the party so I fancied something a little different. This recipe is based on Dan Lepard's Halva flapjack, a recipe I have seen lots and lots of bloggers making. You can find the original recipe here. I'm still not sure about using tahini so I decided to adapt the recipe to suit what I had available (hello ginormous jar of peanut butter) and what I fancied eating (mmm, cranberries and chocolate). Dan says that the use of tahini in this recipe allows less butter to be used and that when heated tahini goes fudgy. Now, clearly tahini is made from sesame seeds and peanut butter from peanuts, but both seeds and nuts are high in fats and have the same sort of paste consistency so I was hoping that using PB wouldn't lead me far wrong with the recipe.

Foodycat noted that the recipe needed to be cooked for longer than Dan stated and that hers was still very gooey in the middle after the stated time. She also recommended using the full amount of oats. So with these recommendations in mind, here is my adapted version of Dan's original recipe.

Chocolate Peanut Butter and Cranberry Flapjack
Ingredients
100g butter
75g light muscovado sugar
200g condensed milk
75g peanut butter (mine was a crunchy 100% peanut version)
50g honey
100g dried cranberries
100g chocolate, chopped
225g oats

Method

- Grease and line an 8"/20cm square tin with baking parchment. Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C.

- Melt the butter, sugar and condensed milk in a saucepan until hot and the sugar has dissolved.

- Remove from the heat and add the PB and honey and then the dried cranberries. Mix well.

- Add in the oats and mix fairly well, then add the chopped chocolate and mix until everything is evenly distributed.

- Spoon into the prepared tin, smoothing the surface and bake until pale golden. Dan states 15-20 minutes, I found mine needed at least 30.

- Remove from tin and allow to cool, but cut whilst still slightly warm if possible.

Notes

- I added the chocolate along with the oats rather than earlier to stop it all melting into one chocolate blob. This way I reckon the oats have taken the heat out of the mixture. But don't hang around while you're mixing it.

- I cut mine when cold and it was still soft enough to do this.

- My house smelled deliciously of hot peanut butter and chocolate while these were cooking. A particularly delicious combination...

Wow, these were fab! They were lovely and fudgy in the middle and the combination of chocolate, peanut butter and dried cranberries was like eating a particularly decadent version of one of my favoured sandwiches, peanut butter and jam. Mmmm! The cranberries were great at providing just a little tartness and the chocolate was, well, chocolate - i.e. delicious! I will make these again and wish I had made them earlier! I think that they would be particularly good at a party (especially if you want to pretend that the oats are good for the little children attending!) so although they're not flashy or over the top, they are my submission.

If you want to see my other submissions to We should Cocoa here they are:

September - Chocolate raspberry cake (raspberries)

October - Triple chocolate and hazelnut crunchies (hazelnuts)

November - Chocolate caramel cupcakes with caramel buttercream (caramel)

December - Chocolate date crumble bar (dates)

January - Chocolate box cake (leftovers)

February - (tea)

March - Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate lime buttercream (lime)

April - (marzipan)

May - Chocolate roulade with black forest buttercream (roulades)

June - White chocolate and strawberry muffins (strawberries)

July - (apricot)

August - Chocolate rose rice pudding (rose)

Hmm, must try harder this year to complete all the challenges! Can't wait to see what's in store for us all!

MM7 - Lemon butter cake

This is the fourth and final post in my mini series on baked goods using condensed milk - the others are double chocolate blueberry cookies, brown sugar chocolate cake and blueberry and cranberry condensed milk oat cookies. It's also another in my 'Marked and Made' series - all of the things that I've had bookmarked either physically or on the t'internet as being things that I should really get round to making at some point. That point has arrived!

Dan Lepard (who else!) first published this recipe for Lemon butter cake in August 2006. Wow, I really am digging into the archives aren't I!

I followed the recipe pretty much as given here, but I don't think I had quite enough lemon juice - I think that some of the volume of my lemon juice was made up with lemon segment bits, so next time I'd add the full amount of lemon juice for even more tang. I can't link to Dan Lepard's forums on this cake at the moment because he's doing maintenance on them (hoping to have them back soon, as they're an invaluable source of hints and tips!) but Suelle at Mainly Baking has made this cake (before she started blogging!), and mentioned that she had trouble whisking the egg white to the required consistency. I was unsure what to do about this, but decided to go with Dan's instructions as I had an electric hand whisk to do the hard work (which Suelle didn't have) and I think that they turned out ok - see pic below:

I haven't done much work with egg whites, but these are fairly shiny and probably soft peak stage? I'm not sure if that is correct, but the cake seemed to work well. The only other change I made was to cook the cake a little longer (if you look carefully you can see it's a little overdone on the edges) and I omitted the lemon juice in the icing topping. I really wish that I had used it though, because I think it really would have added to the overall lemon-yness of the cake.

Such a lovely, lovely cake. I wish I hadn't waited this long to try it for the first time. I will certainly be making this one again. The cake has a close crumb, and wasn't really what I was expecting - I suppose I was expecting it to be similar to the lemon syrup cake I often make (a Nigella recipe) although there's no reason to think it would be. The lemon flavour is beautiful - not absolutely in-your-face, but very definite and almost builds in intensity as you chew the cake, going back for one mouthful after another. I think that a lemon icing would have just finished this off and I'm very annoyed at myself for having not used lemon juice in my icing. A real success, and a great use of condensed milk! I think that overall, the two cakes I made with condensed milk were more successful than the cookies, but then I'm not great at making cookies I guess!

Blueberry and Cranberry Condensed Milk Oat Cookies

These cookies are the third in my mini series of things to make with a can of condensed milk. (The first two are these double chocolate blueberry cookies and this brown sugar chocolate cake.) I was looking on the Carnation website, browsing through all of the things I could make with my can of condensed milk (and there are a lot! it's a pretty good website for ideas) and came across this cookie recipe. Although it was the double chocolate cookies in the Sainsburys magazine that first caught my eye, I wasn't particularly happy with the way I baked them (waiting for a re-bake I feel) so a different cookie recipe was just what I wanted. These have a much higher proportion of condensed milk to the other recipe and I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

I decided to halve the recipe, because I had other plans for the remaining portion of condensed milk left in the tin (recipe to follow soon!) and the ingredients I used are listed below. I also decided that having enjoyed the dried blueberries in the last batch of cookies I'd use those again, with the addition of dried cranberries (which are cheaper than dried blueberries, but almost as nice!). The recipe says it makes 12, but they must be 12 absolutely enormous cookies because after halving the recipe I still got about 15 or so!!! In fact, if you're planning to get only 12 out of the full amount, I'd suggest cooking only 4 to each tray because they do spread quite a bit.

110g (4oz) butter, softened
110g (4oz) caster sugar
85g Carnation Condensed Milk
100g (3.5oz) oats
75g (3oz) self raising flour
40g each dried cranberries and dried blueberries

For the method, see the original recipe here. The dough is very sticky, and it wasn't really possible to roll the cookies, it was more a case of mushing them into a cookie-appropriate shape and trying not to lose this shape whilst transfering them onto the baking tray. Mmmm, sticky!!!

As you can see, my cookies don't really look like those on the website. Mine have spread quite a bit more, and I can only think that the amount of flour is slightly different or something like that, because I followed their ingredients and method pretty closely. Anyway, it didn't really matter because these were yummy! They were fairly crisp on the edges and nicely chewy in the middle - a combination of the condensed milk and the chewy oats. I still like dried blueberries and cranberries, which is pretty much what I expected! Very more-ish indeed and definitely one to remember for a fairly small amount of condensed milk.

MM5 - Brown Sugar Chocolate Cake

This is the second of my 'things to do with a tin of condensed milk' mini series. The first can be found here - double chocolate blueberry cookies. It's also resurrecting a series I started a very long time ago, 'Marked and Made' - things that have, for one reason or another, been languishing on the 'to bake' list for far too long. I guess it's just my way of acknowledging having finally made them. Interestingly, I don't actually make all that much that I've bookmarked - I seem to be far more influenced by things that I've seen recently and I suppose that if I haven't made something pretty soon after I've seen it, the chances are it'll have to wait far longer than I ever expect.

This brown sugar chocolate cake is a case in point. Dan Lepard first published the recipe for it in November 2005 - five and a half years ago..... even I hadn't realised it had been that long! I think I also avoided making it because there had been an extensive discussion on Dan's message boards about people who had had spectacular failures with this cake. I hate a failure, and often won't give something a go if I think it won't turn out well. But Dan's careful step-by-step photo guide gave me more confidence and when it was successful, people raved about it. I was still a little nervous though.

I decided that I would use half and half self raising and plain flour, and a very scant tsp of baking powder. I left the cake for 50 minutes initially, which I think has slightly overcooked it, and I was slightly worried that the top would taste burnt as it looked very dark. As you can see from the picture above, my cake had obviously risen too much in the oven, and had already collapsed back on itself by the time I took it out of the oven. Thankfully, it didn't sink any more while it was cooling, so I ended up with a flat, but not sunken cake. Given the history of the recipe I wasn't expecting peaks or massive rising, so I was a happy bunny indeed!

And what made me even happier was the divine taste of this cake. The 'burnt' top I thought I saw, wasn't burnt at all, for which I was very thankful! The first thing to say is that it is extremely delicate, but I'm sure that actually this is part of what makes the cake so delicious. It is a moist, chocolatey, melt in the mouth loaf with a beautiful soft crumb and I wouldn't hesitate to make it again. Next time I think I'll use all plain flour. Suelle at Mainly Baking has also made this recently (which was another prod to my memory that I ought to make it) and wasn't 100% about it, having made a couple of changes but I thought my relatively unchanged version was truly delicious. I think it would be great with vanilla icecream and a chocolate pouring sauce too, but it was fabulous at tea break time. My colleagues were really pleased with it too - I gave it to some colleagues who rarely get my baking these days and they were very happy!!!

Double chocolate blueberry cookies

Sorry about the lack of activity round here. I've got lots and lots to post but have been unexpectedly without internet access for the past few days - I was staying in a hotel that I'd expected to have wi-fi and had been planning to catch up on some posting, but there was no wi-fi, so obviously no posting! Never mind, I'll try and make up for it now. Starting with 101 uses of a tin of condensed milk. Well, perhaps not quite. When I made these caramel muffins I not only found Carnation Caramel, but tins of condensed milk too, my cupboards truly are a voyage of discovery sometimes!

A recipe in the current issue of the Sainsbury's magazine (June 2011) had caught my eye, and required 2 tbsp of condensed milk. Obviously it's not ideal to open a can for just 2tbsp (unless you want to risk eating the rest just as it is....) so this post is the first of a mini series using condensed milk. Onto the recipe...

Double chocolate cookies
Ingredients
125g butter, softened
125g caster sugar
2 tbsp condensed milk
125g self raising flour, sifted
50g cocoa powder, sifted *
100g plain/white chocolate, cut into chunks or 50g each dark chocolate and dried blueberries

* I think I used slightly less cocoa, because 50g is an awful lot, and then just added a little more flour to substitute. I think I used about 30g cocoa powder.

Method
- Preheat the oven to 150C/gas 2. Line a couple of baking trays with parchment paper.
- Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.
- Beat in the condensed milk and then add the flour and cocoa and mix. Stir in the chocolate and blueberries.
- Roll into 12 walnut sized pieces (I got about 25) spacing well apart on the baking tray. Flatten slightly then bake for about 25 minutes** (I did 20 and they were overdone) until firm at the edges but soft in the middle.
- Leave to cool for a few minutes before transfering to a wire rack to cool completely.

**Gas 2 seemed very cool, so I used gas 3 and baked for 20 minutes. I forgot that because the recipe was only supposed to make 12, so mine were effectively half the size, that they'd need less time anyway. They weren't burnt, but they were definitely overdone - lovely cookies, but too crispy. 

Originally from Sainsbury's magazine, June 2011.

These were nice cookies, but as I say, I definitely overcooked them, and they deserve another chance. I do like the combo of dried blueberries and chocolate. I used quite big chunks of chocolate rather than choc chips, and it was nice to hit a big lump of chocolate; I bet they'd be great warm, or dipped in coffee! They aren't as good as the world peace cookies though! Other flavour variations suggested in the recipe are: White chocolate and cranberry, Zingy ginger and lemon, Maple syrup pecan, Oats and honey, Cherry and flaked almond and Toffee fudge chunk. I quite fancy trying them with maple syrup and cranberry, in a combination of the flavours they suggest!