Courgette Risotto

I don't often post savoury recipes. I love baking, and tend to share the fruits of my labours with my work colleagues or family if I happen to be visiting them at the right time, but my savoury side isn't as well developed. I blame it on living alone. It doesn't seem worth it half the time to make something interesting just for me, but I must get out of this mindset and start making more of an effort. Anyway, I was visiting J and T this weekend and we decided that we wanted courgette risotto. I've blogged about mushroom risotto before here and I use pretty much the same method for making the courgette risotto.

The inspiration for the recipe originally came from the BBC Food website, from their video section, Get Cooking, which is really instructive. The recipe is one of Sophie Grigson's, Courgette and Herb Risotto. I have to admit that I've never made it with all of the herbs specified (or in fact, any of them!) because lots of small amounts of fresh herbs are not budget friendly and the only thing growing in my garden at the moment (aside from weeds and grass) is rosemary, which wouldn't have quite the desired effect!

However, I think my take is good too!

Courgette risotto
Ingredients (for 3 people)
Olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
3 medium-large courgettes
250g arborio risotto rice
100ml dry sherry
750ml-1 litre vegetable stock (I use Marigold Bouillon powder)
Parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper to taste

Method
- Heat a good glug of olive oil in a large-ish pan, and add the chopped onion. Sweat slowly until softened but not coloured, about 5 minutes or so.
- Coarsely grate about 1/3 -1/2 of your courgette into the pan and continue to cook over a medium heat until the courgette has started to soften.
- In the meantime, coarsely chop the remaining courgette and saute over a medium heat in a large frying pan.
- Add the risotto rice to the grated courgettte/onion mix and stir for around a minute to coat the rice, which should go translucent.
- Add the dry sherry and simmer until it is all absorbed.
- Start adding the warm vegetable stock, a ladleful at a time keeping stirring as much as you can. The stock needs to simmer while it is being added, if the heat is too low the rice won't cook. Too high and the stock will evaporate before the rice has had a chance to absorb it.
- Add the stock until the rice is cooked to your liking. Al-dente is traditional, but I like mine softer.
- When it is cooked, add salt and pepper to taste and stir in a knob of butter and some grated parmesan (as much as you like!) and grate some more parmesan to add at the table.

J made a lovely rosemary and rock salt foccacia and a green salad to go with the risotto, which were great accompaniments.

Red Nose Day fairy cakes

Quick and easy cupcakes for Comic Relief. I wanted to make something super-speedy and appropriate to mark Red Nose Day today. I didn't have much time in the evening, and these cupcakes fitted the bill perfectly. This must be the easiest cake mixture in the world, and tastes fantastic, largely due to the use of real butter. Well, it's worth it to raise money for a worthy cause!!!
The half a cherry represents a red nose. Yep, this seems obvious to me too, but quite a number of my colleagues didn't click on until I explained it..... even though I've been raising money for Comic Relief all week by taking cakes into work. Well, I think they look like red noses!

Fairy cakes with red noses

Ingredients

120g very soft butter

120g self raising flour

2 medium eggs

120g caster sugar

1tsp baking powder

2-3 tbsp milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

9 glace cherries, cut in half for decoration

Icing sugar

Method:

- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Line 18 holes (you'll need two bun tins really, but see note later) with fairy cake cases (not muffin cases, which are larger).

- Place all ingredients (except cherries and milk) in a bowl and whisk with an electric hand whisk until well combined, light and fluffy.

- Add the milk a little at a time until your mixture is softer and drops more easily from the spoon.

- Divide the mixture between the cases and put in the oven.

- Bake for about 18-25 minutes, but check after 15 if you know your oven is hot. They are done when pale golden brown and springy to the touch.

- Remove to a wire rack and allow to cool.

- Make a simple water icing by mixing icing sugar with hot water until you have the required consistency. I don't have amounts for this, simply adding more icing sugar if the mixture is too runny or more water if it's too stiff. Add the water 1tsp at a time though - it's so, so easy to get into a cycle of too wet, too stiff, too wet, too stiff....... until you end up with gallons of icing! I made mine fairly stiff so it didn't run off the fairy cakes too much.

- Add half a cherry and admire your work.

Notes: I only possess one muffin tin. I filled all 12 holes with fairy cake cases and balanced the remaining six on the top, between the holes. This worked surprisingly well, but the cakes balanced on the top cooked in about 15 minutes, the ones in the proper holes took nearly 25!?!

I also used quite small eggs for these and needed to use 3 tbsp milk to make the mixture soft enough.

If you want, you could fold some chopped glace cherries through the mixture before baking, say 100g. If you want to do this, wash them first to rid them of the sticky syrup that will make them all sink to the bottom.

Now for the important bit..... sell them for as much as possible to raise funds for Comic Relief. Yum! Everyone who had one of these loved them, and I'm sure your friends and family could be persuaded to part with a bit of hard cash, even in these (whisper it) credit crunch times to support such a worthy cause.

Soured cream cake with a chocolate spice swirl

I've been meaning to try baking a cake with soured cream in it for quite a long time now. I've made Nigella Lawson's chocolate soured cream cake in the dim and distant past, but I don't particularly remember the soured cream making much of an impact. I'm sure the effect is there, but subtle as her recipe uses a relatively small amount of soured cream in a relatively large cake.

Anyway, I was reminded of the existence of the little freebie booklet 'The Guardian Guide to Baking' (with recipes predominantly by Dan Lepard) which was given away in November 2007 with one of the Saturday issues of the paper. In here is a recipe entitled 'The easiest cake in the world' which is a rich soured cream cake. I actually don't think the title is accurate - yes, the cake is easy to make, but an all-in-one sponge (such as I used for these butterfly cakes) is even easier!

I decided to follow Dan's recipe closely and he gives quite a few option for baking. I went with a 7" (18cm) square cake tin but also decided to adapt the recipe slightly by adding a cocoa sugar spice layer. Well, that was the idea. You can see from the pictures that the layer wasn't quite there, it turned rather magically into a swirl!

Soured cream butter cake

Ingredients

200g unsalted butter, softened

250g caster sugar

2 large eggs

200g soured cream

300g plain flour

3 tsp baking powder

For the cocoa layer

10g cocoa powder

30g light brown soft sugar

1 scant tsp mixed spice

a splash of milk

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4.

- Grease and line a 7" square baking tin.

- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy and then add the eggs, one at a time until well combined (an electric mixer is best here).

- Beat in the soured cream until it disappears and then sift in the flour and baking powder, beating to combine.

- Remove a large dollop (sorry I didn't measure this, but probably about 1/5 - 1/4 of the mixture - I only wanted a thin layer) and add it to the cocoa, sugar and spice in a small bowl. Add the milk and mix through until well combined.

- Spoon around 1/3-1/2 of the white mixture into the cake tin, smoothing out into all the corners. Place small blobs of cocoa mix and spread to cover the white layer completely. Then blob the remaining mixture onto the top (it is easier to spread it evenly if you do many smaller blobs than piling it all in the middle).

- Place in oven and bake for 45 minutes to an hour (mine took around 1 hour 15 minutes I think) until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

- Remove to a wire rack and allow to cool.

As you can see from the picture above, my carefully planned layer did not materialise. I honestly don't know why not, I very carefully made a layer of dark in the middle. The only thing I can think of is that the edges of the cake started to heat up and cook more quickly than the middle, leading to a sort of convection current effect where the edges rose up and fell into the cooler middle. Anyhow, it isn't important - it's quite a pretty effect at the end of the day!

So to taste... the spice was subtle - if you want something more obvious you'd have to increase the amount. I couldn't really taste the cocoa, but that was ok because I only really wanted it for the colour anyway.

I have to admit I wasn't madly keen on this cake. (My personal preference is this buttermilk cake!). The cake is very rich and buttery - you can really feel the smooth butteriness of the soured cream. However, this was very much a personal opinion, as my colleagues quickly snaffled it with much praise and delight!

Butterfly cakes for Comic Relief

How can you resist these gorgeous little butterfly cakes, ready to fly away (into the mouth of a passing colleague more than likely!). These were an on-the-spur-of-the-moment type cake, and consequently must be extremely easy. The recipe was a standard vanilla sponge cake mixture with a vanilla buttercream icing. Simple is beautiful and these were really popular with my colleagues. I'm also raising money for Comic Relief at the moment, and these cakes are part of that effort. Why don't you do something funny for money for Red Nose Day on Friday 13th March???

Butterfly cakes
Ingredients
120g butter
120g caster sugar
120g self raising flour
2 large eggs
1tsp baking powder
1tsp vanilla extract

Method

- Preheat oven to 180C/Gas 4 and line a muffin tin with 12 cases.

- Place all ingredients in a large bowl. NB butter must be very soft, or use margarine.

- Mix well using an electric hand mixer until thoroughly combined, light and fluffy.

- Divide between cake cases and bake for 20-25 minutes until light golden brown.

- Allow to cool.

For the buttercream. Cream 90g softened butter (not margarine here, it's important to use butter for flavour) with 180g icing sugar and a dash more vanilla extract until very light and fluffy.

Cut a circle out of the top of the cake and then cut it in half to make two wings. Place a blob of buttercream in the hollow of cake you've created, then gently but firmly squash the wings back in place as in the photo below.

Complete your creation by dusting with icing sugar. Irresistible.

Gingerbread

This is one of my favourite recipes (with a smeary and spattered page in the book - How to be a Domestic Goddess), and fortunately, extremely easy to make. I love recipes that don't require you to have softened butter, because firstly I never remember to take it out, and secondly, even if I do take the butter out my house is sufficiently cold that it never softens to proper soft consistency to allow easy creaming. I always have to cream the butter on its own first to make sure it isn't going to kill off my electric hand mixer.

Anyway, enough of the moaning and onto the cake. You can probably guess that this cake is made with a melted butter method - so quick, so easy and smells so delicious as you do it. There really is something about the smell of melting butter, sugar, syrup and treacle that is sublime.......

Gingerbread (adapted slightly from Nigella Lawson)
Ingredients
150g butter
125g dark muscovado sugar
200g golden syrup
200g black treacle (I ran out and used about 150g treacle, 250g syrup)
2 heaped tsp ground ginger (or to taste if you don't want it as strong or like it hotter)
250ml milk
2 large eggs, beaten
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda, dissolved in 2 tbsp warm water
300g plain flour


Method

- Preheat the oven to 170C/Gas 3.

- Grease and line a 12 x 8" (20 x 33 cm) tin with parchment paper. DO NOT use a loose bottomed tin, or anything with cracks in it. The reason will be apparent later.

- Gently melt the butter, sugar, syrup, treacle and ginger in a large-ish pan.

- Off the heat, add the milk, eggs and bicarbonate of soda with its water.

- Pour the melted mixture onto the weighed flour, beating well until no lumps of flour remain. Or, if you're me and misread the recipe - add the flour to the pan (less washing up....) and beat with an electic whisk to remove the lumps - the electric whisk is necessary - just beating with a spoon doesn't work.

- The batter will be liquid - think double cream consistency (which is why you can't have any cracks in your baking tin) so pour it into the lined tin and place in the oven.

- Bake for 45mins to 1 hour until risen and firm. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

- When cool, you can ice the cake with a simple icing made from 175g icing sugar and 1tbsp lemon juice plus a little water as necessary to make a thick icing. Spread this on and allow to set before cutting.

- This makes 18-20 squares.

Fabulously sticky and gingery with lovely hints of treacle adding to the warmth. I love the magic of pouring the batter into the tin, placing it in the oven and removing a cake an hour later! The cake itself is light and moist and utterly delicious.

I didn't make the lemon icing this time, because it can get a little messy when transporting the cake to work etc, but if you want to, the sharply sweet lemony icing is the perfect contrast.