Apple, Orange and Cinnamon Strudel

As mentioned in my first basic budget tips post I always check the reduced sections when out grocery shopping. At the moment there always seems to be fresh puff pastry packs, usually anchor, in the chilled reduced section. I grabbed one and a 'roll back' short crust for some planned cooking/baking later in the week. You can freeze these blocks so don't worry if you spot some reduced and don't have any imminent baking plans!


 I love baking. It's an activity I like to involve G in, so the more simple the process the better at this age. Ready made pastry also obviously saves time which there never seems to be enough of! Cooking/baking everything yourself instead of buying it ready made from the shop isn't always cheaper like people like to preach (though this one would be if pastry was done from scratch - but it then still depends on what you're already stocked up on) but you can get past the problem of not finding exactly what you want.


I thought it would be nice to try out using orange juice and rind instead of the usual lemon for this recipe.

Our strudel turned out lovely but possibly a bit on the sweet side for those who don't have a sweet tooth.
Not everyone uses egg so feel free to leave this out if you prefer.


Recipe


Ingredients:

• Block of puff* pastry 500g
• 4 ready to eat apples
• Sultanas
• 50g Brown Sugar
• Flat tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• Orange rind and 1-2 tbsp juice
• 1 tsp margerine/butter
• 1tbsp flour
• 1 small egg (optional)
• Icing sugar for dusting

Method:

• Preheat oven to 180oc
• Roll out the puff pastry on a floured or icing sugar coated surface
• Roll into a large oblong shape
• Peel, core and chop apples into small chunks or thin slices
• Grate orange and add rind  to the apples, then slice and add the juice of one half of the orange. Make sure the apple is coated.
• Add chopped apples, sugar and a handful or two of sultanas to your mixing bowl
• Add small knob of butter/marge
• Add the cinnamon and nutmeg and mix well
• Add 1tbsp flour, mix well.
• Add the egg and mix well
• Place mixture in a straight line along side of the pastry (leaving a gap between the mixture and the bottom edge of the pastry).
• Fold the pastry over, sealing the filling inside.
• Make horizontal slices in the top (up to you how many) to allow steam to escape.
• Bake for 20 - 25 minutes until golden brown.

We served ours with custard the first time and ice cream the next. It's not keeping inline with my getting fit and healthy but it's a lovely pudding for the cold Autumn and Winter months.




*Strudel is also often made with filo pastry, the method is just slightly different when filling.

White & Dark Chocolate Cookies

I followed quite a basic recipe for these. They turned out quite well but next time I'll be following one online and trying out some corn starch for optimum results.

This makes a small batch, it yeilds about 10 - 12 large cookies.

Ingredients:

150g Dark chocolate broken into pieces

Half a small bag of white chocolate chips

225g SR flour

50g Caster sugar

50g Light brown sugar

125g Margerine

1 large egg

1 tsp Vanilla Essence

Method: 

• Preheat oven to 180oc
• Cream together the margerine and two sugars.
• Add in the egg
• Add in the vanilla Essence
• Fold in the flour
• Add in the chocolate and the chocolate chips

Put dollops of the cookie mixture onto a baking tray covered with baking paper.

Leave plenty of space between each one as they really do spread out. Some of ours didn't have enough space so didn't turn out a lovely round shape as we had to cut them apart from the others.

Bake for approx 12 minutes.

This was fun to do with G. Cornstarch is on my next shopping list and I'd like to try out some peanut butter cookies too.

Apple and Cherry Flapjack

So we did quite a bit of baking over the summer holidays. Flapjack is a fun, cheap and easy one to do and a tasty snack.

Recipe:

• 2 sweet Eating Apples of any variety
• 250g Margerine or butter
• 250g light brown or caster sugar
• 3tbs Golden syrup
• 450g Oats
• Couple of handfuls of chopped Cherries

Method:

• Preheat oven to 160oc
• Grease and line a baking tray
• Peel, core and chop apples
• Melt the butter/margerine, sugar and syrup in a pan until melted.
• Take off the heat and mix in the oats, apple and cherries.
• Fill tray with mixture and bake for 20 - 35 minutes.
• Cut in to bars and refridgerate

I thought the chopped apple was lovely in this flapjack, rather than grated but I actually found the flapjack itself way too sweet. If done again I would use half the sugar or I fancy trying out this recipe without the apricots and seeds (I can't eat seeds and just not a fan of the apricots). Also I'd love to find some cherries to bake with that aren't glace as that was unneeded added sugar to the recipe as well. 

Jus-Rol Lemon & Blueberry Tarts

 After using Jus-Rol for our apple and blackberry pie the other week I ended up having a look on their website and found lots of lovely recipes. One quite simple fun looking one I thought would be good to do with Grace was the Lemon and Blueberry tarts. They sounded lovely and also quick to make thanks to using Jus-Rol Short Crust Pastry Block.

Of course you can make your own pastry for these but this was easier baking with a 3 year old who has a tendency (not just mine I'm sure!) of sprinkling sugar and flour everywhere - 'it looks like snow mummy' and an unawareness that holding the mixing spoon coated in a huge glob of mixture might result in said mixture going all over carpet/table/furniture/child, delete as appropriate!

Recipe:

1 Shortcrust Pastry Block (chilled) 

125g mascarpone cheese tub 

1 egg  

1/2 lemon Juice and rind 

75g caster sugar   

Approx. 100 blueberries (fresh) 

 icing sugar to serve if desired 

Method: 

Preheat oven to 200°C / 180°C for fan assisted

1. Unroll pastry, cut out 12 discs, use to line a 12 hole bun or jam tart tin.
2. Beat together the egg, cheese, lemon juice and rind and the sugar until creamy. Divide the blueberries between the pastry cases and top with the cheese and lemon mixture.
3. Bake for 12 – 15 minutes until pastry pale golden and filling set.

To go to direct to the recipe follow this link

A bit messy but lovely!

We found you could make twice the amount (24 tarts) with the whole of the pastry block. You could also just save the other half of the pastry for another recipe.
We doubled up the filling ingredients so we had enough for the extra tarts.

Yum!

After filling all the tarts we still had some mixture left so put that in a pie dish and cooked that too. It was lovely just on it's own or could be had with ice cream.

G loved the final results which hopefully made up for mummy being stressy :( when she started sprinkling the sugar everywhere but the mixing bowl. We will definately be making these again :)

Blackberry and Apple Pie

So we went blackberry picking (brambling) last week in Bramhall park amongst other things with my sister and two of G's cousins. After our park adventures we made apple and blackberry crumble at my sisters house. The next day I took G to a nice little park closer to us and after a long play in the park I spotted loads of ripe blackberries (which I was quite excited by) so I took another haul and washed and refridgerated them and the next day we made apple and blackberry pie! I am tempted to go and pick some more before they all go and freeze them to use them for more baking or to go with yoghurt etc. Free fruit is always a good thing!

I'd already made flapjack in the morning and we did this when G was back from a tiring session at nursery so we were a bit lazy and cheated by using pre-made short crust pastry. 

It's not always the best idea to get pre-made pastry when on a budget but I got the shortcrust ready to roll block  by Jus-RolTM which is cheaper (and slightly less lazy) than the ready roll sheets and as luck had it the pack I picked up was reduced in price also! The blocks also have more pastry (500g) whereas the sheets were (320g) so I would have needed two of them.

G made good use of my sugar paste cutters I use for decorating her birthday cakes and made some lovely decoration for the top of our pie using the left over pastry.

We just went with the flow (like people would have before they had recipes to follow/like I do with much of my cooking ha) and what would fit in our pie tin, however there are plenty of specific recipes on the internet if you'd like one.

Here is our quite short and slightly vague recipe:

Ingredients:

• 2 to 3 Large Bramley (cooking) Apples
• 350g Blackberries (roughly - we used a lot, did not weigh but basing on how many blackberries in supermarket cartons).
• Short Crust Ready to Roll Block (500g)
• ~50g Light brown sugar
• A little milk (we used soya) to brush the pastry

Equipment:

• Peeler and/or knife to peel and chop the apples
• Baking tin 9 inch
• Pastry brush



brushing with the soy milk

• Sugar Paste cutters (optional)

Method:

• Set oven at 175oc (we have a fan oven). 
• Grease pie tin/dish.
• Separate pastry into two balls. Roll out one to fit your pie tin/dish. Use a sharp knife to remove any extra pastry.
• Peel and slice apples. G placed half of them in.
• Sprinkle in first layer of blackberries.
• Sprinkle first layer of sugar.
• Repeat. There was room for more fruit after (we used 2 apples, next time would use 3).
• Roll out second ball of pastry to create lid. I also cut a strip of pastry to go round the edge of the pie to help seal the lid.
• Make a couple of air holes in your pie lid (ours got covered by leaves).
• Brush lid with little milk.
• If wanted create decorations with any spare pastry. G made leaves, flowers and stars for ours. Brush these with a little milk also.
• Set tin/dish on middle shelf of oven and bake for approximately 30 - 40 minutes. The lid should be golden/browned. Ours could have been browner but the decorations had started to catch.

Placing her pastry creations on the lid

 We used some of our half price Tesco's finest ice cream to have with it. It was lovely!

Soda Bread

Baking is something which I enjoy and sporadically takes place in our house. When I do it now it more often than not involves my now turned 3 year old. It's fun for her and I've slowly learnt to not worry so much about how messy it gets. It's a good activity when the weather is bad or a break from whatever we are doing at the time. It's usually just a simple recipe to make it easier as baking with a child but also as we're not often stocked up on lots of exciting ingredients due to lack of funds.

My mother used to make us soda bread when we were little and seeing it being made on one of CBeeBies shows recently reminded me. That along side it's simplicity and it being budget friendly meant I decided to to make it in our next baking session.

Ingredients:

• 250g/6oz self-raising wholemeal flour
• 250g/6oz plain flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 435ml buttermilk

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 200C/gas 6/fan 180C and dust a baking sheet with flour. Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Pour in the buttermilk and mix it in quickly, then bring the dough together very lightly with your fingertips. Now shape it into a flat, round loaf.
2. Put the loaf on the baking sheet and score a deep cross in the top. Bake for 30-35 minutes until the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. If it isn’t ready after this time, turn it upside down on the baking sheet and bake for a few minutes more.
3. Transfer to a wire rack, cover with a clean tea towel and leave to cool.

I got my recipe from bbcgoodfood.com and changed it slightly to suit our needs.
I didn't have buttermilk so we used normal milk and stirred a couple of spoonfuls of lemon juice into it 5 minutes before using it. I also used white flour not wholemeal and left out the oats (not used in simple/ traditional soda bread recipe's) due to my health conditions. 
I altered the volume of milk to accommodate these changes.

Mixing

The recipe tells you to handle the mixture very gently but this wasn't going to be something I was worried about as I wanted G to get stuck in and experience it. She often can get funny about getting messy hands but enjoyed this part and the needing as well as the earlier mixing parts. 

Getting Stuck In

We used 450ml of milk and our dough was a bit too sticky and needed more flour so I have altered my recipe to 435ml milk for this post.

Lovely warm with jam

We had our bread warm, G tried hers with margerine and I had jam (which she's not a fan of). If you haven't tried it before I would suggest only eating it warm as it's much nicer then. It would be nice to make it again in the Winter.