Tiffin, a beautiful thing.

Despite what you may think, I do not have a sweet tooth. Like at all. But there are, I believe, some treats that are able to draw out the sugar demon in anyone, one of those things being tiffin. Despite any ill feelings I may sometimes harbour towards sugar, tiffin is always there to rebalance our relationship. It’s phenomenally versatile, I’ve never made it with the same ingredients twice and just add whatever happens to be floating about at the time. You don’t like nuts? Leave them out. Glacé cherries not your thing? Chuck something else in.  Tiffin is also incredibly easy to make, a simple case of chop, melt, mix. Simple.  Make these for friends, family, loved ones, people you don’t know/like...everyone. 

Ingredients

250g dark chocolate, chopped

200g butter

3tbsp golden syrup

200g digestives biscuits, broken up

50g raisins

100g hazelnuts, chopped

100g glacé cherries, chopped

Method

Start by greasing and lining an 8x8” square tin.

Place the butter, chocolate and golden syrup in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water making sure the bowl doesn’t touch the water below. Allow the mixture slowly melt until smooth.

Add to the chocolate mixture the digestive pieces, raisins hazelnuts and cherries, stir to combine. Pour the mixture into your pre-lined pan, pop in the fridge and chill until set, about 4 hours.

Once set, use a sharp knife to cut the tiffin into squares and serve.

Enjoy! x

A Quacking New Year

This year the boy and I continued what is fast becoming a new year’s tradition: dinner followed by getting drunk with Jools Holland. Life in the fast lane...

I don’t actively hate new years, in fact I always have the best intentions to go out, do something wild, even just leave the house. Alas I’m often too busy getting excited about Christmas that I tend to forget about new years until about 2 days before, when I frantically think of all the things that I could possibly do before settling for dinner followed by getting drunk with Jools Holland. My lack of planning often finds me running between supermarkets trying to gather last minute ingredients, nightmare. Anyway this year proved to be no different; ‘What shall we do for new years? London? Edinburgh? South Africa?’ See such good aspirations.

Anyway we got to eat lots of extravagant food, drink sloe gin and champagne (dangerous) and discover Pokey Lefarge and the South City Three (amazzzzing).

Hope you all had a luverly new year x

Moules marinière

 

Slow roasted duck legs with apple and cinnamon

Chocolate salted caramel tart

A Belated Thanksgiving Post

So I’m a little behind on the old blogging front I know. It’s gotten to the point where my camera is full and the prospect of going through all my photos, editing them and writing about them seems like an insurmountable task. Oh well, here it goes. 

Following the success of her winter weekend last year, Lucy invited us all back up to Rugby to celebrate Thanksgiving. Now we were faced with the slight problem that none of us are American and we had never even eaten a Thanksgiving meal let alone cooked one. We weren’t about to let that stop us though, oh no, we carried on blindly and prepared what I suppose was really our interpretation of a thanksgiving feast. To any Americans reading this, I am sorry and we tried our best. 

I can’t take any credit for the photos below as they were taken by Lucy’s nephew Pod. I see photography in his future!

For breakfast Lucy made pancakes with bacon and syrup, yum!

Then began the task of preparing lunch! I was left in charge of the turkey, seasoning it was fine but getting it in the oven was a bit of a pickle. It took two of us to get that thing in and out, it was so heavy (thanks Helin!).

We had an early starter in preparation for the feast, Lucy’s take on a prawn cocktail, phwoar!

Everyone chipped in for the main meal and came up with all kinds of deliciousness!

Roasted squash

Candied yams. To say I was dubious about these yams would be a gross understatement. Yeah I got over that pretty quick and went back for seconds.

 

Whipped potatoes

Stuffing

Honey glazed carrots. Green beans

Lou’s famous gravy

It was an absolute feast!

For pudding, the fabulous Dine made pumpkin pie topped with a sort of walnut praline. Insane in the membrane. 

Lucy’s brother Nug, did some research and a little presentation on Thanksgiving as none of us really knew the history behind it. I actually managed to confuse it with the Boston Tea Party which is apparently something entirely different...

After dinner we all composed little poems about what we were thankful for and hung them on he tankful tree made by Helin.

I had an absolutely fantastic weekend, full of food, friends, charades, guess who, more food, a few funny little games from Alice and lots of Friends Thanksgiving episodes. 

And Christmas pants!

Thank you so much Lucy and Dine for having us all x