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Halloween Hamburgers and Hot Chocolate Pudding
Can’t be bothered to make witches hair spaghetti or pumpkin soup from scratch?
I feel your pain.
If you want to nod your head towards Halloween for the children without the endless sweaty toil at a hot oven, and you’re not a totally organic lentil weaving wholefood maniac (not that I have anything against being a provider of decent food for the majority of the year), why not have a go at making some Halloween Hamburgers followed by some awesome hot chocolate for pudding?
Don’t panic, we’re not even going to MAKE the burgers from scratch. Oh no! Just buy some decent (or not, it’s your call) ones from the supermarket and cook them as you will. (I prefer frying – hence my gargantuan hips) While you’re doing that, pick up some of that extraordinarily orangey, bouncy processed cheese slices and some jacket potatoes. Chuck some whipped cream in a can, hot chocolate, mikado biscuits and a flake in your basket for good measure, oh! and a bottle of decent red wine.
About an hour before you’re going to put the burgers on, preheat the oven to gas mark 7 and place a roasting tray with some oil (olive or vegetable) in to heat up. Chop the potatoes into wedge shapes, soak in water, refresh, and dry throughly – for spicy wedges, dredge some cajun spice plus a little cayenne over the dried potatoes – before tipping the wedges into the roasting tray (stepping back to avoid fat spattering)
While the burgers are sizzling in the pan, or spluttering under the grill, get some of that amazingly awful cheese out of the fridge (although judging by the colour, texture and taste of the stuff you could probably keep it in a cupboard under the stairs for 40 years before it even started to think about going off) and push a cup into it to make a circle of plastic
Cheesy. If cheese were made from melted lego.
Let your creativity take you where it will – as long as that will is to make the cheese look like Jack O Lanterns.
You can eat those little cut out bits if you want. You probably DON'T want - but I bet you do it anyway
When the burgers are cooked, pop the little cheese pumpkins onto the top so they start to “melt” a bit (um this shit don’t melt, it just sweats a bit)
and serve with the potato wedges, some ketchup and maybe a veggie of some description – corn on the cob would be good, or a small tomato and cucumber salad..
Beefy, cheesy, easy
So for pudding?
If you can’t be arsed or don’t have the time to make my fabulous Halloween cupcakes then you can make an HAYMAZING hot chocolate drink which is laden with enough sweet stuff to class it as a pudding. (This always worked with my two when they were small – and still does the trick now when they’re ravenous teens)
My ingredients - Feel free to pick and choose and create your own family recipe
Choose your cups and fill three quarters full with milk. Transfer the milk into a jug and then pop it into the microwave. Adjust your settings according to how modern and fantastic your microwave is; mine is 1000000 watt (or thereabouts) and I give it about three minutes on high for three cups. You want the milk to be very hot but not boiling.
You can do this on the oven top - obviously. Also, my microwave needs cleaning.
While the milk heats up, place a couple of marshmallows (OMIGOD my homemade marshmallow would be frighteningly good in this) in the bottom of your cups.
One of each colour. We're gender neutral in this house
Once the milk is hot enough whisk your instant hot chocolate into the milk. I always add an extra teaspoon per person than the recipe on the side of the carton dictates.
Because this drink will also be a “pudding” feel free to add some extra chocolate at this point. I like to crumble some Flake into the mix, but have also used Bournville in the past or Mint Aero.
Hmmmmm
Whisk thoroughly again and then pour the hot chocolate liquid onto the marshmallowed cups
ZOMG!
The next bit needs to be completed quickly so get everything ready. You’ll need, the canned cream, the M&M’s, the mikado biscuits as “stirrer” and some flake to sprinkle on (You could use canned cream, malteasers and forget the “stirrer” – Just use whatever you have to hand) At this point open your bottle of red wine.
Quickly squirt the cream onto the hot chocolate it will start to sink immediately, so work fast…
SQUIRRT
Add decorations
The cream is sinking! SINKING ALREADY!
And serve.
*sigh*
An easy way to celebrate Halloween without the complicated recipes – what more do you want from me?
Oh yeah, pour a glass of your red wine into your fanciest glass…sniff…and take a sip. You deserve it.
Triple Layer Coconut Cake with Lemon Filling and Boiled Icing. Sounds Dangerous.
I had a coconut left over from the Totally Tropical Beach Party.
I decided it would be a crying shame to let it go to waste and so off I went to google to find a recipe that used fresh coconut.
I stumbled upon this:http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/fresh-coconut-cake-with-a-lemon-cream-cheese-filling-and-boiled-icing-recipe/index.html and my saliva glands went into overdrive. I was frothing (and if you’ll read on you’ll see that frothing at the mouth is somewhat of a theme while making this mission of a cake)
So the morning dawned. It was a Sunday, but a special Sunday – It was a bank holiday which means that Sunday is actually Saturday and Saturday is like a Friday, but a Friday that you’ve booked off work.
ANYWAY.
I cracked open the coconut.
YUM!
It was rotten to the core.
That cake though, that sweet, sweet cake had burrowed it’s way into my brain and I was determined to make it. A rotten coconut was not going to beat me. Oh No.
So I went shopping and got some desiccated coconut.
This recipe is HARDCORE. It requires 3 layers of cake. This is a challenge for me as I only own two 8 inch tins, I do have a third tin which just about fits the bill but I was a bit nervous about not using matching tins. Honestly, my naivety at this point is, with hindsight, touching.
I preheated the oven (my oven needs to start at gas mark seven in order to ignite) and got on with creaming the butter and sugar together
That's a half cup of vegetable oil waiting to get into the mix
I continued on with the recipe. Adding flour, oil and buttercream to the mix
Cake Batter.
I then whipped the egg whites into stiff peaks before folding them into the batter (I’m starting to feel slightly pissed off by this point, this is the sort of recipe which requires the use of every single bowl and spoon in the kitchen)
FFS
I folded the egg whites into the batter and poured the mixture into the pre-prepared cake tins. Into the oven they go..
Have you turned down the heat?
I forgot to turn down the heat.
I’M COOKING THESE BABIES AT TWICE THE HEAT THEY SHOULD BE AT.
I didn’t even notice, I was so busy getting on with the next level of madness (the lemon and creamcheese filling) that it was only after about 10 minutes and a really STRONG smell of cake burning cooking that I realised my mistake.
This could have been a very different blog if I had waited even 3 minutes more, but with a quick application of tin foil and a swift reduction of the heat, I managed to salvage the situation. (I might have also said the word FUCKING FUCKKK about 17 times.)
Three is the magic number
I move onto the lemon filling. This goes without incident, and is butter, creamcheese, lemon zest and lemon juice whipped together.
The cakes are cooling and before I can spread the filling, I have to make the icing.
At this point I realise that I have to make a sugar syrup which is meant to then be whipped into stiffened egg whites. Brilliant. This recipe might as well ask me to conjure a a robot army out of the dirt in my back garden, FOR FUCK’S SAKE. This is also the moment that I realise that NOT reading recipes before embarking upon them can turn me into a snarling, slathering BitchBeast.
"Take your eyes off me for a moment...that's right..glance over there at something for a second...I'm going to BOIL OVER NOW! MWAHAHAHAHA"
After I had cleared up the unbelievably quick-cooling-dries-to-a-crack-glaze-all-over-the-hob sugar syrup and poured it, with fear in my heart, into the whipped egg whites I got on with filling and icing the cake.
The cakes could have done with cooling even more before adding the filling, hence the dripping
The icing is amazing, like a frothy cloud. Desiccated coconut added to decorate.
This cake weighs in at an impressive 955 calories per tenth of an 8 inch diameter cake.
Oh. My. Hips.
Ain't it beautiful though?
And it tasted like eating a coconut and lemon cloud of diabetes coma, ie: delicious.
What can we learn from this post? READ THE RECIPE, you idiot, and if it sounds too much like hard work, it probably is. (but this was totally worth it)
I scream, you scream, we all scream for Ice Cream (Cupcakes)
Well, I’m back from my holiday. We did NOT die in plane crash, and although I have returned to the UK slightly crispier than before, this is entirely down to the 40 plus degree heat combined with beer at lunchtime forgetting to put on sunscreen regularly, rather than some sort of fiery fireball.
(I’d like to take this opportunity to thank one of my commenters DillyTante for her comforting words on my last post. Thanks, Dilly. Thanks A LOT)
In Skiathos, I pondered on the cake I would like to make for Oliver’s upcoming Beach/Tropical party (Yes, I am THAT sad) and came to the conclusion that I’d like to make cupcakes which look like ice creams.
So, while going out to restaurants to eat delicious food:
I think I'll pass...
Or watching the sun set over the harbour:
*thinks about cupcakes*
Or just generally hanging out:
WHAT?
The idea grew and grew.
So today I decided to have a trial run. I googled about a bit and found a recipe which actually cooks the cake inside a cornet. Genius! I decided to try a few of the cornet cakes and to also try a traditional cupcake in a case.
I assembled the most important ingredients…
The bananas and plums are there for me to make rude fruit salads for my own amusement. (the chicken likes to watch)
…and got to work. The recipe calls for a pretty standard vanilla cake mixture which should then be distributed between 12 cornets (with flat bases). As this is a trial run I only made four and spooned the rest of the batter into some lovely cases which I bought from the local CakePorn shop.
Oh! Do you remember when I told you of my vast and unending love of the two local party shops Here ? Well, in news just in…one has closed down due to financial difficulties and the other BURNED DOWN. *gasp*. So I am reduced to driving to a party shop that also specialises in cake decorations and tins and cases and cake stands and and and I’ll be bankrupt by Christmas.
So I prepared the batter and shared it between the cones and the cases.
Note the large amount of batter in the cornets
I baked them for 25 minutes and got on with the buttercream ice cream icing.
Again, I used a standard buttercream recipe consisting of:
250g unsalted butter
600g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp milk
I also added the second half of a vanilla pod’s seeds (the first half went into the cake batter) and whisked the butter and vanilla together until pale and then added the icing sugar slowly. Adding the sugar slowly made NO FUCKING DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER and I still ended up with a kitchen which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Miss Haversham’s house. I made half of the mixture without colouring paste, and the other half a small smear of “SugarFlair” paste in primrose yellow.
The cakes came out of the oven looking pretty good…
Hmmm
…but as you can see the cakes in the cornets have risen far too high over the edge of the wafer, when I add the icing this is going to cause a problem.
I got on with decorating the cakes, adding icing, flakes and sprinkles to get an idea of what works best.
Looking pretty good
The inside of the cornet
And the traditional cupcakes looked pretty good too..
YUM!
And so onto a taste test..
The cornets, although looking much more authentic as “ice cream” were far, far too sweet (possibly due to the large amount of frosting needed to cover the overspill of cake mixture). They were pronounced “YUCK!” and “TOO MUCH” and ended up..
Make compost, make something good of yourself Ice Cream Cornet Cupcake...become one with the universe.
(they also wouldn’t sit still on my…and I’m embarrassed to confess that I own one..cupcake stand *shame* which will be necessary to make the small fairy cakes into an effective Birthday Cake for the party)
And so we have a winner!
It's an ice cream in cake form...what's not to like?
But I’ve now got 40 cornets to use up and a ridiculous amount of icing sitting in the mixing bowl, malevolently.
And so I knocked up a cone dipped in icing, rolled in hundreds and thousands and filled with Marshmallow, M&M’s and smarties:
Sugar PLUS
And Oliver and Tom pronounced it “Good” and ate it, wafer and all.
And so, to a couple of links for you if you would like to make cakes that look like ice cream.
And a link to the blog that inspired the cone filled with sweets (actually, this whole blog is filled with wonderful ideas, I would have tried the cupcakes in ice cream pots if only there had been time)
Thank God for trial runs.
Man vs Food Party-ette
If you’re a fairly regular reader of my blog, or if you actually know me, you will know that I was very poorly for seven whole days last week. (You can read some whining about it here)
I’ve been a bore. So today I decided to treat the boys and make a spectacular MAN VS FOOD dinner.
Man vs Food is a brilliantly mesemerising TV programme from the US and stars Adam Richman as he chomps his way around the States. Each episode culminates in Adam taking on a “Food Challenge” and it is just…mind boggling. I have watched him eat pounds and pounds of burgers and fries, 12 dozen oysters, enormous MANcakes (*snigger*), pizza slices bigger than a human baby.
We love, love, LOVE the show and watch it, aghast, as a family. You can find out more here. (Also I love him)
So, I got up early this morning and had a good hunt around the internet for some authentic American recipes. I landed on a site called Soul Food and Southern Cooking and plumped for a meal consisting of:
Southern Fried Chicken
Macaroni and Cheese
Cornbread
Corn on the Cob
Homemade Lemonade
and
Peach Cobbler for dessert.
I headed off to the Supermarket and filled my trolley with abandon…
Hmmmm, plenty of high fat, low nutritional items in this baby (and a chilli plant)
On the way home we listened to the radio and Oliver suddenly asked me why the woman was singing about “choking him”. I was somewhat confused as the song playing was “Jump!” by the Pointer Sisters. Although, hilariously, it really does sound as if they’re singing “Choke HIM!” during the chorus, and so then I couldn’t stop laughing and tears were spurting out my eyes a bit and I had to pull over.
When we got home I got the chicken ready, by placing it into a mixture of full fat milk, salt and buttermilk…
milky, milky, bokey, boke.
and placing it into the fridge for a few hours.
While the chicken bathed itself like Cleopatra, I got on with making the cornbread. I’ve never even tried it before, and so was quite excited.
It’s really easy to make. You just mix together the dry ingredients of cornmeal, flour, baking powder and salt in one bowl, and the wet ingredients of melted butter, egg and milk in a jug and them combine them, stir well and pop into a fairy cake tray with cases.
Easy Peasy
While the cornbread cooked, I started on the macaroni cheese. Quite frankly, I was staggered at the amount of cheese and butter the recipe called for. A stick of butter (115g) and one and a half pounds of grated cheese (500g) makes this side dish a real gut buster…
Don't even look at this photo for too long or your EYES will get fat
The cornbread had cooked, and had been tasted, an essential task for the serious cook..
I pronounce it..."Tasty"
and so the macaroni cheese headed into the oven to bubble away and turn into Certain Death By Dairy.
I was starting to flag a bit by now and decided to make a jug of lemonade, just to have a couple of glasses with a little splash of vodka in to have a taste and liven me up a little.
Vodka Optional
After a drink I felt ready to tackle the peach cobbler. *childish snigger*
The recipe called for a “Baking pan” and whatever the fuck that is, I don’t own one. I do have a silicone cake tin in the right measurements though and decided that it would probably turn out OK. I’m telling you now, that it didn’t. So if you’re planning on trying any of the recipes, I strongly urge you to buy a “Baking Pan”. Good luck with that.
This doesn't look right...
I think the problem was that you’re meant to melt the butter in the “Baking Pan” and then add the batter and the peaches; instead of melting the butter in the microwave, pouring it into the cake tin and then spooning the batter on top to form an unholy alliance of fat with a thin batter which, sort of, curdled. MMMMmmmmmmmm
“Ah Screw It!” said the vodka I and bunged it into the oven with the Macaroni Cheese to cook for an hour.
And onto the chicken. I diverted a little from the recipe online and followed some advice from Nigella Lawson about poaching the chicken in it’s milky bath before coating in flour and frying.
I cannot begin to tell you how bad this smelled. All I can do is ask you to engage your imagination and think about chicken boiling in milk and buttermilk until the liquid becomes some sort of horrific cottage cheese floating on…plasma?
Dear Lord.
Once the chicken had cooked through, I let it cool down, double dipped it in seasoned flour and egg and fried in an entire block of solidified vegetable fat. *arteries weep*
There are no words. Unless the words are "Gross Obesity"
Finally everything was ready and the table groaned with a billion calories.
That's banana ketchup in the front of this shot. Yes. (and butter)
It was all…unbelievably delicious. We couldn’t finish it all, not by a long chalk as it was all so heavily fat laden that we became full very quickly, but my GOD it was good.
Yeah, shovel it in you bloody WHALE
So for the next two weeks I will be living on rice cakes.
The peach cobbler was a freaking disaster. It looks OK in the following picture, but it hadn’t cooked through and was just..ick.
Looks OK, Tastes like uncooked cake mix. And not in a good way.
If you fancy trying some authentic soul food then check out Soul Food and Southern Cooking
You can find a handy recipe converter here.
As we ate we decided that there is definitely a great party idea here. Maybe a dinner party with a good number of guests would manage to finish the food, and the “Food Challenge” could be a stupidly hot chilli laden dip served with nachos and the person who managed to eat a certain amount in a certain time could be the “winner”
*ponders*
You could rig the house up in stars and stripes and serve lager and cocktails in teacups a la the prohibition. Maybe throw the party on the 4th of July (it’s a bit late now for me to be having these sort of revelations…but hey! there’s always next year)
In conclusion…
In the fight between Man vs Food? On this occasion Food won.
*scrape* *scrape* *scrape* *scrape*
