Flapjacks & The Green Pan - Recipe & Review

I was never built to be a full time slave. I run out of steam way to quickly and concentration is not my strong suit. So when I was given the opportunity to work at a job which kept me busy for only 5 hours out of the day I was ready and waiting. Of course a full time job pays better and longer hours at the office mean less chance for me to spend money but it also means spending every hour after lunchtime wishing I was home or finding way to keep my eyelids from shutting on me. 

The other problem with being stuck at an office is following people on twitter who do things like go out for lunches or, as @rethavs did today, make yummy things for lunch. Then you are stuck staring at pictures, coming up with escape schemes until it's time to go home and by then all your energy is sapped and you make hot dogs for supper or go out instead. 

I was already home when the offending image was posted onto twitter and decided that this would be the perfect time to do a long overdue test of my Green Pan. 

Everyone who has ever made flapjacks or their daintier cousins know that these are some seriously sticky things before they are cooked. If you don't get the right amount of oil in their you don't get a good result. Too much and they soak it all up, too little and you'll be scraping your pan for days. So what better way to test this seemingly amazing pan? I used no oil, butter, grease, spray&cook, suntan lotion or any other kind of lubricant, just the pan...face to face with the sticky and delicious flapjack batter. 

The result? Perfect flapjacks! I will admit now that this is not the first time the pan was used, it gets used often for scrambled eggs and omelettes, so this was not just because it's brand new. As for the flapjacks, this recipe is a keeper.

(Adapted from cookbook.co.za's recipe)

What you need:

1 1/2 cups cake flour
4 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
Pinch salt (about 1/4 teaspoon)
1 1/4 cups milk
2 jumbo eggs 2 teaspoon of vanilla extract1/4 cup melted butter

What to do:

Sift or whisk dry ingredients together. Add the milk and mix well. Add the eggs one at a time, whisking well between each addition. Add the vanilla extract. Lastly whisk in the melted butter. Heat the pan on a medium heat and pour on a measure of the batter (all depends how big or small you want the flapjack to be) and cook on one side till bubbles form, pop and don't refill with batter. Flip over and cook till golden brown underneath. Serve warm with anything you like. mmm Nutella.

Disclaimer: The Green Pan was a prize I received at the Food Blogger's Indaba but my review is honest and nothing was left out

Caramel Bread

TheHusbands brother loves to cook. So when we're up for a visit I try and see where his interest lie and how well he executes them. So far I have seen him do 2 things. 1) Wreck a really good piece of meat and 2) Caramel Bread.

His way: Buy bread dough from the grocery store, make little balls, place in a baking tin and cover with Caramel Sugar and Cream. Leave to rise then bake.

This is the way I have been doing it. It's one of those dessert you can whip up real quick, everyone loves it and there is only 1 dirty dish (and sometimes a dirty drip tray if I underestimate how much it bubbles over)

It really is a self saucing dessert. The caramel sugar melts into the cream and soaks into the dough as it bakes. If you put in enough cream (and it doesn't all boil over onto your drip tray) there will be some caramel sauce left over too.

So the other day, while cooking up a cottage pie I sat waiting for the bing of my oven timer and realised "I need dessert!". How could I have people over for supper and not give them something sweet to end with? Caramel bread came to mind. Smells great, tastes delicious, minimum effort. I checked my watch, 17:00, there would be no way that PnP would still have raw dough for sale.

This lead me a to google search for a simple white bread recipe and I stumbled on this recipe. Checked my pantry (cupboard), checked the fridge, inspected my counter and found everything except bread flour. So did I give up? No! See I am a cook not a baker so I have no regard for exact ingredients...pffft. I used cake flour instead. I can tell you that on this one occasion my contempt for recipes paid off well (nothing exploded either, bonus!)

What you need:

1 cup milk

2 tbs butter

1 1/2 cup warm water
2 packets dry yeast
2 tbs sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup warm water
6/7 cups flour (use bread if you have it, cake if you don't)
1 cup cream (or more if you have a deep enough dish)
1 cup caramel sugar

What to do:
Melt the butter in the milk in a saucepan on a low heat. Once melted put aside to cool. Mix the yeast and 1/2 cup of warm water together and put aside too. In a large bowl mix together the sugar, salt and water together. Once cooled add the milk and butter mixture. Make sure the mixture is not too warm before adding the yeast mixture, you don't want to kill the yeast. Mix the flour in one cup at a time until you get a nice smooth and slightly sticky dough, not too sticky though. Kneed it and then pop it into a well oiled bowl, flip it over so that the dough is coated in oil and then cover and leave to rise for about an hour or until doubled in size. Knock it down and leave it for another 30 minutes. Greece a baking tin of your choice and and make balls of dough. The size is your choice depending on the baking tin you use but the balls are important. Sprinkle the caramel sugar over everthing keeps a little aside to sprinkle ontop. Pour the cream over. Cover and let rise for at least 20 more minutes. Before popping it into the oven at 180°C sprinkle the rest of the sugar on top. Bake until golden brown and serve warm. 
Can also be served the next day with some extra caramel sauce and a cup of coffee

Orange Yoghurt Cake

To be honest, this post was meant to hold a good ol' South African dessert. Only fair after the All American post before it but not all is fair in pregnancy and cravings and so the Local is Lekker post will have to wait.

Don't you worry though, this post is full of sweetness just right for the winter season. The perfect cake to bake if you don't want to spend too long out from under the covers and ready so quick you could probably bake it just before guest arrive for coffee.

Let em take you back to Tuesday afternoon. After checking with the whole family what the plans were for supper I was left with "make something" and my porridge brain shut down and no ideas other than "spaghetti bolognese" would come up. There was no mince and what I really wanted to do was curl up under a blanket and stare blankly at the TV screen. The latter won and I was delighted that "up next" on the Food Network was Ina Garten. Aha! I thought, she will definitely have something that will inspire dinner.

I was wrong, between the Baked Salmon (I don't like salmon, yes yes I know) and the Oriental noodle salad (Don't get me wrong, it looked good...and summery) nothing really caught my eye. Why do I bring up her show then? Well her dessert, lemon yoghurt cake, did. Off I ran to get pen and paper and rewound the segment to copy down ingredients and instructions and then rushed off to the kitchen, forgetting the warmth of the blanket and the vapid calm of watching TV

Into the kitchen I dashed and checked the fridge. Plain yoghurt...hmm just 1 small tub but I did have some leftover inkomazi/maas (Leben or sour milk), that should work. Then turn to the fruit bowl to check for lemons...plenty but the oranges...ooo. With that a cake was born.

A perfectly easy cake and one I have never baked before so perfectly fitting for Tandy Sinclair's  competition to win Le Creuset competition (click the link to see their amazing range)

What you need: (adapted from the Lemon Yoghurt cake by Ina Garten)
For the cake:
1.5 cups cake flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
2/3 cup plain yoghurt
1/3 cup Maas (Leben or sour milk. You can also use a whole cup of yoghurt)
1 cup sugar
3 Jumbo eggs
0.5 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp orange zest
0.5 cup vegetable oil
For the glaze:
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup orange juice

What to do:
Preheat the oven to 175°C. Line a 24cm springform pan. Sift all the dry ingredients together. In a separate combine the yoghurt, maas, sugar, eggs, vanilla and zest. Mix in the dry ingredients until just combined and then add the oil. Mix till all is combined but do not over mix. Pour into your pan and bake for 30-35 min checking to see if it baked through. While it cools slightly (too cold and it won't soak up the glaze) heat up the sugar and juice until clear. Pour over your cake.
Serve with a couple of slices of orange and a dusting of icing sugar.

Oh, I ended up making potato and leek soup for supper, wonderful how a little baking can get the creative kitchen juices flowing.

Meringues - Angel food

For my birthday TheHusband told me to pick a spot for breakfast, he wasn't sure he would be able to join us for lunch so we wanted to spend some time together. I chose to go to MissK. The food was really good but what really got my attention and stuck in my mind were their giant meringues. Brittle and crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside, I loved every sweet bite.

A few moths later my father decided to try a gellato recipe that uses a bazillion egg yolks, well 8 of them and I decided that it was the perfect opportunity for me to make meringues. So I popped on to google to find the perfect meringue recipe, I found one and my apologies to the blogger who's page I found it on but I seem to have lost the link.

The idea is simple:

Sift your egg whites through a fine sieve

Weigh them

Coat the mixing bowl with lemon (cut the lemon in half and rub it on the bowl)

Pop in the egg whites and start whisking

weigh out twice as much castor sugar

when the egg whites reach the foamy stage slowly start adding the sugar and whisk till stiff.

Take a large spoon and spoon big blobs of meringue onto a baking sheet (or pipe them on prettily if you must)

Then pop into the oven on 110°C with the oven door open for about 1 hour, then drop to 90°C till dried out. (these temperatures my vary depending on your oven)

For a little variation mix some strawberry essense into the egg white mixture and make strawberry meringues 

Bircher muesli the WW way

When summer comes around, cooked oats no longer sounds that appealing. I can eat them through winter for breakfast almost every day but summer time I go back to the cereals. However, I need variety otherwise I get bored and eat all the wrong things, so I was really happy when I was taught by my WW to make this variation on a Swiss breakfast.

 

What you need:
¼ cup oats
100ml fat free vanilla yoghurt
½ cup berries (fresh or frozen)
1 medium apple
1 teaspoon honey

What to do:
1. Mix the oats with the yogurt and leave aside to let the oats swell (overnight if possible)
2. Peal the apple and pop it in the blender with the berries.
3. Spoon the fruit mixture over the oats
4. Drizzle the teaspoon of honey over the whole lot and enjoy :)

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