Whoa, did someone says Guinness? And Chocolate? Guinness Brownies

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Guinness. Lovely Guinness. Wonderful on its own, and it would seem, pretty good with chocolate too, but in honesty I already knew that, as evidenced here and here.

Because Guinness is good for you, I fervently believe that these brownies will have health giving properties. It is a mere detail that they contain stuff which may not form part of a calorie controlled diet, for the reason that these are so beneficial is that I defy anyone not to sit down with one of these bad boys and a cuppa and not feel completely restored, or else just a little bit better about the trivialities of life. Here is some photographic proof of the restorative properties of Guinness, from a small visit to Dublin more years ago than I would like to admit.

Has Guinness

Gets smiley

This is not necessarily a shameful attempt to get in early on the whole ‘what shall I cook for St Patrick’s Day?’ internet traffic, more an encouragement for those who may be pre-disposed to celebrate the day with a pig under their arm/wear a ‘Kiss Me, I’m Irish’ t shirt/don a snazzy leprechaun hat to do something slightly less predictable. Actually, scratch that. This blog is no place for sanctimony and so this is not the time and place to tell people how to live their lives.  You crack on with whatever it is you’re planning, but make these brownies as well, because they are amazingly glorious. In fact, don’t wait ‘til St Patrick’s Day to make them. Make them now.

You’re welcome. Slainte!

Guinness Brownies, adapted from 'Baked in America' by David Muniz and David Muzniak

Makes 12 humungous ones

Ingredients:

8oz plain flour

6oz plus 2 tablespoons cocoa

½ tsp salt (or taste the batter once it’s mixed; you might need a smidgen more)

12oz dark chocolate - I used 72% cocoa. Go big or go home.

6oz white chocolate

6oz unsalted butter, cubed

6 large eggs at room temperature

12oz caster sugar - original recipe says granulated but, not for me.

1 tsp vanilla extract

16fl oz Guinness, at room temperature

9oz milk chocolate chips

Method:

Preheat the oven to 190c

Grease a 12 x 9 x 2 inch pan really, really well. I then line it with foil, in a bit of a cradle style so I can lift the brownies out afterwards.

In a large bowl, mix the dry ingredients – the flour, the cocoa, the salt.

Place a heatproof bow over a pan of simmering water and melt the white and dark chocolate and the butter. Don’t allow the bottom of the heatproof bowl to touch the simmering water or you risk the chocolate seizing. Set aside to cool a little. You don’t want it so hot that it will ‘cook’ the eggs when you add them.

Talking of eggs – in yet another bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until the mixture becomes light and creamy and the beaters/whisk leave a ribbon like trail when you pull it out of the mixture.

Put the mixer onto medium and carefully add the melted chocolate mixture, stopping periodically to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Ensure that the mixture is completely amalgamated together. Reduce the speed to low, add the vanilla and then add the flour mixture in stages, allowing the flour to mix completely into the batter before adding more. Do not overbeat.

Finally, continuing with the mixer on low, add the Guinness, and mix until everything is well combined.

Carefully pour the batter into the prepared tin, giving it a bit of a shake so it all levels out and fills the corner of the tin. Once the mixture has settled, scatter the chocolate chips over the top.

Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the centre emerges with set crumb, not raw mixture. Do not overbake. The mixture will probably shrink from the edges of the pan.

Allow the brownies to cool completely before cutting into big slabs/removing them from the tin. I put mine in the fridge to speed the process a bit. I have no idea if this is correct but patience and Guinness and chocolate have never really gone together in my life, so….

Not quite Barefoot Contessa - Lasagne with Chicken Sausage

My admiration for the Barefoot Contessa knows absolutely no bounds. Ever since that hot June afternoon when I sat down with a tiny Lola and flicked through the TV channels trying to find something to stare absentmindedly at whilst it was bottle time, I have been a fan. There she appeared, on my TV screen, looking all smiley and homely, with her lovely house and her Kitchen Aid and those cute American measuring cups, putting her ‘good vanilla’ and half a pound of butter into a bowl, and I thought, ‘Oh yes, this could be me.’ Unfortunately, instead of ‘habitating’ in The Hamptons, I was lounging somewhere near Liverpool, half asleep, not yet totally dressed, with a little bit of baby dribble adorning my left shoulder but all that was mere detail. This was going to happen. I could breeze in and out in my Mercedes/BMW, the odd dinner party here, the trip to the speciality food store for some mozzarella from the happiest buffalo in the whole world there. Bring it on.

Fast forward 10 years and I have the nice house (though it’s not what you’d call ‘tidy’ – I need at least two hours warning of any visit so I can shift the dogs, children, washing, yesterday’s plates, clothes, etc.)  Phill bought me a Kenwood for my birthday instead of a Kitchen Aid (I am very grateful; I know that sounds like I am not…) and I bought my own measuring cups. Not much going on on the old Mercedes/BMW front but I like to zip about in my little Fiesta up to the farm shop for some carrots… I think the point I am trying to make is that sometimes it’s nice to take an idea and put a twist on it and kind of make it yours, and that is what I did with my ‘I am going to be like the Barefoot Contessa fixation’ and the Barefoot Contessa’s Turkey Sausage Lasagne recipe. I used chicken sausage. And it was fabulous.

Lasagne is a very important dish in our house. I’d like to say it is because of our Italian roots but collectively we’re not that interesting. However, it was a lasagne that wooed Phill (along with, I hope, my stunning wit and repartee, my jolly personality and what I am going to call my ‘allure’) and if I happen to think out loud about what to cook for dinner, I know what the answer is. How would  my brood take to this lasagne craziness? The answer, thankfully, was a general thumbs up, though for the reasons above, Phill said he preferred the real thing. This, however, is a tasty, ramped up humdinger of a dish that epitomises Barefoot Contessa recipes. They’re never bland.

Lasagne with chicken sausage, adapted from ‘Barefoot Contessa Family Style’ by Ina Garten, or you can find the original recipe here

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 1/2 lb chicken sausages, casings removed

1 ½ tins chopped tomatoes

5 – 6 tbsp tomato puree

Large handful chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley, divided

pack of fresh basil leaves, chopped

salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1/2 pound no cook lasagne sheets

15 oz ricotta cheese

3 to 4 oz creamy goat cheese, crumbled

10oz Parmesan cheese, plus 1/4 cup for sprinkling

1 large egg, lightly beaten

1lb fresh mozzarella, thinly sliced

Method:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Heat the olive oil in a large (10- to 12-inch) pan. Add the onion and cook for 5 minutes over medium-low heat, until translucent. Add the garlic and cook for 1 more minute. Add the sausage and cook over medium-low heat, breaking it up with a fork, for 8 to 10 minutes, or until no longer pink. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, 2 tablespoons of the parsley, the basil, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Simmer, uncovered, over medium-low heat, for 15 to 20 minutes, until thickened.

In a medium bowl, combine the ricotta, goat cheese, 1 cup of Parmesan, the egg, the remaining 2 tablespoons of parsley, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Set aside.

Ladle 1/3 of the sauce into a 9 x 12 x 2-inch rectangular baking dish, spreading the sauce over the bottom of the dish. Then add the layers as follows: half the pasta, half the mozzarella, half the ricotta, and one third of the sauce. Add the rest of the pasta, mozzarella, ricotta, and finally, sauce. Sprinkle with 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese. Bake for 30 minutes, until the sauce is bubbling.

I served this with salad and garlic bread.

I should coco! - Coconut and Lemon Curd Madeleines

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I’ll be honest, I’ve been slapping coconut oil on my face for as long as I can remember, and it is indeed as good a moisturiser and restorative as my previous moisturiser, if not better, which, when I discovered this, was brilliant and disappointing rolled into one. It's brilliant when I think on one hand of the money I now save by buying coconut oil and putting that on my dressing table instead of the (expensive) moisturiser that I had been sucked into buying by promises of eternal youth. My savings now go towards my not insubstantial collection of Kurt Geiger shoes, which is very pleasing, but the cloud that goes with this particular silver lining is my thinking of the copious amounts of money I had spent in the years gone by on 'posh' moisturiser which in turn led me to lament the ‘Kurt Geigers’ that could have been mine if I had been a bit more savvy. Life can be cruel.

But my recent discovery of cooking with coconut oil has been a revelation. A bit of reading around led me to discover that coconut oil had been the ‘go to’ oil for cooking and baking, before we discovered the horrors of hydrogenated, manufactured fats and indeed like many other naturally derived oils, coconut oil had long been a beauty/health staple too by those in the know. Win. Win. So, for no real logical explanation, I decided to celebrate my much improved knowledge by making madeleines.

Regular readers to this blog will know that I am a Francophile, pure and simple. That being the case, it is surprising that my madeleine pan, bought at Super U in a pretty Dordogne town one balmy summer when I was young, beautiful and carefree, before such pans were ever readily available here, has had about three airings in all the time I have owned it. Despite my lack of effort, madeleines are a cinch to make, as long as you are vigilant because like most ‘biscuity’ types, blink and they are burned.

Newly inspired, I decided to make coconut and lemon curd madeleines, which are loosely based on the idea of placing a dollop of something in the middle of the raw madeleine mix. I’d seen it done with Nutella, but with my coconut vibe, I thought that the sharp lemon tang would be a great foil to the mellow, nutty coconut. So, I set off to work, replacing the requisite amount of butter for VitaCoco coconut oil and adding about 50g of desiccated coconut, a pinch of salt and a teaspoon orange flower water (I was thinking citrus…) to a well-established madeleine recipe that I had cut out of a French cookery magazine in the dim and distant past. The result was, even though I say so myself, pretty damn good. It was a good thing that madeleines don’t really keep very well and need to be eaten within a few hours of baking. Marcel Proust used to dip his stale madeleines in his tea; Lola, Finn and Phill snaffled these before I had managed to put the kettle on. There can be no better recommendation in my mind.

And if you don’t like lemon curd, what about lime curd for a totally tropical vibe? Or a dollop of raspberry jam? Now, Coconut and raspberry: Let me just think about that for a moment. Or you could visit www.swearbyit.com for some more great recipes!

This recipe is an entry into the #swearbyit challenge with Vita Coco. Find more great coconut oil recipes and tips on using coconut oil at www.swearbyit.com

Coconut and Lemon Curd Madeleines

Makes approximately 18

Ingredients:

3 large eggs

130g caster sugar

1 tbsp honey

1tsp orange flower water (optional)

100g Vita Coco Coconut Oil, softened,( but cooled if you have melted it) plus a little more for greasing the tin.

50g desiccated coconut

150g plain flour

6g (a generous teaspoon) of dried yeast

A pinch of salt

About a quarter  to half of a jar of good quality lemon curd

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200c

Place the eggs and the sugar in a mixing bowl and beat until light and airy.

Add the honey and the orange flower water if using and mix well.

Add the coconut oil. If it is quite solid, mix it vigorously into the egg mixture until it disperses evenly.

Add the flour, the coconut, a pinch of salt and the yeast and mix until combined. Don’t overbeat. Personally I taste the mixture at this stage to see if I can discern the flavours, in this case, coconut. If it tastes a bit bland, add a little more salt, but be careful.

Grease the madeleine pan very well with the coconut oil. This is imperative as you want your madeleines to come out easily.

Place a heaped teaspoon of the mixture into each madeleine mould. Tap the pan down on the working top to encourage the mixture to settle into the mould.

Place a scant teaspoon of lemon curd onto the madeleine mixture.

Top the lemon curd with another generous teaspoon of the madeleine mixture. You may have to use the spoon to disperse the mixture evenly and it may all become a bit messy, but it will be okay.

Give the madeleines a final tap in the pan and then place them in the middle of the preheated oven. They might spread frighteningly and will look pretty awful initially but all will be fine. They should take about 8 – 10 minutes to bake and they should be a light golden brown with perhaps slightly browner ‘shell’ edges. Remove from the oven and when you can do so. If you have greased the pan well, the madeleines should come away from the moulds easily.

Trim the madeleines to their characteristic shell shape. It is likely that some of the mixture will have spread from the mould and therefore some trimming will be needed to neaten the madeleines up. I just think of all those sweet crispy bits and it pleases me enormously.

Eat warm, or whilst they are not quite cold. They will begin to become a little less light once they have been cold for a while, in which case, do what Proust did: make a pot of tea.

LET ME EAT CAKE, I SAY (Just like Marie Antoinette) Spelt and Olive Oil Cake with Blood Orange

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I don’t really know whether Marie Antoinette was into ‘healthy eating’ or not really. If she was anything like me she needed to be, as when I am in France I tend to eat my own weight in croissants, camembert and crusty ‘baguette’ and then wash it down with Madiran, and whilst red wine is meant to be REALLY good for you, I am not sure the rest of it is. Anyway, the damage is done for me and before our next jolly to La Belle France in July (Annecy and the French Alps, plus a foray into Northern Italy – very excited) I want to be healthier. But I want cake.

Here is the compromise.  I bought some spelt flour yonks ago because I bought a recipe book (yes really) which raved on about it. I made a recipe from the book for a lemon tart and it was horrible and I thought, ‘Spelt? Nah…’ and put it back in the cupboard. Fast forward to the purchase of another cookery book (yes really…) called ‘Grains as Mains’ and after a couple of successful meals made, no doubt coming to a blog near you soon) I happened upon a recipe for olive oil and spelt cake, with blood orange. I lurve blood orange. I lurve cake. This doesn’t sound as unhealthy as ‘normal’ cake. I opened the cupboard and out came the much maligned spelt flour. 

The alterations I made for this recipe were down to the fact that I like a cake that looks semi appealing, and I had an idea that this might not. Plus I did not want to waste any of my blood oranges so I upped the zest to the zest of two oranges as it took two oranges to produce the juice required to make the cake. I also decided to slice my remaining orange up, after removing the peel and a pith with a sharp knife, and put it on the cake. Then I thought that the slices might dry out and look a bit shrivelled so I strew a tablespoon or so of Demerara sugar over the cake in the hope that it would caramelise over the orange slices and make them look like huge jewels.

As the cake came out of the oven, I brushed over a luscious syrup made of orange juice and icing sugar to give it that ‘French Patisserie’ look.  Marie Antoinette would definitely be up for this cake. I am sure of it.

Spelt and Olive Oil Cake adapted from ‘Grains and Mains’ by Laura Agar Wilson

Serves 12, apparently…

Ingredients:

120ml extra virgin olive oil plus extra for greasing the tin

225g spelt flour

100g ground almonds

Grated zest of one orange (I used two)

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 eggs

150g light brown sugar

To decorate the top

A blood orange, peeled with the pith removed

1 tbsp Demerara sugar

To glaze:

1 tsp blood orange juice

35g icing sugar

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180c – grease and line a 23cm round cake tin.

Mix the dry ingredients (not the sugar) and the orange zest together until well combined.

In a separate bowl, mix the wet ingredients, plus the sugar, together.

Add the wet and dry ingredients together and mix until only just combined. Do not overmix.

Place the cake mixture into the prepared pan.

To prepare the decoration, slice the bottom and the top of the orange so that it sits flat. Using a sharp knife, cut the peel and pith away from around the orange, starting at the top of the orange down to the bottom. When you have removed the peel and the pith, slice the orange into thin slices and place them onto the top of the cake. Strew the Demerara over the cake and then place it into the oven.

Whilst the cake is baking, make the glaze. Mix the orange juice and the icing sugar with two teaspoons of water until everything is combined.

Bake for about 40 minutes, until a skewer/toothpick in the centre comes out clean. Brush the glaze over the cake.

This is best served warm.