Sticky Presents

Father's day was approaching and since don't usually do more then bake something since I am ultimately lazy and hell my husband isn't much into mother's day so turn around is fair play. Unfortunately my mother informed me that my father would be gutted it didn't do something nice for father's day.  

Usually my dad is a carrot cake or spice cake kind of guy, which is all well and good until you crack out the pineapple in the carrot cake.  Pineapple does not belong in carrot cake and in my opinion neither do nuts. I am a purist when it comes to brownies and cakes ... I don't like nuts AT ALL in my baking.  There are times for peanut butter but that is a butter and not truly a nut which just messes with the decadence of brownies.

So in order to kill 2 birds with one stone... or 2 father's day present in one go I decided to bake up a batch of Sticky Gingerbread.  This makes 2 deliciously moist gingerbread loaves.

I dislike washing dishes and I hate to waste all my time chipping off what would have been a delicious cake or muffin from the inside of the pan.  Solution: Parchment paper and A Stapler. Here is a corner in an angled sided loaf pan.  I use the staple to keep the parchment in place.

The parchment liner stays put and that makes it easier to fill the pan.

 This recipe is made in a pan which makes it super easy for clean up and your ingredients don't have to be at room temperature so it is an easy last minute baking project.

 Melt the butter and add the brown sugar and molasses.  Let that melt and dissolve and then let cool slightly.  The add the beaten egg to the cool sugar butter deliciousness.

 Here is another sign that I am lazy, I would prefer weighting my dry ingredients since that takes so much less effort then measuring it out.

 Flour and spices and everything...Dry?

 Then you mix everything together.  I used a spatula but really that is really up to you.

Pour in to your prepared pans and bake.











Sticky Gingerbread
Original Recipe from "Healthy Lunchboxes: for kids"  By: Amanda Grant

1 cup Butter
1 cup Dark Brown Sugar
2/3 cup Molasses
2 Eggs, Beaten
12 oz All-Purpose Flour (approx. 2 1/2 cups-2 2/3cups)
2 tsp Ground Cinnamon
1 tbsp Ground Ginger
1 tsp Baking Soda
1 1/4 cups Warmed Milk


~Line 2 - 2lb loaf pans.
~Preheat oven to 275F.

~In a large saucepan over medium low, melt butter with the brown sugar and molasses. Stir continually until the butter is melted and the sugar is dissolved.

~Remove butter sugar mixture from the heat and let cool slightly. I like to temper the egg a bit so I add a bit of the butter sugar mixture to the beaten egg and mix it about to bring the temperatures closer together. Then you can whisk your egg in to the butter sugar mixture.

~Weigh out the flour and measure out the spices(excluding the baking soda), then add to the butter sugar pan.

~Mix the baking soda in to the warmed milk and then add to the batter.

~Pour the batter equally in to the pans.

~Bake 50 minutes or so, the tops of the slightly golden and a toothpick comes out clean.

Enjoy!

Egg Curry Time

I have been wanting an egg curry for a couple days so I decided to put that last of chickpeas that I used to make some Nacho Mmmm Sauce and made a vegetarian Korma with swiss chard an spinach. 

 

So with a little (minimal) research I found that egg curry can be made with a korma which is a lovely creamy coconut curry. I decided to modify the basic recipe that I got from Daksha's Gourmet Spices on their Korma spice blend.  These are the best spices that I have had, they are flavourful without being spicy.  

Egg Chickpea Korma with Swiss Chard an Spinach

4 Hard boiled Eggs

2 tsp Korma Curry Powder

3 tbsp Olive Oil

1 can Chickpeas, drained

1 cup Greek Yogurt

1 Onion, diced

1 lb (approximate) mixed Swiss Chard and or Spinach

2/3 cup Coconut Milk

1/4 cup Ground Almonds

2 tbsp Water

1 tsp Sugar

pinch Salt

-Start by hard boiling the eggs. 

1)In a saucepan place eggs and cold water just to cover.  

2)Bring it just to the boil, cover and remove from the heat and set the timer for 13 minutes.

3)Once the timer goes, run the eggs under cold water.  Eggs peel better when left to cool.  

-Mix chickpeas with 1 tbsp olive oil and 2 tsp Korma curry paste.  After they have marinaded for a bit transfer chickpeas to another boil and add yogurt.  Use the original bowl to place the peeled hard boiled eggs to add some more flavour.

 -Chop up the swiss chard.

-Chop the spinach.

-In a pan heat 2 tbsp of oil and saute onion.  
-Add chickpeas and yogurt marinade.
-Top with the swiss chard and spinach.

-Add the coconut milk, ground almond, and water (if needed).
-Let cook a couple minutes.

 -Add the hard boiled eggs to the curry to reheat the eggs and finish the cooking the greens.

- Serve over rice.

Game Night Ravenous Hordes Baking #2

Tonight's dilemma is brought to you by sick kid.  Rosie is under the weather, nothing seems to be causing it, she is just low energy, has a fever and is whiny.  So someone (Rosie) has spent the day watching Treehouse kids tv.  This is okay but I missed Little Misses' school party and a tea at her school, but hubby did make both those events. 

Also game night was cancelled due to a friends birthday that all the gamers are attending. So I figured I would be off the hook from baking something but there was a lot of left over fruit from the party so we are having a pre-party get together and now I am back on making something for the ravenous hordes.  On a current trip to Costco we picked up some cinnamon raisin bread with the plan to make bread and butter pudding which is a favorite for our family.  So I had to throw together a quick bread and butter pudding so I used my sister-in-laws recipe as a base and changed a few things, mostly out of necessity since we didn't have 4 cups of milk in the house, but surprisingly we had some table cream which will hopefully make it tasty.  The other ingredient that we didn't have enough of was sugar.  It is really hard to bake without sugar, especially when the recipe calls for it.  I did have some finer berry sugar so I cut it down a bit and hopefully that will work. 

This recipe is from my sister-in-law and it is totally amazing.

Miti's Whiskey Pudding with Whiskey Sauce

Bread Pudding

1 Loaf Cinnamon Raisin Bread (or you can use what ever bread you want, add 1 cup raisins)

3 tbsp Butter

3 Eggs

3 cups Milk

1 cup Cream

2 tbsp Vanilla

2 cups Sugar

1 tsp Cinnamon

-Butter a large and relatively deep oven pan with the butter. Arrange the bread, or as much as will fit. If using raisins with regular bread, hide the raisins among the bread.

 

I've arranged the bread, it isn't pretty but so what.

-In a large bowl mix the other ingredients. Pour over the bread. Press down so that all the bread gets moistened.

 

The custardy liquid is whisked together and ready to pour over the bread.

The bread has been mushed into the custardy liquid, I didn't leave it to sit long enough but that just means that doesn't soak up all the juice, still it is delicious.

-Let stand for an hour (for today's pudding, I didn't have enough time to let it stand.) Bake for another 45-60 minutes at 375F or 200C

Out of the oven and ready for the sauce.

-While still hot cover with Southern Whiskey Sauce.

We were too desperate to eat it so pictures had to wait until some of the pudding had been consumed.

Southern Whiskey Sauce

8 tbsp Butter

1 cup Sugar

1/4 cup Bourbon

2 tbsp Water

1/4 tsp Nutmeg

1/8 tsp Salt

1 large Egg, beaten until Frothy

-In a saucepan combine all ingredients EXCEPT the egg (you can also leave out the bourbon until just before adding the egg so less of the alcohol burns off.)  Cook stirring until the sugar has dissolved.  Add the egg while whisking vigorously.  Bring to a simmer and cook until thickened, about 1 minutes.

Game Night Ravenous Hordes Baking #1

Everyone Monday evening our house is over run by ravenous gamers.  As part of standard fair for Mondays we used to do just pizza but have branched out a bit.  The nice thing about gamers is that they will devour almost anything placed in front of them.  There are some up sides and some down sides to this.  This means I can make something that I should eat the whole tray, but almost anything is my house seems to be fair game.  I have used this to my advantage on many occasions, such as a pan or two of lemon bars that got devoured withing minutes.  


Tonights delicious treat is one that I tried a few years ago at our New Year's Whistler trip, Michael made brickle.  I had attempted it a couple of years ago and it didn't turn out well, which is a surprise since it seems rather simple to make.  


I tried a different method of making it and this batch turned out really well.


Brickle 


48-60 Saltines Crackers (such as premium plus)
1 cup Butter
1 cup Sugar
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 bag of Chocolate Chips (I like dark chocolate)


-Preheat oven to 350 degree


-Line cookie sheet with heavy aluminum foil.


-Lay the crackers out, try to get them to fit fairly snuggly.  Break crackers to fit, so that they crackers go edge to edge.

-In a saucepan, melt butter and sugar.  Stir often.  Bring it to the a boil, remove from heat and add the vanilla extract.

Butter and sugar melting but yet to come to a boil.

It has come to the boil and the vanilla is added, the vanilla will  cause it to bubble up a bit.

-Pour butter sugar mixture over the crackers and place in the oven for 7-8 minutes.

Butter mixture is poured over and spread out over all the crackers.

-Remove from the oven and scatter the chocolate chips all over the top and place back at the oven for another 2 minutes.  Remove from the oven and using a rubber spatula spread the melted chocolate all over the top.

The butter mixture has been cooked for 7-8 minutes.

The chocolate chips have been spread out and heated in the oven for 2 minutes and then spread out.

-Allow to cool 20-30 minutes and then you can refrigerate it or allow it to solidify and then brake into pieces.

All ready to cool.

 Tasty and very more-ish. 

Ham Time

There are times when nostalgia come back and leads to great things.  When I was kid and visiting my grandparents in Cardiff, Wales.  My grandmother would cook a roast for Sunday dinner and occasionally she would make a gammon ham.  I don't remember anything about the Sunday dinner ham but I have fond memories of the leftover ham in sandwiches made with white bread, butter and mustard.  Oh sweet decadence.  It has taken years for my mother, my husband and I to come up with something that approximates this lovely ham.  Gammon ham is quite expensive here and quite difficult to get, I have to order well in advance at my local butchers but there is now a Scottish butchers that keeps it on hand.  


I had asked my dear husband to make gammon ham (also known as green ham) for a Sunday dinner, so he ordered a 6-7 lb gammon ham to be picked up on Saturday.  At 4:05pm, dear husband announced that he had neglected to pick up the ham before the 4pm closing time and besides the fact that the butchers isn't open on Sunday, it needs to soak overnight to remove a bunch of the salt, so unless he found another ham we would be ham-less for Sunday dinner.  This would have been okay, but I had been thinking about this ham all week and really wanted some leftover ham for sandwiches.  Luckily there is a butchers about 45 minutes away that usually carry gammon ham, there was one draw back.....

... it is 20 lbs of ham.

They only had bone it (which is fine) and they only had a 20 lb gammon ham.  The nice thing about a huge bone-in ham is that it was surprisingly inexpensive.  $1.99/lb, so our 20 lb ham only cost us $40 which is less then I bet the 6-7 lb boneless ham will cost us (since we ordered it and we still have to pick it up.)

This ham was huge, and luckily we had a bunch of people coming over to help us eat 20lbs of ham. Plus, my mum will happily take some leftovers.

Gammon ham is a 2 day process, that is because a gammon ham is a raw salt cured ham  and it needs to sit overnight in cool water to remove some of the salt.  So that is an 8 hours plus step.  To help the salt removal go a little faster you can do a bunch of water changes, which is only really necessary when you are soaking a large ham.  The next step is to simmer the ham to cook the ham, then you remove it from the poaching liquid (which in our case was water and apple juice, but it has also been done in Dr. Pepper or Coke which impart a sweeter flavour.) The last and final step before devouring is to remove the skin leaving a thin layer of fat then roasting the ham for 20 minutes to crisp up the fat and cook any of the flavours you apply to the fat.

Gammon Ham 

-You'll need a gammon ham, which you will have to get from a butcher since groceries stores (at least in my part of Canada) do not carry them.

-In a large enough pot to fit the ham, place the ham and fill with water and let sit for 8-24 hours, larger joints of ham will require a few changes of water and 24 hours of soaking.

-The ham will require simmering for 20 minutes per lb, so our 20 lb ham should have taken 6 2/3 hours, but ended up taking 5 1/2 hours for the internal temperature to reach 160 degrees. We used a mixture of 1/2 apple juice and 1/2 water.

-Once the ham has reached 160 degrees, you remove it from the pot and place in a roasting pan and remove the skin leaving a thin layer of fat, you can cut the fat into a diamond pattern and pierce the flesh with cloves, but I find that a bit to clovey.  So did a rub of brown sugar, dry mustard powder and mace.  

-Roast it for 20 minutes in a oven pre-heated to 450.

-Slice and Serve.  Delicious.

Side Project

So, I have been working on a little side project that is sucking all my time recently...

It not the greatest picture but someone decided not to play along with the ultrasound tech.  So besides being uber tired and going through a bout of morning sickness, I also have had a stuffy nose since December (which is before I got pregnant, but it hasn't gone away.)  Things have settled down a bit here, so I have resumed (hopefully) blogging our food journeys, I have a bunch I have to post but I thought I would start here.