the desiccated orange made a chocolate orange cake

Dear Reader, I have a confession to make. I had to throw out an orange. Oh, the shame. We’re not very good with fruit – we buy it, and then we don’t eat it, so this orange had languished in the bowl for quite a while, and had gone mouldy. It was accompanied by a…

banana and *chocolate* cakes

Neither Pete nor I are especially fond of bananas in their raw form, but I bought some for the GrandToad’s visit a few days ago. He didn’t really want them either, so there were five bananas going brown in the fruit bowl. Not a problem – banana cake! I use a basic recipe refined over…

Morrisons: a disappointment. And a blackberry cake

We try not to use big supermarkets much. My usual haunt is Aldi, but if I must go elsewhere, we generally do Morrisons. And there are some “treaty” things we get in Morrisons, so when Pete cycled off there on Saturday with trailer in tow (after the car debacle), he was going to get some….

a sort of goulash

We had friends coming for supper on Sunday evening – lovely, as I love cooking for people, and don’t do nearly enough of it since we moved! I wasn’t sure what I wanted to cook, but I went to the butcher and bought some beautiful lean pork, and there was a big bag of mixed…

chocolate overload

For a few years, we have received a monthly box from the Hotel Chocolat Tasting Club. They are beautiful chocolates – rich and intense, and so not to be scoffed in a sitting, but rather savoured over several days. But somehow we fell out of the habit of eating them, and had two unopened boxes…

last night's supper (16/6/7)

We started with tuna, quickly seared in a ribbed pan, accompanied by a broth with slivered ginger, sesame seeds, rice wine, shoyu, a dash of balsamic vinegar, and finely chopped coriander, and some rice. It was glorious. And then. And then. Ohmigod. We had molten chocolate cakes, accompanied by raspberries and cream. And then we…

Triple Chocolate Espresso Bean Cookies

seen on 101cookbooks.com Today’s recipe is for you coffee lovers. I had a bag of chocolate covered espresso beans on hand and thought it might be interesting to bake them into a cookie. A dark chocolate cookie. A dark chocolate cookie pumped full of lots of freshly ground espresso powder… makes my buzzy chocolate cake…

vodka chocolate chillis

I saw this on LJ, and thought of Sasha. Make a slit in the side of the chilli and remove membrane and seeds. Then you marinate them in vodka for 12 hours+. Then you pipe a mixture of white chocolate, vodka and freshly ground black pepper into the cavities, chill, and finally dip in dark…

yes, but is it *enough* ?

Browsing through some photographs today, I found this one – taken on 20 January this year. I uploaded it to my Flickr account, and captioned it thus: I needed to make a chocolate mooooooose, so I thought I’d better make sure we had enough chocolate in the store cupboard. I think we did … bigger…