Red Velvet Cake

There is a cake I have been wanting to make ever since I passed the Hummingbird bakery in London a couple of years ago. I'm not sure whether it is the name or it's signature colour that has lured me into wanting to make it. The famous cake I am talking about is of course the one and only Red Velvet Cake.
I have seen several chefs recreating this beauty, from Nigella Lawson to the recently model turned chef Lorraine Pascall. This cake is pretty much a simple chocolate sponge cake but it is dyed a garish red colour, hence giving it its proud name. Various recipes will use different ingredients and different amounts of cocoa, but I find that the majority simply use eggs, butter,
sugar, cocoa as well as buttermilk. Now for
those unfamiliar with what buttermilk is, it is simply a dairy drink which you can easily buy from all supermarkets. If you can't find it you can substitute it for a mixture of yogurt and milk or simply add a little vinger or lemon juice to milk and leave it to stand for 5 minutes.
Now, once you see the amount of red food colouring that is called for in this recipe please don't be alarmed. Yes it does call for a half a bottle of food colouring but I can assure you that unlike when you add large amounts of colouring to icing it makes it go a funny taste, in this cake the only give away that you have used the food colouring is its garish red.
Seeing as it is Valentine's Day tomorrow I felt this would be the best time to make a love coloured cake and then decorate it further with Love Hearts, just to make those commitment free days even sweeter!

Ingredients

115g butter
300g sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
250g flour
2 tbsp cocoa
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup buttermilk (or 1 cup milk mixed with 1 tbsp lemon juice)
2 tbsp red food colouring
1 tsp vinegar
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1) Beat the butter and sugar together until creamy, then stir in the vanilla.
2) Add the eggs one at a time, making sure that the egg is fully combined into the mixture before adding the next.
3) In a separate bowl sift the flour, cocoa and salt and in another bowl combine the buttermilk with the food colouring.
4) Alternatively add the dry ingredients and the buttermilk to the butter mixture, begining and ending with the flour.
5) In a little bowl combine the soda with the vinegar, let it fizz and then mix into the batter.
6) You can pour this into a larger 23 cm round tin or into two smaller tins, grease the tins before pouring in the batter.
7) Bake at 180C/gas 4, for 25-30 mins if using the smaller tins, or 50-60 mins when using the larger tin, a skewer inserted should come out clean.


Frosting:
I used a simple butter cream frosting made from beating 280g icing sugar with 140g softened butter along with 3 tbsp milk and 1 tsp vanilla essence.

Greek Night

As the little domestic goddess I like to think I am, I decided to host a Greek night for my friends. I have been planning this night since last September, even bringing back with me Greek pitta bread (which I froze immediately on arriving at my home-away-from-home in Southampton) and Ouzo, a traditional spirit which has an aniseedy flavour to it. It took me a long time to decide what Greek delicacies I should cook. Having to decide between things I actually thought I was capable of cooking and things I thought my friends would enjoy. As much as I love them, seeing as my friends are fairly fussy about their food this was a particularly tricky process.

I wanted to cook things that for me were typical Greek flavours and would conjure memories of eating in a taverna by a sandy beach in the summer. The thing that first came to mind was tzatziki, a yogurt, garlic and cucumber dip, which nowadays you often find in English supermarkets, but this is no where near as good as the home made stuff. For me, its bliss when you're left with this garlicky oniony flavour in your mouth, as bad as that may sound it just reminds me of eating in our little local taverna. Keep in mind though that I would not advise this dish if you're planning on going out on a date later on.

Next I decided to make "keftedakia" which are like little meatballs that are fried and go perfectly with the tzatziki. They are made with mince meat, a finely chopped onion, breadcrumbs, an egg, salt and a dash of vinegar. What makes this a bit more interesting than you're usual meatballs is that the diced onion is fried till golden brown and then mixed with the rest of the ingredients.
To finish of the whole meal I chose to make a cheese pie and "pastitsio" (which simply put is almost like a pasta bake). The cheese pie is fairly simple: for the filling you first make a basic white sauce and once this has thickened add 3 eggs and 600g of mashed feta cheese to the pan. Once this has cooled you layer a few sheets of filo pastry in a oven proof dish brushing each layer with a mixture of butter and olive oil, then pour in the filling and top with the remaining filo sheets, giving the pie a final brush of oil before popping it into the oven for 45 minutes.

The meal for me was really good, but my friends definitly favoured a few dishes over the others. They enjoyed the pastistio, the keftedakia and the pitta bread which I had grilled and then brushed with a little olive oil and seasoned with salt and oregano and cut into little triangles, the most. On the plus side though this meant I was left with all the left over cheese pie and tzatziki...I can't complain.

New Year's Cake

Greeks love to celebrate the New Year with their "Vasilopita",a New Year's cake. Every family has their recipe, some yeast based and others more like a cake. The fun of this tradition is that a coin is hidden in the cake and on New Year's Day it is cut into as many pieces as there are people present, including one "gia to spiti" (for the home) and one "gia to xristo"(for Christ). The person who receives the coin is thought to have good luck all year round.

Every year my "yiayia"(grandmother) bakes this cake for our family but this year I thought I would bake one myself.

Vasilopita

2 cups sugar
225g softened butter
5 eggs (separated)
1/4 cup brandy
3/4 cup milk
1 cup finely chopped walnuts
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp baking soda
zest of an orange
1/2 cup orange juice
500g self raising flour
pinch of salt

(Makes enough to fill two 23 cm cake tins)

1) Beat the sugar and butter together till pale.
2) Gradually beat in the egg yolks along with the vanilla essence and orange zest.
3) Combine the orange juice with the baking soda and add this to the batter as well.
4) Pour the milk into a jug along with the brandy.
5) Alternating between the two, fold in the flour and milk mixture into the batter.
6) Whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks and fold this into the mixture.
7) Finally mix in the walnuts.
8) Grease and line the tins and pour in the cake batter.
9) Bake at 150C for 50 minutes,you know it's done when a toothpick inserted comes out clean and the top has gone a lovely honey colour.

It's all about the oats

I can pretty much resist all types of temptations. I am not the type of person who will open a packet of biscuits and 15 minutes later find that the whole thing has been completely demolished. However when it comes to anything oaty, its a completely different story all together. When I am faced with a golden, chewy, flapjack, a comforting bowl of porrdige or even a great oatcake topped with a chunk of mature chedar cheese, my will power just seems to go out of the window. However, what always makes me feel slightly better after I have devoured half a tray of freshly baked flapjacks is the nutritional benefits to eating these lovely little, pearly oats.
As we all know oats are a great source of slow releasing energy. They also recieve pretty good press in terms of their cholesterol lowering properties and also help reduce the chance of heart disease, which lets be honest at my age is not something I tend to think about, but nevertheless we all know that oats are good for us. So I would say, get in that kitchen, get out a bowl,a wooden spoon and put some music on and make these delicious biscuits.

Oat and Raisin Cookies

225g softened butter
150g granulated sugar
200g light brown sugar
2 eggs
245g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
175g oats
240g raisins
(optional: few handful of white chocolate chips)

1) Beat the butter together with the sugars, till light and creamy.
2) Mix the flour, salt, cinnamon, baking powder, oats and raisins.
3) Add the eggs one at a time to the creamed butter and sugar.
4) Gradually add the flour and oat mixture(along with the white chocolate)to the butter and mix till everything comes together.
5) Chill the batter for a few hours.
6) Place 50g balls of the batter onto a greased baking tray and then flatten the biscuits a little with a fork, the back of a spoon or just with your hands. Bake for 20 minutes or until the just begin to turn a bit brown at the edges, at 180C.

Cupcake Week

For all those who love cupcakes, this week is a very exciting one. It's National Cupcake Week, an event organised by the British Baker magazine to honour our love for these little treats. This means we finally have a valid excuse to bake some yummy cupcakes. So go ahead, set aside half an hour and make yourselves a batch of these delicious cupcakes.

Cupcakes:
150g sugar
150g butter
150g self raising flour
3 eggs
1/2 tsp baking powder
100ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract or grated zest of a lemon

1)Beat the sugar and butter together till light and fluffy
2)Gradually beat in the eggs, one by one
3)Fold in the flour and baking powder along with the vanilla or lemon zest.
4)Fill the cupcake cases just over 3/4 full and bake at 180C for 20-25 mins

Butter Icing:
50g butter
200g icing sugar
2 tbsp milk

Melt the butter and mix with the icing sugar until fluffy and light, then stir in the milk. At this point you can add any food colouring that you want, my colour of choice is usually pink.
Now sit back and enjoy the joy that is this amazing week

Brownies

Now there are a couple of recipes I have which as my close friends will know, I never part with. .. But I've decided to not be so selfish and to share one of my favourite recipes with you: the ultimate brownie recipe.

Most of my recipes are adaptations of others’, such as the flapjack recipe I use which I have adapted from James Martins’ Chocolate and Ginger Flapjacks. The brownie recipe I rely on, but to which I have made a few tweaks to, is Nigel Slater’s. I find that after years of painfully searching for a good brownie recipe that is rich but not too sickly, this one is, as I said mentioned earlier, The Ultimate Brownie recipe!

Brownies

250g dark chocolate

300g sugar

3 eggs

250g butter

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp vanilla extract

60g flour

60g cocoa

Pinch of salt

1) Melt 200g of the chocolate and set it aside to cool

2) Beat the sugar and softened butter together until pale and fluffy.

3) Gradually beat in the eggs one by one (if the mixture starts to curdle add 1 tbsp of flour)

4) Fold in the melted chocolate and vanilla and cut up the remaining 50g into gravel sized chunks and fold

that in as well.

5) Lastly sift in the cocoa, flour and baking powder and fold in gently.

6) Pour into a square 23 x 23 cm tin and bake for 35 mins (or until the top has formed a thin crust) at 180C/ fan

160C.

These are best served immediately, if you want them as a dessert, with a melting ball of vanilla ice cream and a rich chocolate sauce made with equal amounts of dark chocolate and cream melted together in the microwave. Or they are best made the day before if to be eaten as a snack or packed in a lunchbox as they tend to keep their shape better when they are a day old.

A evening in Athens

Everytime I come back from university I fall in love with Athens all over again. You can get lost in all the nooks and crannies of Thisseio, Plaka, Psiri and never come across the same shop, the same art mural, the same cafeteria, there are just endless things to see and do. You can listen to the various buskers playing a jazzy, upbeat song or admire the Acropolis while nibbling on some nuts, bought from an old Greek man off the side of the street.
One thing I love about Greece is the culture of going out for a coffee and sitting there, chatting for hours on end. Greeks love their coffee and especially during the summer, they love their ice-cold frappe. You can go out any time of the day and you will struggle to find a place to sit down and have a drink. It's always at this time that I wonder "don't these people have jobs?", no wonder Greece is feeling the burn of the economic crisis. Walking down the pedestrianized pathway that leads you from the Acropolis area down to Thisseio, the road is paved with cafeterias. Row after row, table after table, cafe after cafe. For a second I was taken aback with the abundance of these coffe shops, but then it hit me, this is what we Greeks do, this is what we are famous for: sitting and lazing around, drinking endless amounts of coffee without a care in the world of what one should really be doing or what time of day it is. But that's what I love about the Greek νοωτροπία (way of thinking), they live a casual, carefree life. Especially in the summer, we wake up late, feast on lovely fresh melon and peaches all day, lounge by the sea and then decide to head off for dinner around 10 in the evening. What a life, eh?