Cranberry and pear pies

I have been baking these pies every Christmas for the last 3 years. They are not mince pies, we are not very keen on mincemeat anyway. 

These are cranberry and pear pies and here is the recipe.

It says makes 8 on the recipe but I use mini muffin tins and make 20-24 of them using  the same amount of ingredients on the recipe and still have a little bit of leftover of the filling.

Mint truffles

I have been busy making the present for the office secret santa last night.

I decided to make a box of chocolates for a lovely firend of mine in the office.

First I started with making the box for the chocolate. I used a old mince pie box and cut it open, then wrapped it a fancy silver wrapping paper then stick it together again to the box shape it was. But kept the top open to be the lid.

I made my giant mint truffles from the Dan Lepard recipe that was on Guardian couple of weeks ago. Here is the link for the recipe.
Then all I had to do was put the truffles in the pack and then wrap it nicely :)
All done.

I think I will be making a couple of more boxes this week.
I will try with orange flavour with dark choclate filling as well.

Lamb curry

We are having lamb curry tonight. Thanks to the Japanese shop that I came across on the way from work to home we discovered S&B golden curry sauce.

I am all for making my own curry sauce from scratch but this is really easy and very tasty for a quick midweek supper. I just follow the instructions on the pack and it always turn out to be very good. I have tried it with chicken and lamb.

JAMIE OLIVER PULLED BRISKET CHILLI

We had Jamie Oliver's brisket recipe tonight. It was very good, I have replaced the oregano with rosemary as we didn't have any oregano left and forgot to add the vinegar but it was still lovely :)
And yes I cooked it last night for almost 5 hours in the pressure cooker for it to be nice and soft.
No photo of it unfortunately as my phone died when it was ready.

Simit

Yesterday we had these lovely "simit" for breakfast. "Simit" that I make is a bit softer version of the traditional "simit" as I make the dough with milk and butter. Here is the recipe;

Ingredients;
200ml whole milk
100ml cold water
2 teaspoon fast-action yeast
75g unsalted butter
625 gr strong white flour (I have swapped 100 grams of this to wholemeal flour)
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoon grape molasses
3 tablespoon sesame seeds


Boil half of the milk, then mix with rest of the milk and the water in a bowl and beat in the yeast and leave to dissolve 5 minutes.
Melt the butter.
Add the flour, honey and salt to the yeast mix then pour in butter and using your hands work everything to a rough but evenly mixed dough. In order to get a even softer dough you can adjust by adding some more water.
Cover and leave for 10 minutes, then lightly flour a patch of worktop and knead the dough for 10 seconds.
return the dough and leave to rise until doubled in size roughly for an hour.
You can repeat the 10 second kneading twice within this one hour.

Shaping;
Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces.
Take a piece and divide into two and roll each half into 20 cm long rope.
Hold down one end of the rope with one hand while twisting it with the other. 
Then form this twisted rope into ring, pressing and rolling the overlapping ends together on the work surface with one hand to seal. 
Place on a greased baking sheet and let rest until rise by half about 15 minutes.
Mix the grape molasses with 6 table spoon of water and put the sesame seeds on a plate.
Once risen take them off the sheet and dip the top side into the grape molasses water mixture and then roll the topside in the sesame seeds. Then put back in the baking sheet.
Repeat for each and bake  at about 220C (200C fan-assisted)/425F/gas mark 7 for 20-25 minutes, just until they're risen and coloured on top.
Enjoy with some cheese and tomato and a cup of tea.