I tried a bit of an experiment this weekend, Saturday baking- we were taking pud to a friends’ house and I decided to bake a cake to take round, rather than buying something. Which is brave as my kitchen disasters are pretty regular and by doing this I was leaving myself no time to then go out and buy a replacement.
I also thought I thought I’d get the recipe off the Thermomix website, as they have lots of good stuff on there. And now that I have my hands on the Cook-Key I can rummage on the website on my laptop in the office, favourite all the recipes I like, run to the kitchen, synch the Cook-Key (takes about eight seconds) and all the recipes are then on there. Ready and waiting for guided cooking, no more propping up my iPad perilously close to the washing up bowl. It also comes with six months access to the Cookidoo collections so ALL the recipes are accessible for free.
I do like doing a bit of Saturday baking, as it’s generally a bit less stressy than trying to fit baking in around other stuff on a weekday, and you do most of the work up-front, rather than different techniques in a recipe…I get bored doing those. This weekend as we were around for the first time in ages I set the task of doing a lot of cooking. So not only did I bake the brownies in the pic above, but also Limoncello and fig tarts, and the on Sunday, butternut squash soup, roast chicken, potatoes, carrots, green beans and brocolli, all in the Thermomix. Oh and a rather fabulous grumpy that was blissfully lump free and didnt have a granule of Bisto in sight.
The brownie recipe is gluten-free by the way and even if you don’t have one of Thermomix’s amazing machines to do the mixing, it’s still worth grabbing the recipe, you’ll just make a bit more of a mess in the kitchen. Go on, give it a try (you’ll need to register for free to get to the recipe, but it’s worth it)!
We were at our friends’ place last night and they both loved it…not that they’re fussy, but they know what they like!
Half of the fun, as with any recipe, is tweaking it once you get confident with the basics. Sometimes because you just don’t have the exact ingredients, but you *almost* do and substituting something else in can give a dish a really unexpected lift. And cover up the fact you were too disorganised to get ALL the ingredients, as I was last weekend when making tikka paste. This recipe called for pistachios but I think next time I might try it with walnuts
In this case, the raspberries were exactly right and didn’t need changing. You can still get late raspberries if you look around, and local ones have loads of flavour as they haven’t been stored in nitrogen to slow down ripening. For instance, our local ‘pick your own’ no longer advertises raspberries as available, but there are some on the canes (just not enough for 1000 hungry pickers at once).
Stirring in lumps of white chocolate and putting raspberries on top of uncooked dough before baking felt like baking with my Mum when I was 5