Quick chocolate pudding

What do you when you have no pudding and the local shops sweet things all contain milk. I get out our favourite dark chocolate and coconut cream.

Melt the chocolate(40g roughly) and then stir in half a tin of coconut cream (not tinned coconut milk) and then pour them into small ramekins. Pop into the fridge for 10 minutes and they are ready to eat. 

Barbados Independence Day

30th November is Barbados' independence day, my grandmother is from Barbados, and my way of marking independence day is making Conkies. Conkies are a bit like a cake that are steamed (normally in a banana leaf) they are made/eaten as part of independence day celebrations. Although as always we have to make them slightly different, so there is no dairy, egg or nuts in the conkies I made.

Conkies (makes 7)

130g pumpkin (butternut squash)

110g sweet potato

130g desiccated coconut

1/4 cup flour 

1 cup fine cornmeal 

1 tsp baking powder

1 1/4 cup of milk (KoKo)

2 tsp of nutmeg

2 tsp of mixed spice

80g raisins (optional)

Grate the pumpkin and sweet potato into a bowl and then mix in the coconut.

Stir in the flour, cornmeal and baking powder. Add in the milk and raisins (if using). Mix together, it should have the consistency of a thick batter.

Get a square of foil roughly 15cm by 8cm (traditionally you would use banana skins), and Add a Dessertspoon and a half of the mixture in the middle of the foil. Wrap up the mixture in the foil and put in a steamer for 25 minutes. Check they are cooked by pushing the package (if they feel firm they are done)

Open up the package and enjoy. 

Comfort Food - Banana Jam Roly Poly.

What am I making with these ingredients

While making dumplings for our casserole the other day, I saw the recipe for a Roly Poly. Roly Poly's weren't a childhood staple for me but it made me want to try and make one. What about the filling though, we have lovely Strawberry jam in our fridge that could do but we love bananas here, and I had seen on one of the websites I frequently visit Banana Jam. 

Banana Jam

400g of banana (skins on, roughly 4 smallish bananas not the tiny ones)

1/2 cup and 1 tablespoon of Light Muscavado Sugar

1 cup of water (can add more if you want a thinner consistency)

2 teaspoons of Cinnamon (less if you aren't a cinnamon fan)

Pinch of Salt

Cut the bananas up and let them simmer for 20 minutes, stirring often.

The more you mush the banana's the thicker the jam will be, I like a smoother jam but left a few chunks as others like chunky jam.

I made the suet up to the recipe on the back for dumplings. I made a slightly bigger batch, so 60g of suet, 120g of flour ( I had plain flour so added a teaspoon of baking powder)

Roll out your suet pastry, & add a layer of your jam the pastry. The right hand edge was left clear as that was used to stick the roly poly together.

Ready to go in the oven.

I baked the Roly Poly at 170 for 30 minutes and made custard using our normal milk (Koko) and birds custard powder. It was a hit here with all of us going back for seconds. There was enough banana jam for jam on toast for breakfast. 

Pumpkins

This week was halloween, and we had great fun carving our pumpkin. Nate enjoyed scooping out the seeds.

We didn't want to waste any of the pumpkin, so we promised Nate we'd make a soup. Nate chose the vegetables to go in the soup; carrots and parsnip. After carving our pumpkin and putting a candle inside it, Nate got a little scared of it, good time to make the soup.

In a pot we put the chopped up pumpkin and water with a stock cube we let that simmer for 10 minutes while we cut up the carrots and parsnip then in went the carrots again, letting them simmer for 10 minutes and for the final 10 minutes we put the parsnips in along with a teaspoon of turmeric, cumin and garam masala.

I then used the hand blender and plused it until smooth and served it with a sprig of coriander

Even the pumpkin seeds were roasted so none of our pumpkin went to waste. It was rather yummy so hopefully we'll be carving a pumpkin again next year.

Dairy Free Eton Mess

Earlier this week I had a huge punnet of strawberries, I had decided I wanted to try oven dried strawberries and then thought it would be nice to have an Eton Mess, Nate is dairy free so we hit a bit of a wall. So I got thinking what would be a good alternative.

Eton Mess Nate style
Handful of strawberries - chopped
Meringue Nest - crumbled
Tablespoon of Oven dried strawberries
2 Tablespoons of Coconut Cream - tinned version

Make sure you get the coconut cream and not milk, you also don't want to shake it up as you want the thick bit at the top of the can. Add more or less coconut cream to your taste.

Scatter the dry strawberries on top after you have mixed the strawberries, meringue and coconut cream. Eat immediately.

If you want the taste of cream it hasn't quite got it but for someone who hasn't had cream for a while it is a worthy substitute. Nate finished his bowl and then came and helped both of us finish our Eton Mess the finest compliment I think.

To make the over dried strawberries, you need to wash the strawberries, dry them and then chop them into quarters. Lay them on to a baking sheet that has been covered with baking paper or greaseproof paper, make sure they aren't touching.

Strawberries laid out not touching ready for oven drying.

Cook on low (100C) for about an hour and a half and then turn them over and continue cooking for another hour and half. If you like them slightly chewy you will need to adjust the times.

Dried strawberries

Chocolate steam buns

I have quite a few things to write up. The nice weather has really got my creative juices going. We love Char Sui Bao here and I wanted to make something using the bread outer as I wasn't confident that I could make the Char Sui the same. I decided on Salmon, so I cooked the Salmon in the oven and filled the Bao with a mixture of tomato, cucumber and cooked courgette. The outcome was lovely however, I wanted something sweet.

Salmon Bao

I had an idea, we always have chocolate and I had coconut cream. So I melted a tablespoon of chocolate chunks and added two tablespoons of coconut cream to the melted chocolate and used this mixture to fill the Bao dough. Steamed the bao for 10 minutes and they were ready.

Over flowing chocolate Bao.

Recipe

I used this recipe for the Bao dough. For the chocolate filling:
3 tablespoons of chocolate
6 tablespoons of coconut cream

Melt the chocolate however you would normally, I used the microwave method 30 seconds, stir, 30 seconds, stir etc until melted. Then stir in half of the coconut cream, once it has been stirred in add the rest of the coconut cream. Divide the dough up into 24 balls. Take one ball and make a big hole add a teaspoon of chocolate/cream mixture and then pinch together carefully. Try not to let the mixture touch where you are going to pinch the sides up as it won't close properly. Steam for 10 minutes, I only have a little steamer so steamed them in batches of two. Let them cool down slightly and eat.

None of these buns made it to the next day or to dinner for that matter, they should have a slightly coconutty taste but it shouldn't be overpowering. I'm sure the coconut cream could be swapped out for normal cream for those who aren't dairy free.

Yummy!