Smurf themed Halloween Dessert

Smurf themed Halloween Dessert

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Last year, I showed you how to make the Scrambled Zombie Brain Halloween dessert. This year, I want to show you how to do a Smurf themed Halloween dessert – “Gargamel’s Scrambled Smurfs”.

With 3 main ingredients – sponge cake, blue jelly and custard, you can make this so easily. Add to this version some blue food colouring and candy eyeballs, to make it gruesome (poor Smurfs!)

Gargamel’s Scrambled Smurfs

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A few handy notes on the ingredients:

  • Pre-make the jelly ahead of time – it requires 4 hours to set. Using a fork, break up the jelly into blobby chunks.
  • You can either make your own plain sponge cake, or buy it from the supermarket. Cut the sponge cake into bite size pieces (don’t worry about being neat).

Assembly of Gargamel’s Scrambled Smurf Trifle:

1. Scoop a layer of jelly into the bottom of a glass or clear dessert dish.

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2. Add the candy eyeballs. Use a teaspoon to hold the eyeball and push the spoon into the jelly, where you want the eye to sit.

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3. Add blue food colouring to the custard and mix until marbled through.

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4. Scoop a layer of thick vanilla custard next.

 

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5. Then a layer of cut up sponge cake. Adding the layers in this order means that the sponge cake gets scooped up with enough custard so it’s moist to eat.

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6. Now, I’m not sure what colour Smurf blood is – but I’m going to go with blue! You could make it red or even purple. Add a drizzle of blue food dye around the rim of the glass and let it ooze down into the cake and custard.

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5. Last of all, top with more custard and jelly – half on each side of the glass so you get to see them both when looking into the dessert. And add a couple more candy eyeballs, so they look at you when you go to take the first bite!

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Food Ideas for Christmas – a twist on making Olive Bread

Food Ideas for Christmas – a twist on making Olive Bread

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Here’s a couple of food ideas for Christmas – that will be visually appealing and tasty!

A while ago I posted about making Olive Bread, which by the end would get you two cobs of bread. For Christmas, how about putting a twist on this recipe – and change up the last step of making the Olive bread?

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Step 4: Punch Down, Divide, and Shape the Loaf.

A. Instead of dividing the loaf into two cobs – split the dough into 3 equal parts.

B. Once you have your 3 parts, lightly roll them and pull them out to make lengths (about 50-60cm).

C. At one end, attach all parts together, but pushing the dough down at the tip.

D. Then start plaiting the dough!

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E. Once you get to the end, shape the plait into a wreath and neaten off the loose ends by tucking and hiding them in with the beginning of the wreath.
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You can see my creative effort at joining the dough strips at the top of the wreath.

At this point, you are up to Step 5: Proof the Dough (Second Rise) and continue on making the bread as per recipe. This little twist on making olive bread, can be done with other bread recipes too. Do you have a favourite bread recipe you like to use? If you do, give this idea a go for Christmas, and see your family and friends stare at your edible table decoration!

Another Christmas themed idea for the table, and a perfect accompaniment to your bread wreath – is creating shaped butter. This was covered in an earlier post as well, and you may have noticed these cute little fellas made an early appearance:

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For something a different, why not add to the Christmas colours of your decor, and make your shaped butters green. You can do this by adding either basil and garlic or parsley and pepper to your butter. Use a mortar and pestle to grind your green leaves, which will help colour your butter.

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Olive bread and basil butter. Not just good looks, but great taste!

 

How to menu plan to save time & money

How to menu plan to save time & money

How to Menu Plan
When I first moved out of home and in with my future husband, we went through quite a few of the general running-of-the-house role sharing tasks together. We soon found out what we were a) better at doing and; b) preferred doing.

One of the everyday jobs that I was happy to take away from him (for the most part), was cooking. He enjoyed cooking, and we even cooked together at times (because it seemed so romantic!) – but the cooking was best left for me because frankly, I enjoyed to eat dinner well before 9pm. His ‘measure twice, cut once’ mentality and my predisposition for becoming hangry (angry when hungry) was going against us.

Eventually though, cooking became tiresome for me. Every night after work, I would sit down with a pile of recipe books, glazing over them wondering; What are we going to eat? What could I be bothered to cook? What do we even have in the pantry/fridge? I couldn’t be bothered driving up to the shops now…

I just want to eat!

Every night, the same uncertainty was making cooking a chore & less enjoyable. So finally, my desire of being organised conquered – I employed the help of some brightly coloured sticky page markers and began what was to become, my life-long helper – the menu list.

As we were new to cooking for ourselves and we each had opinions on certain meals & flavours – our experiments, trials & errors became the foundation of the ultimate menu list. The recipes that got the thumbs up, ended up with a sticky page marker, the ones we weren’t so fond of, never got another look-in. Simple.

Note: You can go on and skip step 1. (creating a menu list) and go straight to step 2. (the menu plan) if it seems a bit much for you. I admit, it does take some time (give it a few hours at least). But you will reap the rewards on a weekly basis if you put in the time to begin with.

Stage 1. The menu list.

Can you imagine having all your favourite recipes at your finger tips – book title, page number, must have ingredients for the shopping list, at a glance? That’s what I imagined, so I created a spreadsheet with this simple system. It was easy once all the favourite recipes were marked. Here’s what I did:

Firstly I sub-titled sections on the spreadsheet in groups ie: beef, pork, chicken, fish, vegetarian etc. I then went through every page I had favourited and slotted the following information in the corresponding columns:

Column 1: Brief description – this isn’t the recipe title, as sometimes they can be a little fancy or long. This is my own brief description eg. Goulash beef & pasta.

Column 2: Recipe book & page number – this was a code, and didn’t include the full details. For example, Marie Claire’s Cooking, page 26 – became C26. And Family Circle Quick Pasta Recipes, page 36 became P36. Too easy!

Column 3: Ingredients to put on the shopping list – this is where you only include the things you know you’ll need to buy, rather than what you will already have in the pantry or fridge as a staple. You wouldn’t put pasta, stock, onion, tomato paste for example, but items such as sour cream, green capsicum would go in this column.

The third column takes time & patience. If you don’t do this section, it won’t put things into a spin – but it will save you time on a weekly basis as you won’t be opening recipe books to check what you need to buy.

Once you have this Holy Grail set, you are set. You can also add and remove as time goes on – as you can see from my list!

These pages have seen better days. They’re over 5 years old!

Stage 2 – Menu Planning. 

I used to use scrap paper and write the days of the week, with my codes from column 2 in them – and leave the bottom section as a shopping list. Until I found a menu planner notepad at kikki.k! There are quite a few around, even a search on etsy found a few well designed planners. Whatever works for you here, just get it on paper.

You’ll find that with a menu planned out – you’ll shop quicker, there’ll be less food wastage, you’ll spend less at the supermarket and spend less on take-away dinners!

 

Super Easy Halloween Dessert

Super Easy Halloween Dessert

This super-easy, super-delicious dessert also looks AMAZING and is perfect for both kids and adults alike. It looks as amazing as the Ice-Cream Soda (Spiders), and you can also get creative with different colours & flavours of jelly.

This one has been specifically created for an after dinner dessert on Halloween (for dinner, we are having Smoked Pork “Ghoulash” – keep an “eye-out” for that one on the blog soon). OK, enough with the sub-standard puns and on with the recipe for:

Scrambled Zombie Brains!

A few handy notes on the ingredients:

  • Pre-make the jelly ahead of time – it requires 4 hours to set. Using a fork, break up the jelly into blobby chunks.
  • You can either make your own plain sponge cake, or buy it from the supermarket. Cut the sponge cake into bite size pieces (don’t worry about being neat).

Assembly of Zombie Brain Trifle:

1. Scoop a layer of jelly into the bottom of a glass or clear dessert dish.

 

 

2. Scoop a layer of thick vanilla custard next.

 

 

3. Then a layer of cut up sponge cake. Adding the layers in this order means that the sponge cake gets scooped up with enough custard so it’s moist to eat.

 

 

4. So at this point, the Zombie brain needs a little more “ewwwww” factor, so we are going to add a drizzle of red food dye. If you use the little plastic squeeze bottles, you can easily rim the glass with food dye and let it ooze down into the cake and custard.

 

 

5. Last of all, top with more custard and jelly – half on each side of the glass so you get to see them both when looking into the dessert. A total visual feast!

 

 

Get creative!

As an alternative to Scrambled Zombie Brains, you might want to substitute the green jelly with blue jelly, and make Gargamel’s Minced Smurfs!

Recipe: Cumin Chicken & Cauliflower

Recipe: Cumin Chicken & Cauliflower

The idea for this recipe first came from a cauliflower salad my mum had made, where she simply splashed some vinegar in with steamed cauliflower trees and seasoned it with salt. Simple yet yummy! So I started a meal one night with having this as a side and thought some chicken would go well with it. I hadn’t finalised in my head how I was going to flavour the chicken yet, so as I’m cooking over the wok, I think out aloud “Hmmm, I think some cumin would be nice with this.” To my son’s horror, he replied, “What! Human???”
Cumin spice. Otherwise known as Human in our house.
Cumin Chicken & CauliflowerIngredients (serves 4):

400g chicken breast fillets, diced
1/2 cauliflower head, separated into bite sized trees
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 tbsp Apple Cider vinegar + 1 tbsp extra
1 tsp cumin

Method:1. Add chicken and garlic to a hot wok with oil and brown.
2. Add cauliflower, cumin and 2 tbsp vinegar. Stir well until evenly coated.
3. Cook for 10 minutes on high heat, with a lid (to help soften the cauliflower).
4. Stir occasionally and towards the end, add the extra 1 tbsp vinegar and season with salt & pepper.

Serve with long grain rice and sprinkle a little cumin to colour.

1. Using a deep cookie cutter, pack the rice inside until level to the top.
2. Gently remove the cookie cutter to reveal your shaped rice!
Styling notes:
Off-White Plate – Target
Heart shape cookie cutter – Daiso