Lasagna

You will need:
Sauce -
200-400g ish of Mince meat of some sort (generally beef? but whatever really)
A jar or two of tomato pasta sauce, or tinned chopped tomatos, or a bunch of finely diced tomatos
A largish brown onion finely diced
Optional herbs/vegetables/garlic/whatever you want to add (grate the vegies, finely chop garlic)

Bechamel -
Butter
Flour
Milk
Optional cheese

The rest -
Lasagna sheets, from the shops or homemade.
Cheese

Fry the onion and garlic (if you're using it) in some oil over medium heat. Once soft add mince and fry until all browned and cooked. Add the vegetables if you want to, and then the tomatos or tomato sauce or the canned tomatos and let simmer for a while. Stir occasionally.

Once the sauce is simmering, melt about 2-3 tbsps of butter in a saucepan, put the heat low and then add 1/4-1/3 cup of PLAIN flour, stir well and make sure there are no lumps, don't stop stirring and let it slightly brown to cook out the flour. Then add about 1/2-3/4-1 cup milk, I usually add maybe 1/4 cup and then mix it all in and then add the rest. I don't know why I do it that way, and I don't think its necessary or makes any difference at all. Keep stirring it over low heat until it thickens, then take it off the heat. I usually add some cheese to it as well.

To assemble your lasanga:
I think traditionally you put bechamel on the bottom, but I don't like too much of it so I don't. If you want to, maybe make more bechamel or there won't be enough..
I do it like this: Meat sauce, lasagna sheets (fit as many in the tray whole as you can and then break bits up to fill in gaps), meat sauce, lasagna sheets, meat sauce ..until theres no sauce left. Then put some bechamel on the top, spread it out a little, then top with cheese.
Bake at about 180 for 15 or so minutes until the top is browned and delicious.

Rainbow cake

Its someones birthday tomorrow! And I don't really know them, so cake is an obvious present-solver.
Usually I do cupcakes, but I wanted something easier to carry, and recently I've gotten more into cakes then cupcakes, and also by making a cake there was leftovers and my housemates are loving me so much.

I made this cake mixture and then divided it into 5 bowls and made them red, purple, blue, aqua-ish and orange.

Then I put one colour at the bottom of a greased tin and spread it out a little, then put another colour on and spread it, and so on until all colours were used and the batter was spread almost all the way to the edge.
Then I baked it and cut a nice square out of it.


Tomorrow I'm going to ice it and cover it in sprinkles, and probably a happy birthday message. I'll post up photos when its all done :)


BTW my icing recipe is:
About a tbsp of butter melted in a saucepan (purely because we don't have a microwave yet, if you have one use it instead of a saucepan >.<)
Then add icing sugar and tsps of hot water until you reach the right consistency and quantity.
For this one I'm going to seperate it into bowls and add colours, then put small blobs of it over the cake, then spread it around, hopefully making an awesome rainbow swirly icing. Then I'll pipe happy birthday on top once the icing is set (if you don't make a large quantity of icing and so don't have much water in it, it will be a lot greasier and not set hard. If you're just making a small amount just use a tsp of butter, unless you want it greasy and soft that is.)

My basic cupcake recipe

If I'm gonna dedicate a blog to my cake, I have to do one for my cupcakes. I make these for every occasion ever. I got it from my year 10 foodtech teacher, who was awesome. And I've been using the same recipe for 2 and a half years now.

You need:
3/4 cup SR flour
1/4 cup caster sugar
1/4 cup (60g) butter
1/3 cup milk
1 egg

Soften the butter, the best way is to just leave it out of the fridge for an hour or so before use, but you could also dice it up and microwave it on low for about 20 seconds, don't let it melt though or it won't work. Then cream it with the sugar. Add the egg and beat. Then gradually add 1/4 cups of flour and tbsps of milk until all combined.
Bake at 180 for about 10-15 minutes. Depending on the size of the patty pans.

And you can srsly add anything to these, same as the cake.
Take out a tbsp or 2 of flour and replace it with cocoa for chocolate.
Or add chocolate chips, peanut butter, apple, raspberries, white chocolate, nutella, cheesecake mix, foodcolouring (such as in these), or any sort of artificial flavouring you want.

My basic cake recipe

Firgured I may as well give this its own post since it features in so many others, but none in which it is plain.

This is the easiest, quickest, most mess free cake recipe I have ever found.
You will need (You better appreciate this Adria)
1/2-3/4 cup SR flour
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 cup milk
1 egg

Then you just put it all in a large-ish bowl (in the order above, but I don't think it really matters) and beat it for a few minutes until its all combined and smooth. I usually put just 1/2 cup of flour in, and then add more if its too runny.

Then bake it at 180 for about 15 minutes (depending on the tin you use..) in a greased and if you wish lined tin until a skewer comes out clean. Take out of tin immediately and cool before icing.

And you can pretty much add anything to it, to make it chocolate just stick with 1/2 cup of flour and add 2 or 3tbsp of cocoa.
Add a tsp of vanilla essence to make it vanilla.
Or just add awesome stuff to it:
Raspberries and white chocolate chips.
Peanut butter.
Apple and cinnamon (and sprinkle the top with brown sugar and cinnamon before baking)

And here it is featured in some of my other posts:
Black forest cake
Alice in Wonderland cake

Epic toast

So I got late-night hungry and went to investigate the fridge and came up with this. Then I had to go make it again because it was so good.

It goes like this:
Toast, buttered. With avocado on it, a little salt and lemon juice, then diced tomatos, then scrambled eggs, then some mersey valley spring onion cheese.

Omnomnom.

Roll'd chicken with mushroom red wine sauce

On the last day of a week-long course I did we were trying to use up all the leftover stuff so our amazing teacher left us to our own devices. We'd made bechamel earlier in the day and had to use it somewhere in our dish.

I got a chicken breast fillet and sliced it in half but not quite all the way through to get a thin long wide peice.
I sprinkled it with basil and garlic and then rolled it up, and put toothpicks through it and baked it at probably about 180 for 15 minutes. Once its out slice it into a few pieces.
Meanwhile I sauted some mushrooms in heaps of butter, deglazed it with red wine, and then added the bechamel.
Then let it drain through a sieve to get rid of the mushroom and be left with a smooth sauce.

I served it with cherry tomatos and baby spinach and coriander leaves. It was epic.

Toffeed strawberries

Featured here with a happy grater.

These are so easy. And they can go with anything.
I made them to go with a flourless chocolate cake and icecream, but they'd be awesome on pancakes, cupcakes, pudding, icecream, every type of cake ever, french toast, scones, srsly anything. Well maybe not ANYTHING but pretty much.

Chop up some strawberries, depending on how big they are, in halfs or quarters.
Put them in a saucepan with about 1/4 cup caster sugar and a little water and let them cook. The toffee will stick to the pan, and a lot of it will stay there rather than be in with the strawberries, but don't stress about it. It is still delicious. However, make sure you start soaking/cleaning the saucepan straight away otherwise it will be stuck. forever. and ever.

Orange and pumpkin salad.

I made this for a function we did in my hospitality class this year to go with buffalo wings (if I can find the recipe I will post it), it is amazing.
Its really really easy and completely delicious. Vary the amount of pumpkin and orange depending on whether its gonna be a side salad or a main in itself.

Cut some pumpkin into small cubes, drizzle with olive oil, salt, pepper, powdered chilli, herbs, garlic, and whatever else you want.
Bake it for about 15 minutes at 180.

Cut the skin off an orange and then cut out the segments.
Wash some baby salad leaves (I used spinach and rocket)
Combine it all and drizzle with some dressing (I think I did olive oil, mustard, and orange juice)

Black forest cake.

I made this for my friends birthday.
Starting off with a massive chocolate cake, using this recipe but doubled.

Then I cut it in half and filled it with cream and sliced up cherries. Then covered it with chocolate ganache.

The edge is chocolate, made by melting some chocolate and spreading it over some baking paper, then wrapping it around the cake and letting it set. Then peeling off the baking paper.
You can make it even prettier by drizzling some white chocolate on the baking paper first, then putting the milk or dark chocolate over it.

I topped it with piped cream, cherries, and chocolate drizzle.

Baked potatos

These were another thing inspired by something I stumbled upon, I'd previously made two similiar things:
baked potatos where you scoop out the middle and mash it with cheese, sour cream, spring onion, then put back in skins and bake.
And also tomatos with the middle scooped out, filled with rice, pesto, and an egg on top then baked. This one was a potato with an egg baked in it, but I mixed in a few other things with it.

First bake the potatos in some foil at 200 for about 45 minutes.

Then once they were cool I sliced off the tops and scooped out the middle, and mashed it with a spoon of sour cream and some cheese.

I finely diced some tomato and mixed it with fresh thyme. Then put a spoon of it at the bottom of the potato shell, then a spoon of the mash, then I spooned some egg into each one (because these were small potatos I only needed 1 egg for all four, but if the potatos are big enough use a whole egg).

Then I baked them for about 15 minutes and served it with soup

This photo is terrible, oops.

Rainbow cupcakes

These were for a party I invited myself to, I scored the invite by promising rainbow cupcakes in return.

This is my cupcake recipe. Its wonderful.

I divided the mix into 5 bowls, and made them orange, red, purple, blue, and green. And spooned each colour one at a time into patty pans.

Once they were done I iced them with cream cheese icing (pretty much cream cheese with icing sugar added, make sure you don't add too much of the sugar or it will go too runny) then I put rainbow sprinkles on them.

Fish and chips

This is unbelievably simple.

For the fish:
Crush some salada biscuits (or chips, or savoy crackers, or cornchips, whatever) until they're quite small crumbs. Crack an egg into a dish and slightly beat it. And put some plain flour in another dish.
Take your fish (I used Bassa, but use whatever you want) and put it in flour, then egg, then the crumbs.
Fry it on one side until you can see it cooked more than halfway up the sides, then flip it onto the other side until its cooked though. Try not to flip it more than once, doing so can make the crumbing start to fall off.

For the chips:
Preheat oven to about 200.
Peel your potatos and cut into chips. Boil for about five minutes until almost all cooked through. Then spray some oil over them, and any seasoning you fancy (I used thyme from our garden and salt) and bake until crisp and browned.

For the tartare*:
*not real tartare.
I tried to make tartare but the mayo failed, so I just mixed some yogurt, finely chipped cucumber, and lemon juice.

Alice in Wonderland cake

A friend of mine had an Alice in wonderland themed party, and it has kind of become my trademark to make cupcakes for peoples birthdays.

I'd heard and seen about so called 'topsy turvey cakes' and decided that it would be perfect for my AIW cake.
I made 3 cakes, 2 quite large, but thin-ish triple chocolate ones, and one smaller, taller white chocolate and rainbow. The cakes were made using this recipe, but you can use whatever you want.

For the triple chocolate cakes I added extra cocoa, and chocolate chips (dark and milk).
And for the white chocolate I didn't add cocoa and put white chocolate chips in, and when putting in the tin I took a 4 spoons of batter into 4 bowls and added colours, then fill a tin half full with the plain batter, put the colours on around it, then top with the rest of the plain batter, then swirl around with a knife.

Once cooked I froze them to make them easier to cut.
Heres a video of how to make it topsy turvey, because I tried and failed at explaining it myself. I just did 2 quite small layers compared to the video, with the triple chocolate on bottom and the white chocolate on top.



Once the cake was assembled I covered it all with white chocolate ganache.

To decorate it, I made chocolate cards. I got a pack of playing cards, and using a piping bag with a really thin nozzle I piped dark chocolate over the design, you have to get the chocolate to a particular temperature. Too hot and it will just spread out and not keep to the shape of the design, but too cool and it won't pipe easily. I don't remember how I did it, but once you melt the chocolate just let it sit for a minute or two until its still quite runny but not super hot.

Once they're completely hard spread white chocolate over the back, and let harden again. The cards quite easily just peeled off for me, but if you use really papery cards it might be worth greasing them a little.

I cut hearts out of strawberries, and piped pink white chocolate ganache on the top in hearts too, then drizzled dark chocolate over them.
I places the chocolate cards on the front, and some tic-toc biscuits on the back. And piped a Happy Birthday message on top.

Bacon pancakes

So I stumbled upon a recipe for these (will post link if I ever find it again..) and when my housemate bought home bacon figured it was time to try it.

Its pretty simple, you make a pancake batter, mine is:
Put 1 egg about half a cup of milk in a bowl, mix, add about 1/4 cup sugar (caster or brown works best, brown if you want a more caramel-ey sweet) and then gradually add SR flour until its a pancake-batter consistency (probably about a cup)

Then fry your bacon, we used short rindless bacon and I cut it in half to make smaller pancakes, but you could do whole pieces of bacon and make them larger if you fancy. Once the bacon is ready on the first side flip it, and then spoon the batter over the top. Flip them once bubbles rise to the surface and pop without closing over again.

We just ate them as they were, but they would be wonderful with maple syrup (canadian style) or even icing sugar sifted over them (or both). Or could easily be made savoury by omitting the sugar from the batter (and maybe adding some cheese or herbs) and served with tomato and sauted mushroom.