I feel like I have neglected my blog the last couple of days as well as the other sites which my work appears on such as Pinterest and Yummly. I have been stuck in the kitchen creating some of my new recipes which are great for Easter as well as other occasions. I have recipes for the children to make as well more intricate ones but all will be revealed soon when I publish my next little recipe book. The last couple of days have been spent writing up and baking so I am quite exhausted. However, the excitement of being so close to finishing this second book is taking over. My second recipe book is mainly going to be recipes as I feel that there is not much more I can say about setting up your own home baking business ( this won’t stop me though as I can chat for ages on the subject). My first book is available from Amazon as an e-book or paperback. These are the links to my first ever book which I am quite proud of.
This blogging and writing combined with the baking is proving to be a full time job which I am loving but I am still trying to have everything finished during school hours so I can spend some time with the children and not be thinking about this. Unfortunately, I find I am walking around with a notebook and pen in my back pocket and keep stopping to write down ideas.
This next week is busy as apart from St Patricks day tomorrow which I am making something for and I will share it later there is also Mothers Day coming up soon. On my website I have shared a couple of links from my favourite shops at the moment with ideas for Mothers Day gifts. I particularly like the Whittard of Chelsea gift idea but I love tea. Knowing my husband I will get a new pair of slippers, lots of kisses, breakfast in bed and a homemade card or two. There is a [amazon_textlink asin=’B00T623WS0′ text=’Red Nose Day ‘ template=’ProductLink’ store=’wwwlovetobake-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’fe5721b9-0a3f-11e7-8423-6126b7c2f572′]next week so something silly will have to baked. Next week is Salt Awareness Week and at the end of next week it is International [amazon_textlink asin=’B00DN5MERQ’ text=’Waffle Day’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’wwwlovetobake-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’1bc772f3-0a40-11e7-9b73-71d1a7a8b0e1′]. Plenty to work on then and look forward to. It looks like it is going to be a rather hectic week or two ahead and I am already living on sandwiches and soup at the moment I can’t remember the last time I had a proper meal. The children and husband are all eating meals (last night they had a chicken dinner – I didn’t want any dinner by the time I had made theirs- isn’t that always the case though).
My soups have all been homemade as I treated my daughter to a hand blender for her food technology project the other week and I haven’t stopped using it since. This week alone I have made carrot, red pepper and sweet potato soup and yesterday I had broccoli and leek soup. Two different ends of the colour spectrum there and both were very tasty. I am thinking of what vegetables I could use in a soup today as it is so easy. Just chop and boil them in a pan then whizz up with the blender. Hardly any cleaning up is needed – how I ever managed before this I don’t know. I will add some recipes and photos of my homemade soups when I have a new one made and I remember to take a picture of it is consumed. 🙂
I have been looking though the history of blog posts which I have written and I decided to add some of the past ones onto Yummly but the only way I know how to do this is by re-doing them in the Yummly layout so today I am going to add Flapjack to my repertoire. I make so much of this in my house as my children love it. My daughter made a lovely version at school one week but she cannot remember the recipe so I have made an awful lot of it and now have the best, crunchy, not too sweet, moreish flapjack that I can make. Sometimes I add other ingredients to it but more often than not it is the basic recipe with no extra bits , for example , chocolate chips, dried fruit.
[lt_recipe name=”Flapjack” servings=”16″ prep_time=”10M” cook_time=”30M” total_time=”40M” difficulty=”Easy” print=”yes” summary=”Nutritionally, one slice contains 248 calories, 12.3g total fat (16% daily total fat), 32g total carbohydrate (12% daily total carbohydrate), 1.9g fibre (7% daily fibre) (based on a 2000 calorie diet).” image=”https://www.love-to-bake.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/slicees-flapjack.jpeg” ingredients=”4oz dark brown sugar;4oz caster sugar;8oz soft spread;10oz porridge oats;2 tbsp. golden syrup;3oz self raising flour;” ]Preheat the oven to gas 4.;Line a baking tin.;Melt the soft spread, syrup and sugars in a pan until the sugar is dissolved. Stir constantly.;Remove from the heat.;Add the oats and the flour and mix to coat the dry ingredients completely.;Transfer to the tin and flatten down with the back of a spoon.;Bake for 20 – 30 minutes till the edges are golden.;Allow to cool before cutting into pieces.[/lt_recipe]
I like to make flapjack as I feel my children who will not all eat porridge are still getting the benefits of the oats even though there is sugar in the recipe and I would rather they ate homemade treats rather than shop bought. I have even carried out a blind taste test with them (like in my university days) where they were blindfolded and presented with a plate containing shop bought flapjack and a plate of homemade flapjack. They all described the two types perfectly and used some good descriptive words for both flapjacks. I was very impressed as they all guessed correctly. At university we had to hold many of these taste tests for foodstuffs ranging from cheesecakes to chicken nuggets and we would have to identify different flavours, which were processed , which were homemade and so on. This carried on into my job at a brewery where I worked as a production chemist. Here we were regularly tested to see if we could identify different flavours contained in the beers as our job entailed the quality testing of the beers before they were transported away from the brewery.
Now I am reminiscing about the past instead of looking to the future. Off to the kitchen I go to prep for dinner tonight and make a treat for the family (which is also one of my new recipes for my new book). Nothing like killing two birds with one stone is there. Now I have an idea in my head so I am off to use it.