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Amazing salted caramel brownies

20 Tuesday Sep 2016

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I recently baked the best brownies I’ve ever baked.. twice! These salted caramel chocolate brownies are chocolatey oozy goodness that you really need to try. They are pretty quick to make and so far loved by all who’ve tried them, definitely a recipe I will keep to hand for the future.

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Ingredients:

200g butter

4 eggs

160g plain flour

60g cocoa powder

1x tin of Carnation caramel

1 tsp of flaked sea salt

1 tsp vanilla extract

300g dark chocolate

300g

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Method:

Preheat the oven to 180°C

A 30cm x 20cm non-stick tin is recommended, lined with greaseproof paper.

Step 1

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Break all of the chocolate into chunks, add to a bowl with butter and melt over a pan of simmering water. Make sure the bowl doesn’t touch the water.

Step 2

Remove the bowl from the heat, whisk the sugar into the melted mixture.

Step 3

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Add the eggs and vanilla extract, whisk until light and bubbly.

Step 4

Sieve the flour and cocoa powder into the mix, then gently fold, be gentle so as not to knock out the air.

Step 5

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Pour half the mix into the tin, spread evenly. Then spread the tin of caramel over the mix in the tin, sprinkle evenly with the salt.

Step 6

Add the rest of the chocolate mix to the tin, then bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes.

After the 20-25 minutes the brownie will still be soft, this is fine. Just take out and leave to cool completely in the tin.

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This is a Tanya Burr recipe, it’s available in her recipe book.

 

Let me know what you think, Ali xx

 

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Weekend baking

11 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by in Baking blog, German Shepherd, Lifestyle, Uncategorized

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I wasn’t feeling too great this weekend so decided to do some baking to cheer myself up. I’ve seen quite a few YouTubers and bloggers make Tanya Burr’s cookies and have wanted to try them for months, so this is what I decided to bake. What I love most about the recipe is for quantity of chocolate it just says “large bar”, I got a really large bar, 360g of Dairy Milk to be exact, plus a large Milkybar.

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Here is the whole recipe:

200g butter – needs to be softened

300g caster sugar

1 large egg

27g self-raising flour

75g cocoa powder

dash of milk

large bar of milk chocolate

large bar of white chocolate

large bar of dark chocolate (Tanya’s blog says this is optional and I didn’t add)

It’s a pretty simple recipe; first step is to cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. My butter had been out of the fridge for a few hours but it really wasn’t soft enough, I made the mistake of trying to mix it with my electric whisk and it went absolutely everywhere! So I then carried on with a wooden spoon, it took ages and gave me arm ache, soo use really soft butter.

Next – crack the egg in, then add the dry ingredients; flour and cocoa, mix it all up to form dough.

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As you can see my dough was dry so I had to add quite a large dash of milk to make it all stick together. Lastly, the most important ingredient; chocolate. I decided to just use milk and white chocolate in mine, not because I don’t like dark chocolate, in fact I really do like dark chocolate, but because I had such a large bar of milk chocolate I didn’t think I needed any dark. As it turns out there was more than enough chocolate in the cookies.

I baked them three per baking tray, then one on its own. The recipe makes ten large cookies I didn’t want to crowd them and let them get stuck together. They do cook in eleven minutes as per Tanya’s recipe, but are really gooey and you do have to leave them to cool for around half an hour before eating. So gooey that I couldn’t even transfer them to my cooling rack as they were just falling apart. Shame, I had to eat that one! After half an hour when they had set a little i moved them onto my wire rack to completely cool. I have to say they are actually the nicest cookies I’ve ever baked, and I’ve tried many recipes.

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After baking these, I was still in the baking mood, so I measured out all the ingredients to make a whole wheat loaf in my bread maker, I didn’t want it to bake that night as it was already 9pm and the bread takes at least three hours, so I set my machine to bake the bready ready for 9:15 the next morning. I haven’t been so excited for it to be morning in a long time. I awoke to the smell of bread baking and it was so good. I took Bella out for a walk and when we got back it was ready and the house smelt just like a bakery. I had a slice straight out of the machine, dripping in butter, what a lovely start to my Sunday. I was definitely feeling better after that.

Ali xx

Happy Birthday Bella!

18 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by in Baking blog, German Shepherd, Uncategorized

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Bella is 1! I can’t believe it! In celebration I decided to bake her a dog friendly birthday cake, I have shared the recipe below. I’m really proud of how far she has come along in the last year, her behaviour has improved massively and she has such a great personality. She actually manages to make me laugh on a daily basis; I can no longer picture life without her in it. (Taking it over)

So, for the cake you will need the below:

1 egg

65g peanut butter

60ml vegetable oil

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

80g honey

135g grated carrots

120g wholemeal flour

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

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First step set the oven to 180°C and grease a cake tin

Second step, mix the egg, peanut butter, oil, vanilla and honey together in a bowl

 

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Next, add the grated carrot and mix well.

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Then sift the flour with the bicarbonate of soda into the bowl and fold into the mixture. I found that the wholemeal flour didn’t sift very well; I had to use a spoon to get it through the sieve.

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Lastly spoon into the tin and bake in the oven for 40 minutes.

This is the first time I have made a cake like this, and I wasn’t sure it was quite done after 40 minutes, but I think it was. My cake tin was a bit too big for this mix, so when it had cooled down I cut it into the shape of a bone.

I gave Bella a little taste of the off-cuts and she seemed to enjoy it. To be honest, she will eat pretty much anything. The only thing I’ve found that she won’t eat is lettuce. There is a little video on my YouTube channel of it if you want to check that out.

Here is the finished cake 🙂

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If you make this please comment and let me know if your dog likes it. I’ll be spoiling Bella on her birthday with some new toys, a bone to eat and of course a little bit of cake.

One more of Bella, watching me patiently making the cake and using her biscuits as decoration.

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She is so cute!

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Ali xx

 

Baking bread

10 Thursday Mar 2016

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I love bread. I love the smell of fresh bread, I love the smell of bread being baked, and I love eating bread. I love bread so much, that when on holiday a few years ago I made my family stop at every bakery we saw just to go inside to look at and smell the bread. I was the designated driver for the holiday, so they didn’t really have much choice! So that’s why I thought I’d write a blog about baking some bread.

Anyway, due to my love of bread, for Christmas my boyfriend bought me a bread maker. Amazing. I have made bread from scratch a few times, but this bread maker just makes it so, so much easier, it’s wonderful.

I thought I would share with you one of my bread making sessions, today I chose to make a French bread style loaf. Now, normally you would expect this to be in the form of a baguette, but this is just a regular loaf shaped bread. Still tastes great though.

For this, I used my Russell Hobbs breadmaker. It comes with a leaflet that gives you recipes for different types of bread, I have made a few of them before, but this is my first time trying the French bread recipe.

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You will need:

300g strong white bread flour

1 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of dried yeast

200g of water at room temperature. (The water is measured in grams in the recipe book so I just weighed it on my scales as if it was a dry ingredient.)

 

I was obviously making this in my bread maker, so you put all of the ingredients inside the loaf tin ready to be mixed. However, you must add the ingredients in a certain order, otherwise the yeast may activate too early or not activate at all and then disaster will strike. The recipe book advises that the wet ingredients are added first, so water on the bottom. Then dry, so I added the salt before the flour (salt and yeast need to be kept well away from each other). I added the yeast last, so there was a flour barrier between it and the salt.

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That is basically all the hard work done. The rest is up to the brilliant machine! You just pop the loaf tin into the machine, select the programme you require and off it goes. It mixes, kneads, proves and bakes the bread without you having to do anything else. It then beeps at you to tell you it’s ready. Can you tell I’m a little bit in love with it?!

The French bread recipe takes 3 hours and 40 minutes from when you start the machine to when it’s baked. There is also an option to set the machine to come on at a certain time, I haven’t tried it yet, but I want to set it to be ready for breakfast. Imagine waking up to a house smelling of fresh bread that you can literally go downstairs and start eating! Heaven.

This is about 10 minutes after I started the machine, all mixed together ready to start proving.

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This is with about an hour to go, so just about to start baking I think.

 

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The finished loaf! I was practically drooling as I took this photo, I had a slice as soon as I’d taken it. Yummmmmmmmmmmmm!

 

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For any of you who like bread as much as me, I hope this has inspired you to get baking. I do see it as a bit of a cheat, but honestly, it’s so good, you need to try it.

Ali xx