Raisin Scones

I was asked to bake some scones for a charity bake sale and I decided to try a new recipe. I fell to the safe bet - Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa. I only recently watched her make these scones on her TV show (Food Network) and they looked delicious. To accompany the scones, I made Raspberry Butter and whipped some cream. The scones turned out great; light and fluffy and golden all over.

                      

The recipe I used can be found here. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/raisin-scones-recipe.html

Notes about this recipe:

1. Use 1 tsp of salt instead of 2.

2. Heavy cream = Double Cream.

3. I used a round cutter that was 3 inches wide- you don't have to use the square cutter here.

3. Recipes makes 14-16.

4. Bake in fan oven at 180 degrees for 18 minutes.

If you are unsure if your scones are done, just cut one open and look inside to see if they need a few minutes more. This is also a great excuse to eat the scone, because you can't serve a cut up scone to someone, right?!

Once you are happy that your scones are cooked, place them on a wire rack and allow them to cool.

Along with this I also whipped together 1/4lb of Kerrygold butter with 1/3 cup (about 2-3 heaped tbsp) of good raspberry jam and a pinch of salt to make the Raspberry Butter.

With the raspberry butter, I suppose you are just cutting out the "extra hassle" (I put that in quotations, because it's NOT an extra hassle) of having to spread butter AND jam onto your scone, but together they make a lovely creamy and sweet topping for your scone.

I also used the leftover cream I had and whipped this up to serve with the scones. 

I found a tray and covered it in a nice linen tea towel, and placed the scones inside. This can then be served with the butter and cream in their jars.

                   

Party Food

We love entertaining! Having guests over in our place, feeding them good food, some really good cocktails and always great chat, it's a perfect night in my view!

We love coming up with ideas for food and spend the days prior to it discussing recipes and ideas for what we could do. As many of the guests overlap on these nights, we need to constantly think of new ideas. Saying that, we always make two dishes that have been tried and tested at our previous parties. These are great as you know how to cook them well and they act as fall backs in case your new recipes go haywire!

The last party we had was a few weeks back, and our safe bets were chicken wings & potato skins. The skins are great as they can be prepared well in advance, so you can just pop them into the oven as your guest arrive. 

Our new recipes were mini pizzas and jalapeno poppers. We also tried a new way to display the dessert - gluten free chocolate biscuit cake!

With the mini pizzas - we started by buying a pizza base. (I could have made a pizza dough but this was a nice and easy cheat to save time and energy.)

I cut the pizza base into small circles (about 2 inches in width) using a small glass to indent & cut, and a knife to free any stubborn pieces not coming away with the glass. I popped these onto a tray lined with baking parchment and put them into the oven at 180 degrees for 10 minutes. This allowed the mini bases to crisp up.

Once they were crisp enough, I took them out of the oven and spooned about a table spoon of pizza sauce (passata mixed with tbsp of oil and herbs) onto the base. On top of this I put pieces of mozzarella and then a slice of pepperoni or some sweet corn. I also added a sprinkle of oregano on top.

These went back into the oven again for about 10 - 15 minutes until the cheese was melted enough and the base had crisped even more.

*To cater for our Gluten Free friend, we used Gluten Free (GF) pita breads as some of the pizza bases out there for coeliacs are terrible.
We cut these out using a glass/knife as well (being careful not to use the same glass/knife/chopping board as we used for the 'normal' pizza base as that contains gluten and will contaminate the GF food). 
We used a separate tray for these mini bases and used the same ingredients as the mini pizzas. They worked perfectly.*

For the Jalapeno poppers, we used both jalapenos and sweet peppers. 

These were the poppers pre-oven. Again these can be prepared hours in advance.

We started by cutting the peppers into half, length-ways. Then de-seeding the insides. We then spooned some Philadelphia cream cheese into the centres and closed the peppers again. 

The peppers were then wrapped in streaky bacon, and we stuck a toothpick into them to secure them together.

We placed these on a rack in a tray and into the oven (set at 180 again but this time turned to the grill-oven setting). These took about 15 minutes in the oven, turning once. The bacon should be crisped up and the cheese inside should be melted.

We lost one or two of these to the tray because either the toothpick or bacon weren't holding it together tight enough. Lesson learned!

Everyone loved these! Before hand I had thought that they may be the only item left on the table after the night, but they were devoured! And because they were de-seeded, they weren't too spicy!

The final piece was the dessert. I had made the gluten free chocolate biscuit cake before, so we decided to do up the display of the dessert this time. We also made this gluten free, so that everyone could enjoy.

We had some sherry glasses from IKEA so I spooned some whipped cream into these glasses and placed a large slice of chocolate biscuit cake on top. There were 'ooooohs' and 'ahhhhs' when they were brought to the table, which is really what you are looking for isnt it?

Banoffee Pie

Ingredients:

Base:
100g butter, melted
250g digestive biscuits (finely crushed)

Filling:
100g butter
100 brown sugar
397g can condensed milk

Top:
3 regular bananas
284ml cream
flake bar

Method:

1. Melt the butter and add to the crushed biscuits, and mix well.
2. Press mixture into base of tin or dish and chill well.
3. For the filling, melt butter and sugar together in sauce pan OVER LOW HEAT. Stir until butter is melted and sugar is disolved.
4. Add the condensed milk and bring gently to the boil, while stirring continuously. Once it thickens, remove from the heat.
5. Spread over the biscuit base and cool for 1 hour in the fridge, until firm.
6. To serve, slice the bananas and place half of them on top of the caramel.
7. Whip the cream and add the other half of the bananas to it. Place this cream on the top of the pie. And sprinkle with crushed flake bar pieces.

The base with the toffee:



The bananas placed on top: