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?

Homemade Pizza

Ingredients:

For the base: 
7g sachet active dried yeast
1/2 tsp sugar
175ml warm water
1 tbsp olive oil
260g of flour - with extra for kneading and rolling.
1/2 tsp salt

For the sauce:
1 Jar of Passata
2 tbsp Olive Oil
1 tsp Oregano
1 tsp Basil
1 tsp salt

Method:

1. For the sauce - Mix passata, oil, oregano, salt and basil in a bowl. Cover and let it sit for an hour. 
2. For base - Sieve flour and salt into a bowl, and create a well in the middle.
3. Pour yeast, sugar and water into jug, stir a bit and let it sit for 10 minutes in a warm place (or until a bit frothy).- then stir in Olive Oil.
4. Pour the yeast mixture into the well of the dry ingredients and with your fingers pull in the flour and salt mix until a dough is formed.
5. Flour the counter top, and knead the dough on it for 5 minutes.
6. Oil a bowl and put the ball of dough into it, and cover with a damp tea-towel for 45 mins. Place it in a warm place for best results. The dough should be double its original size.
7. Punch the dough down and knead again. Return to the bowl for another 10 minutes, covered with the towel again.
8. Take as much dough as you need and roll it out on a floured surface to form the pizza base.
9. Place the base onto baking parchment on a tray and apply the sauce.
10. Then add Mozzarella and any other toppings you want. 
11. Drizzle a bit of olive oil and some oregano on top!
12. Cook at 180 degrees for about 7 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and golden.