Let's Eat #1, weekend treats
What with The Great British Bake off, I Can Cook (which is a firm favourite in our house!) and Tesco’s Bake On challenge, our house has been talking cooking non-stop recently!! The Little Coeliac is nearing 5 now so she is my little shadow in the kitchen and wants to join in with everything I’m doing which his great – her newest love is washing up!!! Long may that last!!! :)
Anyway, this weekend we kept it simple. We’d had a busy week so we pottered around at home, did some gardening and some scooting (in a vague attempt to burn off some of our cake calories!!), did some baking (of course) and collected conkers!!! All-in-all, a really nice, relaxed weekend!
So what did we bake?
First up, the so simple but always yummy rice krispie cake. In our house, referred to as the [Tesco Free From] Choco Snap cake!! I found a really simple recipe (I know you don’t really need one) on bbcgoodfood.com (was actually for cornflake cakes but we substituted the cornflakes and it worked well) which consisted of coco pops (or your cereal of choice), golden syrup, butter and chocolate. Who isn’t going to like that?!?! We took them as a little energy booster for half way through our scooting trip and everyone seemed to like them!
Then, we moved on… as many of you will know, gluten free pastry isn’t always the best but it is pastry week and we thought we would join in with Tesco’s #BakeOn competition so we started out to make the required Blueberry Coconut Pastries. We were even going to make our pastry from scratch; however, as we are walking around Waitrose talking about the ingredients we need, my daughter decided that she no longer liked blueberries or coconut (previously probably two of her favourite foods and I am sure they will be again next week) and suggested that instead of Blueberry Coconut Pastries, we should make Lemon Pastries.
Now I have to digress for one moment. I don’t know about you, but in our house, we can’t get enough of the lovely Katie on BBC’s I Can Cook. We’ve watched I Can Cook, I Can Cook On The Go and now we’re on I Can Cook With You!!!! We love how cheery she is and her recipes always feel achievable. We know all of the songs and you will often catch me humming a little rendition of “roll up your sleeves, give your hands a wash…..”!!!! Well, apparently, last week Katie had made some yummy lemon pastries which we really should make. I of course hadn’t seen that episode and Daddy was at work so we had to do a quick search through the I Can Cook With You recipe list (what did we do before we had internet access in the supermarket?!?!?!) and luckily I found the right one!
This was a recipe for Crumble Top Tarts, basically lemon tarts with a crumble topping. As we had moved away from the #BakeOn challenge somewhat, I didn’t feel so bad about suggesting we bought our pastry rather than making it from scratch and we bought some lemon curd too (after all, that’s what Katie said we should do!), and returned home to the kitchen, ingredients in hand and set about making our Crumble Top Tarts. As hoped, they were really fun and easy to make. We all had a go at rolling out the pastry and cutting the circles out, popped them in a muffin tin, added a spoonful of lemon curd, made the crumble topping and we were done! We ended up making seven pastries (instead of 4 as the recipe suggested) and we didn’t double the crumble ingredients (I don’t know why not!!!!) so we didn’t have loads of crumble on top but you know what, they tasted amazing!!!! Even the pastry was really nice!!
We used Schar, gluten free, shortcrust pastry and Waitrose 1 lemon curd which was heavenly – not too tart, not too sweet.
We will definitely be making these again and now we know how much we love lemon curd, we might even stretch to Lemon Meringue Pie for Grandpa’s birthday next month (it is his favourite cake after all)!
