Strawberry Smoothie

 Today the sun has been shining and there have also been clouds.  Sous Chef J decided he needed a summery drink to 'get into summer' so decided to make a smoothie.

As is good practice, he gathered the ingredients (but forgot the orange juice in this pic) then set about preparing his Vitamin C packed drink of delight.

It's a simple to make concoction.  He puts all the ingredients into a container then whizzes them with the Braun Hand Blender (although, after seeing a Vitamix demo at last week's Good Food Show, he keeps telling me one of their blenders would be better!!)

Using a handful of hulled strawberries, juice of one orange and a whole ripe banana as a base he added a squirt of lemon, a squeeze of runny honey, a splodge of natural (home made) yoghurt and a dash of vanilla extract.

Then WHIZZZZZZZ.  Pour out into "suitable receptacles" and enjoy!

Tweet Pie Choc Chunk Cookies

Those of you that follow us on twitter will be aware that Sous Chef J and I were at the BBC Good Food Show at the NEC last Friday. Whilst there we were able to watch chef Brian Turner demonstrate a couple of recipes on the Belling stand. He used an innovative, twitter crowdsourced, recipe book called Tweet Pie. It contains more than 200 'twecipes’ via Twitter from members of the public - 50 have been published in the book with all proceeds donated to the food charity FoodCycle. It can be bought on eBay for £4.99 using this link .

We chose to recreate the recipe tweeted by @ebmulcahy. Although it’s the one we saw being cooked, Brian made a few tweaks, and we also had to amend the recipe incorporate our gluten free requirements. Plus, we 'sort of' halved the amounts stated in the tweeted recipe in case the switch to gluten free didn't go to plan.

The ingredients we used were:-

125g caster sugar
125g butter (softened)
1 egg yolk
175g Dove's Farm self raising flour (for those not following a gluten free diet, just use SR Flour!)
Chocolate - white and dark, roughly chopped

The sugar and butter were creamed together. Then the egg yolk was added and combined well. Finally the flour was added and the mixture was brought together. This was all done by hand (just like we'd seen in the demo.) The mix was then wrapped in greaseproof paper and chilled (we left ours overnight.)

When it was time to bake the cookies, we removed the dough from the fridge for about half an hour then divided it into three parts.  Sous Chef J had (finally) decided that they would become chocolate chunk cookies - some were to be white chocolate, another lot would be dark chocolate and the third batch a mix of the two chocolates.

Once the dough was kneaded and had the chocolate of choice incorporated, they were roughly rolled into balls, placed on a non-stick baking tray and flattened slightly.  They were then placed in a pre-heated fan oven at 180ºC.  Having taken note of Chef Turner checking the oven after a few minutes, Sous Chef J ensured we did the same and set the timer for 6 minutes... whereupon it was decided another 4 minutes were needed to ensure cooked cookies.

Having been cooked "to perfection" the cookies were left to cool on their baking trays for 5 minutes before being transferred to a cooling rack. Then we 'tested' one of the white choc chunk cookies... although there was competition to get to the cookie first!

It was lovely to meet Jo (@jos_kitchen) and Louise (@comidayvida), both Midlands Food Bloggers, on the Belling stand.