Halloween Recipe

Hola Stylistas!

So I haven't posted in ages, as in a proper blog post. My last post (Entitled 'My Stylish Saturday') was for a competition and it'd be cool if you all read it as hopefully that would boast my chances up a tad :) The link will be at the bottom of this post x


Wow shameless promotion over... It's 12 days till Halloween, which is frighteningly less than two weeks. Halloween falls during half term and today it's a day kids go out and beg for candy (guilty of this), classy isn't it? Or when girls who wear barely anything can get away with it (Like as shown in Mean Girls, the best girl movie EVA). Or the day when you can walk into the shop and buy candy ridiculously cheap, without the effort of 'Trick or Treating'. There's always one who is on a 'diet' when it comes around to Halloween time and boy that must be hard. *Hands a gold medal*. So today I got my Nigella on and culminated scarily good strawberry treats for you :) They're more fruit than sugar so you can indulge a bit.

Creepy Chocolate Coated Strawberries:

This recipe starts off  with the middle design and takes each strawberry in turns. Then you adapt this to a batch. It's just easy to describe the single designs.

You will need:

• Ripe strawberries that will make a witch jealous
• Meltable chocolate- White and Milk flavours
• Orange and black sprinkles
• Orange food colouring
• A piping/icing bag
• Orange food colouring

Method:

1. Starting with the easiest design, melt your milk chocolate. It's quicker to melt it in the microwave than on the hob. Break the chocolate bar (or pour chocolate chunks) into a microwave proof bowl. Put this bowl into the microwave and take it out every 30 seconds to stir. It normally takes just over 2 minutes. For the melting on the hob method, you put your microwaveable bowl over boiling water and stir. This method isn't as safe as the microwave method and does take longer. 
2. Whilst you're waiting for the chocolate to melt, wash and dry the strawberries, ready for dunking!
3. Once the chocolate is melted and cooled; take your first strawberry and dunk it in the chocolate! Make sure it's coated the whole way round. Put the strawberries in a safe container and try to sit them upwards, so the leaves are on the bottom of the container. This way the chocolate won't look messy.
4. Once you've coated the strawberries, mix in a little drop of orange food colouring into your chocolate. Only enough to get the colour orange as you don't want an overpowering taste of food colouring, yuck. Once your strawberries have cooled, coat half of the strawberry into the orange chocolate. Let these dry and move on to your next design.
5. Next, melt your white chocolate (by following step one if you can't remember!) and prepare your strawberries for dunking.
6. Dunk your strawberries into the white chocolate then sprinkle orange and black sprinkles over them.
7. Leave to cool then dip the rest of your strawberries into the rest of the milk chocolate. Using your orange chocolate from earlier, fill a piping bag with this and you may want to melt some more milk chocolate (if you've ran out). Using the piping bag, ice chocolate lines onto your chocolate canvas. Rotate between the two colours.

Yummy and eerily delish :) Below are low cost utensils/ingredients that were used during the tutorial, so check them out and here is the link to 'My Stylish Saturday' post: http://arrayostyle.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/my-stylish-saturday.html

Fathers Day recipe

Fathers Day is tomorrow! Who's got their presents sorted? If not there's plenty of time to get down to the shops and get some ingredients to make him something spectacular to maintain your 'Daddy's Girl' title. Or there's always the dreaded prospect of waking up EARLY on a SUNDAY to get the ingredients. Whichever you prefer.
Here's a recipe for chocolate truffles; which only requires 5 ingredients (4 if your Dad's allergic to nuts). It's likely you've got some of the ingredients in the cupboards anyway. 

This recipe takes 25 minutes (20 minutes preparation and 5 minutes cooking) so plenty of time for that jog to the shops!

Ingredients:

• 150ml Double cream
• 2 Tbsp cocoa powder
• 50g Chopped hazelnuts
• 100g dark chocolate, chopped into small pieces
• 100g milk chocolate chopped into small pieces

Equipment:

• Mini paper cases
• Egg box
• Ribbon (Optional)

Method:

1. Heat the cream in a pan, when it gets hot remove from the heat and leave to stand for 1 minute. Add the chopped chocolate into the pan and mix it together, until it's smooth, glossy and melted. Pour mixture into a bowl- then chill into the fridge until it's firm.
2. Now the chocolate is firm, use two teaspoons to scoop out 12 walnut-sized truffles. Roll half the truffles in cocoa powder and the other half in hazelnuts. Of course if he's allergic to nuts you could try icing sugar. Place the truffles into the mini paper cases, then transfer these to the egg box. Tie up the ribbon and give to someone you love <3

Pancake Day > Valentines Day

These greater than or less than signs have been creeping up on Twitter recently; not gonna lie but maths, in our LEISURE TIME! Maybe that counts as the minute bit of revision I do for maths. Speaking of which if you aren't hammered with revision (or you have no motivation to do it) enjoy my blog. I don't encourage putting off revision... however I may encourage procrastination. Which is worse. 

As I've been so distant from the blog lately (yeah totally revision...) I've forgotten pancake day and the dreaded Valentines Day. Shrove Tuesday for the religious out there- or Pancake day for the one's who just want pancakes- is the day just before lent, where everyone pigs out. Fat Tuesday is also a term used. But if we're going to go that way, with my love/hate relationship to cupcakes, Fat Tuesday is everyday. Lent is where you give up something for 40 days. As a 'thoughtful' friend, I've been betting on how long my friend can last giving up chocolate. Comes in handy for the Republic sale, R.I.P. and whilst we're talking about deaths R.I.P Gangnam Style. I would say it to PSY's singing career too but my sister's too much of a fan. Bit ironic as she pronounced his name incorrectly for most of the time he was famous. 

Focussing on Shrove Tuesday. On Tuesday; our had everything else, but eggs or flour. Come on! These probably sound basic to you, but we only have eggs if it's a planned fry up. Flour on the other hand, was self raising. So this weekend will be Fat Weekend- sorry for offending you weekend, you're the only delight of the week. Well half of Sunday lets it down. 

On with the chocolate chip pancake recipe which I asked Nanny for. Can't go wrong with a bit of Gran's baking.

Chocolate chip pancakes

Serves: 2 
Prep time: Under 30 mins
Cooking time: Under 10
Eating time: 5 Seconds

Ingredients:

• 2 Eggs
• 5 tbsp Milk
• 150g Plain Flour
• 2 tbsp Caster sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 75g of dark chocolate chips (you could use milk or white to spice it up)
• Sunflower oil, for frying
• Any toppings you like to serve. Ice cream, nutella, syrup- up to you :

Method:

1. Whisk together the eggs and milk.
2. Place the plain flour, caster sugar and a pinch of salt in large bowl, then make a well in the centre, pour in the liquid and beat with a hand whisk until smooth.
3. Stir in the chocolate chips, then cook spoonfuls of the mixture in a non-stick pan, using just a tiny splash of sunflower oil, for 1-2 minutes on each side until puffed and golden.
4. Stack and serve with a scoop of butterscotch ice cream and a drizzle of maple syrup.

Baking goods!

Mince Pies are very Christmassy indeed! On with the recipe.

• Ingredients:
• 225g plain flour
• 50g ground almonds
• 140g butter , cut into small pieces
• grated zest of 1 orange
• 50g golden caster sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• Method:

1. Put flour, almonds, butter, orange zest and sugar in a food processor and whizz into crumbs. Add the egg yolk and a teaspoon of cold water and pulse to form a dough. Wrap in cling film and chill for 30 minutes.
2. Preheat the oven to fan 180C/ conventional 200C/gas 6.Roll out the dough thinly and, with an 8-9cm plain cutter, stamp out 18 rounds - they need to be larger than the bun tin holes. Use to line one and a half 12-hole bun tins, pinching and fluting the dough edges above the level of the tins with your fingers.
3. Put a heaped teaspoon of mincemeat in each case. Quickly knead the trimmings and roll out. Use a star cutter to make 18 stars.
4. Put a star on top of each pie. Brush stars and pastry edges with egg white and dust lightly with caster sugar. (The pies can be frozen at this stage in the tins, then removed, packed into freezer bags and frozen for up to 3 months.) Bake the pies for 12-15 minutes (18-20 minutes from frozen) until the pastry is crisp and golden. Cool in the tins for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar before serving.