Valentine’s Day 2012
They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach and any woman’s affection can be won with sweet treats so with Valentine’s Day just around the corner it’s time to roll up your sleeves, put on your pinny and get baking!
From romantic Valentines cupcakes, to decadent muffins and homemade fudge why not try your hand at a few different recipes and create a tantalizing homemade hamper?
And if you’re worried that your baking attempts might look a bit amateurish, don’t fear-BakingMad.com is here to help.
The place to go for thousands of inspirational recipe ideas, BakingMad.com also offers top tips and advice from their very own home baking experts. And because Baking Mad’s recipes use only the finest baking ingredients you can be assured of great results every time.
When the occasion really matters, choose high-quality natural ingredients to ensure sure your results taste as good as they look. Billington’s has a full range of natural, unrefined sugars – from Golden Caster Sugar and Unrefined Molasses to Light or Dark Muscovado- perfect for a truly decadent cake or pudding. And Allinson flours are still milled to meet the same high standards set by Dr Thomas Allinson in 1892.
Finally, for that perfect finishing touch, why not choose from Silver Spoon Cakecraft’s wide range of edible decorations. From chocolate letters and numbers, to sprinkles and bejewelled jelly drops, they have everything you need to lift your baking from the so-so to the seriously impressive.
Go on, see how many hearts you can win this Valentine’s Day!
Valentine’s Heart Cakes
Ingredients
Method
- Preheat the oven to 180°C, Fan oven 160°C /gas 4.
- Butter and flour the sides of four 10 cm heart shaped tins and line the bases with greaseproof paper.
- For the cake: Snap the chocolate into chunks and place in a bowl. Add the milk and sit the bowl over a saucepan of gently simmering water and heat until the chocolate has melted. (Make sure the bottom of the bowl doesn’t touch the surface of the water.) Set aside to cool slightly.
- Beat the butter until very soft then add the caster sugar and continue to beat until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, and then fold in the melted chocolate.
- Sift in the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and the bicarbonate of soda, and fold in gently to mix. Divide the mixture between the tins and bake in the oven for 25 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the middle of each cake comes out clean.
- Remove the cakes from the oven and allow to sit for five minutes before turning them out of their tins and placing them on a wire rack to cool. When cool slice the cake in half.
- For the chocolate butter icing Melt the chocolate in the microwave on High for 1½ minute, stirring halfway. Leave to cool. Beat the butter and icing sugar in a large bowl until creamy. Beat in the chocolate until smooth. Spread the butter icing on the bottom half of the cake and sandwich with the other half.
ABOUT BAKINGMAD.COM
Bakingmad.com is a free mouth-wateringly helpful website that offers everything you want to know about home baking. The site is packed full of hundreds of inspiring recipes including everything from biscuits, breads and cupcakes to muffins, pies and pizzas. All the recipes are tried and tested by the home-baking experts in the Baking Mad kitchen and come with top tips, ‘how to’ videos and easy to follow step-by-step instructions.
The Search For Local Food
Trying to improve your diet is something that we’re all interested in, but where do you really begin? A lot of documentaries have come out talking about the overall quality of food in the world, which has started a movement to buy local food.
Sounds great, right? Well, it definitely is but trying to “go local” might be a little more difficult than you might expect. You just have to make sure that you’re thinking about trying to get the best food possible for your location. If you’re in the middle of nowhere with only chain supermarkets, you might feel that you don’t have any options.
However, it’s always a good idea to start looking around for a local farmer’s market in your area. Sometimes the market is only open for part of the year, while large cities often have a market that’s open all of the time. it’s just a matter of trying to figure out what you want to get, and how far you’re willing to drive.
Some people in small towns actually make the drive to the larger city with the year around market, but they time it so that they can put in a bigger order.
Are there foods that are more important to get local than others? Fruits, vegetables, and meat all make the list. Fresh local dairy is also a good idea, as knowing the source of where your food comes from can give you a lot more peace.
Of course, you might wonder if there’s really a difference — especially when you see the price tag. Since there’s a lot less demand, the prices are generally higher to reflect the work that goes into local products.
The truth is that there is a lot of care taken into small farming these days. If you’re trying to figure out how to feed your family the highest quality in terms of food, looking local is definitely a good idea. Most small farmers do not invest in the pesticides and antibiotics and other practices that are found in factory farms.
Looking for grass fed beef? You’ll find it better local than at a chain store — and the beef is much more delicious as a result.
If you’re looking for just about anything that’s going to taste better and also avoid the genetically modified food issue, you really owe it to yourself to check out the local food movement! Get started today!
Should You Serve Wine at Your Next Holiday Dinner
Wine is one of the oldest beverages in the world — but did you know that there’s a time and a place to serve it? Sure, the idea of a candlelit dinner with wine sounds luxurious, elegant, and romantic — but you also have to think of the cultural ties that some have to wine. Many religious people choose to abstain from alcohol — for good reason. Too much alcohol can make us tired, dizzy, and sick. We become miserable when the alcohol gets out of our system, leaving us more frustrated and irritated than we were previously. You just need to make sure that you are always thinking about your own goals when it comes to pulling off a great holiday meal.
You don’t have to serve wine. You don’t have to avoid wine. Those are the two points that you should take to heart no matter how you feel on the subject. Even if you take nothing else form this guide, you need to understand that. It’s better to always make sure that you can at least give people an option if you know that you have an audience that really likes a little wine with their meal.
In the spirit of the holidays, you will still want to make sure that you watch over your guests. Anyone that is obviously too intoxicated to drive should not drive. Make sure that you have the number to a taxi service handy for moments like that. It’s better to spend a little money ahead of time than to find that an accident has occurred. You also want to make sure that you are firm — a few glasses won’t hurt, but seeing a visibly drunk person try to drive themselves can make you liable for any accident that they cause, or any injury that they bring to themselves.
If you are going to serve wine, make it fun — get cute wine tokens that people can use to identify their glasses. It’s a nice conversation starter and gets people talking.
There’s always a great time to make sure that you have enough wine, but make sure that no matter what you do with it — it is stored properly. Good wine needs to be chilled before it’s served. Warm wine just isn’t pleasant at all — don’t serve it, and you’ll be good to go!
A Few Ingredients That Can Perk Up Just About Any Dish
When you’re trying to entertain for the holidays, the last thing you need to freak out about is the food. Yes, you’re going to have a lot of people to think about, but there are some good points about the world of food that you need to also be aware of. For starters, you have to realize that food is so very critical to our cultural identity. It’s really universal — who doesn’t like good food and good people together in one space? The time is right to share food with friends, and it can make shy people come out of their shells and finally relax. So if you’re trying to put together a really good holiday meal, there are a few things that you need to know about.
Ingredients can transform a dinner space into a festive space, but you need to know which ones will really make an impact.
The first ingredient would have to be butter. Butter changes everything, and if you really want your holiday guests to be impressed by your cooking skills, butter is definitely your friend. Also, the saturated fat in butter is actually far better for you than the processed margarine products that have made their way onto the national scene. It’s better to have a natural product like butter, that’s pretty much intact — there are no fillers that really need to be there in butter. It’s just butter, for crying out loud!
Cheese also adds a lot of flavor to just about any dish that you can think of. When it’s sprinkled on top of a nice chili or a hearty soup, things get really interesting. You can also add it to tacos, burgers, and just about everything else. Make sure that you get cheese made from real milk — the processed stuff just doesn’t taste the same and trust us — you will be able to taste a difference.
The final ingredient that we’ll mention here would have to be vegetables. Yes, vegetables really are our friends here — they add crunch, texture and dimension to our favorite dishes. The flavor they provide can really give your main entrees a new spin and take that you just can’t get anywhere else.
Now is definitely the time to make sure that you work these ingredients into your cooking this holiday season. Good luck!
There’s Something Special About Salt!
Salt is definitely a good thing, but unfortunately we have a bad relationship across the board with salt. We have been taught that salt is something that needs to be cut out of the diet, and thrown back to the darkest reaches of the cabinet. The reality is that salt can definitely be our friend. In terms of flavor, there’s nothing that really brightens food the way salt does. Even things that freshen food, such as lemon and lime become even more incredible when you add salt to it. However, it really does need to be the right type of slat.
What do we mean by this? Well, it’s really straightforward — the salt that you’re used to is table salt. There’s nothing wrong per se with table salt, but it’s not very flavorful. It also doesn’t have all of the trace minerals that would normally come with salt. This means that you don’t get the energy boosting benefits, nor do you get to fully nourish your body with the small amounts of minerals that it needs to continue running smoothly.
This is definitely a good time for getting a new take on salt. Sea salt — Celtic sea salt in particular — is a great salt that takes your food to the next level. It can be used both as a finisher for after you finish cooking, as well as a good seasoning for when you begin cooking.
Salt also helps the body regulate itself and produce the right hormones that we need to function properly. People that always feel tired might actually have a sluggish thyroid caused by too low salt levels. Imagine that — maybe salt is actually good for us and we never realized it!
If you’re trying to please a hungry crowd, don’t forget to add salt before adding in other ingredients. If you’re going to make pasta, you always want to make sure that you salt the water. If you just salt the noodles, the salt will run off when you add sauce and everything else.
Keeping food fresh and simple just means looking as a few ingredients that matter, and making those ingredients count as much as possible. Now is the perfect time to really make sure that you can do just that — get yourself some good salt today!
The Benefits of Visiting a Real Butcher
If you live in a decent sized city, you will find that there are at least one or two butchers in your area. The classic days of going to the meat man or meat woman are fading away, but there are still a few places where you will see the art of meat in action.
Food is pleasurable, and there’s nothing wrong with taking pleasure from what you eat, and how you eat it. You will just need to make sure that you focus on the bigger picture and think about what type of cuts you want, as well as what the butcher can do for you.
One of the biggest things that the butcher does for their customers is give them information. If you want to know what to do with a really tough cut of meat, the butcher can help. If you want to know what the most budget friendly cuts are going to be, you can ask your friendly butcher. They thrive on people getting more educated because that means that they’re going to be a lot more likely to come back to see the butcher again. On the other hand, if you only shop at the supermarket where everything is already precut, then you’re really missing out. Going back to the butcher means that you will have things cut to your specifications. If you want something ground up for you — you can have that. If you want something cut off the bone, your butcher can also do that for you. It’s just a matter of making sure that you know exactly what you want and then let the butcher know too.
If you need animal fat of some kind, the butcher is also one of the best sources to get that. You can get lard, tallow, and other animal fats from the butcher will generally no problem. The prices are also hard to beat, considering that you aren’t going to have to render the fat yourself in all cases.
A lot of people complain about the downfall of big “mega marts” and how it’s hard to find good service. If you really want good service and friendliness as well as education, you really owe it to yourself to stop by the local butcher. They are a direct link to the community and they would love to help you out!
