Family Teatime & Grandma's Recipe Treats

Delighted to be asked to review two really nice recipe books - Family Teatime & Grandma's Recipe Treats. Have already made Maple, Pecan & Lemon loaf from Family Teatime - it didn't last very long and was perfect in the afternoon with a nice cup of tea. The recipes are nicely presented and easy to follow. The style of the writing is relaxed and informal and the photographs mouth-watering! More information can be found as follows:

Family Teatime, edited by L.K. Bulbeck, is published by Flame Tree Publishing, and priced £9.99 in hardback. For more information visit

www.flametreepublishing.com.

Grandma’s Recipe Treat, edited by L.K. Bulbeck, is published by Flame Tree

Publishing, and priced £9.99 in hardback. For more information visit www.flametreepublishing.com.

Check back soon for more recipe reviews.

Apple & Pear Crumble with a twist.

Had a batch of croissants that went slightly off piste! Smelled great but hadn't risen very well. Not bad to eat but toughended up pretty quick - so what to do? Never one to miss an opportunity I decided that they would whizz up quite nicely into a crumble topping. Croissants blitzed with some brown sugar and hey presto! Bramley apples and commice pears with some brown caster sugar, a few cloves and a sprinkle of mixed spice. Crumble on top and into the oven for 40 minute. Lovely jubbly.

Bramley Lemon Curd.

Recipe from River Cottage preserve book. Can't wait for it to cool!

Steamed Apple Pudding

Steamed apple pudding. Simple recipe using suet crust pastry. Mixture of bramley and coxs apples with some golden caster sugar a sprinke of mixed spice and a few cloves. Steamed for two hours and served with real Custard. See the recipe here.

Sloe Gin done.

Eight litres in bottle which will give us four to drink next year. 500 ml of gin, same of sloes plus 150g of sugar. Some people use more sugar but we find that too sweet. A few sloes short so need to grab a few more tomorrow for a top up. The smaller darker bottles are last years production. Certainly worth the wait.

Sloe Gin Season.

First frost have been so it's time for Sloe Gin. Visited our favourite hunting ground and found plenty like the ones in the picture. Four litres of gin await and with some sugar will create a match made in heaven.

Tarte au citron - done!

Inspired by the great British bake off. I thought I would attempt Mary Berry's Tarte au Citron. quite happy with the result. will see what It tastes like later. Update at 23.39 - it was very yummy!

Perfect Puddings

Spent and interesting and tiring afternoon/evening filming "The Pudding Club" edition of Perfect for the good food channel yesterday. Along with fellow judges Nour and Lucy our task was to taste and give out thoughts and opinions about 6 puddings prepared by two mystery chefs. The rounds were; classic, simple and ultimate. I can't say at this point who the chefs were or give the results until the programme is broadcast in January next year. The puddings were; Steamed Ginger Pudding and Steamed Lemon Pudding for the classic round. It was Caramelised Banana & Butterscotch Fool and Passion Fruit Curd & Raspberry Puds for the simple round. Finally - for the ultimate round - it was Rice Pudding Souffle with Raspberry sauce and Chocolate & Lavender Mille Feuilles. Great fun and an interesting insight into the world of telly!

New Celeb' on the main site

Very pleased and flattered to have a new celebrity listed on the main web site. Can you guess who? Very much related to a recent post here.

Matching English Puddings with Wine

My other great passion in life is Wine - particularly French, Spanish or Italian. That said I can be persuaded (without too much of a struggle) to try anything. The majority of people who enjoy wine normally associate matching with starters and main courses but dessert is often overlooked. The pleasure of pudding can be enhanced by pairing with a suitable wine. But which wine? I'd be interested to know what you think and what you have tried. Typically a sweet wine is the best accompaniment but while some things work better than others it is about pleasure and not rules. I'd love to build a comprehensive set of suggestions to include on the main site and as a feature page here. What do you think?

Bramble Jelly update

Following the bumper harvest the jelly making has finally finished. Total production from the fruit collected was 21 pounds. The secret ingredient in the last batch was the sloes from last year's sloe gin. After removing from the gin I froze a couple of kilos one of which I used in place of blackberries in the last batch - the Cuvée Spécial. To this I also added a couple of cinamon sticks and some cloves during the cooking of the fruit. The house smelt of Christmas and mulled wine. The resulting jellies are sweet (as you would expect) but the sweetness is quickly followed by a rush of fruit flavour which is absolutely fantastic. Great this morning with Corinne's croissants. From a recipe perspective you could replace any of the jam ingredients with the jelly which will do equally as well.

Breakfast bliss!

Corinne's croissants, home made yoghurt, home made bramble jelly (about which more in a minute), fresh coffee, chooks scratching, bees buzzing - bliss. Think lens on camera needs cleaning!

Blackberry Classic

After three days of jelly making I thought I would bring you a classic English recipe - blackberry & Apple Crumble. This beauty is so simple to make and you don't need to make it more complicated or add any little twists. It's perfect as it is and served with a little double cream is simply heaven. I have updated the recipe increasing the amount of blackberries and the brown sugar mainly because I had more berries left over from the jelly making and I've got a sweeter tooth. I also increased the cooking time althouth, all ovens differ so keep an eye on it. You can see the recipe on the main site by clicking here. Further updates on the jelly making tomorrow, one more batch to finish in the morning.

Blackberries by the bucket load!

Spent a couple of hours with my big Bro' picking blackberries from a favourite family hunting ground. The berries are fantastic this year and the flavour outstanding. They may be small but they are sweet and delicious. Mum's memory of where to find crab apples was spot on too. The previous day's wind and rain had done us a huge favour as there were plenty on the ground where they had landed softly amongst the leaves in the wood. We filled the second bucket in about 10 minutes. We ended up with about 7 kilos of blackberries and about 6 kilos of crab apples!

Now thoughts turn to what to do with our bountiful harvest? From a puddings perspective there has got to be a blackberry and apple crumble naturally. The rest will go into making blackberry and crab apple jelly which I think we've got enough jars for - just! Just need to buy a couple of tonnes of sugar. Also going to do an experimental version with something we harvested last year. Bet you can't guess what that is. Check back in the next couple of days to find out. Now where's that preserve pan gone?

Honey recipes

Ok so what traditional English puddings can we enjoy with honey? Something really simple but a delicious change is to add a couple of table spoons of honey to cream before whipping it and then spooning over summer fruits. Very tasty.

You can find a couple of ideas on the main site under Honey Apple Batter Pudding or Honey Tart. The latter is a variation on treacle tart!

Hope you like them. Give them a try and let me know how you get on.

Thoughts turning to blackberries now - watch this space.

And the Honey winner is......

Me! We (the bees really) managed 31 pounds. The flavour is outstanding and it will be a while before we see if it is going to solidify. At the moment is gloriously liquid which makes it great for adding to yoghurt or pouring over fresh summer fruits. Better still on some home baked bread - delicious. Watch out for honey based recipes to follow.

Honey, honey, honey!

On a scorching morning we relieved our hard working girls of their crop of liquid gold. We've only had them since May but what a great job they've done. After removing the supers we set about extracting. Initial tasting while uncapping is always exciting and the honey is fantastic. We both agreed that there was a hint of citrus about the flavour which we have no idea where it could have come from unless someone has planted a load of orange or lemon trees somewhere near by. I am wagering that we have around 40 pounds and Corinne reckons we have nearer 60. We'll see tomorrow when we weigh it. Don't think we will beat our 2009 crop of 90 pounds!

Our new labels arrived this morning and with the jars that came on Thursday we are all set for jarring. Thoughts turn now to recipes with honey, although not the precious stuff in jars - way too good for cooking. Each year we melt down the wax cappings and the wax floats on top of the liquid honey and after it cools it's really easy to lift off. What you are left with is "cooked" honey which is still very tasty but no longer pure in that the heat changes its character and flavour.

Our honey comes out of the hive, is spun gently in the extractor which has an initial coarse filter to remove the occassion dead bee or bee body part. After we finish we run the honey out of the tank under the extractor through two more filters that take out anything that made it through the first one. After it settles for 24 hours it goes directly into sterilised jars. After adding labels its ready for sale. Hmmmmmm.

Check back in the next couple of days for updates and photos.

NEW - Features Page Added

Check out this page for occasional features. The first one is there now - a bit early for Christmas but I am sure you'll understand.

Web Site Updates

Have done some updates to the web site this morning including a delicious feature recipe - take a look. I've also included links from eleven of the recipes that include bread in their ingredients list. The link goes to Virtuous Bread - which if you haven't already seen you should take a look at.

Hmmm. Just discovered that internet explorer users may find that some pages don't display correctly :-( Need to dig in to that to find a solution. Safari, Firefox and Chrome users should be ok.

Bread as a pudding ingredient

If you visit the main site you'll find lots of lovely recipes for using up spare bread. Things like Bread & Butter Pudding, Bread Pudding, Summer Pudding etc. etc.

The main reason for this post is to introduce you to Virtuous Bread. Back in July I attended a two day bread making course delivered by Jane Mason who is the driving force behind Virtuous Bread. Like me Jane loves English Puddings and to my delight she knew the site when I mentioned it to her. Anyway, if you love bread based English Puddings I am sure you will love Jane's site and the whole idea behind Virtuous Bread. The courses are great fun, relaxed and informal with great coffee and you'll make loads of bread too. Take a look - you won't be sorry.

Traditional English Puddings Blog Relaunched.....

Welcome again to the Traditional English Puddings blog. I say welcome again as I have decided to relaunch the blog with the hope that I will be more diligent in keeping the content flowing. Am currently sitting in Burgundy (France) on another rainy day and my thoughts turned to warm sticky comforting puddings - crazy for August but there you go!

The main web site www.traditionalenglishpuddings.co.uk is now getting an average of about 20000 unique visitors per month and I thought it high time to start offering my visitors something more to get their teeth into. So we'll see how it goes.

You can also follow us on Twitter @englishpuddings or on Facebook - Traditional English Puddings.