Food 'n' Drink – Food and Drink news |

Mother’s Day is Sunday 18 March
and this recipe from Loseley is ideal for all the family to make.

Cooking supplies:

• 6-7 eggs
• 1/4 cup of pineapple orange banana juice
• 1 cup of flour
• 3/4 stick Loseley Summer Meadow butter
• 1 cup of milk
• 1/2 cup of sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• Whipped cream
• Strawberries
• Powdered sugar

Cooking directions:

- Have the children mix all the ingredients together the eggs, flour, salt, milk, sugar and juice.

- Next, have the children place the Loseley Summer Meadow butter in a 7X11 baking dish and place in the oven.

- Turn oven on to 425 degrees.

- When the Loseley butter is bubbling, add the batter to the baking dish.

- Cook it in the oven for about 20 minutes or until the edges turn deep golden brown.

- While the batter is baking, have the children cut up the strawberries.

- When the Pancake Puff is ready, have the children add on whipped cream, then strawberries and powdered sugar.

And, voila, the children are now ready to serve Mother’s Day Pancake Puff with Strawberries to mom!

Loseley Summer Meadow Butter is packed in a 250g tub and available for £1.39p.

Loseley Chilled Foods are available from the chilled cabinet of local independent grocers, Ocado and Waitrose. Visit www.loseley.com for more information

Seasonal baking with Light Muscovado

Billington’s have teamed up with Eric Lanlard, the master patissiers, to create a specially limited edition of Billington’s Orange and Cranberry mini Christmas Loaf. After adding a festive twist to the pairing of these seasonal flavours, the loaves are available in Lanlard’s South West London luxury cake boutique, Cake Boy.

Topped with glistening orange zest and wisps of leaves in 24 carat gold, these cakes are far from a mere festive fancy. The gluten free Billington’s Orange and Cranberry mini Christmas Loaf  is packed full of such seasonal ingredients as Billington’s glace cherries soaked in amaretto, bitterweet cranberries, juicy oranges, ground almonds, Billington’s unrefined light muscovado sugar and a sprinkling of cinnamon.

Eric comments, “Every cook will tell you, if you want the best baking results you need to start with the best ingredients.  I use unrefined light Muscovado because it has a richness and depth of flavour unmatched by any other sugar, which is perfect for this particular loaf.  These mini treats are ideal as a dessert, served with fresh redcurrant berries or on their own for afternoon tea and they also make a great gift.”

Not all sugars are the same.  Many are only brown on the outside, underneath, they are really white sugar which has been coated to add colour and some flavour.  Billington’s sugars are different.  They are unrefined so the sugars are very simply produced with the aim of locking in, rather than refining out, the natural molasses of the sugar cane.  It is this difference that gives unrefined sugar its superior flavour and natural colour.

Billington’s unrefined sugars are available in all major supermarkets. For inspirational and festive baking ideas visit www.baking.mad.com, the first port of call for everything to do with baking. Whether you’re an experienced baker or a novice, bakingmad.com offers a one-stop shop for recipes, tips, and advice.

Billington’s Mini Gold Christmas Loaves – serves 6

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Cooking time: 30 minutes

Preheat the oven to 180c (fan 160c) 350F/gas mark 4.

Grease and line six mini loaf tins.

Many of today’s great chefs and cooks, when asked how they started cooking, pay tribute to the times when, as youngsters, they helped their mum or grandma in the kitchen. Baking with your kids can be so much fun and yes, it can get messy, but encouraging a child from an early age to help you do simple tasks in the kitchen can set them in very good stead for the future.

While very few will actually go on to be Michelin starred chefs, cooking is a basic skill that everyone should learn.  We all know someone who claims that they can’t boil and egg, and this person will almost always say that when they were little the kitchen was their mum’s domain and they were shooed out whenever there was anything ever being cooked or baked.

Children have traditionally always with helped with cooking, and we hear tales from years gone by when they got to stir the Christmas cake or pudding and help with preparations. This has all changed over the last generation as gadget and appliances have taken over, and most teenagers admit that the only things in the kitchen they are happy to use is the microwave.

If you made the mistake of shooing your kids out of the kitchen, chances are they won’t be great cooks, and so the trend continues. Make the time to bake with your children, and you will be surprised how much you enjoy it. Start off with simple recipe ideas like crispy cakes. Melt the chocolate yourself but let the children stir in the crispies and put them into the cases.

By allowing a child to measure out ingredients you are also helping them with their maths, and include them in the process as much as you can. One of the easiest things to make is a simple sponge cake, and under your supervision, they can do everything bar put it into the oven and get it out again.

Once they are a little bit older you can move onto pies and other pastries. Rolling out pastry is something that kids love to do, and seeing a pie coming out of the oven that they have created is a big thrill for any kid. Even if you are cooking something they can’t help with, let them watch you and explain what you are doing. Before long they will be helping you and you can spend many a happy hour cooking with your children.

A Featured Advertorial

Channel 4’s Baking Mad with Eric Lanlard gives amateurs and pros the chance to bake incredible recipes that give the taste buds something to remember. Eric’s recipe ideas are simple to follow and look fantastic. Beginners will appear as if they have been baking for years, while pros can experiment and show off the best of their skills. All of the award-winning baker’s recipes are unique and delicious but five of his recipes which featured on Baking Mad with Eric Lanlard really stand out from the crowd.

The Choux Parisien is a recipe that will leave pastry fans desperate for more. After buying the necessary ingredients, you will need to make the mouisseline and pastry separately. For the mouisseline, bring milk to the boil in a pan whilst combining the egg yolks, sugar and flour in a separate bowl. Whisk the two together before heating and adding the butter. Once the mixture has cooled you will be able to beat in the hazelnut paste and pipe it onto the choux pastry, the method for which can be found through the link above.

Cream Cheese Brownies are the perfect way to indulge in a treat that is worth writing home about. The extravagant ingredients make for a perfect dessert; just try not to think about how many miles you will need to walk afterwards. The brownie base is made simply by melting chocolate and butter into a mixture to which the sugar, vanilla, salt, eggs, flour and coffee are added.

This brownie base mixture can be spooned into a lined tin and topped with the marble topping made from cream cheese, sugar, vanilla and egg. The smell of these brownies in the oven will bring in all of your neighbours.

Eric’s Chocolate Honeycomb Squares make the perfect snack for your lunch box, although that depends on whether they last that long. A chocoholic’s heaven, these sweet tooth satisfactions are Eric Lanlard’s own version of the tiffin and are packed with chocolate honeycomb balls, digestive biscuits, golden syrup, milk chocolate and butter. Simply melting the ingredients together is sufficient to make the mixture; the difficult part is waiting for it to set in the fridge before you can eat it!

Now and again it’s nice to have a change from your staple banana cake recipes and sample leftover fruit in a different dessert. The Baking Mad with Eric Lanlard Eton Mess recipe does just this. The ultimate in British puddings, the Eton Mess combines raspberries with sugar, mascarpone cheese and cream to make an intensely rich dessert that is well balanced with the sharpness of the fruit. For a Lanlard twist, add some popping candy to give guests a fun surprise at the bottom of their bowl.

Finally, Eric Lanlard’s Rhubarb Fool with Rhubarb Caviar can make an ordinary dessert look Michelin star worthy. Served in shot glasses, this pudding looks glamorous, elegant and intricate but is actually quite easy to make. By stewing the rhubarb with sugar and water you can make a compote that should be strained and set aside. Whisking cream with vanilla powder and vanilla seeds will make a soft peaked mixture that can be spooned on top of the stewed rhubarb in the glass. Now for the clever bit; the strained liquid from the rhubarb should be reheated with agar flakes and rhubarb flavouring.

This liquid can then be used to fill a syringe and dropped into a jar of cooled sunflower oil. As the liquid hits the oil it will form small rhubarb ‘pearls’. These pearls can then be removed and used to decorate the rhubarb fool that has been assembled within the shot glass.

Should one decide to attend a cooking school there are first a few questions that one my ask oneself. The most important question is: What do you want to cook? Do you want to cook the food of a specific region such as Italian or Greek? Do you want to cook stews, pastas or stir fry? Once this has been answered, you then need to ask yourself: Where do I want to study? One could study in the buzzing metropolis or in a quiet, contemplative country setting.

Another key question is: How do you want to be taught? Would you like to benefit from the tutelage of multiple teachers or would you like to be mentored by just one chef? There are benefits and downfalls of both decisions. Learning from just one chef allows you to specialize whereas learning from many allows you to experience many different techniques and visit many different kitchens. With one chef, you’d also hardly travel, but with many chefs you’d have to travel to many different locations. So this question is really one that depends upon the individual’s personality.

Of course, the next question would be that concerning resources. Do I have the money and the time to study what I would like to study? Do I have the appropriate materials at home to assist me with continuing to learn after the classes? Do I have an adequate understanding of the products which I need for professional cooking? Product reviews on line can help to assist with gaining knowledge in this area. There is a smorgasbord of options available to the prospective student. These range from three days to three years, a weekly class at your local community centre all the way up to an expensive learning extravaganza. Whatever your desires and resource requirements, there is somewhere out there where you can learn to cook.

A very good way to learn how to cook is to embark upon a cooking holiday. One must decide how intensive their holiday will be before starting out however as a trade off between learning and sightseeing must be made. However, as with cooking schools the potential holidays are almost infinite. Truffle hunting (and cooking) in France, crab cooking in New Orleans, harvest festivals throughout the country are just some of the opportunities available to the holiday maker. Different opportunities exist at different times of the year so, if cooking is your passion, a cooking holiday is definitely for you.

Advertising feature for Hovis

Here’s a fascinating fact. Did you know that there are around 100,000 people in the UK with the surname Baker? The name is one of Britain’s oldest, dating back to the 8^th Century and deriving from those who had special responsibilities for looking after the baking ovens in castles and monasteries.

The name might be an ancient one but the practice itself is much older still. There is evidence that Ancient Egyptians were baking since before 8000 BC – although it’s not advisable to try their wares now unless you have a passion for rock cakes in the most literal sense.

Today, baking remains one of the most popular and rewarding forms of cooking. There’s something wholesome and warming about filling the house with those wonderful home-cooked smells and then presenting an array of cakes, scones, tarts, biscuits and bakes to your friends and family.

Hovis know that great baking is all about getting the basics right. All Hovis loaves are free of artificial preservatives and artificial flavourings, while their flour comes from 100 per cent British wheat supplied by over 600 British farmers.

The same impeccably high standards apply to the Hovis range of flour. Whether you want Premium White, Wholemeal or Granary, Hovis flour makes the perfect base for all kinds of home baking treats.

With more than 120 years experience in the baking industry, Hovis also know how satisfying it can be to make your own bread, but also that it can be time consuming. Hovis Bread Mix is the quickest and simplest way to make great bread in your own kitchen. It comes pre-prepared, containing all the ingredients you need, so all you have to do is add water, knead the mixture for five minutes, leave it to rise in a warm spot for a couple of hours and then put it in the oven until your home fills with the irresistible smell of fresh bread. The results are simple, delicious – and amazingly cost effective.

Whether you’re baking a birthday cake, rustling up some home-bakes or trying out your bread-making skills, trust an expert with your baking basics. Trust Hovis.

Follow us at Hovis Bread.

Coventry based cake artist Laura Edwards won Gold for her Snake Cake, in the sculpted novelty cake category, at last weekend’s Cake International exhibition at the NEC.

The cake (named Eric), which was made from vanilla madeira sponge, was sculpted into the shape of a corn snake.  This was the first major competition that Laura, who only started baking professionally less than a year ago, has won.

Laura, a self-taught cake artist,  is the owner of Chic Cakes which creates bespoke, unique and unusual cakes designed to make any occasion one to remember.

Cake International was a 3 day event featuring presentations from some of the best cake artists in the UK and guest presenters from the United States.