Stars & Moon Cupcakes

December has been a hectic month, what with preparations for Christmas etc,leaving me with little or no time to blog or even to make mince pies and my Christmas cake!!
I just about managed to squeeze in these cupcakes,which I made for a friend´s little boy´s first birthday. The cupcake was a raspberry jammy cupcake, a recipe taken from Hannah Miles´s Big Book of Cakes and Biscuits, with a chocolate buttercream which I found a little too sweet, maybe owing to having run out of Tate and Lyle icing sugar and having to buy a different brand that was actually flavoured with vanilla and not noticing till it was too late! I then coloured some left-over fondant from my cupcake course(this is an upcoming post!) yellow and using my star and moon biscuit cutters,cut out the fondant shapes and placed them on top of the cupcakes and ta-da!!! star and moon cupcakes....made fairly quickly and easily!

La Cabina, Ciudad Real

Last weekend was my birthday however I chose to celebrate it the weekend previous to that of my birthday as my mum was here. We decided to try out a fairly "new" restaurant that we hadn´t been to before,La Cabina. Located in Plaza de la Constitucion 18, it is a small but chic restaurant with modern and trendy decor.

We all settled on the menu of the day, which consisted of 3 courses with a few choices for each course and all for the reasonable price of 25 euros per person. The starter courses were a little disappointing for me as they all contained fish or seafood,which I´m not a big fan of. Both my mother and I plumped for the mango salad with prawns and a balsamic vinagrette(I asked for it without the prawns and they very kindly replaced the prawns with Iberian ham!)-a lovely, light and refreshing starter. My husband asked for a cod scrambled egg-and-fries dish,which he thoroughly enjoyed.

All three of us went for the same main course, pork tenderloin/sirloin in a Dijón mustard and honey style sauce with peppers and potato rosti.Beautifully cooked pork with a nice balanced tangy,sweet sauce and soft potato rosti but crisp on the outside...it was delicious. We all opted for something different for dessert, mainly so we could all try each other´s!! I went for the sweet potato and patisserie cream millefeuille, which despite being pastry and sweet potato was fairly light and delicate,Mum chose the pistachio truffles, very rich  chocolatey, nutty goodness and my husband´s choice was Pan de Calatrava, a typical dessert from the region, which is quite similar to flan.

 All in all, a lovely meal was had by all and the quality and quality was excellent for a fairly reasonable price. We´ll definitely be going again and I thoroughly reccommend this restaurant. Great service too.

Halloween Eyeball cupcakes

 Once again rather behind on my posts!!I love Halloween and this year was even more special as it was the first year that I could celebrate it with Chloe! I can´t wait till she´s a bit older to hold a Halloween party for her and her friends!This year though we celebrated Halloween in a pretty mudane kind of way. For starters, I had to work till 9pm so there was no trick-or-treating but I think she´s still a bit young for that anyway. There was a Halloween part at her nursery school,which she dressed up for...we managed to find a cute little witch´s costume.

The day after Halloween (All Saint´s ) is a bank holiday in Spain so I decided to whip up Annabel Karmel´s Halloween Eyeball Cupcakes although instead of the vanilla, I used lemon rind to give them a nice lemony flavour. As I didn´t have much icing sugar, I made some glace icing,half of which I coloured green using yellow and blue liquid food colouring. I then used assorted sweets for the eyeballs and to make the faces. Unfortunately,they don´t look quite as good as the photos pictured on the recipe webpage but nevertheless these are easy to bake and great fun to make and decorate with your kids. I tried to involve Chloe by trying to let her help me mix the green icing but all she wanted to do was to try and eat it and then wandered off to find her daddy!!Maybe I have to wait till she´s a little older to try and do some baking/cooking with her. I´m looking forward to when we can bake/cook together!

Best Ever Carrot Cake

Since starting back at work after the summer hols, I´ve hardly had time to cook,let alone bake or blog, particularly since Chloe is going through a rather clingy phase and it´s hard to get anything done. I made this carrot cake the week before I went back to work and haven´t got round to blogging it until now or baking much since!! So, without further ado and because time is of the essence, here is the recipe I used. It´s adapted from Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book and if I remember correctly I used half of the recipe to make a smaller cake(which is the recipe I´ll be giving you!) I had a lot to live up to as both my mum´s and my aunt´s carrot cake are delicious and they use different recipes to me....but this recipe was just as good as theirs!!!

Ingredients:
2 eggs,beaten
1 cup of plain flour
1 cup of sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 1/2 cups of finely grated carrot
1/3 cup of sunflower oil

For the cream cheese icing:
125g Philadelphia cream cheese or similar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup of butter at room temperature(softened)
2 1/2 -3 cups of icing sugar

Method:
1.Grease and flour a round cake tin of about 20cm and line with greaseproof paper.
2.Preheat oven to 180ºC.
3. Mix flour,sugar,baking powder,cinnamon and bicarbonate of soda together.
4. Mix eggs,carrots and oil together and then add to dry ingredients.
5.Pour cake batter into cake tin and bake in the preheated oven for 30-35 mins or until a cocktail stick comes out clean.
6.While baking prepare the cream cheese icing. Beat cream cheese, butter and vanilla until light and fluffy. Then add icing sugar gradually mixing well after each addition until icing has spreadable consistency.
7. Leave the cake to cool for 10 mins.
8.When cool ice the top with the cream cheese icing as smoothly as possible.

There are various ways in which you could decorate this cake. You could sprinkle chopped up or whole pecans or walnuts on the top, grate some carrot on the top or even make some fondant or buttercream carrots(I´m going to have a go at this in the future!). I chose to do a simple circular line pattern using a fork as you can see in the top photo!

Ate o´ Clock Restaurant Review, York

We stumbled across this restaurant by chance while we were in York and thinking that Chloe would need feeding soon and that it looked very charming and pleasant, decided to eat there. The restaurant is tucked away down a little alley or side street.As it was such a beautiful day we chose to sit oustide on the picnic style benches,which are surrounded by flowers. Unfortunately, we didn´t take any photos but I have to say this is one of the best meals we had during our trip to England and it was also one of the prettiest restaurants. Inside it was fairly modern with clocks set at eight o´clock and the toilets, which were upstairs, with Hollywood film set memorabilia such as clipboards.

There is a lunch menu for lighter lunches but you can also choose a menu of two courses for a fairly reasonable price(can´t remember exactly how much it cost now!). We all went for the two course menu,my inlaws chose soupof the day,which that particular day was tomato and basil and my husband and I chose the Vegetarian Black Pudding. It was a very unusual dish but really tasty.The Vegetarian Black Pudding was actually a bit pinkish in colour and I couldn´t identify what it consisted of.It was a cross between sweet and savoury and was accompanied with a sauce or jus and strawberries...beautiful presentation. My husband wasn´t as convinced about it and he identified the taste of cinnamon in the Vegetarian Black Pudding.My inlaws enjoyed their soup too.

For the second course two of us chose Pork sausages with thyme, apple mash and shallots and unfortunately I can´t really remember what the other two chose....maybe fish(this only proves that I should try and post as soon as possible otherwise I forget!!)What I do know is that we all really enjoyed our dishes. In the end,my daughter fell asleep and we had to wake her up to give her her dinner.My only complaint with this restaurant is that they had nowhere to change my daughter but as we were sat outside and we were the only ones around(we were still on Spanish time!)we just changed her outside on the picnic bench seats.

I´d thouroughly reccommend going to this restaurant if you are in York. You can find out more about Ate o´Clock restaurant by clicking on the link.Enjoy!

Hyltons,The Lake District

I´ve been on my travels hence the absence of posts. I went back to my roots in Lancashire and it was great to meet up with family and friends and show Chloe where I´m from, even though she´s too young to probably remember much about this trip!! One of the places we visited
is The Lake District, or Bowness-on-the lake, Windermere to be more precise, which is one of the most beautiful areas of the British countryside. Chloe enjoyed seeing all the swans, ducks and Canadian geese. Beatrix Potter, the famous children´s author who created Peter Rabbit was from the Lake District and we visited the Beatrix Potter World attraction, which Chloe loved.

We stumbled across Hyltons by chance and even though it was packed we managed to find a table.Hyltons is in the centre of Bowness-on-Windermere. It is a modern, fairly spacious and pleasant restaurant which serves traditional British food and European dishes such as lasange etc.The staff were very helpful and friendly and the food was served quite quickly,despite the fact that the restaurant was fairly busy, so it is obviously a popular place too! It was child-friendly too as highchairs were available...I can´t remember if there were child changing facilities.There is also a children´s menu but my daughter was so hungry that we gave her a jar!

Although, I´m not a big fan of fish and seafood, I decided to choose an old fav of mine,scampi and chips and everyone else chose fish and chips. The scampi was succulent and covered in a lovely crisp and crunchy batter and the chips were thick and golden....delicious. Everyone also enoyed their fish and chips...tender haddock in a crispy batter,not a greasy batter...I tried a little bit and liked it too...it didn´t taste too fishy!! The portions were quite large and filling so we didn´t have room for dessert unfortunately! The food was a reasonable price so all in all a great place to eat. In fact, it was one of the best meals we had during our trip to England. I´d definitely reccommend eating here if you are visiting the Lake District!Here are more reviews of Hyltons.

Coronation Chicken Salad

After watching the Olympics Opening Ceremony, I have been very patriotric. Also, the fact that I´m off back to my home country this week for a holiday and to catch up with friends and family is filling me with excitement! So what could be more ideal than to share a traditional English dish perfect for the summer, especially the hot weather (even if it´s not so hot in the UK at the mo!).

This is Coronation Chicken Salad based on the BBC Good Food recipe- I did the creamy version!Coronation Chicken was invented in 1953 by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. This is my version, just slightly different but not much!

Ingredients (for 2)
1 bag of mixed salad leaves
2 skinless chicken breasts
1tsp mild curry powder
2tbsp mild mango chutney
1/2 cucumber, cut into sticks
2tbsp flaked almonds
handful of sultanas
4tbsp natural yoghurt
3tbsp olive oil
juice of 1/2 lime or lemon (I used lime)

Method
1. Combine curry powder with  2 tbsp of yoghurt and cover chicken breasts.
2. Cook in 1 tbsp of olive oil,then slice chicken.
3.Stir remaining yoghurt, mango chutney and lime juice together.
4. Place salad leaves, cucumber and chicken slices in a bowl and add the yoghurt,lime and mango chutney dressing, add almonds and sultanas and toss!

You could make this healthier or more low fat if you use low fat natural yoghurt.