My love for Collies, Cakes, Cooking, Eating Out & Days Out.
When it comes to making and eating scones my husband is the expert. He was
gifted the National Trust Book of Scones a while ago so for National Cream Tea Day we got baking together. We chose the Chocolate Orange Scone Recipe from Goddard’s House and Garden for a delicious treat. We made a couple of adjustments to the recipe but they were delicious.
Whilst thumbing the pages of New York Cult Recipes by Marc Grossman I stumbled across a recipe for Chocolate Babka. This is a breakfast cake popular in Jewish New York bakeries and Deli’s. A hybrid between bread, brioche and cake with lots of added chocolate. What’s not to love!
The ingredients are simple and easy to come by. You need a bit of time for the dough to rise twice but not many other tricky skills. So here is the recipe from the book and my experience of making and eating Chocolate Babka.
As it is my birthday this week my hubby said he would bake me a cake instead
of me baking one. Not going to argue with that! After a bit of mooching through some recipes we found the perfect one. From the book Scandinavian Baking by Trine Hahnemann, Honey Cake with Orange Buttercream. This is a book we’ve had a while but not yet tried a recipe from but this one has a lot of my favourite flavours in it. So whilst hubby baked I was snapping photos so I can share this bake and recipe with you. Continue reading “Honey Cake with Orange Buttercream”
This cookbook challenge recipe for slow roasted garlic and lemon chicken 
comes from Forever Summer by Nigella Lawson. The book previously belonged to my late Mother in law who sadly died in 2016. She had marked many recipes in this book but never got chance to make them all. In her memory I am working my way through some of the recipes she ear marked. This recipe struck me as a dish that would work in both summer and winter alike, just varying the accompanying dishes. Continue reading “Slow roasted garlic and lemon chicken”
This Cookbook Challenge recipe for Pastiera di Maccheroni comes from 
Gino’s Pasta by Gino D’Acampo. I have cooked quite a few pasta recipes from this book and always had a great result. The methods of cooking are very traditional and relatively simple. The Pastiera di Maccheroni was a recipe I had just never got around to making. In simple terms it is a meaty macaroni bake. Continue reading “Pastiera di Maccheroni”
This week I dug out my 40th Edition Be-Ro book and did the Cookbook Challenge. It is a well thumbed recipe book so was hard to find something I
haven’t baked before but hiding away on page 53 is Chocolate Spice Cake.
This cake is suits Autumn perfectly, especially this week being Halloween and Bonfire Night. The Chocolate Spice Cake is lightly spiced with cloves, cinnamon and mixed spice so is a lovely alternative to parkin and gingerbread. Continue reading “Chocolate Spice Cake”
This weeks Cookbook Challenge comes courtesy of the Hairy Bikers. In 2009
the Hairy Bikers presented a cookery show where they toured Britain and cooked up dishes using local recipes and ingredients. I bought the accompanying book and have made a couple of the recipes religiously. However my cookbook challenge gives me the incentive to try something new so today it is Somerset Chicken. Continue reading “Hairy Bikers Somerset Chicken”
This recipe for Almond Macaroon Cake is my very first Cookbook Challenge. I 
love to bake a cake so it was an easy place to start. Not wanting to give myself a free pass I have chosen a cake I have never seen before. Also because I now call Scotland my home I wanted the first recipe to have a bit of Scottish history. Continue reading “Almond Macaroon Cake”
So I’ve set myself a little challenge and imaginatively called it Cookbook Challenge. Hopefully this will encourage me to try out new recipes. I’ll also learn to adapt recipes when I just can’t get hold of the necessary ingredients.
6 months ago my husband and I moved from East Yorkshire to the Isle of Skye off the North-west coast of Scotland. Thinking back to March 2018 and the “Beast from the East”, snow, winds, freezing temperatures, then that was the week we moved our world nearly 500 miles. Not without it’s challenges but we were living our dream.
So post-Christmas 2017 the packing started and wow did we own some stuff. We had an exact amount of space on the removals truck, any more and it wasn’t going to fit. We’d been in our house in Wetwang for 12 years, running two businesses and amassing a lot of clutter. It was very therapeutic sorting through things, throwing them away, recycling and donating, but the actual packing had to start at some point.
Decision made, I would sort through and pack books first. We had collected nearly two bookcases of cookbooks since we first set up house together 22 
years ago. We had cookbooks we never used, never were going to use and really didn’t need. Now I love books, I always had hundreds of reading books as a child, and I don’t exaggerate. When I moved out of my parents home after University I took half a dozen wooden tea chests out of their loft, full of all my books. But this time I couldn’t take everything, so I had to be cruel to be kind.
I managed to whittle the books down to ones I use all the time, ones I use from time to time, ones I love to look through for inspiration and ones I really want to start to use. The rest really had to go. Fortuitously our Village Hall had a weekly book swap and was also hosting a Jumble Sale so they did very well from my clear out. All the rest have made it to Skye and I have no regrets.
Last weekend I had to empty the bookcase in the kitchen where I keep all the 
cookbooks to do some DIY. As the books sat piled up on the kitchen table I kept looking at them and pondering. Maybe I should challenge myself to cook a few new things, maybe I should dare to try a few new recipes. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut. Whilst thumbing through a few pages with a cup of tea in hand I came up with Cookbook Challenge.
So I have challenged myself to pick up each and every book, choose a recipe and cook it. Sounds simple right? Maybe, maybe not! There are cookbooks old and new, traditional and modern, celebrity and very much not celebrity, books I’ve bought, books I’ve been given, books I’ve inherited, you get the idea. Some books are way out of my comfort zone and others are well thumbed.
It might be one recipe a week, some times more, other weeks may go by without a Cookbook Challenge happening. Either way I will give this a crack, learning new things along the way…
Each time I complete a Cookbook Challenge recipe I’ll write it up whether the 
result is good or bad. I’ll also be very honest about how accurately I managed to follow the recipe. One big challenge I have here on Skye is availability of ingredients. We only have 3 supermarkets on the island and they are all fairly small and all owned by the Co-op. Nothing wrong with the Co-op but if they don’t have what I need it can be a struggle. For time to time I use Amazon Pantry. On trips onto the mainland I dive in large supermarkets to stock up the pantry but groceries can be a challenge.
So here goes…my Cookbook Challenge!
