Things I'm up to around the kitchen and garden. Crafting food and drink and embarking on the keeping of hens. Possibly the odd comment about hotel and restaurant food.
This is a quick and tasty way to cook egg. It's similar to cottage eggs, where the egg is baked in a ramekin without a bread lining, which is still delicious, but you have baked-on egg to contend with when washing up.
Ingredients (per egg)
1 egg
1 slice of bread
butter
2 tsp double cream
1 grind of salt
1 grind of black pepper
Method
Cut the crusts off the slice of bread and roll flat with a rolling pin.
Spread with butter.
Push the bread, butter side down, into a ramekin dish or a muffin tin.
As you push the bread down, folds of bread will form. You can just press these to the edges.
If you make any holes in the bread as you press it into the tin, rip off a little bread from the top and press it down over the hole.
Crack in one egg.
Season with salt and pepper.
Add the cream.
Bake for 15 minutes at 180 C.
Serve.
My kids love these. Some eat them with their fingers, some eat them with a spoon, before eating the bread cup. Come to think of it, I love these with a salad for a lunch or light dinner.
You could vary the seasoning of the egg to your personal taste. Perhaps some finely chopped parsley or smoked paprika.
Makes: 20 cookies Prep time: 5 minutes Cooking time: around 9 minutes Skill level: Easy as falling off a bar-stool Equipment: food mixer / large spoonerism
From as far back as I can remember I have enjoyed chocolate chip cookies with a glass of milk. Mum baked them from a recipe in a Be-Ro flour cookery booklet at a time of my life when the most pressing issue seemed to be whether you were left with milk in the glass after the cookie was gone or whether there was still cookie to be consumed after the milk glass was drained. Invariably it would lead to countless toppings-up of milk and additional cookies. Before long I was following the fail-safe recipe myself with a frequency that makes me wonder why I wasn't a more portly youth and I continued to bake them when I went to university. Which is when the miraculous morning after cookies made their first appearance.
It was in a year of University life where I had enjoyed the second year of my degree so much that I had the need to do it again and in a bid to remove the temptation to go out on the town every night with house-mates, I elected to live in a flat on my own. This was very successful from a culinary point of view, because I had a kitchen to myself - complete with a magic socket, but more about that another time - but less successful with regards to knuckling down to work thanks to the advent of the more affordable mobile phone contract: BEEP-BEEPPub?
It was on my return from a rather heavy night that I stumbled into my flat and into bed via the kitchen.
The following morning I rose, a little less than bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and padded into the kitchen.
As far as I could tell, I had returned the previous night and had a bit of a fight with a bag of flour, looking at the state of the kitchen, but there, amongst the snow-scape and unwashed kitchenware, was a cooling rack of chocolate chip cookies. I had no clear recollection of baking them, but they were infinitely better than any I had baked before. A magnificent restorative they seemed to be, but the only fly in the ointment was that I had no clear recollection of what I did to make them so good.
Over the next few weeks I tried varying the recipe with different amounts of this and that ingredient, shorter cooking times or lower temperatures but to no avail. It was some time later that I figured out what I had done. It was down to the lazy cack-handedness of a drunk student. The quantities were the same, but out of laziness I had used a food processor to chop the chocolate into chips at the same time as using it to mix the dough and over chopped the chocolate to fine grains that melted into the cookies on baking, making them more moist.
The following recipe is not that of the original Be-Ro flour booklet, but rather improved in my opinion and not just indicated as a restorative for self-inflicted alements but great for a little comforting treat too.
