Oh Automne, Embrrrace Me In Your Strrrrong Arrrrrms

It's getting cooler, and I'm getting happier by every falling degree. It was 14.5C when I went out this afternoon, according to Wunderground.com. Twelve thousand steps took me to the Haagse Bos, past the tourist-filled open gates of Huis Den Bosch, which I presume meant that the King and Queen weren't in residence, and back round by the lake, pausing to snap some burgeoning Autumn colour, tree stump art, and a sentinel heron, keeping guard on one of the palace CCTV cameras.  

Yes, it's a camera in my pocket, Autumn, but I'm still really pleased to see you!

Food Blogging For Idiots

What can I say? I made biscuits again. Cookies. Shortbread. Ach, you know what I mean. I'm just thankful that up to now they've all stored well, because potentially they could be trouble makers in the old fat department.  

I have to admit I'm really enjoying this baking lark. It's like messing around with Play-Doh that you can eat. That you're supposed to eat, I mean. (Because really, who hasn't fallen for that vanilla-y goodness at one point or other in their childhood?) All this mixing and blending and rolling and kneading and actually, it's even better than Play-Doh, because I don't know about you, but I think I must have had a non-food version of brumotactillophobia (a fear of different foods touching on your plate) when it came to the different colours touching one another in play. There's probably a proper name for that, but I'm damned if I can find it. There's an answer for everything online, but you have to ask the right question first...

Now, though, everything gets mixed up together, and depending on what it's going to be, gets rolled out, or squished, or prodded or shoved into baking tins. I suspect all I've actually done here is confirm the fact that I'm just a big kid.

But today I'm going to pretend I'm one of those fancy food bloggers, because me and my little Samsung Galaxy S2 phone camera (yes, it's 2015, yes the S6 has been out for a while, but you know what? Take a look at my work space (which comprises of the lid of a table-top gas cooker, and my sink drainer) and baking tools (ranging from ancient, to second-hand, to cheap but cheerful), and you'll realise that getting the most modern phone with the zippiest tech is not the first thing on my list of life upgrades) me and my phone camera are going to pretend we're in the kitchen of Nigella or Ina, and it's really a fancy DSLR!

But first, I have to tell you what we're making! I'm failing in my duties as a food blogger already.
Tsk.

We're making Double Dark Chocolate Shortbread Cookies. Oh yes.

You need: 

120 grams of softened, unsalted butter

30 grams of icing sugar

30 grams of dark cocoa powder

1 teaspoon of vanilla essence

100 grams of (gluten-free) all-purpose flour

90 grams of dark chocolate chips  (I *may* have added a bit more, because chocolate)

Reading the recipe, the first instruction was to wang the oven on to 160C, but reading further, you had to refrigerate the dough for at least an hour. Uh-uh. My leccy bill ain't having any of your wasteful habits, madame authoress. None of them. My tiny little oven doesn't need such a grand introduction to the medium heat of 160 degrees Celsius.

So instead I went ahead and creamed the butter, cocoa powder and icing sugar together to get a smooth paste, then added the vanilla, following that with the flour, and finally the chocolate chips.

 Turning it on to a board (read: lid of the cooker) I prepared it to be rolled into a 'smooth 8" log'.

:: snerk ::  I am a child.

I added a little cocoa powder to the baking paper, just to be on the safe side, then wrapped the log, twisted the ends, rolled it out, and put it in the fridge for an hour.

Yes, that's Markie's cocoa powder. The cheapest per gram, if you can believe that, that I can find here. Seems ridiculous, and although I must admit to not knowing the contents of every shop in town as of yet, as baking supplies go, this country seems woefully behind the times.

Remembering to put the oven on (well done me :: pats back::) I brought out the log, and chopped it up into roughly 20 pieces. The advice is to use a sharp knife. I'd add to that and say watch out for the cold and solid choc chips, because no matter how sharp your knife is, it's going to deflect off a choc chip or four and do unspeakable things to the uniformity of the shortbread cookies. Just sayin'.

As you can see, I was left with one small piece, one extra small piece that would have ruined the beautiful layout of my two trays of cookies. It was tragic, but it had to go.

Go in my mouth.  

The recipe suggested a baking time of twelve to fifteen minutes, and I went for thirteen, because I could. The next time I'll go for a couple less; my tiny wee oven likes to be good at what it does occasionally, and the shortbread don't seem to be greedy when it comes to time and heat demands.

I remembered just in time not to attempt to remove them from the baking sheet when they came out of the oven - flashbacks to my Mum making shortbread at home, and always leaving them in the tray to 'set' and cool a little before attempting to put them on the racks.

And these babies are so melt-in-the-mouth it's not true! They're light and chocolatey and ridiculously moreish, and I was hard-pressed to stop at sampling one. Okay. Two. They're really good, even though I say so myself. I think a couple of minutes less both of the initial mixing, and in the oven, might have made them a little less crumbly, but on the whole the recipe does what it sets out to do - give you a pile of delicious, double dark chocolate shortbread cookies.

A Game Of Fronds

"Nic is forever delighted by the first signs of degeneration and decay!"

You'll be forgiven if you think that that degeneration also includes my photo-taking skills. I know - the first photo is a higgledy-piggledy mess of slightly over-contrasted scrappy leaves and a not particularly pleasing arrangement of tree trunks, and while the second may be slightly better composition-wise, it's still bland and hardly worth sharing.

But look. Look closer. Do you see? The rowan leaves at the bottom of the first photo? They're turning pink! And the second photo? Pale green, orange, and yellow, baby! 

AUTUMN IS COMING! (Like Winter Is Coming, but hopefully with less chance of having your head chopped off by a spoilt boy-king.)

My favourite time of year is just around the corner!

I have never been a fan of Summer; the combination of being a fair-skinned redhead with a remedial need to stay covered up at all times, and being fat with an overriding emotional need to stay covered up at all times has led to a dislike of Summer months that border on dread. 

Give me Autumn and Winter where I can hide my layers underneath layers of clothing. Give me seasons when everyone is wearing more and I stick out less from the crowd. Give me seasons when it gets dark early and I can wear my black and blend in later. 

But give me seasons of change and colours and paths covered in crisp leaves. Give me seasons of emerging tree-forms, black against the blue sky and chilled, misty breath past frozen waterways and sleeping earth.

I can't wait!

Clandestine Choc Chips

It's strange how much a blog that was started as a means to jot down some mental meanderings on the path to pound-loss contains so many posts about cake. And biscuits. And cookies.

Actually, knowing myself as I do, it's not strange at all. In fact, it's more surprising that the post-to-cake ratio isn't higher than it already is.  

I've always said, life without cake is not life. Yes, I want to lose weight, YES, I AM LOSING WEIGHT, and I am doing it WITH cake in my life. No, not cake every day, but then I never had cake every day when I wasn't trying to lose weight, either. Moderation, and all that. But I know myself well enough that, like most people I know who try to ease themselves up on that healthy diet wagon, restricting something so much that it's 'not allowed' any more, is just asking for trouble. Ranging from slipping off the back for a quick whatever-it-is-you-can't-live-without, to blowing up the wagon and everything else in the surrounding area. With lots of swears and promises of flammen-werfers for the future.

Going gluten-free has both compounded the 'problem', and simplified it, in one fell wheat-less swoop. No more nipping out for a quick packet of bourbons. (To be honest, nipping out for a packet of biscuits has never really been my thing, but it'll do to illustrate my point, if I eventually arrive at it.) No more scanning refrigerated shelves at the end of the day to see what cream cakes have been reduced. (Don't you give me that side-eye - I know you've done the same!) This is marvellous for my hips, but disagreeable to my brain.

Instant glutened, sweet (usually) gratification is no longer an option, unless I'm willing to mortgage my soul. You can take the girl out of Scotland, and all that, but I'm blowed if I'm going to pay five quid (or the equivalent) for six wee chocolate chip cookies, just because they're gluten-free. Uh-uh. I can spend that money on enough raw ingredients for over a hundred cookies, should my particular needs take me in that direction. (Well, as long as I don't want to add chocolate chips. Rarer than fairy dust over here, and just as expensive.)  

As I've said before, I'm fond of a wee something with a cup of tea in the afternoon. Sometimes apple chips, sometimes a biscuit, something usually around 100 calories, to make sure I keep within my daily range. So this weeks' effort comes from sallysbakingaddiction.com: Flourless Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies.  

Yes, I'm aware that chocolate chips aren't mentioned in the title, but I merely followed the recipe. It is totally not my fault that there are stealth choc chips, but, like a proper artist, I felt I had to be true to the original idea.

90 grams of rolled oats

1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon of baking soda

1 large egg

250 grams of peanut butter

6 tablespoons of light brown sugar

90 grams of choc chips

Basically you mix the dry stuff together, the wet(ter) stuff together, then mix them all up, adding the choc chips last, for some reason. Hey, I never claimed to be anything other than what I am: an enthusiastic amateur! I got thirty squishy, gooey, nommy cookies out of this mixture, each around two inches in diameter, and about half an inch thick.

What is good is they both refrigerate, and freeze well, which is just as well or this whole gluten-free cookie-making thing would be somewhat detrimental to the old shifting weight thing. Just because you know what's in them, doesn't mean that they're necessarily any better for your hips, should you wish to snarfle them all down in one go...

Chocolate Cake For Dummies

"Nic made her first real cake from scratch yesterday. (There's never been any cause to learn before, really, because cake-eating is not a daily occurrence, or even weekly, but the GF thing happened and suddenly shop-bought cakes and mixes were out of the question, when they were in question at all.)

So. This fudgey chocolate cake was made. And she saw that it was good. And so did the others. (Fingerprints on the plate are testament to that - it was made for a friend's birthday and appears to have been a success!).

It is called (wait for it, wait for it) 'Chocolate Idiot Cake'. 'Nuff said...

(We are not, however, discussing the cake made before this one. Because it was a travesty to cake-dom, a shameful parody of spongey goodness, an embarrassment to everything baked that came before.)"

Of course, I'm not counting the times when I was wee where I 'helped' my Mum in the kitchen making sponges, Eve's Puddings, or Mrs Laidler's American Devil's Food Cake (and if I can find that recipe ever again, I'll give it everything I've got to turn it gluten-free), but apart from a failed attempt at baking in first year home-economics class (it may have even just been an apple crumble), everything else has been either shop-bought already, or made out of a packet. Don't judge. I chose to do woodwork and metalwork at school, and even though I say so myself, I turned a mean lathe.

So, I have to admit to being a little nervous making this cake. When I say the first effort was a travesty to cake-dom, I think I'm being unfair to travesties to cake-dom in general. Thankfully for the author, I can't remember what the recipe was, but it included a list of interchangeable flours. The author lied. You CANNOT change almond flour with coconut flour gram for gram. It is known. (Now it is known, anyway.) Coconut flour LOVES the liquid, so it does. That, coupled with the suggestion of using 3/4 of a cup of caster sugar and 1 tablespoon of water instead of half a cup of agave syrup, was just asking for Trouble. With a capital T.

I called it my Learning Cake.

I also called it other things. Unprintable things. It did, after the addition of a cup of water (I started to wing it after realising that coconut flour, cocoa, caster sugar and a tablespoon of water will not make anything remotely resembling cake batter) change consistency from cocoa-coconut dust to something that could be coaxed in to a cake tin, but in all my years of watching cakes being made on telly I've never seen something come out of the oven that drips water on to the cooling rack. A soggy bottom that would have made Paul Hollywood run for the hills. It was, once it had dried out a little, surprisingly edible, although I do admit to not really wanting to finish it all before it went mouldy. (Cake-making for one: you either need an enormous freezer for your amazing and delicious creations, or be enormously bad at baking so that you don't want to keep it for longer than necessary. There is another option, but that entails putting back every pound that I've lost over the last three years, and as much as I'm an advocate of Life Without Cake Is No Life™, a line has to be drawn somewhere...)

But the Chocolate Idiot Cake was a dream come true. Squidgey in the middle, with a chocolatey crust on the edges, even consistency throughout, rich, sumptuous, and meltalicious on the tongue.

I need to make another one to see if it freezes okay.  

For science.  

Pin The Fail On The Chunky (Choc Chip Cookie Recipes)

"Nic is considering finding another location to keep all her online workouts in one place, because Pinterest just isn't cutting it. There are too many brownie recipes, and cookie recipes, and cake recipes to trawl through, like an army assault course for her overwhelmed imagination, before she can even get near her own set of calorie-killing videos!

Man, serving two gods is really tough!"

I think I wasted half an hour suffering from Oo-Shiny Syndrome tonight before I remembered I was looking at my Pins to decide which Jessica Smith workout videos I was going to put myself through and not lose myself in a sea of savoury scone recipes. I was already in my gear, my yoga mats were on the floor (they help deaden any noise I make so I don't frighten the downstairs neighbours), and my music stand was ready to hold my darling Galaxy Tab that I use to play the videos. Worse, I didn't even get to MY Pins, I was stuck on the page that has Pins from people you know, Pins from people you don't know but have Pinterests in common, Pins from Pinterest itself suggesting things you might like. So many cookie recipes! And I don't think I'll ever find the end of the page that has an infinite variety of banana bread.

I need internet blinkers.

You Spin Me Right Round, Baby, Right Round

"Nic continues to exercise the hope that she works best with unorthodox weight-loss methods, after spending an hour hula-hooping her corporeal self to the spiritual delights of The Great British Bake Off!"

I'm loving this hooping lark! Okay, it's not real hooping in the almost gymnastic sense that you see on YouTube - I have neither the dimensions of room nor control of my limbs to allow any fancy-schmancy arm and leg and dancing about shenanigans, but I have just enough control of this rotating glass-breaker (yeah, RIP water glass, your brave sacrifice to the hooping arts will not be forgotten) to be able to squat a little, move from side to side a little, and shimmy a little while doing my best gyrating hips Elvis Presley impression.

I have no idea if I'm doing it right or not, but I finish feeling like I've worked hard, and I do manage to break into a decent sweat, so something is certainly happening body-wise. To what extent that has to do with the actual exercise, or the presence of Paul Hollywood on my TV screen I couldn't tell you. I appear to be developing a penchant for silver foxes, but in this case I don't know how much that has to do with the general scrumminess Mr Hollywood (which, to be fair, is considerable), or the amount of cake on screen.

Hey, this far into the game I have to take my inspiration wherever I can find it, and if it involves losing weight and baking (even in this most abstract of forms) I'm going to run with it. Or, you know, twirl around with it. The combination of cake and weight-loss is, after all, my modus operandi!