Rocky Road

As a teacher the summer term is normally my favourite time of year. Sunshine, sports days, less stress, the count down to the summer holidays. Unfortunately it's not quite working out like that at the moment. It's been a busy few weeks so I thought I whip up a batch of rocky road to keep us all going. I also made some banana muffins but these were an EPIC failure (both in looks and taste) so I'm not even going to post them (yes, they really were that bad!)

My introduction to rocky road came about 6 years ago when I used to work with a teacher who made THE most amazing cakes. She would make a batch of rocky road which she'd bring in and they would be gone in minutes. We were pretty much obsessed with them in the staff room and they were always requested. This was my first attempt and I think future attempts will need a little refining. The beauty of it is that it requires no baking. When you look at recipes on the Internet you will find all sorts of different versions with different ingredients. The combinations and possibilities are endless. Do you go for rich tea biscuits or digestives? Milk chocolate, dark chocolate or both? Fruit or no fruit? Nuts or no nuts? I opted for a simple Nigella recipe from the BBC website that you can find here. There is also a Christmas version as well. I decided to add some glace cherries as I had some that needed using up - Mr Birdie was not keen on these and has advised me that in future raisins would be a better addition (this has been noted!)

Ingredients:

125g unsalted soft butter
300g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
3 tbsp golden syrup
200g rich tea biscuits
100g mini marshmallows
150g glace cherries (optional extra)
2 tsp icing sugar, to dust

Method:
1) Heat the butter, chocolate and golden syrup in a heavy-based saucepan over a gentle heat.

Once melted, remove from the heat, scoop out about 125ml of the melted mixture and set aside in a bowl/jug.
2) Place the biscuits into a freezer bag and crush them with a rolling pin until some have turned to crumbs but there are still some pieces of biscuits remaining (this can be very therapeutic!)
3) Fold the biscuit pieces and crumbs into the melted chocolate mixture in the saucepan, then add the marshmallows and the cherries.

4) Tip the mixture into a 24cm/9in square baking tin and smooth the top with a wet spatula.

5) Pour over the reserved 125ml of the melted chocolate mixture and smooth again.

6) Refrigerate for about two hours or overnight.
7) To serve, cut into 24 gingers and dust with icing sugar and enjoy!

Disaster time... Lemon Viennese Whirls

If Craig Revel Horwood (the nasty man from Strictly Come Dancing if you're reading this Dad!) had been in my kitchen this afternoon he would have declared it a 'di-sah-ster dahling'!

I decided that I wanted to make something biscuity this weekend. After trawling through some of my old Olive magazines I found this recipe for marshmallow Viennese fingers. However, Rob wasn't too keen on the idea of marshmallow and suggested something lemony instead. After a little research on the internet I found a recipe here, which is loosely based on a Hairy Bikers recipe on the BBC website which you can find here.

All started well as I had all the ingredients (butter, plain flour, cornflour, icing sugar, vanilla extract and lemon zest and juice).

You need to then prepare two baking sheets. I'd read that it was handy to have pre-drawn circles of about 5cm onto your greaseproof paper to aid the piping so I dutifully drew 28 circles!

You mix together the ingredients in a food processor/blender and then you're ready to pipe - or so I thought. This is where it all started to go wrong. Now I had read that it was helpful if you're butter was soft so I had left mine out since yesterday. This was obviously not enough! When it came to piping my mixture was far too hard and refused to even come out of the piping bag. Rob suggested leaving the mixture in a bowl in a warm bowl of water to help soften it so I left and it did soften. It started to pipe - success I thought - however I was left with a buttery sludge and piping became tricky. I'd also read that the recipe was meant to make 16 Viennese whirls (32 separate biscuits). I managed 16 separate biscuits. At this point I was feeling quite defeated but carried on and placed them in the over. Here are at what they looked like after I eventually managed to get them out of the piping bag!

After 15 minutes in the oven they came out looking acceptable - they are very delicate and crumbly. From just getting them from the baking tray to a cooling rack I managed to break two leaving me with 14 biscuits (7 in total). 

The filling is butter cream and lemon curd which you spread on each half and you then sandwich together. They are a little on the wobbly side but they look good and most importantly taste good. I'll definitely try making them again and will hopefully learn from my mistakes by making them smaller and making sure my butter really is soft!  

Happy baking!

Dil :-)