Peanut Butter and Jam Jewels

They look beautiful, like the sort of jewels worn by fairy-tale princesses - Nigella Lawson

Heh! If you are Princess Fiona maybe!

The verdict:

Unusual or substituted ingredients: I used plum jam on half and peach jam on the other half (not strawberry as suggested - don't like the pips!). Best to use a fairly solid jam which doesn't have large pieces of fruit in it, as this makes it easier to spoon into the indentations. Nigella says the jam is supposed to go a bit runny and then harden (into the "jewels") but mine didn't do that. It didn't make any difference to the eating!

Special utensils or cookware: None. Just an electric mixer for the creaming. Nigella suggests using your thumb to make the jam indentations, but I found a pate knife with a nice rounded bottom and used that. Even so, the indentations rose and practically disappeared during baking - luckily they are soft enough to re-indent once you take out of the oven. Then you spoon the jam in. I wonder if it might be easier to spoon the jam into the indentations before you bake them (which is what my mother does with her Jam Drops).

Repeatability: Yes, I would make these again. Vary the jam for interest!
Sauciness: More like sticky, whilst cooking anyway - you have to refrigerate the dough for at least an hour after mixing - it is very sticky (yep, peanut butter will do that!!) and refrigerating makes it much easier to manage when rolling the dough balls. And, as I discovered, you can easily refrigerate for a whole day, as I made the mixture on Saturday morning but didn't get a chance to bake them until Sunday afternoon.

Overall pleasure level: Combining one of the best things to come out of the US (good ol' PB&J) into a biscuit is clearly a recipe for biscuity goodness. These are an 8 for me.

Rhubarb Grunt

I hate rhubarb. You can do all of those recipes - RoseRed

**

A grunt is like a cobbler or a slump: at its most basic, fruit stewed in the oven with a scone-like topping - Nigella Lawson

Cobbler? Slump? Gosh there are some funny names for desserts out there. I had a hunch that the terms would be mystifying to the American readers. I wasn't even sure I knew what those vaguely old fashioned sounding words meant and I was raised by an English woman!

Wikipedia, however, tells me that these are terms that should be known to all of us if we are from English speaking countries.

Right. Got that? Just funny names for fruity, doughy desserts. On we go.


The Verdict

Unusual or substituted ingredients: Rhubarb. I've never cooked with it. I don't remember eating it since I was seven and living in Tasmania. Even then I have no real memory of how it tasted. On the basis of this dish, I'm going to grow it in my garden! I love the slightly acidic, tangy flavour of it.

The scone-y stuff on top wasn't very scone like, if you ask me. It's flour and cream. What a weird combination! Although I guess it had a certain heaviness that you might find in scones.


Special Utensils or cookware: None. I cooked it all in a square pyrex dish. Nigella suggests pyrex so you can see if the rhubarb is bubbling. It worked.

Repeatability: Sure. When I have a massive rhubarb plant in my garden, I'll add this to the myriad of ways I'll be looking for to get rid of it. I think, apart from the sugar and cream, it was probably quite a healthy dessert. OK, a sort of healthy dessert.....


Sauciness: Put it this way. I made this for my father in law and he loved it. I suspect it's of his era. So, it's a good, solid, old fashioned dessert. Not real saucy.

Overall pleasure level: Absolutely delightful, really. The brown sugar, butter, cream, doughy, crunchy top and bubblingly soft rhubarb combines to make a really satisfying winter dessert. Served it with ice cream. I imagine I'll make this one for many winters to come.

Bells

The Essential White Loaf

I can't let Bells have all the breadmaking fun, can I? - Rose Red

Inspired by Bells' delight in making bread from scratch, and her excellent results, I finally decided to give it a go.Look at that - how good does that look!!

The verdict:

Unusual or substituted ingredients: Just your standard breadmaking stuff - flour, water, bit of butter and salt. And yeast. I'm not down with that fresh yeast business, so I use instant yeast, and (while I've never used fresh yeast) this seems to work perfectly fine, and it keeps in the fridge for ages. And no fussing with little sachets which may or may not give you the right amount. Just measure out what you need.Special utensils or cookware: None. Nigella suggests using a mixer with a dough hook (which I have) but I really wanted to do it by hand. And it's not hard! If I was really busy and making bread, I might use the mixer, but for a lazy weekend pleasure, there's really no need. Except for the kneading bit (heh!! sorry, couldn't help myself). Kneading is fun. I'm not sure if I noticed the point at which the dough is supposed to become smoother and so on, but it seemed to work out ok.As for leaving it to rise, well, that was the hard part - I just wanted to cook it and have bread - I started making it a little too late in the morning - although it ended up being just in time for lunch. The question I had was whether the dough had in fact increased by half it's size again at the end of the allotted time (plus a bit). But I couldn't wait any longer!Repeatability: I would definitely make bread again. This white bread is really so so easy. And so yummy.Sauciness: But yeah, not saucy. As Bells has previously noted, bread is earthy, not saucy. It is a little messy, in the mixing/kneading stage, but licking your bread-doughy-fingers is not quite the same as when you are cooking, say, some type of chocolate delight!Overall pleasure level: Oh, this is fabulous. Making it was a pleasure, eating it was a pleasure. And despite all Nigella's warnings that the bread won't get crusty in a standard domestic oven, this bread was perfectly golden and crusty on the outside, soft on the inside - yum! I think that makes it a 10!

Sourdough

I know the idea of a long-drawn out tripartite baking process is not necessarily a welcome one, but presumably you do this because you want to, not because you are trying to find time-saving ways in the kitchen and kind of stumbled onto this by mistake - Nigella Lawson



The Verdict
Still on a bread kick, the decision was made to bake sourdough in tandem with fellow blogger, Tanya. She lives in hundeds of kilometres away in Brisbane, so it was long distance tandem baking. She just so happens so be a Nigella fan, too, so we chose the sourdough recipe from Domestic Goddess and set about making it on Wednesday last week. Yes, that's right - it's a recipe that takes days. Fortunately, much of the process is set-and-forget. And is it great? Oh yes it is. Even if Nigella says her version cheats a little.

Unusual or substituted Ingredients: I don't mess around with bread recipes. I do as I'm told so I didn't change anything, but she does give you the option of making rye or white sourdough. I chose rye. Above, that muddy looking sludge is what's known as the starter. That's flour, a pinch of yeast (that's apparently the cheating part - you're not supposed to do put that in traditionally), a hint of milk and warm water. For three days, that disgusting mixture bubbles and froths away. It's living. How cool is that? That's about the most unsual thing I've cooked since starting the project, I think.

Three days later you make a sponge.


That's where you take some of the starter (the rest gets kept as a sort of family pet for future use) and mix it with more flour and you leave that for about 18 hours. It's certainly a drawn out process!

Finally by Saturday afternoon, we got to the proper bread stage. Here's my loaf proving in the sun. It actually had a tea towel over it, but that doesn't make for as nice a photo.

Special Utensils or Cookware: None at all. As always, you could knead with a dough hook, but I like the hand method.

The dough, after punching it down

Repeatability: Well now that I have the tasty starer in the fridge (you have to feed it periodically to keep it alive) I will have no problem making sourdough whenever I feel like it. All I need is the 18 hours to grow the sponge. Hmm...it's still going to be a time consuming effort, no matter which way you look at it. I don't care. This was GREAT! My husband and father in law thought so too.

Sauciness: I don't think of bread as particularly saucy. It's earthy. Not saucy. But not everything needs to be!

Overall pleasure rating: 10 out 10 for me. This was fabulous. I feel a huge sense of achievement for making my first sourdough and it was delicious. I served it with a big bowl of Moroccan Lamb Soup. Perfection!

Bells

Chocolate Cheesecake

In theory, the cheesecake purist within me shudders at the idea of something so unorthodox - Nigella Lawson

The verdict
I don't consider myself a cheesecake purist so am unsure what is so wrong with the idea of a chocolate cheesecake. Feel free to enlighten me.

I made this to take to lunch with friends and their children and it went down a treat, unorthodoxy and all.


Unusual or Substituted Ingredients
Nigella says to make just a plain biscuit base for this cheesecake but I couldn't resist adding some baking cocoa to the biscuit mix before smooshing them down with the base of a glass. That's a trick I learned a while back. It's a good one.


Special Utensils or Cookware
You'll need a springform tin and a baking tray large enough to hold it. Once the cake is made, you put it in a bath, about 2-3cm up the side of the tin before cooking it for an hour.


It's worth noting that you're supposed to melt the chocolate and add it to the cheesecake mixture, stirring it through gently so you get a marbled effect.

Nope. Not in my house. I tried that. The chocolate, once it hit the cold mixture, sort of turned into flakes so no marbling occurred. I think next time I'd let the chocolate cool a lot more before I tried that.

Repeatability
Oh yes. This is a good one. Even though I would personally like a chooclate cheesecake that was richer (read: more chocolatey) the rich creaminess of this marvel is pretty bloody good. It's quite a wet cheesecake so it's kind of mousse-like in texture. I'l ddrag this one out for entertaining again and again, I imagine.

This is all that was left after four adults and two children (see below) polished it off.

Sauciness
I imagine if served with a greater concentration of chocolate, some chocolate dipped strawberries, appropriately placed whipped cream and you'd have one very saucy dessert on your hands.

Or, if you're a child, on your face. Meet Miranda and Sebastian. I think their faces say it all.





Bells

Meringues

I've never met a child who didn't like meringues, and they're child's play to make, too - Nigella Lawson

Well, yes they are! Very very easy. And a great way to use up left-over egg white from this (or any other recipe calling for egg yolk/s only).

The verdict:
Unusual or substituted ingredients: This recipe is so simple that it only has two ingredients (or 3 if you want coloured meringues). Egg white and caster sugar - 60g of caster sugar per egg white. Can't get simpler than that!
While I mostly stuck with the white meringues, inspired by Nigella's description of using the back of a spoon to make "neat nippled small bosomed shapes", I decided to go the whole nine yards and make them pink as well, for added realism (or childish delight, more like!)
Special utensils or cookware: I used the kitchenaid to mix the whites and sugar - meaning this is truly a recipe you can make while doing something else (eg knitting!). Just put the mixer on to beat for about 5-10 minutes and go and multitask! A good way to tell when you've beaten your egg whites and sugar enough is to rub a little between your thumb and forefinger - if it feels gritty, beat some more. You will probably never get it entirely smooth, but the level of grittiness will reduce.Beat until it is a "gleaming, satiny mass".

Repeatability: If I have leftover egg whites I will definitely make these again - the other great thing about meringues is that they keep very well in an airtight container - and they taste good too! When I was making them, my husband asked me what I was going to do with them and I told him I was planning on taking them to work. After he'd eaten his first one, he wasn't so keen on me taking them out of the house!
Sauciness: "neat nippled small bosomed shapes" - need I say more??!!
Overall pleasure level: I hadn't had a meringue for ages before these - I'd forgotten that lovely chewy centre and crisp crust (heh, bet you can't say "crisp crust" ten times in a row!). These are really very good and fun to make to boot! - 8/10 for me!

Pain-au-chocolat Pudding

It looks beautiful and tastes divine - Nigella Lawson

Just for Bells' birthday - a lovely wintery choccy custardy pud. Mmmm mmmmmmmm.
The verdict:

Unusual or substituted ingredients: This is really a bread and butter pudding. However, unlike your standard B&B pudding, this uses pain-au-chocolates (chocolate croissants) rather than bread and sultanas. As I was buying the ingredients late on a Saturday afternoon in a rush (as I was making it for dinner at friend's that evening) I couldn't actually find 4 pain-au-chocolat, so I bought 3 (from 2 different places) and a plain croissant as well.

Other than that, nothing particularly unusual. Unless, that is, you count half a litre of milk and half a litre of double cream as unusual. That's a litre of pretty creamy dairy in there!! Oh and 4 egg yolks and 1 whole egg. Oh my. I think it's going to be creamy custard! And since I have 4 egg whites left over, my next Nigella recipe will give you a very easy way to use them up.

Special utensils or cookware: None - just a big bowl to hold the creamy custard as you are making it, before you pour over the previously sliced p-au-c that you've put in a casserole dish. Repeatability: This is a very easy dessert - I would definitely make it again. Sauciness: Well, you know with a litre of creamy stuff, this is quite saucy. And once you cook it all together, the chocolate from the p-au-c oozes out into the custard and gives it a delicate, not overwhelming, chocolate taste. Overall pleasure level: As Nigella says: "I can't tell you how comforting this is". It is truly a comfort food. A point or two off for looks (because, really, Nigella - it might look "beautiful" straight out of the oven, but there is no way to serve this to make it look even remotely attractive!

So for me, an 8.