Gooseberry crumble

I've been making the most of the weather and have been spending as much time outdoors in the garden as possible. It's so lovely to see everything in bloom and it's the time of year when all of the months of hard work and tending to teeny-tiny seedlings pays off and there seems to be pure abundance.

This year, I managed to get to the gooseberries before the birds did and after weeks of watching as the gooseberries turned from pale green to a luscious deep purple, the day came when I finally decided to take on the gooseberry bush - and I won!...Well, I escaped with just some slight thorny scrapes. And here are the spoils:

It's hard to see how many gooseberries I actually got but there were almost 1kg, not bad for a fairly small, two year old gooseberry bush. So I decided to make a batch of crumbles. The recipe below is adapted from this one that I found here on the BBC Good Food website.

Ingredients:
800g gooseberries
125g sugar for the gooseberries and 120g for the crumble topping
150g plain flour
100g oats
125g butter

Method (pretty much the same as the Good Food one):

1. Preheat the oven to 180C. Top and tail the gooseberries and mix with 125g of sugar. Separate into individual dishes or one large one if you fancy a feast! Then sprinkle 3 tbsp of water over them.

2. Add the flour, butter and oats into a bowl and rub together to form 'breadcrumbs', then stir in the rest of the sugar.

3. Spoon the crumble mixture over the gooseberries and pop into the oven for about 45 minutes. If you've made a batch like I did then you can either put them straight into the freezer ready to defrost and cook at a later date or gift them to friends and family - mine were delighted and I got and apple and blackcurrant crumble in return.

As you can see, I got three small-ish crumbles from my pickings, plus a large one and there are still a few gooseberries ripening on the bush so hopefully I'll be able to make some more.

Incidentally, I thought I'd purchased an 'Invicta' and was surprised when they turned purple, so I suppose the identity of my gooseberry plant will remain a mystery.  Oh and I wont pretend that this song wasn't buzzing around my brain while I was busy baking....Everybody's good at cooking something...

Beetroot and chocolate brownies...and back to blogging

So it's been a year since I last posted on the blog. Life seemed to get in the way and I'm afraid to say that I lost my blogging mojo. I've still been busy in the background, growing veggies and trying out new recipes in the kitchen and I've discovered a particular fondness for veggie infused cakes (and have converted a few people along the way). My first attempt at a veggie cake was the rather lush Carrot and Courgette Cake which I tried last year and is still a hit with family, friends and work colleagues. For anyone interested, the post can be found here. 

My most recent find are Shaheen's Beetroot and Chocolate Brownies from her Allotment2Kitchen blog. I skipped the almonds as I didn't have any and used 'normal' caster sugar rather than golden caster sugar and the results were delicious! You can't see it from the photo but they have a beautiful reddish hue to them and the fact that they are packed with beetroot make them feel like a slightly virtuous indulgence too.

Ooh just looking at them has got me tempted. I think it's time for a cuppa and a piece of cake - I'm counting it as one of my 5 a day!

Birthdays, baking and blogging from an ipad

This is my first attempt at blogging from my iPad, partly due to me being lazy and not wanting the hassle of uploading my photos to my laptop. There's an obvious time lag between typing the word to it appearing on the screen, which is slightly annoying, but I'm going to preserve with it and see how it goes.

It's currently the Easter holidays which means I have two weeks off work - hooray! And I seemed to have crammed quite a lot in so far. On Monday it was my lovely girlfriend's birthday so I spent the day making her feel like a princess and eating cake - yum. I made this carrot and courgette cake from the Good Food website as it's her favourite (and this is the point where I discover that there's no option to add a photo from my iPad - or if there is, I can't find it so will have to do some research...):

Tuesday was spent in the garden - cutting the grass, weeding and all the usual jobs that we dash to do at the first hint of sunshine. We also bought a cherry tree which we plan to plant together on Friday.

Then yesterday I painted the bathroom and bedroom ceilings. I should have done it when I decorated the rooms but as my leaky roof needed replacing it didn't seem like a wise choice (especially when I woke up mid-winter to a dripping sound, only to discover that my loft was full of snow which was melting - thankfully the insulation soaked up most of the moisture but the ceilings didn't completely escape). But after a long day of painting and discovering the day later that I had muscles that I didn't know I had, the job is now complete. Two ceilings down, two to go - although they can wait until the summer holidays!

Today has been a tidying up and feeling very tired day. I haven't pushed myself to do too much and have just pottered around the house. I made myself this lush veggie pizza for tea:

I made the dough in the bread maker and topped it with tomato purée, frozen mushrooms, peppers and sweetcorn with a sprinkle of mozzarella on top - delicious!