Cornucopia cookbook adventures, Family Dinners, More cupcakes and a lot of fruit.

I decided to give one of the recipes a go from the Cornucopia cook book I have. I went with the ' Sweet potato, Broccoli and Lentil Sambar'. I had no idea and still no idea what a sambar even is but it looked nice in the picture. Some sort of a curry anyway, I think :/.

The recipes in the book are written in paragraph from. I find this pretty confusing and hard to follow so I wrote it out in a simple form. Step by step :).

I also decided to be extremely organised, so I did all my chopping before hand and sorted it into bowls.

There's onions, Carrots, Sweet potato, Red lentils, Tinned tomatoes, Broccoli, Cumin, Coriander, Ginger and other spices. I didn't have enough Sweet potato so I added some Butter nut squash. Some Peppers too.

So all this into this. Doesn't really look very appetizing.

I served it up with some short grain brown rice. I had first tried Short grain brown nice in Fresh. I had asked the chef what it was. I found some in Holland and Barret. It's yummm!

Verdict. It tasted pretty Bland. The recipe didn't have enough spices for the amount of water that is to the added. It would have really watered the spices down. So I added a bit more of everything until it had more flavour.

I would love to be great making curries. Always the same problem, not enough flavour.

Last night before I was going to Katie's house to commence on the weekly X factor sessions, I made Muffins. I also used a cornucopia recipe. Last winter most Saturdays, a load of us would go to Katies' to watch the X factor and I would always bake! So I made muffins with raspberries.

Over all I liked the recipe. Real simple and the muffins came out lovely and huge. I love huge muffins.

http://www.cornucopia.ie/

Last week my Mum was going to a Birthday dinner party for one of her friends. I always ask her to say she will bring dessert so I can make it!

We were thinking of what cake I could make when she thought I should make a big cupcake stand. Something different. So I did so. I made the usual Raspberry cupcakes. They turned out well! I also made a few chocolate ones.

So the cake. I decided to be summery and make a double layer victoria sponge cake with summer fruits. In the middle there is whipped cream, raspberries and raspberry jam. On top- Butter cream icing, Strawberries, Raspberries and Black berries.

My decoration was influenced by this photo.

But didn't go as smoothly as I hoped it would :/

The whipped cream in the middle of my one started to melt everywhere. The strawberries on top started to slide off. So It looked a bit of a mess and not as nice as I imagined it to be. But I learned that wet fruit and icing do not mix well!

This is just before the sliding began.

And I made Bean Burgers. I love these so much. So easy to make. They are vegan too unless you add honey to them like I do. They don't hold together very well so I might add a egg to them next time. A few posts below show you how to make these. Seriously try! Easy, quick and delish.

This is the mixture before I mould them into burgers.

And after! Gotta keep watching them because they burn real easy if you don't keep an eye on them.

My dinner.

After Dinner. I thought it looked rather nice.

People's Park dlrcoco Sunday market apreesh

Every Sunday down in People's Park, Dun Laoghaire there is a farmers/food market.

http://www.dlrcoco.ie/markets/venues.htm

I go down most Sunday's or try too once there is people to go with or it's not raining. Jesse and I usually cycle down.

Last Sunday it was an extremely nice day out, warm and lots of sun.

I had planned on writing a lengthy blog about this but I have just gotten very lazy.

Well there is the Lebanese stand. They do the best falafels. I've stopped getting them though because I used to get them so much that now I'm kinda sick of them. The falafels themselves are hands down the best though. Soo crispy!!

Baked goods wise, this is the place to go. Naomi's muffins. I took a very sly picture. There is cupcakes, muffins and brownies. All at a reasonable price too. I've gotten free stuff and money off before she I like this place.

There is an Indian stand. They mostly do veggi stuff I think. I have seen chicken curry before but everything this time was vegi.

I went for the chickpea wada this time. It was pretty tasty. Along with an overpriced smoothie.

There is usually another complete vegi stand that do Indian type food but he wasn't there last week.

Jesse got a chicken Thia curry from the Thia stand. It is meant to be good and give lots of chicken. I do love veg Thia curry a lot!

We got watermelon slices for a euro.

I went to Milanos the other night for a Suzie's Birthday dinner. I hadn't been in forever but I always remember the pizza being unreal.

I got a pizza from the 'lighter' range. It had a hole in the middle and had salad to fill the hole. Salad and pizza is the way to go. Only thing missing is salad creme.

Home grown vegetables and Bean Burgers

At the start of the summer I put together 2 vegetable beds. We got 2 vegetable large square shape beds. At the start of the summer it looked like this.

Also have a potatoe patch thing.

Planted in it was lettuce, onions, cabbage, rocket, parsley, thyme. A lot of the cabbage and Lettuce got destroyed by slugs though. I didn't wanna use slug pellets but ended up using them anyway because they ate EVERYTHING!

So I got lazy and pretty much abandoned it up until today. After cutting the horrible amount of grass I have, I was in a gardening mood. So I took all the weeds out of the vegetable patch, pulled out any dead shit and pulled up all the onions because they were ready. My mum freaked though because we are not gonna have to use all of them when we coulda just pulled one out when we actually need it, ah well.

There is quite a lot of onions. They're more red onions still to be picked.

The onions grew some pretty nice flowers too!

There is also a tomatoe plant and a rubarb plant that are still growing. A few green tomatoes on it there! Seeing an actual vegetable like that growing is very class.

There is some sweet pea growing on the deck, which I love. The flowers are so pretty. I made a DIY climbing system for it using string and bamboo. It grew pretty quick.

Now onto some food.

Today I made Bean burgers for dinner. I followed a recipe from a vegetarian cookbook I have but I flavored it in my own way.

It was very easy to make. It involved, chopping an onion finely and frying it. Add a tablespoon each of coriander and cumin. Adding garlic. Then adding this to a bowl of Kidney beans. I used 1 1 tin and a half. It made about 5 burgers.

The recipe was just that plus mushrooms but I had none. I added a lot more stuff to it to make it tastyier!

I added-

• Pine nuts
• cashew nuts
• dried cranberries
• Chilli
• Honey
• Parsley
• Salt, pepper
• And the most important ingredient- Sun dried tomato paste

This stuff is THE BEST.

You then mash it altogether with a potato masher and mould them into burgers, dust with a bit of flower and brush with a little oil and pop them under the grill. They have no egg or anything in them so they don't hold that well but pretty well.

I ate mine in a pitta bread with salad and salad cream. I should of put cheese on too.

I also used some nandos hot sauce and left over cous cous I made earlier.

It was very tasty and was made to be eaten with salad cream. Will be making again!

all sorts

Well first of all I got a baking dream. A freestanding mixer, I love it! I can make icing real well now with it. Saves a lot of time too. Why I didn't have one before, I do not know.

I went to town with my Mum and Sister on Tuesday to get some Lunch. We were going to go to Govindas, a Vegetarian Indian restaurant but we got lazy and stayed southside. So we went to Fresh, A vegetarian restaurant in Powerscourt (http://www.cafe-fresh.com/) . I had eaten there a couple years ago and I remember it being really good.
They had a delish looking Potato and Carrot curry that my Mum and Sister got.

I tried some and it was lovely! The rice that came with it was so good and fluffy. I went up and asked the chef what it was. He told me it was short grain brown rice, So I will be getting some of that. He was a really nice Indian chef. Indians are the masters of curry so of course the curry was delish.
I was way to hot at the time for curry so I got a falafel wrap thing. I was so indecisive in what to get. I should of gotten something different than falafel because I always have falafel. It was disappointing. Was not into. I couldn't tell the falafel from the hummus. Ah well. Next time something different. Came with 2 salads too.

They has real nice desserts too. Vegan cakes and the likes but I was way to stuffed!

I met Rachel after and got shakes and we sat in Trinity. I went for the buttons one avec Peanut butter. It was GOOOD!Love peanut butter. Toast with raspberry jam and Peanut butter never fails.
Trinity buildings are extremely nice and Trinity hangouts are also nice. I wish my college had grass to chill on.


And because peanut butter is the best, I made Peanut butter cookies for a Picnic on Bray head. I made half of them just plain cookies but added peanut butter to the rest of the cookie dough. I'd love to know how to make REEEEALY good cookies. Like chewy, fudgey ones instead of cakey type ones.


A few weeks back I baked for a Disney movie marathon Jesse, Susan, Ruth and I had.
I made raspberry and white chocolate Brownies and just raspberry cupcakes as per usual.
Jesse bought sugar letters so she could write rude things on the cupcakes haha.



It's true :)

Just some avoca salad apreesh. If I could make shit like this I'd be very happy. The cookbook lies, I'm telling you. They have secret ingredients!

Lemon cupcakes!

Lemon cake with some failure icing.

Homemade pizza!

Fun cupcakes! I always wanted to put mini smarties on cupcakes. More failure icing too.