-The Hangry Cook Birthday- Coconut and Chocolate Pancakes

It is a bit early for pancakes but as it’s my blogs first birthday I thought I would celebrate by making the dirtiest breakfast since the fry up, and yes the chocolate sauce is necessary. This recipe could be served with some ice cream or cream for an extra layer of filth which would, even by my standards, be classed as more of a desert than a breakfast but each to their own.  Back to this post being about the first birthday of The Hangry Cook. You will have noticed that there has been a steep learning curve with regards to the photography and with any luck my writing style and I hope over the next year I will only get better! And finally thanks to anyone that reads my food ramblings / adventures, please comment if you like this recipe!

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  What you need for 1 large portion of pancakes (makes 4):

  • 65 g of flour
  • 90 ml of whole milk / coconut milk
  • 60 g of palm sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp of baking soda
  • 50 g of unsalted butter
  • 50 g of good quality dark chocolate
  • A hand full of desiccated coconut 
  • And another 50 ml of milk

  
  -optional 20 ml of cream / Crème fraiche 
  

  -optional extra a scoop of ice cream

  
  

  How to make it:

  1. Put the coconut, egg, flour, milk (90 ml), sugar in a bowl….DO NOT PUT IN THE BAKING SODA…and mix together. Bear in mind that the mixture will not be smooth because of the desiccated coconut.  Transfer the batter into something that you can easily pour your batter out of – I like to use a classic Pyrex jug. Now let the batter sit, allowing the coconut to absorb some of the liquid.
  2. While the batter is resting make your chocolate sauce by melting the butter and chocolate into 50 ml of milk. Melt in a pan over a low heat. Keep whisking everything together until smooth, thick and shiny and then set aside. However at this point you could add in your Crème fraiche(if using) and give the sauce another quick mix. If the sauce is a little too thick (remember you still want to be able to pour it) add in a little water.
  3. Now it’s time to prep the pancakes by firstly adding in your baking soda and giving the batter another mix up. Finally before cooking if the batter is just a bit on the thick side add in a little water. Put a knob of butter in a frying pan on a medium heat. Once melted pour in a portion of your batter and fry. You will notice that raw top will begin to bubble, at this point and flip the pancake and cook for another 1-2 minutes until golden. Repeat until all the batter has been used.
  4. Finish by stacking the pancakes and pour over a generous amount of chocolate sauce.

  
  -as an optional extra you could put some chocolate in the raw side of the batter when frying like I did.
  

Spiced Pumpkin Pie

It’s that time of year again where we go sugar and pumpkin crazy and rightly so. However rather than butchering a perfectly edible pumpkin, with the traditional triangle eyes and jiggered teeth, cook with it. This pie is spiced with flavours I associate with Halloween and bonfire night; I’m talking about the dark brown sugar, ginger and cinnamon associated with parkin, the caramel surrounding a toffee apple and the autumnal smell of the roasted pumpkin seeds. Using the short crust I prepared earlier on the blog, the pie has a crumbly texture with smooth filling topped with a crunchy, nutty top. You need to stop reading this dragged out prologue and get the oven on and start making this pie!

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  What you need:

  • 500 g of pumpkin
  • 200 ml of cream
  • 75 g of dark brown sugar
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1tsp of ground cinnamon 
  • 2 inch of stem ginger in syrup
  • ¼ of nutmeg
  • 300 g of pre made short crust pastry
  • 100 g of caster sugar

  
  

  How to make it:

  1. Chop up your pumpkin into large chunks and place in a 180^oC oven for 20 - 30 minutes until it starts taking on some golden colours.  Meanwhile start work on your pumpkin seed praline by scooping out the pumpkin seeds and washing them to separate them from the fibrous flesh. Pat dry and place the seeds in the oven for 20 minutes, until they start smelling nutty and just begin to take on a golden colour. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool.
  2. While various components of the pumpkin are roasting away roll out your pastry –you want it to be 1-1.5 cm thick so you might have to let it warm up slightly so you can roll it out. Place the pastry in a 22 cm flan tin (one where the bottom pushes out is best) pricking the pastry with a fork all over. Once pricked place some tin foil /greaseproof paper on top and then some baking beans / dry rice / lentils to ensure the pastry stays flat when blind baking. Place the pastry in a 180 ^oC oven for 20 minutes.
  3. While the pastry is cooking make the pie filling. In a saucepan bring all the spices, dark brown sugar and cream to a simmer and remove from the heat and let that cool. Once cooled to an ambient temperature whisk together 3 beaten eggs and add to the cream spiced mixture. Finally using a blender blitz the cooled roasted pumpkin and creamy egg mixture together. Once smooth pour into your cooled pastry case and cook for 30 - 40 minutes at 170^oC. The top of the pie should have a golden colour while still retaining a wobble in the centre.
  4. Finish the pie by making a caramel, heating the caster sugar with 5 tbsp of water in a non-stick frying pan – do not stir the sugar ever! Stirring will prevent a caramel from forming and you’ll just end up with a pan full of crystallised sugar. Simply swirl the pan so all the sugar eventually dissolves and melts. Once a golden caramel has formed throw in your roasted seeds and mix them in quickly with a spatula. After all the seeds have been coated with caramel pour the molten mix onto some greaseproof paper and allow the caramel to cool and harden. Once the caramel has set break it up into small pieces and scatter them on your pie.

  -As with all sweet pies pour some cream on and stuff it in your face. Also sprinkle some sea salt on your molten caramel for an extra hit of contrasting flavour. 

Rhubarb Pannacotta

I will start by saying that I am not a massive fan of pannacotta - I usually think that it is a bit bland and subsequently a waste of being bad. I wanted to strike against the mild pannacotta and stuff some flavour in there in the form of rhubarb. Rhubarb can divide a crowd - some like it, some don’t, with school dinners being the source of the problem to those that loathe it. Breaking this down further how did school dinners ruin rhubarb’s chance of becoming a popular pudding filling? 1- Over cooked rhubarb becomes stringy which doesn’t exactly have the most appealing texture and appearance and 2- A lack of sugar leaves an overwhelming sourness on the palette. This recipe boils the rhubarb and extracts the juice which is then combined with sugar and cream, removing any chance of it being overwhelmingly sour and all those stringy bits too. Try this recipe and convince your friends and yourself that rhubarb is delicious and not something to be afraid of! – Except for the leaves as they’re poisonous. In summary, the leaves contain oxalic acid ~0.5%, and when in the body the acid bit falls off the molecule leaving behind oxalate which inhibits the enzyme lactate dehydrogenase, leading us to stop producing usable energy from glucose. I wouldn’t panic too much as you would have to eat kilos of the stuff, and before then the laxative properties of the leaves would let you know you ate an abundant amount!

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  What you need to make 4:

  
  

  • 135 g of rhubarb (plus an extra stick for the sauce)
  • 300 ml of double cream
  • 80 g of caster sugar (plus an extra 2 tbsp for the sauce)
  • 1 star anise
  • Half a tsp of vanilla extract /paste
  • 1 lemon
  • 2 leaves of gelatine 

  
  

  How to make it:

  
  

  1. Place your gelatine in a bowl and cover with cold water to soften.
  2. Chop up the rhubarb, throw it in a sauce pan and just cover with water. Bring the pan to the boil and simmer until the rhubarb has gone soft – by this point the water should have taken on a red/pink colour. Sieve the rhubarb but don’t press the rhubarb through the sieve, just let it drain and cool. You should have 140 ml of resulting rhubarb juice (if you don’t dilute it to 140 ml).
  3. To the rhubarb juice add the zest of a lemon, vanilla, the cream and 80 g of sugar. Place the mixture onto a moderate heat until it starts to simmer. At this point add in the soft gelatine and whisk to ensure it is fully dissolved and evenly distributed.  Let the mixture come to room temperature then pour it into your ramekins. Cover each with cling film and place them in the fridge overnight to set. 
     
     -as a side note do not use powdered gelatine because I find that it doesn't evenly distribute itself throughout your mixture, resulting in jelly spears in your finished pannacotta.
     
  4. When you’re about to serve take your extra rhubarb stick and slice into fine batons (as shown in picture VII) - you don’t want too many just enough to flavour your sauce. Throw the rhubarb in a frying pan and add in enough water to come halfway up the side of the rhubarb sticks. Squeeze in a little lemon juice, 2 tbsp of sugar and a star anise. Quickly bring to the boil and let the ingredients cool and infuse into your sauce.
  5. When serving run a small knife around your pannacotta and place the ramekin into a bowl full of boiling water for 10 – 20 seconds (this will melt the outside of the gel enabling you to easily release the pannacotta from the ramekin). Place your serving plate on top of the ramekin and flip everything over and the pannacotta should fall out. Pour over 1-2 tablespoons of your cooled sauce and serve with a sprig of mint.

  
  

Cherry and Sailor Jerry Rum Jam

While it may not seem the season to eat jam on toast and jam related puddings it is the season to make jam. All the excess fruit that we cannot eat right now can be preserved, allowing us to enjoy the last summers bounty all the way through until next summer. Making jam is easier than you think and it allows you to select British local fruit at it’s best to make the finest tasting jam! This recipe is also to mark the start of Talking Pork’s fundraiser, a BBQ food van that will only use the best local produce for seasonal traditional BBQ, but I will talk more about this project later. 

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  What you need:

  • 500g Cherries, stones removed
  • 500g High pectin jam sugar
  • 1 lemon, juice and zest
  • 50ml Sailor Jerry rum (or any spiced rum - I like the vanilla flavour in Sailor J’s)
  • 4 Clean jars with lids

  
  

  How to make it:

  1. Start by removing the stems and stones from the cherries – I found the easiest way to do this was to don a pair of rubber gloves, remove the stem and squeeze the cherry until the stone pops out. You may find this works better on riper fruit, so an alternative is to slice around the cherry, twist until it separates into two halves and remove the stone this way. The gloves are necessary if you are doing a larger batch as the cherries stain your hands.
  2. When you have completed this arduous task quarter the cherries and put them into a large saucepan. Add the zest and juice of the lemon and simmer for about 10 minutes until the cherries soften.
  3. Meanwhile, wash the jars in soapy water, rinse away any suds and place on a baking tray. Put these into a pre-heated oven at around 150°C and keep them in the oven until all moisture has evaporated, leaving the jars sterile (this will take around 10 minutes).
  4. Once the cherries have softened add the jam sugar and stir until you can no longer see the white granules. Turn the heat up and bring to a boil – if you have a sugar thermometer boil until the jam reaches 105°C. You can also check if the jam is at the setting point by spooning a little onto a cold plate (see image VIII) – if it is ready it should set quickly and have a wrinkled surface when pushed with a spoon.
  5. At this point you can throw the rum in – the alcohol will evaporate instantly because of the high temperature (boiling point of ethanol 78 ^oC), leaving a wonderful spiced vanilla smell and flavour. Remove from the heat.
  6. Bring your jars out of the oven and fill a jug with jam. Holding a jar with a tea towel so as not to burn yourself, pour the hot jam into the jar and tightly screw the lid on. Repeat this process until you run out of jam – this amount should roughly fill about 3-4 jam jars, depending on their size. Turn the jars over when you have put the lids on to create a vacuum and thus seal the jars correctly. Let them cool completely.
     
     -Store the sealed jars of jam in a cool dark place. Once opened keep refrigerated.

  
  

Non-bake Strawberry Cheesecake

I’m no massive fan of the unbaked cheesecake but it’s handy when you don’t have loads of free time to make a baked one.  With that sterling introduction I have to say that this cheesecake is super easy to make, really quick, proper tasty and if I’m honest it’s super healthy because it has strawberries on top.

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   What you need:

  • 15 digestive biscuits
  • 3 tbsp of crunchy peanut butter
  • 60 g of unsalted butter
  • 200 ml of double cream
  • 200 g of mascarpone 
  • 4-5 tbsp of caster sugar
  • 1 tsp of vanilla extract
  • 1 large or 2 small punnets of strawberries 
  • A lemon

  
  

  How to make it:
  
  

  1. Start by making the base; put your biscuits in a blender to break them up into small pieces. Mix the biscuit crumbs with melted butter and peanut butter until well combined. Now take a 20 cm diameter flan tin / cheesecake tin and throw in your biscuit paste. Use your hands to spread the mixture across the entire base and up the sides of your tin, aiming for about 0.5 cm in thickness. Cool the base by putting it in the freezer for 30 minutes.
  2. Meanwhile make the filling by whipping up the double cream with the vanilla essence and 3 tbsp of sugar.  When whipping up cream do not use an electric mixer, do it by hand otherwise you can over whip the cream making it too firm or worse split.
  3. Into the cream add lemon zest and mascarpone, quickly whisking it all together.
  4. Make a strawberry sauce by taking half a large punnet of hulled (green tops removed) strawberries (about 20 strawberries) and put them in a pan with the juice of half a lemon and a tablespoon or two of caster sugar. Put the pan on a moderate heat until the strawberries break down, then blend the sauce and cool it.
  5. All that is left to do is to take your biscuit base out of the freezer, spoon on your cream filling roughly spreading it across the base, throw on hulled strawberries and pour over the sauce. 

Sticky Toffee Pudding

With the transition from the end of winter to spring I thought I would make a pudding that I think best combats the winter blues! I have kept the sponge in this recipe very light to remind us that it’s not early January and that….. Summer is coming.

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  What you need for 6 portions:

  
  

  For the sponge:
  

  • 75 g of dark muscovado sugar
  • 75 g of light muscovado sugar
  • 175 g of plain flour
  • 2 eggs 
  • 1 tsp of vanilla extract (NOT essence)
  • 50 g of butter 
  • 175 g of dates (you NEED the dates - without them it’s not sticky toffee pudding!)
  • 1 tsp of baking powder
  • AND 1 tsp of baking SODA 

  
  

  For the sticky sauce:
  

  • 250 ml of double cream
  • 75 g of dark brown sugar
  • 75 g of light muscovado sugar
  • 80 g of butter

  For serving sticky sauce:
  

  • 300 ml of double cream
  • 50 g light muscovado sugar
  • 50 g dark muscovado sugar
  • 1 tsp of vanilla extract 
  • 50 g of butter

  How to make it:

  
  

  1. This recipe is so easy and very quick to prepare, so here we go. For the sponge start by de-stoning the dates (if necessary) and finely chop the dates up. Put the dates in a bowl and cover with 275 ml of just off the boil water, and let them cool to room temperature.
  2. To make the sponge batter put your dates and water, butter, sugars and eggs into a blender (or you could do it with a hand blender) and blend until smooth. Then transfer to a big bowl and whisk in your flour and vanilla. –I didn’t put the flour in the blender with the wet ingredients because I didn’t want to “work the gluten”. By this I mean I don’t want the baked sponge texture to be in anyway like bread i.e. chewy. To stop a chewy cake / sponge from forming don’t over mix your flour with your wet ingredients. Right at the end whisk in your leavening agents, (the stuff that is going to make your sponge rise) like baking powder and baking soda.  You must add both, because they are slightly different and the combination yields a greater rise than just one of them.
  3. Quickly pour your batter into a buttered brownie tin or any other cake tin and place in the oven for 30 - 40 minutes at 180 ^oC.
  4. Each sauce follows the same preparation technique:
  5. Add the cream, butter and sugar into a sauce pan and melt everything together, then bring the liquid to just boiling then take off the heat.
  6. Repeat method for the serving sauce, not forgetting the vanilla.
  7. Once the sponge is cooked –springy to the touch and when stabbed with a skewer there is no raw batter on the skewer- pierce your sponge all over with a skewer and then pour over your first sticky sauce. Put the sponge under a hot grill until the top starts to bubble and then serve with the extra hot sticky sauce poured on. 

  -If you want to really indulge yourself you could pour on to extra cold double cream or really say goodbye to winter and make yourself some homemade custard!-

Valentine’s Day Tarte Tatin Treat

Chocolate is wonderful in deserts however it’s over done on Valentine’s Day. I ask you to stray from the crowd and make this instead; where nothing is going to impress your valentine more than a pudding made from your own puff pastry. Crisp, delicate, golden pastry is a perfect alternative to the expected chocolate desert.

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  What you will need:

  
  

  • 3 medium apples (pick some different varieties I went with a sweet pink lady and a couple of granny smiths.
  • ½ the portion of The Hangry Cook’s homemade pastry, see recipe. (When making The Hangry Cook’s homemade pastry make the full batch and freeze the unused half for another day). 
  • 100 g golden caster sugar
  • a good splash of rum / calvados (apple liquor) /amaretto or whatever you fancy
  • 1 tsp of vanilla extract (not essence) / 1 vanilla pod with the seeds removed
  • 50 g of butter
  • plain flour for dusting
  • 1 lemon

  How to make it:

  
  

  1. Start off by pre heating your oven to 190 oC. Rolling out your pastry 1 cm thick into a disk shape a couple of cm bigger than the frying pan you want to cook your Tarte Tatin in –use the flour to prevent the pastry sticking-. Once rolled out cover it and pop the pastry back in the fridge to prevent the butter from prematurely melting.
  2. Chop up the apples into quarters removing the core, keeping the skins on; the skins give the apples structure when cooked. – I used use some lemon juice to prevent the apples browning while chopping up the other apples, it also adds a bit of flavour.-
  3. Heat up your pan and pour in the sugar, making sure to keep the sugar level even, which in turn yields even heating i.e. you’re preventing the sugar burning. Quickly add a splash of spirit (in my case the rum) and let the sugar form a caramel. -If not all the sugar is dissolving swirl the pan, do not stir it! Stirring will cause the sugar to crystallise, and you will need to start again.- Boil the caramel until it’s a dark brown buttery colour.
  4. To the caramel add the apples and cook them for 5 mins until soft, they should be able to take a knife fairly easily. The apples should not be cooked to a mush/pulp!
  5. Quickly add the pastry on top of the apples in the pan and tuck in the pastry around the apples at the edge of the pan, being careful not to get the caramel on your skin the temperature is anywhere up to 190 oC! In the middle of the pastry cut a small hole using a knife to allow steam to escape.
  6. Place the whole pan into the oven for 30 minutes or until the pastry is golden in colour and cooked all the way through.
  7. Once cooked take it out of the oven, don’t let it cool, you need to flip the pie. Put a large plate on top of the pastry and flip the plate and pan at the same time. Tarte Tatin done.

  
  

  -serve with ice-cream, I practically like a real strawberry ice-cream with it. Happy Valentine’s Day!-

  
  

Spiced Crème Brûlée

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  What you need:

  • 4 ramekins 
  • 340 ml double cream
  • 70 g caster sugar
  • 4 eggs 
  • I tbsp vanilla extract / a vanilla pod
  • 40 g of stem ginger 
  • 1/2 a nutmeg
  • 2 tbsp of brown sugar / caster sugar

  
  

  How to cook it:

  
  

  1. Start off by heating up the cream with the vanilla, grated ginger and nutmeg until the cream starts to just boil, and then take it off the heat.
  2. Whisk 4 egg yolks with 70 g of sugar until smooth-ish and pale in colour. 
  3. While the cream is still warm whisk it into the egg mixture in batches, making sure everything is well combined. Then sieve the mixture back into the pan.
  4. Pour the mix into four individual ramekins ensuring the portion size is equal between them for even cooking. Place the ramekins into a roasting tray and the fill the tray with hot water from the kettle. The water level wants to be at least half way up the sides of the ramekin. 
  5. Put the tray in the oven at 150 oC for 35 – 40 mins. When you take them out make sure the centre is still wobbly.
  6. Remove them from the water bath, let them cool to room temperature and refrigerate for 1-2 hours.
  7. Thinly sprinkle on top the brown sugar / caster sugar then blow torch to caramelise - alternatively put under a red hot grill for 1 minute - creating the characteristic hard top. Make sure the top is cooled before serving.