Millionaire’s Shortbread with Salty Peanuts

Peanut Millionaire's Shortbread - 3


Millionaire’s shortbread
is something of staple in my baking repertoire, second only to brownies, perhaps cookies, in the list of simple treats I’ll bake when called on to bring something sweet to a special occasion. Like brownies, I’ve got a favourite recipe (ok three, on rotation) but I’m not averse to a little tinkering here and there. These lovely little morsels were my contribution to a baby shower this weekend just gone, and although it’s hard to beat the classic, I may have to throw a handful of salty peanuts into every batch of millionaire’s shortbread I make from now on, they’re so damn delicious.  Continue reading

Chocolate Peanut Butter Feuilletine Cheesecake Bars

peanut butter cheesecake

Creamy peanut butter, crunchy biscuit & crisp feuilletine

This post started life as something very different. Very different and infinitely more virtuous.

While the content of this blog will most likely have helped you arrive at the correct conclusion that I’ve got a very sweet tooth, eating healthy food is also important to me. At the weekends I’ll bake with abandon, often experimenting for meals with family and friends or rustling up the ultimate in comfort food to ease us back into the working week come Sunday. The other five days I’m a little more restrained, as likely to enjoy a bowl of Greek yoghurt and honey or something simple and fruity as anything more button-bustingly flamboyant. I’m therefore always on the look-out for interesting ideas for sweet treats to enjoy mid-week: recipes that are wholesome enough to eat every day but every bit as delicious as their more calorific counterparts. Continue reading

Chocolate Coated Peanut Butter Flapjacks with Crystallized Peanuts

homemade_flapjacks

Silky milk chocolate coated peanut butter flapjacks

How many recipes have you made in your lifetime? How many more do you think you might still? And just how many are left languishing inside eagerly acquired cookbooks, on pages torn from magazines, on bookmark bars and Pinterest boards, never to see the light of day as you return to tried, tested and trusted recipes you’ve always enjoyed?

According to a poll commissioned by the Good Food Channel last year, the average British woman can cook just seven meals from scratch, with eighty percent admitting to churning out the same thing over and again, and only two percent turning to cookbooks or online for a source of inspiration. I don’t know about you, but as a member of that minority percentage, my problem is less how to get out of a cooking rut and more deciding what to make next from the ever-growing reams of recipe ideas accumulating in print, online and in my head. Continue reading