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Vanity and the Bluestocking

Vanity and the Bluestocking

Category Archives: Food

The Darkest, Dampest, Deadliest Chocolate Brownies of All Time

11 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by Beth McNally in Food, Recipes

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Chocolate Brownie Recipe

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I’m going to tell you a secret. The kind of secret that your friends will plead for, one that will make grown men fall in love with you and your enemies turn green with envy. This is hands down the best recipe for chocolate brownies that I have ever found. Milkshakes bring all the boys to the yard? Pshaw! These chocolate brownies work much better. Three thoughts that might help:

1. You must – absolutely must – use real butter and dark brown sugar. Not golden caster sugar, you want the most flavourful dark brown sugar you can find. Billington’s molasses sugar is the best, but Sainsburys’ dark brown soft sugar is surprisingly good.

2. You can replace part or all of the flour with cocoa powder for an even more chocolatey (and less sweet) result – and the more cocoa you add the softer the brownie will be. It will take longer to cook, and you will lose the crumbly, friable crust you get on brownies, but instead you will create something closer to a chocolate brownie fondant. It’s lovely either way – experiment and see what you prefer.

3. I tend to leave out the vanilla essence, and scatter in a handful of raspberries or morello cherries…

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Fluffy slices of cardamom cloud

07 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by Beth McNally in Food, Recipes

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Cardamom bread recipe, pulla recipe

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The rain is lashing the windows and the wind is howling round our little cottage here in Somerset, so – clearly – the only thing to do is to fill the house with warm and cozy baking smells. There’s a traditional Scandinavian bread called pulla, which I’ve always wanted to try making – it’s a standard bread dough enriched with butter and eggs and a little extra sugar and infused with cardamom, my favourite spice. Continue reading →

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My Love is like… A Green Green Cabbage?

07 Monday May 2012

Posted by Beth McNally in Food

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recipe, Spring greens

Last Sunday we had a big family meal at the Methuen Arms in Corsham, and it was hands down the best roast dinner I’ve had in….well….a very long time! All of the food was lovely, but the dish that really stood out was – of all things – the cabbage! They’d somehow managed to create cabbage that was meltingly tender, really full flavoured and savoury (without even a whisper of the dreaded sulphurous tang of overcooked cabbage) and deep deep green. It had hints of garlic, and had obviously been tossed in butter before it was served….. Even the Renaissance Man liked it!

Ever since, I’ve been trying to work out how they got the cabbage so tender without overcooking. Here is my first attempt…. Continue reading →

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A Cheesy Valentine

18 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by Beth McNally in Food

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Cheese review, Fine Cheese Company, Food

The Renaissance Man is a troublesome creature – he most inconveniently has his birthday between Christmas and Valentines day, so by the time we get there I’ve usually run out of present ideas. This year I managed to surprise him though… He’s a big cheese fan, so rather than the usual chocolates or flowers I got him a box of lovely cheeses from the Fine Cheese Company. Here they are after we’d been attacking them for a while:

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On the top left is the Vacherin Mont d’Or, a really gorgeous, unctuous cheese wrapped in spruce bark. You can really taste the resin in the cheese around the edge, but the middle is much creamier which makes a lovely contrast. To the right is the Shropshire Blue – really intense and earthy, but with none of the harshness that blue cheese can have. Oddly, it goes really well with cinnamon biscuits. On the bottom left is the Crottin de Chavignol, probably my least favourite of the selection. It’s a nice, hard, well flavoured goats cheese, but the rind has a mushroomy flavour which doesn’t really work for me. The last one is my favourite – the cave aged Premier Cru Gruyère Von Mühlenen. It’s a fabulously intense and savoury flavour, but with a slightly nutty sweetness too. Complex and glorious – I can see why it’s been named world champion cheese three times!

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Recent Posts

  • Collecting art on a budget
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  • Homemade rose essential oil by any other name would smell as sweet
  • The Darkest, Dampest, Deadliest Chocolate Brownies of All Time

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