Easy Jam Tarts for BLW!

For those who haven't heard of it BLW stands for baby-led weaning which is what we've started doing with our daughter in the last month or so. Basically it involves skipping the purees involved in weaning and just letting your baby feed themselves. If you're interested in finding out more Gill Rapley has written a great book and the baby led weaning forum is full of useful advice.

But back to cooking...the point of baking for your baby is that you should avoid giving them sugar, hence all the experimentation recently! So here's a recipe which I made last night and proved very popular with the little teacup this morning. It's a very easy recipe to scale up or down as the quantities are the same.

Jam Tarts

Ingredients
100g butter
100g plain flour
100g wholemeal flour
a few tablespoons of cold water
a few tablespoons of sugar free jam (I used cherry St Dalfour)

Recipe
1. Combine the flours and rub in the butter until it resembles breadcrumbs.
2. Use a little water to form a dough. Wrap the dough in a plastic bag and chill in the fridge for half an hour or so.
3. Grease a patty tin and preheat the oven to gas mark 6 (200 degs C / 400 degs F).
4. Roll out the pastry and stamp out circles using a pastry cutter. If you fancy it also cut out the same number of stars to put on top.
5. Put the circles in the tin and top each with a few teaspoons of jam and a star (if using).
6. Bake in the oven for 15-20mins til lightly browned.
7. Leave to cool before eating.

And here's the results being enjoyed for breakfast!

Spiced Apple, Hazelnut and Date Loaf

We have a load of apples at the moment, from a neighbour's tree (thank you!), that needed something doing with them. We've frozen lots, stewed lots more and this cake was the first of the baking to start using them up! It's adapted (a lot!) from a recipe in a recent Sainsbury's magazine - the original has parsnips and apricots in, here's the recipe if you're interested. My version has apple, hazelnuts and dates in but still uses the original combination of spices and is really very easy to make.

Spiced Apple, Hazelnut and Date Loaf

Ingredients
150g plain flour
150g wholemeal spelt flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
10 cardamon pods, seeds removed and crushed
4 eggs, lightly beaten
75ml date syrup
70g pear and apple spread
50ml apple juice concentrate
100ml vegetable oil
2 apples, peeled, cored and roughly diced
100g chopped hazelnuts
100g chopped dried dates
Recipe
1. Preheat oven to 180 deg C (350 degs F / gas mark 4). Grease a 2lb loaf tin.
2. Mix the flours, baking powder, spices, eggs, date syrup, pear and apple spread, apple juice concentrate and oil together in a bowl.
3. Fold in the apple, hazelnuts and dates and transfer to the prepared tin.
4. Bake for an hour and a half until golden and risen and a skewer comes out clean.
5. Leave to cool in the tin then turn out.

October Bake it! - Ginger Cake

I enjoy 'normal' baking too, i.e. with lots of sugar, and have been following a few blogs on the subject. There's so many out there but I do enjoy the blogs of the Great British Bake Off finalists, Miranda Gore Browne and the Pink Whisk. The Pink Whisk introduced me to the Bake It! club, recipes are posted each month and everyone has a go at the same recipe. So... I thought why not try and adapt a Bake It recipe to be free of refined sugar? The October recipe is Ginger Cake and here's my adaptation :-). It tastes good and looks just like the original really! The method is very similar, I just changed a few of the ingredients. The original recipe is here.

Ginger Cake
Ingredients
125g butter
80g granulated fruit sugar (I used Fruisana)
85g date syrup
85g apple and pear fruit spread
200ml milk
250g self raising flour
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
3 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
2 eggs
a little sugar-free apricot jam

Recipe
1. Grease a 2lb loaf tin. Preheat the oven to 160 degs C (gas mark 3).
2. Melt the butter, fruit sugar, date syrup, fruit spread and milk in a saucepan. Leave to cool for five minutes.
3. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and add the melted ingredients.
4. Beat the eggs and add to the mixture. Stir well.
5. Pour into the prepared tin and cook for 45-50 mins til a skewer comes out clean.
6. Leave to cool in the tin for 15 minutes then remove to a cooling rack.
7. Brush with a little sugar-free apricot jam.

 I'm afraid I then cheated a little as I wanted to ice the cake but haven't figured out how to make icing without icing sugar. So I made a ginger buttercream icing (using 40g butter, 100g icing sugar, 20g finely chopped stem ginger and 1tbsp milk) and decorated it using slices of stem ginger. Here's the result (after a few slices were already eaten!):

Fruit and Nut Slice

Over the weekend I made (and ate most of!) this lovely fruit and nut slice. It is very easy to make in between looking after my lovely little daughter and tastes excellent! I would describe it as somewhere between a flapjack, a cereal bar and one of those nice Rawr bars you can buy. It uses pear and apple spread to sweeten it, which looks disturbingly like marmite but doesn't taste like it! The recipe is from Jane Sen's "Healing Foods Cookbook" which also has some other nice sugar-free cookies and cakes... looking forward to trying them soon :-).

Fruit and Nut Slice
Ingredients
150g (5oz) raisins
150g (5oz) nuts (I used hazelnuts but any would do)
4tsp pear and apple spread (or other fruit concentrate)
85ml (3fl oz) sunflower oil
75g (3oz) oats
150g (5oz) plain flour
85ml (3 fl oz) water

Recipe
1. Grease a 7" flan case. Preheat oven to 190 degs C (gas 5 / 375 deg F).
2. Blend the dried fruit and nuts til finely chopped.
3. Mix all the ingredients together til well combined.
N.B. the recipe calls for everything to be added to the blender, mine wouldn't have coped with that so just mixing it in a bowl worked fine! I guess you'd have a smoother mix if you blended everything.
4. Pour/press the sticky dough into the flan case.
5. Cook for 30 mins or until browned.
6. Cut in case and leave to cool before serving.

Sorry no photos... it got eaten too quickly!

Scones

Afternoon tea is a great English tradition and wouldn't be complete without some scones. I've never added sugar to mine, after all they are normally served with plenty of jam so why add even more sugar! And if you're feeling virtuous then you can stick with the sugar-free jams such as St. Dalfour or Meridian. I'm afraid we'd run out of sugar-free jam so I had to eat one with real apricot jam on, terrible! These also freeze really well and can be defrosted in a low oven so everyone thinks you just baked them!

Sultana Scones (makes approx 6 scones)

Ingredients
8 oz self-raising flour
1 1/2 oz butter
2 tbsp sultanas
1/4 pint milk
pinch of salt
Recipe
1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 7 (220 degs C / 425 degs F) and grease a baking tray.
2. Add the salt to the flour. Rub the butter into the flour.
3. Add the sultanas and mix to a soft dough with the milk.
4. Knead a little til smooth then roll out (approx 1" thick).
5. Cut out scones using a round cutter.
6. Put on baking tray and bake for 12-15 minutes til lightly brown.

Chocolate Brownies

Today I thought I'd try out this recipe I found on the Vegetarian Society website. It sounded simple enough but I admit I was dubious that chocolate brownies could be made without sugar. However, I'm now convinced, they taste lovely! Quite sweet, although as a bit of a chocoholic I'd probably like them a bit more chocolatey. We had some for desert with some nice thick plain yoghurt and they were delicious.

Chocolate Brownies 

Ingredients
8 oz\250g dates
4 oz\100g butter
1 egg, beaten
1 very ripe banana, mashed
2½ oz\60g wholemeal flour
2 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp cocoa powder
3 oz\110g walnuts, roughly chopped
1 tsp\5ml vanilla essence

Recipe
1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4 (180°C / 350°F). Grease a square cake tin (about 18cm x 18cm/7" x 7").
2. Put the dates into a saucepan and add water to just cover them. Cook for 5-10 minutes or until softened. Puree the dates until smooth and allow to cool a little.
3. Cream together the dates and the butter/margarine while the dates are still warm, until light and fluffy.
4. Add the egg, the mashed banana and vanilla essence and mix well.
5. Sieve the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder and add to the mixture.
6. Fold in the walnuts and turn the mixture into the prepared tin.
7. Bake in the preheated oven for 30-35 minutes, or until the brownies feel fairly firm to the touch.

I used a 8" round tin as I didn't have a convenient sized square one. This took an additional 5 mins in the oven.

Banana Bread

This is a yummy recipe from the baby-led weaning forum. DD hasn't tried it yet as she's too small but in a few weeks she might!

Banana Bread
Ingredients
8oz Banana (approx two bananas)
3oz Raisins
4oz Plain flour (I used wholemeal)
3 tsp Baking powder
2oz Butter
1 egg
1/2 tsp mixed spice

Recipe
1. Preheat oven to gas mark 4 (180 deg C/ 350 deg F) and grease a 2 lb loaf tin.
2. Mix together the flour, baking powder, spice and raisins.
3. Melt the butter.
4. Whisk egg and mash in the banana.
5. Fold into the dry mixture and add the melted butter.
6. Put in the prepared tin and bake for 45 mins to an hour until a skewer comes out clean.

Sugar free living continues!

OK, so I wasn't very good at posting on here during August but we tried out lots of nice food and didn't miss the sugar much at all! I think it has really cured me and my OH of our craving for sugar and, although we will eat sugar occasionally, I think we realise that it's a treat and not a necessity.

So the sugar-free living will largely continue, albeit with a treat now and then :-).

Garibaldi Biscuits

Due to their appearance Garibaldi biscuits have always been known as 'squashed fly' biscuits in my family but they taste much nicer than their name implies! Relatively simple to make too, if you can manage pastry then you'll manage these!

Garibaldi Biscuits
Ingredients
100 g plain flour (I used half plain, half wholemeal spelt)
50 g butter
1 tsp apple juice concentrate
a little water
a generous amount of currants

Recipe
1. Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles bread crumbs.
2. Add the apple juice concentrate and enough water to form a dough.
3. Chill the dough in the fridge for half an hour or so.
4. Divide the mixture into two. Roll one half out as thinly as possible in a rectangular shape and transfer to a greased baking sheet. (N.B. Use a baking sheet with no sides so that you can roll over it with the rolling pin.)
5. Sprinkle generous amounts of currants over the rolled out dough.
6. Roll out the second half of the dough to roughly the same size and thickness.
7. Using a pastry brush wet the edges of the dough on the baking sheet with water.
8. Place the second piece of dough on top of the first. Roll with a rolling pin until the currants are just showing through.
9. Score with a knife into rectangular pieces (but don't cut through).
10. Bake for fifteen minutes at gas mark 5 (375 deg F / 190 deg C) until golden brown.
11. Cool and then break along the score marks.

Sugar-free Jam - my first attempt!

A lot of the recipes call for use of sugar-free jam. I've been buying this but really I'd like to make my own. So after searching on the internet I found a few recipes and tried this one out. I have to say it was much quicker and easier than making 'normal' jam. The resulting jam wasn't as sweet as the shop brought sugar-free jams so I think next time I'd add more juice concentrate. I was lucky enough to find a lot of mirabelles (small, sweet, yellow plums) growing for free in the hedgerow so made the jam from these. However, I'm sure you could use any variety of sweet plums if you don't have mirabelles!

Sugar-Free Mirabelle Jam
Ingredients
900 g mirabelles (or other plums)
90 ml apple juice concentrate
120 ml liquid pectin (I used Certo)
Recipe
1.  Stone and chop fruit. Place in pan with apple juice concentrate.
2. Simmer for ten minutes.
3. Boil hard for ten minutes.
4. Add the liquid pectin and pot in sterilised jam jars.

Fruity Bread

We've been making our own bread for years now as it tastes so much nicer than the supermarket stuff! My hubby likes bread for breakfast and I'll have it occassionally too so this is a recipe I often make for our 'breakfast bread'. It's open to endless variation of the ingredients - different flours, fruit, nuts, spices, etc. A lot of recipes use sugar or honey to mix with the yeast and liquid but you don't really need it in my experience.

Cinnamon and Sultana Plait

Ingredients
500 g plain flour
500 g wholemeal flour
2 tsp salt
2 tsp quick yeast (I use Doves farm's one)
2 tsp cinnamon
lots of sultana's - as much as you fancy
1 egg
approx 500 ml of warm liquid (I use half water/half milk)

Recipe
1. Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl (including the yeast and sultanas).
2. Add the egg.
3. Begin to add the liquid, mixing well, until you have a soft, sticky dough that comes away from the bowl. You may need more or less liquid depending on your flour so don't just add all the liquid at once!
4. Knead well for 5-10 mins.
5. Cover with a damp cloth and leave to rise for approx two hours until doubled in size.
6. Grease a large baking sheet.
7. Knock back dough and knead for a few minutes.
8. Divide into three and form a long 'sausage' from each.
9. Put on baking tray and plait to form your bread. Dust with plain flour (if you wish).
10. Cover with a damp cloth and leave to rise for approx an hour.
11. Preheat oven to gas 6 (200 deg C / 400 deg F).
12. Bake loaf for approx 40 mins til crusty. If in doubt insert a skewer to check it's not still 'doughy' inside.

Roast Gammon

I guess we don't often realise how much sugar can be in savoury things too. For example, we had a gammon joint for cooking but a lot of recipes call for a sweet glaze. It does taste nice with a sweet glaze so I wanted to create a sugar-free one and here it is! The gammon tasted lovely so it's well worth it.


Roast Gammon
Ingredients
1 kg gammon
90 ml apple juice
60 ml date syrup (I used Meridian's)
1 tsp mustard
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sherry (or other alcohol)
Pinch cayenne pepper

Recipe
1. Put the gammon in a saucepan of cold water and bring to the boil. Simmer for half an hour (or fifteen minutes per lb if you have a different weight gammon).
2. Meanwhile put all the rest of the ingredients in a saucepan and simmer til reduced to approx one third.
3. Preheat oven to gas 9 (240 deg C / 475 deg F).
4. Carefully remove skin from gammon and coat with half of glaze mixture.
5. Put in oven and immediately reduce temperature to gas 4 (180 deg C/ 350 deg F). Roast for 35 mins (or ten mins per lb plus an additional 15 mins), basting half way through with rest of glaze and any juices from the meat.
6. Leave the gammon to rest, covered with foil, for fifteen minutes. Then serve.

Mmmm.. Chocolate cake!

Or, more specifically, sugar-free chocolate courgette cake! I know, it sounds a little strange but it is yummy! I adapted a recipe from Nigel Slater and it's a great way to use up courgette.

Chocolate Courgette Cake
Ingredients
200 g butter
4 tbsp sugar-free jam (I used apricot)
2 eggs
150 g courgette (approx one medium size one)
200 g plain flour
2 tbsp cocoa powder
pinch of salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla essence
60 g walnuts
80 g sultanas

Recipe
1. Preheat oven to gas mark 4 (180 deg C/ 350 deg F) and grease a 2 lb loaf tin.
2. Cream the butter and jam. Add the eggs.
3. Grate the courgette and squeeze the excess moisture out before adding to the mixture.
4. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.
5. Put in prepared tin and bake for about an hour. (N.B. It seems to be a very moist cake but a skewer should come out clean when the cake is cooked.)

Picture to follow shortly...

More pickle!

Ok, some more pickle! Both me and my other half love bread and butter pickle. For those of you who haven't heard of it it's a pickle made from cucumbers and is for eating with bread and butter (not made from it!). It tastes especially good with some strong cheddar too. It normally contains sugar but having looked up a few recipes for pickling cucumbers I know that you can still preserve them without the sugar due to the vinegar and salt content. So I thought I'd use the normal recipe for it but omit the sugar. The recipe is courtesy of my mum this time!


Bread and Butter Pickle
Ingredients
1 large cucumber
1 red onion, sliced very thinly
1 green pepper, deseeded and cut into strips
1 1/2 tbsp coarse sea salt
300 ml white wine vinegar
50 ml apple juice concentrate (original recipe contains 275g caster sugar)
1 tbsp mustard seed
1 tsp celery seed or dill seed (I didn't have any so skipped this!)
5 cm stick of cinnamon
6 allspice berries
Pinch of cayenne pepper

Recipe
1. Peel cucumbers (if you wish) and slice thinly. Mix with onion, pepper and salt in a bowl.
2. Sit a plate on top of the bowl, weigh it down and leave in the fridge overnight.
3. Drain the vegetables and rinse under running water until they don't taste too salty.
4. Heat the vinegar, juice concentrate and spices and simmer for a few minutes.
5. Add the vegetables, stir once and bring to a bare simmer.
6. Put into hot, sterilised jars and put lids on.

Tastes better after maturing a while so leave it for a few weeks if you can! I haven't tried it yet but will soon as we have some nice cheddar in the fridge that would go perfectly....

Finally... some chocolate!

I wouldn't have thought it possible but this weekend we had chocolate moose for pudding! It was a rather unusual recipe and I was slightly dubious but it was very nice. It had a lovely smooth texture and did taste chocolatey. Nice time though I really have to use a much riper banana as you could taste that it wasn't that ripe! The recipe is vegan but we added a teaspoon of honey to make it a little sweeter (due to the aforementioned unripe banana!). Makes enough for two people

Chocolate Mousse
Ingredients
1 ripe avocado
1 ripe banana
1 tbsp cocoa powder
flavouring of choice - vanilla essence, grated orange rind, peppermint, etc

Recipe
1. Blend all ingredients together.
2. Serve and eat!

The recipe was from Star Khechara's "Holistic Beauty Book".

Pickle

Well yesterday the neighbour came over and asked if I wanted a rather large bag of runner beans as they were rather overwhelmed by the production of their plants! How could I refuse? And I had wanted to try out this recipe for a pickle after I saw it on TV. Pickles and chutneys often use sugar in so have been off the list for us. However, I quite like having some with some bread and cheese so I'm looking forward to trying this one. It's maturing for a bit now (although I don't think it needs to according to the recipe) and I shall report back soon....

Mixed Vegetable Pickle (from "The Edible Garden" series on BBC with Alys Fowler)

Ingredients
450 ml cider vinegar
50 ml apple juice concentrate
2 tsp salt
450 g green beans, strung and sliced (I used a mix of runner beans, yellow courgette and red pepper)
2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 habenero chilli, deseeded and sliced (I skipped this as didn't have any!)
5 cm piece cinnamon bark
2 bay leaves
Small sprig of winter savory
Pinch of black peppercorns

Recipe
1. Mix the vinegar and fruit juice concentrate in a bowl. Add more juice or vinegar to taste.
2. Add herbs/spices to vinegar mix and let everything marinate.
3. Chop the vegetables and add to the vinegar mix.
4. Put in a clean jar, squashing the vegetables in and ensuring they are covered with the vinegar mix. If not then add more vinegar/juice concentrate.

They can be eaten straight away but do improve with age. I couldn't fit mine in one jar so had to use two. I tried to share the spices/herbs between them so hopefully it's worked! Here's a picture of the finished product.

Day two - cookies and cake!

Well, to keep us going I tried a couple of recipes on day two and I have to say they have both vanished pretty quickly now! So quickly that I'm afraid there are no photos but I'll try and remember next time...

Firstly some cookies, the original recipe was courtesy of this excellent blog but I have adapted it slightly. These tasted great! Slightly less sweet then perhaps we're used to but the jam and the fruit does make it quite sweet enough. I took the cookies round a friends house and no-one even realised they hadn't any sugar in! I also made another version with ground ginger, sultanas and spelt flour and these were good too.

Walnut and Sultana Cookies

Ingredients

• 100 g butter
• 3 tbsp sugar free jam (I used St Dalfour apricot jam)
• 1 beaten egg
• 50 g ground almonds
• 50 g sultanas
• 30g chopped walnuts
• 100 g wholemeal flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp mixed spice

Recipe
1. Cream butter and jam together.
2. Add the egg and beat well.
3. Add the rest of the ingredients to make a sticky dough.
4. Spoon dollups of the mixture onto a baking sheet (I made twelve cookies) and flatten slightly with a fork.
5. Bake at gas mark 4 (180 deg C/ 350 deg F) for 15-20 mins til golden.


And I wanted something to take on a picnic to share. So I found this recipe for a fruit cake (from Rose Elliot's "New Complete Vegetarian" cookbook). This was really good too and surprisingly sweet, I don't think anyone would realise that it has no sugar in. I think it would make an excellent Christmas cake, perhaps with some pretty dried fruit put on the top before you cook it. The cake went down really well at the picnic and a couple of people asked for the recipe so it must have been good! The cake is also vegan.


Fruit Cake

Ingredients

• 225 g dates
• 275 ml water
• 450 g mixed dried fruit (I used sultanas and apricots)
• 175 g plain wholemeal flour
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp mixed spice
• grated rind of one orange or lemon (I hadn't any so just used a dash of lemon juice!)
• 40 g ground almonds
• 4 tbsp orange juice (again, I hadn't any so used apple juice)
• a few flaked almonds

Recipe

1. Preheat oven to gas 3 (160 deg C / 325 deg F). Grease and line a 2lb loaf tin.
2. Chop dates and add to saucepan with the water. Cook over a low heat til soft. Then remove from heat and mash to break up.
3. Add all the remaining ingredients (except for the flaked almonds) and mix well. Spoon into the tin and sprinkle the flaked almonds on top.
4. Bake for 1 1/2 hours until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
5. Cool slightly in tin and then turn out onto cooling rack.

Welcome!

Following a sudden realisation that we're eating way too many sweet things my hubby and I have decided to have a refined sugar-free August. So I've set up this blog to record how it goes and the recipes that we try.

The rules are - no refined sugar. To us that means no caster sugar, icing sugar, brown sugar, golden syrup, etc when we're cooking. Also it means not buying (and eating!) anything which contains glucose in it's various forms.  We've decided that honey and fructose are allowed although we shall try and keep these down too.

I think the most difficult challenge for me will be chocolate - I always have a piece (or two, or three...) of dark chocolate after dinner. It'll be a hard habit to break! For my OH I think the challenge is more to do with snacking as sweet things (such as biscuits, cakes) are so easy to snack on.

I hope you like the recipes and always appreciate any ideas you may have!