Free – food and drink recipes

***I originally found the basis for this recipe in a collection edited by Alexa Stace, and have since tweaked it considerably to make it my kind of pudding – very intensely chocolatey, moist, and dense, and not too sweet. It doesn’t keep very well I’m afraid – it goes very hard when cold (which doesn’t stop the human dustbin in our house consuming it at whatever temperature and age he finds it, bless him).
This recipe is a good example of when cocoa can be a real boon – baked products are like alchemy in some ways – if you play around with ratios of ingredients too much, you get an inedible result. With chocolate flavoured products this can be a problem, as the fat content of proper chocolate can spoil a recipe – enter cocoa, which ups the anti by giving an intense chocolate flavour, without turning a sponge cake mixture into a greasy brick.
I added the cherries to give a bit of added interest to the recipe – but you could leave them out, or replace them with other dried fruit if you prefer – apricots, figs, mango or papaya should all give an equally palatable result.
Note: the pudding rises a LOT in the oven – it will look tiny when it first goes in the pudding basin, but don’t be tempted to use a smaller basin or you’ll end up with a horrible burnt mess on the bottom of the oven. Also, the pudding tends to absorb a lot of the moisture in the sauce, so you may want to serve the pudding with some pouring cream, custard, or icecream.
Makes 3-4 small but filling portions

Ingredients
Pudding:
30g (1oz) Butter, softened
60g (2oz) Caster Sugar
60g (2oz) Dark Chocolate
1 Large Egg
55g (2oz) Plain Flour
2? tsp Cocoa Powder
100g (3.5oz) Dried Cherries
? tsp Baking Powder
Sauce
150ml (5 fl oz) Milk
30g (1oz) Butter
40g (1.5 oz) Dark Chocolate
1? tbsp Granulated Sugar
1 tbsp Golden Syrup

Method
Measure out the sauce ingredients first, and either heat gently in a small saucepan over a low heat for about 10 minutes, or heat in the microwave in suitable container for about 2 minutes at high power. Whisk the ingredients well to combine them and set aside.
Grease a 1.1 litre (2 pint) pudding basin. In a separate bowl, beat the butter and caster sugar together until pale and fluffy. Meanwhile, melt the chocolate by the usual method (in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water), and then stir it into the butter mixture. Beat in the egg thoroughly, and then sift the flour and cocoa into the bowl, and fold in thoroughly. Then stir in the cherries.
Pour the sauce into the greased pudding basin, and add the pudding mixture on top of this. Bake in a preheated oven at 180?C (355?F, Gas Mark 4) for about 40 minutes, and serve immediately.

Calories per portion: about 540 kcal
Fat per portion: about 28g-

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An apple crisp is a tasty dessert that will about make each member of the family go crazy. The heavenly scent while it is being baked, together with the sweet taste makes this dessert excellent for any meal. It’s a flavorful treat that almost everybody will surely love and enjoy. There isn’t any big day wherein an apple crisp isn’t served. You can either prepare it for your special guests, or just have it on an ordinary day. It is your call.

Although there are numerous kinds of fruit crisps recipe, an apple crisp is the most commonly served dessert on the table. To basically describe it, it’s a sort of dessert that has fruits on the bottom layer topped with sweet toppings.

you’ll notice that most cafes have their own apple crisp specialty but do you know that you can make your awfully own? That’ll be great, wouldn’t it? To get started, you need to prepare six cups of cut apples. Make sure that the apples you are about to use are fresh and delicious. 2 cups of flour, two cups of brown sugar, one and a half cup of butter, one and a half tablespoon of cinnamon, cup of quick oats, half cup butter or marg and to complete the ingredients, prepare two tablespoons of nutmeg.

Take out an oblong baking pan. Preheat the cooker to three hundred and seventy five degrees Fahrenheit. While waiting for the oven to get heated, put butter or margarine along the sides and the base of your baking pan. It is endorsed, but not always needed that the scale of your baking pan is 9 by 11. If you’ve got something similar to the mentioned pan size, then it will do. Applying butter along the sides and on the bottom of the pan serves as the oil.

Next step is to have the sliced apples placed in your baking pan. Ensure that the apples are uniformly spread out. Make sure that the apples will go past the peak of the baking pan. After you are done with the apples, put it aside and take out a bowl. This time, place the flour, fast oats, brown sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon. Mix them altogether and don’t stop till it is totally blended, or until its texture is crumbly.

After which, you can either use your hands or a nice fork to uniformly add the mixture on top of the apples. Alright, it is almost done. The last thing that you ought to do is to put your baking pan in the cooker for approximately thirty mins. Remember, the time that is required to cook the tasty apple crisp will rely on the cooker that you are using. Just ensure that before you take out your impeccably delicious treat, the apples are tender, but still juicy and the topping is remarkably crispy.

That’s it! An apple crisp is extremely simple to prepare, right? It is counseled to serve your ultimate apple crisp pudding while young. If you desire, you may have it served with a cup of ice cream or vanilla to make it more tempting, and to bring out its awesomeness.

Try my favorite apple crisp recipe here: http://applecrisprecipe.org

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