Peanut butter and salted caramel ice cream

Behold, the king of ice cream!  It’s so up my strasse it’s coming back again.  I made an egg custard ice cream (the recipe for that is from Nigella Summer) and then added peanut butter and some salted caramel sauce I had in.  And it worked.  Oh, how it worked.

Treacle sponge pudding

This beauty, a comfort food classic, is from Paul Hollywood’s British Baking.  I didn’t trust Paul’s timings after the last cake I made from this book and carried on steaming for 40 minutes longer than he suggested, mainly as all those other puddings I’ve made have taken longer and I also once read that you can’t overcook them.  All this aside, this was a stunner - it looked stunning and tasted stunning.  Today I had it with homemade white chocolate ice cream but would go with custard in the winter

White chocolate ice cream. Vanilla shortbread. Meringues

The ice cream and the shortbread is from Nigella Summer and the meringues from Delia’s complete cookery course.  This ice cream is the absolute bomb and by far the best I’ve done so far- my boyf’s son thinks that caramel pieces might just finish it off  so I’ll give that a go next week.  So, this is a kind of Eton mess - a Manchester mess if you will.  The shortbread is very short and nice with a coffee but I doubt I’ll make them again and certainly not for having with ice cream as Nigella suggests.

Rum and raisin ice cream

Again, getting my mum to eat pudding has become harder and whilst we have been tucking in to the amazing puddings I’ve been making recently she just sits there and watches so I thought this would entice her and it did!  It feels to me like taking a trip back to the 1970s but the flavour of the real ice cream sans chemicals and preservatives is just great, the rum really coming through and making its presence felt without overpowering it.  Also, making this and with my 2 previous attempts at ice cream not being as successful as they could have been, this was bob on proper ice cream, so now I know how to do it properly- nothing is going to stop me now!

Fish tray-bake, jersey royals, simple spinach salad

Had my fish loving mum over for dinner tonight and as her dementia gets worse so does her appetite and she just doesn’t get through a Sunday dinner like she used to - it’s also hot today, too hot for a roast, so I gave this from Jamie’s 30 minute meals a go.  I supplemented it with aubergine stuffed with feta and mint (from Nigella Summer) and the whole thing worked really well.  The tray bake which had just 10 minutes under a hot grill was really lovely - better than I imagined it would.  That’s the thing about Jamie that I have come to see over the years - his flavours are fantastic.  I added a monkfish tail to his recipe (only because it was on offer in Morrissons) but it would have also been great without.