The Simple Things: English Summer Garden

I had a few quiet hours yesterday, so I decided to lend a hand in tidying up our garden; weeding, trimming, and pulling up old lettuces and overgrown radishes to be replaced with new seeds. Afterwards, I picked a punnet-full of our strawberries, and treated myself to some whilst I sat in the sunshine. The sweet peas have just begun to flower, so I cut a few to fill up my room with their delicate scent.

Take Three

#1. Taking advantage of later summer opening times, Mum and I treated ourselves to an ice cream at the new parlour in town, which sells local Yorkshire Wolds ice cream. Today, they were trialling a new flavour, pistachio. This has got to be my favourite ice cream flavour, but it isn't one that I come across often, so I was pretty pleased. I wasn't the only one, it seemed, as we got the very last scoop out from the box; so hopefully we should be seeing this flavour more often. It was the perfect antidote to the confusion of the stormy, humid weather that we've seen this week.

#2. Congratulations to my gorgeous Mum for graduating from a Master's degree of science with clinical research. I am so in awe of the fact that this is now her third degree... I have a lot to live up to! It was a busy day of cancelled flights down to Southampton, but I am so proud.

#3. Happy summer holidays! I am finally off for the next six weeks. I've ended up baking twice in two days -flapjacks and lemon drizzle traybakes -and I am looking forward to taking inspiration from my Flavour Thesaurus to start experimenting a little more, like in this post. Today's leisurely lunch was a wrap filled with turkey, cooked peppers, and guacamole (which I make with avocado, lemon juice, mango chutney and chopped chillies). Delish.

All those hazy, lazy days of summer

This last term, post exams, has seemed to have gone on forever! Happily though, I am finally on my summer break, with a bit more time on my hands to spend on my interests and blogging. I should even be starting driving lessons soon, after some seven months of procrastination, so watch out if you find yourself on the roads near me!

I am all ready to go off to Turkey on holiday, and finally get some sailing in, since I am currently on the market for a new boat and haven't been out on the water this year. I'll also be windsurfing, doing early morning yoga and hopefully trying a bit of diving -in short, keeping myself as close to the water in the mid-summer Mediterranean heat as possible! Then, I'll be hoping onto a train and making my way down to see the lovely Miriam of The English Mademoiselle Diaries.

My challenge for August is to take the veggie challenge. I'd like to spend a few weeks with a lower impact diet, by removing the more intensive, polluting meat from my plate, and hopefully becoming a more inventive cook in the process. I will allow myself a couple of seafood dishes a week, since I don't eat much of  that anyway, and as seafood is still largely a wild product. I should be keeping a food diary on this, so you can all see how I am doing.

In the meantime though, I am looking at updating my blog layout, so watch this space!

Until next time xxx

Thyme-infused Ganache

Recently, I was asked to take part in a flavour pairing event run by Aero. I was soon sent my kit in the post containing the impressively-sized Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit, along with a bar of Aero mint and orange bubbles. The chocolate was spotted immediately by my family, and disappeared before you could say "Nestle".

The book however, provided me with a more lasting satisfaction as I perused through all the listed combinations with chocolate. The Flavour Thesaurus, although not something that I might of necessarily bought myself, looks like it may well prove to be invaluable, as a brief skim through has left me feeling inspired and ready to become more experimental in the kitchen.

http://adventuresofalondonkiwi.blogspot.co.uk/

Lots of ingredient combinations caught my interest, but in the end I decided to pair my chocolate dish with thyme. As soon as I read this, I knew that it would work; I could imagine the flavours in my head and knew exactly what I wanted to make.

We have plenty of thyme in our garden, so after arriving home today, I set about preparing my infused ganache. Make sure that the cream isn't too hot; if your 37 degree skin can melt chocolate, then boiling liquid will almost certainly cause it to split.

Thyme-infused Chocolate Ganache

• 125g good quality dark chocolate (I used 70%)
• 100ml double cream, extra thick if it is availible
• 2-3tsp fresh thyme

Chop the chocolate up as finely as possible, and place in a bowl.
Add the cream and thyme to a milk pan, and gently heat, using a really low heat to allow the thyme to infuse its flavour fully. When the cream starts to feel hot to touch, but not boiling, remove from the heat. Strain off the thyme leaves, and pour evenly over the chocolate. Let it sit for a couple of minutes while the chocolate melts, then stir into a smooth, glossy mixture.

Line a rectangular tin with greaseproof paper, and pour over the ganache, spreading into a even layer between 1cm and 1.5cm thick. Leave in a cool place -not the fridge if you can help it -to set, before cutting it up into squares, shapes using icing cutters. 

Passionfruit Sponge Cake

I hardly need an excuse to bake, but my Mother's birthday this week gave me the perfect reason to get the mixing bowl out midweek. It lead to a funny sort of day; diving into M&S first thing to grab some passionfruit, via a gorgeous deli for almond croissants; carefully taking my precious parcels into school, then back out to a short trip to Leeds, before dashing back home again to get the oven on.

I strained out the pulp of the passionfruit and used my fail-safe Victoria Sponge recipe, replacing the vanilla essence with a spoonful of the fruit pulp. I've heard that you can purchase passionfruit extract to get a stronger depth of flavour in the sponge. While that was baking, I whipped up my first ever batch of passionfruit curd, using a recipe from Nigella Lawson. I was surprised at how quick and easy the curd was to make, so I will most definitely be making a few more fruit curds in the future! I was getting a little pressed for time at this point; so I tidied up and left everything to cool overnight. 

 5:30am the next morning, I was in the kitchen again prepping the cake. After sandwiching the curd between the sponge layers, I made half a batch of my cream cheese frosting, replacing the butter with a tablespoon or so of left over curd. I couldn't use e electric whisk without waking everyone, so for the next half hour, while I warmed up the croissants and finished getting ready I kept on nipping back to beat the icing, and seem to get perfectly acceptable results for spreading over the top. I think marscapone would taste even better, with just a little icing sugar beaten in, as an alternative, so do try that too and let me know what you think.

By half past six, breakfast in bed was ready for my  Mama, and the cake, finished with a sprinkling of pale pink pearls, was lit. I had to leave for my early train at 7, but not before I'd made sure that my gift had been opened and the day's surprises revealed -namely a spa package courtesy of my Father to the Feversham Arms.... I'm so jealous! Sufficed to say, I am pretty pleased with our efforts for this year -my Mother is by far the easiest person to buy for! Who do you like to treat? 

Passionfruit Curd

• 5 passionfruit
• 50g unsealed butter
• 1 large organic egg 
• 1 egg yolk
• 75g caster sugar (I used golden)

Blitz the passionfruit pulp in an electric mix, and strain it into a bowl. Save a small amount of the unstrained seeds.

Melt the butter gently in a heavy based saucepan. Beat together the eggs, yolk and sugar and pour into the saucepan, along with the passionfruit juice, stirring continually until the mixture begins to thicken.

Add the reserved seeds, and remove from the heat. Decant all this into a sterilised jar or two, and leave, ideally overnight, to cool.

Competition Wins

Hello! Today I thought I'd share some recent competition wins. I won most of these within the space of a few days which made for a pretty exciting winning streak.

Firstly I arrived home from an exam to a message from Holly of HollysBeautyBox saying that I'd won her hair and nails gift box. The gift contained a Bristows leave in conditioner; Neals Yard Hand Cream; Nails Inc Gel Effect Top Coat; Undressing Cream By Bumble & Bumble; Collection nail polish in Candy Floss; Maybelline  Gel Polish In Coral Reef; OPI Play The Peonies and also a Mellor & Russell PINK Hairdye!

I've found myself using some of the products pretty regularly, especially the Neal's Yard organic honey hand cream, which smells so good! I especially love how Neal's Yard are donating £10 000 per year to bee-conservation projects, as protection against bee numbers falling is something that I strongly support. I'm also loving having a Nails Inc top coat, and a bit of Bumble and Bumble for holiday.

On the very same day I was then tweeted by Debenhams notifying me that I'd won their Pinterest My Dream Prom competition (see my winning board here).

I was lucky enough to be given the whole range of Elemis' Fresh Skin skincare. There's so much I love -the cleanser, exfoliator, serums and moisturisers.... I will definitely be repurchasing!

Then, on a quick 20 Question-style twitter competition run by Benefit cosmetics I had my third win. We had to guess the product to win it, and luckily for me, the product that I happened to guess wasn't only the correct one, but also the blusher, Hervana, that I had been saving up for. I don't tend to treat myself to make up very often, so I was really excited about this one!

Lastly, I won this adorable frog prince charm, courtesy of John Greed Jewellery. It's so cute! At the risk of sounding a bit soppy, I think that this is the perfect romantic charm to be bought.

The Finish Line

After three months of hard revision, I am happy to say that I have finished all my exams for this year! It is such a relief... I can have "me" time again! Plus I can now give my blog some much needed love since I've had to neglect it for a while. I had seven exams, nine including general studies, and hopefully everything went okay. There were a couple of tough exams, but I'm not going to worry about any of it until August.

Exams haven't been the only thing that I have been finishing; on Sunday I completed my first ever Race for Life. I've been thinking about doing it for years, so when a friend of mine, Abbie suggested that we entered, I decided it was finally time to go for it. One problem though -I only had a month to get running again! I'd ran a little over summer 2012, but I hadn't been properly training for ages. So I've spent the last month exploring my local area as I gradually picked up my pace again, and I was so pleased to run the whole 5km without stopping in 31 minutes. It was pretty slow by most people's standards, but I'll be keeping up training to beat my time next year, or maybe go for the 10km. Abbie has a couple of photos of us, I think, so I'll pop them up on twitter if I can get hold of them.

The Race for Life was really well organised and was so fun. My JustGiving page is still running, although is looking a little empty since I've been mostly getting sponsorship in hand, so if you feel like donating to Cancer Research, my page is here ;) Thank you!

 The closest I could get to any photo's of me!! My forehead and a swish of my hair!

All photo's from the York Press website.

So here's to feeling summery. Our garden is looking well on it's way to being productive and I'll hopefully be getting lots of salad leaves and strawberries soon; and there is nothing nicer than nipping onto the terrace for a few sprigs of fragrant thyme. Hope that you're all feeling as good as I am!