Pinoy Hubby

Sugar & Crumbs , a maker of flavoured icing sugar, recently sent me a few samples to try, including a tiny amount of blueberry flavoured buttercream. When I saw that the chosen ingredient for We Should Cocoa this month is blueberries, I decided to order a bag of the icing sugar and incorporate that into a recipe. A little while ago I was in a café and saw some really cute stacked cakes that were like mini Victoria sponges, but cupcake sized. I thought these would be fun to make for a barbecue when I had some friends over including a vegan so found one of my most successful vegan chocolate cake recipes so far, which you can find here. I baked them as cupcakes, and when they had cooled carefully sliced off the top of the cupcake as it was domed, so I had several flat discs of cake. I made up the icing which just involves mixing the icing with softened butter but I used vegan margarine; the flavoured icing sugar itself is suitable for vegans. It has a lovely blueberry taste but I deci...

Monday spaghetti bolognese Tuesday BBQ: sausages Wednesday Boyfriend at his mum's so home by myself: fish and vegetables Thursday Sharknado 3 premier! TV dinner of chicken curry Friday fish/chicken and chips Saturday Lunch: Langos like this Dinner: BBQ: poussin for me (if I can work out how to barbecue it!); he will probably just want burgers and sausages Sunday Lunch: Out at a car show. May take picnic. Dinner: Something from the freezer - not sure what time we will be back

Now that we’ve got a gas barbecue it’s really easy to come home midweek and grill something for dinner outside. And since we spent quite a lot on a very good Weber barbecue I want to make sure we get enough use out of it!   When it’s 7pm before you even walk in the door from work, you don’t want to spend too long fussing around with recipes. And marinating something the day before requires too much forward planning – the beauty of a gas barbecue is you can decide on the spur of the moment to fire it up if the weather is nice. Even if you have a traditional coal barbecue and are grilling at the weekend, you don’t always want to spend all day preparing a selection of dishes. So here are some easy, speedy ideas for a quick barbecue.   The meat Stating the obvious but for me there’s nothing like a sausage on the Barbie. They are quick to cook – Richmond’s work really well, just make sure you don’t buy the skinless variety as they don’t barbecue so well. You can keep a selection of...

Translating as "rancher's eggs" this is a popular Mexican breakfast dish, though not one that I actually managed to eat while we were in Mexico! Because of that I decided to make it as a light lunch/brunch after we came back. I found this Food Network Jamie Oliver recipe but adapted it to make it quicker - rather than make my own tomato sauce I used passata from a box. I'm also not a fan of fried eggs so I decided to make this with poached eggs instead and it was really nice. I also forgot the cheese on top! Here's how to make my speedy version. To serve 2: 1/4 onion, diced 100g diced chorizo oil for frying 2 flour tortillas 2 eggs 8 tbsp. passata fresh coriander to serve Fry the onion and chorizo in a large frying pan until cooked through then add the passata and heat. Meanwhile poach the eggs. In another frying pan, heat a little oil and fry the tortillas for a minute each on each side. Place an egg on each tortilla on a plate and top with the chorizo and passa...

I never seem to have enough freezer space to make ice cream, and while I do have some ice lolly moulds I have no idea where they've gone since I moved house. I was browsing on Ebay and found a cute little plastic mould for chocolate lollies in the shape of cows (my boyfriend's last name is Cowe so I have a bit of a thing for cows!). I didn't want to make ice lollies as I don't particularly like them and these moulds weren't really big enough, and I remembered eating "mini milk" ice creams as a child; so I knew there must be recipes for milk-based lollies out there and had a look online. I adapted one I found on the Telegraph website as the quantities were far too great and it also said to add sugar which I thought was a bit odd. The quantities of milk, cream and chocolate were: 500ml whole milk 250ml double cram 150g dark chocolate I scaled it down and used two parts milk to one part cream and used about 3 tbsp. milk and 6 tbsp. cream, but I used a lot mor...

It all started with a basket of fruit that we were sent at work. By the end of the week, there were a couple of bananas left that were going really soft. I was the last person in the office on the Friday (sigh) so thought I may as well take them home as they would only be thrown away otherwise - even though I don't like bananas! A few of my boyfriend's family were coming to our house at the weekend for an informal barbecue and I wanted to make dessert; I knew they liked bananas even though I didn't so I thought this would be a good way to use them up. Though I don't think the person who sent the healthy fruit basket necessarily expected the fruit to end up in a sugary dessert - we did eat the rest of the fruit whole! I remembered that I had bought some cornflakes at Easter to make chocolate cornflake cakes and it had been a massive box. I'm not a big fan of cereal anyway and find cornflakes very plain so most of the box was left. I wondered idly whether you could us...