Ingredients

• 3/4 lb S.R. Flour
• 1/4 lb Black treacle
• 1/4 lb Golden syrup
• 4oz brown sugar
• 2 small eggs
• 1/2 teaspoons soda bic
• 4 oz margarine
• 1/2 teacup milk
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger

Method

1. Put fat, sugar, treacle and syrup in a saucepan and heat gently until the fat melts. Leave to cool.
2. Sift the dry ingredients in a bowl, make a well in the centre and add eggs & milk.
3. Slowly pour in treacle mixture, stir without beating, until well blended.
4. Turn mixture into a greased and paper lined tin.
5. Bake in the centre of a slow oven (150′c) for 1 1/4 hours. Test by pressing.
6. Remove from tin when cool.
7. Store in an air tight container.

Tin should be 11″ x 9″ x 2″

Pirate video

Don’t let the song get stuck in your head!

I went to the Brake Road Safety Awards on Friday evening with work. The company that I work for won an award for our risk management product which I thought was pretty cool. Nothing like drinking on company expenses.

I am going to have a Pimm’s party. It is called Pimm’s in the Park and will be on Saturday 11th August at 2pm in St Andrew’s Park, Bristol. Everyone is invited, just bring along a picnic, some chums and a bottle of Pimm’s!

Take one chicken breast and slice a pocket in it length-ways. Shove some slices of lemon into the pocket you created. Grill in a George with some slices of red pepper until the chicken is cooked all the way through. Discard the slices of lemon and place the entire chicken breast and peppers into a wholemeal pita-bread. Consume with a side salad.

You get a sweet flavour from the red pepper mixing with a very light lemon flavour that permiates the chicken breast. An easy quick weekday evening meal with minimal washing up.

Take a salmon steak and place onto a sheet of lightly oiled tin-foil. Sprinkle on some thyme and add a knob of butter on top of the fish. Place two slices of fresh-cut lemon on the salmon and then wrap it up in the tin foil so as to keep the fish moist. Cook in the oven at 200′c for about 20 minutes.

I served it with mash potatoes and peas. It was delicious. Anyone want to come round for dinner some time?

Oh, and I also helped Sam get her network running. For those of a technical bent if you follow the Belkin instructions on setting up an ADSL router for use with AOL you can end up making a PPPoE connection from your PC, via the router, to AOL. This skips out all useful things that the router does. What you need to do is set up your router using some alternative instructions and then it will all work swimmingly.

• This bullet point for Rosie.

The world’s biggest pancake was cooked in Rochdale in 1994, it was an amazing 15 metres in diameter, weighed three tonnes and had an estimated two million calories.

Some links to get you going:

• Blue Peter pancake recipe

I created the most amazing cottage pie I have ever made. It really was the best. I used my standard cottage pie recipe but for some reason it just worked better than ever before. It really was the best. I even added diced carrots to the mixture and the mash was all cheesy and crispy on top. Tesco had a special offer on 800g punnets of mince so even after having fed both Rosie and myself I still had enough to freeze that will last me four more meals.

For desert we had Gü Chocolate and Vanilla cheesecakes.

I love cottage pie, hadn’t made it for months.

Most of the veg that I cooked had come from the new Fresh Food Market in Bristol. I also got some very nice dark chocolate truffles.

Baked Bean Hot Pot

• 500g minced beef
• Beef oxo cube
• One onion, diced
• One red pepper sliced
• Half a green pepper sliced
• 7 mushrooms, sliced
• Two 400g tins of baked beans
• Half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper
• One teaspoon of basil
• Salt and pepper to taste

Fry the mince and onion in a large frying pan. Crumble over an oxo cube while the mince is browning. Add the peppers and mushrooms and stir for two minutes. Then add the two tins of baked beans, cayenne pepper and basil. Combine together and slowly simmer for 10 to 15 minutes until the mixture is really thick and looks good enough to eat. Serve on a plate with potatoes, knife and fork.

Tonight I made a chicken stir-fry and used some sugar snap peas in it. They are so much nicer than mange tout.

I decided to make a bolognaise sauce that we could have with some fresh pasta that was left over from the weekend.

Normally when we make a bolognaise sauce I just use lots of tomato, some dried herbs and meat which I cook for about 20 minutes. However last night I decided to havea go and making a proper bolognaise sauce.

Sarah chopped some onions for me and also some garlic. The garlic was a bit old and dry but tasted fine. We fried the onion and garlic in a pan with some extra virgin olive oil and chopped up bacon. Once the onion had turned translucient and the bacon had crisped I added the meat. We used a kilo of meat so that we could freeze some of the sauce.

While the meat was browing I crumbled two oxo cubes over the meat to give it a bit more flavour. Once the meat had browned I added a large glass of red wine and let it boil down so that there was about half a glass of liquid in the pan.

I stired in a tin of roughly chopped tomatos, half a jar of passata, two tablespoons of worcestershire sauce, a handfull of blitzed fresh bazel leaves, about 10 blitzed sundried tomatos, some oregano, black pepper, salt, paprika, cayenne pepper and thyme. Mixed this all together and let it simmer for about an hour before serving.

I think it was possibly one of the best bolognaise sauces that I have made. Everyone appeared to enjoy it.