September book reviews.

Okay so I took these pictures on the 1st October, meaning to write this post that evening, but then the month suddenly got super busy and now here we are, weeks later, and I can barely even remember what I thought about half of these books. So in light of that, let's go for less-than-100-word reviews! Short and sweet and totally not the result of my terrible planning.

(Maybe next time I do this I'll take notes on the books immediately after reading instead of relying on my appalling memory.)

Banana and cherry loaf cake.

I've been trying my hand recently at this whole youtube thing, to varying degrees of success, and thought I'd share one of those videos here.

It's only a quick one at just 30 seconds, of a banana and cherry loaf cake that I made for my dad a few weeks ago.

Now that I've moved home again I seem to have started earning my keep by baking cakes. My parents are not complaining.

I hope you enjoy the video! (I'm secretly quite proud of it.)



Recipe

2oz butter

5oz caster sugar

5oz self-raising flour

1 egg

1 banana

A handful of cherries

A few drops of vanilla essence

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 170ºC.


2. Cream butter and caster sugar together.


3. Add the rest of the ingredients.


4. Mix until well combined.


5. Grease and line loaf tin.


6. Pour in the mixture.


7. Bake at 170ºC for 40-45 minutes or until golden brown and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Homemade pizza party.

To celebrate the end of university a few of us decided to have a little pizza party last week (and by party I mean we ate food and watched a couple episodes of Merlin on DVD) and make our very own pizzas and cheesy garlic bread from scratch.

Thanks to my fancy food mixer the dough was much easier than I had expected it to be and we'll definitely be making our own pizzas again because jeez they were delicious!



Although maybe I'll use less toppings next time.



I recommend always eating homemade pizza with a glass of Pimm's.

I used this recipe for our dough but made a little bit of a change to the cooking method that I have added below.

Ingredients

375g (13 oz) plain flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon caster sugar

7g (1/4 oz) dried active baking yeast

2 tablespoons olive oil

225ml (8 fl oz) warm water (45 C)

Method

1. Combine flour, salt, sugar, and yeast in a large bowl. Mix in oil and warm water. Spread out on a large pan.


2. Bake at 190 C / Gas mark 5 for ten minutes.


3. Add your toppings.


4. Bake for another 10 to 15 minutes.

For our garlic bread we used the exact same method and recipe as the pizza dough, adding garlic butter and grated parmesan at step 3.