Chocolate Peppermint Brownies

I love the combination of chocolate and peppermint, so I decided to give my regular brownies a Christmassy twist today with the addition of peppermint icing. I had recently bought some paste-style food colouring, and I wanted to try it out, so I combined the two.

I used the Chocolate Brownie recipe in Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess which is not on her website, but I imagine any brownie recipe would work. As I don't eat nuts, I leave the walnuts out, and I don't know how well nuts work with peppermint, so I would stick to a plain chocolate brownie.

I then made up plain glace icing, with about 300g icing sugar and 6 tablespoons of hot water. I then added half a capful of peppermint flavouring. I reserved about two tablespoons of the white icing, and spread the rest over the brownies. I then used my red food colouring to dye the leftover icing a candy cane pink, which I piped in stripes across the brownies. To hide my terrible icing, I 'feathered' it using a skewer.

The final combination works really well!

Orange Princess

This pudding - and it is definitely a pudding, rather than a dessert - is based on Queen of Puddings, but is made with oranges rather than the layer of jam. It's really a very simple and economical pudding, being based on breadcrumbs, eggs and milk, and even with the meringue, nicely uses up the whole egg. My recipe is from the Dairy Book of Family Cookery, surely an 80s classic, which I think you used to buy from the milkman. 

Ingredients

300ml milk

1 orange

15g butter

75g caster sugar

50g breadcrumbs (white is best)

2 eggs, separated

1. Heat the milk and butter together, and grate in the zest of the orange. When the butter has melted, stir in 25g of sugar and the breadcrumbs. Stir in the egg yolks.

2. Pour into a buttered 1 pint ovenproof dish. Bake in the oven at 170C for 20 minutes. 

3. Remove from the oven and cover with slices of the orange.

3. Whisk the egg whites until stiff then fold in the remaining 50g sugar. Pile the meringue over the pudding.

4. Brown quickly in the oven.