Shrimp and Chicken Greens

This is the salad that I have been making for lunch recently, though I added frozen cooked shrimp along with the chicken breast. The salad greens are a mixture of baby spinach, baby arugala, baby romaine and a mixture of mache, radicchio and frisee, you could use your favourite greens, and I buy different greens as the mood strikes. To this I added cut up tomatoes and cut up cucumber, with the peel still on, and some cubes of feta cheese. The chicken and shrimp, both already cooked, I stir-fried until they were crispy and hot. The dressing I used was a hazelnut oil vinaigrette. Quite delicious.

Alphonso Peach and Mango Juice

I noticed that there are three offerings for sale from the Alphonso Mango Juice Co., this one is Alphonso mango juice and peach juice, the third is alphonso mango juice and carrot. This tasted as good as the mostly mango with some orange juice.

Chocolate Toffee Honey Cake

I took my inspiration from these Giant Chocolate Toffee Cookies. Though there should be more chocolate and less cake compared to that recipe, I thought the combination would be great. I know, certainly, that the cookies are always a hit. This is another variation on the orginal Devonshire Honey cake recipe I've made, now, six different versions of. And again, the cake smelled wonderful coming out of the oven. After a few moments, the middle of the cake fell, and later, more dramatically, though I suspect it did because of both the chocolate and the large amount of toffee falling to the bottom of the cake because the flour could not support it. How did it taste? Very rich and delicious, and well received at work, one fellow said it was 'to die for', and had two pieces.

Chocolate Toffee Honey Cake
225 g sweet butter
250 g runny honey
100 g dark muscovado sugar
175 g good dark chocolate
3 large eggs
300 g (2-1/4 cups) self-rising flour
2 Tbsp cocoa powder
5 chocolate toffee bars (like Skor® or Heath), broken into small pieces
2 Tbsp honey

Preheat oven to 300F. Grease a 9-inch springform pan. Line bottom with parchment paper.

Whisk flour and cocoa together till mixed.

Melt butter, honey, and sugar slowly in a saucepan. Boil for one minute.

Add chocolate to hot caramel and stir till melted and mixed through. Leave to cool (caramel will thicken).

Beat in eggs one at a time in the saucepan. Whisk in flour into egg caramel mixture in two batches. Stir chocolate toffee bar pieces into batter.

Pour into the greased pan and bake for 60-65 minutes or until cake is golden brown and springs back when pressed.

Turn out the cake onto a wire rack. Warm 2 Tbsp honey in a small saucepan and brush over the top of the cake to glaze. Leave to cool.

Passion Fruit from my Dad

This is the purple passion fruit that I remember from growing up, that my father introduced me to, he recently went to the supermarket specifically to buy one for me. The taste is mostly sweet, with an underlying slight sourness that makes it delicious.

Sticky Rice Dumpling with BBQ Pork and Lotus Seed

This is another wrapped, in lotus leaf, glutinous, or sticky, rice dish, it's a whole meal for one, convenience food, all you need to do is put it in boiling water for 25-30 minutes and then eat. This one contains BBQ pork, lotus seed (large seeds that are quite tasty), mung bean, salted egg yolk and pork along with the glutinous rice and spices (one of which is the ubiquitous monosodium glutamate). Fairly tasty.

Kras 60 Percent Finest Cocoa

This chocolate bar from Croatia did not impress me as much as the last tested bar, from Switzerland, though it tasted fairly good, and better than I imagined Eastern European chocolate would taste. The company, located in Zagreb, was established in 1911. The ingredient listing looks good, cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, soya lecithin as an emulsifier and artificial vanilla flavour (I wish companies would attempt to use real vanilla). The bar snaps well when broken, and smells fairly good, though I doubt that I would try this again.

Ginger Juice

The Ginger People create a number of products with, well, of course, ginger, and I have written about them before. This product is fresh pressed ginger, the essence of ginger in liquid form. I'm trying it in my salads, so far 1/2 teaspoon doesn't give much of a kick, I'll up it to one teaspoon tomorrow to see if that works. It smells quite gingery. You can probably use in any dish that normally has ginger in it, to give it an extra zing.

Some More Spring Flowers

Spring flowers are out in force, here are some beautiful examples.

A Profusion of Trilliums!

This must be a good year for Trilliums, at least in a forest near my Dad's house. These two pictures give you only a taste of the whole hillside of white flowers.

I learned today that when trilliums age, they last about 20 years, and mature after 8-11 years, they sometimes go pink in colour.

This oddly sharp, crinkly one is neat.

Monbana Hazelnut Flavored Chocolate Mix

Having tried their Monbana Dark chocolate bar and liked them fairly well, I came across another of their products, a sipping chocolate, hazelnut flavoured. And simply chocolate it is, just sugar with cocoa and hazelnut flavor (both natural and artificial). Easy to make, just add two teaspoons to a cup of hot milk, stir, and you're good to go. I had this with my Saturday morning coffee, it added a nice chocolatey touch to the black coffee, though the hazelnut taste was very subtle, perhaps overpowered by the coffee.