International Food Week: Italian Meatball Spaghetti Bolognese

For last nights meal we had Meatball Spaghetti Bolognese and it was absolutely delicious. We took a trip to the market on Tuesday and I bought a student £10 pack of meat, which included: mince, steak, burgers, sausages, chicken and bacon. If you have a market near you, or a butchers, I would highly recommend you to buy your meat from them, as you always get good value for your money and the meat always tastes fantastic.


Meatball Spaghetti Bolognese

(I have no idea why this picture is changing colour every time I put it into blogger. Apologies for the graininess! I promise the original doesn't look like this)

What you will need:

• Spaghetti (a handful)
• 2 small onions - or as many as you wish
• Mixed herbs
• Chopped tomatoes (a can or carton)
• Mince meat (400g)
• An egg
• Tomato puree 
• Vegetable oil

1. Mix the egg in with the mince - this will hold the meat together when making the meatballs

2. Chop up the onions and fry in a wok/pan until soft.

Making the bolognese sauce:

3. Pour a carton of chopped tomatoes into a jug 

4. Add a sprinkle of mixed herbs

5. Mix in tomato puree to make it the thickness you like

6. Add the sauce in with the onions to simmer

7. While the sauce is simmer, you can start making the meatballs. Take small amounts of mince and roll into balls (as big/small as you wish)

8. Start to fry the meatballs until brown and cooked all the way through.

9. While the meatballs are frying, add the spaghetti in a pan with boiling water in and boil for 10 minutes.

10. When all the meatballs have fried, add them into the sauce until the spaghetti is ready to be served.

and voilà another quick, cheap and delicious meal. 

Please note: I am not a proper cook however I thought it would be ideal to show you what we're eating this week!

International Food week: Chinese Chicken Balls and Chow Mein

David has graced me with his presence this week (finally! This semester has been hard to see each other with David being in his third year and i'm at uni and working). We decided instead of our usual wining and dining, we would save our money and cook instead. I really don't know why we don't always do this, we are both fairly good at cooking - we just love eating out, especially if you can get unlimited drinks...

On Monday we went to Handmade Burger Co. as on Mondays they have 30% student discount and as a loyal customer I had a free burger to claim! We had a massive mare in there but it just shows that being a loyal customer gives you benefits (I will tell you about this over the weekend when I do my Gig Post). Monday night ended by going to see Crystal Fighters at Leeds Uni union and it was absolutely fabby. If you've never heard of them, check them out because they are such a happy, crazy and sparkly band and seeing them live just made me love them more. 

Yesterday we had our Chinese meal: Chicken Balls and Chow Mein Noodles. 

What you will need (serves two):

• 2 chicken fillets
• Half a packet of batter 
• An egg
• Water
• A pan full of oil
• Onion(s) as many as you wish - we used 2 small onions
• Spring onion(s) as many as you wish - we used 3 sticks of spring onion
• A clove of garlic
• Egg noodles (I used Sharwoods)
• Chow Mein stir fry sauce (I used Blue Dragon)

1. Get the oil boiling in the pan 

2. Chop up the chicken fillets into pieces

3. Make the batter mix. Add water and 1 egg - the batter mix pack has the instructions on the back. If you want to make your batter from scratch you can use this recipe steps 1-5. We cheated a wee bit.

4. Soak the chicken in the batter mix. Start to place a couple pieces of chicken at a time into the oil - once brown take out and place in a bowl with some kitchen roll to soak the fat up.

5. Chop the onions, garlic and spring onions and fry in a wok.

6. Boil the noodles in a pan for 3 minutes.

7. Add the Chow Mein sauce to the onions.

8. Once the noodles have boiled, add them to the wok with the onions and the sauce in and mix. 

9. Once you have fried up all the chicken balls, you are ready to serve. 

and voilà a quick, cheap and delicious meal. 

Please note: I am not a proper cook however I thought it would be ideal to show you what we're eating this week!

Baking Mad #3 GIVEAWAY

We finally have our Cookbook to giveaway, excited? We are!

So because this is for a cook book, the obvious route was to do another baking post, yay! This time we went for something which we thought was a bit different, bread.
We actually expected this to be a lot harder than it was, and were surprised that we didn't need much ingredients at all to make great tasty bread. We follwed this repcipe on bakingmad.com

This bread was amazing, even though it was just plain white bread, it tasted so good especially with Heinz mediterranean vegetable soup! David also made his own Hairy Bikers Beer and Cheese Bread which was just as good especially toasted!
I definitely would recommend using the Bakingmad.com website as it so easy to use and there is so many differenet recipes for you to use and browse through. There is also great ideas and inspiration if you're bored or just ran out of imagination. Also definitely check out The Pink Whisk, Ruth Clemens's blog, as we are giving away her Cake decorating book, which is amazing! It has some great tips, templates, ideas, and pictures, there is even a motivational ending on cake decorating!
I think our next baking challenge will definitely be either Chelsea Buns or Scones, because who doesn't love homemade scones! 

Also guys, what do you think of our new layout?!

Don't forget to enter in the competition and leave a comment of your favourite Bakingmad.com recipe!

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Bakingmad.com #2

Hello Lovelies!

Happy Easter, hope you're all eating as much chocolate as you can. I've got my Easter egg waiting for me to demolish.

We have some exciting news, our FIRST GIVEAWAY will soon be published to win a Baking Mad Cook Book for all you food and baking fanatics! We haven't received the Cook Book yet, so as soon as we do we'll post more information about the competition, hopefully will be next week!

Anyway in the spirit of Easter, we've been doing a lot of Easter baking! First of all me and Tori made some cute cupcakes, cornflake cakes and shortbreads which all turned out fabulous check out the post here. Then bakingmad.com sent me some decoration ingredients to use so me (Charlotte) and David have baked possibly the most extravagant Victoria sponge I've ever made.

Be sure to check out bakingmad.com if you've not already as they have so many amazing easy recipes for you to follow like these Cake Pops, each recipe have a step by step guide of how to make it and they have loads of inspirational ideas to make your cooking better and more fun!

This is what we got sent. I've never used roll on icing before, so it was a challenge when we finally started decorating the cake.

We decided on a Victoria Sponge with a jam centre, following this recipe but changing the additional ingredients

Here's how to make a brilliant Victoria Sponge

As this was the first time that either me or David had used Roll on Icing I'm afraid I can't give you any advice or tips to perfecting it as we just improvised on our cake, all I can say is that you need a lot of patiences. Check out bakingmad.com here for more information on how to dye the icing.

Here it is! This took us all day long and after lots of stressing trying to get my chick and eggs to look life like, I was very pleased of the final outcome!
Massive thanks to David for helping me, and doing all the banner and the icing letters and for the morale boost!
After trying the cake, it was totally worth it, the Sponge tastes amazing and the icing is just the right amount, I wish I could give you all a piece to try.

We will let you know as soon as we get the competition sort and hopefully you will be a lucky winner of a new Cook Book!

Have you made an Easter Cake? What do you think of our cake?

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