Short crust pastry/ sweet pastry

 

Short crust pastry/ sweet pastry

Print Recipe
Course: Desserts
Ingredients Method

Ingredients
  

  • 1 Cup Self raising flour
  • 1 Cup Plain flour
  • 125 Grams Cold butter. Chopped
  • 2 Tablespoons Icing sugar
  • 1 Large Egg
  • 1/3 Cup Water or Milk Cold

Method
 

  1. I blitzed butter and flour quickly in a food processor then poured into a bowl, add icing sugar. Can mix with fingers to a fine breadcrumb.
  2. Beat egg and milk together. Make a well in the centre of the flour and pour in the eggy milk, stirring with a knife. Add a little more milk if need be to pull it all together, give all a hand squeeze.
  3. Wrap pastry into some cling film and pop in fridge for use this day. You can also portion, warp firmly in cling wrap and pop into a labelled bag to freeze for use another day.

Quick dips

Do you have a few quick dips you can throw together at short notice, with ingredients you keep in your fridge or pantry if guests pop in on short notice?

My quick go to ones would be …

Sour cream or thick Greek yoghurt mixed with a little sweet chili sauce with a little more sauce poured over the top.

Sour cream or thick Greek yoghurt mixed with French onion soup mix (taste along the way).

Sour cream or thick Greek yoghurt mixed with salsa.

Sour cream mixed with sweet mustard pickles.

Don’t have dipping crackers use saladas/saltines broken into squares. Cut crusts off bread, cut into quarters and toast in the oven then cool. Cut and oven baked pocket bread, burrito wrappers. Thin sliced hot dog rolls or French stick oven baked and cooled.

Don’t have thick Greek yoghurt, sit a couple of tablespoons of normal Greek yoghurt on some paper towel for a couple minutes to drain and you’re good to go.

There are many options in your cupboard and sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. Great to play around with for weekend snacks.

Christmas cleaning – Decorations

Now that Christmas has been and gone how long does it take you to take down your decorations and pop them away for another year? Do you sort through them to figure out if they need repair, cleaning or no longer want them at all, are you a sentimental keeper of decorations and have pretty much every one from the kids, from friends and travels over many years?

Me I went on a big cull of my decorations after giving my boys their personal tree decorations when they all moved out of home. It seems that each year a few less get put out and a couple more get thrown out, the amount of decorations being put up seem to ebb and flow, I don’t throw them out but I don’t always put them up. I guess this makes for different styles and colours to decorate our house in each year, variety and all that.

Of course hubby goes big with the lights outside so it’s covered they get taken down new years day, or I should say they start being taken down Jan1 as it tends to take a while and of course the summer heat.

Fake tree for us as a real one would die in our summer heat and I don’t like the thought of a chopped down tree dying just for my pleasure for a few weeks.

Whatever you celebrate I hope your season was a good one.

Gift wrapping

Size matters, well it does when you’ve run out of gift wrap and need to find something on hand to cover your gift and make look pretty, look good and you’ve no time to run to the shops to get any.

aMaking/personalising a gift bag can be as easy or as complicated as you’d like to make it, the easiest way is to jazz up a plain paper lunch bag which I have a stash of for such occasions. Simply print out a verse for the occasion and cut into a shape. You could also stamp sentiments if you have them or hand write a greeting. Can’t cut out a shape jazz up your greeting with washi or patterned paper tape you can buy almost anywhere. Bows and ribbons still apply. Stamp or draw pictures over the bag to personalise it. Seal it at the back or seal it at the front with the pretty bow. Paper bags also come in many sizes and are best of all very cheap.

Don’t want or have a lunch bag to jazz up how about using a serviette/paper napkin to do the job it’s like using tissue paper though be careful of tearing. Pop on some ribbon and a gift tag and you’re good to go.

These options don’t sound fancy but they can look really good depending on how detailed you wish it to be and can be great if you have either of these things on hand when you’re lacking paper.

Size does matter because these options are for smaller gifts unless you have really large lunch bags and huge paper napkins, but it’s all about options.

Are you a rice rinser?

I either make perfect rice or gluggy rice, do I rinse as I’ve always be told to do and do I rinse before hand or do I rinse the starch out after it’s cooked? It’s one of those foods I like but often feel challenged cooking.
It makes no difference if I’m microwaving or cooking on the stove which I’ve found take approx the same to cook. I have issues with long grain rice.

I do use arborio rice (short grain) to make my creamed rice (stove top cooking in milk, when cooked add vanilla and sugar to taste, serve hot or cold) and it’s never failed it’s the long grain stuff I have issues with mostly … maybe I’ve just never taken the time to actually check it out and just gone blithely on my merry way on what I think is the way to cook rice.

How do you cook yours?

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