Chocolate Fridge Cake

Why is it that no-one believes me when I say I have 'left-over' chocolate to use up?  Surely it isn't just me?

This time of year I often have a fridge full  of leftover chocolate. Okay I exaggerate a bit - it isn't exactly full of the stuff - but there's often a couple of bowls containing bits of abandoned Easter Eggs and sometimes even some chocolate left over from Christmas.

Chocolate Fridge Cake is an ideal way to use it all up.

Here's a recipe but you can adapt it in lots of ways depending on what you need to use up.

250g Digestive biscuits (or any biscuits that need eating up!)

300g Chocolate - whatever you find lying around the house that you've asked more than once to be moved or eaten up is fair game

100g unsalted butter

150g golden syrup

200g approx of dried fruit e.g. raisins, chopped cherries, chopped apricots, mixed peel  (and nuts if you like) 

Bash up the biscuits in a plastic bag, melt together the butter, syrup and chocolate over a low heat or on low power setting in the microwave, stirring occasionally. Add the biscuit crumbs and fruit to the melted mix.

Line a 20cm square tin or glass bowl with cling film and pour in the mixture.  Leave to set in the fridge for a few hours. When set, turn out the cake and peel off the cling film.  Cut it into chunks while it is still cold.

One day I might be able to post a picture, but the cake keeps getting eaten up before I get round to taking a photo!

The Post Christmas Clean-up

Happy New Year!

Here's my post Christmas tidy-up schedule.

Eat any leftover Christmas pudding for breakfast.
(That's my favourite bit of tidying up)

Collect up all the empty gift bags to use next year. This year I didn't have to buy a single gift bag but I have got pretty good at rounding up any abandoned bags left by my Christmas guests. Given that gift bags can be anything from about 80p to £2.50 and that I'm no good at wrapping up I think I must have saved about £20 by re-using gift bags and most of them seem to have found their way back to me ready for next year.

Extract all the ribbons and bows from the Christmas present unwrapping. So you don't need to buy any for next Christmas. More money saving.

Cut up Christmas cards to make labels for next year.
 But don't do what I did and lose them. This year I've made sure to keep them next to my stock of gift bags so I'll know where to find them.

Recycle your Christmas Tree.
For a few years I had a pot-grown Christmas Tree which was great but it didn't survive more than about five years of neglect. Since then I've not been organised enough to find a pot-grown tree at a reasonable price. But most local councils offer a shredding service for Christmas Trees now. We used to have to take our tree to one of several local car parks for shredding. That was always a messy business that I felt a lot of people wouldn't bother with so it is great that many local councils now pick up Christmas Trees along with the normal waste and recycling collections this week or next week. Check out your local council's website for details.

Just in Time!

Year six!

I confess to a smug smile on my face yesterday morning when I looked out of the window and saw we had our first real frost. Why? Because, yes... my Dad and I dug up (Dad) and potted (me!) all our Geraniums and put them in the conservatory for the winter.  I think this is now about year 6 from the same half dozen Geraniums I was bought as a present - and now they total twenty seven plants and 14 cuttings (well the bits that fall off as we transplant them).

Every year we bring them in in the Autumn - usually by October half term rather than nearing the end of November, but they looked  lovely in full bloom still and so we just kept our eye on the frost forecasts. But last weekend we decided we could hold out no longer and yesterday morning it looked as though it was a wise choice.

We use old plant pots and a bit of soil dug up from the garden combined with the fabulously rich compost made in my wormery (another Christmas present!) so it costs us nothing.  Better than that though, Geraniums thrive whether the weather is wet or dry through the summer - in fact, they seem to thrive on neglect which can only be a good thing in my garden. And, last but not least of their characteristics is that they seem to be totally rabbit-proof.

My wormery

See also: http://rosiesecoblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/use-for-broken-crockery.html

Gardening - It is all so much effort!

Or is it?

Well it does require some effort, most definitely, but I can't help thinking that sometimes we don't do ourselves any favours by the way we garden.

I have long associated the growing of tomatoes with the 'Growbag' technique.  Stick a couple of grow bags on your patio and plant them up with a couple of tomato plants in each and low and behold you will have tomatoes in abundant supply all through the summer. BUT probably only if you remember to water them every evening. Ughhh! Can you be bothered with that?

The thing we all know about Growbags is they dry out very quickly. So why do we insist on planting our tomatoes in them?

This year we decided to do things a bit differently.  Instead of using grow bags we planted our tomato plants straight into the ground along a post and rail fence.  If I remember rightly they got a couple of cans of water over them when they were first planted and I pulled up the weeds from round them early on but since then they've been entirely left to fend for themselves.  If they want water then they have to send out their roots to look for water. If they want to survive among the weeds then they have to be strong and be the fittest.

It seems to be working!

You want water? Find your own!

So despite the money saving (no grow bags to buy or water to pay for) and the huge saving on time and effort we are still being rewarded with lots of tomatoes and they taste wonderful.

Free Fuel

Last Christmas I was given a briquette maker - one of those metal contraptions you use to turn waste paper into 'logs' to burn on the fire.

I was mad keen to give it a go but a quick read of the instructions and a bit of common sense told me it was not a job for January. The main thing about making waste paper briquettes is that the paper needs to be soaked before you make them and then they need to be able to dry out. So... a job for the summer, it seemed.

But having sensibly put my briquette maker away until the weather was right, you may have guessed it, I never once thought about making myself some winter fuel this summer. However, on a gloriously sunny day in mid September I remembered my plan and went to survey the pile of newspapers that I'd been donated by my grandmother. It was a big pile. Better late than never, I thought, and set to work making my briquettes. By this time I had of course lost the instructions so a quick search on Google led me to this video from http://www.downthelane.net.  What was bothering me slightly was that the newspapers I was shredding up could easily have been recycled so other than the benefit of hopefully gaining a little bit of free heat was I really being environmentally friendly turning newspapers into fuel?  As we have two wood-burners and a Rayburn we get through a lot of wood in a year, most of which we manage ourselves from a small woodland.  Chopping wood, where ever it comes from always generates wood chippings and there is lots of waste from the smaller brushwood, and other than a useful mulch for flower beds and around our new trees it pretty much seems like a waste product, so I decided to add a bit to my paper mix to see what happened.

Having set my mixture to soak for a few days I went to inspect and it seemed to be a suitably gooey mess. So I spent a pleasant afternoon in the sunshine making 36 paper and wood-chip briquettes. Are they going to dry I wondered?

I left the soggy creations on a palette in an open barn hoping that if the sunshine didn't last at least the wind might dry them out. Little did I know our Indian Summer would continue.  This morning I went to inspect my briquettes and they were nicely dried out. Here they are stocked in my shed ready for use.  I'll let you know how they burn!

TIP: I think one of these briquette makers makes a great present, but really, why buy one? - just borrow. Anyone who has one will only be using it for a few days a year!

Credit Crunch Carrots

In a mad moment we decided to dig up all our carrots yesterday.

In true Rosie style - stable door and horse bolted style - I Googled 'How to Store Carrots' after having dug up the entire crop.

Yes, I know, we always get everything wrong. And digging up the entire crop wasn't the first gardening sin we'd committed. For a start we didn't bother with thinning except when we wanted a few carrots for dinner - when instead of weeding out the weediest ones we picked the biggest. Well, if you want to eat them, then why not pick the biggest?

First sin, don't thin.

So, for my second sin, what did Google tell me about how to store my carrots? That's right! The best way to store carrots is in the ground. Ah well! Too late for that.

I continued my Googing and was pleased to learn from the World Carrot Museum - did you even dream there'd be such a thing? - that carrots will actually increase their vitamin A content during the first five months of storage. Yay! A glimmer of hope.

I decided that since I couldn't exactly plant my carrots again I ought to try to find them the next best thing, so I found two old bread crates someone had kindly left behind after a party (you see it sometimes pays to never throw anything away!)and filled them with a layer of soil from my vegetable garden. Then I sorted through my carrots and picked only the perfect ones, laying them in neat rows on the layer of soil. I then covered them over and started a new layer. My crop from one packet of seeds, which has kept us going through the summer already, amounted to an entire wheelbarrow full which turned into three layers of perfect carrots in each crate and a large number of 'rejects'.

Hopefully this way we'll get to eat more than the mice and slugs will!

The rejects have now been scrubbed and cut up into chunks (taking out any bad bits) and I'm making them into soup - one batch for now and one for the freezer. The only slight problem is, I've eaten so many carrots while I chopped I'm worried I might be tinged with orange. Oh well, better than fake tan!

Going Bananas

Bananas - lots of them - going cheap - or going to waste.  Couldn't bear it! They've been transported all this way. Bought lots, eaten lots but still I have five of them left getting blacker and blacker.

Time for banana bread! My favourite banana bread recipe is from The River Cottage Family Cookbook which has chopped up apricots and sultanas in too. That's three of my five-a-day, I reckon! This recipe calls for three large ripe bananas - but I declared mine 'medium' so opened up all five ate the least blacked one while I mashed the other four and it turned out just fine!