My favourite smoothie recipe (... or good stuff by stealth)

I've been trying to eat a bit more healthy recently. Since I got a new job a few months ago where I'm getting up at 5am everyday, I've been really lacking in energy - never mind concentration after being bombarded with peoples complaints all day long! I've also been hoping a healthier diet might help improve the condition of my skin a bit, something I'm always fighting against. 

Two things I'm trying out are Matcha tea and more leafy greens. Matcha tea is a fine powder of whole ground green tea leaves, supposedly containing a high boost of antioxidants. The brand I bought, from Holland and Barrett, claims it contains 137 x the antioxidants of other green teas! The benefits are said to range from weight loss and anti-aging properties to improving concentration and boosting your mood. Unfortunately it tastes the same as green tea, which I don't enjoy at all. Being a powder, though, it's quite easy to mix in to other things. I've been putting it into fruit teas until now, but I thought I'd experiment with adding it to smoothies. Kale, too, is thought to be a 'super food' packed full of nutrients - it does, however, have quite a strong flavour and it's one of those things I just don't know what to do with, so I thought I'd have a go at chucking a handful of that in too.

My ingredients are banana, berries (I use frozen - cheap and just as good!), a handful of kale and a teaspoon of matcha powder. I also add a little bit of liquid in the form of fruit squash - I don't like milk in smoothies, and while fruit juice is great it does add a lot of unnecessary sugar which will already be in the fruit. Squash adds a little bit of flavour without being sugary - about half a glass is enough. 

I used my hand blender I normally use for soup making and blended it all together. It doesn't come out super thick, more like a juice.

That's the result right there... I'm not going to lie, the kale and matcha makes it come out a bit of a sludgy pink-brown colour, but don't let that put you off. The good news is it tastes much better than the colour!

...Nope, not even putting it into a cute milk bottle with a polka dot straw can help the look of this one, sorry! However, the matcha and kale, as I hoped, are entirely disguised - what you've essentially got is a nice sweet berry and banana juice with bits. Hurrah! 

Making healthy stuff taste good since 2014...

Gooey Chocolate and Walnut Brownies

Ingredients I used:

200g dark chocolate

180g butter

200g caster sugar

110g plain flour

3 eggs

50g walnuts

LOTS of chocolate chips

I melted the chocolate and butter together (the original recipe said to do this in a bowl over hot water, but who has time for that? I chucked it in a saucepan and made sure to keep stirring - less washing up too!). I then whisked up the sugar and eggs, stirred in the melted chocolate mixture (after it had cooled a bit) and chucked in my walnuts and chocolate chips - but I guess you could use any extras, white chocolate chunks would work well. It all went in the oven on 160 for about an hour - it took a long time to cook as the mixture made quite chunky brownies in my small square cake tin. They were still lovely and soft and fudgey in the middle, so that was good! Flowery flags optional, of course...

The best brownie dessert is a melty warm brownie with a big spoon of ice cream, YUM. 

I want to try melt in the middle chocolate puddings next, I'm not sure how hard it would be. Any recipes? What have you been baking recently?

Facemask Friday

I used to have a favourite Lush fresh face mask, called Oatifix, but as much as I love Lush products, they are pretty pricey and are only an occasional treat. However, a while ago I received this book as a gift, Carla Oates' Feeding Your Skin, a collection of DIY natural chemical-free recipes for every type of  beauty product possible, from masks and scrubs to the more unexpected hair dyes and nail polish, using things in your kitchen cupboards.

Being on a budget at the moment, I decided to forgo the expensive Lush products for my poor dry skin, and instead raided the cupboards to see what I could make myself. As it turned out, I had everything I needed for the Lemon Tea Mask recipe.. 

Whittards finest English Breakfast, some might say, is a bit too fancy for slapping on your face, but as I've worked there for years it seems I have acquired a lot of loose leaf tea in my house that doesn't get used nearly often enough, so a use might as well be found for it. The book actually uses tea in a lot of the recipes - there's a black tea and apple cider vinegar tint for dark hair I'm keen to try out! Oats, as it happens, weren't actually in the mask recipe above, but in the name of experimentation and trying to replicate my Lush favourite, I chucked a handful in anyway. It actually made the rather sloppy mixture much thicker and easier to use as a mask. 

What I effectively ended up with was a sort of tea-and-lemon-flavoured porridge mix. On the face it went, and it wasn't a half bad replica actually - after 20 minutes my dry skin is looking a bit less hopeless. I'd love to share a picture of the mask in action, but unfortunately -  in the style of Mrs Doubtfire - great lumps kept falling off if I dared to move. I think this could be rectified by perhaps more milk powder or oats to thicken it up, but I think the recipe, and others in the book, are a great starting point to adapt and add to. I'll certainly be making up batches of my own products regularly and testing them out! 

Any great facemask recipes I should try out?

Golden Syrup Goodness

The last few weeks have been crazy busy getting all of my university work in - the deadline was today and I finally submitted everything! I'm not completely free now - I still have to write my 15,000 word dissertation over the summer. But I have a bit more time for all the things I've been wanting to do.

The first thing I did after handing in all my work today? Made a TREACLE TART!

I've never made one before and the last time I made pastry instead of buying it was when I was at school, so I'm pretty pleased it turned out so well.

I used a recipe from the BBC Food website here. It doesn't require many ingredients at all really.

For the pastry:
225g Plain Flour
110g Butter
1 Egg

Rub in the butter and flour and add the egg, and knead into dough. Blind bake in the oven first for 15 minutes in the tin.

For the filling:
450g Golden Syrup
85g Fresh Breadcrumbs
Pinch of Ground Ginger
2 tbsp Lemon Juice

Just chuck them all in a bowl and mix! Pour in and bake for 30 minutes.

The trickiest bit was the breadcrumbs - I spent ages trying to grate bread to make them until I realised I could put them in a blender. I think next time I might add something else to it to make it more interesting - maybe some walnuts. But for now, super sweet deliciousness is perfect, just what I needed after all the work!