Wild garlic flower oat cakes…

I fancied some oat cakes recently, I have no idea why, I haven’t had an oat cake for years, but sometimes something just takes your fancy doesn’t it?

So I decided to look up some recipes and see how to make them myself. There’s many recipes if you search for them, all with their slight variations; I read a few, got the basic idea, and devised my own plan.

I have continued foraging for wild garlic this week, in particular for the flowers; the plants are now flowering like mad and I think they’re so very pretty, as well as being tasty. I’ve collected them to use raw in and over dishes, and I’ve dried some in the oven for other experiments, so when I was pondering oat cakes, wild garlic was still very much on my mind.

For the first batch I made, above and below, I added crumbled, dried wild garlic flowers to the oat dough, as well as pressing dried flowers into some of them.

In the second batch, below, I added some dried and crumbled wild garlic leaves and added some non dried flowers instead to see how they would fare..

I also made a version with added sesame and pumpkins seeds, which worked well too, just not as pretty 😉

So whether you fancy some plain or pimped, here’s the recipe I used:

Ingredients

200g oats (I’ve used thick Scottish oats)

1/2 – 1 tsp salt to taste

50ml olive/rapeseed oil

A few tablespoons of boiling water

Method

Preheat your oven to 160C fan, 180C.

Line 1 large or 2 medium baking trays with baking parchment.

Put 100g of the oats into a mixing bowl, and the other 100g into a blender and run it to make a fine oat flour.

Add the oat flour & salt to the whole oats and add any extra ingredients that you want to add: a handful of seeds, some herbs, spices, chopped nuts…the possibilities are endless.

Drizzle over the oil.

Add 2-3 tablespoons of hot water and start to mix it all into a dough, add extra water as necessary to bring it into a usable dough.

Generously flour your work surface and roll the dough out to about 3mm thick.

*This is the point at which I pressed the flowers into the oat cakes.

Cut out the oat cakes with cookie cutters, I used 6cm and 8cm diameter ones.

Use a palette knife or fish slice to lift the cut rounds onto the parchment paper.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, turning once halfway through.

*The time required to bake them may change depending on how much water you’ve added and what additional ingredients you’ve included.

Assess the oat cakes yourself to ensure they are as cooked and crunchy as you want them to be.

Allow them to cool to harden further.

Enjoy them on their own or adorned with whatever topping you like.

Store them in an airtight container. Mine softened after a couple of days but they were still good and the wild garlic flavour worked well.

My weekend brunch.

I hope you have fun with some oats cakes!

For the love of cauliflower…

 

You may well be completely fed up with all of the cauliflower recipes out there at the moment, or you may be loving all of  the inspiration, or the wonders of cauliflower may be a new thing to you?? Either way, this post is not me jumping on the band wagon, my cauliflower experiments started long before the current food world cauli explosion, no, I decided to put this post together as I eat cauliflower almost daily and I thought I would share some inspiration, photos and past recipes all in one place. Call it maybe a one stop cauliflower recipe shop!! (Not that I’ve exhausted the subject yet or anything!!) 

 

Gone are the days of cauliflower merely being the over boiled roast dinner side dish of days gone by, cauliflower has become a king in the vegetarian and vegan world due to its flexibility whilst being healthy and fresh, and of course, low calorie. I was watching a food show the other night and a top chef had ‘created’ a cauliflower dish and I was literally shouting at the screen ‘that’s not new!!! Some of us, lots of us, have been doing that with cauliflower for years!!!’ (Obviously, Bob wasn’t impressed about being disturbed from his evening slumber, but it I couldn’t help myself.) I very rarely hear or see a chef presenting a ‘new’ vegetable dish nowadays, I usually have a feeling of seen/heard it all before, and that’s due to the amazing inspiration in blog world, as well as my own experiments. So many home cooks are doing amazing things in their kitchens, but of course, they are not out there being lauded and marketed, it’s not until a well known chef latches onto the idea that suddenly it’s applauded as an amazing new find! 

Anyway, my aim was not to bemoan chefs, but to provide cauli-inspiration: flavour, colour, health and happiness all in one dish 🙂 

It’s lovely just roasted…and it doesn’t have to be drenched in oil, I find just using a spray oil is enough to create lovely crunchy florets. You can roast it just like that, or add some spices and stir them through before roasting it. Roast it at around 200C, give it the odd shuffle around as it roasts, and take it out when it looks like this.. 

   

..you can marinate it to take on flavours…as I regularly do…like this or this, my cauliflower nirvana..

   

..use it in place of flour to make doughs for pizza… 

 

..to make crackers.. 

 

..or ‘rice‘… 

 

..in a curry…or like this one…

   

..for lunch any day of the week, drizzled with tahini sauce, cooked with harissa, dotted with black garlic, or homous…

       

..pan cooked with leftover tomato sauces and topped with eggs.. 

 

..or just in a lovely complete dish, as a main or side dish… 

 

And of course, you can eat any leftovers cold, or throw them in a blender with tahini and lemon juice and make an interesting dip. The possibilities are endless, in all cuisines, and there’s lots and lots more inspiration out there if you look, this is merely a glimpse, there’s more in my recipe index and even more on my Instagram feed. 

I hope you like my offerings and feel the cauliflower love 🙂 

I am bringing my array of dishes along to this week’s Fiesta Friday and hope that everyone gets a taste of all the options! This weeks party is being hosted by the lovely Angie along with co hosts Julianna and Hilda – come along and join the fun xx

Sourdough crackers and breadsticks



Last week I made another sourdough starter, this time following the method in Paul Hollywood’s ‘Bake’ book, which uses flour, water and grated apple. I can tell you now, it grows and grows, it’s a sight to behold! The recipe states that the apple should be organic – mine was not organic I’m afraid, but the recipe still worked very well. 
I get so excited watching starters develop their first bubbles and then grow and grow, gaining even more bubbles and volume. There was no stopping this one, Bodicea III, she almost grew before our eyes. 

During the development, you are required to throw half of the starter away before feeding her and leaving her to further develop; I just couldn’t cope with throwing any away, this was the baby I had nurtured! So I looked for ways to use up lots of starter, I’ve already made three different sourdough pancake recipes so decided to try something different. 

As fate would have it, on the day I needed it, the Kitchen Witch posted this recipe for seeded crackers – perfect! She used a rye flour starter and rye flour in the recipe – my starter is not rye based and I did not have any rye flour so I used strong white flour and my white flour starter and it still worked beautifully. I also didn’t have any poppy seeds, so I used black sesame seeds instead. 

They are so tasty! TOO tasty to be honest!! Whilst baking them, my neighbour knocked on the door to ask if I was baking…she reckoned she could smell it through the wall!! And yes, she tried one and gave them a thumbs up 🙂

I also decided to try making some breadsticks as Ben loves them and found this recipe which worked well. 

Aren’t they fab? I was so proud!!! I made breadsticks! (I know, I’m easily pleased…!) I kept bouncing around the kitchen in glee – just call me Tigger!! 

I hope you are all having a good week so far, see you tomorrow for this week’s ‘What would you feed me?’ post from another special blogger…xx