Weetabix Apple Breakfast Biscuits

I'm becoming quite trusting of the apple and cinnamon combination. Almost always, the flavour turns out right, often pulling off a killer combo in crumble, ice cream and cake.

The first type of 'breakfast biscuits' I ever had were Belvita's honey and oat biscuits, which I absolutely love.

Weetabix has a similar type of biscuit, which I bought at a corner shop for 39p. Each pack has a plastic container of 4 biscuits. The container is quite annoying to meddle with to remove a biscuit, as there is no space for a finger to slot in.

The biscuits have a lovely, hearty taste, which warms up in your mouth. There is a great balance of apple and cinnamon flavours, but they are mild yet noticeable, which gives way to the wheat-y base. The biscuits are dense and crunchy, and they melt in your mouth.

The thing about breakfast biscuits is that they are rarely eaten during breakfast. At least in the case of my friends and I, anyway. We bring them to school and have them for a snack. Eighty percent of the time, I plan to do that, but end up finishing them while sitting on my desk at home. (They are really addictive and moreish!)

Biscuits are biscuits, and they'll be treated like biscuits, even if they're meant for a certain time of the day.

Greggs

I didn't have a good impression of Greggs right from the start.

The first time I heard about it was when I chanced upon an article on the Daily Mail, in which a Greggs employee acts like a gassed eight-year old and decides to badmouth artisan bread-maker, Paul Hollywood, for doing the plaited loaves all wrong and speaking like an Enid Blyton narrator. Accompanying the article was this picture of a Greggs shopfront:

I am not a big fan of the storefront. It looks more like a bookstore than a bakery to me.

The other thing is, you can't insult Paul Hollywood, you simply can't.

Just look at all that adorable-ness.

Bam. No one can make bread-making look more epic than the Hollywood.

The whole thing was probably a publicity stunt by Greggs, but nevertheless I chose Greggs, out of curiosity, as a lunch option while shopping in Hounslow.

The café section was preceded by a bakery section. I think. There were about two shelves, which contained doughnuts, muffins, and loaves which looked very neat and identical.

Moving on to the café section, they had yogurts, salads, pasties, cakes, Danish pastries, croques, sandwiches, pasta, coffee, and other quintessential café food items. The prices were really appealing, with pasties costing about £1.50 and a bowl of pasta for £2.99. 

A steak bake pasty and an iced apple cream Danish cost me exactly £3.

The steak bake was puff pastry filled with beef stew. I loved the warm, creamy and hearty taste of the beef stew, which were quite generous chunks.

Emma, my food buddy for the day, tried some of my dessert. After the meal, I commented, "I do wish that there was more apple in it, though."

She replied, "It was supposed to have apple in it?"

The Danish pastry sandwiched a thin layer of apple and sauce under a thick poof of whipped cream, storybook style. The apple's taste was drowned out under the cream which was a bit much, and I could only occasionally feel its gooey texture.

Greggs is a good option for a cheap café lunch, with tasty-looking pastries and a few other limited options for savoury items, which includes customisable sandwiches (Emma: "The lady took forever to make my sandwich, and look, all my onions are falling out.") and fish fingers. Not somewhere to return to day-after-day, but alright when on a budget and for convenience's sake. Their next step will be to redesign their banner and stop being so cocky and dissing my Hollywood.

Greggs (Hounslow)

181 High Street

Middlesex

TW3 1BL

Tel: 0208 577 2890

Magnum no. 5 Stolen Kiss: Tarte Aux Pommes

Spring is here, and anyone who has been faced with six months of gloom, rain, sleet and howling wind will find any possible opportunity to have an ice cream.

Or maybe it's just me.

The 9th of April was a good day all around the UK.

I enjoyed the scoop of 'Vermonster' flavoured ice cream from the Ben & Jerry's at Leicester Square's Odeon, which is a maple syrup ice cream with pecans and a caramel swirl. Such lovely flavours in that ice cream... there really is nothing else to say about Ben & Jerrys' ice cream, other than 'yum.'

This caught my eye in Tesco Express because a) it was in a fancy green box b) it is packaged and named like a fragrance and c) tarte aux pommes means apple tart, ooh yeah.

A little bit coffin-like in presentation, but I was delighted to see that the chocolate coating was white.

The only other time I've had apple pie-flavoured ice cream was when I had a mini cup of Ben & Jerry's Oh My! Apple Pie, a vanilla ice cream containing chunks of apple and pie crust. It fared well, but Magnum one-upped that by coating a similar mixture with cinnamon-infused white chocolate, which really enhances and completes the taste of an apple pie/tarte.

If I had an endless stomach pit + insane metabolism + immunity to fat + all other physical traits I can't have, I would have this ice cream everyday!

IKEA

I had never realized how much strategic planning goes into the layout of every IKEA megastore. When I was younger, my route simply headed straight up the escalators and into the ballpit-playground for about two hours, making friends and enemies within the mass of multi-coloured spheres, before coming out into reality and heading home in a car full of large cardboard boxes and plastic things.

The food bit didn't seem relevant to me until I sat down in the IKEA Resturant one day with my mum and had some poached salmon slathered with what I know now as hollandaise sauce, and it absolutely blew my mind and made me fall in love with salmon fillets. My mum also started to buy a seemingly never-ending supply of Swedish meatballs, as well as lingönberry jam and that creamy, brown, magical gravy. She'd pop them in the oven and I'd have about fifteen of them for dinner, with fries and hot gravy. Mmm.

About two weeks ago, my friend, Esther, and I, shared a few plates of food picked out from the various 'stations' in Wembley's IKEA restaurant which vaguely resembles an Oliver Twist-esque food queue, with the generic grey trays and all. However, the place had a lovely, large and homely interior with golden wood, and simple but chic lighting.

Esther is a queen.

Ten meatballs were £3.89, and they came with gravy, a free flow of jam, as well as mashed potatoes and steamed carrots. Some other customers had fries with their meatballs, but I'm guessing that they came with the larger quantities. The meatballs were bouncy and tasty -- flawless, and never failing to impress.

The salad bar had a small variety of beans, leafy greens, beetroot, giant couscous,coleslaw and cucumber. For a the size of a soup bowl, it was somewhere between £2-3. (There was a fixed price but I can't remember it now.)

The salmon and spinach lasagne was a generous portion, and tasted so good. Warm, browned lasagne layers encompassing fluffy salmon bits and fragrant spinach -- it was quite filling as well!

There is also a free flow of coffee, which one has to pay (If I remember correctly, it was about 95p per cup or something like that) for per possession of mug, unless you have IKEA FAMILY membership -- then you get free coffee on weekdays!



And of course, who can resist their desserts?

No, salad leaf, you are healthy, get out of the picture.



Filled with whipped cream and held by a yummy shortcrust pastry, this strawberry tart was simply heaven.

Their quality-control is really good as well. Every tart looks the same, and just by looking, you can tell that each one tastes absolutely yummy. I guess it is due to the fact that we are talking about IKEA, and they probably handle their food like their generic, please-all furniture.

The almond cake with chocolate and butterscotch pieces (£1.75) was too good-looking to resist. The layered, nutty sponge cake has a lovely caramel-like flavour, and when topped with butterscotch, whipped cream and chocolate, there is a rich blissfulness which is not overpowering due to the presence of the almond sponge layers. 

There is a lot of apple in this Swedish Apple Cake (£1.45), which is great. At a glance, one would think that the apple in encased in shortcrust pastry, similar to the likes of an apple pie, but upon closer inspection, the 'pastry' is actually a firm cake, which I guess is what makes it Swedish. Customers are promised vanilla sauce, but I guess they ran out, because we got a blob of whipped cream instead. I would have preferred the cake warm, rather than cold from being stored on the chilled shelves. It's alright, but I'm not a huge fan of this one.

The Chocolate Truffle Cake (95p) was what you'd expect from a truffle – rich, dense, and chocolatey. It might be a bit too rich for an entire bar, but it was alright when served with whipped cream and shared with a friend.

This pretty much sums up our IKEA trip.

After the long and tedious journey through the land of beds, tables, plates, potted plants, toys, and the final showdown of the ceiling-high shelves of brown boxes, we made it to the cashier, which felt as good as reaching the finish-line of a marathon track. All I checked out was a bottle of Dryck Bubbel Apple & Lingön, which is a sparkling drink made of apple juice and Lingönberries. (£1.89) It is a sweet and satisfying drink, and both flavours compliment each other well –neither overpowers the other.

My bottle is green, though.

Like a drink stall for the said marathon track, there is a bistro just beyond the cashiers which sells hot dogs for 60p along with soft drinks, soft-serve ice cream cones, cinnamon buns and doughnuts. Perfect for the exhausted shopper. Sneaky.

Next to the bistro is the Swedish Food Market, which sells Swedish food (no shit, Sherlock.), some featured in the IKEA restaurant earlier on, such as the apple cake and the almond-layered cake thing. Of course, there are frozen meatballs, packets of gravy mix, jars of lingönberry jam, and packets of vanilla sauce mix for the cakes. Other popular Swedish items such as herring roe, cod roe, salmon, and oat biscuits (I sampled some of these – really really nice.) were aplenty on the shelves.

Like Choccie Dodgers, Kakor Choklad (50p!) is a sandwich biscuit filled with chocolate ganache, with a portion of it peeking out through a heart-shaped hole in the top biscuit, which is a plain butter biscuit, while the bottom one is a chocolate biscuit.

Wow. The chocolate filling really is something. It is thick, creamy, and has a fragrant chocolate taste, without the sweet, milky, artificial THIS-IS-CHOCOLATE-DO-YOU-HEAR-ME flavouring you sometimes get in other cookies. 

See that map on my screen? I'm planning world domination at the moment.

Also sold at a great price of 50p, Kex Äpple looked interesting to me. I bought it thinking that it would contain an apple-flavoured filling, but the biscuit sandwich was filled with vanilla-flavoured filling, while an apple-flavoured candy occupies the heart-shaped hole. What?

Okay, the filling was good and the biscuits had a good, firm texture without being too crumbly.

The candy did have a lovely apple taste, but that little centre is the only instance during which you have any apple taste at all – the rest of the biscuit is a normal vanilla sandwich cookie. The apple taste didn't even spread. Furthermore, that candy was hard. Not hard like rock-hard, but more gooey-hard, like a licorice stick. Determined to prolong the lifespan of the apple flavour to last throughout the entire biscuit, I bit into half of the candy bit and had to wait a good 4 seconds wiggling the biscuit about, trying to rip apart that damned heart. IKEA could have been much smarter with this biscuit.

I can't wait to go back to IKEA to try the rest of their budget-priced foods!

IKEA - Wembley

2 Drury Way

North Circular Road

London

NW10 0TH

0845 355 1141

Opening hours:

Monday to Friday	10:00 am – 10:00 pm
Saturday	9:00 am – 10:00 pm
Sunday	11:00 am – 5:00 pm

Graze #2

Click here for part one.

I found my second Graze box waiting for me when I got home on Friday evening. I don't remember why, but I remember feeling a little bit down that day.

I opened the box and could not help feeling better when I see four little punnets with cute illustrated fonts and doodles on them, each containing a yummy-looking snack.

Apple & Cinnamon flapjacks - A big YES to this one. I love the hint of cinnamon, and can feel little apple pieces, which don't overpower the almighty golden syrup taste. I've labelled this snack as "Love", which means that Graze will send me these flapjacks more often.

Informative page in my booklet

Cookies & Cream - Creative, but a little bit strange. This snack contains mini chocolate cookies, white chocolate buttons, (there were only four) raw hazelnuts and sunflower seeds. The sunflower seeds created a dull background flavour which had nothing to do with the cookies & cream concept, but I enjoyed the white chocolate. The cookies were alright, and although the hazelnuts were probably meant to compliment the chocolate flavours, the fact that they were raw and just there in the box didn't do much for the overall combination. Still a good snack, but just doesn't fit its title that well.

Boston Baguettes w/ BBQ Relish - The 'Baguettes' were crunchy breadsticks with salt and tomato seasoning, and the dip was a good-quality BBQ sauce with tomato chunks. It was delicious, and a good snack to have with just 84 calories to make you feel better about having it fifteen minutes before dinnertime because they were just sitting there on your table for no particular reason.

Toffee Apple - Thank goodness, this one survived the weekend and made it to school on Monday.   I felt that the apples had a strange texture – a dried exterior with rubbery, semi-moist insides. The taste of the apples dipped into the toffee isn't too bad, though, a pretty good snack.

Come on guys. Just order a free Graze box using that code, and I get £1 off my next box! These boxes are really lovely, the snacks are just so satisfying.

Pizza, scotch eggs and apple crumble

The following is an insight on how three girls enjoy a Friday night with movie and food.

First we spend the whole week fantasizing about how we would add stuff like corn, pepperoni, mushroom, olives, ham, pineapple, minced meat etc. onto some awesome cheese-filled-crust pizza dough and put it in the oven for an epic Sunday movie-night, but then other plans arise and we are at Tesco at 6pm on a Friday night after a long day at school, lazy to knead dough and discovering that there is no pre-made pizza dough available in the gigantic Tesco in Twickenham.

We give up and scan the chilled ready-to-bake pizzas which were selling at 3 for £5 – perfect, one for each of us.

DJ P-Zah tears it up!

We threw these together in the oven while setting up a DVD of The Help. 12 mini scotch eggs went into the oven too – it was our first time trying these British appetizers, which are boiled eggs wrapped in sausage meat, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. I wonder why the person who invented this wasn't satisfied with a boiled egg and had to coat it with all sorts of gunk.

Dissection of a scotch egg

One of my friends didn't quite like the egg, but I did. It was just a little pleasant treat with a nice crusty touch, and I'm looking forward to tasting real scotch eggs, which aren't from Tesco, someday. Those that look like this.

The pizza was really satisfying as well. They baked well in the oven, and had great tastes, and loaded with ingredients. The 'deep-dish' one just happened to have a thicker base rather than more ingredients, just a heads up.

'Meat feast'

Although we each had a pizza, it is a universal, mutual agreement that there is always room for dessert. Tesco's Bramley Apple Crumble comes in a box like this:

Months ago, we removed the paper sleeve and placed the plastic box into the oven, which warped. So this time, we scooped it out of the container, which kind of ruined it, but we didn't care because this Bramley Apple Crumble is so good, especially when topped with vanilla ice cream. (~£1 for a container the size of three-ish bricks)

Apologies for the lousy picture, I didn't want the ice cream to melt.

I haven't had much apple crumble before, because I've only just recently become a baked-apple fan, but I really do love Tesco's Bramley Apple Crumble. The crumble is sweet and crunchy, and the filling is plentiful, warm and yummy. The warm mess combined with simple vanilla ice cream is the perfect dessert, especially with all the different textures.

I felt 9 months pregnant after eating dessert, because the freezer was too small for ice cream, so we had to finish it, therefore I kept on dolloping spoonfuls of ice cream onto my crumble.

(Long, satisfied 'ahh')

I bake at last

What is that?

Is that my oven?

Is that something in the oven?

Is that something I made, in the oven?

:D

I'm so happy to be back. On the first day, I slept for seven hours, so I woke up just in time for dinner, (dinner, no longer 'supper' like they say in Britain) so the only pocket of time I could find to bake was at half-past nine at night, but I took it anyway.

I made butterscotch muffins from a recipe written on a slip of paper by my mum, with mainly the ingredient list and minimal instructions copied from god-knows-where. The muffin was a regular vanilla butter muffin, and the rest was simply butterscotch sauce spread over the top. I made a mistake by using brown sugar instead of muscovado sugar, for the muffin bit. I think muscovado sugar gives a stronger, molasses-ey taste, but brown sugar works too. Still tasted great!

And then the butterscotch decided to throw me in a corner and tell me what a wannabe baker I am.

The last time I tried cooking sugar, I was making creme caramel (a.k.a flan) and, although I got the caramel without burning it, majority of it hardened in the ramekins and the pan. Why? I still have no clue.

I made butterscotch by mixing and heating golden syrup, butter and sugar. Then I left it on the stove while waiting for the muffins in the oven. Then the butterscotch became all weird when I stirred it. It turned into what looked like toffee worms swimming in a pool of oil. I have no idea what happened, could someone please enlighten me.

Anyway, I salvaged what I could, and managed to yank some of the hardened butterscotch onto my muffins.

Overall, the muffins tasted great, with or without butterscotch sauce, (as you can see I didn't have enough sauce for the last four muffins) and I'm happy.

Then we had some great cake from Jane's Cake Station to celebrate my brother's 19th birthday. It was a basic single-layered chocolate cake, and the texture of everything was perfect. Chocolate cream not too runny and not too firm, while the cake was moist and almost jello-like, meaning that it didn't fall into crumbs very easily. It is a cake that you can't fail to like.

Today, I baked this baby, and as my friend Chaice would say, "I feel like a proud mama duck."

It is a Finnish apple cake with cinnamon, found on my trusty recipe source, Foodgawker. It was a rainy day and I woke up at noontime, plus I didn't seem to have plans for most of the day, so why not more baking?

Here's some of the action (Apples being mixed with sugar and cinnamon)

I'm never a fan of spice, such as cinnamon, but I decided to give it a go anyway, and now I actually find the taste and smell of cinnamon quite appealing! While in the oven, the aroma filled my entire house, and I couldn't wait for the hour of baking time to be over so I could try some of that cake!

We got some beautiful cake batter here... and some kick-ass apple-arranging over there...

And some more top-quality springform pan removal... and some apple-arrangement disappointment!

The cake poofed up and rose above the apples, so the apples look like they are disappearing under a patch of quicksand. But it's fine because it tastes amazing.

Well of course it does, because if you take a look at the recipe, the amount of butter and sugar in that cake will give anyone a clogged digestive system if taken all at one go.

Here's a fossil of a quicksand victim.