Thermomix® Roasted Butternut Squash Risotto Recipe

This year I grew butternut squash in my garden for the first time. Between the slugs, the lack of sunlight and the fact that we’re moving soon, they’ve remained small, but perfectly butternut shaped. I’m quite pleased, actually!

Butternut Squash is perfect for this time of year – it’s light but filling, and can used in a variety of dishes.

Butternut Squash Risotto

Since we’re moving in a week, we’re trying to use up a lot of store cupboard supplies, and one of those is Risotto, so today I made this roasted butternut squash risotto for our lunch. It’s slightly different from my usual, in that I didn’t have wine or home made stock, but I was very pleased with how it worked out!

5.0 from 1 reviews
Thermomix® Roasted Butternut Squash Risotto Recipe
 
Prep time
Cook time
Total time
 
Author:
Recipe type: Main
Serves: 4
Ingredients
  • 50 g parmesan cheese cubed
  • 1 medium onion, halved
  • 1 tbs white wine vinegar
  • 1 tbs dried sage
  • 50 g olive oil
  • 400 g arborio rice
  • 1000g stock/water
  • 10g butter
  • 1 Butternut Squash, sliced
  • salt & pepper to taste
  • *handful of fresh sage, if you have.
Instructions
  1. Heat the oven to 190C.
  2. Layer sliced butternut squash on a tray, drizzle with oil and salt, and cook for 30 minutes.
  3. After 10 mins*, put the Parmesan into the thermomix bowl & pulverise for 10 seconds Speed 9 and set aside.
  4. Place the onion and oil in the bowl & chop for 5 sec on speed 4.
  5. Saute for 3 mins at 100C on reverse speed 1.
  6. Add rice and white wine vinegar and dried sage into bowl & saute for 2 mins at 100C on reverse speed spoon.
  7. Add stock and water and cook for 15 mins at 100C on reverse speed spoon.
  8. Add butter and cheese and stir. If you have two bowls, swap over, otherwise empty the bowl and put half of the butternut squash in the bowl. Put the MC in place and pulse on turbo four or five times till it's pureed.
  9. Mix the squash into the risotto and season to taste.
  10. Sprinkle with fresh sage leaves, if you have.
  11. *Use those ten minutes to lightly fry sage leaves, if you have them. Set aside for topping.

 

Raw Ferrero Bliss Balls Recipe

Ferrero Bliss Balls

I discovered these hazelnut and chocolate beauties quite by accident. I was trying to make hazelnut flour but left the nuts going in the food processor for too long and ended up with hazelnut butter. I added cocoa powder and coconut oil and came up with a beautiful chocolate spread alternative, which has lasted for over a month in the fridge without going off.

Ferrero Bliss BallsThese are so delicious, popped in a jar with a ribbon on, they’re easily made into gifts too.

You can find this and 20 more recipes in Bliss Balls For Beginners, available here for $3.50/£2.99.

5.0 from 1 reviews
Raw “Ferrero” Bliss Balls Recipe
 
Prep time
Total time
 
Our version of Ferrero Rocher, but raw and healthy. These keep well in cool weather for up to a month, so make perfect special occasion gifts.
Author:
Recipe type: Raw, Sweets
Serves: 20 bliss balls
Ingredients
Ingredients
For the hazelnut chocolate "sauce":
  • 75g hazelnuts
  • 5g cocoa(feel free to adjust this for a more or less chocolatey result)
  • 20g coconut oil
For the Bliss Balls:
  • 100g hazelnuts
  • 150g dates
  • 45g oats
Instructions
Thermomix® Instructions
  1. Blend the first set of hazelnuts to a fine crumb speed 4, 5 seconds
  2. Add the cocoa and coconut oil and mix on speed 9, 90 seconds
  3. Add the remaining hazelnuts, dates, and oats.
  4. Mix well about speed 4/ 20 seconds.
  5. The mixture looks like loose crumbs when you're done. Take a small handful, and press it together, then roll into a ball.
  6. You can eat it right away, but put it aside to allow the coconut oil to hold it all together, and it'll be nicer cold too.

Buy-Now-button-300x293

Five Easy Princess Party Food Ideas

We celebrated my daughter’s fifth birthday this weekend past, and she had her heart set on a Princess party, which is ironic because she’s never really watched any of the original princess movies or read the books. It must be something inherent in girls!

In choosing foods to suit the Disney Princess theme, I had to look closely at the stories, and here’s what I came up with:

1. Snow White’s Poisoned Apples

5 Very Easy Princes Party Food Ideas

Well, that could not have been easier. 

Buy red apples. Polish them up a bit. Put them in a bowl. Job done.

I didn’t expect the kids would really eat them, to be honest, but every last apple was eaten by the end of the party!

2. Cinderella’s Pumpkin Patch

5 Very Easy Princes Party Food Ideas

Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother turns her pumpkin into a carriage, and mice from the field into horses. What simpler way to recreate pumkins, especially in the Autumn months, than using clementines! Peel them, and remove as much of the pith as you can, and they look like little pumpkins. Cut a stalk of celery into the ‘stalks’ for the pumpkins and stuff them inside. Again, the kids devoured these!

For the mice, use two meringues, stuck together with melted white chocolate. I cut pink marshmallows ‘slices’ with scissors as that shapes them, and stuck them to the meringues. With more time on my hands, I’d have used the white chocolate on them too as the ears kept falling off. I used a black food pen for eyes and whiskers on some of the mice, before one of the kids ran off with it and I had to use a blue gel pen for the rest. Suffice it to say the black looked less creepy. But it worked okay enough.

3. Belle’s Portrait Gallery

5 Very Easy Princes Party Food Ideas

We’ve  subscribed to the Disney Cakes and Sweets series from the very beginning, but I realised recently that you can actually buy individual books too, if you want to, and those also come with the beautiful moulds and baking bits that we used. 

For these, I used about 8 blocks of white chocolate at a time, melting them in a glass bowl over a pot of boiling water. If you use a Thermomix®, you can do it on 37C for perfectly tempered chocolate too.

Add a drop or two of food colouring, as needed, and allow to set. Obviously doing this three shapes at a time is tedious, but it’s worth it in the end. I visualise these as a series of paintings, waiting to be hung on a wall! These Beauty and the Beast moulds are from issue 52 and cost £3.99

4. Crown sandwiches

5 Very Easy Princes Party Food Ideas

These are also from Disney Cakes and Sweets, issue 17 [also £3.99], but you can pick up various versions around the web.

Again, easy and quick to do too. Butter your bread, and put the filling on, and press down to cut the shapes. My husband always moans that there’s a lot of waste with these, but I don’t think there really is. If you imagine most little people don’t eat the crusts anyway, you can often lay your shapes out in such a way to minimise the wastage.

We did sandwiches with ham, some with cheese, a few with cucumber and cream cheese and some salmon. I also made a tea for the adults, just cutting each sandwich into five ‘fingers’. They went down quite well too!

5. Aurora’s (Lemon)ade

5 Very Easy Princes Party Food Ideas

Aurora, the made up name for Sleeping Beauty, needs saving, so who will come to her aid? She is also the only original princess who wore a pink dress, so it seems fitting that a pink drink is named for her.

I discovered a beautiful naturally pink lemonade recipe, which I’ll share soon.

I hope those five easy Disney Princess party food ideas are helpful and take some pressure off on party day!

5 Very Easy Princes Party Food Ideas

 

How Interchangeable Are Thermomix® T5 And TM31 Recipes?

Anyone with a Thermomix® knows now that there’s a new model in town, and there’s been a lot of joy, excitement, unhappiness and downright anger and disappointment among owners. Among bloggers, however, the big question has been: can I still blog if I don’t have a T5?  

A few days ago I borrowed the new ‘Basic’ cookbook from a new owner, so that I could try to make some recipes in my TM31 and give it an honest try.

My findings were simple-ish.

If you are a confident cook and Thermomix® user, it should be really simple to flit about between the TM31 and the T5, though you may find yourself overfilling your bowl at times, so you will need to scale down. If you’re a T5 user, you may have the opposite problem, with not having enough quantity to fill the bowl – okay if you’re making soup, annoying if you’re chopping garlic and need to scrape down the bow more frequently.  It’s not insurmountable, however, and personally, I wouldn’t hesitate to use recipes from either.

But down to business…

My husband goes crazy for Creme Caramels so when I saw the recipe, it was the first thing I was going to try. The 700g water was too much for my TM31 bowl and overflowed a bit at Varoma temp. I poured 200g out about 10 minutes in, and had no problems further.

Incidentally, and not any fault of the Thermomix®, but one of my ramekins couldn’t stand the heat and broke in half, leaving the kitchen smelling like boiled egg, and the contents of the bowl looking like scrambled egg juice. Trust me, it looks no better than it sounds!

T5 Creme Caramel in TM31

The result? Beautifully set Creme Caramels. (I’m pretty certain, however, that the recipe is flawed. They tasted like egg topped with sugar. There was no vanilla essence in the ingredients list, and there’s no opportunity for the sugar [in the creme] to melt. As a result you have a grainy looking, flavourless desert. I made them again, adding vanilla essence, which tasted a lot better, but still had the weird grainy sugar look [see those ‘dots’ in the picture? It is possible that this is due to the Varoma temperature on the T5 being higher than on the TM31, but I doubt it]. I’d definitely not recommend the recipe in the Basic Cookbook as far as flavour and appearance go though.)

Next up I raided the garden for courgettes. As it turned out we don’t have any carrots, so I halved the Steamed carrot and courgette tagliatelle recipe. It’s not strictly a perfect test, I suppose, but it worked fine. The steamed courgettes were fresh and delicious.

Steamed Carrot & Courgette Tagliatelle T5 Basic Cookbook

Another confusing recipe for me is the T5’s yoghurt. Looking longingly and with envy at people who pop in their ingredients and wake up with yoghurt (because the added step of adding yoghurt 60 minutes later is such a trial for me *dramatic eye roll*) doesn’t seem to marry up with the instructions in The Basic Cookbook, which talk about decanting the yoghurt to jars and leaving overnight. Maybe someone who’s made  yoghurt in a T5 can clarify that for me?

The main area where you may run into problems flitting between the two machine’s recipes, is in the Varoma. The TM31 has (I believe) a Varoma temperature of 110C but the T5 has a temperature of 120C. For a lot of cooking, that won’t be an insurmountable difference – for example when steaming vegetables. You may just have to adjust cooking time a little.

As an example, I made the chocolate sauce from the T5 cookbook. You have to cook the sugar/water/vanilla mix for 9 minutes, then add cocoa and cook at Varoma for another two minutes, and your chocolate sauce is ready. This works just fine in the TM31, and makes a delicious sauce, or a hot chocolate base (fabulous as an alternative to powdered hot chocolate, and YOWZA! the best hot chocolate, ever, by the way!).

If you want to reduce it down to a spread, however, as the tip in the book suggests, you may need to cook it a little longer than the three-four minute-instructions. I used half the recipe as a sauce, and used the other half for the spread, so I can’t give you exact measures, but on half the original ingredients, 3 minutes, it cooled to a very tasty, but very runny ‘spread’. Also, the book doesn’t say this, but you do have to let it cool down properly to get it to be ‘spreadable’.  Once you’ve decanted your syrup or spread, add milk to the bowl, and cook for 3 minutes on 80C. Start with a quick ‘turbo’ or two to get all the chocolate sauce from around the tops of the bowl – again, not in the book, but common sense.

Chocolate

So basically, where you’re using the Varoma temperature to set or melt something, you may need to give it a bit of extra time, you’d have to decide on a recipe by recipe basis.

Ideally, to really test this, you’d need two machines side by side, making the same recipes, and looking at the results. I can’t do that, alas. 

The Basic Cookbook is lovely in appearance and is much, much approved on the Fast & Easy cookbook.

I love that it tells you how many servings, how long it takes and even nutritional information, at a glance, something that was sorely lacking in the F&E cookbook. It does however, need a finer edit which should have been done before it went to print, really, as Thermomix® already know (Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard that half the recipes are tried and tested Vorwerk recipes, and the other half are added by Thermomix® in each country, so the books differ according to national tastes – it seems these are the problematic recipes)… unless of course you really want 400 onions on your focaccia with onions.

I do wish Thermomix® would redo the F&E cookbook in the same way… a little homage to their loyal customers, maybe.

Either way, with some exceptions where you have to account for bowl size, or cook time, with a little practice and common sense I see no reason why you can’t use recipes from either TM31 books or T5 books, irrespective of which machine you have. 

Sponsored Video : Kellogg’s Breakfast For Better Days Campaign

Full breakfast, lazy breakfast, continental breakfast, slice of toast? One thing each of these has in common is that they are eaten in the morning, normally, and can set you up for the day ahead. We have all been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and however we choose to fill our tummies, after hours of sleep, we know that it’s important.

And yet, 1 in 7 children in the UK miss out on the meal entirely. Whether through parental neglect or simply lack of money, 2.4 children in every class in England and Wales lose an hour of decent learning time a day due to hunger. Every parent knows that a hungry child is a grumpy child, and you don’t have to be a genius to know that a rumbly tummy doesn’t make for a good learning environment as concentration is lower when your blood sugar is lower.

While the definition of healthy varies from person to person, I love the fact that they are trying to reach out to those children who need it with their “Breakfast for Better Days” campaign, making sure they are getting ‘something’. Basically, when you buy a box of cereal, you’re giving a bowl to a child who may otherwise have gone without.

New research from Kellogg’s and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) has found that people in the UK are spending more on food, but eating less, with the average food bill set to increase by £357 by the end of 2017. To those of us already struggling to feed our families healthy meals on already stretched budgets, this will come as no surprise.

If you’re wondering how Kellogg’s will be giving out these meals, 15 million of the breakfasts and snacks will be distributed in the UK in the form of grants to school breakfast clubs, breakfast programmes and food donations to food banks such as those run by the Trussell Trust.

Click on the video below for more information.


This post has been sponsored by Kellogg’s, but all thoughts are my own

Thermomix® Lemon Drizzle Cake Recipe

Lemon Drizzle Cake

I love Lemon Drizzle Cake. I have tried so many different recipes to find one that I love, and I think I finally have it.  This recipe makes a beautiful sugary crust on top, while the cake stays moist and yummy. It’s lemony flavour goes throughout the cake, and is, quite frankly, delicious.Lemon Drizzle Cake

The benefit of doing it with the Thermomix® is that it’s fast as can be – I made this and two other cakes and two breads in 90 minutes today!

Lemon Drizzle Cake Recipe

I use a lemon zester for the skin as that’s easier for me than ‘peeling’ the lemon with a potato peeler to add the skins to the bowl. That said, I do use a peeler for a few bits for the top of the cake. I think that’s quite pretty.

If you don’t have a Thermomix®, the original recipe is here. Below you’ll find it adapted for Thermomix®, though you can do the same in any food processor, really – just use your beating fittings for the butter, and the mixing one to combine it all.

Lemon Drizzle Cake
 
Prep time
Cook time
Total time
 
This cake can keep for 3 - 4 days, (if you can show that much discipline!) and freezes quite well.
Author:
Recipe type: Cake, Thermomix®
Serves: 12
Ingredients
  • finely grated zest 1 lemon (or finely peeled skin)
  • 225g sugar
  • 225g unsalted butter
  • 4 eggs
  • 225g self-raising flour
For the drizzle
  • juice of 1 lemon
  • 85g icing sugar & extra to sprinkle
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4.
  2. In the thermomix, add the sugar, and thin slices of peeled lemon skin and mix sp5/20 secs. (I have a fantastic zester so it's easier for me to just add the zest to the sugar than to try to peel the lemon first)
  3. Add the butterfly then add the butter and mix 1 min/speed 4 until pale and creamy - you may need to scrape down the sides half way through.
  4. Keep the blades running at speed 4, and add the eggs, then add the flour through the lid of the Thermomix® bowl while it's running - about 1 minute to add it all.
  5. Oil or line a baking tray and spoon the mixture in and level it out.
  6. Bake for 45-50 mins until a thin skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.
  7. Mix together the juice of the lemon and 85g icing sugar. Pierce holes around the cake using a fork or knife edge) then pour the drizzle over the warm cake. Make sure to cover all the cake.
  8. The juice will sink in and the sugar will form a lovely, crisp topping. Sieve over additional icing sugar if you wish for the white colouring. Top with more grated lemon.
  9. Leave in the tin until completely cool, then remove and serve.

 

Italian Breads With Giovanni Rana Pesto And Bolognese Sauces

I love food competitions and stretching my creative brain to include competition criteria, as it’s something that stretches me out of my comfort zone. Normally. The Giovanni Rana competition isn’t a huge stretch, since pasta isn’t a novelty in our home. Quite the opposite – it’s something we have loads of! What we don’t normally treat ourselves to, however, is pasta sauces. When I saw the Giovani Rana sauces, I decided that I had to try something that incorporated pasta sauces.

One of our favourite Italian food combinations is bread and oil (and vinegar). It brings to mind memories of late afternoons relaxing on the banks of the Arno river in Florence, Italy, dipping fresh breads from Mercato Centrale and sipping light red wines.

I decided to play with the breads and pasta sauces from Giovanni Rana, and see what I could come up with.

Ingredients

I used my Thermomix® for both of these recipes, but you can choose any recipe or method you prefer, and add the ‘toppings’ to the finished product.  The two breads here are Pesto and Mozzarella Foccassia, and Bolognese Rosemary BreadFBTopped

The Focaccia Bread I used was from the basic Every Day Cookbook. This is the recipe:

Italian Breads With Giovani Rana Sauces
 
Prep time
Cook time
Total time
 
Despite a very wet dough, this Focaccia recipe makes an airy and light bread. Add the toppings to the hot bread to allow them to melt in, and enjoy with salad or on it's own.
Author:
Recipe type: Bread
Cuisine: Italian
Serves: 4
Ingredients
  • 500g bakers flour
  • 2 teaspoons of dry yeast (or 1 sachet)
  • 1 teaspoon of salt
  • A pinch of sugar
  • 30g olive oil
  • 400g warm water
  • Sea Salt
  • Giovanni Rana Pesto Sauce
  • Capers
  • Mozzarella
Instructions
  1. Place water, oil, sugar, yeast, flour and salt into bowl and mix at speed 6 for 20 seconds.
  2. Knead for 2 minutes on Interval speed
  3. Lightly oil a bowl and transfer the dough into the bowl. This is a very wet dough. Very wet.
  4. Leave to rise for at least an hour, till it's doubled in size.
  5. Preheat oven to 220c
  6. Remove from bowl and shape onto a baking tray or stone bake tray. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt.
  7. Place in oven and cook for 10 - 15 minutes. Without removing from the oven, sprinkle with water, then cook for a further 10 – 15 mins or until golden.
For the topping
  1. Tear the mozzarella and spread over the hot focaccia. Drizzle the Giovanni Rana Pesto sauce over and top with capers. Make sure to add toppings to hot foccaccia so that it all sort melts onto and into the bread.
Non Thermomix® Instructions:
  1. Add the ingredients to a bowl and mix using an electric beater until well mixed.
  2. Knead for 20 minutes by hand, or 15 minutes with a bread hook.
  3. Follow the same rising and resting instructions as above.
  4. Follow the topping instructions as above.

The Giovanni Rana Pesto is quite salty, with a very sweet ending, it’s delicious and perfectly suitable for this bread.

RHbread

The next bread is this Rosemary & Honey bread recipeadapted to make my Italian Style Bolognese Bread.

Follow the instructions as written out up to and including step 4, but before twisting the bread, make a groove down the centre of each ‘braid’ and fill with sauce.

Honey & Rosemary Bolognese Bread

The Bolognese sauce from Giovanni Rana is ideal as it is quite firm out the tub and wont run all over. Gently ‘close’ the dough over the filling, and then ‘plait’ the bread as per the recipe.

RH2

Leave it to rise, and follow the Rosemary & Honey bread recipe again from step 6.

Your finished bread should look something like the one above.

Tear of a piece off each bread, serve with some salad, and have a lovely meal together – maybe not on the Arno, but all the Italian flavours in one meal, simply can’t go wrong.

*Giovanni Rana sent me £5 worth of vouchers to buy and try some of their products. We also bought a RAVIOLI SPINACI E RICOTTA filled pasta for dinner one evening, which took about four minutes to prepare – bonus on an ‘I’m not cooking tonight’! dinner. Opinions, thoughts and recipes are my own, except where otherwise stated. 

“Save Our Paws” Explained By A 4-year Old

Arctic Home is a joint initiative between Coca-Cola and WWF to help raise urgent awareness and funds for the endangered home of the polar bear mum and her cubs. The campaign is calling for everyone to visit www.arctichome.co.uk to share their support and make a donation. Coca-Cola will match all donations made to the campaign up to €1million.

Untitled

We were sent a box of Bear Paws goodies – they are delicious, and an absolute favourite with  my children – as Bear is celebrating it’s 5th birthday, and for two months will be donating 5p from every pack of Bear snacks sold to the WWF/Coco-Cola campaign.

Ameli had questions about the campaign, so I was trying to explain it to her, and then she tried to summarise it in her four year old way… have a look, then add Bear Paws to your shopping list for lunch box snacks.

[youtube lMC_JmfKC-Q]

Find out more, and donate to the Polar bears here.

Entertaining Food – A Review Of Benihana Japanese Steakhouse

My two girls and I were invited to Benihana, a Japanese restaurant in London who are trying to promote themselves as a family friendly – child friendly – restaurant.

The event itself had two elements – one of entertaining us, and another to show us what a visit to Benihana with children would be like.  I’m going to focus on what you can expect when you visit Benihana with your children.

Beni Girls
Beni Girls leading the kids in a hip hop workshop

(Although I should mention the Beni-Girls, dancers from Japan touring the Benihani Restaurants in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the chain. They were lovely, entertaining the kids with hip-hop dancing and putting on a show including sharp utensils and butchers knives as inspired by the Teppan chefs. You can find out more about their London appearances (this weekend) here.)

Benihana Japanese Restaurant, London
The only way to eat chicken…

Everything about Benihana screams quality. From the modern, yet still traditional décor on the way down into the basement restaurant, to the proper foil balloons kids get on the way out the door, Benihana is a Japanese Steakhouse with a difference.

Unlike many London restaurants, there are wide open spaces where you can wait comfortably in the bar area for your company to arrive. There’s also a big screen in the waiting area announcing occasions, “Happy Birthday James”, “Happy anniversary Mr &  Mrs Smith” and so on, perfect for personalising your evening.

When you’re ready for your meal, you’ll  go through to one of the square tables, but instead of a centrepiece there’s a Teppan pan – a huge flat frying griddle – with a chef waiting to cook your food.

The history of Benihana is based on showmanship. When Rocky Aoki started the first restaurant in the USA  in 1964, he knew that Americans liked a show, and he decided that the road to success was in fact by entertaining diners. As such,each table has its own private chef, and amidst smoke and flame (s)he will prepare your meal in front of your eyes. Adults and children alike, this side of the ocean too, mesmerised.

Benihana Japanese Restaurant, London
Food and entertainment in one

The chef chops, chucks, lights, throws and entertains as he cooks your meal, and waiting staff are super alert, observant and ready to serve. While its a really quick way to prepare individual dinners for a party of people, its not just a meal, its entertainment too. The chef juggles sharp knives and spatulas, flips a shrimp tail into his hat, arranges onion rings into fire-shooting volcanoes and juggles with flashing lights. Mesmerising.

Benihana Japanese Restaurant
Benihana chefs hats make cute photo opportunities

The children’s menu folds into a chefs hat which they can put on, branded with Benihana and sure to inspire a photo or ten, and if they take them off, they can play the maze game and soduku printed inside while they wait. Benihana may be a steak house, but it isn’t a fast food experience, and its different to any steakhouse I’ve ever been to. Its also not cheap dining, but I don’t suppose its any differently priced than say dinner and a cabaret would be, with the difference that it is actually something that keeps even little kids engrossed for a while.

Benihana Japanese Restaurant
Delicious as a Strawberry Kiss

Something that is worth specific mention is their selection of cocktails and mocktails. There are a few on the kids menu – mocktails, that is – and they are decently sized and the ones we had were delicious. Strawberry Kiss is the bomb, should you ever find yourself wondering which to order. Delicious.

My only observation for improvement would be that they didn’t seem to have the facility for cooking for allergies. So if you’re a pescatarian, your food is cooked with the meat, if you’re allergic to shellfish, you cant eat anything until the hotplate gets cleaned again. I know that’s not their problem as such, but it is a little limiting for people who have to be careful about what they eat.

Our overall experience of Benihana was fantastic. It may be very different, going in on a Friday night to going in at opening (5:30) on a Wednesday afternoon, but with kids you’re probably likely to be leaving as the crowds arrive, and your experience should be similar to what ours was.

From a practical point of view, there is a family/wheelchair toilet with a changing table. There were people with pushchairs, but I don’t remember seeing a ramp down – I may have missed it, but there were pushchairs down stairs.

My four and two year old had a fabulous time, I got to eat delicious food cooked by someone not me, and may have sampled a cocktail or two, and had the opportunity to chat to grown up people in a relaxed environment. What’s not to love about that!

*I am aware that I failed miserably to take any photos of the actual food. This is as much a surprise to me as it is to anyone who has ever had a meal with me. Feel free to search twitter or Instagram for #benigirlsbash however, and you’ll see everyone else’s pictures  there!

**We were given a free meal and demonstration at Benihana in exchange for an honest review. 

Cacao Nibs As A Crio Bru Substitute

I cant speak to its effectiveness in every recipe that calls for the much sought after Crio Bru, but I can say that when brewed as a coffee-style drink, cacao nibs are a perfectly suitable substitute for the hard-to-find and expensive Crio Bru variety.

Last weekend I was very lucky and thrilled to attend a workshop with Tenina Holder, who is quite possibly one of the people responsible for the rise in demand for this cacao by-product.

The thing is, its really hard to find in the UK. You can buy it on Amazon, but its pricey and import duties make it crazy expensive.

So whats a girl on a budget to do?

Experiment, of course.

I have bags and bags of organic cacao nibs at home, bought because of the health benefits, but not always used quite as often as I could.

DIY Crio BruI poured 25g of raw cacao nibs into the Thermomix® and ground it on speed 10 for one minute. I could vaguely smell the chocolate. I then brewed the powder as I would any coffee, and tentatively took a sip. Well. It tasted of nothing. And not a very good nothing. I added sugar and milk and it tasted of nothing, with sugar and milk. Fail.

The next day I decided that to replace Crio Bru with cacao nibs, it would need to be roasted. So I lay 50g of cacao nibs on a baking tray and put it in a hot oven – 180C – for 6 minutes. I dont know why six, but six, determining that it would be best to be guided by the smell as I didn’t want burnt beans either.

Well, after about 4 mins the kitchen was filled with a beautiful chocolatey aroma and after two more minutes, the cacao nibs were a dark crunchy brown. In the Thermomix® for 10 seconds at speed 10 and they were all powdered.

Two heaped teaspoons went into the Boden cafetiere, and the rest into a sealable jar. Like with any decent coffee I boiled the water, then gave it a few seconds to cool so it didn’t scald the powdered cacao nibs, poured in and left to brew for about two minutes before pouring.

Crio Bru2

The difference was amazing and immediately obvious.

I had a few sips as is, and it was fine, but then added milk and a small teaspoon of rapadura, and thoroughly enjoyed it! It does look a bit like a weak tea, but the flavour and smell are fantastic!

Crio Bru3

I know Tenina said that in time you can pick out just by taste which flavour of the Crio Bru you’re drinking, and perhaps if you’re used to drinking Crio Bru you wont like the home roasted cacao beans, but as someone without those specific beans to compare it to, I think its lovely! I’m also sure that you could subtly flavour it, perhaps with dried orange peel in the brew, or perhaps soaking the beans before roasting them (which would take longer to roast) but what I do know for sure is that raw organic cacao nibs are a perfect substitute when drinking Crio Bru.

*Tenina also recommends brewing it for 10 minutes in the Thermomix® with your milk for the best flavour. I haven’t tried that yet.

(If you’re interested, these are the Cacao Nibs I use.)