No-bake heaven

So its been a while since I last posted! I haven’t been lazy, its simply all the stress of midterms, etc and etc. Never mind that though, regular updates from this moment onwards!! (I promise).

I have had one thing, and one thing specifically on my mind recently; no-bake recipes! What a genius invention! As I have repeated many a time, I am currently limited to a microwave and my imagination, but you can only do so much with a microwave. What didn’t cross my mind was simplifying it even further….no baking AT ALL.

I will be the first to outwardly admit my absolute obsession with pinterest. Its bad. A whole hour, if not more, spent on that website every day. I’m considering treatment…

Anyway, I feel like I’ve got a lot of good from it. Inspiration, encouragement to continue baking despite the shortages and expenses, and lastly, and perhaps most importantly, no-bake recipes! I will include my favourite ones in a link below to help you guys out, because I feel that the experience of making something delicious in a matter of seconds, must be shared with the world. Now I will admit, that most of them have oats and sugar and often a teeny-weeny bit of chocolate….so they are not exactly the picture of health! But I don’t know about you, I often have those days where (excuse my french) I just don’t give a SHIT. I need some sugar in my body, and I need it NOW. I may even be running late for work, or have a bunch of homework that I need to do, these recipes are perfecto for exactly that scenario.

The recipe I made most recently could even be what you might consider part of a ‘balanced diet’. Oats for fibre: check! Peanut butter for protein: check! Honey for natural sugars: check! And chocolate chips for yumminess: an almighty check! The list of benefits just keeps on growing, eh? It took me all of 0 mins to prepare, 5 minutes to make and 30 seconds to demolish using my own mouth and the mouths of others. Quite the success!

I’m even going to go against my general rule of following the recipe down to the decimal points and say that this does not apply to the majority of these recipes. I pretty much read the ingredients, threw them all in a bowl and set about mixing, adding more of certain ingredients as I went, making sure to taste regularly of course! It is so fucking easy that you have no excuse not to give it a go. I look forward to hearing your experiences! Peace and love ❤

http://www.thisgalcooks.com/2013/06/07/25nobakedesserts/

http://tasteeveryseason.com/over-50-no-bake-treats-recipes/?w3tc_note=flush_all

http://busybeingjennifer.com/2013/10/no-bake-desserts/

GIVE ME THE RECIPE!!!

Yesterday was the day of the recipe…actually make that recipeS. You know, those wonderful lists of ingredients in particular quantities and arrangements that simply make your tongue want to roll out of your mouth and die in delight. I’m talking about THOSE recipes. I believe we each encounter very few and specific moments in our lives when we open our mouth and instead of the bitten and chewed food travelling to our stomach, it travels to our heart. Now, as corny as that sounds, if you have met one of your food spouses, then you know exactly what I am talking about. I began the day with porridge and fruit, nothing unique or worthy of discussion there. However, my lunch was by then already exciting me. My two other friends and I were planned to go to lunch at a restaurant called Elmo before our 2pm class at school. I had briefly looked at the website and knew that it was a pretty snazzy place, despite its less than impressive exterior. In fact, at first glance you would be entirely uninterested to even pass it. We were seated by a couple of gay waiters, just to add to the day’s excitement, and handed our menus. I chose the chicken skewers with a side of truffle fries, a rather safe choice I must admit, but nevertheless it was what I was in the mood for. The food arrived swiftly and we began to eat. The chicken was covered in something called ‘yakitori’ sauce, which was described as a ‘japanese glaze’. i am telling you now…it was heavenly! Far beyond my expectations. I was full and yet I continued to eat fries so that I had a socially expectable manner of devouring every last lick of the sauce on my plate. I believe my friend’s noticed, and chuckled at the sight of my avid appreciation of this small delight.

Next was on the way home from school and during one of those hourly conversations that in some way involves Nandos or Wagamamas, phenomenons I am aware that many Americans do not know of. If you do not, I encourage you to immediately go and find one, travel across state if you must!! Anyway, it has been a long kept desire of mine to own the recipes to the infamous Nandos Piri Piri sauce, and simply anything to do with Wagamamas, whether it be sauce or cake…just ANYTHING. Now I am aware that I can buy the Piri Piri sauce at any local English supermarket, but there is something about owning the recipe, that goes far above and beyond that. Wagamamas is simpler, as they are selling a large and wonderful cookbook, that anybody, friend of foe, is welcome to buy me for my birthday. Nevertheless, I have plans to work there over summer break in the hopes of ‘accidentally overhearing’ the key secrets to the Wagamamas success; Sheldon Plankton style!

Last, but far from least, is those cheap ass, fat filled, chocolate smothered cakes you can buy from any supermarket. You know, the ones that cost about $6 and are made by the thousands every day and the shot across the world. Full of chemicals to keep them from moulding, and placed a fair distance from the more expensive, daily-made local pastries. Yes, those. Most of my curiosity comes from wanting to know how on earth these things can last weeks and weeks. In my books, that’s a little suspicious. The other bit comes from my fascination in its ability to twist a group of people tightly around its finger; some sort of love chemical me thinks! Finally, a little bit of me, and this is the baker part of me, is irritated that chemicals continue to overpower good natural ingredients in the culinary world perhaps if I can own the recipe to these laboratory cakes I can discover a way to combine good eating and good food. As unknown to many, they rarely come hand in hand.

The Little Man

At this moment in my life, and surrounded by other aspiring and competitive actors, it is almost needless to say that I am on a diet. Aren’t we all? Whether it be eating less take out, or cutting out chocolate, or being one of those yoyo dieters like myself, we all seem to be doing something to achieve that photo shopped look. I hate it. I really do! But it unfortunately seems to have become a fact of the 21st century, much like auto tuned music and vegetarian meat (what is that shit?!). The reason I am, and will probably forever continue to be a yoyo dieter, is for one reason, and one reason only; I am a baker. If there is someone out there who bakes as regularly as I and manages to keep to the suffocating restrictions of a diet, please make yourself known. Please tell me HOW IN THE HELL YOU DO IT. It comes down to that guy inside your head saying “now Amanda, you wouldn’t want to waste that last bit of cookie dough would you?” and “the edges of that cake were intended for your mouth, sent personally by the oven gods”. I hate that guy. He is impossible to get rid of!!! They say that we are our own worst enemy…I oppose that argument, saying instead that he, THAT GUY, is. After all, we can’t cry over calories we haven’t eaten, right? I’m sorry, that was bad. But true…

I used to be really good at it actually. I would come home from school at the youthful age of 11 and run straight into the kitchen, open a bag of flour and get cracking. Before long it would be 7pm and all my after school hunger would have been quenched by the sheer fumes wafting from the oven. That was when I was young, and with less room in my head for that little man. Over the summer, when I truly get cracking on my baking (with plans of opening a pop-up shop!!) I expect to gain extreme amounts of weight, and becoming extremely malnourished through my ignorance of all vitamin C that exists in my kitchen. Well that’s in the future, and this is the present. So I will continue my life in the hopes of “throttling” that little man (my new favourite word). If you have any advice, or anything at all to say about this matter, pleeeaaaassse message me!

Turning on the oven

Today is the historic day that I began this blog. Sorry for my arrogance there, but I guess you need to dream big when it comes to popular hobbies like the one I just chose. You see, no one, and I mean NO ONE believes that I will carry through with this blog. I am not exactly what you might call the ‘commitment type’. But baking is something I am seriously passionate about, and I will try my absolute bestest to see this through! I’ve actually been wanting to blog for months now, but just could not find a topic. I considered fashion, but lesbehonest…I am nowhere near intelligent enough in that arena to even begin advising other people on it! Then one day, I was thinking about summer jobs for an unoriginal teenager like myself. I thought; why not go with something I love doing, and run a two-month pop-up bakery! Then it suddenly dawned on me…THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I SHOULD BLOG ABOUT. And that is the story of how I came to be here. I can’t really do much in terms of baking my own stuff, as I am currently at college and sharing one kitchen between some 2000 students in a good ol’ stereotypical dorm building. Needless to say I am not enthusiastic about entering that kitchen anytime soon. I am limited to my microwave and dreams of my kitchen back at home, where I plan to encourage my mother’s despise of me through my absolute consummation of all available kitchen space. I am quite the ‘don’t talk to me when I’m in the kitchen’ type, and will become incredibly frustrated if you decide to breathe my kitchen air or, god forbid, WATCH ME. When I do return home, expect full on daily blogs, but until then I will try my best to make do with my microwave and the money-nabbing supermarket across the road.

What I wish I could do to my microwave…THIS IS WHERE THEY BELONG.