How to Use a Kitchen Blowtorch (Sunday School)

An in-depth look at how to use a kitchen blowtorch, including a look at the safety features!

Kitchen blowtorches are versatile pieces of kit that can catapult ordinary desserts and dishes into extraordinary creations. In this guide, I'll walk you through the anatomy of my kitchen blowtorch, a GenWare MicroTorch supplied to me by Viking Direct for the purpose of this blog post. I'll also share a few ideas of how you could use a blowtorch and why every aspiring patisserie chef needs one!

Welcome to the very first Sunday School--a new endeavor here on Anyonita Nibbles. I'm planning on bringing you a different cooking tutorial or guideline focusing on how to use ingredients, kitchen equipment or how to execute various techniques the first Sunday of each month!

With this chocolatey espresso-soaked bread, you can have your coffee & eat it, too! This loaf bakes a perfect breakfast treat!

Yield: 1 loaf
Prep time: 25 minutes
Cook time: 35 minutes

Mocha Loaf

Disclaimer: This recipe was not written by Anyonita Nibbles and is not a gluten free recipe and has not been tested without gluten.

Is it a bread or is it cake? Honestly, it doesn't really matter because (I'm told) it tastes incredible. You've got rich flavours going on in this loaf: deep flavours of strong espresso and rich dark chocolate. There's just a little bit of sugar in this recipe to help round the cake out and take away some of the bitterness from the coffee and the bitter chocolate. I served it with a sprinkling of icing sugar just to help sweeten it up a bit more and for contrast.

This loaf is from the Baking Mad website and was made using products supplied by Baking Mad for the purpose of testing. I've tweaked the recipe just a bit, but pretty much followed the original recipe to the letter. Because the flour supplied wasn't gluten free, I wasn't able to sample this, but as I said, I've been told (repeatedly, in fact) that the loaf was delicious and a good mix of sweet with bitter.

When I was looking for recipes to test, I kept coming back to Baking Mad's summer baking recipes, completely enamoured with all of the fantastic treats they've whipped up! Clearly, this dark chocolate and coffee loaf won out over all the rest, though. There was just something that I couldn't resist, plus, since I knew whatever I baked, I wouldn't be able to eat, I wanted to do something that my husband wouldn't be able to resist, either. As a dark chocolate fiend, this appealed massively to him.

Ingredients:

For the mocha loaf
3 tablespoons water
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
4 tablespoons butter, slightly salted & melted
5 tablespoons dark muscovado sugar
7 grams (1 packet) dry yeast
75 grams dark chocolate, roughly chopped
225 mls espresso, cooled
450 grams self-raising (self-rising) flour

Mocha Loaf

Instructions:

1. Activate the yeast in the water for about 5 minutes until foamy.
2. Place the flour, chocolate, cocoa and sugar into the bowl of a stand mixer.
3. Mix with the butter, coffee and the yeast water until a soft dough forms.
4. Turn out onto a clean work surface and knead 10 minutes. Do not add flour to the work surface.
5. Grease a loaf tin with a bit of butter and shape the dough and slide it into the tin.
6. Cover the dough with a clean towel or plastic bag and let the dough prove until it doubles in size.
7. Preheat the oven to 220c / 430f.
8. Place the loaf in the oven and drop the temperature to 200c / 400f.
9. Bake 25 to 30 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean.

A gluten free summer dessert, made from fresh cherries, crushed meringue, freshly whipped cream & decadent mango coulis !

Yield: 2
Prep time: 20 minutes
Cook time: 75 minutes

Gluten Free Cherry & Mango Meringue Mess

This is a dessert with all the undeniably delicious flavors of a tropical summer ... and it's got everything: that smooth velvety finish off perfectly whipped cream, the satisfying crunch of meringues, tart juicy cherries and sweet acidic mango. It's such an easy dessert to make, you can rustle one up during the day to serve with dinner tonight or you could dress it up and dish it into champagne flutes or martini glasses and serve it glam'd for a ritzy party.

9 Beautiful Blueberry Recipes at #tastytuesdays

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Wrapped in warm Middle Eastern spices, these gluten free lamb koftas are hearty and filling!

Yield: A dozen
Prep time: 30 minutes
Cook time: 20 minutes

Gluten Free Lamb Koftas & Couscous with Homemade Hummus

These Middle Eastern-inspired lamb koftas are brimming with flavor! They've got a very mild sweetness and the allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg give them a warmth and depth that almost borders on smokiness.  I paired them with simple, out of the pack couscous flavored with spices and peppers and served a hearty homemade hummus to bring everything together to make a quick, gluten free weeknight meal.

Decadent Nutella-filled gluten-free & paleo pastry crust topped with sumptuous brûléed peach slices!

Yield: 2 tarts
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 20 minutes

Gluten-Free Brûléed Peach & Nutella Tarts

Y'all, these tarts. I don't even know where to begin; they're an enticing and alluring mix of naughty, aphrodisiac deliciousness. First, you take a crumbly, almond and chestnut gluten-free pastry crust and fill it with silky Nutella. Then you fan juicy, sumptuous peach slices over top, sprinkle with sugar and burnish the sugar and peach flesh with a blowtorch.

How to Price & Pitch Blog Ads

Today we're going to be talking about money; the root of all evil & our very lifeline. (I know, it's the love of money that's the root of all evil, but as soon as you have it; you love it, so excuse my intentional omission!)

One of the ways bloggers make money is by selling advertisements. It's an integral part of blogging for money, yet it's one of the least talked about aspects of blogging. There are loads of ad companies (such as Gourmet Ads*) that make it easy for bloggers to display syndicated ads and earn money. But the issue with websites like this, is that they often require bloggers to meet a monthly quota of pageviews or unique visitors before welcoming them into their program.

If you're not averaging 50K or more pageviews, you may struggle to find ad companies willing to work with you, but that shouldn't exonerate you from running your own ads on your own blog. In this tutorial, we'll briefly look out how to price blog ads, including sidebar ads to sponsored posts. We'll also discuss how to pitch blog ads to business seeking advertising. This tutorial is being written with those bloggers who have less than 50K monthly pageviews in mind, but anyone could find it beneficial.

*This is not an affiliate link.

This quick gluten-free summer dessert is filled with sweet peaches & made from 4 ingredients with no added sugar!

Yield: 2
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 10 minutes

Gluten Free Doughnut Peach Skillet Crumble

This summery dessert is a peach lover's fantasy. There's nothing to detract from the flavor of peaches and it's topped with an indulgently decadent crumble. It comes together in less than half of hour and requires four ingredients. If you really wanted to indulge, you could serve it with a scoop of soft vanilla or cinnamon ice cream. As it's written, this dessert is naturally gluten-free and paleo, too!

#tastytuesdays no. 67 with 11 sensational summer salads

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Morrison's Delivers: My Online Grocery Shopping Experience #morrisonsonline

An unbiased look at my experiences ordering groceries online and having them delivered by Morrisons.

Online Grocery Shopping at Morrisons Everybody's gotta eat. And unless you're really swish, having to eat means having to prepare at least some of your meals at home. We try to eat at home as much as we can because with a 2 year old, you can never tell what kind of restaurant behavior you'd be in for if they're in a bad mood; plus, I really do enjoy being in the kitchen, turning ordinary ingredients into stunning and surprising plates of food.  Doing your weekly shop online and having it delivered to your house at your convenience is a big part of grocery shopping culture here in the UK. Practically every large supermarket provides this service and Morrisons has just kick-started their own take on grocery deliveries to your door.  Living in the middle of the city centre, in a building that is half a commercial property and half a residence, we always got turned down for grocery deliveries -- no one wants to bring food to an address that's listed as commercial..even if it's not! No one, that is, until Morrisons started their fab delivery service!  From the very beginning, I got the impression that this delivery service was unlike all the other tired delivery services provided by Morrisons's competitors. I'll be honest, I was expecting the entire process to be just like the rest: pretty hands off and run-of-the-mill but it was nothing of the sort! Let me show you: