Popchips

I have four main food weaknesses:

• Anything Sweet
• Bread
• Cereal
• Anything Bitesize

These four devilish foodstuffs are things I can and do graze on constantly, consuming in them in vast amounts. To be frank, I am lucky I'm not the size of a blimp thanks to these food demons and my insatible love of consuming them.

Bitesize things are particularly difficuly to resists. That "Oh just one more" inevitably leads to "Oh ****, I've just eaten the entire box/ packet/ container - Marks and Spencer mini bites are particularly bad for this (especially the Oatberry Cluster ones).

Crisps, too, are always a danger. That lovely crunch, the hard texture, the tangy flvours - it's no wonder we all can easily munch out way through a family sized bag. So, how nice is it, once in a while to find a bitesize snack that is relatively healthy.

Popchips are essentially crisps, which have not been fried but rather 'popped' - apparently they take potaotes, add heat and pressure and a 'little pop magic' - so you are left with something with more flavour and substance than baked crisps but without the guilt of fried crisps.

The barbeque ones  I sampled really did stand out from other crisps. The texture in your mouth and that satisfying crunch as your teeth sink into the smoky discs really are different from the usual crisp experience. They feel lighter but they also have enough substance behind them to satisfy.

Tastewise, the barbeque flavouring is a really deep, sweet sensation with a tiny bit of bite amongst that throaty smokiness. Sweetness and heat are perfectly in sync to provide a barbeque crisp that isn't as synthetic tasting as those awful Walkers ones.

At £1.89 a bag, these aren't cheap but they do make a nice treat and, better still, it's a guilt free treat.

White Chocolate & Custard Biscuits

Another lazy Sunday afternoon led to some more baking and once again it is from a copy of BBC Good Food. Rather than cakes, I decided to make biscuits. Not just any old biscuits, white chocolate & custard biscuits. Now making your own biscuits may seem a fairly archaic practice, considering the amazing range even the smallest of supermarkets offers. But making biscuits is one of the nicest baking experiences in my book, simply because it is so unnecessary.

You make biscuits because you want to potter around the kitchen – it’s not urgent and it’s not needed. It’s why I also like making things like granola, bread and chutney. You make them because you want to be cooking, not because you have to be cooking. And when you can make something as nice as these biscuits, it’s all the more worthwhile.

These lovely golden biscuits had the perfect texture. Soft enough to melt in your mouth but with enough of a shortbread-crunch to give it some interest. The pale, yellow of these biscuits cheers you up just by looking them and the little drops of white chocolate buried underneath their cracked surface makes them even more appetising.

The custard powder, which went into these, is subtle, but it gives the biscuits a lovely vanilla taste that far surpasses any shop bought custard cream. And until you can buy shop bought custard creams that are packed full of sweet, melt in the mouth specks of white chocolate, these will always come out on top.

From BBC Good Food June 2012:

140g softened butter

175g caster sugar (I used golden caster sugar to make these golden ovals even more sunny)

1 egg

½ tsp vanilla extract

225g self raising flour

85g custard powder

85g white chocolate chips

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan. Line 2-3 baking sheets with baking parchment. Put sugar and butter in a food processor and whiz until light and fluffy. (I couldn’t be bothered to get my food processor out of the cupboard so I did everything with an electric whisk in a mixing bowl and they turned out great).

2. Add the egg and vanilla and mix well.

3. Sift the flour and custard powder together and tip into the bowl and pulse to form a dough. Scrape out of the food processor and mix in the white chocolate chips by hand.

4. Pull out pieces of dough and roll them into portions just smaller than a walnut (you should get about 25 biscuits) then place on the baking sheets, with a little space between them to allow for spreading. Press each biscuit down lightly with your fingers.

5. Bake for 12=15 minutes until golden. Remove and cool on a wire rack.

Whittard's Amaretto Coffee

Much as I love eating, I can't really pretend to be a connoisseur. Nowhere is this more apparent than in my taste (or lack of) in coffee). I like Starbucks and I'm unashamed to admit. Yes, it's mass market and it's not refined or even proper coffee, but getting myself a plastic cup of American-chain goodness brightens up my morning okay?

Coffee critics will further look down on me because I can't even have a proper coffee - it has to be so pumped full of flavoured syup that it's barely a coffee. My beverage of choice would always be a gingerbread latte or perhaps the hazelnut latte. No, it's not classy, but I do love the warming, toasty feeling I get for having a hot cup of coffee with that lovely gingery or nutty aroma and taste.

So if you're a coffee snob, this product is not for you: Whittard's Amaretto Coffee. Adding to the crime of being flavoured is the fact it's instant coffee. But please, do not let this put you off. This is pure joy in coffee powder form.

I absolutely adore Amaretto. A Jack Daniels topped with Amaretto and Coke is one of my favourite drinks but then I just love anything to do with almonds. Frangipane is one of the nicest baking tools available - a thick, almondy paste blanketing whatever pastry you're making. The Bakewell Tart and Battenburgs are behemoths in the cake world. And as for marzipan.. well let's just say when I'm making a Christmas Cake, I'll need to buy two packets to cover the cake because I literally can eat an entire slab of the that almondy, pliable block of suagry gold by itself, each piece greedily torn off and ending up in my mouth rather than the cake.

So I was always going to inevitably love this coffee powder. The Amaretto flavour is subtle; you are drinking something that tastes of coffee, not an Almond drink. But that unique scent and taste of almond is hidden and swirling around the drink and at the back of your mouth, touching it with its glorious, sweet taste.

At £4.50, it's not cheap.But it is worth it (and the amount of free samples I was taking in Whittard's, I had to buy something). This provides a comforting mug of almondy bliss, that is the perfect partner for a lazy Sunday afternoon on the couch with a magazine and a couple of biscuits.

Peanut Butter & Forgotton Favourites

Of all of today's moments of food heaven, it was something as simple as plain old peanut butter that stood head and shoulders above the crowd. Considering I've also made a lovely sweet and sour stiry fry with brown noodles, had copious free flavoured hot chocolate samples at Whittards and bought a beautifully sweet cinammon pretzel coated in a blanket of sugar at Westfields, this is no easy feat.

But what was it amount this tub of gungy goo that lines the shelves of even the most understocked coner shop, that made it stand out so?

Obviously, taste was probably the critical factor. This wasn't just any old peanut, this was an M&S Thick and Crunchy Peanut Butter. So attractively packaged in the new Simply M&S design (and quite good value at only £1.38), this peanut butter had the most gloriously thick and gungey texture. As I spread it across a perfectly crisp piece of toasted French Pain de Campagne, there was friction and it stuck to the knife. This is eaxctly what I want from peanut butter - it was fabulously sticky.

Better yet was the way this smooth, thick goo stuck to the roof of my mouth, blanketing my tongue and tastebuds in a rich, creamy, peanutty goodness. Speckled throughout were great big shards of peanut. These weren't the pathetic little tokens cheaper peanut butters offer you but, rather, were crunchy, providing heft and bulk.

But I think the reason I enjoyed this so much was because I so rarely eat or buy peanut butter. I don't know why this is, I love peanut butter, but somehow it never makes its way into my shopping factor. It is an overlooked and forgotten favourite of mine. We all have them, whether it be foods from our childhood or things that are hard to fine.

So think about something you love but you just never seem to get round to buying and go and get some! The pleasure of devouring a personal pleasure that you rarely eat just makes the eating experience that bit more special.

BBC Good Food Cherry Oat Squares with Chocolate Drizzle

Having gone far too long without a spot of baking, my need for sweet cakey goodness led to my trying a new recipe from this month's BBC Good Food magazine. The whole feature on 'Baking for a Cake Stall' was filled with the most tempting pictures of bulgingly beautiful cakes and biscuits and frankly I could have quite happily baked (and eaten for that matter) the entire lot. But the picture of a tower of squat little squares of oaty goodness tempted me above all others and I settled on the Cherry Oat Squares with Chocolate Drizzle.

In my mind, these perfectly lend themselves to the idea of food as art. Golden building blocks of cake stacked so daintily on top of one another, they resemble a delicious food version of a jenga tower. The enticing deep, dark chocolate drizzled over the top provides a stark contrast to the warm golden brown of the cake.

Essentially, these are flapjacks but having been made with self-raising flour as well and with the omission of golden syrup, they are less dense and cloying. Instead, they are lighter, crumblier with a nice soft, biscuity texture that is still firm and satisfying.

Punctuated with glace cherries, that glisten like rubies, buried in the sandy rubble of the flapjack, they provided a pleasing mix of tastes. The chewy yet crumbly flavour of oats, the sweet bursts of cherry goodness and the sophisticated depth of dark chocolate all work together to provide a wonderful taste sensation, all packed into one little, dense square.

These went down so well at work, that I didn't even get one.

Recipe:

·         140g butter, melted, plus extra butter for the tin

·         100g self-raising flour

·         175g caster sugar

·         175g porridge oats

·         1 egg, beaten

·         100g glace cherries, halved

·         50g dark chocolate

1.       Heat oven to 180C/160C fan. Butter and line the base and sides of a 22cm square cake tin, allowing it to come up over the sides to make it easier to get out.

2.       Mix together the flour, sugar and oats in a bowl. Add the egg, melted butter and cherries and mix well to combine. Tip into the tin and press down with a fork to smooth the mixture and spread it evenly.

3.       Bake for 2-25 minutes until golden brown. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then carefully lift out using the paper and place on a board. Mark, but don’t cut, 3 lines each way to make 16 squares.

4.       Melt the chocolate in the microwave for a minute then drizzle over the squares. When the chocolate had set, cut the squares down the marked lines.

Dorset Cereals Gingerbread Porridge

I think breakfast is perhaps my favourite meal of the day. It is often quoted as being the most important, but for most people breakfast is boring. It is the meal you hastily wolf down as you run out the door, late for work. I imagine it is also the most monotonous meal for most people. My friends tend to eat the same thing every day for breakfast and it is all pretty uninspiring.

As the first meal of the day, breakfast should be exciting. A celebration of a new day with the promise of exciting eating opportunities. You should go to bed excitied to wake up, just so you can eat whatever delicious thing you've got planned for a morning boost.

And Dorset Cereals' Gingerbread Porridge certainly does that. I love porridge. That creamy, warm, nourishing breakfast that tastes so comforting but is also good for you. But I do tend to have just plain oats which I make myself and then add something to (some honey, blueberries, raspberries, raisins, hazelnuts etc). I don't really buy into these convenience satchets as they seem expensive for what they are and are likely to have unnecessary additives and flavourings.

But hey, sometimes you want to indulge yourself and this porridge is certainly a treat. Wonderfully thick and sweet with actual pieces of gingerbread speckled throughout its cinnamony stickiness. The little nuggets of gingerbread are like biscuit gold - sweet, full flavoured and crumbly. The porridge itself is also permeated with gingery and spicey flavours that entice the nose and tantalise the tastebuds. This cosy little bowl of warming goodness is the porridge equivalent of a cake baking in an oven.

Trust me, if you're not the sort of person who enjoys breakfast, try this. It practically makes me want to go to bed at 10am because I cannot wait a whole day for my next bowl of this!