Crusted Lamb : Part 1

Ok, so I've got visitors tomorrow, and it's going to be a moroccan stew and couscous in the tagine, but cooked outside of the tagine I wanted to do a crusted rack of lamb as i'd seen one done on a cookery show recently.

Couldn't find a recipe was the kind of thing I was after though, a sort of haphazard sweet and savoury moroccan affair. Also, the recipe's online don't seem to agree on which order to sear, apply crust, and slow cook and if you can at any point refrigerate. So I took advice from Alison and Ian Mayor, it seemed wise.

My crust ingredients are...

Dry things for crustiness:

Almonds, Pine Nuts, Breadcrumbs, Black Pepper, Salt, Turmeric, Paprica, probably some other things that came to hand. I can't remember.

Wet things for sticking the crustiness to the lamb:

Olive Oil, Mustard, Sun Dried Tomato Paste, Harissa.

I've hammered all that together, seared the lamb on both sides, but mostly the fat side then applied a paste made mostly of the wet things. Then poured the remainder of the dry things on top. This is what it looked like:

It's now wrapped in clingfilm and waiting for tomorrow in the fridge. I'll let you know how it goes.

My intention, is to serve it with slices of orange, samphire and balsamic. Not sure if that's odd, but it's what i'm going to do.

Discovering Biscuits

Recently I've been on a bit of a biscuit making kick. It started with the cookies I blogged about not so long ago and has grown from there. All this baking is like rediscovering my childhood, I was always making cupcakes, crispy cakes or pie pastry with my mum and granny. There's something very satisfying about knowing that from such simple ingredients you can make almost anything, usually in far greater quantities than you intended. Those ingredients stretch a long way.

If you care about all your biscuits being the same, uniform in shape and size, then you'll need to get one of those shape cutters, I don't even own scales, so I'm not about to start caring what shape they come out of the oven in. These are now officially Paul's favourite biscuits, the best thing about them is they can be as chocolatey as you like. I've already made a variation on this recipe involving chocolate chilli buttons and intend to make them with orange zest in the next few weeks to create a sort of chocolate orange biscuit.


Okay, so how did I make these?

You will need two sets of dough, chocolate and vanilla.

The Vanilla Dough
175g plain flour - 1 and 1/2 cups (for those of us without scales)
75g icing sugar - 2/3 a cup
125g butter - do it by eye, most packets are 250g so roughly 1/2 of that
vanilla pod seeds, or a little bit of vanilla extract

The Chocolate Dough
150g plain flour - 1 and 1/3 cups

25g cocoa powder - 1/4 a cup
125g butter - roughly 1/2 of a packet
And just to offset the bitterness of the cocoa powder (but not too much) a tablespoon or so of icing sugar, you be the judge.


Get the block of butter out of the fridge, divide in half. Cut each half into cubes, this will make it so much easier to handle later. Now go and have a cup of tea.
Preheat your oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4, grease and line an oven tray with greaseproof paper or baking parchment.

By this point the butter will be soft enough for your needs. Take all your vanilla dough ingredients and put them in a bowl, then rub together until the mixture becomes a dough. Take the dough out of the bowl and put it to one side.

In the same bowl (no point in adding to the washing up) put together all of your chocolate dough ingredients and as before rub together until it becomes a dough.

Now you've got two doughs, yay. Roll each dough out into a square that's about 1cm thick (your baby finger is probably 1cm thick) and press one dough on top of the other, brush with a little water to make sure it sticks. Cut that in half and press one half on top of the other, you'll now have four layers of dough, stripy.

The striped part of the dough will be the top of your biscuit so cut it up accordingly, making each biscuit roughly bigger than the size of a domino. Place your dough on the baking tray and put them in the oven for 25 minutes. All ovens are different so keep an eye on them, you're looking for the vanilla dough to go slightly golden, the texture of the biscuits should not be too soft or they'll just fall apart but be careful you don't cook them for too long.

While they're cooking you might consider melting some dark chocolate and white chocolate to drizzle over them once they exit the oven. This is optional and I will warn you the texture of melted white chocolate is not what you expect it to be, but it will set back to normal once left to stand on the biscuits.


This tends to make enough biscuits to fill a large tin, they'll probably last you a month (less if children are involved).

This recipe is roughly based on Chocolate harlequin biscuits, having mutated through use to reflect my wants and needs.

Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Biscuits

These were delicious.

Being rather fond of chocolate it was about time that I learned how to make my own chocolate biscuits. It's safe to say that Nigella Lawson likes chocolate almost as much as I do. The recipe that I followed was Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies, with a few alterations, as follows:

There was a lack of light brown sugar in the cupboard so I used dark muscovado sugar instead, this is a very rich, sticky sugar, apparently ideal for sprinkling on desserts. I did not sprinkle, I used roughly 75g.

The term chocolate chips can be interpreted loosely in my opinion, Nigella covers for this school of thought by referring to them as morsels. I snapped two bars of chocolate into squares, some large, some small and stirred them into the mix before scooping it out onto the baking tray.

Overall this recipe took me under an hour, anything that can be cooked in under an hour is worth your time.
Don't expect neat and tidy looking biscuits from this recipe. They are huge, chunky, amazingly chocolatey and great broken up with some icecream and raspberries. They are not tidy and if this worries you then you're reading the wrong blog.