A Nice Day of Cooking

Sometimes, it’s nice to have a day away from my laptop. Of course, I’m not away from my laptop because I’m typing this article, but the rest of today has been really nice and relaxed. And what did I do with my time away from my desk? I spent it in the kitchen, making and baking things. Something calm and easy, simple for the soul.

This carrot cake was the first thing I made. It doesn’t look like a carrot cake from above, because it has a smooth, chocolate-y glaze covering the top. Inside however is very carrot-y but also very soft and delicate. This isn’t a normal carrot cake recipe though. Normally you grate the carrots thinly and stick them into the rest of the batter. However, with this cake, the carrot is blended up alongside the wet ingredients, then mixed together with the other wet ingredients, before being folded into the dry ingredients.

The glaze is also quite interesting. I never considered using water and butter to make an icing, but it came out alright. The icing actually glazed over pretty damn quickly, but a lot of time was spent essentially evaporating the water from the cocoa, butter and sugar, turning what remained into a syrup.

Pie.

There were quite a few other things I cooked as well. The largest of which was a chicken pie. I’ll be honest though, I didn’t make the pastry myself. Sometimes I do, and making pastry can be pretty easy, but I wanted puff pastry, which takes hours to make. The chicken, veg and sauce inside, I made the filling myself. I cooked the chicken first in a frying pan, which I then put in a bowl with some sweetcorn and some onion I had cooked earlier. I added the bechamel sauce and then filled a pie crust I had laid out earlier, then shoved it all in the oven. Not particularly hard, but I think I didn’t use enough salt.

For a change, I also cut up and roasted up some pumpkin. We don’t normally get pumpkin, but we decided to get some on a whim and it came out really well. It did take a long time to cook (about an hour at least – wasn’t really counting) but it was a fine addition to the pie. I also thinly sliced some potatoes and roasted those too.

The nicest thing though is roasted garlic. In hindsight, I should have taken the garlic apart, peeled every clove and roasted it in a small tray. However, I attempted to just cut the top off the garlic, drizzle it in herbs, spices and a bit of oil, then wrapped it all up and cooked it in foil. It was still very tasty, just hard to break apart and get that soft, roasted garlic goodness.

It’s easy.

Thing is though, none of this took long to make. And it was all pretty easy. Sure, I winged the garlic and the pie contents, but this was all very easy to cook. All I really did was follow some instructions, and boom, all sorted. Job done. Surely anyone can follow a recipe. And there are recipes out there for pretty much everything.

Either way, it was a really nice, calm afternoon. 10/10, would definitely spend the day cooking again.