Wednesday was boyfriend's 28th birthday (my, my, we are getting old!) but unfortunately it fell midweek and the day after substantial Christmas partying! I had just returned from a hectic and very long work day in Sheffield and boyfriend had his work Christmas party at a casino! So as you can imagine, we woke up very tired and slightly hungover, but £25 cheaper thanks to boyfriend's roulette success!
We still had to get into work so we got on with the normal routine, including our standard brisk walk down Whitehall. But celebrations began soon as we had decided to take a long lunch and go to a super secret restaurant (well, it was to me) for lunch. This place is called Firecracker and it's a modern Oriental dining and karaoke place, not too far from Parliament Square. It's one of those cool underground places with pretty modern decor, and a huge soundproof karaoke room. But, since we were there for lunch and not singing, we found a little table in the corner and began to peruse the menu.
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| Bento Box a la Firecracker |
Now I'm a big fan of Asian food, and I also love it when a restaurant does something particularly different or kitsch. Firecracker definitely held up its end of the bargain on both these fronts, and to top it all off it was relatively cheap too (relative to normal central London I mean). Their lunch menu included a choice of bento box - either dim sum or main chinese dish based. Boyfriennd ordered the dim sum, which came with sweet corn soup, rice, pork buns, chicken buns, beef char siu and duck spring roll. I went with the main meal bento, which also had the soup, with rice noodles, duck rolls, salt and pepper chicken wings and sweet and sour chicken. Absoluyely delish...and so filling too: we were stuffed!!! That didn't stop me from devouring all the prawn crackers though!!! Yum yum!
We had to go back to work for a few hours then, but it's great how much faster a long lunch can make the day go. Before we knew it we were back on the train home to Belvedere, with a relaxing evening of good food to look forward to. Although given the size of our lunch we didn't actually plan to do any eating until about 9pm...
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| How good does that look!?! |
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| Mmmm...marination |
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| I love this sight, and smell! |
There was loads to get on with however, as boyfriend had requested Moroccan lamb for dinner. Instead of the typical tagine route, I decided to marinate some pretty hefty looking lamb steaks in harissa and grill shortly before eating. I had planned a whole variety of our favourite sides, including saffron and garlic pita bread. That required a fair amount of time (see recipe below), as the yeast needed time to activate and make the bread rise, and then that also needed to be grilled. I popped some spiced potato wedges in the oven, and grilled some chopped peppers, onions and halloumi. And of course we had an apricot and sultana hoummus to dress the pita and veg with.
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| Tasty treat for dinner! |
You'd think that would be enough to do, but I also decided that boyfriend needed a birthday cake, which everyone deserves to get on their birthday. His favourite is golden syrup cake, which I've put off making for years because it is literally just a cake made of sugar. But it had to be done eventually, and prepping the mixture for this was quite fun on account of getting to melt sugar with heaps of butter and golden syrup (again, see recipe below). I did realise, too late, that the BBC recipe for this was actually a fat person size cake, and I had enough cake batter to make two!!! Totes worth it though, as yesterday boyfriend and I each got to take a cake to work and it went down a treat!!! Got more compliments than for my Moroccan bread masterpiece!!! And I have to say, this was one of the best cakes I've ever tasted!!
And what more is there to say? We ate (too much), abstained from the gin for a change, and watched some Blackadder before bed. Probably not how I will spend my 28th birthday but, according to boyfriend, it was perfect!!
Recipe for Pita Bread
Dough Ingredients:
300g self raising flour
7g yeast
dash of milk
4g salt
2 tablespoons oil
150ml warm water
1 tablespoon garlic powder
Method:
Mix all ingredients together, taking care not to initially pour the salt on the yeast (as this kills it). I use my Kenwood and knead using the dough hook for about 15 minutes. Then put aside in an oiled bowl to rise, for about 1.5 hours.
When the dough has approximately doubled in size, split it into several evenly sized balls. Roll these out until about half an inch thick. Then sprinkle a mixture of herbs and chilli flakes, and a very fine amount of saffron on top, and brush on some olive oil. Get a griddle pan smoking hot, and place the pita dough oil side down onto the pan. Grill for about a minute on either side, until it puffs up slightly. Et voila!!!
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| Dough is rolled out and ready |
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| In the pan |
Ingredients (note that this amount makes two cakes, as shown in the picture):
450g self-raising flour
450g golden syrup
225g butter
250g light muscovado sugar
2 eggs
300ml milk
Method:
Gently heat the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan, stirring only occasionally. Set aside to cool for about 15 minutes after these ingredients are incorporated. Beat together eggs and milk, then add with the flour to the mixture. Beat this with a wooden spoon until mixture is smooth and lumps are gone (although I had a few left in mine and it didn't really matter!).
Pour into a lined cake tin, and put in a 140 degree Celcius pre-heated oven for 45 minutes. When brown and luscious looking, bring out and leave to cool in the tin. Prick a few holes in the top and pour a drizzle more golden syrup over the top of the cake and that's the ticket!
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| The final sha-bang |
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