gourmet gifts

Category Archives for Gourmet Gifts

Recipe: Spiced Apple Butter

Filling your entire home with the smell of apples and spice, every mouthful packs an autumnal punch. Enjoy the sheer alchemy as the apples, cider, cinnamon, cloves and brown sugar are transformed into a mass of molten, burnished heaven… How many crumbles does it take to empty an apple tree? If you’re lucky enough to have […]

Recipe: Sunshine Granola

Every mouthful is a taste of Summer. Sweet, tangy mango and pineapple, a hint of coconut with toasted macadamias and almonds. How can that be anything but good for you? There’s something rather smugly satisfying about eating granola. It doesn’t matter what’s actually in it, you just feel like you’re being very good to yourself. […]

Five Homemade Gifts With Vodka

Both hubby and I drank vodka as students. It was cheap and reasonably palatable (our mixer of choice was limeade – you could buy a 2 litre bottle for about 50p! We were classy kids in those days…) Nearly 20 years on and we still find ourselves being given bottles of vodka by well meaning […]

Recipe: Sweet Chilli Jam

I’m a relative newbie when it comes to preserving and pickling. It all began a couple of Christmases ago, when, as usual, I had been completely disorganised with my Christmas shopping and had managed to get to a week before without having a plan in sight – let alone a neatly wrapped pile of presents […]

Lemon Meringue Cookies

If you want the sweet, zingy freshness of a lemon meringue pie, but in the form of a gooey cookie, then these little babies are for you. You can whizz them up in 15 minutes and devour at your leisure (probably less than 15 minutes…) I made a batch to take as a gift to some […]

Tomatoes: Homemade Tomato Ketchup

Five ways with…tomatoes: Tomato Ketchup I couldn’t do a series of tomato recipes without including one for tomato ketchup. Even tomato haters have to admit that they love a bit of tommy k! This version has a nice kick to it which you can decrease or increase according to taste by adding less or more […]

Orange Curd

O range Curd You will need: 3 large oranges 1 lemon 1 lb castor sugar 6 eggs (beaten) 4 oz butter (unsalted) Peel the zest from one of the oranges and the lemon – I use a potato peeler rather than a zester as it will all be going in the food processor anyway) Add the zest […]