Chocolate Peppermint Christmas Milkshake

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // December 16, 2014 // 21 Comments

This Chocolate Peppermint Christmas Milkshake is the perfect way to enjoy a milkshake during the holiday season. Made with After Eight mints, it’s fully of chocolatey, pepperminty goodness. You’ll totally love it!

Woo it’s Day 2 of my Christmas Countdown. Yesterday I realised that I had as many Christmas recipes left to post as days ’til Christmas, so I’m posting one Christmas recipe a day up to, and including, Christmas Eve. Yesterday was amazing Spiced Caramel and today it’s this yummy Chocolate Peppermint Milkshake.

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Christmas Spiced Caramel

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // December 15, 2014 // 33 Comments

This Christmas Spiced Caramel is full of delicious festive spices, drizzle it on everything and anything this holiday season! It’s so easy to make and so delicious!

Have you guys been listening to Serial? If you have, I’m only up to episode 7 so far so no spoilers please! If you haven’t, you need to start now! Right now! Okay, you can read this post and save this recipe first, but then listen! It’s a series of podcasts from NPR and you can download them for free from your podcast app (just search Serial) or you can download it here. No, I’m not being sponsored by NPR that would be weird (and awesome, I love NPR!) this is just totally worth listening to and I want to talk to y’all about it! If you’ve been living under a rock and have missed all the buzz around Serial – it’s a nonfiction story told week by week about a murder that happened 15 years ago, a young man was convicted of murdering his ex girlfriend. Nothing quite adds up though and Sarah Koenig has been digging through the case since last year trying to get to the bottom of it.

It’s really interesting, so gripping and really thought provoking. There’s so much to think about and you can go from thinking “yes he totally did it” to “there’s no way he did it” in the space of one episode. Go download it now, and you can thank me later! There’s 11 episodes so far, new episodes released every Thursday, I don’t know how many there will be total – I think they just keep going until they come to some kind of conclusion

Those who of you who have been listening to it, what do you think? Are you enjoying it? Do you think Adnan did it? If not, who do you think did? Remember, I’m only up to episode 7 so no spoilers!! Also, would be nice to keep your comments generally spoiler free for those who are behind me or haven’t started it yet! If you wanna talk to me about it in detail though, you can come chat to me on Twitter!

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Clementine and Pomegranate Muffins

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // November 28, 2014 // 51 Comments

These Clementine and Pomegranate Muffins are the perfect way to get your Christmas fix in the mornings, full of festive flavours and totally delicious!

Bye Bye Thanksgving, Hello Christmas! I figured it made sense to start off my Christmas themed recipes with a breakfast recipe! Because what better way to get yourself in the festive spirit than tucking into a yummy muffin full of Christmassy fruits and flavours in the morning? Of course, you can eat these any time of the day, don’t limit yourself to just breakfast time!

(the problem with taking photos with shiny baubles is you can’t avoid including yourself in the photos!)

Pomegranates are such a great Christmas fruit, those red jewels are just so festive and they taste their best in the winter. I can’t really place why clementines are festive, but they are aren’t they? Maybe it’s because it’s customary in many places to include a clementine in Christmas stockings, did you get one in yours? Or will you be popping one in your kids stockings this year? Personally, I prefer a chocolate orange in mine, that’s fruit too right?!

But wherever these traditions come from, you can’t deny the yumminess of the combination of these two and they taste like elves dancing on your tongue – or something less weird sounding! My brain is too fried to think of a better metaphor so I’m afraid you’re stuck with that one! They’re not just festive, they’re beautifully moist with a chewy top, so delicious! Just the way a muffin should be. The trick to getting that classic muffin top is to fill your cases almost to top and bake at a high heat for 10 minutes, before reducing it down to bake all the way through. That way the muffins puff up on the top and retain the moisture throughout.

Getting the pomegranate seeds to evenly disperse is a little trickier. I like to toss them in a little of the flour mixture, which definitely helps, but since the batter is a bit on the thinner side for these muffins a lot of them are still going to sink. But you’ll have a few up at the top and they still taste wonderful, so who cares! There’s no muffin police here!

These muffins are beautifully moist because they’re fully of lovely clementine juice, I also used kefir milk in them because it’s my new favourite thing, but also because they also keep them moist and rich tasting.

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, you may already have seen me post about the semi break I am taking from blogging at the moment. It’s not a full break because I enjoy it too much for that, but as I’ve mentioned before I have a few health issues and right now I really need to take care of myself. Those of you who blog know how much effort can go into it, it’s so much more than just writing a few posts, and as much as I do enjoy doing it I need the rest more right now! I’m not going away completely, my next post will be sometime next week (Wednesday at the earliest) and hopefully after then I’ll be back on a regular schedule (or at least most of the time). Over the next week there won’t be much activity on my Twitter or Facebook accounts either – but there will still be a little posting on my Instagram, I’m heading to Atlanta on Monday so come follow me on there if you wanna see what I get up to or just my general ramblings, I’d love to chat with you on there!

I hope this recipe will tide you over for a little while anyway, it is a good one! I’m gonna bring these muffins along to Fiesta Friday, in the hopes they get you all in a nice, festive mood! Come party with us, it’s always a lot of fun and along with our fab host Angie, we have two wonderful co hosts to party with this week – Prudy and Jess. And I’ll be back with a post in time for next week’s FF, I’m never one to miss a good party 😉

Keep safe guys, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving if you celebrate it and have fun getting ready for whatever holidays you may celebrate this winter!

Clementine and Pomegranate Muffins

2014-11-27 23:37:56

Yields 10

Moist muffins with clementine and pomegranate and a chewy muffin top!

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Ingredients

220g plain flour (all purpose flour)
170g caster sugar (super fine granulated sugar)
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
2 clementines, peeled
240ml kefir milk*
1 large egg
115g unsalted butter
1 pomegranate - seeds only

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 230C/450F and line a muffin tin with papers
Combine the sugar, flour, baking powder, bicarb, cinnamon and salt in a bowl and set aside.
Put the clementines in a food processor, and blitz until you have a puree. Stir in the kefir milk.
Put the egg and butter in a large bowl and beat.
Stir in the clementine mixture.
Put one tbsp of the flour mixture in a small, and add the remaining to the muffin mixture. Stir to combine.
Put the pomegranate seeds in the bowl with the 1 tbsp flour and stir to coat.
Stir the pomegranate seeds into the muffin mixture gently, until evenly dispersed.
Spoon the mixture into the cases, filling almost to the top. Sprinkle a little caster sugar on top if desired.
Bake at 230C/450F for 10 minutes. Leaving the muffins in the oven, turn the temperature down to 200C/400F and bake for another 10 minutes, or until they're a light golden brown and springy to touch.
Remove from the oven, leave to cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely

Notes

*If you don't have kefir milk, you can use greek yogurt instead.
Will keep in an air tight container for 3 days

By Michelle @ Giraffes Can Bake

A Tipsy Giraffe https://www.atipsygiraffe.com/

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Sweet Potato Pie Bars

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // November 16, 2014 // 40 Comments

In my last post I talked about coming up with Thanksgiving recipe ideas and how there are so many yummy dessert recipes out there and so I didn’t need to come up with my own. Well, need and want are very different things – we may not need another Thanksgiving dessert recipe idea, but I wanted one!

Sweet potato is one of my all time favourite foods, I’ve yet to find a way I don’t like to eat it! But I’d never eaten sweet potato pie before, so naturally I decided I needed to make it! I somehow don’t own a pie plate, I don’t know how this happened but here we are – the need to make a pie but no pie dish to make it in. But who says pie needs to be round anyway? These sweet potato pie bars are the perfect solution to the lack of pie dish conundrum – and I would totally make it this way again even after I’ve acquired my own pie dish. There’s just something about slicing it up into little bars that makes it so much more appealing to me – maybe it’s because I could add a streusel topping and a marshmallow glaze without ruining the clean look of a pie! Making them in bars is a great way to serve them up for Thanksgiving too – no fiddly too thin pieces to make sure everybody gets a piece, a fork isn’t even needed if you want to mingle around the the table. I definitely think they have a more rustic, family feel to them, don’t you?

Since I’d never even eaten sweet potato pie before, I decided to start from an established recipe. I chose this one by Joy the Baker because I love her recipes and the ingredients list on this had me drooling! I thought to myself – I can make her one and then make any changes to suit my tastes. Silly me, I should have known I wouldn’t want to change anything about one of her recipes. I used her crust recipe and filling recipe, then just made it in bar form and added a streusel and glaze. I thought about topping this pie with a lattice crust, but my weakness for streusel beat that idea out. And I’m glad it did, it gives an extra yummy layer of texture, and is a great vehicle for the marshmallow glaze. Marshmallow is a go to pairing with sweet potato dishes and there’s a good reason for that, it just plain works! it’s simple to put together too, it’s just butter, marshmallows and sugar. I melted marshmallows to add to the mix, but in a pinch marshmallow fluff would probably do the trick too. It’s a nice, thick glaze too so it holds its own against the streusel!

Coriander isn’t something I would have thought to put in myself, but it really does make this pie shine! You’ll want to buy coriander seeds and grind them yourself too, coriander is one of those spices that tends to lose it’s flavour quickly once ground. There’s a lot of yummy, warming spices in this pie of course – as well as the coriander we have nutmeg and cinnamon. You cook the filling through before adding it to the pie, so you awaken all those delicious spices that bring so much fall flavour. It’s a good idea to blend the filling first too to make sure the whole thing is smooth, I used an immersion stick blender but you could add it to your blender and give it a whirl too.

There’s a fair bit of work in putting this pie together, with cooking the potatoes, cooking the filling, making the crust, making the streusel and the glaze. But it really isn’t very daunting, you can do stages simultaneously and each part is pretty easy. In bar form as well it’s very forgiving – you don’t have to worry about the top of your pie or breaking the crust!

I hope you give this one a go, it’s a great recipe (with most of it coming from Joy the Baker, you can trust me on that) and your family will love it!

Come say hi on social media! You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and Bloglovin’. If you like this post, enter your email into the subscribe box on my sidebar and my future posts will magically appear in your inbox!

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Chocolate Walnut French Toast Two Ways

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // November 14, 2014 // 29 Comments

I’m English. I live in England. Yet here I am, posting a Thanksgiving recipe! But here’s the thing, I love holiday baking. Especially if that holiday is in the autumn, because it’s my favourite time of year with all my favourite flavours (I know, I’m such a revolutionary). So while I came up with this yummy French Toast recipe with Thanksgiving breakfast in mind, you can totally enjoy it on any day, anywhere in the world. My total Englishness can attest to that, because enjoy it is something I did with great enthusiasm!

I set out to make a yummy breakfast for Thanksgiving because I figured there’s enough amazing Thanksgiving dessert recipes out there already, my input isn’t need. And you need a fabulous breakfast on Thanksgiving morning before all that food you’re going to eat – call it stretching! I knew I was going to make French toast because I’d just made a Sourdough loaf (I may have made the bread with the sole intention of using it for french toast) and I of course wanted it to be Thanksgivingy, so I was trying to think of desserts I could use for inspiration. Pumpkin Pie was obviously one of my first thoughts, which lead to pecan pie – pecan pie french toast! Perfect! But then I couldn’t find any pecans (what kind of dystopian world am I even living in?!) so I landed on walnuts instead.

Last year I actually celebrated Thanksgiving with my best friend’s family in Atlanta. Her mum made an amaaaazing pecan pie, the thing that tipped it over the edge for me was the chocolate chips – so I knew I had to include chocolate chips in my ~~pecan~~ walnut pie french toast. Why two ways? There’s a couple of reasons actually – I initially made stuffed french toast but I couldn’t eat it myself because the issues I have with my jaw means I’m limited in what I can eat. Plus baked french toast has been on my list of things to bake for a while now, so after I fell in love with the stuffing for this french toast I knew I had to make it in baked form. So Chocolate Walnut French Toast Two Ways was born! Those two ways being Chocolate Walnut Stuffed French Toast and Chocolate Walnut Baked French Toast with a Streusel Topping.

Whichever way you make it, you’re going to love it. The chocolate and walnut filling is sticky and sweet just like pecan pie, you can of course make it with pecans but honestly I loved the walnuts. It made it feel more festive for me! The baked version would probably be your best option for Thanksgiving (or Christmas!) breakfast since you’ll prepare it the night before, no fussing about in the morning when you have 1001 other things to do, you can just wake up, pop it in the oven and serve a delicious breakfast that your family will think you’ve been up since the rooster’s crow slaving away for them! Don’t worry, I won’t tell them 😉

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