Breakfast Pastry Pies

Hope you are are keeping well. During the past few weekends, we are back to making breakfasts with ready-rolled puff pastry. I find them light and tasty. They can be easily used in savory or sweet recipes and make them look complex i.e. people then ask: how did you make it 😀

Last week I went back to my own recipe to make cinnamon rolls which is Dina’s favorite. This week, I tried, breakfast pastry pies 🥧 – again, very easy to make and very customizable, depending on what you have in your fridge at that time to go into them; obviously, puff pastry and eggs are the only mandatory ingredients.

I had plenty of things leftover in my fridge because I hosted a dinner on Friday, so I had a lot of options.

Here is what I used:

Ingredients (Makes 12)

• Puff pastry
• Fresh green pesto
• 5 eggs
• Spinach
• Coriander
• Fried onions
• Sliced mushroom
• Parmesan shavings
• Salt and pepper

Method

Let your oven to preheat at 190 degrees.

Take a muffins/cup cakes baking tray and line the cups with the baking paper or spray with oil.

Brush the pastry using a brush with fresh pesto. My advice is to always choose fresh pesto over the the ones that come in jars. You can easily find it in any grocery store.

Cut the pastry into circles using a pastry cutter. I just used a mug.

Place each into the baking tray.

Add, mushrooms, spinach leaves, coriander leaves, fried onion.

Whisk eggs in a jug with added salt and some milk.

Pour the mixture into the pastry cups.

Add the Parmesan cheese shavings to each.

Sprinkle with freshly ground black pepper.

Bake for 20 minutes.

We really enjoyed and they were all gone in a few minutes, since, you know, the pastry is too light.

I hope you enjoy this simple recipe.

Don’t forget to bake the leftover pastry cuttings; remember, they have pesto on them. Children would love them.

Beware, puff pastry can stick to the bottom of the pan easily, you will need to take care of that 🧐

Will be back with something new soon. Have a good week ahead.

Side note: Never waste food!

Bye x

Cinnamon Rolls – easiest breakfast or teatime

I am often short on breakfast ideas and always looking for new simple recipes to try. I ate a cinnamon roll at work yesterday. It was good so this morning I decided to bake some myself.. and why not since they are so easy!

Let’s get the ingredients.

1. Puff pastry ready rolled
2. Melted butter
3. Sugar
4. Cinnamon powder
5. Egg wash

– brush the puff pastry with butter

– coat the pastry with sugar

– sprinkle cinnamon generously

– roll the pastry

– cut into 3/4 inches pieces

– line an oven tray, place rolls and brush with egg wash

– bake for 15-18 mins at 190 degrees

– ready!

I served them warm and believe you me, they were delicious and a lot better than bakery bought 😏 Girls loved them too

Enjoy your weekend!

x x x

Our Cake Rusks – simplest and yummiest!

To my surprise, cake rusks are easiest to make. Can be made with minimum ingredients, most of which are available at home, almost all the time. Surprised, because all my life I wasn’t aware that they were made with so few ingredients and that also so easily. To me they were some mysterious teatime snacks from my childhood that were only available in Pakistan. YES! Only in Pakistan because the ones I tried once in Ireland are not the same and (and way too expensive for their quality and taste) so I never bought from here again. But many of my friends do buy them, out of love for this staple snack 😀 but of course, no need from now since you have this simple recipe at hand 🤚

Okay, let me first tell you (for those who don’t know already) that rusk is a hard biscuit and cake rusk is a caky version of rusk and it is loved at teatime in Indian subcontinent.

I came across its recipe on Food Fusion Facebook page. I tweaked the amount and time of the baking period to suit my liking plus I must mention that first time I made them without baking powder because I missed seeing it in the original recipe but even then they out turned out perfect, not sure how 🤔 so now I recommend using only 1/4 tsp to make them fluff a bit!

Ingredients

Butter 100g

Sugar 3/4 cup

Plain flour 1 cup

Eggs 3 at room temperature

Vanilla extract

Baking powder 1/4 teaspoon

Method

– Mix together butter (softened) and sugar.

– Whisk in eggs, 1 at a time.

– fold flour and baking powder into this mixture.

– Add vanilla extract and mix a little.

– Grease a rectangular dish and place butter paper.

– Pour the batter and bake in preheated oven at 180 degrees for 30 mins.

– Then take out and cool a bit. Cut into traditional rectangles.

– Put on a baking tray and bake for 10 mins on each side again.

– Enjoy with tea ☕️ Your kids will love them too.

Unfortunately, I did not take too many photos but the one on the top is good enough to show how lovely they were ❤️

Until next time, bye bye 🤗

A Little Bit About This Summer

Summer is Ireland is a myth. Lol. Not really, I mean we do have 3 months of warm sunny days with frequent light and heavy showers with the regular (chilly) wind. To be honest, there are few days that are actually bright and sunny with no wind. But it is also true that we can count them on our fingers. This year, we already have had some and few more to go.

No matter what is the status of the rain, wind or temperature, Spring and Summer are beautiful in Ireland as it is indeed a beautiful place to live.

I thought I would write down a series of posts on Summer as we have already done a few interesting things to celebrate the presence of sun. Hopefully more to come!

Let me mention first, that with the arrival of Summer I had to say good-bye to 2 of my wisdom teeth and the extraction for one of them did not go too well so I was sick for a good 2 weeks and lost some weight, blah blah blah.. But I want to keep that for a separate post as I also want to let others know what really to expect from a tooth extraction.

OK let’s go back to beautiful floral Summer.

We started it off with a lovely barbecue at our friend’s. It was a lovely calm day with no wind at all, giving me excuse to just sit down in my place with light chit-chat and delicious food while children were busy playing and men doing the BBQ.

What is Summer without a beach? Yes it is also true for Ireland 🙄 North Bull Island is our favourite beach because it is actually sandy (not rocky) and very accessible.

The girls went with the Dad to enjoy beachhhh…

At that point around, I was hit by my teeth extraction and after few days when I started to recover, we went for a casual walk in Phoenix Park. I loved the photos from that day.

Whether it is Spring, Summer, Autumn or Spring, it is incomplete for us without visiting the Kildare Village.  Not that I don’t like the shopping there but we love it primarily because they decorate the entire place according to the season. This year also, it was adorned in Spring/Summer theme. Here are some photos from the day.

With all this, we are also celebrating Ramadan, I don’t have any good photos to share because I was mostly sick to do proper justice to food in Ramadan except for the pakoras post that I shared a while ago. Still going on so hopefully will have more to add to my gallery.

Hope you all are enjoying the Summer while it lasts.

Bye until next time ❤️

About My Daughter’s Birthday Party – DIY Party Favors, Games & More…

Contrary to my expectation and plan, I am writing this post quite late. This is about my beautiful daughter Saba turning 10. Her birth date is actually on the 11th of April but because the schools were off for the Easter break, we grabbed the opportunity and celebrated it on the 7th.

I kinda like doing themed parties and this time it was easy to pick because of Easter.

I was very excited to do the decoration and party favors. I always try to keep things simple and beautiful. I have kept my home decor every subtle and monotoned so that I can blast it with colors on different occasions and it will never look over the top and this way the decorations would stand out instead of just blending into the background or disappearing. Anyway, let’s forget about my home design ideas 💡 this post is about Saba’s birthday party, right?

Party Favors

For favors, I bought little blue and pink plant pots and some cute stick-on bows from IKEA.

Girls are often attracted to jewelry so I bought little character necklaces and put them in pastel colored cardboard boxes from IKEA.

I adorned the pot with the bow, added 1 necklace box, 1 box of jelly, and filled the rest of the space with chocolate eggs.

Decoration

Saba likes unicorns so I had that in mind and as I said earlier, I don’t like too much decoration, I believe things like party favors, food, plates etc should be attractive and colorful enough to serve as decorations themselves.

I only bought some silly smiley and unicorn helium balloons 🎈 and voila!!! them, with party favor pots made a beautiful sight. Here are infinite photos of the setup:

Party Games

For party games, Easter Hunt was an apparent choice. I filled some plastic egg shells with chocolates, ready to be hunted on the day.

Another one was making birthday cards for the birthday girl and the birthday girl to choose the winner of the best card.

Third game was pass the parcel. The parcel was however, not the real-many-layered parcel but just a cushion!

Party Food

It was easy to decide the cake – unicorn cake 🦄 🎂 For food I wanted to keep a mix of vegetarian and non-vegetarian options. There were cheese pops, margarita pizzas, chocolate rice crispy nests, cheese twists and chicken nuggets served with juice.

Party Time! 🎉

The party started at 11am and everyone was on time 😀 I hid all the Easter Eggs around the house and garden. Girls were super excited to search for them. I must say, they all were very interested in all the activities we did that day!

After this was the card making competition. Girls did a brilliant job and made beautiful cards for Saba.

This was followed by pass the parcel.

The winner of each of these games was given a special Easter hamper full of Easter goodies.

Then came the party highlight; the cake cutting!

At the end was food, which everyone enjoyed.

Some parents stayed for a while before taking the kids and enjoyed a coffee or juice and some chit chat before leaving.

We had a great time with all the parents and I hope that children enjoyed themselves! We appreciate the beautiful and thoughtful gifts received, Saba loved them ❤️

The Great Little Easter Egg Hunt

Hope you are having a great Easter Break. I like Easter break because you don’t have to do the morning getting-ready-for-school and school-drop off routines. You can stay in bed for a little longer too. This year was even better because my sister was with us and she minded the children 😌

Anyhow, keeping the children entertained is one big thing to do during such school breaks, particularly when you are working yourself and tired to death at 5pm.

Fortunately for us in addition to planning for Easter Egg Hunt we have my daughter’s birthday also that falls in April (11th), so it keeps us busy and in and out of the house.

This year I organized a little Easter egg hunt for my girls and 2 of their friends who live in our neighbors (also, they go to same school) 🙂

I loved doing a mini setup of Easter crackers, decorative eggs, giant giveaway Easter eggs and some chocolate to enjoy – thanks to the great deals that are available on all the stores during Easter season!

I hid the chocolate eggs and little chocolate bunnies all around the house and outside in the garden. Well, I hid them so when that I myself couldn’t find 2 of them 🙃

Anyhow, girls simply loved hunting the eggs. See some of the photos from that day. Loved the little bunnies hopping here to there 😄

Later after the hunt kids devoured the chocolates.

And finally the giant chocolate egg giveaway 😃

So this was Easter Egg Hunt for us.

Do comment, how you enjoyed your Easter?

I am happy that I will be back with another interesting post soon IA

See you all xxx