The Wright side of life: When in need of some comfort...

The reason we are here is we are heading down to Brighton for a week. It is our turn to visit our daughter and granddaughter, but also, I am appearing threedays over the weekend at the Foodies Festival. Time to demo those tartlets again!It will be a task blind baking the pastry cases in my caravan oven perhaps, but I have all week to practice.The caravan wardrobe is full of my festival robes, I can’t get away with regular camping clothes anymore!When we arrived here the shop had closed so my task this evening is conjuring something up out of a couple of potatoes, a few carrots and an onion.Options to go with it are either a tin of corned beef, so corned beef hash is an obvious choice, or I have seen a tin of Fray Bentos steak pie in the cupboard. John must have sneaked that into the shopping trolley, he loves them, but I do really like to make all my own things.Speaking of comfort food, there has been so much of that in my kitchen all week. John and I have had the worst colds ever. I was really pleased not to have anypressing engagements this week so at least I could coddle myself a bit.We have had stew and dumplings, dumplings made with butter as we didn’t have any suet in the cupboard.We had a shepherd’s pie made with Quorn mince, I like to do meat free but I have to trick John into joining me, I don’t mention the Quorn!I made a good tagliatelle using mince but with added chorizo and laced with my spice of the year, smoked paprika.On Saturday I was feeling a bit perkier so, we had a bit of an upgrade and had duck breast with blackberry and port sauce. I must confess here, I went to the port bottle and it was empty, so it was a blackberry and red wine sauce.Yesterday my thoughts turned to showstoppers. When I was on the Bake Off my showstoppers got me out of the mire a few times, I came up with some belters.I need something that looks fancy but is easy to put together. I came up with a chocolate mocha Bundt cake.A Bundt cake tin is a ring tin with an elaborate design so it gives a cake a carved appearance.Then I made some ganache to drizzle over it. I made some praline to scatter on the ganache and topped it off with piped cream and fresh fruit. It looked fantastic and tasted even better (see the picture).I will be putting the recipe on my website soon.Wishing everyone a fab May Day weekend and catch up with you all next week!Stay Fabulous

Karen

For more tips and recipes go to www.karenwrightbakes.co.uk