Garlic and Honey Marinated Lavender Lamb Kebabs

First of all, apologies for my absence and not responding to previous comments. 

The last few weeks have been very hard. My husband has been very poorly and was finally admitted to hospital on Monday last week. He did get home yesterday, but is extremely weak. It will be a long slow road to his recovery. 

On top of that, I've got pneumonia and feel SO rough at the moment and little Oliver is now full of the snots. I can't lie down as breathing is almost impossible and the coughing unbearable.....so may as well do a middle of the night blog post and catch up a bit...

Garlic and Honey Marinated Lavender Lamb Kebabs

Gosh. That was a bit of a mouthful for a blog post title !

Saying that, I've eaten this twice for dinner in the couple of weeks and thoroughly enjoyed it.

There really is not much to this, and it could be easily scaled up to suit several people. There are no specific quantities ! It's makes an easy, quick and tasty meal.

Diced Lamb

some sprigs of lavender from the garden (can substitute with rosemary)

honey

lemon juice

garlic

Put the diced lamb in a non reactive bowl (such as glass). Add a good squeeze of lemon juice and a crushed garlic clove and approx 2 teaspoons of honey. I'd suggest this for one serving - so you'll likely need more of everything to scale up the recipe.

Give it a stir and leave (covered with cling film) for at least 1 hour to marinate.

Thread the marinated diced lamb pieces on to the lavender sprigs (or rosemary stalks with leaves removed). The flavour from the lavender or rosemary really infuses through the meat.

Put on a baking tray and drizzle with about 1/2 teaspoon more honey per skewer. I'd suggest two skewers per person (perhaps just one if serving with pitta bread and salad)

Grill in a halogen oven at about 230deg C on the top rack for approx 12 > 14 mins, turning once during cooking until a lovely golden brown.

I ate this with a fresh fig, drizzled with 1/2 tsp of honey and some diced cucumber in a tablespoon of Greek yoghurt with some chopped red chilli.

Here is my little cake tester about 2 weeks ago, wearing his new chef's outfit....

Oliver hard at work making chocolate krispie treats !

Sarah-Jane Nash, October 2011

Lavender and Blossom Honey Cupcakes (mini size)

These are different. Really very different.

I had been combing the net, looking for a "different" cupcake or muffin recipe last week to make cakes for taking into work on the Saturday.

Our wood burning stove Shop gets really busy on a Saturday at this time of year, and I like to be able to offer customers a homemade cake and coffee whilst they wait or have a browse...

I found a recipe HERE for Lily Vanilli's Lavender and Honey Cupcakes.

All I can say is WOW. You might remember the taste from when you were a child of Parma Violets. Well - it's a floral kind of taste like that and almost astringent too.

Instead of normal cupcakes, I made mini ones using an extra deep silicone mini muffin mould. This mould is generally for commercial and semi commercial bakeries - but works amazingly well cut into 2 trays of twenty cells each in a conventional oven. Unlike normal mini muffin tins, this is a little deeper and has straighter sides. When making muffins, you fill the mix to the top of the paper cake case. The muffins rise with a lovely domed top. Mini cupcakes worked in a similar way - only the batter acted differently, so I got a sort of spread crown at the top.

You really do know that the lavender is there. You infuse milk with the lavender and this is then added to the batter and to the frosting. The batter made 40 mini cupcakes. You needed to eat one and then have a second to really decide if you liked it or not ! It was most unusual, but really fragrant, flowery and girly. These had frosting overload - but the frosting was glorious. I must admit, I made the frosting up as I went along and didn't actually use the recipe for that at all. However, I think it would have been very similar.

We've got some really cute mini muffin paper cases in stock now and loads of standard 50mm base size muffin paper cake liners coming in too very soon. The ones photographed are actually specifically for the 40 cell extra deep mini muffin mould as they have a slightly oversize base diameter to suit that mould. We've got those in several patterns although they are not yet online in our website shop.

Sarah-Jane Nash, http://www.siliconemoulds.com/ - the biggest online silicone bakeware cook shop. Shipping worldwide.