Inside Out Nkuto Cookies

Hello there! 

Yes, it’s been a while and it’s great to be back! Hope you didn’t miss me here too much? I did 😅 so it’s really awesome having you read here today!

Ever wondered what you could use Shea butter for aside your skin and hair? Well, I recently rediscovered the flair for baking with Shea butter and now excited to share with you my quick and easy Nkuto bake! 

General info

Inside Out Nkuto Cookies - our Foodie Recipe

My Motivation

Where do I start? This is a long one 😅 My mum... my first Nkuto (Shea Butter) bake was made by her, with her willingness to experiment with what most wouldn’t bake with. She made me realise the delightful shortening Shea Butter could produce. 😘😘👩‍👧, the Ghana Food Network asked the world on Instagram what we use Nkuto for and reminded me I could actually do this again. @vanessa who recently dashed me massive amounts of genuine Nkuto from the Northern parts of Ghana. All this with my craving for a homemade bake, my desire to experiment once again, and my curiosity for pushing machines to give me more than what they’re traditionally known for 😏

My Hack

All that lovely milk which masked the strength of the Nkuto like no other, and in combination with it gave me the taste that could fight with a delicious shortbread any day! 🤩 If Nkuto does not remind you of silky tastes, then try a good Milk-Shea-Butter combo, it may just click 😃

My Challenge

Dealing with a small turn table. I’ll probably half the portions next time 😅

My Excitement

I feel like I made shortbread!!! I won’t tell a lie! And to my surprise (I must be completely honest), the taste and texture this recipe gave me makes me realise one thing... I shouldn’t be making these often if I want to fit in my clothes. Delish! And the crunch within... I knew microwaves cooked from within but to produce this magical combination is an experience I’m happy I’ve had. Speaking of which, it was quicker to make with the microwave - enough motivation for me to try more microwave bakes in the future 😍

Serving Size

Approx. serves 6 at 2 cookies per serving 

Overall Cooking Time

25 mins (16mins Prep time; 9mins Cooking time)

The Recipe 😃

I hope you this video motivates you to try out this recipe! Do let us know what you think of it when you do 😃 

And till we meet again, do continue to have exciting foodie experiences 😋😍



Thank you for reading our post and watching our video today. If you loved it or simply learnt something new, kindly remember to like, comment or share with others.

Warm regards, 

The Ndudu Tales team 

Cornish pie crust mess, quiche crust just right!!!

Helloooooo everyone!! 

It has been a while... but we’re glad to have some foodie tales lined up. We’ll do our best to keep up with the weekends.

Yesterday, I attempted something I had never done before: make a Cornish pie crust with olive oil instead of butter or margarine.

I ended up making quiche! And a delicious one at that. But that isn’t the amazing part...

The amazing part is how I eventually got to improvise based on the baking knowledge I already had with the disaster before me... just because I was more motivated to make this work than throw each disaster away.

The oil and the flour combo was a mess: oily, and falling apart. That’s when I remembered that all my caterer friends mentioned to me that they used oil for cakes, not pastries!!! So I added eggs to help bind it up. That helped, but the dough would not roll out without breaking up. My Cornish pies were not happening. So without access to muffin tins, I created small dough moulds to hold the beef filling. That’s when the quiche idea was born, because I couldn’t figure out how on earth I’d be able to create a workable lid for the pie. By then I knew without a proper baking mould, the dough could spread out during baking and not really hold the filling. So I baked only the moulds for some minutes, took it out before it was properly cooked and compressed the bases further before adding the beef filling, the milk and eggs and popping them back in the oven.

I was truly astonished and so proud how it turned out; probably you can tell by my write up so far. The crust was light, flaky and delicious. But I realised even more that determination often makes possible the impossible.

I almost gave up and threw away my dough at each disappointing turn...

Really encouraged by this particular baked goodie. 😁

Now that my excited narration is complete... lol... let’s move on to the video recipe, shall we?

I hope you enjoyed the video and are motivated to try out this recipe! Do let us know what you think of it when you do 😃

And till we meet again, do continue to have delicious foodie experiences 😁



Thank you for reading our post and watching our video today. If you loved it or simply learnt something new, kindly remember to like, comment or share with others.

Warm regards, 

The Ndudu Tales team 

Creamy fishcakes and veggie sauce

It’s great to be back to share another first attempt at a set of recipes I’m not familiar with. Achieving this dish made my week, and remembering it, it makes my hour all over again.

I fell in love with fishcakes at the Bathampton Mill; our blogpost on my visit there would give you some indication of how excited I was about my first taste of fishcake. And I decided to create my own... one which was creamy and smooth and comforting but also lightly spicy and full of flavour. Some ambitions are high and require a lot of research but this surely paid off!

I also hadn’t made potato skins ever... I just felt, hey, I could stop waste by converting it into a crispy topping. Also, the sauce... well, was a combination of my first attempt to actually cook with wine and also not waste the milky fish stock I had left over.

An overall success... and having three other people give me lovely compliments that day, I was simply elated! Super thankful I tried. Super thankful I had the support to try, especially from Ariel and Naa Djama. And super excited and humbled that Yassine, Joana and Ariel enjoyed my first ever fishcake dish. I hope when you do try this recipe, people who get to taste your dish would be happy too.

Enjoy the video 😃

Did you notice my mention of my favourite pepper mix in the video??? Well, for the recipe to this mix  in the video, please click here.

Till we meet again, please keep having wonderful foodie experiences and do let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.


Thanks for watching our Creamy Fishcake and Veggie sauce recipe. If you enjoyed this video and blogpost, please remember to share it with others, like or comment. 

Baked Garlic Flour Chips

Hello!

I trust you are well. I am... exhausted from a long day but super happy I can share our latest video with you!

First, I’d like to thank Irene Appiah Kubi for the special request to publish this recipe, and then to Birago for allowing us to ‘christen’ her new oven with this recipe and to my three wonderful cooking assistants who have special mention in our video today 😁.

So my grandma taught me this recipe a little over 15 years ago. At the time she lived with us and was a raw garlic die hard! I hated it! We shared a room and I had had more than enough of the scent of garlic 😫. So you can imagine my intense horror when she informed me she was going to add crushed garlic to the flour chips recipe she was teaching me! I begged and complained so she wouldn’t add it. In her frail 80ish voice and heavy Fante accent she said, “Owww... daabi ooo, ɔbɛyɛ dzɛ. Awo de hwɛ...” freely translated as, “oh... no oooo, it’d be nice. You wait and see...” I remember that defeating moment so well because she was not only right, but absolutely right! And since then, I have never loooked back with garlic, though I still hate it raw 🤦🏾‍♀️

Mama, you taught me well, this one... wish you were here to read this 😁

Now that you know the stories behind this very video, let’s jump straight into it! Have fun, enjoy and I hope you love it!

Thanks again for watching our video! Please do give this recipe a try and let us know what you think 😃!

Till we meet again with another foodie blogpost for you, do remember to keep making your foodie experiences wonderful! 

Thanks for stopping by today to read our post and watch our video. If you enjoyed it or learnt something new, or both 😉, please share this post with others, like or comment. We’d appreciate that.

Warm regards, 

The Ndudu Tales team 

Homemade pizza!!!! No yeast, and counting firsts...

Hello there!

I'm beginning to wonder: if every cloud has a silver lining, then long breaks from posting definitely come with a huge bangs of enthusiasm when I start writing.

How are you and how has your own food is journey been so far? Mine has been awesome, in between moving house, changing occupations and relocating... boy, do I have a lot to type about in the days ahead.

For this post, I will be sharing how I made my first homemade pizza! Yes, my very own homemade pizza from scratch. A totally delightful experience for me, I made my own pizza dough and created my very own topping, Blazing Hot Wonder!

Since I get to give you my secrets in these posts, guess what? The Blazing Hot Wonder didn't start out with that name at all, or even with its deliciously fiery taste. It was intended to be savoury-sweet and tasty for sure, but I underestimated the small paprika-like pepper I added that ended up being hotter than any cayenne pepper I had ever used. And voilà! The Blazing Hot Wonder was born. 😄 So if you're not a fan of yor tongue being set on peppery fire, you could omit the pepper from your ingredients when anything it out. The sweet peppers will manage to give you the pepper flavouring effects without the intense 'heat'. I guess it comes to show that pizzas can have any toppings you want and many inventions are just common mistakes made viable in some way. Isn't that awesome to remember?

Ok, back to the pizza... Another first this pizza brought was my first foodie recipe video. It started out as a few shots and some fun with Google Photos and then ended up with some Photo Grid editting and the full recipe. 😃 My special special thanks to Ellen Mimi Owusu for the encouragement to create the video, and as you can see it has left me perpetually pleased as punch 😁.

So today, I won't be writing or posting pictures as much as I normally do with our blog posts here at Ndudu tales. Instead, I will be leaving you with my first homemade video showing how I made my first homemade pizza (both in pizza crust and pizza topping)! Do relax, enjoy your viewing and don't forget to give us feedback by leaving a comment below or reaching out to us any other way you are comfortable with. Because guess what, we'll only eventually get better at this and would love to have you on board!

This pizza was made without yeast and inspired by the following recipes that taught me how to make the dough and the passata (the tomato stew like base that comes with most pizzas).

Yeast-free Pizza Dough:

 https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/244638/no-yeast-pizza-crust/

Tomato Passata: 

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/817646/tomato-passata

You would notice these in the credits of the video.

And now, my long awaited moment, and hopefully yours as well... Lol... Ofosua's first homemade pizza recipe... #drumroll

Homemade Pizza Recipe

I hope you had fun and learnt something new with us at Ndudu tales today. If you did or simply enjoyed our post or both, please remember to like, comment or share it with others. 

Till we meet again here Ndudutales, where the love of food bring us together, keep having wonderful foodie experiences!

Chocolate cake!!! - and my first layered one too... #allsmiles

Allo, allo, allo!

Been a while and hope we're good? I am! The very fact that I can type this, makes all things bright for me... lol...

So recently, I wanted to try out this filled cupcake recipe, and then I got distracted by the recipe below found on my baking brick of Stalk margarine...

So in my post on Surf cakes, under the Butter vs Margarine section, I explained why I loved Stork margarine as a butter alternative. I hope you find it useful.

So back to my story, in the end, I postponed my pursuit of filled cupcakes till later and went on a search for chocolate powder 😃!!

Three shops and a zillion steps later, I was the proud owner of these beauties and was ready to bake my first layered cake!!! Whoop whoop!!!

I am honestly getting used to these photo stories, so as with some posts, I'll chip in where I deviated. I hope you have fun reading, and baking it if you do try... I did!!! Lol...

Ready? Let's go!!

The cake itself 

Just an FYI, I had never baked a cake from creaming the eggs and sugar first. I always started with sugar and fat, eggs came after that... so this method is my first, and actually a pretty good first, surprisingly... lol... 

So this is one thing I love about baking, exact measurements often make me think of mathematical story problems from Primary school. We'll be using subtractions a lot in this recipe, due to the tools I had. Here, we need to find the weight of the empty bowl before we weigh out our sugar.

Here, I used half the sugar the recipe specified. More a personal choice than a technical reason, I tend to find the sugar specified in almost all recipes I discovef too sweet... in fact damagingly sweet... lol... emphasis on my personal opinion. So as implied in my post on Surf cakes, under the Sugar section, I try to reduce all sugar quantities in recipes I find. As a general rule, I either use half or two-thirds of sugar required. Often half works well with double the salt. #hackalert

Now a tip here, when the recipe says fluffy, it actually means fluffy... lol... not just lighter and creamier... fluffy... till your batter reminds you of light clouds in the sky, or whipped cream, or the word 'fluffy' itself... don't give up, don't lose hope, keep whisking!!! You're closer now than 30 seconds ago 😃😃

After measuring out 4 scoops of my 1/2 cup of flour to get 500ml of flour, I had to figure out how to get that weird 20ml in the recipe. Weird because I had no 20ml cup!!!

In walk my 80ml cup, 30ml cup and basic arithmetic to tackle our joyous 'story problem!'

Before I continue, in case I've lost you on the 'story problem' from Primary school, let me chip this in:

When I was in Class 3 or so, we started using maths to solve simple daily problems. We called them story problems, an everyday problem like measuring up our sugar accurately on the scale up there, or the measuring the flour as follows. From them, we needed to figure out what our variables were, our constants, what was needed, what the bottle neck was and then work out an equation that gave us the answer!! Whoop whoop!! I loved them... and still do... so I actually get excited when I need to create a formula from simple things like this. I understand if you may not relate, I'm pretty excited about numbers, math and algorithm, but before I bore you further (if you aren't excited), do forgive, I digress... 🙈🙈

So how do we get the needed 20ml of flour? 80ml minus 30ml minus another 30ml gives us 20ml!!! Whoop whoop!! Doesn't that feel smart 😃 If it doesn't, no fears, I love to celebrate so at this juncture I'll do a little dance to that... heeheheee 💃💃💃

Let's continue with the picture story, shall we?

Another moment of dancing for the smarty pants, we just got the 20ml... lololll.... 💃😂💃

This is our salt... doubled... actually 150% more in this case... a teaspoon is 5ml, the recipe said 2ml... #hackalert

Pleeeeeease use butter NOT margarine for this recipe. Don't substitute unless you can confirm it's a butter alternative like Stork margarine. Margarine is awesome for dense and heavy pastries & cakes... not the light and fluffy we're trying to achieve here 🙂🙂

So my Stork baking brick is 500g so getting the 125g was kinda easy... 500g in two gives me 250g in two gives me... you guessed right, 125g! So here we are with approximately 125g of Stork margarine (or in your case real butter if you used that) in our ceramic bowl below waiting to be melted...

I put this in for a minute and watched the rest of unmelted Stork margarine melt into the surrounding hot fluid. I felt letting it all melt in the microwave may 'burn' it. I guess that worked well...

Whisk the batter once more so it's still as fluffly as possible before adding the other ingredients...

At this point, the number of times you mix the dry ingredients into the batter increases how heavy the cake will end up. So, try to fold in the dry ingredients with as few strokes as possible. Ideally, do this by adding the dry ingredients a bit at a time; it often helps. #hackalert

Remember to grease your baking mould!!!

I didn't have two round 20cm tins so I dumped all of mine in one rectangular one... I had to call my awesome Cake maker friend to give me tips in getting two separate pieces in the end. I'll tell you what I did that helped at that moment.

Till you see that your cake no longer rises after 10mins, don't open the oven door! Many a cake fall flat by this sudden change of temperature the oven door (or a suddenly reduced 'flame') causes. If you need to reduce the temperature in any way, try to do so after the tip above and/or when the surface of your cake looks crusty and not soft or smudgy. The no-longer-rising check is often more reliable to me. #hackalert

So in all confession, I burnt the cake... again... 😒... unfortunately my current oven has no gas mark caliberated or temperature caliberated dial. Although I did find this historical explanation on oven calibrations useful, I still have to learn to set my dial just right. I drew out that it should be on low flame, still wondering how low low should be...

Anyway since I did burn the cake, my call to my Cake maker friend became very useful. I needed to know what knife I should use to carve cake... her response, a bread knife or a sharp carving knife would do well... I chose the carving knife. It gave me a smooth cut without having to saw and lose more cake in the crumbs that would have fallen with each stroke. The carving knife I used was that sharp! You can check out these and other knives here if you need a visual or brief descriptions.

The icing (another first for me 😃)

I have never ever in my life made icing till this time. Never... so let's see how it panned out... lol...

So this is where I made a mistake... the recipe said 'icing sugar' but I used normal granulated sugar...

Well, if you've ever made icing before you'd be familiar with the impact of my choice... lol... yes... little crystals distributed within the icing.... not particularly entertaining unless you like biting into sugar crystals in icing... lol!

So lesson learnt, when it comes to baking and confectionery, I will really take note and barely cheat on the type of sugar when its been specifically called out. Icing sugar is icing sugar, I'll stick to that... lol

I love replacing essence with Robertson's Mixed Spices, so this is what I did here. I used 4 shakes to replace the approximate teaspoon of vanilla essence. 

Since I wanted to create contrast with my icing, I ended up using only some of the chocolate powder, and then added the rest and whipped the icing again after I had covered the cake.

I don't own a cake display unit yet, so I created the following from the lid of a plastic container that had a transparent bowl. I chose this container so I could decorate my cake on the lid and cover it with the bowl. No need to move the cake and smudge the icing, and it was good for slicing the cake and simply decorating it. #hackalert... lol

Contrast achieved

One of my friends bought this for me. I found it pretty useful as my other cookie press started to open up at the seams when I made my garlic straws for the first time.

So with my gift, my darker icing, and my covered cake, I continued my first ever icing job and Ta-daaa!!!

My first icing job was born! Pretty unprofessional in look, but the extreme pride in my heart remains. So proud of me 😆

With a piece of my first layered icing cake...

... and my make-shift cake display housing what remained of the cake...

... this lengthy Ndudu tales post comes to an end. On behalf of the Ndudu team, thank you so much for reading. Do leave your comments below...

And do let us know if you tried this recipe and used any of our hacks.

If you learnt anything new, or simply enjoyed this read, please like this post and/or share with others 😊

Till we meet here again, have a wonderful baking experience whenever you get to bake and an awesome Foodie experience with each bite or drink you have 😁

Apple pie!

Hello!

Great to have you back here reading again (or if it's your first time here, my warm welcome to you 😊 ). It has been ages, right before our last post though, I so agree. (We started composing this one before the previous one.) Forgive the unintentional suspense once more; I hope our subsequent posts will be compensatory enough.

This was our first bake off. Don't have pictures from our second. #sadface

When we had our last bake off in February right before I left SA, I promised Doro my next post would be about our famous apple pie. We're in May, and a whole lot has happened since then. But jDoro, I never forgot my promise. So I specially dedicate this post to my biggest apple pie enthusiast, *drumroll* Doro!!!

Doro's on the far left, and I'm second from the right

As usual, I'll share the links to the recipes I used and then my hacks. A gentle reminder to us all, I'm a proud newbie to this baking stuff and love to try new things. Aside helping my mum before she stopped baking when I was much younger and a few baking episodes with friends, I'm as new as it gets. So I'm absolutely glad you're reading and hopefully baking with us. But I digress again, back to the apple pie...

So our apple pie recipe is a bit funny 'cos we got our perfect combo from different sites. Plus they're different little stories that go with it... including our almost messed up crust which I talk about a bit in the Crust section below. And my all time favourite jist: that no one really wanted to work on it during our first bake off but it actually became the favourite baked treat we had that day... lol... So Doro eventually did most of the work that day, I must say. It's a lot of work, especially peeling all those apples but surely awesomely rewarding when it's out of the oven. #allsmiles

The Filling 

We got the filling ingredients from this Betty Crocker page.  To be absolutely honest, we simply enjoyed the extra Zang we got from adding lemon juice, and because that made our filling a bit runny, this is how we changed the ingredients:

• 1/2 cup of All purpose flour
• 4 tablespoons of butter
• 1/4 - 1/2 cup of Lemon Juice

And we followed the following steps:

1. Peeled and cored the apples, and then cut them in 8 or 12 segments depending on the size of each apple (that's half of each quarter or a third of each quarter)
2. We melted the butter and the sugar in a pan at high heat and stirred till we noticed a consistent mixture
3. Added the apples at this point
4. Then added the flour
5. And then finished off with the lemon juice. 

The trick is to make the filling taste very Zangy whilst on the stove because it tastes less acidic when it cools off and loses more Zang in its taste when the baking is done.

The Crust

Whilst the filling cooled off we made the crust from scratch using this recipe from this SimpleBites page. I must confess when we began to make the dough in our very first Bake Off, we did not estimate we needed freezing. I think because we ignored that instruction, our dough began to 'melt' after a while. So after working the dough according to the other steps, we added another cup of flour when we were rolling it out before lining our baking moulds. We kept sprinkling the flour bit by bit on our rolling surface till the dough absorbed it all and it felt firmer.

With our baking moulds lined with the dough, we distributed our filling and created incisions on the coverings. These incisions were made so there would be space for the pie to let out steam. So definitely, tarts and meshed coverings didn't need them. If there's no room for the pie to breathe, depending on how much space your filling takes up, you could have a messy pie from the filling bursting/oozing out from any weak portions of the crust.

We popped our pies in the preheated oven and let it bake for 30mins at 180°C. Basically we were cooking the dough since the filling was well done. And voila! Our lovely Apple pies were ready!

Lovely, warm, sweet, beautifully zangy, and a pleasant crust, a bon appetit to you when you finally try it out. And a special thanks to Doro, without you, this post may not have seen the light of day (especially since it took me about a month to finally complete it.... lol)

I hope once more you enjoyed my hacks and they are useful to your baking experience... and make you feel like a baking champion when you get all those compliments!!!

For the day you bake again (or for the first time), we, at Ndudu tales, wish you a Happy Baking Experience!

If you enjoyed reading this post at Ndudu tales or simply learnt something new, please share it with others. And do let us know what you think in the comments below. Thank you.