bright side of the road: 3 Delicious Dishes

So it's been a long time since I've posted, no really good excuses to give for not posting and lots of great treats were had!

Justin and I have just recently returned from Canada, from getting married, which will have a post of its own soon because I have been dying to post the wedding cake recipe for months now!!

But for now, I have one main dish and two dessert treats to share with you!!

The first recipe is a simple and delicious recipe that we picked up for free from Waitrose. They have these great recipes cards that you can pick up in the shop and they are usually relatively simple and easy enough to make!

BBQ Chicken and Simple Slaw

Ingredients:

2 tsp ginger, peeled and grated
150 ml tomato ketchup
3 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
800 g chicken thighs
1/2 of a cabbage, shredded
1 large carrot grated
4 salad onions shredded/chopped finely
2 tbsp Sherry Vinegar & Tarragon dressing from Waitrose (or dressing of choice)
1 tsp Nigella seeds

Method:

1] In a large bowl, mix together the ginger, ketchup and Worcestershire sauce together. At this point - (I'm not good at leaving well enough alone when it comes to recipes...I like to mix it up a little) I also added a good glug of of this fab Raspberry and Chipotle sauce I picked up from TKMaxx. It was yum.....I can totally recommend it!

2] Slash the chicken thighs with a sharp knife then add them to the bowl and make sure they are evenly coated and the sauce gets into the slashes to the flesh.

3] Grill the chicken thighs for 25 mins, turning them once until nicely browned and cooked through.

4] In the meantime, mix together the cabbage, carrot, radishes and salad onions. At this point you would add the salad dressing and Nigella seeds. Well....the person who did the grocery order did not order these two items. So instead I mixed together some White Wine Vinegar, Olive oil and a bramble sauce that I had kicking about in the fridge!

5] So the chicken should have a nice glaze on it now, serve it up with a bowlful of the slaw and some fresh made bread!

The next two recipes were very new to me! It was the first time I did anything Red Velvet-y, first time I used bacon in baked goods, as well as whisky! I have to admit - it was a bit of a cheat recipe and it called for Duncan Hines Red Velvet cake mix, but honestly I didn't mind because making both of these on a school night still kept me up until 12:30am!

I won't post the full recipes here - instead I'm going to link to the websites where I found them. This is for two reasons - [1] so I can share some other blogs and [2] so i can be better at crediting other blogs/websites - often I take recipes down and totally forget where I've gotten them from! Below I have posted some pictures from my recreation of both recipes.

The Red Velvet Cake Cinnamon Rolls are from a new blog that I came across last week called No. 2 Pencil. I didn't make any adjustments to this recipe whatsoever because baking is a bit of a science and I wanted to make sure that this one turned out since it's such a long effort!

This recipe took quite some time to make because you have to let the dough rise twice - this is what takes a boat load of time! Baking only took 20 minutes!!

So in the meantime I was able to focus on the Marshmallow Caramel Whisky Bacon Bark - say that five times fast!!!

The bark recipe comes from another fun recipe website that I've recently come across Endless Simmer - I came about it through searching for new bark recipes. I'm a big big fan of making bark recipes. They are so incredibly easy to do, and you can put just about anything in them!! Nuts, dried fruit, coconut, other chocolate.....the possibilities are endless!!!

I did make some adjustments to this recipe though! Instead of a regular whisky I used this great Canadian rye whisky that I bought back with me! I thought it would match perfectly with the bacon because it's infused with maple syrup! So so soooo incredibly delicious, and probably worked better then the really smokey whisky we had in the cabinet for this sweet treat! The other addition I made was to include nutmeg in the spice mix when creating the sugared bacon. I really like nutmeg and I think it brought a little extra level to the mix! :)

So, the cinnamon rolls were absolutely fantastic, but incredibly lush and filling! If I make them again I might try to make them smaller!! And although the bark recipe might sound a little weird - it really works well together, it's really delicious and I'm now intrigued to use bacon in more sweet treats!!

Some (pretending to be) artsy fartsy photos of my baking adventure below!