Pear, grape and danish blue salad

I know, sounds awful. Totally works, though! I pinky swear it does. Delish.

Ingredients:

• 2 large or 3 small (very) ripe pears, trimmed and cut into long thin slices
• 200g-ish of good quality (sweet) red grapes
• 2 celery sticks, sliced (keep some leaves for garnish). (That one wasn't in the title, was it? That's right, I sneaked it in. Sneaky little celery. Trust it, though. Let it happen.)
• 2 Tbsp of lemon juice
• 3 Tbsp of olive oil
• pinch of salt
• about 2 tbsp of blue cheese (I used danish blue)
• wlanuts (optional)

1. Mix the pears, grapes, celery and walnuts in a bowl.
2. Shake the olive oil, lemon juice and salt together.
3. Pour the dressing over the salad.
4. Plate up.
5. Garnish with blue cheese and celery leaves.

I can't claim this one as my own, it's inspired by a Waitrose recipe card. Whatever, how about you come up with your own recipes all the time? Yeah, didn't think so.

Meringue ghosts

Boo!

Who wins at pinterest? That's right, I win at pinterest.



So this one doesn't have much of a recipe. All you need to do is make meringues (recipe here), make them a bit bigger and stacked, then use a skewer or something to pull little hands out of the body and bake it as normal, maybe add extra 15-20 min.

Oh, and do yourself a favour and use a homemade piping bag to shape the meringues. I say homemade, because any typical piping bag tip will be quite small and, while you can still make a tall meringue with it, it will just end up looking like a jobby (yup, tried it). What you want to do is use a zip lock bag or something like that and cut a rather large (maybe an inch long) opening in one corner. It's a bit more messy that way but they end up looking much better.

To make the faces, use food colouring gel. I used this, worked pretty well: