Real Student Food: Sweet Chilli Wraps

This is the first post in what I'm hoping will be a new feature on this blog: Real Student Food.

As a university student, I have the sometimes difficult task of cooking for one person a lot of the time, and when I've looked to student cookbooks or online recipes, they often don't cater for just one person, and the portions can be difficult to size down (seriously, what am I supposed to do with the other seven eighths of a bell pepper?) so I've found myself improvising.

I'll be posting my meals with the prices of the ingredients and the price per portion, as sticking to a budget is a key part of student food.

A lot of the food I make is incredibly simple, I try to be healthy where I can, the so called 'Freshers 15' is a real issue for students and one that I hope to avoid.

Today's recipe: Sweet Chilli Wraps with chips and salad.

Price of ingredients:

Salad leaves £1

Chicken Goujons £2

Tortillas £1

Chips £2 

Sweet Chilli Sauce £1.50 

Total: £7.50

Price per portion:

Salad leaves 30p

Chicken Goujons £1

Tortillas 25p

Chips 25p

Sweet Chilli Sauce 10p

Total: £1.90

Simply cook the goujons and chips according to the packet instructions, wrap up the chicken with the sauce and salad leaves and serve with chips and salad leaves. 

This recipe does leave about half the pack of goujons, these can be covered over with foil and put back in the fridge for a couple of days or frozen so that they last longer. The remaining tortillas can also be frozen for use at a later date. The salad will go off quickly, so I'll try to incorporate that into my meals as a side for the next couple of days. 

Rainbow Piñata Cake

Piñata cakes have been all over the internet recently. So when me and David decided to have an afternoon baking, it seemed the obvious choice. Although the cakes appear very effective, they are in fact incredibly easy to make.

For the cake mix I stuck to a tried and tested recipe. 

150g self-raising flour

150g caster sugar

150g butter/margarine (I use Stork when making cakes)

3 eggs

As a lazy baker, I'm a big believer in the all in one method, simply beat all of the ingredients together until you end up with a light, smooth mixture. 

To create the multi-coloured marble effect, split the mixture in to three bowls and add a full tube of Dr Oetker's Food Colouring Gel to each bowl. We used blue, yellow and red. 

Then spoon a little of each mixture in to the tin at a time, and gently swirl together with a knife to create a marbled effect. 

Bake both tins for 20 minutes at Gas Mark 5 until golden and risen. 

Once the cake has cooled, using a sharp knife cut a crater into the top of one cake and into the bottom of the other and fill with your chosen sweets. We chose jelly babies but any kind of small sweet would work. 

To ice the cake, beat together 150g stork and 150g icing sugar together until light and creamy. Use the icing to sandwich the cake together and to cover the top and sides of the cake. Finish with sprinkles of your choice. 

And there you have it! 

Have you baked anything recently?