Cream of tomato soup (and coffee cupcakes)

I still have a mountain of tomatoes from the greenhouses and was pondering what to do with the latest harvest - a little under 1.5 kg of various sorts of tomatoes).  So I cut them all in half and put them cut side up on a baking tray then scattered finely chopped garlic over them and drizzled extra virgin olive oil over them.  I roasted them in the oven at 150d for about an hour and then passed them through a fine sieve until i had roasted tomatoey goodness in a bowl and only dried skins and pips in the sieve.

Then I tasted the sauce.  It was absolutely delicious. So good that I thought it would make fabulous cream of tomato soup.  Although - I probably didn't really want to put 300 ml of cream into the tomato soup.  It still tasted wonderful, but now was a sort of tomatoey cream rather than a creamy tomato soup!

Fortunately, I still had quite a lot of cherry tomatoes around, not to mention some small shallots.  So I finely sliced the shallots and put them and the cherry tomatoes into a frying pan with some butter and some sunflower oil (not a lot of either) and fried them down until the shallots were slightly golden and the cherry tomatoes were soft.  Then I added them to the tomato cream and then some home made chicken stock to slacken it all down a bit.

And I have to say that the resulting soup was absolutely wonderful. I had a bowlful for lunch with some buttered soda bread.

Since I had the oven on, I decided to make some cupcakes as well.  Coffee cupcakes are a real pleasure after a bowl of tomato soup :-)