Tag: baking

Home made crackers

Home made crackers

Ingredients Method Heat oven to 180 degrees celsius and line two 20 x 30cm baking trays with baking paper In a medium bowl, mix together masa flour, seeds and the teaspoon of sea salt. Add the olive oil and boiling water. Mix together until all 

Orange and apple muffins

Orange and apple muffins

Ingredients Method About this recipe Comparing apples with oranges was the name of the game for my fruit bowl for a while there, thanks to Wonky Box. It got me thinking – oranges are lovely in baking, but I haven’t come across many recipes where 

Mandarin cake

Mandarin cake

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups white sugar
  • 125 grams butter, softened
  • 1/4 cup cream fraiche
  • 2 eggs
  • 4 mandarins
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
  • 2 cups plain flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda

Method:

  • Heat the oven to 180 degrees celsius. Grease and flour a 20-cm cake tin.
  • Blitz the mandarins, skin on, until they are quite pulp-y with some shreds of skin (using a food processor or chopper attachment of a stick blender set).
  • In a large bowl, cream the butter, sugar and cream fraiche together until light and fluffy.
  • Add the eggs one at a time, blending after each addition.
  • Stir the mandarin pulp and vanilla essence into the wet mixture (reserve a teaspoon of the pulp if you wish to use in icing).
  • Sift together the flour, baking powder and baking soda. Add gradually to the wet mixture and stir in until just combined.
  • Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin and bake for 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle is largely clean with a few crumbs.
  • Cool on a cake rack in tin for ten minutes before turning out.
  • Add the reserved teaspoon of pulp to a butter and icing sugar topping and ice when cool, or dust with icing sugar.

I’ve recently subscribed to Wonky Box – what a delight! It gives me a nice little pick-me-up throughout my week – make no mistake, I am exactly the kind of geek who finds vegetable-related updates exciting. Tuesday’s announcement of which goodies to expect in that week’s delivery, Thursday’s emailed invitation to track my Wonky delivery and finally, courier updates on Friday on my Wonky Box’s location, creeping tantalizingly closer to my front door and finally landing there on Friday afternoon. I’m loving the challenge of finding ways to use the different fruit and vegetables; the flavour is always excellent even if the shape is a little less-than-perfect.

A few recent boxes have included mandarins and I wanted to do something a little bolder than just skinning and eating ’em – which I must clarify, I do consider perfectly acceptable. They’re also quite lovely peeled, sliced vertically and added to salad (if you’re lucky I will post my favourite mandarin salad another time). But for some recent Wonky mandarins, I was hankering to go a little further.

I always put my hand up for bringing dessert to get-togethers because I love making sweet treats but I prefer a bigger audience for them than just my husband and me. Although we could happily polish off a whole cake between just the two of us, it’s probably better that we don’t do this on the regular. Family dinner a few weeks back called for a cake and I had a small pile of Wonky mandarins practically begging for attention from my fruit bowl.

I’ve blitzed oranges and lemons for cakes and other puddings in the past, but doing so with mandarins was new to me – I’m happy to report it worked well. Pulverising the mandarins with the skin on delivers delightful little bursts of sharpness in the cake, which is otherwise sweet and slightly crumbly. I topped this with a butter and icing sugar-based icing to keep it sweet for the smaller members of my family, however a dusting of icing sugar would also go nicely.

Peach and almond upside down cake

Peach and almond upside down cake

Ingredients: Method: About this recipe My peach and almond upside down cake is dense and hearty with a buttery topping of sweet sliced fruit. Inspired by the retro delight of a pineapple upside down cake, this version is comforting and appropriate for winter, with a 

Cashew butter cookies – vegan + gluten free

Cashew butter cookies – vegan + gluten free

Ingredients Method About this recipe Struggling to come up with vegan and gluten free baking ideas? Then let cashew butter be your friend. My lovely Fix and Fogg jar of cashew butter was a gift and gosh I love it. It’s creamy and rich and 

Apple jelly

Apple jelly

Ingredients:

  • 1.5 kg apples
  • 5-6 cups of water
  • Approximately 3 cups sugar – one cup per cup of juice your apples produce
  • Lemon juice

Method:

  • Chop the apples into smallish chunks – no need to peel or remove the core (yesss!).
  • Place in a large saucepan and add 5-6 cups of water – adjust as needed to ensure the apples are just covered.
  • Place the saucepan over a medium high heat and bring to the boil. Simmer until the apples are soft but not falling apart or mushy.
  • Strain the apples through a muslin cloth or jelly strainer for at least 8 hours, placing over a bowl to collect the juice. Don’t squeeze – it’ll make your jelly cloudy!
  • When you’re ready to make the jelly, place a saucer in the freezer for testing the jelly set point.
  • Measure out the juice into a saucepan. Add the sugar, stir to combine and bring to a rapid boil.
  • Boil for ten minutes. Test for setting – place a teaspoon of the mixture on the saucer you’ve had in the freezer and place back in the freezer for two minutes. Drag your finger across the surface; it’s set when the jelly forms wrinkles that keep in place.
  • Keep boiling and testing whether the jelly is set every ten minutes (this batch took just over 30 minutes to reach setting point).
  • Once set, take off the heat and stir in the lemon juice to your taste (I used half a lemon). Pour into sterilised jars and cool.

We’re really in Autumn here now and I’m enjoying the mellow days and slight cooling in the air. I enjoy Autumnal eating – warming soups and stews, sauces and pickles made from the last of the summer tomatoes, feijoas. I was lucky to be gifted a bounty of cooking apples and although chutney flittered across my mind (because yum, a lick of chutney on some hearty bread), I settled on jelly because I fancied the idea of an over-nighter of a recipe. My Dad grew up in Bannockburn, Otago and home made jelly was a regular fact of life, along with a lot of other goodies given the remoteness of Bannockburn in the 1950s. He talks about the apples being bound up in muslin and tied to the bath taps to drip into a bowl overnight – no squeezing allowed! I’m not quite that adventurous nor in possession of enough apples to consider tying them over the bath, but it was still a pleasing feeling to get up in the morning to a lovely bowlful of juice. It was very pretty and I almost regretted boiling it up for jelly – but not quite, because the jelly is proving to be quite delicious on toast. And even better with some sharp cheese if, like me, you subscribe to the cheese-and-jam school of thought.

White chocolate & strawberry jam blondies

White chocolate & strawberry jam blondies

Ingredients Method About this recipe… I’ve been playing around with this recipe since Christmas. I treated myself to a jar of Roses strawberry conserve to go with festive croissants and needed something to do with the leftovers that wasn’t simply jam on toast. Nothing wrong 

Spiced plum shortcake

Spiced plum shortcake

I think we all need a little sweetness at the moment. Summer holidays, and the little dash of optimism and refreshment they deliver, feel like a long time ago indeed. Luckily, I have this spiced plum shortcake recipe stored up from my own summer holiday, 

Some stuff I cooked in 2021

Some stuff I cooked in 2021

Happy New Year! I was lucky to have a pretty decent 2021, and I know I am in the minority here. It was a shocker for many of my favourite people. Wherever January 2022 finds you (ideally somewhere relaxing and on holiday with many tasty beverages), I hope that a better year is ahead for you.

When I look back over the year that was, the Delta outbreak is the main stand-out memory. I’m positive I am not alone in this. Cooking has played a significant part in my lockdown experiences, both because I am a greedy-guts in general, but also because it is very comforting. I know people may expect themselves to have cooked a range of intricate and gourmet dishes with all of the extra spare time available when locked down, but for me I found that living in a pandemic is quite enough mental load all on its own, thank you very much. It’s a time for tried-and-true comfort. In our house, I put aside any expectations and we pulled out the old favourites that feel like a pair of well-worn slippers.

I love Nigel Slater an awful lot. I like to call him Uncle Nige, because honestly, how great would it be to have him as your uncle? Since discovering his roast chicken recipe from his Appetite cookbook, I have never followed another roast chicken again. He calls it “Unmucked about chicken” and I heartily recommend it. We ate this more than once – photos below.

I love making stock with leftover bones. I think it makes me feel good about myself. So, following many roast chickens, there were many bowls of my noodle soup with the stock.

Leftover roast vegetables lend themselves very nicely to a lunchtime frittata.

Ham and cheese sandwiches are generally pretty great. My husband got excited about ham and cheese about halfway through our lockdown and tried out BBC Good Food’s Croque Monsieur. It involves a lot of butter and cheese. It was good.

The other stand-out cooking memory for me is that 2021 is the year I finally put on my big-girl pants and braved making a bundt cake. I was gifted the beautiful bundt tin pictured below about four Christmases ago and I was always too scared to use it. Despite writing Lick Your Plate, I am not an overly skilled baker and a lot of stuff I bake winds up stuck to the tin. It was too upsetting, picturing half a bundt cake slopping out onto a plate with the rest remaining stubbornly welded to the intricate mouldings. Well, I felt the fear and did it anyway…and was really happy with the results. I used the lemon bundt recipe from the Chelsea sugar website. I recommend it – the cake was very light and lemony and came out of the bundt tin perfectly.

I’m looking forward to another year of cooking and writing about it – it’s a very enjoyable creative outlet for me, and one I want to indulge more often. My goals are to pick up the Edmonds cookbook again (still in the A section of the index, sigh), to write up more pudding and cake recipes and to include some quick-and-easy meals I make a lot.

Happy new year again and take care wherever you are x

Covid comfort baking: spiced apple scones

Covid comfort baking: spiced apple scones

Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, fruit can go a little south in the fruit bowl. Things in general feel like they have gone a little south lately. This time a year ago our current COVID circumstances would have been unimaginable to pretty much all