Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding

So I thought I'd take the briefest of respites from my 100 Days of Awesome caper. Yeah, yeah, I know, I heard you all breathe a sigh of relief. I know that it's not exactly rivetting blog content, writing about the tiny little awesome things that happen each day that add up to make a good day. But hey, this blog is called "The Teensy, Tiny, Insignificant Details", and that's what I'm talking about, y'all. Those little spots of sunshine. You'd be surprised how much more positive you feel at the end of each day when you actually take stock of those moments, and I highly recommend doing it.

 

Anyway, this particular, more widely-interesting (to the general public, particularly those with a love of baked goods) ray of sunshine showed up on Saturday. I had made a vegetable soup out of the manky dregs of my vegetable drawer, and decided that it wasn't going to quite fill me up.

 

So, because of that, and because I had a cold and wanted comfort food, I decided that I needed* to make chocolate self-saucing pudding. Immediately.

 

I had also recently come into possession of these totally adorable individual enamelled baking dishes, and I needed* to use them to assauge the cuteness overload I was experiencing. Immediately. Let's just take a moment to bask in their awesomeness:

 

Done. Note also the cookbook to the side - from the Australian Women's Weekly "Kitchen" - and what it should look like if you make it in a large dish. (Note that the link I provided is for an Australian book store, and they don't know I exist (besides having taken my money in exchange for books from time to time!), but I do support the concept of buying local books from companies that employ some people locally, rather than just buying them off Amazon.

 

Moving on, this recipe is a bit of a winner - it only requires one bowl (which isn't a bowl at all - it's a saucepan); is dead easy; is egg-free (not an issue for me, but some people are allergic... and it will also make you feel much safer licking raw batter off the spoon if you're pregnant!); and it uses only baking staples that you are already likely to have in your cupboard. True, it's not exactly fancy-pants dinner party fare, but certainly is delicious and is perfect for a comfortable dinner with friends. 

 

It also travels quite well if you make the batter and put it in the dish, refrigerate until you're ready to transport it (it should stop it from rising), bring the brown sugar/cocoa mix with you in a plastic bag and do the sprinkle/add boiling water step once you're at your venue. And if you do that and pop it in the oven right as the main course is being served, it should be ready for consumption at just about the right moment.

 

I halved the recipe, and made it in three smaller containers - two of my adorable enamel dishes and one small Chinese bowl. I used a little less water because I got the feeling I was going to drown the puddings (although that ended in a more chewy, caramel-y sauce rather than a runnier one I have had in the past when making a full batch in a large dish), and reduced the cooking time by about ten minutes. I'd keep a closer eye on it than that if you're not following the original recipe and check it after about 25 minutes, though - my oven has a track record for not running at the temperature it is set to, so you never can tell what's going to happen. Makes things exciting!

 

The recipe, from AWW "Kitchen", can also be found here.

 

INGREDIENTS:

 

60g butter

½c milk

½ tsp vanilla extract

¾c castor sugar

1c SR flour

1 tbsp cocoa

¾c brown sugar, firmly packed

1 tbsp cocoa, extra

2c boiling water

 

METHOD:

 

Preheat oven to 180oC.

 

Melt the butter and milk in a saucepan. Remove from heat, mix in vanilla and sugar, followed by flour and cocoa. Stir with wooden spoon until smooth and well-combined.

 

Transfer to greased ovenproof dish/dishes (I've used a 6-cup Pyrex casserole dish before which worked well). Mix brown sugar and extra cocoa together until evenly distributed, sprinkle over the top of the pudding, then carefully pour boiling water over it.

 

Bake in oven for around 40 minutes, until the centre is firm (I tested with a skewer and tasted the crumb to check with it tasted raw, which it did. Once it was cooked the skewer actually came out clean).

 

Serve with ice cream. Yummo!

 

 

 

And how quick and easy was that! You may even have noticed that the method wasn't full of my usual disclaimers about how I changed the recipe on the fly, because I didn't. It really was that easy.

 

*Use of the word "needed" is fairly subjective in this case and pertains more to actions that will lead to feeling gratified, than to more widely-accepted basic human needs such as oxygen and water.

Tarting Yourself Up - Raspberry Chantilly Tart

My dad uses the word "tart" perhaps more than your average person. He's renovating his house at present and talks about "tarting the place up" and says that the place is "tartsville, darling" in this amusingly mincing voice. Even when he buys a new suit or a tie or cufflinks he talks about "looking like a tart." He's quite the character, my dad.

 

For those who are playing along in America, the word "tart" has several meanings, including one which you may or may not be aware of -

 

First, there's the word for a sharp taste, e.g. "that apple was a bit tart for my liking,"

 

Secondly, there's the food - a baked dish with a pastry base and an open top.

 

And thirdly, there's the British slang for a promiscuous woman or a prostitute.

 

Obviously my dad's prolific use of the word "tart" pertains to the third definition. Not that he's a promiscuous woman or a prostitute (although I have no idea what he got up to in his younger years, but I really don't want to think about that!!!), but to "tart oneself up" is to put a bit of effort into making yourself... perhaps a step beyond presentable. Showy, even. And to have "a tart on the side" implies that you are engaging in, erm, extracurricular activities that perhaps you ought not be!

 

And obviously this post is about baked goods, not about women of questionable character or putting on a show. Although I have to admit the tarts did a pretty good job of being showy - they're quite simple, but also effective.

I also need to confess that, in the past, I've used a (baked!) tart as a vehicle for publicly delivering a backhanded comment about someone's moral sensibilities and personal choices. They say that if you can't say anything nice then don't say anything at all... unless you can backstab with sweetened baked goods, in which case you're good to go!
 

The recipe came from the book 50 Rainbow Tarts. It caught my eye in a book shop the other week while I was looking for a birthday gift for my friend A, and I simply had to have it. Hah, that's usually how it happens. Happy not-birthday to me! Although A was actually with me at the time, so there's really no excuse for losing focus...

 

It's a great concept, and it really appeals to me in terms of how visually pleasing and structured the recipes are - there are 50 tarts, all colours of the rainbow, and the index is basically a paint colour chart with little sample dots and the name of the tart  and page number listed below it (sorry about the quality of the picture - I snapped it quickly with my iPhone to show a friend who displays slight OCD tendencies when it comes to colour-coding!).

 

You can tell it was written by a graphic designer with a love of food, and I wish I'd thought of it first! Quick suggestion to the publishers for the second print run, though - run your dots right the way across the page and treat it as a full-page spread rather than two pages, or else do the same but starting in one corner and radiating out through the spectrum of colour and shade as you move across the page.

 

There are both sweet and savoury tarts, and each one has been made into a small oblong with a with a white strip at the bottom, much like a paint colour chip. I'd probably call it an open tart because everything is kind of piled on top of a flat base with no sides. There are four different pastry base recipes right in the front, several recipes for the white part, and from there the book makes its way through the rainbow by applying different toppings to various combinations of base and cream.

 

INGREDIENTS:

Pastry Base
160g plain flour
25g icing sugar
50g unsalted butter, chopped into small pieces
Pinch salt
1 vanilla bean (I used 1tsp of vanilla bean paste)
1 egg
3tbsp milk

Chantilly Cream
150mL chilled cream
20g icing sugar

The Tart
1 quantity pastry (above)
1 quantity cream (above)
125g raspberries, plus more for decoration (I used frozen raspberries and picked out 24 good ones plus a few spares and let them thaw out on a piece of paper towel, standing on their ends)
3/4tsp gelatine powder
 

METHOD:

Pastry Base
Line baking tray with baking paper. Combine all ingredients as far as the salt.

Add vanilla, egg and milk and roughly combine with your hands (although I prefer to use a butter knife, because then I don't get sticky hands. They will get sticky later, though, just not quite as sticky as this step!).

Lightly flour your hands, remove rings (I'm telling you to do that because I always forget!) and tip onto a floured bench and knead the dough until smooth and it forms a ball. You don't want it too sticky but also not too dry.

Roll out flat and cut into four 12cm x 15cm rectangles (I would probably make eight that were half the size next time). Note that in the process of squaring them up, I ended up with excess pastry. So I spread the offcuts with apricot jam, rolled them into little pinwheels and baked them with the rest of the pastry. Yum!

Place onto prepared tracy, prick all over with a fork and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 180oC (350oF). Bake for about 20mins, or until lightly golden. Cool.

Chantilly Cream
Beat cream in mixer until firm peaks form (but don't let it turn to butter!). Sift sugar into cream and beat for another few seconds until sugar is well incorporated.

The Tart
Combine the raspberries (except those set aside for decoration) with sugar and gelatine with a tablespoon of water in a saucepan over medium heat. Crush raspberries gently with a wooden spoon and bring to the boil. Remove from heat, strain through fine sieve to remove seeds, then cool completely (I put mine in the fridge to speed things up. Use a container with thin sides rather than a ceramic dish, as it will cool faster).

Once cooled, fold the raspberry liquid into half the cream, then spread on the upper part of the pastry base. Pipe or spread the remaining chantilly cream in whatever pattern your heart desires onto the lower part of the pastry. Decorate with the intact raspberries that you drained earlier.

THE WRAP-UP:

 

The base itself wasn't as sweet a shortcrust as I am accustomed to, which kind of bugged me when I tried eating it raw, but obviously once it is loaded up with chantilly cream that is no longer an issue ;) It's also worth mentioning that in my head, a sweet shortcrust pastry is the melts-in-your-mouth one mum used to make from the Alma Lach's The Hows and Whys of French Cooking, which, predictably, is quite a heavenly pastry. I will probably experiment with different shortcut pastry recipes, but if you do the same you should bear in mind that the pastry needs to be robust enough to hold up when it is loaded up with topping and moved around.

 

I tried several methods of piping the cream (I'm a piping kinda gal!) but I'm sure just smearing it on with a knife or the back of a spoon would do just as well. I think all three look fine, but the third one is probably a bit prettier.

 

Be warned that the cream becomes a little runny once you fold the raspberry mixture through. I don't know whether I didn't put enough gelatine in, or it didn't cool enough, or it was just always going to happen. I might have to give it another try, just to be sure, and maybe add a bit more gelatine. All in the name of quality control, you see... ;)

 

Alright then, you lot, off you go. Get yourselves a cup of tea and have a little bit of tart on the side...

Blueberry Cheesecake Slice

One of my bestest friends in the whole, wild world is having a baby soon, so on one ridiculously hot day in early Februray I held a baby shower for her.

 

Em is having a little boy, and I'm super-excited by the prospect of being Aunty Ness. SQUEEEE! I'm totally going to be that cool "aunt" that bakes cupcakes and pays Lego and climbs trees and teaches him to use firearms drive a 4WD and takes him base jumping hiking and teaches him how to treat girls (although I'm sure his parents will have that one covered. Yeah, and in case you couldn't tell from the strikethroughs, Em is probably reading this... hi, Em! *waves*). Of course, before all that happens he will probably throw up on me more than a few times and possibly even make a habit of crying when I pick him up, but I'll try not to take that personally. Phht, kids.

 

Sorry, just had to get all that excitement out of my system. (Side-note - I've been doing a fair whack of online dating of late, and a few of the guys have successfully stalked Googled me despite my poorly-disguised fake email address, so this is a public service announcement to those ones who may have found my blog: Please don't freak out that I'm excited about my friend's baby, or that I love my housemates' squishy li'l pudding of a kid. Yes, babies are cute and yes, I do want kids... but I don't want them this week, so you can chill out! ;) )

 

Ahem.

 

Anyway, one of the ways in which my excitment manifested itself - and you should probably know that it has manifested itself in several ways - was to make everything for the baby shower blue. Blue lollies, blue cake, blue ice cream, blue cheesecake. Em's brother Heath did a fabulous job with blue decorations, too. The savoury food was obviously not blue, because that would have been disturbing, but thanks to Other Ness for providing the delicious, normal-coloured savouries!

 

I took the base recipe from Taste, but decided that it was nowhere near being blue enough, and the quantities were wrong, so I doubled it and changed the topping. I also made it in a slab pan with quite square sides (which I think is about 22 x 32cm), because I wanted nice, square/oblong servings. Now that I think about it, it's basically a denser, cheesier version of the Aussie classic jelly slice, and gosh it's nice!

 

Note that, using the tin I used, I ended up scraping about 1/4-1/5 of the mixture out (so, a heaped cereal bowl's worth) to make room for the jelly layer, so you could probably make do quite well with a 3/4 batch of this mix. Even doing a 1/2 batch (which is the whole, original batch) would work, although I'm not certain that the base would be robust enough to hold up.

 

INGREDIENTS:

500g plain, sweet biscuits (i.e. two packs of milk arrowroot biscuits)

250g butter, melted (i.e. one block)

3tsp gelatine powder

1/4c boiling water

1kg cream cheese, softened (i.e. four Aussie blocks of Philly)

1c castor sugar

2tsp vanilla bean paste

600mL thickened cream, whipped (i.e. large container of Pura/Bulla cream)

(Note - I had intended to fold some blueberries through the batter, but forgot to buy them that day, so the batter was plain. Feel free to add some here, though!)

 

500g-ish box of fresh or frozen blueberries (I recommend roughly chopping at least half of them up, to make it easier to cleanly slice the cheesecake later. Note also that you may not use the whole box if you don't like the look of it, so start by dealing with half and then add more if it feels right)

2tbsp gelatine

200mL boiling water

4-600mL cold water (note that I'm basing my quantities on hazy recollections of the gelatine tin saying 1tbsp of gelatine, 100mL boiling water, top up to 400mL mark with cold, but you should obviously follow the directions on whatever packet you end up using)

Blue food dye

Blueberry essence
(Alternately, you could just puchase blueberry jelly crystals from the supermarket, but apparently I'm not that smart!)

 

Grease and line tray with baking paper (make sure you get the corners and the sides of the pan where the paper doesn't extend to nice and greasy).

 

Process/crush biscuits until they resemble fine breadcrumbs. Mix in melted butter until just combined and press into tin. Refrigerate until firm (20mins).

 

Sprinkle first lot of gelatine over boiling water in heatproof jug. Whisk with fork until dissolved. Set aside to cool (15mins).

 

Beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla until smooth. Gradually beat in gelatine mixture until combined. Fold in whipped cream (this is where I didn't fold any blueberries through and should have, but it turned out fine). Pour most of the mixture into pan, leaving enough room on top for 5-10mm of jelly, smooth top and refrigerate.

Pour boiling water into heatproof jug (I actually used 2 separate, 500mL jugs as I don't have a 1L one), sprinkle gelatine over the top, let it soak for a minute and whisk with a fork until dissolved. Continue to whisk and add 4-600mL cold (room temperature) water (depending on how thick and rigid you want the jelly layer to be), then colouring and flavouring to taste. Leave to cool fully.

Lightly roughen the surface of the refrigerated cheesecake with a fork.

Lick the fork clean and then put it in the dishwasher so you don't accidentally use it again. Sprinkle cheesecake with blueberries (some chopped, as mentioned above).

You don't want a solid layer of blueberries as it will be difficult to cut and compromise the integrity of the cheesecake layer. You only want just enough to have a couple of whole ones and several chopped bits adorning the jelly on each slice. Gently pour on jelly mix, squash any floating blueberries into the cheesecake so you get a nice, smooth finish, and refrigerate until set.

Cut into oblong slices (I got 30 slices out of this tin), lift carefully out (you might as well know that the corner slice will be totally buggered and the biscuit layer will probably fall off it, but hey, you need to eat the "ugly one" anyway in the name of quality control!) and serve.

Nom.


Notes - Don't do what I did and add a bunch of frozen blueberries to the jelly - the jelly immediately around the berries will set almost instantly and make it quite tricky to make smooth.

I also recommend cutting the cheesecake with a hot, dry knife (you'll need a jug of boiling water and a tea towel to make that happen).

 

 



"It's a Miracle!" Freeform Berry Tart

Kia ora!

Well it's been quite some time since I posted. I could give you a million reasons, but mostly it's just that I've been living life (and loving it!).

As I write this I'm on holidays with Kirsti visiting Kat in NZ . We've been bumming about Auckland with Kat for the last few days, and tomorrow we head off to find us some Hobbitses. We haven't yet decided if we will make it a habit to eat Second Breakfast in our travels but I guess we'll just have to take things as they come ;)

Speaking of breakfast, this recipe is one you could **almost** get away with for breakfast - I mean, if berry Danishes are breakfast food then surely so may this be. I made it for a friend the night before I flew out, so the lucky bugger had the option at any rate!

I made a half batch (or at least I **thought** I did - recipe as follows), but the full recipe can be found in Margaret Fulton's Baking (which Kirsti gave me last year for my birthday). True to form I only vaguely followed the instructions. You should all know by now that I'm pretty impatient and also tend towards laziness, interspersed with forgetfulness. And yet, it turned out just fine. Things usually do, when it involves butter and sugar, not to mention berries and cream. Can't really go wrong :)

HAHAHA oh man, I just re-read the recipe before copying it out, and realised just how poorly I halved it. So the recipe below is the complete one. I halved the flour and almonds in the first bracket (I can't say for sure whether I halved the butter. I may have, but make no promises), and everything in the second, and it's actually a bit of a miracle that it held shape at all, but hey, it tasted great!

INGREDIENTS:

2c plain flour

125g butter

1/2c ground almonds

2tbsp castor sugar

1 egg, lightly beaten

A little grated lemon rind

1tbsp rum

1/2c ground almonds

1/2c castor sugar

600g mixed berries (frozen is fine - thaw them first though, and if there is lots if juice/water, drain most of it off)

3tbsp icing sugar

Cream to serve. 

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Mix ingredients in the first bracket in the order in which they appear (I dumped them all in the food processor) until combined. Form into a ball, wrap in glad wrap and refrigerate for an hour. (I chucked it in the freezer for about half an hour. Impatience and all!)

Roll out on baking paper in a 30cm circle, put on a tray and chill for 30 minutes. (Seeing as I had halved the flour and almonds, my circle was a bit smaller, and I estimate that I smooshed it to around 5mm thick. With my hands. Yep, I was totally winging it.)

Preheat oven to 180oC. (Check!)

Sprinkle tart shell with the second lot of almond plus 1tbsp of the sugar. Spread fruit over shell, leaving 5cm border. Fold border up to hold fruit in, leaving a gap in the middle. Sprinkle remaining sugar on pastry. 

(Because I was transporting ingredients, I  combined the almonds and sugar in a freezer bag. Fortuitously there was a big lump of sugar in there to sprinkle on the pastry at the end, so I set that aside then sprinkled a thin layer of the combined mixture onto the tart shell, then dumped the berries into the bag, trapped some air in it as if you were crumbling/flouring meat and shook it around to coat the berries. I then spread that mixture on, folded the edges up and sprinkled on the sugar. More than one way to skin a cat!)

Bake on the lowest shelf for about 45 minutes, until the pastry is golden. Cool on tray until just warm (we know how impatient I am - I cooled it for around five minutes!), dust with icing sugar (I didn't), cut into slices and serve with cream. 

Dodgy iPhone photo (nicely styled cream, though!):

 

The half(ish) batch would have served four. 

Leftovers!

 

This is quite an easy recipe, and although it requires refrigeration steps, you can kind of work around that as you cook your main course. It's definitely one I'll make again. And because it's freeform, it doesn't matter a jot if it turns out "rustic" (or, to the average bystander, "ugly"). 

Enjoy!

Teacup Apple Crumble

So... is it me, or does anyone else suffer from the illusion that things that come in tiny servings must be healthy? Mini muffins. Fun-sized Mars Bars. Fun-sized anything. Mini Magnums. Doughnut centres. Aeroplane-sized cans of Coke. And that somehow, because it's in a tiny portion (and therefore uses more packaging - three cheers for environmental destruction!), you can eat more of them. Like two. For the purposes of this, let's say two. We don't need to dig deeper into my abysmal snacking habits here right now.

 

Now, I love apple crumble. I love apple crumble almost as much as I love deluding myself. So making apple crumbles in tiny portions seemed like the perfect idea. Sure, I could have made them in shot glasses like you see at cocktail parties, but come on, you need enough apple crumble for it to work its wonderful, warming magic on you.

 

INGREDIENTS:

 

3 apples

1tsp sugar

1tsp cinnamon

3 cloves

A little water

1tbsp butter

1tsp cinnamon

2tbsp brown sugar

3tbsp plain flour

 

(Note that I "wrote" the quantities into the My Fitness Pal app in grams (which was a rough conversion to begin with), and now I'm converting it back, so they may be a little out. Play with it until it feels (and tastes!) right!)

 

Peel and roughly dice apples. Cook them, covered, with a little water and the sugar and spices until softened - around 5 minutes. Make sure they don't stick. Once softened, tip off any extra water and leave cover off.

 

Meanwhile, rub butter, cinnamon, sugar and flour together until evenly distributed. Try not to "test" too much of it - rest assured that it really does taste quite nice!

 

Grease 3 (or 4, depending on their size) oven-proof teacups. Divide apple mixture among the teacups. Remove and discard cloves. Top with the crumble mixture.

 

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200oC for around 5-10 minutes, until lightly browned. Obviously I can't remember whether it was 5 or 10 minutes, and as you can see from the scorched bits hidden under the ice cream, I overshot the mark, so keep an eye on it! All you're doing is browning the topping as the filling should still be hot. At some stage in the near future I will make this again and test the times but for now, hey guys, it's apple crumble. It's not rocket science. It needs to be hot, and apple-y, and cinnamon-y, and wonderful. No biggie.

 

 

Enjoy one with a scoop of ice cream. Or two.

 

And for those health-conscious peops out there, there are 301 calories per serving without adding ice cream. So it's probably just as well you made these in a tea cup, otherwise you'd go back to the pan a sneak another spoonful. And then another... and another... and another... yeah, I'm onto you!

"It's All Relative" Healthy Chocolate Brownies

Quite some time ago I made Chocolate Heartache Cupcakes which used eggplant as a base, and were flour and butter free. They were so incredibly rich and moist and dense that the thought of applying the whole eggplant-as-a-baked-goods-base concept more broadly has been playing on my mind ever since.

 

It was inevetable that my thoughts would turn to inventing a brownie that was (gasp!) healthy. I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to eat brownies, relatively guilt-free?? I carefully crafted the recipe over several days' driving to and from work (50 minutes each way. Why yes, I DO devote a lot of time to thinking about food, why do you ask?) and was finally ready to test it on the guinea pigs at work execute the magnificience that is these brownies. Inevitably I made some changes on the fly to improve the texture, but that was always going to happen.

And lo and behold, these healthy chocolate brownies were born. Relatively healthy, anyhow!

 

INGREDIENTS:

1 medium eggplant

1/2 large zucchini

1 banana

1 block Club chocolate (180g)

2 large dollops honey (it's probably close to 1/4c, but to me it was using a dessert spoon and doing two huge spoonsful)

3tbsp cocoa powder

1 1/2c ground almonds

1tsp vanilla extract
1/2c choc chips
1/2c pecans

 

Prick eggplant all over with a fork and place in a covered dish in the microwave with a little water in the bottom. Steam for 4 minutes. Flip over, and steam for a further four minutes. Allow to cool enough to handle, then chop the top and peel skin off. Mash or blend until relatively smooth and set aside.

 

Grate zucchini. Squeeze as much excess moisture out as possible. Add to eggplant mix.

 

Mash banana. Add to eggplant mix.

 

Melt chocolate. Add to eggplant mix.

Mix in honey, lightly beaten eggs, cocoa powder, almonds and baking powder until you have a consistent mixture.

Transfer mixture into a greased baking dish or tin and bake for about 50mins at 180oC until set.

 

Note that you will likely find it quite difficult not to eat several pieces at once. If I were you I'd do what I did and bring it into work!

 

EDIT: It helps them hold together if you refrigerate them overnight once cool. I cut the lines in before refrigerating, and then just cut over them again before serving. Also, I'm quite sure those are the quantities but the question has now been raised in my mind. When I get home tonight I'll find the envelope I wrote the recipe on and correct if need be!

 

EDIT #2: If you have copied this recipe out before the 23rd of June 2013 then the quantities are are a little out of whack and there are a couple of things missing. Obviously I found the envelope I wrote it on this morning and am editing it accordingly. Sorry if I stuffed up your brownies! Best you try again ;)

Mango and Peach Sorbet

You may recall that I got the ice cream maker attachment for my Kenwood for Christmas. The first thing I made with it was raspberry sorbet, and, having neither the time nor the inclination to faff about with making an egg-cream-custardy-thing to make proper ice cream out of, or to then do something with the egg whites, I decided to make sorbet again yesterday instead of branching out into the grown-up world of proper ice cream. After all, Melbourne is in the middle of ANOTHER week of 30oC+ and I ain't turning no stove nor no oven on for nobody!

 

Sorbet it is. Locate fruit, sugar, liquid of some sort and food processor. Whizz together. And this one's even better than the raspberry sorbet because this time there was no boiling of sugar syrup. Huzzah!

 

INGREDIENTS:

1 ripe mango, peeled, pitted, chopped

2 ripe peaches, peeled, pitted, chopped

1/4c lime juice (that's about the juice of 1.5 limes)

3 heaped tablespoons of icing sugar

 

Whizz it all up in the food processor until smooth. If it's not cool, which it will be if the fruit was in the fridge, chill it.

 

Jump into your Tardis, put the bowl of your ice cream maker in the freezer 24 hours ago (if that's the sort of unit you have, like I do), then come back to the present day and remove it from the freezer and set it up.

 

This is where I say "freeze according to ice cream maker manufacturers' instructions" but in my case, turn your Kenwood/other inferior machine on, pour the puree in and leave it going for half an hour to 45 minutes.

 

Once again I got quite a soft sorbet but I'm imagining that when I pull the leftovers out the freezer tonight I will discover that it is quite solid. (Note: they were. I had to leave them out for ages before I could get the spoon through!)

 

You can add more or less icing sugar to taste, but the amount there was just enough to balance the lime juice and let the mango shine. This was originally supposed to be all-mango but SOMEONE ate the other mango (and it wasn't me, y'all!). Nonetheless I think it was better this way - the peach made it not-terribly-mangoey but sort of supported the flavour without overpowering it. If that makes sense.

 

I can't say which is my favourite because I am inherently biased towards raspberry but it doesn't seem fair to choose the quality of a recipe on what my favourite flavour happens to be, so... if you want something tart and refreshing, possibly to accompany a chocolatey dessert (although it is damned fine on its own), go with the raspberry. If you want to lounge about eating sorbet on a summer's eve then go with the mango (and it has also occurred to me that I could just serve it in a glass and add a splosh (bigger than a splash) of rum to it, just for kicks).

Raspberry Sorbet

 

I can't remember whether I mentioned it, and I'm inclined to say that perhaps I didn't, but last year I was given a brand spankin' new Kenwood mixer for my 30th birthday by some super-duper-awesome-wonderful people in my life. I admit I was torn between getting a shiny Kitchen Aid, preferably in Rasberry Ice, or a Kenwood. But I grew up on Kenwood mixers, and this puppy has a massive 1500W of power versus the insipid 300W of a Kitchenaid. No contest.

 

So although this is beautiful, this is what I ended up with. Which is also beautiful, but in a different way. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get quite a bit of pleasure out of polishing it yesterday! #whyimsingle

From Kenwoodworld.com. To purchase visit "shop" at top of page

Not only does it have a 1500W motor but it also has a mixing bowl that is 2L bigger than does the Kitchenaid, so in theory I can now make quadruple batches of pavlova in one bowl without it exploding. And, oh, the batches of cake I could make! And the cream I could whip! I have such lofty ambitions :)

 

Anyway, for Christmas, my parents (independently, because they're divorced) gave me cash to put towards attachments for the Kenwood. I had enough for two attachments which are actually quite decent value for money. For example, the Kenwood stand-alone food processor is worth about $400, but the food processor attchment for the mixer was about $130. I guess the theory is that once you have the machine, the money you save on the attachments is about equal to the money (and space) you would save on all the other kitchen gadgetes. 

 

So I counted my little wad of cash and ordered the ice cream maker and a food processor attachments, and they arrived last week. And on the weekend, I used both to make raspberry sorbet, and it was amaaaaazing. You know, presuming you love raspberries just as much as I do! It was more tart than sweet, and made around four servings of two scoops each. I imagine next time I may consider straining the seeds out, but not for sure. I'm probably too lazy to bother, truth be told ;)

 

First, I used the food processor to puree the raspberries.

 

And then I used the ice cream maker to make the sorbet (duh). With this particular unit you put the ice cream maker insert in the freezer for 24 hours before you want to make the ice cream, so it requires a little forward planning, but honestly, if you can't predict that you're going to want ice cream then you're a moron. You could probably just keep it in the freezer all the time, and because it's a bowl you can put your frozen peas in the middle and you won't be losing a whole lot of space in your freezer to it. 

 

Sorry there's not a good shot of it (there are sure to be many more opportunities to take a picture of me making ice cream!), but imagine a plastic-on-the-outside, metal-on-the-inside bowl with a flat bottom and straight sides that sits within your mixer bowl. The cavity between the plastic bit and the metal bit contains what I assume is the same fluid you get in those plastic freezer bricks you put in your esky (as we call it. For those playing in New Zulund an esky is also known as a chully bun (=chilly bin), and for everyone else in the world I think it's known as a cooler or possibly an ice box). The ice cream maker has a clear polycarbonate lid, and that white plastic bit you can see in the middle has a shaft that goes down to the bottom, then splits into two paddles. The two paddles make their way in opposite directions to the side of the bowl where they make a 90 degree turn and move up the sides of the bowl. You can juuust see the top of one of the paddles poking out on the left of the bowl, at about the five-minutes-past-nine position.

 

INGREDIENTS:

350g of fresh or frozen raspberries, pureed

3/8c castor sugar (that's half of 3/4, if you're having trouble picturing it)

1/2c water

1/8c lime juice

 

Dissolve sugar in water in saucepan over low heat, stirring occasionally. Once dissolved, bring it to the boil and boil for one minute. Set aside to cool.

 

Once cooled, mix through pureed rapberries. Add lime juice and mix (I had left the raspberries in the food processor and added both the sugar syrup and lime juice and turned it on quickly to mix them through).

 

Put in ice cream maker and freeze according to manufacturer's instructions. In this case, the brief is to assemble the (pre-frozen) bowl, make sure it all lines up, then turn it on low and THEN pour the mix in. If you do it the other way around it will freeze to the side of the bowl and you will have problems!

 

In my case, it took half an hour for it to become a scoop-able but slightly wet sorbet. Being impatient, I was fine with that. The instructions say most things take half an hour, but to leave it going for up to 45 minutes if it's a little soft, and then if it's still not hard enough then you scoop it out and put it in the freezer. I know that the half of the batch we didn't eat on the first night hardened significantly in the freezer, so I had to let it sit on the bench for a while (the fridge might have been smarter) before scooping it out.

 

Easy peasy! I have to say, I was a little turned off ice cream making by my sort-of-disasterous vanilla ice cream, but I think I'm back in the game. And sorbet is a good place to start because there's no mucking around with eggs making a custard first.

 

What an excellent Christmas present. I look forward to many more interesting ice creams and sorbets! (I have my eye on a honey-walnut ice cream. Mmm...)

 

 

 

Cherry Wink Cookies

Just before Christmas amidst my usual pre-Christmas baking flurry I promised to give you some recipes for the massive pile of biscuits I made. There is nothing especially Christmas-y about these except that they have a bright, red glace cherry on top, and for some reason I associate glace cherries with Christmas. And with gobbling down ice cream on a hot summer's evening (in summer on special occasions mum would make us an ice cream cone with (usually) vanilla ice cream and a glace cherry on top. There's nothing quite like licking your way around the cherry and then trying to push it down into the ice cream with your tongue so it won't fall off. And then of course you get a frostbitten tongue, but who cares?? You're eating ice cream!).

 

This one is from Margaret Fulton's Baking. I got this book for my 30th birthday from Kirsti. So far I have had two excellent biscuit-making experiences from it, and one really bad cake-making experience. At this point I'm inclined to blame the oven I used but I'm going to have to try and make that cake again to figure it out. And then give the cake away immediately that I have taste-tested one slice, because although it was a disaster I still ate more of it than I ought to have!

 

To the biscuits! (or, cookies for the American readers)

 

INGREDIENTS:

1.5c (225g) plain flour

2tsp baking powder

Pinch salt

125g butter, softened

0.5c (110g) castor sugar

1.5tsp vanilla

2tbsp honey

1 egg

2tbsp milk

2c corn flakes, lightly crushed

0.5c glace cherries, halved.

 

METHOD:

Preheat oven to 200oC. Line tray with baking paper.

 

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together.

 

Cream butter, sugar and vanilla, then add in the honey and egg and beat until combined.

 

Mix in sifted flour mixture alternately with milk until of an even consistency.

 

Roll tablespoons of the dough in the crushed cornflakes and place on tray. Gently press a glace cherry on top.

 

Bake for around 10 minutes, or until golden.

 

Eat 12,086,473,493 of them because you enjoy the subtle honey taste and the light crunch of the corn flakes so much!

Sorry that this is the only picture I have of them - I had a spectacular one on my iPhone of them all cooling on racks, row upon row, but my phone died two Sundays ago and took with it to its grave a lot of photos that I am quite sad to lose :( I still haven't even figured out if I will get my music back (although I'm sure that given I bought most of it from iTunes, straight to my phone, there must be a record of me having purchased it). There's a valuable lesson in that - back up your iPhone!

Lastly, an Australian tablespoon (tbsp) is traditionally 20mL where the rest of the world satisfies itself with a mere 15mL. So if you're using an American or British tablespoon and the mixture seems a little dry, it's probably because it's missing 10mL of milk and 5mL of honey.

 

Date and Chocolate Torte

Not so very long ago in a land not at all far away (might have been this very chair, in fact), I came across this recipe on Hotly Spiced, an always-amusing food blog. Charlie is a great story teller, so I find myself popping over a couple of times a week to see what recipes she has up her sleeve and what story she has woven around it.

On this particular day I was suffering a surplus of egg whites on account of the lemon curd and ice cream I had recently made. The single paltry egg white I used for the meringe in that recipe wasn't quite enough to balance out the yolks so I had seven sitting in the fridge, thinking about what they would become (macarons were a vauge possiblity, but I'm still a bit scared of them). So when I stumbled across the recipe Charlie had posted for date and chocolate torte it was like a sign from above. It's from the Vogue Australia Wine and Food Cookbook... 1985! AND it's gluten free.

Preheat oven to 180oC. Grease a springform tin and line the base with baking paper.

Roughly chop 250g of each of dark cooking chocolate, dates, and almonds (skin still on). I used the stick mixer's food processor and found that the chocolate became jammed on the side of the bowl so you could really only chop one row at a time. Quite frustrating! You'll also need to hold it with two hands because once it starts chopping it kind of tap-dances on the bench.

Whip 6 egg whites until stiff peaks form and gradually add castor sugar, beating until it dissolves/disperses. Fold in almonds, chocolate and dates (I did this in a couple of batches so as to not completely flatten the meringue mixture).

Spread in tin and bake for 45 minutes.

Switch off oven, open oven door slightly and allow to cool in tin. If you're not me, once it's cool, turn onto platter, cover and refrigerate overnight.

If you are me, cool for about half an hour then carefully remove from the tin while it's still kind of warm and melty.

Serve it up with a round of double cream and some granny smith apple slithers (I like the tartness to balance the sweetness of the chocolate and dates; I imagine strawberries or raspberries or perhaps even nectarines would also work well).

Thanks for the recipe, Charlie!

PS - I did the maths and it has 338cal per serving (1/12th of the torte), without the cream. Not too bad considering its extreme deliciousness!

2012 Ice Cream Cupcake Contest - Lemon Meringue Ice Cream Cupcakes

This is the contest that kindled my interest in perfecting cupcakes a year ago. It is what incited me to declare one of my 101 Things Challenges to be Year of the Cupcake, and bake a new cupcake each month for twelve months (Heheh. And I wonder why I have struggled with my weight this year...). Last year's effort was Thai Ginger Cupcakes, which featured a ginger base (which I seem to recall was pure bliss), and a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top rolled in toasted coconut and lime zest. Yummo spagummo.

Looking back at last year's post, I cringe a little bit. I can probably blame most of the bad photography on the fact I took the photos indoors at night under fluorescent light, but the styling wasn't crash hot, either. Not that it's much better now (please ignore the green curtains in the background - they're the cheap ones mum made in the eighties and has been intending to replace them with cream-coloured roller blinds for quite a time, but, in true Mum style, this hasn't happened yet), but these days I make more of an effort to take photos in daylight. It doesn't always pan out that way, and sometimes I just need to eat it immediately so I point and shoot with a flash on, but I do try a little harder now to compose the photo. Plus I've realised the redundancy of taking photos of every damned step of the recipe, unless you are an awesome photographer (like Ree Drummond) or you have something interesting or quirky or important to say about the step. Ree does her cooking commentary well and is the reason I fell in love with that style of food blogging, but I don't think I'm quite up to her level. You know, quite. <--- UNDERSTATEMENT!!!

The rules for the Ice Cream Cupcake Contest include posting your cupcake recipe (which must include both cake and icecream elements) and photo; linking back to Stef over at TheCupcakeProject and Tina/Bethany/Kevin over at Scoopalicious; add your link to the bottom of Stef's competition page; and fill out the entry form.

So that's the links taken care of, and once this post is complete, that will be the posting taken care of! (also, so I'm not just paying lip service to the rules, I will also link you to Stef's ultimate vanilla cupcakes. I've only ever made a self-styled GF version, but if they are anything to go by, oh, my. You must try them. Now! VANILLA! Nom.)

To preface the post, I will show you what we're aiming for. I actually went a little bit schmancy this year and combined three elements to make my Lemon Meringue Ice Cream Cupcakes, all of which were home-made: Cupcakes, ice cream and meringue. Oh, make that four - lemon curd, which was piped into the cupcake and also swirled through the ice cream.

PART ONE: The ice cream. This should be done a couple of days in advance, I think. I began it the night before and as you will see in later photos, its structural integrity was somewhat questionable.

This one's from Taste.com.au and was the only basic ice cream recipe I could find that a) required only the amount of cream I knew was already in the fridge, and b) didn't call for an ice cream maker (which I don't have. By the way, I have a big birthday coming up. Hint hint. And I like the colour red. Just in case anyone (like the people at Cuisinart, for example, or Kitchenwaredirect, who have received a wee bit of my income over the years) are listening... HAHAHA as if. Mind you, if they are listening, if they give me an ice cream maker I promise to blog my way through their recipe book! Yep, good thing dreams are free... and surely you can forgive me for dreaming, because my brain is a little fried at present on account of being precisely three weeks from the big 3-0. Denial is a beautiful place.).

Anyway.

Because I've linked to the recipe I won't rehash it, but I will tell you that I think I did something wrong. I suspect it was something to do with how hot the liquid was when I added it to the egg yolks, but I'm not sure. I don't know whether it's supposed to look like this (the froth on the top of which looked and tasted like when you leave a tub of ice cream in the car on a hot day and it melts and expands and foams like a rabid dog, so I thought I was on the right track at the time)...

(and don't ask me why it's sideways. It was taken in landscape. This usually only happens with photos that were previously rotated. Sorry!)

But then, when I was eating a spoonful of foam to confirm its deliciousness carefully stirring, the foam parted to reveal an un-homogenous "custard". Yes, it had been coating the back of my spoon as the recipe stipulated, but not thickly as I had expected. Perhaps this is why:

The lower layer is all chunky (albeit fine, soft chunks, like a porridge made of polenta), so I attacked it with the stick mixer and all was well in the world. Yep, world peace and the dissolving of world debt really is as simple as fixing your custard-y errors with a stick mixer. You're welcome.

As I said before, leave plenty of time for the freezing part. It'll take longer than you think.

Once it was (mostly) frozen I took about eight heaped spoonfuls out (one for each cupcake) and stirred through some crushed meringue and about 1/4 of the lemon curd. You want it to be frozen enough to hold its shape (unlike mine!) when it comes time to put it on the cupcakes.

PART TWO: The lemon curd. Yields... I dunno, about 1/2-3/4 cup? Enough to fill some cupcakes with but not much more.

I got this one out of my new cupcake book. Given I have to post this before I get home for the weekend I will have to forgo citing it for now, but promise to edit it in shortly.

2 egg yolks

1/3 castor sugar

Zest and juice of 1 lemon (approx. 1/4c juice)

65g butter, softened and cubed

Beat egg yolks, sugar and lemon juice until combined. Add zest and stir. Place in heatproof bowl over saucepan of simmering water (don't let the bowl touch the water) and add butter. Stir with wooden spoon until butter melts and then keep stirring until it thickens into a custard, about four minutes or so. Push through a seive to get rid of the zest chunks (I may or may not have gathered them together out of the seive and sucked the residual lemon curd off it before discarding it... but nobody saw it so it probably didn't happen). Cover with plastic wrap to stop a skin forming and cool in refrigerator.

PART THREE: The meringue. These are from AWW's Cook, the recipe for Meringue Kisses with Passionfruit Filling, but obviously without the filling. Sounds like they could be tasty, though...

1 egg white

1/2tsp white vinegar

1/3c castor sugar

1tsp icing sugar.

Preheat oven to 130oC. Line tray with baking paper.

Beat the first three ingredients until stiff peaks form. Fold in the icing sugar.

Using a "soft serve" tip (I think it's a Wilton 2D but could be wrong. It's a low number and a letter, I think!)...

...pipe soft-serve-esque meringues to fit on the cupcakes. You will want to have some meringue left over to crush into the ice cream so if you pipe nine swirls and use the ugly one for the ice cream you'll be fine.

Bake until they have dried out. The first clue is that they will move on the tray when gently pushed (wet meringue sticks), and the second clue is that they will feel light and sound hollow when the bottom is tapped. This will take 30-50 minutes. Keep an eye on them because you don't want them going brown - soft serve isn't brown!

Once cooled, use a fruit pitter/stoner like this:

... to gouge holes in the underside of the meringue. This is partly to quarry more meringue to stir through the ice cream and partly to allow the meringue to grip to it and not just immediately slide off. I guess you could probably use a paring knife (wow. Only took me eight goes to spell it correctly!) and a teaspoon, or perhaps a grapefruit knife, but this bladed spoon with a point did a good job of gently scraping at the meringue without stabbing myself, slipping or otherwise crushing the meringue or putting a hole through it. Go gently, grasshopper.

PART THREE: The cupcakes.

This is a basic butter (cup)cake recipe from the AWW Cooking School cookbook. I divided the below recipe into thirds to yield eight cupcakes (so this one yields 24). Mine were a little overcooked so maybe check them before the stipulated 20 minutes is up.

250 butter

1 1/4c castor sugar

3 eggs

2 1/4c SR flour

3/4c milk <-- edit: check this quantity on weekend

Preheat oven to 190oC. Do the usual - whip butter until light and fluffy, add sugar and whip until nice and combined, add eggs (don't over-beat), add flour and milk in 2 batches each, just combining (again, don't over-mix). Divide into 24 cupcake cases. Bake for a little under 20 minutes, until they spring back when touched. Remove from oven, cool 5 minutes in tin then turn onto rack.

ASSEMBLY:

Once the cupcakes have cooled, the curd has set, the meringues are sorted and the ice cream is frozen, get your bismarck tip (yay! I know things! I imagine you could also do it with a round tip, or get that paring knife out again and cut little rounds out the top of the cake, squirt some curd into it with whatever tip you have, then replace the little round of cake) and stab each cupcake with it, wiggle it about a bit to make a cavity and then pipe the curd into the cupcake.

I got a couple of squirts into each cupcake, and then dusted them with icing sugar in case someone didn't want to eat the cupcake fully assembled (scandalous I know, but it was a possibility. I also had to test the cupcakes to make sure they were up to snuff, so I can confirm that they taste good like this, even if they look a bit scrappy).

Finally, get a spoonful of your (hopefully frozen!) ice cream, smear it carefully on the underside of the meringue and assemble the cupcake. It was a pleasing combination of sweet and tangy, and the competing textures made it a pure joy to eat. A messy joy. Note the melty ice cream sliding off my cupcakes - don't be me. I suspect that if the ice cream had been much harder, though, the meringue may have shattered when I applied the ice cream to it. It's a fine line!

If I had my time again, I would make the ice cream a week in advance. Or I would just use store-bought vanilla ice cream and soften it on the bench before stirring through the crushed meringue and lemon curd. But altogether I'm pleased enough with them - how they tasted and how they looked - to post a second photo!

Must... eat... quickly!

PS - if you want to be a Cheaty McCheaterson, I can't see a reason that you couldn't just use packet mix cake and store-bought lemon curd and ice cream. I don't know whether you'll get the same quality product (unlikely) but if you're in a hurry, better to have Cheaty Cupcakes than no cupcakes at all!

Pioneer Woman's Mocha Brownies

Well. I finally did it. After resisting for the longest time due to the crazy amount of butter and sugar in these, I made Pioneer Woman's mocha brownies from her first cookbook.

I just want to say what an absolute hero Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman) is to me. I stumbled upon her blog via Cake Wrecks way back in 2009 (might even have been 2008...) and I haven't looked back. Not only did her buttery recipes appeal to me, but I also became hooked on the story of she and her husband's romance, entitled Black Heels to Tractor Wheels. You can read it on her blog (I'm having trouble finding the whole lot of them - perhaps the category was removed once the book was published? But at least some of the components seem to remain, so search for Black Heels), or buy it in book form. She comes across as being this lovely, sweet, slightly ditzy woman and is totally relatable in so many ways. It's going to sound really twee, but she made me believe in true love when I was doubting it, and she made me feel kinda normal cos hey, I'm a bit of a ditz myself and I share her love for food and family and friends, too. I love you, Ree!

(No... declaring your undying love to a blogger you've never met isn't weird. At all...)

Anyway, enough babble. To the brownies!

I have scribbled this out on the back of a receipt and am transcribing it on my bus ride back up to Barham, so hopefully I wrote it down correctly. Note that I have written the Australian measurements here, and that I have only included a half quantity of the icing as I (accurately) assessed a whole batch to be a bit over the top. If you want the original recipe, buy the book! Your thighs won't thank me, but your heart will sing with joy. There's this amazing recipe for berry cobbler and... oh, just by the dang book already!

BROWNIES

120g dark chocolate

220g butter

2c sugar

4 large eggs

3tsp vanilla extract

1 1/4c plain flour (I used gluten free flour and they turned out wonderfully)

Preheat oven at around 160oC (325F was what the original said - you may wish to check my conversion!)

Melt chocolate, being careful not to burn. Set aside to cool slightly.

Beat butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time and mix until batter is an even consistency.

Drizzle melted choclate into sugar/butter/egg mixture with the mixer still running. Add vanilla and mix. Add flour and mix until just combined.

Spread into greased 8" tin (I also lined it with baking paper coming up two of the sides to make it easier to remove the cooked brownie). Bake for 40-45 minutes until set in the middle (note that I cooked mine for closer to an hour, but I think the thermostat on mum's oven is buggered - I have ordered an oven thermometer and hope this will assist future recipes!).

ICING

110g butter, softened

2 1/2c icing sugar

1/8c cocoa powder

Pinch salt

1 1/2tsp vanilla extract

1/4 - 1/3c brewed coffee, cooled to room temperature

(optional: coffee essence)

Mix all but the coffee until just combined  in the mixer. Then, add a little under 1/4c of the coffee and whip until light and fluffy. If the mix is too stiff then add a little more coffee. I added some coffee essence at the end because I only used instant coffee and the flavour wasn't strong enough for me.

Spread icing on brownie and refrigerate until set. Cut into 16 slices.

Note that if you cut it into 16 slices, I calculated that there are around 540 calories PER SLICE!!! Yes, really. So I cut it into 25 slices and I feel much more comfortable with my decision to eat two in one day :)

Bon appetit!