crunchy pink slice

This is the first recipe I used in our new house and since our loss.

Chris' family were coming to visit us, so I wanted to bake something to share for afternoon tea. As is typically the case, the afternoon tea we were going to share with Chris' sister and hubby, turned into dinner and dessert. Not a bad thing!

But the pink slice was a success as Leesh and subsequently the following day, Chris' parents, loved the slice. In fact Chris may have overindulged somewhat and had trouble sleeping for the huge amount of sugar he consumed from his consumption of pink slice.

This was easy to make and used things just from the pantry. So this is a keeper.

lorraine's small eclairs

I took this simple and lovely recipe to my parents' place (due to the fact I still haven't cleaned out my poor greased up oven!).

Chris had to give me a hand with the mixing of the mixture in the saucepan as it was really tricky and I was feeling weak. Mum helped make the icing. It turned into quite the team effort!

These were made into profiteroles instead.

They were so tasty and light and delicious. Yum! I will definitely remember these!

lemon polenta cake

Subtitle: the day I forgot to use a baking tray.

I used my spingform pan and this cake turned out to be a wonderful Mother's Day treat for all you shared in eating. Can I blame the hormones on my silly forgetfulness as I used a springform pan, filled with a buttery mixture, with no baking tray underneath and filled the bottom of my oven with grease?

This cake was grand and an effort and expensive, but worth it for a special Mother's Day.

best-ever choc chip cookies

These were so yummy! I made these to have with top quality ice cream for dessert with our pals Bec and Ben. Bec made a yummy rice dish from her Jamie in America cook book and I prepared the dessert.

This recipe produced masses of cookies and when I do them again, I will ensure I bake them for less time to make them more chewy. This batch were quite crispy, which was still yum, but I can't deny the love I have for chewy choc chip cookies!

apple and cinnamon muffins

Gosh, I have been so slack with getting this blog done, even though I've stuck with my baking commitment to some extent.

Since I last wrote, I have been working a lot, we have bought a house, Chris has changed jobs, we moved house, we have had experienced huge joy and huge loss of late. These may be excuses, but it is the truth of why this has been put on the back burner for ages.

I will describe the recipes that I have made during this time to what I can remember, but it has been so long...

This was a delightfully easy recipe and the muffins were super tasty. I used my silicone moulds to bake them in and it worked so well.

Muffins are wonderful. This recipe has replacement options, so it is a basic recipe. I will endeavour to make many of the other varieties in the future.

Apple and Sour Cream Slice

Now I'm sure that everyone has had a try of this fine slice at least once in their lives. I love it. My Aunty Heather used to make it when I was little and my husband's Aunty Beth has made this more than a few times since I've known the family. I adore this slice.

The recipe appears very simple. And the making of it is just as easy. Except for the baking aspect. I don't quite know why the bottom turned burny brown.

However, I plan to make this slice over and over due to its simple ingredients and method. As well as its scrummy-ness.

I made this to take to my dear friend Aimee's baptism/her sons' dedications. What a special day to be a part of.

And this is precisely why I love to bake. It can be a gift to bless those you love. It can be a sign of celebration. It can be a simple I love you in the form of something to devour.

Snowballs

I might entitle this one, "What a Waste of a Perfectly Lovely Sponge Cake?", or perhaps "The First Mixmaster Experience".

Just before undertaking this recipe I received my eBay purchase of one Sunbeam Mixmaster, which I love. I've wanted a mixmaster for years and with my first pay cheque (actually my second after giving my first as a thank offering at church), I bought my very own. I considered getting one of the swish coloured Kitchenaid ones (RRP$799) but chose to get the more frugal but still effective option.

So I made my first sponge cake, which turned out wonderfully with the use of the new appliance. I do wonder if my arm would've fallen off trying to use handbeaters for this one!

Once it had baked, the idea is to use a scone cutter to cut rounds and roll in icing and then in coconut. So this was where the disaster happened. I spent a good 2 hours trying to fix the icing, which at best became sweet slop and then used shredded coconut (I wasn't going to the shops to get desiccated when it was apparent that my mum would arrive and they wouldn't be ready to serve!). But I did my best.

Mum came and we ate out strange snowballs, which were nothing at all like the picture in the book or in my mind. But we enjoyed them anyway. We ate them with many cups of tea and viewing of Pride and Prejudice, my new BBC DVD given to me for my birthday. It was a lovely way to share such a poor result of a recipe. On the upside, Mum took home the remaining sponge cake to make into a trifle for her and Dad. So I'm delighted to think Dad got some trifle out of it!

betty's caramel tart

I so enjoyed sharing this with people.

I have always loved my Nanna's caramel tart and this is the first attempt I've had at anything similar.

The creation of the three parts was great. The beautiful tart base that was cooked wonderfully. The caramel filling took ages to stir up, but it was smooth and creamy and sweeeet! Then the meringue was just delish.

I will love cooking this again. I shared it with my parents, Chris and Kate and Cam. But I did receive praise with each serve. Yum, I would love to have some right now!

Yo-yo Biscuits

Oh, these are awesome! Beautiful sweet biscuits and a lovely sugary filling. Yum.

The 3 sets of shifting the flour and custard powder nearly broke my ageing sifter! But it made the biscuits so deliciously smooth.

Made these twice in the last week or so. Shared with the Dohertys (enjoyed by young and not as young alike!) and my parents and the family-in-law over the Easter long weekend. A joy to share.

Raspberry scones

I love scones and I love raspberries. But for some reason this recipe did nothing for me. The serving with added cream and raspberry jam did though. I felt like it was a wasted amount of raspberries and I would have preferred regular scones.

I do however wonder whether my raspberries were slightly unfrozen and caused issue in the recipe. The picture in the recipe book showed regular looking scones with raspberries dappled through, whereas mine turned purple from the breaking up of the raspberries as I folded them into the scone mixture and kneaded the dough as well. And how very sad: a sprinkling of icing sugar just makes things look less appealing...

They did not all get consumed, which speaks volumes about how un-special they were.

Next time I will make scones without raspberries and add the raspberries with the cream as an afterthought!

Small cakes

I made these for Megan's baby shower last week (congratulations on the arrival of Imogen Corinne Parker).

Very simple, quick and tasty recipe. Truly tastes like the ones Nanna used to make.

I loved the fact I could use the little silicone cupcake moulds I received from Mum for my birthday last year. They really looked terribly cute with pastel pink and blue casings and a little white icing on top.

Truly delightful.

Nanna biscuits

I even love the name of these biccies.

Even though I felt like I had some trouble making these and they all melded together on the baking tray in the oven, I loved these.

I enjoyed using my cute blue measuring scales to get the correct amounts of ingredients. I loved the fact these were so quick and easy to make and require so little cleaning up afterwards!

The ingredients were meant to come together as a dough, but they really didn't. Despite this fact, the end result was a sweet, buttery biscuit.

I ended up making two batches.

The first batch I made for my sister-in-law, the giver of the recipe book, who has been doing it tough lately, but has demonstrated an amazing strength, patience and perseverance. She is truly wonderful. I hope that the biccies have and will help her enjoy her down-time. Love you Leesh!

The second batch was shared with the girls, Bec, Tahlia, Kate, Erin and myself, on our roadtrip to Canberra. It was such a fun weekend, and I hope that whenever I make these little gems in the future, I will reminisce over the girlie weekend away! Love you girls!

The picture I've included is of the final biscuit (of some 32 I made) that I will enjoy with a cup of tea later on today.

All Together Cake

This was simply the easiest cake ever. Love love love it! These ingredients are all just from the cupboard buzzed together for 6 minutes and baked for 40.

The icing however did not come together as easily, and despite tasting buttery and sweet, looked positively gross on the cake and nothing like the picture in the recipe book! I added so much more dry ingredient to try and get it together, but the consistency of the icing was still rather vomity.

But with fresh whipped cream and some dollops of raspberry jam, it tasted amazing!

Next time, I will make my own butter icing.

Chocolate Rum Slice

Oh yum.

And the question from people was consistently, "Did you make this? It looks like you bought it." Snaps for me.

This one was fun to make. Starting with the processing of biscuits, cocoa and butter to make a tasty, salty base. Then the fun of melting down marshmallows, chocolate and rum to pour over the base which became a deliciously smooth centre. Finishing with whipped cream, which seems to have been a favourite ingredient in this recipe book, and shaved chocolate.

The photo really doesn't do it justice.

Enjoyed by new mummy Laurie, Gilly, Ben, Bec, Preston, Chris, Chris, Maxi, and a happy helping myself! Yes, that is a lot of pieces = bonus!

I will definitely make it again and again.

Banana muffins

Not a fan of these muffins.

The recipe may be fine, but my results were unsatisfying.

Firstly I couldn't work out whether to add butter in its normal form or melted; the recipe was slightly ambiguous.

Also, the oven heat must have been way too high, because the poor muffins were black on the outside and not well cooked on the inside. This meant that after having the best ones (the least burnt) fresh, the others tasted almost rancid on following days. Not fun.

Not pretty either, even on this pretty plate I received from a family friend, Grandma Ruth. Such a shame!

So I don't think I'll attempt it again, even though I suspect I may have to fine tune a few aspects to get a nicer result.

It's the first of my experiment recipes that I haven't been impressed with, and really, 3 great ones and 1 not so good, ain't bad odds.

Instead, the next time I have overripe bananas on hand, I will again make my Mum's beautiful banana cake. I love her cake, it's one of my favourite baked goodies that she makes. I have had amazing feedback from friends on it when I've made it, especially with an extra sprinkle of mixed spice!

Gingerbread

I have very sweet memories of decorating gingerbread men in my Nanna's kitchen as a child, as well as my Aunty Isabel's beautifully adorned gingerbread houses for the Christmas table. So I was delighted to find that my next afternoon tea experiment was gingerbread!

The ingredients are so simple; things you just find ordinarily in the pantry. Putting the bits and pieces together was quite easy too, and I really relished the kneading of the dough, I love getting my hands into what I make!

After some fridge time, I had to roll out the dough. I think I've discovered that it is not so much my ability to roll dough that's the problem as my bench top and my rolling pin do not like doing their job with me in preparing dough. I do think it requires a fair bit of team work between your implements and yourself in such a process. However, I did use a copious amount of flour on both surfaces to attempt to improve my dough rolling experience.

I cut the pieces with a fluted circle cutter and put them in the oven. There were two full oven trays of biscuits, enough to overfill my largest biscuit jar!

I decorated them with white icing with little squiggles. Next time, I will be a little more confident in how the icing works, and will hopefully do prettier decorations.

This is a recipe to keep for sure. They are just the yummiest, so easy to make, and last for ages.

This batch has so far been shared with my husband, our mortgage broker, buddies Chris, Bec and Ben, and a few just for myself with a cup of tea. Lovely.

Nelly's Apple Shortcake

This one was fun!

Firstly the shortcake was easily buzzed about with the beaters with only a few ingredients, so simple, and they turned out perfectly (and made the house smell delightful!).

I prepared the apples slightly differently from the recipe. I was a little hesitant about how they would turn out, as I normally do things by the book! But I cooked them just the right amount and they were tender and sweet, perfect for filling a shortcake.

The whipped cream was great. I love beating cream until it gets a little life of its own and becomes so light, fluffy and a wonderful accompaniment to any sweet thing. This recipe required it to be spread on top of the shortcake, and it spread beautifully across the top and looked so pretty.

The end result: all flavours mixed to become a lovely afternoon tea treat to share with my friend Aimee (and little Ethan) on Thursday and then with my parents and husband on Friday.

I loved sharing this cake with people who are dear to me and it is on my list to make again in the future.

New Year's Resolutions and Lemon Meringue Pie

Can you smell that?

Someone's been baking. I can detect sweet pastry and lemon zest on the breeze. Mmmm....

So Christmas has passed us once again and we've reached the New Year. This is worth noting as these two things are my reason for starting up this blog.

At Christmas, my gift-giving extraordinaire sister-in-law gave me a lovely gift. It consisted of a set of book labels by Poppies for Grace as well as a recipe book called afternoon tea.

As soon as I saw this book, I knew I would love it. It is pink for one thing (I just can't help loving that aspect) and it is full of recipes that mums, aunties and grandmothers make. It is made by frankie magazine and it has the same pretty photography and sweetness that I find in the magazine.

So that is the Christmas side of things.

As for the New Year, well, a personal challenge to myself is to bake each item in the book, 40 in all. I figure I can do that in a year, say, one a week and that means that I can take some holiday leave if need be. My brother-in-law suggested that I create a blog, a la Julie & Julia, and write about my experiences with each recipe.

Et voila, this is my blog.

Lemon Meringue Pie:

I got a real kick out of buying the ingredients from the shops as well as a lovely flan tin to make my pie really pretty, but as I started making the pastry dough I remembered how frustrating I find making pastry.

I don't know what it is about me and dough, but there is always a massive mess and it is never simple. They never mention this being an issue when writing the recipes, so I assume it's just me. And the dough. This time, I think it was because the egg was too large, because I did everything else by the book! To the gram amount!

However, with a bit of extra dry ingredient, the pastry did eventually come together and make it into the tin ready for blind baking. It worked really nicely in the end, not too crumbly or hard. Fantastique!

The lemon filling needed to be thicker when put in the pastry case, as it came out rather runny, but it still tasted delicious and zesty. I'll just ensure to cook it for longer to thicken it up next time.

And the meringue. Funnily enough, with all the baking I've done over time, I haven't made any meringue, and it worked beautifully. Although, next time, I wouldn't cook it so long as it lost the pretty white colour and was a little too brown as you will note from the picture (taken by my dear husband, Chris, the photographer guy).

And so, week one of my 2010 personal challenge complete, I enjoyed a piece of my lemon meringue pie for afternoon tea with Chris (who, not surprisingly, is a fan of my New Year's resolution!).