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a hot date with tea and cake

Here’s the recipe for a really good afternoon: bake a cake, get your pretty new vintage china out and pour yourself a cup of your current tea obsession (at the moment, lime and orange).

For this marble cake, I sort of followed the recipe from the Edmonds cookbook, but made a few adjustments. For example, the recipe tells you to divide the cake batter into three equal parts and add red food colouring to one of the parts to make it pink. I don’t think I’d ever heard of marble cake with three colours (am I just totally out of touch with the wonderful world of marble cakes?) so I skipped that step. I also added vanilla essence to the batter, to make the plain part of the cake a little less plain, and replaced the cocoa with drinking chocolate.

Anyway, you’ll need: three eggs, 3/4 cup of sugar, 1 cup of self-raising flour, 50g of melted butter, 2 tablespoons of boiling water, 2 or 3 tablespoons of drinking chocolate, 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence.

Pre-heat the oven to 190 degrees celsius. Beat the eggs until thick and gradually add the sugar in until the mixture gets thick and white. Fold flour into the mixture and then fold the butter and boiling water into it. Divide the batter into two equal parts. In one of them, stir in the cocoa/drinking chocolate. Leave the other plain. Grease a loaf tin and spoon the two mixtures into it diagonally. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.

 

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vanilla cupcakes with passionfruit icing

It really must be true what people say about how running leaves you full of energy because, following the run of death, I ended up having a fairly productive weekend.

On sunday morning, I was out of bed by 9am and, since my legs were too sore to go for a run in the morning, I stayed home and got a bunch of stuff done. And then I made cupcakes. These only took me like 10 minutes to make, plus the 15min to bake and the time to let the cupcakes cool down before icing them (if you look at my icing job up there, you can tell I didn’t wait long enough for them to cool down). Anyway, I’m a big fan of anything delicious that only requires about 10 minutes of work so I thought I’d share the recipe here.

For the vanilla cupcakes: mix 125g of melted butter with 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence and half a cup of sugar. add two eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. fold 1 cup of self-raising flour into the mixture and then add 1/4 litre of milk and mix well. bake for 15min at 180 degrees celsius.

For the passionfruit icing, I just used 5 heaped tablespoons of icing sugar (which turned out to be enough to ice 12 cupcakes) and some delmaine’s passionfruit dessert topping that I had already bought for another dessert (that I’ve since forgotten to make). I’m not entirely sure how much passionfruit topping I used but it was quite a bit, maybe one third of the bottle. It was quite passionfruity (what a terrible made-up adjective for a journalist to use, I know) so I think next time I’ll add some butter to it.

Enjoy!


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berries and white chocolate chip ice cream recipe

what’s one to do when one’s out of ice cream and gets a craving for this cold treat? well, one stops referring to oneself as “one” and “oneself”… and then makes ice cream from scratch.

I used the always faithful Edmonds cookbook (a kiwi classic) for the basic ice cream recipe. The result is the mixture you see below and, for that, you will need to get a few bowls dirty. Here’s how:

beat four egg whites until stiff peaks form. gradually add 1/4 of a cup of caster sugar to the egg whites, one tablespoon at a time, beating until the sugar dissolves before adding the next tablespoon.

in a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks and another 1/4 of a cup of caster sugar until thick and pale. add one teaspoon of vanilla.

fold yolk mixture into egg white mixture.

in another bowl, beat 300ml of cream until thick. then fold the cream into the egg mixture.

That’s your basic ice cream done. If you pour that into a container and freeze it, you will have vanilla ice cream. Or frozen boredom, whatever you want to call it. So pick your favourite ingredients to add to it and make it more interesting. For this first attempt, I picked berries and white chocolate. I had a bag of frozen berries in the freezer so used those to make about 1 1/2 cups of berry pulp.

I didn’t have any chocolate chips, only chocolate buttons, so patiently broke them into little chips (because that’s how committed I am to ice cream).

Give the mixture a good stir to ensure the white chocolate chips are all over it and don’t just concentrate in one place. Pour the mixture into a container (or individual serving bowls) suitable for freezing.

Freeze for about three hours or until firm.

Eat it as if ice cream is going out of fashion.


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easiest apple tart ever

Yes, this is another post about food – more specifically, it’s a post about cake (my favourite of all food groups – and what do you mean ‘cake isn’t a food group?’).

A few days ago, I baked my first ever apple tart (tart, not pie – take it easy!). Why, you ask? Well, because I remembered I had found what looked like the easiest recipe ever, even for a noob like me.

Anyway, in the absence of anything smart to say here, I thought I’d share another recipe.

Ingredients:

  • 250g butter (soft but not melted)
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
  • grated rind of one orange
  • 2 1/2 cups flour (self-raising)
  • diced apple (I used a tin of apples I had at home, not sure how many apples to use, perhaps 4 or 5)
  • icing sugar to dust on top
Mix together butter, sugar, egg, vanilla essence and orange rind until nice and creamy. Add flour and mix well. Spread 2/3 of the mix in a cake tin (make sure it’s greased and floured). Spread the diced apple over it and dot the remaining mixture over the top. Bake at 190ºC for about 40 minutes. Let it cool down and dust with icing sugar.

I can’t remember where I got the recipe from, as I wrote it down a while ago and it has been sitting in the “to try” queue.

The result was very positive, even though the bottom was a wee bit burnt (less time in the oven next time, I guess). I’m looking forward to giving it another go, perhaps adding blueberries to it.


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queijadas de laranja

I went a wee bit baking-mad this weekend and, among other things, made these delicious queijadas de laranja, which I had been craving for a while. Queijadas are a Portuguese treat that can have different flavours. These are orange. I saw someone online describe queijadas as cheesecakes but I don’t think that’s quite right. They’re sort of halfway between a cheesecake and a muffin – cakey but really moist inside. Read: delicious!

Anyway, thought I’d leave the recipe I used here because they are so easy to make everyone should give it a go! Awesome with a hot cup of coffee!

***

Queijadas de laranja

  • 1/2L milk
  • 175g flour (self-raising)
  • 40g butter (softened)
  • 300g sugar
  • 4 eggs
  • juice and rind of 1 orange
  • optional: icing sugar and/or cinnamon

Pre-heat the oven to 200ºC. Heat up the milk in a saucepan and, once it starts to boil, add the butter.

Separately, mix flour and sugar and then add the eggs. Mix it all, then add the orange juice and rind and slowly add the milk, always beating well.

Pour the mixture into a muffin tray and cook it in the oven for 25 minutes.

You can choose to dust some icing sugar or cinnamon on top, once they’ve cooled down.

NB: these measurements were enough to make 23 queijadas so, all in all, a very inexpensive little treat!

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cheeseburger cupcakes

We had a cupcake competition at work a while ago and I used it as an excuse to finally try to make the cheeseburger cupcakes I had found numerous tutorials for online. I didn’t take any photos of the process because, well, I forgot. But probably also because I was convinced this first attempt was going to be a massive failure. They turned out quite cute and, even though I haven’t tried making them again since then, I still think I’ll give them another go for a special occasion.

Anyway, here’s a step-by-step tutorial, with no photos. I’ll try to remember to take some next time I make them.

1. Bake a batch of chocolate cupcakes.

2. Bake a batch of vanilla cupcakes.

3. Wait for them to cool down and then cut the top and the bottom of the chocolate cupcakes so you get a flat(ish) slice from the middle. Set that aside.

4. Cut the vanilla cupcakes in half.

5. Squeeze some orange juice on top of the vanilla cupcakes and then sprinkle some sesame seeds on top (the juice will make them stick).

6. For the icing, you can use whatever flavour you want. I used lemon juice for all of them mainly because I was a bit sick of being in the kitchen when it got to that stage and just wanted to get it done. Get some lemon juice and icing sugar together and make a fair amount of icing (I know this isn’t very specific but I really don’t know how much icing I ended up having to make). Then divide the icing into 3 separate bowls. Add some yellow food colouring to one of them (this will be your cheese), some red food colouring to another one (your ketchup) and some green food colouring to the third one (which will be your lettuce).

7. To keep it easy, I used two different piping bags instead of my fancy icing syringe (which I would have to keep washing otherwise). I put the yellow icing on the bottom of the chocolate cake, to help it stick to the bottom of the vanilla cupcake. I then squeezed the ‘lettuce’ on top of the chocolate, using a bigger nozzle to give it a bit of a leafy look. Then I squeezed the ketchup, using the smaller nozzle.

yum!

p.s.: if you’re looking for a video tutorial, this is a great one.