Gorgeous Mother's Day

I had a gorgeous Mother's Day.


Mother's and Father's Days around here normally concentrate on sleep-ins and breakfast in bed made by the kids.


This last year both girls have done a lot more cooking and it really showed how much their skills have improved in the meal they produced yesterday. Makes me wish I'd kept a record of what they made each year. I do remember a few tea and toast years, some french toast, and quite a bit of Dad help but can't remember much more.


Anyway this year there was a cup of tea followed by a delicious banana and oat smoothie in bed. 
After leisurely getting up and ready there was a brunch of pumpkin, fakin (vegetarian bacon) and caramelised onion mini quiches and salmon, dill and cream cheese finger sandwiches,    

lemon and cardamon bun and chocolate pastry swirl with a latte to go!

Finally an early afternoon sweet course of lemon and cardamon buns and chocolate pastry swirls with coffee. 


Fabulous! 

And done with no help - (and all went smoothly except the spilling of milk all over the laptop with the recipe on it which was sitting on kitchen bench!! We need to rethink this habit!! Insurance claim in, fingers crossed!)






I suspect you may see their recipes if you follow Mia's Blog. 

In the afternoon friends lent us their season passes to the netball and we saw our first professional level netball match - NSW Swifts vs Melbourne Vixens. What a game! Swifts won - just - and it was very exciting with a great atmosphere. Always good to try something new. Ian even one a lucky door prize at the after match members event. 







Thank you Gorgeous Girls and Lovely Husband. It was a great day!
Nicola / Mum

ANZAC Biscuits

I did a guest post on my daughter's blog - Little Blue Bicycle this week while she is away. I baked ANZAC biscuits - a traditional Australian Oat and Coconut Cookie. Click here if you'd like to see it!!

Tuscan Plum Upside Down Cake

We had family for dinner last night. I don't always do dessert - but my father-in-law is a dessert fan so I decided to find a dessert using our plum surplus. With our Italian leaning this week a Tuscan Plum Upside Down Cake seemed to fit the bill. I haven't made an upside cake before!

Ingredients

• 275 g Sugar
• 150 ml Water
• 
  
• 900 g Plums, Halved and Stoned 
• 
  
• 150 g Soft Butter
• 175 g Sugar
• 200 g Self Raising Flour
• 3 Eggs

   

Method

Preheat the oven to 170’c.
• 
  
• Put the sugar and water into a heavy based pan (that can go into the oven).
• Stir over a medium heat until the sugar dissolves, then cook without stirring until the sugar caramelises to a golden brown. (I turned it off at a hint of brown as the cast iron pan I used held heat and the caramel continued to darken after I removed it from the stove)
• 
  
• 
  
  
  Carefully and immediately arrange cut side down in a single layer in the caramel (this will be the top of the cake when it is cooked).
• 
  
  Put the butter, sugar and flour into the bowl of an electric food processor, whiz for a couple of seconds, then add the eggs and stop as soon as the mixture comes together. ( if you don’t have a food processor, just cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs one by one, then mix in the flour).
• 
  
  Spread the mixture in an even layer over the plums in the pan.
• 
  
  
  
  Bake in the preheated oven for about one hour.
• 
  
  The centre should be firm to the touch and the edges slightly shrunk from the sides of the pan.
• 
  
  
  Run a knife around the edges to make sure it has not stuck anywhere.
• Leave it to sit for 3 or 4 minutes before turning out.
• 
  
  Serve with whipped cream, ice cream or crème fraiche.

It was delicious, hot at the time and in my lunch box today. I also have a nectarine stack - I could see this becoming a regular dessert!

Ethical Shopper

We try to make the world a better place in little everyday ways where we can. I don't pretend we are making anything like the impact we could - but we, like many, are on the Western Treadmill of work, school, housework and not too much else and this is one area we can manage right now.
Spending our money where it does the least harm and possibly some good is our aim.

I try to stay out of supermarkets a lot. I buy fruit and vegetables through a co-op (Harvest Hub) which tells me who grew my fruit and where. We grow some of our own citrus and herbs. I buy very little meat - and only free range or organic. I buy sustainable fish types from a proper fish shop and very little tinned fish. We have our own chickens for eggs. We make a lot of our own bread and other baked goods. We make some of our cheese and yoghurt. And if we weren't so firmly on the treadmill we would make and grow a lot more.


When I do need to shop in a supermarket, I try to choose one of the smaller chains, Franklins usually, and I choose brands and support businesses that behave ethically. To simplify this I use an App called "Ethical Shopper"
This was slow early on but quickly I came to know the brands to choose and those to avoid and now it's fairly simple.

Sometimes you come up with products that are difficult and have to make some compromises or changes. For example, I now buy most cosmetic and toiletry items at chemists, health food shops or department stores where I get a better range of options - I discovered the massive range in supermarkets really only comes from about 3 companies.

Sometimes I compromise - I buy some fair trade chocolate from a company that has some black marks for it's other chocolate products - but figure the fair trade purchase and message is worth it.

This almost always means we pay more for things. But we are comfortable with that.

It's small - but across a whole year of eating it must make a difference - and if I can influence someone else to adopt it, and they can influence someone else etc- the difference may become big enough to change some business and farming practices!

Off my soapbox and back to my cooking now.

Nicola

Coconut cupcakes with a passionfruit filling and coconut-passionfruit buttercream

You know those days when you’re just in the mood for cupcakes?

Baking them, decorating them, eating them? Just as long as cupcakes are involved?

Well over the weekend I had one of those days. I had intended to make cakes later in the week, but I just COULDN’T wait!

So I baked these adorable little coconut cupcakes, filled them with passionfruit curd, and topped them with coconut buttercream. Yum!

They were really scrumptious- the filling made them really moist, and the coconut and passionfruit were perfect together!

The cake itself is based on a combination of two Martha Stewart recipes, the passionfruit curd is a Stephanie Alexander recipe and the icing is just a variation of my standard buttercream.

The icing makes enough for a fairly flat covering of all the cakes, but if you want to do piped swirls, you’d need to double it.

And let’s face it, the more icing, the better!

I’ve got some leftover passionfruit curd and cake crumbs from the centre, too. I’m thinking passionfruit cake pops!

Coconut cupcakes with a passionfruit filling and coconut-passionfruit buttercream

Based on: http://www.marthastewart.com/336105/basic-cupcake-how-to, http://www.marthastewart.com/316189/coconut-cupcakes-with-seven-minute-frost and Stephanie Alexander’s passionfruit curd from ‘The cook’s companion’ pg. 681

Ingredients:

Cakes:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup packed desiccated coconut

150g unsalted butter, softened

1 & a 1/3 cup sugar

2 large eggs, plus 2 large egg whites

3/4 cup unsweetened coconut milk

1 & a 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Filling:

½ cup sugar

60g butter

2 eggs, well beaten

Pulp of 6 passionfruit

Icing:

150g unsalted butter

250g icing sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

½ cup dessicated coconut

Pulp of 3 passionfruit

Directions

To prepare the passionfruit curd, combine the sugar and butter in a small saucepan over medium heat until the butter has melted and the sugar is completely dissolved. Reduce heat, add the remaining ingredients and stir until the mixture thickens (this will take quite a while, but you’ll know when it happens!) Set aside and allow to cool.

For the cakes, preheat the oven to 180˚ c (350˚ f) and line a small cupcake tin with patty-pans. Combine flour, baking powder, salt and desiccated coconut. Using an electric mixer in a separate bowl (or a food processor with a whisk attachment), cream butter and sugar light and fluffy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating after each addition.

Reduce speed to low. Mix coconut milk and vanilla extract in another bowl. Gradually add both the wet and dry ingredients and combine. Divide batter among muffin cups, filling each 2/3 full.

Bake cupcakes until testers inserted into centers come out clean, about 20 minutes. Let cool in tins on wire racks.

Meanwhile, prepare the icing by draining the passionfruit pulp in a medium sized sieve, reserving the liquid. Beat together the butter and icing sugar until smooth and creamy. Add vanilla extract, coconut and the drained passionfruit liquid, and combine.

When the cakes have cooled, use a knife and a teaspoon to dig a small well in the centre of each cake. Fill with the passionfruit curd, and top each cake with the icing and remaining, drained passionfruit seeds.

Enjoy!

Mia

Gingerbread Houses

My girls and two of their friends spent a morning at our place decorating gingerbread houses last week. The Gingerbread was bought as a kit from Ikea. The icing was royal icing which we made ourselves. The recipe with plenty of icing for four houses is given below.

Royal Icing

8 egg whites

2 tspns lemon juice

2kg Icing Sugar

Work in Progress

Place egg whites and juice in mix master on low speed and gradually add icing sugar until all combined and glossy.

We piped using zip lock bags with the corners snipped and some plastic piping squeeze bottles from a biscuit kit.

The girls shopped for their own lollies and chose boiled lollies, red liquorice, chocolate freckles, smarties, mint leaves and jubes. We also had little shiny balls (cachous).

These are the finished products!

Nicola

Savoury Muffins

(This is a post I wrote months ago but for some reason forgot to post. Oops!)

This morning I made some not particularly impressive, but scrumptious savoury muffins. I made them for lunch, because I was in the mood for cooking, yet feeling remarkably uinspired, this morning, so once again turned to Taste.com.au for ideas. Given the time of day, I browsed their lunch recipe collection and found a fairly plain, yet very inspiring savoury muffin recipe. More internet searching led me to base the muffins on recipes I found HERE, because I loved the flexibility it presented. So, based on what we had in the crisper, I made the courgette and pine nut muffins- but with no courgette or pine nut (or basil or sultanas). Instead I added diced yellow capsicum, grated carrot and sliced olives. I also substituted plain flour for wholemeal and parmesan for tasty cheese. (I think that you could probably substitute whatever you liked, so long as it didn't change the ratios).

Through the course of making the muffins I became more and more convinced that they were going to fail, because all the vegetable quantities (as well as that of the cheese) were completely made up! However the muffins worked better than I expected, and were actually pretty yummy. A little heavy, but better than last time I made savoury muffins (with a completely different recipe), although that time I really made little savoury rocks, because I left out the eggs! They made a great lunch, and the leftovers are stored away in the freezer for their calling- which I'm guessing will be school lunches next week! I only took one photo- still not used to this whole recording as you cook thing- but promise to take more next time.

Mia

Croissants

Well, here goes nothing! First Post!

Today I made Croissants (Well, actually I started them yesterday morning, but I cooked them today so I think that's what counts)! They were a little more of an undertaking than I expected- I spent about 6 hours working on them and this was spaced across more than 30 hours! But the end product was remarkably croissant-like and delicious, so I am still making my mind up as to whether it was worth it.


The recipe I used was in 'Bourke Street Bakery; The Ultimate Baking Companion' A cookbook Dad got for his birthday, predominantly for use in sourdough making. It's a fantastic book with all sorts of yummy bakery-like things in it, although the methods do all seem to be at least a page long! The recipe was divided into 2 parts- Croissant Dough (Which can be used in all sorts of other things, like snails for example) and Croissants (to be precise, the recipe was spread across 148-9 and 168-9). I would have put the recipe, except it's literally 4 pages of very small font and I don't want to bore you.


They were meant to be for breakfast, but in a slightly more extreme example of my complete inability to predict how long I will take to cook something ( partly connected to my inability to read the full recipe before I begin them) they were ready just after 4:30 PM. Oh well, I guess I'll know next time! We served them with hot chocolate in bowls- when we were little we got croissants from a local bakery all the time and this was our way of making them just a little more French (No idea where the idea came from, or if it's French at all, but it's fun) and strawberry jam which I made last Friday. They were delicious!! They were pretty much like shop bought croissants, except perhaps a little less buttery on the inside. Enough writing now, here are some more photos.
Mia

Voila!