Baked Cinnamon Donuts

I’ve been in a baking frenzy last night and this morning. After having baked a great lemon syrup cake and a batch of chocolate fudge brownies for Rae to take to a get together tomorrow I was packing it when a recipe for Baked Cinnamon Donuts popped up in my twitter feed. I guess when you’re on a roll… You can find the recipe here http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/20358/baked+cinnamon+doughnuts. It’s dead easy, the only things being it’s time consuming with the two lots of resting and I’d suggest you don’t do an arms session at the gym a couple of hours beforehand if you intend to kneed the dough manually, but apart from requiring …

Chocolate Porridge Cake

I was reading $120 Food Challenge the other day when this caught my eye – Chocolate Porridge Cake. As a very recent convert to porridge I thought it sounded intriguing so I gave it a go, and boy am I glad I did. It turned out to be a dense, moist cake but with the lightest flavour. I’m guessing it’s the oats that make a small piece so filling. The recipe said to add your favourite chocolate  icing, which was a bit of a problem as I’ve only made icing once before, for the Chocolate Gingerbread Cake so I rang mum. Mum gave me a rough guide to icing and …

Sticky Chocolate Gingerbread Cake

It was Rob’s birthday this week and tradition demands a cake. The morning of his birthday I was flicking through The Age and found a recipe for Karen Martini’s Sticky Chocolate Gingerbread Cake. It looked suitably birthdayish and all I had to do was pick up some fresh ginger so away I went. The result was pretty damn good, even if I do say so myself. Lots of spices with fresh ginger and ginger juice combined with a hint of lemon in the decadent icing made for a grown up chocolate cake, but one that a couple of the kids actually liked too. It’s very much a special occasion cake …

Lemon Cheesecake – Take 1

I was flicking through taste.com.au and came across a lemon cheesecake recipe. Now cheesecakes are always popular and lemon, I love lemon anything so I thought I’d give it a go. As you can see it worked out okay. I know to make the crumbs for the sides and base a lot finer next time though. The sides need to be a bit thicker too but it tastes great, There was a serving suggestion of cream on the side; trust me, you don’t need it. Next time I may do 50/50 lime. I also need to work on making the sides more presentable. I’m happy for a first try, second …

Honey Chocolate Cake

Tonight we have the Queen Of Cakes over for dinner so it’s a bit scary but I’ve tried to impress with a pretty yummy looking cake. This is Margaret Fulton’s Honey Chocolate Cake – but what the title doesn’t tell you is that there’s a good whack of booze in there thanks to some dry sherry and rum. It’s my first ‘slice in half and fill with cream’ cake and Mel provided me hints and tips on the consistency of the cream and sawing the cake in half evenly. I’m pretty happy with my first effort at this sort of cake. Update Man, that sherry is strong. I’d probably lessen the amount …

Chocolate Fudge Cake

The other day Phee asked if I’d bake a cake for her birthday. Gulp. That’s pressure. I hunted through Margaret Fulton and found many cakes I wanted to make – most of them ginger – but when I saw the chocolate fudge cake I knew I’d found the one. I haven’t made many cakes so it was a bit daunting. I’d always thought chocolate cakes would be more difficult and this one wasn’t a cake as such, it was more about the fudge center. It also involved beating eggs and folding them in without collapsing them – scary stuff for a beginner. I made the cake and was a bit scared. …

Strawberry and Yoghurt Cake

I’ve been reading the Age’s Good Weekend for decades now and always skipped right past the recipes, I mean, only clever and insanely talented people could ever cook/bake them. Mere mortals need not apply. This morning I paused on Neil Perry’s Strawberry and Yoghurt cake. It looked delicious and when I looked it seemed almost too simple to be true. No eggs and polenta made it different to anything else I have baked so after grabbing some polenta from Coles I set to work. I took my time, didn’t stress and it worked! Two hours in the oven is a long time to wait to see how everything turned out …

Peanut Butter Cheesecake

Margaret Fulton strikes again. I didn’t plan it but I’ve made two peanut butter sweets in a row. In her recipe Margaret says she adapted an American recipe for peanut butter cheesecake to Australian tastes – I assume it’s a little less ‘heavy’ and lighter on the peanuts. This recipe called for Wheaton Chocolate biscuits but the local Coles didn’t have any so I opted for Chocolate Ripple instead – not sure but I think they may be heavier than Wheaton’s. I also had to adapt as I didn’t have a small enough flan tin so, to avoid spreading the crust too thin, I used a baking tin instead. It …

Orange and Blueberry Cake – The Verdict

Yum. Light, fluffy and a good sweet hit from the blueberry’s. Next time I may add a little more orange juice, just to bring out the orange flavour a bit more. Served with thick cream. The whole cake was gone in two sittings. Source : Margaret Fulton Baking Complexity : Simple Preparation Time : About 15 minutes Baking Time : 2 x 20 minutes What I Learnt : Our oven is 20 degrees or so cooler than it should be. Don’t be afraid to add more flavour. Add lots of five minutes extra cooking instead of ten minutes. Issues : Base and side stuck to tin a little – more greasing …

Margaret Fulton’s Orange and Blueberry Cake

Last day of the working week and the urge to have a cake for sweets tonight struck. We had all the ingredients in the pantry and fridge so I decided to go with Marget’s orange and blueberry cake. It was a simple recipe, I didn’t even get to use my new mixer and took next to no time to put together. I didn’t have a flan tray (although both Rae and I swear there’s one here somewhere) so I used a cake tray instead. I think this made the mixture a bit thicker than it should have been because the cake needed an extra ten minutes to cook through int …