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 …
Category Archives: Baking
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 …
Back With Berry and Oat Muffins
I haven’t baked in ages, mainly because it’s not been great to have sweet things laying around while we try and get fit and keep weight down. Today, however, work was getting on top of me and the urge to do some baking to cheer me up became too strong. I went back to what kicked off my baking late last year – quick, easy and healthy bran and oat muffins from The Healthy Food Guide. Simply combine one and a half cups of self raising flour, sifted, one cup of rolled oats and half a cup of firmly packed brown sugar. Stir in a third of a cup of …
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 …
Cinnamon Crinkles
I cooked these these this morning as a warm up for a serious cake baking attempt and they were well worth it. Light, crisp and just the right hint of cinnamon as you finish. Only problem with these type of biscuits is stopping at the one. Ingredients 125g butter, softened 165g caster sugar, plus 2 tablespoons extra 1 egg 200g self raising flour 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon Method 1) Preheat the oven to 180 2) Cream the butter with the 165g of sugar. When it’s light and fluffy beat in the egg. 3) Add the sifted flour to the butter 4) Make marble sized balls of the mixture and roll …
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. …
Fast Ed’s Coconut Bread
Last night I caught Fast Ed (really?) making his coconut bread on Better Homes and Gardens. You can see the video here, and is it just me or did they speed it up a bit? It’s a simple as you can get. Heat the oven to 180 degrees, butter and line a loaf tin. Whisk together 1.5 cups of coconut milk (that’s close enough to a 400ml can), 2 large eggs and 75ml of vegetable oil. Combine 1 cup of castor sugar, 2 cups of shredded coconut and 2.5 cups of self raising flour. Add this to the milk mix and beat well until it’s all combined. Lick the beaters. …
Ginger Biscuits
My nana loved ginger, she’d always have a box of the candied version to have a nibble from. While I couldn’t come at that I did love ginger nut biscuits – as a kid I could literally eat a packet. One of Rae’s requests the other other day was for something ginger so I decided on Margaret Fulton’s ginger biscuits – perhaps the simplest biscuit I have made but my god, they are good. This is the third batch (thanks to a request from Ren) and they won’t probably won’t last the evening. There was an error in the recipe. It said to pre-heat the oven to 180 before …