Dinner at home - halloween!

We had friends over for dinner the night before Halloween, so I decided to make the food a little halloween themed. but only a little!




I wasn't paying $20 for a "carving pumpkin" at Woolworths, so I carved an apple instead! A tea light fitted nicely inside.




For dinner, I made this beef and bacon pie.  I uses Maggie Beers Sour Cream Pastry.  It was easy to make - it just goes together in the food processor. The filling for the pie, I made up.  I sauted a leek, then added garlic, and chopped up meat.  I think I used blade steak. Not really a meat expert here - it had a bone in it, which  I cut out and used to make some meaty stock, which I added to the browned meat with some tomato paste.  I simmered the meat on a low heat for a few hours, until it was really tender and falling apart, and the gravy was thick.  Then I left it overnight to cool in the fridge. The next day I shredded the meat up a bit with a fork.

I rolled out the pastry and lined my pie dish with it, then put it back in the fridge to harden up, I then filled it with the cold meat filling and put a pastry top on.  I then put it back in the fridge to cool again. I btushed the top with egg wash and baked in the oven for 20 ish minutes, until nicely golden brown.

I served the pie with some assorted roasted vegies, which is what I ate for my dinner.





dessert was a slight drama.  I made a kind of chocolate mousse-y thing using condensed milk, cream and cocoa powder which I beat together, and put into cups with a suprise of caramel in the middle. Then we went and bought a new fridge, and in the excitement of getting the new fridge delivered, I left the dessert in our old fridge, which was taken away by the delivery man. Oops. So a quick new dessert was needed.  I had already made these chocolate spiders to put on top of the mousse, so I zipped down to the IGA and bought some ready made tart cases which I filled with the left over tin of caramel. And there we have a super easy, and rather tasty dessert.

I am still cranky at myself for leaving my Ikea cups filled with dessert in that fridge. Have to go to Ikea to get some more cups!!!

Malteaser Birthday Cake

Here is a birthday cake I made some time in the not tooooo distant past... its a basic chocolate sponge, with chocolate icing and Malteasers! Quite tasty it was too.

Happy Birthday Mum - Zebra Cake!

For my Mum's birthday (which was way back in May) , I decided to make a zebra cake - recipe from here. The only change I made was the addition of icing, because, well, it was for a birthday, and a birthday cake needs icing!! Despite appearances, this was a very easy cake to make, with the only fiddly part being the alternate spooning of mixture into the cake tin.  The resulting pattern inside the cake was certainly worth it. THe cake tasted good too!!

Easter Baking disasters!

We invited Pam & Sid over for morning tea on Easter Sunday. Janet asked if I could make a chocolate cake and some cookies. As is usual, I started looking through my cookbooks and magazine clippings for some inspiration. I found a recipe for a chocolate sponge roll that I had kept from a baking tin I bought, so decided to give it a go. This was my first disaster. I think I cooked it wrongly, because it was a little crunchy on top, an when I tried to roll it, it just folded and broke into pieces. I tasted a bit of the broken cake, and it didnt even taste any good.  So the cake AND the recipe went in the bin.

So I moved onto the cookies while I waited for some more butter to soften for Cake take 2.  I chose some choc chip cookies from a generic tyoe of cookie and slice book that I have. Never cooked from the book before, may not do so again :-).  The cookies looked ok when they went into the oven, they puffed up and looked fine when they were nearly baked, but when the timer went off and I looked in the oven, they had flattened like pancakes! Oh dear. These ones didn't go in the bin.  We tasted them and decided they were still edlible - we renamed them "pancake cookies"

Onto cake number 2 - I made Nigella's Sponge cake recipe from "Domestic Goddess", substituting some cocoa powder for some of the flour. I like this recipe because everything gets thrown into the food processor!

My 2 sponge cakes came out of the oven looking nice and even! YAY another disaster avoided.

I decied to fill the cake with mock cream & grated chocolate, since I didnt want to go to a shop.  Heres a tip - don't make mock cream in advance because (d'uh) when you put it in the fridge it goes hard.  To fix this small problem, I just beat it up again, and added a couple of tablespoons of "Philadelphia Cream" yes, cream, not cream cheese! They have a new "cooking cream" product - its not for whipping though, so by mixing it with my mock cream, I softened the mock cream, and thickened the Philladelphia cream! Brilliant!!

the cake was goooooood!!

Christmas Brownies

And before Christmas is too much of a distant memory..... some Brownies I baked to use up the leftover dried cranberries and white choc chips from the Nigella Cookies......

I simply used my usual stand-by brownie recipe can be found here, and stirred in the cranberries and choc chips.....YUM! (I always like it when I put white choc chips in these brownies, because they stand out and make the brownies look much prettier!! haha - even though I don't particularly love white chocolate!!)

Paw Print Cupcakes!

We picked up our new puppy Shadow, and took these cupcakes along with us (for the humans, not the dogs!).  I decorated them with M&M's and mini M&M's - makes for very easy puppy paw print cupcakes!

Chocolate Coca Cola Cake

I saw this recipe in a book I borrowed from the Library - "Sue Lawrence's Book of Baking", and just had to try it.....it turned out well - a deliciously moist chocolate cake.... (co-incidentally, we got home today after buying a new dvd player, and I popped in the "Nigella" dvd, which wouldn't play on our other dvd player, and Nigella made a version of this same cake....)

Chocolate Coca-Cola Cake from "Sue Lawrences Book of Baking"

250g Self Raising Flour

3 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder

1/4 teaspoon bicarb soda

280g caster sugar (recipe actually calls for golden caster sugar, but I haven't seen that anywhere)

250g Butter
250ml Coca-Cola

100ml milk
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

for the icing
150g butter
50ml Coca-Cola
3 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder
400g icing sugar (again recipe calls for golden icing sugar)

Preheat oven to 180 c, and prepare a 24cm springform cake tin (I lined it with baking paper)

Sift flour, cocoa and bicarb into a large bowl.

Slowly melt butter and cola in a saucepan, then slowly add this to the dry ingredients along with the milk, eggs and vanilla, stirring all the time.

Once thoroughly but gently combined, pour mixture into the prepared tin and bake for about 40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean (it took a little longer than 40 minutes in my oven).  Leave in tin on a wirewrack for about 10 minutes, then remove from tin.  Allow to cool completely.

To make the icing : melt butter along with cola and cocoa in a saucepan.  Pour this mixture into the icing sugar and beat until smooth.  Ice the cooled cake.  I decorated the cake with coke bottle lollies.

Chocolate Brownies

I made some Chocolate Brownies for Janet on the weekend..... the recipe is a hand written one I havein one of my recipe folders. It has no name on it, so I am not sure who it came from. But it is from someone who has neat writing and a red pen :-).  The original recipe is for Walnut Brownies. Obviously if you want them to be Walnut Brownies. add walnuts.  Because these were for Janet, I used chocolate chips instead, since she is not a fan of crunchy nuts.

Chocolate Brownies

125g butter (I used 125g Suncoast Gold Vitality Macadamia Spread)
1/4 cup cocoa
3/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup plain flour
3/4 cup of your choice of add-in (I used choc chips, but macadamias would be fantastic, as are pecans or walnuts)

melt butter in saucepan, stir in cocoa and sugar.  Remove from heat and whisk in eggs. Stir in flour and add-in of your choice.  Spread evenly into a slice tin. (I then sprinkled with some more choc chips).  Bake in moderate oven for about 20 minutes.  When cool, cut into squares of a size of your choosing. 

Because I used the Vitality spread instead of Butter (which is made from macadamia oil, it really would have been more appropriate to make these into macadamia brownies...maybe next time!!)

Happy Birthday to ME!!

yes, after eating those mega burgers, we still found room for cake! A death by chocolate cake to be precise. It was gooooooood.

Cupcakes

yes, that little boy on the add going on about the frosting made us buy a box of cupcake mix. And they were delicious! I was a little worried, because the mixture had lumps in it and I couldn't get them out, but I just went ahead and cooked it like that, and all was good. The icing in the box was good too. Just cut the corner off and squeeze it on. Much less mess than I usually end up with. But we really didnt need to be eating 12 cupcakes :-)

Janet & Ali's Big Adventure Day 10 - training day!

Yes, time to catch the VIA train to Montreal!! We caught a taxi down the hill to the station and waited a couple of hours for our train. When we got on it was great! Very roomy & comfy.

It was amazing to see all the snow surrounded houses, icy rivers & frozen swimming pools from the window. A few hours later and we were in Montreal. Following our Google directions, we made it to our hotel on foot. We are on the 11th floor and have a King bed. First room we've had with a view of anything other than a wall - so I tried out the cameras night time setting. We headed to Nickels Restaurant for Dinner (Celine's Restaurant). Janet had Lasagne & I had Pasta Primavera. We shared a piece of Celine CHocolate Cake, which was the biggest piece of cake I ever saw. Far out. We couldn't finish it. I photographed the whole event, then home to bed.

There was a big hockey game on and everyone out was dressed in the red & blue shirts. The right team must have won, because we heard lots of horn tooting outside.

HCB's on Good Friday!!

Good Friday is time for our traditional family gathering to eat Hot Cross Buns.....

and chocolate easter egg brownies (by Mum)

and a spectacular carrot cake......(by Kristy)

and red velvet cupcakes (which looked slightly wrong from above...)....



and generally too much food!