All posts tagged: baking

Our Growing Edge December 2015 Intro

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This month is hosted by Jazz from Dash of Jazz. The theme is NOSTALGIA. To join, click on the submission button below: We all have bucket lists. Whether they’re written down somewhere or kept in our heads and hearts. Our Growing Edge is the part of us that is still learning and experimenting. It’s the part that you regularly grow and improve, be it from real passion or a conscious effort. This blogging monthly event aims to connect and inspire us to try new things and to compile a monthly snapshot of what food bloggers are getting up to. If you have a blog and are planning to write about a new food related experience, join us! More info on the event can be found here. Our host, Jazzmine is a Texas native with Nigerian roots, loves classic Southern cooking and has suggested the theme NOSTALGIA for this month. Some ideas you could try this month: Cook a recipe you remember from childhood Make a family favourite with a new main ingredient Cook a loved one’s favourite recipe Recreate a recipe that is well …

Tasty questions with Miss Charlotte Cake

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Miss Charlotte Cake is an Auckland pinup beauty who bakes cakes and desserts. She loves high tea and all things vintage. She came runner up in the Miss Pinup New Zealand 2015 Competition and was recently a winner on Come Dine With Me New Zealand. I’ve had the pleasure of dining out with Miss Charlotte Cake a few times via #brunchclub, #cocktailclub and Zomato and she’s always charming, gracious and impeccably dressed. Below are her answers to the tasty questions I cooked up for your enjoyment. Describe your blog: Rustic Baker – Blogger – Pinup Gal What is the most popular post on your blog? It’s actually a post I did on what its like to live with a pinup girl and is aimed to my parter Carl. It was shared so many times on social media I lost count. I think others just found it really interesting getting a guys point of view on all this vintage stuff! You can read it here. Name your favourite comfort food: A big bowl of hot spaghetti bolognase and lots of parmesan cheese grated on top. …

Banana Hakanoa Mini Cakes

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I’m one of those optimists who buy fruit with hopes of eating well, but the moment the fruit gets home, it loses it’s appeal. The longer I leave it, the less I want to eat it. It’s a problem and I’m working on it. The four bananas on the banana stand were queuing up to enter the blacklist so I decided to quickly do something about them. I heard rumours that banana cakes and muffins were good for baking noobs like me. Baking isn’t my thing. I am slowly but surely getting there. I admit, I’m not a natural. I’ve raved about Hakanoa Ginger Syrup before and gave away a big bottle to celebrate this blog’s second birthday. This organic sugar syrup is really versatile and delicious and makes a great gift for yourself or for a ginger loving foodie in your life. I have to be honest, I usually use this syrup to add dimension to savoury dishes. Equal quantities of Hakanoa Ginger Syrup, soy sauce and oil make for a quick and yummy marinade for …

SweetNZ: My First Carrot Cake

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Our oven has been cold for a week and I hope a new oven is on it’s way soon. Not new new, but newer will do. Until then, no oven-based recipes. At least I can bask in the glory of this wee cake that I baked over my holidays. I’ve been meaning to make an “easy” cake for a while now. Those I know who bake always say to start with a banana cake or a carrot cake. Tofu the bunny adores carrots and carrot cake sounded delightfully blog worthy. When we eat carrots, Tofu gets the tops and the peel. Carrots are gold in this house. I also figured it was worth finding out what exactly was in the cream cheese frosting that I adore so much. I used Mama Dorosch’s Carrot Cake recipe from KitchenTrials.com and it was a successful first go. The cream cheese frosting is as follows. Cream Cheese Frosting Makes plenty for one cake  Ingredients 250 grams cream cheese 100 grams butter  2 cups icing sugar (powdered sugar) Preparation Bring …

Mini Party Scones

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Do not trust these seemingly innocent baked goods. Mini items are deceptive. Because they’re so small, they hardly count as food. So you pop one of babies into your mouth each time you walk by and before you know it, you’ve eaten ten. True story. It happened to me and it may happen to you. Scones are not too different in composition from the American biscuit, though they’re usually eaten differently. Cheap and filling, they’re never far away from the menus of cafes and lunchrooms and often one of the first things a child will bake in school cooking class. Sometimes there are different ways to say a word: the posh way and the common way. I’ve always called a scone a “skon” which rhymes with con, swan and Tron, but the posh way to pronounce it would be to call it a “skone” rhymes with bone, phone and loan. I play pretend posh and I jokingly call it “skone” so often that it’s part of my vocabulary now. So call it “skon” or “skone”, …

A Bunny Christmas

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This post is an entry for Sweet New Zealand, a monthly blogging event open to all Kiwi bloggers. Founded by Alessandra Zecchini, this month’s event is hosted by Bron Marshall. See here for more info on this month’s event. This week, my friend Miss A developed a deep and sudden obsession with making a gingerbread house. Her flash of enthusiasm roped me on board. I was super apprehensive about the mission as I’m not a baker. No sir! But I was keen to decorate a gingerbread house. So, with her leading the baking and I leading the decorating, we made this after work, over wine and 2 nights. We didn’t have much of a plan but we are stoked with how it turned out. All we knew is that we were going to make a house, but we ended up with a house, 4 trees, 3 bunnies, a fence and a snowman. Wafer makes a lightweight and authentic roof, but goes soft after just a day. We used this recipe by Tamara Jane of the Good Morning show for the gingerbread …

I Love Strawberry

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I love strawberries and I find it hard to resist buying just a punnet when I visit farmers’ markets. This recipe is so easy and uses very little strawberries that you could make it 2 nights in a row if you wanted to extend your punnet. Cooking strawberries is some kind of voodoo magic to me. The taste and fragrance of these hearts, so potent you will be amazed it’s not artificial. There is no need to add more sugar to this dish as jam is already quite sweet. I used feijoa and ginger from Peninsula Preserves that we picked up from Lyttelton Farmers Market last month. This post is an entry for Sweet New Zealand, a monthly blogging event open to all Kiwi bloggers. Founded by Alessandra Zecchini, this month’s event is hosted by Mairi from Toast. See here for more info on this month’s event. Strawberry Heart Puffs Makes 2 hearts Ingredients 1 sheet frozen puff pastry 5 strawberries  2 tablespoons jam  Butter for greasing Optional: icing sugar for dusting  Preparation Lay puff pastry out the counter to defrost. Preheat oven to …

Transferable skills

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I was at work and in my fist was a small piece of paper that said “Italy”. During the world cup season, we each had to bring in a morning tea based on our drawn countries. What to bring? There are many yummy Italian foods. Pizza, pasta, antipasto, breads…. Being a terrible baker, I challenged myself to bake for everyone at work. Chinese fighting muffins Light, fluffy bread and moist cakes? Never! It’s not my style. My baking is generally hard and dry. So I figured, why not harness my natural talent for making Chinese fighting muffins? Look upon it as a transferable skill. Maybe you have a negative cooking skill that could be turned right given the perfect recipe? Biscotti is hard and never moist. Biscotti is classy. Biscotti would be perfect. I found this online chocolate biscotti recipe by Susan from Farmgirl Fare. If I’m afraid of making something, the words easy and beginners in the heading makes a big difference. I worried about burning these since it’s hard to tell if dark brown biscotti …

Lemon Sugar and Elephant Ears

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This post has been written as part of the new Sweet New Zealand blogging event founded by Alessandra Zecchini. It’s a chance for kiwi bloggers to share their sweet treats, so if you are a kiwi blogger and are interested in participating, check it out for this month. This month’s event is event number 2 is hosted by Allison at Pease Pudding and more information can be found here. Lemon Sugar I’ve been wanting to make flavoured sugar for a while and with our lemon tree growing some beautiful, thick skined beauties this spring, I knew I had to do something with the zest. Using my microplane zester (I love that thing), I lightly scraped the outside layer of a lemon and let the zest dry for about an hour on a chopping board. I then layered zest and white sugar into a jar. Leave the sugar for at least a few days for the lemony oils to permeate into the sugar. The result is pretty, but I haven’t used this sugar just yet. With the zest that was …

BakerTweet

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Last year at the design conference Semi-Permanent, I saw Nicholas Roope speak. Nicholas is from the London advertising agency Poke. Poke resides in a building called Biscuit Building. So it’s no real surprise that they came up with this genius product called BakerTweet. I’m not a Tweeter or a Twitter follower, but BakerTweet in my area would make me rethink this. The geniuses at Poke realised that people often visited bakeries and bought things that were less than fresh. What if loyal customers could know the moment a baked product came out of the oven? That’s where BakerTweet comes in.

Birthday quiche!

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35 quiche. Only 1 quiche was sacrificed to quality control. At my work, it’s tradition to organise something for a morning tea shout or lunch shout for your birthday. The last 4 years I have just bought food from the local bakery to share, but this year I decided make something. We don’t have much of a kitchen at work so it really had to be something that could be served cold or could be microwaved. I’m not much of a baker, but I can make a pretty mean quiche. I made 36 of these quiche filled with eggs, cheese, tomato, broccoli and onion. They took much longer than I anticipated due to only 1 muffin tin. If I were to do this again, I’d buy or borrow some more tins. Everyone at work seemed to enjoy them with most scoffing back 2 quiche. Based on my recipe here.

Quiche pies!

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I make quiche pies about once a fortnight. They can be eaten hot or cold and are wonderful for breakfast, picnics, lunch, snacks or with a salad as a meal. I always change up the ingredients depending on what we have in the fridge. The ingredients I reckon you must have are puff pastry, egg and cheese, the rest you can be creative on. They keep fine for about 3 days…Maybe longer, but never had a chance to find out! Quiche pies Makes 12 Ingredients 3 sheets of puff pastry 6 eggs, beaten with a dash of milk 1 spring onion (scallion) finely sliced 6 sundried tomatoes 4 mushrooms sliced thinly Half an onion sliced thinly Cheese – 12 bite size pieces A bit of butter, melted A bit of oil A bit of salt A bit of pepper Preparation Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F) Optional: Fry mushrooms and onion in a little oil until they soften. Remove from heat and set aside. Brush butter onto a muffin tin. Cut each sheet of pastry into …

Feijoa chocolate muffins

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We have a feijoa (pronounced fee-jo-ah) tree in the backyard! We are looking forward to a whole season of these babies. For those that don’t know what the fudge a feijoa is, it’s a type of guava and has a strong, tart, sweet flavour. They have bright green skins that you don’t eat and inside is a mellow cream colour. Seeds are tiny and never an issue. They have a short but abundant season here in  New Zealand. Feijoa chocolate muffins 1 egg 1/4 cup oil 1/2 cup sugar 1 cup milk 2 1/2 cups plain flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 cup chocolate buttons 1 cup chopped feijoas Preheat oven to 200C. Beat egg, oil, sugar and milk in a bowl. Sift flower, baking powder, cinnamon and add to egg mixture. Add feijoa and chocolate and mix lightly so that it is just combined. Spoon mixture into greased muffin tins. Baked at 200°C for 15 minutes. Nom. Makes about 10 muffins