Ramblings on apple cake and butter

My friend gave me a big bag of granny smith apples from her tree. I stewed most of them and we ate them with our porridge for breakfast last week, but I used some to make this walnut and apple slice. The recipe was one of those ones requested from a café in Taste magazine. The slice is very cakey with lots of sliced uncooked apples, walnuts and sultanas and lightly spiced with cinnamon and mixed spice. The cake was most delicious just warm out of the oven with a scoop of the left over dulche de leuche ice cream that I made a couple of weeks ago. But, it also kept quite well in a container in the pantry for a couple of days.

I was thinking about my lemon cream pie – I think the reason it is so yellow is because NZ butter is very yellow. I noticed when I made the butter cream for my perfect party cake, I couldn’t get a really white finish to the butter. I wonder if in the US butter isn’t as yellow as it is here?

Also, last night, I started the first night of an intensive Wilton cake decorating class. I am very excited. Last night was demonstration and then I have classes tomorrow night and two next week. Tonight I am making the cake I need to take with me to decorate tomorrow night. I think I will try Dorie’s perfection pound cake.

TWD - lemon cream pie

The TWD challenge this week was lemon cream tart. This was absolutely divine! It was like a lemon curd pie, but rather than the butter of the curd added when cooking the curd, it was emulsified into the curd, like making mayonnaise.

I made my tart in two stages, as I wanted to take it down to Napier for the girls’ weekend. On Thursday night I made the lemon cream and the pastry. Lemons are not in season in NZ at the moment, so it is hard to find nice juicy ones. I had to juice about 7 lemons to get the right amount of juice. Dorie’s instructions regarding temperature of the curd were quite specific. I know that some other TWD bakers couldn’t get their curd up to the right temperature, but I had no problem, using a metal bowl which seems to be the key. The amount of butter in the curd was a little bit terrifying, but my lemon cream came together into a beautiful sweet but tart creamy mass.

The pastry came together really well, and my taste of the raw mixture confirmed that it was yummy – made with icing sugar, so sweet like shortbread. I took my cold lemon cream, uncooked pastry and tart tin down to Napier and assembled the tart on Saturday night. The tart dough rolled out beautifully and baked up lovely and crisp. The tart assembled looked divine and got rave reviews from my Mum and sisters. We had it with thickened cream. Another Dorie success!!!

Girls' weekend in the Hawkes Bay

In the weekend I went on a Girls’ Weekend with my Mum and three sisters. We went to Napier, where two of my sisters live – Mum and my other sister flew up from Christchurch and I flew down. We had a great weekend and, as I usually do I did some baking to take with me – this is how I show my love to people!!!

One of the things I made was this macadamia nut ginger crunch. A few years ago my Mum told me about this delicious slice that she had in a café that was ginger crunch but had macadamia nuts in the icing. I set forth to re-create it for her and came up with this slice which she thinks is better than the original. It is pretty good and is now one of Mum’s favourites. One of the main problems I find with ginger crunch usually is that the icing is a bit mean – a thin scraping on the top, or the base is too crunchy. Even though it is called ginger crunch, I think a little bit of cakiness is essential.

To me, this recipe is perfect. The other thing I add to the base to give extra texture is some slivered almonds. When I made the slice on Thursday night I didn’t have enough slivered almonds, so I used some flaked which worked just as well. The almonds give the base a nice chewiness. I make the icing thicker than usual and I find and the addition of the macadamia nuts is inspired!



The weekend in Napier was gorgeous. Other foodie highlights included lunch at Te Awa Farm vineyard on Saturday, Hastings Farmers market on Sunday morning (I couldn’t get too much as I was flying home, but managed to buy quince, mini pumpkins, gorgeous fresh rosemary and some miniature heirloom tomatoes) and I met Stephanie Till, a gorgeous fellow foodlover who with her partner, creates the condimentum mustard range. I have “known” Stephanie through foodlovers and the occasional e-mail for a long time, but it was so wonderful to actually meet her!! She is a delightful lady and I look forward to meeting with her again next time I am in the bay – or when she is up in Auckland.



Mum’s Macadamia Ginger Crunch

200g butter
1 c brown sugar
2/3 c sliced or flaked almonds, lightly toasted
2 c flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ground ginger

· Cream together butter and sugar
· Stir in rest of ingredients, press into a lined 23cm tin and bake at 180c for about 20 minutes.
· While still hot, spread over following icing

100g butter
180g golden syrup
3 tsp ground ginger
2 ½ c icing sugar
1 c chopped macadamia nuts

· Melt together butter and golden syrup
Stir in rest of ingredients. The icing will be quite thick

cupcakes for the fair

Last week one of the girls at work asked if I would make some cupcakes for her son’s school fair. I was very flattered of course and went home on Friday night to make cupcakes. I decided to do half girly and half for boys. I also made half vanilla, using the Crabapple bakery vanilla cupcake recipe that I have made before, and the other half, chocolate. Instead of using my favourite chocolate cupcake recipe, I tried out the Crabapple bakery recipe and it was great!! I need to use this book more often. The cake wasn’t too rich (which I thought was a good thing given my target market of kids!!!) and had a lovely light texture. Kids would love them, as would adults.









I decorated the boys’ cakes with blue icing and the girl’s with pink (of course!!). I used little blue wrappers for the boys and Disney princess wrappers for the girls, then decorated them with decorations that I made with coloured fondant (my new favourite way for decorating) – hearts and flowers for the girls and stars for the boys. I cant think of anything more imaginative to decorate boys’ cakes – any suggestions?

I was really pleased with how the cakes looked and apparently they sold like hot cakes!!!

Crabapple Bakery Chocolate cupcakes (I halved this recipe and got 30 cupcakes)

3 c flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
3 tbsp instant coffee
1 c hot water
1 c cocoa
1 c cold water
200g butter
2 ½ c castor sugar
4 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla

· Combine coffee and hot water, then add cocoa and cold water to make a thick liquid
· Cream butter & sugar, add eggs one at a time and then vanilla
· Sift together dry ingredients and fold into butter mix alternately with cocoa mixture
Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 180c for about 18 minutes

Dorie's Quintuple chocolate brownies

As you know, if you have read my earlier posts, I have a few recipes to catch up on that the TWD group baked before I joined them. One of them is this quadruple chocolate brownie which I made a couple of weeks ago. It is quintuple chocolate because it has three kinds of dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate in it. The dark chocolate and bittersweet are melted, the milk chocolate is in chunks and the white chocolate is used for a glaze like topping.

I have a few really good brownie recipes, and I am definitely adding this one to the list. I didn’t use the two different kinds of dark chocolate (I used Whittakers 70% cocoa solids) and I was a bit naughty and used white chocolate melts instead of lovely white chocolate for the topping. I used good old cadburys for the milk chocolate chunks that were dispersed throughout the brownie. The brownie had great texture – lovely and moist and I loved the milk chocolate chunks throughout. It also had nuts in it – I used walnuts and they added extra crunch which was great!



The only thing that I would say about these brownie is that the white chocolate is a glaze rather than a layer of chocolate. Dorie said it was a glaze, but the photo in the book indicated that it was more of a layer! Still, I am not disappointed – like all the Dorie recipes I have tried this brownie is divine!

The other exciting thing I have to report is that I know of two other people who have bought Dorie’s book since reading about it on my blog!!!! I am always surprised, delighted and amazed when I hear about people I don’t even know reading my blog!!!

Friends for dinner

Over Easter we had some friends over for probably the last bbq of the year. I have had so many other things to post about lately, that I haven’t got round to posting about this until now. We had a delicious meal. Pretty basic nibbles to start with of spinach and cannellini bean dip with Turkish bread. The main was beautiful lamb done on the bbq. I adapted a recipe from Dish magazine that basically smothered one side of a butterflied leg of lamb with a herb and parmesan mixture. It was bbqed for about 25 minutes. With that we had a delicious Israeli cous cous, dried apricot and parsley salad (also adapted from Dish) and a rocket salad with feta and figs baked in a little balsamic vinegar. Really yummy!

A friend had given me a big bag of feijoas earlier in the week, so for pudding I made these little frangipane feijoa tarts – basically puff pastry circles (I used Edmonds pre-made pastry as I find it rises better than other brands), spread with frangipane (I used ground macadamia nuts instead of almonds for a change) and then topped with sliced feijoas.

The tarts were nice, but nothing startling. However, I served them with home made vanilla ice cream (second outing for my ice-cream machine!) which I swirled with dulche de leuche (well, caramelised condensed milk which I think is pretty much the same thing!). That was a real highlight. The ice cream went really well with the crispness of the pastry and the tartness of the feijoas. I really enjoy ice cream making – just need to start having a few more dinner parties!! We weren’t going to have many in the 1970s house as it’s not really designed for entertaining, but I love cooking for people too much not to!!!!

TWD - Gooey chocolate cakes

Unfortunately another less than great photo of a really delicious gooey chocolate cake, being this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie challenge. I made these little cakes last Wednesday and took them to book club on Thursday night. Unfortunately it meant that they weren’t hot out of the oven which is a shame, but I microwaved the little cakes for a little while to try and get some of the molteness back into the cakes and then served them with thickened cream. Dorie had also said that you could have them the next day and that they would have a truffle type texture rather than gooeyness.

Straight out of the oven the cakes were meant to have oozing, gooey centres. Mine didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the centres were deliciously moist and had that “have I cooked it enough?” fudginess, but they weren’t flowing like other little chocolate cakes with flowing centres that I have made. I wonder if it is because I made slightly smaller cakes, so that I got 9 from the recipe rather than 6? I did cook them for slightly less time, but maybe 8 minutes cooking time would have been enough for a gooey centre?

Anyway, the cakes were still divine! I personally think these are more puddings than cakes – they don’t have the ascetic appeal of a normal cake, but they are incredibly easy to make and delicious to eat!