Old Fashioned Favourite

A sequel to one of my favourite books, Ladies, A Plate, has just been released. It’s called (quite cutely) A Second Helping. It’s full of more old fashioned favourite recipes, the kind I find in my Nana’s recipe books. I am lucky enough to have two of my Nana’s recipe books. They are the two cook books I treasure most from my vast collection. They are what I would call “community” cook books- recipes collated by women in a local community raising money for a particular cause. I love Nana’s handwritten notes in the margin. Treasures such as “Good!”, “Not as good as my recipe”, “Good for a party” and other such notes.

Having received “A Second Helping” it inspired me to look through Nana’s books again. I came across a recipe called chocolate cream slice. My blogging friend Morven said her mother used to make this and it was called keamish Square. It is a real old fashioned slice, but quite delicious. A chocolate base, layer of raspberry jam, layer of a kind of mock cream which is set with gelatine and then chocolate icing. My husband loved it. I really liked it too but it is quite sweet so you can really only eat a small bit at a time.

I’ve tagged a whole heap of other old fashioned recipes that I am going to try and report on in the coming months.

Chocolate Cream (or Kneamish) Square

120g butter
120g sugar
1 egg
180g flour
1 tbsp cocoa
1 tsp baking powder
Raspberry jam

• Cream butter and sugar; beat in egg
• Stir in dry ingredients.
• Press into lined 18 x 23cm tin and bake at 175c for 25 minutes
• When cold top with a layer of raspberry jam and then the following topping and then once that has set, ice with chocolate icing

120g butter
60g sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp gelatine dissolved in 3 tbsp cold water

• Cream butter and sugar
• Beat in remaining in ingredients until thick, pale and creamy

Cake Decorating

I am currently doing course 4 of the Wilton cake decorating courses – this course focuses on fondant and gumpaste. To be honest it probably isn’t worth doing – well, that’s not quite right. The four lessons could quite easily be condensed down into two lessons. I actually had to miss a lesson last week as well as we were away on holiday.

Gum paste is like a much more expensive (4 time the price) version of fondant. The advantage it has over fondant is that it sets hard. Whereas fondant doesn’t completely dry hard. It is used to make flowers such as the carnations and daisies we were taught in the class. This little cake is a banana cake and is quite simply decorated with green and white stripes and whit daisies. We were meant to be doing a cake with a shawl thing on it. Well, I cannot imagine a situation where I would put a shawl of fondant on a cake, so I made my more simply decorated cake. It’s not perfect but it’s kind of cute.




I haven’t posted for ages on any week day meals we have had, mostly because the last three weeks or so have just passed by in a blur! Last night we had lovely fresh fish (terakihi). I sprinkled it with lemon zest, sea salt and pepper and drizzled it with lemon infused olive oil before roasting it at a high temperature for about 12 minutes. Just before it came out of the oven I sautéed some slivered almonds and cherry tomatoes in a little lemon infused olive oil, just until the nuts turned golden and the tomatoes started to pop out of their skins. I spooned this over the fish and served it with roast kumara, salad and home made hummus on the side. This was loosely based on a recipe in the latest Dish magazine.

TWD - flaky apple turnovers

This week’s TWD recipe was chosen by Julie of Someone’s in the Kitchen and is Flaky Apple Turnovers. This is another one of those recipes that I probably wouldn’t have been rushing to make, but I was pleasantly surprised with.

The flakiness of the pastry dough for these turnovers comes from the “folding like an envelope” action when rolling the pastry, and the tenderness is aided by the addition of sour cream (in my case thick natural yoghurt). I just made a half recipe of the pastry, and even then only added about 2/3 of the butter, so my pastry probably wasn’t as flaky as it might have been – it just seemed to be an horrendous amount of butter!! I actually only ended up using enough pastry to make 3 apple turnovers and I froze the rest for another day.



The filling is simply sliced apples, cinnamon, sugar and a little four to thicken. The turnovers were delicious straight from the oven (I don’t think they would taste all that great cold). We had them with mixed berry yoghurt which was a delicious complement. See what the other TWDers thought here.

TWD - Chocolate Souffle, Better late than Never!

Another short and sweet post. We came back from holiday yesterday – had a wonderful time in the beautiful bay of Islands. Weather was fabulous too. I wasn’t able to make last week’s TWD challenge to post on Tuesday, so here is my chocolate soufflé for last week chosen by Susan of She’s becoming Domestic. I made a half recipe. My soufflé puffed up beautifully in the oven and then spectacularly deflated when I took it out!! It still tasted delicious though and we had it with yoghurt for dessert.



Back to usual posting next week!!!

SPCA Cupcake Day

We are off on holiday next week so there wont be any posting. In the meantime, it was SPCA cupcake day on Monday and I made these cupcakes to take to work for people to “buy” as a donation to the SPCA. My favourite were the dogs – so cute. The dog cupcakes are chocolate cake and the cats are vanilla. See you all in a week!

Birthday Cupcakes

My sister, her husband and my gorgeous niece and nephew have been staying for the past week. While they were here, it was my sister’s birthday. In the weekend my other two sisters came up and we had a birthday picnic on Saturday. My 5 year old niece loves baking and on Saturday morning we made these cute cupcakes for my sister’s birthday. My niece is going to be a talented baker! She has immense patience for a 5 year old when baking and a steady hand when it comes to mixing, folding and even cracking open eggs (she cracked 7 eggs over the weekend for different things we baked and not one piece of shell at all).



These cupcakes are chocolate cupcakes decorated with whipped cream that we tinted pink. We sprinkled them with some pretty pink sprinkles that I bought from foodtown and then topped them with sugar roses that the lovely Lorraine from Not Quite Nigella sent me from Sydney. The purple rosebud is actually one that I made – my first attempt at a ribbon rose and I must say I was quite pleased with the outcome. I have just started course 4 of the Wilton cake decorating classes, so will be posting about my cakes in the next few weeks.



The cupcakes were delicious and the whipped cream topping was just perfect on the pretty cakes.

TWD - Espresso Cheesecake brownie

As you can tell from my very slack posting I have been quite busy lately with family staying, busy at work and other things! So here is a very brief posting on this week’s TWD recipe which was chosen by Melissa of Life in a Peanut Shell and is Espresso Cheesecake Brownie. I made these for when I hosted book club at my house last week and they went down a real treat. Once again I must apologise for a rather terrible photo of a really delicious treat – a busy life means hurried photos.

These cheesecake brownie were more cheesecake than brownie – a brownie base with an espresso flavoured cheesecake topping and then a layer of sweetened sour cream on top. I am not a coffee drinker, but the coffee flavour of the cheesecake topping was not so pronounced as to bother a non coffee drinker. I am not sure what the sour cream topping added to be honest. I would have been just as happy without it. My sour cream topping didn’t set all that well – maybe the consistency of sour cream in New Zealand is different to that in the US?

Anyway, the result was that all the girls at book club loved the brownie. I did too - it was simple to make, although it did take a lot of ingredients. But, I would make it again. See if the other TWDers loved it as well here.