Happy Halloween!

Today is Halloween. This is not a tradition that we have usually celebrated in NZ, but with our recent trend towards American things, Halloween is becoming more prevalent. If I had children I don’t think I would let them go trick or treating, but I always have treats on hand for any children we get knocking at out door!



It’s also a great opportunity as a baker to be able to use those witches hat, ghost and pumpkin cookie cutters that are too cute not to buy! This year I made witches hats to send down to Griffyn and Piper, my nephew and niece. I was actually delighted with how these turned out! I was a bit nervous about colouring fondant black – I didn’t want to end up with gray cookies! I used chocolate fondant which meant I started with a nice dark base, but also meant that the fondant had a nice taste rather than just tasting like sugar. I hope you make out the little bats which are sitting on the witches hats. I couriered these off to Griffyn and Piper and they just loved them.



A huge thanks also to my blogging friend (and fellow lawyer) Gaye from Cake law who has awarded me a yum yum award. Thanks Gaye! You are a real sweetie!!

Cupcake Hero - Squash

It has certainly been a week of blog events! Today I am posting my October cupcake hero entry. The theme this month is squash – now in the States what we think of as butternut pumpkin is actually known as Butternut Squash, so I have used what we call pumpkin as the base of my cupcakes. In NZ a squash is like a watery, over sized zucchini! Which I don’t think would make very nice cupcakes.

As I have written before, I love pumpkin and I am partial to the sweet combination of chocolate and pumpkin. So, my cupcakes are butternut chocolate cupcakes with a butternut cheesecake filling. They are not the prettiest cupcakes I have ever made, but personally, I think that they are one of the yummiest. The cupcakes themselves are chocolate, but include grated pumpkin – a bit like a chocolate zucchini cake, but pumpkin chocolate. I based the recipe on an Annabel Langbein recipe. The cakes are deliciously moist and so easy – just put everything in your bowl and mix!



Next, I filled the cakes with a pumpkin baked cheesecake mixture. I based the recipe for this on one in the Whimsical Bakehouse small cakes book. I halved the recipe, retaining the full amount of spices and baked the topping in a small ceramic dish. I then scooped out the centres of the cupcakes and filled them with the creamy cheesecake filling. I wasn’t sure about the icing. I love great big swirls of icing, but I did think that the cakes might be rich enough with the cheesecake filling. So instead, I went for a simple ganache topping which I spread across the top of the cakes. I topped my cakes with little pumpkin shaped sprinkles.

I must say, I am delighted with these. They are a little different, but taste delicious!!! Thanks again to Laurie for running this fabulous event. See the other squash cupcakes here!



Chocolate and butternut cheesecake cupcakes
For the cheesecake:
180g softened cream cheese
¼ c brown sugar
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp cream
¼ c mashed pumpkin
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp ground ginger
1/8 tsp allspice
1 egg
· Beat the cream cheese, then beat in the sugar, cream and flour. Mix in the pumpkin and spices and lastly the egg.
· Bake at 180c in a small dish (mine was about 15cm round) for 15-20 minutes until cooked, but still retaining a little wobble, then refrigerate
For the Cake:
1 c sugar
1 egg
½ c milk
1 c grated pumpkin
1/3 c dutched cocoa
½ tsp each mixed spice and cinnamon
100g butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp golden syrup
2 c self raising flour
½ c boiling hot strong coffee
· Either beat everything together in a bowl until smooth, or process in a food processor
· Spoon into cupcake cases (I got 15) and bake at 180c for 18-20 minutes

To Assemble:
· Scoop a small lid out of each cooled cupcake and fill with a teaspoonful of pumpkin cheesecake
Top with the cake lids and then ice with chocolate ganache

The Daring Bakers do Pizza!

Yes, it is that time again! Another Daring Baker challenge to post. This month’s challenge was chosen by Rosa from Rosa’s Yummy Yums and is Pizza! This obviously left quite a wide scope for imagination.

I have made pizza dough from scratch quite often, so the challenge wasn’t something new for me. I do love home made pizza though, so my challenge was to make something simple but tasty. Some of the best pizza I have ever tasted was at a small pizzeria (if that is actually an Italian word!) in Rome called La Renella. They sell pizza by weight in Italy and my husband and I kept going back there for more. Some of the stand out flavours were eggplant and mozzarella and potato and parmesan. I loved the simplicity of the Roman pizza.



I found the dough for this recipe quite sticky, but past experience has shown me that a sticky dough often gives a crisper base. I also only made ¼ of the recipe – enough just to make one large pizza. We were meant to try tossing the dough as part of the challenge, but my dough just a bit sticky for that. I had visions of dough sticking to the ceiling! The pizza stone (or tray in my case) was liberally sprinkled with semolina which gave the pizza a great crust.

We had to top our pizza with both a sauce and a topping. I made a sauce using chopped onion, garlic, olive oil and canned Italian tomatoes. I simply reduced this down, adding a small spoonful of brown sugar, salt and pepper to make a delicious well flavoured sauce. On top of the sauce I used prosciutto, blue cheese and pinenuts. My husband and I both really enjoyed this pizza! It was the first meal that I cooked in the kitchen of the place that we are renting while our house is being built. The oven passed the pizza test (and more importantly passed the shortbread test as well!).



See what variations of pizza the other Daring Bakers (I think there are well over 1000 of us now!) made here.

TWD - chocolate chocolate cupcakes

This week’s TWD recipe was chosen by Clara of I heart Food for Thought and is double chocolate cupcakes (Clara also has a great cupcake blog whcih you can see here). Clara specifically requested that we decorate our cupcakes with a Halloween theme. Halloween isn’t that big in NZ – but is getting bigger! So I went for a fairly mild Halloween theme by using these Halloween sprinkles.



The cupcakes get their chocolateness from melted chocolate and cocoa. The batter was easy to bake and baked perfectly – no major peaks, sinking or anything like that. However, I was disappointed with how dry the cupcakes were. I filled mine with nutella which gave a bit of moistness, but I’m not sure if I over baked the cakes or what, they were just drier than I like. The glaze wasn’t that great either. The glaze was made with melted chocolate, butter and icing sugar, but when I added my icing sugar, the chocolate seized – I will be interested to see if anyone else had this problem. I managed to rescue it by adding some rice bran oil, but I think I would prefer a ganache type icing.



Oh, and here are the bases of my new cupcake cases - aren't they cute!

There are not many Dorie recipes which I have been disappointed with, but unfortunately, this one of them. See what the other TWDers thought here.

Fly away home...

Last week I made these little ladybird cupcakes and took them down to Christchurch for my niece and nephew. The cakes themselves are white chocolate and raspberry flavoured – the chocolate was melted and the raspberry flavour just came from raspberry essence. I find that kids don’t like things too strongly flavoured.




The icing on top of the cakes is white chocolate ganache coloured with red colouring. I was really pleased with the colour which looks just like that of a ladybird. The dots were made with melted chocolate, as were the eyes and antennae. I was a little disappointed with the antennae and the eyes – they just weren’t as good as I had hoped! But Griffyn and Piper loved them - they ate two of the mini ones each as soon as I gave them to them. The idea is simple but the end result is quite effective.

Cookie Carnival

This is my first time participating in the Cookie Carnival, a monthly event organised by Kate from the Clean Plate Club. Each month a cookie is selected and everyone bakes it. This month’s is pumpkin whoopie pies. You can find the recipe here on the Martha Stewart website. This is complete first for me – first time baking for the cookie carnival and also the first time I have made or even tasted whoopee pies.

Whoopie pies are almost like little cakes – they have the consistency of a ginger kiss or a sponge drop and are joined together with icing. The icing of the pumpkin whoopie pies was cream cheese based – I am not sure if that is a common feature or not. As we don’t have canned pumpkin puree in NZ, I steamed and mashed pumpkin. It isn’t pumpkin season here at the moment, so the pumpkins have lost a bit of their sweetness and are a bit dry – but it didn’t matter too much for these pies. I did have to add a lot more icing sugar to the icing to get it the right consistency. I am not sure whether others had this problem – it may be a symptom of the recipe being a Martha Stewart one, as I know some others do have problems with the quantities in her recipes. My icing isnt the bright orange of Martha's either - not sure if this is because of the amount of icing sugar I used or because I used real pumpkin as opposed to canned.

I am not sure if I love whoopie pies – I think I would prefer a small cake or something with cream! Although, there is a recipe on Martha’s site for peanut butter whoopie pies – that sounds like my kind of thing!

Farewell to my Kitchen

Since I started writing this blog over 12 months ago, we have been in our 1970s house waiting for the plans to be finalised, consents to come through and the winter to be over before we start the major re-build. Prior to us moving in there (also about 12 months ago) we lived in a new house with a modern kitchen. When we moved I thought that my right arm was cut off, not having a fan bake oven – I have learned to cope :0) and all the baking you have seen on my blog has been done in my old Atlas oven. It works like a bomb!



However, the time has finally come for us to move out of our house and the builders to move in. I thought you might like to see a photo of what my kitchen actually looks like. And so, here it is! Not in the slightest bit flash, but it has done the trick. Even though it is old it still has a dishwasher and a waste disposal. We move into a little two bedroom flat in the weekend. Not sure what the oven will be like, but it looks fairly new. It will be interesting. Then, once our house is finished in 6-8 months, I will have a state of the art modern kitchen with a scullery, a 900mm wide stand alone oven, a second oven in the scullery, gas hobs, great lighting, a huge island, soft close drawers and all the other mod cons that I could possibly want. I cant wait! Although, weirdly enough I do feel a little sad saying goodbye to my old kitchen!



One of the last things I will cook in my oven is this cranberry, apricot and walnut loaf. The recipe is a Julie Biuso one that you can find here. I didn’t love it – although it is a sturdy loaf and I think it would be quite good toasted and spread with butter. My husband enjoyed it. I think I may have been a bit mean with apricots, craisins and walnuts – so if you make it, be generous!