masterbaker - vanilla challenge

The masterbaker challenge for April is vanilla. People are often asked whether they prefer vanilla or chocolate and I think it is an unfair choice! While I would almost always choose chocolate first, vanilla is definitely my favourite spice. I love the smell of vanilla and the taste of real vanilla adds so much to otherwise bland foods such as ice-cream, custard and whipped cream. Actually there are only two perfumes that I wear – eternity which I mostly wear, but sometimes for a break I use body shop vanilla. The fragrance I fill my house with is also called cocoa and vanilla which I adore! So, yes to chocolate but equally yes to vanilla!!





Anyway, back to the challenge. Last year I bought some vanilla jam from Q Gardens in Waitara. The jam is made with melon as a base and has flecks of vanilla bean through it. It has a lovely vanilla flavour – you cant really taste the melon, I guess it just gives the jam the pectin for setting. I decided to put it to use in my vanilla creation for March.

I love little jam drop cookies, but wanted to do something a bit different, so I used mini muffin tins to bake the cookies, making little vanilla jam tarts. These taste like a cross between a biscuit and a tart base. They look kind of cute for a change. I added poppyseeds to the dough to give a little bit of crunch and it is also flavoured with real vanilla extract (the heilala brand I always use). These little bites are deliciously filled with vanilla jam. I used the end of a wooden spoon to make the indents – I find it works better than my finger. If you didn’t have vanilla jam you could fill them with any other flavoured jam – plum would be nice or the peach and vanilla jam I made earlier in the year.

Vanilla Jam Tarts

125g butter
1/3 c sugar
1 tsp Heilala vanilla
1 ¼ c flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp poppyseeds
2 tbsp milk
jam to fill

· Cream butter and sugar, add vanilla
· Stir in dry ingredients and then milk to make the dough
· Press small balls of dough into greased mini muffin tins (I got 20 little tarts)
· Press an indent into each tart and fill with half a tsp of jam
· Bake at 170c for 18 minutes or until golden
Leave for at least 5 minutes before removing from the tins

March Masterbaker - Easter Candy

It took me a while to come up with my wee treat for the March masterbaker challenge. I couldn’t get past cupcakes with a caramel egg hidden in them. But it seemed a bit boring. Then it came to me, Easter “candy” within “candy” (candy isn’t really a word we use in NZ – we go more for the English lolly). Easter Rocky Road is my contribution to the challenge.



Instead of the usual marshmallow in the rocky road, I cut up marshmallow Easter eggs. I also halved some baby chocolate eggs and added them to the mix. To be honest, the rocky road didn’t look as pretty as I had hoped – I had wanted to put in those candy coated Cadbury mini eggs, but four supermarkets later, I couldn’t track them down – all sold out!! The rocky road was pretty rich – in fact it probably tasted richer because I had been eating chocolate pretty much all day when I ate a piece!! You probably don’t feel like making this right now straight after Easter, but maybe next year? Or you could make some now and substitute the marshmallow eggs for normal marshmallows.

Easter Rocky Road

200g dark chocolate
20g butter
100g condensed milk
50ml baileys
6 marshmallow Easter eggs, chopped into quarters
small bag of chocolate mini eggs chopped in half
½ c slivered almonds, lightly toasted

· Melt together chocolate, butter, condensed milk and baileys. Leave to cool for about 10 minutes
· Stir in remaining ingredients and pour into a lined loaf tin
· Chill for at least two hours before cutting into pieces