Miracles for Hospice

These little cakes that I made for hospice this month are called Miracles. The recipe came from Ladies, A Plate. The cakes are little chocolate cakes with a spoon of raspberry jam in the middle and iced with chocolate icing. They are very simple little cakes – not as rich as many of the cupcakes I make and they last in the tin for a few days.

These little chocolate cakes are what my great Aunty Jean used to make. Aunty Jean was Dad’s aunty, a very sweet lady who was a lovely baker. One of her specialties was these cakes. I cant remember whether Aunty Jean called them miracles or not (the miracle being that there is a spoon of jam in the centre!), but this recipe is very similar to the one she made. Aunty Jean would sprinkle the iced tops with chocolate hail or hundreds and thousands. I don’t like jam and so she would make a few for me without the jam, sprinkling the tops of mine with chocolate hail and the jam ones with hundreds and thousands, so I would know which ones were mine.

These are a lovely, old fashioned treat. Aunty Jean’s icing was less of a swirl, but I wanted to make mine look a bit more special for hospice.



Miracles (from Ladies A Plate)

170g flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 tbsp cocoa
115g sugar
115ml milk
1 tbsp golden syrup
½ tsp baking soda
1 egg
55g butter, melted
Raspberry jam

• Warm milk, syrup and baking soda together until the mixture froths up
• Stir in dry ingredients, then the lightly beaten egg and butter. Mix well
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake for 12-14 minutes at 180c
• When cold, cut a small pyramid shape out of the top of each cake and fill with ½ tsp raspberry jam. Pop lids back on top
• Ice with chocolate icing made with icing sugar, cocoa, 1 tbsp butter and hot water

A steamed pudding to start Winter

It’s always nice to have pudding when you have people staying. It seems to make the occasion of eating dinner, more of an event. So most nights while my in-laws have been here, we have had pudding (we ate the TWD tiramisu cake for a couple of nights!). On Wednesday night I made meatballs with a tamarind sauce and pilaf from Bill Granger’s latest book which I treated myself to earlier in the week. I love Bill’s food – it is easy to prepare, simple and fresh, but still has Wow factor. The meatballs were great and the tamarind gave a lovely sharpness to the sauce.

I wanted to make something quick for pudding and looking through my recipe box, I spotted a recipe for golden syrup steamed pudding that I had ripped out of a Delicious magazine quite a while ago. The recipe comes from John Burton Race, a celebrity chef who I don’t really know a lot about. It is an incredibly easy recipe to prepare quickly (it took me about 5 minutes max to put it together). If you don’t have golden syrup, you could use treacle or honey. I don’t think I would use molasses as that would be too strong. Golden syrup is a pantry staple in New Zealand though, and golden syrup steamed pudding is a good old kiwi favourite.

I made four individual puddings using this recipe, and I didn’t bother properly steaming the puddings in a bain marie like I would if I had more time. They still worked perfectly.

Golden Syrup Steamed Pudding (adapted from John Burton Race in Delicious Magazine)

4 dsp golden syrup
175g self raising flour
75g butter
50g sugar
Zest of one lemon
1 egg
100ml milk

• Combine sugar, flour and lemon zest. Rub in butter (I find the best way to do this is to grate the butter into the flour).
• Combine the milk and egg and then mix into the butter and flour mixture
• Grease 4 small pudding ramekins and pop a dsp of golden syrup into each. Evenly divide the pudding mixture between the two ramekins. Cover the tops loosely with tin foil.
• Pop on a tray into a pre-heated oven at 180c and bake for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
• Invert onto serving plates (I slip a pallet knife round them first to loosen) and served with whipped cream or ice cream

You Want Pies With That - family favourite

This month’s You Want Pies With That theme was chosen by Rebecca at Ezra Poundcake and Mary from Alpineberry. The theme was to take a family favourite pudding and turn it into a pie. When I think back to when I was a child, my favourite (and I think the family’s favourite) was chocolate self saucing pudding. I didn’t really fancy that in a pie, so instead when for a rice pudding tart.

I made a simple shortcrust pastry, sweetened with icing sugar and enriched with egg yolk, baked it blind and then filled it with rice pudding which I had made, cooled, and then added a couple of eggs and some cream to make the filling more custardy and then hazelnuts and raspberries. I actually got the idea from a recipe in Dish magazine from a while back, so it is not a truly unique creation, but does encapsulate a family favourite pudding.

We had the tart warm with whipped cream on Saturday night for pudding and then cold with yoghurt on Sunday night. It would be a great tart to make ahead and you could vary the ingredients (almond and apricot, macadamia and blueberry etc).

Check out the other pies here.

Rice Pudding Tart (adapted from Dish magazine)

• Bake blind shortcrust pastry rolled to fit a tart dish with a removable base (I used a square on)
• Fill with the following filling, then bake at 180c for a further 30 minutes or until the filling is set.

50g Arborio rice
1tsp vanilla paste (or extract)
¼ c sugar
2 c milk
1/3 c cream
2 eggs
70g chopped hazelnuts
Raspberries to decorate top

• Combine the rice, vanilla, sugar and milk and simmer over gentle heat until a rice pudding consistency is met, stirring every now and again. Cool
• Lightly beat eggs and add to the cooled rice with the cream. Stir in the hazelnuts. Put the filling into the pastry case, dot the top with raspberries and bake as above

Fruit Salad Loaf

After making a meatloaf last week that only required a small can of crushed pineapple, and only having a medium sized can of crushed pineapple, I had about half a tin of crushed pineapple sitting in a container in the fridge. Quite some time ago I spotted a recipe in Dish magazine for Fruit Salad Loaf which had only ¼ c of crushed pineapple in it – perfect! The fruit salad aspect of the loaf is that as well as the pineapple, it had a mashed banana, chopped dried apricots and orange juice and zest. The loaf was drizzled with icing sugar mixed with lemon juice.

This loaf was delicious. It is really moist and lasts in the tin for about 4 days according to the recipe – mine didn’t last that long as it was well and truly eaten before then. Well worth making if you end up with a little crushed pineapple and a manky banana in the fruit bow.

Last night’s dinner for my in-laws was a chicken, spinach and pasta bake. I had a really busy day at work yesterday, so wanted to make something quick and easy. I bought a rotisserie cooked chicken on the way home from work, cooked some pasta, made a cheese sauce and combined the lot with home made cheese sauce (a roux with grated cheese added), and baked the lot in the oven – a bit like macaroni cheese. We had it with a green salad and crusty bread.

And fingers crossed there will be photos of a completed kitchen next week!!!

Fruit Salad Loaf (Dish magazine)

150g butter
175g sugar
175g flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp mixed spice
3 eggs
Zest and juice of one orange
8 dried apricots, thinly sliced
¼ c well drained crushed pineapple
1/3 c mashed banana

• Cream butter and sugar
• Beat in eggs, one at a time
• Add the remaining ingredients and stir until just combined
• Pour into lined loaf tin and bake at 180c for 45-50 minutes or until cooked through
• When cold drizzle with a thin icing made with icing sugar and lemonjuice

TWD - Tiramisu Cake

This week’s TWD recipe was chosen by Megan of My Baking Adventures and is Tiramisu cake. The cake is a two layer cake, each layer being soaked in a coffee syrup and then joined together and topped with mascarpone mixed with whipped cream. And, if that’s not decadent enough, there is a layer of chopped chocolate between the two sponge layers.

Tiramisu is not my favourite dessert – I don’t like coffee. This cake had some great qualities though! Firstly, the cake itself made a perfect little cake (I halved the recipe and used my 6inch round tin). I made the cake on Sunday and filled it last night. It was a lovely cake – sponge like, but solid enough to take a robust filling. I didn’t put the alcohol into my syrup (Dorie recommended using kahlua, brandy or similar), mainly because we now live in a 3 level house and the alcohol is all on the lower level and I was too lazy to run down the stairs (I’m not usually this lazy – I went for a 9km run this morning!). I also didn’t want an over bearing alcohol flavour – I put too much brandy in the Christmas trifle and no-one would eat it except me. I loved the chopped chocolate in the middle.



Dorie suggested decorating the cake with chocolate coated coffee beans. I was putting the cake together last night at about 9.30 for my in-laws to have a piece with their supper and wasn’t feeling overly inspired to decorate the top, so I left it nude. But I bet lots of the other TWDers made their cakes look gorgeous – check them out here.

Baking for the in-laws

My husband has been project managing our new house for the last seven months, but is back to work today. We still have a few tradesmen floating round the house, so my in-laws have come up for the week to keep an eye on them. Which gave me the opportunity to do some baking, as a good daughter in law always has some nice treats in the tins!

I thought I would make something from my new Allyson Gofton book, Bake, and one of the first recipes that appealed to me when I first flicked through the book was for Persian Rice Biscuits. The biscuits resemble yo-yos or melting moments, but are made entirely with rice flour and are flavoured with rose water and ground cardamom. The cookies are joined together with a butter cream icing flavoured with rose water. The result is delightful, melt in your mouth cookies which I imagine would be perfect with a cup of coffee (I don’t drink coffee, so that is why I am imagining). These wee cookies would make a wonderful gift.

Last night I made lamb shanks for dinner and I did them differently to normal, using a recipe from Dish magazine. You make a paste of Dijon mustard, honey and soy sauce, smear on the lamb shanks, bundle the lamb shanks into individual parcels using baking paper and string and bake at 150c for 3 hours. I love lamb shanks when the meat is just falling off the bone, so I cooked mine for closer to 4 hours. They were delicious and the clean up was really easy as all the mess was in the paper. We had them with mashed buearegard kumara and broccoli with cheese sauce.

Persian Rice Biscuits (Allyson Gofton – Bake)

250g butter
½ c icing sugar
2 c rice flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ground cardamom
1 tbsp rose water

• Cream butter and sugar,. Then mix in rest of ingredients
• Roll into small balls and flatten with a fork.
• Bake at 160c for 15-20 minutes until firm and light golden
• When cold join together with buttercream icing made with butter, icing sugar and a few drops of rose water

Thursday night Frittata

Thursday night dinners are usually an easy meal for us – more often than not something like pasta or a frittata using up leftover bits in the fridge. I know that a true Italian frittata is a delicate egg concoction cooked on the stove top and finished in the oven, but frittata is the best word I know to describe the more robust egg dish I make.

Last night was a frittata night. I usually make my frittatas but placing all the vegetable, meat and cheese components of my frittata in the bottom of my oiled dish, then topping with 6 eggs beaten with a little milk and baking at 200c for 20-25 minutes until set. Last night I very loosely based my frittata on one that was in Dish magazine a while back. I softened a sliced red onion and some garlic and then added to that some grated potato, cooking this mixture slowly for about 10 minutes until the potato was mostly cooked through and a little crispy. I then put that in my baking dish, topped it with strips of roasted red peppers, stoned black olives, a chopped tomato, a jar of drained, chargrilled artichokes and chunks of feta. I then poured over 4 eggs beaten with 1/3 c milk and ½ c grated parmesan and baked for 20 minutes.

The frittata was delicious. We had it with some of my home made red pepper sauce and a glass of Sauvignon blanc. The perfect Thursday night dinner.

By the way, my husband loved the cookie carnival lemon slice!! And the piece I tasted last night did taste better than it did when it was first made - maybe it improves with age?