Sour Milk and Raspberry Cake

A lovely cake that I made some time ago is Matthew Evans' (The Gourmet Farmer) Sour Milk and Raspberry Cake.  The sour milk I imagine works a little like buttermilk to produce a tender crumb in the cake.

As it is raspberry season, while the recipe calls for frozen raspberries, this cake would be a great way to highlight fresh raspberries:

Look at that lovely golden crumb:

Serve the cake warm or room temperature,  by itself or with cream, custard or icecream:

To make this cake, you will need:

250g butter, softened

1 1/2 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup sour milk or buttermilk

2 2/3 cups self raising flour

100g raspberries, fresh or frozen

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and grease and line a 26cm springform tin.

In a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar until light and creamy.  Beat in the eggs, one by one, then the vanilla.  Add the milk and flour in two alternating batches, and fold in until just combined.

Gently fold through the raspberries, then scrape the batter into the prepared cake tin and level the top with a spatula.

Bake the cake for 35-45 minutes or until cooked through when tested with a spatula.  Remove the cake from the oven and leave it to sit in the tin for 10 minutes before unmoulding onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Roasted Hazelnut Panna Cotta with Strawberries

 

Some time ago, I spied a recipe for Roasted Hazelnut Panna Cotta with Strawberries by Helen Goh in the Good Weekend magazine.  It looked so good, and I had most of the ingredients, so I was in to make it.

This is the end result:

Mine were probably a little softer set than they should have been, and I ended up with some hazelnut crumbs in them, but I don't care - they were soft and silky and flavoursome.

If you would like to try these panna cotta, you will need:

6 dariole moulds
1 teaspoon vegetable oil for brushing moulds
200g whole skinless hazelnuts, toasted
600ml full fat cream
200ml milk
130g sugar
pinch of salt
3 sheets leaf gelatine
peeled skin off a lime
12 strawberries
1 tablespoon icing sugar
1 tablespoon lime juice

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Lightly brush the inside of each dariole mould with vegetable oil and place them together on a large baking tray.

Pu the gelatine leaves into a bowl of ice water and allow to soften (~ 5 minutes).

 Meanwhile, roughly chop the hazelnuts in a food processor.  Put the chopped nuts into a large saucepan with the cream, milk, sugar and salt.  Turn the heat on to the lowest setting and stir the mixture gently until it comes to a simmer. Once the mixture reaches a simmer, turn off the hear and add the lime peel.  Squeeze the excess moisture from the gelatine and add it to the cream mixture.  Stir to combine, then leave the mixture to infuse for 30 minutes before straining into a jug.

Pour the mixture into each of the dariole moulds, then place the moulds on the tray in the fridge to set for ~ 6 hours.

To unmould the panna cotta, run a knife gently around the edge of each one, then invert onto a serving plate.  If it doesn't unmould easily, dip the mould briefly into hot water before inverting again.

Serve with chopped, macerated strawberries on the side or on top of each panna cotta.

Devilled Eggs

 If they're scrambled I can only eat two eggs. If they're deviled, I can eat forty.

Devilled eggs is one of those party dishes that everyone jokes about, but most secretly enjoy.  Until recently, I had never made devilled eggs, but that changed when my team held a disco themed virtual Christmas party.  I know that they did not eat food at discos, but disco food was one of the prize categories, and I assume that they meant food from the disco era AKA the 1970s.  So devilled eggs and pineapple hedgehogs it was!

I made these devilled eggs using Nigella Lawson's recipe, which rather fancily pipes the egg mixture back into the whites.  They were rather good, a good mix of creamy and spicy, which is just as well, as I had to eat them.

If you would like to make these eggs, you will need:

12 large eggs (or however many you want to make
and adjust other ingredients accordingly)
4 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 teaspoons mustard
a good pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon paprika
3 drops tabasco sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons boiling water

Bring water to the boil in a saucepan, and add the eggs to it one by one.  Boil the eggs for one minute, then switch off the heat and leave the eggs to sit in the saucepan for 12 minutes.  Fill a bowl with ice cold water and transfer the eggs to that bowl, and leave to sit for 15 minutes before peeling the eggs.

Halve each egg lengthways and gently remove the yolk.  Put the yolks into a mixing bowl.  Choose 18 of the best looking white-halves and place them on a serving platter (you need more yolks than whites).

Add the mayonnaise, mustard, salt, paprika and tabasco to the egg yolks and mash them all together before blending with a stick blender to combine thoroughly.  Ass as much of the boiling water as is required to bring the yolk mixture to piping consistency.

Put the yolk mixture into a piping bag fitted with a star tip and pipe the yolk mixture into the cavity of each white, and sprinkle each one with extra paprika.

Serve.

Seasons Greetings

 From me, my family and friends to you, your family and friends, wishing you all the very best for a very merry Christmas and the holiday season!

Ottolenghi’s Spicy Nuts

 Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way

Christmas in Australia on a scorching summer’s day ...

             

The final item in this year’s Christmas boxes is Spiced Nuts, from an Ottolenghi recipe.

These nuts are made with 2 teaspoons of cayenne pepper, so they pack a punch. They’d be great with a cold beer by the barbie, with seafood sizzling away.

If spicy nuts with kick are your jam, you will need:

380g of mixed nuts

80g pumpkin seeds

1 teaspoon sunflower seeds

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 tablespoons honey

1 teaspoon salt

2 sprigs rosemary, leaves only

2 teaspoons pepper

2 teaspoons cayenne pepper

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees.

Put all of the ingredients except the pepper and cayenne together in a roasting tray and stir to combine. Roast for 15-17 minutes, stirring from time to time, until the nuts turn dark brown. Remove the nuts from the oven, stir through the pepper and cayenne. 

Allow the nuts to cool in the tray, stirring from time to time. 

Serve with a coldie!

Gingerbread Buche de Noel

There is no Tuesday with Dorie scheduled for this week, so instead, I will share my Gingerbread Buche de Noel that I made from Baking Chez Moi for my choir’s end of year  lunch.

I  made this recipe for TWD in 2014, so it is fun to revisit it all these years later.

This is the gingerbread sponge roll pre-filling:

and being rolled up with the pecan praline-studded filling inside:

and the snowy-frosting coated, praline studded final product:

It was just as big a hit now as it was then. I only have a photo of a half slice:

However, you can see all the marvellous complexities of this dessert.

If you are keen to try it and don’t have the book, the recipe is online here.

Gingerbread

 I need no gift beneath the Christmas tree this year

Christmas with you is all I truly need my dear.

                                                   Deborah Cheetham, "Christmas with You"  

During this year of virtual everything, ABC Classic Radio commissioned Yorta Yorta woman, Deborah Cheetam AO, to write a new Christmas carol to be recorded by a virtual choir.  The wonderful result is Christmas with You, which 1,500 people from around the world sang as a virtual choir.  You can find the video here.  I was very proud to be part of this project as a soprano (not my usual singing part but this one was within my range and I liked that part the best). 

On the topic of Christmas, another addition to my Christmas boxes this year was gingerbread, made from the recipe in the November 2020 issue of the Australian Women's Weekly. I didn't have dark brown sugar so my gingerbread don't have the same burnished hue as theirs, but they tasted great.

I decorated the gingerbread with rolled fondant that was stencilled with some beautiful Australian Christmas themed stencils by Berry Sweet from Miss Biscuit, that I airbrushed on.  I figured that having invested in an airbrush earlier in the year, I was going to make the most of it!  I also sprinkled the biscuits with some edible gold glitter.  

If you would like to try the gingerbread recipe, you will need:

350g plain flour
100g brown sugar
100g dark muscavado sugar
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
115g cold butter, chopped
87g (1/4 cup) golden syrup
1 egg

In a food processor, place the flour, sugars, baking powder and spices and pulse to combine.

Add the butter, and pulse to combine.  Add the golden syrup and 1 egg, and process together until the mixture the dough just comes together.  

Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead until the dough is smooth and the same colour throughout.  Wrap the dough in clingfilm and refrigerate for an hour.

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Remove the dough from the fridge and roll it to a 6mm thickness on a floured bench or between two pieces of baking paper.  Cut out desired shapes and place onto a baking tray lined with baking paper.   Re-roll the scraps and keep cutting out shapes until all the dough has been used.

Bake the biscuits in the preheated oven  for 12 minutes or until the biscuits are firm to the touch, rotating the trays front to back and top to bottom if you bake more than one tray at once.  Remove the trays from the oven and allow the gingerbread to cool completely on the trays.

Decorate as desired.  I rolled out fondant and cut out shapes the same size as the biscuits, and using a paintbrush dipped in water, lightly moistened the top of each biscuit and pressed the fondant shape gently on top.  After the fondant had dried, I stencilled the biscuits using an airbrush and red and green airbrush colours, then before the colour dried, lightly sprinkled edible glitter on the top of each biscuit for that festive shine.

     

TWD - Mint Chocolate Sables

 I’ll be home for Christmas, you can plan on me ... (Bing Crosby)

For the last Tuesday with Dorie for this year, I made Mint Chocolate Sables. They are what they say on the tin, and they are good.

My only warning is not to go too heavy on the peppermint flavour, unless toothpaste is your jam. I probably went a little too subtle, but the mint flavour was definitely there.

These biscuits get their chocolate flavour from both chopped chocolate and cocoa. They are dark and rich.

Served with a scoop of peppermint chip icecream, these biscuits are da bomb.

To see what everyone else baked this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

Toblerone Brownies

Have yourself a merry little Christmas (Judy Garland, Meet Me in St Louis)

On the weekend, I had a friend over for Christmas lunch. I kept it simple - cheese and dips and olives and crackers to start, roast chicken and vegetables for main, and for dessert, a delightfully rich Toblerone brownie from the Coles magazine.

This brownie has an awful lot of chocolate in it, so it’s not for the faint-hearted:

 However, I knew that my friend loves brownies, so I was on a winner.

To make these brownies, you will need:

125g butter, chopped

180g dark chocolate, chopped

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

220g brown sugar

2 eggs

150g plain flour

35g sifted cocoa powder

450g Toblerone bars, chopped (I bought one big one, the recipe calls for 9 x 50g bars)

125ml cream (not light cream)

20g toasted flaked almonds

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius and grease and line a 20cm square cake tin, with paper overhanging the sides as a handle to release the brownies.

Put the butter, chopped dark chocolate, vanilla and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat and cook, stirring,  until melted and smooth. Allie the mixture to cool slightly then ehisk in the eggs.

Using a rubber spatula, fold in the flour, cocoa and 150g Toblerone, them scrape the batter into the prepared tin.

Bake the brownies for 45-50 minutes or until cooked through.  Allow the brownies to cool completely in the tin.

To make the topping, put the cream in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 5 minutes or until the cream thickens slightly.

Add 150g Toblerone to the cream snd stir until the chocolate is melted and has combined with the cream. Pour the topping over the cooled brownie in the tin. Allow the topping to cool slightly before sprinkling the top of the brownies with the remaining 150g Toblerone and toasted flaked almonds.

Put the brownie in the fridge to cool for 2 hours. To serve, run a knife around the edge of the tin to release the brownies, lift them out of the tin using the baking paper handles, and cut the brownie into 16 squares.

Rum and Raisin Fudge

 Another Christmas box item for this year is Rum and Raisin Fudge. I wanted to include fudge as one of the sweets in my boxes, and rum and raisin is a winning flavour combination.

I used this Australian Women’s Weekly recipe for my fudge. It was easy to make, with no need for a thermometer.

This fudge is rich and decadent - a small piece is enough. The rich chocolate flavour is offset nicely by the rum-soaked raisins.

To make this fudge, you will need:

1 cup raisins

2 tablespoons rum

395g can condensed milk

125g butter

1 cup brown sugar

2 1/2 tablespoons golden syrup

150g chopped milk chocolate

Grease and line a 20cm square cake tin.

Put the rum and raisins in a small bowl and soak for 10 minutes.

Put the condensed milk, chopped butter, brown sugar and golden syrup in a medium saucepan. Stir over low heat until combined, then bring to the boil. Boil for 10 minutes, stirring constantly .

Stir through the chopped chocolate and raisin mixture.  Remove from the heat and scrape the mixture into the prepared cake tin. Smoothe the top.

Allow the fudge to cool for 6 hours at room temperature before cutting into squares.

TWD - Raisin Bars

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie (Dorie’s Cookies) recipe is Raisin Bars. The name of these bars is not inspiring, but don’t be put off - they are more like a fruit crumble.

When baking, the oats snd brown sugar in these bars smells heavenly:

The dough also contains chopped almonds, so it has plenty of tecture:

The same dough forms the base and topping of these bars.

I could not resist serving one of these bars warm with icecream.

To see what everyone else baked this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL Section of the TWD website.

Creamy Caramels

 It’s nearly Christmas, so I have been busy making Christmas treats for gifts.

I love caramels, so couldn’t resist making caramels for my gift boxes. These are Creamy Caramels were made from a recipe in The Australian Women’s Weekly Sweet. To make these caramels, you will need:

1 cup sugar

90g butter

2 tablespoons golden syrup

1/3 cup glucose syrup

1/2 cup condensed milk

Butter a 19cm square cake tin.

Put the butter, sugar, syrups and milk into a large heavy bottomed saucepan. Stir the mixture over the heat, without boiling, until the sugar dissolves.  Bring the mixture to the boil, then boil while stirring constantly for 7 minutes, or until the mixture has turned golden in colour.

Pour the mixture into the buttered cake tin and stand for 10 minutes before marking squares in the caramel with a metal spatula.

Allow the caramels to cool completely before cutting right through into squares and wrapping in cellophane.

Guinness Bread

 I had some Guinness left over from my Christmas puddings, which coincided with my need to have a homemade loaf of bread for a video, so I searched online for bread recipes using Guinness - et voila, I found this recipe for Guinness Bread on Platings and Pairings.

This is a non-yeasted bread, relying on baking powder and the Guinness to rise. It has oats inside and out for texture. I also glazed it with a honey butter glaze to make it prettier for my video:

This bread has an earthy flavour from the Guinness, which paired beautifully with the sweet glaze. I ate it without any spreads because it had its own innate sweetness.

To make this Guinness Bread, you will need:

3 cups flour

4 teaspoons baking powder 

1/2 cup oats + 1 tablespoon for topping

2/3 cup brown sugar 

1/2  teaspoon salt

350ml Guinness

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius and spray a loaf pan liberally with cooking spray.

Combine all of the dry ingredients other than the 1 tablespoon oats together in a large mixing bowl.  Slowly pour in the Guinness and mix until just combined with the dry ingredients.

Scrape the batter into the prepared loaf pan, smooth the top and sprinkle the oats for the topping evenly over the surface of the loaf.

Put the bread in the oven to bake for 45-50 minutes or until cooked through.

If you want the optional glaze, melt together 55g butter and 1/4 cup honey in a saucepan, stir in a pinch of cayenne pepper and salt, then brush over the top of the bread as soon as you remove it from the oven.

Allow the bread to cool completely  in the tin on a wire rack before slicing and serving.

TWD - Cheddar-Seed Wafers

 This week's Tuesday with Dorie (Dorie's Cookies) is Cheddar-Seed Wafers.  These are crisp, thin crackers packed with cheddar and poppy seeds.

These crackers are super easy to make, and there is no need to rest the dough.  The resulting crackers are crispy and very cheesy.

I liked these just on their own.

To see what everyone else baked this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

Orecchiette with Prawns and Zucchini

Nigella Lawson has said that she likes to keep frozen prawns on hand to make a prawn dish whenever she fancied it.  Inspired by this, I grabbed a tray of prawns at the supermarket recently with this orecchiette dish in mind. The recipe comes from Taste.com.

This dish is a terrific all in one, and dead easy to make.  If you'd like to try it, you will need:

400g orecchiette

60ml olive oil

2 crushed cloves garlic

2 tablespoons capers, rinsed

2 small chillies, seeded and finely chopped

2 zucchini, finely diced

700g medium green king prawns, deveined and cut into 3 (I just used small prawns)

2 cups baby spinach

1/2 cup mint leaves, torn

juice of half a lemon

salt

Cook the pasta and drain, retaining 1/3 cup cooking water.

In the meantime, heat the olive oil in a frying pan.  Add garlic, capers, zucchini, chillies and a half teaspoon of salt  and cook, stirring, for three minutes.  Add the prawns and cook on high until the prawns are cooked through.

Add the pasta, three quarters of the mint, spinach and lemon juice to the prawn mixture and mix to combine.  Season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with the remaining mint.

Serve and enjoy!

Christmas Puddings - Martin Bosley Cooks

Have yourself a merry little Christmas 

Let your heart be bright

Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.

                                                   Hugh Martin

 I am starting to get excited about Christmas. It is my favourite time of year, with many of my favourite songs, favourite foods and favourite activities in my favourite season (summer), with some of my favourite people.  I hope to be allowed to go home to my family - fingers crossed.

I made my Christmas cake months ago, but decided to turn my hand to Christmas puddings next.

I have owned Martin Bosley Cooks for years, and have always meant to make his Christmas pudding recipe but never quite gotten around to it.  Well, now I have!  Martin’s recipe makes 4 x 12cm puddings - I halved it to make 8 x 4cm puddings.

Instead of using muslin to cover the puddings while steaming in the oven, I made pleated baking paper covers:

I have no idea what they’ll taste like, but hopefully good!

To make a half recipe my way, you will need:

1/2 cup raisins

75g sultanas

75g currants

50g blanched almonds, chopped

90g vegetarian suet

juice and zest of half an orange

juice and zest of half a lemon

1/2 Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored and grated

1/2 carrot, peeled and grated

60g flour (I used a gluten free flour mix)

1 1/2 eggs

pinch of salt

pinch of ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon mixed spice 

60ml brandy

75ml stout

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate for 48 hours. (I skipped this due to time constraints.)

Preheat your oven to 150 degrees Celsius, and grease 8x 4cm pudding moulds.  Divide the pudding mixture evenly between the moulds. Press the mixture down firmly. Place circles of baking paper that have been lightly greased  over the top of the mixture. 

Cover the top of each mould with a circle of damp muslin tied with string (or do as I did - use baking paper with a steam “pleat” instead).

Line a large roasting dish with baking paper and put the puddings on top. Put the dish in the preheated oven, and pour in enough water into the dish to come halfway up the side of the pudding moulds.

Cover the dish with foil, and cut a small hoke in the centre of the foil to release the steam.  Bake in the oven for 4 hours.

Remove the puddings from the oven and allow them to cool completely before unmoulding them and wrapping in baking paper then foil.

On Christmas Day, reheat the puddings and serve with custard and cream or brandy butter.

TWD - Carrement Chocolat, The Fancy Cake

 

On November 11, 2014, I published my first Tuesday with Dorie - Baking Chez Moi post. The recipe was Palets de Dames, Lille Style, being fancy little frosted cookies. Now, almost 6 years to the day later, I am publishing my last Tuesday with Dorie - Baking Chez Moi post.  Allow me to indulge in this achievement, because 6 years is a long time and a lot has happened over that period.

Today’s final recipe is a very fancy French style chocolate cake - Carrement Chocolat. It comprises a thin chocolate cake, flavoured with cocoa, sliced in half and filled with chocolate creme patisserie, glazed with shiny chocolate ganache and topped with abstract salted chocolate shapes:

My cake is not as grand as it might have been because it is only a half recipe. In this strange and sometimes frightening year, I have been working from home for 8 months, so I cannot share a full version of this cake with my colleagues, as I once would have. I also lost my cake loving downstairs neighbour a couple of months back - he would have told me this cake was “beautiful”, so I feel very sorry that he is not here to share this delightful treat.

I did give a slice to a lady in the same complex who lives in another tower, and today, I am going to Pilates for the first time in 5 months, so I will share a few slices with my instructor and classmates.  This is a celebration cake, made to be shared, so I am grateful to finally be allowed out to share it with a wider group of people.

My favourite part of this cake was the addictive salted chocolate shapes on top, followed closely by the silky chocolate creme patisserie. This cake was definitely “beautiful”, as John would have said.

Here I am, in full celebration mode, at the end of my third full Dorie Greenspan cookbook:

It has been a tradition that Doristas, as Trevor dubbed us, celebrate the end of each book in some way, so this odd sideways-looking selfie (due to the device camera positioning) with my cake and my book, all dressed up with nowhere to go, is my way of marking this auspicious occasion.

Another tradition is to rate your least and most favourite recipes.  My least favourite was the Cats Tongues, which were an abject failure for me, while my all-time favourite is the delightful canneles, unique and fabulous in their own right.

To my fellow Baking Chez Moi Doristas - congratulations, it’s been quite a ride that we’ve been on together.

And as for Baking Chez Moi - this is finis. Au revoir!

TWD - Pain de Genes Buttons

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Pain de Genes Buttons. Their back story is that during a seige in 1800,  the only food that the townspeople of Genoa had was almonds. These little cakes are very simple, comprising almond paste, egg, cornflour, flour, salt, kirsch and flaked almonds.

They don’t look much, but these little cakes are very tasty. The texture is soft and spongy. 

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

Pumpkin Cake with Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream

Today is Halloween. It is a festival day that is fairly new to Australia and was not celebrated here when I was a child. However, it has take off in recent years and is popular with children and adults.

I don’t celebrate Halloween but thiught it would be fun to bake a Halloween inspired cake. Looking through my cookbooks, I found Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Pumpkin Cake with Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream from Heavenly Cakes. It was cute and I had bought pumpkin especially to make a Halloween cake, so I went with it.

The full cake is made in a two piece 3D pumpkin shaped pan and feeds 16! For one person, this could not be justified, so inspired by Rose’s suggestion to bake the cake in a bundt tin, I baked a quarter of the cake recipe in mini bundt tins:

The cake is a pumpkin walnut spice sponge, with cinnamon and nutmeg. These little cakes were easy enough to bake

The painful part was making the buttercream. It is made in three parts - a caramel creme anglaise, an Italian meringue buttercream and finally, the two are beaten together with butter and an orange concentrate (which I had to make). The buttercream is then coloured in two different shades of orange. 

I had to make the creme anglaise twice, as the first attempt was a dismal failure. The second time around, I ditched the thermometer and went with experience in making caramel and creme anglaise instead.

Two mini bundts are joined with buttercream, then the whole lot is iced with buttercream. A small amount of darker orange buttercream is then used to make contrasting stripes in the cake. 

Finally, to make the cake look like a pumpkin, you make a stem and tendril out of marzipan tinted brown by rolling it in cocoa, and hand cut leaves with green tinted buttercream.

It is definitely a labour of love, and I only made one.

My buttercream was not quite right, but it did the job. Taste-wise, I would prefer my usual buttercream, which is also a lot easier to make.

It was fun to do this once, but I won’t be doing it again.

I think the pumpkin bundts would go nicely with cream cheese icing, or warmed up and served with vanilla icecream.

Happy Halloween!

TWD - Macaron Biscotti - Not

 This week’s TWD “recipe” (Dorie herself said it’s not a recipe) are Macaron Biscotti. You are meant to take unfilled macaron shells and bake them again in butter.

I did not know when I made macarons two weeks ago that this would be our next recipe. I didn’t have any leftover macaron shells and I was not making any more to do this - sorry.

Instead, please enjoy my macarons from last time and imagine what they’d be like unfilled,  dipped in butter and baked again.

If you want to see Macaron Biscotti, the other bakers may have made them - visit the TWD website.

My Mum’s Meatballs in Tomato Soup

 I had a hankering recently for the meatballs baked in tomato soup that my mum makes. I rang her for the recipe so I could make them. It always makes me laugh when she gives me a recipe because the quantities are so I exact.

There is not much else to say about these meatballs except that they are good! If you would like to try them, you will need:

500g beef mince

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

2 tablespoons tomato sauce

1 onion, finely chopped

1 egg

2 slices bread, processed into crumbs

1 x 400g tin tomato soup

plain flour or dried breadcrumbs to roll the meatballs in

1/2 soup can of cold water

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

In a large bowl, mix together all of the ingredients except the soup, water and flour.  Make balls of the desired size from the mixture with wet hands.

Roll the meatballs in flour (or dried breadcrumbs) and place in a large casserole dish. Pour over the tomato soup, then the water.

Bake the meatballs in the oven for 1 1/2 hours. Serve with rice and vegetables.

Honey-and-Tea Jammers

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Honey-and-Tea Jammers. Jammers are one of Dorie’s  signature cookies, and we have made a different version before.

Jammers comprise a sable cookie topped with a jam centre surrounded by streusel. These Jammers have a tea and honey flavoured cookie base. I used T2 Strawberries and Cream tea, given to  me by my friend Swee, to flavour my cookies. As suggested, I used strawberry jam for all but 4 of my Jammers, as I ran out of it, and blackcurrant jam for the final 4. I actually liked the blackcurrant ones the best, but all of them were good. 

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

TWD - Parisian Macarons

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Parisian Macarons. These delicate, pretty

treats had a moment a few years back as the successor to the cupcake, and they are still very popular.

I have made macarons before here and here. I have even gone out of my way to try macarons made by patissiers here and here.

It is more than 10 years since I last made macarons, so I think it was time. Dorie’s recipe turned out well for me, with feet and all.

I tinted my half recipe of macarons pale pink, which required more colouring than I expected. I filled some of them with musk flavoured ganache (using the aptly named Flamingo Fantasy flavouring) made with pink chocolate melts:

 

Flamingo Fantasy is the perfect way to describe these macarons:

I filled the remainder of the macarons with strawberry jam:

I may have piped my macarons a tad too large so some of them spread into one another, but they were devine nevertheless.

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.