TWD - Chocolate Babka

 This week's Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Chocolate Babka.  This epic recipe takes at least 2 days to make due to the need for the dough to rise, then chill.

However, the end result is simply stunning, and tastes great.  The bread component is a buttery brioche dough, its filled with spices and cocoa, and finally topped off with streusel.

It was pretty exciting shaping the dough - when the rolled log is cut in half, you get some impressive stripes:

Th dough is then braided - pretty, right! 

And after all of that effort, you get a rather handsome looking chocolate babka:

I can't tell you how it compares with the Bread's Bakery chocolate babka, but it was really good.

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

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas all!!

Here’s my Christmas box treats for this year. At the top are macaroons from Anja Dunk’s excellent German baking book, Advent.

And these gingerbread men are made from Anja’s gingerbread house dough recipe.

These rum balls are a perennial favourite family recipe.

These are candied nuts from a David Lebovitz newsletter recipe for candied pecans.

Here’s this year’s Christmas cake, a Sunbeam recipe snipped from a magazine.

Of course, we had to have fudge. The recipe is from The Australian Women’s Weekly Sweet.
 

And here is a gorgeous light display of Australian flora on Brisbane City Hall.

Have a wonderful and blessed festive season everyone.

TWD - Cinnamon-Anise Stars

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Cinnamon-Anise Stars. These bikkies are made from a cinnamon/star anise/coffee spiced dough, topped with a white glaze (sprinkles optional).

They were fairly plain to my taste, but icing makes everything good. And they are pretty cute.

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

TWD - Pear-Comte Tart - Pear Comte Tart

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is pear Comte Tart. It comprises a short crust pastry, coated with mustard and filled with an egg/cheese mixture and topped with sliced pears.

It’s quite a pretty tart. I just used garden variety cheddar.

This tart made the perfect light meal served with salad.

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

TWD - Cranberry Spice Squares

 

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is Cranberry Spice Squares. Except getting fresh or frozen cranberries is impossible here, so I used redcurrants that I froze from Christmas. Same same, don’t you think?

These squares are a squidgy, moist (yes, I said it) gingerbread studded with sharp tangy berries. Three sorts of flour are used to give the squares earthiness (I only used plain flour and wholemeal flour because I didn’t have rye flour.) They smell like Christmas when baking.

The squares are meant to be frosted with cream cheese icing but I didn’t have any cream cheese. They are fine without it.

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

Halloween Pumpkin Cupcakes

It’s Halloween tomorrow, so just for fun, I made some Halloween pumpkin cupcakes. 

The pumpkin cupcake recipe contains minimal sugar and is super simple to make. The recipe is available online at Kidspot here. I only made half to yield 6 cupcakes.
 

I iced my cupcakes with cream cheese frosting tinted orange. For 6 cupcakes, this recipe at Taste.com was sufficient.

The cute Halloween cupcake papers and toppers are from Coles supermarket.

For those who celebrate Halloween, I hope you have a fun night!

TWD - Blue Cheese and Fig Bites

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Blue Cheese and Fig Bites, baked in mini muffin tins. 

I subbed blue cheese for cheddar, fresh figs for fresh pear, and baked them in a standard size muffin tin. It’s a pretty forgiving recipe - I think you can sub the cheese and fruit varieties for whatever you have.

They were rather good - they’d be quite nice served on a cheeseboard.

To see what everyone else made this week and their thoughts, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

TWD - Caramel-Apple Crisp

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Caramel-Apple Crisp. The name says it all.
 

I cheated and used bottled caramel sauce rather than wasting cream and time making my own.

This dessert is delicious. I made a serve for one. Go make it. That is all.

To see the other baked delights from my esteemed Dorista colleagues, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

TWD - Java Mini Mads

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Java Mini Mads. These are coffee flavoured madeleines, baked in mini muffin tins.

I decided just to bake mine in a normal madeleine pan, yielding 12 madeleines.

These were delicious. The humps that I got on these were smaller than I normally get, but I’m ok with that.

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

TWD - Scone Pudding

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Scone Pudding, made using leftover Buttermilk Scones.

The scones are sliced horizontally into thirds and layered into a baking dish, brushed with curd (I used orange curd), topped with spiced custard (I used cardamom), left to soak up the custard, then topped with sliced apple, sprinkled with sugar and baked.

This pudding is meant to be served warm, but I liked it cold as well. It made a nice change to bread and butter pudding.

To see what everyone else thought of their TWD recipe this week, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

 

Madeira Cake

It was my mum's birthday this week.  In a rare event, I was at her place for her birthday, so I made her a birthday cake.

Mum does not like rich cakes, and I heard her once mention that she liked Madeira Cake.  For this reason, I dug out my high school Day to Day Cookery book and made mum a Madeira Cake for her birthday.

This cake is quite simple to make and is rather tasty.  I added a lemon glaze to the top of my cake for a bit of extra sweetness and moisture.

If you would like to try making this cake for yourself, you will need:

120g butter

3/5 cup sugar

grated zest of one lemon

1/4 cup milk

1 1/2 cups self raising flour

Grease and line a loaf tin, and preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Cream the butter and the sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer.  Beat in the eggs, one at a time.  In a separate bowl, sift the flour and stir through the lemon zest.

Add the flour and milk alternately to the cake batter (3 x 1/3 flour, 2 x 1/2 milk, starting and ending with the flour) and mix after each tranche to just combine.

Scrape the  batter into the prepared loaf tin, smoothe the top with a knife, and bake in the preheated oven for 35-40 minutes or until cooked through when tested.  

Remove the cake from the oven and leave in the tin on a wire rack for around 10 minutes before unmoulding from the tin onto the rack to cool completely.

Once the cake has cooled, you can decorate it as you please (I used a simple glaze made of icing sugar and lemon juice).

Passionfruit Coconut Cake

Recently, I made this amazing Passionfruit Coconut Cake from a recipe by Lorraine at Not Quite Nigella.  This luscious cake is flavoured with passionfruit pulp and dessicated coconut, and is topped with a delicious passionfruit flavoured buttercream. 

How good does that look!  I only made half the icing (as I don't like thick icing), and used tinned passionfruit in the cake.  

I absolutely loved this cake - moist (yep, that's a good word for a cake), light and fruity.  An absolute winner!  If you want to get in the mood for summer, this is the perfect cake to make. 

TWD - Buttermilk Scones

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Buttermilk Scones. As the name suggests, these scones are made with buttermilk rather than straight milk (though I cheated and just used soured milk instead).

This scone recipe is different to what I am used to as it contains egg. This made the scone dough rather sticky, and I had to use more flour than the recipe suggested to get anything resembling a workable dough. I also found that the finished product did not rise like a typical scone, presumably because of the texture of the dough.

The end result was perfectly edible (see photo), but it won’t be my go to scone recipe.

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

Orange and Hazelnut Galette

 Last week, a friend gave me some blood oranges, remembering that I had mentioned I always missed the season.

Having been gifted these beauties, I wanted to showcase them, and found this recipe for an Orange and Hazelnut Galette from UK Delicious - perfect!

The recipe features an orange flavoured galette dough topped with hazelnut frangipane and blood orange slices. The only change I made was to use Dorie Greenspan’s galette dough recipe from Baking with Dorie instead of the one in the recipe.

This galette is a delicious dessert, and a fun way to showcase blood oranges, should you be lucky enough to have them.

TWD - Tomato Tart

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie (Baking with Dorie) is Tomato Tart.

If I saw this tart on a menu, it’s not something I’d naturally gravitate to, but this is delicious. 

I made a half recipe for a smaller tart. The savoury galette dough as promised makes a crust that is both crispy and flaky. The partly baked tart shell is topped with a honey-mustard mixture, torn basil and grated cheese, before being layered with sliced, salted and drained tomatoes. More basil is slotted under the tomato slices before baking.

Once the tart comes out of the oven, it is sprinkled with more grated cheese, pepper and more basil.

The tart makes a perfect light lunch when served with salad on the side.

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

Helen Goh’s Favourite Orange Cake

 This weekend, I made a cake that has been on my to do list for a while - Helen Goh's Favourite Orange Cake.  You can find the recipe online here.

The smell of this cake while baking is glorious - it contains a whole boiled orange that has been pureed, and it gives the cake a beautiful orange aroma and flavour.

On Day 1, I left the cake unadorned and ate it warm with icecream for pudding:

On Day 2, instead of using the thick buttercream icing in the recipe, I made a glaze using icing sugar, water and a couple of drops of orange essence to top the cake.

Whichever way you eat this wonderful cake, it is a perfect way to enjoy the flavour of orange in cake form, and very easy to make.  You just need a bit of time (as the orange needs to boil for an hour).

TWD - Fortune Cookies - final DC recipe

Well, we have made it - after nearly six years (!), we are posting the final recipe from Dorie’s Cookies.  The first Dorie’s Cookies recipe was posted on 1 November 2016 (though I was two days’ late).

The last recipe happens to be Fortune Cookies.

These fortune cookies are shaped by hand and in a mini muffin tin. Somehow, mine don’t look quite the right shape, but they’ll do.

I didn’t bother writing my own fortunes - I just printed off some motivational message fortunes from the Web.

My cookies are posing with a tiger brooch for the year of the Tiger.

Here’s a final look at Dorie’s Cookies:

 FINIS

Harry Potter’s Birthday Cake

 It’s Harry Potter’s 42nd birthday today, so I have made a mini replica of the first birthday cake that he ever had, made by Hagrid.

It is a chocolate cake with buttercream icing:

The cake recipe that I used for this cake is available here. I made the icing using this recipe. I made a quarter of the cake recipe for a single layer 6” cake, and half of the icing recipe.

The cake itself is sugar- tastic delicious. A word of warning - you will need to do s crumb coat when icing the cake and have a glass of hot water to dip your knife into while icing the cake, as the cake tends to stick to the icing as you try to spread it.

Happee Birthdae Harry!

TWD - S’mores Icecream Cake

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is S’mores Icecream Cake.

The original was an enormous 9” cake containing a lot of icecream and chocolate. I quartered the recipe and ended up with 2 x 10cm heart shaped cakes.
 

The cake starts with a biscuit and peanut base, topped with icecream, then fudge sauce, then more icecream, then a peanut butter/marshmallow fluff filling, then yet more icecream and finally more fudge sauce. After freezing the cake for 6 hours, it is topped with mini marshmallows that are then torched, and put into the freezer again.

You end up with a cake that is a rather rich, decadent treat:

I used all vanilla icecream rather than 3 separate flavours as suggested by Dorie. Marshmallow fluff is not easy to come by here and I’d be unlikely to use it again, so I made a homemade version using melted marshmallows and corn syrup. 

While I do enjoy this icecream cake, it is quite a process to make and rather decadent, so once what I have is gone, I won’t make it again.

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

TWD - Gozinaki

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Gozinaki.  This is a Georgian sweet made with three ingredients - walnuts, honey and sugar.

You toast and chop the walnuts, then stir them into a mixture of boiled honey and sugar - flatten, roll, shape, set and cut. Done!

This is definitely more of a sweet than a cookie, and it is very sweet. That said, it is delicious, but a small piece is enough.

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

TWD - Crumb- Topped Ricotta Coffee Cake

Today’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Crumb-Topped Ricotta Coffee Cake. It comprises a dense ricotta based cake base, topped with blueberries and finally with a crumb topping.

Mine took almost twice the recommended 50 minutes to bake, but came out ok.

 My recommendation is to serve it warm with icecream - just saying.

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

WWDH - Sticky Miso Roasted Chicken with Sesame Pumpkin

This week’s Wednesday with Donna Hay recipe is Sticky Miso Roasted Chicken on Sesame Pumpkin.

This is a delicious dish where pumpkin doused in a sesame seed mixture is topped with chicken coated with a miso paste sauce.

 I used dukkah in place of just sesame for the pumpkin, and jointed a whole chicken rather than using chicken thigh fillets.

This one is definitely a keeper.

To see more Donna Hay dishes, visit Kayte and Margaret.