Tan Squares

I love old fashioned slices, and anything with caramel is a winner for me. Accordingly, when a lady at work posted her mum’s recipe for Tan Squares on our Intranet, I was sold.

Tan Squares are a little like millionaire’s shortbread, but with a crumble topping instead of chocolate. The base and the crumble topping use the same dough, so they are quick and easy to make.

I had never previously heard of Tan Squares, but despite their plain name, they are delicious, and are a keeper in my books.

To make Tan Squares, you will need:

Base

175g butter
115g sugar
275g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Filling

200g condensed milk
2 tablespoons golden syrup
50g butter

For the base:

Grease and line a 20cm square cake tin, leaving an overhang of paper on two opposite sides of the tin.

Cream the butter and the sugar in a stand mixer. Beat in the vanilla, then mix in the flour on low speed.

Press half of the base mixture into an even layer in the base of the cake tin and place into the fridge to chill for 30 minutes. Put the remaining dough into a bowl and place in the fridge to chill.

For the filling:

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Melt the butter, golden syrup and condensed milk together in a small saucepan, then stir over low heat until it turns golden brown. Remove from the heat.

Spread the filling carefully  over the chilled base, then sprinkle the rest of the dough loosely over the top of the filling to form a crumble topping.

Put the slice into the preheated oven to bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown on top.

Remove the slice from the oven and allow it to cool completely in the tin before carefully lifting the slice out of the tin using the baking paper overhang as handles. Place the slice onto a chopping board and slice into 16 squares or whatever size you prefer.

Enjoy with a cup of tea or coffee for a decadent treat.

TWD - Peanut Butter and Fudge Brownies

This week's Tuesday with Dorie recipe from Dorie's Cookies certainly packs a punch flavour-wise.  It is Peanut Butter and Fudge Brownies, and the end product is as decadent as it sounds.

If you followed the recipe exactly, these brownies contain nearly half a kilo of chocolate.  I went all the way in the brownie itself, but I halved the quantity of the chocolate topping as my inner calorie counter was having a conniption as it was.

The brownies contain 283g of chocolate, a cup and a half of sugar, 170g of butter, four eggs and a cup of peanuts, the glaze features a cup of  peanut butter and the topping (full batch) contains 200g of chocolate, with another 113g of butter between the two of them.  Yikes!  I committed the cardinal sin of not reading the recipe before I started, so I made the full batch - if I had read it through first, I would definitely have scaled this down.  Sure, there are 32 brownies, but it still ain't diet food.

Undoubtedly, these brownies are delicious (hey, peanuts, chocolate and sugar!), but I felt guilty just looking at them.  I gave half of them to my neighbours, and I am attending Pilates for the first time in forever tomorrow, so I will share the love with my teacher and class mates.  I am OK to snaffle a few of these brownies (they really are delicious!), but given my proclivity for eating things I shouldn't already, I don't need these in the house.

Luckily, these brownies do freeze, so if you are tempted, you can make a batch and stick some in the freezer for later.

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

Chocolate Ganache and Blackberry Cake - Charlotte Ree's recipe

Celebrate your birthday today. Celebrate being happy every day.

Anonymous

On Tuesday, my blog quietly turned 13 years old.  It's hard to believe that I started this blog so long ago.  I spent a good couple of years reading other people's blogs before I decided that I could so it too, and jumped in.  And here I still am, though much less frequently, as I have found Instagram a much quicker and easier way to share my cooking adventures.

I think the fact that I am still blogging is an occasion worth celebrating, so I will do so in the time honoured fashion of sharing a cake.

This cake is Chocolate Ganache and Blackberry Cake, and fittingly,  I discovered the recipe on my new favourite medium, Instagram.  It was posted by Charlotte Ree, an Australian baker who has published a cookbook fittingly called Just Desserts.

Despite looking ultra-chocolatey, this cake is flavoured with cocoa rather than chocolate.  The chocolate ganache and the blackberries are decorations on the cake rather than being ingredients.

I was particularly drawn to this cake because Charlotte had baked her version in the same Nordic Ware bundt tin that I had bought just before the lockdown started.  I hadn't had a chance to use it because one person does not need a whole bundt cake, but I had visitors coming for the first time in weeks on the weekend that I made it, so there was an excuse to make a whole cake.  And it certainly was a beauty of a cake, inside and out: 

I also shared this cake with my downstairs neighbours, who told me not once but twice how much they enjoyed it.  Now there's a ringing endorsement. 

You can find the recipe for this cake in Charlotte's book, on her Instagram site, or online here.  Go on, make it - I know you want to!

On that note, happy bloggiversary to Laws of the Kitchen.

Spritz Cookies

When I was growing up, my mum often made biscuits she calls “Pusher Biscuits”, because they are made with a biscuit press.  More commonly, these biscuits are known as Spritz Cookies, or Spritzgeback (squirt cookies) in Germany.

I was (and am) fascinated by the various shapes formed when the biscuit dough was extruded from the biscuit press. They are just so pretty.

These biscuits are shortbread like in flavour, and Mum always sandwiches them in pairs with water icing.

The dough is simple enough to make, but it is important to get a sufficiently firm consistency for the biscuits to be extruded correctly from the biscuit press. The biscuit press itself can be rather temperamental, and there were a couple of discs that would not work for me, no matter how hard I tried. If you don’t own a biscuit press, the dough can be extruded in short lengths from a pastry bag fitted with a wide star tip.

To make these biscuits, you will need:

120g butter, softened

1/2 cup white sugar

1 egg, lightly beaten with a fork

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 tablespoons cornflour

1 3/4 cups self raising flour

1 pinch salt

1 cup icing sugar, sifted

1-2 drops of food colouring (optional)

cold water

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Place the butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, and beat until pale and creamy. Place the egg into the bowl and beat well, followed by the vanilla.

In another bowl, sift the flour, cornflour and salt together. Add the sifted flours to the other ingredients, and beat until the ingredients just come together to form a firm dough with the consistency of pastry. (If your dough is not firm enough, it won’t extrude properly from the biscuit press; if this happens, just mix a little more self raising flour into the dough until the dough extrudes correctly.)

Form the dough into a log and fit it into a biscuit press fitted with your choice of disc and press the biscuits onto baking sheets lined with baking paper, leaving 2cm or so between the biscuits so that they have room to spread while baking.

Put the biscuit trays into the oven for approximately 10 minutes or until the biscuits turn lightly golden brown at the edges, turning the trays front to back and top to bottom half way during the baking time.

Remove the biscuits from the oven and transfer to wire racks to cool completely.

To make the icing, mix the icing sugar with just enough water to make a spreadable (not runny) icing, and colour as desired. (I used 2 drops of rose pink colouring.)

Arrange the cooled biscuits into pairs of the same shape and size. Spread the icing onto one biscuit of each pair, and place the other biscuit of the pair on top. Set the biscuits aside on a flat surface until the icing sets before storing in an airtight container.

TWD - Fruit and Nut Croquants

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Fruit and Nut Croquants. These biscuits are like a hybrid of biscotti and meringues, but are only baked once. They are crisp on the outside, and chewy in the middle.

I used cranberries and almonds in my croquants, and sprinkled nutmeg orange sugar from Gewurzhaus on top. I didn’t have cloves, so I substituted nutmeg and cloves for nutmeg and cardamom. They tasted really good, a bit like Christmas.

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

Adam Liaw’s Chicken and Pumpkin Curry

There’s nothing like a good curry when the weather turns frosty, and I have seen a few great recipes lately.

Adam Liaw’s Chicken and Pumpkin Curry recipe on Instagram caught my eye, as Ihad all of the ingredients (more or less).

The recipe is simple and tasty, and the list of ingredients is not too long for a curry.

To make this curry, you will need:

Rampeh

8 macadamia nuts (I used cashew nuts)
2cm galangal (I skipped it)
2cm ginger (I used a squirt of ginger from a tube)
5 garlic cloves (again, I used a squirt from a tube)
1 onion

Other ingredients

1 chicken, jointed (I chopped up a couple of chicken breasts)
1/2 butternut pumpkin (I used Kent pumpkin)
10 curry leaves (I used the zest of a lime instead)
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons Baba’s meat curry powder (I used Keens Mild Curry Powder)
400ml coconut cream
800ml water
(I also added about 250g snow peas toward the end of the cooking time)


Put the rampeh ingredients into a food processor and blitz to form a paste.

Put a tablespoon of oil into a deep frypan or wok and heat until sizzling. Fry the rampeh in the pan for 10 minutes, then add the remaining ingredients to the pan and bring to a boil; reduce the heat to a simmer and simmer for 40 minutes.

Serve with steamed or boiled rice.

TWD - Cocktail Puffs

This week’s TWD recipe is Cocktail Puffs. Doristas who made these last fortnight said the dough was fussy and the biscuits were teeny tiny - and I agree on both counts.

When the dough goes for its first chill, as Dorie says, it’s more like frosting than dough. Even after the first chill, the dough is very sticky. All up, this dough sits in the freezer for 3 hours.

The biscuits are filled with a thin layer of savoury spread - I used mustard pickles. They are folded over and cut into one inch pieces - absolutely tiny. I made 11 biscuits from one quarter of the recipe.

The end product tastes fine, but not worth the time and effort to get there.

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