EwE - Mixed Berry Cobbler - Red, White or Blue: It's Up To You!

The US celebrated the 4th of July this week, so Kayte chose a "Red, White or Blue - It's Up to You" theme for Eating with Ellie.  

I decided to go red, white and blue by making Ellie's Mixed Berry Cobbler from So Easy.  There were red cherries, blue blueberries and white (ish) cobbler crust - served with vanilla icecream: 

Look at  all that scrummy oozy fruit - and the crust is made with wholemeal flour and minimal butter:

This was so wonderful served warm on a cold winter's night.

To see what everyone else made for this week's Eating with Ellie, visit the LYL section of the EwE website.

Old Fashioned Apple Pie

Don't you hate it when you buy apples and get them home, to find that they are rather bland and chewy?  That happened to me recently, and I was left with over a kilo of apples that weren't much good for eating as they were.

Rather than waste the apples, I decided to make an apple pie.  I made my apple pie using a combination of recipes so that the end product fitted in with what I wanted.

I flicked through Pie It Forward by Gesine Bullock-Prado and came across her recipe for Vermont Apple Pie.  She makes a rough puff pastry for the crust.  However, the rough puff pastry makes an enormous amount of dough, which uses a correspondingly enormous quantity of ingredients (only a quarter of the recipe is required for this pie).  Instead, I opted to make Dorie Greenspan's Good for Almost Everything Pie Dough (a double recipe for a double crust) from Baking - From My Home To Yours. 

Pastry sorted, I only made half of the filling in Gesine's recipe because I only had 5 apples.  I probably should have used a stronger cheese in the filling, because I really couldn't taste the mild cheese that I used.

Regardless, pie is pie, and this one tasted really good.  It was a great way to use up substandard apples and turn them into something delicious.  

Chocolate Double Miso-lution Brownies

For those outside of Australia, we had our Federal election last Saturday.  Unusually, it was a double dissolution election, where the entire upper house of parliament (the Senate) was dissolved and to be voted for, as opposed to just half of it, which is the norm.  This was an attempt by the then current Coalition government to rid itself of a hostile Senate with many disparate independent senators. However, if you follow Australian politics, you will know that this strategy failed dismally, and we are now faced with the prospect of a hung parliament (with neither of the major parties having a clear majority) and an even more hostile Senate.

There is a terrific show on the ABC called Kitchen Cabinet, where political reporter and home baker Annabel Crabb visits the homes of various politicians and attempts to get inside their heads while sharing a meal.  Annabel always brings dessert.  When she visited Malcolm Turnbull, our current Prime Minister, she brought self-styled Chocolate Double Miso-lution Brownies (a word play on double dissolution) for dessert.  Malcolm didn't get the joke and did not react when she mentioned the name of her brownies.  Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

I however was intensely interested in making the Chocolate Double Miso-lution Brownies because, as the name suggests, they contain miso paste, giving the salty-sweet flavour that is all the rage at present.  I was pleasantly surprised - the miso is not overpowering and just adds a hint of something that you probably wouldn't be able to identify if you didn't know what it was.  The white chocolate on top gives a nice sweet, slightly crunchy contrast to the dense salty-sweet brownie beneath.

If you fancy joining us to munch on some Double Miso-lution Brownies while we wait for  an election result, the recipe is as follows:

200g butter
145g sugar 
3 eggs 
200g dark chocolate
3 tablespoons shiro (sweet white miso paste)
50g plain flour 
50g cocoa powder 
100g white chocolate

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Beat the butter and sugar in a stand mixer until pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Mix in the miso paste using a metal spoon. 

Melt the dark chocolate in a bain marie or microwave, then cool slightly before folding into the brownie batter.

Sift the flour and cocoa together then fold gently into the batter until just combined.

Spread the batter into a greased and lined 23 x 23 square cake tin (mine was a little smaller). Chop the white chocolate into small pieces and press them lightly just into the surface of the brownie, leaving the pieces mostly above the batter to allow them to caramelise without sinking.

Bake the brownies in the pre-heated oven for 20-30 minutes.  Remove from the oven and allow the brownies to cool on a wire rack before cutting into squares.

Stars and Stripes Cookies for the 4th of July

It is the 4th of July today, American Independence Day.  To mark this occasion, I have made Stars and Stripes Cookies using my improved biscuit decorating skills from my course at Miss Biscuit in Seddon (post to come).

I made Miss Biscuit's no chill vanilla sugar cookie dough - if you are interested in the recipe, you can buy it in downloadable form here.

Here are my baked cookies:

I was going to make star shaped cookies, but my star cutter is tiny - too tiny for the design I wanted to do, which was inspired by a design on Pinterest.

Here is my icing equipment all set up ready to go, as we did in our Miss Biscuit class: 

The base recipe for royal icing was again Miss Biscuit's recipe, which is made using egg white powder rather than raw egg whites.  I made black outlining icing (which used a ton of black gel colouring!), and red, white and blue for the flooding icing.

Here are the outlined cookies ready for flooding: 

Here are the cookies after the first stage of flooding:

And here they are, all finished:

To help the icing dry out in our cold and wet weather, I placed the cookies in the oven on low heat (120 degrees Celsius - that's as low as my oven will go) for 15 minutes.  This is a trick I learned from The Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits, though they put their cookies in the oven at 50-70 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes instead.

These cookies are quite time consuming to make, but I think they turned out great.

Happy 4th of July to all of my US readers!

Cantaloupe Meringue Pie

Last week, I brought you Cantaloupe Bread with Walnut Glaze.  I still had oodles of cantaloupe to use up, so I made another of the unusual cantaloupe recipes that my Web search brought up - Cantaloupe Meringue Pie.

This one sounds almost not possible, but believe me, it is.  Best of all, it uses up a whole cantaloupe (mine was very large to start with so I just used what I had left). 

The top photo was taken while the pie was still warm, so the filling was not quite set.  It tasted delicious, but the filling tended to spill out of the sides of the slice of pie.  It is better to wait until the pie is cooled before cutting it, when you get this:

Isn't the bright orange colour amazing!  It makes a nice twist on lemon meringue pie, and has the advantage of not being as sweet, so it won't blow your mind with sugar.

I used gingernut biscuits in my pie crust instead of Graham crackers (because Graham crackers aren't readily available here).

If you fancy trying something a little different and you like cantaloupe, then I highly recommend making this pie.

EwE - Warm Bulgar Salad with Grapes and Feta - The Colour Purple

This week's Eating with Ellie theme chosen by Margaret is The Colour Purple.  I made Ellie's Warm Bulgar Salad with Grapes and Feta - the grapes and red onion in the salad are purple, and I used cracked purple wheat.

This dish is lovely - the nutty bulgar wheat pairs nicely with the creamy feta and sweet grapes, and the kick from the red onion.  It is a nice filling salad as well, and I served it as a side with Ellie's Pork Tenderloin with Fennel and Grapes.

I would definitely make this salad again, and it is yet another winner from Ellie.

To see what other purple dishes the others made, visit the LYL section of the EwE website.

TWD - Rice Pudding, Strawberries, and Spiced Hibiscus Syrup

This week's Tuesday with Dorie alternate recipe is Rice Pudding, Strawberries, and Spiced Hibiscus Syrup.  I do love rice pudding, so I was very happy to make this.  However, I only made a half recipe because I didn't want to make my rice pudding into a roly poly (me).

The rice pudding is made with a very small amount of arborio rice, which is pre-cooked then plumped up with lots of milk.  I used skim milk because that is the only milk that I use, and it worked fine.  The pudding is topped with chopped strawberries (no magic there), and a spiced syrup which is meant to be flavoured with hibiscus tea.  The spices are black pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and orange. I couldn't find pure hibiscus tea, so I used a passionfruit tea that claimed to have "a twist of hibiscus".  In reality, it just tasted like passionfruit, but that suited me fine.

I really enjoyed this pudding.  The serves are quite small, but when you consider that one serve contains a whole cup of milk, that is adequate.

To see what the other Dorie bakers made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.