Quite a bit of baking went down in August

So our little brother turned 4! and we just had to bake him a chocolate cake - thank you Aunty Erin and the BBC for the delish recipe!

I had oodles of icing left over from various things, so decided to swirl them onto cupcakes and sprinkle them with a bit of happiness (orange & yellow sprinkles). not too shabby.

Here's a South African mainstay : melktert. It's really delicious. I used a recipe in a classic SA cookery book (Kook en Geniet) and they just AREN'T the way I remember them. I will have to hunt for another one and make them again! 's all there is to it

what to do with 3 OLD bananas?

 

The answer of course is : Nigella Lawson. Bless her!
in her book, Nigella Express, she has a lovely little recipe for banana muffins with butterscotch bits. It's got a huge amount of oil in it, but the muffins come out light and peel out of their cases with ease. What more could you ask for ? Just delicious.

Church Bake-Off : bless

 

Calvin's entry - in progress

Francis "Eagle" Lipman organised a church-wide Bake Off. Our boys were the only entries in their age group, so they won. Delightful!

For the St James Primary School Summer Fair, there was a baking competition. The entries were fantastic and so varied. Our boys made swirly cake with bright buttons. Every child was credited with participation and the winners were in 3 categories. I think it'll be an annual fixture going forward.

Mocha cupcake recipe transformed

Those wonderful people at the Hummingbird Bakery have a wonderful Mocha cupcake recipe that I transformed into a cake for the school fair/fete. Delicious!

Victoria Sponge

Nigella's Victoria Sponge recipe is easy to make with great results. Only thing I would change was to try and make it even lighter.

comfort food - South African

We were munching the last of my rusks (bought) the other night and I remembered that I had two cartons of buttermilk in the fridge. Cha-Ching! time to get baking. I found a recipe in the wonderful "Kook en Geniet" (a South African food bible) and got baking. The end product ? really delicious, but I'm not sure if it's just me - the drying time took an eternity! I remember my mum drying rusks in just one night. It took forever. Is it because I'm using a fan oven? Next time I'll add more sugar and a bit more salt - just didn't taste exactly right. Oh well :)

Applefest last week

Apple publishing have produced a bucket of little "500 of X" books. This recipe is from the cupcake one. They were delicious and disappeared in one sitting

Recipe : apple sauce & cinnamon cupcakes

makes 12

115g (4oz) unsalted butter, softened

115g (4oz) caster sugar

115g (4oz) self-raising flour

2 eggs

115g (4oz) unsweetened apple sauce

3/4 tsp cinnamon

50g (2oz) chopped pecans **

75g (3oz) sultanas ≠

1 small red eating apple, thinly sliced

2 tbsp granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 175˚C (350˚F / Gas mark 4). Grease a 12 cup muffin tin.

Place the butter, sugar, flour and egg in a bowl and beat with electric whisk until smooth, about 2 - 3 minutes.

Stir in the apple sauce, cinnamon, pecans and sultanas.

Spoon the batter into the cups. Lay the apple slices on top and sprinkle with a little sugar.

Bake for 25 minutes. Remove tin from the oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes

Remove the cupcakes and cool on a rack. Serve warm.

Store in an airtight container for up to 3 days, or freeze for up to 3 months :)

Ruth's notes :

** I used 1/2 pecans and 1/2 walnuts

≠ Zack wanted chocolate chips so I made up 2/3 sultanas and 1/3 chocolate chips = total weight of 75g

I tripled the recipe and it made 25 large cupcakes (filled to the top). I didn't have enough apple sauce to triple, but it doesn't seem to have made a massive difference.

This is Nigella's Apple Kuchen recipe. It's not bad but it's not amazing. The base took a lot of work - kneading and allowing it to rise overnight, etc etc. It came out lovely and bready which you then top with the apple, eggy-custard topping and the all-spice, slivered almonds, etc. It looks great but wasn't sweet enough or apple-y enough for me. I wanted something more sticky... more sweet throughout. Gotta keep trying.

bread machine sunflower & honey loaf

Our Panasonic bread maker comes with a recipe book. I use it most of the time, but only for the simple recipes. Early on we'd had an issue with a seeded recipe when there was smoke and a dreadful creature at the bottom of the tin at the end. Since then, we haven't attempted anything too adventurous. I tried the sunflower and honey recipe last week and have made it again and again. It's delicious.

Norwegian Mountain Loaf

Cruising through all the recipe books I found this one. She recommended baking it in a silicon break tin, and altho' I used one, I won't do it again – I felt that the bread ended up being to wide and would have been a better shape if I'd baked it in a regular tin. It's deliciously nutty and has both sunflower and linseed in it which is delicious. I'll definitely make it again soon.

nutty seeded wholemeal bread

So I am on a mission to make a delicious, seeded loaf that has just enough sweetness and seeds in it to fill a nostalgic void in me. ha ha! Not sure if it's possible.
In the meantime, I've made a recipe I that was passed down to me by my aunt - it uses buttermilk and honey.
Today I'm trying Nigella's Norwegian Mountain loaf - there are tons of seeds in it, but it doesn't have honey in it.
Once this loaf is eaten I will try another one - possibly with rye flour.

cake sale at school : cupcakes

Year 1 held their fundraising cake sale on Friday. Instead of doing crunchies or flapjacks I went for something straight down the line - cupcakes with butter-cream icing. Thanks to Janine Rose, whose cupcake decorating evening I went to some time ago, I whipped up two dozen vanilla cupcakes and used up all the left over butter-cream icing that was in the fridge (pink & white). Calvin decorated them with smarties and marshmallows. We sold everything and had excellent contributions. I think we made £87.00 on the day which is fabulous.

toffee apple tower cupcakes

Australian Women's Weekly have given us the gift of a wonderful book on cakes, cupcakes and cookies. most of them are pretty ostentatious, and the photograph of this particular recipe is no exception. That being said, now that the actual cupcakes have been made, they are deliciously-scrumptious with their heavy handed helpings of grated apple and maple syrup. Huzzah!
Now all I need to do is make the icing and I can photograph them and post here.