Easter Eatings - Hot Cross Buns and Fairtrade Chocolate

Happy Easter everyone! It just isn't quite Easter without some hot cross buns and this year I decided to bake some for my family instead of buying them.

To be honest, I've never been a big fan of hot cross buns but my parents seem to love them so I baked some for them. But I do know that I love freshly baked bread so eating these buns still hot from the oven and slathered with melted butter made them taste much better :)

And just in time for Easter, I received a block of Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate from the lovely people at The Online Circle.

The great thing about Cadbury Dairy Milk is that it now uses Fairtrade products which means that the cocoa farmers get a fair price for their products as well as extra money to invest in social, economic and environmental development in their own communities. Yet another reason to indulge in some chocolate this Easter!

Placecard Cookies

As I mentioned in my previous post about Après restaurant, I made sure that I sat next to people who would be willing to share their food with me so I could try all the dishes on the menu. In order to do this, I had to make place cards.

Since I wasn't having a cake, I also wanted people to have a little something to take home so I decided to kill two birds with one stone by making placecard cookies.

These cookies were just basic sugar cookies glazed with purple royal icing and white royal icing used to pipe on the names. It was my first time piping out letters and I was really worried that they would turn out a big mess but thanks to Queen Chu who let me borrow her piping set, and a bit of patience on my part, they turned out beautifully.

Photo courtesy of BLT

I wrapped them up in some plastic gift bags, tied some purple ribbon around the top and placed them on the table setting when we arrived at the restaurant. Everyone loved the cookies which were crumbly and buttery, with BLT and Captain Awesome polishing off their cookies before dinner had even begun!

Strawberry Meringue Layer Cake

It was my grandma's birthday and my family had requested I make a cake for her. Something light. Something 'healthy'.

I didn't think there was such thing as a healthy cake but I spent my time poring over cookbooks to find one that didn't have too much fat and wasn't too dense and heavy. I came across this beautiful cake in Nigella Lawson's Forever Summer and since my grandma's favourite colour is red, I thought it was quite appropriate to have plump, rosy red strawberries standing out against a white cream surface.

It all seemed to be going well except when I took my cakes out of the oven, the meringue hadn't puffed up as I expected it to but instead had flattened down into a sugary, slightly chewy layer. I read and reread the recipe and I'm quite sure I did everything right, so anyone have any suggestions as to why my meringue didn't puff up?

In any case, the cake was still ethereally light and sweet and sandwiched a delicious combination of lightly whipped cream and strawberry halves in the centre. It was well received even by my grandma who even ate a whole piece to herself! She usually insists she can't eat that much and tries to offload some cake to other family members or gives it to my grandpa. I took it as a compliment that she managed to polish off her own slice of cake this time :)

Gleaming Maple Cheesecake & Glazed Ham

Christmas has well and truly passed now but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy a nice glazed ham or a festive cheesecake anytime you want. I spent my Christmas at home surrounded by my loving family and lots of delicious food. Two items on our Christmas menu included a glazed ham from Donna Hay and a gleaming maple cheesecake from Nigella Lawson. To see what other food was on offer that day, check out this post!

My cheesecake was well received, although being my fiercest critic I knew it was overbaked and not as light and creamy as it should be. I'm not sure whether to blame my oven or not but I checked it after half the supposed baking time and it already looked done. I took it out about 10 minutes after that and I knew that it had been in the oven for too long since it was missing the wobbly centre.

Despite my mistakes in making this cheesecake, I would definitely make it again. The maple syrup smells fantastic and permeates through the whole cake. And of course, the gleaming layer of maple syrup on top of the cheesecake is a definite crowd-pleaser.

I've also included in this post (just for you, Trissa!) the orange glazed ham that my Mum made. The glaze was delicious except there simply wasn't enough of it, both when it was being glazed and in taste. The recipe below is straight out of the book but I would suggest perhaps making double quantities of the glaze since most of the glaze was already used up the first time the ham came out of the oven. Glazing it a few more times would also help impart more of the flavour onto the ham.

Gingerbread Galore!

The lovely bloggers Helen from Grab Your Fork and Suze from chocolatesuze recently organised a massive Xmas party for Sydney food bloggers. Everyone brought along a dish to share and needless to say with around 50 food bloggers in attendance, we ended up with huge amounts of food. Check out these posts for more foodie madness!

Amongst a tiered platter of classic kids favourites, "Elvis" cupcakes, a slow cooked Bo Ssam, chicken wings, a Makoto sushi platter and other delicious offerings, I made some iced gingerbread cookies for the occasion (recipe below).

A few days later I also decided to try out raspberri cupcakes' mini gingerbread houses. These turned out great and now there is a cute little gingerbread house sitting on my dining table awaiting it's destruction on Christmas Day! 

I didn't make all four houses in the recipe so I had some dough leftover for some gingerbread Christmas trees and gingerbread men to decorate the garden around my house. The house was very sturdy and the measurements for the house were perfect! Thanks Steph :)

It's not quite finished yet - on the day I intend on sprinkling some sifted icing sugar for some snow and also putting a puff of smoke from the chimney using mini marshmallows and an unravelled paperclip, as shown in the raspberri cupcakes recipe. More photos will be posted up of the finished product later.

Inspired by Chocolatesuze: Rainbow Vanilla Buttercake

Looks like a normal cake right?

Until you cut a slice out of it to reveal crazy rainbow colours!

I had planned on baking something amazing for my dear friend Queen Chu's 21st birthday, but it wasn't until I saw this cake that I thought a) I have to make this! and b) I'm crazy! At this point in time chocolatesuze had yet to post up her method of making her amazing rainbow cake so I was sort of improvising along the way and just praying that everything would turn out alright.

I was never as ambitious as chocolatesuze to make an astounding 20 layers in her cake AND make it into a fork shape, so I ended up with 8 layers. I didn't have high hopes for success while I was baking this, hence the lack of process photos but it turned out surprisingly well (albeit a bit lopsided!). Chocolatesuze's recipe is here for a 20 layer cake and probably one that is more efficient to make but I'll post mine below anyway just in case you're interested ;)

Masterchef Fever: Apple Tarte Tatin

As any Masterchef fanatic would know, Celebrity Masterchef begins tomorrow at 7.30pm on channel 10! I have my doubts whether it will be as successful as normal Masterchef, but we'll see how it goes...


To celebrate the return of Masterchef to our television-waves, I have tried and tested the Apple Tarte Tatin from the first pressure test and it turned out to be not so stressful after all hehe. I've made this a couple of times since it aired on tv and have made a few changes to the original recipe since at home we don't usually have a 45 minute time limit imposed on us!


The apples are deliciously soft and caramelised and the pastry has that lovely "crrrunch!" that Matt Preston seems to go on and on about. And of course, anything containing apples and pastry that's fresh out of the oven tastes even better when paired with vanilla ice cream ;)

Cooking with BLT: Chilli Chocolate Brownies

Don't worry, this post isn't about some weird chilli chocolate brownie that involves bacon, lettuce and tomato as well! It's about a planned chillout night at Sir D's place which quickly turned out to be a boys night + my friend BLT and myself. So what do we do when the boys are playing video games? We bake of course!

Although I love a classic chocolate brownie, sometimes spicing things up with a kick of chilli just makes things a bit more exciting ;). In this case it definitely made things more exciting, since we decided to play a practical baking joke and give some unsuspecting guys a super-mega-chilli hit!

Deadly dousing of chilli...

The brownies were well received by all, even by those who received a slice that had been given the extreme chilli treatment. Funnily enough, most of them thought that there was something wrong with their tastebuds when they tasted the spicyness in the brownie rather than there being something wrong with the brownie itself! BLT and I were beginning to think that we hadn't doused the brownie with enough chilli powder until one person said, "I need some water...!"

Brown Sugar Pavlova

After eating the glorious brown sugar pavlova from MuMu Grill and seeing Not Quite Nigella's success at recreating it, I had to try and make it at home. I wanted the pavlova to be the main attraction so I decorated it simply with some sweetened whipped cream and some strawberries. Sir D also likes his pavlova with less of that gooey, spongy interior so I left it in the oven for a bit longer so that it dried out a bit more.


And although I must admit that it wasn't nearly as good as the pavlova from MuMu Grill, it was greatly enjoyed by Sir D and myself. It turned out superbly crunchy on the outside with a bit of the spongy, airy meringue on the inside, and along with the strawberries and cream made for a fantastic home-made dessert. And for once, my pavlovas didn't collapse when I added the cream and fruit so yay for that!

Strawberry Clafoutis

After eating a hearty dinner of roast chicken and vegetables, a warm comforting dessert was in order. We picked up some divine smelling strawberries from the supermarket and decided to use them in our dessert. I had read about a strawberry clafoutis on Citrus and Candy only the night before, and after salivating over pictures of a baked custardy dessert I knew I had to give it a go. It's a great recipe because I don't often have cream in the fridge and whilst most clafoutis recipes require cream, this one uses butter which I pretty much always have on hand.


It turned out to be a great hit - BLT loved the custard mixture so much she practically licked the bowl clean! Make sure you eat it while it's still warm out of the oven as a great remedy for the winter blues.

Apple Crumble

I don't remember exactly when I started baking, but it might have all began around the end of primary school with those kids cookbooks. I have failed in my baking many times - the height of my baking fails would probably be failing even when making a packet cake mixture. Hopefully since then I have improved and now whenever I get a hankering for something sweet after dinner and I don't have many ingredients, I whip up an apple crumble which is especially good on cold winter's nights.

This is a crumble recipe with no oats (since Sir D doesn't like oats) and it produces a crumbly and crunchy crumble at the top. I made this the other night for some friends (with the help of Sir D, debdebdeb and Spud) and it was the perfect end to a great bake night!