the hungry mum

I know everyone loves chocolate but in my home caramel is always – and I mean ALWAYS – the flavour of choice. Milkshakes/puddings/ cakes… if they are given an option they always choose caramel.

Do you find yourself drowning in Easter eggs at this time of year? I know I do. Despite not having a sweet tooth I find mini Easter eggs popping up like mushrooms. They come home from school, they are pressed upon me when I visit shops and cafes and they emerge, quite often, from the handbags of certain grandmothers.

St Patrick`s Day is Friday March 17 and while the day marks a religious and cultural commemoration I believe there is always room for dessert.

In Australia Valentine’s Day is just a minor blip on the calendar, not the huger than huge occasion it is in the US. Nonetheless it gives me a perfect excuse to dust off my heart-shaped cutters and to create something sweet.

It’s the day before Australia day and you’ve been invited to a BBQ and asked to bring a dish. Forget the potato salad, ignore the dips and crackers: this green and gold trifle is simple to make and will turn you into a dessert champ. 

I bake most days so generally the family is pretty blasé about my baked treats. This giant double chocolate skillet cookie is the exception. Upon pulling it from the oven I was met with a chorus of ‘oooh, yum!’, ‘that looks amazing!’, ‘I’m going to eat the whole thing’ etc etc.

Miss 10 adores white chocolate, so I used white choc chips for her. The Hungry Dad and I love dark chocolate so added them for us. Miss 8 has yet to meet a type of chocolate she didn’t adore so she would be thrilled with anything with a trace of cocoa in it.

As always, the simple things in life are often the best – this recipe is basically one huge chocolate chip cookie that you bake in a skillet / frying pan in the oven. Ensure that your pan has a metal handle – do not place a…

I am not a fan of fruit cake. There, I said it. I know it is a tradition, especially at Christmas time, but I find fruit cake heavy and cloying and overbearing. I once made a Christmas cake from scratch, spending the GDP of a small nation on pricey dried and glace fruit. It went pretty much untouched on Christmas Day, and after storing in the pantry for a month or so I ended up throwing it out.

Never again.

Growing up my dad worked for Nestle, which means we had a plethora of items to keep any sweet-tooth person happy. Of all the treats dad would bring home my favourite was always Milo, a malted milk product that we would ladle into mugs of milk, or eat straight from the jar.