So the internet is awash with chocolate cake recipes. Dark chocolate cake. Flourless chocolate cake. Fudgy chocolate cake. Full fat with whipped cream chocolate cake. Low fat chocolate cakes. Mud cake. Chocolate and fruit/nuts/booze/ cake.
In my time I have baked and eaten many, many chocolate cakes. Many are not worthy of the time or calories. Often they are insipid. Or dry. Or forgettable.
This is the chocolate cake that you have been waiting for.
Sometimes you want an easy-to-throw together cake that isn’t vanilla or chocolate. Sometimes you have a pantry full of honey as every time you’re at a fair or farmers market and you see another variety of honey you just can’t help yourself and end up buying yet another jar. Sometimes you just want to watch the hypnotic sensation of honey oozing from a spoon and falling lushly into a bowl of cake batter. Or maybe that’s just me. Continue reading
I am utterly enamoured with my mini donut baking pan. The holes are teeny tiny, resulting in a fairy-sized morsel that it irresistible. Whenever the baking urge strikes I often start with the pan and work backwards, searching for a worthy recipe. I have now found my ‘go to’ recipe for mini chocolate donuts, thanks to the lovely blog mysanfranciscokitchen.com
Going through my stats recently it occurred to me that you all love Donna Hay. This makes me incredibly happy because – as you may have guessed – I too love Donna. I have mentioned it many MANY times here before so it is wonderful to see that we are in simpatico 🙂 Continue reading
How I love a country getaway! When an escape to the country is also a girl’s weekend away it is close to perfection. Continue reading
It will come as no surprise to Hungry Mum devotees that I adore bundts. In fact you may be heartily sick of me posting about these cakes but I just can’t get enough of their buttery goodness. Continue reading
If in doubt, bake. That’s pretty much my mantra and it applies to all sorts of moods: feeling down? Bake. Stressed? Make some cupcakes. Happy? Turn on the oven and crack out the KitchenAid, coz we’re going to get our bake on.
I can’t remember what mood I was in when I baked these more-ish brown sugar and M&M cookies but I do recall the delicious scent that wafted through the kitchen as they were cooking. And I remember feeling so tempted that I immediately ate one as soon as they were out of the oven [note: hot bickies are hot].
Brown sugar, for those new to the whole caper, add a depthness of flavour that caster [white] sugar can’t. It also sounds much posher, dontcha think?
This is a mash-up of a couple of recipes from the Australian Women’s Weekly weighty tome Bake. Buy it – you’ll love it.
Gather:
200g butter, diced and at room temperature
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 ¾ cup plain flour
½ teaspoon bicarb soda
3/4 cup M&Ms
Let’s get to it:
Preheat oven to 170C and grease and line two baking trays with baking paper.
Beat butter, vanilla, sugar and egg in bowl of electric mixer until light and creamy.
Sift in flour and bicarb, stir until mixed then stir in M&Ms.
Roll tablespoons of dough into balls and place on trays about 3cm apart.
Bake 14-ish minutes/until golden, cool on trays.
This is Popcorn, my mini schnauzer, hoping she could sample one. #no
I fell in love with the book ‘Bake – Essential Companion’ by pastry queen Alison Thompson after borrowing it from the library and my lovely hubby surprised with a copy of my own for mother’s day last year.
If you’re a baking fanatic like me you’ll have hours of kitchen fun with this book. I’d never attempted a roulade until this one and I must say, I was very nervous. I did have a few problems with cracks in my cake and totally panicked until the Hungry Dad came to my rescue [swoon] and solved the issue with some ingenious use of plastic wrap. And the finished product was utterly delectable. I omitted the original recipe’s ¼ teaspoon ground cloves as my pantry was clove-free. Continue reading
This is one of my favourite cakes to bake and eat so I was gobsmacked that I hadn’t blogged it already. I searched my blog twice, convinced that I must have already shared such a fab cake with everyone but I hadn’t. MAJOR oversight.
I used a recipe is called ‘Anna Encel’s Wonderful Babka’ in a fav cookbook of mine called ’50 Fabulous Chocolate Cakes’ that gets a major workout in my kitchen.
Like I tend to do I reduced the amount of sugar by half a cup. The original recipe called for 3 tablespoons of drinking chocolate which I changed to melted chocolate. I normally use 100grams of dark chocolate but this time I broke up one of the many milk chocolate Easter bunnies that my girls got for Easter and used that instead. Shhh, don’t say a word….
Gather:
250g butter, melted
3 large eggs
2 ½ cups self-raising flour
1 cup caster sugar
100g melted dark chocolate
1 ½ cups orange juice
½ tsp orange liqueur [optional]
Let’s get to it:
Preheat oven to 180C and thoroughly grease a bundt tin, ensuring you get into all the crevices.
Put all the ingredients except the melted chocolate into the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until well combined.
Pour one half of the mix into the bundt tin then dollop in the melted chocolate. Cover with the remaining batter
Bake 40-ish minutes [depending on your oven you may need another 5 or so minutes]
Allow to cool in tin for about 30 minutes before tipping onto wire rack.
I make a batch of Donna Hay’s hot cross buns every Easter and when eaten fresh from the oven they are heaven on Earth. Like many baked goods they are best the day they are made. You can pop them under the griller after a day or two [if they last that long!].
the hungry mum 