When I told Miss5 that I was baking a Mexican chocolate cake she asked if it had tacos and beans in it. No, it doesn’t, but it does have one helluva kick. This comes courtesy of some spice that transform the sometimes overly sweet flavour of chocolate cake into a cake for grown-ups. I found the recipe on food.com and tweaked it. Continue reading
Firstly – an apology for the lack of photos with this post. I’ve been baking like a mad woman in the last few weeks for various Christmas-related events and even though I intend to photograph as I go for my blog it hasn’t turned out this way.
Sigh.
First up, a super easy Christmas ice cream pudding that I’ve been making for many, many years. I have no idea where the original recipe comes from but it is embarrassingly easy.
This is so simple and a perfect dessert for Christmas Day in Sydney, which is, without fail, a squillion degrees. I made nine desserts for my mother-in-law’s Christmas lunch on the weekend and this was the first thing to vanish.
GATHER:
2 litres best quality vanilla ice cream, softened
1 cup mixture of sultanas, currants and raisins
Good splash of rum
¼ cup glace cherries, chopped
2 tablespoons cinnamon
LET’S GET TO IT:
Soak the dried fruit [but not the glace cherries] in rum and leave overnight.
Line a 2-litre pudding basin with cling wrap, leaving overhang.
Working quickly tip the softened ice cream into a large bowl and stir in rum-soaked fruit, cinnamon and cherries.
If desired place some home-made chocolates [see below] in the base of the pudding basin, then add ice cream. Smooth the top then fold over the overhanging cling wrap. Wrap in foil and freeze overnight.
Home made Christmas chocolates
I found a similar idea for these little chocs online and Christmas-afied them using red and green Christmas sprinkles from a baking store. Simply line two mini muffin pans with mini liners. Place 150g your choice of chocolate with a splash of canola oil in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Stir until melted and glossy. Pour chocolate into mini pans until bottom is covered and then a bit more. Sprinkle over Christmas sprinkles and place in fridge for a few hours until firm. Remove and discard wrappers.
Miss 7 and I made these for her to hand out to her class. We bundled a few up in cellophane bags for all of her classmates. I should have taken a photo…
The sad, neglected apples sitting unloved in the fruit bowl were never going to get eaten. They looked so shiny, so full of hope in the greengrocers. By the time they had completed the journey home and been relegated to the big purple ceramic fruit bowl they had begun to lose their lustre. A cake would turn these lovelies into something befitting their sweet taste. Continue reading
Our rosemary bush is a beast of a thing – large, unwieldy but capable of producing the most fragrant and delicious tasting leaves. No matter how much we use or give away there is always more, more, more taking over our herb garden.
Looking for another way to use it I stumbled across the mistress of original cooking concepts, Nigella Lawson. My well-thumbed copy of ‘How To Be A Domestic Goddess’ provided the answer with this luscious cake.
Continue reading
If you are trying to watch your waistline or worried about the soaring costs of dental care avert your eyes. For this treat be both fat-and-sugar laden *but* it is super delicious and a cinch to make. Continue reading
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – cinnamon is the new black. The older I get the less I’m interested in sickly sweet desserts and cakes but I still want something with a real taste. I love vanilla [real, actual vanilla – not the nasty synthetic stuff] and I love cinnamon. This cinnamon tea cake has both which makes it a real winner. Continue reading
I was sent a copy of ‘After Toast – Recipes for Aspiring Cooks’ by Kate Gibbs to review in my day job as a journalist at The Leader newspaper. I brought it home to test some recipes and the first one to get the Hungry Mum treatment was her recipe called All About The Chocolate Loaf. I adore chocolate cakes that actually use chocolate, rather than cocoa, and this delivers that intense choc hit I was after. Ms Gibbs said the cake improves over a day or two but I served mine that evening. She suggests sesame & almond praline as an accompaniment but I lathered mine with dark chocolate ganache and walnut pieces.
GATHER:
1 1/3 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon bicarb soda
130g dark choc melted
200 g butter, diced, at room temperature
1 ¼ cups brown sugar
2 large eggs
splash vanilla
1 cup boiling water
LET’S GET TO IT:
Preheat oven to 190C and grease and line a 23cmx 13cm loaf pan.
Sift flour with bicarb, set aside.
Cream butter and sugar in bowl of electric mixer until pale, then add eggs one at a time, then vanilla.
Fold in melted chocolate. Add one heaped spoon of flour at a time and boiling water alternately, stirring after each addition [I didn’t end up using all the water]. Batter will be runny. Make sure there are no lumps.
Pour into pan and bake for 30 minutes. Reduce heat to 170C and cook for another 15 minutes.
Remove and allow to cool for about two hours before turning on a wire rack. When cold dress with choc ganache or icing sugar.
Yes, it is muffin mania at the Hungry Mum! What’s not to love about a portable sweet treat that requires no icing and no cutting?
Pumpkin has long been my favourite vegetable but it is only recently that I have been attracted to the idea of adding it to sweet dishes. In Australia it is served roasted or sometimes mashed but always savoury. Thanks to international baking blogs I am becoming somewhat obsessed with plonking pumpkin into my baking repertoire. Unlike the US we don’t have canned pumpkin here so it requires a fair bit of effort to chop/boil/mash the pumpkin but it is so worth it. Continue reading
I love making muffins – they are quick and easy and people tend to think it is fine to eat what is essentially cake at any time of the day. Win! I felt like making something with a hit of ginger recently and stumbled across this recipe on bestrecipes.com.au and knew it would be good. It creates quick, fast muffins that are moist and flavoursome.
GATHER:
1 cup of boiling water
¼ cup golden syrup
1 teaspoon bicarb
2 eggs
½ cup vegetable oil
¾ cup caster sugar
2 cups plain flour
1 tablespoon ground ginger
LET’S GET TO IT:
Preheat oven to 170C and line a 12 tin muffin pan with wrappers.
Pour boiling water into a bowl, add golden syrup, bicarb and mix, then allow to cool for 5 minutes.
Stir in oil, eggs and sugar and mix.
Add remaining ingredients and stir with a silver spoon until just combined [do not over-mix or muffins will be tough]. Mixture will be very wet so use a ladle to fill up muffin wrappers.
Bake 15-ish minutes.
Serve warm as is or allow to cool, then dust with icing sugar.
Joy the Baker is a legend. Her eponymous website is an inspiration and her recipes always work. I had a hankering to make some bickies the other day and her site was my first port of call. She wrote about these lovely brown sugar cookies last September and said she found the recipe in Epicure. Continue reading
the hungry mum 