My love of cheese is well-documented to those who know me in real life. Give me a glass of wine, a plate of cheese and you will have my gratitude for life.
I particularly love strong cheeses like ripe bries and bitey cheddars but just recently I have a newfound respect for ricotta. This versatile soft cheese can be used for sweet and savoury dishes. It lends itself to being baked in a cake, oven-baked as a savoury side dish, added to frittatas, stirred through pastas… Continue reading
My favourite flavour for anything sweet is chocolate orange. Always has been, always will be. For my birthday last year we visited the Blue Mountains, a stunning part of New South Wales surrounded by amazing bush – and amazing food. Continue reading
This post is a mash-up of two recipes from books currently sitting on my bench. Like many people reading cookbooks – specifically, baking books that consist mostly of sweet bakes, rather than bread – is my Thing. Continue reading
Regular readers will know that while I love baking I don’t have an overly sweet tooth. Put a mud cake or cupcake in front of me and the response is usually, meh. Place a cheese board within a 5 kilometre radius of me and watch me run and attack it.
The cake I will always eat is a syrup cake. I know – they are usually pumped full of sugar which contradicts everything I just said. What I love about them is their moistness. Part of this is due to the fact that most syrup cakes are made with semolina, almond meal or polenta, which keeps cake soft. But drenching a hot cake in hot flavoured sugar water also goes a long way in ensuring a cake stays beautifully fresh and soft.
And as is often the way, every time I make a syrup cake and offer it to the Hungry Dad he reminds me of how much he doesn’t like syrup cake – in a nice way but still #grrrrr Continue reading
Does anything spell afternoon tea more than a madeleine? These pretty little delicacies never fail to impress, although they are embarrassingly easy to make. I’ve got a few madeleine recipes on my site as I love making them and they are always well received. To make the real McCoy you will need a traditional pan, readily available from home ware stores. Continue reading
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
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.
the hungry mum 