| by Lou | 4.10pm UK time |

Oh, hello blog. Sorry. We've been neglecting you. Um, how about some home baking to get things pumping again?

Earlier this year I had a wonderous Jaffa Tart in a restaurant in Te Anau and have been looking for an opportunity to make one myself. With a bag of jaffas sitting in my kitchen and my gentleman friend coming to stay it seemed the perfect excuse... but... there seems to be no recipe for a Kiwi Jaffa Tart on the internet.

Allow me to provide one, with credit to Mary Berry and Willie for the base and filling respectively.

I made two mini tarts, so double the recipe if you are making a big one.

Kiwi Jaffa Tart

Pastry:
85g flour
50g butter
1 tbsp icing sugar
Half an egg yolk
Half a tbsp cold water

Cut the cold butter into tiny cubes and rub through the flour (or use a food mixer if you have one). Rub through the icing sugar, then add the egg yolk and cold water. Use your hands to mix it into a nice consistent lump of dough and stick it in the fridge for half an hour.

Tip from Mary: Lay baking paper over your bench surface before the roll out phase - it's sooo much easier for clean up. Grease the tart tin's base and sprinkle with flour, then roll the dough out so that it exceeds the edges of the tin base by about an inch (or more if making one big one with higher sides).


Fold the sides in and delicately place it into the tin, then fold the sides back up and press them into the (greased) tin sides. There will be surplus hanging over the edge which Mary would leave, but as mine fell off the tin into the bottom of the oven and nearly set my kitchen on fire (leading to me burning my arm and the pastry in the panic...), I would actually recommend cutting the surplus edges off. Also check there isn't surplus flour on the bottom of the tin.

Cover with tin foil and weigh with baking beans (or actual little stones, or I used rice), and bake for 15 mins at 200C. Remove the foil and baking beans, then cook for a further 10 mins or so until it is dry.



Filling:
90g very dark chocolate (I used 85%)
25g butter
35g castor sugar
90ml maple syrup
1 and a half eggs (use the rest of the egg from the pastry for the half)

Chop the chocolate finely and melt with the butter over boiling water. Gently heat the syrup and sugar until the sugar dissolves. Whisk the eggs and then combine all three.

Great British Bake-Off tip: put the bases into the oven and then pour the filling in from a jug. It avoids spilling as you transfer from bench to oven.

Bake 10-15 minutes until it is firm.

The Kiwi Bit:
Crush a whole load of jaffas. This is not as easy as it sounds - I used a rolling pin and still found them to be ridiculously resiliant.

Sprinkle the crushed jaffas (or just halved, as the photo shows many of mine to have been) over the tart. I did it while it was still very hot so that the jaffas melted a tiny wee bit, helping them to adhere.

Once everything has cooled remove the tart from the tin, and voila:

| by Bel | 4.04pm NZ time |

UPDATE: Download the lemon gin & tonic cake recipe (1 page PDF 100KB via google docs) thoughtfully scanned by my colleague!

When life gives you lemons, make a G&T ... cake!!

To clarify, I have never actually made this cake, but I did eat a chunk of it for morning tea today:

It was delicious.

Here is an approximation of the recipe that I found on Google, which the lady in my office says is pretty much the same as the one she used:

Ingredients

Cake
200g Butter
1 1/2 cups Chelsea White Sugar
Zest of 2 Lemons
4 x Eggs
3 cups Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
3/4 tsp Salt
1 cup Milk (at room temperature)

Topping
1/2 cup Chelsea Caster Sugar
Juice of 2 Lemons
6 Tbsp gin

Method

Cake
Preheat the oven to 160ºC (fan-bake). Prepare a 24cm loose-bottomed cake tin by lining the base with baking paper, brushing the sides with butter and dredging lightly with flour.

To make the cake, cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time.Sift the flour, baking powder and salt together, and fold carefully into the egg mixture.

Add the milk and stir in gently. Pile the mixture into the prepared cake tin.
Bake for 50-60 minutes or until the cake shrinks from the sides of the tin. This can also be made in 6 small loaf tins which would be baked for about 25 minutes.

Topping
While the cake is cooking, prepare the topping and the decoration. To make the topping, stir the caster sugar, lemon juice and gin together.When the cake is removed from the oven, pour topping mixture over the hot cake. Using a brulee torch, gently scortch the top of the cake.

From the Chelsea Sugar website.

Just to be specific, here are the instructions I got from the chef in my office:
The one I made was 2 cakes and then you iced it with white choc butter icing
CRAFTY LADY!!

I was confused initially as that recipe only mentions booze in the topping, and I was sure that the cake itself as soaking in ginly goodness, but apparently the topping makes its way down through the body of the cake, infusing flavour throughout.

| by Bel | 2.08pm NZ time |

Something unprecedented happened yesterday. I was asked for my recipe. Yes! A person wanted to replicate a food item which I had created.

*waits for murmuring hubbub to die down*

I know, folks, I was as shocked as you. And immeasurably pleased. I wish I could have told my coworker that it was a family secret passed down through the ages, or a special something I'd craftily whipped up, but in actual fact I'd just googled the thing we had two cans left of in the cupboard.

And VOILA! Taste sensation.

It's a cannellini (white bean) dip with Italian parsley. If you have ever made dips yourself, then you'll know that it's friggin easy but please don't go round telling everyone because I need to be able to impress people with SOMETHING.

I had two cans of cannellini in the cupboard because a) they are pretty cheap and b) I can use them to make salady type things that no one else in my family touch and therefore I get it ALL TO MYSELF.

I googled 'cannellini' and discovered they are also known as 'white beans' which has to be one of the most literal and unimaginative names ever. Some recipes called for roasting a capsicum (AS IF!!) or steaming spinach (WHATEVS!!). Then I struck one which merely requiring chopping up some Italian parsley, which grows plentifully in our unattended garden.

You can find the original recipe on the Food Network website, where it was devised by someone called Giada De Laurentiis. Apparently she is a famous TV chef.

Or maybe an axe murderer? Or a witch who gains strength from bathing in blood?? That certainly doesn't look like hygienic kitchen practice to me.

Her recipe is quite specific but my technique is looser:

Ingredients

• 1x can of cannellini beans (for 2x ramekins of dip, or 2x cans for a big bowl)
• a couple cloves of garlic
• salt and pepper
• a bunch of Italian parsley
• olive oil

Method

1. Chop the parsley and the garlic.
2. Put everything in a bowl.
3. Add some oil so that it is easy to stir*.
4. Then whizz stick** the crap outta it.
5. THE END.

Here's my final version, as part of the spread my team made for the social club shared lunch celebrating winter solstice:

*I saw that many of the 287 comments on Giada's recipe were people irate about the excessive quantity of olive oil she'd recommended. This is why I never bother too much with following directions exactly. Also: I am lazy.

**This was the most time consuming part of a very short and quick process. Friggin whizz stick getting gummied up every two seconds!! Guess who bought a food processor off Trade Me the very next day. (Answer: me.)

Posted by Bel. The time is 5.01pm here in Wellington NZ

1. Get a punchbowl. We use our glass mixing bowl.
2. Buy 2 litres of rum. Go hard and get something actually from Cuba, like Havana Club.
3. Don't bother with sugar syrup, just use lemonade. Nothing too sweet though, the old classic Schweppes Dry is good, and I really like their Soda with a Twist of Lemon too. You need a couple of bottles of mixer for each bottle of spirits, depending on how bad you hate your own liver.
4. Fresh ingredients are important! Lots of lovely slices of lemon and muddle a big pile of mint leaves, Sally Draper style. Lime is great too, but can be outrageously expensive. Non-concentrate lime juice can be an effective alternative if you go to a snazzy supermarket.
5. Put it all in the bowl.
6. Enjoy!
7. Extra for experts: keep a teatowel nearby because there is no way to pour punch without the glasses getting all drippy and sticky, especially as the night goes on.

Posted by Bel. The time is 3.49pm here in Wellington NZ

I'll follow Lou and Lotte's lead and not spell out the whole recipe here. It comes from the Edmond's Illustrated Cookbook, a big pictorial version of the NZ institutional tome. The illustrations are mostly full page, full colour, food porn type photos, rather than being useful pictograms of exactly the meaning of those oh-so-confusing instructions.

The recipe is very easy and you only need two mixing bowls to pull it off. (The thing I hate most about cooking, other than how pointlessly time consuming it is, and the overwhelming feelings of anxiety it produces, is the vast amount of dirty dishes the process involves each and every time.) The book says 15 minutes to cook but it took a little longer in our decrepit gas oven.

Iit appears as a "Blueberry Muffin" recipe on page 16 or 19 but I have moved on from the 90s and am flinging other delicious things in with my flour and milk. (And eggs. And sugar. But that's pretty much it, right? Sweet!)

Current favourite is boysenberry and white chocolate. This batch was done with frozen boysenberries and white chocolate buttons (any brand of either - but if you were going for real chocolate, then choose carefully!).

The standard trick with making muffins is to not over mix your mixture. As few good stirs as you can get away with to get your flour and stuff combined in with your wet ingredients and then LET IT BE. You're not friggin Jamie Oliver with your whizz stick pureeing the fuck out of some poor soup.

The real trick is to not throw in your berries/choc chunks/walnuts/whatever until the very last minute. With those frozen berries, you can even place them individually in the muffin tray holes AFTER having filled them with the mixture, as they are very easy to handle if you've just pulled them outta the deep freeze.

Canned berries are a whooooole different story. This is a sample from my second batch (yes, I was struck by the domesticity virus two weekends in a row!!) which was made with a can's full I drained out and then had to add to the muffin mixture before dolloping into the tray.

As you can see, 1) my cellphone takes exceptionally shitty photos, and 2) the smooshing and swirling causes the whole muffin to go very purpley in comparison to the isolated taste explosions of the earlier muffins.

Going on comments from my guinea pigs - I MEAN TASTE TESTERS - both styles were much enjoyed and it was the caramelly goodness of embedded chocolate swirls that was the real highlight anyway!

Posted by Lou. The time is 9.35pm here in London UK.

This past weekend I had the good fortune of sharing afternoon tea with two wonderful ladies in a gorgeous backyard on one of the sunniest most beautiful days I have seen in London.

We shared out a course each with Heidi providing sandwiches, Kelly (our host) the baked course, and me sweet treats. I decided to keep it simple and make two different sets of mini tarts, going for citrus and chocolate (which, of course, between them are the cornerstone of my cooking life!).

My first set of tarts were bitter chocolate meringue, which consisted of a basic biscuit base (approx 100g crushed digestives per 25g melted butter, mixed till they hold form when squeezed in your fist) with a dash of cocoa added, with an extraordinarily simple filling of 70% chocolate melted (200g) with cream (1/2 cup).

After they have been left in the fridge to set for a while, chuck on meringue (4 egg whites beaten till stiff with approx 220g castor sugar gradually added), and cook for 15 mins/ until golden.

Lemon in the ramekins on the left, bitter chocolate in the

silicon muffin cases on the right (not that you can tell the difference)

Second was lemon meringue, with the same base as above minus the cocoa, and a filling of lemon curd (I use Delia's simple recipe), meringue chucked on top. Conveniently, by the time you've made the lemon curd the bitter chocolate filling will be chilled so they can go into the oven together (if you happen to be making both!).

The added bonus was that with leftover egg white you can make some (flat, in my case) meringues as an extra treat!

I perhaps went a little bit too not-mini on the size as after eating Heidi's delicious cucumber and bellpepper cream-cheese sandwiches over a cup of tea, followed by Kelly's perfect scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream over a couple of glasses of bubbly, we were feeling a bit too full for the whole sweet delight. But managed to get it down in the end, of course.

Please note the awesome doily tray Kelly scored for £1 in a local store

Posted by Lou. The time is 1.30pm here in London UK.

Raspberry Cheesecake Chocolate Brownie Cake

I had a big cake success this week after following Michelle's lead and turning raspberry cheesecake chocolate brownies into a cake. The recipe is one she has lying around at home generically printed on a plain white piece of paper that gives away nothing of its original, but after a bit of googling I have traced it to this Nigella speciality. Basically you just do it all the same except shove it into a loose-bottomed cake tin instead of a brownie tray (and please do remember to swirl - the swirl is very important). And - the key thing that she and I always forget - cook it for significantly longer than what the recipe says.

I made mine before heading off to the tennis on Monday, and despite leaving an extra 15 mins cooking time it was still a bit raw in the centre when I had to leave for my date with Federer. I left it in the (switched off) oven to hopefully cook a little more, then panicked all my way to Wimbledon that I was creating a disaster by letting it dry out. Thankfully the cheesecake component stopped it drying out, and the slightly-under-cooked nature of the brownie part just made it fudgier. I had also been concerned about the appearance at it developed a few crevasses, but my colleagues insisted it looked amazing and with one accusing me of buying it from a shop and passing it off as my own I guess I can believe them.

I was too embarrassed by the appearance to take a photo,

but here is one of cheesecake brownies to give you an idea of the potential.

And if you like could imitate the orgasmic sounds emitting from the dozen or so people enjoying a piece next time I see you. Thinking about their reaction in conjunction with the fact that Michelle won a cake competition at her work with it last year, I would say that of all the things I have ever made this is the one that is guaranteed to dazzle and delight so give it a go sometime! (They are, of course, also excellent in their intended state as brownies.)

******

Willie's Cloud Forest Chocolate Cake

Willie is a British chef who moved to Venezuela and bought a cacao plantation, which led to a business producing boutique 100% chocolate. (website here) He then had a Channel 4 series going behind the scenes of cacao production, featuring his recipes for food made using the pure cacao, both savoury and sweet. Kelly gave me his book and so - using Lindt's 90% dark chocolate as the closest alternative available at my supermarket - I've been trying a few of them out and this "Cloud Forest" chocolate cake has become a staple.

A slight twist that came through one of my serendipitous baking mishaps, was when I omitted the almonds, not quite realising that they were taking the role of flour, and was left with the most amazingly gooey cake ever. Not recommended if there is an emphasis on presentation and being able to eat it tidying, but definitely recommended for a messy treat at home.

******

Key Lime Pie - part 1

Whilst in Miami over New Year's, Di and I launched into the quest to find good key lime pie. Unfortunately the only really good one we did come across was at a bar one night after I'd eaten so much for dinner I didn't order one and had to be contented with one delicious forkful of hers. I decided to make some in the weekend in preparation for Di's upcoming 30th birthday celebrations (have to get some practise in to find the best recipe, you see), and used this simple recipe from the BBC Good Food website. Unfortunately I didn't think about it too much in advance, but in retrospect I should have gone with something more like this recipe from the Hairy Bikers as there is one key difference that is very important to me: one type of key lime pie has a creamier and larger filling (which is what I made), while the other is a thinner layer of a more tarty filling, with cream on top (which is very much my preferred version - in fact, I don't like much cream with it at all).

This is what my ideal key lime pie would look like - no artificial colouring,

focus is the citrus filling, and just a little bit of cream.

The pie was okay - luckily I had bought an extra lime or two as our local grocer turned out to have sold me expensive and too dry limes grr so it wasn't quite as citrus as I wanted it to be, but it was a very quick and easy recipe. Luckily I'd only made half though (in a loaf tin using a lining of greased baking paper to easily pull it out and leave me with a rectangular shaped pie) as I don't think I wouldn't have wanted to eat another full serving. So I'm going to call this part 1 with further experimentations to follow - anyone want to invite me round for a BBQ to give me an excuse to try the Hairy Bikers' version?

**oooh just read the Hairy Bikers's one all the way through and it also is wrong - it has meringue on top, which makes it more like a key lime meringue pie, so I'm going to try this one from the Joy of Baking website**

Posted by Lou. The time is2.55pm here in London, UK.

I've realised that if I'm to post here consistently and regularly I need to find something in my life that is worthy of posting beyond the occasional review of films and books. (Beyond live-blogging my watching of Mad Men season 3 when it turns up...) The answer is... baking! But in the guise of avoiding copyright infringements I am not actually going to include the actual recipes (the real reason being that I can't be bothered writing them out).


First up:

The Baklava Cupcake Incident

For my birthday last year the lovely Kelly gave me a wonderous selection of glorious baking-related items including this recipe book Cupcakes: A Fine Selection of Sweet Treats and some silicon cupcake/ muffin cases. (I will tell you a fact to keep with you for life: silicon bakeware is the shizz. I will never look back. Especially after this one incident, in which I forewent the silicon bakeware to my demise.) This recipe book is also the shizz - it has a beautiful textured hardcover, and each recipe is is accompanied by a delightful full-page illustration that has you foaming at the mouth.

So I was heading to a birthday picnic in the weekend and decided to try out the Baklava Cupcakes recipe. Essentially it is rather simple: a fairly basic cupcake mix with a combination of chopped nuts (walnuts and almonds in this instance), sugar, butter and cinnamon placed in the middle and on top (pre-cooking!), with warm honey brushed onto the cupcakes as they cool.

The mistake I made was in defying the silicon moulds. I didn't have enough, so thought "hey, why don't I just put some paper cupcake cases into a large rectangular dish?". Do not do this. This is the second-stupidest thing I have done all year*. In case - like me - you haven't picked up on the obvious: there is a point to cupcake moulds. Paper cases do not keep their shape. You will end up with a big blob of a cake-like substance rippled through with paper cases.

Thankfully I had a brain-wave and recovered the situation by allowing them to cool, cutting them into smaller square shapes, and placing them delicately in the remaining cupcake cases. Of course there was a second disaster in that they turned out to have not actually cooked all the way through due to the lack of space between cupcakes, but this allowed the second brainwave of pushing the not-quite-fully-cooked bits cut off the sides into the magical silicon cupcake moulds before the second attempt at cooking them through, which left me with the bonus of having Drunken Cupcake Snacks when I got home in the middle of the night.

The Baklava Squarecakes were very well received and I can testify - on the basis of extensive testing of the square, cups and scrappy bits - that they taste mighty fine. Mighty fine indeed.


*The stupidest thing I have done all year is the fatal decision to take the number 100 bus home last Tuesday during the torrential downpour. This led to me spending more than an hour and a half on a hot and damp bus surrounded by wet people and their even wetter umbrellas and bags as we made a tour of all of London's traffic jams in defiance of the usual 40 minute travel time. I nearly cried.



On a happier note:

The Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes are the One Of The Best Things Ever. They are not-too-difficult to make, look amazing, and taste like heaven.

Essentially you: make a plain vanilla cupcake, only 3/4 filling the moulds and only 3/4 cooking them. Scoop out the centre. Put in a big fat dollop of lemon curd (I home-make mine but will only judge you a little bit if you buy it in a jar). Put an even bigger, fatter dollop of uncooked meringe on top, and bake just a couple of minutes until they start to look brown.

Et voila:

These specific ones were made for a Ladies Afternoon Tea Party.

Please note the glorious silicon cupcake moulds, which both

look good and slip off without even a hint of sticking.

My tip to enhance the experience of these is to scrunch the bits of scooped-out cupcake into the bottom of a smallish dish (or larger muffin moulds), spread on your leftover lemon curd, ditto with the meringue, and you have some mini- lemon meringue pies for that all-important Drunken Midnight Snack/ Hangover Breakfast.

Posted by Lou. The time is 10.40pm here in London, UK.

I got home tonight to discover that four eggs were about to expire - well, we know what you can do with four eggs!

So I...

Pre-heated the oven to one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees-celsius
Beat those mutha-fuckin' egg whites

Then added one and a quarter cups of castor sugar gradually whilst beating them more and more and more until it looked like a glossy bit of stiff heaven
Then I took a teaspoon of white vinegar and a teaspoon of vanilla essence and mixed them with a tablespoon of cornflour

Chucked that nasty looking mix in with the egg white and did what Michael Jackson did best (beat it!) until it couldn't be beaten any more (litearlly - the hand-beater start to spack out as it was too thick for them to rotate in)
I then lovingly put it into a small intimate circle on some baking paper on an oven tray (Jamie Oliver tip - use a dot of mixture under each corner of the paper to keep it in place) and put it into the oven, immediately turning the temperature down to one-hundred
I'm not a twat, so I didn't open that oven door even though temptation gripped me
Then an hour later I turned the oven off, opened the door slightly, and let the pavlova cool within

And was rewarded with this beautiful speciman:

You did me proud eggs, you did me proud.

Posted by Bel. The time is 6:56pm here in Wellington, NZ.

As soon as the weather turns crap, I start craving my mum's chocolate pud. It's of the self-saucing variety and is awesome. Here's the recipe she emailed through to me:

Self saucing chocolate pudding

4 oz margarine (or butter)
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup milk
2 cups self raising flour (or add 1 heaped teaspoon baking powder well mixed into flour)
4 dessertspoons cocoa (you may need more, today's cocoa is wimpy)
Some sultanas or raisins as you wish
vanilla ( 1 small teaspoon if desired)

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs, add milk, and add the flour, BP, cocoa and raisins (already mixed together)
Place in ovenware dish.

Mix together 1/2 cup sugar and 3 dessertspoons cocoa, sprinkle over the mixture.
Gently pour over 3 cups of boiling water (use bowl of spoon to deflect the force)
Do not stir, cook 30 mins in moderate oven or 6 etc mins in microwave.

I did a half batch for starters and it served four people reasonable portions (i.e. measly really, when all you want to do is pig out on the hot chocolatey gooey goodness). And also cold choc pud is the breakfast of champions, if you don't believe me then ask my two little brothers - both clocking in at over six foot.

One tip I would give, doyenne of cuisine that I am, is to "slather" rather than "sprinkle" the topping mixture and to not be hesitant about pouring the water over top before you put it in the over. It seems counterintuitive to tip cups of water all over your carefully prepared concoction - but this is what helps make the saucy sauce!

Also, I'm not quite sure if Mum actually means you should cook it for "6 etc minutes" in the microwave, for surely even the most nuclear powered of modern kitchenware would not be capable of this..?

Anyhoo... enjoy!