Shortbread

The shortbread I made consisted of four ingredients... that's it! Easy, huh? Icing sugar, flour, butter, and cornflour.

First, I mixed the olivani and sugar until it got fluffy. Then I put the flour and cornflour in...

 After all ingredients were thoroughly mixed, I rolled them into balls and squashed them flat-ish with a fork.

Then I baked them :) THE END!

Marble cake ♥ ❤ ♥

The other day we went to Aunty and Uncle’s friends’ place so I thought that it would be the perfect opportunity to make Marble Cake (something I’ve been wanting to make for a while). Because of my love of both art and baking, I thought, well… why not combine the two?

We went out and bought a fluted bundt cake tin especially for the occasion!

After preheating the oven, I brought out all my ingredients. Judging by the recipe, I thought that there would be quite a bit of cake mix so I got out the ‘hard core’ mixing bowl; in other words, the big bowl!

I put in the butter (or in my case, the catering spread), caster sugar and vanilla and combined it with the electric mixer until it was light and creamy looking. Then, after gradually adding the eggs (and beating them well!) I sifted the flour and baking powder over the mixture and folded it in with the milk.

Easy so far, huh? Next I split them into three and put cocoa powder, a little more milk and castor sugar into one bowl (the one with the most batter :P), and red food colouring (the recipe says to use pink food colouring, but seeing as we had none I used a little bit of red. The mixture is white-ish so it turned pink in the end anyway. Be careful not to put too much though.) in the other, and left the one bowl remaining (the original bowl) the same.

I eagerly put my brand-spanking-new fluted bundt tin onto the bench and put spoonfuls (I really just filled my cup measurements a little, making sure not to ‘cross contaminate’ with the other colours) into the bundt tin.

 <-- Me still in my running outfit.

Into the oven, goes my little baby marble cake!

And out comes a perfectly shaped, heavenly tasting, and gorgeously presented marble cake dessert. 

Lemon Cakes

Last week, after run, chores AND beach (seems like Sunday is becoming my busy day :/), I just had enough time to make lemon cakes before (another thing to add to my Sunday list) I made dinner.

  <----Picture from the recipe book

Again, there was heaps of butter that I substituted with catering spread. Yuck!

First, I preheated the oven to 160°c. After, I put the very softened butter (I actually remembered to soften the butter first this time) into a plastic bowl, then castor sugar, and lemon rind and used the electric mixer to make it fluffy. Then I put one of the three eggs in, mixed it, put the second one in, mixed it, and then put the third one in, and oh? What next? Oh yeah, I mixed it. What a surprise.

I put the lemon juice in next.

Then I put the flour in and then the baking powder, and folded it into the lemony mixture.

Then, even though it said to grease the tin, I didn’t. Luckily they didn’t stick.

Then into the oven they went, for around 20-30 minutes. IT’S THAT EASY!

Chaos in the kitchen! I'll try and remember to clean up as I go next time. ;)

You can put passionfruit syrup on it if you want, but I find it’s nice with or without it.

Yum-o!

Anawhata

After running at 7, we (Aunty, Uncle, Sunny the most cutest dog ever and moi) all decided to go to Anawhata Beach (ahna-fata). Luckily the weather held out for us and was actually sunny for once.
From our house, there’s around a 45 minute drive there. About 15 minutes of that drive is gravel road, so after going on it, the car was encased in this grey dusty stuff. Definitely calls for a wash!
Also, the gravel road is extremely windy, immediately after a turn is another turn and another turn and another turn and so on. So you have to be careful when driving because you can’t see if a car is around the corner coming towards you and it’s a two way road but it’s really thin, so it’s hard to make way for another car.
Then, after the drive, you get out and there’s about a 20 minute downhill bush hike you have to do to actually GET to the beach. But once you’re there it AMAZING!
It seemed like Sunny had ants in his pants because he was just itching to get off his lead, and once he did… he ran and there was no stopping him. Although I can’t talk… I was no better ;)

There are two sides to the beach. You have to go over this little dune to get to the other side. I like the first side best.
It was suuuuuuuuuuper hot and boiling, for a nice change. Some of the sand near the dune/on top of the dune was really really hot and I was hopping from foot to foot.
After checking out Side 2, we went back to Side 1 and I retreated to my cave. With Sunny of course.

In my cave, I made some little sand balls with the glittery black sand there and I threw them at Aunty!

After, when it was time to go ( :( waah) we had to do that bushwalk again. This time, it was like 10 times hotter (or at least it felt like that much), we were exhausted (me and Sunny mostly, we did all the running around ;D), the walk is uphill this time. NOOOO! I felt like I was gonna die. No kidding. (Well maybe I am. But seriously, that walk is horrible!)
Sooooooooooooo I won’t be going back there in a hurry, even though the beach is simply stunning, but I will definitely be going back there. LOVE IT! Yeah, that’s right, Imma beach babe. Lol.

My First Blog!

Over this long weekend (yessss!) I decided to do some baking. Okay, well let me just tell you that every time I flick through a recipe book I find myself tagging every page. This is one of the many recipes I’ve bookmarked out of Donna Hay’s Modern Classics 2 (which I think is a lot more drool worthy than Modern Classics 1 as its contents are ONLY sugary things and desserts. Yum. I’m a sweet tooth!) and I’ve really been looking forward to making the recipe I’d chosen, for a long time. I finally got to make them… MELTING MOMENTS!

Here is the recipe.

Melting Moments

175g (6oz) butter, softened – Usually I would use Olivani but in baking I use any dairy free catering spread that you can find in the regular supermarkets.

¼ cup cornflour (cornstarch), sifted

Filling

60g (2oz) butter, softened – Again, the catering spread

1 cup icing (confectioner’s) sugar

2 tsp lemon juice

2 tsp finely grated lemon rind

A lot of butter, huh? When you look at it there’s heaps of butter, but if you use the catering spread like I do when I’m baking it has less fat than real butter, and I wouldn’t want to have too much of it anyway because there will still be quite a lot of fat, but once in a while should be fine anyway. J Trust me, it’s worth it!!

I hardly ever sift my flour etc. because for me, I find that afterwards it’s just the same as before I sifted it. But being the silly girl I am, I didn’t see the ‘softened’ after the butter so I had to take out the butter (after adding the flour, cornflour, vanilla and icing sugar) and put it in the microwave in a small dish for 15 seconds. Luckily I hadn’t mixed them all together yet.

Then I beat the very buttery mix with electric beaters and it looked pretty good. It says to put the mixture into a piping bag with a fluted nozzle, but since we don’t have a piping bag let alone a fluted nozzle (the nozzle that’s kind of flowery shape), I improvised by using a Ziploc baggie and making my own ‘fluted nozzle’ by cutting the same shape in the corner of the baggie. Then I turned it inside-out, put my hand inside the outside and grabbed most of the mix with my hand and then turned the bag right side out.

After all that, I piped little round swirls of the stuff into a baking tray and they looked alright considering I only used a Ziploc baggie. Donna Hay says to put non-stick baking paper on the tray but I didn’t because there’s so much butter that I figured I didn’t need it, and I was right. They slid of the tray with ease after around 13 minutes of baking. Yay!
 
ABOVE LEFT: Sad looking melting moment biscuits, second batch. ABOVE RIGHT: Batch 1 melting moment biscuits.
While these biscuit rounds were in the oven, I made a start on the filling just by putting all the ingredients in a bowl and again using the electric beaters.

 Unfortunately, after my biscuits had cooled and I was ready to put the filling in I thought that it was a little too runny. Checking the recipe again, I decided that it should be fine to spread onto my soon-to-be-Melting-Moments as it didn’t say to refrigerate. After doing the first one, walking away, and coming back… the top had almost completely slid off the bottom and the runaway filling was slowly spilling onto it and the plate it was sitting on. 

So, I put the lemony filling into the freezer, trying to make it harden a little more so it would be like icing (which I thought it would be like immediately after making it). After around 10 minutes it still wasn’t hard (arrrggghhh) so I put it into the fridge overnight.
If you were wondering, I ate the failed Melting Moment for dessert, and it was very very yummy despite its appearance and runny filling. :P
Today I took it out of the fridge and the top was a lot harder, the rest a little harder than yesterday, not the consistency I wanted it but that's as good as it was going to get so I had to deal with it.
ABOVE: Putting the filling inside of the Melting Moments.
So, my Melting Moments look very good and although I’ve only eaten that one that I had for dessert last night I know they’ll be scrumpdiddileeuptious.
I’m going to do it again sometime (not in the near future though… too buttery and fatty) and I want to make the filling the consistency I wanted in the first place and also I want to try different flavours of filling, like chocolate, strawberry and caramel.
Tonight I’m going to be making dinner – Prawn and Pork Cakes with Noodles and Broth. I’ll tell you how that goes later on.

This morning me and my Aunty went on a 30 minute run at 7 this morning, already sore behind my ankles and guess what?

I HAVE ATHLETICS DAY TOMORROW! :O
Looking forward to that. Yeah right.