It’s another AWW recipe that I’ve slightly altered to suit. I’ve never come across a carrot and banana cake recipe before, and I love both separately so I thought I’d probably love the combination too! Also I had a heap of soft bananas and a whole bag of carrots in the fridge… It turned out surprisingly well, not dry but not too dense, with a light and springy texture all the way through. It actually reminded me of the texture of the carrot cakes that my Nanna used to make when I was a child. It’s not a ‘pretty’ cake, not is it super sweet, but it is an easy, tasty and wholesome cake and I’ll definitely be making it again.

1  ¼ cups GF plain flour
½ cup GF self-raising flour
1 teaspoon bicarb soda
1 teaspoon mixed spice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
2 cups finely grated carrot
1 cup mashed banana
1 cup vegetable oil 

Preheat oven to 170C. Grease a 23cm springform tin and line the base with baking paper. Sift all the dry ingredients into a large bowl. Stir in the eggs, carrot, banana and oil. Pour into the tin and bake for about 1 ¼ hours, cool in tin.

When the cake was cool enough I turned it out onto a wire rack and then drizzled it with a icing glaze that I made from almond milk, icing sugar and cinnamon.

It was ugly but delicious! I think it would keep pretty well in an airtight container but there wasn’t any left over for me to find out!

I’ve been a bit scared of attempting to bake anything wheat & dairy free though, partly because I’ve eaten some things in the past that were pretty awful, and also because they seemed far more of a hassle to make! This all changed on the weekend though. I found a huge range of wheat free & dairy free products in a local supermarket, including a packet muffin mix, and it seemed like a perfect place to start – easy, cheap, and it would use up the old blueberries that I had in the fridge!

Initially I was reluctant to go with a packet mix, it feels a bit like cheating to me, but I thought it would be the safest place to begin. If the muffins went wrong then I wasn’t left with a heap of leftover ingredients that would be hard to use, and it would give me a good idea of what the final product should be like when I start trying to bake them from scratch.

The instructions were easy, and all I needed was eggs, water and the filling (I used some blueberries that were slightly past their best, but you could use almost anything). The batter was really sticky, but it was just the right quantity to make 6 big muffins.

They were slightly crunchy on the outside and soft and cakey in the middle, and turns out I really loaded them with blueberries! I was impressed.

Overnight I kept them in an airtight container on the bench, but by the next day they had lost their crunch and gone kind of sticky. I warmed one up for breakfast and it still tasted good, but I’d say these are best on the day that they are made, fresh from the oven.

I got myself some wheat free self-raising flour too, so I may even give cupcakes a try soon – I’m excited that I’ll actually be able to eat them this time, so stay tuned for that experiment!

They are easy to make, and the recipe makes quite a few – it all depends how thick you roll and cut the cookies. I packaged them up into some pretty glass jars and gave them as Christmas gifts this year!

2 ¼  cups plain flour
250g butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon rosewater essence
2/3 cup shelled pistachios, roughly chopped

Sift flour into a large bowl.  Cream butter, add rosewater essence and sugar, beat well. Add flour and nuts, mix until dough clumps together.  Turn out onto clean benchtop and knead until smooth and the dough all comes together.  Roll into logs, wrap in glad wrap, refrigerate until firm enough to slice (about an hour should do, but overnight is fine as well if you want to make the dough in advance).

Slice logs, bake 10-15 minutes at 180C. The time will depend on how thick you slice the cookies, the thicker your cookies the longer they will take to cook. Watch them carefully after 10 minutes – they should be starting to turn just golden around the edges when they’re ready, but they’ll go brown and taste burnt very quickly after that.

Cool them on wire racks, then store in an airtight container – they’ll keep for a couple of weeks (if they don’t get eaten first!).

It is technically a muffin recipe, this is true. The nod to cupcakes comes through with the cupcake liners and the size, and also with the topping. The recipe is modified from an AWW recipe, and it made 24 savoury cupcakes.

½ cup polenta (cornmeal)
 1 cup milk
200g finely diced bacon or ham
3-4 spring onion stalks, finely chopped
1 ½ cups self-raising flour
2 teaspoons caster sugar
125g corn kernels, not drained
100g melted butter
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup grated cheese

Preheat oven to 200C. Mix polenta and milk in a small bowl, drain the corn kernels and add the juice but not the corn, and allow to stand for 20 minutes. This helps to soften the polenta and makes it less gritty in the final baked result.

Fry the bacon and onion for about 5 minutes, and set aside to cool for about 10 minutes. Mix the flour, sugar, corn kernels, grated cheese and bacon mixture together in a large bowl. Add the butter, eggs and polenta mixture, and mix briefly until just combined.

Fill each cupcake liner about 2/3 full, and bake for about 20 minutes.

To make the topping I mixed a tub of spreadable cream cheese with a large handful of finely chopped parsley, and spread this on top of each cupcake once they were cool. I then topped each cupcake with a small amount of tomato relish, but chutney could also work. The cupcakes can be served at room temperature or warmed slightly.

If you wanted to make a vegetarian option, you could omit the bacon, add more corn, and maybe also add some sun-dried tomatoes or toasted pine nuts.

*Although most people seem to think that this counts as a muffin, not as a cupcake, as you can see below from the (informal) vote we ran today…

Recently though, I was issued a bit of a challenge. One of my colleagues had a birthday coming up, and she really REALLY wanted a cake in the shape of a turtle, but with purple toenails. So I thought I’d give it a shot!

My first attempt at a themed decorated large cake, and I think it turned out pretty well! (yes, I know it’s more like a tortoise in shape, but we’re calling it a turtle, ok?)

Here’s how I did it…

I used a basic butter cake recipe, and I made two batches. The first I baked the whole batch as one cake, in a 20cm round tin, while second batch I used to make 5 cupcakes and then baked the remainder of the batter in the tin.

250g soft butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 ¼ cups caster sugar
3 eggs
2 ¼ cups self-raising flour
 ¾ cup milk

Preheat oven to 180C, grease and line the base and side of a round cake tin (I used 20cm). 
Beat the butter till light and creamy, add the vanilla and sugar and beat again until fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Sift in half the flour and mix with a metal spoon. Sift in the rest of the flour and the milk and mix until combined.
Bake for 1 hour, stand in tin for 5 minutes, then turn onto wire rack to cool. (only bake the cupcakes for 30 minutes though)

I used the second cake as the base, and the first cake I shaped using a sharp knife and then layered on top, sandwiched together with raspberry jam. I cut the cupcakes in half and used them for the feet, but I used a whole cupcake for the head. So far so good! You could probably do it just using the one batch of cake mix and that would be fine – this was a pretty big cake!

I made a basic buttercream icing, added green food colouring and did the shell. Added a bit more green colouring and a drop of pink to the rest of the icing to do the head and the feet.

Then I piped on purple toenails, but you could also use smarties (if you wanted coloured toenails at all). I used a tube of black ‘writing icing’ to do the eyes, and a tube of green to do the shell markings. I really didn’t know what the shell markings should look like so I made it up, and I think this is probably one of the weakest parts of the decoration.

Overall it still turned out better than I thought it would, wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be, and it was very much appreciated by the birthday girl! Success!!

I intended to try icing them in a slightly different way, but realised too late that I needed a different coupler as all my other decorating tips are smaller, so I went with the usual.

I used my regular cupcake recipe, that I mentioned in the Earl Grey Tea Cupcakes post, and I even used the lemon buttercream from that post too, but I changed the cupcake flavours slightly… It made about 40 cupcakes, which is a LOT, so if you’re not feeding an army you might want to halve the recipe (although you could still add the same amount of lemon zest, they could handle a stronger flavour if you’d like it).

250g soft butter
2 cups caster sugar
4 eggs
3 cups self-raising flour
1 cup milk
finely grated zest of 1 lemon 

Preheat oven to 180C. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating briefly after each addition. Add the lemon zest and beat briefly until mixed through. Sift in half the flour and fold together with a large metal spoon. Add the rest of the flour and the milk, mix until just combined. Fill cupcake tray sections about 2/3 full. Bake for about 25 minutes.

The real trick with muffins is to hardly mix them at all. In fact they work best if you’re in a hurry! I mix my dry ingredients separately in a large bowl, then do the liquid in a smaller bowl, then combine them at the last minute. I also use a big ‘Texas’ style muffin tin – it holds 6 muffins and the recipe makes the perfect amount.

Basic Recipe (makes 6 Texas style muffins):

2 cups flour
¼ cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
 ¼ cup oil or melted butter, cooled to room temperature

Grease a muffin tin and preheat oven to 200C.  Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl, and then add any extras* that you might like. Lightly whisk all the liquid ingredients in a smaller bowl, then add to the dry ingredients. Mix quickly and roughly, it doesn’t matter if there are a few lumps. Spoon into the muffin tin and bake for about 25 minutes.

They keep well for a few days in an airtight container, but I still like to warm them up slightly before serving.

*Extras
I like to experiment with flavour combinations, they are so versatile that whatever you feel like will probably work, but here are a couple that I’ve found have worked nicely…

• 2/3 cup fresh blueberries + 2/3 cup white chocolate chips
• 2/3 cup dried cranberries + 2/3 cup white chocolate chips + 1/4 cup dessicated coconut
• 1 finely grated carrot + 2/3 cup chopped dates (I also substituted half wholemeal flour for this one)

I’ve had a lot of people say to me that they can’t cook or that they can’t bake. I know that it can be really disheartening when something you’ve made, and spent time and effort producing, doesn’t work out. But sometimes all you might have needed was a little bit of extra information, some hints or tips on what to do (or not to do!), and your result would have been so much better.

So here I thought I’d share, for all my fellow amateur bakers out there at home, a few of the things I’ve learnt so far in my cake adventures. Hopefully I can help others to not make some of the same mistakes I’ve made!

• First up – follow the instructions! Baking requires as much accuracy as possible; it’s like science. I’m very random when it comes to any savoury dish, but I’ve learned that’s not such a good idea with baking.
• Creaming the butter. Make sure it’s at room temperature first, and then cream it before you add sugar. It should become paler, smoother, and fluffier. THEN add the sugar. Which leads me to my next point…
• Creaming the butter AND the sugar. Use caster sugar unless the recipe states otherwise, never substitute for white sugar – caster sugar granules are much finer. The point of this is to get the sugar really well incorporated and partially dissolved into the butter. So don’t skimp on this step. I’m lucky enough to have a KitchenAid mixer which I use for these 2 steps, but a hand electric beater should give similar results – it’ll just take a bit longer.
• Adding the eggs. Often recipes will say to add eggs one at a time, beating between each addition. This is where you DON’T want to beat the mixture too much. Beating too much at this point will make the mixture separate. And definitely make sure you add the eggs after the sugar has been beaten in – I’ve accidentally done it the other way around and it’s a disaster. The cakes don’t rise and they go all crunchy and crystallised on the the outside.

If you’re really only just starting out, I’d recommend something like biscuits and cookies to begin with – they are usually much simpler and don’t tend to require any special instructions. I think one of the easiest recipes, but one that provides the best value in terms of deliciousness and quantity vs effort, is this jam drop recipe. Give it a go!

Mostly I’d just like to say: if it didn’t work out, don’t give up!! Have another go, or try something different next time.

I thought this could be the first in a series of ‘lessons learned’ posts, so please let me know if you find any of these things helpful at all, or if you have any tips or tricks of your own, I’d love to hear what you think

Unfortunately my peanut butter icing didn’t work so well (it curdled! I don’t know) so I had to then think of something else that would use ingredients I already had on hand at 9pm on a Sunday night. I decided on jaffa – a classic combination of chocolate and orange.

For the icing I simply made a basic buttercream, but added some orange flavouring (I didn’t have any real oranges) as well as some pink and yellow colouring, and then decorated them with jaffas! They worked out well especially considering they were a rushed afterthought, and they disappeared pretty quickly at work, so I shall call them a success