lemon, rosemary & pine nut shortbread

I bet you’re thinking that’s a slightly weird flavour combination right there, especially for a sweet bakery item. I know that was my first reaction when I came across this recipe years ago. And then I thought about it for just a little bit longer. And then I made the shortbread, and I was hooked. Actually I can’t believe I’ve never written about this recipe before! It’s delicious, smells amazing, and also isn’t overpoweringly sugary – something about those flavours make this biscuit sweetly savoury, and when you use salted butter instead of unsalted it’s even better.

It was so long ago that I first made these that I can’t even remember where the recipe first came from. I have written about my go-to shortbread recipe before, and this is where it started although the flavour combination can change, but I’ve made a few tweaks over the years. It’s an easy one (I like easy) and you can make the dough ahead of time to bake it when you need it (also useful if you’ve got a lot of things going on at once).

When you roll and cut the biscuit dough you can make it whatever size or thickness that you like, but you may need to adjust the cooking time slightly to suit. A minute or two either way is all it will need.

250g soft butter
2/3 cup icing sugar
zest of 1 lemon
1 heaped tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary
1/2 cup toasted pinenuts
2 cups plain flour (you may need a little extra depending on the dough consistency)

Cream the butter and sugar, add the lemon zest and rosemary and beat well. Add the sifted flour and the nuts, and mix until the dough clumps together. Turn out onto a clean benchtop and knead briefly until the dough comes together and is smooth – you will need to work fairly quickly otherwise the dough gets too soft. 

Roll the dough into logs, wrap in glad wrap and refrigerate until firm (an hour or two should do it, but you could make this dough a day or two ahead if you wanted). 

Slice the logs into biscuits, about 7-8mm thick, and bake in a preheated oven at 180C for about 10 minutes. They should be just starting to go golden around the edges, and they will burn quickly so keep an eye on them. They do spread slightly on the tray, but not a lot.

Cool on wire racks and store in an airtight container.

The first birthday cake

My daughter turned one last week. We took her out to brunch (mostly because we wanted to eat tasty foods) and she had avocado and banana, which she was very excited about, and we had a get-together with the grandparents that involved cute dresses, tasty lunch foods, presents, and of course there was cake. It took about 30 seconds of thought before I decided that she had to have the traditional number one cake. You know what I’m talking about – the cake shaped like a number one, covered in buttercream and smarties. It’s an Australian classic.

And for good reason. It’s simple, it’s effective, you can make the cake the day before, and everyone loves it.

I made a plain vanilla butter cake as the base, but I guess if you wanted to you could do something fancy. I don’t recommend that though, because if you have a one year old then they’re probably taking up most of your attention and sitting at your feet while you make this, begging to be picked up only to want to be put down again 30 seconds later, ad infinitum, so simple is best. My biggest tip would be: don’t overestimate your time or patience. Unless you’re making this for someone else’s kid, in which case do whatever you like. There were no tears, but there were swears, I’m not going to lie.

My second biggest tip would be: make the cake the night before. Refrigerate it and the next day it will be way easier to cut into shapes without crumbling everywhere. You can make the whole thing from a single large square cake. No need to double quantities or split it between tins or anything like that. Here’s the cutting technique I used:

Stick the bits together with a dab of icing (there was some cake left over, if I’d had a larger cake board I’d have used all the cake but I didn’t have room):

250g soft butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups caster sugar
3 eggs
2 1/4 cups self-raising flour, sifted
3/4 cup milk

Cream the butter with electric beaters or a stand mixer until pale, add the vanilla and sugar and cream until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating briefly after each addition. Stir in half the flour and then half the milk, then the rest of the flour and the rest of the milk.

Pour into a greased square tin (I think mine is 22cm x 22cm) lined with baking paper. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for about 1 hour. Cool the cake in the tin for 5-10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack. Wait until it’s completely cooled before icing. Or, even better, follow my tip and refrigerate overnight first.

To make the icing, beat 125g-150g butter with electric beaters or a stand mixer until pale, and then this is where I stopped measuring. I added a fair bit of icing sugar, maybe 500g, maybe a bit more. I also added a couple of tablespoons of milk – it helps make the icing a bit paler and fluffier and more spreadable. Basically with icing I just keep adding bits of things until it seems right and I have enough. Keep an eye on the texture and taste and you’ll be fine. You can add some colour to the icing if you want, but I didn’t.

Cut the cake up, and stick the bits together with a small amount of the icing. Then just go for it – buttercream all over the outside of that cake until it’s all nice and even and covered up. Make it as smooth as you can, but remember that the smarties hide a lot of mistakes.

My daughter seemed to enjoy it, although I took the smarties off her piece so that there was no choking. She’d never had cake before, but honestly I think she would rather have had a banana. So I ate the rest of the cake myself over the next 2 days. It’s a lot of sugar. Now I jut have to decide what kind of cake to make next year!

 

Oaty choc-chip cookies of goodness

Amongst the many things I’ve learned over the last 12 months is that being a new mum can be tough and hungry work sometimes, and having decent snacks on hand is an excellent plan. So, I came up with these. These are choc-chip cookies. But they are not your average choc-chip cookies! Apart from being soft, chewy and delicious, these guys are packed with extra goodies that make them perfect for breastfeeding mamas. They are a great snack to grab when you haven’t got much time or free hands, they’re wholesome and milk-boosting, and you can freeze them for later. What more could you want?

Now, some people find that the brewers yeast really helps boost their milk supply, but some don’t – I know there are differing opinions out there. My theory: if it works for you then keep it in, if not then leave it out. If you haven’t tried it then give it a go – you never know what might work for you. Either way the rolled oats, flaxseed and chia still make these a wholesome and delicious snack for everyone, and will help keep you going after a sleepless night.

On the off chance that you’re one of those strange people who doesn’t like chocolate, then you can substitute sultanas or raisins instead. I use a kitchenmaid mixer for the whole thing, which makes an easy recipe even easier, but if you don’t have one then regular beaters and a mixing spoon will work just fine. The dough needs to rest in the fridge for a while before being baked, otherwise they will spread out too much in the oven. It also makes the dough easier to roll.

115g butter
1/4 cup caster sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups rolled oats 
1/2 cup plain flour
2 tsp chia seeds
1/3 cup ground flaxseed
1/2 tsp baking powder
15g brewers yeast
1 tsp cinnamon
3/4 cup dark chocolate chips or sultanas

Cream the butter, sugars, egg and vanilla. Add all the dry ingredients except for the chocolate chips and mix well. Add the chocolate chips and stir until just combined.

Cover the mix and put in the fridge for about 2 hours. Roll into balls (put your thumb and forefinger together to make a circle, about that big) and place onto trays lined with baking paper. Press down each ball with the palm of your hand to flatten slightly. Bake in a preheated 180C oven for about 12 minutes, they should be slightly golden brown around the edges. Cool on trays.

They will last a few days in an airtight container, or you can wrap them individually (or 2-3 together) and freeze them.

Pistachio white chocolate chip cookies

Saturday afternoon. A hankering for chocolate chip cookies. Severe lack of recent grocery shopping. It’s experiment time!

For these cookies I used my regular chocolate chip recipe but with some major flavour alterations. Dark chocolate chips, walnuts, and a dash of vanilla became white chocolate chips, pistachios, a pinch of cardamom and some rosewater essence. I ate 4 in a row straight out of the oven so I’m calling these a success!

125g soft butter
2/3  cup caster sugar
1 egg
1 cup plain flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 cup shelled pistachios
1/2 teaspoon rosewater essence
1/2 teaspoon cardamom

Cream the butter and the sugar, add the egg and rosewater essence and beat until just combined. Stir in all the remaining ingredients. Drop spoonfuls onto trays lined with baking paper, and bake for about 15 minutes in a preheated oven at 180C. Cool on trays about 10 minutes then transfer to a wire rack.

This made about 30 cookies.

Nanna’s Cinnamon Snaps

My strongest memories of my Nanna are of her in the kitchen baking something. She was the kind of nanna who always had home-baked biscuits, scones, or cakes in the house, ready for any unexpected visitors. She never used a written recipe, nor did she own any electrical appliances other than a very well loved kettle – all the creaming of butter and sugar was done by hand with a wooden spoon (she had forearms of steel!). She was old-school.

Nanna would write down a recipe if anyone ever asked her for it though. In amongst some boxes of her old stuff that are still sitting in my father’s garage, we recently found her recipe for cinnamon snaps. I remember making these with her, the sultanas going chewy after being baked, and using all different shaped cookie cutters.

Here’s my version – just some slight changes/clarifications and also I figured out how long and how hot to bake them!

1 cup soft butter
1 1/2 cups caster sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons golden syrup
1 cup sultanas or raisins
3 1/2 cups plain flour*
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon mixed spice

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs one at a time beating after each addition. Add the vanilla and golden syrup and beat well. Stir in the remaining ingredients to form a sticky dough. Turn out onto a well floured surface, roll out to about 5mm thick. Cut out biscuits, re-roll the remaining dough and cut again until you have used as much of the dough as you can. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for 15-18 minutes, depending on how soft/crunchy you like your biscuits. Cool on a wire rack.

*I don’t know whether I lost count of the flour I was adding, but my dough ended up WAY too sticky so I had to add another 1/2 cup of flour. So I may have ended up using 4 cups of flour, or maybe just 3 1/2 because I undercounted to start with. Not sure.

This recipe makes a LOT of biscuits. I think there were at least 50 in the end for this batch, so they’re excellent if you have people coming over for morning/afternoon tea, or of you have to ‘bring a plate’ to some kind of gathering.

A Different (from my usual) Chocolate Cake

So I realised recently that the only recipe for a full sized chocolate cake that I’ve used in ages, and in fact the only one I’ve actually written about, is the Chocolate Stout Cake. It is definitely my go-to for a chocolate cake, and it’s great for decorating, it’s a crowd-pleaser… But sometimes I just don’t feel like a super heavy and intensely rich chocolate mud cake. This week I felt like something just a little lighter.

I always get a bit nervous trying a new recipe for a full sized cake – what if you go to all that effort and then when everyone is around and you cut it and it’s terrible? Oh, the pressure! Anyway, I bit the bullet, tried a new recipe, and it worked out 🙂 Luckily, because it was taken to work for a team member’s birthday!

Originally I envisioned this cake with a fluffy chocolate buttercream icing all over it, and maybe even layered through the middle as well. But a late night and extreme tiredness got the better of me and I went with the lazy option when it came to icing and decorating. Lazy still equals delicious though, so it was all ok.

250g butter, softened
1 cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 eggs
200g dark chocolate
1 1/3 cups plain flour
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarb soda
1/2 cup milk

Melt the chocolate (I do this in the microwave, slowly so that it doesn’t burn) and set aside to cool to room temperature. Meanwhile, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla and beat again, then add the eggs one by one, beating between each addition. Pour in the cooled chocolate and beat well. 

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and bicarb soda. Beat in a third of the dry ingredients to the batter, followed by a third of the milk. Repeat until all the dry ingredients and all the milk is beaten into the batter. 

Pour the mixture into a greased and lined round springform tin (mine is a 24cm tin) and bake at 160C for about 50 minutes. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn upside down onto a wire rack.

Now, if you were making a chocolate buttercream (and I still think this would be great, I mean, how can you go wrong with chocolate buttercream) you would need to cool the cake completely before making the icing and decorating the cake. But if you want to just dump a jar of Nutella on top of the cake instead and spread it around and let it ooze down the sides, then now is when you do that.

 

Oh yes, that is what I did. Most of a 400g jar went on top of the cake. I saved some for eating with a spoon from the jar at another time, like right now as I’m writing this.

While the cake is still warm, the Nutella goes a bit melty and spreads really nicely. Then you put it in the fridge so the Nutella doesn’t melt entirely off the cake. Or, even better, just before you put it in the fridge you also cover the top of the cake with hundred and thousands, to add a bit of fun colourfulness.

Told you – lazy but delicious (and effective) cake decorating.

Valentine’s Day Coconut Cookies

I have so many different shapes of cookie cutter stashed away at home. I have never used any of them. I thought a pre-Valentine’s Day morning tea would be a perfect excuse to test out the heart-shaped cookie cutter!

Now, the last time I tried to make biscuits that involved rolling out dough and trying to cut out shapes was years ago and is referred to as the infamous gingerbread incident. It involved tears, screaming, throwing dough on the ground and locking myself in the bathroom. It wasn’t pretty. So this attempt had the potential to go badly…

125g butter, softened to room temperature
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/4 cup self-raising flour
1/2 cup desiccated coconut

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy using an electric mixer/beater. Add the egg and beat in well. Stir in the flour and the coconut in two batches. Turn the dough out on to a floured surface and knead lightly until it all comes together and is smooth. Roll it out between two sheets of baking paper until it is about 5mm thick, then put that in the fridge for about half an hour.

Cut shapes out of the dough with whatever shape of cutter you like, lay them on paper-lined baking trays, and bake in a preheated 180C oven for about 12 minutes. While they are baking, gather the remaining dough up, re-roll it, put it back in the fridge. Basically just keep repeating the process until you’ve used as much of the dough as you can to cut out and bake the cookies. You can do whatever you like with the last scraps – I like to eat the dough raw at that point 🙂

What I did to decorate these was to make a super basic icing from icing sugar, water, food colouring and a few drops of rosewater essence. I used a piping bag just with the end cut off to decorate, and my piping skills are far from great, but I think they ended up looking fairly cute anyway.

Honey-roasted Macadamia & White Chocolate Chip Biscuits

Well, hello there! Yes, it’s been a while, I’m sorry. I lost my baking mojo there for a while, but I think maybe it might be coming back… Maybe. Hopefully!

So I’m not the biggest fan of white chocolate usually, but somehow when you put it into baked goods and then throw macadamia nuts into the mix as well, you have something a bit delicious. It seemed strange to me that I had never made macadamia & white chocolate chip cookies before – I’ve certainly eaten my fair share – but looking through the archives it would appear that I’ve totally missed making such a standard recipe. Well, I thought it would be a standard recipe, but do you think I could find such a thing in any of my books at home? Not a chance. Here follows an experiment which seems to have worked out reasonably successfully… until the very end.

Standard set up for a lot of my baking: workplace morning tea for a farewell, I have an idea of what I want to make, and I have limited ingredients. No regular macadamia nuts in the pantry, just half a packet of honey-roasted ones. No normal, little white chocolate chips, just those big round ‘melts’. No actual recipe. Let’s do this!

I used a standard plain biscuit recipe in the end, one that is usually for jam drops (because how much do I love jam drops?!) which makes quite a short biscuit and suited these flavours well, but it’s also very easy.

125g butter, softened to room temperature
1/3 cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 1/4 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons milk
honey-roasted macadamia nuts, chopped (I think I had nearly 1/2 cup)
white chocolate chips (or the bigger ‘melts’ if you want to try the experimental version)

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla really well, until it’s pale and creamy. Stir in the flour and baking powder, and add the milk to get the right consistency (sticky dough, but not too sticky). Stir in the macadamia nuts. If you’re using regular white choc chips, stir them in too. Shape teaspoonful sized bits of dough into balls, place on trays lined with baking paper, flatten them slightly with the palm of your hand and bake in a preheated oven at 180C for 18-20 minutes, until they are slightly golden brown at the edges.

BUT, if you are using the big chocolate melts, DON’T stir them in. Instead, once you’ve mixed in the macadamia nuts just go straight to making balls of dough. Except, shape each ball of dough AROUND a single white chocolate melt. They should go nicely in the middle of each ball of dough. Then put them on lined baking trays, flatten slightly with the palm of your hand, and bake them as above.

Cool the biscuits on the trays for 2-3 minutes, then put them on a wire rack to cool completely. 

Now, when I say that the experiment worked up until the very end, I mean it. These looked great, and I tasted one and it was pretty good. They cooled down, and I packed them into a container. The next morning I left the container on the kitchen bench, walked out the door, and didn’t realise until I walked in the door at work. So instead of being able to contribute actual food to the morning tea, all I could provide was a couple of photos of what might have been and a story about how I’m an idiot.

My husband is happy though – guess what he’s eating this weekend?

Oatmeal Sultana Biscuits

I’m not going to call these healthy – they do still have a fair bit of sugar in them – but they are definitely wholesome. Wholesome and delicious. And probably a great deal better for you than chocolate chip biscuits, or melting moments, or something like that. So if you feel like a bit of sweet baked goodness, but don’t want to feel too guilty about it, go for these.

They’re also really easy to make, and dairy free! You probably have all the ingredients in the pantry already, and you can chuck in a bit of whatever you feel like – that’s what I did.

1 cup plain flour
1/2 cup wheat bran
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bi-carb soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup sultanas
handful of sunflower seeds
2 tablespoons desiccated coconut
3 teaspoons chia seeds
2/3 cup lightly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 eggs
2/3 cup light vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 170C. Whisk together the sugar, honey, eggs, oil and vanilla in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, mix together all the rest of the ingredients. Add the honey mixture to the dry mixture and stir through well.

Drop large tablespoonfuls of the mixture onto baking trays that have been lined with greaseproof paper, leaving enough room between them for spreading. Bake for about 15 minutes, then take them out of the oven and leave to cool for about 5 minutes on the trays. Transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.

You could use any kind of dried fruit that you liked in these, and lose the coconut/sunflower seeds/chia seeds if you wanted to. I think they’d be good with dried cranberries and slivered almonds, or maybe chopped up dried apricots.

Gluten-Free Pineapple & Coconut Cupcakes

New team at work, new birthdays, new likes/dislikes/allergies. We have a coeliac and someone who is allergic to peanuts, and while the coeliac is fine with missing out on cake (she’s used to it, poor thing) I don’t think anyone should have to miss out if they don’t have to. So here we have some gluten-free (and peanut-free) cupcakes.

This is a recipe I’ve not used before, plus the added gluten-free factor meant that I was really worried these might not work out, but they seem to be pretty good! I tried making the pineapple flowers to add a bit of sparkle and they were surprisingly easy and delicious. If I were to do this again though, I’d make the pineapple flowers first and let them cool while I made the cakes.

3 cups plain gluten-free flour (or regular flour, if you like)
2 teaspoons baking powder
250g butter, softened
1 1/2 cups caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 eggs
440g tin crushed pineapple, drained (reserve the juice as you may need it later)
1/2 cup desiccated coconut

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla well. Add the eggs one at a time and beat lightly between each addition. Sift in the flour and baking powder in two batches, and fold in to the batter. Add the pineapple and the coconut and mix well. I found the batter to be really thick, so I added about 2 tablespoons of pineapple juice as well, and could probably have added more.

Spoon batter into lined cupcake tins and bake at 180C for about 25-30 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Makes 24.

Pineapple Flowers – you will need a whole fresh pineapple for these. Cut the skin off and take out the eyes. Slice into rounds as thinly as you possibly can. Make a sugar syrup by melting 2 tablespoons of sugar into 2 tablespoons of water in a saucepan, and boiling briefly. Brush the pineapple slices with the syrup and lay on wire oven racks. Dry in an oven at 120C for about an hour. Take the pineapple off the racks and push them into mini muffin trays (or egg cartons) to shape them, and allow to cool.

I made a cream cheese icing, and decorated the cakes with toasted coconut as well as the pineapple flowers. Yum! And cute!!