Pikelets

Posted on January 29, 2017 by andieinspired

20161228_161237 I have so much to share about our Christmas holiday in New Zealand and so many photos that I love of my friends, family and home. I will get all the stories uploaded in the next few weeks while they’re still fresh in my brain. We’re starting at the end though, with baking.

There was a lot going on, during the last morning of our New Zealand holiday. We were repacking our suitcases, this time fuller, with all the goodies we had picked up to take home, and getting ready for friends to come over to say goodbye before we went out to Wellington to catch our long flights home.

I was trying to hydrate lots as I thought that might help me during the flight and soaking up the last few hours with my mum and sister. We were meeting dad for lunch. img-1484428431624-v So of course, I baked. Baking is always my stress relief, it’s good to keep my hands busy. I made pikelets. Probably one of the first recipes I ever learned and one that I hadn’t made since leaving NZ over 9 years ago. Although I needed the recipe book for quantities, I definitely didn’t need the method. I still know that like the back of my hand.

I think there must have been a couple of years of my life when I made these weekly. Me and my friend used to bake these or chocolate fudge every time we met up. Then we would go on missions around the neighbourhood. We must have driven our parents crazy as I never remember doing any dishes…

As I was making the batter I found out that my best friend wouldn’t be joining us as she was in labour! She wasn’t due for a few weeks yet, so hope crept in that I might meet the little man. I told you, it was an eventful morning making these pikelets.

They tasted just as I remember them too. I ate a few straight off the pan like my friend and I did as teenagers. Hot and doughy and oh so good.

Pikelets are pretty retro now and I mostly only see them as dinky canapés with smoked salmon and cream cheese on top. This morning we served them with whipped cream, garden strawberries and jams. Granny chic for sure. 20170115_104621 I won’t share the recipe with you here as it’s pretty standard. But next time you’re thinking of having people over for morning tea, think of pikelets. I think we usually made a double batch to share as the mixture is pretty small.

As we tucked into our pikelets, my friend was going through labour. We got news of the arrival of her baby boy and a very cute pic just before we got on the plane bound for Melbourne. A very nice send off to a great holiday in NZ.

Gifting Christmas Brownies

Posted on December 4, 2016 by andieinspired

It can come as no surprise that I love baking. It is without a doubt my number one hobby. But as much as a love it, it does come with its downfalls; what is made has to be eaten and it usually doesn’t last. I know what you’re thinking – that doesn’t sound like a downfall at all..? But when people are on diets around you and you know you should be eating healthy yourself it can be very hard to justify baking so much.

So I always try to make the most of special occasions, whether that’s making Banoffee Cake for Thanks Giving, Chocolate Nut Bars as a house warming gift or a three tiered Baby Shower Cake! The best kind of baking is baking to share.

Last weekend we had our annual Christmas dinner gathering with what Ben and I dub the ‘Aussie Crew’. An affectionate name for the first group of friends we made when moving to London nearly five years ago. They’re mainly Aussies but of course there is us and some locals too. Every year we celebrate with a boozy pub dinner before people start flying out for summer Christmases (there is always someone in a big group of expats).

This year I took the chance to make everyone little parcels of brownies. I made the tags from Christmas themed images I have collected over the years. I struggle to throw anything remotely reusable away, so it’s always good to be able to make use of the little bits I’ve kept. 20161126_friends_christmas_lunch_0040 The brownie recipe I used was, of course, Edmond’s. There are two recipes for brownies in the Edmonds Cookbook; Chocolate Brownie which uses cooking chocolate and Coconut Chocolate Brownies which uses cocoa. As I didn’t have enough cooking chocolate I decided to make the coconut ones and sprinkle chocolate chips on top. The universe had other ideas though and I burned my first batch to a crisp, so I still don’t know what the Chocolate Coconut Brownies taste like. As I had used the last of my coconut, I remade the recipe without it and luckily, they still turned out well.

^^^ I asked Ben to try and capture the icing sugar dusting as I thought it would make a nice photo. I should have thought more about the background though.. oops!

Here is the recipe:

Coconut Chocolate Brownies

Ingredients

125g of butter

1/4 cup cocoa

1 cup icing sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1/2 cup coconut

1/2 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Method

Melt butter in a medium sized saucepan. Add cocoa. Stir over a low heat for 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from heat. Stir in sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla and coconut. Sift flour and baking powder. Stir into mixture. Pour into a greased and lined shallow 20 cm tin. Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 30 – 35 minutes. Leave in tin for 5 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Cut into bars and dust with icing sugar.

Note – It definitely did not need 30 minutes in my oven. We are slowly learning that our new oven is on the hot side though and especially on a fan bake option that is going to be a lot hotter than the oven that this recipe was written for. I would check after 15 minutes to avoid disaster – an overcooked brownie is the worst!

Oh and here is us in our festive hats and jumpers…

15250782_10154746246087118_1179090309711114262_o

I can highly recommend these Racing Santa Christmas Crackers from Sainsbury’s too.

^^^ It all got quite competitive

I hope you all enjoyed your brownies guys. See you in the New Year!

Peanut Brownies for my Dad

Posted on August 15, 2016 by andieinspired

20160814_Peanut_Brownies_0700 Today is my dad’s 60th birthday. Happy Birthday Dad!

Over the weekend I was messaging my two sisters who live at home in New Zealand as they were buying presents and getting ready to bake dad’s birthday cake. It’s always these times I find the hardest about living so far from home; the times when families and friends gather and celebrate. These are the times when I feel most homesick. Also when Whittakers releases new chocolate flavours and my Marmite supply runs out, but mostly on big occasions for the people I love and 60? Well that’s a big occasion!

So rather than wallow in my homesickness I got up on Saturday morning and made my dad’s favourite biscuit, and of course it’s an Edmonds Cookbook recipe, Peanut Brownies. I haven’t made this recipe since I lived at home but luckily they turned out alright, a little less chocolatey than I remember them. But still sweet and nutty and good.

I don’t remember when I first learned to bake, but my sisters and I were always baking something in our house growing up. There can’t have been many weekends where someone didn’t make something and that would often be Peanut Brownies at dad’s request. Dad is a huge fan of peanuts so there would always be bags of them in the house ready for snacking on or baking with.

20160814_Peanut_Brownies_0733 The quality must have been hit or miss though, revisiting this recipe made me realise how far I had come with my baking. I’m sure I used to melt the butter for this recipe, although it calls for the butter and sugar to be creamed. I even remember accidentally cooking the egg in the mixture by adding it to the hot butter and sugar too early. The egg white whitened in the mixture and you could see flecks if it throughout like you do in egg friend rice. Mmmm.. eggy… I have always been weary of doing that since.

When baking these on Saturday all I could find were roasted salted nuts in the supermarket, I thought the salt would be too much so rather than being defeated, I bought them anyway and took them home to wash them. All I did was rinse all the salt off through a sieve then places the sieve in the pre-heating oven to dry off while I made the mixture. It worked a treat. I think at home we would quite often make this with peanuts with the husks on too, it gives them a bit more texture and the skin would go crunchy in the oven.

20160814_Peanut_Brownies_0736 Peanut Brownies

125g butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
11/2 cups standard plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt
2 tablespoons of cocoa
1 cup peanuts, roasted and husked

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and beat well. Sift flour, baking powder, salt and cocoa together. Mix into creamed mixture. Add cold peanuts and mix well. Roll tablespoonsful of mixture into balls. Place on greased oven trays. Flatten with a fork. Bake at 180 degree Celsius for 15 minutes or until cooked. Makes 20.

20160814_Peanut_Brownies_0708 Dad I wish I could just pop over there and share these with you and give you a big 60th birthday hug. But know that I’ll be thinking of you as you celebrate this huge milestone.

See you in four months, and if you’re lucky I’ll make you another batch then.

Love you xx

Banoffee Cake

Posted on June 9, 2016 by andieinspired

I can’t believe it has taken me this long to share this with you guys. I wrote this post after first making this cake back in November for Thanksgiving. I didn’t get any pictures at the time though so I held the post. I have since made this three times and the latest creation, which is the one I got pictures of, was for our friend’s 1st year wedding anniversary celebration.

Here are my post-Thanksgiving ramblings:

Guys, I think this is an amazing idea! I’m not claiming it’s very original, but I haven’t seen it done before and man it is so good you have to try it.

I was invited to my first Thanksgiving dinner this year and told simply to bring dessert. Our hosts were going full American with a huge turkey and all the trimmings. So I got thinking about American desserts.

When I think of American dessert I always think of pie. Pecan pie, pumpkin pie, key lime pie and of course banoffee pie. To me these are quintessentially American desserts and are a must for the Thanksgiving table. My problem with this was though, I have never made any of them before. In fact, until Thanksgiving I had only ever tried a banoffee pie so although I am very keen to try them all, to make something for a big group of people without even being able to be sure if it was vaguely right was too much of a challenge.

As Thanksgiving got closer and closer and I was still toying with the pie idea I hit on a compromise I thought might work and save me the pressure of feeding pie to Americans. Feed them cake!

So, I pimped out a banana cake, American style. Banana and caramel always go awesome together so why not in a cake? And guys – it totally worked and tasted pretty awesome if I do say so myself.

I make banana loaf all the time. I’m obsessed, I wrote about my love affair with the loaf in one of my first blog posts. I make banana cake very rarely so it was a nice change for me. My banana cake recipe is an Edmonds Classic too and it is a nice change for the loaf as it’s a much lighter and sweeter texture. Mmm sweeter is always good.

Here is the recipe for those following at home:

NZ Banana Cake

125g softened butter
¾ cup sugar
2 eggs
2 cups mashed ripe bananas
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons hot milk
2 cups standard plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add mashed banana and mix thoroughly. Stir soda into hot milk and add to creamed mixture. Sift flour and baking powder. Fold into mixture. Turn into greased and lined 20cm round cake tin. Bake at 180°⊂ for 50 minutes or until cake springs back when lightly touched. Leave in tin for 10 minutes before turning on to wire rack.

I made 2 layers by splitting the mixture evenly between two 20cm round tins. Bake at 180°⊂ but reduce baking time to 25 minutes.

How to pimp it: The Banoffee Makeover

Now for the fun part!

As I had two layers I started by layering salted caramel on the base layer. I used store bought but I’m sure homemade caramel would be next level awesome. Then dollop whipped cream on top. Don’t be tempted to add any sugar to the cream as this cake seriously doesn’t need any more sugar. Add the next layer on top and then drizzle over chocolate icing.

I have also done this with one layer of cake by topping with whipped cream, drizzling caramel sauce over the top then sprinkling with dark chocolate shavings.

Delicious.. I’m taking birthday cake orders…

My first Carrot Cake bake

Posted on September 27, 2015 by andieinspired

In high school two of my good friends used to make a carrot whenever they got together, sometimes weekly. They even once made a carrot cake at one’s family house, then walked up the hill to the others’ and made another one there. For them, a carrot cake meant cream cheese icing. Lots and lots of cream cheese icing! Because that’s what a carrot cake is all about right? A thick layer of glossy, fresh, lemony icing. Yum!

I often wonder who came up with this recipe. Who had the idea of putting vegetables in a cake? Because it is a good one. The carrots offer a subtle flavour to the cake and keep the texture light and moist and not as cloying as cakes with more refined ingredients can be.

I was so impressed by the Edmonds recipe, it turned out really great, exactly as a carrot cake should be. I wish I hadn’t avoided it so long. I think when I was younger I dismissed carrot cakes as I thought there was no way that the batter of this cake would taste good.

The batter was a key consideration for me in my younger baking, I loved licking the bowl, I think it was one of my main motivations for baking, second only to eating the product of course. So a mix without creamed butter and sugar? That was totally out of the question.

Nowadays it’s not only carrots in cakes. You hear about all number of healthy vegetables being corrupted by surroundings of sugary, fatty cake batter. I think my next attempt will be pumpkin, once I get over making carrot cakes that is.

Are these photos tempting you to try it? Go on… do it. And then invite me over so I can enjoy all the cream cheese icing with you.

Chocolate Nut Bars

Posted on September 16, 2015 by andieinspired

Recently some of my friends have been hitting some very adult milestones. This year one group of friends has celebrated a wedding, another couple have welcomed a baby and one friend has become a first time home buyer.

I did do a little hunt for something homey to give as a gift, but short of giving a succulent (an excellent option in my opinion but I couldn’t be sure how it would be received) baking was my best option. I found some cute tins and started daydreaming about what to fill them with.

This recipe, of course, is another Edmond’s find. I was interested in trying it as it looks like the slice equivalent of an Afghan biscuits. It tastes quite similar too, but it has more of a crunchy texture which goes well with the softer and sweeter chocolate icing.

Do you like my piped houses? I don’t bring out the piping bag very often as it’s so fiddly to clean I really try to avoid it from the start, but I knew I had to do something to elevate these from common home baking to a gift-worthy bake. I’m pretty happy with the outcome, I like the way the clean white icing contrasts with the dark chocolate, yum!

So here is the recipe:

Edmonds Chocolate Nut Bars

Ingredients:

125 g butter, softened

1 cup of sugar (I only used about 3/4 cup)

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1 1/4 cups plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 tablespoons cocoa

1 1/4 cups cornflakes

3/4 cup coconut

1/4 cup chopped walnuts

Method:

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla beating well. Sift flour, baking powder and cocoa together. Mix into creamed mixture. Add cornflakes, coconut and walnuts, mixing well. Press mixture into greased 20 by 30cm tin. Bake at 180 degrees celsius for 30 minutes. When cold ice with chocolate icing.

Chocolate Icing

My go to chocolate icing recipe is icing sugar, cocoa, butter and hot water. I scale the ingredients up and down depending on how much I need and add a little more water or icing sugar as necessary to get the texture right. To ice this slice I used about 2 cups of icing sugar, 3 tablespoons of cocoa, 1 tablespoon of softened butter and enough hot water to get a thick runny texture.

Happy baking guys, let ,me know if you give this one a try!

Coconut Dream Slice

Posted on August 31, 2015 by andieinspired

This bake was born out of a very rainy bank holiday Monday. We got back from a trip to Wales yesterday nursing hangovers and tired from all the driving. So when I woke up this morning to pouring rain and bleak skies, I quickly decided that I wasn’t leaving the house. I changed into my track pants, caught up with the world – there is little to no reception where we stay in Wales – and settled in for a day of my favourite things at the moment: reading, baking and watching back to back episodes of New Girl.

I mentioned to Ben that I was going to bake and he said how about a slice? He was thinking one of those fridge slices with condensed milk or real chocolate, but we had none of that. Looking through my Edmonds cookbook, my eyes skimmed over the Brownie and Ginger Crunch and landed on the Coconut Dream slice recipe, luckily we had a lot of coconut.

I have never made this one before, and as far as I know have never had it. I had no idea what it was supposed to look like, or taste like for that matter. But with lots of coconut and more than a fair share of brown sugar, I knew I couldn’t go too far wrong with it. This recipe has a simple base of butter, brown sugar, flour and baking powder which is quickly baked before an eggy topping is poured on. The topping consist of eggs, more brown sugar, vanilla essence, chopped nuts and a whole lot of coconut. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to look like this, I may have slightly over baked it. It tastes delicious though, you can really taste the caramelisation from the brown sugar and I love the chewy coconut and nut topping. It’s good as it is, but I think warmed with cream or ice cream would take this traditional slice to the next level.

I’m not going to reproduce the whole recipe as the Edmonds company might have something to say about too many of their recipes turning up on my blog. But you can buy a copy of the book here.

So Kiwis, has anyone had the Coconut Dream slice? Is this how it is supposed to look?

Simple Banana Loaf

Posted on May 24, 2015 by andieinspired

It has taken me a while to get this post sorted as I kept forgetting to take pictures for it. But it’s fitting this is my first Edmonds Recipe post as I make banana loaves more than anything else in the kitchen.

I’m not a fussy person, I will eat anything that is put in front of me and enjoy it. I love food and I hate wastage. But that being said, there are certain foods that I just generally avoid. Pumpkin and sweet potato, unless they are in a soup – then I am all for them, but I really struggle to eat them by themselves and so therefore, rarely buy them. I will also avoid fresh tomato, by avoid I mean I’ll eat it if it is already in my sandwich, but I very rarely add it in there myself.

Lastly, building up to my most shameful food particularity, I can’t stand bananas when they get past a certain point. The point where they get really sweet, and their texture goes from firm to floury and their skin gets thinner. It gives me goosebumps thinking about it. I really don’t want to eat those bananas.

What these bananas are perfect for though, is baking. So rather than throw them in the food waste, I collect them in the freezer. I say collect as sometimes I’ll end up with about five or six in there. On weekends when I have a bit of time, I defrost a few and turn them into a banana loaf.

I make banana loaf about once every two weeks, it usually looks something like this. Sometimes I add chopped nuts on the top, sometimes I mix in chocolate chips and usually I add vanilla and cinnamon.

I reduce the amount of sugar that is in the standard recipe as, one, I’m eating this every week, and two, it really doesn’t need as much sugar as the recipe suggests, the ripe bananas in it add a lot of sweetness too.

When its freshly baked I share it with whoever is around home, but then I cut the rest up and wrap the individual slices in cling wrap. I then freeze them and take them out when I want one. I take a slice to work every now and again, or heat them and put a spoonful of yoghurt on top. Yum! It’s such a versatile, fail safe recipe and it alleviates my banana wastage guilt.

So, here is the recipe:

Edmonds Banana Loaf

Ingredients:

1 3/4 cups self-raising flour

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup sugar ( I only use 1/4 of a cup)

2 eggs

1/4 cup milk

75 grams melted butter

1 cup mashed banana (ripe is best, I usually use 2 large bananas or 3 small)

Optional extras:

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup chopped nuts (walnuts and pecans work well)

Method:

Sift flour, baking soda and salt into a bowl. Mix in sugar. In a nother bowl beat eggs. Stir in milk, butter and banana. Mix quickly into dry ingredients, stirring until ingredients are just combined. Mix in any optional extras. Spoon into a greased and lined 22cm loaf tin. Bake at 180 degrees celsius for 45 – 55 minutes. Leave in tin for 10 minutes before turning onto wire rack.

If you are going to freeze it, let the cake cool completely before wrapping in cling film.

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