Day to Day

Honey cookie recipe

Yesterday I made lemon meringue pie and a double batch of honey cookies.  A few of you have asked for the honey cookie recipe, so here we go....

Ingredients:

• 90 grams butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 155 grams self raising flour
• a good heaped tablespoon honey

Method:

• Cream butter/sugar
• Add the flour and honey - mix well
• Form a ball with the dough (teaspoon full) on a cooking tray, press down with a fork
• Bake approximately 12 minutes in a moderate oven

I always do a double or triple batch! The original recipe came from my Mum and used homemade raspberry jam (instead of honey) but one day I was out of jam, so gave the honey a whirl. 

Enjoy.

 

 

Delicious coffee cake recipe

A delicious coffee cake recipe for you!  This is a favourite and the original recipe came from my Mum's handwritten cook book.

Ingredients:

120 grams butter

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tablespoon of coffee essence (or I make a strong coffee solution to use - 1 tablespoon coffee with 1 tablespoon of boiling water - mix well until all the coffee has melted)

1 cup plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 cup hot water

walnuts - to chop up a little and sprinkle over the icing.

How to:

Cream the butter and sugar.

Add the remaining ingredients (except for the baking powder) and mix well.  Now lightly mix through the baking powder.

Cook in a moderate oven (180 degrees) until cooked through nicely.

Once cool you can ice the cake.  For the icing I use 1 cup of icing sugar, 1 tablespoon of butter and a splash of vanilla essence.  Then I mixed up 1 tablespoon of coffee in a little boiling water and added to the icing sugar, butter and vanilla essence - stirring through and only adding a little at a time until you get the correct consistency.

Add the chopped walnuts to the icing before it sets.

Enjoy!

Good old home cooking

I went through a spate of cooking late this week.  I seem to do that - no treat cooking for weeks and then I feel the urge to bake something nice for the family.

Here's what I cooked on Friday:

Easy chocolate slice - recipe HERE.

Crunchy caramel popcorn for our Friday family fun night. Recipe HERE.

Honey cookies (so good!): I used THIS recipe for raspberry jam cookies, but switched the jam to organic honey.

Zoku pops with juice - we still love our Zoku pop maker, it's just so fast with freezing.

I also dried a batch of tomatoes in our dehydrator, but I think I over dried them a touch - they're a wee bit crunchy on the outside. Oops.

To finish off the day I cooked some tacos from scratch with red kidney beans and served them with my best ever guacamole - recipe for the guacamole HERE.  I made a double batch, which meant not an ounce of cooking for Saturday's dinner. Win!!

Have you been cooking any extra treats lately?

Vegetable patch cake

A few of you emailed and asked for more details about the vegetable patch cake, so I thought I'd pop back and share.  It really was an easy peasy cake to do...and fast...I do love fast!

The cake was out of a Women's Weekly cake book, that I picked up at the supermarket a couple of months ago.  There are some really gorgeous cakes in there, plus a lot of brand new designs that I haven't seen before.

The cake is vanilla, iced with chocolate frosting and sprinkled with milo - for dirt!

The tomatoes are jaffa lollies with fondant (dyed green) for their tops and stalks. The carrots are a combination of mint leaves that have been cut with scissors, and orange fruit sticks that have been shaped into carrots with a knife.  The cauliflowers are raffaelo chocolates that have wrapped in tiny pieces of green fondant.  Easy and fun!

Turning eleven

Our sweet girl turned eleven today.

We celebrated with pancakes for breakfast and a vegetable patch cake in the afternoon.

{Sneaking moments on her new iPod touch}

Happy birthday beautiful girl, we love you!

A dose of summer

This week we've had silly string, splashing and finally a big old dose of summer.  When summer hit this weekend, I bought two blow up pools for the back yard.  Two?  Well, yes....because bath sized pools with colourful fish on the side were all that I could find.  So, two seemed like a good number to squeeze a 10 and 16 year old into.

The silly string was $1 for the can.  $1 for thirty seconds of fun - yes please!

There was baking on the weekend too, by Bella this time.  She cooked up a double batch of Nanna biscuits and they were delish.  So good.

Oh, and the crochet.  My laptop cover is nearly finished - buttons and those twenty million pesky ends left to sew in.  

We've also had a hooky break through here!  Bella has mastered the 'join as you go' method and is working on a green and pink cushion for herself.  It's been quite lovely to sit, chat and crochet together, in-between the sunshine.

....and camping.  We'll be heading off again soon for a couple more days, so I've been doing last minute tidying and packing in the caravan.

Mind you, that summer wave of weather vanished yesterday.  We're back to sock wearing and warm clothes wearing here.  I think the forecast is nice a little later in the week though, fingers crossed.

Rhubarb relish recipe

Have you ever made a batch of rhubarb relish?  If not, you must.  It's delicious on all sorts of things - potatoes, silverside, in sandwiches or on anything that you would normally use relish with.  So good.

Ingredients:

500 grams rhubarb - chopped into little pieces

6 level teaspoons curry powder

150 ml brown vinegar

2 cups sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

2 onions - chopped finely

Method:

Put all ingredients in a large saucepan on the stove top. Boil gently and stir for 30 minutes.  Bottle, refrigerate and enjoy! 

This makes enough to fill two medium sized pasta sauce bottles.  I'm unsure of the original origin, as somebody shared the recipe with my Mum.

Zoku pop maker

I finally caved and bought a Zoku pop maker on Thursday.  I've been wanting one of these for a while now and discovered they were on sale at Habitat, plus I had a gift voucher for that store, so....hello Zoku!

It's really cool and fast.  You basicallly keep the main part in your freezer 24/7 and then when you feel like an ice cream or icy pole, just pour something into the mould and in 6-9 minutes your pop is ready.  No power or batteries!  

Here's our first pop recipe, incase you Zoku too.  I found it online and it's a keeper - these taste like a chocolate billabong icecream.

Nutella Pops:

1/2 cup of milk

1/6 cup of nutella.

Blend, chill (for 2 hours) and pour into the Zoku.  Makes 3 pops.

Crunchy Pink Slice

Bella and her friend baked this crunchy pink slice a couple of weeks ago.  It was delicious and easy enough for two ten year olds to cook without assistance.  

Here's the recipe:

Slice ingredients:

150 grams melted butter

1 cup self raising flour

1 cup coconut

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence

Icing:

1 tablespoon butter, softened

1 1/2 cups icing sugar

1 tablespoon milk

2 drops red food colouring - I think a few extra drops were added by the young masterchefs, as the slice topping was rather bright.

1 1/2 cups of coconut - although we only used half a cup, sprinkling it lightly.

Method:

Preheat oven to 140 degrees.  Grease a slice tin.

Combine slice ingredients, pop in tin and bake for 30 minutes until golden.

Icing - Beat the butter and icing sugar.  Slowly add the milk and food colouring. Spread on top of the warm slice and sprinkle generously with coconut.  Refrigerate until cool.

We're definitely making this one again! 

Recipe source: Frankie Magazine 'afternoon tea' :: This is our most used & loved cook book, so good.

Best guacamole recipe

This is the best guacamole recipe - well, we think so!  It's a variation of several recipes that I've found over the years and since we had it tonight on top of tacos, I thought I'd share.

• 1 medium avocado - mashed with fork
• 1/4 red capsicum - finely chopped
• 8 finely chopped cherry tomatoes
• 1/4 - 1/2 of a large finely chopped red onion
• 1 tablespoon light mayonnaise - I use Praise 97% fat free creamy mayonnaise
• 2 tablespoons light sour cream
• 1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
• 2 cloves garlic - crushed
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• Salt and pepper - to taste

Mash the avocado, add the mayonnaise and sour cream - mix well with a spoon.  Add in the remainder of the ingredients and mix well again.

Serves 4 and they're really big servings!  For anybody doing Weight Watchers - it's 3 Pro Points per serve.

Super nice on toast, crackers, mexican food and steak or a chicken breast.  Well, we love it on lots of things!