Recipes, recipes, recipes. . .

I have a second blog! Sort of. I am now an author on the blog Recipes from the Attic, a blog formed by several girls from the Rebelution forums. Last year, I started a thread on the forums for sharing recipes - the thread grew to be 11 pages long. . . recently, someone suggested that we started a blog for all the recipes we had collected - and so the Recipes blog was created!

Quite a few of you have voted in my poll asking for more recipes on my blog. Well, feel free to check out this new blog - I've already posted one or two of my favourite recipes on there, and I plan to post more soon.

Current Mood: Contemplative

Gingernuts

Here's my new favourite recipe for gingernuts, taken from A Cook's Book of Baking: Butter, Sugar, Flour from Murdoch Books.

Gingernuts

Makes 50

250 g (9 oz/2 cups) plain (all-purpose) flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon mixed (pumpkin pie)spice
125 g (4 1/2 oz) unsalted butter, chopped
185 g (6 1/2 oz/1 cup soft brown sugar
60 ml (2 fl oz/ 1/4 cup) boiling water
1 tablespoon golden syrup or maple syrup (I use treacle)

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C (350 degrees F/Gas 4). Line two baking trays with baking paper.

2. Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda, ginger and mixed spice into a large bowl. Add the butter and sugar and rub into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

3. Pour the boiling water into a small heatproof jug, add the golden syrup and stir until dissolved. Add to the flour and mix to a soft dough with a flat-bladed knife. 

4. Roll into balls using 2 heaped teaspoons of mixture at a time. Place on the prepared trays, allowing room for spreading, and flatten out slightly with your fingertips. Bake for 15 minutes, or until well-coloured and firm. Cool on the trays for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Repeat with the remaining mixture. When cold, store in an airtight jar.

Also check out this recipe for banana bread - I tried it this week, and it's fantastic!

Muesli bars and "sloppy icing"

On Monday I tried out a couple of new recipes, including Low-fat, Low-sugar Muesli Bars - my mum had come across the recipe while browsing online. They were very nice - chewy, and not too sweet. Here's the recipe:

Low fat, Low sugar Muesli Bars

Ingredients
2 cups rolled oats
6 crushed Weet Bix
1/2 cup sultanas
60g dried apricots, chopped
1 cup 100% orange juice
1/3 cup honey
2 egg whites

Method
1. Combine orange juice and honey in a small saucepan, and simmer over medium heat for around 10 minutes, until it thickens and forms a thin syrup.
2. Combine oats, Weet Bix, sultanas and apricots in a bowl. Add syrup and stir to combine. Add egg whites and mix.
3. Preheat oven to 180'C. Press mixture into a lined 18 x 28cm tin, and bake 20-25 minutes until golden.
4. Cool in tin, turn out and cut into bars.

The recipe is from Simple Cooking - do have a look, there are some great recipes on there!

Another favourite in our family is Spicy Raisin Squares. It's definitely not as healthy as the muesli bars :-) but it tastes delicious! I made it this morning with my brother. (It's my brother's favourite slice. He says he like it because of the "sloppy icing". . .) We used plain flour instead of self-raising flour by accident! I'm not sure exactly how it happened. Never mind, it was still edible.


Spicy Raisin Squares

1 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1/2 cup castor sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar

125g butter

1 cup raisins
1/3 cup stewed apple
2 eggs
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Preheat oven to 180'C. Line a 28 x 18cm tin with nonstick baking paper. Place flour and both sugars in large bowl. Rub in butter with fingertips until mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add remaining ingredients. Mix well. Spread into prepared tin. Bake for approx. 25 minutes. (I find it usually takes longer in our oven; see how you go.) Cool in tin. Ice with cinnamon icing (recipe below).

Cinnamon Icing

3 tablespoons (50g) soft butter
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
milk
nutmeg

Beat butter till light. Add icing sugar a little at a time, beat until light and fluffy. Add cinnamon and vanilla. Add enough milk to make mixture spreadable. Spread over cooled slice, cut into squares. Sprinkle with nutmeg.

Adventures in Baking

Last weekend my sister and I had a go at making croissants. We got the recipe from the book you see above, Baking: easy to make great home bakes. I was a bit worried about how the croissants would turn out, but they were delicious! We had them for morning tea on Saturday morning. They are a bit of a fiddle to make. Like most yeast recipes they need time to rise, and because the mixture is a pastry, you also need to allow time for the dough/pastry chill, too! We started on Friday afternoon, then left it to chill overnight before making up the croissants on Saturday morning. It does take time, but they're actually not all that difficult to make, and the end result is delicious - well worth the effort. I'll definitely be making them again. I won't post the recipe here - it's one of those recipes that needs step-by-step photos to make it easy to understand.

Another recipe from the same book that's much quicker to whip up is Oat and Raisin Muffins. They are wonderfully moist, so moist that they can be kept for a day or two without drying out too much, although of course they do taste best straight out of the oven. I don't know what it is about them; maybe it's the rolled oats that give them their moist, chewy texture. I think this would have to be my new favourite muffin recipe! I've made a few changes from the original recipe. Here's my adapted version:

Oat and Raisin
Muffins

Makes 1 dozen

85g rolled oats

250ml milk (I used soy milk)

1 teaspoon vinegar

120g butter

100g dark brown sugar

1 egg

120g flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

40 or 50g raisins (the recipe says to use 30g, but that's not enough!)

Pour the milk into a large bowl, add vinegar and leave for a few minutes to curdle. Add oats to milk, let soak for one hour.

Lightly grease a 12-cup muffin tin or use paper cases. (I use paper cases; less cleanup. I hate scrubbing muffin tins!) Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C.

With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. (I just used I wooden spoon and muscle power - again less cleanup. It's not like we're making spongecake, there's no need to beat the stuff to death.) Beat in the egg.

In another bowl, sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Stir into the butter mixture, alternating with the oat mixture. Fold in the raisins. Do not overmix.

Fill the prepared cups two-thirds full. Bake until a skewer inserted into the mixture comes out clean, 20-25 minutes. Transfer to a rack to cool.

Hint: make a double batch!!

Baking is currently out of print, but if you wanted to you could buy it second-hand at Amazon or Alibris.

Italian Breads

At our last trip to the library, I picked up a couple of great recipe books: The Italian Cook, by Kate Whiteman; and A Little Taste of Morocco.

The Italian book has some fantastic recipes in it, and each one of the recipes is written in a step-by-step, easy to understand format. I've had fun trying out a couple of bread recipes this week, one of them for Foccacia, flat bread; and the other for Grissini, bread sticks.

The Foccacia was delicious, sort of like a really nice, crusty pizza base, sprinkled with fresh rosemary, salt, and olive oil. While it was cooking, the aroma coming out of the oven was heavenly. It is rather oily - the oven tray is well-greased with olive oil, and then the top of the bread is brushed with two more tablespoons of oil... but it's extra virgin olive oil, that's good oil, right? It's not butter or margarine. Anyway, oily or not, it was delicious. It was a hit with all of the family, in fact. I don't think I can post the recipes on here, I'm afraid that might be breaking copyright laws. I would if I could!

I made Grissini today, with help from several little sisters. They were also nice, with a sort of salty, garlicky flavour. Somewhat surprising, as there isn't any garlic in them! It's been a nice day for baking, very cold and drizzly, with a maximum of just 14 degrees C. Not really that cold I guess, but cold for us.

I haven't actually tried any of the recipes from the Moroccan cookery book yet, but I'd like to. It's quite a beautiful book to look at, full of photographs of Moroccan markets, cafes, streets, and food, of course.

Extremely Unhealthy Brownies

Over at the Rebelution forums, there's a thread going about baking/sharing recipes, so I thought I'd share another recipe here. Remember I said something about Extremely Unhealthy (but delicious) Brownies in my first post? Well, here's the recipe! These are very rich, full of sugar and butter and cocoa, but they're nice to have as a treat now and then for afternoon tea. They can also be served with cream or ice cream and eaten as a dessert.

Brownies

250g butter or margarine (unsalted is best)
3/4 cup cocoa
2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 cup plain (all-purpose) flour
pinch salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt butter in large saucepan. Stir in cocoa and sugar, cool. Add eggs one at a time. Stir in flour, salt, and vanilla. Pour into 28 by 18cm slice tin, bake in moderate (180 degrees C) oven for 25 minutes.

These freeze very well - I actually prefer to eat them frozen!

When I figure out how to post photos on here you might even get to see a photo of them. ;-)