Category: Baking
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Black Bean Brownies
I tried this recipe as part of my “Lunchbox Treats with Something Extra” experiment – that is, baking sweet treats for the kids’ lunchboxes that aren’t too high in sugar and include veggies (or in this case, beans for extra protein) – and it was a resounding success. I know baked goods with beans sometimes…
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Zesty Lemon Muffins
What I want most from a lemon muffin, or cake, is plenty of bitey zesty lemon-ness, and these muffins are just perfect. They have a delightful zing from all the lemon zest, and then the addition of lemon syrup poured over the warm muffins gives them the perfect extra lemony twist. The recipe is mostly…
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Lemon Drizzle Birthday Cake
This is a bit of a mash-up of recipes for lemon drizzle cake and a Swiss buttercream icing recipe from Smitten Kitchen that makes a wonderfully decadent layered birthday cake. The cake is intensely tangy and lemony, and the icing is rich and creamy without being overly sweet (and pipes on beautifully if you’re going…
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Gingerbread Biscuits
These are lovely spiced slightly crunchy gingerbread biscuits, adapted from a classic recipe in The Joy of Cooking. They’re great to make with children – the dough is easy to mix up, it involves melting butter in a saucepan (a big plus according to my four year old), they can press shapes out of the…
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Scone Pizza
This is very barely adapted from Hungry and Frozen’s scone pizza recipe (I added some thinly sliced zucchini and crumbled feta to the original recipe) and is very much as it sounds; a delicious scone-like base (although significantly easier to make than scones, as it doesn’t involve rubbing butter time-consumingly into flour) with a gorgeous…
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Buchteln (or Sweet Bread Twists)
“They strolled back to their pension where a meal was awaiting them of wonderful pastries, ivory butter piled thickly on fancy bread twists, and what Mary-Lou called “lashings of coffee and cream”.” (from Theodora and the Chalet School) Sweet bread twists are frequently mentioned in the Chalet School books, either being served to students during…
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Dark Chocolate Chunk Biscuits
This is a recipe from Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet which is actually entitled “Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies”. I know this is much more alliterative than my version, but saying “cookies” makes me feel un-Australian. Biscuits it is. They’re extremely chocolatey and rich and magnificent. Lepard suggests using them for ice-cream sandwiches, but honestly despite my…
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Brown Sugar Chocolate Cake
This recipe is from Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet, and makes a wonderfully unassuming loaf cake with a rich chocolate flavour and molasses-like sweetness from the brown sugar. He notes that cakes with a high proportion of fat and sugar to flour are susceptible to sinking, which as you can see mine did. Lepard’s suggestions…
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Challah
While I was making this loaf of challah, glancing down occasionally at my son “playing” around my feet (in other words, unravelling a roll of alfoil and emptied a drawer of baking implements), I realised that I hadn’t been making bread recently because breadmaking is a little more difficult with a toddler, or proto-toddler, than…
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Spiced Apple Sauce Cake
I made this for my 31st birthday this year, because I had plenty of apple sauce, and I love cream cheese icing. You can tell two things about my baking methods from this photo -I can rarely be bothered sifting icing sugar, and I’m lazy about cutting lining paper for cake tins (so I just…
o frabjous day! 