Left-over Cereal Chocolate Slice and Triple Chocolate Cookies

I haven't had much energy for blogging lately. Only 5 weeks to go til the baby is due and I am definitely nesting - the inside of my fridge has never looked so clean. So that and organising a bathroom renovations seems to zap all my time.

I have also been trying to have a clean up of my recipe collection. I have accumulated 3 years worth of Good Livings (from the Sydney Morning Herald) so have had a lovely time going through them cutting out recipes - of course I can't just throw them out. I need to do the same with 3 years worth of Gourmet Traveller Magazines!

I have been browsing blogs lately for baking ideas. I like having something home-baked to send in lunchboxes (and for me to snack on!). It has to be nut-free to send to preschool of course, but sometimes I make a nutty item later in the week or just for me!

I found the slice recipe on Cate Can Cook and it was perfect for this week when we finished the packet of weetbix. There was exactly 1 C of crumbs in the bottom of the pack. Usually these go to the chickens but this is a better use!

This recipe has been around for years. I found a few variations on my search. I added an egg to Cate's recipe as my mix was dry. The result was a yummy soft chewy cakey slice with a thick layer of chocolate icing - whats not to like? I sprinkled mine with Hundreds and Thousands which the kids liked!

I also baked a batch of triple chocolate cookies for my husband to take skiing. These were chosen with his chocolatey tastes in mind but I must admit I enjoyed them a lot!

The camera cord is missing so photos will come later!

Here are a few other recipes I have in mind to bake:

Puffed-Rice Slice with Peanut Butter and Chocolate @ Mathilda's Market Blog
Oaty Chocolate Caramel Rice Bubble Bars @ Cate Can Cook
Chocolate Chip Shortbread @ Cate Can Cook
Brown Sugar Shortbread @ Not Quite Nigella
Afghan Cookies @ Not Quite Nigella
Jelly Slice @ Pod and Three Peas
Banana Sour Cream Cake @ Pod and Three Peas (bananas are supposed to get cheaper soon!)
Chocolate Crackle Top Biscuits @ Taste
Fresh Strawberry Cake @ All Recipes
Pear, Date and Hazelnut Cake @ Bill Granger in the SMH

Left-over Cereal Chocolate Weetbix or Cornflake Slice
1 cup self raising flour
1 cup crushed weetbix or corn flakes
1 dessertspoon cocoa powder
1 cup brown sugar (firmly packed)
3/4 coconut (dessicated or shredded)
125g butter, melted
1 egg

Preheat oven to 180 C.

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl. Press mixture into a slice/lamington tin. Bake in oven (180C) for 10 minutes.

Remove from oven - allow to cool slightly. Smooth the chocolate icing onto slice. Sprinkle with hundreds and thousands or coconut and leave to set.

Chocolate Icing
1 C icing sugar
2 tbsp cocoa
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
20g butter, melted
1 tbsp milk (plus extra if needed), warmed
Hundreds and Thousands or Coconut, to sprinkle

Place the icing sugar, cocoa, vanilla, and butter in a bowl. Mix together, then add 1 tablespoon of milk, adding more if necessary to form a smooth paste.

Triple Chocolate Cookies
makes 30 - 40
This is a large batch of cookies, you can halve it or you can freeze uncooked dough in balls or logs to bake later.

250g unsalted butter, softened
350g soft brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs, lightly beaten
310g (2½C) cups plain flour
60g (½) C cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
a pinch of salt
250 - 350g dark and white chocolate, chopped or chocolate bits (The original recipe had 350g, I thought this was a lot so reduced to 250g. I used 100g chopped white chocolate and 150g dark chocolate.

Preheat the oven to 180 C.

Place the butter and sugar in a bowl, and beat until light and creamy. Add the vanilla and eggs and stir together well.

Sift in the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt and mix until just combined. Fold in the chocolate.

Place large spoonfuls of cookie mixture on a greased and lined baking tray, allowing room for spreading. Cook in batches for 15-20 minutes, until the bases are cooked. Allow to cool on the tray.

Chocolate, Almond and Currant Cookies

I made Chocolate, Walnut and Currant Cookies from the Pod and Three Peas blog the other day with the kids. I thought these would be a good snack cookie for the kids - fruit, nuts and oats to make them "healthy" and chocolate to make them appealing. But the results were even better - they were flat and chewy with a slightly caramel flavour - reminding me a bit of a chewy florentine. I think I ate more than the kids! I used flaked almonds and chocolate chips with the currants.

What to do with ... lemons

Our lemon tree has just ripened so we have a big box of lemons to work our way through. Not that I am complaining - I love lemons! If I choose dessert I would probably go lemon flavoured (Lemon Delicious pudding is my favourite - see below), where as my husband would always go for chocolate.

The lemons last quite a few months but the last few years I have taken lots of them, zested them then juiced them. I freeze the zest in an airtight container, you can just scrape out as much as you need, and freeze the juice in ice cube trays, then store in a container or ziplock bag once frozen. That way I have lemons on hand all year!

I haven't tried all the recipes linked below. My favourites are marked with a *. I must blog some of these recipes!

mains...
Lemon chicken - Bill Granger
Lemon linguine - Nigella
Greek egg and lemon chicken soup (Avgolemono) - Cuisine.com.au
Broccoli with Lemon Sauce - Women's Weekly

desserts...
*Lemon Delicious (self-saucing pudding) - my favourite dessert
*Lemon Tart - River Cafe (I make half the recipe in a 20cm flan tin)
*Lemon No-bake Cheesecake - Philadelphia packet recipe
Lemon Meringue Pie
Crepes with lemon and sugar
Lemon and Blueberry Trifle - Taste.com.au
Lemon Semifreddo - Taste.com.au
Lemon sorbet

cakes, biscuits, slices...
*Sour cream and lemon cake @Pod and Three Peas
*Melting moments - Women's Weekly
*Lemon poppyseed cake - here is the lime version
Lemon slice
Sponge cake with lemon curd filling
Lemon icing (lemon juice, icing sugar and a little butter) on banana cake

other...
Lemon curd/butter - Cuisine.com.auhttp://www.cuisine.com.au/recipe/Lemon-butter
Preserved lemon - Stephanie Alexander

plus...
check out this lemon recipe collection @ The Happy Housewife

Playschool Salad

After Monday's episode of Playschool on which they made a salad, Molly (my 5 year old) announced she wanted to make salad. She has never eaten salad! She then asked everyday if we were having her salad. So on Wednesday we had Playschool Salad and Chicken Schnitzel. And Molly ate a whole bowl of salad! With dressing! And she helped make it.

Thankyou Playschool! If only they could also give a lesson in how to eat your dinner in under an hour...

Playschool Salad
Prepare amounts to suit your family. Remember to cut ingredients small/thin enough that your little ones can eat them with a fork.

Get the kids involved - my 5 year old was able to wash and chop the lettuce, peel the carrot, string the snow peas and pull off the grapes.

lettuce, shredded
carrot, grated or finely chopped
celery stick, finely chopped
snowpeas, ends and strings removed, chopped in half
red grapes, halved
apple, chopped into small pieces

Dressing - combine in a jar and shake
olive oil
lemon juice
salt
sugar

What to do with ... sour cream

I thought I would start a new series of blogs about what do with ingredients that I end up left with or produce that I have a bounty of. I am starting with sour cream as I often end up with half a carton in the fridge after a mexican meal.

Sour cream is the ingredient guaranteed to get my children to eat anything, any vegetable soup is gobbled up with big dollops of sour cream, but rather than just handing the tub to them with a spoon I might try some of these recipes instead!

Sour Cream

serve with...
mexican - chilli con carne, burritos, tacos, enchiladas, chicken and corn soup, taco soup
jacket potatoes
soup - pumpkin, mushroom, zucchini

substitute into...
pasta bake
mashed pototoes
scrambled eggs

whip up...
Guacamole
Salsa Dip - mix sour cream with salsa

meals...
Stroganoff - beef, chicken or mushroom
Creamy paprika chicken [150g] @Not Quite Nigella
Baked taco chicken - mix sour cream with taco flavouring and pour over chicken fillets, bake.
*Annie's potato salad - combine 1/3 C sour cream, 2/3 C mayonnaise, 2 tsp lemon juice, parsley. Mix through 750g chat potatoes boiled, 4 eggs hard boiled chopped and 4 bacon rashes chopped and fried. Serve warm or cold.
Quiche made with sour cream instead of cream

baking...
Maggie Beer's sour cream pastry [60g] by Maggie Beer
Lime and Sour Cream cookies [90g] @FoodRSO
Sour cream carrot cake [140g] @Nigella
*Old fashioned chocolate cake [150g] by Nigella
*Sour cream and lemon cake [185g=3/4C] @Pod and Three Peas
*Strawberry Streusel Cake [250g] by Nigella
Sour cream pound cake [250g] @NotQuiteNigella
Nigella's sour cream and white chocolate icing [125g] @NotQuiteNigella

Cheesecake with sour cream topping by Nigella
Blueberry Muffins [250g] by Donna Hay
Sour cream and choc chip cake[250g] @Nigella

* = favourite recipes

Next week what to do with ... lemons

Butternut Macaroni Cheese with Rosemary, Bacon and Parmesan

This yummy recipe comes from a Delicious magazine back in 2005. I have been making it since then and the kids now like it too! I have found normal macaroni and cheese too rich so this has the advantage of being moist from the pumpkin and still cheesy, but the best bit is the crunchy bread crumb and bacon topping!

Butternut Macaroni Cheese with Rosemary, Bacon and Parmesan

serves 4-6
Olive oil
3 garlic cloves, sliced
1 dried chilli, crushed or 1 large pinch dried chilli flakes (optional)
½ cinnamon stick
1 large butternut pumpkin, peeled, flesh chopped into 2 cm cubes
400g macaroni
300ml milk
1 cup thickened cream
150g parmesan, grated
8 slices pancetta or streaky bacon
1 sprig fresh rosemary, leaves picked (dried works well here too)
3-4 slices day-old bread, crusts removed, torn into chunks (150g)

Heat a splash of olive oil over medium heat and gently fry garlic till golden. Add chilli, cinnamon, pumpkin and small glass of water. Cover with a lid and cook on medium heat for about 20 minutes till pumpkin is soft. Uncover and boil the liquid around the pumpkin until reduced to almost nothing. Remove from heat and remove cinnamon. Mash the pumpkin and season.

Cook macaroni until al dente, then drain well. Quickly toss in a bowl with the pumpkin, milk and cream. Add three quarters of the parmesan and season, then place in large baking dish (2L).

Preheat oven to 200 C.

Cook pancetta or bacon in a large frypan over mediom heat till light brown. Add rosemary and bread, fry gently for 1-2 mins, then pulse in a food processor till chopped. Sprinkle remaining parmesan over pasta, then with bacon and rosemary. Bake for 30mins till crisp and bubbly on top.

Whats-in-the-fridge Spanish Eggs

I didn't have much inspiration or energy for dinner tonight. I hadn't defrosted anything and there was only eggs and bacon in the fridge. We had carbonara last night so I felt scrambled eggs was a bit similar...

I scraped together left overs for the kids then I thought of something - those baked pots of spicy tomato sauce eggs. I found out these are called Spanish Eggs amongst other things and usually contain chorizo and are served for breakfast.

Here is my version, with bacon and mushrooms, flavoured with chilli, paprika and cumin. My Gran and I enjoyed it with freshly baked bread.

Whats-in-the-fridge Spanish Eggs
serves 2
This would be great with the addition of fresh parsley or oregano, but it was a bit cold to go outside...

olive oil
1 C mushrooms, chopped
1/2 onion, finely chopped
1 rasher bacon, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
sprinkle smoked paprika
sprinkle dried chilli
sprinkle ground cumin
1/4 C frozen spinach
1 tbsp grilled capsicum pieces (optional, I had a jar)
400g tin tomatoes
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 200C.

In a frypan, fry the mushrooms in a little oil until browned, set aside.

Add a dash more oil and fry the onion and bacon. When the onion is softened add the garlic and spices and cook stirring for another minute. Add the spinach, capsicum and tomatoes and simmer to thicken. Season to taste.

Put sauce into individual ramekins, wider rather than deeper are better. Crack an egg into the centre of each. Bake for 10 - 15 minutes until the white is set and yolk still runny.

Serve with bread to mop up the yummy sauce.

Fairy 5th Birthday Party

My eldest daughter Molly just turned 5! We had a party for her on the weekend, she chose a fairy theme as she is very into Tinkerbell at the moment. I tried to resist having an entirely Tinkerbell party but there was a lot of her :) The 9 little girls in attendance, in their gorgeous fairy outfits, all seemed to have a good time.

I made a fairy cake with little Tinkerbell figurines on it. Molly started out wanting a carousel/merry-go-round cake with horses but we changed it to a fairy merry-go-round to fit in the theme better. It turned out really well, but I may have stayed up very late finishing it off the night before!

The base cake was a 24cm Nigella Lawson vanilla buttermilk birthday cake (1 1/2 batches) covered in pale green buttercream. The top was a Nigella Lawson sour cream chocolate cake (1/2 batch) baked in a bowl, covered in ready-to-roll fondant dyed pale pink. I piped bright pink buttercream flowers all over the cakes, which I quite enjoyed! These are the kids favourite bit of course! It was assembled with 6 ribbon covered cake dowels and a ribbon covered cardboard tube which were just poked into the cake with the top cake (on a cardboard cake board) resting on top. Some of the figurines were dangling from the top cake by fishing line so the fairies were flying.

For the rest of the food I made:

• butterfly and flower shaped cheese pastries (puff pastry with grated cheese) - these were Molly's favourite and were the easiest to make
• sausage rolls  - I like this recipe, I used beef sausage mince from the butcher and skipped the herbs - make plenty as the parents always like them too!
• fairy bread
• pink fruit skewers with strawberries, red grapes and watermelon
• pink meringues
• coconut ice

We decorated the room with silk flowers and balloons. The lolly bags had wizz fizz, strawberries and cream, musk sticks, and candy-bracelets. For prizes I found Tinkerbell glitter glues in a wand shape and mini fairy notebooks.

I find it best to keep the kids busy for the whole party, so we played lots of games:

• musical flowers (like musical chairs but with cardboard flower shapes)
• fairy treasure hunt in the garden - they looked for chocolate coins, the Tinkerbell glitter glues, and shiny cut out stars and flowers
• Pin the wand on the fairy - we used the star cutouts they had found on the hunt
• Pass the parcel - with a candy bracelet in every layer, as Molly said "it was fair because we all got an eating bracelet"
• and we finished by turning on the Tinkerbell Movie.

I couldn't resist having a cooking activity at the party, I love cooking with kids and seem to find a whole extra patience reserve. We made marshmallow fairy wands that I saw on Juicy Bits.

Marshmallow Fairy Wands
wooden sticks or skewers
marshmallows
white chocolate melts
pink and purple food dye (the liquid pink dye worked much better than the purple paste)
lots of sprinkles
piece of polystyrene foam

Melt the white chocolate and add food colouring to get desired colours. Place in small bowls to allow for easy marshmallow dipping. Put the sprinkles in little bowls.

Place a marshmallow on the blunt end of the stick. Dip into chocolate and into sprinkles.

Stick skewer into piece of polystyrene to allow to dry.

Our fairies made 3 each and when they were dry I put a cellophane bag over them and tied with curling ribbon to send home.

Passionfruit Self-saucing Pudding

The Good Living section of the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday this week had a selection of passionfruit recipes by Jane and Jeremy Strode. I couldn't resist the self-saucing pudding, especially as I had passionfruits in the fruit bowl. The recipe is just like lemon delicious - a light spongey self-saucing pudding that I love but possibly even better! We all devoured it and I am going to have to make it again soon.

You can find the recipe here at cuisine.com.au. I followed the recipe exactly but stretched it to 3 larger and 2 smaller serves.

Babi Kecap Pork in the SC - Slow Braised Malaysian Pork with Ginger, Chilli and Sweet Soy Sauce

We just had a lovely long weekend at home with my sister and her fiance staying. My sister introduced me to the Almost Bourdain blog which sadly finished recently. We found this recipe for Babi Kecap Pork which not only looked delicious but had the great advantage of using kecap manis (sweet soy sauce) and tamarind water, both of which I have quite a bit of and don't use much, as well as pork shoulder which I had in the freezer.

I cooked it all day in the slow cooker and it was fantastic, we ate all of it between the 4 of us. There was no way the kids would have eaten it (they had two minute noodles which they were thrilled about:) but I will try it again without the chilli and I think they will enjoy the sweet salty sauce (and I will add chilli flakes to my serve!).

We followed it up with a delicous apple pie cooked by Amelia and Adam - I love guests who cook us delicious food (and are great company) - thanks for the pie, pancakes, caesar salad, hamburgers and guacamole!

Babi Kecap in the Slow Cooker - Slow Braised Pork with Ginger, Chilli and Sweet Soy Sauce
recipe adapted for the slow cooker from Almost Bourdain who adapted it from Rick Stein's Far East Odyssey
I used the last of the summer's chillis from my garden - one long red and two jalapenos chopped seeds and all - it was the perfect spiciness.
serves 6

2 tbsp vegetable oil
100 g shallots, thinly sliced
50 g garlic, crushed
25 g peeled ginger, finely grated
1.25 kg lean pork shoulder, in 3cm chunks
4 tbsp kecap manis
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
3 tbsp Tamarind water
1/2 tsp pepper
3-4 medium-hot chillies, seeded and chopped
4 red bird's eye chillies, left whole
500 ml asian chicken stock
Crisp fried shallots, to garnish

Heat the oil in a large, heavy-based pan over a medium heat. Add the shallots and fry until they are soft and richly golden. Add the crushed garlic, ginger and 1/2 tsp salt and cook for 1 minute. Add to the slow cooker, or set aside.

Add the pork to the pan and fry for 2 minutes until lightly coloured. Put in the slow cooker. Add the kecap manis, dark soy sauce, tamarind water, pepper, chopped and whole chillies and stock (only enough to almost cover the meat). Cook in the slow cooker on low for 8 hours or on the stove leave to simmer, uncovered, for about 1 1/2 hours, stirring now and then towards the end of cooking, until the pork is tender.

Lift the pork out of the sauce with a slotted spoon onto a plate. Boil the cooking liquid until it has reduced to a well-flavoured, slightly thicken, shiny, dark brown sauce. Season to taste with salt, return the pork to the pan and stir in. Spoon the pork onto a warmed serving plate, scatter with the crisp fried shallots and serve.

Serve with rice and greens.