And… it’s been a while!
With Covid-19 lockdown restrictions easing, a friend came for a visit in the weekend which gave me the perfect excuse to bake these cinnamon rolls. They were SO good that I wanted to keep track of the recipe (particularly since I converted it to metric) – hence dusting off this old blog!
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Fresh fig season is the best season (apart from summer, but we’re not counting that).
I’m really lucky that my friend’s mum has a large fig tree, and I’ve been reaping the bounty of their harvests.
That’s right – free figs all for meeeee. Alastair doesn’t really eat them, so I’ve been scoffing them down like crazy.
These brownies came about due to op shopping.
There’s an op shop near my workplace that I pop into occasionally to look for photography props. Most of the time I come out empty handed but sometimes I get something good.
On my last visit, I found something great – a large French crystal cake stand. For the huge sum of $5. Wheeee.
Do you like quinces? If so, make this tart.
Not sure if you like quinces? Doesn’t matter, make this tart.
Don’t like quinces? Make this tart anyway. Someone in your life will appreciate it.
It is deliciously delicious and worth the effort.
I like to buy apples through autumn and winter, but invariably we end up with ones in the fruit bowl that are starting to go floury. I hate floury apples. Plus if there’s one thing worse than an overexaggeration, it’s floury apples. 🙂
What to do with them? Well there’s a gazillion and one things you can do with apples but lately I’ve been very enamoured with apple sponge pudding. The kind of pudding that has a layer of baked sponge/cake on top, and soft apples sitting on the bottom. I made one recently that had an additional component – caramel sauce – which coated the apples on the bottom.
After a break over Christmas, Celeste, Penny and I are now back with our Meal to Share posts. This month’s theme is “Chinese New Year” and I’ve been allocated dessert. If you’re a newer reader, Meal to Share is our monthly collaboration where we each cook a course for a themed meal – so don’t forget to check out their posts for the rest of the meal!
On Sunday, I spent a fun couple of hours at Penny’s house with Anh, Celeste and Anna, making mooncakes. Mooncakes are Chinese pastries that are normally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. They’re very sweet, and high in calories, plus they’re relatively expensive per cake (I think a box of four here, depending on the quality, sells for ~$20-$25. But you’re not supposed to eat a whole one by yourself at one go – I wouldn’t eat more than 1/4 at a time.)
The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, and it’s meant to be when the moon is at its maximum brightness for the entire year. (The Chinese calendar is a lunar calendar, with the months following the cycles of the moon.) The Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated in many Asian countries – such as China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and the Phillippines, and this year it’s officially today! Happy Mid-Autumn/Moon Festival!
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Unbelievably, we’re on to Week 41 of the Cookbook Challenge, and the theme this week is: celebration.
I don’t have a specific occasion to celebrate this weekend, but here are some things that I’d like to celebrate:
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After the success of the previous International Incident Parties, this month we have scones to celebrate the birthdays of Cherrie and Anh. Happy birthday!
When I was in primary school back in NZ, we used to have lessons that we called “‘manual’ – where we learnt cooking, sewing, and woodworking. My favourite was the cooking (surprise surprise), probably because in woodworking all I could turn out were wonky wooden pencil cases, and in sewing I made boring bookmarks and cushions. But in cooking – oh cooking! In cooking we made things like apple crumble, Anzac biscuits, and scones, and not only was it fun, but we got to take our food home and eat it!
So I have a fondness for scones, though for some reason I don’t make them often. Scones have a reputation for being simple, but that simplicity is rather deceptive as it’s far too easy to bake a flat, dry, puck rather than a light, fluffy tower.
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Cookbook Challenge: Week 36
Theme: Comfort Food
Recipe: Lemon delicious puddings
From: AWW Bake
The theme for this week’s Cookbook Challenge is “comfort food”. After a rather busy week, this weekend has been incredibly lazy so something comforting and puddingish sounded good to me.
I have rather a lot of lemons (due to Maria giving me 5kgs from her tree) and I’ve been doing my best to cook and bake my way through them. So for this week’s theme, I decided to make lemon delicious in an effort to use up more lemons. If you don’t know what lemon delicious, it’s a classic – a baked pudding that ends up with two layers: a light sponge on top of a tangy sauce. (more…)