R:Code-name cupcake

I recently volunteered to join the morning-tea roster for Dr George O’Neil’s Fresh Start clinic and my turn’s come round to being in sweets.

Having received rather encouraging comments from my birthday cupcake attempts, I decided to bring in cupcakes- and try to get the frosting right this time. The recipe borrowed from A’s Magnolia Bakery cookbook is a brilliant cupcake recipe, it epitomises simple, old fashioned goodness! The house smells so wonderful now, I feel all homely and fuzzy

The table’s now set, and i’m all ready to go!

Clockwise from bottom: Pretty sprinkles, Pastel frosting, Latte (for me!) and 53 vanilla cupcakes

R: Stuffed mushrooms II & Strawberry Crumble

GFM made buffalo wings for dinner tonight, basting with our freshly homemade spicy tomato sauce. Inspired by A’s stuffed mushrooms, I did a vego one as an entree. With the mushrooms as big as saucers, 1 per person was more than enough!

Mushrooms make wonderful edible plates

After the wings, we had a strawberry fruit crumble for dessert. Hmmm…. it was sticky, blood red, and full of fruity goodness… so good that I forgot to take a picture before digging in! DOH!

I decadently split 1 punnet of strawberries among 3 ramekins then and added 2T of pimms, 1T of ginger wine and 1T of A’s lemon curd to each ramekin. To make the crumble, I blitzed 100g of wholemeal flour with 100g of cold butter then stirred in 100g of oats, a handful of chopped almonds and sunflower seeds. Finally, I topped the strawberries with the crumble mix and grated a little more butter on top for good measure.

After about 30mins in the 200degC oven, when the strawberries are bubbling up and engulfing the golden crumble, and the sweet smell of baked strawberries is in the air, you know its ready. Tuck in and try not to burn your tongue like I did!!

Point in time where I thought about taking a picture

R: Knotty thoughts

Today is the day we try out Oktoberfest at Elmars. And whilst I have every faith in the good establishment, I couldn’t help but add up how much it would cost us if we each had a (mandatory!) pretzel and how much we could save if……

Can we BOOP?

I know these aren’t the prettiest pretzels around, but they were PRETTY simple to make.  Without any clear plan in mind, I used a basic Richard Bertinet bread recipe: 500g of flour (i used a mix of white, spelt and rye, to give it what i think is the authentic deep colour), 350g water, 1 sachet of yeast, 10g salt and 1 spoonful of honey. Let the bread rise twice knocking back between rises, then make ropes and deftly form neat pretzel shapes. The people at Aunt Annie’s make this look so easy, as you can tell from my mangled shapes.

Then boil up 4 cups of water with 4 tsp of baking soda in it and cook the pretzels in it on both sides till they look nice and bloated. Quick sprinkle of caraway/sesame/seasalt, glaze with egg and into the oven at 230 deg celcius

Allow to cool then conspire how to sneak these into Elmars!