Winter + White Chocolate

Think about it...
It's a cold winter evening and you're snuggled on the couch with a lovely knitted blanket over your knees.  What could make this a better picture?  Only biting into a warm white chocolate chunk cookie!

Heaven!  You see, white chocolate and I...well, we have a bit of a 'thing'.  But please don't allow this to hold you back from experimenting with this recipe!  Instead of white chocolate, you could use ANY type of chocolate, chocolate bar, nut or dried fruit.  This is the wonderful cookie recipe of my childhood and you really can do anything with it.

White Chocolate Chunk Cookies

250g butter, unsalted

70g caster sugar

70g brown sugar

1/2 can condensed milk

2 tsp vanilla essence

350g S/R flour

80g plain flour

200g good quality white chocolate, chopped roughly

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees.  Cream the butter and sugars until well combined and lightened in colour.  Mix in the condensed milk and vanilla before adding your flours. When your mixture has come together, add the chocolate.  Roll tablespoons of the mixture into balls and place onto baking trays, allowing room for spreading. Bake for 15 minutes or until lovely and golden.

This recipe makes a whole lot of cookies so you could halve the mixture but what would be the fun in that?

F. x

Nostalgia and Chocolate Cake

Isn't it funny how, no matter how old we are, we still long for the food of our childhood?  I regularly turn to the recipes that I have cooked a million times, after have watched my mum cook them a million times before. My tastes are very much influenced by my darling mother's cooking.  For example, I always make my custard incredibly thick.  Why?  Because that's how Mum always did it.   My lovely husband, often asks me for meals that his mother used to cook for him, giving me 'feedback' as to how I can make it "more like Mum's."  As much as I find this ever-so-slightly irritating, it is endearing too.  These are the tastes, textures and smells of our childhood and how much comfort we find in the nostalgia that comes along.  This speaks volumes for the amount of love and affection in our childhood homes, and the care with  which each meal was prepared and presented.  I hope that one day, my (future) children will have the same experience and continue our mother's recipes on as they share them with their own families.  I have previously shared my mum's delicious chocolate cake recipe, a family must-have for all birthdays and celebrations.  These are the chocolate cup-cakes that graced my lunchbox in primary school and the same chocolate cup-cakes that Mitch often has in his.  The legacy of love through nourishment continues, and how truly wonderful it is.

F. x



Home Sweet Home

This weekend, I will be travelling back to Brisbane to see my family.  After almost three months in Blackwater, the thought of returning to Brisbane to stay with my parents and younger siblings has me overwhelmed with warm fuzzy thoughts of the comfort of 'home'.  No matter how long you've been away, somehow Mum's place is always referred to as 'home' and I love that.  My Mum is my favourite cook (well on par with Maggie Beer and Margaret Fulton).  One thing that my Mum is an absolute master of is custard.  And another is pulling a homey dessert out of nowhere, on demand.  Crumble has always had a soft spot with me, for this very reason.  It was one of the things that Mum would make on a weekend (dessert is not for school nights) to accompany her champion of custards. 

Funnily enough, I found myself rubbing butter into flour one night this week, pulling together a crumble as a mid-week treat for Mitch and I.  There is really nothing more flexible.  Whatever you happen to have in the cupboard goes in.  Once you have a base of butter, flour and sugar (raw, castor, brown or a combination), throw in whatever takes your fancy.  For me, it happened to be coconut and chopped walnuts.  Thinking about it now, a little nutmeg would have also been delightful.  Juicy tinned peaches filled the bottom of darling cream Wedgewood ramekins (a present from Mum for this very purpose!), before crumble is packed over the top.  I am by no means a minimalist when it comes to crumble toppings.  Twenty minutes later, the smell of baking fills the house and out comes perfection in a jar....golden, knobbly and lucious.  The smell and taste of home.

F. x

A spot of morning tea, anyone?

 

Whatever happened to having people around for morning tea?  While I will bake scones or biscuits if I have friends or family coming to my house, I very rarely make a date specifically for 'morning tea'.  How terribly sad to have lost something so civilised. Having a situation to be rectified, I decided to rekindle my romance with an old and underestimated favourite: the pikelet.  In my experience (and vast this experience is) it is very possible for the humble ol' pikelet to go terribly wrong and how this happens, I will never understand (perhaps the over-reliance on bicarbonate of soda to provide adequate 'fluff').  These little friends were a staple in my household growing up.  Mum would often help us make pikelets for afternoon tea and I have lovely memories of eating more than I ever made!  Our recipe for pikelets was very simple: a chunk of self raising flour, an egg (or two, maybe), a whole lot of vanilla extract and milk added by feel.  They always turned out and must have been ok because they rarely had time to cool before being lathered in sticky strawberry jam and gobbled up.

I must admit that this morning, the gorgeous grande dame of the kitchen, Margaret Fulton provided my recipe as I wanted my pikelets to be beautifully authentic to morning teas of a bygone era.  This meant the addition of a little melted butter and half/half milk and buttermilk.  I did deviate by sneaking in some lovely vanilla.  Keeping this traditional, there was no low-fat in sight and this included the bubbly butter in the bottom of the frypan. After five minutes of mixing and ten minutes flipping, I had a plate full of fluffy, cakey, and very homemade looking pikelets.  The cream was whipped and the kettle boiled....and my hunky husband had the entire batch finished off within the time it took me to cook them.

(Well, except for the two I ate in between flips.)

F. x

Childhood Memories

I absolutely adore baking cakes.  Every single time that I bake cupcakes, it brings back childhood memories of baking in the kitchen with Mum.  We used to make a batch of our "special recipe" every single week and freeze the cupcakes so that us kids could have one in our lunch box every day.  Mum used to let me put each ingredient into the bowl, being incredibly patient as I invariably dropped shell into the mix after cracking the eggs.  I would insist on being the one to mix the batter with the electric beaters and without fail would send the majority of the batter over the kitchen splashback, the bench and all over us!  My favourite were Mum's chocolate cupcakes and I still make them using that exact recipe quite regularly.  It doesn't matter how many different or more complicated recipes I try, these ones still taste the best.  Now, I am all for sharing (and Mum wouldn't mind) so I encourage you to try this and let me know how you go!

F. x

Mum's Chocolate Cake

125g unsalted butter

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 ½ cups SR flour

½ cup cocoa

1 cup milk

Cook in a medium oven for 20 minutes (cupcakes) or 40 minutes (large cake).

Me and my gorgeous Mutti