Recipe Sixteen: Wholemeal Bread

On Christmas Day my sister turned up to lunch with these:

Now I'm generally one to watch my how much bread I eat,

HOWEVER...I ate a piece of these that was about half the size of my head and I did not regret it
one. little. bit.

I have been inspired:

Note: This was originally a basic white bread recipe, it should have stayed that way. The wholemeal flour seemed to take on a lot more moisture and my bread turned out a little stodgy. Just substitute the wholemeal for white bread flour.


Basic Wholemeal Bread:

3 teaspoons of dried yeast
125ml of warm water

2 teaspoons of caster sugar

2 1/2 cups of wholemeal flour

1 teaspoon of salt

30gms of butter, melted

125ml of warm milk.

In a small bowl whisk your yeast, water and sugar until the yeast dissolves. Stand in a warm place for 10 minutes or until the mixture has gone frothy.

In a large bowl mix together your flour and salt and then mix in your butter, milk and frothy yeast mixture.

Lightly flour your counter top and turn the dough out onto it.

Knead this for 5-10 minutes or until your mixture is elastic.

Grease a bowl and place dough inside, cover with plastic wrap, pierced in one place and put in a warm place for an hour. Your dough should double in size.

Preheat oven to 200C (180C Fan Forced) & grease a small loaf tin.

Turn the risen dough onto a floured counter & knead until smooth.

Mold into a shape that fits your loaf tin & place inside.

Leave to rise again for 20 Minutes.

Bake for 45minutes and turn onto a wire rack.

Recipe Fifteen: Mum's Salsa

This is my Mum:

I've noticed that so many times when I go to write out a recipe the title starts with
the word 'Mum's'.

I have to say that although I never noticed it growing up, my Mum makes some pretty
spectacular food. 

It's a shame my child/teenage year-old self never really appreciated it.

Think of all the wasted time not stealing her recipes!!!

I mean look at this:

I never thought to ask for this recipe!

(It's ok though she's going to make it again & guest post. Thanks Mum!)

I remember when I was about 8 and mum brought home a blank exercise book and told me she was going to write recipes in there for me to cook for the family. 

It rocked.

Anyhow time for another one of 'Mum's' recipes. 

A super easy but super popular:

 Sweet Chilli Salsa.

All of the following vegetables need to be diced:

2 Tomatoes

1 Cucumber

1 Avocado

1 Red Onion

+

1 regular sized tin of Sweet Corn

Sweet Chilli Sauce

250gm of Cream Cheese.

Combine all of your vegetables and add to them sweet chilli sauce to taste.

(Make sure you actually taste it or said author of he original recipe might pull you aside to gently ask whether you had in fact added it at all....)

Place your cream cheese in the middle of a plate and flatten slightly

Pour over vegetable and sweet chilli mix.

Serve with corn chips.

xx

Recipe Fourteen: Whiskey Meatballs

I first saw these babies here.

And then followed them back to here.

And now, with a few alterations they are being eaten by my Christmas Eve guests.

My main change to this recipe was replacing the bought frozen meatballs with some home-made frozen meatballs and swapping out the Bourbon for plain old Tennessee Whiskey.

This will definitely become one of my 'make-ahead/pot luck/easy entertaining' recipes.

Meatballs:

500gms of Pork and Veal Mince

(Our butcher minces and sells them together otherwise you want 250gm of each)

1/2 an Onion, finely chopped.

1 cup of Breadcrumbs

1 clove of garlic, minced.

1/2 a tablespoon of dried thyme.

1/4 of a cup of cheddar cheese.

2eggs

Salt and pepper.

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and either using you hands (which is far more satisfying and does a much better job) or a wooden spoon mush all the ingredients together until mixed evenly.

Rolls mixture into balls and place on a plate, cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Heat a little oil in a large pan and in two batches brown meatballs all over.

Don't stress about cooking them all the way through, they are going to be cooked again in their glaze for a couple of hours.

Pop these babies in the freezer until a few hours before you want to serve the dish.

The Whiskey Glaze:

1/2 a cup of Tomato Sauce

1/2 a cup of Brown Sugar

1/4 cup of Whiskey

1 teaspoon of Lemon Juice

1 teaspoon of Worcestershire Sauce

Combine all of these ingredients in a bowl and whisk until mix is smooth.

In a pan on low-medium heat on the stove (or in a slow-cooker set on high) place your frozen meatballs and pour over the glaze, stir the meatballs around so they are all covered.

Let the sauce heat through and the meat balls warm up (stirring every now and then) then turn your stove right down to low (or your slow-cooker onto low) and let them stew away for 2 hours.

Serve!

xx

Recipe Thirteen: Peanut Butter Crackle.

This slice is how I get my brother to mow our lawns.

I was actually considering making him a gigantic slab of this for Christmas.

 The only problem with that is if I had to keep it in my house for any extended period of time it would be eaten. 

I don't mean a small square here and there.

I would seriously sit and eat until it's ALL gone.

Anyhow, enough about my extraordinarily lacking will power.

Peanut Butter Crackle

1/2 a cup if Caster Sugar

1/2 a cup of Golden Syrup

1/2 a cup of Smooth Peanut Butter
3 cups of Rice Bubbles

100gms of Dark Chocolate to decorate.

Line a slab pan (20cm x 30cm)  a 25cm diameter round pan.

Stir sugar and golden syrup in a small pan over low heat until sugar has dissolved.

Add peanut butter and stir until dissolved.

Put your rice bubbles in a large mixing bowl and pour in the peanut buttery syrup.

Mic until combined and press into your pan.

Melt your chocolate and put into a zip loc bag. Snip off one of the corners and pipe lines of chocolate all over the top! .................This is until you realise you forgot to pick up chocolate from the store and there is no way on God's green earth that you are going anywhere near the shopping mall that is open for 36hrs straight, 3 days before Christmas. I do love my run-on sentences.

Refrigerate for an hour, cut into squares wedges and serve.

xx 

Recipe Nine: Mum's Lemon Slice

(I know it says recipe nine...and I just posted recipe twelve...seems there was no ninth recipe...so here is it's replacement!)

The secret ingredient in many of my favourite recipes is the memories they conjure up with your first bite.

This one says Christmas lunch with my Nan and Pa.

It says new bikes and hot days.

It reminds me of the days when all five or six of us  played together in the back yard.

Mum's Lemon Slice:

1/2 a cup of sweetened condensed milk

100gm of Butter

200gms of Granita Biscuits

1 Cup of dessicated coconut.

The Rind of one lemon, finely grated.

Lemon Icing

2 cups of Icing Sugar

40gms of butter

The Juice of the rindless lemon!

Grease and line a slab pan (15 X 25cm)

Put your butter and condensed milk in a small pan and melt together.

Put the biscuits in your food processor and process until you have fine crumbs

Pour these crumbs into a bowl and add 2 teaspoons of lemon rind and the coconut.

Add the hot butter mixture and combine.

Press this mixture into the base of your pan.

Refrigerate for an hour.

Make your lemon icing:

Place icing sugar, butter and 2.5 tablespoons of lemon juice into a small bowl.

Beat until smooth with a wooden spoon.

Spread over base, sprinkle with toasted coconut if you like and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Call in everyone who is playing in the backyard and serve.

xx

Recipe Twelve: Devilled Eggs

Devilled Eggs.

Absolutely retro.

Absolutely no idea how to make them.

From what Google tells me there are hundreds of variations on this recipe and I had to choose one.

I chose the most basic, able to be made out of what I had on hand version:

Devilled Eggs.

12 Eggs 

4 Tablespoons of Whole Egg Mayonnaise 

3-4 (to personal taste) Tablespoons of Dijon Mustard.

1 Tablespoon of chopped chives.

Paprika (to decorate)

Chives (to decorate)

1.Hard Boil your eggs. I start with enough cold water to cover the eggs by about an inch & use a Egg-Perfect (I'm not paid to link here but that is where you can get your own!) timer and my eggs are perfect every.single.time.

2. Peel The Eggs:

3. Chop the eggs in half & pop out the yolks.

4.Combine the hard boiled yolks, mayonnaise, mustard and chives in a bowl and mash together until smooth.

5. Fill a piping bag fitted with a plain round nozzle with the yolk mix and pipe this back into the empty egg whites.

6.Sprinkle the tops of your eggs with paprika and fresh chopped chives.

xx

Recipe Eleven: Christmas Town

This post is part of the "Sweet Adventures Blog Hop' Festive Favourites.

Last year I was inspired to make Martha Stewart's "Gingerbread Town Square Cake".

That said when you look closely at the recipe and realise you're going to need three days, over 20 eggs and almost a kilo of butter it was easy to get disheartened about the whole thing. 

This year I decided to make the cake with the same basic premise, flavours and visual outcome minus the heart clogging, wallet emptying and time erasing process.

So here goes:

Gingerbread Facades:

2 1/4 cups of self raising flour

1 1/2 teaspoons of ginger

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

3/4 teaspoon of cloves

1/2 a teaspoon of nutmeg

95gm of butter

1/2 a cup of firmly packed brown sugar

1/4 cup of treacle

1 lightly beaten egg.

Process the flour, spices and butter until they look like breadcrumbs

Add the sugar, treacle and enough egg to bring the mix together

Turn onto a floured surface and knead until smooth.

Shape into a disk and refrigerate for 1hr. Pre-heat oven to 180C

Roll dough out between 2 sheets of baking paper until 3mm thick.

Cut out facade shapes (I found mine here)

Bake until just firm (8-10minutes)

Leave to cool completely & then ice with Royal icing.

Walnut Meringue Layers:

2 1/2 cups of walnuts lightly toasted.

1 1/2 cups of Pure icing suagr

1 cup of caster sugar

6 large egg whites.

Process your walnuts until fine.

Add icing sugar and 3/4 of a cup of your caster sugar.

Process to combine.

Whip your egg whites until soft peaks form.

Add remaining caster sugar one tablespoon at a time until dissolved.

Continue to beat until stiff glossy peaks form.

Fold walnut mix into the egg meringue.

Draw 3 18cm diameter circles on baking paper, turn the paper over and pipe out circles using the walnut meringue.

Bake for 2hrs, then stand in the oven with the door ajar for another hour.

Gingerbread Butter Cream

250gms of butter

3 cups of pure icing sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons of Ginger

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

1/2 a teaspoon of Nutmeg

Milk to texture.

Whip the butter until pale, gradually add icing sugar.

If your mix becomes to stiff add a splash of milk to bring it back to the right consistency.

Beat in spices.

Whip 250mls of Cream.

Assembly:

The layers are assembled like this:

Meringue, buttercream, meringue, buttercream, meringue.

Then using remaining butter cream, frost the edges as best you can and stick on your facades.

Put your whipped cream on the top of the cake and spread.

Sprinkle the cream with cinnamon and you're done!

MERRY CHRISTMAS

xx

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