Baby Hat Upgrade

I have a pile of old wool hats that I use for Ada, that used to be her brothers.  Boring plain old hats.  In the weekend I accidently stumbled across the Grey Street Markets in Hamilton East and found an amazing stall, run by a lady called Janice Mary, which sold the most beautiful mosaics and crotched and knitted flowers.  So for $1.50 I upgraded one of Ada's hand me down hats into a cute girly hat.  I think it might be time to learn some basic knitting and crotchet skills - I love the end result!

And here is a picture of the cross I picked up.  Janice makes her mosiacs with such love and precision.  I will definately be going back to pick some more up for Christmas presents!



Cure Kids Red Nose Day Baking

Our local bookstore is supporting the Cure Kids Red Nose Day by hosting a bake sale outside their shop today.  I donated two dozen Red Velvet Cupcakes (baked using the recipe off my favourite baking blog  - http://www.bakingmakesthingsbetter.com/2011/05/red-velvet-cupcakes-yum.html ) and a dozen Red Nose Gingerbread Men (recipe on my blog).  It was hard resisting a few treats myself!

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Sour Cream Chocolate Cake

I think I have finally found perfection in a chocolate cake.  This was nothing short of amazing.  Rich, decadent and moist.  I was so satisfied after one piece.  This is it.  I may never use another chocolate cake recipe again!  It was hard to get photos of, as we had visitors around, and it disappeared pretty much before I had a chance to photograph!  The picture above was one of the final pieces.

I made this for hubby, as he is a chocolate cake fan, and he had fun decorating it.  I love our names on it - it is our wedding anniversary coming up in a few days so this was our pre-anniversary treat!  It was his first attempt at making chocolate decorations, and he called them his tornado's!  He put the cream in the middle, which made it extra yummy, but it definately would be just as good without it.

250g butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
3 eggs
1 3/4 cups plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 cup cocoa
1 cup sour cream
200g dark cooking chocolate, melted and cooled
Ganache for icing

Preheat oven to 160 degrees and grease and line a 22cm round cake tin.

Place softened butter and sugar into a bowl and beat until light and creamy.  Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

Sift flour, baking powder and cocoa over the butter.  Add sour cream and melted chocolate and mix.  Spoon into tin and spread evenly. 

Bake for 55 - 60 minutes or until just cooked.

Cool on a rack and ice.  We cut in half and spread the middle with ganache and cream, then iced with ganache.

Alphabet Cookies

We've just made a firm decision that we will homeschool our children, so I've been doing so much research into school curriculums this week - on the educational theme I decided to make some Alphabet biscuits.  The kids love these biscuits, but they do take a bit of preparation and are fiddly.  Don't make these if you are short of time!

I use a basic butter biscuit recipe as follows:

250g butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla essence
1 egg yolk
2 cups of plain flour
1/3 cup cornflour

Cream together the butter, sugar and vanilla until light and creamy.  Beat in egg yolk.  Mix in flour and cornflour until it forms a smooth dough.  Gently knead on a lighly floured surface, wrap in gladwrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.  This will make the mixture nice and hard so it can be rolled and cut.  Pre-heat oven now to 180 degrees and prepare 3 x baking trays.

Roll one half of the dough out between sheets of non-stick baking paper until 5mm thick.  Cut out shapes.  Re-roll and repeat until dough is used and then do the same for the second half of dough.  Its not the easiest dough to work with - you can roll it out flat and then refrigerate it until hard again, then cut the shapes out.  I use a sharp steel spatula to scrape my shapes off the baking paper into the trays.

Bake for 10 - 12 mintues, or until lightly browned.  Allow to cool slightly then transfer to cooling racks.  Ice with a basic icing or with fondant.

Pear and Ginger Upside Down Cake

Tamara Jane featured this on Good Morning a few weeks back, and a close friend of mine told me I had to try it.   I knew it would be good, as she knows her food.  I had actually seen it being made on the show and thought at the time it looked pretty good, but I wasn't prepared for just how good it truely is.  You have to make this cake.  It is devine.  Not cheap, but it ranks up there with probably one of the best cakes I've ever come across!!

2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
250g melted and cooled butter
2 packham pears, peeled, cored and cut into 2cm slices
1 cup of golden syrup
2 eggs
1 tsp baking soda
2 1/2 cups plain flour
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp mixed spice
200g sour cream

Preheat oven to 160 degrees and lighly grease and line a 6cm deep cake tin.

Sprinkle 1/2 cup brown sugar over base of prepared pan and pour 1/3 cup butter over the sugar.  Arrange the pear slices in a single layer over the butter and sugar.

Place remaining butter into a large bowl.  Whisk in syrup and eggs.  Sift in soda, flour, ground ginger, mixed spice and remaining sugar and mix.  Stir in sour cream and pour batter over pears.

Bake for 1 and a half hours or until cooked.  Stand for 10 minutes and turn out onto a platter.  Serve and enjoy.  Have two pieces.

Freeset Sari Baby Wrap

I was at the HEART Conference over the weekend, and again Freeset were there with their amazing bags.  If you haven't heard of Freeset before, check out their website http://freesetglobal.com/  Its a dream of mine to travel to India, and now that I have heard of Freeset its now a dream to travel to the factory and see this organisation running.  Better yet to volunteer for a month.  The work they do is just amazing and the changes they can make to these ladies lives is priceless.

One of the things they were selling at the conference, along with their bags, were Sari Rugs and Sari Baby Wraps.  I was lucky enough to take one home - here is Ada wrapped snuggly in hers:

These are basically secondhand Sari's that have been upcycled.  It is just beautiful and I love all things to do with India, so you can imagine my obsession with it!  As they have no batting its around 4 layers of Sari's, handsewn together with a hood attached (which is machine sewn).  Its a piece of art and I am loving showing it off and telling the Freeset story where ever I go!

This is the front, with the hood in the top left hand corner

The back

I love this - there was obviously a little hole in the material, so this is where they have patched it up!

Close up of the stitching

Strawberry Shrewsbury's

As an adult I am not a fan of the storebrought Shrewsbury biscuits, but do remember the joy as a child trying to get the raspberry out of the centre with my tongue.

I am so bored with the usual biscuits I've been making lately that I am on a mission to try lots of new biscuits I've never baked before, that are child friendly.  This is another recipe I've had floating around for ages,  In fact, have a look at this - these are the recipes I've been collecting for a few years that I want to try. They are a mixture of magazine cut outs and hand written or typed recipes given to me by other people.  I will never get through them!!

Anyway, I digress!  These biscuits fit the bill perfectly for being child friendly and I am fighting my way to the biscuit tin with the children.  I did roll them a bit thickly, and they are more a meal in a biscuit - next time I will be rolling the dough thinner.  But still sooooo good!

125g softened butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 TBS lemon rind
2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
Strawberry Jam

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.  Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add the lemon rind and egg and beat well.  Sift in flour and baking powder.

Knead well.

On a lightly floured board roll out to a 4mm thickness and cut out shapes.  In half the biscuits cut a 1cm hole (I used one of my Wilton icing tips).

Place on greased and lined oven trays and bake for 10 - 15 minutes.  Cool.  When cold spread the whole biscuits with strawberry jam and top with biscuits with holes in them.