cupcakes cupcakes

#8 on my 25 before 25 list is to make beautifully decorated cupcakes. I was given for Christmas my first piping bag set by my lovely parents and last night I gave it its maiden run.

Now I don’t consider these cupcakes beautiful enough to cross #8 off yet (I am thinking amazing icing, and maybe even cupcake toppers will be required) but they have been a good first go with the piping bag.

red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing

Luckily I have morning tea at work today so I won’t have to eat them all. I grabbed the recipe from over at bakerella if you’re interested.

meringues for a birthday

It was one of my coworker’s birthdays today – and I don’t like passing up the opportunity to bake. And so I chose my lemon meringue tarts to prepare, a recipe which always looks impressive, but is a cinch to make. I got the original recipe from taste.com.au but I’ve made a few adjustments to increase the meringue to lemon ratio, as well as increasing the volume in general.

Ingredients

2 sheets of frozen ready rolled shortcrust pastry, partially thawed

1 tin of sweetened condensed milk

2 lemons, rind finely grated, juiced

2 egg yolks

4 egg whites

1 cup of caster sugar

Method

Place a flat baking tray in oven. Preheat oven and tray to 200°C. Cut each sheet of pastry into three strips, and then three again, so you have 18 squares in total.

Lightly grease muffin holes. Line with pastry. Place pan on baking tray. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes or until pastry is light golden. Reduce oven to 180°C.

Combine condensed milk, lemon rind, 1/2 cup lemon juice and egg yolk in a bowl.

Place eggwhite in a separate bowl. Using an electric mixer, beat until soft peaks form. Add sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, beating well after each addition, until meringue is thick and glossy.

Spoon lemon mixture into pastry cases. Top with meringue. Place muffin pan on baking tray. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes or until meringue is light golden.

And then you are right to eat them!

long weekend cooking

The labour day long weekend brought with it many cooking adventures. First, in an effort to use some pastry that was taking up some space in my freezer I made my own version of pastry twists. Trying different flavours I used three different mixes; rosemary & salt, tomato paste & parmesan, and finally parmesan & paprika.

The tomato paste with parmesan was the best of the lot! It had the most flavour and wasn’t as dry as the other flavours.

I was feeling the culinary vibe so I continued and created a pineapple upside cake – a family favourite.

And, in my family’s traditional fashion, I ate it in a bowl covered with milk! yum! To this day we are uncertain to where this odd tradition came from, but hey it works!

The long weekend was topped off with one last cooking adventure – arrabiata pasta, my cheats dinner! Potentially the easiest pasta sauce to make, fry up some garlic, bacon and chilli, add two tins of tomato and simmer for around 30 minutes. And you’re done. If you’re feeling creamy, add a carton of sour cream and stir.

It certainly was a delicious weekend!

weekend adventures and rosemary rolls

Phil and I headed down the Great Ocean Road for the weekend – never having ventured outside of Melbourne when it comes to Victoria I was excited to see the region. The twists and turns of the great ocean road certainly was a scenic drive, and despite the weather the beauty of seeing the sea again certainly heighten my mood from the oncoming illness. Below are some photos of our gorgeous apartment and the view from it.

Back to the normal world I decided to cook something different for a side tonight – taking a leaf out of the Pioneer Woman’s book and made rosemary and butter rolls.

They turned out perfectly! Using a basic dough recipe and adding fresh rosemary and rock salt it was easy to whip up! A definite keeper.

mini? check. oreos? check. cheesecake? check

Those that know me know that I have a love for all things miniature, especially when it comes to food, and so when I stumbled upon a recipe for mini oreo cheesecake (which itself was from Martha Stewart’s cupcake book), you could say I was excited. Now on further reading of the recipe I realised the oreos themselves weren’t miniature, but rather the  mini was in reference to the cheesecake, slightly less excited but not enough to put me off creating them. So after work I headed off to the shops to buy the whopping 4 eggs I needed for the recipe. After some imperial to metric conversions I decided that 1 kilo of cream cheese was a tad too much for me to purchase, so I halved the recipe. Below is my interpretation of the linked recipe above:

Ingredients

18 Oreos (just short of a whole pack – the one with two rows inside)

500g of cream cheese

1/2 cup of sugar

Splash of vanilla extract

2 eggs

(the original recipe had sour cream, however after some searching, other recipes didn’t include it – so I felt I could leave one fatty ingredient out)

Preheat oven to 135 degrees Celsius. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners or grease well with non-stick baking spray. Place 1 whole Oreo in the bottom of each cup.

With an electric mixer on medium high speed, beat cream cheese until smooth, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Gradually add sugar, and beat until combined. Beat in vanilla.

Drizzle in eggs, a bit at a time, beating to combine and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Stir in chopped cookies by hand.

Divide batter evenly among cookie-lined cups, filling each almost to the top. Bake, until filling is set, about 22 minutes.

Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Refrigerate at least 4 hours (or up to overnight). Remove from tins just before serving.

Finished product – may have got it out the fridge a few hours too early, but it was tasty none the less.