Cinnamon-buttermilk muffins

I have a funny relationship with doughnuts. I don't mind the odd doughnut but I can't really eat them, Homer Simpson-style. I don't know why. I can eat the little doughnut balls, but big doughnuts make me feel ill. I do love the flavour of doughnuts though. Sounds complicated? I told you it was a funny relationship. Maybe it's the oil?

Anyway, while I was reading foodgawker, I came across quite a few recipes for baked doughnuts. Sometimes I have had ideas to make my own doughnuts but I have a fear of deep frying so I have never attempted it. The baked alternatives often have a yeasted batter/dough too, which had just seemed to be a bit too much effort.

These Cinnamon-Buttermilk Muffins posted on Food Gal addressed my two issues quite well. It combined the ease of a muffin mixture and did not involve deep fryer. I had to try them after that.

These muffins, like their doughnut brothers are topped with a mix of cinnamon and sugar. Since the muffins don't have the benefit of being fried, in order to make the cinnamon sugar mix stick, the muffin tops are dipped in melted butter. Well, I brushed melted butter on the tops of mine as this mix didn't rise all the much and my muffins were lucky to clear the tops of their cases.

The recipe says that the batter is similar to a doughnut batter which means the muffins have a similar texture. I think that the muffins were quite successful in doing this, they were very tasty. I have to say that I could eat more than one of these muffins without feeling ill as I would with real doughnuts.

These were very easy and very yummy. A great alternative to a real doughnut.

See this post on Food Gal for the recipe.

Dulce De Leche Ice Cream

I love dulce de leche. It's creamy and rich and smooth and silky. I've tried making it at home various ways but I've found that Pennisi's at Woollongabba can be relied on to stock it in jars. I have trouble with my homemade dulce de leche, sometimes it's not as smooth as it should be. The jarred stuff stays nicely smooth and is often softer and easier to scoop than my homemade attempts.

While I do love dulce de leche I am not really sure what I can do with it. I mean, I do enjoy dipping apple slices into it and I know that you can sandwich it in between two cookies but I really wanted to do more with it. Then I found this dulce de leche ice cream posted on What A Dish!.

I'm a huge fan of egg-based ice creams. The ice-creams made of frozen cream or sweetened condensed milk do not work for me at all. I've never had a problem with them (touch wood). I always temper my egg yolks with a little bit of the heated milk before adding the rest, I always let the custard rest in the fridge overnight and it turns out the most amazingly creamy and rich ice cream.

This recipe was nice and easy. Heat your milk and dulce de leche in a saucepan until just below boiling point while beating your egg yolks and sugar until light in colour. Add the hot milk to the eggs and then return to heat and cook until it coats the back of a spoon. The recipe states to cook until it reaches 71 degrees C (160 degrees F), but I was too lazy to find my candy thermometer. I will say that my eggs were extremely fresh and I knew my icecream would not be fed to any pregnant women so I was happy to take my chances if the temperature guide was for food safety issues.

After the mix coats the back of a spoon, pour it through a sieve into a bowl and stir in some cream. Cover with plastic wrap so that the wrap is touching the whole surface of the custard and let it chill overnight. The next day, pour it into an ice cream maker and then freeze until set. Simple.

I didn't read the full recipe until I sat down to write this post and I see now I was supposed to layer the icecream with more dulce de leche. I don't think it needed it, to be honest. The ice cream was incredibly rich, perfect in small doses. It had a strong dulce de leche flavour, it was just lovely.

See What A Dish! for the recipe.

Chocolate Espresso Cookies

I mentioned a little while ago that I had recently discovered foodgawker. I think I am becoming a little obsessed with foodgawker to be honest, as there are so many things that I'm finding that are making me want to jump up right then and there to cook them.

Luckily, it's just an urge at this stage. I can generally wait to the weekend. Generally.

I like to click on all the pretty pictures of chocolate cookies, because I love chocolate cookies and I love seeing what other people love about chocolate cookies. I clicked on a post from Cookworm and was reeled in hook line and sinker by this sentence:

"The texture is a bit brownie-like, with fudgy, supremely chocolatey insides, fortified with a healthy dose of espresso"

Oh my. These cookies had to be made.

Luckily, they are actually really easy to make. The butter is melted, so you don't even have to wait for the butter to soften - which does frustrate me at times, because I always want to make cookies when I've only got rock hard butter.

I did cheat though. I used the microwave to melt my chocolate and butter. I do have a lovely double boiler which was a gift from D, but I was lazy. Microwave it was. I am not sure if the microwave heats the chocolate/butter mix to a higher temperature than a double boiler, although it would make sense. It took a long time for the melted chocolate to cool down. Even then, I may have moved too quickly as I did find some less than happy bits of egg in the mix. I fished them out as best I could. I couldn't tell in the finished product, so shh!!!

I also don't like nuts in cookies, so I left out the walnuts.

After mixing everything together, I had an extremely runny batter. Extremely. I've since found another similar recipe that tells you to refridgerate the batter for a few hours as it will thicken, but it didn't really matter, it made it easy to scoop.

I have to say, I wasn't too impressed when I first tasted them, but as I reflected on the first cookie something tickled my fancy and I couldn't stop eating them. They are so yummy. They are definately brownie like, with a fragile crispy shell. I halved the amount of chocolate chips as I'm not really a fan of chunky things in cookies so I didn't have the extra chocolate hit, but trust me, these cookies didn't need it.

My work colleagues seemed to like them as well, which was both good and bad. Good because the recipes makes heaps but bad because now they are all gone.

See the recipe for Chocolate Espresso Cookies over at Cookworm.

Golden Macaroni and Cheese

Sometimes I find it difficult to leave work at work. When I emotionally take work home with me on a weeknight, it's not too bad. You know, you get home late and you leave early the next morning. When I take it home over the weekend, I tend to spend it being quite mopey and waste a lot of my time worrying at whatever the issue is.

At times like this, I don't want fresh and vibrant food. I want comfort food, food that is creamy and warm and gooey and most likely pretty darn bad for you. So, I was feeling a little blue and in need of comfort. I was looking through foodgawker and found myself clicking on all the mac cheese recipes, so I figured I might as well not fight it and give in. I made macaroni and cheese.

Just as a little side note, I really want to make this recipe from Italian Food Safari without actually making my own orecchiette so I went down to a nearby Woolworths and to try and buy some. I found something that was labelled orecchiette and bought it, despite my misgivings that it looked more like a donut than an ear. (Funnily enough, that's how the brand describes it on their website - donut-shaped). I couldn't bring myself to make this recipe with my strange orecchiette and decided to utilise it in this recipe instead.

My mouse appears to be a little possessed today. It keeps clicking and dragging things when I want them to stay where they are and refusing to click and drag when I want to link things. Grr.

Anyway, back to creamy, cheesy pastas. As I said, I found the recipe for Golden Macaroni and Cheese on Elizabeth's Edible Experience via foodgawker. It looked so easy to make and it was incredibly easy. Dangerously so, in fact. It takes remarkably little effort to get something so gooey and wonderful into the oven.

Elizabeth says that the trick to this recipe is that part where you put your flour and milk (and some garlic powder, mustard powder and white pepper, in my case) into a jar and shake vigorously. The sauce thickens while baking. Amazing. In fact, my biggest issue while cooking this was that I couldn't find a jar big enough for me to make my floury milk cocktail. I don't know where all of my big jars have gone. I ended up finding one that only just contained everything, but sometimes I like living dangerously.

Just for fun - and because I had lots of cheese in the fridge - I mixed up some sharp cheddar, some extra sharp matured crumbly cheddar and some mozzarella. I really liked the way it turned out. There was a nice sharp edge but still had the stringiness of the mozzarella. It was a good balance.

My oven doesn't brown things all that well, so I fired up the grill for the last 5-10 minutes of cooking to get some golden crispy topping.


I did halve Elizabeth's recipe because I was only cooking it for D and me, but I have to admit that we ate the whole thing. It was amazing. It was one of the best macaroni and cheese dishes I have ever tasted. Incredible.

So, if you are feeling blue and only warm cheesy creamy pasta will do, check out Golden Macaroni and Cheese over at Elizabeth's Edible Experience.

Chicken

Thanks to Martha's recent newsletter giving me many many ideas for cooking chicken wings, my delicious is full of chicken marinade recipes. I love having marinated chicken in salads for lunch, so I picked a few recipes that I could try out.

Funnily enough, none of the recipes I've chosen are Martha recipes, despite her newsletter being my inspiration. I've frozen the chicken pieces in their marinade ready to be defrosted and cooked during the week.

When I have defrosted them, I'll be sure to let you know how they turned out.

I've chosen Savoury Chicken, Southwest Chicken and Tandoori Style Chicken.

Jazzed up potato chips

During an old episode of Ainsley's Gourmet Express 2, Ainsley made some potato wedges scattered with bacon bits roasted in the oven, topped with some grated cheese to finish. Curiously, he had these as a side to a seafood soup.

I remember visiting New York Fries when they had a store in the Myer Centre and that was my first experience with cheese topped potato chips. I think the serving was something simple like cheese and gravy but I remember I wasn't impressed. The cheese made it sticky and gooey and the chips were soggy. I have never really wanted to try it again. Don't get me wrong, I love chips and gravy, but I do have quite high standards.

Ainsley's take, however, looked quite appetizing. I mean, so many people love bacon. I was cleaning out the freezer and I found a nearly-empty bag of frozen chips and some diced bacon, so I decided to give it a try.

I added the chips and bacon and cooked them for the full recommended cooking time and at the end grated over some sharp cheddar cheese (not very much) and put the tray under a hot grill for a few minutes until the cheese melted.

It was quite nice, but it was difficult to get a mouthful that had a bit of everything in it. Are you supposed to put enough cheese on top to make the bacon stick to the potatoes?

Breakfast at the Brisbane Markets

A Hungarian Langos with garlic and some chicken yakitori and rice.


Oh, and a sausage tasting cup. So many sausages for $5 - we couldn't even get through half of it!

Buffalo Chicken

Recently, I received one of the Martha Stewart Newsletters in my inbox which linked to array of chicken wing recipes. I love chicken and I love experimenting with different marinades and cooking techniques. I couldn't decide which of the recipes to try first, so I selected seven of them and sent them to D for the ultimate decision.

He chose this Buffalo Chicken recipe. I have only read and heard about buffalo wings so I was excited to give them a go. Since they are so popular, I did a quick internet search to see what other recipes were out there and to see which one I liked the most.

I ended up using a mix of three different recipes. D loved it and said that it tasted pretty much as he remembered, except less spicy. It was a lovely flavour and I will definitely make it again.

So, I used Martha's recipe as a base. I poached the chicken quickly in boiling water seasoned with cayenne pepper, chilli flakes and a little salt. Then, once the chicken had dried a little, I dredged them in flour seasoned with paprika, salt and pepper and grilled them under a hot grill.

Once they were cooked, I coated them in the sauce - a mix of tomato sauce, melted butter, sriracha chilli sauce and garlic powder - and popped them back in the oven quickly.

We served them with some blue cheese dressing - blue cheese mashed with some Greek yoghurt. Martha says you should add lemon juice too, but my yoghurt was quite tart to start with so we didn't think this was necessary.

I used chicken tenderloins instead of wings as D doesn't like chicken on the bone. Next time, I won't poach the chicken first and just cook them the whole way through under the grill as I did overcook the tenderloins a tad. I was also slightly conservative with the sriracha. I'm not very tolerant to hot foods and I wanted to make sure I could still eat it. When I poached the chicken in the cayenne and chilli flakes, the steam was very strong and I was concerned that it may have flavoured the chicken more than it was intended to. As it turned out, it didn't and we had fairly mild flavoured chicken.

It was extremely tasty though. I'm very happy we gave this a try.

Buffalo Chicken with Blue Cheese Dip
Adapted from MarthaStewart.com

600g chicken tenderloins
1 tbs cayenne pepper
1 tsp chilli flakes
1 tbs salt
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons paprika
1 tsp coarse salt
1/4 cup tomato sauce
1 tablespoon butter, melted
1 to 2 tablespoons hot sauce, such as Tabasco
1 tsp garlic powder

Dip
30g blue cheese, crumbled
2/3 cup plain low-fat yoghurt
coarse salt and ground pepper

Fill a large pot half way with water and then add the first 4 ingredients.

Bring water mixture and chicken to a boil and then boil for 5 minutes.

Combine the flour, paprika and salt in a freezer bag. Add chicken, toss to coat and shake off excess.

Ideally, I would have refrigerated the chicken at this point for an hour. Apparently this helps the flour mix adhere better to the chicken, but we were hungry so I didn't.

Preheat the grill to a medium high heat. Place the chicken on a rack above a baking tray lined with foil and grill for 5 minutes on each side.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in the microwave and then add the tomato sauce, hot sauce and garlic powder. Mix well.

Remove the chicken from the grill and coat with the tomato/butter/chilli sauce mix. Return to the grill and heat for a further two minutes.

Serve with blue cheese dip

To make the dip,mash the cheese and yoghurt together in a small bowl with a fork. Season with salt and pepper.

No Bake Cookies

My cold has been hanging around like a bad smell this week, generally making me feel run down and crappy. I'm also going to blame the cold for the uncontrollable urge to make some chocolate biscuits that came over me on Wednesday night. I wasn't feeling very well at all and I knew that I wasn't up to anything complicated, so when I came across these no bake cookies at Eat Make Read it was a nice surprise.

We had all the ingredients on hand, so I got to melting. The hardest part of the whole exercise was the dropping of the biscuits. I cheated and used my icecream scoop, which means mine turned out a little funny looking in the shape department. Next time, definitely go for the two teaspoon approach.

Next time I will also reduce the amount of oats. The biscuits were quite crumbly and didn't hold together very well. I think a little less oats might fix that.

I love the flavour though. The peanut butter and cocoa flavours melt together really well and the taste is quite different to what I was expecting. It was really moreish though, I was dreaming about the biscuits all day on Thursday, because I had forgotten to bring the biscuits to work.

See the post No Bake Cookies on Eat Make Read for the recipe.

Chocolate Tart

We have started adding the Brisbane Markets at Rocklea into our Saturday market rotation. We hadn't been there for a long time and decided to go back one morning when there wasn't a Jan Powers' Market at New Farm or Manly.

Each time we visited, we wandered past the Twist 'n Roll stand where there is a delightful display of beautiful macarons and tarts and pastries. I've lingered there trying to decide what I would buy if I was to buy anything, but had never actually bought something. Until the other day.

I was debating on what flavour macarons to buy when I saw this gorgeous chocolate tart. Once I saw it, I couldn't go past it. Plus, it was topped with a chocolate macaron!

The macaron was amazing. It was chocolatey and not too sweet. I ate it first, but wished I hadn't. The tart was awesome too. I was very excited to go back and buy something else the next time we visited the market, but it was Easter Saturday and they weren't there. Next time, D will have to hold me back from the macaron fridge.

Spice Bread

Last weekend I wasn't feeling the greatest, thanks to a friendly cold that decided to pay me a visit. I slept for most of Saturday and made my zucchini slice on Sunday. This is pretty unusual for me, I try to make at least three recipes each weekend. It was getting later and later on Sunday and work was getting closer and closer and I'd only made my zucchini slice.

I was browsing through foodgawker and found a post on Happy Love Strawberry where Indigo talks about a fantastic spice bread with a hilarious anecdote that just called to me. It got me up off the couch and into the kitchen.

It was so so easy. The hardest part was getting the 250g honey out of its squeezy tube. I put the mixing bowl on the scales and just threw things in. You may have thought that I would have learned about aimlessly throwing things into my mixing bowls after the chilli powder incident which only happened hours before, but it appears I'm not quite that smart.

The smell while it was baking was incredible. It was so hard to wait for it to come out of the oven, particularly because my oven was being temperamental and it took an hour and a half to bake. It tastes great warm from the oven, at room temperature or toasted lightly in the toaster. For the ultimate indulgence, I use a tiny bit of Gympie Farm salted butter. Amazing.

I want more recipes like this. I wonder what would happen if I googled 'lazy recipes'?

See the post Greedy Spice (or: So Tell Me What You Want, What You Really Really Want) on Happy Love Strawberry for the recipe.

Zucchini Slice

I have been hankering after a good zucchini slice for a little while now. I can't explain where the hankering came from, but it was quite persistent.

When I first moved out of home and before I got my food blogger wings, my flatmate's mother gave us a recipe for a simple and healthy zucchini slice that we could easily pull together. It was the best zucchini slice I had ever tasted and it was that zucchini slice that I wanted. Typically, I couldn't find the recipe, so I headed over to Taste.com.au.

There are two recipes for zucchini slice on Taste.com.au. One from Fresh Living with 9 reader reviews that required 6 eggs and one from delicious. with 337 reviews and a little message saying that it was the most printed recipe on Taste.com.au. Plus, it only needed 5 eggs and I'm all about egg conservation.

It was really easy. The most difficult part was the grating of the zucchini and cheese. See, I broke out the grater discs on my food processor for the first time (I've had the food processor for 2 and a half years) and when I cut the zucchini and cheese into chunks to be fed into the chute, I must have cut them too small. When it came to the end of the piece of zucchini/cheese, the end bit got caught up into the disc and whirled around between the disc and the lid. Is this normal or did I just cut the pieces too small?

In case you were wondering, 375g of grated zucchini turned out to be 4 large zucchinis minus the little end bits.

I used some Cracker Barrel Extra Sharp Vintage Cheddar for the cheese. I had tasted the Special Reserve Vintage Cheddar at the Good Food and Wine Show last year and really enjoyed it. It was a lovely strong flavoured cheese, quite sharp. I wanted something strong in the slice, but I thought the Special Reserve would be too sharp for what I wanted. Luckily, the Extra Sharp worked perfectly. It was strong enough to add a lovely flavour but it wasn't too much. I hadn't tasted the Extra Sharp before, but I'm sold - I may have found my new go-to cheddar.

Some of the reviewers mentioned that they fried off the onions and bacon before adding them to the mix and I thought that was a great idea. It softened the onions and added a nice crispy outside to the bacon. I added some garlic to the mix too, because I love garlic.

The only other change I made was inspired by the other zucchini slice recipe, which called for the addition of curry powder. I thought this was a great idea too. I love curried eggs and I know curry powder and eggs work really well together, so I had to add some to my slice. Unfortunately, I wasn't really measuring at this stage, I just took the curry powder tin and tried to sprinkle it into my flour. I had a little bit of a shaking hand and a rather large tablespoon of curry powder fell into the bowl. I tried to remove some, but there wasn't a lot I could do so I kept on going.

Happily, everything came together really well. The curry powder is quite distinctive, but it works very well with the slice. It also smells wonderful. The texture is really pleasing, it has more body than a frittata but it is lovely and light. Apparently it freezes quite well too, I've got some in the freezer now and I'll let you know how it goes.

The recipes made heaps. Where I would normally take my leftovers to work, but this time I hoarded the whole thing - it's all mine!!

Zucchini Slice
adapted from delicious magazine

5 eggs
150g (1 cup) self-raising flour, sifted
1 tbs curry powder
375g zucchini, grated
1 large onion, finely chopped
200g rindless bacon, chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
60ml (1/4 cup) vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 170°C. Grease and line a 30 x 20cm lamington pan.

Heat a small frying pan over a medium heat and cook the onion and bacon with the garlic until the onion is soft and the bacon is crispy. Remove from pan to cool slightly.

In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs then add the flour and curry powder and mix until smooth.

Add the remaining ingredients and mix until well combined. Pour into the prepared lamington pan and bake for 30 minutes or until cooked through.

Gummi Pizza

Every Easter for the last few years we pay a visit to Tom's Confectionery Warehouse at Hendra during its 24 hour trading. We like to go at random hours so we really get to enjoy the 24 hour experience.

This Easter we came away with our fairly standard Easter fare, but we also found these cute little Gummi Pizzas. They were far too cute to stay on the shelf. D has eaten his and said that they looked better than they tasted, so mine is staying uneaten.

A twist on pasta aglio e olio

December 2010 Update: I have discovered that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Ila of I Nom Things, who is the mystery blogger. I found the recipe, untagged, in the depths of my delicious bookmarks. Now I can properly give her the credit she deserves, because I love this recipe. You can find it here.

I have only recently discovered Foodgawker. Since my discovery, my list of blogs to read and things to cook has grown exponentially and I just can't keep track of them anymore. I have decided that with all the long weekends around at the moment, I am going to reorganise my delicious bookmarks and try and get them in some semblance of order.

This simple pasta dish was one that I found while trolling through Foodgawker but my head must have been somewhere else because I didn't bookmark it and now I can't find where it came from. So, if it was your blog that inspired me to twist up my standard pasta aglio e olio (pasta with garlic and oil), thank you so much. I wish I knew who you were.

I know this is the second quick pasta dish in a row, but we do love our pasta here. Especially quick, easy pastas. D even makes a wonderful pasta aglio e olio when I can convince him to cook it. Our standard version puts the pasta on to cook and while it's bubbling away, you heat a small amount of olive oil with some chopped or crushed garlic and some chilli flakes. When the garlic starts to go brown at the edges, you take it off the heat and the mix it through the cooked pasta.

The mixed up version takes it one step further. While the pasta is cooking and the oil is heating, you add 1 tbs lemon juice, some chopped basil leaves, some grated parmesan cheese and some pepper to a bowl, then add the garlic and oil and pasta and stir together. This dish walks a fine line between being tasty and being too oily, but the lemon does a wonderful job of cutting through that oiliness and the freshness of the basil is a great addition.

Thank you mystery blogger!

What's for dinner today?

I do most of my fun cooking on weekends. I work reasonably long hours and go to bed early, so there isn't enough time to do anything too experimental after work. I wasn't feeling too well this weekend, so I slept through Saturday rather than cooking.

Well, sleeping doesn't make for an interesting post on a food blog and arguably this recipe doesn't either, but it was tasty and easy and is embarassingly a pretty typical dinner for us. We like pasta.

It was so easy that all I had to do was drag myself into the kitchen, boil some water and cook some Barilla Tortellini ai Formaggi. While that was bubbling away, I fried some chopped garlic and chilli flakes in a little bit of oil until the garlic was just browning at the edges, tipped in a tin of tomatoes and let it reduce a little bit. Just before serving I stirred some chiffonade of basil leaves into the sauce and then the whole thing was mixed together and topped with parmesan.

If I was being good I would have served this with a bright green side salad, but that was too much effort.