Sticky Date Cupcakes with Butterscotch Frosting

And I'm back into the normal food! Thank you so much baby for giving my poor distressed tummy a reprieve!

A quick one - but SO good.
This one is a mish mash of recipes from all over the net. All I knew I wanted was Sticky date cupcakes so I found a base recipe on Taste.com and then modified it to suit my pantry contents (as usual), comparing with other recipes out there to make sure my little changes wouldn't be bad :) I switched white sugar for brown - which just seemed more appropriate and then trawled about looking for a frosting recipe.
All in all it turned out well but the frosting was way too stiff and needed extra cream.
I did a double batch of the cakes and this amount of frosting was perfect - imagine doubling the frosting and using 10 CUPS of Icing sugar - even my sugar tolerance isn't that high :)

Delicious.

Sticky Date Cupcakes (makes 12) - I doubled and made 36 teeny cupcakes
Ingredients:
• 200g Diced Dates
• 1 teaspoon bicarb soda
• 60g unsalted butter
• 200g SR Flour
• 125g brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 250ml water
Method:
1. Preheat your oven to 180C.
2. Put the dates and the water into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Take off of the heat and stir in the bicarb, then add the butter and stir until all melted.
3. Sift the flour into a bowl, add the sugar and combine. Add the date mixture and eggs, and stir until all just combined.
4. Divide into cupcake cases and bake for 17-20 minutes or until skewer comes out clean.


Butterscotch icing (but don't double this)
100g butter
2/3 cup soft brown sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup
1/2 cup cream
5 cups pure icing sugar
Combine the butter, sugar, golden syrup and cream in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir occasionally until the sugar dissolves. Turn heat up to high and boil for at least 5 minutes. Cool to room temperature.
Add sifted icing sugar, beat with an electric mixer until light and fluffy.

Toobs and Green Apples

No this is not a recipe, (I hear you all sigh with relief!)I realise it's been a long time between posts but that's mostly because this little Stepford Wife is expecting a little Stepford baby.

And I'm here to tell you that already - food is no longer my friend.

My poor dear Husband has been getting the lamest of meals. Nothing at all blog-worthy unless there's many of you out there that need the instructions for

1. Boil water and insert spaghetti

2. Brown mince and dump in jar of sauce

3. Simmer both for 10mins and serve together. (Don't forget to drain pasta)

:)

Cakes and cookies and lovely treats are way too much effort and at the moment the little babe only seems to want Green Apples and Toobs - thank goodness for the apples to make me feel somewhat righteous!

I did make an attempt to see if there is a home-made version of Toobs I could impress you all with, but no luck - apparently that's a secret only the people at Smith's know.

-and incidentally I wouldn't google 'recipe for Toobs' - apparently there's something somewhat pornographic about that innocuous seeming phrase!! Who knew!!

Only God has the secret to making those awesome green apples so I have nothing to offer you except for comfort if you happen to be one of the zillions of pregnant folk I know - It is getting better! Hang on to your version of Toobs for a few more weeks - not much longer!

xxx S

Salted and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies

So a quick one but a great one! This recipe I stole from Raspberri Cupcakes and was intrigued from the moment the title popped up on my RSS feed - what an absolute winner! These cookies are rich and deliciously sticky with malty milo goodness. I obviously used Milo instead of regular malt powder so my cookies are much darker than hers but they were awesome and disappeared really quickly.

The combination of Dark and milk choc chips adds a really nice extra dimension (as if these gorgeous creatures needed one more!)

They are dead easy - I hope you have a go!

x S

Spaghetti Pumpkin

So yes, It has been a really long time. I know that if other bloggers go for this long without posting I take them off my RSS feed so I completely understand if you've done the same to me!
I've spent the last year preparing my accreditation paperwork for work - and there's still 40 days to go! so I've been giving priority to that - whenever I open up the laptop I feel compelled to look at research articles or write programmes rather than write about yummy food. But trust me the cooking is still happening. I can justify that as a basic human need :)

This one is more of a review than a recipe. Last year my nanna got 'Spaghetti Pumpkin Seeds' with her Burkes Backyard magazine as as she is getting on a bit and we have a bizarrely flourishing vege patch (apparently neglect is an excellent gardening technique- especially when your house is built where there used to be a cow pasture :) she asked us to grow some so she could see what they looked like - and this is the result!

It looks like an elongated yellow pumpkin and if you cut it while uncooked the flesh is firm and yellow with a few seeds in the centre. The trick is to cook it whole for 1.5hrs in the oven and then slice it open lengthways. In this way the inside steams up and the flesh separates into long strands that look a lot like spaghetti or glass noodles.

Perfect for the gluten free types and a good way to get veges into you, this pumpkin was easy to grow and cook, but what about the flavour? well I wouldn't equate it with spaghetti. In the picture we tried it with a basic tomato sauce and neither of us were particularly fussed. Both of us felt it was more like a noodle than a pasta and so we tried it the next night with a sweet and sour sauce and found it much more appealing.

Interesting and fun to try though, if (through no effort on our part) we happen to get a crop next year then I'll treat it in a more asian style and perhaps even try a vietnamese noodle salad with the cooked strands!

Have a great day everyone - back in 40 days or so :)!

The Salt Book

So occasionally since I started this blogging business I get emails from people keen to have me promote their book or product. I have decided that this is a compliment - apparently they believe enough people might want to check out what's going on here to make it worth their while.

I usually say no because I'm not really expecting to make money here and it just seems like another thing to add to my already expansive list of 'Things to Do'.

And then it occurred to me this morning when I got an email about 'The Salt Book' that perhaps if there are any dollars in it I could do something useful with them - like give to one of the charities I support. And so here it is.

If there happens to be any commission come my way on this one I will give it to Bush Church Aid, a great organisation that ministers to remote communities throughout Australia - you can check them out here

You all know that I'm a cookbook junkie and am currently on a cookbook diet - not allowed to buy any more until I cook more from what I already have (this excludes gifts, and massive bargains Husband dear :)

And I haven't actually had my hot little hands on The Salt Book but I have to say it looks interesting, definitely something I'd pick up in a bookstore to inspect further - especially as the Husband has a salt addiction that I suspect will need curbing at some time in the future...

so if learning further about salt would be helpful to you please feel free to inspect it further. The picture is a link to their site.

Have a great day,

Shan

Love Treats!

This one is a bit late I'm afraid but it's so good I can't leave it out!

This was a Valentines Day treat for my spectacular husband. A brilliantly easy recipe that I stole from the lovely Chocolate Suze.
You can read it for yourself here.

I've made a slight alteration and made the heart shaped cups dark chocolate rather than white and added raspberries to break up all that richness with something!

How fabulous is a recipe that only has 4 ingredients- even better when those ingredients are chocolate, cream, condensed milk and Nutella. Not for the faint hearted or the calorie counters but it's blissfully easy and very impressive.

I can wholly recommend sitting them in the fridge for a while - and any leftover mousse is divine the next day!

Don't feel like you have to have the chocolate cups either - it would be just as fabulous in a pretty little dish or champagne glasses with some chocolate curls on top!

Have a lovely week everyone

xx S

Create-a-Salad

It's been just one thing after another at the moment and I am busy doing my accreditation for work this year (10 months or so of permanent guilt that I'm not going to get it because I haven't tried hard enough) so the cooking in my home has reverted back to the standards - Spaghetti Bolognaise, Apricot Chicken, throw together roasts, freezer chicken kiev etc etc.

I'm just about dying of food boredom. That's the trouble with developing fancy tastes - you just can't go back.

So when my sister and her boyfriend came for dinner all the way from jolly old England I thought I'd go nuts with a summery Aussie salad to welcome them. Unfortunately it rained all day which kind of takes the joy out of salad so I did salad and roast chicken which worked very nicely.

The salad was great fun to make. I went shopping without a list and picked up all the things I like in salads with no thought about how they go together - fortunately it worked and was a big tough manly meal of a salad (if anything can be manly that has figs in it :)

So here's the list of salad ingredients from a woman who shopped with abandon at finally having the opportunity to make something interesting for a change!

Rocket
Fresh Figs
Goats Cheese
Pancetta
Macadamia Nuts
Lemon juice
Dijon mustard
Nice Olive Oil


Crisp up the pancetta in a pan, lose any leftover fat and then toast the Macadamias so they get charred and warm with pancetta flavour.

I did the dressing in a jar with equal amounts of oil and lemon juice, a teaspoon of dijon and a drizzle of honey. Shake until combined.

Toss the whole lot together and enjoy. I really enjoyed it and there were no leftovers so I suspect other people did too! I was so happy with the final product (and incidentally - the photo! Love it when you accidentally get a great image with a point and shoot - I'm no photographer!)

Have a lovely week.

PS. I finally got a picture up of the Lemon polenta cake on the previous post for those who wanted to know what it looked like!