Cheesecake brownies

Mmmmmm.  They’re delicious and combine two favourite foods – chocolate and cheesecake.  The recipe is pretty simple and they don’t take too long to make.  And in any case, they are more than worth the effort.  Here are the details.

• 150 g butter
• 300g cooking chocolate (Milk or dark depending on your preference, I ‘ve made the brownies with both and in combination)
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 1 1/2 cups plain flour
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 250g cream cheese

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Melt butter and chocolate in a small saucepan on a very low heat until they are fully combines.  You could use a double boiler if you’re worried about the chocolate seizing but it should be fine as long as the heat is low.  Set aside to cool. 

In a small bowl mix together the room temperature cream cheese and 1/3 cup of the caster sugar.  When they are fully combined, add one of the eggs and mix thoroughly. 

In another larger bowl whisk the two remaining eggs and then mix in the remaining 2/3 cup sugar.  To this mixture, add the chocolate mixture and combine well.  When the ingredients are smooth and glossy, add the flour 1/2 cup at a time, mixing well after each addition.  Then fold in the sour cream until well combined. 

Line a brownie pan or 20cm square cake tin with baking paper and spoon the chocolate mixture in.  Make sure it’s spread into the corners.  Spoon the cream cheese mixture on top of this and use a knife or spoon to create marbling in the mixture.  Bake for 30-35 minutes and set aside to cool in the pan afterwards. I found this made 18-21 brownies depending on how you divide up the pan.

the finished product

‘Cos it’s cold in this here corner of the world

Or about as cold as it gets in a subtropical climate.  Near summer like weather for most of the year does not adequately prepare you for the few really cold weeks we get.  Rather than making more puddings (because I think I’ve eaten enough of them lately) I decided to make soup.  Not my Mother’s soup recipe either (because ham hock – I think that’s what it is – soup is not my favourite) but a new recipe that I half made up for chicken and rice soup.

I really like rice, in fact I like most forms of carbohydrates.  I didn’t use any special rice for the recipe just the basmati I had in the cupboard but I think it would probably work a little better with medium or short grain.  Here are the details (and yes there are no picture but it’s a pale white rice soup, it was only going to look so photogenic).  It was delicious though and very filling.

• 1 cup rice 
• 2 litres stock (I used a combination of chicken and vegetable stock)
• half onion – diced
• 2 cloves garlic
• inch of ginger
• pepper
• salt
• 1 shallot
• cooking oil
• 200g diced chicken pieces

Dice onion and slice garlic and ginger finely.  Heat small amount of oil in a saucepan and cook onion on low heat until soft.  Add garlic and ginger to the onion and cook briefly.  Once combined, add rice and mix well.  When the rice is well coated, add the stock, and then the pepper and salt to taste.  I wanted my soup to be peppery so I added quite a bit from the pepper grinder. Cook on low heat until rice grains are fully cooked through and soup appears thick.  When the rice is about half done and the stock is hot, add the diced chicken, mix well and continue cooking.  I didn’t time my soup (sorry!) but it was on for at least one hour, more likely an hour and a half.  Cooking time will vary depending on rice used but you don’t want the soup to become a gluggy, unappealing mixture.  When cooked, slice shallot finely and add into mixture.  Serve.

This made enough soup for approximately four people.  I’ve had two big servings of it and there is still lots left.  It’s warming, filling, peppery and there are nice little pieces of ginger that add some spice.

Buttery lemon biscuits

Welcome to post number 100!  I’d like to think I had something exciting in store but alas, all I have is a recipe for delicious biscuits that I somehow failed to take photos of.  Not quite sure how I spaced out on that one but the biscuits have moved along to their final destination as a morning tea offering at work, so no chance of catching up with them. 

I found a recipe for lemon and poppyseed biscuits on Taste.com.  It looked pretty reasonable so I thought I’d try it out even though I didn’t have any usable poppyseeds.  The recipe worked quite well, and for once I managed to make the number of biscuits the recipe suggested the dough would produce.  Bits and pieces as follows.

• 150g butter
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• grated rind of one lemon
• juice of 1/3 lemon

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (160 for fan forced).  Cream butter and sugar, then add egg and mix well. Fold in flour and baking powder, when combined add grated rind and juice.  Roll dough into 30 small balls and place, with space between them, on lined baking trays.  Bake for 12-15 minutes until lightly browned.

My biscuits turned out fairly well, lemony and buttery with a slightly crunchy outer layer.  They didn’t spread out enough to look like the pictures on Taste.com but I think I had the oven turned up too hot.  I baked them at 180 degrees instead of 160 but they were still cooked through and buttery, crumbly inside.  They just looked more like bite sized cookies instead of larger biscuits.  Sprinkling some sugar on top of the dough before baking would have worked quite well too.

More rainbow cakes!

While checking out Tastespotting recently I came across this blog entry for a six layer rainbow cake.  It looks like a bit of work (the layers were all made separately) but the colours are sooooo bright and appealing.

Banana cinnamon pancakes

Sounds good right?  I decided to make these pancakes the other day not because I had some fantastic recipe but because I had some rapidly ripening bananas that I had to use before they turned to mush.  So here’s the recipe.

• 1 cup SR flour
• 1 egg
• 1 cup milk
• 2 mashed bananas
• 1-2 tbspns cinnamon
• 2-3 tbspns sugar
• dash salt

pancake ingredients

In a bowl combine flour, sugar, salt and cinnamon.  To this mix add milk and egg.  Whisk till combined.  Add mashed bananas and stir till combined thoroughly.  Mixture is ready to cook up in frying pan.

mmmmm... pancakes

I found this mixture made 7 large pancakes but would make a lot more pikelet sized ones if necessary.  The pancakes were tasty (especially with some maple syrup).

Quince and berry pastries

Having never cooked quince before I was at a bit of a loss deciding what to do with them once prepared.  I bought three decent sized quince at the markets and after the long winded process of peeling and chopping them, I began the long process of cooking them.  There are lots of different recipes on the internet detailing how to prepare quince so I settled on cooking them in 4 cups water, 1 cup sugar and a dash of vanilla and cinnamon.  I simmered them for approximately an hour and a half till they appeared to be done.

But what to do with a container of cooked quince?  So the first thing I used them for was to make some pastries with the puff pastry I bought the other day.  I added some berries because the quince on their own were quite sweet.

I baked them in the oven for about 35 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius and they turned out pretty well for a first attempt.

Snickerdoodles!

Possibly the silliest biscuit name ever.

They are, however, extremely delicious.  I made some the other night from a recipe I found in a Women’s Weekly cookbook.  They’re really easy to make and don’t involve any strange or hard to find ingredients.

• 250g butter
• 1 tspn vanilla
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 3/4 cups plain flour
• 1 tspn bicarbonate soda
• 1/2-1 tspn nutmeg
• cinnamon sugar for rolling dough in

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Cream butter, both sugars and vanilla together.  Add the eggs, one at a time making sure each is mixed in thoroughly. Add flour, bicarb soda and nutmeg and mix well.  The dough then needs o be rolled into balls (approx tbsn sized) and rolled in the cinnamon sugar.  If the dough is too soft, placing it in the fridge for a while before rolling can useful.  I cooked these for about 15 minutes and the recipes yielded 34 biscuits but you could probably get more if you made them a little smaller.

Blueberry and lemon cupcakes

I finally got back to baking items that were decent enough to be photographed by my little point and shoot.  This week’s outing was blueberry cupcakes with lemon icing.  I’ve made a similar recipe before and it is really easy.  The cupcakes are also delicious. 

To the recipe (which can found through the link) I added 125 g fresh blueberries.  I cooked them for twenty minutes. When they were completely cooled I iced them with a lemon icing made from 1 cup icing sugar and the juice of half a lemon – which was delicious.  This time my yield was sixteen reasonable sized cupcakes.  This cake recipe is definitely a keeper.

mmmmm delicious icing

Spicy pear cookies

Although my baking has slowed a bit recently, I had some pears that I needed to do something with.  I thought, maybe a cake, or a fruit crumble?  But then I found this recipe for spicy pear cookies on AllRecipes.  I haven’t used up all the excess fruit I currently have but it’s a good start (and it gave me something to do the walnuts I inexplicably bought not long ago).  I have omitted the raisins from the original recipe because I don’t like them and they are gross. I put it down to eating too many of those tiny packs of sultanas as a child, I just don’t like the taste now.  It could also be that I don’t like really sweet things unless they’re made almost entirely of refined sugar – who knows?

Here’s the recipe:

• 115 g softened butter
• 1 and half cups brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tspn vanilla essence
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 and half tspns baking powder
• 1 tspn ground cinnamon
• 1 tspn ground ginger
• 1 pear – peeled, cored and diced
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 175 degrees Celsius.  In bowl cream butter and sugar, mix in egg and vanilla when well combined.  Add flour, baking powder, cinnamon and ginger to batter and mix well.  Stir in pears and walnuts.  On lined baking tray place tbspn sized rounded balls of dough.  Bake for 15-20 minutes.  This mixture gave me just under 30 cookies of reasonable size.

Raw dough is kind of gross too (but it has potential - unlike sultanas)

Fifteen minutes will get you a soft chewy cookie, but they might not come off the baking paper in one piece.  I cooked mine for twenty and they were crunchy at the edges and chewy in the middle.  These cookies are very tasty but if I were to make them again (and I might considering the number of pears I have) I would leave out a half cup of sugar (it makes the cookies delicious but I’m concerned the lovely taste is mostly sugar and not the spices I added).  I would also put in maybe another half cup of walnuts because they taste good and pears have quite a mild flavour.

Potential achieved!

The cookies are good though – I’d eaten four before I got them into their airtight plastic container

I can sing a rainbow…

Well maybe not, but continuing in the tradition of glorifying other peoples’ cupcake experiments – check out out these lurid rainbow cupcakes.  Rainbow Brite would be proud.