There are a myriad of uses for alphabet cookies. Children’s parties. Cake decorating. Teaching tools. Personalised edible gifts. Romantic messages for a loved one.
But really, who needs an excuse? I believe we never get too old to be above playing with our food!
For this week's challenge I baked from Murdoch Book's "Bake It".
This one was a gift from my boyfriend's brother and sister in law a while ago. It's your typical baking book with a difference: most of the recipes have some sort of twist from the old classics. This usually involves use of spices or various substitutes for flour, like polenta or semolina. They're definitely not your typical ingredients-you'll-find-in-your-cupboard type recipes, but they are nice to try something new! There are some ginger cupcakes I've been wanting to do for ages, which I was planning to do this week. But I haven't found time to grocery shop, so had no cream. So I've gone for the choc fudge cookie sandwiches instead.
This would have to be one of the most last minute celebratory cakes ever. I mean, I literally woke up on Father's Day, went "Oh, I should make dad a cake", realised I had 3 hours before he was coming over, and I was cooking him a beef osso bucco that was going to demand my oven for an hour and a half.
Quick, think, think, what do you have in the house? Chocolate. Strawberries. Dad loves mudcake and strawberries. WIN.
So I went digging through my usual chocolate cake books to try to find a moist chocolate cake recipe. I have tried so many chocolate cakes, but always fail to find the one. You know, that one chocolate cake that is so rich and moist that you can feel coronary failure approaching just thinking about it?
I got what you usually get when you totally rush a cake; something that was not very aesthetically pleasing. But who cares when you get a cake that tastes so good?
After I took part in RSPCA's Cupcake Day, I suddenly got a few people very [legitimately] interested in purchasing some cupcakes for themselves. Ever since I started getting more seriously into cake decorating, I have had a myriad of offers and requests about purchasing, but they always fell through for one reason or another.
So I find it amusing how, now when I am doing a Masters degree and barely have time to cook dinner every night, I suddenly have an influx of orders! The lady this one was for is a colleague of my boyfriend's — she was especially generous in both her donation and support for the RSPCA fundraiser, so I just wanted to find the time to make sure I could do this for her.
Wow. It did not take me long to fall off the band wagon with this one. Lately, finding time to cook anything that isn't 2-minute noodles is an achievement within itself.
But here's one to fire this challenge up again. This one comes from Mary-Lou Arnold’s “The All Occasion Chicken Cookbook”.
A move from the sweet and to the savory: though you probably won't be surprised to hear that it involves pastry.
I mean, how many times have you heard me say I love pastry?
Those of you in the country may be familiar with RSPCA’s Cupcake Day. A friend alerted me to the event, and I couldn’t resist the idea of baking for a good cause.
So I set up my donation page and started collecting donations. The response was phenomenal. Far more than I expected. When I started this cause, I thought if I raised $50 it would be worth it. When the online total reached $260 before the day itself, I was stunned.
A belated post, and a rushed one (I’m not keeping up with this challenge very well).
This week I turned to one of my most disliked cookbooks. This is one part of a 4 pack of Pilsbury’s “Cookies, Brownies and Chocolate Galore”, this one being the “Cookies, Brownies and Bars” book. Another op-shop find from my dad, and was chosen for this week by my boyfriend.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some great looking things in here. But all recipes advocate using their brand, most of the recipes advocate using something that isn’t easily substituted.
I live in Australia. I can’t get most of it here.
Oh well.
But a cookie pizza? Cinch to sub.
For this week of the challenge, I am turning to one of my favourite mini books. My boyfriend’s mum got me New Idea’s “Ultimate Chocolate Cookbook”, a tiny book that has 25 delicious recipes inside. One of my favourite aspects of the book is the troubleshooting chapter in the back, which shows you how to recover failed recipes by morphing them into something new. I haven’t had to resort to this myself yet, but I think recipes books need more of these.
As for the recipes, they range from the fun to the decadent. I think I have cooked almost all of them, so finding an untouched one was a challenge in itself. I happened to cook two recipes out of it today. One being white choc chip banana pikelets. The other being this molten chocolate torte:
The first season of MasterChef coincided with two other significant events for me: the first cake decorating book my dad bequeathed unto me, and the time around which my dessert-loving boyfriend and I stopped spending every waking hour at live music concerts and more time hanging out at home and, subsequently, cooking for him.
It reignited a love of food and baking that I’d had flashes of as a child, but had lost touch with as other things filled my life.
Julie Goodwin, Australia’s first MasterChef, won many hearts during a competition throughout which she often appeared out of her league. She was so lovely I couldn’t be upset when she beat my favourite contestant, Poh, in the Grand Final. But I think the moment she won the most hearts was when, during one of the final challenges, she revealed the idea for her cook book. Every chapter to tell of a chapter in her life. It would be filled with stories and photos of her family and their favourite recipes. But the final chapter would be left blank, for us to fill with out of tales, photos and recipes.
Win she did, and with her publishing deal she released exactly the book she’d promised on the show, titled “Our Family Table”.
Cakecrumbs 