Elina Prawito - Satin Ice Artist of excellence

On Monday I travelled to Auckland to see Elina be presented with her Satin Ice artist of excellence chefs jacket. Elina is the first person in New Zealand to be awarded this honour. You can check out Elina's work on her website here and her facebook page here The Satin Ice website has a lovely profile on Elina which you can read here

Elina gave us an awesome demonstration on how easy it is to make the ice cream cupcake. I love the clean simple lines of her work, which are so often hard to achieve. She made it look do easy!

Here I am with Gobake's newest team member Kirsten and Elina of course!

Grandma Kiwicakes bakes again

As a child I was never too thrilled when Grandma Kiwicakes made "Chinese Chews" as I wasn't a fan of raisins or sultanas. Luckily I grew up and it's pretty tasty to me now. How times have changed, I very much doubt a recipe would be called Chinese chews these days, unless it was in fact Chinese. Looking through vintage cookbooks (somewhat of a hobby of mine) I've noticed there quite a number of recipes with highly inappropriate names for our modern times.

Have you got a vintage recipe with a funny name - I'd love to hear about it.

Passionfruit melting moments or Yo-yo's

Grandma Kiwicakes has been inspired to make passionfruit crunchies (although we always called them melting moments or yo-yo's) after my latest melting moment blog post. She used to make these every summer when I was a child

The recipe comes from this really old recipe book of household hints, Mum made them every summer from the late 1970s, however the book is much older than that.

The dough is super yum (just don't let Grandma Kiwicakes catch you stealing it)

The recipe in the book is only for the biscuits. Grandma Kiwicakes own twist is to make up a butter icing with passionfruit pulp added for the liquid and them squish em together once they've cooled to make a yo-yo.

Bubblegum Ice-Cream - from Kiwicakes test kitchen

Make ice-cream in minutes using easy frost powder! Here it is presented in a dotty ice cream paper cup to match the shimmer pearl powder blue gumballs atop.

Simply measure 100g easy frost and 100ml water into a plastic screw top jar and shake to combine. Add 3ml bubblegum flavour and shake again. 

At this stage you can either pour it into your ice-cream maker and press start or simply beat with a handmixer for 1-2 minutes until it looks like whipped cream and freeze for 3 hours. Serves 2.

Melting moments - every kiwi kids favourite

Recently I've decided my little boy is ready to learn to bake &; cook. His older sister is hugely passionate. In fact if you follow my blog regularly, you'll have seen many of her recipes, both sweet & savoury. My dad was a fantastic cook, so is my hubby. I think every person needs to learn, it stands you in great stead for later in life. I've joked to him he'll get the best girlfriend if he can cook, to which he replies "eww girls!" I'm also trying to as we go along, to teach my children about home made vs shop bought and knowing your ingredients. He's always loved to pitch in and help when anyone is baking or cooking. However now I've started an actual campaign to teach him things (which includes a recipe journal, the kind you hand write in, not the kind you place printed pages in) On the weekend we started with our Marmite toasties Then we moved on to Melting Moments. To keep him enthused, I wanted to start with easily achievable things. We'll move on to the souffle in 5-10 years when he's mastered the basics. For kids, the squashing with a fork is the best bit!.

Melting moments are a firm favourite with most kids, including my little man who is a picky eater. I have fond memories of them as a child and still love to indulge.

Ingredients

Biscuits

200g Butter, room temperature

½ tsp Vanilla Essence or vanilla bean paste

½ cup Icing Sugar

½ cup Cornflour,

1½ c Flour

Icing

75g Butter, softened

1½ c Icing Sugar

A little hot water

Method

Preheat the oven to 160ºC. Line a baking tray with baking paper.

Place all ingredients in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until just combined. Remove lid and scrape sides. Continue to pulse until the dough forms a ball.

Roll a small amount of the biscuit mixture into balls (about the size of a walnut)  and place them on the prepared baking trays.

Use a fork to flatten and mark the top of each biscuit.

Bake the biscuits in the preheated oven for aprx 12 minutes until lightly golden.

Leave the biscuits to cool on the tray.

To make the icing, place the butter and icing sugar in a bowl. Add 1 tbsp hot water at a time until a firm spreadable consistency is reached. When the biscuits are cold, spread the icing on one biscuit and press another biscuit on top of it.
Makes 12 aprx (24 halves)

A nice seasonal twist is to add passionfruit pulp instead of hot water (we made a few of those for Daddy on the right)

Simply sinful chocolate tart - Poppy Bakes

This lovely chocolate tart was made by Poppy 11 years old. She chose to garnish it with strawberries from our garden and pink edible glitter

(Note children may need help with this one, as the mixture is very runny when taking in and out of oven)

Ingredients:

500ml cream

450g chocolate (we used a blend of milk chocolate and dark chocolate - anything works really - chop up fine or use chips)

1 egg yolk and 1 egg

2 sweet short pastry sheets pre-rolled (buy at the supermarket)

Method:

Preheat oven to 180C

Line a 12 inch flan, tart or pie pan with the sweet short pastry, lightly prick base, line with either foil or baking paper, and load up with pie weights/beans or uncooked rice and blind bake for 15-20 mins until lightly golden.

In a small saucepan bring cream to a gentle simmer. Remove from heat and whisk in chocolate (the heat from the cream will melt the chocolate). Let sit aprx 5 mins to cool. Whisk in egg until thoroughly mixed.

Place tart pan on a cookie sheet, it will make it easier to place in to oven. Pour chocolate mix in to pastry shell. Bake aprx 20 minutes. When you remove this from the oven, it will be bubbling furiously and still look liquid. However once cooled to room temperature it will set completely.

We served this with a little French vanilla ice cream.

This tart tasted amazing and it was a real surprise just how great, from such simple ingredients.

Faux Gold leaf effect from Anna Maria Cake Design

This awesome post comes to your from my friend Anna Maria of Anna Maria Cake design who can also be found on facebook here. Anna Maria had this to say about her wonderful faux gold technique

  Lately I have been working a lot with Claire Bowman products.

As I always say to my students and cake friends, this product has so much potential we barely scratched the surface of what can be created with it.

Today I would love to share with you how to make faux gold leaf, using Claire Bowman Cake lace.

Surely you will love it as much as I do. Not only can you save time and money but you can apply this technique with all other pearlised Claire Bowman lacemixes.

Here we go, just a few simple steps spread the gold cake lace mix onto a non stick baking tray liner

Use a large plastic or metal scraper (this is a Sugarveilscraper) and evenly spread the cake lace.

Turn a baking tray upside down, place the gold sheet on it and bake at 80° C for about 8-10 minutes.

Alternatively use "THE MAT" as a frame, cut it into a rectangle about 2" larger than the non stick baking sheet and for the centre about 1" smaller than the baking sheet.

Secure the baking sheet as well as the frame with some masking tape on the work bench, spread the lace mix evenly using the frame as a guide.

Remove tape from frame and slowly lift the frame away.

Place a baking paper on the work bench, turn the gold sheet upside down and and peel the non stick baking mat away.

Cut the gold paper to the required size using a scissors or a craft knife on a cutting mat. Any leftover gold paper can be stored between baking paper for up to 6 months.

Brush the entire cake with water

Stick the pre cut strips of gold paper on the cake.

For the top, cut a circle of gold paper same size as cake and adhere to the cake

"Voila" - all finished had to have a piece to eat!. Yummy - caramel mud cake with salted caramel and ganache filling.

Marmite cheese toasties - a blast from my childhood past

These simple but tasty kids snacks are a blast from my childhood past. My mum (aka Grandma Kiwicakes) used to make them over the weekend for us and store some in an airtight container for school lunchboxes during the week

And the recipe couldn't be simpler. So much so I hesitate to call it a recipe. Simply toast your bread, spread with Marmite and add grated cheese sparingly (too much makes them soggy)

Cut in to soldiers before baking at 180C until the cheese is bubbly. Remove and allow to cool. At this stage they seem to grow legs and walk off the tray whilst your back is turned. If you can mange to cool any completely, they will keep in an airtight container for a few days.