How to create antique or vintage shades of buttercream icing

The good folks at Sprinks have supplied these awesome colour charts, to show you just how easy it is to create vintage shades using buttercream icing and the Sprinks range of gel paste food colourings.

The Sprinks bottles come fitted with an eye dropper, so you can easily count the drops. You can find the entire range here at Kiwicakes.

Passionfruit Crunchies a childhood favourite biscuit

Passionfruit Crunchies are an absolute favourite from my childhood. Probably because only 1 or 2 batches were made every passionfruit season. Then you had to wait until next year.

Mum (AKA Grandma Kiwicakes) made them every year. This year Grandma Kiwicakes passionfruit vine failed, as ours had taken off prolifically, I decided it was time I gave them ago and asked for the recipe.

Grandma Kiwicakes tells me the recipe was from "the Truth cookbook - an old scandal rag" - seen below without a cover. These recipe books certainly already expect you to know how to cook - with instructions like, "sandwich together with passionfruit icing" I used butter/icing sugar and 1 passionfruit to make my icing.

I doubled the recipe, and used larger than teaspoon sized balls, as mum always made them BIG. This resulted in two oven trays, with 34 halves, resulting in 17 biscuits when sandwiched together. You can make them any size you like.

I baked at 180C