Summer strawberries - chocolate dipped with chocolate transfer detail

Chocolate dipped strawberries can be transformed with the use of chocolate transfers. It's quick and easy to do. Chocolate dipped strawberries are a fond memory of Valentines Day for me. My now hubby presented me with a bowl of strawberries for Valentines day that he'd dipped himself way back in the 1990s when we first started dating. At the time I was suitably impressed that he'd taken the time to make something for me. I'm still impressed today when I'm given a home made gift, made with love.

Chocolate transfers elevate the simple chocolate dipped strawberry to a whole new level. Chocolate transfers come in a wide variety of colours and patterns, to suit every occasion. You can view our entire selection here.

Simply melt your chocolate over a double boiler, dip each strawberry and place down on your chocolate transfer sheet. Once cool, lift your strawberries away from the sheet and place on your serving dish (I do not refrigerate my strawberries, as this makes them ooze juice).

Any portion of unused transfer can be reused for your second round of dipping, simply place your next strawberry down on any patch of colourful transfer, avoiding the clear spaces, where the colour has been removed by the previous strawberry.

Chocolate Courgette Cupcakes - Poppy bakes

My daughter Poppy used anniversary day here in the north of NZ to make use of the many courgettes we have growing in the garden. Our kids won't eat courgettes, they declare loudly they don't like them. However they were heard to say "you can't even tell there's courgette in here" And they're right, unless you were told, you'd struggle to guess. The grated courgette adds a wonderful moistness to the cupcakes.

Ingredients
1 medium courgette aprx 120g (leave the skin on if they're spray free)
85g milk chocolate
2 Tbsp cocoa
2 eggs
50g brown sugar
90ml vegetable oil
120g flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
handful chopped walnuts

I've labelled this recipe with the tag "healthier option. It's a healthier option UNTIL you put the cream cheese icing on top. They make a great muffin, which kids will adore. With the addition of the icing, they're scrumptious.

Preheat oven to 180C. Line a cupcake pan with 12 liners. Grate the courgettes, discarding any liquid. Over a double boiler melt chocolate and allow to cool slightly.

Place the eggs, sugar and oil in a large bowl and whisk together. Sift in flour, baking powder, baking soda and cocoa. Stir gently until just mixed. Stir in courgettes and pecan nuts. Fold in melted chocolate. Spoon mixture in to cupcake liners. Bake 20 minutes.

Icing 

125g butter

250g block cream cheese

2 tsp vanilla

1/4 cup cocoa

3 1/2 cups icing sugar.

Cream together butter and cream cheese, add vanilla. Stir together cocoa and icing sugar, add 1 cup at a time, beating well with each addition. Ice cupcakes when cool.

Spiced Plum and Honey Cakes - Kids in the kitchen

I arrived home a few days ago to my daughter Poppy (10 years old) having made this plum cake. My hubby has been trying to educate our family to work more with seasonal ingredients and it's something the children are taking part in with great enthusiasm. Grandma Kiwicakes plum tree was raided for this cake.

The smell upon entering our home was incredible. Poppy tells me this was the most complicated recipe she's ever tackled. She said nothing was hard, but for her there were a lot of steps.

Poppy decided to make a cinnamon honey whipped cream to go with it. She tells me she "just added cinnamon and honey to whipped cream, until it tasted right". By the time I arrived home the cake had already been sampled, however Poppy had taken photos for me.

The recipe is from my recently purchased book Love, Bake, Nourish by Amber Rose. It's been a great find. Amber Rose offers great tips on the health benefits of many of the ingredients listed. A lot of the recipes exclude sugar and refined flours and there are great gluten free options too.

Recipe reproduced with permission from Love Bake Nourish by Amber Rose, with photography by Ali Allen. Published by Kyle Books and distributed in New Zealand by New Holland, RRP $45.00

Spiced plum & honey cake

This cake works particularly well made with smallish dark red plums that are really sweet. The plum season comes just as the evenings start to get shorter and you can feel a chill in the air. I really enjoy this time of year, when the leaves turn a golden amber and dew-laden spiders’ webs line the woodland pathways. It’s the onset of the season for comfort food and best-loved jumpers.

serves 8–10

180g white spelt flour, sifted

2 teaspoons baking powder

130g ground almonds

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground cardamon

½ teaspoon ground star anise

5 large free-range eggs, separated

240g unsalted butter, softened

210g honey

400g plums, halved and stoned

Unrefined icing sugar, for dusting (optional)

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and flour a 22cm loose-bottomed cake tin.

Start by mixing all the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks, butter and honey with an electric hand mixer until thick and smooth. Gently fold in the dry ingredients.

In a separate, very clean bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff, then fold them, a third at a time, into the cake mix, ensuring that they are thoroughly incorporated.

Scrape the mixture into the prepared tin and level the surface with the back of a spoon or a palette knife. Place the plums cut-side down on top of the cake mix. Transfer to the oven and bake for 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 10 minutes in the tin before carefully turning out onto a wire rack to finish cooling. Dust with icing sugar, if you like.

As a tea cake this doesn’t seem to need anything else, but if you are eating it as a pudding, it’s very good with a little cream or Greek yogurt sweetened with honey.

Dried pineapple flowers

I first saw these dried pineapple flowers in an issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine more than 13 years ago. I've always wanted to try them. I decided as it was Grandma Kiwicakes birthday this week to give them a go on top my mini pavlovas I was making for her birthday dinner (recipe for pavlovas to come tomorrow). These elegant flowers are very easy to make.

Preheat your oven to 120C degrees. Take one whole pineapple and cut the outer rind off.

Remove the eyes with a sharp kitchen knife (this also creates variation in the edges of the flowers)

Cut thin slices and arrange on a baking tray covered with baking paper. Bake 30 minutes one side. Remove from oven, flip over and bake 25-30 minutes on the second side.

Be careful to make your slices all the same thickness. As you can see from my photo above, I burnt one, before the others were quite done, as it was thinner than the rest.

I placed them in tin foil circles I had squished in to shape using my hands, this allows them to dry with a nice fluid shape, rather than dead flat. You can make these up to three days ahead of when you need them. Refrigerate until required. I kept mine in the fridge in a container resting in their tin foil forms.

Pineapple Bran Muffins - from Kiwicakes test kitchen

Warm up a cold day with these healthy yet flavoursome fruity muffins. They are quick to make and smell amazing!

Mix together with a spatula:

1 t baking soda dissolved in 1 & 1/2 C hot water 

1/4 C butter/margarine, melted

1 egg

1 C brown sugar

1 1/2 C flour and 1 t baking powder, sifted

1 C bran

1 pack Freeze Dried Pineapple Chunks (reserving 12 pieces for the top)

Spoon mixture into Muffin Tins and top with an extra piece of pineapple each. Cook on fanbake 150'C and test with a cake probe after 10 minutes. They cook to golden in 10-15 minutes depending on your oven. Transfer to a wire rack to cool and store in an airtight container. 

Adding margarine instead of butter can make this recipie dairy-free and lower-fat but personally I enjoy natural butter. 

I love these traditional muffins, but boosted with the intense pineapple chunks they are to die for, and you won't feel guilty about enjoying this yummy snack.

Homemade rosemary olive oil crackers

Lately I've been trying to make a lot more of the food our family eats, rather than always buying processed items. When I saw this post from Chef in Disguise I just had to give making my own crackers ago, as I'd never tried before. If I knew how easy and incredibly tasty they would be, I would have done it years ago.

Together with my husband we've been trying to grow more food and buy more locally grown food, particularly spray free or organic. My husband recently arrived home with olive oil that is grown & pressed locally by V-Oliva. Now it's all I want to use! There's just no comparison to what I used to bring home from the supermarket.

The olive oil is probably the only expense for these crackers, but the recipe makes a large quantity, which is still cheaper than store bought crackers. The crackers I grabbed from the cupboard to compare had over 20 ingredients, many of which were numbers or names I couldn't  pronounce, while these have just five ingredients.

I split my batch of dough in half and sprinkled one batch with paprika and one batch with parmesan before baking. In my photo above a paprika cracker is shown with the best ever feta from Grinning Gecko and yummy pesto from Hydro Healthy. Both of which I bought at the Whangarei Growers Market. We have so much fresh rosemary in our garden I opted for fresh over dried (as used in the original recipe).

Ingredients:

1 Cup flour

1 Cup wholemeal flour

A good handful of fresh rosemary chopped finely

1 tsp salt

1/2 cup of olive oil

1/2 cup warm water

Mix dry ingredients together in a bowl, make a well in the centre and add olive oil, and at least half of the water. Stir together, until it forms a nice dough, add more water if needed (you may not use it all). Rest for 5 minutes.

Roll out very thinly on baking paper, or a silicone baking sheet. I use a pizza cutter to cut them into rectangles, it's much faster than a knife and prevents dragging.

Bake at 200C for approx 10 minutes or until golden brown.

Gluten Free Feijoa cake

Last week you may recall, I posted this recipe for gluten free Mandarin cake. Over the weekend, I looked at our poor feijoa trees which are still groaning under the weight of all their fruit and decided to give the same recipe a go, substituting the feijoa for the mandarin in the recipe. it turned out just great, I used the skin and all. It tasted amazing!

Mandarin cake - (Gluten free) with marzipan mandarins

This cake was so much fun and so quick to decorate. At my home, our family has committed to eating more seasonally and making good use of all the produce growing right on our section. I made this cake, this week for my husband's birthday, he is not a fan of icing, so this cake was perfect for him. The recipe was from Julie Le Clerc's Favourite Cakes book and Julie in conjunction with her publisher's Penguin, she graciously granted her permission to reprint the recipe for you all.
I originally tried the coconut version of this recipe, as one of my staff members Karina had made it. In the recipe Julie suggests options to use either 330g of dessicated coconut or 330g or ground almond. I knew if I tried the almond version I'd really love it (as I'm a huge fan of almond). My staff here at Kiwicake's are just gorgeous, when we are not sharing our baking or cooking, with each other, we are gossiping about recipes or what we are going to bake or cook - it is so inspiring. I am grateful to Karina for discovering this recipe - she tells me she prefers the almond too after having had a slice from this cake.

We planted our little mandarin tree some years ago and despite it's small size it's producing a vast quantity of mandarins at the moment.

I thought the mandarin's made of marzipan would be a nice compliment to the almond in the cake. They are coloured using the new Progel food colouring gel pastes, which I was thrilled with the workability of these gels. I modelled the mandarins using my hands, and just poked the dots on them using a toothpick. I used a small rose leaf cutter and veiner for the leaves.

When I baked this, I did use a springform cake pan as suggested. I fell in love with my new Fat Daddio's brand springform pan. It worked really well, I may use it for quite a few things I think, now that I have invested in one.

Recipe from "Favourite Cakes" by Julie Le Clerc, published by Penguin. The recipe is gluten free. If you do not need it to be gluten free, you can use any icing sugar and baking powder you have on hand.

Mandarin Cake.
600g Mandarins (or oranges) - we've tried both and prefer the madarins
6 eggs
1 cup caster sugar
3 cups of dessicated coconut (225g) or 3 cups of ground almond (330g) I used the ground almond
1tsp gluten free baking powder
gluten free icing sugar to dust

Preheat oven to 160C and grease a 22cm springform cake tin and lightly dust with gluten free flour.
Coarsely chop the mandarins, including the skin but removing any pips and place in a saucepan with enough water to cover.
Bring to the boil, then simmer until mandarin pulp is tender and the liquid has mostly reduced (this will take 30-40 mins). Blend or process to smooth puree and set aside to cool.
PLace eggs and sugar in bowl and whisk with electric mixer until thick, pale and fluffy.
Fold mandarin puree into egg mixture. Fold in coconut or ground almond and baking powder. Pour mixture into prepared tin. Bake for 70 minutes (mine took 65 mins, so check before timer goes off), covering with foil halfway through to avoid over-browning.
Allow to cool in the tin before removing to a serving plate. Dust with icing sugar to serve.

We served this cake, with a mandarin frozen yoghurt - that my ten year old daughter made from a recipe from a children's cook book. The original recipe was apple frozen yoghurt, we adapted it to mandarin flavoured by switching out the apple juice and changing it for the juice of mandarins. When choosing your apples, use a mild apple (not a strong sour one, such as Granny Smith) as the mandarin is sour enough. It was the perfect accompaniment.

Mandarin frozen yoghurt.
1/3 cup honey
1/2 cup juice squeezed from mandarins
1 tsp gelatine
500g greek yoghurt
3/4 cup grated peeled apple

Put honey and mandarin juice in a saucepan and stir on low heat until the honey has melted. Cool for 5 minutes. Then add gelatine, stir until dissolved.
Put yoghurt, grated apple and gelatine mixture in to a loaf pan (on our second attempt we used a silicone loaf pan, so it was much easier to turn out, than from a metal pan. We found this very difficult to scoop, to we cut slices from the loaf and it looked quite stylish on the plate, next to the cake when served.

Both recipes worked well with children helping, as all of the steps were very simple to follow. The hardest part for them was waiting for things to cool, to move on to the next step