Ingredients:

• 125g unsalted butter
• 115g caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence (add another if you want it to be super vanilla)
• 60ml milk
• 245g Plain Flour
• 50g Cornflour (OR, custard powder. But I don’t want it to go that yellow, and custard powder is cornflour, colour and vanilla. So either will work).
• Rolled fondant or royal icing or your own icing to decorate

Method:

1. Soften butter, and cream with caster sugar.
2. Add milk and vanilla and mix thoroughly.
3. Sift in the flour and cornflour.
4. Fold into the mixture. This takes quite a while, and eventually it turns into a dough. Make sure you lift it and incorporate all the remaining dry floury stuff on the bottom of the bowl so everything in the bowl is now stuck to the dough.
5. Wrap in glad wrap and put in the fridge to rest for 20 minutes.
6. Do a dance!
7. Get out your dough, and break off half, put half back in the fridge.
8. You can use cornflour or flour to dust your work area (lightly, it doesn’t need much). I used cornflour because I already have it in a shaker for all my fondant work, and it won’t turn the cookies too flour-y either.
9. Flatten your dough slightly and using a rolling pin lightly start to roll it out so that it’s just under half a cm thick. Roll it out in one direction and then turn your dough 90 degrees and roll in the other until it’s all even thickness.
10. Now you can cut your shapes! I’m using a champagne glass and high heel shoe (and a flower right at the end) for my cutting. Just push down to cut the shape and lift out the cutter, you can pull away the excess dough and lift up all your shapes at the end. Don’t worry about trying to lift them off the board as you’re cutting them out, you might shrink your cut shape!
    
11. Pop them on a tray lined with baking paper and have them all evenly spaced. My tray is loaded. But I’m silly I am using a special silicon mat on a regular baking tray for these. It’s supposed to replace baking paper and remain flat, so there are no bubbles under your baked goods. We used these at TAFE but they were the Silpat brand (and all of these kinds of woven silicon mats can be quite expensive). I paid $20+ wholesale for this one.
12. Bake at 160C for 13 minutes or until the edges of your cut outs and the bottoms and edges start to brown up and they are golden.
    Here’s the important part: You expect them to be hard when you touch them in the oven to see “if they’re done”, like a cake. These cookies won’t do that. They’ll still be soft until they cool down, and then they go a little crunchy. If you bake them until they’re firm out of the oven they’ll be like rocks and totally inedible.
    When the edges just start to brown like in the pictures below you’re good to take the tray out.
    And as much as you want to, don’t move or touch them until they cool down or you’ll break your cookies. I had three casualties on each tray because I’m “clever” and also impatient.
    The champagne cookies were harder to handle because the stems are fragile, but I still had two broken shoe cookies as well.

Once they’re cooled, you can now decorate! A simple way of decorating (if you can wait that long to eat them) is with rolled fondant. Simply roll out your chosen colour, cut the shape with the same cutter (after it’s been cleaned) and dab a bit of water or sugar glue to the back of your fondant and apply to the cookie. You can ice in royal icing or a simple sugar and milk/water combo but I find any piping onto cookies super time consuming for this time, considering I’m doing 12 of each cookie plus other desserts tonight and tomorrow for Mum (jelly slice, macarons, cake and cupcakes).

I’m using Cake Art’s White Chocolate Fondant with a white edible shimmer dusting to make them super special. Enjoy! *eats all the broken ones*

Croquembouche Puffs

• 155g plain flour
• 80g unsalted butter
• 310ml water
• 5 eggs

1. Preheat your oven to 210C and line 2-3 trays with baking paper.
2. Sift the flour three times on to a sheet of paper and set aside.
3. Place butter and water in a saucepan and stir until it comes to the boil. Remove from heat.
4. Add flour and quickly mix until combined. Return to the heat and mix (this is where it gets really hard) with a wooden spoon until it comes away from the sides and forms a smooth ball.
5. Transfer the mixture (called a panada at this sticky glue-like stage) into a new bowl to cool down.
6. After it cools slightly, add the eggs one at a time. Mix well after each addition. After the last egg, the mixture should be thick, glossy, and falls off the spoon in a thick ribbon. You don’t want it to be too runny or the puffs won’t hold their shape, but not too thick either.
7. Place mixture into a piping bag with a large round nozzle. Here I’ve used a number 13 for the bigger ones I made, but later I switched to an 11 for the smaller ones. These are large plastic pastry nozzles which you can find at the General Trader, Creative Cooks, and other specialty cake/pastry/cooking stores.
8. Pipe out small round teaspoon sized amounts of the mixture onto the tray. The way I piped these is holding the bag 90 degrees from the tray (directly above). Hold the tip just above the tray, and pull up slowly with the mixture. When you’ve finished piping, release the pressure on the bag and lift away. You will almost always have a tail when you lift away.
9. When you have finished piping out the tray, wet your fingers and gently push on the tails that you left when piping. Your hands need to be wet or the mixture will just stick to your fingers. You can fix up mixture that’s gone sideways and reshape the puffs. You can do this step when piping macaron shell batter too *hint hint*
10. Wet your hands again and shake the excess water over the tray.
11. Place in the oven for 10-12 minutes or until they start to brown. Use a toothpick to make a hole in the bottom of each one and return the tray to the oven at 180C for 3-5 minutes to dry out.
12. Store in an airtight bag or container to prevent them going stale. I’d recommend using them within 48 hours if you’re not going to freeze them (I’m sure they’ll be fine frozen, but I don’t have a big enough freezer to store things. They may be softer than usual when defrosted but hey, puffs are delicious anyway).

You can fill these with whipped cream, thick custard (not pouring custard like I bought because that’s all the service station had at the time), thick mousse or whatever you can think of that would go well! They are traditionally filled with a custard and then dipped in caramel or chocolate (usually a type of pouring fondant).

When I was 12, I went to the Barossa with my Mum to do some catering work one weekend. I was to help prepare desserts and bring the empty plates back in so we could clear them away. The dessert was sticky date with a toffee shard. I’m nearly 23 years old now, and to this day I have never tasted a sticky date pudding as delicious and memorable as that one. Do you have desserts like that? Or food? Memories associated with food… Mmmmm, food.

Unless I’m completely blind, the supermarkets never used to sell diced dates like this, and the other day I saw they did, so it makes life a lot easier when preparing these because dicing dates takes FOREVER and I’m super impatient.

You absolutely don’t need frosting for these if you don’t want – they are super sweet and moist so you can get away with it. Otherwise, you can look up butterscotch frosting and you’re set. But prepare to go into a sugar coma!

Sticky Date Cupcakes (makes 12)

Ingredients:

• 200g Diced Dates
• 1 teaspoon bicarb soda
• 60g unsalted butter
• 200g SR Flour
• 125g brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 250ml water

Method:

1. Preheat your oven to 180C.
2. Put the dates and the water into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Take off of the heat and stir in the bicarb, then add the butter and stir until all melted.
3. Sift the flour into a bowl, add the sugar and combine. Add the date mixture and eggs, and stir until all just combined.
4. Divide into cupcake cases and bake for 17-20 minutes or until skewer comes out clean.

Delicious!

Ingredients:

• 120g Unsalted Butter
• 1/2 cup Caster Sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 cups SR Flour
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence

Method:

Note: It’s best for all ingredients to be the same temperature when preparing this, so you can weigh up your butter in advance and leave it covered to soften up. You can just leave the egg on the bench too. The ingredients will mix together a lot better if they’re all room temp!

1. Beat together butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
2. Add the egg and mix until all combined.
3. Add the flour (sifted) and vanilla essence and mix with a big spatula or wooden spoon to get all the ingredients to come together.
4. If the mixture is crumbly (if your butter and eggs were too cold) and it won’t come together like a dough, add a teaspoon or tablespoon of milk and work it through.
5. Separate the dough into two round balls, cover with cling wrap and put in the fridge for 20 minutes to rest. At this time, preheat your oven to 170C.
6. Take out one of the balls and roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface. Cut out equal numbers of each size star (this will make 5-6 of each).
7. Place on oven trays with baking paper and bake for 5-10 minutes or until a very light golden colour.

The trick is not to overbake. Cookies are an interesting creature (haha) because when they are in the oven and nearly done, they are still very soft. We can be used to cakes being firm to the touch when done, but cookies cool down and go crumbly and solid if they are overbaked and firm to the touch when they come out of the oven.

Have some faith in your oven and cooking times, and when in doubt use an oven thermometer and give it another 1-2 minutes. Yum yum!

I made two different recipes while in my course, one is slightly easier than the other but if you want a faster baking time, this is the one you should use. This is also not as rich as the other one! I hope you enjoy it.

Creme Brulee (makes 6)

• 250ml Milk
• 250ml Cream
• 3 Eggs
• 2 Egg Yolks
• 60g Caster Sugar

1. Warm milk and cream together on stove, but do not boil.
2. Whisk eggs and sugar well.
3. Pour warm milk on eggs, whisk and strain through a sieve into a jug or bowl. Leave to settle and skim any foam off of the top.
4. Pour into ramekin dishes and place into a deep tray. Pour hot water in 1/4 up the side of the ramekin dishes.
5. If there are any bubbles on the top and you have a blow torch, you can get rid of the bubbles before you put them in the oven!
6. Bake at 150C until the creme brulee is *just* wobbly, but not runny and not hard. This takes about 15-20 minutes.
7. When they are done and cooled, you can add the caramel layer on top. Dust the top with a thick layer of icing sugar and caramelise under a grill or with the blow torch.
   Be careful not to let it go too long or the sugar will burn and turn black. You need it all to be a golden brown.

And you’re done! Enjoy

I have just moved house! (and excuse the poor quality of this photo, normally my photos are wonderful!) I am now in a wonderful large unit with my boyfriend and it’s just us two. We have a new kitchen and oven which has a very nice clean shiny door to peer at baked treats! This is the first thing besides cupcakes that I have made in the oven and they are super yummy. If you need a good shortbread recipe, try this one. He couldn’t stop eating them!

Adapted with some changes from the NMAA Cooks recipe book (given to me for my birthday some years ago)

Shortbread

• 375g Plain Flour
• 60g Cornflour (or rice flour)
• 250g unsalted butter
• 125g caster sugar
• 1-2 tablespoons milk (optional)

1. Preheat your oven to 180C and line some cookie trays with baking paper.
2. Rub butter into flour. The easiest way to do this is straight out of the fridge, grate the butter into the flour. It will work it through much quicker.
3. Add in all other ingredients and mould together.
4. If it is very crumbly and not coming together, add a tablespoon or two of cold milk to help bring it together.
5. Roll into a ball and cover with glad wrap and place in the fridge for 5 minutes. When it cools a little, take it out and dust your bench lightly with plain flour. Roll out your dough (dust your rolling pin too) and cut out your shapes. Place in the fridge or freezer until cold, then put into the oven.
6. Bake for 5 minutes at 180C, then turn your dial to 150-160C and bake for another 20-25 minutes. They will go a golden colour so we’re not looking for brown to judge if they’re ready here. You can check if they are ready by turning it over and tapping on the middle of your cookies gently. If the colour is getting darker on the bottom and it is not as soft, they’re ready.
   Set your timers for 20 minutes and check them then. Mine were in for 25 minutes but I opened the door two times! Eeeek.

They will be a little soft in the middle still when you get them out of the oven, but they harden slightly on cooling. Don’t let that fool you into overbaking them! I used minature Christmas cookie cutters to cut mine and only did a half recipe and look how many it made! It depends on the size cutters you use as to how many this recipe will yield for you.

This also (maybe) goes without saying, but you should never really set your timers and just walk away for the entire time. If you’ve never baked a particular recipe before, keep an eye on it! Even if you glance every 5 minutes or so, just check that it’s not setting your house on fire. Not that I would ever give you directions that should result in your house being on fire, it’s just a disclaimer of sorts I think. I can walk away from my cupcakes for the 17 minutes I set the timer for (15-20 minutes) because I have made that particular recipe hundreds of times and know exactly what to expect from my oven and the batter.

Don’t eat too much of the dough!

This is by far the best and most reliable vegan cupcake recipe I have ever used. Every single time it has come out perfectly, with no hint of it even being vegan – the guests don’t have a clue! And when they find out, they’re amazed they are vegan!

The first time I made these for an order was for the lovely Bel who still even now continues to rave about them

They contain no egg and no dairy, and the substitutes used here are water (to replace milk), vinegar (to replace egg, in a way) and Nuttelex (to replace butter).

• 250ml water (room temperature ~23C)
• 90g Nuttelex / Butter / Margarine (softened)
• 1 tablespoon vinegar
• 1 tablespoon vanilla (use just a teaspoon if using butter)
• 1 3/4 cups Plain Flour
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon bicarb soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat your oven to 180C.
2. Put liquids and butter (or whatever you use) in first and then add all sifted dry ingredients on top.
3. Mix until all combined thoroughly, divide into cupcake cases.
4. Bake in oven for 17-20 minutes. Use a skewer to check if they’re done or they will lightly spring back when touched.

If you would like them to be chocolate, simply add some sifted cocoa into the mixture when you’re combining the ingredients. It should only take 1-2 tablespoons worth to flavour the mix. Enjoy!

Edit: A few people have asked about icing. I make my buttercream always the same way, one part butter (or replacement) and two parts icing sugar. Add a teaspoon of vanilla essence. Yum

Just a last note: After this recipe, all my recipes will be by weight for two reasons:

1) We do it in my course and it’s becoming a good habit
2) Even though you can buy measuring cups from the supermarket or your local cooking supply store, they are not always quite accurate. A weight measurement instead of a cup measurement across the recipes will ensure that every recipe is exactly the same every single time you make it. Think about it, sometimes you get large eggs and sometimes they’re small – that can make all the difference!

Cheesecake Tarts (fills roughly 12-18)

1. Preheat your oven to 180C.
2. In your mixer, beat the cream cheese with the sugar. Most cream cheese will not need any softening but if you have a brand that is particularly hard, leave it to soften slightly or pop it in the microwave for a few seconds.
3. Slowly add the eggs and vanilla, beat until combined.
4. Arrange your tart cases on a tray and fill 3/4 of each one with the mixture. Bake for 15 minutes and leave to cool.
5. When completely cooled, arrange your fruit on the top. Or eat them, if you don’t want fruit!

While it’s not this recipe, for some inspiration here’s a photo from my first Pastries class today where we made fruit tarts and a flan. I hope the fruit arrangement gives you some ideas!

I made some slight adjustments to the recipe and if you follow the link above you’ll see he had macadamias – I’m not the biggest fan of nuts in brownies (also because of allergy concerns with some people) but chuck a handful or two in at the end and mix them through if desired.

Recipe: Chocolate Brownies (no nuts)

Ingredients:

• 250g Dark Chocolate
• 250g Unsalted Butter
• 205g Caster Sugar
• 175g Eggs (3 or 4 eggs depending on egg size. Advisable to measure)
• 110g Plain Flour

Method:

1. Get all your ingredients ready first. Your eggs should be as close as possible to room temperature – if you use them straight out of the fridge, it will react with the warm chocolate mixture.
2. Preheat oven to 160C and grease and line a square tray. Roughly 25-30cm square is ideal.
3. Measure out the chocolate and butter into a saucepan and set aside.
4. Whisk together the eggs and sugar in a seperate bowl, and sift out the flour in a third bowl.
5. Melt the chocolate and butter on a low heat and allow to cool slightly.
6. Pour a little amount of the chocolate mixture into the eggs and sugar and mix to combine. This will temper the mixture if the chocolate is still a bit warm. We don’t want to cook the eggs! Add the rest and whisk.
7. Add the sifted flour in stages and whisk until combined.
8. Pour into prepared pan and place straight into the oven. Here I sprinkled a handful of chocolate chips along the top for effect.
9. After about 25 minutes, have a look to see if the top is still ultra spongy – if it is, leave it another 5 minutes
10. You can test to see if it’s done with a skewer, but we still want some crumbs to cling to it, dry brownies are no fun!
11. Remove tray from oven and remove brownie slice from the tray onto a cooling tray. Let it cool completely before slicing!
12. Dust the top with icing sugar and trim all four sides, then cut into equal rectangles. Enjoy with a hot drink

You should have a very evil, chocolate and delicious brownie, that’s not too chocolatey, not too dry or moist, and melts away in your mouth.

To honour my non-watching of this season, I decided to finally give the delicate little thing a go. Firstly I’ll clarify a couple of things:

1) To settle all the debate and the questions, these biscuits themselves are actually macarons. Macaroon with a double o is a word used to apply to a variety of small cakes of meringue-like cookies. So technically it could probably apply as both, however if you are making the recipe with almond meal and egg whites like I am about to tell you below, they’re macarons. I’m not going to get all up in arms about it, I call it one or the other depending on how many letters I feel like pressing at the time.

This recipe is derived from the one that Callum used on Masterchef, and the original “Violet Macaroons with Raspberries and Buttercream” recipe is available on the Masterchef website.

Basic Plain Vanilla Macarons
(makes roughly 24 halves)

Ingredients

• 225g pure icing sugar (very important – if it has any other ingredients in it it’s not icing sugar it’s icing mixture, no matter what the front says)
• 130g almond meal
• 3 egg whites
• 60g caster sugar
• essence of your choice, to taste
• a few drops of food colour of your choice

Method

1. Preheat oven to 120C. It’s very important it stays at this temperature almost exactly, so be ready as always with your oven thermometers.
2. Sift almond meal and icing sugar into one bowl. Sift it again into another bowl, then back into the original bowl – so it should be sifted three times. Set aside.
3. With an electric mixer, beat the egg whites until doubled in size. Slowly add the caster sugar while mixing, and mix until it forms firm peaks. The way to tell is to lift the beaters out and if the peaks don’t drop back in, you are pretty much there. Another way is to slowly lift the bowl upside down (haha) and if the whites don’t move they’re also ready.
4. Add your essence to taste, then carefully add the food colouring. I chose only to add a little vanilla essence for this run, so my macarons are completely white.
5. Fold your sifted almond meal mixture into the egg white meringue, and keep folding gently until all combined and it starts to look smoother. The consistency should be not too runny, but not a dough either – it’s been described as a “magma”.
6. Place the mixture in a piping bag with a round tip and pipe 4 – 5cm diameter circles onto a lined baking tray. To do this, hold the bag 90 degrees half a cm off the baking paper, and squeeze. When the circle is big enough, stop piping and pull the tip out of the piped circle.
7. Leave them to rest for 15-20 minutes. If there are any little bits poking out of the top from when you piped them, you should be able to gently press them back down.
8. Place them into the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Remove them from the oven and let them to cool.

To make the filling, it is a small amount of buttercream – 85g unsalted butter and 100g sifted pure icing sugar. You can colour this too to match your macarons. Add more icing sugar as always if the buttery taste is still too much, but you also don’t want this to be a very thick and stiff buttercream. The consistency should match the light and airy taste of the macarons.

Now here’s some things that no one tells you about macarons:
- They are extremely fragile biscuits. Looking at them you would think they are completely rock solid and a full biscuit, when indeed they are meant to be slightly crispy on the outside and soft and moist on the inside. If you press too hard when handling them or picking them up from the tray, they’ll crack. I have had several disaster ones but also several perfect ones.
- You will need to use all the mixture on the first run. If you let the mixture sit too long in the bowl without piping it to form the skin, they won’t “pop” off of the tray and they will look like this:

- Now that I’ve tried this for the first time, I get the feeling there might not have been enough egg whites from the eggs that I used. I may try a fourth egg white in my next run, to see if that will improve the smoothness when piping. As you can see from the first picture, while it is great it’s not the perfect consistency, and I think it needs a little more liquid substance of some sort for that to happen. If you give that a go, let me know if it’s any better!

As always please feel free to use the contact form to send me any questions or comments, or leave a comment on a post!

Aside from macarons, I am scheduled to start a six month course in Patisserie on the 19th of July, so this blog should be a lot more active with lots of baking tips and tricks from the girl in Patisserie school!

x Monnie