dinosaur doughnuts

Quick post today. Made these dinosaur doughnuts a couple days ago with Clara on a whim and decided that they were too easy and tasty to not do a post on. This recipe is ridiculously quick to prepare and also requires little washing up because essentially all you need is a blender and a pan.

The first thing you should know about these is that they are baked, not deep fried so whilst they might not be as delicious, they are a lot healthier for you. I would love to make doughnuts the proper way but the truth is, deep frying and scalding oil terrifies me so maybe at a later date. These doughnuts also have no sugar, butter or flour! Well the doughnut part that is, I used cinnamon sugar to coat them... The recipe instead uses almond meal and honey. I found the recipe on this blog and the recipes there are all grain and sugar free and makes me feel incredibly guilty for using so much refined flour and sugar. Anyway, it's definitely worth a look.

This recipe also uses a batter instead of a dough and yeast. The original recipe used a doughnut tin to cook the batter in but I didn't have one. So I just pulled out whatever I could find in my cupboard and decided on using this adorable dinosaur pan (thank you Yen). You all should know about my love of dinosaurs so this seemed appropriate. I'm not sure if it was because of the thickness of the pan but this took a little longer to cook than the recommended 10 minutes, more around the 12-14 minute mark. If you are going to make this though, I suggest you bake it for 10 minutes first and then decide if it needs any longer because you do not want to overcook them.

I also didn't have any dates to make the icing and the attempt to use sultanas as a substitute didn't work out well. So I just decided covering them in cinnamon sugar instead which is always safe, trusty and delicious.

Also apologies about the photos, I started baking too late and the sun was already going down and no light = bad photos.

dinosaur doughnuts
adapted from roostblog

1 1/4 cup almond meal/flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
3 eggs
1/4 cup oil or ghee
2 tbsp honey
1/2 tsp vanilla extract


cinnamon sugar
25g melted butter
1/3 cup caster sugar
1 tsp cinnamon


1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees.
2. Put all dry ingredients in a blender and mix with a spoon.
3. Add all wet ingredients to the blender.
4. Blend until the batter is smooth.
5. Pour into greased dinosaur pan or doughnut moulds or whatever you can find.
6. Bake for 10 minutes and then check on them. If they are still not cooked, bake for a few minutes longer but be careful not to overbake or they will be dry.
7. Remove doughnut from pan.
9. For the cinnamon sugar, mix the sugar and cinnamon in a bowl.
8. Brush doughnuts with a little bit of butter while still warm and coat in sugar.

Simple, isn't it? If you're really lazy you could even use store bought cinnamon sugar like I did the first time I made them but it didn't seem economical. Good to make if you have a doughnut craving or just feel like baking something quick. These are best served warm so microwave them for a few seconds to heat them up if you can. This'll also prevent them from being dry which they might be after a day or so.

Since I have a few spares sitting in my kitchen right now, I've decided to give them away! So, first three comments on this post can get a dinosaur from me tomorrow. But if you all jig or nobody comments I'll just eat them all myself.

With all these upcoming class parties, birthdays, housewarming parties etc, I'll probably turn into a baking machine, which is good for me, good for those around me but bad for my father who is OCD and feels the need to double clean the kitchen every time after I bake.

So get commenting and I'll be back soon!

father's day breakfast

Hello readers. Yes I am back, for now.

Seeing as it was father's day today, I thought I might as well document the obligatory father's day breakfast that I make yearly. Felt like making something both sweet and savoury so this is going to be a double post.

I'm just going to jump straight into it because I have nothing to rant about today.


baked eggs in tomato with basil and prosciutto
recipe from almost bourdain

Pictured above, this was the savoury part of the breakfast and it was incredibly easy to make and highly recommend it to lazy people who feel like a warm breakfast. I've never baked eggs before but after this I think I'll try out some other baked eggs recipes. One thing though, while the recipe said to only bake the eggs for 5 minutes, mine needed much longer than that, more like 10-15 minutes.

Anyway, photos.

And every breakfast needs sugar so...

lemon souffle cakes [serves 4]
(from Bill Granger's 'Sydney Food')

3/4 cup buttermilk
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons lemon juice
3 teaspoon grated lemon juice
[I used one large lemon for this]
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
25 g unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoon caster sugar
pinch of salt
2 egg whites

200g strawberries. halved
1 tablespoon honey
icing sugar

1. Place buttermilk, egg yolks, lemon juice and zest and vanilla in a bowl and stir. Add butter and mix  well.
2. Sift flour, baking powder, sugar and salt into a large bowl. Make a well in the centre and stir in the butter milk mixture. Be careful not to overmix.
3. Whip egg whites into soft peaks and gently fold egg whites into batter using a large metal spoon.
4. Melt a bit of butter into a non-stick frypan on medium heat and drop 2 tablespoons of batter per cake.
5. Cook till golden brown and turn to cook the other side.
6. Keep warm while you cook the rest.
7. Toss the strawberries with the honey.
8. Dust lemon souffle cakes with icing sugar and top with strawberries to serve.

Some tips, for the strawberries, I added a little bit of water to thin out the honey a little and I also used more than 200g since we had so many at home. Often recipes macerate strawberries in sugar but this turns them brown and mushy so use honey as this makes them appear even more red. To keep pancakes warm, I often just put them all on a plate and cover them with a clean tea towel. Alternatively, like I have done, use a mini oven that is just warm and leave the pancakes in there.

These souffle cakes are super light and fluffy and should be fantastic for summer. They are a bit more effort than stock standard pancakes but if you have the time, they are worth it. Plus I just wanted to make the most of the beginning of strawberry season. Seriously, I swear we have like, five punnets of strawberries in the fridge right now. Not that I'm complaining.

Food porn starts here.

Served with croissants and coffee and some freshly whipped cream, breakfast is served.

I'll probably be posting a bit more in the next couple weeks until the end of school (17 DAYS!). With the upcoming birthdays and possible parties, I'll most likely be baking a lot so hooray! I miss this.

Well that's it from me, until next time.

caramelised banana pancakes

I don't even remember how to start a blog post.

Oh whatever, that'll do.

Got roped into making pancakes for my mum this morning. Yesterday I fell in love with this pink bowl which I thought would be perfect for pouring pancake batter and my mum only bought it on the condition that I would make her pancakes today. Thus the caramelised banana pancakes.

And behold my precious bowl along with a whole lot of other junk.

Also, it actually took me four treks up the stairs to even manage to get these photos taken. Since the weather was oh-so-lovely today and light was almost non-existent, I needed to my flash to take thses photos. But it was out of battery and since AA batteries in our household are an extremely limited commodity, I had to spend a good 15 minutes hunting. I have now learnt that all of our remotes use AAA batteries and the X-box controllers that use AA are all empty. Oh hey! Random segway for the day which has absolutely nothing to do with baking.

I used a basic pancake batter recipe which I found online so it seems a bit redundant to post it up but since I need to take up space in this post and feel as though I am actually a good food blogger, I will.

basic pancake recipe
[serves four but I can eat half myself because pancakes are delicious and don't you dare try to stop me]

1 cup self-raising flour
1 1/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup caster sugar
1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 egg
cooking spray

1. Sift flour into a bowl and mix in the sugar and bicarb soda
2. Whisk buttermilk and egg.
3. Stir/whisk into the flour mixture
4. Heat frying pan over medium heat and spray with oil.
5. Pour batter into pan and cook until bubbles appear on the surface. (2 minutesish)
6. Flip and continue until cooked. (1-2 minutes)

Oh that last picture is awful. Action shots are so difficult to take.

And oh, if you are worried about not having any buttermilk at home it's okay! Cos I never do! I just use a substitute because I'm cheap and lazy and I use this instead.

buttermilk substitute

1 cup of milk
1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar

1. Combine.
2. Stir.
3. Wait for 5 minutes.

DONE.

It looks pretty gross though, like curdled milk. Buttermilk is traditionally just leftover sour liquid from churned butter. Nowadays they just add lactic acid to milk and let it ferment for a couple hours so it's sort of what we are doing here. I used about half a lemon because one lemon yields 2-3 tablespoons of lemon juice and I used 1 1/4 milk because that's what the recipe asked for.

And now the bananas!

caramelised bananas

4 bananas
40g butter
1/4 cup sugar

1. Slice bananas diagonally
2. Melt butter and sugar in a pan.
3. Add bananas and let them cook until soft (5 minutesish)

To serve, you can add some maple syrup (though it should be sweet enough) and I dusted mine with cinnamon and added cream because I felt it was too healthy.

And that's pretty much it from me so see you in a couple months.

Oh and coffee.



And more pictures.

sweetcorn fritters + roast tomato + bacon

Hi there! Remember me? The incredibly inconsistent, constantly absent, lazy food blogger? Well I'm back...for now.

I normally wake up too late to make breakfast so weekends are normally the only time I bother cooking in the morning. Actually this meal went from being breakfast, to brunch and then to lunch because I am so slow at cooking and there were some few technical difficulties. But more on that later.

So this recipe is by Bill Granger from his book 'Sydney Food' which I absolutely love. Everything in it is really quite simple to make which is fantastic for me because I'm not very good with savoury dishes. I was really lucky to have all the ingredients except the capsicum and halved the recipe because it was just me eating (why am I so lonely, someone please join me).

sweetcorn fritters with roast tomato and bacon [serves 4]

1 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1 tablespoon sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup fresh corn kernels (from cob)
1/2 cup diced red capsicum
1/2 cup sliced spring onion
1/4 cup coriander and parsely (combined)
4 tablespoon vegetable oil
8 halves of roast tomato
1 bunch rocket ( I used baby spinach leaves because I didn't have any)
4 rashers grilled bacon
olive oil

1. Sift flour, baking powder, salt and paprika into a bowl and stir in the sugar.
2. In another bowl combine eggs and milk.
3. Make well in dry ingredients and slowly add the egg mixture into the dry while whisking
4. Place corn, capsicum, spring onions and herbs into a mixing bowl and add just enough batter to bind them (about 3/4 cup)
5. Heat oil in a non-stick fry pan over medium heat and drop 2 tablespoons of batter per fritter. Cook 2 at a time.
6. Cook for 2 minutes until golden and flip to cook the other side.
7. Transfer to plate and keep warm while cooking the rest.
8. Place one fritter on each plate. Top with 2 tomato halves, a handful of rocket, a rasher of bacon and another fritter. Drizzle olive oil around the base.

roast tomatoes

4 roma tomatoes halved lengthways
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper

1. Preheat oven to 180 C
2. Place tomato in baking tray with cut side up and drizzle with olive oil.
3. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
4. Roast in oven for 40 minutes.




























As you can see, there is nothing technically difficult with this dish. The only problem I had was roasting the tomatoes. Since I was only cooking for myself, I though it would be a waste to use to big oven just for one tomato, so I used our mini oven instead. Unfortunately the close proximity between the olive oil and the heating bars caused in a minor fire. If you don't know me, I am terrified of fire which is why, I don't often cook savoury things. It took a while to get over my fear of burning to death to finally turn off the damn oven.  So then I transferred the tomatoes to our slightly larger mini oven but the same thing happened. In fear of burning our house down with me along with it, I decided that it was best just use our regular oven which was slightly wasteful, but safer.

I also forgot to add salt to the fritter batter which was incredibly dumb of me so if you try this recipe, don't do that. My fritters were also slightly thicker than what they should have been but cooked through nonetheless. It was really quite delicious and will probably make it again though for the amount of time it took, would only make it if others were eating too.

Not sure how my attempt compares to the original though I definitely plan to try sometime in the holidays.

And okay I couldn't resist. So I guess I will be reading spoilers for next season. Two days! Maybe I'll bake something 'Game of Thrones' related? Am I that lame?

Indeed I am.

So farewell. I hope you have enjoyed looking at what I ate to break my fast.

And oh yes,

Winter is coming.

LuxBite

Melbourne!

Last Thursday, I was lucky enough to finally go to Melbourne since I've actually never been. On our agenda was clothes (i.e. Topshop) and food. Though I brought my camera with me everywhere, I really couldn't be bothered taking photos but I did take photos of our visit to LuxBite. I have really bad memory so I can't remember what most of the stuff was but I can kinda guess. Oh wait! Found the menu. IMMA GENIUS.

Affrogato - Vanilla ice cream topped with a shot of hot espresso.
Yes, I am copying straight off the menu. Do you have a problem with it? Huh? Huh?

Mango Tango - Passionfruit tart, pineapple jelly and a mango flower

It was okay. Tasty, but nothing mindblowing though the pastry was quite good. It was really hard trying to identify the different parts because I had already forgotten what the label had said once we sat at our tables and started eating.

Stoned Meringue Monster - Pistachio sponge, raspberry yoghurt and creamy apricot

I liked this one, the inside was really soft and delicate, not what I expected. And meringues are always delicious anyway. Again, couldn't really remember what I was eating not that that was a bad thing. It was nice but we were just too nooby to figure it out the separate parts.

Our box of macarons! We bought the twelve pack, so four each for the three of us. We bought kaya toast, sour strawberry, rose & lychee, ribena lemonade, salt caramel and peanut butter & jelly, doubling up here and there.

Ribena Lemonade

Rose and Lychee

Okay from memory...

The kaya toast macaron didn't really taste like kaya. It had a little bit of butter in the middle which was pretty cool but was otherwise, disappointing. Ooh! This reminds me that I should probably make some kaya sometime soonish. I think we have some pandan leaves. Huh. I'll check tomorrow morning.

The peanut butter and jelly one was good but most peanut butter things mostly are. It was hard to taste much of the jelly, it's a tiny little block in the middle.

Ribena Lemonade...I don't remember much.

And the rest I didn't try.

Yes, I am a really bad reviewer. I'm more of a 'this is tasty', 'this is not', 'this is weird' and 'this is kinda sorta okayish'.

LuxBite will be on the 'this is tasty' but slowly nearing the 'this is kinda sorta okayish' side. Like I've said, it was good, but not spectacular. The presentation was lovely though and the shop was nicely decorated so I suppose it is also about the overall experience of the meal.

Oh and I almost forgot.
Clara and Amelia's toast with a poached egg because they felt like something salty.

And end post with a picture of the really nice macaron box with the shop's website conveniently printed on the end which then directs the reader to the site to further browse through more pictures of food and menus. Or click on this link. www.luxbite.com.au