Chocolate chip slice :)

Quick Simple chocolate slice FIX! 

I make these for my husband when I dont have time to make the yummy brownies, these can still satisfy him for that brownie craving!!! 

Ingredients: 

1 Cup SR flour

1/2 Cup Desiccated coconut

1/2 Cup Brown sugar

2 TBspoons Cocoa powder

125g melted butter

395g can sweetened condensed milk

3/4 Cup Milk chocolate chips

Method:

Preheat oven to 180'C (160'C fan forced) and grease and live a slice tray.

Place flour, coconut, brown sugar, cocoa, butter and condensed milk into a bowl and mix well. 

Press into the base of the pan and top with chocolate chips. 

Bake for 25-30 minutes. Remove and allow to cool before cutting into squares. 

Presto! Yum! 

Simple YUMMY yoyo biscuits!

Quick easy recipe for some delicious yoyo/melting moments:

This is the Country Womens Association recipe! They always have the best tradition recipes!

Ingredients:

170g Softened butter
1/3 cup icing sugar
55g custard powder
170g Plain flour

Icing:
4 tablespoons icing sugar
2 tablespoons softened butter
1 teaspoon Vanilla essence

Method:
Preheat over to 180 Degrees. Grease baking tray.

To make biscuit dough, cream butter and icing sugar together. Add custard powder and well sifted flour and mix well. Roll mixture into little balls, place on prepared trays and press down with the back of a fork. Bake for about 20 minutes.

To make icing, combine sifted icing sugar with butter and essence until smooth.

When biscuits are cool, join together with icing.

** Dont forget to make an even amount of biscuits are you join them together at the end.
** for a larger batch, make small balls.

Nellie's tips #4

Want to know the secret to stopping your cake from getting that big fat peak on top? Put your cake tray on the lowest bar of the oven and Taddah! Even cake!!!

Nellie's Tips! #3

Buttermilk! The humble Buttermilk is the KEY ingredient to the perfect cake! Using buttermilk instead of normal milk helps the cake to rise perfectly and evenly! Buttermilk is also DELISH in muffins too!!

Rainbow Layered Cake!

My wonderful In-Laws were coming to visit us! And it was my Sister-in-laws birthday 2 days after they left, so I decided to celebrate early for her and finally TACKLE (and I do mean tackle!!) the layered rainbow birthday cake! Due to the fact im a perfectionist and would not settle for anything under almost perfect, this cake definitely took its TIME!!!!! 

To make this cake you need to follow the recipe EXACTLY and you can not cut any corners! For me it took about 5 hours to make, only due to the fact I only had 1 cake tin the size I needed! (Plus I had the family day care kids to put to sleep and wake up in the process!) 

*** MAJOR TIP! You MUST use a 20cm round (8inch) Cake tin. It CANT be bigger or smaller as this recipe will not work-unless you have some good maths brains and want to tweak the recipe to fit into a larger cake tin. Standard tins are 22.5cm round (9inch). I could only find 1 cake tin 20cm round from a friend. So if you are LUCKY and happen to find at leased 2 cake tins this size I suggest you BUY THEM BOTH! it will HALF the time of making this cake I PROMISE!!!

**Do not try to cook 2 cakes at once, only have 1  cake in the oven at a time, as it will change the cooking time, and when your baking for this long-you dont want to have to constantly check if the cake is ready-you just want to set the timer and pull it out without checking. 

**I did a test try first with another recipe and that one just isnt as good, thankfully I made that decision after only 2 layers! 

** Make sure you have a good kitchen scales on hand as you will need to WEIGH the ingredients perfectly. 

SO good luck! Enjoy. Its so much fun towards the end, and I must say I was VERY proud of myself when Angela cut open the cake and the rainbow was just perfect! Its a scary moment, because you dont know if you covered it enough in icing and if the cake stays together until the final reveal. But if you follow this recipe perfectly it will be PERFECT!

The Recipe

Because Gods number is 7 and he made the rainbow with 7 colours, it makes it an odd number so unfortunately you will have HALF a batch left at the end. But dont waste it-throw it in little cupcake pattys and make some mini cakes for the kids :) 

YOU WILL NEED TO MAKE 4 BATCHES OF THE FOLLOWING MIXTURE AND HALF EACH BATCH TO MAKE 2 RAINBOW COLOURS EACH TIME.

125g softened butter

225g plain flour

150g golden caster sugar

3 medium free range eggs

3 tbsp buttermilk (aaah, the key to all even bakes)

1/2 tsp baking powder

Pinch of salt

1 tsp vanilla extract

Food colouring 

** Some of the food colours you only need a few drops, but I found when using the standard food dye drops, that making Orange and purple used ALOT of food dye, and took a while to finally get a pretty colour. 

** whatever the raw batch is is pretty much what the cake will be when baked

• Heat your oven to Gas Mark 3 (I had it on fan bake at 160 degrees) and grease 2 x 20cm cake tins, and line with baking parchment. If it is not a spring tin, make sure you line the sides as well as the bottom of the tin, as it makes it super easy to remove later.
• Bung all the ingredients into a mixer and whisk until smooth. Then, tip into a clean bowl and weigh. Split the mixture exactly in two and pick your first two colours of choice.

• Mix in the colours until you’re happy with how dark they are. 
• Spread each coloured mixture as evenly as you can into a tin. Bake for 16 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean from the middle of the cake. They’re pretty thin so don’t take long at all. While they’re baking, make up your next batch of mixture and repeat the above step with new colours.
• Turn the cakes out onto a wire rack and clean down the tins, re-grease and re-line.
• You can leave out the 7th layer if you want, but it meant missing out the pink sponge and I really didn’t want to do that (tragic). You’ll just have to split the final batch of mixture in half and find use for the rest. I think the 7th layer is what makes IT so GOOD!

• While they’re all cooling, it’s frosting time. The recipe I used I found I ran out of icing just a little so I would say use Maybe 925g of light cream cheese and 500g icing sugar would work, along with 1 tsp vanilla extract, but you can judge and taste as you go. Blend these ingredients carefully by hand, ensuring you don’t over-mix as cream cheese goes runny and shiny, which is not what you want.
• ** I found that using the vanilla extract made the icing a yellow colour so I added a tiny bit of blue food dye which made the icing a pretty very pale green. This icing is SO YUM!
• Find a pretty cake stand, smear a dollop of frosting in the middle of said stand, and start stacking! Red first, covered in a layer of frosting, then orange, yellow etc etc. Using a palatte knife (an invaluable tool when icing a cake this big), spread the frosting over the entire cake, filling in any gaps and trying to cover any obvious lines of colour poking through.

** If you are not a good icer, then you can always cover the cake with 100's & 1000's or smarties or anything you want. I found icing the 'rough' look worked well but I added 100's & 1000's on the top to make it pretty look really good. 

** I also made the cake the day before it was the birthday party and iced it on the day, if you choose to do it this way, which I found was a good way, glad wrap each individual cake and put in the fridge.

And thats IT! I put my cake in the fridge, not covered for an hour to allow the icing to dry, then I glad wrapped over it, or put it in a cake tin. 

So much fun!

Pigs in Mud Cake- My mummy's Birthday. White chocolate Style!!!

It was my mummy's birthday on July 18th. 

I was so excited because she was coming up to visit Emerald on her birthday! So I planned a lovely dinner at my Brothers place and i said that Ill make the cake. My mum used to LOVE Pigs-yes your read right...PIGS, so I thought pigs in mud might be the best cake to make. My mum however does not like rich chocolate cakes, so I decided to make a yummy WHITE chocolate cake instead and also use Wafers instead of kitkats. Heres the recipe. It was delish!  So this is my version of the pigs in mud cake. If you do like Chocolate cake, use a chocolate mud cake recipe instead of white chocolate and go back to kitkats on the side instead of white wafer sticks. 

      ingredients
for the cake
        

9 oz chopped butter

         5 oz chopped white chocolate

         16 oz superfine sugar

         1 cup milk

         8 oz all-purpose flour

         3 oz self-raising flour

         1 teaspoon vanilla essence (or extract)

         2 lightly beaten eggs


*** i doubled this recipe so i could make 2 cakes to stack on top. if you dont want a very tall cake, just half the recipe and watch the cooking time, as it will be less to bake. 






Method

                        Preheat oven to moderately slow (170C).

                        Grease deep 20cm-round cake pan; line base and side with baking paper.

                        Combine butter, chocolate, sugar and milk in medium saucepan; using wooden spoon, stir over low heat, without boiling, until smooth.

                        Transfer mixture to large bowl; cool 15 minutes. Whisk in flours then essence and egg; poor mixture into prepared pan. Cover loosely with foil, bake for 1 hour.

                        Discard foil, stand cake in pan for 10 minutes then turn onto a wire rack; turn top-side up to cool. 

           

            
** i found using the foil loosely over the top of the cake during baking time was GREAT to help stop the rise of the cakes! 


         
Ingredients for the frosting inside the cake


                                       150g icing sugar – sifted

                                            50g unsalted butter, softened

                                            20g unsweetened cocoa powder

                                            1 1/2 tbsp whole milk

                         

      Method for making the frosting:

                                       Using the electric whisk or mixer with the paddle attachment, slowly beat together the icing sugar, cocoa and butter until the butter is completely mixed in (mixture will still be powdery at this stage)

                                            With the machine still running on a slow speed, gradually pour in the milk

                                            Once added increase the speed to high and whisk until light and fluffy

                                            Spread evenly between the two cakes

                         

         Ingredients for the pigs


                                       Ready to roll fondant icing

                                            Pink food colouring

                         

            To make the pigs, its really up to you and your imagination. I just softly kneaded the dye into the fondant until I had the desired colour, then I just started rolling the balls and copying the picture of the pigs to make my own. HAVE FUN!




Ingredients for the chocolate sauce topping


                                       250ml double cream

                                            400g milk chocolate

         



       
Method for making the chocolate sauce:

                                            Put your cream in a pan over low heat

                                            Keep stirring until it just starts to boil

                                            In between break the chocolate bars into pieces

                                            When the cream is almost boiling take it from the heat and gradually add chocolate

                                            Keep stirring until you have a nice smooth mass and then leave to cool stirring every now and again

                         

            This is where you need to be patient! Make sure it has cooled and thickened before you take the next steps!

                                            Cut about 1 inch off the ends of the white chocolate wafers. (I needed to do this so the top of my cake tin would fit, also makes for a shorter fence, but make sure you dont cut it too short, you need some fence to hold the sauce)

                                            Once your chocolate sauce has cooled at thickened to a custard consistency you can start smearing it on the sides of your cake. Use a spatula or the back if a knife to do this.

                                            Once you’ve smeared it all around you can stick your wafers on. This can be a bit tricky so place them on a slight angle against the cake. When you have gone right around quickly tie your ribbon around the cake. This will pull the wafers up straight against your cake

                                            When the left over chocolate sauce is only just fluid pour it over the top of the cake. MAKE SURE IT IS NOT TOO THIN WHEN YOU DO THIS OR IT WILL SEEP BETWEEN THE KITKATS.

                                            Before it totally sets place your little piggies on the chocolate

                                            Place in the fridge to set