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Ginger Kisses

If you grew up with these you will know how gorgeous light and warming they are to eat, and you know how hard it is to restrict yourself to just one of these beauties!

Ginger kisses are a traditional kiwi treat and once you bite into that pillowy ginger goodness you won’t want to leave.

Here is the ingredients list for today’s traditional bake:

2 cups/260g plain flour

1 tsp ground cinnamon

3 heaped tsp ground ginger

1 level tsp baking soda

¾ cup/160g caster sugar

110g salted butter, softened

¼ cup/90g golden syrup

1 large egg

¼ cup buttermilk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

 

We start by sifting the first 4 ingredients in a bowl and set it aside to cream the next 3 ingredients in another bowl.  Once combining those you will add the rest of the ingredients to the creamed mixture.

Heres were you combine the two to make the magic happen, folding in ever so carefully because you don’t want kisses you can bounce off the floor or knock someone out with. 😄

Your oven goes onto the usual 180 C and line your trays with baking paper – I used two as they spread when they cook.

Drop tablespoonfuls of the mixture onto the sheets spaced a little apart to allow for spreading. It’s best to bake them one sheet at a time to allow for even cooking.

Once you room is filled with the gorgeous smell and they are lovely and golden (10-12 minutes) take them out and cool.

Then comes the magic!
I have chosen a buttercream to sandwich them together but if you are going to eat them all in one day feel free to fill with whipped cream.

Here are the ingredients for the buttercream;

60g salted butter

1 cup icing sugar

2 Tsp golden syrup
(feel free to add ground ginger to this if you want an extra kick)

Milk to mix

Place or pipe (if you’re feeling fancy) as much buttercream as you desire onto the base of one kiss and pop another one on top pushing gently to sandwich them together.

Try baking them for yourself and you will agree homemade is best, you also get the added bonus of filling your house with delicious smells for the day. 😊

Thanks for coming back to my blog and I hope to see you here again soon. 💕

2023-06-28T13:05:18+12:0028 June 2023|Bakes, Edmonds Cookbook, History, Kiwi bakes, Vintage cookbook, Vintage Kitchen|0 Comments

Lamingtons

With the school holidays in full swing it felt like a great time to whip up a kiwi classic!

This is something I don’t make that often due to the fact that it can get pretty messy in the kitchen when the kiddoes get involved.

You will find these in every good bakery in NZ, some even filled with cream too. A good lamington is light and soft, soaked in chocolate or strawberry icing and thoroughly covered in delicious coconut.

This recipe makes them from scratch but if you want a cheats version you can buy a plain sponge and do the icing yourself. Just a heads up though, that’s the messy bit. 😊

This recipe requires:

6 eggs

2/3 cup caster sugar

1/3 cup cornflour

1/2 cup plain flour

2/3 cup self raising flour

3 cups icing sugar

1/2 cup cocoa powder

15g butter melted

2/3 cup milk

Desiccated coconut for rolling in.

 

First we put all the eggs in our electric mixer to beat for 10 minutes until they are thick and creamy.  It’s  best to preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius and grease and line a square cake tin while you are waiting unless you fancy a quick dance party instead.

The sugar gets put into the egg mixture gradually until dissolved and then make sure you triple fold your combo of flours as this makes for a lovely light sponge. Add this to the mix.

Super simple right! This mixture goes into your prepared cake tin to bake for 30 minutes. When it’s done it gets cooled upside down on a cake rack. A good tip that makes the cake easier to dip in the icing, is to make it a day ahead.

Mix all the remaining ingredients together until it is nice and runny and cut your sponge into squares.  This is where you need to ignore the clean freak part of you and throw caution to the wind. Your hands will be covered in icing as you coat each piece, then roll over in a low tray full of coconut, making sure you have them all covered.

Exercising all of your control leave them to set for a while to make eating them a bit easier.

They are delicious filled with cream and jam too, if you like to treat yourself. 😊

I hope you enjoy these as much as we do, thanks for reading and please come back again soon.

 

2022-07-20T20:20:06+12:0020 July 2022|Bakes, Baking with kids, Coconut, Edmonds Cookbook, Kiwi bakes, Vintage Kitchen|0 Comments

School Lunches

Where on earth did the summer holidays go? I hear you wondering.

School is back and if you are anything like me, you will start off school lunches with a hiss and a roar, preparing and presenting your kiddoes with a perfect healthy lunch each day.  Then all the activities start back up and work and home life get mega busy again and things start to slide……..

I set aside some time on a Sunday to do a wee bit of baking for the school lunches and it always makes me feel better if they are going to school with something without hundreds of added preservatives in them.

If you simply don’t have the time for hours in the kitchen then I have found a couple of quick yummy recipies which always go down well with my lot.  You might recognise them as a couple of classics, one is taken straight from the good old Edmonds cookbook.

The first recipe is ‘Cheese Biscuits’, which are a delicious light little fluffy bite and the cheese gives them added calcium and protein, perfect for eliminating that soggy mid-day lunch cheese that has been sitting in their lunchbox in the heat.  And if you cut them into cute little shapes they will fit into their containers nicely and make the perfect little snack.

For this recipe we gathered together 1 cup plain flour, 1 tablespoon icing sugar, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 25g butter, 1/2 cup grated cheese (cheats tip: buy the ready grated cheese for an even quicker bake) and 3-4 tablespoons of milk.  If you like a little bite add a pinch of cayenne pepper to the mixture before mixing.

We sifted all of the dry ingredients into our bowl and cut the butter in (if you have a food processor, chucking it all in this to blend the butter in quickly is a fantastic speedy solution).  Then you just need to mix in the cheese and milk to form a stiff dough, this can also be done in the food processor or by hand.  Pop it out onto your floured board, roll out to around a couple of cms thick and get your coolest cutters out until you have used up the whole mixture.  They then go on a greased or lined tray, prick each with a fork to look like biscuits, then pop into a 200 C oven for 10 minutes until lightly golden.

If you use small cutters these can make quite a few, trust me, your kids will love them!

Our second recipe I’m sure all of you will be familiar with, is Rice Bubble Slice.

The ingredients for this are all placed into a medium size saucepan, making sure you leave room for the rice bubbles to be stirred in at the end.  They are 115g butter, 4 tablespoons of sugar and 2 tablespoons of honey.  If you don’t fancy taking out a mortgage at this stage for the honey you can substitute for golden syrup and it works just as well, just maybe reduce the amount of sugar to around 3 tablespoons to avoid it being too sweet.

We just melt these ingredients until they are golden and bubbly and take off the heat and stir in 4 cups of rice bubbles.  Pat the mixture flat into a rectangular brownie tray which is lined with baking paper, makes it much easier to remove later when it’s ready to eat.  Pop the tray into the fridge until it is set and all you need to do is slice it into squares to eat.  Easy as that!

I hope your family enjoys these little treats and I would love to hear your suggestions for some quick lunchbox bakes.  Thank you for joining me again and please come back again to visit soon.

2022-02-02T11:07:11+13:002 February 2022|Advice, Bakes, Baking with kids, Biscuits, Edmonds Cookbook, School Lunches|0 Comments

Classic Kiwi Baking – Eclairs

Hey there,

It’s another week in Level 4 for us Aucklanders so it was time to do something a bit different and break out into the good old classic kiwi bake. What better place to do that than with a classic kiwi cookbook – The Edmonds cookbook. 😁. Hopefully, most of you kiwis have this in your cupboard, so why not get it out and bake along with us!

Yes! So I have a helper for this bake…my 11-year-old son. That’s right folks, let’s teach our boys how to cook too, it’s not just a girly ‘sport.’ 😁. He has been helping me in the kitchen a lot this lockdown and is getting pretty good at it. Today I let him pick and he chose something I’m sure most of you know and love – Chocolate Eclairs. ❤️

We started out getting all our ingredients together on the benchtop and measuring them ready to go. The recipe calls for 75g butter, 1 cup water, 1 cup plain flour, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla essence, 3 eggs, Chocolate Icing (icing sugar, cocoa, water + butter) and some delicious fresh whipped cream.

Just a note folks, that it will take some strength and a decent piping bag to pipe these beauties onto the baking sheet, so get pumping iron. 😁

My helper and I started off with the butter and water in a saucepan and heated it on the stovetop until the butter had melted and the mixture was bubbling. Here’s where you have to work fast – straight after you have tipped your flour into the butter/water mixture you will need to use those muscles to stir vigorously until the mixture comes together and away from the sides of the pot.

We then turned off our element and brought the pot over to our bench to add the sugar and vanilla essence. After incorporating this we added the eggs one at a time (using a go between bowl just to double check there was no shell going on in too). This mixture may look a bit weird and is pretty tough to combine, if you have trouble mixing the eggs in pop it in your mixture for a quick burl, works wonders!

It doesn’t look very pretty yet but there’s more work to be done! It will be delicious, I promise.

Fill your large piping bag with any large nozzle you fancy and pipelines of around 7cm onto the baking sheet. A trick to get the pastry to disconnect from the nozzle is to cut it off with a pair of scissors or a sharp knife.

Here we have several lovely caterpillars lined up on our tray. 😁 We used two trays to fit them all in. Then in they went to our trusty oven at 200 degrees Celsius for around 25 minutes. The bigger your eclairs the longer they should be in the oven (We made cute minis – the smaller they are the fewer calories, right? 😂).

After the timer went off we took them out, nice and golden brown, to cool. Then with a sharp knife, we cut a slit in the slides the length of the eclair. If you have large eclairs and need them to dry out inside, then cut the slit earlier and leave to dry.

We whipped our cream to soft peaks and made some really easy chocolate icing with a cup of icing sugar, a tablespoon of cocoa and a tablespoon of butter, with water to mix until we were happy with the consistency. Then we got out a piping bag with a smaller nozzle and piped that delicious cream inside the eclair, and iced the top with our chocolatey good Icing.

And there was only one thing left to do, which was to enjoy the tasty treats – Fresh is best people! ❤️

I hope you all get a chance to do some baking with your family, it really is a very special time, and something they will take with them for the rest of their lives. ❤️

2021-11-10T08:55:03+13:0018 September 2021|Bakes, Edmonds Cookbook, History|0 Comments
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