A Few of My Favourite Things !

This is one of Nigella’s creations, a muffin dressed up as a jam doughnut. I’m too lazy to give you the recipe here but I can tell you that there were extremely popular at work. They had cooled a little so I heated them for about 15 seconds in the microwave. Great with a cup of tea!

Oh, and they were baked in my recently acquired mini cake tin. Aren’t the shapes lovely?

Way back mid-last year, a Paper Chef entry caught my eye and this recipe has been sitting in my ‘to try’ folder for some time. I love banana bread and would normally use mum’s recipe but buttermilk just conjured up such cosy feelings and images for me that I had to try this recipe out…with a few modifications of course!

I used one mashed banana and about 4 dried ones, all chopped up into little pieces, and also added not just dried dates but apricots and sultanas as well. With the additiional dried fruit, I really should have cut out the sugar entirely as it turned out to be just a tad too sweet for my tastes. What a great loaf otherwise though - moist with a good crumb.

Btw, A. loved the sound of buttermilk so much that he considered having it on his cereal but upon tasting a little, found that it not to be rich and creamy as he had imagined, but thin and sour instead!

Buttermilk-Honey Banana Bread

2 eggs, ¾ cup sugar, 1 mashed banana, 1/3 cup buttermilk, 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1 tablespoon vanilla extract, 1 ¾ cups flour, 2 tsp baking powder, ½ tsp baking soda, ½ tsp salt, 30 g butter, 1/4 cup honey, 1/4 cup chopped dates, 1/3 cup chopped dried bananas, 1/4 cup dried apricots and sultanas, 1/4 cup walnuts

1. Beat the eggs with the sugar for about 5 min until thick and light.
2. Add mashed bananas, buttermilk, walnuts, honey, dried fruit, oil, butter and vanilla.
3. Add sifted flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt mixture to the wet ingredients and mix until just combined.
4. Pour batter into loaf tin and bake at 170C for 60 min until top is golden brown.

This was my second attempt at hot cross buns this week. The first recipe that I followed was from Nigella’s Feast and it did not turn out well. Maybe it was something I did or didn’t do but I would love to hear if anyone has had succes with that recipe.

This time, I modified a Delia Smith recipe - the first of her recipes that I’ve tried - and it was a winner! I left the dough to prove overnight instead of 1.5 hours, but that’s just because it suited our day, then moved from the fridge to our bench yesterday morning before we went to the Good Friday service. Mum, dad, W & W came over after the service to share in a bowl of mum’s duck porridge - yummo! In the meatime, I punched the dough down, divided it into 12 round portions and left it to prove again before piping the cross on and baking.

The result - fresh, spicy, fruity and full of flavour, quite unlike the first lot I made which did not rise very much and was therefore quite dense as well as flavourless. I did not have any mixed spice in the pantry and so substituted with ground cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves. I don’t remember the exact amounts of each spice that I sprinkled on, but it was definitely more generous than the 1 heaped tablespoon of mixed spice that Delia recommends.

In fact, we did a little taste-testing of this against hot cross buns, both fruit and choc chip, from Browns and choc chip from Bakers Delight and I’m happy to report that both A. & I felt that mine trumped the commercially made ones The homemade ones had a better flavour and were slightly denser, giving them nicer mouth feel.

Hot Cross Buns

50g caster sugar + 1 tsp, 1 tbs dried yeast, 450g strong flour, 1 tsp salt, a few tsp of ground cinnamon/nutmeg/ginger/clove, 125g mixed dried fruit, 40ml warm milk, 1 egg, 50g melted butter. For cross: 2 tbs flour + boiling water to create paste for piping. For glaze: 2 tbs sugar, 2 tbs boiling water.

1. Stir 1 tsp caster sugar into 150ml tepid water and sprinkle in dried yeast. Leave until frothy.
2. Sift flour, salt, spices together and add tge remaining 50g sugar and dried fruits. Make a well in the centre and pour in the yeast mixture, 40ml tepid milk, beaten egg and melted butter. Mix into a dough, transfer to a clean surface and knead until smooth & elastic (around 6 min).
3. Place back into bowl nd cover with cling film. Leave in a warm place until it rises to double its original volume (place in fridge if leaving overnight). Turn it out & knead it back down to its original size.
4. Divide dough into 12 portions and arrange on baking sheet. Slash a cross across each one with a sharp knife. Cover with cling film and leave to rise for about 25 min.
5. Mix the flour and water into a paste suitable for piping and pipe a cross on each portion of dough. Bake at 220C for 15 min, watching carefully that they don’t burn.
6. Brush buns with the glaze as soon as they come out of the oven.

Here is what I did this morning - the Sussan 10km Fun Run! I was pretty chuffed to (a) complete the whole 10k without stopping to walk; and (b) come in at just over 54min. Although my husband often questions why they would name events like these ‘fun runs’, I have to say that it really was fun to be running on such a beautiful sunshiny morning along the St Kilda foreshore and look out onto the blue, blue waters. So, how was your morning?

After completing the event, we headed to Baker D. Chirico, an artisan bakery on Fitzroy Street, to pick up a loaf. There are many delicious-looking treats just waiting to be had: lemon creme brulee, strawberry custard tarts, almond biscuits, baby meringues, little flourless chocolate cakes. We left with a loaf of rye bread and a slice of pear custard tart for my hubby, who sat reading patiently while waiting for me to complete the run. The loaf was just out of the oven, and we waited (im)patiently for it to cool before cutting some slices to have with lunch. Mmmmm, talk about yummy bread - so moist and fragrant.

For dinner tonight, we had some homemade chicken char siew bao, which A loved because it had real chunks of chicken in it! My mum will be very impressed to hear that I made the dough from scratch according to the recipe for Leavened Dough from a book called ‘Making Dumplings’ by Amelia Liang that she had brought back from Malaysia for me. I kneaded together 250g plain flour&250g wholemeal flour (it’s what I had), 40g sugar, 2 tsp dry yeast mixed with 260-280ml warm water and 1 tbs baking powder, then added 20g oil. The dough was left to proof until doubled in size before using to wrap the char siew chicken. It was left to rise again for 30 min before being steamed for around 15 min. I can tell you that it was delicious and a lovely change to be able to identify the type of meat that you were ingesting- LOL! (Sigh - just had a look at my photo of the bao and realised that I prob should have placed it onto a diff coloured plate…)

I also cooked some eggplant flavoured with miso. I started by heating up some chilli flakes then stir-fried the diced eggplant until softened before added the usual mix of shoyu, mirin, sake and sugar. After stirring through for a few minutes, I added some instant miso soup mix (hey, it’s what I happened to have in my pantry) before dishing it up.