Chocolate cupcakes

For years I searched for the perfect chocolate cake recipe. I tried so many combinations of things. Butter, cream, chocolate, oil. Nothing gave it that rich flavour and moist texture I desired. You know the cake I mean, the one the kid has to eat in front of the entire school in the Movie Matilda. Every kid wanted that cake. 

Eventually, I got the combination just right. I started making these as cupcakes about 7 years ago, but only had a high speed blender at the time. I made them so often, they are usually made just by feel these days. 

I have had family asking for this recipe for years. I'm not even exaggerating. I have always intended to pass it on to them, but every time they ask me to make it I just never got around to writing it down.

So here it goes. They get it the same time as you do.

Rich Chocolate Cupcakes
(makes 12 regular size)

150g almonds
200g dates
125g water
3 eggs
2 Tbsp coconut oil
1 tsp vanilla bean paste
65g cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
Pinch salt

Add almonds to the bowl. Blend on turbo for 2 sec 2-3 times until fine.
Remove almond meal. Without washing bowl add dates and water. Blend sp 7 for 15 sec then scrape down sides and blend sp 3 for 10 sec.
Add eggs, coconut oil and vanilla bean paste. Blend sp 4 for 3 sec.
Add reserved almond meal, cocoa, baking soda and salt.
Combine sp 5 for 15 sec.

Spoon into muffin cases or silicone muffin tray.
Bake at 160°C for 15-20 min, until a toothpick inserted to centre comes out clean.

You can also use this recipe for a cake. Bake 30-40 min, until a toothpick inserted to centre comes out clean.

Apple Crumble Smoothie

There is something about winter that just screams apple crumble. It has rained on and off all day today and we have had to have the heat pump running constantly. If that doesn't say Auckland winter, I don't know what does.

We already have plans for dinner and dessert, so why not a mid-afternoon smoothie?

This smoothie takes me back to the winter days of my childhood. I would come home from school and mum would have a hearty dinner waiting for us, then we would get into our pyjamas and sit around the potbelly stove eating a great big bowl of apple crumble before bed. 

Apple Crumble Smoothie

(serves 2)

3 small granny smith apples (or 2 medium, approx 300g), cored and quartered

1/2 tsp cinnamon

pinch nutmeg

50g rolled oats

30g almonds

200g milk (we use non-dairy milks, this time we used rice)

200g water

100g ice 

Put all ingredients in mixing bowl and blend for 2.5 minutes/speed 10. 

Pour into glass and serve.

Carrot and Parsnip Soup

Mr 3 woke up with the start of a cold and a cough this morning, so I asked him what he wanted to eat. He said he wanted soup. Nice and easy. He usually asks for potato and leek, so this is what I was expecting when I asked him what flavour he would like. To my surprise he pulled out a carrot and a parsnip. 

I'd never made a carrot and parsnip soup before, but I have done a carrot and ginger one a few times, so I figured I would do something similar. I wanted to add the fresh ginger and orange to help kick the cold before it takes hold.

I also made some garlic croutons to go with it for an added crunch to the soup and hopefully the garlic will also help his recovery.

Carrot and Parsnip Soup with Garlic Croutons

(serves 4)

Croutons

2-3 slices of your favourite gluten free bread

30g olive oil

30g butter

2-3 sprigs parsley

2 cloves garlic

Preheat oven to 150°C

Add garlic and parsley to TM bowl

Chop 5 sec/speed 5. MC on.

Add oil and butter

Heat 2 min/70°C/speed 1. MC on.

Pour oil mix into a bowl and slice the bread into small cubes.

Add the bread to oil mix and stir to coat thoroughly.

Spread out in a single layer over an oven tray. Bake for approx 20 minutes until golden and crispy. Toss occasionally for even cooking.

Clean and dry mixing bowl.

Carrot and Parsnip Soup

1 onion, peeled and quartered

2cm fresh ginger, peeled

30g olive oil

30g butter

300g carrot

200g parsnip

1-2 tbsp stock paste

zest of 1 orange

juice of 1 orange

300ml water

200ml coconut cream

1/2 tsp pepper

Put onion and ginger into TM bowl. Chop 5 sec/speed 5.

Add oil and butter. Saute 3 min/100°C/speed 1. MC on.

Add carrot, parsnip, stock paste, zest and water.

Cook 22min/100°C/speed 1. MC on.

Add cream and pepper. Place MC on. Squeeze orange over the lid so the juice drips in under the MC leaving the pulp and seeds. Blend 1min/speed 5 slowly increasing to speed 9.

Serve with croutons.

Stegosaurus Snacks

These are something I have been making for about 20 years. The legs and eyes were a recent addition, even though I have always called them Stegosauruses (due mostly to Mr 3). 

Today my parents took me, Mr 3 and 2 of his cousins Mr 5 and Mr 16 to see Erths Dinosaur Zoo. So of course Mr 3 and Mr 5 had to come back to my place to have a dinosaur themed lunch after it.

Remember, stegosaurs were herbivores so if you can't fill them with meat - only vegetables.

We always make extra vege mash when we do these because it is a great thing to have in your fridge to add as an extra to any meal.

Recipe

(makes 8)

Pastry

300g plain flour

150g butter

100g cold water

1tsp salt

Add all ingredients to bowl and mix 20 seconds/sp 4. 

Turn out onto Thermomat and roll into a ball. Store in fridge until ready to use.

Filling

1kg peeled and chopped vegetables (this time we used, 1 broccoli head, 2 medium carrots, 2 medium potatoes, and 2 small kumara)

250g milk (we use rice milk)

40g butter

1 tsp salt

Add all ingredients to bowl and cook 25 min/95°C/sp 1.

Mix 40 sec/sp 4.

Preheat oven to 200°C

Roll the pastry to approx 4mm thick. 

Cut into 13cm circles. 

Place 1 tbsp of vegetables in the middle.

Dampen the edge with water and fold in half. 

Roll spare pastry into 1cm balls and attach for legs.

Add black sesame seeds for eyes.

Stand up on an oven Thermomat or baking paper.

Bake for 10-15 min until lightly golden.

Serve with fruits/vegetables in true stegosaurus style.

Teething problems

Sorry! I have been away for so long. I decided to rip out my entire kitchen and put in a new one. This has taken longer than I had hoped because we needed to replace our fuse board among other major electrical issues as part of the renovation. 

I am loving the new kitchen. I have a dedicated spot for my Thermomix with its own power point and storage cupboards. It sits right between the fridge and on-bench pantry so everything is right in close range when needed. The chipbooks can stick on the side of my fridge so they are very handy.

We put in an induction cooktop and twin pyrolitic oven to enhance our new cooking experience. I didn't realise that you can't use these like your regular cooktops and caused an oil fire the first time we cooked on the new stove. Oops! 

What happened was I turned the stove on to heat up, it goes up to 15. The manual said not to leave it at 15 for too long, so after about a minute I turned it down to 10 and popped some oil in. Instant fire. Flames over a metre high.I grabbed the pan and was walking backward and forward with it in the kitchen trying to decide what to do with it. I knew you can't put water on it, and the lid was in the cupboard out of my immediate reach. I dropped it back on the stove and grabbed a teatowel, soaked it with water and threw it on top, I then put the lid on as well as an extra precaution. After it cooled, my husband used lots of elbow grease to remove the black burnt oil, but my beautiful new Scanpan frypan is now tarnished. We joked that it will be a good reminded of how quickly the new cooktop heats up!

We managed to cook our honey, soy tofu in a saucepan without incident, and the ThermoServer kept the sticky rice warm throughout the ordeal. So we still had a great dinner, it just took a little longer than expected, and we had a few laughs along the way.

So far, the oven is working great. Still working out the functions, but this morning I made honey date loaf for lunch. It cooked perfectly, I probably need a different tin to cook it in because the silicone one spread quite wide and it looked weird. It tasted great though.

Our smoke alarms did go off when we tried to set fire to the kitchen, but they were very quiet. Definitely not loud enough to wake people who are asleep. Replacing the batteries or the alarms themselves is high on our priority list this weekend. Have you checked yours lately?

Works in progress

I want to share what we have on the go at the moment. We are currently trying to finalize the recipes and get them to a point where I am happy to share. Most are almost there but the method needs a bit of tweaking. Others, the method is there but the flavour or consistency isn't quite right.

Anyway, here is what we have for now.

Honey soy tofu on boiled rice

This is something we have bought for a long time as a "packet mix". It was our go to quick meal, just pop the meal ingredients in the pan, throw a bag of microwave rice in the microwave and in about 5 minutes, you have a meal. Oh my goodness, the sugar content of those packet sauces is more than we need. So we came up with our own. We have tried letting the tofu sit in the sauce and marinade for a while before cooking as well as just popping it in the fry pan. We found that not leaving it to marinade actually yielded better results with flavour and texture.

This was served on the boiled rice (EDC), but we prefer the automated rice.

Oat flour waffles

Waffles have long been a staple weekend breakfast for us. My father-in-law makes amazing pancakes which are half oat flour and half wheat flour. Many years ago we took this approach to our waffles, and then at one point we dropped the wheat flour. We made these in our blender for a long time, but the thermomix does a much better and faster job. I think I have this recipe pretty much perfect, I just need to type it up. 

Nutella

There are many versions of a healthier nutella out there. This is ours. I decided we were going to make it one day and was sure that I had all the ingredients that I would need. When I went to make it what I thought was a bag of hazelnuts was actually a bag of macadamias. We opted to use cashews instead because we buy those 3kg at a time and always have loads. A few versions later and our recipe is almost perfect. In all honesty it doesn't taste like nutella, but they share no common ingredients, so why would it? As a nutty, chocolate spread it stands on its own very well though. Mr 3 asks for this one all the time.

Vegetarian sausages

Okay - full disclosure - these came about by accident. I was meant to be making hummus but without realising, I popped a can of pinto beans in the thermomix and blended them with some garlic. After we had a good laugh, Mr 3 suggested the mix looked like sausages so we thought we would try. We added some herbs and some GF flour then wrapped them - albeit not very well - and steamed them in the varoma. These are the sausages that came out of the varoma. We chopped a couple and fried them with a passata with basil and oregano and served them on some GF pasta. Definitely something workable here, maybe with more herbs/spices and better wrapping. We will keep working on these and have something in the next few months.

And here's the finished meal we made.

And of course, we have our lemon curd icecream from my last post. 

Lemon curd icecream

This is made with coconut cream and sweetened with honey or maple syrup. We are trying to work out how we stop it from freezing solid so we can serve it straight from the freezer.

Is there anything else you want us to add to our list for now?

I scream for icecream!

I love icecream. 

Okay, well it's not really icecream as such. We love fruity dream from the EDC. 

This week Mr 3 decided we should make lemon icecream. My mind instantly wandered to Joshua's Lemon Curd icecream. I could eat an entire tub of that in one sitting. However, it isn't diary free or refined sugar free (we aren't super strict on not eating dairy or refined sugars, we just don't like to have them if there is a better alternative).

We embarked on our journey to make the worlds best lemon curd icecream. And we got most of the way there!

I don't want to share the recipe just yet, the flavour is right (it's better than right - it's amazing!), but the consistency needs some work. When you freeze our icecream it freezes solid and took a good hour on the bench in 30˚C weather to become soft enough to serve. 

We are looking into ways to stop it freezing, but so far it appears that you need to add sugar, alcohol or antifreeze for that to happen. None of which I am happy to add to my icecream. 

Mr 3 and I have come up with a list of icecream flavours we would like to make once we get our method down. 

We welcome any and all tips on getting a nice soft rolling icecream.