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Chocolate Guinness Cake

Clare found Laura's (from Hungry and Frozen, a highly recommended student food blog based in Wellington) Chocolate Guiness cake post and just had to try to make one herself. That, and a doubtful comment from Kaleb at "the other flat" spurred her on. Now, I say (not lightly) that it was the BEST chocolate cake I had ever had. Not just texture-wise, but taste wise as well. This includes consideration of all bakery-bought, gourmet fancy pants chocolate cakes I've tried, the prices of which would give you more of a heart attack than if you eat this cake whole. I think I'll stop with the hyperbole and just get on with showing the cake.

The cake, bare and all, the day after (so it slices cleanly). Unlike most cakes made exclusively with butter, this wasn't hard the next day, or dry, or waxy, but densely devilishly delicious. The guiness actually lends a beautiful flavour to it too. Clare changed the recipe (we didn't have sour cream), but the cake was still beautiful. Thanks Nigella - this recipe is from her book Feast.

Chocolate Guiness Cake inspired by/adapted from Nigella Lawson's Feast

makes one large 8 inch cake

1 c (250ml) Guiness

110g unsalted butter

3/4c cocoa

1c white sugar

1c brown sugar

3/4c cream cheese (softened), sour cream, or yoghurt

2 eggs

1 Tbs vanilla extract (not essence - try the nicer supermarkets, or go to Piko)

2c flour

2 1/2 tsp baking soda

Melt the Guinness and butter together. Whisk in cocoa, sugar, eggs, vanilla and sour cream/cream cheese, beat and then sift in flour and baking soda, stirring just enough to combine.

Bake for 45 minutes at 175C or 350F in the centre of the rack. The outside will cook faster than the middle. To prevent the outside burning while the centre cooks, Ro taught us a secret - Put some parchment or cooking paper over the cake and continue to let it cook until a knife inserted comes out clean.

Lots of icings would work - Laura has an icing idea in her post, but we like the cake as is.

By the by - the cream cheese works best we think (although it could have been our less-than-great yoghurt).

Orange spice cake

Oranges, oranges, oranges. Spices, spices, spices. When you can't make up your mind, you could make both, or you could combine them. I'm quite sure this has been done before (there are a few orange spice cookie recipes floating around), but I managed to knock this together with help from Sarah's post (inspired by Nigel Slater, who is apparently teh shiz) about the basic cake. It has no milk, which I like, because I don't buy milk and am always cautious of substitutung with soymilk. I'm much more of a yoghurt fan, mostly because you get two doses of goodness (a shot of dairy and a small helping of good bacteria to help digestion and your immune system). While the original basic cake has no cooking oil, I put some in and lessened the butter content to make it a little easier on your arteries AND to keep the cake soft the next day (I tend to find butter cakes go a bit hard the next day). Also, it makes fluffling the butter and sugar much easier!

The daffodils mean that it is indeed spring in New Zealand, and this cake is a great way to celebrate that. Zesty and yet warming, I really enjoyed this cake on so many levels.

I actually enjoyed eating the oranges on top - they're chewy, absolutely packed with flavour, and the pith isn't overpoweringly bitter at all. They add a real zing too! Also, I just realised that I've posted about 3 orange cake recipes now (I've actually tried 4 this year, I reccomend this orange and lemon cake by Technicolor Kitchen which Clare and I have made about three times this year now). Perhaps my favourite kind of cake? Anyway, if you're dreaming of a dense but not over-poweringly buttery cake, this is the one!

Orange Spice Cake

Makes one 8inch cake

100g unsalted butter

25g cooking oil

125g sugar

2 eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp orange essence

125g flour + 1tsp baking powder + 1 tsp mixed spice

grated rind of 1 orange and 1 lemon

1 orange, sliced thinly (don't worry if they're not perfect slices, this will end up more of a rustic cake anyway)

Icing sugar to dust (actually makes a difference - if you don't have this, sprinkle over some more white sugar on orange slices after arranging before baking)

Line an 8inch spring form pan with cooking paper (easiest way: put bottom of tin down, put paper over this, then clip cake tin on and cut off paper). No need to grease sides unless you're not using a non stick pan. Preheat oven to 180C (350F)

Measure butter and oil in a medium to large bowl, and soften in the microwave (try 10 second intervals to be safe. DON'T use melted butter). Whisk in sugar, and beat until pale. Whisk in essences, eggs one at a time, incorporating well each time to create a smooth stiff blobby texture. Sift in dry ingredients, add rinds, and mix until just incorporated with a spatula - don't keep mixing once everything is incorporated. Spread mixture into cake pan, and arrange orange slices on top.

Bake for approximately 35-40 minutes on center rack of the oven, checking and rotating about halfway. The picture in my post shows a cake that is a little overcooked - I would have taken it out while it was a bit less dark brown, but then again I had mine in for about 50 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack, then remove cooking paper, plate, and dust with plenty of icing sugar. This will soak into the oranges overnight if you leave it, but don't worry about this - it'll still look pretty, if not more!

Spiced Molasses Cookies

Nope, not chocolate, but molasses cookies! If you feel like something really sweet but isn't sickly, greasily so, this is the perfect cookie. They're slightly chewy, but not sticky, and crunchy on the edges. Thanks goes to Pittsburg Needs Eated, who posted the recipe from Cook's Illustrated. I did alter the recipe slightly, to make it easier for the average student, but of course the original recipe is much nicer I'm sure, so if you're in the mood go for it!

Now if you've had molasses before in anything and aren't too keen on how it tastes, simply substitute the dark brown sugar in the recipe for caster sugar - this will make a much lighter cookie.

I liked the fact that these cookies were a little unconventional, yet still very nom-able, and even sort of healthy (don't quote me on this). Seriously though - molasses is a health supplement almost, with high levels of iron. They're great as a grump-reducer during your girly time of month, and help boost your iron levels yummily!

I used the same method as the original recipe, but changed the boldened bits:

1/3 cup granulated sugar (about 2 1/2 ounces), plus 1/2 cup for dipping

2 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (11 1/4 ounces)

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground mixed spice

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/4 teaspoon table salt

12 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), softened but still cool

1/3 cup dark brown sugar (about 2 1/2 ounces)

1 large egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract - omitted

1/2 cup molasses (about 6 ounces), light or dark

As a result the cookies didn't really have the pretty cracked bits like in the original recipe. Also, I cooked them for 14-15 minutes, as when i prodded them at 11 minutes, the bit where I prodded them sort of collapsed a little and didn't spring back. The second time I prodded them (at 15 minutes) they sort of sprung back and were a lot firmer. I also made much larger cookies - I used 2 Tbs dobs and put 9 on a baking tray. This made 22 cookies.

Moist yoghurt scones (beat pancakes)

I adapted a recipe from the brilliant Edmond's cookbook (their Yoghurt and Wholewheat scones) and wow. These were the moistest scones I'd ever made, but they weren't doughy and I even managed to sneak a healthy amount of wheatgerm in (which is great for you, by the way). The fantastic thing was, I only used one bowl, 1 sieve, 1 spoon and a baking tray for these babies, and they require no milk. Breakfast, anyone?

Served with cream cheese and fruit syrup (because it was raining too hard to get jam) - the kind you use as juice concentrate. You may be cringing, but the syrup was fanstastically better than jam because it didn't have seeds and was way too much fun mopping up with the creamy cheesy scones. By the way, if you've never had cream cheese and jam, you are missing out. It's like eating cheesecake, with whatever you're serving it with. With scones - they are delicious.

Moist yoghurt scones

Makes 9 small scones

50g butter, chopped into cubes and softened

1 1/2 c plain flour

1/2 c wheatgerm or wholemeal flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 Tbs baking powder

1 Tbs sugar

1/2 c thick yoghurt and 1/4c - 1/2 c water (start with 1/4c), mixed together

Preheat Oven to 220C or 440F

Sift dry ingredients onto softened butter, and mush together with your fingers until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Pour in the sugar, yoghurt mix, and quickly mix to form a soft dough. Add more water if the mixture appears dry and the dough feels tough.

Dust an oven tray with flour, and roll the dough out into a 20cm square. Cut into thirds horizontally and vertically so you end up with 9 scones, but DON'T separate.

Bake for about 10 minutes in center rack of your oven until tops are pale golden. Serve hot/warm - once cool, these taste better microwaved for 10 seconds.

Recommended toppings:

butter and jam

fruit syrup and cream cheese

berry compote

whipped cream

Suggested additions to the scone mix:

Dates, chopped finely

Raisins/sultanas

Oats

Chocolate chips

Flourless orange nut cake - bittersweet symphony

I have been craving this for soooo long - Piko sell Venerdi's version (which is slightly more hazelnutty) and it makes me melt every time. So I found a recipe at She Craves, and finally got to work (you know those recipes that you bookmark and KNOW you will make, and every now and again you come across the ingredients and something comes up, or you forget one orange, or something? This was that recipe). I used half roasted hazelnuts, half almonds and ground them myself.

Now, I don't know what I did wrong (it was either using non-organic oranges with a bitter pesticide, or not boiling the oranges long enough, or both) but the cake ended up having a bitter after-bite, which I found ok but might not sit well with some people. However, it did work very nicely with some dark chocolate shavings which made the bitterness much more of a feature.

Also, the cake pictured is the second I made, because there ended up being a lot of batter and I didn't want too much of a thick cake so I made a smaller one.

Sugar and spice make winter nice.

This is Clare's spectacularly good gingerbread (well... adapted from the Edmonds cookbook, but wonderfully so all the same), which goes on the night. Hence why she always makes two (if you leave gingerbread over a few days it goes dnse and sticky and moist... but I like the more fluffy cake like texture of the fresh loaf. "Fluffy" does not mean spongy by the way - just soft and melt-in-your-mouth). It's not "pow!rightinthekisser" kind of ginger/spice either, but you can always add more to make it stronger.

Spiced Gingerbread

125g butter, softened

1/2 c sugar

1c Golden Syrup

1 egg

2 1/2 c standard plain white flour

1/4 tsp salt

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

3 tsp ground ginger (or 4tsp if you want more ginger flavour than spice)

1 tsp nutmeg

1tsp cinnamon

1 shake of mixed spice

1 cup water

Preheat oven to 180C or 350F

Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Warm syrup until runny, and beat into butter. Add egg, and beat well. Sift all dry other dry ingredients together, and stir into the butter mix alternately with water. Pour into either a large cake tin (20cm square) or two small loaf tins, greased and preferably lined. Bake for 45-60 mins if in a large tin or 20-30 mins if in two tins.

After cooking, leave in tin for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack and serving.

Easy, decadent brownies!

Ok, when I need brownies, I want them soon, because let's face it - if you're going to satisfy a craving, it shouldn't require a whole bunch of fancy manoeuvres (omg it took so long for me to find out how you spell that, and uber still insists it's wrong. Any suggestions? I'm in NZ, so American spelling doesn't count!)....where was I? Cravings. I'm quite sure that anything overly complicated would be incomprehensibly and undesirably in the way of a potentially very simple need. Erm. Speaking of complicated ways of saying things - essay writing has scrambled my brain. Anyway. Look at brownie:

Any suggestions photography wise would be much appreciated by the way - I just couldn't get these brownies to look...revolutionary :P

Just so you brownie connoisseurs out there know, this is more of a cakey brownie (in fact, I would totally make this into a double layer cake), but it's very dense and rich. It's not hiding under the pretense of pretty much just being fudge, so if that's what you're looking for... well. Go make fudge! But let me just say, this recipe is potentially easier. ZOMG.

Easy peasy satisfy-your-craving-uber brownie

Serves... well. Let's not go there. Lets just say this makes a lot of brownie. Use two regular brownie dishes or one for an uber thick brownie. I went for uber thick and cut them in half for the photo.

Taken from another site, which I didn't record at the time. Apologies - please email me if you're the original writer and want to bitch and moan!

250g butter (preferably unsalted)

2 1/4 c white sugar

1 1/2 t vanilla

5 eggs,

1 c flour

1 c cocoa

3/4 t salt, omit if using salted butter

icing sugar to dust

Preheat oven to 175C/350F

Melt butter and cocoa together in a medium to large saucepan. Take off heat, and leave for a few minutes until warm/hot enough to touch. Mix in sugar.

Beat in eggs one at a time (a whisk will do), and stir in vanilla. Sift flour and salt in, ad stir until just incorporated. Pour into greased baking pans, and throw in the oven for approximately 45 minutes until a knife/toothpick inserted comes out clean-ish.

Let it cool until it is at least warm (yes, it's hard. But trust me on this). Then slice it up and dust with icing sugar, possibly serving with some whipped cream, ice cream or natural thick yoghurt.

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Dressed up yoghurt

Why settle for supermarket flavours when you have all sorts of interesting stuff at home? And if you don't have interesting stuff at home...get some!

Double almond yogurt with apple and pomegranate syrup - sounds fancy, but it's not!

Double almond yogurt with apple and pomegranate syrup

serves one

150ml (ish) good quality natural yoghurt (I used Clearwater organic bought from Piko Wholefoods in Christchurch. 750g for just over $5, and it comes in a cool bucket! No really it's a lovely mild and very versatile yoghurt)

a few drops of almond essence

1/4 tsp vanilla essence

1 tsp honey

a few almonds

2 Tbs Baker Hall's Apple Pomegranate fruit syrup concentrate (but be creative - gees it can be raspberry jam, or whatever - just something fruity)

Mix first 4 ingredients thoroughly, then stir in fruit with one or two stirs so you get a marbly effect (if you don't like that mix it all the way obviously) and sprinkle with almond. Again, you can be creative with the nuts you use (or you could forgo them)

Other flavour ideas:

vanilla, almond, and peach (canned will do)

vanilla, hazelnut and peach

vanilla and honey

pecan, cinnamon, apple and honey

rosewater (only with a mild yogurt)

raspberry, almond and honey

blueberry, almond and honey

blueberry, orange and lemon (with a mild yoghurt)

strawberry, vanilla and raw sugar

orange flower water and raw sugar

orange flower water and almond

banana (I wouldn't use essence though), honey and vanilla

plum and orange flower water

tia maria (coffee liqueur) and chocolate shavings (with a mild yoghurt)

...comment with more ideas if you want!

Almond Orange Cake (made with olive oil and yoghurt)

Baking and Books had a post on Almond Orange Flower teacake, and while I couldn't find orange flower stuff anywhere (and yes, I did venture beyond the supermarket!) I did have orange essence (which I guess students can find more easily!). The AWESOME things about this cake are:

1) It's ridiculously easy - no need to grate rind, I just put the oranges there for prettyness.

2) The texture is lovely - not crumby, but moist without being greasy

3) It seems to be relatively healthier - ground almonds, olive oil rather than butter... but this doesn't compromise on taste or texture (the yogurt gives it a fantastic dense texture)

I'm not posting the recipe, just follow the link and replace the orange flower with orange essence if you can't find it. Also, I'd recommend putting half as much almond essence (the cake was very almondy), and possibly doubling the orange essence or grating some orange rind into the cake if you want a more orangey cake. Also I used some raw sugar as I ran out of white, but that worked fine. Coarse sugar will give a crunchy top, caster sugar will create a softer top.

EDIT: I found orange flower water in Christchurch (where I live) at Rare Fare but haven't bought it yet.... *is (sadly) excited*

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Banana Bread with a crunchy top!

Technicolor Kitchen and For the Love of Cooking inspired me to use those 2 forgotten bananas Mum had given me. Sure it doesn't look great, but it was so moist and yummy and the first time i made banana bread that wasn't miserable or so hard I could knock you out with it. That doesn't make me sound pro at all, but it is actually damn good. I edited the recipes a bit (well, merged and added) to try and make them healthier, but this didn't compromise the taste (there's much less of the cake now, if that's any consolation).

Moist banana cake with crunchy top (kinda healthy too?!)

2 bananas, mashed

1 egg

*1/2 cup normal white sugar (doesn't need to be caster

*1/2 tsp molasses

2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

**75 mL vegetable oil

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

3 Tbsp wheat germ (optional if you're confident you won't get heart disease)

optional nuts/extra embellishments

*Or use 1/2 cup soft brown sugar, or 1/2 cup raw sugar & 1/4 tsp molasses

**will keep it soft the next day. Could use 1/4c butter, but I hate measuring butter in cups. Also, it's far more expensive at the moment).

Beat the banana and egg together first to incorporate tiny air bubbles, then mix in the rest of the stuff well.

Then...combine these in a separate bowl and mix well or sift together (or both):

1c flour

3/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt (omit if using salter butter)

Slowly mix the dry and wet stuff until it all comes together - a spatula works well for this.

Pour into a greased tin (approx 15x7.5cm). Sprinkle:

Raw sugar (white sugar is ok, as long as it's coarse and not caster sugar)

poppy seeds (optional)

on top to get the "crunchy top" - now, when I say crunchy, do not expect to feel like you're eating cake attached to a thick potato crisp/chip. But I think this is a good thing.

Bake at 175C / 350F for 40 minutes in a preheated oven or until a skewer comes out cleanish. Cool on a plate before cutting and devouring.

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