Cheat's Lemon Tart Recipe

I've gotten quite lazy with my baking.  But I still really love cake.  Dilemma.  I'm constantly on the lookout for tasty cake recipes which avoid all that tedious creaming of the butter and sugar, and the fewer ingredients the better. 

I'm a big lemon tart fan.  However, I can think of almost nothing worse than battling with short crust pastry.   It seriously takes all day.  So I call this the cheat's lemon tart recipe.  This is a gem of a recipe - I think it was originally from Better Homes and Gardens or something like that (disguised as the much less appetising 'lemon tea cake').  You get a lovely crumbly crusty type cake base, yummy lemon curd filling and crumble topping.  So not quite a tart but still, lemon curd.  The filling uses pretty much the same ingredients as the base, but with added lemon. 

I always always get tons of compliments when I make this.  The only downside is it requires a bit of heavy machinery - you need to pull out your food processor - but you can do all your tidying up while you leave the crumb mixture in the fridge!

Cheat's Lemon Tart Recipe

Ingredients

• 375g self-raising flour
• 250g sugar
• 175g butter
• 2 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
• 4 lemons, zest and juice 

Method

1. Bung 350g of the flour, 150g of the sugar and 100g of the butter in a food processor, and process until it's combined.
2. Add 1 egg and 1 egg yolk and again process until combined.  I have no idea what would happen if you just added that whole extra second egg.  I'm going to try this next time, because I never get around to making those merangues which I intend to do with spare egg whites...
3. Your mixture will be very dry and crumbly.  Spread out some cling wrap, and pour the mixture onto it.  Then grap the four corners of the plastic and try to smoosh it together (I find I need to wrap it a second time with cling wrap to keep it together).  Then chuck it in the fridge.
4. While this is in the fridge, preheat the oven to 180 C and grease and line a 20-ish cm round cake tin.  Mine is springform because that's how I roll.
5. Then make your lemon curd by placing the lemon juice and rind, the remaining sugar (100g) and butter (75g) into a saucepan.  Once the butter is melted add the other egg and yolk (see my comments re wasted eggs above) and whisk over heat until combined, then add the remaining flour (25g) and whisk until thickened.  This should happen pretty quickly. 
6. Get your crumb mixture out and dump two thirds of it into your prepared pan, and smoosh it down, keeping a slighly raised egdge.  Pour in the lemon curd, then sprinkle over the rest of the crumbs.
7. Bake for 30-35 mins, or until golden on the top and serve!!

nom nom nom

And it's good for a couple of days after you make it, but mine never lasts that long.
(I think I get extra points for this post because I avoided the title 'when life gives you lemons'!)

Mochachino Brownies

If it isn't blogged about, it didn't happen right?  Yipes, I better share with you the fact that I did some baking!!

My last three attempts at brownies have failed.  They were less a brownie and more a brownie-batter puddle.  Burnt on the outside, not cooked on the inside.  I maintain it's my oven - it's way too hot.

Anyway, this time, a new recipe and success!  I give you, my slightly tweaked version of Mochachino Brownies

Brownies
115 g butter
115 g chocolate (I used old gold)
2 tbsp strong coffee (I brewed up a Ristretto pod)
250 g caster sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
3 eggs, beaten
100 g milk choc chips (original recipe said 55g of choc chips and 55 g walnuts, however my other half does not like nuts so I just added more chips)

1. Preheat the oven to 180 C, grease and line a sqaure baking tin.
2. Place the butter, chocolate and coffee into a saucepan and melt until smooth.  Cool slightly (I let it cool for the amount of time it took me to gather the rest of my ingredients).
3. Whisk in the sugar, eggs and cinnamon.
4. Mix in the flour (I continued to use my whisk) and stir in the choc chips.  
5. Pour into the prepared tin, bake for 30-35 mins, apparently until firm but moist inside.  Mine was probably in for closer to 40, but this was purely because my oven timer didn't go off when it was supposed to.  So mine was a bit black on the top.  But it is still ridiculously moist, plus I hid the blackness with icing. 
6. Allow to cool before icing.

Icing
115 g white chocolate
1 tbsp coffee (I had left overs from that brewed above)
2 tbsp milk
175 g icing sugar, sifted

1. Melt white choc with milk and coffee.  
2. Sift in the icing sugar and mix together (I used my whisk).
3. Spread over your brownies.  My icing was quite runny, so I popped it into the fridge for a while to set a bit before using.  Then it's a lovely consistency and won't drip everwhere.

I cut mine into 25 pieces.  They're super rich, so try not to have more than say, 5 :D

Ginger!

via

I personally like everything about ginger.  My dad is ginger.  Unfortunately, none of his children are :(  Boo!  I'm hoping that if I have children the ginger gene will somehow rear its bright orange head.   I love ginger tea, crystallized ginger and if course, gingerbread.

Christmas for me means gingerbread!  It's the only reason I will visit Starbucks, because during the Christmas period they have gingerbread latte!  

This is my favourite recipe for making gingerbread men, which I found ages ago on the back of some packet or other, so I'm going to share it.

Gingerbread Men Cookies

120g unsalted butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup golden syrup
1 egg
2 1/2 cups SR flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tbs ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cloves
2 drops vanilla essence
1 tsp bicarb soda

Cream the butter and sugar, add the egg, golden syrup and essence.  Add the sifted flour, spices and bicarb.  Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 20 mins.  Then roll out and cut away!  I also put the cut out men in the freezer for 10 min before they went into the oven, but these like to puff up a lot in any case!  Bake for 6 minutes or until golden at 180 C.

I do a pretty basic glace icing, and decorate them fairly simply.  They look very homemade :D

*NOM*

I really want to try a gingerbread house this year, but it look like a lot of effort.  If I make one I will definitely share!!

You *haven't* been to Sassafras?!?

... is what a colleague recently said to me, in a tone that suggested I had committed some kind of mortal sin.
The BF and I were due for a holiday anyway, and I had a little spare cash, so I booked a night in Sassafras.

It was lovely!  So green, so lush.  We got rained on all day the first day, but a bit of sun poked through the clouds on the second day.

A lovely view of farms and trees through the mist.

Lots of pretty flowers in bloom.

Not a flower, but  Chinese Cedars are so hot right now.

The BEST place was Tea Leaves, a store which sells about 300 varieties of tea and boasts of the most extensive range of teapots!

No bulls please :)

They had this one, which I thought was the coolest:

A nice surprise was finding a wool store!  I bought myself some goodies!

Yes, calm down, I am now the owner of a Zauberball!!!

But it was quite touristy.  Lots of gift shops full of rubbish.  Like this:

Giant cherries anyone?  (I apologise for offending you if you have one of these in your house)

I'm fairly certain Sassafras has the highest density of tea rooms per square kilometre in the world.  And we didn't have scones anywhere!  So I promptly made myself some when we got home, using my favourite easy recipe.

Mine looked just as tasty! (via)

A bit sad I didn't go to Miss Marples or the Tesselaar Tulip Festival, but my least favourite thing about holidays are tourists, even when I am one, so it was probably for the best!!

Sunday night

What were you doing with your Sunday night?

Oh that sounds nice.

What was I doing?

Oh.. just making meringues...

...yeah, I'm bad ass.

Trying new things

By my grandmotherly standards, I had an insane weekend.  Well, there were lots of grandmotherly things included, but I still did A LOT!  I'm usually such a sloth.

I tried out some cool new recipes, made alterations to some old old ones, had some success and some total failure. You know what I hate? people who recommend recipes without trying them themselves first.  So, I will only show recipes which have worked for me :D

Found via Punchfork (which is pretty awesome btw) I used this recipe and made corn dogs!  Next time I'll add a bit more milk to the batter because I think it was a bit too gluggy, but they were scrumptious!  I might also try making these with mini hot dogs, because I could only make one at a time with my puny deep-fryer.

The only problem is, now I have a giant bag of corn meal left.  Who's coming over for corn dogs??

Also via punchfork, I made this recipe for roasted tomato soup.  Ok, so it's a bit of a no-brainer recipe... but LAY OFF!  I hadn't ever made tomato soup before, as I've never liked the canned stuff.  But this recipe is very tasty.  And once you've made it once, you really won't need to look at the recipe again.  This is the second time I'd made it, and this time I added a red capsicum.  It came out very capsicummy!  mmmm

I've made this recipe for chocolate cupcakes many times before, but this time I used some super cool coffee flavoured chocolate buttons I found at Haighs.  I also subbed extra flour for the almond meal, doubled the amount of instant coffee and didn't ice them.

Exclusively Food is my absolute favourite website for baking recipes.  I have so far had 100% success rate with all recipes, and there are lovely detailed instructions and pictures for each recipe.

And, in the interests of full disclosure, I tried this recipe for bread... the idea being I would have lovely soft warm bread for breakfast Saturday morning.  TOTAL DISASTER.  I'm sure the recipe is fine, it seems to be a fairly standard bread recipe.  But mine was flat, burnt on the outside and dough in the middle!  I wish I remembered to take a photo, it was hilarious!  Oh well.. better luck next time...

My last weekend activity was testing out my green thumb. I got my little potted herb garden re-started.  I'd attempted this before, but made the mistake of putting them outside for some "sun", only to have the whole lot totally infested by bugs.  I also sowed some sweet-peas, but I will spare you the photos of a pot full of dirt.

Also, I'm sure you can tell, I've discovered a super cool Mosiac generator, making me look very professional indeed!

Do you have any recipes to share?  Any secrets of herb growing success?

Stuff I like, and stuff I've seen

I like stuff.  I'm sorry but I do.

I live in a material world and I am a material girl. (Anyone else love that line in The Wedding Singer?)  I can't help it.

I saw this post by Lauren Carney and was beside myself with awe.  How gorgeous.  I made a total impulse buy and bought this sweet brooch:

Sold 19 July 2011.  Muahhahahah.

 Another impulse buy, I couldn't resist this cute bath mat.

The Kitten approves, and thank goodness! The bath mat is one of her favorite chill out places.

Other stuff I've spied lately...

DIY Dahlia Corsage Brooch, spotted by Lisa.

And Lisa found this cute Narwhal crochet pattern.  Might have to get my amigurumi back on! 

Narwhal ami pattern from Wunderkammer

  Knitrageous also did some etsy shopping and picked up this cute knitting eye chart.


Very cool, though I couldn't find who on etsy was selling it.  Little help?

 Speaking of etsy (again)... look at this!!

Muffin pan and measuring spoon necklace from CuteAbility

  And MiA spotted these gorgeous cookies!

Granny square cookies from sugar and meringue.

Finally, on a totally different note, I saw Capitain America: First Avenger over the weekend.  I was originally intending not to post such frivolous things such as my opinion of  movies on my little blog... but... I friggin loved this movie.  I generally quite like comic books movies, but the idea of Captain America didn't interest me very much.  I thought it would be all war and American patriotism. But it was awesome!  There was really very little of that stuff and it was more about skinny Steve Rodgers becoming the bad ass Captain America.  I can't pinpoint exactly why I liked it, I think it mostly had to do with Evans' performance.  So I am now a massive Chris Evans fan (I  already really liked him in The Losers, Scott Pilgrim and Fantastic 4 anyway).  And omg The Avengers trailer?  You have got to be kidding me.  I nearly peed my pants.  Make sure you stay til the end of the credits for this one. 

awesomeawesomeawesomeawesomeawesomeawesome

Seen something cool lately?  Please share below!

My sunday

Obviously yesterday was mothers day.

I won't go into details, but I didn think this was a good opportunity to share a couple of my favorite recipes which I made for lunch yesterday.

A while back Meet me at Mikes blogged a few baked risotto recipes . I've made No 2 - the Tomato and Parmesan Risotto a couple of times now. I make a few variations to the recipe:

1. add a couple of rashers of bacon at the same time as the onion.
2. omit capers and lemon zest (only because I didn't have these ingredients handy - it still turns out scrumptious)
3. double the recipe - Still turns out fab and makes enough to serve 5 people!
4. I use that fresh chilli you get from the fridge section of the supermarket rather than flakes - and then only the mild version.

This all fits in my 20cm cast iron crock pot - right to the brim but it doesn't expand so don't worry!

Doesn't look attractive but one of my favorite recipies now! Very tasty and VERY simple.
I've made this recipe for doughnuts (specifically, beignets) countless times now, and they always go down well. They melt in your mouth. I halve the recipe and that easily makes enough for 6+ people (6 people who eat a bunch of doughnuts each too!!).

Yesterday I even cut out different shapes - hearts and little men, and all turned out delicious. They didn't last very long but well worth the effort.

Also spent some time yesterday teaching mum and sis to crochet granny squares. There is mum's first granny square - go mum!

My sis thoroughly enjoyed both the doughnuts and the granny squares - actually I lie about the granny squares, she found them far too frustrating to make :( - but she wore hers around her neck :).

My kitchen table yesterday, crochet, doughnuts, coffee, what more could you want!! That black/grey item there is my Monroe that I managed to finish off, now for blocking and then I'll be ready to show it off properly :)