High Tea

Update: Card-Reader located!

It was SIL's birthday on April Fool's Day, and her party was yesterday. She had a Sunday High Tea, here at MIL's, and asked certain people to make various signature dishes: D his lemon tarts, me my stained-glass cookies.
Preparations began the day before with the purchase of local butter, local eggs, and whilst not local sweets they were bought from a local sweet store (support your locals!)

 

The butter was chopped, then sugar and vanilla added, then I left it to sit to soften.

But it was quite cold on Saturday, and it was very reluctant to cream. What better place to very gently warm and soften it than on top of the coffee machine?

Then I had to leave my preparations there, in the fridge, while I went to work and D came home. Unfortunately, SP turned into a Leech-Baby at this point, and he only got to half make his pastry cases and then MIL finished them and made the lemon filling the next day.

I finished off the cookies the next day too.

And then we set up for tea:
We put out the teacups;

The plates, napkins and cutlery;

Flowers on the side table;

Hydrangeas and magnolia leaves from the garden in the darkened hallway;

 Food plated up and ready to go;

MIL made the most beautiful, luscious, special birthday cake (recipe at end);

Which we ate...

And as the afternoon progressed, and the sunlight filtered through the trees into the garden, we became aware of the sugar-overload invading our systems and resolved to eat bread and water for tea.

Happy Birthday SIL! :)

***

Recipe
MIL's Special Birthday Cake: I insist you try it; it is divine.

Raspberry and White Chocolate Cake
(also known as 'Mary Phillipou's Wonder Cake', from Trick or Treat by Kerry Greenwood, 2001, Allen and Unwin)

2 eggs
1 cup caster sugar
300ml cream
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 3/4 cups self-raising flour
1 cup frozen berries (or dried fruit)
1 cup white chocolate bits

Grease a 20cm baking tin and line with baking paper.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
Beat the eggs and sugar together until thick.
Add cream and essence and mix well.
Add the sifted flour and fold until until smooth.
Fold in berries and chocolate bits.
Pour into the prepared tin and bake for approximately 50 minutes. It's cooked when a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Allow cake to cool in the tin and turn out.
Dust with icing sugar and top with berries.

Gingerbread and biscotti recipes

Just to round things out, here are the gingerbread and biscotti recipes I used this year.

Gingerbread
(paraphrased and adapted from Donna Hay magazine, issue 6, p 96)

125g (4 oz) butter, softened
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup (4 fl oz) golden syrup
2 1/2 cups plain (all purpose) flour
2 tsp ground ginger tsp bicarb soda (baking soda)

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees celsius (375 F).
Place the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until light and creamy. Add the golden syrup and beat well. Add the flour, ginger, and bicarb soda and stir to combine. Knead the dough lightly to form a smooth dough.
Roll out the dough on a floured surface, or between two sheets of non-stick baking paper to 5mm (1/4") thick. Use a cookie cutter to cut out shapes from the dough and place them on a baking paper lined tray. Be careful! The dough will be very soft.
Bake for 8-10minutes or until golden brown. Cool on the trays.
Ice with lemon icing. The lemon with the ginger 'lifts' the flavour considerably.
Makes 25.


Biscotti.
(paraphrased and adapted from The Essential Mediterrananean Cookbook, Murdoch Books, p 148)

2 cups plain (all purpose) flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 cup (8 oz) caster sugar
3 eggs
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp grated orange rind
3/4 cup (3.5 oz) natural pistachio nuts

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius (350F).
Line two baking trays with non-stick baking paper and dust lightly with flour.
Sift the flour and baking paper into a large bowl. Add the sugar and mix well. Make a well in the centre and add 2 whole eggs, the egg yolk, vanilla essence and orange rind. Stir until just combined. Mix in the pistachios. Knead for 2-3 minutes on a lightly floured surface. The dough will be stiff at first but quickly become soft. Add a little water if necessary.
Divide the mixture into two equal portions and roll each into a log about 25cm (10") long and 8cm (3") wide. Place the logs on the trays, allowing room for spreading. Slightly flatten the tops.
Beat the remaing egg and brush over the logs to glaze.
Bake for 35 minutes and remove from the oven.
Reduce the oven temperature to 150 celcius (300F).
Allow the logs to cool slightly, then cut them into 5mm slices.
Place slices flat side down on the trays.
BAke for 8 minutes. Turn the over and bake for a further 8 minutes, or until slightly coloured and crisp and dry.
Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Belated baking

So it's days and days after Christmas, but I'm getting around to the Christmas Baking post. It's 39 degrees celcius outside today, so the only gardening going on is lots of water to keep the plants alive (tomorrow - NYE - is forecast a whopping 43 degrees celcius).
So, as you might have gathered, Christmas to me means going crazy in the kitchen. I like to give baked goods as gifts.


SP helped in her own way.


This year I started with orange and pistachio biscotti, and almond biscotti.


Then I made Viennese fingers (recipe)


And Viennese 'drops' too.


The cookie trees were a bit of a hit. I was going to do all vanilla cookies (recipe), and then I got bored and added in gingerbread too, all iced with lemon icing.


The leftover biscuits made a bigger tree, which we took to my mother-in-law's house for her annual Christmas Eve birthday party.




D made his famous Christmas puddings.


He also used my leftover biscuit dough to make pastry for mince pies by re-kneading the dough with an egg.


Everything, naturally, was delicious. Perhaps the best of all was the bumper raspberry crop out of my MIL's garden.


Merry Christmas to all readers, and may you have a Happy New Year. All the best for 2011!

The Christmas Experimentation Continues

So the earwig post will have to wait for another day, partly because I was side-tracked by cookies, and partly because I have not yet attempted to do anything about the little buggers (and I know you were all just dying to read all about it...)

I was flicking through my Donna Hay magazines, of which I have far too many, looking for cookie recipes when I came across this picture in issue 6.


I thought I'd try something like that to go on top of my cookie trees, so out came the star cutters again. I used two different sizes to make a dough outline from rolled out cookie dough (recipe at end).


I had no idea how hard it would be to find red boiled lollies (I wanted red, dammit, not orange, not yellow, definitely not green and certainly not sugar free!). I ended up buying a mixed pack of fruit lollies, but I'll need another source of just red lollies because I don't eat them and there are hardly any red ones in the packet.

Anyway, you roughly chop up the lollies and pile them in the centre of the stars. Conveniently, it's about one lolly per cookie.


When you cook them in the oven, the lollies melt and spread out and fill the space.


And once they are cool, they're lovely cookie stars with transparent, glass-like coloured centres.


They looked beautiful, and tasted better than I thought they would (not being lolly eater myself). The idea is that you hang them on your tree as decorations, but I don't think the sugar centres would last well if it was humid.
Incidental, I thought I'd try to make a sugar-bark with demerara sugar (as suggested by chef-husband). I found this recipe on the ABC 'The Cook and the Chef' website but if it were used in cookies they would burn before the sugar was melted. Thinking that perhaps another sugar would work I tried again with white and raw casters, and raw sugar, but unfortunately the same thing happens so boiled lollies it must be.

*

'Turtle Dove Cookies'
Paraphrased and adapted from Donna Hay Magazine, Issue 6, page 90.

185g butter
1 cup caster sugar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups plain flour
1 egg
130g boiled lollies, roughly chopped

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla extract until smooth.
Add the flour and egg and mix to form a smooth dough.
Knead the dough lightly.
Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius (350F).
Roll out the dough on a floured surface, or between sheets of baking paper, until it is 5mm (1/4") thick.
Use a cookie cutter to cut out your cookies. Place them on cookie trays lined with baking paper.
Use a smaller cookie cutter to cut out borders from your larger cookies. Use the leftover dough to make other cookies.
Place 7g of boiled lolly in each cookie border (about one lolly's worth).
Bake for 10 minutes or until golden and the lollies have melted.
Cool on the baking trays.
Makes 18.

Busy, busy!

We have done so much in the garden over the last few days. SP has been unwell - her first genuine lurgy - and so she spent a lot of time asleep, which meant that we were able to achieve quite a lot.

I doubled the size of the vegetable garden (and boy, did my body feel it the next day), we extended the irrigation system down to the front of the garden, got my lemon tree planted in the lawn, and the lime trees repotted into bigger pots, not to mention more heritage carrot and tomato seeds planted into pots. And then bok choy and basil seeds, corn and pumpkin seeds, and 'assorted' squash. And then there are the artichoke, capsicum, yellow zucchini, and rhubarb seedlings. And some ancient strawberries, thyme, and miniature roses to be replanted. And I've even started work along the front fence for the lavender hedge (Hidcote). Whew! Out of breath yet?
And do I have pictures of any of it? Nope! SP woke up before I could get organised for that part. Tomorrow's mission is to take photos of all that we've done so far. I do, however, have pictures of my idea for this year's Christmas baking: cookie trees. A rush job, because really I just wanted to try out my new star cutters, but very simple and I think I could work this up into something quite cute.