Winter is on the way in Sydney. Time to break out the soup recipes! This one is pretty simple, a soup with lots of veggies and some Middle Eastern spices.
Vary the vegetables as you like, but make sure you include lots of root veggies like potatoes, parsnips and turnips. Other vegetables such as red peppers, celery and tomatoes work well too.
A note on the spices. The Middle Eastern spices mentioned are combinations of spices. If you can’t get either, feel free to substitute with a 1//4 teaspoon of a few of the following: cumin, coriander, allspice, paprika, cardamom, ginger.
Ingredients
500g pumpkin, peeled, cut into chunks
500g carrots cut into chunks
250g sweet potato
250g swede cut into chunks (swap for something else if you don’t like Swede)
2 onions, white or brown, cut into chunks
4 -5 garlic cloves halved, no need to peel
2 teaspoon of ras el hanout or baharat *
1 teaspoon sumac
Sea salt and ground black pepper
30mls olive oil
1.5 litres chicken or vegetable stock
Method
Preheat oven to 190 degrees C fan forced.
Put all the vegetables into a large baking tray, sprinkle over the spices and salt and pepper. Pour over the olive oil. Mix well, making sure everything is coated with oil.
Bake for 30 minutes or until the vegetables are soft.
Remove from the oven and transfer to a large stock pot or saucepan. Place on the stovetop. Add the stock, and bring to a medium boil.
Using a stick blender, blend till smooth. Or you could transfer to a blender and blitz. Leave some of the soup chunky if you want.
Serve with a swirl of Greek yoghurt and a sprinkle of coriander or parsley.
ANZAC Day is Tuesday 25 April. It’s time to get baking!
I’ve baked a few versions of the famous biscuit over the years, but since I discovered the “real deal”, the authentic recipe researched by The Cook and the Curator, the wonderful blog of Museums of History New South Wales, I haven’t looked back!
So here’s the recipe. Make these ANZAC bikkies and you will not only get the real thing, they will be utterly delicious!
I add golden syrup, as I love the toffee flavour it imparts. Most recipes do include golden syrup.
Somewhere I read in a recipe that browning the butter after melting it gives a greater depth of flavour. It really does! To compensate for the fact that you lose a little bit of the butter by browning it, I have added another 15g of butter to the recipe.
The Cook and the Curator note that coconut is an optional ingredient and it wasn’t added till the 1930s. By all means add some to to your biscuits, but personally I’m not a fan.
It really is a straightforward ANZAC biscuit recipe – very easy to put together and quick to bake.
Here is the link to the original recipe from The Cook and the Curator if you would like to know more.
Ingredients
165g salted butter
180g rolled oats
120g plain flour
125g brown sugar
2 tablespoons golden syrup
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
2 tablespoons boiling water
Method
Preheat oven to 150 degrees C. Line 2 oven trays with baking paper.
Place the butter in a small saucepan and heat until melted. Once the butter is melted, cook for about 3-4 minutes, swirling the pan often. The butter will foam and turn a golden brown. Remove from the heat and put into a bowl to cool slightly.
Mix the rolled oats, flour and sugar in a large bowl.
Combine the melted butter and golden syrup in the same saucepan. Add the bicarbonate of soda and boiling water and whisk to combine. Remove from heat.
Add the butter/golden syrup mixture and stir until well combined.
Take tablespoons of mixture and make into balls. Place the balls onto the baking trays, allowing space for spreading. Don’t flatten the balls!
Bake for 15 minutes or until biscuits are dark golden brown. Remove the biscuits from the oven and cool on the trays. The biscuits will firm up as they cool. Now remove to a wire rack to cool completely.
Store in an airtight tin. They keep well for a few days.
This is simple apple tart I baked and blogged a while back. Recently I picked up some beautiful red apples from my local Orange Grove Markets. And as autumn is just showing its muted colours and the days are a little cooler, I rustled up another similar galette.
Made with yoghurt pastry (a variant on sour cream pastry) and with a pile of red apple slices, sugar and theme sprigs, this galette is a simple, rustic bake.
Ingredients
3 red apples, whatever you fancy. Crisp apples like Pink Lady are excellent Lemon juice 1 free-range egg yolk, beaten, for glazing Several sprigs of lemon thyme 3 tablespoons caster sugar 1 free-range egg white, lightly beaten
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C fan-forced. Line a baking tray with baking paper.
Cut the butter into cubes and pulse with the flour in a food processor until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Spoon in the yoghurt and continue to pulse in bursts until the mixture comes together into a ball.
Wrap the dough in cling wrap and refrigerate for 20 minutes.
Core and slice the apples thinly, and place the slices into the lemon juice to stop them going brown.
Remove the pastry from the fridge and roll out between two pieces of baking paper so that it is about 2cm thick, rolling into a rough circle. Remove the top layer of baking paper and carefully transfer the pastry to your lined baking tray, by turning the pastry over and removing the bottom sheet.
Shape the round to neaten it if needed, and turn the outer edge up about 2cm in to make the sides of the galette.
Drain the apples slices and place in any artistic way you like on the tart.
Brush the 2cm edge of the galette with as much of the beaten egg as you need. Scatter some of the thyme sprigs over the galette and sprinkle with 2 tablespoons of the caster sugar.
Place the galette in the oven and bake for about 20 minutes. The galette should be golden brown around the edges.
Once out of the oven, leave to cool. To make the crystallised thyme sprigs, dip some more thyme sprigs in the beaten egg white, then dip in the remaining tablespoon of caster sugar. Leave to dry on a piece of baking paper.
Serve with the thyme sprigs scattered over, or add a dollop of cream or more Greek yoghurt.
It’s after Easter – and here’s a great way to use up all those uneaten chocolate eggs, if indeed there is still chocolate that’s uneaten at your place!
Left Over Easter Egg Rocky Road, or just simply Easter Rocky Road, is perfect to make after Easter and will keep, broken into big pieces, in an airtight jar or tin for a few weeks. Delicious!
My Easter Rocky Road is pretty simple – you can add pretty much what you feel like at the time.
Easter Rocky Road
Melt a 200g block of dark chocolate and a 200g block + half a block of white chocolate. Pour into a tin lined with foil, dark on one side and white on the other. Leave a little of each chocolate for splattering.
Using a skewer, run some pink food colourin through the white chocolate.
Place as many as you like of the following in the melted chocolate – pink and white marshmallows, Smarties or M and Ms, mini Easter eggs.
I scattered some freeze-dried raspberry powder over the Rocky Road too.
Splatter or drizzle the left-over dark chocolate on the white side and the white chocolate on the dark side.
Another recipe from the Easter vault! A quick cookie/bickie that you can make in a lot less time than it takes to make hot cross buns. But maybe make these as well! This is a good recipe to make with kids too. The recipe is based on one from Donna Hay, with some tweaks.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C. Line 2 baking trays with baking tray. Cream the butter and sugar in a food processor. Add the eggs and vanilla, making sure the eggs are well incorporated. Add the lemon zest, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, milk and sultanas to the food processor and mix in. Be careful not to over mix in case you break up the sultanas. Refrigerate the mixture for 30 minutes or until firm. Roll tablespoons of the mixtures into balls and place on the baking trays. Bake between 10-15 minutes, depending on the hotness of your oven, until the cookies are pale brown. Remove from the oven and cool on the baking trays. To make the icing, place the icing sugar and lemon juice in a bowl and mix to a paste. Place the icing mixture in a piping bag and pipe a cross on each cookie. You don’t have to be too precise, the flavour of the cookies is more important than a beautifully executed item! Or that’s what I think anyway.
These 2023 hot cross buns are an upgraded version of a previous 2021 recipe. I’m always keen to make the perfect hot cross bun, and I’m pretty happy with this version!
These buns are made with a sourdough starter and dry yeast. You could make this recipe without the sourdough starter – just add more dry yeast as suggested in the ingredients list.
They have a lot of fruit which has been soaked in Pedro Ximinez sherry, although any port or muscat would do. They also have puréed orange and candied orange for a real orange hit!
Ingredients
Buns
300g mix of sultanas and raisins
40mls Pedro Ximinez or port or muscat
1 whole orange
625g strong flour
7g dried yeast (use 10g if not including starter)
12g salt
125g sourdough starter
Zest of 1/2 a lemon
I teaspoon each of ground cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice
1/2 teaspoon each of ground ginger and cloves
50g brown sugar
30g golden syrup
2 medium free-range eggs, well beaten
60g unsalted butter, in small pieces
200g full fat milk at room temperature
150g apple juice
50g candied orange peel
Cross
50g flour
25g water
Extra free-range egg, for brushing
Glaze
50g caster sugar
50g golden syrup
100g water
Method
Soak the raisins and sultanas in the Pedro Ximinez or port or muscat for up to 3 hours to plump up the fruit.
Put the orange into a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, then simmer for up to an hour until the orange is soft.
Let the orange cool, then cut in half and remove the pips. Purée the orange in a food processor. Measure 70g for the dough, and reserve the rest for another batch of dough. It freezes well.
Starting with the flour, add all the other ingredients (except dried fruit and candied orange peel) to a large bowl. Just make sure the yeast is on one side of the bowl and salt on the other.
Mix everything roughly together using a wooden spoon, just to amalgamate the ingredients. Leave to rest for 20 minutes.
Using the dough hook of an electric mixer, knead on low speed for 10 -15 minutes until the dough is soft, shiny and passes the windowpane test. This dough is initially quite wet, so it will take 10 minutes or more kneading to bring it to that lovely elastic consistency you are looking for.
Add the sultanas, raisins and any residual alcohol that hasn’t soaked into the fruit, and the candied orange peel. Mix for about a minute on low to distribute the fruit evenly through the dough.
Remove the bowl from the machine and cover with a plastic bag or tea towel. Leave to prove in a warm place for 2 hours.
The dough should have doubled in size. Carefully remove the risen dough from the bowl and place on a board or bench top which has been lightly floured. Putting a little more flour on your hands to stop the dough from sticking, flatten the dough to a rough rectangle, and fold in half lengthways. Cut in two and roll each half into a sausage.
You should get 16 large hot cross buns from the mixture. Take one sausage and divide into two, then divide each into 4 pieces.
To shape your buns, take one piece and roll into a ball, and with your cupped hand over the top of the ball, keep rolling on the board or bench top till you feel the dough tightening and developing a nice ball shape.
Repeat with remaining balls. Do the same thing with the other sausage.
Place the 16 balls – now buns – onto a large baking tray lined with baking paper.
Cover with a large plastic bag or a tea towel and leave to prove again. I prove this second time in the fridge overnight. You can also prove at room temperature for an hour or more until the buns have grown a little in size. (They don’t get huge – this happens in the oven.)
Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C fan forced or 190 degrees C non fan for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the crosses. Mix the flour and water together to make a dough. Place the dough on a clean surface dusted with flour and roll into a sausage about 1cm thick. Cut the sausage in half, and cut each half into 8 pieces. Roll out each piece again to make 2 thin strips. You should have 32 strips in total. Brush the risen buns with the beaten egg and lay the dough strips on top in the shape of a cross. Brush the crosses with egg too.
Put the tray into the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes until the buns are a deep golden brown.
While the buns are baking, make the glaze. Put the caster sugar, golden syrup and water into a small saucepan and heat gently on the stovetop stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Simmer for 2 or 3 minutes until the glaze has thickened slightly.
Once the buns are cooked, remove from the oven. Brush the warm syrup over the warm buns, making sure you brush the sides as well.
These buns are best eaten on the day, preferably while warm, with lots of good quality butter.
The next day, split and toast and serve with, of course, more butter!
Hot cross buns freeze well too, so make a pile that you can store in the freezer and reheat as necessary.
NB Reheat in the oven, the buns don’t do well in the microwave.
Every year I try different hot cross bun recipes or tweak my own versions. So here are links to recipes from the masters Jamie Oliver and Paul Hollywood.
These recipes make great buns or use them to give you inspiration to develop your own.
I have shown photos of each, with a link to my recipes in previous posts.
Making your own hot cross buns is fun, seasonal and very satisfying!
The Quirk and the Cool 