Banana Cake with passion fruit icing

Cake cake cake cake cake cake cake

I lurve the cake

It's so delicious. Tender crumbs on the inside and icing to contrast and compliment on the outside. I did not get to be the size I am today without a love of cake. True fact. 

My classy amateur photos today were brought to you by my phone. 

Last weekend there were uber ripe bananas. My husband hates to waste and so do I. Luckily the solution was simple. Banana Cake!!!! After trawling the internet and searching the cupboard I decided on using the Donna Hay One Bowl Banana Cake recipe. The only adaptation I did was to not put the cinnamon in. 

I had some issues with the baking. When the oven is on fan forced, it is really enthusiastic. I'm talking seriously enthusiastic. The recipe said 45 minutes. I checked it after 20 minutes and it was pretty much done. Some small crumbs on the skewer so it was put back in for another 10 minutes with the fan on but heat off. Possibly not the best idea as the sides burnt a little. 

Nothing a little passion fruit icing couldn't fix.

It was delicious 

Chinese pork and cabbage dumplings

Since I was here last so much as happened. As is my habit now, I post a few things and then disappear for a few months/years because big life things happen. Between the last post and this one I have moved country, started back at my old school, gotten married and bought a house. Whilst all of this has been happening my love for pork dumplings has remained constant.

Oh pork dumpling. Shall I compare thee to a summers day? Thou art more lovely and temperate.

Bah! Only when you aren't consumed with mountains of chili sauce are you temperate. You are always lovely though.

I missed your deliciousness. 

I really missed you.

Rural England doesn't really do the dumpling. You can find things in the freezer sections of some supermarkets. We had an Asian supermarket in town so worse case we could go there on a Saturday morning. I really missed the pork dumplings from Melbourne. They were soooo good. A food court staple for me the past few years.

Normally they ended up being made myself. I've made my own wrappers, used store bought and you know what? It doesn't matter which one you use. They both taste great. For this batch I went with the store bough wonton wrappers as that's what the local supermarket had. 500g of pork took 2 packets of wrappers.

As we wrapped them I had the jingle 'One ton rodeo' going through my head. It went like this 'won-ton-ellini' My wontons looked like tortellini. I love tortellini.

The basic recipe I got from the ABC website. It's one of the many fabulous things from Poh's Kitchen. I doubled everything and had some left over. The leftover filling became fried meatballs in a soup that evening with the dumplings.

Wontonallini. I gotta wontonalliiiiini. I need a wontonallini.

Yeasty goodness

Bread. How I love thee. Let me compare thee to a summers day.....

Seriously though it's the food of gods. I love the stuff but haven't been able to find bread I'd like to eat at a price I'm willing to pay. I enjoy baking my own but have never found the time to commit to a regular baking schedule. Let's face it. If you let me go, I'll eat bread and butter for most meals.

This is where present me thanks past me quite a bit. When I moved to the UK, my sister bought me an Amazon voucher so that I could stock up on ebooks for the plane. What we didn't realise is that .com vouchers cannot be used with .com.au or with .co.uk. Which meant that I had all this credit and nothing to spend it on... Needless to say I bought a few cookbooks. One of which was The Bread Bible.

Last week I tried the Sandwich Loaf recipe. Half was baked on the day and the other half stashed in the fridge for a few days. One of the comments in the book says that this loaf is everything that Wonder Bread tries to be and doesn't achieve. I thought the recipe was a little odd as it required both milk and butter as well as three rising sessions. Once as starter, another as dough and the third as a shaped loaf.

Over all I thought it was a very easy if not time consuming recipe. It could definitely be done over a few days if you were time poor but able to find 30 min for mixing, kneading and cleaning up the bench afterwards (this is a very wet dough). Last week I stuck to the recipe and this week I changed up half the flour to whole meal spelt. It's been sitting in the fridge for a while. To compensate for the wholemeal flour I added extra yeast.


Edit - a week later - the bread that sat in the fridge for a week was very tasty. M wasn't a fan of the texture. He found it oily, mostly likely due to the butter and milk.

There are no pictures because my iPad is being a poo and not accessing the images properly. Will update when I can.

Blueberry Muffins

One of my favourite muffins is blueberry. A crunchy top and filled with messy blueberries is all I need to be happy. Well it's all I thought I needed. For those who follow other food blogs you have probably already made your way over to Smitten Kitchen. Deb's food is delicious.

 

I'm in back to school mode. September 1st means the start of the school year and a new school for me. I'll be teaching at a school about an hours commute away which means leaving the house at 630am and not getting home until 6/630pm. My solution to this is to be uber organise and have enough food with me to cover all meals and snacks except dinner. If I'm even more organised then I'll be able to have breakfast at home before I leave work.

Deb posted these muffins as the perfect blueberry muffin a few days ago. As someone who adores blueberry muffins, I decided to try them out. For once I stuck to the recipe!! The only difference is that I got 10 muffins instead of 9. I could probably have gotten 9 if I bad filled the cups even higher. 

As you can see I got quite sizeable muffins. Getting 9 would have meant slightly higher tops but I am happy with what I got. The recipe is here

Rosemary chicken salad....with bacon

Last Thursday M and I headed up to Edinburgh for a wedding. Neither of us had ever been to a Scottish wedding before and some parts were definitely different to what we're used too. 

Our main breakfast each day was a choice between a full Scottish breakfast and a continental. Apparently fried bread is a thing in Scotland....wait... Fried everything is a thing in Scotland. Needless to say that we were craving vegetables and salad. Luckily I found this. We had it for dinner this evening and it was delicious. The only thing I would do differently would be to dress the leaves before they hit the plate. 

If you do one thing this weekend it should be to eat this 

Birthdays come but once a year

Yesterday I watched as this years birthday cake was being made. The cake itself is a coconut cake with raspberry jam sandwiched between and lemon icing on top. Recipe for the cake is here. 

It doesn't look like much but it will be delicious. More detail will follow in a later post but for now let me leave you with this. 

A long long time ago

in a galaxy far away, I stopped blogging for several years. My deepest apologies!

In a nut shell, teacher training was intense as was the first 4 years. I'm halfway through the 5th year and starting to wonder if this is really what I should be doing. So it's back to blogging!


Life in England is different to back Australia. Small towns don't provided the same opportunities as big cities but the also an advantage to this. I've been able to concentrate more of honing my crafts and focusing on the little things.

Like home grown strawberries.

Strawberries, custard and amaretti biscuits 

I made one of these yesterday with home grown strawberries. Whilst not as sweet as the ones from Sainburys, they were still delicious. Both here was made from scratch, I bought it all. The amaretti biscuits have lasted since last July in the pantry, making them a worthwhile purchase. 

The glass itself is from a tasting session with The Lakes Distillery. We had a taste of their vodka, gin and whiskey. I recommend checking them out if you can find them.