Cake 1 out of the Australian Women's Weekly Childrend's Birthday Cake Book - Hickory Dickory Watch!

So start with one round butter cake.

Chop the top off it to get it flat

Ice it with most of the vanilla cream.  Should look a bit like this from last time.  I didn't use any food colouring (didn't have any at the time), it's just got a natural light yellow from the butter.

Put a saucepan lid over the middle of the cake and then sprinkle hundreds and thousands all around.  Decorate with jubes and licorice.  Only I hate licorice, so I printed out some numbers and the clock hands on paper and stuck them on.  We won't mention these jubes are actually flavoured, and most of those black ones are licorice flavoured.  The sweetie very nicely suffered through them for me.

The inside

And this is what it's meant to look like.  Neither of us are fans of prunes either, so I wasn't going to buy a whole bag of them just for this.  Can you spot the mistake?  Looks like they've fixed it on the Women's Weekly website.

1 down, 106 to go..!!

For a long time I've wanted to make all the cakes in the Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book.  Which is a bit silly because I really don't even eat cake.  We had this book as kids and had a few of the cakes from it.  But we were only ever allowed to have cakes that required one packet of butter cake mix.  I guess Mum didn't want to get stuck with lots of leftovers.  

Anyways.  Back in September I had a go at making the first cake in the book.  This was actually the second attempt at making a butter cake - the first one was very very over done.  I have to remember we have a very hot oven.

Butter Cake

125g butter (room temperature)
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup castor sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1/3 cup milk

Beat butter with vanilla until light and creamy.
Add sugar and beat until light and fluffy
Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Stir in half the sifted flour and half the milk, stir until combined.
Add remaining milk and flour, stir in lightly, then beat lightly until mixture is smooth.
(honestly you could probably mix in all the flour and milk together).
Spread into a greased tin and bake as directed for your tin size.

I think this was everything all beaten up

Then into a baking tin.  I have a "deep 8 inch" tin, which it says to bake for 50 minutes.  Yeah nah.  Much closer to 35 minutes.  And I used my regular way of using the oven - fan forced with the rear element only.

It will make a big dome

Yeah whoops.  Might need to cut the top off!

The finished cake before cutting the top off.

Vienna Cream

125g butter (room temperature)
1 1/2 cups icing sugar (sifted)
2 tbsp milk (room temperature)

Beat butter until it is as white as possible.
Gradually add about half the icing sugar, beating constantly.
Add milk in gradually then gradually beat in the remaining icing sugar.

The first time I made Lachie's Breakfast Lasagna was back in 2016!

Last month I did keto again, so made another couple of these.

But Lachie's recipe is slightly insane and makes way way way too much food.  And there's way way way too many eggs.

So I revised it a little and I would consider this my "final" recipe.

I used maybe 250g mince - you can add bacon/onion/mushrooms/garlic to it if you're being all fancy, otherwise just plain old mince will do.  Mix in a 250g block of cream cheese, and a little water to thin it slightly.  

Also very lightly scramble 4 or 5 eggs (it can be quite liquid as it will continue to cook in the oven).

I do half the mince mix, then a layer of ham

Then the eggs and the rest of the ham

Then the other half of the mince mix.  If you had more ham you could add it here, but I just used a small pack of Primo ham which only gave me two layers.

Top with lots of cheese

The bake for maybe about half an hour til all the cheese goes golden

I cut this into eight pieces and would have one piece per day.  It's very messy to microwave so make sure it's covered.  Lachie and Stu are happy to just eat it cold.

The other week we thought we should get some meat that we could slow cook.  Market Meats had a 2kg piece of pork neck that looked promising.  So we got it.  Turns out it was all meat and not meat with bones in the middle.  Winning!  

Found a recipe online that seemed simple enough.

So mix up a heap of garlic, a tablespoon of bacon fat (cause I had some, otherwise just use oil) and a heap of thyme (I can't remember if I added that parsley at the end).

Rub it all over the pork

They said "a handful of bayleaves" so I probably could have used more (hey! I'm not driving!)

Come back five or six hours later

Shred it all up

I didn't get any photos, but at the end, take all the sauce from the slow cooker and boil it up with a stock cube (that bone broth in the photo above was all solidified), 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar, a generous tbsp corn flour, maybe a cup or so of water (not sure how much I used - I thought I used too much but I think it was ok).  Boil it all for a bit til it thickens.

Edit: did this again and got a photo this time.  Also, don't add a cup of water, only add enough to make a slurry - it'll be a lot quicker to thicken!

Then mix it all back in the slow cooker.

I had to put some in the freezer, then we spent the next two weeks getting through the rest of the leftovers!  So good!!!!

Back in October I planted some dill seeds.  A bunch of them grew.  One bolted.  

In addition, I had some chicken in the freezer I wanted to use up, and well I've got *litres* of lemon juice that needs using up.

So last night I made a "creamy lemon and dill chicken".

Some chicken thighs, cut into pieces, a big old bunch of dill, lemon juice (I used five cubes and it was quite lemony), cream, some random jelly (lamb I think) I found in the freezer, salt and pepper.

Fry up the chicken til golden

Add the cream/jelly/salt/pepper

Add a heap of dill

Simmer for a while to thicken the sauce

Serve with rice and whatever veggies need using up.

Stu went back for seconds so it must have been good ;)

We came home with half a dozen peeled onions from the club the other week.  What to do with them?  Stu suggested French onion soup.

So I found this recipe.

So we have a bunch of onions, which I sliced up.  Some butter and oil for frying.  Salt/sugar/stock/wine.  Not shown: more stock, flour and cognac.

So fry up the onions in butter and oil.  Cover and cook for like 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add some sugar and salt and brown a bit longer.  

Add a few tablespoons of flour and cook for a few more minutes.

In the slow cooker I added a litre of vegetable stock and 150mL white wine (that reminds me, must finish the bottle of it).

Then added the onions to it, and a decent splash of cognac.

I had some for lunch the next day (I might have added shallots and sour cream after this cause they go with anything right? ;) ).  I didn't have any cheese or croutons to do it properly so just had it by itself.

It was pretty decent.  My veggie stock was very very out of date.  I imagine it would be A Whole Lot Better if you made your own stock.  

10.6.24

Yeah, so long ago I've forgotten pretty much everything. I'm pretty sure I used this recipe from RecipeTinEats (the website not the book).

There was a dry rub

Then a sauce

After being cooked for a while

Turned over

And done.

I do remember that they definitely weren't fall off the bone tender.  Definitely would need to have cooked them a lot longer and slower.  And there was a lot of fat which wasn't super pleasant.

Not sure if I'd bother again.

26.8.24 (backdated entry)

When we went food shopping at the markets on the weekend we were looking for something we could slow cook. Stu saw osso buco so we got some of those. Found a recipe in The Slow Cooker Kitchen that I think I got from the Green Shed.

Coat some osso buco steaks in a little flour then fry til caramelised.

While that's frying, add half a cup of dry white wine (I didn't measure this), a cup of stock, half a tub or so of tomato paste, a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, garlic, rosemary, thyme, bay leaves (fresh ones, thanks Jo!).

When the meat is done, cook a diced onion and a couple of carrots until a bit coloured.

Cook in a slow cooker all afternoon.

Enjoy!  (enjoyed here with creamy polenta)

This was on the same opening in the book as the Mexican Red Rice.  I hadn't looked at the recipe when we went shopping, but as I was looking at it later I realised we had all the ingredients for it anyway!

I didn't measure out the 6 cups/540g of cabbage she suggested, I just used all of what we had left in the fridge.  Don't even know how much that was.  

Then the dressing.  1/2 tsp minced garlic.  Really?  Why not just say a clove .. or two.. ?  I mean I know they can be different sizes but still.. 1/2 cup/100g sour cream.  Didn't measure that either, just used about a third of the tub.  2 tbsp mayonnaise or 4 tsp olive oil.  We don't normally have mayo in the house so just poured in some olive oil.  2 tsp lime zest and 2 tsp lime juice.  Or whatever the zest from half of that lime would be (I used the other half to cut into segments for serving).  Most times we wouldn't have fresh limes in the house so I'd just use bottled lime juice.  1/2 tsp salt.  Or just a sprinkle.

You're meant to mix it all up then let it sit for 20 minutes to soften the cabbage.

Then she wanted 1 cup/55g of spring onion (sorry, "green onion").  Another dumb measurement.  I just used "one".  If it had been bigger I would have used all the greenery in it as well.  Probably could have thrown in another one actually and next time I probably would.  And she wanted 1/2 cup/25g of coriander.  How about just a bunch of it that I didn't use in the red rice or leave for garnishing.

Mix it all together and you're ready to go!

The verdict? This was surprisingly amazing.  Creamy and zingy and crunchy.  I probably should have had more cabbage to sauce ratio as all that sour cream and oil can't be that good for you surely ;)  I'd definitely do this again.  

Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Me: Yes!!
Stu: Yes!!

When I was looking at the recipe for Mexican Shredded Beef it suggested serving with Mexican Fried Rice on page 223.  Looked pretty simple so I got ingredients for that as well.

She wanted half an onion.  Dumb.  So I did a whole one and halved it once I'd cooked it, saving the rest for bolognase later in the week.  I cooked the onion in a saucepan since I'd be using it later for the rice.  So it didn't end up as brown as I'd normally do it.  Chuck in some minced cloves of garlic near the end.  

Meanwhile, mix up 1 3/4 cups salt reduced chicken stock (yeah I just used a cube and I didn't properly measure it in the big jug), I skipped the 1/4 tsp of salt because what's the point of using low salt stock if you're just going to add salt to it, and I'd used regular strength stock cubes anyway; 2 1/2 tbsp tomato paste, which was about half a tub, probably should have just used a sachet; some coriander.  I was going to get a chilli too but never ended up getting one.  And I forgot about the dried ones we had.  Oh well.  And a cup of long grain rice.

Chuck it all in the saucepan.  Return to the boil then simmer for fifteen minutes with the lid on.

Then you're meant to take it off the heat and let it sit for ten minutes without taking the lid off.  Only I did for a bit because it still a little.. moist..  Maybe I should have measured the liquid a bit better ;)

The verdict? Yeah pretty good.  Possibly a little gluggy but that was probably my fault.  Tasted good enough and keeps really well as leftovers (sometimes rice can get a little dry as leftovers).

Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Me: Sure :)
Stu: Sure :)