Rhubarb Gingerbread

Despite having my own rhubarb plant, I don't actually end up making many things with it. But in amongst the recipes I received at my Hen's Party I found this recipe for Rhubarb Gingerbread - so another Good Bitches Bake gave me a good opportunity to try it out. I didn't have the recommended square tin so just made a round one (and a little cupcake so I could test what I was giving away! One must carry out quality assurance. 😉)

Rhubarb Gingerbread
*makes a 20cm square cake
*preheat oven to 180'C & line a baking tin.

100g wholemeal flour
100g plain flour
1/2tsp baking soda
2tsp ground ginger
100gm butter
100gm brown/raw sugar
60ml treacle/molasses/golden syrup
2Tbsp milk
2 large eggs
50g crystallised ginger pieces
350g rhubarb stems, washed & dried

• Remove the 'hoof' from the rhubarb stems & cut into 1cm slices.
• Chop ginger into pea sized pieces.
• Sift together the flours, soda & ginger into a mixing bowl. Tip the coarse bits of the wholemeal into the bowl. Mix in rhubarb & ginger.
• Melt together butter, sugar & treacle. Allow to cool before stirring in the eggs & milk.
• Make a hollow in the dry ingredients & pour in the liquid. Mix well.
• Pour mixture into prepared tin & bake for 40mins.
• Cool for 5 mins before removing from the tin & cool on a rack.

Are you a rhubarb fan? How about ginger?

Chocolate & Raspberry - A Great Combo!

I know the popular combo is white chocolate and raspberry, but I'm not a huge white chocolate fan. So I like pairing raspberries with milk or dark chocolate. I really like using the freeze dried raspberry powder at the moment - it gives a real raspberry flavour, though the colour isn't a strong pink so you may want to add some colouring to the icing if you want a deeper pink colour.

I was introduced to the 1M piping nozzle a while back (relatively late in my cake decorating experience really!) and its great - so easy & quick to make cupcakes & cakes that look fancy!

Best Ever Chocolate Cupcakes!

1/2 cup cocoa
1 cup boiling water
1 1/3 flour
2tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
115gm butter
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
2tsp vanilla
2 crunchy bars, chopped (optional)

• Stir boiling water & cocoa in a small bowl. Leave to cool.
• Cream butter & sugar.
• Add eggs one at a time.
• Beat until smooth, stir in vanilla.
• Add dry ingredients & beat til just incorporated.
• Add cocoa mix & stir til smooth.
• Add crunchy bar pieces if using.
• Place in cupcake papers & bake 16-20mins at 180'C.
• Ice with your favourite buttercream frosting when cool.

Makes 16 standard cupcakes.

Do let me know what you think if you give them a try 😊

A little bit of magic.

My friend's daughters love Unicorns and, lets face it, so do I - so I use them as an excuse for indulging in unicorn related things. So for a special afternoon tea when one of these lovely girls turned 5 back in November, I made unicorn cookies.....100s of them it turned out. That's a good recipe that one! So there were herds of unicorns left over from the afternoon tea party (which we had on a yacht!) - this meant my bake for Good Bitches Baking that week was sorted. Quite likely unicorn cookies weren't going to bring the kind of magic the recipients need, but hopefully the pretty colours of the sweet treats brought a little brightness to their day.

I used this sugar cookie recipe from Cake Warehouse and made this egg free royal icing. I've not made egg free royal icing before - it was great, and so much easier to make another batch when you run out! As far as I can tell, in NZ corn syrup is glucose syrup (well, that's what I used and it worked!)

Anyway if you're like me you just want the pictures of Unicorns, so here you go :)

 

                           

Do you believe in Unicorns?