Factory shopping happiness

I was very happy to read that Compass Bakery factory shop opened a branch in Diep River recently and gave them a try for B's birthday party.

The prices were INCREDIBLE!!!
They were not only less than half what one would pay at the store they bake for, they were just plain cheap!!!

This is what I paid:
Carrot cake R22
Large chocolate cake R27
6 cake pops R15
4 savoury muffins R8
6 mini pecan pies R15
9 cupcakes R18
6 cupcakes R12

I bought a BOX of cakes and paid R297 for the lot!!

Pink Princess and Pirates birthday party

B turned 7 in August and wanted a princess party, but because she had boy cousins, decided to have a princesses and pirates birthday party so the boys could also dress up.

I was trying to keep costs down, so it wasn't too out there.
I got lovely pink plastic table cloths from the Crazy Store. At the Crazy Store I also found the most exciting item for the party - a pink princess castle pinata!! Both my girls got terribly excited when they saw it:)

For entertainment we borrowed a friend's jumping castle and brought the slide and trampoline from home, and the church garden already had a small jungle gym and swing set.

When the girls arrived I gave them each a crown and the boys got swords (that I picked for a song at Osman's - LOVE that place!)

They played for a bit and then sang Happy Birthday for B. She loved the Red Velvet cake I made for my sister's virthday and so I made her one for her birthday cake.

They then ate, played a couple of games and had their faces painted.

When they left, the boys got treasure chest party packs and monster trucks and the girls got Tangled party packs and make up kits.

My kids got hiome, had a bath and slept till almost 8am the next morning - all partied out :)

Budget Beef Wellington

A while ago I needed to feed quite a few people on not too many ingredients, and so I googled "mince recipes" and was inspired by what I saw to try to create my own version of a budget beef wellington:)

To make this you'll need:

500g minced beef

1 finely chopped onion

1 finely grated carrot (optional)

1 egg

500g puff pastry

Since I was cooking for a crowd, I doubled the recipe.

I took 1kg of minced beef, seasoned it as I would for meatballs, added a large minced onion and 2 beaten eggs to bind it. I then shaped it into 2 large loaves and placed it in the middle of a sheet of puff pastry. I then cut the pastry on either side of the loaf into strips, brushed some beaten egg on the ends and laid them criss-crossed over the loaf of mince.

I then brushed the pastry ith beaten egg and baked it at 180 degrees C for 45mins-1hr.

 It looked gorgeous, smelled amazing and the kids all had second helpings:)

Red Velvet cake

It was my sister's birthday recently and I decided to make her a Red Velvet birthday cake. The recipe comes from the awesome Ultimate Snowflake collection recipe book (which my sister gave me for my birthday, incidentally!)

I made 2 small layers with the batter and then simply topped it with whipped cream and strawberries.

I also used the recipe to make 120 cupcakes for an aunt's birthday!

Slow cooker Saucy chocolate pudding

Electricity has become horribly expensive, so I don't bake nearly as often as I used to. While I was browsing Pinterest this morning, I came across some yummy looking recipes for desserts made in the slow cooker. After reading through a few, I started to wonder if I couldn't try some of my old  faithful, favourite recipes and just cook them in the slow cooker instead,  which brings me to my newest adventure - "Slow Cooker Transformations" :)
The first experiment will be a yummy chocolate fudge pudding which I got from my trusty Snowflake Too Fresh To Flop recipe book.

I made it exactly as I normally would, except I put the batter into a greased slow cooker and cooked it for 2 hours on high.

The verdict : Delicious:)

Inspiration Sunday - 18 Aug 2013

This is something that is so close to my heart and has been my prayer for my daughter from before she was born. The deepest wish of my heart is for her to know the path God has laid out for her to follow, and to choose to walk in it.

Inspiration Sunday - 11 Aug 2013

Whenever I feel like the task is too big and feel overwhelmed, I need to remember this

Image from Kingdom First Mom via Pinterest

Inspiration Sunday - 04 August 2013

This is definitely a message I need to take with me and remember...

Image via Pinterest

Inspiration Sunday - 28 July 2013

Here's a thought to take with you through the week :)
I love Bible verses that can be applied to life so directly and unambigiuously and can almost be like a motto. Easy to remember and easy to apply to your life. This verse was made visually beautiful by Emily Burger Designs.

Menu plan (and pantry challenge!) - 8 - 14 July 2013

What a wonderful weekend! My husband and I managed to go away (just the two of us!!!) this past weekend to a little coastal town about an hour away from home.

 

We had an amazing time, but the getaway meant that my usual menu plan and shop for the week ahead fell by the wayside. What I'm going to attempt to do is make meals entirely from the contents of my freezer and pantry. My restrictions are my husbands low fat eating plan and no shopping for ingredients, only fruit, bread and milk for the week.

Here goes...

Mon: Out to dinner at a friend's home (buying babysiter supper from canteen at work and girls will have leftover pasta from yesterday)
Tues: Roast duck breast with lemon and honey (new recipe I'm going to try), served with potatoes, peas and carrots
Wed: Toad in the hole for the girls and I, Tuna salad for my husband
Thurs: Salmon fillets with balsamic vinegar and garlic (new recipe), brown rice and salad
Fri: Omelettes with cheese and tomatoes
Sat: Beef rogan josh (using ready made sauce)
Sun: Chicken tray bake (new recipe)


I'll post pics of the dishes once I've made them:)

I'll be linking up at Orgjunkie.com :)

Orgjunkie.com

Crochet hat and booties

A friend of mine recently had a baby, so I made my first baby beanie and set of booties for her little man:)

 The beanie and bootie patterns are both from the Lion Brand Yarn website.

They were both quick and easy patterns for a newbie like me. I just added a row of blue to finish the beanie and added a teddy bear applique to make it more personal.

Herby Toad in the Hole

I’ll never know why this dish is called toad in the hole. It’s a bit like American corn dogs, except, instead of the sausage being dipped and fried in batter, the batter is poured over the sausage and baked. But no matter what it’s called, this is one of my husband’s favourite meals. It feels very relaxed and pub-grubby to me, so I think it suits Saturday night suppers very well. I found this recipe on the BBC Good Food website and pinned it a while ago and actually managed to include it on my menu for the 1st week of 2013 (which you can find here if you’re interested), but I had forgotten just how social New Year’s week was, so due to lots of braais (bbqs) and parties, this ended up being actually the only thing I made off my carefully planned menu!

Due to lots of Christmas and New Year baking I had actually run out of cake flour for the batter, so I quickly substituted maize meal (corn meal)and just hoped it would turn out ok! The maize meal actually added an interesting density to the batter, and I might well use it again. My husband could smell the rosemary even while I was stripping the stalks and loved the herby aroma the dish was wafting about while it was baking :) 

This was quite a winner with my family and I decided to make it again this past Saturday, only this time I had cake flour and so was able to follow the recipe a bit more faithfully! However, I didn't have prepared mustard, so substituted a spicy mustard grind that I had instead, which was A-MAY-ZING! So below is the 2nd attempt. I used a metal cake pan this time round, and it made the edges lovely and brown and crisp.

Toad in the hole made with cake flour

Served with steamed vegetables

Creamy, low fat, extra protein mince (ground beef)

I came across a fantastic one-pot recipe that I totally love from this website. I was so surprised at how lovely and creamy the cottage cheese makes the recipe, without tasting anything like cottage cheese!
I decided to vary the recipe slightly by turning it into a type of spaghetti bolognese, with with the benefit of the creamy tatse and extra protein provided by the cottage cheese (I'm trying to up my protein and eat less carbs).

What I used:
500g mince (ground beef)
1 finely chopped onion
1 250g tub plan fat free cottage cheese
1 tin tomato puree
seasoning as desired

Brown the onion till soft
Add the mince and cook till no longer brown
Add the cottage cheese and combine

Add the tomato puree
Season as desired
Simmer for 10 mins

Serve over pasta, or as a sloppy joe filling or pop into a container to freeze for use at another time!

Christmas Eve: Slow cooker roast beef

So I know it's a while after the event, but in case there are any people who are new to using their slow cookers, here's how I used mine to make roast beed last Christmas Eve:)

 

I hadn’t used my slow cooker for literally years, but after seeing so many delicious looking recipes on Pinterest, I decided to haul it out of retirement. I knew that it is one of the more reliable methods of ensuring your meat stays tender and I didn’t want to risk drying out my meat for such a big event. I read so many recipes that I can’t remember who really inspired this one, but it was probably from www.allrecipes.com.

I first browned the beef over high heat on the stove and put it in the slow cooker. I then quartered an onion and laid it all around, along with about 6-8 halved cherry tomatoes and half a cup of red wine and cooked this on high for 4 hours. After 4 hours, I took out the meat, stuck the hand blender in the slow cooker and pureed the onion and tomatoes and poured this mixture into a saucepan on the stove. After bringing it to a boil, I added some Bisto and made a gravy. I then sliced the meat and laid it back in the slow cooker and poured over the gravy and set it on low to keep warm till my guests arrived. It tasted every bit as good as it looked! My fussy, tactile-defensive 6yo even had 3 helpings of the beef :)

Cake pops

So I was intrigued by this recipe posted by on Facebook  by Skinny Taste today, and decided to try my own version of it. I remembered that I'd bought a cake pop mould online a couple of months ago and had yet to give it a test drive, and today seemed as good a time as any:) 

 I searched online for a while looking for a recipe that suited - I wanted one with less sugar since I knew I would be coating these pops anyway. I found this one by Spark People.

For the recipe, see below. For the long version (with details of my trial and errors with my first attempt at making cake pops...keep reading!

What you're going to need is: 

INGREDIENTS: 

1-1/2 cups unbleached flour 

3/4 cup sugar or other sweetener 

1/2 tsp. Salt 

1 tsp. Baking soda 

3 tablespoons cocoa powder 

1 tsp. vanilla 

1/3 cup vegetable oil 

1 tablespoon vinegar 

1 cup cold water 

Sift the dry ingredients together. Add the wet ingredients and beat briskly with a wooden spoon till smooth.

Spoon into your cake pop mould (mine uses about a teaspoon of batter per mould) and bake. 

I adjusted the cooking time slightly from the original recipe since my cake pops are quite tiny and don't need as much cooking time as a cupcake.

I baked mine for approx 7 mins, turning the mould over halfway during the cooking time. In retrospect, the tuning them over seemed to have introduced air bubbles which made aboout a third of the batch break in half when I opened the mould. The baking time of 7 mins seemed quite perfect this time. 

The result of round 1 looked like this:

Not so pretty, but after I gave one of the broken/air bubble ones to my 2 year old, she came back 10 second later and said "Want more!", so I reckon they tasted ok :) I gave one a try myself and was very pleasantly surprised - soft, full of rich chocolate flavour but lovely and light in texture - winner!

I filled the moulds as full as they could go the second round and let them bake the full 7 mins on one side instead of turning them. After 7 mins - great! No air bubbles. However, the pops were not nearly cooked through so I put them in for another 3 mins. Still not done, so another 2 mins (now 12 mins in total).

For round 3 I filled them as before and baked for 10 mins - just right.

I let them cool then packed them away so that I could coat them the next morning. 

Now for (what I thought was ) the fun part - coating them and making them beautiful!

I  melted a large Easter bunny because that was what I had in my house! 

I dipped each pop in the chocolate and...voila!

 

A broken cake pop, imperfectly covered in chocolate. I couldn't understand it. Why was the chocolate not smooth and drippy like in the tutorials? Mine was thick and sticky. I was sooo disappointed! First I thought maybe I hadn't melted the chocolate long enough, so I turned up the heat to see if the chocolate became more melty ... no. So I searched some more and found here that you need to chill the pops for a bit before coating them, so I popped mine into the freezer for 15 mins.

Slightly better, but my internet research taught me that Easter egg chocolate isn't right for the job so it wasn't smooth and drippy like in the tutorials :(

So I chilled them some more and googled icing (frosting) coatings for cake pops...nada. So I just mixed up my own with icing sugar and milk.

I dipped the pops in them and added sprinkles... but there was no saving them! They looked CRAP.

So I tried again with the chocolate and added some sprinkles to hide the oopsies

Not great, but they'll do.

What I've learned:

1. I really, really love the internet!
2. Not all chocolate is created equal and they can't be used interchangeably.
3. Cake pops made as whole cake balls taste WAY better than crumbled cake with frosting
4. You can't make cake pops quickly - only do this if you have a few hours to devote to the task
5. They taste great regardless of how they look
6. Your kids will love them so they are totally worth it:)

Choc mint cupcakes

Happy days! During December, Checkers in Canal Walk had a promotion happening one day while I was shopping, where they gave you a free recipe book with every 2 large pouches of baking powder bought. Since I 1) LOVE freebies and 2) Love this particular author (she also wrote the Snowflake Too Fresh to Flop recipe book which I use all the time), I went ahead and bought the baking powder even though I didn't really need any at the time. Anyway, here's the book:

The first recipe that I HAD to make was choc mint cupcakes:)

  

 Recipe:

2 XL eggs
125ml cooking oil
125ml castor sugar
5ml peppermint essence
few drops green food colouring
500ml cake flour
15ml baking powder
200ml milk
2ml salt
50g grated mint chocolate

Choc glace icing

375ml icing sugar (confectioner's sugar)

30ml cocoa powder

45ml warm water

Extra grated chocolate for decorating

Whisk eggs, oil and castor sugar together until light and fluffy.

Add essence and food colouring and whisk lightly.

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together. Add to egg mixture alternately with the milk.

 

Fold in grated chocolate and mix well.

 

Spoon the mixture into paper cases, filling each two thirds full. Bake at 180 degrees celsius for 12-15 mins.

Icing: Sift icing sugar and cocoa powder together. Add warm water and beat until smooth and creamy. Ice the cooled cupcakes. Decorate with grated chocolate.