Kids Cooking Thursday: Speculaas Fruit Scrolls

This is a recipe I modified from a Hot Cross Bun recipe I tried a few years back. I wanted something spicy and fruity, but with a bit of a twist (har har) so we used dutch biscuit spices, and made a jam scroll-y type thing.

Speculaas Fruit Scrolls
4 cups good quality plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups lukewarm milk
15g dried yeast (I used 2x 8g sachets)
1/4 cup sugar
2 1/2 tsps speculaas spices (recipe follows, for those who aren't lucky enough to get it sent from Holland ready made)
60g soft butter
1 egg
1/2 cup sultanas
1/2 cup craisins
1/2 cup chopped dried apricots
approx 1/2 cup jam (we used the last of our Strawberry, Blueberry & cranberry conserve)

Put yeast in bowl with the milk and 1 teaspoon sugar. Leave for 10-15 mins until it starts to froth.
Sift flour, salt, spice into bowl and add sugar. Rub in butter and add egg, milk and yeast mixture and fruit. Knead for at least 10 minutes or until elastic.
If the dough is sticky you may have to add a little more flour.

Place into a greased bowl, cover with glad wrap and leave in a warm spot until double in size. (No point giving times, with it being Summer over here and all, my kitchen is way hot).
Punch down to original size and knead lightly until smooth. Roll out into a thinnish rectangle (but no holes) and spread with jam.

Roll into a log, working from the long end. With a sharp knife, cut into slices about an inch thick, and place on a baking paper lined tray about 1 cm apart.

Cover with a tea towel and stand in a warm spot for about 15 mins or until double in size.
Place in 200 c oven for about 20 mins or until cooked.

Speculaas Kruiden(Spices)
2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground aniseed
knifepoint of pepper


If you'd like to join in with Kids Cooking Thursday please leave a permalink to your own Kids Cooking Thursday post, as per the rules.

World Bread Day: Cream Cheese Fruit Bread

Today is World Bread Day, and nothing is better than dragging out the bread machine and letting it make you some piping hot yumminess. Pity this bread wasn't really our cup of tea. Well, the boys wolfed it down, and Miss Three would have eaten hers, but it was so heavy and dense the slice broke when she tried to lift it, resulting in tears, and dried fruit mixed with vanilla yogurt. Not to worry, I ate hers. But I found that it was only the hint of cinnamon and the dried fruit that made it nice at all. Perhaps if you had fussy children that needed their dairy hidden, this would be great, but I don't see the point of the cheese except to ruin the texture of the bread. Still, it got rave reviews, so it could be just me.

Cinnamon Cranberry Cream Cheese Bread adapted from Allrecipes
1/3 cup milk
1 cup cream cheese, diced
1/4 cup margarine
1 egg
3 TBSP sugar
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups bread flour
2 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
2 tsp Dutch cinnamon
2/3 cup dried cranberries
2/3 cup diced dried apricots

Place everything into your bread machine and select Sweet loaf, Light crust. Serve hot with butter. Then head on over to Kochtopf to check out all the other yummy entries.

Don't forget to think (and cook!) pink for the Virtual Night In, raising money and awareness for Breast Cancer Research.

Kids Cooking Thursday: Cups and Saucers

Welcome all to the first interactive Kids Cooking Thursday! Hopefully by posting your links here, we'll all have more recipes to encourage our little junior chefs with.

Today we cooked two things. The first was cupcakes using our Fruit Salad Bread recipe. We were all out of cupcakes in the freezer, for afternoon teas, and I liked having these on hand for me to grab as breakfast on the run while feeding Master Three-Month-Old.

Mmm, fruity!

But I couldn't just throw up a link to an old recipe, not on our first interactive week. So we made these:

Tea cups!

I saw these over at Planning With Kids and have since seen them in a few places.

Normally, this isn't the sort of cooking I do with the kids (Pretzel Butterflies aside), as I prefer to be teaching them how to cook, and not just assemble things. But these were so cute, and we are going to a birthday party on Sunday, for afternoon tea, so I thought we could bring these along. (And we did do some actual cooking today, so I thought we could get away with it ;) )

Now here comes the fun part... Please leave your name (with what you cooked) in Mr Linky, and let's get those little chefs cooking!

Monthly Mingle - Fruit & Chocolate

August is not summer here in Australia. It's cold, and frequently wet (unless we are in the middle of a drought... again). It's not a time of year that makes me think of summer fruits, although you can always get canned of course, and watermelons are starting to show up in the stores - not that you feel like eating them when it's only twelve degrees (Celsius). But Meeta choose summer fruit & chocolate for last months theme, and since I saw the post with a week to go, I thought I'd sneak an entry in. I figure that grapes and strawberries and apricots are all summer fruits right? So if I were to get hold of dried versions, wouldn't that be an acceptable winter version? I just can't bring myself to pay import prices for, or to make summery type foods with, the fresh sort.
I was going to use the recipe post as my entry for MM, but I just couldn't make up my mind which one to use. Did I go with the chicken mole, because it's different and unique, or with the fruit and choc scones the kids made, because the fruit has more of a role to play? Or the dark chocolate berry brownies, which are my clear favourite, but most of the fruit flavour actually comes from the chocolate. All of these recipes hit my menu plan with the thought of entering one for MM. But which one? It was a difficult decision. I couldn't make the decision. So instead of posting an event notice at the bottom of one of those posts, I'm putting it here, with photos, and links back to the original posts for the recipes. Because really, when it comes to fruit and chocolate, you can never have enough right? So, following that logic, you really should also check out the round-up.

Chicken Mole


Wheely Scones


Dark Chocolate Berry Brownies

Kids Cooking Thursday: Wheely Scones

The kids have been asking to make 'wheely scones' since tuesday last week, when Justine made them on Playschool. I'm not sure the kids will really eat them, but we need more afternoon teas for them in the freezer and I thought if I let them cook it, they'll stop asking.

You'll need:
scone dough
sultanas
chopped dried apricots
choc chips
a lot of patience

Roll the dough out into a rectangle. We split the dough in half and made two rectangles, ensuring no fighting over sultana placement. Scatter your toppings across the dough. Starting from a long end, roll up like a swiss roll. Slice into desired thickness and bake at 190°C for 15 minutes or until risen and golden.

I'm not a big scone fan, but the fruit stopped these from being too dry and tasteless. All the same, the kids are in no danger of me trying to pinch these off them. Maybe if I liked scones. I'm just weird like that. I don't like muffins either.

Now, throwing this one open for comments from the peanut gallery (now that's an odd phrase really, I wonder where, apart from my dad, does it originally come from?): if I were to whack a Mr Linky on the end of my KCT post next week, would anyone join in with me?

Kids Cooking Thursday: Fruit Salad Bread

This week for Kids Cooking Thursday, we made something for breakfasts. Since the first thing I do of a morning is feed Master 2-Month-Old a bottle, I don't generally get time for a sit down breakfast. In fact, I usually don't even get to drink a coffee until he's finished, which can be up to an hour later. So if I want breakfast, I have to be able to grab it and eat it, in the time it takes for the kettle to boil, and then hot water to heat the bottle. (about 3 minutes all up) Hence the cupcake sized bread. That, and I only had one loaf pan.

This recipe lovingly stolen from Cookie Baker Lynn. You can check out her original recipe at that link, the recipe below reflects how we cooked it.

Fruit Salad Bread

4 cups all-purpose flour
1-3/4 cups sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1-1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 eggs
1 Tbsp grated lemon zest
1-1/2 cups fruit juice (I used Apple & Mango with a Hint of Lemon Myrtle)
3 cups mixed chopped fruit* (We used 3/4 punnet strawberries, 3/4 of an apple, 1/2 a banana, and 225g dried apricots.

Preheat oven to 180°C. Grease 2- 9 x 5 inch loaf pans (or one, and put out 20 patty pan cases into muffin tins). Realise you have no baking paper, so you can't cut pieces of parchment paper to fit in the bottom and up the sides of the pans, or put the parchment paper in the pans and grease. Or you could read the recipe properly before committing to cook it, and buy paper, then you could actually do that step. I didn't.

Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl; rub in butter with fingertips until mixture resembles coarse meal.

In a medium bowl, toss the fruit with 1/4 cup of the flour mixture.

Combine eggs and juice in a large mixing bowl. Add the flour mixture, stirring well. Gently fold in the fruit.

Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan, and the rest into the paper cases. Bake in preheated oven for 1 hour and 10 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean. For cupcake/muffin sized, that's about 20 minutes. Cool in pans 10 minutes; remove the bread from pans, peel off the parchment paper, and let cool on wire racks. Leave the paper on if you have cupcake sized, it'll help keep them moist for longer.

* Note on fruit- If you're using leftover fruit that's very juicy, put it in a sieve to drain off the excess juice. You could use that juice, combined with confectioner's sugar to make a glaze for the warm bread.

Yield: 2 loaves

This was a little more detailed than most of our Thursday recipes, but the kids took it in their stride. Above you see Miss Two setting out the patty cases. Our mix was fairly stiff, it was more of a blob operation, than a case of pouring the batter. I really recommend the Native Blend juice we used, it gave a lovely lemony, limey, mango taste to the bread, and the most divine smell to the uncooked batter. The Apple, Strawberry and Rosella Flower flavour would have worked equally well I think. Perhaps we should make another batch to see. :)

This was an entry for August MBP: Fruit Fare, hosted by My Diverse Kitchen. Monthly Blog Patrol was dreamt up by Coffee @ The Spice Cafe.
***The Round-up is here***