Kids Cooking Thursday: Birthday Racing Muffins

Yogurt, Berry & White Chocolate Muffins (adapted from Best Recipes)
1½ cups wholemeal self-raising flour
½ cup caster sugar
40g butter, melted
2 eggs, beaten lightly
1 cup low-fat strawberry yogurt
1 cup frozen mixed berries
140g white eating chocolate, chopped coarsely

Preheat oven to 180°C/160°C fan-forced. Line muffin tray with paper cases.
Combine flour and sugar in large bowl.
Add remaining ingredients and mix batter until just combined.

Evenly fill muffin holes. Bake about 30 minutes.
Muffins need to cool completely before icing.

Make cars by "gluing" Smarties or M&Ms on a fun size Milky Way bar with melted chocolate. Very gently carve a small hole in the top of the bar and insert a Tiny Teddy biscuit.

You could also use Hershey's Kissables inserted into the sides as wheels, but they have a tendency to cause more severe structural damage to the chocolate. These also make a great party treat just by themselves.

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.

Pernese Bubbly Pies

Those over run juices? Best bit!

This recipe is taken from the "Dragonlover's Guide to Pern", written by Jody Lynn Nye with Anne McCaffrey. For a verbatim recipe try The Sninge's Lair. I'm going to paraphrase, and add the few tiny, little changes I made. And fill you in on the lazy bones way I did it all. (Warning: Epic length, sugar fuelled post!)

Pastry
1/2 cup butter
2 tbsp sugar
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup ice water

Cut the butter into chunks. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl. Work the butter gently into the dry mixture with a fork until pieces the size of peas form. Sprinkle the water over and work it in. (Do not overwork the dough.) Form the dough into a ball.
You can make the dough in a food processor right up to the water step. Then you really are better off going by hand, or at least be more paranoid and stop more often than me, because I did the whole thing in the food processor, and somewhere between dough coming together and just right, I waited too long, and ended up with tough dough. This pastry was nothing special though, so I'm sure you could use a combination of shortcrust or puff pastries or even just your preferred sweet pie pastry.

Filling:
5 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen)
2 1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 tbsp citrus juice (I used an Orange, Mango & Pineapple Nudie, because that's what I had)
1-2 tbsp butter or margarine (I forgot this)
Gently toss berries with sugar and cinnamon in a large bowl. Sprinkle citrus juice over mixture. Spoon berries into crust and dot with butter. Or take your frozen berries in their neat little resealable bag, tip the sugar, spice and juice in, and shake it all through. (Close the bag first!) If you are making the big pies as listed via the link, then I would use the butter. If making the little ones though, I'd skip it, because I didn't notice the loss, and it might interfere with setting of the awesome leakage toffee. ***Edit to note*** Somehow I got my sugar wrong, and added 2 1/2 cups instead of one. I've fixed that here, but just be aware that if you use the original recipe, you probably won't get the toffee awesome-ness I've described

For Twelve Gather-Pies
1 crust recipe
1/2 filling recipe

Divide dough evenly into 24 parts. I did that by making a large flat disc, dividing into 8, then rolling each triangle into a log, and cutting that into 3. Then I rolled each log piece into a ball. Put a piece of baking paper on a flat tray, cookie sheet, whatever. This is really important. Do NOT skip the paper. I added this in because I always bake everything on paper, because I'm lazy and don't like scrubbing trays. And it's a good thing too. Because these suckers are going to boil over, leaky sticky juices everywhere. And you are going to want to catch all that, and not only are you not going to want to clean it up, you are going to want to eat it. Every tooth achingly sweet tiny crumb. Berry toffee. How can you go wrong? And best of all, it comes 'free' with your pies!
Anyway, I was saying, paper your tray, then flatten 12 of your pastry balls and place them on the tray. Top each with about 1 tbsp of berry mix. Flatten the other 12, and cover the berries, picking up each pastry and making sure the edges are folded over and squooshed nice to fit. You can glaze these with 1/4 cup of water and 1 1/2 tbsp sugar if you like. I didn't, but in future I might use a bit of an egg wash. I got a lovely golden colour, but if they had golden'ed up a little earlier, my pastry may have behaved nicer. Stab the top of your pie 3 or 4 times, or you can more politely cut 3 or 4 small slits in the tops of your pies. Either way works, providing you don't stab through the bottom piece of pastry. Not that I did that. I'm just saying.
Bake at 200°C for 20-25 minutes, until crust is golden. Then walk the fine line between "serve hot" and "don't burn yourself on that molten toffee, ah shards these things are hot, oh the pain, the agony" because if you have to go to the emergancy room, your pies will be cold by the time you get home, and while that means you can get straight into that wonderful, wonderful toffee/leaked sugary goodness/mess on the tray, the pies are nicer while hot. At least small-children-bath-water-hot at any rate. Again, not that this happened to us, not with the speed my kids eat we were lucky to have them warmer than tepid, but I'd hate for it to happen to you. After all, sugar at high temps makes toffee, and that's one of the worst kitchen burns to get, right up there with oil or bacon fat (darn bacon, how can you be so good, yet so evil?).

Sorry, I think I got a little off track today. Must be all the sugar. Or not. They haven't really proved that have they? Somewhere I read today (no I can't remember where) that children in sugar-filled situations like birthday parties tend to get hyped no matter what they eat. Well, to you scientists, I say, what about a 19 year old who downs 32 of those little prepackaged teaspoon serves of sugar that you get in cafes, in one hour, and then is buzzing all night like a bad speed rush hmm? Except that I never took speed, but my friends and I regularly used to down "sugar shots" as we called them, to the point that the cafe we used to hang out at had to stop putting sugar on the tables, and only have them at the counter next to the registar.

Oh, right, the pies. Sorry.

Master Four ate two, as well as half a Turkish Delight that his father bought for him to have (as) with his dessert, and a third of my Double Dipped Cherry Ripe. (Nice concept, but I have to say, if they stuck with the regular 45% choc instead of switching up to the 70% I'd have liked it better. I don't like my dark choc super strong) Miss Two ate the other half of Turkish Deligh, a 1/3 of the Cherry Ripe, and the filling from one pie. She then ate a little of the pastry, and procedded to poke dints in the rest of it with her fingers until bedtime.

I had three. Plus all the toffee I could flake off the paper without tearing up the leftover pies.

This was going to be an entry for Novel Food #5, but in a moment of absentmindedness, I rearranged my menu plan calendar and put these in a week past the deadline! But go check out the round ups anyway, over at Champaign Taste and briciole.

Triple Choc Berry Brownies

I have the most kickass brownies recipe in the world. It gets better the longer you leave it, which is great incentive not to eat the whole batch all at once,(though if you taste them still warm and squishy fresh from the oven (ok, half an hour cooled, so you don't burn yourself on the chocolate bits) you'll find it hard to believe they get better.) and it's so easy to change the recipe around to make different flavours. These are the fudgey sort of brownies, but they are cakey enough to satisfy my sister who loves her own very dry, crumbly, cakey brownies. I modify the recipe almost every time I make it, to change flavours, and take advantage of new things I've found in the supermarket - who ever knew they made dried strawberries? Here is the recipe as the kids and I made them today, so you don't have to go flipping between this page and the original recipe. Sorry I have no cute kids cooking photos, but I couldn't really stop in the middle for fear of ingredients disappearing into little mouths!

185g (6 oz) butter
185g (6 oz) mixed berry flavoured dark chocolate, chopped
3 eggs
1 1/4 cups caster sugar
1 tbsp vanilla
2/3 cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
3/4 cup dried strawberries, roughly chopped
1/2 cup milk chocolate drops or roughly chopped
1/2 cup choc coated sultanas

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Place butter and dark chocolate in a
metal bowl over a pot of simmering water and stir until smooth.
Allow to cool. Place the eggs and sugar in a bowl and beat with a electric
mixer (or wire whisk) until light and creamy. Add vanilla. Fold through chocolate and butter mixture. Sift the flour and cocoa over the mixture and mix to combine.
Add strawberries, sultanas, and chocolate and pour into a 23 cm(9 inch) square pan that has been lined with cooking paper and sprayed with cooking spray.
Bake for 35-40 mins or until set. Check with a knife. Allow to cool and then cut into squares. Chill overnight or for two days for best results.

Dried strawberries = nice touch. I've sent a boxful (the pictured boxful actually) to my parents place tomorrow with one of my sisters, so I will see what the reaction was when I get my container back. I have a smaller box to take with us to DP's parents (less chocolate eating people there) and an even smaller box here for us to eat (like I need the extra chocolate!) and I really liked them warm, but I'll see how these "age".

Mixed Berry Mudcake

Adapted from the August/September 2001 issue of Super Food Ideas.

Mixed Berry Mudcake
250g butter
250g Nestle Club Mixed Berry flavoured chocolate
2 tbsp instant coffee
1 1/2 cups SR flour
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 3/4 cups sugar
4 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 tbsp Galliano
Chocolate Sour Cream Icing
60g dark choc
a knob of butter (I think it would have been about 10g?)
1/4 cup sour cream
blueberries, or other berries to garnish

Melt butter, chocolate and coffee in a saucepan over low heat, stirring until smooth. Remove from heat. Sift the flours, cocoa and soda into a large bowl and stir in the sugar. Make a well in the centre and then pour in combined eggs, milk and Galliano. Gradually incorporate the dry ingredients, and then blend in the chocolate mixture. Pour into a greased and base-lined 22cm deep round cake tin.

Bake at 160°C for 1 - 1 1/4 hours, or until cooked when tested with a skewer. It may look slightly wet, but remove from oven unless the centre looks raw.

To make the icing melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl. Microwave or over hot water, I'll leave that up to you. I added some icing sugar because my 70% dark chocolate was very bitter. I don't know how much, maybe 1/4 cup? Once you add the sour cream the icing will start to set so be ready to work quick. Spread across the top of the cake and garnish with berries.

Now, I had some real issues with this cake. Most likely because I only have one round cake tin. I think it is 22cm, but it was nowhere near deep enough. The batter filled the tin, leaving no room to rise. Perhaps I should have called this volcano cake, because it sure erupted in my oven! Even after it had done dripping everywhere, I had trouble getting it to cook in the centre. The top had formed a thick crunchy crust, but the middle underneath was still raw, even after 1 3/4 hours. I ended up breaking that up, flipping the pieces over so the raw side would cook, and upping the temperature to 180°C for another 15 minutes.

Broken disaster cake

Hopefully you'll have a bigger cake tin, and maybe a fan forced oven, and won't have all those problems. I'm pretty sure I can just slice the ragged edges off and ice the bottom though. I'll leave it in the fridge overnight, wrapped in gladwrap, and ice before taking it to my sister's birthday tomorrow.

The bottom isn't so bad

Normally I wouldn't tell you to buy or use a specific product by brand, but the Mixed Berry flavoured dark chocolate is so tasty, and no one else makes it. I had so much success using it in brownies that I had to give it a go in this cake. The original recipe just called for dark chocolate, and added glace cherries just before adding to the tin, to make Cherry Mud Cake (also using Frangelico instead of Galliano) but I'm not as big a cherry fan as I am of berries.

***I took this to the party and it went over a treat! My brother even told me that was how to make Black Forest Cake - and here I thought that was made with cherries! ;) So it was worth the hassles in the end. It tasted great too! I forgot to take a photo of the finished cake, but one of my sisters did, so I'll add that up when she emails it to me***

Sugar High Friday: Straw/Blue Berry Turnovers

Straw/Blue Berry Turnovers (served with double choc ice cream)

I didn't follow a recipe for this, just made it up as I went along, so some of the measurements aren't exact. You'll need two thawed sheets of puff pastry. Well, I wanted 8 pastries, to serve 4 people, but you can adjust this as needed. Slice the pastry into square quarters, but leave on the blue plastic for easier handling.

I found it easier to score a line about 1cm in from the edge, all the way around the whole sheet, to show where my 'seam allowance' (to borrow a sewing phrase) was, and to lightly score a line down the diagonal centre of each quarter piece, to show the fold line. That way I had a neat triangle shown for where the filling went, making the next step heaps easier.

Get some Strawberry Philly with Fruit, and with a knife or the back of a spoon, smear a liberal layer inside the triangle area. Don't go into the 'seam allowance' or the pastry won't seal properly and you'll get a mess during baking. Then top generously with frozen blueberries. Fresh if you can get them I guess, but I'm not paying $7 for a 200g punnet.

Take one corner of the pastry square and fold it over, creating a triangle, and seal the edges with a fork. Bake at 180°C for around 15mins or until golden. Be thankful you don't have to sit in front of the oven holding the gas knob for the whole time to keep your oven lit like I had to tonight. Then take out, and serve hot with ice cream. Chocolate works well, or you could use a berry flavour, to really get that berry overload happening for ya.

Ready for baking

This has been an entry for Sugar High Friday #45: Berries! hosted this month by Susan at Food Blogga.

Sugar High Fridays was dreamed up by Jennifer at The Domestic Goddess

***Round up is here***

Super Triple Choc Berry Brownies

Based on the recipe used here, I thought I'd give Jazzie's brownies another go. I was planning on doing these yesterday, so they'd be perfect to eat tomorrow, but since I didn't get to buy chocolate, I guess I'll have to make do with having them to eat on Mother's Day.

Differences: instead of using 185g of dark chocolate melted in, I used 80g of Cadbury's Desserts - Tiramisu flavour, a block we tried but no one liked much on it's own, and 40g each of two new flavours I saw at the shop, both dark: Old Gold with Raspberry (mmm, crunchy bits!) and Nestle Club Mixed Berry (mmm, berries!). Then when it came to adding in the chopped up chunks of chocolate, I used another 20g of the Tiramisu, plus what was left of the two blocks of dark chocolate. That didn't quite make up to the amount required, so I added some choc coated sultanas as well.

Fresh from the oven

After sitting for a few hours, some of the chocolate was still molten. I expect a few hours (ie, overnight) in the fridge will sort them, but I don't expect these to really hit their stride until Sunday - if I can get them to last that long.

The Nestle Club Mixed Berry is a really good block of chocolate, and no, they don't pay me to say that. (But hey, Nestle, if you want to pay me to try out and review your new chocolate flavours, I'd be more than glad to! Cadbury, that goes for you too! lol) It made such an awesome smell while these were baking. Although I think I'll go back to the standard format of melted dark choc, and chopped milk choc, trying a different substitute for the white choc next time (DP doesn't like white choc) I'll probably use the mixed berry choc for the melting again.

Initial still warm taste test: A little chewier than I remembered, but it was a crust piece. Tiramisu chocolate didn't take terribly well to being cooked, went a little crunchy/crumbly/chewy. Good thing I didn't use a lot of it. The berry chocolate was still gooey almost five hours after being taken out of the oven, but as I said, the fridge will fix that.

Mixed Berry Smoothies

With a forecasted top of 40°C today, I was glad it was fish and chips for dinner, especially as yesterday I well and truly overdid it with the making of soup, rolls, ice cream and cake. But yesterday was only 38°C.

Not that I had fish though, and DP thought it was too hot to eat anything salty... in fact he must think it is still too hot to eat anything, even though the cool change has come in (now).

But at the time I finished dinner, it was still 38°C. And I thought it was the perfect time to try a Mixed Berry Smoothie, as blogged by Shyamala, over at Food, In The Main... This is a fairly old recipe of hers, so click here for the pertinent post, or click on my ever so arty pic above. Her recipe was as follows:

Mixed Berry Smoothie:
1-1/2 cups mixed berries (she used strawberries, raspberries and frozen blueberries)
3 scoops low-fat vanilla icecream
2 cups milk
1 cup yogurt
a few ice cubes
Sugar to taste

Method:
Blitz all the ingredients (minus the sugar) in a blender. Taste for sweetness and add sugar as required. Blend again. Serve cold in big glasses.

Now, I didn't change much, but I feel to be honest, I should share the changes I made. I used frozen blueberries and frozen raspberries. I had no strawberries, as it's impossible to keep them in my house with Miss Two around... she can sniff them out of fridge at 5 metres away, and then she won't stop pestering till she can eat them! I also had no low-fat vanilla ice cream. I have vanilla bean ice cream I made yesterday, but that is far too good to go in a smoothie, no matter how good the smoothie! But I did have some moderately low fat strawberry ice cream that I made back in January, that was a little on the undersweet side, so we haven't been eating it. I also used wildberry flavoured yogurt, because I couldn't find a big enough single plain or vanilla when I did the shopping. Oh yeah, I didn't use ice either, because all my fruit was frozen. And I used a couple of drizzles of honey instead of sugar to sweeten.

Still, it turned out this lovely bright purple colour, and once again I find myself lamenting the lack of a real digital camera, as opposed to the dodgy one on my phone, or the 7yo one we have with no connecting to computer abilities (anymore). You really can't tell the beautiful colour this was from these photos.

Wish you could see the real colour this was

This was an entry for March's Monthly Blog Patrol, hosted by Sig at Live To Eat and originally thought up by Coffee at The Spice Cafe