Peanut Butter Cookies

This post has been sitting as a draft for quite some time. We made these peanut butter cookies a few months ago when I discovered Smitten Kitchen's Peanut Butter section. It was one of the first recipes we made from her website and since then we have made many more. These cookies turned out slightly differently to how they appear on the smitten kitchen website but they were delicious and I will definitely be making these again.  

We made these as a spur of the moment cookie making on a Sunday afternoon so we didn't have any chocolate chips around and I'm not certain that peanut butter chips are even available in Australia, although they seem like an awesome idea, so we omitted both of those. Otherwise we kept the recipe exactly the same. You can find it here. 

Strawberry and Cream Cheese Tarts

I've recently been on a bit of a desert making spree. During the Easter/Anzac Day long weekend I experimented with two different types of tarts. I don't normally do deserts entirely without recipes, I normally just bend and tweek but I was feeling adventurous and I had leftover cream cheese so I just sort of winged it. 

I love the light crunch that puff pastry brings to a dish and by brushing a little sugar syrup over the puff pastry before baking the shells take on a lovely light sweetness to compliment the cheese and strawberries. These tarts are really simple to make and can be whipped up within half an hour. Making them perfect for an impromptu desert.

Makes 8

Ingredients:
2 sheets frozen puff pastry
1 tbsp white sugar
2 tbsp boiling water
250g cream cheese
12 tbsp icing sugar
3 tsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp grated lemon rind
12 strawberries

Method:
Preheat oven to 200ºC. Cut each sheet of puff pastry into four squares. Grease a muffin tray and press each piece of puff pastry into a hole. White sugar and boiling water and brush over each piece of puff pastry. Place in the oven and cook until golden.

Meanwhile place cream cheese, icing sugar, lemon juice and rind in a mix master or food processor and beat until well combined. Cut each strawberry into four.

Remove pastry casings from oven and allow to cool slightly. Add 2 tsp of cream cheese mixture in each casings. Place 6 pieces of strawberry onto and serve immediately. 

Apple Tarts with Almond and Brown Sugar

Continuing on with my desert spree from the long weekend I whipped up these tarts really quickly with what was in my fridge. They are really quick but do require a little fiddling with filo pastry. They were fantastic though especially with all sorts of apples just coming into season in Australia. I suggest you make some. You can substitute whatever pastry you want for the filo. I find the crispness of filo offsets the apples nicely.

Ingredients:

Makes 4

1 Granny Smith Apple cored and sliced

1 Pink Lady Apple cored and sliced

15 sheets Filo Pastry (Approximately)

4 Tbsp Brown Sugar

1 Tbsp slithered Almonds chopped or whizzed in the food processor

1 Tsp Cinnamon

Glaze:

2 Tbsp Brown Sugar

1 1/2 Tbsp boiling water

Method:

Preheat oven to 200ºC. Grease a muffin tray. Mix together brown sugar, cinnamon and almonds. Spread mixture between random sheets of filo pastry reserving about 1/4 of the mixture. Cut pastry into four through all layers and place into individual muffin holes making sure to push pastry gently into corners. Arrange apple slices in pastry cases making sure there is an even mix of each apple in each tart. Sprinkle remaining sugar and almond mixture over apples and bake for 30mins until apples are cooked through and pastry is light golden.

Mix glaze ingredients together. Brush over tarts and serve with ice cream. 

Mascarpone Mini Cheesecakes with Dulce De Leche

Caramel Cheese cake has been something that I've wanted to create for sometime, but I'd never quite found the right recipe. When I saw the recipe for Dulce de Leche Cheesecake Squares on Smitten Kitchen and Delicious Magazine's recipe for Mascarpone and Lemon Cheesecake in the same day I figured that it was telling me something. So took both recipes and took the bits I wanted to make caramel cheesecake awesomeness. Then I miniaturised them for bite sized awesomeness.

Ingredients:

Cheesecake adapted from Delicious Magazine.

Dulce de Leche from Smitten Kitchen.

500g Cream Cheese

1 Cup Caster Sugar

4 eggs 

1 egg yoke

400g Mascarpone 

1tsp Vanilla Essence 

Process:

1) Preheat oven to 140ºC. Place a baking tray half filled with boiling water on the lowest shelf.
2) Cream sugar and cream cheese until well combined.
3) Add eggs and egg yoke and mix.
4) Add mascarpone and vanilla essence and mix until all ingredients are well combined.
5) Spoon mixture into 1/3 Cup/80ml ramekins or similar sized cupcake liners stopping 1cm from the rim. Arrange ramekins in a large baking tray.
6) Place baking tray on the centre shelf in the oven and bake for 40mins. Remove and allow to cool fully, cheesecakes will collapse in on themselves.
7) Make the dulce de leche following the instructions on smitten kitchen.
8) Fill the hole formed in the centre of cheesecakes with dulce de leche. Place in the fridge for 4 hours or overnight.

The hardest thing about these is stopping at one.

In the Kitchen - Sourdough Bread

 

I got the Bourke Street Bakery Cookbook for christmas 2009 from my in laws and I loved it from the start. I must have been one of the only Sydney-siders who hadn't really heard of the bakery which was the origin of the book. I have since been several times and would definitely recommend it to anyone in Sydney.

Last year I started with the bread that took the least time to make, the olive oil dough, and it turned out to be a big hit. So much so that I can't count the number of times I made it over the last year. I didn't really branch out past this and the pizza dough.

Just before Christmas when I had a bit more time I decided to make my own starter following the instructions in the cookbook. It takes three weeks to get a reliable starter going but its really just a matter of feeding it flour and water everyday. I ended up with a pretty reliable starter in just under three weeks and made my first loafs of sourdough last weekend. 

My starter

This weekend I made a second batch. Making sourdough bread is not a short process, it takes three days; one to feed up your starter, one to make the dough and one to cook the loaves. That's not to say that it's particularly time intensive. It's not. It probably only takes about 1.5 hours of actual active time. What takes the most time is the proving, which the cookbook suggests you do overnight giving you fresh loaf of bread for lunch the next day. Here's the process:

 Keep 100g of your starter aside to continue to feed

Add the starter to the bowl of a mix master.

Add the flour

Pour in the water

Start to mix 

The dough beginning to form

Set aside to rise 

Turn out onto a floured surface 

Knock Back 

Knock Back

Knock Back

Set aside to rise again

Separate into three 

Roll into a dough ball and leave to stand

Spread out each ball

Fold in on itself

Roll into a loaf

Leave to rise overnight

Loaves after they have risen 

Loaves after they have risen 

 Into the oven

Loaves out of the oven 

Loaves out of the oven

Nice crisp crust and a soft crumb

We ate the first loaf with a little butter for lunch. Fresh bread is defiantly worth the effort, plus its lots of fun.