Sticky Steps » Baked

Gingerbread Men (and Women) recipe

Thi — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:14:38 +0000

Gingerbread People

Getting into the Christmas spirit I decided to make gingerbread men (and women) for my family. I know, Gingerbread is not so fashionable these days but I love those classic treats. Yes, I am a fan of carrot cake, rum balls and trifles.

So after seeing Margaret Fulton’s Christmas recipe I could not resist. A little bit of an overkill but I made two batches and around 35 ginger bread men and women (each with a custom name). It was very simple and incredibly fun.

The recipe (summarised) is as follows:

Ingredients
1/4 cup golden syrup
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
125 g unsalted butter, chopped
1 large egg, lightly beaten
2 1/4 cups plain flour, sifted
Icing Pen to decorate (You can get these at Coles or Woolies)

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Combine golden s yrup, sugar and spices (over the a pot of simmering water). When the sugar has dissolved, add the bicarbonate of soda. Then remove from heat.

Mix the butter and the syrup mixture together. Stir until the mixture is smooth and let it cool.

Mix the egg and with 1 cup of flour. Then add the remaining flour and knead with your heads. Once the dough is soft and smooth divide it into two. Chill for 30 mins to let it firm up.

Once the dough is chilled, re-knead it. Then roll the portion of dough so it is 5mm thick. Cut the gingerbread using the cutters.

Bake for 10-15 minutes and cool on racks. Then decorate as you please. For the proper recipe, grab a copy of Margaret Fulton’s Christmas book.

Gingerbread people down, 18 more days to Christmas, 5 more presents to buy and 3 kilos of predicted weight gain!

Written by Thi.

The very best gooey, fudge, mud chocolate brownies and recipe!

Rob — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:43:00 +0000

While busy exploring Twitter this week, I developed an instant obsession with photos of Quay’s 8 texture chocolate cake that adorned Reemski’s profile page (and check out her blog at http://www.tummyrumble.net/). The gooey, soft chocolate layers quickly prompted me to dig out my own chocolate brownie recipe that I had adapted from Nigel Slater’s “Very Good Chocolate Brownies” recipe. Here’s a teaser of the end result.

The ingredients required are:

300g brown caster sugar
250g softened butter
250g of the best chocolate you can get (darker is better and aim for ~70% cocoa solids)
3 large eggs plus the yolk of another egg
100g plain flour (Nigel uses 60g)
60g of good cocoa powder
1tspn baking powder
Optional: Pecan, macadamia or walnuts

The steps involved are simple:
1) Preheat the oven to 180C

2) Line a large baking tin (23cm) with baking paper

3) Cream the sugar and butter with a mixer until white and fluffy

4) Melt 200g of the chocolate and chop the remaining 50g into small pieces or “gravel” put this aside.

5) Lightly beat the egg mixture and introduce to the creamed sugar/butter slowly with the beater running slowly until combined.

6) Pour in the molten chocolate and fold with a spoon. Add in the chopped chocolate bits.

7) Sift in the dry ingredients and fold in with spoon gently as to not knock any air out.

Now pour it gently into the baking tin and bake for about 30-35mins. It is ready when you stick a fork in and it comes out a bit sticky but without any raw batter. It will be soft and solidifies a bit when it cools so don’t panick if they seem squishy.

I enjoy these best warm at the bottom of a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Yum!

What makes a perfect muffin?

Rob — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:37:00 +0000

What makes a good muffin? To me it needs to be warm, moist and wholesome. If you have tried a fresh baked muffin from Steel Espresso in the mornings you will know exactly what I mean! Not only do the staff get creative with the daily flavours but their muffins are consistently moist with a crisp “muffin-top” that makes a die-hard foodie like myself extremely jealous!

Well, that jealousy and my obsessive curiosity got the better of me and I attempted to re-create the perfect muffin at home (although it wasn’t perfect – more on this later).

The recipe I used is Kim’s Moist Muffins from Best Recipes (yes it was a risk).

Ingredients
220g self-raising flour (I don’t have scaled so used 1 7/8 cups)
½ cup veg oil
¾ cup milk
½ to ¾ cup caster sugar (depends on your flavour i.e. sweeter flavours will require less sugar)
1 egg lightly beaten
1 tspn vanilla extract
150g of flavour of choice. Common picks are blueberry, white choc & raspberry, choc chip, pinapple & passionfruit pulp or a carrot one which I made using grated carrot, 2tspn cinnamon, 2tspn nutmeg, sultanas, walnuts and shredded coconut.

Method
Preheat oven @ 180C
Mix the dry and wet ingredients in two separate bowls.
Add the wet ingredients into a well in the dry ingredients.
Add the flavours
Mix but don’t overmix! Mixing wet ingredients with flour causes the gluten strands to form and overmixing will give you a very tough muffin. Mix it in big whirls until the flour just disappears and don’t be scared of lumps.

Bake for 15-20mins until lightly browned

Well the photo certainly looked great but how did it taste? Unfortunately it wasn’t quite sweet enough (I used 2/3 cup – will go for the full ¾ cup next time) and texturally it didn’t live up to my Steel Espresso muffin benchmark (slightly drier and didn’t have that springy, fleshy cake like texture).

So it’s back to the drawing boards for me. If you have a great muffin recipe please, please share it with me!