Baked Mini Cheese Board

Entertaining guests this weekend? Then may I suggest this super cute and impressive looking - but also quick and easy! - starter? It's great to have ready when your guests arrive and you're (or at least I am usually) still getting the main meal ready. Something about melted cheese makes for a big crowd pleaser - am I right?

What you'll need:

• An assortment of mini cheeses (or larger cheeses if you're feeling wild)
• Pre-made puff pastry of your choice (one sheet/block should be enough for 6-7 mini cheeses)
• Honey, jams, and/or cranberry sauce
• Optional: pecans and/or walnuts
• Optional: brown sugar

What to do:

Preheat your oven according to the directions on your selected puff pastry.

Roll out the dough (particularly easy if you have pre-rolled pastry) using a rolling pin. You want to aim for a pretty thin pastry sheet here - about what you would want for a pie crust.

Once you have a flat sheet of puff pastry, place your mini cheese selections on top, leaving enough space around each cheese to wrap it up in pastry after you add the toppings. I used a sharp knife to cut the pastry dough around the cheeses.

Now comes the fun part - experimenting with toppings! You can really add whatever you have in terms of jams, honey, and nuts. As starter suggestions, here are the combinations I went with:

Strawberry jam on top of the baby brie:

Honey and pecans on the emmental cheese:

Home-made cranberry sauce on a soft cheese:

Brown sugar mixed with chopped walnuts or pecans also makes a nice topping - particularly good on brie or a similar cheese.

Once you've decorated your mini cheeses with your toppings of choice, wrap the puff pastry around the cheeses. Carefully pinch together the edges so that nothing leaks out with it's in the oven!

Place on a cookie sheet and bake according to the directions of your chosen puff pastry - about 15 minutes for mine. Remove from the oven and let cool for a minute or two before removing the cheese filled pastries from the tray onto a more aesthetically pleasing dish or tray!

I served mine with a small bowl of my homemade cranberry sauce and baby spinach garnish.

I also made a larger version of this - a giant wheel of brie and cranberry sauce - to hold back the hungry masses at Thanksgiving. It was gone in minutes...

Spinach and artichoke dip also makes for an excellent crowd-pleasing starter that you can prep ahead of time and have ready when your guests arrive (I made a large dish of this for Thanksgiving too!). I usually just look up a Spinach Artichoke Dip recipe and adapt it according to what I have on hand/my dislike of mayonnaise. For the basic idea, I've adapted both this recipe and this one in the past.

Happy pre-dinner party snacking!

Ginger Molasses Cookies

So there's this place in Athens, Georgia called Big City Bread Cafe that makes (among other things) really and truly delicious ginger molasses cookies. When I'm able to visit, I always try to stock up on a few. But since the delicious cookies live thousands of miles away from me right now, I'm trying to perfect my own recipe. This recipe makes chewy, not too sweet cookies with a little ginger kick. Yum!

What you'll need: (Makes 3 dozen cookies)

• 140g butter
• 100g light brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 180ml molasses (black treacle)
• 160g chopped crystallized ginger
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp ginger
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 270g flour (I used a GF blend)

What to do:

Preheat your oven to 170C/325F.

Add the light brown sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla together in a mixing bowl. Blend with a handheld mixer on low/medium for about a minute.

Set this wet mixture aside and roughly chop the crystallized ginger. Don't worry about being too uniform, but do aim for smallish pieces. The pieces should be not much larger than a chocolate chip morsel or M&M. (Or you could use The Ginger People's crystallized ginger chips, which are already the perfect size.) Once you've chopped the ginger, set it aside for a moment.

In a separate, smaller bowl combine the dry ingredients - the baking soda, powdered ginger, and flour. Then gradually blend this into the wet mixture. Finally, mix in the molasses. Once the molasses is thoroughly blended, fold in the crystallized ginger pieces.

Evenly space rounded spoonfuls of the cookie dough (which will be on the sticky side) onto a parchment covered cookie sheet. You can also lightly sprinkle the tops of the cookie mounds with caster sugar.

Bake for about 9 minutes and allow to cool for a couple of minutes before removing from the tray if you want the cookies to remain in one piece!

Enjoy as a warming (both inside and out!) snack on a cold January afternoon!

Are you a ginger fan? I definitely am - I always bring these ginger candies with me when I travel (ginger is supposed to help with motion sickness!).

42 Wallaby Way?

Whale shark with fish groupies

Happy Friday! In Atlanta and looking for something to do this weekend?

We went on a little daytime holidate (holiday date - see what I did there?) to the Georgia Aquarium just before New Year's. If you're ever in Atlanta, especially on a cold or rainy day, it's worth a visit. Make sure to plan time to enjoy the main tank with the whale sharks and manta rays - it was my favorite!

Goliath grouper vs boy staring contest

Looks like the Goliath Grouper is about to have a little boy snack, doesn't he? I sincerely hope the boy is making the same grumpy face back at him.

Colorful jellyfish

Blacktip reef shark in the main tank

Have you been to an aquarium lately? What about the zoo?

Cranberry Pumpkin Bread

Happy (belated) New Year everyone! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays! It's been far too long since I've posted anything here, but I've been away having family time and eating way too much - I hope that sounds familiar to some of you...

Since it's freezing almost everywhere (apparently) and I'm sure you've all been just sitting at home pondering over what to do with your leftover pumpkin and cranberries, may I suggest using this bread recipe? It's extra tasty warm.

What you'll need:

• 140g plain flour (I used a GF blend here)
• 90g caster sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• pinch of salt
• 40 g unsalted butter (room temperature)
• 120ml milk
• 2 eggs
• 200g pumpkin puree
• 300g cranberries
• 200ml orange juice

What to do for the cranberry sauce:

Rinse off the cranberries and then dump them into a saucepan with the orange juice. Bring just to a boil, then simmer until the cranberries pop. Set aside to cool while you prep the rest of the batter.

What to do for the bread:

Preheat your oven to 170C/325F.

Put the flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger in a large mix bowl and stir together.

Next blend in the milk, butter, eggs, and vanilla with a handheld mixer on low/medium.

Once the batter is well blended, gently fold in the cranberry sauce.

Lightly butter a bundt tin and pour the batter in. Level off the top with a spatula or spoon.

Bake for approximately 40 minutes, or until an inserted fork comes out clean. 

Loosen the edges of the loaf away from the tin using a spoon, and leave to cool for at least 15 minutes before attempting to remove from the bundt tin. 

Pumpkin cranberry bread morning snack, anyone?

Mini Baked Pumpkin Doughnuts

Munchkin pumpkin and Mini Baked Pumpkin Doughnuts.

Bite sized doughnuts, what? Maybe more like "two bites" sized, if we're adhering to accuracy here. Consider "bite sized" a challenge, if you will. On another tangent, yes, I did spend a considerable amount of time debating "doughnuts" vs "donuts". The Google-machine has informed me that the use of the spelling "doughnuts" predates "donuts", so that swayed me. Your baking trivia for the day!

And now, on to the more salient issue of how to make these little guys in your own home:

What you'll need:

• 125g flour (any all purpose variety, GF blends included)
• 110g caster sugar
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (you can be a bit generous with this)
• 25g unsalted butter (room temperature)
• 120ml buttermilk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• pinch of salt
• 250g pumpkin puree 

What to do:

Preheat oven to 170F/325C.

In a large bowl, combine the caster sugar, unsalted butter,vanilla extract, eggs, and buttermilk. I used a hand crank egg beater for this step, but if your electric handheld mixer has a very low setting, that would work too. It's just quite a liquid-y mixture at this stage, and anything high powered will send ingredients flying out of your mixing bowl and onto your wall. Don't ask me how I know this.

The next step is to add the pumpkin puree and keep mixing until it's delightfully orange.

Happy autumnal orange color!

In a small separate bowl, mix together the flour (I used a gluten free blend for these), baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, and pinch of salt - you can simply use a fork to do so. Then gradually add the dry mixture to the wet mixture, mixing as you go.

Once the batter has a smooth texture, you can set it aside for a moment and lightly butter the mini doughnut tin. You can, of course, use a tin that makes larger doughnuts, just remember to increase the baking time if you do so!

If you have an pastry/piping/icing bag, it will come in handy for the next step, particularly if you are actually using a mini doughnut tin. You can fashion a makeshift pastry bag from a sandwich bag or by rolling parchment paper into a funnel. Scoop the batter (it should hold together well and feel fluffy and not at all runny) into your pastry bag and pipe the batter into the doughnut rings. Fill about 2/3s of the way up.

I have no photos of the piping process because I was alone in the kitchen and maybe had doughnut batter all over my hands from an overflow incident with my parchment piping "bag". Maybe.

Pop the mini doughnut tray into the preheated oven for about 8 minutes. The doughnuts will puff up quite a bit, and an inserted fork/toothpick should come out fairly clean when you test. After cooling for about two minutes, gently loosen the doughnuts from the tray with a spoon. If they come out with little resistance, excellent! They are ready to cool on a rack or plate for another couple of minutes before eating. DO eat this warm if at all possible.

Cooling in the doughnut pan...

About to be devoured!

See? I told you these doughnuts were tiny! They are also very light and fluffy, thanks to the buttermilk. And they have an orange vegetable as the main ingredient, so you they can feel slightly superior to other fried, non-veggie containing doughnuts out there. Not that they would be smug about it.

 Doughnuts, anyone?