Fruit Cake

Yippee! It's that time of year again for rich colourful fruit cakes, brandy-soaked puddings, and yummy eggnog drenched in alcohol!
One of our X'mas creations is this yummy fruit cake covered in nuts.
The gorgeous reds and greens definitely put us in the mood to be jolly!

Our Baker's Tip: Here's my twist on the traditional fruitcake. Top a lemon-flavoured butter cake with honey, mixed fruits and almonds and you've got something new for the festive season.

Pineapple Cake

Nothing fancy about this recipe - just a modest, unfussy pineapple upside-down cake. Traditional in its simplicity, yet extremely satisfying.
Loved it.

Our Baker's Tip: A quick fuss-free recipe. Mine's a little plain but there's lots you can do to decorate this - use walnuts, glaced cherries, macadamia nuts and dried apricots.

Lemon cream cake

Our thoughtful baker used low-fat milk in this recipe and lemons cos she, too, can tell that I'm losing something fast - my waistline!
Anyway, although our perfectionist baker wasn't too pleased with her own creation, picking on the texture of the lemon cream, I found it pretty yummy and appetising. Four others who tried it agreed with me!

Our Baker's Tip: Who says butter cakes have to be boring? Slice the cake in half, fill with lots of lemon curd, slap lemon butter cream on top and jazz it up with lemon slices and you've got a brand-new cake!

Chocolate Walnut Cake

Check out our fudgey yummy gorgeous chocolate walnut cake! We're mighty proud of it cos the aroma of the chocolate was absolutely heavenly, it was jammed pack with fresh walnuts, and the cake was dense and sweet.
Yikes, there goes my DIE-T!

Our Baker's Tip: This chocolate ganache (ie. the cake topping) was a little of an experiment, combining a recipe for icing and a recipe for frosting. It's just cream, bittersweet chocolate and icing sugar!

Peaacchy!

Fruit pastries are the best way to satisfy our craving for something sweet without going over the edge. Not too rich, not to sweet, yet not too tangy.
We didn't feel a tad guilty having this right after dinner!

Our Baker's Tip: A simple twist to a simple butter cake - arrange peach slices just before the cake is fully baked, and then scatter a mixture of brown sugar, cinnamon and ginger on top and you get a lovely caramelised texture.

Bittersweet Chocolate Cake

We're in love with a chocolate-coffee combination, so this recipe was right up our alley. Our mocha cake smelt heavenly out of the oven, and was rich, moist and soft.
We preferred ours more bitter and less sweet, so instead of chocolate, we were piling on the coffee powder!

Our Baker's Tip: To make it even more bittersweet, you can use espresso powder instead of instant coffee powder (which I used) to give a more bitter taste.

Chocolate Ginger Cake

We've been baking mostly brownies and cookies lately, so thought we'd go back to basics and bake a real good old fashioned chocolate cake.
Our chocolate ginger cake turned out nice and moist. The bits of crystalised ginger also gave it some extra ooommpph!

Our Baker's Tip: Instead of ground ginger, you can actually finely chop up a ginger root (skin it first, of course) to get a richer ginger flavour.

Cookies!

After a two-week hiatus, our happy baker is back! And boy, is she back with a vengeance - making up for lost time with a MotherLoad of cookies in one day!
The first tray out of the oven contained crunchy rich chocolate peanut butter cookies.
Comfort food that will take away all your blues.

Our Baker's Tip: If you want extra crunch, toast the chopped peanuts on an aluminium-lined tray in the oven for about 5 to 10 mins before putting them in the batter. Alternatively, you can use chopped up honey-roasted peanuts for a little caramel sweetness.


The second tray out of the oven - yummilicious chocolate almond cookies, which has both dark and white chocolate, plus plenty of crunchy almond slivers.

Our Baker's Tip: It's amazing how rich and fragrant unsweetened cocoa powder can be, especially if you're using a good brand like Hershey's - which is what I used here. But it's good news for chocolate lovers all round!


The third and final tray out of the oven was a tangy zingy citrus delight - our favourite orange cookies. Definitely a nice break from all the rich chocolate and nutty stuff.

Our Baker's Tip: Fresh oranges are such versatile building blocks. From bars and brownies to cakes and the simple, unfussy orange cookie. The tiny candied citron pieces as decoration add a little zing.

Double dose of goodness!

Half the fun in baking is exploring. The other half is opening the oven and being greeted by the scent of heaven.
We had double the dose of fun today.
When you combine sugar and spice, you really do get all things nice (corny! heh). Yup, our cinnamon walnut brownies were a real treat.

Our Baker's tip: Cinnamon in anything just smells heavenly. So go ahead and double the amount of ground cinammon needed. For an added twist, try ground ginger or ground all-spice.


And our brownie oat chewies turned out quite a wonderful surprise as well.
They may not be the prettiest of creations, but they were definitely big on taste.
Our cookies were drizzled with delicious chocolate, and the oats made them soft and chewy - just the way we like it.

Our Baker's tip: To add a little more crunch to these, you can vary the recipe by adding raisins, dried citron peel or chopped nuts.

Cookie monsters r us

It's a good day - Two successful yummy cookies emerging from our oven in a single day.
Our double peanut cookies turned out crunchy and not too crumbly. The added dash of chopped peanuts also gave them a bonus ooomph!
Bakers are definitely happy people, we're convinced of that!

Our Baker's Tip: When baking with peanut butter, always use creamy peanut butter. It's easier to cream and won't spatter all over you. For the crunchy nuttiness, add chopped peanuts.


We're back with our "green" recipes!
We bought way too many oranges for our zesty orange cake and orange marble cake last week that right now, the fridge is still overflowing with vitamin C.
Can't possibly let those fresh oranges go to waste, can we? So what do we do?
Bake some orange chocolate chip cookies, of course!

Our Baker's tip: I'm partial to a chocolate-orange combination but for a vanilla twist, you can substitute the dark chocolate chips with white chocolate chips instead.

Apple Cranberry Almond delight!

We were a bit apprehensive when we first saw this recipe.
Kinda ambitious trying to pack so much into one cake, don't you think? But we were mighty pleased with what emerged from the oven.
The fragrance of the apples and cranberries was heavenly, and the flavours blended and complemented each other really well.
Bonus - this cake is chock-a-block with antioxidants!

Our Baker's tip: Be generous with the dried cranberries here. These soury bites help to give a certain pizzazz and a lot of colour to the tart apples.

Choc Chip Cookies

Enough of fancy-nancy-schmanzy recipes for us.
We thought we'd go back to basics and bake some good ol'fashioned familiar comfort food - chewy chocolate chip cookies.
Good on the tastebuds, great for the soul.

Our Baker's Tip: If you like these cookies chewy like I do, don't overbake them but remove them from the tray the minute they're out of the oven while they're still a little soft.

Sweet and sour squares

Cross an old fashioned chocolate brownie with a tangy orange sponge cake and what do you get? Chocolate orange squares! (duh!)
This creation basically sprung up from all the left-over ingredients we had from our past few baking projects, and it turned out pretty ok.
That's what we call "recycling". Cakes can be "green" too!

Our Baker's tip: I'm such a fan of these marbled cakes now that I know how easy it is to do. For this one, divide the dough in half and dollop one half checkerboard-style on the pan. Add cocoa to the other half and fill in the gaps. Then swirl your spoon all over the mixture in fancy patterns.

Thumbs Up for cookies!

The recipe book called these Thumbprint cookies because you're basically supposed to use your thumb to dent the cookie's middle, before filling it with jam.
But because we jammed them full of nuts and raspberry sweetness, we prefer to name them Jammy Nut Cookies!

Our Baker's tip: The fun part about these cookies is you can fill in any type of jam you like. I used raspberry, but you can also try marmalade, blackcurrant or strawberry.

A dose of Peel Fresh

Feeling Fresh and Fruity, so we got busy in the kitchen today with our excess storage of tangy oranges in the fridge, and came up with some zesty orange squares.
We used double the dose of fresh orange peel than what the recipe called for to add some extra flavour and kick.

Our Baker's tip: The recipe calls for store-bought orange juice but for a more fragrant orangey smell, use freshly squeezed oranges instead.

We're going Bananas!

We've been hit by the Brownie Bug lately.
What to do? The last one was so satisfying and got such encouraging reviews from our friends that we just couldn't help ourselves.
Today, we discovered a bunch of too-ripe bananas lying around, so well, we thought we should put them to good use.
Throw in a good dollop of peanut butter and ta-da! Peanut butter banana brownies!

Our Baker's Tip: Don't know what to do with bananas which are slightly over-ripe and bruised? Turn them into brownies! Their mushiness and moistness is perfect for banana-based brownie consistency and texture.

Mocha Almond Brownies

Boring chocolate brownies? NOT!
We were in the mood for a lil something extra to perk us all up, so we thought why not throw in some good old java and nuts.
We were bouncing off the walls after a dose of mocha almond goodness!

Our Baker's Tip: I used instant coffee powder for the mocha taste. For more caffeine oomph, you can try espresso powder instead.

Square is the new Round!

It's one of those "fat" days, you know. Yet, we couldn't curb our craving for something sweet.
So we decided to try and bake without butter. Yup, you read right. Zero butter.
Add some pineapples. Throw in a handful of walnuts. Cut them up into tiny bite-sized pieces, and what do you get?
Gorgeous, yummy yet healthy pineapple walnut squares.
We like!

Our Baker's Tip: For a non-butter cake, this one remains surprisingly moist, mainly because it uses a whole can of pineapple and its juice.

What's brown and nutty?

Everyone loves brownies! Who doesn't?
Anyway, instead of the usual chocolate brownies we're all used to, we decided to give our comfort food a little extra kick by mixing in a whole lot of sinfully rich peanut butter.
We also threw in a bunch of walnuts for extra punch.
Ah well, guess we'll have to do more kicking and punching at the gym tomorrow!

Our Baker's Tip: To make the brownies look 'marbled', drop melted chocolate chips in even intervals on the surface and then use the tip of the knife to swirl the chocolate through the batter.

Hey Sour-puss!

We were in the mood for something less sweet and a little more sour and tangy today, so what better way to tickle and tantalise our tastebuds than to treat ourselves to a lemon meringue tart.
The meringue turned out soft and fluffy, though we had to keep an eagle eye on the oven!

Our baker's tip: When baking, monitor the pie every five minutes to make sure you don't overburn the meringue. Once it turns a golden brown, it's done!