Upside-Down Toffee and Banana Cake

I usually have banana and weet-bix for breakfast, but I've discovered recently that I need a quick brekkie option for when Jnr Pink just won't cooperate and let me eat my breakfast in peace... Which means that I sometimes have a bunch of bananas left over at the end of the week.

So this is the first of a few banana-themed recipes that I have been trying... and if you ask me, I'm starting with the best one - so moist.... mmmmmm my mouth is salivating just thinking about it. Anyway, don't be fooled by the less than wonderful looking photo above, I admit it wasn't meant to look like that and when I perfect it I'll definitely put a better photo up there! But regardless of its appearance, it is unanimous - it tastes absolutely amazing!

Only takes about 15-20min to make, the most time-consuming bit is the fiddly cutting up and mashing of the bananas.

Ingredients
 - 1 cup caster sugar
 - 1 cup water
 - 1 medium banana sliced thinly
 - 2 eggs, beaten lightly
 - 2/3 cup vegetable oil
 - 3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
 - 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
 - 2/3 cup plain flour
 - 1/3 cup self-raising flour
 - 2 teaspoons mixed spice
 - 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
 - 1 cup mashed banana (about 2 medium bananas)


Method
Step 1: Preheat oven to 170degrees Celcius. Grease a deep 22cm round cake pan.

Step 2: Stir caster sugar and water in a medium saucepan over heat, without boiling, until sugar dissolves, and bring to the boil. Boil, uncovered, without stirring - about 10 minutes or until caramel in colour. Pour toffee into prepared tin, top with sliced banana.

Note: This is the bit I have yet to perfect... I've made this one twice already and can't get the toffee bit right (it was my first time working with toffee and apparently its not as simple as it seems). The first time it crystalised (below left), I think possibly because I tried to save time and was doing Step 3 while I was doing Step 2...? And the second time (below right), the toffee stayed runny so when I added the mixture to it all the beautifully placed bananas were pushed out to the edges... Hopefully third time lucky, and when I get it right, I'll update this post!

Step 3: Combine egg, oil, brown sugar and extract in medium bowl. Stir in sifted dry ingredients, then mashed banana. Pour mixture into prepared pan.

Step 4: Bake cake for 40 minutes.

Step 5: Stand cake in pan 5 minutes before turning onto a wire rack covered with baking paper; turn cake top-side up.

Step 6: Serve cake warm or at room temperature.

Buttermilk tart with lemon & berries

The perks of being at home on parental leave is that you can have visitors during the week while other chumps have to work; this week an old uni friend, Lulu brought her gorgeous son Lulu Jnr for a visit to meet Jnr Mr Pink (and to see me again too, I'm sure...). Anyway, I needed a quick and easy dessert that I could make while Jnr Pink was having one of his trademark 40 min naps and this one was perfect.

The hardest part was making the lemon zest and lemon juice... which was easy. Once you've got those, its basically a matter of putting most of the ingredients in the blender and you're done...

Serves 8
Took 15 min to prepare, 30 min to cook plus cooling time

Ingredients
 - 1 cup buttermilk
 - 1/2 cup caster sugar
 - 60g butter, melted
 - 3 large egg yolks
 - 2 tbsp plain flour
 - 1 tbsp lemon zest
 - 1 tbsp lemon juice
 - 1 tsp vanilla extract
 - 1/2 tsp sea salt
 - 1 1/2 cups of mixed berries
 - 1 ready made sweet tart pastry case (or of course if you're ambitious and don't have to worry about a little baby waking up in the middle of your preparations, feel free to make your own pastry!)

Method
Step 1: Preheat a fan forced oven to 155degrees Celcius.

Step 2: Combine buttermilk, castor sugar, melted butter, egg yolks, flour, lemon zest, lemon juice, vanilla and salt in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth.

Step 3: Arrange berries over the pastry.

Note: I used frozen berries for this one, and as they were defrosting the they created a purpley-red liquid that consequently made the tart a purple-stained yellow (you'll see what I mean). To avoid this, you could try straining the berries of as much liquid as you can before putting them in the pastry.

Step 4: Pour the filling over the berries and give the pan a gentle jiggle to make sure the berries are coated.

Step 5: Bake for 30 mins, or until the filling is just set in the centre. Cool completely.

Now I actually had some of the filling left over, so I made up a couple little lemon tarts with some frozen pastry sheets I almost always have in the freezer for 'emergencies' like this...  Mr Pink assured me that without the berries it was very yummy, but with the berries it was absolutely delicious!

Lemon Slice

This one definitely has a place on my list of the easiest slices in the world to make... So easy in fact, that it can essentially be made in 3 steps that take a total of 20 minutes to do if you dawdle. Yes, you read correctly, I said THREE steps, twenty minutes. You basically just put all the base ingredients together, all the topping ingredients together and then put those two together. Simple. Oh, and it tastes pretty good, I suppose I should mention that too, huh? ;-)

Ingredients
Base
 - 1 1/2 cups crushed Corn Flakes (I used a sandwich bag and a rolling pin to achieve the crushiness. Also beware, I had an almost full box of Corn Flakes in my pantry for almost a year before getting around to throwing them out! ... maybe I should have made this more than once... anyway I digress - ingredients...)
 - 120g melted butter
 - 1/4 cup castor sugar

Topping
  - 1 x 395g tin of condensed milk
 - 1/2 cup lemon juice
 - finely grate zest of lemon
 - 1 egg yolk


Method
Step 1: Lightly grease a 23 cm square slice tin (if you want to you can do what I did and line it with baking paper to make it easier to get the slice out)

Step 2: Mix all the Base ingredients together and then press into the tin. Refrigerate for 10 minutes.

Step 3: To make the topping, beat ingredients together until thick and fluffy. Pour evenly over the base and return to refrigerator until set.

Done. How easy is that?! (Answer: Very.)

Christmas Tree Cake

This is going to be a quick one because it's about the decorating as I can't remember what cake I made and really, that's besides the point, you could do this with almost any cake. I think it was either a basic butter cake or a White Chocolate Mudcake.

Basically I bought a Christmas Tree cake mould (from eBay or Avon I can't remember) and it made my Christmas dessert for the year much easier to make... in theory. I still spent hours decorating it on Christmas Eve of course!

So, make your cake. If you don't have a Christmas Tree mould, I'd suggest a square cake and then cut up into trapeziums of shrinking size with a little rectangle for the trunk (and if you're creative enough, a star...)

Once you have your cake, we're ready to decorate!

You'll need
 - 2 packs of ready-made fondant icing
 - green food colouring (or yellow and blue)
 - brown food colouring (or red, yellow and blue)
 - Smarties / M&Ms or some other such colourful circular lolly to decorate with
 - 1/2 cup icing sugar
 - a few drops of lemon juice

Method
Step 1: Divide the fondant into 3 portions with the rough ratio 80:15:5 and use your food colouring to get the colours green : brown : yellow for each portion respectively by kneading the fondant (you may want to use rubber gloves (food grade) or your hands will become a rather 'interesting' colour...)

Step 2: Roll the brown fondant into a rectangular piece large enough to place of the trunk of the tree.

Step 3: Putting the fondant onto the cake... to make the fondant stick you might need to spread a thin layer something like jam over it first. If its a butter cake you could potentially use melted butter.

Step 4: Place the brown fondant over the trunk and gently mould it to the shape of the trunk. To smooth any folded bits of icing (e.g. over the corners of the trunk) use a wet knife or the back of a spoon.

Step 5: Divide the green fondant into 4 pieces with the rough ratio of 40:30:20:10 and then use a rolling pin to roll them into strips. Starting with the longest piece, place the fondant onto the tree from the bottom up.

Step 6: (Only if you have a 'star' to put at the top of the tree...) Roll the yellow fondant into a big enough circle to cover your star and place the fondant onto the star shape.

Step 7: Mix the icing sugar and lemon juice together until it is a semi-firm consistency that can be piped onto the tree. Using a piping bag, zig zag a line from the top to the bottom of the tree.

Use the same icing to pipe dots over the tree, placing your Smarties/M&Ms on the tree as you go before the icing sets.

Chocolate Mudcake Christmas Puddings

This one is a modified version of the Chocolate Ball Christmas Tree that I did a couple of years ago. Because the balls were so popular, I think I have made them around Christmas time each year but have mixed it up a bit by using different decorations for them.

The last couple of years I have made the balls into little Christmas puddings... this was the first attempt...

So I made the balls the same way I did for the Chocolate Ball Christmas Tree (crumbled mudcakes and then rolled and squished them into balls). This time I covered them all in a dark chocolate coating to look like this:

Then I cut up red licorice into small pieces, drizzled some melted white chocolate over the ball and placed the licorice on top before the chocolate set. It looked like this:

So, not bad for a first attempt. But I wasn't happy with the licorice. So the next year I decided to put even more effort into it and I made tiny little red balls and green holly leaves out of fondant icing, and put them on top instead of the licorice... which was A LOT more effort.

Unfortunately I can't find a photo of those anywhere, but trust me, they looked much better.

Choc Brownie Christmas Trees

Hello Old Friend, its been awhile...

Well, after Mr and Mrs Pizzaman moved to the other side of the country (yes, literally) Friday night desserts slowly died away... and so did this blog. However, as I now find myself with the next 9 months or so off work whilst I learn the ins and outs of this whole 'parenting' thing, I hereby pledge to breathe life back into Mrs Pink's Delectable Desserts.

It shouldn't surprise you to know that while my blogging has been on a hiatus for the last couple of years (wow, has it been THAT long?!), my dessert making has not. I have a back log of desserts that I have been making and photographing and just never getting around to posting, so I'll be trying to work through them in the coming weeks/months. Only problem is that its been so long that I can't always remember which recipe I used to match the photos, so we'll see how we go...

First up, as the festive season sneaks up on us once again, is a treat I had lots of fun making last year - Chocolate Brownie Christmas  Trees...

It doesn't really matter what brownie recipe you use as this one is more about the decorating of brownies to make them a Christmas-y treat. 

Ingredients
Brownies
 - 150g butter
 - 300g dark cooking chocolate (chopped)
 - 1 1/2 cups (330g) firmly packed brown sugar
 - 3 eggs
 - 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
 - 3/4 cup plain flour
 - 3/4 cup (140g) dark Choc Bits
 - 1/2 cup sour cream
 - 3/4 cup (110g) macadamias, toasted, chopped coarsely
 - 1 tablespoon cocoa powder

Decorations
 - icing sugar (1 cup or so)
 - softened butter (1 tablespoon or so)
 - milk (dash of)
 - green food colouring
 - Smarties
 - Candy Canes (a couple of boxes)

Method

Step 1: Preheat oven to moderate (around 180 degrees C), and lightly grease and line a 19 cm x 29cm rectangular slice pan, lining with baking paper so that 2cm of paper extends above the pan on the long sides of the rectangle.

Step 2: Melt the butter in a medium saucepan, add chocolate and stir over low heat without boiling until the mixture is smooth.

Step 3: Stir in sugar then transfer to a large bowl and allow to cool until it is just warm.

Step 4: Stir in eggs one at a time

Step 5: Stir in extract, flour, Choc Bits, cream and nuts.

Step 6: Spread mixture into prepared pan and bake for about 40 minutes. Cover pan with foil and bake for a further 20 minutes.

Step 7: Cool in pan; turn top-side up onto a wire rack.

Step 8: This is where the fun begins: cut brownie slice into triangles - to do this I cut the slice into thirds long ways so I had three long thin rectangles and then cut the rectangles into a zig-zag pattern. This left an awkward half-triangle shape at each end, but heck you've got to have some scraps to snack on while you decorate the trees! (this gave me about 14 trees)

Step 9: Grab the Candy Canes and snap off the 'hook' end so that they are straight pieces. I discovered the hard way that you want the stems to be about 4cm long; much longer than that and you'll either break the brownie when you insert it or it'll look ridiculously long, and much shorter and it won't stay in place.

Once you've got your stems you need to delicately insert them into the base of the 'tree'. Now don't make the mistake that I made and just assume the candy canes can be jammed in there... You need to make a bit of a whole first to pave the way. Insert a skewer into the base of the triangle and move it around in a circular motion so that a whole forms. Only then should you attempt to insert the candy canes.

Step 10: Mix up some icing by creaming the butter, stirring through the icing sugar and adding just enough milk to keep it from being too hard. Add a couple drops of the food colouring of your choice.

Use a piping bag to pipe zig-zags onto the trees, pressing the Smarties onto the icing as you go. When the icing hardens the Smarties should be lightly 'glued' in place.

Just had a thought - you could use an oval shaped cookie cutter and make Easter Egg Brownies as well... Hmmm, now I just have to remember that in about 4 months time!