Not quite seven types of biscuits

But then I’m not Norwegian, so thankfully I’m not battling a butter shortage whilst trying to make sure I have seven types of Christmas biscuits. I really feel for those poor Norwegians, not been able to make all your normal Christmas baked goods because there is no butter, tragic.

I’ve made Loftkökur, Sugar Biscuits, Christmas Cake Pattycakes, Gingerbread, Rum Balls, Sunshine Balls (Apricots Balls with dried pineapple and mango added as well) and Vanilla Rings.

Loftkökur
This time of year the traffic to my blog goes through the roof as people come for my Loftkökur post from 2006. Four ingredients, some magic and then you have quite possibly my favourite Christmas baked good. Londoneats also made Loftkökur this year and I’ve contributed to the comments thread over there. I’m going to do an updated Loftkökur recipe post next Christmas and will provide spoonfuls of the magic ingredient to Australians who want to try making them.

Christmas Morning Tea

Christmas Cake Pattycakes
These are new this year and I’ll be making these till the Christmas before I die I do believe. All the niceness of Christmas fruit cake without the dryness or stodginess. I found the recipe in an advert for Lucky Nuts via the Coles magazine (I must say I love the Coles and Woolies magazines, they are the main place I get new recipes these days).

Christmas Cakes
Makes at least 24 muffin size cakes or 48 patty pan size cakes, I suggest halving it)

1 cup roughly chopped silvered almonds
5 cups assorted dried fruit roughly chopped into pieces about thumb nail size (I use sultanas, raisins, dates, pear, peaches, apricots – probably half sultanas and raisins and the rest other fruits)
1/2 cup (at least) of rum, I use Bundy Red and strongly recommend it for all Christmas items.
a good shake of mixed spice
250g butter, softened
250g brown sugar
4 eggs
1/4 cup marmalade or citrus jam (I use my Mandarin jam and just realised that I never blogged about it or my other jam making – blame mobile uploads on Facebook, it’s so quick to take a photo on the phone, add a caption and upload it to Facebook)
500g plain flour
blanched almonds to decorate

Combine the rum, dried fruit and spice in a container and leave at least over night, making sure to give it a good shake every so often to make sure that rum is soaking the fruit nicely. You made need to add a little more rum here.

Cream the butter till pale, add the sugar and continue to mix till the sugar is dissolved. This will take some time but it makes all your baking better if you take the time to cream your butter and sugar well. Add the eggs and marmalade/jam in and continue to mix. Then add half of the fruit mix and half of remaining ingredients (flour and chopped almonds) mix it well and then add in the rest of the fruit, flour and almonds and mix till well combined.

Spoon mixture into cake papers, decorate the top with blanched almonds and bake at 150°C until a skewer comes out clean and they are lightly coloured on top (~ 15-30 minutes depending on the size you are making)

Eat with a good cup of Christmas tea

Sugar Biscuits
This is the only recipe I’ve ever used for sugar biscuits and can’t fault it. It is easy to double, freezes well and is very easy to make.

Snowflakes Christmas Trees
Baubles

Sugar Cookie Recipe number 2
Makes a heap.

1.25 cups caster sugar or white sugar
225g butter, softened
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla (I probably use more like 2.5 tsp of vanilla normally)
2.5 cups plain flour (sifted)
1 tsp bi-carb
1 tsp cream of tartar (If you don’t have cream of tartar don’t rush out and buy it. Over the years I’ve made these with bi-carb and baking powder as well and they are just fine)

Cream the butter till pale and then add the sugar, continue to cream it till the sugar is dissolved and it doesn’t look at all grainy. Add the egg and vanilla and mix again. Add the flour and rising agents and beat till it comes together. Form dough into at least two discs and wrap in either glad wrap or a plastic bag and allow to cool and harden in the fridge (I normally make the mixture one night and bake the biscuits the following night). Remove the dough from the fridge and allow to warm up a little. I normally divide the each disc into about four pieces and work each piece with my hands warming it up and making it rollable. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to an even thickness (I aim for about 5mm) and cut out shapes with your cutters. For best baking results only use one shape per tray or if you must use different shapes you should make sure they have the same surface area because smaller biscuits cook quicker and you don’t want over cooked biscuits. Cook on glad bake lined trays at about 160°C for about 8 minutes. Remove them from the oven just as they start to colour. Allow to cool and then ice with your preference of icing. I’m a royal icing girl. Store in an air tight container and if you find they are a softening in the container put a slice of bread in the container to harden the biscuits back up.

Gingebread
I probably should call this Spicebread, as I do like to be quite heavy handed with the spices.

Gingerbread Men

Gingerbread
150g golden syrup
110g butter
100g brown sugar
375g flour, sifted together with the bi-carb and spices
1 tsp bi-carb

Spices (the more the better but make sure the ratio is ginger heavy)
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp all spice

In a medium size pan, combine the syrup, butter and sugar, bring to a gentle boil and make sure the sugar is dissolved before removing from the heat and stirring in the flour mixture, when the mixture has come together, let the dough rest in the pan for a couple of hours. You don’t need to place this in the fridge, on the bench is fine. I made my mine in the morning before work and left the pan on the bench all day. Roll out to about 8mm thick on a floured surface and cut out your shapes. Bake at 180°C for about 10 minutes or until they spring back when touched. Cool and decorate with melted chocolate or royal icing or just leave as they are.

There we have it. Recipes for all the goods I’ve taken photos of so far. I’m yet to take photos of Rum Balls or Sunshine Balls (probably because I keep eating them!)

I’m now off to start organising the house for Christmas Eve tonight and get things sorted out for Woodford after Christmas.

Biscuits for Super Hornets and biscuits for the Queen

We had a few big events happen in Brisbane/SEQ the other week. There was the arrival of four new Super Hornets which gave us a flyover of 20 Super Hornets to celebrate and then the Queen cruised down our river as well. I busted out some biscuits to help celebrate each occasion.

The recipe that I use comes from here, I use recipe number two. I’ve never added the almond extract through. Icing is just plain old royal icing.

Super Hornets
I’ve made biscuits for the occasion of new Super Hornets arriving before and well with a flyover happening I just had to make some more.
Planes

We were granted access to our roof to watch the flyover and it was quite a sight to see those planes in formation overhead.
20 F/A 18-F Super Hornets in the sky

The Queen
Crown Bicuits for the Queen (I had bought the crown cutter planning on making biscuits for the wedding but didn’t get round to it)
Crown Biscuits

Waiting for a glimpse
Waiting for the Queen

There she is, I do wish that I had gone down to South Bank to see her in “person” but that will have to wait for “next time”.
The Queeen

I’m not sure which occasion I’ll next make biscuits like this for but Christmas is near…
You also may notice that I’ve changed the colour scheme to feel more summery and updated some pictures in the header.

Happy Super Hornet Day :)

I dubbed Friday March 26, Super Hornet Day in honour of the arrival of the first five F/A-18F Super Hornets to Australia. To celebrate I made biscuits of course. 😀 As per usual I used Sugar Cookies Recipe #2 from Simply Recipes, I used orange essence instead of the almond extract but I don’t think I used enough for it to be noticeable.

250/365
Super Hornet Biscuits, 250/365

I had a big Thursday night making these biscuits; I didn’t end up going to bed till sometime after 1am and was up a few hours later to make the packaging. I was quite lucky that two of the girls at work helped with the wrapping and stapling the tags on. I ended up with 52 planes as two were sent to the scrap yard due to faulty wings…. I don’t advocate icing biscuits past midnight, technique is never as good as it is at say you know 4 in the afternoon! I was tired and that resulted in not always keeping a nice even pressure on the icing bag which resulted in some clumpy icing. That is my criticism and one I am sure that most non-baking people would not notice anyway.

Super Hornet Biscuits

I walked round work with a box of biscuits Friday morning, handing them out and wishing people Happy Super Hornet Day, some people thought that the RAAF had supplied them for us, others wanted to know which bakery they were from, some people said “oh Helen, you are a bit of a nerd aren’t you” to which I of course replied “Why yes I am”, other people were just happy to get a pretty biscuit.

251/365
Super Hornet Biscuits, 251/365

Though the real purpose of the day was not to come for another few hours. I swear the time between about 12:00 and 12:45ish when I went down to the river went ever so slowly. There were five of us from work outside Customs House. If you look at this hi-res image on the Defence website, you can spot the five of us on the board walk in front of the steps to Customs House, pretty cool! I had my 16-35mm lens on my camera as I thought that they would fly at a “nice low” height over the river. I should have had my 70-200mm on, they were high in the sky. It also meant that the flyover was quite quiet as well… 🙁 🙁

The Super Hornets Arrive

It was very cool to see the Super Hornets with the F1-11s and the BAE Hawk escort but oh I do wish they had flown lower and louder 😀 I think my biscuits were more impressive than the flyover.

a mish mosh of life’s adventures

Yesterday I took an RDO to renew my drivers licence as it expired today. My last photo was taken five years ago (though my fingers thanks to work want to type 60/12 instead of five years), I was wearing a high school music shirt, I was on the left side of the frame and I didn’t have braces.
new drivers licence

SE QLD has had a lot of rain the last 36 odd hours. This is what our backyard looked round noonish today. (photo by Ryan Sodziak)
flooded backyard

I picked up my Food Connect box yesterday arvo and I haven’t posted a photo of the last box, here is the box from last fortnight and from yesterday.
Food Connect Fortnight 2

Food Connect Fortnight 3

I’m off to the orthodontist tomorrow and I’m at a point where I really just want this whole metal mouth experience that has been going on since 1996 (more than half my life) to be over. I know that I am on the last stretch now and I only have about 12 months ( sounds less than saying one year) to go with braces and then I can get an implant but I want it to have been over by now. I want to move to new horizons but it is impractical to move from Brisbane when I have to go back to the orthodontist in the city every 4-6 weeks. It is like the pause button has been pressed on one part of my life but not the other parts.

Mum left for Central Australia today, she is going to spend the next 2-3 weeks tripping round the centre looking at all things interesting. It was only a few weeks ago that she came back from her big trip round the South of Africa.
Mum arriving home from Southern Africa

The Townsville trip was really fun. I had a great time hanging out with Sam, exploring Townsville, getting lots of work done, paying the final money on our Bali trip and generally having fun.
Here are my bags waiting for the taxi at my parents house.
Off to Tsv

The view from my room 🙂 It was very pretty looking out over the boats.
the view from my room

And here is Sam at the Watermark on Friday arvo just before I left.
Sam at the Watermark

My Amazon order arrived today 🙂 Full of some books for me and some books for Matthew. I am looking forward to spending some time reading in the next few weeks.

I am now up to watching the fourth season of The West Wing – I have watched three seasons in about three weeks… Just plain good drama. I love it.

It was Charlie’s birthday at work the other week. Charlie and I sit with our backs to each other on a connected desk. During the day, I sometimes swivel round on my chair and say “Hi Charlie Girl”. Charlie just laughs. Charlie had said she didn’t want a cake for her birthday so I made biscuits instead. They went down very very well and I now know that offering pretty biscuits to people will get me just about anything I want.
Charlie's Birthday Biscuits

I really like this quote that is floating round the net at the moment.

Until you dream, there isn’t a mold. Until you speak, there isn’t a promise. And until you move, there isn’t a path

Fun in the kitchen

I have been playing in the kitchen this weekend and having a ball. It has also meant that Mum has been able to spend a fair bit of time on the computer organising a talk she is giving on her trip out west last year.

Saturday I made sugar biscuits to have play with icing.

stars, 69/366

Saturday night I listened to the Womadelaide 2008 live broadcast (and loved every single minute of it) whilst decorating those biscuits. I have wanted to go to Womad since 2001 or 2002 when I first saw brochures for it at the library, listening to it this year has just made me want to go 100 times more than I did before. There was just so many artists I enjoyed listening to. At the end of the night I had no regrets not going to see Tiger Army/Zombie Ghost Train with Matthew and his friends (which according to Matthew was an awesome show).

decorated, 70/366

I learnt that so much of it is about getting the consistency of the royal icing just right. As I practice more though I know I will get the consistency better on the first time instead of adding more sugar because it is too runny and then adding more liquid because I made it too solid.

Saturday I also went to the shops and if I go to Chermside I normally tend to poke my head into the kitchenware sections of Myer and David Jones because you never know what might be on sale. Well when I went into Myer I saw a sign which said 30% off all accessories and in the little note below it said it included pasta machines. Well when I saw that they had Atlas machines on the shelf, I knew what I was buying! Ever since I returned the below par pasta machine I bought 16mths ago I have been keeping my eye out, for an Atlas on sale, you know to make the price a whole lot more appealing. So so happy to have a pasta machine again. It also just runs so smooth.

she's my baby

Today I made Ralphs chocolate cake to take to work for a birthday tomorrow and of course I made Pasta! and Mum took some photos.

Pasta is all about the rolling, that blob of pasta would probably go through the machine about 25 times before it is cut, it makes it this most beautiful sheet of pasta.

you want pasta?

I decided to be silly and make very very very long noodles. The first three runs I made as spaghetti and the final run I made as fettuccine. Typically of course you would cut the long pasta strip into 12-20″ strips before cutting it but hey why not?

Pasta!almost done

The final stage, dusting the the fresh pasta with flour before packing it up to pop in the freezer.
dusting

Now it is time for bed and the start of another work week.