Needing a quick dessert tonight, I found this awesome recipe for honeycomb icecream. I had never made honeycomb before, and it was as quick, easy and delicious as I had heard it was. I will definitely be making honeycomb again some time soon.

This is a nice quick ice cream recipe because it uses whipped cream and sweetened condensed milk, both as is, instead of having to cook a custard and then cool it before churning.  I'm going to make sure I always have a tin of sweetened condensed milk in the cupboard, because you never know when I might have a need for quick ice cream.  Better to be prepared for an icecream related emergency than to find yourself in the middle of one, I will from now on always say.

Monkey 1 has a friend staying the night, and this Monkey On Loan loves to experiment with cooking and eating. He was in raptures over the honeycomb and proclaimed the icecream to be the best he has ever tasted. Success!

Honeycomb Icecream

85g sugar
2 tablespoons golden syrup
1 teaspoon bicarb soda
400mL cream
1 can sweetened condensed milk (I understand that the Coles home brand is not made by Nestlé)

Grease or line baking tray with baking paper.  Put the sugar and syrup in heavy based saucepan and heat gently until the sugar melts. Boil for 1-2 minutes until it starts to caramelise.  Don't let the mixture burn.

Stir in the bicarb soda, then immediately pour the mixture onto the prepared baking tray but do not spread.  Mine kind of splodged onto the tray in a cow pat formation instead of poured, maybe a touch too much bicarb?  Leave for about 10 minutes until cold.

Whip the cream until it holds its shape, then whisk in the condensed milk. 

Pour the custardy goodness into your icecream maker, or freeze it uncovered for 1-2 hours or until it begins to set around the edges, then pop it into a bowl and stir with a fork until smooth.

Put the honeycomb into a plastic bag, wrap in a teatowel and bash the bejizzus out of it with a rolling pin.  Very satisfying.

Mix the honeycomb chunks, crumbs and dust into the icecream, and then return to the freezer for a few hours.

Nom it up.

Ours was needed for dessert before it was properly frozen, so it had a bit of a soft serve texture to it, but nobody seemed to mind.

I'm on FIAH.

Sunday evening and thoughts turn to the week ahead and my weird need to feel like a Good Mummy and bake delicious lunch box treats for the Monkeys.

The September edition of the mag "Recipes +" has a basic biscuit recipe that you can then flavour up any which way. The deal is that you make a giant wodge of dough, divide it into five smaller wodges, flavour these wodges, roll them into sausages, chill them, cut them into slices, and bake.

Basic biscuit recipe
385g butter
2 eggs
4 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder.

Once again my fantabby KitchenAid mixer made me very happy, and made this job super easy and fun.

Cream butter. Add eggs. Sift flour and baking powder together. Add flour to butter/egg. Mix it up baby.

Clockwise from top left - custard, vanilla, chocolate, cheesy and choc chip.

Custard - add 1/4 cup of icing sugar and a couple if big spoons of custard powder, and a teaspoon of milk.

Vanilla - add 1/4 cup of icing sugar, slosh of vanilla essence, spoon of plain flour.

Chocolate - add goodly bit of cocoa, and some brown sugar.

Cheesy - add lashings of grated cheddar and Parmesan, and a wee sprinkling of cayenne pepper.

Choc chip - icing sugar, choc chips. Easy.

Roll out each flavour into a large sausage, roll it up safely in baking or wax paper, put it in the fridge. The mag says to make each sausage about 25cm long, but if you want dainty little petit four size bikkies, then a skinnier sausage is what you want.

Chill sausages in the fridge for 30 mins +. Or freeze so that you have a convenient supply ready in case friends drop by and you need to whip up a batch instantly. Yeah right.

Slice into 1cm ish thick slices. I put slivers of fresh strawberries on top of the vanilla slices. Bake them at 160 ish deg for 10-12 mins ish.

Omnomnom. Oh yes indeedy. The Love Of My Life proclaimed them "delicious". My work here is done.

If the cheesy ones turn out to be even half as good as the cheesy biscuits that they sell at the shop at the local markets, I am DOOMED. I have no control over myself when they are in the house. Watch this space.

I am still very enthusiastic about bread, and I thought I would give Tessa Kiros' recipe for white bread from "Apples for Jam" a go.  It used a bit less (450g) flour than my usual (500-600g), and used a fair whack of butter and an egg and milk, and no water, so the bread turned out more cakey and dense than the loaves I have been making lately.  It could also be that our nights are getting warmer, and by warmer I mean that we don't need the heaters on overnight, so the loaves probably didn't have the advantage of rising all night in a heated bedroom. 

I bought a whole heap of strawberries yesterday, so after baking the bread, I sliced the berries and put them in a bowl with some sugar, and put them in the warm oven for a while to moosh up a bit.  When they were warm, I sliced the loaves thickly, spooned some warm strawberries and a bit of the strawberry syrup from the bottom of the bowl over each slice, and they were all eaten by my family in record time.  We will do this one again!

 

I think that the bread would be better for something like grilled cheese with mustard pickle, because it tastes really yeasty and doughy.  There is a bit left, I might have to experiment at lunch time.  For science, you understand.

I'm having a slow day at home with sick kids today, which gives me a little bit of time to put up some more cake photos.

Monkey 1 requested cupcakes to take to school for his birthday, specifically the crab cupcakes featured in Lily Vanilli's book A Zombie Ate My Cupcake.  Which would have been an easier request to grant if the cake decorating shop that had edible glitter and all that stuff was open on the day that he asked.  Which was the day before his birthday.  I agreed to do my best.

 

I decided to make the Red Velvet cupcake base that was recommended in the book, and it was the most decadent and delicious and sensuous cupcake making experience I have ever had.  The red was so red, and the batter was so smooth.  Delicious.  Once again, as every time I use it, I fell in love with my KitchenAid mixer.  Not that I love it any less when I'm not using it, but when I am using it I love it more. 

 

The cupcakes turned out very well, the next challenge was to crab them up.  The recipe required marzipan, but of course marzipan is made with almonds, and nuts and nut products are not allowed in primary schools any more.  Quandry.  But the local stupidmarket stocks a kind of fake marzipan with almond flavouring, and also stocks ready made icing that behaves much like marzipan, but doesn't have the smell or the taste.  This time I used one packet of each and an enormous amount of food colouring.  Next time I won't bother with any kind of marzipan, I will just use the icing.  Once again the KitchenAid did its thing brilliantly to mix the colour through the icing.

The Love Of My Life and I sat up until past midnight assembling the crabs, he was the Master Claw Roller, I did the cutting, assembly and finishing. 

Monkey 1 was thrilled when he saw these waiting for him the next morning.  His teacher was suitably impressed with the cakes, until I told her how much sugar and colouring I had used, and then she said that maybe the kids could eat them just before they go home.  What a wuss.

For the family birthday dinner party cake, Monkey 1 both made me proud and broke my heart by poring over the Woman's Weekly Birthday Cake book.  I felt torn because passionately studying that book for my own cakes was a very important thing in my own childhood, and also for TLOML.  His mum gave me the copy of the cake book that she used for his cakes.

I feel like my kids are following a fine Australian childhood tradition. On the other hand, I felt sad because up until now, Monkey 1 has asked for certain and very specific cakes from his imagination, and I have delivered.  A DNA cake?  Fine.  A Scorpion cake?  Great, I will sculpt it using wire, gaffer tape and hand made and filled profiteroles.  A Mallard A4 Pacific steam engine? No problem, even the steam train buffs will recognise it as an A4 Pacific (and they did, too).  I wonder what happened that he wanted replicas of other designs from books, instead of consulting his own imagination?

Anyhow, he chose the Log Cabin cake, which I made with some alterations from the official design.  I felt very retro 70's when I was colouring coconut for the grass.  But colour it I did and he was really happy with the result.

 

Happy birthday darling boy, how on earth can you be 11 years old already?

Dammit Blogger, where are my pictures??

May is birthday season for Monkey 1 and Monkey 2, and it is always a huge cake festival.

Monkey 2 requested cat cupcakes to take to school.

 Delicious cupcakes all nekkid and yummy, waiting for decoration.

Each cake has icing, then coordinating sprinkles, with ready made icing from a tube.  I tried a few different kinds of eyes, but in the end settled on tiny marshmallows, snipped into thirds with scissors, and sticking the sticky side down on the cake.  I liked how the snipping squashed the slices slightly to make them eye shaped.

She loved the cakes a lot.  From all reports they were popular at school.

Last year I was too sick to make my annual Christmas shortbread, so I am making up for it this year :) So far I have used 2kg of butter, and I am about halfway finished. Yum!