Spiced Apple Cider

 Spiced apple cider mmmm yum.

Here is what you will need:

(makes 4 mugs worth)

1 litre apple juice
3 tsp ground cinnamon
3 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp ground ginger

3 shot glasses worth of rum

Sieve the spices into a saucepan and combine with the juice, rum, and water.
Heat until just boiling, whisking the whole time(keep a close eye on it, it may try to boil over).
VOILA! Cider!
Serve in cute vessels to cute friends.

- Bridget

Spicy Speculaa Biscuits pt 2

Welcome back to Part Two of our Speculaa Spectaculaa (funny)

So the dough from part one has been resting in the fridge overnight, and is now ready to be rolled out and baked :-)

For this stage you will need

-Rolling Pin

-Cookie Cutter/s

You will also need to put baking paper on your baking trays, preheat the overn to 180 degrees 

and flour the bench surface you'll be working on. You will need to keep putting flour down as you roll out your dough.

Let your dough rest out on the bench for a bit before you roll it out to give it a chance to soften. You want the dough to stay reasonably firm however so you get nice edges for your cookies

Roll out your dough to 5mm thickness

Then cut out your cookies. We used a snowflake shape but you can use anything you like!

Place your cookies on your tray, space them out a wee bit. The cookies don't rise much so you don't need to be too worried about them sticking together.

Put them in the oven for 10-12 minutes. The whole house will smell as if it were made of gingerbread, so yummy!

When they are nice and golden, take them out and put them on a cooling rack. When completely cool, you can munch away on them :-) Speculaas will keep for a week in an airtight container, if they last that long that is!

Tasty!

Enjoy :-)

Leah x

Spicy Speculaa Biscuits pt 1

Hey there!

Welcome back to another installment of 24 days of Christmas Craft and Recipes 

here at Little House :-)

Today is the first of our recipes and it comes to you in two parts. This is part one!

This recipe comes from Fashion Quarterly Entertaining. We saw the picture of beautiful snowflake shaped biscuits and couldn't refuse! 

Speculaas are traditionally baked on the 4th or 5th of December to celebrate St Nicholas' day. St Nicholas was the saint who gave gifts to children. Some folks call him Santa for short ;-)

Speculaa cookies originated in Europe, particularly hailing from Belgium, Germany and Holland. Having visited all of these countries and sampled their sweet treats I was particularly keen on having a go at making these spicy tasty cookies!

The key to crunchy, flavoursome speculaas is to let the dough rest for at least a day before rolling them out and baking them. This is why our recipe will come to you in two parts! Today I will show you how to make the dough, tomorrow, we will roll that dough out and make cookies.

Let's start from the beginning, a very good place to start.

To make 40 cookies, you will need:

500g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

220g butter

2Tbs milk

Spices

8 green cardammom pods

5 star anise

1tsp white peppercorns

1 piece of mace

2Tbs ground cinnamon

2tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp finely grated nutmeg

I didn't have access to all the spices in the recipe, so I improvised :-)

I used star anise, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger

Finely grind the whole spices: cardammom, cloves, star anise, peppercorns and mace in a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle. It is quite important to use these as I discovered when trying to improvise. My spices came out OK but needed to be a bit finer

Mix the other spices, sieve the flour and baking powder and mix together. Set aside.

In another bowl, beat the butter and brown sugar together for about 3-4 minutes until creamy

Mix the butter into the dry ingredients until just mixed. Transfer it onto a floured surface and lightly  form the dough. Shape into a disc, wrap it up in plastic wrap and refrigerate.

Give it a go and we'll see you tomorrow at part two!

Leah x

Banana na, doo doo, doo doo doo

 Hello again,

Here I am with another cake recipe, this time a classic banana cake.
This isnt a very large cake, it has just enough for a 18cm square tin, so if you like a larger cake make 1 1/2 times this recipe.

BANANA CAKE

We're gonna make this!

Ingredients:

for le cake:

115g butter/ margarine

150g (3/4 cup) sugar

1 egg

2 ripe bananas

1 tsp vanilla essence (optional)

180g (1 1/2 cups) flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

60 ml (1/4 cup) milk

for le icing:

Around 1 cup of confectioners sugar (icing sugar for us kiwis)

juice of one lemon

Getting ready to roll:

Soften the butter/ margarine, take the egg out of the fridge.
Grease your cake tin.
Preheat the oven to 180C/ 350F.
Peel the bananas and mash well with a fork.

LETS GO!

These are the ingredients...you will need them out right at the beginning. I'll wait here while you do that.

Have you greased your cake tin? Better get onto that before you start...

Cream the butter/ marg and sugar together until light and fluffy (I had a wee issue - I melted the butter instead of softening due to being distracted, HENCE THE SOUPY NATURE, rookie mistake, the recipe works whether or not you have a butter faux par like me). Beat in the egg, followed by the mashed bananas and vanilla essence.

Sift together the flour and baking powder in a separate bowl.
Dissolve the baking soda in the milk in a separate bowl.
Keep em isolated.

Alternately fold in the flour mix with the milk mix until everything is well combined.

Gently fill your cake tin and smooth the top.

VOILA! CAKE! 

FOR THE ICING: Sift the icing sugar into a clean bowl and mix with the lemon juice until you get a smooth runny mixture.

Remove the cake from the tin and drizzle the icing all over it. I put my icing into a plastic bag and snipped a corner, creating a home-made icing bag, then I just went back and forth all the way around!oooo pretty.

Yum.

Hope you're all having a great Wednesday!

B-ridge out.

Lauren's Lemon Glaze Cake

HOORAH!
Little House's first blog recipe!
Today boys and girls I made Lauren's Lemon Glaze Cake.
Delicious and super easy.

This is Lauren's original recipe which we made this cake from.

Heres what I used to make'ith the cake. Noticed some of the ingredients here arent matching to the recipe?
Well you are a clever cookie!Read on to find out what Ive changed...

When I make this recipe I prefer to use margarine instead of butter, and yoghurt instead of sour cream.
I also omit a quarter cup of the sugar.

Lets get started!
Ready?
Set?
Gooooooooo!

First things first - get that lemon rind ga-ra-ted.
I like long threads of lemon rind - to achieve this use long strokes as you grate it as opposed to short sharp movements.
Set aside 3 teaspoons worth for your cake mix, and whatever is leftover for the glaze.
NOTE: grating your thumb like I did is not recommended...

Lightly beat 4 eggs in a separate bowlio...

Beat the marg and sugar until well combined, then chuck in the eggs and the 3 teaspoons of rind.
Beat them up Michael Jackson styles.

Sift your flour and baking powder together in a separate bowl...

Measure out your yog.

Alternately fold in the yog and flour....

YEAH! Now its all combined!

Get your grease on and grease that cake tin

Put your cake mix into the tin and gently smooth the top.

Bung your cake into the oven right in the middle and cook for 60 minutes.

MEANWHILE....make the glaze by combining sugar, lemon juice, and that left over rind you had.

Stirring occasionally over a medium heat until the sugar dissolves until you get something that resembles this...

Once the cake is ready pour the glaze over the top making sure every bit of cake is slimed by glaze.
NOTE: If like me you made your glaze too far in advance and its gone thicky by the time you get to this step, just stir it over a low heat to loosen it back to a runny syrup. Easy.

Nom! Leave the cake to cool completely before removing it from the tin.
Slice it up.
Eat it.
Genius.



Word.
B-ridge out.