Tag: baking

Feijoas

A few days ago I had picked up a dozen or so feijoas from under the tree and decided on a Nadia Lim muffin recipe. Before I began baking today, I checked below the tree to see if any more had dropped – and (expecting only two or three) filled my jersey hem with 33 of them. The ones I already had, plus two from a friend’s tree, were enough for the muffins. The recipe has more ingredients than the muffin recipes I usually make, but included fresh ginger and yoghurt which sounded good. The mixture is very wet, but the skewer came out clean after just over 20 minutes in the oven.

Taste test: The texture is lovely and soft, the white chocolate adds interest in bite rather than in flavour, the overall taste is a bit overwhelmed by the mashed banana so it’s not easy to detect the feijoa, but there’s a nice tingle of ginger. I think I would leave out the banana next time and substitute it with more feijoas.

There are 33 feijoas left over. What to do with them? Smoothies? Perhaps I will eat one or two every day, scooping each one out with a teaspoon.

Pavlova perfection

Mum’s always been the maestro pavlova maker in the family. This year, she struggled to find the recipe and to remember how she made it. She eventually tracked down the old recipe book with the recipe written in careful capitals. There was no complete method however, but I remembered my sister saying that our brother, who makes an excellent pavlova, adds the sugar at one minute intervals. And so it fell to a rather nervous me to make the pavlova for a family early Christmas dinner today.

Plenty of time for a selfie during the one-minute intervals
Fresh out of the oven

The secret of a good pavlova is to beat it for so long it has no choice but to stand up. It collapses a bit as it cools, but that is easily covered with whipped cream and strawberries. I forgot to take a photo of the end result, but it passed the test at the dinner, thankfully.

Pumpkin Pie

A friend with a very productive garden gave us some pumpkin this afternoon as we left her house after playing cards. I was intending to make an apricot dessert that evening, but one of our card players suggested pumpkin pie.

I found a recipe in my ancient Edmonds Cookbook, but used the short pastry recipe from another book. I had more pumpkin than I needed and used it all by doubling the recipe for the filling. I used half yoghurt and half milk, and golden syrup instead of treacle. After I’d boiled the pumpkin until it was just soft, I realised the recipe said to bake the pumpkin. That would have taken too long, but would have produced a drier pumpkin with more intense taste, I imagine.

An ancient Edmonds Cookbook
Pumpkin Pie ready for the oven – the apricots are looked forward to for another day
There were a lot of dishes afterwards!
Forty minutes later it came out of the oven
Cream on top for Mum and yoghurt for me

It tastes very nice; spicy with cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. The pastry was a little hard to cut through with a spoon, perhaps because I used a recipe with one cup of flour instead of the two cups suggested in the Edmonds book, but I prefer a thinner crust. The pie will last us for several days. Yum!