Random Recipe: Orange and Ginger Stained Glass Biscuits

Have you taken part in my blog giveaway yet?

Dom's random recipe challenge for this month was awesome! We were partnered up with another blog who randomly chose a recipe for us from one of our books after we numbered them! My partner was Manu at http://cookingmanu.blogspot.com/

Manu randomly chose a recipe  for me called "orange and ginger stained glass biscuits" in BBC Food's 101 Cupcakes and Small Bakes.

The picture with the recipe was so cute since the heart shaped biscuits had ribbons tied to them and were hung from branches of a Christmas tree.

I made mine round but it was a total fail as they didn't come off the tray! :( apart from one. Which I abused excessively for pictures.

The recipe quite simple and I think to get it right you should add parchment paper to the already greased baking tray.

Here's the recipe:

175g plain flour
zest of one orange
1 tsp ground ginger
100g cold butter, cut into chunks
50g muscovado sugar
1tbsp milk
12 fruit flavored boiled sweets, crushed

Preheat oven to 180C. Grease two non stick baking sheets with oil. Whiz together flour, ginger, orange zest, and butter in a food processor. Pulse in the sugar and milk and turn out and knead briefly until smooth.
Wrap, then chill for 30 minutes.
Roll out to the dough to a 1/4 inch thickness. Cut shapes with 7cm cutters and use 4cm to cut out the middle.
Put the crushed sweets in the middle of each biscuit and bake for 15 to 20 minutes until middles have melted and edges golden brown.
Leave to harden then transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Blueberry and Mascarpone Biscuit Bites

Lemon and blueberry... one of those classic combinations where you can't go wrong, just like raspberry and white chocolate.

I found a recipe in a book called "Lemon and Blueberry Cakes with a Cheesecake Topping"... the picture was adorable, there were these mini cakes topped with a second, equally thick and really white layer of cheesecake  topping. The whole thing was topped with some tiny blueberries. The picture did not correspond to the recipe... in the sense that the procedure in no way would end up making cakes that looked like that!


Anyhow, I tried it. And my suspicions were correct. I ended up with very moist muffins. Disheartened with this result, I decided to play around the concept and come up with something quite similar but not exactly.

 

So I made these blueberry and mascarpone biscuit bites. The base is a biscuit layer (cooked in a mini cupcake tray). The topping is simply some piped mascarpone cheese and blueberries.

I took these to Devina's potluck this Friday and they were a big success. And they're very, very simple to make!

Ingredients, 
oil or butter for greasing
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 egg
1 cup self raising flour
1 cup plain flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
250g mascarpone cheese
1/2 cup fresh blueberries

Procedure
Generously grease the cupcake tray.
Beat the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the egg and beat until combined.
Add the sifted flours and fold in.
Mix in the vanilla extract and make sure everything is well combined.
Take teaspoons of the dough and press into each hole in the tin. Make sure they're 3/4 full.
Bake at 180C in a preheated oven for around 20 minutes until relatively cooked but soft.
Remove from oven and allow to cool completely in tin, around one hour.
Once cooled, spoon the mascarpone cheese into a piping bag with a small star tip.
Pipe from the center out and place two to three blueberries on top.

The Epic Picnic

Arva's carrot cake sandwiches

Sukaina's strawberry and hazelnut cake

Anja's peppadews, veggie sticks, and hummus

What do you think of when you hear about almost a dozen food bloggers getting together for a picnic?


 If you thought exquisite, creative, and absolutely delicious food, then you're absolutely right.


This weekend, a whole bunch of us at Table Talk gathered at Safa Park for an afternoon of foodies and food. Every dish was more delicious than the last and for around three hours all we did was chat, eat, and take photographs. It was wonderful. 

The dessert section

More of Sukaina's cake

Sarah's Melba toast

Sarah brought spicy chicken wraps and melba toast with pickled beet, goats cheese and curried onion jam. I didn't eat the spicy chicken wraps (I must have missed them amongst all the food!) but the melba toasts were absolutely heavenly. They were perfectly bite-sized and I must have had about 5 or 6 without even realizing.


Arva brought carrot cake cookie and cream cheese sandwiches and halloumi and zaatar southern-style biscuits. The carrot cake sandwiches were SO creative.. and absolutely delicious.. They were two tiny rounds of carrot cake with cream cheese frosting in the middle. 


Sukaina brought strawberry and hazel nut cake with mascarpone frosting which was sooo light, elegant, and flavourful. 


Anja brought rosewater-scented pistachio cake, avocado chocolate truffles, hummus and veggie sticks, and feta-stuffed peppadews. The peppadews were wonderful as they were just the kind of thing I felt like eating after my habanero pepper attempt went disastrously spicy. And the hummus was soo good.. don't think I've ever had homemade ones and these beat all the ones I've had at restaurants.


Kari brought Reggae Salsa... Mexican salsa with a Jamaican Twist and Toasted Pita Chips which was magical!


Sandy brought Goat Cheese Tomato Tart which I must have had a hundred slices of.. gorgeous!


Sally brought ginger chocolate cookies and mini spiced butternut squash frittatas. The cookies were one of the best things I think I have ever eaten. The two flavours went wonderfully together and the frittatas were delicious as well. 


Yasmin brought mini chocolate pudding tarts which looked way too amazing to be homemade but they were! Each tartlet was a little piece of perfection.


Lin brought roasted tomaotes with salt pepper, basil & garlic and banana and lemon muffins. The best 
thing about the tomatoes was that they were homegrown! 

Edwina brought a zucchini and chocolate cake- which fully converted me to the idea of zucchini in cakes. I had seen tons of zucchini cupcake recipes before and always found it very odd. I decided to be adventurous and try Edwina's cake and LOVED IT! I never knew how great zucchini can work in a cake. It was soft and subtle and complemented the chocolate flavour in the cake WONDERFULLY. 

As for me, I brought some Italianesque sandwiches and these corn muffins. 

Anja's pistachio and rosewater scented cake

Yasmin's chocolate tartlets

All the food.. and my Italianesque sandwiches

Sandy's goat cheese and tomato tarts

Savoury Biscuits

Are they biscuits or are they cookies?! That's something that's always confuddled me! If I'm not mistaken, I think the American word is cookies whereas the British word is biscuits... I came to that conclusion after flipping through an American cookbook called "Cookies" containing all what I usually call "biscuits".. but for me, cookies are a TYPE of biscuit... the chocolate chip kind, or the oatmeal and raisin kind...

Anyways, moving on... my father can't eat very many sweet things and so he asked me to bake savoury biscuits for him. After some browsing, I came across this recipe which I thought he'd like. I had never made savoury biscuits before and thought it was going to be an interesting experience. Especially since it contained cheese. The recipe looked fairly simple and easy.

And it called for mixing the dough with your hands. Until recently, I always took an aversion to recipes that called for hand mixing or kneading. I fine with elastic-ish bread dough etc but not biscuit dough which was very... soft.. I still find it kind of not-very-enticing when a recipe calls for something that's going to get my hands dirty.. but now, I'd like to think that as I'm getting more dedicated in my cooking, my inhibitions about food-related things in general are decreasing.

I now try making more diverse kinds of food. I also try ordering things that I normally wouldn't when I go out to eat. And, yes, I'm fine(-ish!) with getting my hands messy.

Anyways, back to the biscuits.. I thought they were toooo floury.. but apparently everyone loved them. There's no egg in the recipe and the predominant ingredients are flour and cheese. The dough wasn't coming together very well and so I kept on adding water gradually to increase the sticky consistency of the dough. And at the end, the biscuits looked more like little toasted slices of bread.

Oh, I also replaced fresh/dried rosemary with chives- which I thought would have a stronger flavour.

But, it was fun to make. And it was good to venture into new territory in the world of baking. And everyone loved it! So that is what's important.

Do you have recipes for any good sugar-free or savoury biscuits that I could make?

The Cupcake and Biscuit Making Process

Gingerbread biscuits at Sally's!

So today I had a lovely afternoon with all my food blogger friends from our group "Famished in Arabia"! This time, in the Christmas spirit, we gathered at Sally's home to decorate some wonderful gingerbread biscuits she had made!

It was such a lovely experience, the kitchen was full of women chatting, eating, baking, and decorating biscuits!

Check out Sally's blog here: mycustardpie.com

Ruth at Bon Appetit Review http://bonappetitreview.blogspot.com/ made some heavenly scones that we had with rhubarb jam.

Here are some photographs:

Coconut and Apricot Macaroons with Macadamia Blondies

I want to try baking something different. I feel like I stick to much to my comfort zone of cakes, cupcakes, and biscuits. So here are some macadamia blondies (which were left too long in the oven thanks to me forgetting about them!) and some coconut macaroons with dried apricot and white chocolate. The apricot and white chocolate can be replaced with glace cherries. I think that would work out really nicely.

Enjoy the photographs. Something was wrong with either me or my camera that day. Everything came out blurry.

Cinnamon flavoured almond biscuits

These biscuits are light and dry from the outside and moist and flavourful from the inside. Made them for my lovely IS department.