Australia Day Passionfruit Meringues

Pavlova: is a meringue-based dessert named after the Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova.

10 Things and Cupcakes

   I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22.

Lime, Pistachio and Rosewater Tart

Ladies and gentlemen – I, Rachel Southwood, have cold hands.

Almond and Apricot Bites

This confession has been a long time coming – I’ll just come out and say it. I’m nuts about nuts – almonds, cashews, walnuts, pecans I love em! Don’t even get me started on hazelnuts. My love of nuts is …

Strawberry Milkshake Cake

I have been meaning to make this cake for SUCH a long time – I love making things that aren’t cake into cake, and I really like strawberry milkshake. Like really. Winner.

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Summer Sports

Do you have your summer sport yet? Beach volleyball, swimming, bowls, ultimate Frisbee?
This year I’m going with tennis, there is some awesome and free tennis courts in North Adelaide; including the super awesome wooden one above.

Kumquat and Chocolate Cookie

When I was in primary school we had to bring in a strange fruit and do a class presentation on it, I chose a kumquat. Kumquats are about the size of an olive and completely edible; with the inside being quite sour in flavour and the peel being sweet. They are in season beginning of spring, which is now! These were gifted from a neighbour and aren’t as oval as a normal kumquat.I cannot for the life of me figure out how I researched for my presentation, did Wikipedia exist in 1999? Maybe I looked in the dictionary? How on earth did people function without the internet? How did people complete degrees without the internet?
This is hurting my head, I want to cry. I love you internet.

Sorry, that got a bit heavy. This cookie is pretty heavy, it’s pretty major. It’s delicious. Usually you would pair orange with dark chocolate, to balance out the sweetness. However kumquats already bring the bitterness so this time we are going to pair it with milk chocolate.

Kumquat and Chocolate Cookies –

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter, slightly softened
1 cup  brown sugar
5 Kumquats, zest and juice (keep half of the juice)
2 tablespoons Nutella
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
100g Milk Chocolate chopped into pieces

Method
In a small bowl, mix flour, soda and salt using a whisk and set aside.

In another bowl, cream butter and dark brown sugar until light and fluffy.
Add the zest and nutella, then slowly add the remaining juice. Add eggs and vanilla and mix until combined. Add flour mixture to creamed mixture and mix until combined.

Roll dough onto baking paper into a log shape and freeze. Leave to freeze for at least 2 hours. Once dough is frozen slice and bake the dough at 180C for 10 minutes.
Bake until still soft, and slightly browned. Remove and scatter chocolate pieces onto the
still warm cookies.

Lavender and Lemon Cookie Pop

Spring holds so much hope and anticipation; growing up in the UK it always felt like the start of the year, and that feeling has transferred here, despite the fact that it is September. It holds anticipation for ice-cream eating, long walks with my puppy and road trips to Middleton, my favourite beach spot in SA.

South Australia has really brought it for the first few days a spring, if it was a football team people would be saying “This is our year”. Except Spring can’t really fail at being Spring so, yeah.

This cookie is anticipation in a cookie, the Lemon and Lavender are the perfect spring flavour combination. Refreshing like lemonade, and the lavender is in no way overwhelming, but the key is to only use a small amount otherwise things get soapy. And from experience I can tell you that soap is both a taste that is overwhelming, and exceedingly hard to remove from your mouth.The lemon cheese drizzle makes the cookie taste like delicious cheesecake. Its optional but do it, it’s amazing.

Lemon and Lavender Cookie

Ingredients
230gr plain flour
1/2 teaspoon of bicarb soda
85g caster sugar
45gr dark brown sugar
125gr melted butter
1/4 teaspoon of vanilla paste
1 egg
Rind of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon lavender

Method
Sift flour, soda and sugars into a large bowl; dark brown sugar generally has big pieces in it, sift well then add the larger pieces in too. Stir in the butter, vanilla and egg, the lemon and lavender.On a sheet of baking paper, roll the dough into a log shape. Tie the ends and if necessary wrap in glad wrap. Freeze the dough for at least 2 hours. At this point the mixture will last months.

Slice the frozen mixture and insert lollipop sticks. Bake at 200C for ten minutes.

Lemon Cheese Drizzle – adapted from Rah Cha Chow

Ingredients
70gr cream cheese
3 tablespoons lemon juice
184 gr powdered sugar

Method
Combine ingredients in bowl. Spoon a small tablespoon of mixture on to the cooled cookies and spread evenly over the top. Allow to dry.

Gooey Dark Brownies with Pistachio Praline

Kitchen disasters always happen at the worst of times, this particular one happened after a week-long baking marathon; my teeth had grown sick of sugar and my hands were well and truly done with being buttered. I shan’t dwell on that though because A.) I love baking and B.) I got to make these AH-may-zing brownies and C.) I ate far too many for my own good.

Now brownies have a special place in my heart. Why I hear you ask?

Well I am the queen of under-baking (note baking – the only time I under cook things are veggie pasta bakes that I am just too hungry to wait until they crisp up; and that is all good!), it most definitely steams from far too many dry birthday cakes as a child – other kids obviously my mum made rocking birthday cakes. Because of this when I bake I just hang out in the kitchen watching the cake and painting my nails. Cakes never hurry up for me, they always take a bazillion times longer than the recommended time. This is where brownies become the saviour of the day, they relish the watch, sometimes it all happens so fast; if you’ve seen Masterchef you will know that you are only minutes away from over cooking.

These were for my pretty awesome boyfriend and they went down a treat! I made these at his house and forget he didn’t have a food processor so the praline was more crunchy bits of caramel than the smooth crunch of praline!

Dark Chocolate Brownies adapted from Joy the Baker
makes 24 brownies
200g unsweetened chocolate, coarsely chopped
12 Tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Place a rack in the upper third of the oven and preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Butter a 9×13-inch baking pan.  Line and butter the lining.  This will make brownie removal much easier.

Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.

Place butter and chopped chocolate in a medium-sized heat proof bowl.  Place the bowl over a pot of barely simmering water, being sure that the bottom of the bowl does not touch the boiling water.  Stir until chocolate and butter are completely melted.  Use pot holders to remove the bowl from over the boiling water. Lets mixture sit for a few minutes.

Meanwhile, in a medium-sized bowl, whisk together sugar, eggs and vanilla extract.  Whisk until pale and thick.  Pour the chocolate mixture into the egg mixture.  Whisk until completely incorporated.  Add the flour mixture all at once and whisk to incorporate.  Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 30 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.Potentially review size of container for overflow, however if you do have overflow you can totally eat it, that’s cool.

Pistachio Praline

165g caster sugar
1/4 cup water
50g shelled pistachios

Combine sugar and water in a saucepan and stir over low heat to dissolve sugar. Increase heat and boil, without stirring, until mixture is a caramel colour. Pour into six 175mL ramekins.

Lightly toast nuts in a hot oven.

Remove caramel from heat once nuts are toasted.

When bubbles subside, carefully stir in nuts. Pour onto a greased baking tray, cool, break into pieces and grind finely in a food processor.

Add some vanilla gelato from Gelatissimo and you have an amazing dessert.

❤ Enjoy!

This Week!

I have officially become one of those people who cannot function without a smart phone. My very cute phone met its untimely demise last week. Couple of words of warning, Digimob have apparently got this insane sense of humour. $620 to fix and $628 phone, they have to be joking yes?

So this is my new phone. It’s a Nokia, it’s sell point was a torch… yeah a torch! My friends all think this is hilarious. I’m beginning to see the funny side.

It’s Fringe time in Adelaide, which if you have never been is pretty damn awesome. For roughly a month Adelaide becomes one of the best places on earth to live. Hopefully I’ll get to see Ross Noble and lots of unknown comedians! In my mind March Fringe is to comedy what September issue is to Fashion. Comedy and fashion in one blog. I aim to please folks.

A bunch of other good stuff happened this week too. I figured out how to watch free movies, but for the sake of what is one of the coolest things Adelaide has I’ll just direct you to here where you can pay not very much to watch movies on beanbags and such.

Valentines day happened. Oh and I got an internship at Hills Weddings; that last bit is huge. I cannot describe how lucky I feel to have gotten an internship at somewhere so perfect; the beautiful people behind Hills marketing (totally linked with hills magazine) are totally delightful and the office is surrounded by such a pretty little country garden.

I have plans for purchasing of chinos for this grown up occasion.