Tag: Baking

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Cupcake Day for the SPCA

This coming Monday is Cupcake Day for the SPCA.  What’s that you ask?  It’s one of their major fundraisers, where home cooks around the country bake cupcakes, and cupcake connoisseurs give a donation to the SPCA in order to get one to eat.

My lovely neighbour is a true animal lover (I’ve lost count of how many gorgeous pets she has, everything from fish to Samoyeds).  She also works for the local Pet Centre, and each year they join in with Cupcake Day – including roping in friends and family to bake!  This year they are holding their Cupcake Day on Saturday 24 August. So can you guess yet what my Friday Night Make was this week?

Yep. Cupcakes!

A batch of cooling cupcakes
Vegan-friendly even

As they’re for the SPCA, I’ve made them free of animal products.  The secret ingredient in these babies is tahini, which makes them wonderfully moist, and they have a hint of nuttiness to them too.  Delish!

I have no idea how much they’ll be asking for them, but these are getting picked up from my kitchen at around 8 tomorrow morning, and will be available from The Pet Centre in Lower Hutt. Why not head on down and buy one.  It’s for the animals, after all!

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Cheesecake for the win!

So I promised you pictures of the cheesecake, and here it is in all its, um, glory?

My inspired cheesecake, looking rather like a giant meat pie
My inspired cheesecake, looking rather like a giant meat pie

I did have wonderful things planned for the presentation of the cake, but due to a miscommunication about the cream that I’d reserved for it, a frantic search for my piping set, with thoughts that I could buy cream on the way, and eventually getting to the dinner party just as everyone else finished their mains… well, my cheesecake remained undecorated.  However, somehow that didn’t seem to lessen its appeal.  Even as I was walking through to the kitchen with it covered in the enormous cake carrier, a call went around the party “is that cheesecake?”, “Did someone say cheesecake?”, “I heard there was cheesecake!”. Continue reading Cheesecake for the win!

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There’s no gingernut tastes quite the same…

When my lovely friend Sadie from Ever So Scrumptious invited me to be part of her unofficial Wellington on a Plate event, Cheapskate on a Plate, I knew immediately what I was going to make, and that I wanted to make it from as locally-sourced ingredients as possible.

Gingernuts, eggs (white, brown, and blue), 3 pottles of cream cheese, sour cream and cream.
Ingredients for my dish – yes, that egg is blue.

Part of the deal, is of course, coming up with the best name and description, so I give you:

 

There’s no Gingernut tastes quite the same baked cheesecake

For generations, Griffins Gingernuts were baked in the factory at the foot at the Wainuiomata Hill. Sadly, that factory is no longer baking, but the Gingernuts packed into the base of this cheesecake made the pilgrimage back to the closest dairy to the former site.  Topped with creamy organic delights from Zany Zeus in Morea, blended with Alicetown backyard free range eggs from a frizzle (brown eggs), a blue leghorn (white egg), and an araucana* (blue egg), and for a touch of the exotic, ginger from Thailand.

*Yes, you can see the actual chicken that laid the blue egg if you click the link.  Her name is Quasimodo.

 

Pictures of the finished cake to come…