limes and finger food

I have been busy, travelling and unwell so my cooking mojo went somewhere else and my blogging mojo followed it, however...

This week I had a bucket of limes to use up. And there are more on the tree.

So the challenge begins:

I made Lime Curd - just the Thermomix EDC recipe Oh MY GOODNESS I just want to eat this off the spoon even after seeing how much butter and sugar went in there

Then Lime Marmalade - again the EDC, mind you don't look for it in the index under "L" or "M" whoever put that together should be writing crosswords for a living - it's under "C" for Citrus so I stumbled on the recipe by accident while making the Lime Curd. One batch made 4 jars of sticky breakfast goodness.

Lime cordial was next I chose this recipe because it had less sugar than the others. Himself (who is a bit of a lime cordial connoisseur)  is very impressed with the result.

We are having guests tonight so I wanted to make finer food - I decided to give The4Blades chicken wings a go.
I made the hot sauce a couple of days in advance. I substituted apple cider vinegar for the white vinegar and half the cayenne with paprika and it is still blow your head off hot. It will be interesting to see how it goes with the wings tonight.

So today I had a blitz - I made this cake which is way different to the lazy cakes I usually do - and it is sugar free and GF as well. It smells divine.

Then some of these Lime balls. Just because I could.

And because it seemed like we ought to have vegetables in there somewhere I made 40 mini muffins using this recipe

So then we did the 4Blades hot wings (I needed double the spice mix) and the jerk wings. One batch are cooking in the veroma right now.

Is that enough inspiration for a bit? I think I need a rest!

Lest we forget

Anzac Day 2014

Dawn service for some members of the household and a facebook profile full of images like this one

I had time to go to a rehearsal, read a book, walk the dog by the river and listen to the 4 Blades Podcast who inspired me to make ANZAC biscuits too!

I followed the first recipe because it sounded very similar to the one I usually make which is from NMAA Cooks (the book anyone without a Thermomix should definitely own, and anyone with a Thermomix should be converting recipes from)

My three tweaks:

I used raw sugar rather than white
I set my oven to 150 degrees as we have a very hot fan forced oven
I used the Chefs Toolbox silicon sheets and rather than pressing down with the MC I used a CT muffin pan

The results:

Delicious!

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning. We will remember them. Lest we forget.

Baileys Balls

Well I did the rum balls earlier in the week but I wanted something different - so how about Caramel Baileys Balls?

Ingredients:

1 packet milk arrowroot biscuits (250g)

40g cocoa powder

100g dessicated coconut

1 tin condensed milk

40 ml Baileys Irish Cream

Extra coconut or almond meal to roll them in 

Put biscuits in TM and grind 5 seconds speed 6

Add all other ingredients except almond meal or extra coconut

Mix 9 seconds at speed 5

Take teaspoonfuls and form into balls, roll them in the almond meal or extra coconut

That's it! Ta Da! And two Weight Watchers ProPoints each

Coconut and apricot loaf

We had a guest chef at the Cafe Disarray recently

And she whipped up a cake so easy you could not even simplify it by putting it in the Thermomix. Well maybe you could use the machine for the chopping. But that didn't actually take long.

So the original recipe came from the legendary NMAA Cooks which you can buy here but the guest chef's twist is to add a cup of chopped dried apricots. So easy and DELICIOUS!!

You just mix the following ingredients:

1 cup dessicated coconut

1 cup SR flour

3/4 cup white sugar

3/4 cup milk

1 cup chopped dried apricots

Mix well. Cook in loaf tin  (I used my CT loaf mould) in a preheated oven at 180 deg for around 40 minutes 

 Remove and allow to cool before turning out and slicing

That's all! How easy is that? At 5 Weight Watchers ProPoints a slice make sure you are sharing with friends

Nom nom nom