Super Easy Mikan (mandarin) Rice

So again, this isn't actually baking. But it does involve food, and that's what matters right?

I get email newsletters from a Japanese health food company called Yomeishu Seizo, and this month they did a feature on mandarins (mikan in Japanese), including some novel "cooking challenges." Namely, oven roasted mandarin and mandarin rice. The mandarin rice looked so easy that I had to try it! 

You literally just put rice and water in your rice cooker as usual (I was my usual lazy self and didn't even rinse the rice), sit a peeled mikan on top of the rice, and press go (or whatever you usually do to make your rice cooker work).

By the time the rice is cooked the mikan gets soft enough that it's easy to break up and mix through.

The original post (here, in Japanese - scroll down to "Challenge 2" for their photos) suggests 2 cups of rice with 1 mikan, but I tried 1 cup with one mikan and the flavour was good. Subtler than I was expecting actually, but good.

So there's one super easy way to add some vitamin C to your dinner!

Healthy cupcakes... is this possible?

The answer to that question is... probably not. Not cupcakes that fit my definition of what a cupcake must be. If it's healthy then maybe it's a muffin or... something else.

So I guess these are "something else." For a cupcake-esque healthy-ish snack idea, check out this post from the blog Mom's Deal of the Day - Fruity Frozen Yoghurt Cups! I might just have to give this a try sometime. If you beat me to it please leave your comments below to inform the rest of us :)

This post found via the very cool and very cupcakey Cupcakes Take the Cake.

Strawberry-Cream Cheese Cupcakes

It was so nice to have a week off work over Christmas/New Year. Time to relax and do whatever. I organised an afternoon tea with friends so that I "had" to do some baking.

This is another delight from Betty Crocker's Big Book of Cupcakes - Strawberry-Cream Cheese Cupcakes.

You start with a yellow cake base, add a little square of cream cheese and spoon in a little jam... bake to produce amazingness (<-- anyone who has tasted these cupcakes knows that amazingness is, in fact, a real word).

I was mildly concerned that the jam would bubble and explode and go everywhere. But it didn't. The cupcakes greedily gobbled up the filling as they baked. Less so the mini cupcakes, but that's probably because I gloriously overfilled them.

Now. Cream cheese icing. And swirl.

If you've forgotten the joy of strawberries, you need to remember. Here's something to jog your memory.

A-mazing.

We also devoured other cool stuff, but that will have to wait till next time. Did I mention that I enjoyed my time off work? Happy new year :)

Playing catchup - caramel, banana, peach, choc mint and vanilla

Once you've found some recipes that you like, it's inevitable that they will be repeated! Here are some of my recent baked goods. (This is actually a sneaky mixed-up blog post to make me feel like I've caught up!)

Delicious caramel mudcake. The obvious option for when you're out of white sugar and too lazy to go and get some :p

I tried out my basket weave icing tip for the first time. This icing was too soft so you can't see the ridges, but I can see the potential.

I made banana cupcakes for work to farewell a colleague.

These are peach and cinnamon cupcakes, using the leftover cream cheese icing from the banana cupcakes. Icing keeps pretty well in the fridge so I often use the same icing a couple of times in a row to avoid wasting any.

This batch is chocolate wacky cake with mint Nuttelex icing - made for a friend whose little boy can't have eggs or dairy. The icing doesn't hold its shape as well, but still tastes fine.


Finally, a batch of vanilla with a mish-mash of icing flavours and colours.


My most reliable decoration methods are swirls and solid colour with a little star, so no doubt you'll continue seeing these. Hopefully over the Christmas break I'll get a chance to try some new things too :).

Banana Bread (gluten & dairy free)

When I decide to make banana cake I don't go to the fruit shop in search of bananas that look like this.

I go in search of bananas that look like THIS. These were only $4.99 a kilo and perfect for baking with so I got nearly a whole kilo and froze some for next time!

This was part of my foray into gluten and dairy-free baking - a banana bread recipe from The Australian Women's Weekly "Gluten-free & Allergy-free Eating." You can find a link to the recipe >>here<<. This one also happens to be wheat, yeast and egg-free!

What DOES it contain? A whole lot of mashed banana and some brown sugar make a lovely start.

I very nearly forgot to add baking powder, but a final moment of thoughtfulness saved me from a very flat cake. The dark colour of the batter comes from the linseed, sunflower and almond meal (LSA). I didn't even know this stuff existed before, but it's pretty amazing, and I get the impression it might even be good for you.


Here's the baked product. It cracked a little when I turned it out, but I was just glad I got that baking powder in at the last minute!


This tasted really good. Very moist from all the banana (yum) and vegetable oil, and the LSA gives it a lot of substance. I would happily serve this up again, even if my guests didn't particularly need to avoid dairy, gluten, wheat, yeast or eggs :)

Chocolate Orange Mousse Cake (gluten & dairy free)

I hosted a gluten and dairy-free afternoon tea on the weekend and had fun trying a couple of new new recipes, which both came out really well. This is the first one - a really rich chocolate orange mousse cake from The gluten, wheat & dairy free cookbook by Nicola Graimes.

I used Nuttelex as my dairy-free butter substitute. It's lighter in colour than butter, but it actually tastes pretty good.

This is the cake base, all ready to bake, and already looking pretty appetising.


I used 70% dark Lindt chocolate to make the mousse. It felt a little wrong melting down such nice quality chocolate, but it's the most reliably dairy free chocolate I could source (that isn't just a gross chocolate substitute).


As I was separating my four eggs I was lamenting the fact that I would probably end up throwing the unused portion away. Then I read the recipe properly and found that I would actually be using both parts. Yay! Also, look how orange those yolks are.


Yet another orange ingredient - the rind of two oranges in fact.


Crazy things happen to eggs when you beat them for long enough. It's like magic. Here's before.


And after. Crazy.


After I'd mixed up the mousse and spread it across the cake base I put it in the fridge to set overnight. It probably didn't need that long, but that's how long it got. Here's the finished product, decorated with a sprinkling of extra orange rind.


The verdict from my husband was that this cake tasted like Jaffas. You wouldn't know it didn't have dairy or gluten in it if nobody told you. Unless you were very, very perceptive. What I mean to say is that it was really good.

Banana Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing

I've had a bag of mashed banana in the freezer for at least a couple of months and decided it was finally time to use it, but it still felt pretty extravagant to make banana cake again when banana prices have been so horrendous for so long.

I used a recipe that my friend Jenn gave me at my hen's high tea before I got married. It's super easy and all done in the food processor. It also happens to taste extremely good.

The plain white, large patty pans I've been using to date are an odd size and tend to crinkle up annoyingly. At the supermarket the other day I came to the delightful realisation that coloured cases are exactly the same price per unit AND it turns out that they're actually the right size for my muffin pan :)

It was my intention to decorate these with cream cheese icing in my usual fashion, but I had friends over and they were of the opinion that bright colours would be better.

I provided the cakes and the icing. They did the decorating.

And I was actually quite impressed by the results!

I usually just use one colour of icing because I figure it cuts down on the cleaning up afterwards, but the extra colour is pretty cool, I must say.

The colours reminded us of the food fight scene in Hook (the Peter Pan movie starring Robin Williams). See the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPCzjHPS--U

Here's one by Domestic Cowboy.

Banana cake is just as good as I remembered it being, and this time it was also rather pretty :)

Lemon Diva Cupcakes

My mother-in-law very kindly gave me a copy of Julie Goodwin's "Our Family Table." Julie was the winner of the 1st Australian Masterchef series, and the book is put together really nicely.

I tried out her Lemon Diva Cupcake Recipe (<-- link here), but only had 2 lemons on hand so that's all I used (rather than the suggested 3).

I was making these for church supper so I opted for mini-cupcakes and ended up with about 26.

I added some extra lemon juice to the icing to try and make up for less lemon in the batter, but not sure it made much difference except making the icing less firm.

These weren't my favourite cupcakes, but they still disappeared quickly. If I bake them again I'll make sure I have enough lemons first.

Peach cobbler cupcakes

Have I mentioned how much I love Willow Bird Baking? Julie, who writes it, encourages fun and creativity in the kitchen and has a fantastic recipe index going!

This time around I decided to try Peach Cobbler Cupcakes (<-- link here). I have a soft spot for fruit and also enjoy streusel (ie. crumbly topping) so these sounded pretty good indeed. The batter started out looking a bit gross - buttermilk and peach syrup just don't look pretty when you mix them together!

But, as expected, things soon improved.

I put about 5 chunks of peach into each cake but next time I think I'd try using enough to cover the whole middle layer of streusel and make a bigger deal of the peach.

The fruit is covered over with another layer of batter and streusel. (They're not the quickest cakes to assemble, but it's a tasty combination.)

And then baked.

I just made a quarter batch of cream cheese icing (see previous posts for recipe adapted from Bakerella) to put a small swirl on each cupcake.

But even a quarter batch was too much. I got a bit carried away and over-iced a few - proving, once again, that less really is more.

These were lovely and moist, and the splashes of peach syrup in the batter and icing were a nice touch.