Oh sugar! Oh honey-honey!

I'm going to start by saying if you are a fan of the biscuits honeyjumbles and are particularly attached to them in their traditional form, then you probably shouldn't read on. This is not a honeyjumble-fanatic-friendly post.

For those of you who remain, I'm going to tell you something horrific: honeyjumbles don't actually have honey in them. I discovered this when making them this afternoon. Golden syrup is the only vaguely honey-like ingredient. As the name was obviously inaccurate, I felt well within my rights to rename the faux-jumbles. Searching for a name wasn't difficult; we didn't have any golden syrup so I substituted treacle and this gave the biscuit dough a deep brown colour. A rather specific brown colour.

Flatmate #1: Walks into the kitchen and upon seeing biscuit dough slows dramatically. Asks suspiciously.'What are you doing there?'
Me: 'Making biscuits.'
Flatmate # 1: With relief, laughing. 'Ha! That's good, I thought you were kneading poo.'
Flatmate #2: Enters kitchen. 'Woah - you realise that looks like shit?'

The recipe calls for the biscuit dough to be rolled into a log shape. Just like so:

Clearly the only name for these biscuits at this point in time was 'Pooh Sticks'. Rather appropriate as it references not only the appearance of the biscuits, but also a game invented by a silly old bear that most likely would have gruffled these biscuits (that's Winnie the Pooh, for those of you who have grown out of bedtime stories).

For those of you who just scoffed at the inclusion of a children's book character as an authority for how damn tasty these biscuits are, I'll have you know that grown men fought over these biscuits. In fact, you can see for yourself (or not see, depending on how good your night vision is, as this was shot in low light).

You will need...

• 125g butter, chopped
• 1 1/2 cups golden syrup (I used treacle...)
• 3 1/2 cups plain flour
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 2 tbp fresh ginger, finely grated, or 3 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
  
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• splash of milk (use as required)

Icing

• 1 egg white, beaten lightly
  
• 1 cup icing sugar
• 1 tbsp flour
  
• squeeze of lemon juice (to taste)
  
• couple of drops of food colouring of your choice
• optional - flavouring*
  

The how-to...

1. Combine butter and sugar in a saucepan and stir over low heat until the butter has melted. Once the butter has melted, continue stirring and bring the mixture to the boil. Remove saucepan from the heat and leave to cool for 10 minutes.

2. Sift in dry ingredients and mix to combine. Add a little splash of milk to help the process. Cover the mixture and leave it alone for two hours.

3. Preheat your oven to 160 degrees. Turn out mixture onto a lightly floured surface and knead. You want a smooth, well combined dough - if it is coming apart then add a couple of drops of milk to hold it all together and if it is too sticky add a little flour.

4. Shape the dough into a rough rectangle and cut into 8 equal pieces. Take one piece and roll it into a long thin tube shape. Cut this into six pieces, each approximately 5cm in length. Round the ends of each piece to make the biscuit shape (see first blog picture).

5. Line the biscuits up on a tray lined with baking paper, leaving a couple of centimetres between each biscuit so they can flatten out. Put in the oven for 12 minutes.

6. Whilst the biscuits are cooking, make up your icing. Combine the icing sugar, lemon juice, flour and egg white to make a thick icing paste. If you plan to add colouring/flavouring, divide up the mixture so that you can tint/flavour each portion differently.

7. Pull out the biscuits and let them cool on the tray. After 20 minutes, transfer them to a wire tray and ice them quickly before they are all eaten.

Makes 48.

*I'm always frustrated by coloured foods that taste nothing like the flavours that the pigment promises, so I've added a little vanilla to the white icing and rosewater to the pink icing. After some pestering from my flatmate about what colour the vanilla-flavoured icing should be - blue, according to him - I made some less traditionally coloured jumbles. The 'Science' jumble (green = peppermint) and the 'Malaria' jumble (yellow = brandy). So you can imagine how good this one tasted...

Dear Kate Moss,

Regarding your recent comment that 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' (Women's Wear Daily, Fri 13 Nov), whilst I appreciate that you have founded your career on being a controversial angular waif, I would like to suggest - ever so politely - that you are wrong.

I think that the pro-anorexia critics have covered this sufficiently from a health perspective in the last few days, so I don't plan on rehashing that part of the debate.

From someone who knows, I would like to offer a list of just a few things that taste better than skinny feels.

1. Green & Black's Organic Chocolate

Their milk chocolate is to die for. With a higher cocoa content than your average chocolate, it is the perfect compromise between milk and dark chocolate. Every good supermarket will stock it.

How to eat: share it whilst chatting on the couch with your girlfriends.

2. Anything from Sparkle Cupcakery

The fittingly festive iced pumpkin cupcake is amazing. I'm going back to try the lavendar and honey, and lychee and rose. Don't even try to stop me.

How to eat: when a lovely man picks one up for you and brings it home in the late afternoon in the gorgeous thick paper bag as a surpise , risk spoiling your appetite before dinner and share it. Then eat dinner.

3. The freshly made eggplant, onion and roasted almond ravioli from The Pasta Gallery

You can buy it on Saturdays from the Eveleigh Market, or pick it up from their kitchen, or wait for delivery day.

How to eat: have dinner with the man who surprised you with a cupcake. I cooked it up and served it with a butter, lemon juice and sage sauce, tossed with finely sliced zucchini and fresh spinach and rocket.

4. Breakfast at Cafe Giulia on Sunday morning

Eggs scrambled with haloumi, mint and tomato and served with kefte, or smoked salmon rosettes with hash browns, perfectly poached eggs, spinach, lemon, and some kind of delicious mayonnaise type condiment - these are just two of many offerings.

How to eat: a knife and fork will generally see you through. Nab one of the bigger tables in the courtyard and fill it up with your nearest and dearest. Don't forget the coffee.

5. Lemon Calippo

Icy, lemony confectionary goodness. 99% fat free - Kate, I promise that the odd one of these won't have you out of your skinny jeans anytime soon.

How to eat: wait for a hot day then embrace your inner five year old - run off the beach, skip up to the nearest corner store, tear off the foil, slurp away and definitely don't share this one.

So perhaps enjoying food means I won't be starring in a Yves Saint Laurent mini-movie (and yes, Kate, congratulations are due, you do look unrealistically and unattainably beautiful) but it certainly tastes better than skinny feels.

With kind regards,

A happy girl at a healthy weight

P.S. I've included a gorgeous vintage advertisement titled 'If you want to be popular, you can't afford to be skinny'. Just something you might want to think about...

A Hollywood ending

A solution for when cakes go a little wrong: stick in letter-shaped candles for a Hollywood sign effect and all the funny looking pieces will be forgiven.


This one only went wrong because I didn't grease the moulds properly. Otherwise, this is quite a good recipe - mostly because it harnesses the awesome tastebud surprise that is chocolate and chilli at the same time. You can start this recipe the day before, it can be done in two stages.

You will need...

1/2 cup sour cream
100g dark chocolate, chopped
100g unsalted butter, softened and chopped
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs, at room temperature
a splash of vanilla essence
1 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon chilli powder (for an extra kick, substitute half of this with cayenne pepper)
1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

The how-to...

1.Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees and grease 6 muffin tins.
2. In a little saucepan, over low heat, stir the dark chocolate, sour cream and chilli/cayenne pepper until the chocolate has melted. Stir continuously so that the chocolate does not stick and burn. Turn off the heat and put aside for a moment.
3. Take a small bowl and line with plastic wrap, then pour the chocolate mixture in. Let it cool, then cover and freeze (overnight if you wish).
4. On the day you wish to serve the cakes of loveliness, beat together the butter and sugar. Add the eggs, one at a time, then the vanilla, and continue to beat unti incorporated.
5. Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt together into the butter mixture. Stir until combined. Divide the mixture equally between the muffin tins, and put into the oven for 12 minutes.
6. Take the frozen chocolate and cut into 6 pieces. Roll each piece into a ball and push gently into the centre of each of the semi-cooked muffins.
7. Pop the tray back into the oven for another 15 minutes - the muffins should look done, there may be chocolate bubbling out of the top. Let them cool a little in the tray before you take them out to serve.

These are lovely with vanilla mascarpone, or a little ice cream. And fancy candles if you make a mess like I did.

Resolving the banana issue

As a small person, aged about 5 or so, I had a playground accident that left me with a serious aversion to eating bananas the normal way.

We had one of those play frames that had a slide, a swing and some other bits and pieces contained in it. I quite liked sitting backwards at the top of the slide, with my legs resting on the rungs of the ladder, gazing at the tall sky-scraping poplar trees that lined our back fence and contemplating the kind of things that five year olds do; were there enough spangles on my dance concert tutu? How did my Barbie dolls feel when I had finished playing with them and stuck them in a dark, airtight container? Did my neighbour notice that I wasn't actually listening to his battle strategies, but leafing discreetly through a nice Disney princess story instead? It was a nice place to chill.

One life-changing day, I sat in this happy place eating a banana and swinging my legs. The heels of my shoes were bouncing off the rungs. Swing-bounce, swing-bounce, swing-crash. My feet tangled in the rungs, and my body tipped forward until my forehead rather painfully connected with the bottom rung. Since then, bananas eaten the regular way bring back a disconcerting sense of concussion. I can eat them sliced on my breakfast, blended in a smoothie, mashed into baked goods, but just not whole.

A little embarrassed by not having grown out of this odd borderline phobia almost twenty years on, I hadn't shared this anecdote with my boyfriend, who buys a bunch of bananas every week. They start their life in our fruit bowl with a lovely waxy yellow skin. A couple of days later they are streaked brown and black. A few days on again, and the kitchen smells entirely of banana. Any longer and fruit flies start to swarm. This has been going on for a number of years now, we are in a constant state of banana oversupply. I usually catch them at the overripe stage and turn them into banana cake/bread/muffins, or freeze them for baking later.

This recipe for banana and walnut muffins started as Tess Kiros' recipe for banana bread; I have altered it to suit me.

You will need...

3 large bananas, mashed
2 eggs, beaten
100g butter
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1 cup plain flour
1 cup wholemeal flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 warm milk (soy or rice milk work quite nicely)
1/2 cup walnuts (you can use any nut you like, or chocolate if you prefer)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon maple syrup (optional)


The how-to...

1. If you keep eggs in the fridge, take them out - when baking it is best to use eggs at room temperature. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Grab a magazine and a lemon Calippo, put on a hat and go bask in the sun for a half hour.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric beater. Whilst still beating, slowly pour in the oil.
3. Add the mashed bananas, beaten eggs, vanilla extract and/or maple syrup to the butter mixture, and whisk.
4. Sift in the flour with the baking powder and a pinch of salt.
5. Warm the milk and stir into it the baking soda. Once combined, tip this into the main mixture. Add the walnuts and stir the mixture until just combined.
6. Spoon into muffin/friand tin and cook for about 12-15 minutes (if you are making large muffins you will need longer, probably 20-25 minutes). They should be crisp and golden brown on top, and a clean knife/skewer pushed into the centre of the muffins should come out clean.

Enjoy - they are particularly good with butter when they have just come out of the oven.

Banana crisis averted.

Sweeten the deal

Come 4.30pm on a Sunday afternoon, I usually feel the onset of Monday-itis. The sun starts to set, the temperature drops, and I realise that I haven't washed my work clothes yet. Damn.

I imagine the reason that late Sunday is filled with the dread of impending Monday is that the days have struck a deal, whereby Monday takes over early from Sunday. It goes something like this, in my stress-scrambled brain... Sunday feels like she has had a damned long day - first looking out for the drunken revellers who partied on past Saturday's handover and then nursing the cursed souls through the worst of their collective hangover. Monday kind of fancies Sunday and, knowing that the early part of his shift will be quiet as the bulk of the population turns in early in preparation for the working week, offers to take over early in exchange for a date on a mutual day off.

Sunday and Monday come out of this deal warm and fuzzy, but us mere (Monday to Friday, 9 to 5) mortals don't fare so well. Which is why I propose to sweeten the deal with these here chocolate and walnut brownies. Pop a square of this in your bag for work and Monday won't seem so bad.

You will need...
150g butter
200g dark chocolate*
3 eggs, at room temperature
3/4 cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup toasted walnuts, roughly chopped
100g milk chocolate, roughly chopped*

*real chocolate, not the cooking substitute. In Australia, the 'You'll love Coles' brand is surprisingly tasty and good value.

The how-to...
1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees, and line a square tin with baking paper (this way, you can just lift the entire slab of brownie out once it is cooked).
2. Melt the butter and dark chocolate in a saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly. Set the mixture aside to cool a little.
3. Sift the flour and cocoa into a mixing bowl. Tip in the sugar. Beat the eggs, one at a time, in a separate bowl and add them to the flour mixture. Pour in the cooled chocolate mixture and mix everything until combined. Add the chopped walnuts and milk chocolate and stir through.
4. Scrape the mixture into the baking paper lined tin and smooth the surface with the back of a spoon. Pop it into the oven for about 30 - 35 minutes, or until set. Let it cool in the tin for about 10 minutes - this will give it time to firm up.

5. Cut it up - this recipe makes 16 neat squares - and put it onto a pretty plate. If your feeling friendly, leave it out someplace where your flatmates can find it.

You could make this with any other kind of nut - macadamias and hazelnuts go quite nicely with chocolate - or try adding a couple of shakes of chilli powder, or a splash of your favourite liqueur.