Pistachio & White Chocolate Biscuits

Well, it's been a while. Believe me the kitchen is always in use.

I was expecting a visitor, and I always like to make something home made to have for morning and afternoon tea, and quite often with coffee after dinner.

These biscuits are the best, pistachio and white chocolate. I found the recipe in a Supper Foods magazine a few years ago. The usual butter, sugar, eggs and flour with added chopped pistachio nuts and white chocolate. This one was brown sugar.

They are quick to mix, then just roll into balls and squash onto trays with a fork and bake.

I always make a double batch, because they never last long.

The recipe can be found here if anyone wants to try them.

A White Chocolate Mud Cake

Strawberries have been so cheap lately and I have been trying different ways to have them. Back when we were kids we used to have a strawberry patch, and my Mum would just wash them, cut them up and sprinkle them with a little sugar. These were just left to stand for a while and we would have them with icecream. Now I know this to be called macerated strawberries, but I use icing sugar to make the process a little faster.

Some years ago I used to get free strawberries from my green grocer and I used to do the same, but after a while I looked for other ways to make them go further. Back then I learnt to make chocolate cake in a big muffin tins, and combined with the strawberries and a dollop of whipped cream we had dessert.

This time I tried something different again, a white chocolate mud cake. It's the first time I've made one, and I need to look for a new recepie. This one I found on-line and it was a bit dry. Iced with a white chocolate ganache frosting, sprinkled with coconut, it was the perfect accompaniment to the macerated strawberries.

Orange And White Chocolate Cake

There was a birthday in the house on Monday, so I decided to make a cake. I thought of caramel mud cake, white chocolate mud cake, orange cake, and the list went on. I settled on something with white chocolate, then Googled flavour pairings with it. The list was endless, but it did contain orange, and I still had a pile of oranges that I could use. So then I Googled white chocolate and orange cake recipes and found heaps.

I found one where the orange was cut, skin and all ( I did remove the seeds) and placed in a food processor. This was different. then there was the one with cardamon in it, mmm........ interesting. I have made plenty of orange cakes with cinnamon in them, but never cardamon. So I combined the two. I quite often pick bits and pieces of recipes now and blend to make my own.

The cake was the basic cream butter and sugar, add eggs,  orange pulp,  flour, spice, orange juice and white chocolate type.

It's the first time I've made an orange cake using pulp made in a food processor. I usually grate the orange rind, and I'll keep doing it that way now I've tried it in the food processor. Using a grater gives a much finer rind through the cake, the food processor left some of the pieces a bit big for my liking. I could have processed it more, but it took a long time anyway. Much quicker and better to grate I think.

Then it was time to add the cardamon. The recipe called for teaspoon of the spice, but I wasn't game to add that much, so I only added a very small half teaspoon of it. It can be tasted in the cake, next time I might be tempted to add a bit more, or even combine it with cinnamon.

Once cooked and cooled, the cake then needed icing. I thought of a white chocolate ganache, and orange frosting, and wondered how orange juice  and white chocolate would would react together. So I Googled again and found a recipe for orange and white chocolate truffles.Using this as a guide, I melted some white chocolate with butter, added some icing sugar and orange juice, and stirred until smooth. It tasted good! So this is what I put on my cake, topped off with chopped roasted pistachio nuts.

The cake was excellent except for the larger pieces of orange rind. Great as cake on its own but even better with fresh strawberries. I'll be making one of these again, just not in a food processor.