Simple recipes you can make at home.
Easter is not too far away and I’m feeling good that it is coming
We have a few traditions in our household at Easter including dyeing our own eggs, making our own chocolate gifts (check out my 15 great chocolate recipes), joining in on a family Easter egg hunt and attending church. We also used to travel every year to the Bendigo Easter Fair which includes an amazing street parade, egg hunt, carnival, torch light procession and the Awakening of the Dragon Ceremony. Continue reading
Speculaas Spices
As promised, here is the recipe for Speculaas Spices.
These can be mixed up and kept in an airtight container for when you want to make the beautiful and aromatic filled Sepculaas Cake.
Filled Speculaas Recipe
This amazing Filled Speculaas Recipe comes to me courtesy of my Aunty. I am not really one to hide or keep my recipes secret (obvs) but there is a little something special about this very traditional recipe that made me think twice about sharing it.
It makes a very delicious cake with three layers, the middle layer being a lovely, light version of home made marzipan. The spicy, scented cake on the top and the base is buttery and delicious.
I am pretty sure this recipe is called Dutch Pancakes.
I am very sure that my kids absolutely love it and have been asking for it nearly every morning.
It originally came to us via one of those supermarket magazines but I can’t for the life of me work out which one, nor can I find it again. So instead I have had to adapt from memory to come up with this rather good version.
Two things to note.
You must preheat the pan in the oven for it to work. It must be really rather hot before you throw in some butter and then pour in the batter.
It has no sugar. I think this is rather excellent. It also has a kind of naturally occurring fluffy bowl of its own by the time it is cooked which means I get to control the amount of syrup going in.
I also add chopped bananas, or cooked berries or fresh berries or nuts, depending upon what is in season.
Creamy and quite impressive, this will serve 3-4 or so people at my house.
Dani.xx
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and for a little bit of fun…..
How to predict your future based on your breakfast.
Warm lentil and radish salad
I am always trying to find new ways to incorporate seeds, legumes and grains into my diet as I have never really have a lot of them in my cooking repertoire.
For nearly a year my husband and I ate a strict Mediterranean diet due to a health scare that he had. When a heart specialist recommends a certain diet you don’t really tend to mess around.
It was a very delicious and satisfying way to eat and we had to focus a lot more on eating fish and using nuts, cheese and lean protein in place of red meat. My husband did not eat ice-cream for nearly a year, but once he eventually cracked that first bowl of ice-y creaminess again, it was all over.
Years later I am still on that learning curve of eating more vegetables and adding in legumes, beans and seeds. This lentil recipe is a lovely way to do just that and came about courtesy of some garden fresh radishes from a friend. I also used the remaining radishes to make a mixed vegetable pickle with bay leaves, garlic and peppercorns. This was a direct copy of a delicious jar of pickles I bought from an Italian couple at the Park Orchards markets. Perfect on rice, pasta or in salads it would even lend a lovely tangy crunch to salads.
When the veggie patch gifts you such delicious crunchy morsels, you have to make the most of it.
The star of this salad, apart from the radish itself, is the lovely dressing with maple syrup and tamari.
Enjoy.
Dani xx
Caramel Meringue Tart Recipe
This is another recipe that comes via my husbands Grandmother.
I love to think of her cooking this sweet pie to serve to the many guests who came to visit her in Gippsland. She was well known for her generous hospitality and for always having something delicious to serve her guests.
We visited her old house recently. It sits proudly on a corner block in the middle of a country town. Easy walking distance to most things. I imagine her walking regularly in to town to get her supplies and perhaps stopping to talk to the other locals along the way. This was a farming community and I am sure that she was the kind of woman that helped give a community its heart and soul.
Even though the house is now old and a little run down it still has a generous air to it. Maybe it is because of all the stories I have been told about bustling times where it was full of family and guests, little children and cake. Or maybe some houses are just lovely no matter how old they get.
Wherever this pie was served, I am sure it was well loved. My family were delighted when I made it for them. It won’t keep for long, but that probably won’t be a problem.
Crispy pastry, gooey “caramel” and glistening meringue on top.
A little hint from a busy Mum, you could always purchase a tart case from the supermarket to save time.
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Cauliflower with capers and lemon.
Orange and Vanilla Nut Biscuit Recipe
This orange and vanilla nut biscuit recipe is a bit of a variation on traditional biscotti.
It creates a lovely, orange scented, airy vanilla biscuit perfect for eating with a cup of tea and the nuts add a lovely texture.
Try crushing your own mixture of nuts if you would like. I use the Jamie Oliver method of popping them into a bag and bashing them with a rolling pin. You will want the nuts to achieve some even-ness of texture for use in this recipe.
Orange and Vanilla Nut Biscuits
Beat together 2 eggs with 150g castor sugar until it is light and airy.
Add 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla essence and the grated peel of 2 large oranges.
Fold in 105 g flour and 75 g of crushed nuts (I used almonds and some hazelnuts).
Spread over 25cm by 30cm baking sheet and cook for 15 minutes at 180 degrees celsius.
Cut into thin sticks while hot
Remove and eat when cold (if you can wait).
Notes
I just spread my mixture out onto baking paper on an oven tray. This means that there were some “spare” rounded corners when I did my cutting.
I am not a perfectionist when cooking and these little odd shaped corners did not bother me, but if you were baking for others then I guess you would want to trim them off and put them in the pantry for emergency snacking.
You can see them in some of my photos.
Happy Eating.
Dani xx
Overnight oats with grated apple.
Beetroot and goats cheese tart.
Cauliflower steak with lemon and capers.
Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe
Im going to let you in on a little secret.
These are my all time favourite chocolate chop cookies and my go-to indulgent chocolate snack recipe.
The recipe was given to me by a client many moons ago. She used to make them for all the staff at the clinic occasionally and when she would bring them in, well we would all fall over ourselves in the delight of biting into their still warm, buttery softness.
When I was kindly gifted the recipe and I returned home to make them one rainy Winter’s morning, I discovered that I could not quite replicate the perfection.
So I messed a little with the recipe and found the by excluding 1/2 a cup of the flour success was finally mine.
I have included here for you, the original recipe. If you would like to make the perfect version then I suggest you exclude a 1/4 a cup of the SR flour and 1/4 cup of the plain flour. But if you really want the recipe to stretch, then go ahead and add it in. They are still delicious.
My favourite outcome is achieved when I chop up a block of good quality coverture chocolate into different sized pieces. It is so satisfying to bite into a big melty piece of chocolate nestled amongst the dough.
When I am in a rush though I just throw in those store bough chocolate chips. My most recent record for this recipe was 20 minute from beginning to end and it made for a much friendly afternoon snack than the biscuits my kids beg me to buy from the supermarket.
Dani xx
I cannot deny it, I like baking with chocolate.
Here are a few of my other favourite chocolate recipes.
White Chocolate Mudcake with coconut
Enjoy a little nostalgia in your kitchen?
Then why not scroll through my “Grandma bakes” recipe collection.
While you are here, you might like to support Eat My Street, by shopping with our affiliates.
Opa’s butter biscuits recipe
The life lesson here seems to be, don’t let me near your family cook books unless you like sharing.
I tend to find those old hand written and reliably dog eared pages in a home cooks collection an absolute treasure trove.
So it is with this recipe, lifted from my own Mum’s plastic coated, age old collection of family recipes. This one is titled “Butter Biscuits (Opa’s)” and so I know that at some point it made its way across the seas from the family bakery in the Netherlands many years ago.
It must be good right because why else would a Bakker bother taking it with them and then holding tight to it and passing it down the family?
When I first gave the recipe a try, I immediately remembered…. indeed it is a good recipe.
With the first buttery bite of these sugary biscuit I am transported back to my Oma and Opa’s windmill’d red, green and white house in the Yarra Valley. In tasting these cookies I am remembering my childhood and my grandparents and their ornately decorated lounge room where the adults talked and talked for hours.
These cookies are very sweet and very buttery and as such are a bit of a treat at my house. Worthy of serving at Christmas time I think.
Dani xx
Dani B is a food and lifestyle blogger from Melbourne. She loves experimenting with new recipes and discovering old treasured classics. You can find some of her favourite recipes here.
She also runs Dani Bee social media management Melbourne.
Looking for something else to cook?
How about this risotto picnic pie?
Marshmallow Pavlova Recipe
I am infamously quoted among my extended family as having said “I don’t really eat dessert” and then also, not long after , “‘I’ll have a little bit more please” at one of my first Christmas dinners with my new family.
So it goes with this, the Bruce family Marshmallow Pavlova.
I really am not that much of a dessert eater, unless it involves fruit, cheese or chocolate. But this pavlova is perfect. Marshmallowy, crunchy and sweet all at once.
My absolute favorite (but definitely not traditional) way to decorate it is with too much cream, generous drizzles of melted white chocolate, little chocolate balls and some fresh berries.
I have also experimented with rose water & chocolate in the base as flavorings.
The Bruce family stick to a strict regime of fresh fruit and flake or peppermint crisp as toppings. You can’t really go wrong with these.
This recipe belongs to my late Mother-in law. She taught me a lot about cooking sweet food. She loved cakes and sweets and had a huge repertoire of recipes that were tried and tested. She added her own notations to them year by year, always eager to share the secret tricks to getting these recipes perfected.
I often think back to the advice she gave me when I was home looking after my first baby. Tired, exhausted and completely bamboozled by this new task I had before me to raise a tiny, gorgeous human, she supported me in a vast array of practical tasks without judgement or comment.
Her advice was this
“Always have a packet of biscuits handy for yourself. If you get up in the middle of the night to feed the baby and you are hungry, you will have something to eat.”
In essence what she was saying was “look after yourself” and it was very valuable and precious advice.
She was that kind of person.
I have printed her “notes” here for your enjoyment and to help you make an awesome pavlova.
Her number one rule of pavlova making (and she made many, many pavolvas in her time) was this.
“Just have a bash at it because you can’t get it too wrong and either way it will be delicious.”
So here it is, our Traditional Marshmallow Pavlova Recipe.
Just like Grandma used to make.
Beat egg whites until stiff.
Note that the pavlova will shrink and crack on cooling- that is normal- just fill it with whipped cream and toppings.
Important Extra notes for eggselent pav.
Happy Eating.
Dani xx
Enjoyed this recipe?
Then you might like to see some of my other traditional recipes.
Traditional Cheese Biscuits recipe.
Cheese Biscuit recipe with cayenne & poppy seeds.
The recipe for these “Cheese biscuits”come to me via my husbands mother. We were very fortunate to inherit a bag full of old, loose, handwritten recipes as well as a long list of my mother-in-laws own family recipes.
A lot of the recipes have very basic instructions and I assume this is because they were so familiar to the maker that they never really required any complicated notes. For generations recipes were handed down this way, by cooking in the kitchen together and passing on all the secrets and tips through the process of cooking together, rather than through the written word.
I have quite a few recipes that I learned this way and maybe you do too.
But back to the cheese biscuit recipe. They came with a note to mix together, roll flat and bake in the oven. Through trial and error I have elaborated on those instructions and I have also added in my own extra ingredient, poppy seeds.
These biscuits are surprisingly very tasty and with the addition of cayenne pepper are probably more to the preference of adults, although my children did enjoy eating them too.
I have tested this recipe out on some friends with great success.
The mix creates a cheesy, fully flavoured biscuit with a little crunch and more lightness than you would expect. Serve them with a good cheese and a slice of crunchy pear, or cut them into small squares to add to a cheese plate.
Or just eat simply on their own, they are a little addictive.
I hope you will like it too.
I enjoyed using the “cayenne pepper” which is not really an ingredient that I use much in my kitchen. You can add as little or as much as you like. I get more lavish with the cayenne each time I make them but I do keep in mind that my kids will probably complain if there is too much of it.
I really love discovering traditional recipes that have truly withstood the test of time. Do you have a favourite recipe handed down through the generations in your family? I’d love to hear about it.
Happy Cooking.
Dani xx
I think I am finally ready to admit that Christmas is on the way. For me that means I first had to deal three birthday parties for my children, in four weeks. Now that is over, I am finally feeling a little excited about the festive season.
To that end, I just had to share with you the beautiful Christmas range from another affiliate, Williams Sonoma. You can order online and if you spend over $99, shipping is free.
Do you have your Christmas plans sorted yet? I am looking forward to decorating our new house and enjoying our nightly hot chocolate bar tradition.
More on that soon.
Dani
