Lara's chocolaty bites

Pasta for Pasta Machine

Borden

This is Oma's signature cake (well one of them) that Flash particularly likes and enjoys making. It's traditionally strawberry but other fruits will serve the turn, as you can see. 

Start with the pound-cake base (180g each of sugar, butter and flour and three eggs) and make the tart casing. Cool. No I mean let it cool, although getting that far is cool figuratively speaking as well. 

Make custard: can do it with the old tin of condensed milk, 1.5 cups of milk, 1 egg, 2 tbsp custard powder, vanilla essence, cook for 3 mins (stir) 2 mins (stir) and 1 min in the microwave. You won't need all that amount of custard so you'll have about half left over. What a tragedy, what will you do with that, I wonder? 

Make the fruit: your probably-tinned-fruit-of-choice thickened up with cornflour and sweetened to taste. Has to be pretty firm. 

Serve with whipped cream. 

There is one trick that's hard to achieve. Ideally you'll let this set for a few hours before devouring. Otherwise it's a bit runny. 

Ingredients: 

Flour, butter, sugar (180g), 3 eggs, tin of condensed sweetened milk, 1.5 cups sugar, another egg, vanilla essence, tinned or other fruit, sugar to taste, cornflour. 

Need a tart tin. 

Chinese New Year ideas

 

 

 

Mr B (Breakfast/Snack Banana Slice)

Make a sponge in a slice tin, with 250g made up of flour, raw oats, and desiccated coconut and baking powder. Three eggs, 150g melted butter, vanilla essence. Mix, into lined slice tin, bake at 170c. When done, make a syrup in the microwave from a good dollop of golden syrup and a slosh of orange flower water. Spoon on top of the slice. Cool, cut into two layers. Lightly spoon cream over the base and layer with banana slices, replace top, dust with icing sugar. Rather tasty.

Scones

3 cups flour, 100g butter, 1.25 cups milk (approx), baking powder.

Crumb butter into flour and then mix into dough with milk. Cut into rounds, bake at 200c. Serve!

Pina Colada Cake

This was meant to be Russian Cherry Cake but we had no cherries. So we went all Puerto Rican instead.

You'll make three or four sausages of pastry filled with pineapple, sugar and coconut mix, roll them up into snakes inside a springform pan, and bake 'em at 170. I found the bottom baked less than the top because of the squidginess factor so it might be a good idea to foil up the top and put it slightly towards the bottom of the oven for longer.

For the pastry there's 3.75 cups of flour, 120g butter (melted), two teaspoons of baking powder, a cup of yoghurt and 0.5 cups of sugar combined. Yep, a lot of flour. I found I had to add a bit of milk into this mix because it didn't hold together well enough. Roll up, make yer stuffed snakes, curl 'em up. Cut as per normal cake. Rather nice, actually.