Category / Recipes

by Clare

Pancakes For One

What are you to do when it’s Mother’s Day and you are not blessed with the presence of your children to make you breakfast in bed?  No, this is not a sob story.

Perhaps, like me, your children no longer live at home or, as is the case with our two youngest daughters, they no longer live within easy driving distance.  Or taking it one step further, perhaps, as is the case with our eldest daughter right now, your children are currently overseas, and Mother’s Day is a solo affair.  Or as solo as it gets when your husband takes off down the beach for a surf.
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by Clare

When Cake Becomes Bread

Today’s recipe was given to me by a friend almost 30 years ago and over the years it has stood the test of time as a quick and easy recipe for an all time favourite.  Once referred to as ‘cake’, these days it’s most likely referred to as ‘bread’.  Who decided banana cake was bread anyway?  Yes, I know.  One is moist and sweet, the other slightly dry and not so sweet.  But as Juliet argued in William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet;

‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.’.

So, call it whatever you like.  I love this recipe, it’s versatile enough to be either.  Ice it and call it cake, or leave it naked and call it bread, it doesn’t really matter because it’s yummy either way.

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by Clare

Perfect with a Cup of Tea

My latest recipe is one of my all time favourites for reasons I can sum up in five words.  White chocolate and macadamia nuts.  These biscuits also contain desiccated coconut and, together with the chocolate and the nuts, this is a perfect combination that creates a light, crunchy biscuit ideal for enjoying with a cup of tea or dunking into coffee or hot chocolate.

This recipe also calls for 50-50 white and brown sugar which gives them a slightly malty hint.

But, a word of warning:  This is not a recipe for cookies – those soft, soggy, half-baked things that some people prefer.  This is a recipe for biscuits.  They are meant to be hard and crunchy, but they are also sweet and delectable.
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by Clare

Why I’m Typing Up My Recipes

A little over 36 years ago, I purchased a hard covered notebook.  A5 in size, it wasn’t anything special, or fancy, but it was somewhere I could write down recipes.

Some belonged to my mother, some belonged to her mother and other’s belonged to my father’s mother.  Some recipes were given to me by friends, other’s stolen from magazines in patient waiting rooms, the sound of paper tearing not quite discussed by coughing.

There are even recipes within its pages that are of my own creation, as some of you well know by now.
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by Clare

Best Nachos Ever

Yes, another recipe, but don’t you just love Nachos?  I do and so does Dean, but recently we faced the dilemma of how to make them at home when you don’t have a microwave oven to ‘zap’ them and get them nice and hot with the cheese melted just right.

Sure I could have put them under the griller, but that would only melt the cheese on top and do nothing to warm the rest of the ingredients.  Dean and I like to enjoy our food HOT, so using the griller was out of the question.  I had to come up with an alternative approach to cooking a much-loved ‘treat’ that we do like to enjoy every now and then and, even if I say so myself, the end result was amazing.

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