Red Pepper Marmalade is not the kind of marmalade that you spread on your english muffins in the morning. It’s a relish, a sweet and spicy relish which pairs perfectly with cheese. It compliments soft creamy cheeses with it’s vivid red colour and spicy undertones.

My mother first introduced this to me many years ago. It’s been in my hand written and messy recipe book for a long time now. Kit wrote the recipe down - he loved it so much. He never writes down recipes!

It’s ideal to make when red peppers are in season and inexpensive. Although you could make a single jar easily in the middle of winter if you were longing for the taste of summer and buying out of season peppers. This recipe makes roughly six one and a half cup jars. Some to keep and tuck in the pantry for those grey days and supper cheese platters and some to give to others that need a little spot of something bright in their day.

Just looking at the ingredients - you know this is going to taste great. Vibrant, fresh and colourful - simmered together to make this beautiful relish.

More about the giveaway at the end of the post.

Red Pepper Marmalade

• 8 large red peppers/bell peppers (two of them finely sliced)
• 3/4 cup of lemon juice (roughly 3 lemons)
• zest of two lemons
• juice of one orange
• 1/4 cup of red wine vinegar
• 4 large cloves of garlic - crushed
• 1 onion finely chopped
• 2 cups of sugar
• 2 Tblspns tomato paste
• 1/2 tspn of chilli powder - more or less according to taste
• 1/2 tspn of salt
• 1 tspn fresh rosemary
• 1 tspn of fresh basil or marjoram

Place 6 of the peppers, the herbs and onion in a food processor - pulse until coarsely chopped.

Add to the other ingredients in a saucepan. Such beautiful colours! It’s just so vivid.

Bring to a boil stirring, then simmer for roughly 10 minutes until thick like jam.

Seal in jars. If you want to keep this for some time seal in sterilised jars using your favourite method.

We love to eat this with cheese or spread into a sandwich. Everyone in our house has a favourite - it seems to go well with many different kinds of cheese.

We tried it out with this Kapiti cheese - it was a nice compliment to the saltiness of the cheese. Leah preferred it with a Mainland blue. Isaac - liked it with cream cheese.

I have some put away in the pantry for another day, but within the afternoon I made this, this was all that was left of the first jar.

There is no reason why you could not make this with orange or yellow peppers, I’m sure the result would be equally as good.

The Giveaway

To celebrate my 100th post this week I decided I would do a small giveaway for the the blog. I have two giveaways to send to two winners and I will send them anywhere in the world. The giveaway will be open for a week until Feb 28th NZ time and then drawn after that.

The first of these is a Kiwi classic - The Edmonds Cookbook. This little book contains so many New Zealand recipes and is in almost every New Zealand household. It’s a real gem, even after cooking for so many years I still find myself referring to it.

The second giveaway is for these four little children’s egg cups. These are a follow up to “what is an egg cosy?”.

I’ll try my best to get them to the winner in one piece, but they are ceramic - so all care no responsibility taken on my part.

What do you have to do to win? Just leave a comment stating which item you would like to win and the name of a recipe (can be a baked item/dessert or a dish) you would like to see featured here. I’ll make the winners recipe suggestion - which could be .. err interesting :)

The winner will be chosen at random.

Best of luck to you all!

There is a bread baking obsession going on in our house at the moment. I know you’ve only seen the bagels that Ryan made, but we have plans! Oh yes we have plans. Ryan and I made the Ciriola together, the kneading by hand was a two person job. Just occasionally I wish I had a Kitchen Aid with a dough hook, this was one of those times. Kneading bread is a surprisingly good workout!

Most bread now comes packaged in plastic and tastes like nothing - just a mouthful of air. Bread in my childhood came in half loaves, crusty and full of flavour. Wrapped in brown paper and secured with a single piece of tape or now and then tied with string - not sweating in a plastic bag. Mum would send me to the dairy to pick up a loaf of fresh bread and I’d worm my finger through the crust and pull out the warm insides. I’m pretty sure I thought mum would not notice, if I just kept the crust mostly intact… kids are not that smart sometimes.

I saw these beautiful rolls and I just had to make them. Ciriola means candle in Italian. These little loaves are hard to find information on in English and the translations seemed somewhat inaccurate. One of the pages I translated told me that the loaves were “full of crumbs” I have no idea what that is supposed to mean?! So I don’t have a lot to offer you in the way of information. I do know that they are used for sandwiches.

These loaves are enriched with extra virgin olive oil. If you have some time to make bread; ciriola are crusty on the outside, light on the inside and each warm mouthful makes it worth the time to make them.

La Ciriola

Recipe from the scrumptious Broxholm Road Blog  - check it out - it’s wonderful!

• 1 kg Strong White Flour
• 550g water (divided use)
• 45g extra virgin olive oil
• 25g fresh yeast
• 20g salt
• 1 tspn sugar

Dissolve 1 tspn of sugar in 150g of the warm water.

Crumble in the fresh yeast and whisk to mix through. Pour the yeast mixture into a large bowl or into the bowl of your stand mixer with the hook attachment.

Add the olive oil and the flour - slowly add in the remainder of the water and sprinkle in the salt last.

Mix the dough for about 20 minutes in the stand mixer or knead the dough by hand for roughly 30 minutes. The dough should pass the windowpane test.

Place in an oiled bowl and coat the bread lightly with a slick of olive oil, cover and put in a warm place to rise for roughly 2 hours.

Turn the dough out and cut into twelve pieces weighing roughly 150 grams each.

Roll out each piece of dough to a sheet roughly 30 cm by 10 cm. You want to have it narrow at the ends and widest in the middle. Like an elongated egg shape.

Roll up into a roll and transfer to a parchment lined baking sheet. Give the rolls room to expand. Leave to rise for another 40-45 minutes.

I left our rolls a little longer than this and lost some of the definition in the lovely curly bits at the end.

Preheat the oven to 220C/428F

Just before placing your rolls in the oven slash the top long ways with a sharp knife. You can use an egg wash if you like. I put the egg wash on some and left some without.

Cook your rolls for roughly 20 minutes until golden.

Leave to cool on a rack if you wish or you can do what we did. Serve them burning hot from the oven .. burn your fingers, juggle them around a bit, spread bits of crackly crust everywhere and finally breathe in the scent that only fresh bread has.. devour with copious amounts of real butter or olive oil.

Of the twelve loaves  I managed to salvage two to take to Mum and Dad, the rest were gone faster than I could blink. They were everything fresh bread should be.

I’ve never actually liked Neenish tarts much. I know that’s a strange way to start a recipe that I am sharing with you, but I felt I needed to confess that up front. I have always liked the way they look though. Small single serving tarts half chocolate half white, or half pink and white - or sometimes half pink, half chocolate. They always looked nice sitting in the bakery window displays. However when I bought one I was always disappointed.

Normally dry shortcrust pastry filled with a mock cream and jam. Occasionally I’d try again hoping that it would be better, and I’d strike one that had a condensed milk type filling, which was a moderate improvement on the mock cream, but still nothing to write home about.

I happened upon discussion thread with a person asking for a recipe for Neenish tarts like their mother used to make, the filling they described sounded more like a lemon flavoured pastry cream. That interested me, so I thought I would give something along those lines a go and see what the result was.

Neenish tarts are fairly specific to Australia and New Zealand and I am not sure if they are even known in other parts of the planet. This version is quite delicious, although I think a little fiddly to make. But if you have the time then give it a try, they are a very old fashioned afternoon tea treat that people can’t help but say “Mmmmmmm” over when they have that first bite. You can just picture these on a tiered china cake stand sitting in among the creamy sponge drops, cucumber sandwiches and scones.

Neenish Tarts with Lemon Crème Patisserie

No one is really sure how these originated and where they got their name, there are all kinds of urban legends around them. Including one about a Ruby Neenish - who has vanished into the mists of time - no record of her existing at all. I suspect Ruby Neenish is a little like Spiderman .. just a figment of someone’s imagination. The first recipe for these was published in 1929.

Recipe makes 6  10cm/4 inch tarts.

Pâte sablée (sweet short crust)

This pastry recipe makes a lot more than you will need to make the Neenish tarts. I simply froze the remainder for another day to use for a sweet full sized tart. It will make enough for two full sized tarts with a little left over for six Neenish tarts.

• 250g/9oz butter
• 200g/7oz icing sugar
• pinch of salt
• 500g/just over 1lb of flour
• 4 egg yolks
• 4 Tblspns cold water

You can make this in the food processor or by hand. Cream together the butter sugar and salt, rub or pulse in the egg yolks until the mixture just starts to come together looking like breadcrumbs. Add the cold water. Gently bring together and split pastry into two, forming two disks. Wrap and chill in the fridge for one hour.

You can freeze remaining pastry at this point, you will need roughly 250 grams of the pastry for your Neenish tarts.

When making pastry - it benefits from as little handling as possible. This will keep it flaky and light and reduce shrinkage.

Line your tart pans (I used 10 cm/4 inch tart pans with a removable base) and place in the freezer.

Lemon Crème Patisserie

• 2/3 cup of whole milk
• 1 2 inch piece of vanilla bean
• 1 2 inch long one inch wide piece of lemon rind
• 2 large egg yolks
• 3 Tblspns sugar
• 1 Tblspn cornflour/cornstarch

Pour the milk into a small saucepan, scrape in seeds from the vanilla bean and add the bean and the lemon rind to the milk. Bring to a simmer - remove from the heat.

Whisk the yolks, cornflour and sugar together in a bowl. Very gradually whisk the hot milk into the yolk mixture. Do this a little at a time whisking continuously, you don’t want to cook your yolks.

Add back into the pan again and whisk over a medium heat until the custard thickens. Transfer to a bowl to cool and cover the surface with plastic wrap to prevent a skin forming. When you are ready to use your pastry cream, remove the vanilla bean and rind and whisk lightly to remove any lumps. (can be made 2 days ahead)

Assembling your tarts

Preheat your oven to 180C/350F

Put your lined tart pans in the preheated oven for roughly 10-15 minutes. Check half way through cooking and pierce a small hole in each base with a skewer to remove any air from under the tart base. Cook until golden. Cool on a rack in the tins, remove from the tins when cool.

Fill with cooled pastry cream - making sure the top is level and ice with icing of your choice.

I chose to use royal icing for these and it was not a good choice honestly. The pastry cream was moist and consequently the royal icing started to weep after about 20 minutes. If I was doing this again I would most likely use a simple confectioners sugar icing - I suspect it would hold up better.

To ice your Neenish tarts - ice one half first spreading from the centre to the outside - allow to set for 10 minutes or so before icing the other half.

Despite the issues that I had with the icing on these, they were a sweet and light tart that everyone really enjoyed eating. You could also experiment with a mock cream and raspberry jam filling or perhaps try different flavourings for your pastry cream, a rum version of these is quite common also.

If you are having a last minute tea shower like my imaginary friend Ruby Neenish - these are not the tarts to make since they require cooling in between stages. But if you have a little time on your hands and would like to have an old fashioned afternoon tea treat, then these are just the ticket!

Golden Syrup pudding holds fond childhood memories for me. Sitting in my nightgown with my sister at a little blue table watching Mad Movies with Bob Monkhouse and eating dessert. Sometimes it was Tapicoa or apple dumplings, baked apples stuffed with dates and brown sugar or Queen pudding or just maybe - my absolute favourite - which I promise to share with you another day, Banana Fritters.

Today though it was a Golden Syrup pudding kind of day, cold wind, threatening clouds and spots of rain throughout a very cold and dreary day. Just the kind of day for cold weather food.

I’d made a huge pot of thick vegetable soup and some fresh dinner rolls, but I thought that the hordes at the dinner table might still be hungry, so a dessert as a little something extra seemed right.

Golden Syrup pudding is one of those things that you can make when you really only have the basics in the house. In NZ there is almost always a tin of Golden Syrup sitting in the cupboard with a sticky lid jammed on top.

I found one of those teeny tiny bottles of whiskey sitting forlornly in the pantry from a Christmas gift and a few bits of crystallised ginger winked at me as I grabbed the whiskey, so this was what I came up with.

Golden Syrup Pudding with Whiskey & Ginger

This pudding has a soft cake like top with a smooth thick golden sauce which bubbles underneath. This pudding comes together and is ready for the oven in roughly 5 minutes.

Preheat oven to 180C/350F and have a 10 inch, deep pie dish ready for your pudding.

Base

• 1 1/2 cups of self raising flour
• 1/4 cup of soft brown sugar (first measure)
• 100 grams of butter - melted
• 1 tspn vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup of crystalised ginger - chopped roughly
• 2 Tblspns good Whiskey
• 1 large free range egg
• 1/2 cup of milk
• 1 Tblspn Golden syrup ( first measure)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar (second measure)
• 1 Tblspn cornflour

Sauce

• 2 Tblspns  Golden Syrup
• 1 1/2 cups boiling water
• 30 grams of butter
• 1 tspn Whiskey

Combine your flour and first measure of brown sugar - mix together squashing any lumps. Add in your chopped ginger.

Add in your milk, whiskey, egg, vanilla, first measure of golden syrup, and melted butter. Mix until combined. Pour into your dish that you are going to make your pudding in.

Combine your second measure of brown sugar and cornflour in a small bowl - mix together and sprinkle over the top of your pudding.

Combine your sauce ingredients in a heat proof jug and pour over the top of your pudding.

Cook for roughly 40-45 minutes.

When you take your pudding out of the oven it should look something like this. Crackled on the top with a thick sauce bubbling underneath.

The sauce will be thick from the cornflour that you added on to the top.

If you are worried about giving this dessert to children, don’t be. The alcohol is all cooked off in the oven and all you are left with is a very subtle flavour. Isaac gave this warm gooey pudding a “100% tastiness rating” ..  I’m happy with that!

We had ours with a little plain yoghurt poured over the top.

It was just the perfect thing .. at the end of a grey day.

This is worth buying Golden Syrup for -

100 percent tastiness rating - guaranteed by Isaac.

This is a wonderful warming pie that has a melange of mushrooms and soft waxy potatoes in a cream cheese and sherry sauce.  It’s a hearty pie that’s just the thing for those cold wintry days or in my case cold summer days. Summer has decided it’s not really going to come to Dunedin for any length of time this year and today is definitely on the chilly side.

I guess that’s what happens when you don’t live that far from Antarctica and you have penguins on your beaches. That’s right .. we have six species of penguin here in New Zealand.

These little guys here - live about 20 minutes from my house. They are the rarest penguin in the world - the yellow eyed penguin or Hoiho as they are known in Maori. I blame the cold weather on them. Look at him enjoying the lack of sun!

One of the nice things about making this pie with phyllo pastry is that it looks like you’ve put far more effort into making the pie than you actually have and of course the phyllo is lower in fat than a traditional pie crust. I use this phyllo crust for sweet pies as well when I feel like something different. It makes a really spectacular topping for an apple pie dusted with icing sugar.

The inside is creamy and mellow with a subtle earthy flavour and the little flakes of phyllo add a crunch with each mouthful. Everyone at our dinner table went back for seconds. It’s that good.

Mixed Mushroom & Potato Phyllo Pie

The quantities in this are somewhat flexible, make it with more or less potatoes, or more or less garlic and cream cheese. Play around with the flavours until you have it how you like it.

• 8-10 sheets of Phyllo pastry
• 500-600 grams of mixed mushrooms
• 6-8 medium sized waxy potatoes
• 2 medium size brown onions chopped
• 2-3 cloves of garlic finely chopped
• 3 Tblspns Sherry
• 3-4 sprigs of fresh thyme or one tspn of dried.
• 200 grams/7oz cream cheese (light is fine)
• 50 grams butter (2oz)
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• melted butter or olive oil to brush phyllo

I made mine in a 25cm/10 inch pie dish that was 2 inches deep.

Filling

Wash and chop your potatoes into roughly 1-2 inch cubes. I did not peel mine I don’t mind the skin and like the added nutrition, but you can peel if you wish. Simmer gently until tender in boiling water. Drain and set aside. You should have enough potatoes to loosely fill your dish. Adjust quantities accordingly.

Wipe your mushrooms and chop roughly - I used a mixture of portobello, oyster and button mushrooms. But you could use any combination.

Melt your butter in a large sauté pan over a medium to low heat and cook your onions until translucent, add in your garlic and cook gently. Add in your mixed mushrooms and cook until they are tender and releasing their warm brown juices. Add in your sherry, cream cheese and thyme, simmer one minute stirring gently, add salt and pepper to taste. Do not under season.

Add in your potatoes and stir to combine over the heat. You can crush some of the cubes of potato, try to leave most whole. You do not want a mushy,mashed filling. Taste again for seasoning, you may need to adjust seasoning at this point.

Keep your pie filling warm and set aside while you line your pie dish.

Assembling your Pie

Put your phyllo in a stack and have a damp (not wet) cloth that is large enough to cover the phyllo so it does not dry out.

Melt your butter or get a little olive oil ready to brush on to your pastry sheets. You can use spray on olive oil if you wish - this is the easiest method.  I did not have any spray today - so it was back to the pastry brush for me.

Brush your top sheet of phyllo lightly with melted butter or oil and place in the pie dish with the edges hanging outside of the pie dish.

Do the same with the next piece and place it at right angles to the first. Keep brushing then layering your phyllo like this to cover the base of your pie dish - this forms the bottom crust and part of the top. Use 6-8 pieces of phyllo.

Add in your warm mushroom and potato filling and spread evenly.

Gather up the phyllo from around the edges and gently crumple it up and over the edges of the dish towards the middle of the pie. It will stay where you place it.

Brush with melted butter and crumple up two more pieces of phyllo to fill the gap in the centre.

Your pie should be completely covered. If need be use more phyllo to fill any gaps.

Place in a medium oven (180C/350F) until the phyllo is golden brown and your filling is hot. This doesn’t take very long. You might need to place a piece of foil over your pie if your phyllo gets a little brown. Do keep an eye on your pie; the phyllo will burn quite quickly.

This pie is almost impossible to cut in nice slices, but honestly - it doen’t matter one scrap - it’s so “award winning tasty” as kit said. If we were not feeding a vegetarian I would definitely have added in either thickly chopped smokey bacon or big chunks of chicken or both! But it was also wonderful as a vegetarian version.

This pie took no longer to make than a typical pie with a usual crust. I know savoury pies (apart from chicken pot pies) are a little unusual in some parts of the world, but you would not be sorry that you gave this one a go. Do it for the penguins….