Smoked salmon pizza

My first pizza from Theo's book involved giving the dough hook on the kitchen aid a bit of a work out.

We followed Theo's steps, used good quality cheese and delicious smoked salmon and this came out of the oven:

and was made even more delicious with the addition of the salmon

Blueberry and beer muffins

Today's post is another guest post, from G:

For some reason, I put my hand up to provide some baked goods to my work colleagues for the Biggest Morning Tea held last month I took delight in saying that I would be doing all the baking though- everyone asked me if it was actually going to be my work, knowing the yummy treats I provide are normally not my own work!

I decided to choose a recipe from by beer cookbook, Cooking with Beer (not that imaginative a title really!). Having made successful blue cheese and ale muffins previously,  this time I chose the blueberry and ale muffins. It's a pretty simple recipe, the US book calling for Bisquick, which we don;t have here. Much easier to get together the proper dry ingredients of a muffin mix anyway.  So put the flour, baking soda, salt, and sugar together, then mix in the blueberries (fresh if cheap, frozen-thawed and drained-if not), beer and melted butter.  Divide into muffin tins and bake until done (about 12 minutes).

Now, this was totally yummy, but not likely to win me any awards at the morning tea.  So after asking K about further options, she suggested a simple cream cheese icing and some blueberry coulis for drizzling on top. Best idea ever!

So I easily won the prize for best sweet dish at the morning tea and now my reputation for baking at work is up there with K. Hurrah!

Left over lamb pizza

Theo has a pizza recipe for greek lamb pizza, and while I was inspired by it, I didn't follow it because:
1. we had already cooked the lamb
2. we didn't have all of the pizza ingredients.

My pizza

Theo's pizza

gratuitous shot of the roast lamb

Zucchini involtini

It's not often that I will bother to put on a show for Sunday lunch, but I saw a recipe in Delicious that I thought would be a simple Sunday lunch, albeit one that looked pretty impressive.

It wasn't quite as simple as I had hoped - zucchini slicing, salting, baking and rolling, but it was worth it.

Whoopie Pies

A guest post from G:

It was K's birthday not that long ago, so after purchasing a delicious Brownie and Passionfruit chocolate torte from Le Petit Gourmet to get us through  a few days before I was well enough to bake a cake, I decided to break out the whoopie pie book that had been a source of amusement a few times already (from the title only!). Whoopie pies are supposed to be somewhere between as cake and a biscuit, and look like macarons on steroids.

So I chose to make simple chocolate whoopies, with a peanut butter icing middle,

They worked out OK- I don;t recommend using Copha for shortening though.  Use butter for all of the fat. The copha was just rubbish, and didn't do anything, and they totally didn't flatten out.  As a consequence, the pies really were just mini cakes.  But they were still delish, and the peanut butter icing is to do for!

A rose by any other name

A recent day trip to Daylesford involved the visit to a chocolate shop (the name of which I cannot remember) where I picked up a chocolate rose.

and it all ended with a large raspberry chocolate ganache truffle in the middle!