Tag Archives: lime

Recipe: Sunken Blueberry, Macadamia and Lime Cupcakes

Posted on February 12, 2015 | 1 comment

I always have my suspicions when a recipe calls itself a ‘sunken cake’.  I am sure that this is meant to convey a sense of dense, richness, almost of decadence – the sense of a cake that is so full of wonderful things that it sinks under its own weight.

But I’m pretty sure what it means is that the cook in question made this awesome, delicious, moist cake, and yet, through some accident of culinary alchemy, the rotten thing came out of the oven with a canyon in the middle.  But naturally you can’t tell your visitors or customers that, so you pretend that this was what you were aiming for all along.  “Oh, that’s just my famous sunken chocolate cake.  It’s simply divine with cream.  Would you like the recipe?”

Of course, it’s possible that my suspicions are founded entirely on the fact that this is what happened to these cupcakes.  I decided to experiment with macadamia meal (which does not, thank you so much, Sunbeam, behave exactly like almond meal in a cake), and thought I’d start fiddling around with a recipe loosely based on another one of those beautiful things from Red Velvet, Chocolate Heartache.  And of course, the macadamias turned out to brown much faster than almond meal, and then it’s possible I put in too many blueberries, and the whole thing sank like a stone.  Well, stones.  There were 14 cupcakes, so that makes 14 little valleys of the shadow of culinary disaster…

I wasn’t going to post the recipe, because they looked so disastrous, but they actually met with a fair bit of enthusiasm at this morning’s meeting, so there you go.  Which is another way of saying that the photographs on this recipe are rather minimalist.  I’m sorry about that.  If I could think of a way to make that sound intentional and appetising, I would…

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150 g macadamia meal
50 g white rice flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarb soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
pinch of salt
zest and juice of 1 lime
200 g zucchini, peeled, topped and tailed
2 medium eggs
120 caster sugar
125 g blueberries, plus 12 for decoration
250 g icing sugar
a teeny tiny drop of green colouring

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Posted in cakes, dairy-free, gluten-free, low fructose, Recipes, vegetarian

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Recipe: Root Vegetable Rösti with Peach and Black Bean Salsa

Posted on February 5, 2014 | 2 comments

I’m not sure if these technically count as rösti, since they are not all potato, and they do contain a lot of egg to hold them together.  More like fritters, really.  But when you find yourself with a fridge full of root vegetables on a hot evening, fritters or rösti are one of the better options for not heating the house up too much.

Also, they are very pink.  This should not be understated.  Sometimes, pink food is important.

I was a little disappointed in the salsa – it was milder than I intended it to be, and needed a bit more zing.  Next time, I’d add more lime or lemon, and more chilli. And maybe some cumin?  But it did provide a good contrasting freshness to the fritters, which, being composed of root vegetables and eggs and then fried, were not precisely light!

Not a perfect meal, but a rather nice one for a summer evening.  And worth recording, so that I can play with it another time.

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3 medium potatoes
1 largeish beetroot
4 medium carrots
1 small red onion
1 medium sweet potato
1/2 teaspoon of tarragon
pepper, salt (lavender salt is nice here)
4 eggs
oil and butter for cooking
5 peaches
5 roma tomatoes
2 avocadoes
2 red chillis (or more, to taste)
juice of one lime and one lemon
1 tin (400g) of black beans
1 small bunch of coriander

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Posted in dairy-free, gluten-free, low glycemic index, main courses, nut-free, Recipes, vegetarian

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Recipe: Tangy Apricot Energy Balls with Blueberry, Lime and Sunflower Seeds

Posted on August 3, 2013 | 7 comments

1ballsI’ve been having a chocolate week.  One of those weeks where the only thing – absolutely and utterly the only thing – keeping me going has been chocolate and sweets.  Not even good, dark chocolate either – just the sort of chocolate that is 100% about the sugar and not about anything else…

Now that I’ve hit a weekend, it’s clearly time to try to claw my way back from the brink, and the first step is filling the house with food that will give me energy but isn’t absolutely full of things that are terrible for me.  In other words – it’s time for more raw truffles, though these ones are more closely related to the average muesli bar than to anything rich and chocolatey.  Which might be a mistake, come to think of it, but never mind that. 

Anyway, these little snacks contain a whole alphabet of vitamins from the fruit, not to mention all sorts of proteins and minerals and omega 6 fats (to make your brain happy!) from the sunflower seeds, and a bit of low-GI carbohydrate from the oats.  They are positively *offensive* in their healthiness, but they are so tangy that I don’t mind.  Mmm, tangy…

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80 g sunflower seeds
20 g rolled oats
20 g coconut sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
20 g freeze-dried blueberries
150 g dried apricots
3 dates
20 g coconut oil
juice and zest of 1/2 a lime

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Posted in confectionery, dairy-free, egg-free, low glycemic index, raw, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

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Recipe: Quinoa Salad with Corn, Coriander and Lime

Posted on November 6, 2012 | 3 comments

I’ve started a lunch swap at work with a colleague of mine. On Mondays (or sometimes Tuesdays), I bring lunch lunch to share with her, and on Thursdays, she brings lunch to share with me.  My colleague is vegetarian and can’t eat wheat or dairy, which makes life a bit more challenging, but it’s also kind of good, because I think it’s healthy to be vegan and gluten-free once in a while!

This week’s lunch was going to be quinoa tabouli, but when I got to the shops on Monday night, they were out of mint and flat-leaf parsley, which are kind of a necessity.  So I looked around the supermarket to see what they *did* have, and found coriander and basil and zucchini and roasted peppers and tomatoes and corn … I had limes and curly parsley and quinoa and spring onions at home, so I thought this might be the basis for an American-inspired sort of salad.

It’s pretty good, actually.  Lovely and fresh and terrifyingly healthy – and yes, it’s vegan and gluten-free and quite high in protein from that quinoa.  A good lunch for a sticky, humid day…

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1/2 cup quinoa, any kind
1 cup water
3 small white zucchini or 3 large pattypan squashes
2 corn cobs
1 small chilli, optional
6 spring onions (the kind that look like overgrown chives)
400 g assorted cherry tomatoes
1 bunch coriander
1 bunch parsley
10 basil leaves, or thereabouts
1/2 cup roasted peppers
juice of 1 lime
salt, pepper, olive oil

 

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Posted in cooking with vegetables, dairy-free, egg-free, everyday cooking, gluten-free, low glycemic index, nut-free, Recipes, side dishes, vegan, vegetarian

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Recipe: Lemon and Kaffir Lime Delicious Pudding

Posted on June 9, 2012 | 8 comments

It’s bitterly cold in Melbourne at the moment.  We don’t usually get seriously cold here in June (and I’m sure you Europeans and Americans reading this would laugh at my definition of seriously cold, since it doesn’t involve snow, or even frost).  I actually really like the cold, but there is a different quality either about it or about me this year, because I don’t remember ever having such constantly cold feet before (NB: an alternative hypothesis might involve failed central heating, but we had that a few years ago, so I know exactly how that feels, and this is something different).

Anyway, it will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that I view hot desserts as the absolutely best way to deal with cold weather.  And so here I was with this Margaret Fulton baking cookbook and a glorious farmers’ market lemon and I though, I know, I’ll do lemon delicious pudding.  Only I don’t have butter.  I will do dairy-free lemon delicious pudding!  And then I thought (and I’m a little embarrassed to admit this), actually, I haven’t posted much in my blog this week.  How can I change this recipe so that I can write about it?  And then my eyes fell on the scary, wrinkly little kaffir limes I bought at the market and I thought, why not?

I’ve never cooked with kaffir lime or even kaffir lime leaf before.  I find the scent of it like a more floral and astringent version of lime, so it makes sense that one uses the zest and the leaf in curries.  I can see that working well.  The stallholder told me not to use the juice, but not why, and I wanted to use the juice, so I sent Andrew off onto the internet to check that it wasn’t poisonous.  It isn’t, so we were good to go!

The result?  A surprisingly rich, mysteriously-flavoured citrus pudding.  The lime has kept its floral, slightly shocking flavour, but it doesn’t overwhelm the pudding.  I almost want to pair it with a spice, but I don’t know which spice would fit with it (I just don’t know my Thai flavours, and I think that’s the direction to go in).  Also, I don’t know whether it was the eggs or my new-found ability to make sponge cake, but the lemon sponge was far and away the best I’ve made – so fluffy and light!  And very warming on a cold winter’s night…

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100 g softened butter or nuttelex
grated rind and zest of 1 lemon
grated rind and zest of 1 kaffir lime
150 g caster sugar
3 eggs, separated
1/2 cup self-raising flour
1 1/4 cups milk (soy milk works here)

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Posted in baking, dairy-free, desserts, nut-free, Recipes, vegetarian

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Recipe: Baked Sweet Potatoes with Hot Pink Coleslaw

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 1 comment

This is a recipe I make quite often but have just realised I have never posted on this blog!  Since I need it for a collection of recipes I’m making elsewhere, I thought I’d better post it now, even though I don’t have any photos with which to demonstrate it’s unbelievable pinkness…

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7 orange sweet potatoes of a moderate size (you will be serving one potato per person as a main so don’t get the gigantic ones)
1/4 cabbage, preferably savoy
1 beetroot
6 spring onions (the green kind)
100 g frozen peas
2 really nice apples
juice of 1 lime
1/2 cup yoghurt or sour cream
1 tsp smoked paprika
pinch cayenne pepper
 

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Posted in cooking with vegetables, dairy-free, egg-free, everyday cooking, gluten-free, low glycemic index, main courses, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

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Recipe: Potato and Kale Enchiladas

Posted on July 29, 2011 | 3 comments

By request, another recipe adapted from Veganomicon, and the last I’m going to post this year, for reasons of fair use. Mostly what I changed in this recipe was the chilli sauce, which developed quite a different range of chillis based on what I had available.  And very tasty it was, too.  Also, I couldn’t resist adding grated cheese on top. This is partly because I’m a wimp about chilli, but mostly because I just like cheese.  And, as usual, the discursive prose is all mine.

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Sauce
olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 large green chilli, seeded and chopped
1 1/2 chipotle chillis in adobo, chopped, and with some of their sauce
1 tbsp red chilli-in-a-tube (or one red chilli, chopped)
1/2 tsp chilli powder
2 tbsp spanish spice mix, or paprika
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp oregano
2 x 400g tins chopped tomatoes
1 tsp sugar
salt
 
Filling
500g waxy potatoes, peeled and diced
1 bunch of kale (about 300g) washed, trimmed and finely chopped
olive oil
4-8 cloves garlic
1 tsp cumin
1/4 cup water
juice of one lime
1/4 cup toasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds)
14 corn tortillas
grated cheese (optional)

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Posted in cooking with vegetables, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, low fructose, nut-free, vegan, vegetarian

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