Peach and Peppermint Iced Tea

Remeber when I stewed some peaches to make my peach crumble? Well, I've had the peach liquid sitting in my freezer for weeks. I've finally got around to doing something with it. 

The first thing you'll need to do is make some ice cubes. 

I put mint leaves from the garden in mine, to give it a nice touch. But if you don't have any peppermint, that's ok. The next thing you'll need is two peppermint tea bags. Grab a saucepan and fill it with two cups of water and plus the tea bags,bring to the boil. Once its boiled for a minute or two, take it off the heat. Find  a jug that holds at least a litre of liquid, fill it with two cups of peach liquid and the two cups of peppermint tea you just made. Put it in the fridge for a couple of hours to cool down. 

Once it's cool, grab a glass, put in three or so ice cubes and fill with the tea. It's delicious, I promise! 

Just lovely on a hot summers day! 

French Bread

I've never had much luck baking bread, but when I found  this recipe, I had to try it out. The recipe is  "How to make the perfect French Bread" on steamy kitchen. Definitely check it out, even if, like me, you're scared of baking bread. 

I won't going into details of the process here, just visit the link. But I will say this; I'm always making bread that is either too doughy or burnt. I'll tell you what, this bread came out perfectly. 

See how nice that looks? And it tasted just as good. It may not look as well as the photo on the recipe, but if I do say so myself, it looks pretty darn impressive. 

I was given some homemade mulberry jam, and I thought mulberry jam + fresh bread would = extreme yumminess. And I was right. 

New Toy!

This afternoon an amazing thing arrived in the post. I was so excited I even did a little dance. :P 

That's right, I got a KITCHENAID artisan stand mixer. *happy dance* 

Isn't it sexy? lol 

I can't wait to try it out. 

Christmas Wreath Cake

This Christmas I made a wreath cake. It's a ginger cake made in a bundt pan, covered with cream. Mmmmm....

Christmas ginger cake with whipped cream and chopped almonds. 

It looks just as delicious as it tasted. I was very proud of this cake.

The recipe came from The Anne of Green Gables treasury. I did make a couple of changes. The recipe called for half a cup of molasses and 1/4 cup granulated sugar. Instead I put 1/2 a cup golden syrup and 2 teaspoons of molasses.  It was a hit. :D

Peach crumble with lashings of cream

I love fruit crumble, and I thought it would be a perfect thing to make for the first entry of this blog. Disregarding the fact that it's summer and this a hot dessert. Although it's just as delicious cold.

I had a bought a kilo of white peaches, I love peaches, seriously they're my second favourite fruit (after mangoes). 

What I did was stew the peaches first. And let me tell you, they tasted delicious. And smelled delicious.

Stewed peaches:

1 kilo peaches
2 litres of water
1 stick of cinnamon
2 star anise
One tblspn agave nectar ( Prefferably the dark kind, it has a deeper flavour.)

Bring the water to the boil, add the peaches and the other ingredients. Bring the heat to low and simmer for about 20 minutes. Smell the lovely aroma!
 After they're cooked, spoon out the peaches into a pie dish. Make sure to keep the liquid. You can drink it or make jelly with it.



Onto the topping! I based my recipe on the fruit crumble topping recipe from Perfect Cooking by Marguerite Patten.
 Ingredients:
1 cup flour (I used sorghum but you can use pretty much anything I think)
1/2 cup of roughly ground almonds
1/4 cup butter or margarine (On hindsight, I would use a little more butter, more on that later)
1/4 cup sugar

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Mix your almonds and flour together. Add the butter and rub into the flour with your fingers. Now add the sugar.

Mix in the sugar and sprinkle the topping over the peaches. Put int the oven back for about 40 minutes or until the top is golden.
Now, remember when I said I should have used a bit more more butter? My topping was basically hot flour, so I ground some almonds and mixed with a bit more melted butter, added that to the top and continued cooking.

After it was done, this is what I had:

Obviously, I couldn't wait to eat some.

Mmmm, yum!