Beetroot and carrot wholemeal mini cupcakes

Makes 30 mini cupcakes

I got this amazing recipe from the kitchen garden in my inbox today and I just knew I had to make it. I had some beautiful beets growing in my garden that were begging to be eaten. I have changed a few things in the recipe to suit my needs (ie I didn’t have enough beetroot for the original recipe so I added carrot and swapped pure flour for wholemeal).  

These cupcakes are so yummy. Next time I think I’ll reduce the sugar amount and maybe reduce the butter and add a banana. Will have to wait till I buy some more beetroot seedlings and then wait for them to grow before I can make these again.  

200g beetroot

50g carrot

150g chocolate chips (or broken chocolate bits)

150g butter

2 eggs 150g raw sugar 

1 teaspoon vanilla essence 

100g wholemeal flour

50g plain flour

2 teaspoons baking powder 

30g cocoa

Peel, grate and cook the beetroot and carrot.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a pan.

Put the beetroot, carrot, melted chocolate and butter in a mixing bowl (I used my kenwood mixer).

Add the eggs one at a time and mix well in between.

Add the sugar and vanilla essence mix well.

Add the flour, baking powder and cocoa mix well.

Scope a large spoonful into each mini cupcake.

Add the tin to the oven and bake at 180°C for about 20 until the tops are firm.

Take out of the tin and enjoy.

John enjoying the spoon. 

I love licking the spoon after baking. 

Linked to things we find pinteresting Thursday, everything under the moon, romance on a dime, patchwork living blogging bee, tip junkie, the prairie homestead

Homemade popsicles

It’s summertime and that means lovely warm days and what better to eat on a hot day than a nice cold popsicle. Store bought popsicles can contain a lot of chemicals and definitely a lot of sugar. There is no doubt that store bought popsicles taste great but there are healthy homemade alternatives. Basically any fruit can be pulped and poured into a popsicle mould to be frozen and enjoyed. 

Yesterday I opened a tin of pineapples and poured the syrup into a popsicle mould (though the syrup will be high in sugar but it seems a waste to throw it away).  Laura’s best recipes has 176 popsicle ideas to try.

My summer popsicles:

1 cup cherries

1 cup watermelon

1 cup grapes

Chop up all the fruits and put in a blender. Pour into the mould and freeze.

Healthy Alternatives has a great recipe for a yoghurt ice block;

1 cup natural yoghurt

1 cup fruit pulp

Add to a blender and freeze.

John loves these homemade ice blocks and is so excited when he sees the moulds in the freezer but not all children will especially if they are used to store bought popsicles.   

.25c pasta sauce

A little while ago I shared our amazing $1.50 pasta sauce. I’m so proud that I've been to get it down to .25c pasta sauce since we’ve managed to grow almost all the ingredients ourselves. 

Soon we will even be able to add our own coriander seeds since I’ve let the plant go to seed (as if you let coriander do anything it just bolts when you aren’t looking).

5 small homegrown onions

1 whole clove of homegrown garlic

1 batch of fresh tomatoes (about 2 cans worth maybe 1kg)

¼ tsp paprika

¼ tsp ground coriander seed

Pepper and salt to taste

15 fresh basil leaves

15 fresh oregano leaves

1 Tsp fresh thyme

Finally dice the onions, fry in plenty of olive oil when cooked add spices and garlic fry for a minute then add tomatoes. When bubbling add the herbs.

To make a pasta sauce cover and simmer for 10 minutes.

To make a pizza sauce uncover and simmer for 20 minutes stirring so it doesn’t burn.  

This was the yummiest sauce I have EVER made. So yummy that John and I ate it on toast as a spread. I have frozen half the mixture in a glass jar in the freezer (remember not to overfill glass jars and leave the lid off until the contents are frozen then put the lid back on) and the other half is for pizza for tonight. 

Preserving tomatoes in the freezer

So excited that I’m freezing our third batch of tomatoes for later use. I was hoping to grow lots and lots of tomatoes to be able to make our own sauces rather than buying tinned tomatoes. So far we've had a steady supply of tomatoes so I'm happy. 

I’m not totally sure that growing our own tomatoes works out too much cheaper than buying canned tomatoes. It sure takes a lot of fresh tomatoes to make a pasta sauce. Though in the long run I think it will be cheaper and it’s way more rewarding and tasty eating our own tomatoes. Not to mention not throwing any cans in the recycling. Bonus. 

Our second batch of tomatoes I just put in a container and straight in the freezer as I didn’t have time to make it into a sauce and didn't want the tomatoes to go to waste. I guess I’ll have to defrost, peel and make into a sauce.

Next year I will grow larger tomatoes as the lots of little ones are a pain to peel. Homegrown tomatoes are so much tastier and sweeter than the store bought cans. You don’t have to peel your tomatoes if you don’t want to. I like mine peeled as I don’t like skins in my sauce. Eww. 

Collect all your tomatoes. I collected mine over a few days so I would have a huge pile. Put the tomatoes in a deep dish and pour over boiling water.

Leave for 5 to 10 minutes. The longer you leave them the easier they are to peel. 

Get a sharp knife and gently stab the tomato skin. There is a satisfying pop as the skin shrivels around the tomato making it very easy to remove the skin.

The larger tomatoes can easily be peeled while the little tomatoes can just be squeezed out into a dish. I love my huge pile of freshly peeled tomatoes. Now to make a pasta sauce to freeze and use in the winter time. 


Linked to the shady porch, frugally sustainable, the prairie homestead

Figs: heaven on earth?

I love figs; I love them fresh, I love them dried, I love fig and honey ice cream. Figs are like heaven on earth. When I lived in Turkey I used to eat figs all year around; dried in the winter time and fresh luscious figs in the summer time. 

Sadly here in NZ figs cost an arm and a leg both dried and fresh. Last summer I splashed out and bought 2 fresh figs for $2.50 each sadly they were nothing like the ones I ate overseas. My mum saw a neighbour the other day; who gave her a whole bag full of these amazing fruit and she gave them all to me! How lucky am I?

I now have a fig tree that we bought a few weeks ago. The little tree had 3 figs on it already now sadly it only has 1 fruit left (read little person was in time out after touching my tree grrr). Now that I have a whole bowl full of these amazing fruits I can indulge to my heart’s content. This fruit may or may not be shared. I haven’t decided yet. Actually figs aren’t a fruit at all they are an inverted flower but hey the best tasting flower I’ve ever eaten. 

Lavender body wash

When I was at my girlfriend’s place a few weeks back she had the most amazing body wash. Not only did it smell great; it made my skin feel super soft and just amazing. The recipe comes from a Wendyl Nissen booklet that was in the Woman’s Weekly a while back. 

The original recipe is made with rose soap but I had some lovely lavender soap at home that was sent to me by Sharon from ECOtanka so I wanted to use this. The soap is made by Source Living and is made with 100% natural ingredients. The soap was lovely and gentle on my skin and didn’t dry my skin out like soap often does. It was wrapped in paper which I thought was great as this could either be put in the recycling or in the compost bin. So when I wanted to make my body wash I just knew I wanted to use this lovely soap. 

Lavender body wash:

300ml purified water (or rainwater)

8 green cardamom pods

2 T (packed down) grated lavender soap

1 T glycerine (I used a vegetable based one)

Put the water and cardamom pods in a pot and bring to the boil.  

Once the water has boiled cover the pot with a lid and turn off the heat. Leave to steep for 10 minutes.

Remove the cardamom pods with a fork and add the other ingredients.

Stir the ingredients until the soap has mostly dissolved.

Pour the mixture into a squeegee bottle.  The mixture can be very gluggy when it sets so give it a good shake before use. 

I used an old Weleda body wash container to put my body wash in as it’ll be easy for me to take on holiday. My girlfriend uses an old hand soap pump container as this is easy to use the body wash in the shower.

Hulling and piping with a straw

Daily buzz did a wonderful post on 25 clever ideas; where you read it and go ahha! I thought I would do a series of my own clever ideas so watch this space. The first in this series is hulling and piping strawberries and cherries. New nostalgia did a great post on hulling strawberries with a straw.

So when we were eating cherries last week I said why don’t we pip them with a straw! Basically you put the straw at the bottom of the cherry, push the straw upwards and the pip pops out the top of the cherry. 

This worked a treat with our stainless steel straws (no idea how this would work with plastic straws as they might not be strong enough). I loved piping the cherries as there was very little fruit wastage and you could pop the whole fruit in your mouth. A much saver way to give the fruit to a small person too as they can eat whole halves rather than little bits of fruit reducing the risk of choking. 

Strawberries were also on the menu this week so I used the new nostalgia technique for hulling strawberries. This was really easy with the stainless steel straws and so ended up with these cute little tubes of strawberries with leaves on top. This reduces the waste of the strawberry as you’re not cutting the tops off and cutting a chunk of the flesh off as well.

Will definitely be hulling and piping my fruit with a straw from now on.