Sunday, December 13, 2009

Teacher's christmas gifts - or don't you wish you taught my children!


As you would have gathered by now, I love home baked goods. I love to give home baked goods. I probably should have been European as food translates to love to me! I should have been a big old Italian lady who wanders around saying "you too skinny, you need to eat more" while shoving baked goods at you. You get the point.

This is why I spent many an hour over the last week baking in my hot kitchen (we had a 43 degree day the day before my children's kinder and preschool finished).

This is some of the product. They were quite big boxes full of goodies and I should probably do a photography course soon because my photos are really not getting that across lately! I am struggling with the whole photo thing, which is probably why I am a baker and not a photographer. You need to bear with me and use your imagination sometimes!

Anyway, these boxes were large and filled with shortbread stars, chocolate balls, gingerbread christmas trees drizzled with white chocolate and chocolate brownies.

They are all simple to make and three of them can be made or partially made and frozen, so you can prepare early and don't need to do everything at once.

The shortbread stars and gingerbread dough can be made (and were made) the week before and then the dough frozen until the day I needed it. Both recipes are really simple and I am happy to give them to anyone who emails me.

The chocolate balls are really easy and popular. Sometimes it is the simple things that are the best. These are just Maree biscuits thrown in the food processor. Then you mix in a cup of coconut, a tin of condensed milk and a tablespoon and a half of cocoa. Mix it into balls, roll it in coconut and then put in the fridge.

They are a version on the old fashion rum balls without the rum and I have been asked for them frequently by many friends over many years. In fact, when I first came to Alice Springs I made them at a "meet the new mum in town" function a friend held for me (thank you Kim) and one of the girls that was there swears she is only my friend today because I made them!! LOL.

The Brownies are a new recipe as featured in a previous blog but they are by far the most popular non cup cake item I have made so far. It can be cooked and then frozen too, if you need to prepare in advance. The workaholic can not get enough of them and I am stopped in the corridor of his workplace often in the last month for people to talk about them. What can I say, chocolate and raspberries, how can you go wrong! Again, if anyone is interested in the recipe, just email me.

I even made a "gluten free" version for some of the Workaholic's workers who are gluten free and they went down equally as well as the normal version.

A couple of the teachers wanted to know where I got my goodie boxes from and how they could order them. My friends who have seen them have made me promise that next year I will sell them at the local christmas markets so that they can buy them to give to their kids teachers.

Anyway, thank you to all of the teachers who have influenced my children this year. Oscar has really come out of his shell and is really ready for his first year at Primary School and Alice has only just started at 3 year old kindy but is already painting up a storm!

No comments:

Post a Comment