So I made it back into my kitchen to do some baking. After eating, and enjoying lots of free salami, I thought I’d try cooking something without using salami.. although I’m not sure how salami cupcakes would have turned out; or who would have eaten them!

This recipe seemed interesting; combining doughnuts and cupcakes into one. The yeast was probably the key ingredient, although they didn’t rise as much as I thought they would. Still pretty damn delicious though. This recipe will be brought out again! Although make them on the day you are serving them. They tasted rather stale the next day.

Jam Doughnut Cupcakes

1 ¼ cups self-raising flour
½ cup caster sugar
125ml milk
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon dried yeast
½ cup strawberry jam
20g unsalted butter, melted
2 tablespoons cinnamon sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160°C fan-forced. Line 16 standard muffin holes with paper cases.

2. Combine the flour and sugar in a bowl, and make a well in the centre. Put the milk, eggs, vanilla and yeast in a jug and whisk to combine. Pour into the well in dry ingredients and whisk until smooth.

3. Divide half the mixture evenly among the cases. Top each with 1 teaspoon of jam, then cover with the remaining mixture.

4. Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the centre of the cake. Brush a little melted butter over each cake, then dip it into the cinnamon sugar. Serve cakes warm.

Makes 12-16, depending on how big your cases are.

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Last night I hosted my 2nd dinner party, around this time last year I hosted my first dinner party. This year was also a success, bringing my closest high school friends together for a night of good food and company.

This year I went for a less stressful approach and got everyone to bring along a dish. We settled on the theme of "Wog" and allocated dishes for everyone to bring.

Alana and Adrian provided this lovely anti-pasto spread for everyone to nibble on whilst things were cooking in the oven. Complete with lovely fresh bread, bread sticks, prosciutto, bocconcini cheese, stuffed olives, marinated mushrooms and semi sun-dried tomatoes. It was a great way to get things going with everyone gathered around with a drink catching up on life.

For mains we had a lovely spread (apologies for terrible photos, all you can see is melted cheese and the lighting wasn't the best).

David and Chris brought along this lovely vegetarian lasagna. Although they were going to go with David's mum's recipe they had decided they didn't have enough time and adapted this "Cheat's Lasagna" which was vegetarian ravioli, sauce and cheese. It didn't matter that it was a cheat's version, it was so delicious. Nice and saucy and cheesy and everyone loved it.

Kiran also made a vegetarian dish, eggplant parma. Delicious eggplant in sauce, smothered in cheese. This was also very nice and fit in perfectly with the theme. An excellent effort since Kiran only really cooks Indian dishes. She is the opposite of Andre from Masterchef who only cooks Italian!
Nerdy Rob cooked this delicious chicken cacciatore. I believe this was his first cacciatore, however it was a massive success! The chicken was simply falling off the bone, and the sauce was so rich and full of goodies like olives and mushrooms. It worked perfectly with everything else.

David & Chris supplied this gorgeous salad. And thanks to Tristan for bringing along garlic bread even though he doesn't eat it!

Dessert was my course to take care of. David had jokingly said I should do petits fours, but of course I thought that was an awesome idea and simply had to do it.

The first petits fours I knew I was going to do my chocolate mousse. I knew all my friends loved it since I had served it to them before. So I bought these cute little espresso cups from the $2 shop (3 for $2!!) and divided the mousse among them.

I wanted to make them extra special for the dinner party so I topped them with Persian fairy floss. I had quite the adventure trying to find the stuff with David Jones not being able to get in stock for 6 months. I rang around a few gourmet food shops and finally tracked some down at Jones The Grocer. The next hard part was decided what flavour, I picked up pistachio and chocolate, but there was also vanilla, saffron and rose on offer.
The mousse however was a hit, everyone intrigued by said fairy floss.

The second petits fours was an simple and refreshing fruit skewer. I was going to add a few more fruits, but I thought I'd just keep it simple since there was so much on offer. I did some googling and got the idea to put them in shot glasses for presentation.

The third petits fours was a mini doughnut which I had made before. I decided to make these because I knew they were simple to make, they were bite sized as well so people could have room for them. And well, how cute do they look?

The final petits fours was going to be my biggest risk. Something I hadn't really tried before. Whilst I had attempted a lemon meringue pie before, I remember transporting it in my car and it just spilling everywhere. So I decided I'd give it a go again in smaller form. I was going to make the pastry but then realised how much of a task I had taken on doing 4 desserts and having to clean the house AND work so I cheated and bought the frozen tart shells. This also reminded me of MasterChef at the wedding when they used store bought shells, but I thought, "Hey, if they can do it, then so can I!"

I filled the tarts with Donna Hay's lemon curd recipe which was nice and sour, but not too sour. Then the meringue was from Gourmet Traveller magazine, and I thought this part was going to let me down. It was an Italian meringue which uses a sugar syrup instead of caster sugar when beating the egg whites. For this I bought a candy thermometer to monitor the temperature. LUCKILY for me they turned out well and I could pipe them just how I wanted. I tried to brown them with a small blow torch but that failed, so I popped them under the grill. I had a few MasterChef fail moments here, the blow torch one tasted of butane, and when I was trying to extra brown a few of the meringues my baking paper set on fire! Oh it was hilarious, however the fire was easily blown out and no one got hurt.
The Italian meringue was all marshmallowy inside, and the tarts were a huge hit. I thought everyone would go halves on the tart, but everyone had one tart each! They must have been good!
I would personally like to thank Alana, Adrian, David, Chris, Tristan, Kiran and Nerdy Rob for coming and each bringing something along. An extra shout out to Alana for giving me these goreous flowers and to Tristan for his lovely culinary gift!

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I've been wanting to make doughnuts for quite some time. The only thing that really put me off was the deep frying in oil part. So when I found this recipe on Taste.com.au for these cute doughnuts I knew I had to make them!

The only problem was I didn't own a doughnut pan, and I found some at a shop, but there were going to cost me $7.95 per mould! So I trawled through ebay and found a pan that had 12 moulds, and 2 extra pans and a decorating kit for $0.99. The most expensive thing was the postage at $15! It worked the trick and I had mini doughnuts in no time.

So quick and easy to make, these are treats you can whip up easily in no time!

Iced Doughnuts
Taste Website

1/2 cup (75g) plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup (55g) caster sugar
1/4 cup (60ml) milk
1 egg, beaten
1 tbs olive oil
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
25g dark chocolate melts
100s and 1000s or shredded coconut, to decorate

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