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Nan’s spiced oat cookies recipe

If there’s one strong memory from my childhood, it’s Nan’s cooking. The smell. The taste. The licking the bowl! You knew that was coming, didn’t you?

As I said a few months back, Nan gave me a big grocery bag full of old recipes to scan, including her mother’s group recipe book. Some recipes she let me have and others I made her keep, because I’m sure others in the family would love them one day. Plus, who needs to keep hardcopies when you have Genius Scan on your iPad.

As a refresher, here’s that mother’s group cookbook she had all those years ago (Nan’s now in her mid 80s).

I do love the first page inside the book.

Nan admits she didn’t cook much from this book, but mostly from the scrappy exercise books filled with handwritten recipes now splattered with batter and grease. Some of the pages have dog ears and the ink has started to fade. Most of the recipes I can make out though.

Over the coming months, as I get time, I thought I’d share some of those. Here’s the first one – which didn’t last long in the cupboard after they were cooked:

Spiced Oat Cookies

INGREDIENTS:
¾ cup oats
1 cup plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
½ tsp bicarbonate soda
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp cinnamon
½ cup marg/butter
½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla essence

METHOD:
Pre-heat the oven to 190C.
Cream butter until light and fluffy. Gradually add the two sugars. Beat the egg well and then add to the mixture with the vanilla. Fold in the dry ingredients. Mix until combined.
Place a teaspoon full of mixture onto a greased baking tray. I find lining a tray with greaseproof paper works a treat. Nan would probably prefer to smear butter all over the tray instead.
Bake for 10-15 minutes.
Allow to cool, before removing to a wire tray. Store in an air tight container.
Enjoy!

VARIATION:
Add a dessertspoon of cocoa
Add ¼ cup of raisins or cranberries

Feel free to pin, tweet or Facebook the recipe – after you’ve cooked it, of course! 🙂

March 12, 2013
Easy Chocolate Fudge Cake Recipe

It’s hard to go past a chocolate recipe, so when I opened up Nan’s mothers’ group cookbook the girls immediately wanted chocolate cake. Chocolate Fudge Cake to be precise.

I was a tad dubious. The recipe had two steps. – beat together and bake. It didn’t even tell me how long to cook for – usually a recipe for disaster for this home cook. However, it’s proven a success, especially with the addition of chocolate icing. It’s now on our favourites list.

Chocolate Fudge Cake

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup SR Flour
2 dessert spoons cocoa
1 egg
¾ cup sugar
¾ cup milk
1 tablespoon melted butter

METHOD:

Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl. Beat together for two minutes. Place in two 20cm round tins. Bake in moderate oven for 20-25 minutes.

ICING:

Combine 200g softened butter, 200g icing sugar and 200g melted chocolate.

You can download the recipe here:
[scribd id=111889883 key=key-25qntlz1ozc4gaq8kzce mode=scroll]

What recipes are on your favourites list?

November 2, 2012
Household tips and recipes – Nan’s mothers’ group recipe book
Visiting my nan on Sunday, I started asking her if she still had some of the old recipes she cooked us as kids. Nan was renowned for her biscuits and I thought some of them would make a perfect addition to Ella’s school lunch box as a treat.

What I got was far beyond what I imagined. I came home with a shopping bag full of recipes to look through. Some were even from my great grandmother. Among them was this treasure:

Now Wondrous Ultra Special Sensational Mouthwatering Cookery

This is nan’s mother’s group recipe book. Nan is in her mid 80s. It’s a yellow cardboard covered book with three simple staples in it. Nothing fancy. In the back it says “The North West Union of State School’s Mothers’ Clubs. Donation…. 30 cents’’.

Throughout there are old fashioned recipes typed up neatly, like Chocolate Sponge Cake, Five Minute Cake and Steamed Pudding. There’s also some obscure treats like Apricot Festival Cream, Weetbix Cake and my all-time favourites – Nameless 1 and Nameless 2. There’s a note underneath saying “both are scrumptious – ask Mrs Dodd for the names”. I’m wondering if anyone ever asked Mrs Dodd.

The book even has a couple of pages of “hints’’, like:
- To sharpen scissors, cut on the neck of a sauce bottle or similar as if you were cutting the neck off.
- When requiring a small quantity of lemon juice, pierce with knitting needle and squeeze out the required amount.
- Bunches of mint placed about the kitchen discourage flies.
And so many more.

Over the next couple of weeks I thought I’d share some of the recipes from the book and from her shopping bag full of treasures she’s given me to look through. I might throw in a few of the handy hints too.

To end, here’s the first page in the book. Timeless comedy.

Recipe for Happy Home

1lb of good temper
2lbs forbearance
1lb patience
1.5 lbs contentment
3 lbs unselfishness
1lb fun
2lbs cheerfulness
Method: Mix well with 2 quarts of milk of human kindness.
Dose: 1 wine glass full the first thing in the morning. To be repeated as the effect wears off.

To Preserve A Husband:

Be careful in your selection. Do not choose too young. When once selected give your entire thought to preparation for domestic use. Some insist on keeping them in pickle. Others are constantly keeping them in hot water. This makes them sour, hard and sometimes bitter. Even poor varieties may be made sweet, tender and good by garnishing them with patience, well sweetened with love and seasoned with kisses. Wrap them in a mantle of charity. Keep warm with a steady fire of domestic devotion and serve with peaches and cream. Thus prepared, they will keep for years.

We mums have come a long way in how we go about sharing recipes today!

Do you have anything from your grandparents you treasure? What about an old recipe that you still cook today?

Make sure you subscribe to the eNewsletter to see Nan’s recipes.
November 1, 2012
How to make a Dolly Varden Cinderella birthday cake – without it ending in tears
Why I choose the most difficult cakes to bake, I don’t know. This time it was a Dolly Varden cake for Holly’s second birthday. Not only was it a Dolly Varden cake, but it was a Dolly Varden Cinderella cake.

As you will have read yesterday, I had some challenges. Here are some points from my cake making exercise:
- The recipe calls for one and a half quantities of cake mixture, so I had enough mixture left over to make cupcakes as a backup. Thankfully I didn’t need to use those.
- Fondant ready roll icing I think is easier than butter icing. It’s just like playing with Play Dough. Hence, my mouse!
- This one definitely needs to be made a day before. Unlike last year’s princess castle cake. It took a long time and plenty of things can go wrong.
- After making the recipe and having all sorts of trouble and stress with the Dolly Varden tin, I’ve since read about cooking three square cakes, piling them on top of each other, then trimming the edges to form a cone. Now that would have been a heck of a lot easier.
- Never open the oven to check on your cake when it’s in an incredibly unstable Dolly Varden tin. Never. Read this to learn why.
- I have to thank Donna Hay Kids Birthday cookbook and Pinterest for helping me come up with the design.
Here’s how I made it:

Dolly Varden Cinderella Cake by Kellie O’Brien on Scribd

Would you attempt to make something like this? Or have you already?

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October 8, 2012
How do you make pancakes? (Pancake recipe)

Every Thursday morning, we have pancakes for morning tea. When I say pancakes, I mean Australian pancakes, like what your grandmother used to make – flat and crepe-like. Or maybe that was just my grandmother.

This morning, I decided to put up a photo of Li’l Holly spreading her pancakes with jam and our (very basic) pancake recipe:

1 cup of plain flour
1 cup of milk
1 egg

When we don’t have eggs, we replace the egg with one mashed banana. Surprisingly, it works! We then top them with lemon and sugar. Although, being minus lemons this morning, we went for jam.

Underneath the photo, I asked: how do you make your pancakes? Here were some of the responses:

Amanda: 2 Cups SR Flour, 1/2 Cup Sugar, 2 eggs, a splash of vanilla and about 2 Cups of Milk. They come out more like pikelets, but that’s the way we like them.

Katrina: as above, but minus the sugar and add lemon juice!!!

Alison: I use SR flour – we like them fluffy and high. I add grated apple and they are so moist and yum.

@KatrinaHigham: I am married to a chef. Ours get complicated with egg whites and baking powder. We do sugar, flour, eggs, milk, baking powder and salt. #fluffy

@GoodGoogs: I add sugar. Does no one else add sugar? We are a maple syrup, lemon and cream kind of family.

@MattJForbes1: Try putting some buttermilk, replace 25% of the milk! Sugar is a must!! Or honey!

So, the question is, how do you make YOUR pancakes?

Read more recipes.

September 13, 2012
Gardening can be fun. Umm, are you sure?

You hear people who have a liking for terry towelling hats go on about the therapeutic wonders of gardening. Generally, it has the opposite effect on me, primarily because of the state of the seedlings after I’ve had my way with them. I did not inherit my mum’s green thumb.

However, I still can’t help but have this desire to want a vegetable garden abundant with fresh produce for the kitchen – every Spring. And so the planning has begun. I’ve weeded out (pardon the pun) which plants won’t grow and which we have moderate success with here on the North West Coast of Tasmania.

Here’s what works:
Lettuces – usually more than we can manage
Cucumbers – each year I vow I’ll use them to help the bags under my eyes, but somehow eat the lot.
Zucchinis – Zucchini slice is eaten till we turn green.
Corn – only if in a certain spot in the garden
Peas – usually don’t make it to the kitchen
Beans – as above, but not usually with the same degree of enjoyment from small children.
Carrots – they don’t really look like carrots. The last lot looked more like deformed Barbie dolls.

With the weather soon to warm up, we’ve started to explore the new dirtgirl scrapbook. It can basically be used for whatever you wish, but we’ve decided to make it very much focused on gardening and the recipes we create from those veggies – if they grow, of course!

Ella has already drawn pictures of what she’d like in the garden (although, I’ve had to explain, we can’t grow chocolate) and used some of the cut outs of dirtgirl, pumpkins and flowers to glue onto one of the blank pages.

As part of the Grow Garden Journal Expansion Pack (sold separately), there are dedicated “in my garden today’’ pages, which inspired our gardening focus, along with recipe pages and a sheet of weather stickers. As part of the scrapbook itself, we also have 64 blank pages and pretty craft pattern pages to use for dried leaves, to paste photos to and write in information we glean from the internet to help our gardening become a little more… fruitful. What I love most about the scrapbook is the fact it grows with you – you can add pages as you fill up the existing ones.

The scrapbook certainly oozes quality, style and will have longevity – this is something to treasure many years into the future. I can’t wait to look back on this journal and see what we produced together – with our bare hands and a bit of sun! Priced at $39.95, I think it’s going to be particularly popular with the grandmas out there. I see a lot of grandparent and grandchild projects happening over the coming months.

Now go get grubby!

The dirtgirlworld scrapbook is available through selected Stockists and online at shop.leafjournals.com.

DISCLAIMER: Cath Connell from Leaf. Paper and Journals is a Mum PR client. However, I genuinely love this product. Hence the reason for feeling compelled to blog about it!

How does your garden grow? What vegies do you have the most success with?

August 10, 2012