As health kicks go, here’s one I’m really enjoying.  Eating cakes that are not so naughty but terribly nice to eat.  I’ve started to bake my way through Harry Eastwood’s Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache Cookbook which was in my Christmas cookbook stash. She’s a woman on a mission to bring the best of culinary pleasures without the calories and waistline busting levels of butter, sugar and eggs found in traditional baking.  Her secret weapon is to use vegetables that bring natural sweetness, texture and moisture and ground almonds for fat content .  For a lightness of touch her recipes use rice flour although she says they will work equally well with regular flour.

Aside from her nerve grating writing style and insistence on characterising cakes as imaginary friends and sugar plum fairies, the recipes in her cookbook are beautifully crafted, exact and so far as successful as she claims they would be.  This is just as well as my baking addiction has accelerated beyond reasonable proportions and I can’t seem to help experimenting how many ways you can use a vegetable in baking.   In the last week ‘ve baked walnut loaf, coconut, blueberry and lime slice and blood red Red Velvet Cake which was made without the food coloring she recommended but relying entirely on a home grown beetroot to show its true colours. I can’t wait to make the chocolate cake withed roasted aubergine as the star of the show.

My interest in growing and making food is reaching epic proportions and these cakes have added fuel to the fire adding a new level of satisfaction to weekend baking knowing that a central ingredient can be sourced from your own kitchen garden and a touch more seasonality to your cakes and bakes.  No doubt it takes a bit of extra effort to baking using vegetables but all that peeling and grating is the perfect workout for the upper arms only further reinforcing my belief that these cakes are as close to a health kick that eating cake can be.

The new rhythms of bread making have hit home and I haven’t bought bread since the beginning of the year.  I’ve added flat breads to my repertoire and when I can master soft rolls, bagels and english muffins we’ll be about as self sufficient in making the bread types we eat most.  There are lots of other enticing recipes for specialty breads but I vowed to myself that I needed to get the basics right first and anyway January seemed to disappear so it was time to move on to the next domestic adventure.

Home cheese making is one of the latest crazes in New Zealand after the launch of DIY cheese making kits last year.  I succumbed to the romantic thought of rustling up my own creamy creations last year but it’s only after I was given a voucher for a cheese making course for Christmas by a dear friend of mine did I fully find my cheese making courage.  So far I’ve rustled up ricotta and mozzarella which are the two cheeses we cook with most.  The ricotta is ridiculously easy and with a bit more practice I’m sure that the mozzarella will be as rhythmic.

It’s easy to fall in love with cheese making.  The pure magic of creating so many different cheeses from milk is intoxicating and far more fun than any of my chemistry A level lesson that I remember.  And the eating of the end product is far more satisfying than anything I’ve been out and bought off the supermarket shelf. I can’t deny it was a special moment to load up a plate of heritage tomatoes and basil just picked from the greenhouse with freshly made mozzarella.  For a moment, just a moment, it felt like summer which is a rare thing in these parts as the last month or so Wellington has been under a stubborn cloud that has spoiled our fun.

I’ve plans for making cottage cheese, cream cheese and mascarpone before stepping up the level of cheese making disciplines to make cheeses that need to be pressed and matured. I think my ultimate achievement would be to be grating my own parmesan cheese which from all I’ve read takes more than a year to mature.

All this domesticity is quite addictive. As days go by I become less attracted to filling up the shopping trolley and just making my own.  As I sit down to eat I find myself making an audit of those things on the plate which have been home made or grown. So far the effort has been pretty minimal it takes a little advance planning and preparation rather than hours slaving. It’s amazing what you can put your mind and hand to if you really try.