My ambitions for supremacy of the Art of French Baking, or indeed any sort of baking must rest a while and perhaps indefinitely. No more all butter croissants, ginger baking  and – I can hardly say it – no more pizza on a Friday night.  All I can say is that it’s just as well I managed to make a pumpkin tart before the shutters came down.

Researching all the possible options for the best dietary habits for keeping cholesterol low are already making my head ache.  Low cholesterol, paleolithic, wheat free, low carbohydrate the list seems endless. It’s times like this you really wish the medical and nutrition professionals would have a common view. The only thing that they seem to agree on is that a moderate amount of red wine can be good for your health 😮

The thought of overhauling the pantry stock feels a little overwhelming but that has to be the way to go. My wide variety of gluten laden flours must be retired and the sugars, chocolate and other oh so tasty snacks banished.  In future it’s all going to be wheat free, low fat and only natural sugars.  Oh course my instant reaction is all that we will be deprived of with change in dietary habits although there is a whole new world of culinary adventure to be had.

For now I shall allow his Lordship to express his own story!

Cholesterol bombshell: no more cakes, pastries, pies, cheese, ice cream, eggs, sausage rolls, the list goes on. And on.

— Martin Treanor (@m_treanor) June 18, 2012

To be replaced by lentils, oats, fruit, bran, veggies and oily fish. I'm still struggling to see this as a fair exchange.

— Martin Treanor (@m_treanor) June 18, 2012

Day zero for new diet. Low carb / good fat. Already faced with intractable problem of what I'm going to dunk in my tea.

— Martin Treanor (@m_treanor) June 22, 2012

The upsides of blogging are plentiful.  It’s a great way of keeping in touch with loved ones far away and keeping a journal for yourself.  Very modern don’t you think.  Certainly sharing recipes is the next best thing to having people share your baking for real.  And this is one recipe that most definitely should be shared.  I kid myself that with “Wholemeal” and “Ginger” in the title is fabulously healthy.  Which of course it is – not!

But don’t let that hold you back.  If you like to live life in the fast line this is most definitely a baking treat for you.  And even if you’re generally a slow lane person and just want a pick me up there is no doubt that you’ll be full of zing and energy that you’ll never want to let go.  Which leads me to a warning – this cake has the serious potential to ruin any notions you may have of controlled eating.  The antidote is simple – small quantities savoured – and then go run around the block.

This is a spin on the classic New Zealand Slice – Wholewheat Ginger Crunch, courtesy of my Treasury of New Zealand Baking.  The Recipe is a Jo Segar one so  I was pretty confident that it would be a sound approach to our weekend afternoon treat.  As it turned out it was most definitely simple to make albeit a bit fiddly mucking around with copious amounts of golden syrup.

But I didn’t such stickiness put me off.  Just start with the easy stuff – weighing everything out.  Flour, sugar, oats, coconut etc etc.  Like this blog the recipes are starting to sound very similar.

I can’t resist crystallised ginger – it has magical powers.  No really.  The power to entice you to eat cakes and biscuits.  It also is a life saver for me as hot ginger and lemon drink is my favourite brain rejuvenation solution to pep me up during a long day of back to back coaching sessions.

For once I managed to create and bake the base without causing undue damage or mess.  Round of applause please!  I love cakes that you mix in a saucepan – so much more exciting than the food processor.  No nasty thoughts of loosing fingers in fast moving parts.

The topping also requires a saucepan although the fumes of warming sugar and spicy ginger can start those tastebuds craving.

Early cake cravings can be a problem with this bake as it needs to sit in the fridge to set.  Cue much finger tapping on the kitchen work surface and opening and closing of the refrigerator to sneek a peek.

But finally you can relax.  Stick the kettle on for a compulsory cuppa.  Cut up the slab of ginger yumminess and then take a deep breath.  For it may be a while before you can come up for pure air again.

Ginger has been a common theme for my baking.  I’ve baked ginger muffins, ginger cookies, ginger cake and best of all ginger biscuits so I thought it was only right to try and new ginger baking variation in the form of a ginger loaf.

After living for years in fear of baking a decent cake I’m starting to wonder what all the fuss in my head was about.  It’s true that I still haven’t mastered a decent Victoria Sandwich Cake but I’m not letting that get in my way of rustling up a cake with confidence without too much fuss and nonsense.  I have come to realise though that food blogging cake making can be a pretty dull after a while as the ingredients and techniques are pretty similar so I’m going to have to make much more of an effort to bring the baking experience alive.  That would of course require me to plan ahead rather than be dashing for the camera as the baking process is already under way. Just in the nick of time before the butter and sugar were mixed into a luscious creamy mix.

The thing I love about baking with ginger is there is invariably a dose of treacle or molasses which will almost always guarantee much cursing and muttering as the darn stuff gets stuck to everything and refuses to stop trickling from the jar or spoon.  But it’s worth doing battle with it to get that sticky goo of ginger cake mixes.

The loaf is also a wondrous mix of goodies – ginger (dried and crystallised) sultanas and mixed peel.  Plenty of earthy goodness to enjoy and it gives the cake a nice rich texture.

There is no doubt that you can’t beat a ginger cake for a winter’s afternoon.  Served of course with a steaming hot mug of tea for that final warming effect.

I don’t think you need to wait for winter to make this cake.  In fact I recommend eating ginger cake as often as you can.  For me it brings back some of the happiest memories with my mum as we went shopping on a Saturday morning to get the bread and my treat was always a square of ginger cake with lashings of icing on top. Comfort food at it’s best.

Gingerbread loaf

By Tui Flower from the New Zealand Treasury of Baking

125g butter

3/4 cup soft brown sugar

2 eggs, beaten

3/4 cup treacle

2 cups plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 3/4 tsp ground ginger

1/4 cup each of crystallised ginger, sultanas and chopped candied peel

1/2 tsp baking soda

2 tblsp milk

1) Preheat oven to 160 degrees C. Line base of 19×7 cm loaf tin with baking paper.

2) Cream butter and sugar till light and fluffy.  Add beaten eggs and treacle, mix well.

3) Sift flour, baking powder and ginger together and mix into creamed mixture.  Stir in the ginger and fruits.

4) Dissolve the baking powder in milk and then add to mixture and stir well.  Pour mix into loaf tin.

5) Bake for 1-1.25 hours.  Test the cake with a skewer – it should come out clean when fully baked.

6) Cool the cake in the loaf tin for 10-15 minutes before finishing the cooling on a wire rack.

Eat on it’s own or with lashes of butter.

My colleagues and I got together for our annual walk and lunch.  It’s a brilliant opportunity to put a full stop on the year.  We can let the wind blow away and lingering challenges and we can celebrate what’s been achieved.  We bring to the party items that symbolise our year and take some time to indulge in some mutual admiration before heading off for our respective holidays.

In all our year was described as “lumpy, tricky, wierd but good, sweet and spicy, putting down roots, a mixed bag, surviving on coffee”.  My sense was that there is an overwhelming sense of we survived and there is more excitement to come.  When you see the motley crew I work with it’s unsurprising there is such a diversity of views.  One of our team missed the walk as she is about to give birth to her second child in just a few days but she managed lunch which is where the fun really starts.

Our walk was brisk and undulating as we walked around the southern walkway in Wellington.  I’d hoped for more photo blogging opportunities but to be honest the wind was howling around us and it was best to keep going.  As always there are plenty to look at including ferries coming into harbour.

And planes coming into land at the airport. I was pretty bummed to have the wrong lens on the camera and unable to get a close up on this hercules plane.

In this year of challenge we traded down from the fancy restaurants of Wellington and went to lunch in a suburban cafe, Cafe Polo.  It was really excellent food and like many local eateries in Wellington suburbs is as good as, if not better, than the fancy pants places in town.  The extra benefit for me was I was able to pick up my Christmas goodies from Pudding Lane who produce the most sublime pork pies and other traditional puddings and also run the Cafe.

For the first time I gave home made edible Christmas presents this year and it was great fun.  I’m confident that they’ll be enjoyed by my colleagues too since everyone loves the Crystallised Ginger Biscuits and I’d had a trial run a few weeks ago.

Aside from making enough batches of biscuit dough my greatest challenge was what to package the gifts in.  Just as I was struggling to find some suitable boxes I stumbled into a store in town where there was a massive sale on and I managed to some bargain biscuit barrels.  I was pretty pleased with the way they turned out.

I will definitely think about homemade edible presents again for the future.  Although it took a bit of effort much less sweat and stress that shopping for that perfect gift!

There is still plenty of Christmas preparations to tackle over the next few days but I finally feel I can give into the Christmas spirit.  We’re off to harvest our Christmas tree this weekend and I’ll be shopping, cooking and cleaning for the big day.  This will be our first Christmas on our own in this house and we’re looking forward to kicking back and letting the pace of things be determined by how we feel.  Then we’ll swing into action to meet up with friends and neighbours which will most definitely be fun.

For the moment I’m going to enjoy a long sigh.  I feel like I’ve deserved it.

Made of lots of luscious spices but so simple to make I can wholeheartedly recommend then as a Christmas treat.

There are many Lebkuchen recipes available on the Internet.  The one I used was simply: flour, ground almonds, spices (ginger, cinammon, pepper, ground cloves and cardamon), lemon, baking powder mixed up with honey and butter.  The spices vary with recipes and some include cocoa powder and hazel nuts. I don’t think you can go wrong with any of these variations.

After mixing wet and dry ingredients you end up with a dough that turns glossy when you roll them up into biscuit balls. I like the fact there is not too much fiddling with cooling mixtures, rolling and cutting.  Just grab some mixture, roll it in your hands and then press lightly on the tray to flatten them slightly.

Hey presto around 15 minutes later you have your Christmas fancy ready to tantalise you.  For these are biscuits that must be enjoyed cooled so you can appreciate the full chewiness and heat of the spices.

As well as experimenting with the spices next time I admit I’d make larger biscuits.  More like the size of a small saucer.  That way you can feel better about eating one Lebkuchen rather than having to eat three to get the equivalent satisfaction.  These biscuits are more-ish in a dangerous way.

In our haste to meet our afternoon tea deadline I skipped the glacing of these biscuits but that definitely will add another layer of delight.  Chocolate covered ones are nice to but for me as plain as they come is as good as they get.

There was no doubt that with winter in the air I was up for these heart warming treats.  Shame really as we are in the swing of strawberry season right now but somehow I’m struggling to get into the summery feeling.  But there’s time before Christmas to do that – if the sun dare shine!

Whether it’s hot or cold the bassets are always around when there is stuff going on in the kitchen.  You can’t blame them for hanging around in anticipation that something tasty might fall their way.  It does however require intense concentration and when the flurry of excitement is over it’s essential for them to slope off for long snooze to recover from their kitchen supervision efforts.

Snoozing is not an option for me as I’ve got some serious domestic planning to do after today’s baking adventure.

It’s important at this point to make a complete disclaimer.  I believe that there are few truly new ideas in the world and where possible you should copy and steal all the good ones that come your way and make them your own. So today I’m copying my father in law’s signature dish and will be stealing a suggestion he made that will get me out of a creative hole for my client Christmas gifts this year.

Bob (that’s my father-in-law) has in recent months perfected the art of baking crystallised ginger biscuits.  These biscuits have become so popular with family and friends that he’s now making almost industrial quantities to keep everyone’s biscuit tins stocked.  I can vouch for these biscuits – they are truly delicious.  I sampled one or two, or maybe a few more, when I was back in the UK a few weeks back. He is a generous soul and has sent me the recipe he’s been using causing high excitement at the post office when I went to collect the mail this week.

It was quite a shock to see the list of ingredients required.  But on reflection probably not unsurprising since the recipe came from a spice retailer.

Now not that I’m competitive or anything but I hear that Bob’s biscuits don’t include ground cardamon as suggested in the recipe.  As you can see I managed to track that down and also Molasses which I remember my mother-in-law bemoaning the fact she couldn’t find in the shops.  When I laid out these ingredients all I could think was crikey no wonder these biscuits have some heat in them with all these edgy spices.

It’s a simple recipe though so I set to.  It was only when I got to the sifting flour and spices together I realised I didn’t after all have all the ingredients as I didn’t have any self raising flour.  You’d think I’d learn from last time about how important it is to read the recipe in full.  I did however take this variation in my stride and settled on plain flour with some baking powder and soda instead.

I can tell you the smells were delicious I could feel a cookie dough scoffing moment coming on.  To avoid me eating the dough I had to concentrate really hard and roll up the dough for chilling as quick as I could.  Mason decided he liked the few titbits that fell on the floor.

It is of course right now I know that Bob will be reading this post and critiqueing my technique.  Before you ask, no I did not roll the dough sufficiently small enough to yield the 48 biscuits suggested by the recipe.  I need to work on my biscuit dough preparation technique.  For a first effort I was quite pleased. A little rounder next time I think!

But hey, these biscuits turned out fine.  Well almost.  The darn oven got me again.  14 minutes was just too long by about 2/3 minutes I think or maybe just drop my oven temperature a degree or two.

Luckily I have another roll of dough to bake up tomorrow for MT to take them into the office for morning tea. Or maybe we’ll just keep them at home for the bassets and I to enjoy.

I am however determined to get these perfected so I can start up a cottage industry for Christmas and with a bit of fancy packaging they’ll do nicely for giving to my clients for Christmas.  After giving away fresh eggs last year (which I have to say was pretty well received) I’m sure people will be relieved I’m not turning up with excess cauliflowers which was one of the other options I’d been considering.

Anyway, I reckon Bob is safe for the moment to be the biscuit baking king.  I still need to get my head around the fact these are biscuits and not cookies so have a crisp bite rather than chewy. Unless of course they are suposed to be chewy and the over baking makes them crispier than they should be.  I don’t mind which they are as they are hot and spicy biscuits which go just as well as tea as any Victoria Sponge cake does.  Which is a relief as I’m so over baking cakes that don’t turn out right!