A few of our favourite things...

Libby: This week I discovered the perfect cream cheese icing recipe - it comes courtesy of the Ripe cookbook which I also received for Christmas. For enough icing to cover a large cake, beat softened unsalted butter (100g) with lots of icing sugar (600g) until it resembles fine breadcrumbs in a cake mixer. Then you add cream cheese (250g) and beat for five minutes or so until light and fluffy. This icing is the just the right consistency for piping - it holds its shape perfectly atop these cute little lemon cupcakes I made in celebration of growing a year older. They're topped with another of my favourite things at the moment: fresh raspberries.

Becs: I received a couple of lovely cookbooks for Christmas, Ripe Recipes from the Auckland deli Ripe and A Year's Worth, Recipes from the Dunsandel Store, which is a general store cum cafe thirty minutes south of Christchurch. So far I have made Dunsandel's spiced apple chutney and their amazing smoked pork hock, apple and cider pasties (more on those soon to follow...) From Ripe the toasted muesli, banana and coconut cake, go-go chicken and nutty slaw were all delicious. Both books have lots of recipes for cafe staples of the tried and true variety, Ripe's being a little more cutting edge as you would expect given their urban clientele, the Dunsandel collection is more traditional but very charmingly compiled.




Miriam: This is a great dip that goes well with bread or corn chips. I'm not sure where this recipe originated, but I feel like it came from somewhere like food in a minute(!). It probably only takes a couple of minutes to make - just chop up tomatoes (I like to deseed them first), add parsley and coriander, salt, pepper and bind it all together with sweet chilli sauce. Enjoy.