Only Recipes, by Alessandra Zecchini ©


 Ingredients
  (for my basic vanilla cupcake recipe)
 120 g butter 
3 eggs
 130 g sugar 
A few drops of pure vanilla essence 
200 g self-rising flour
 60 ml milk
  And then optional:
  Fresh As  Blackcurrant powder
 Fresh As  Dried blueberries slices
 Makes 12 cupcakes
 Preheat the oven to 175°C. Line a 12-muffin tray with cupcakes paper cups. Melt the butter in a jug, either in the microwave or in the oven (while the oven is warming up for the cupcakes). Place the eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl and whisk, using an electric beater, until the mixture looks light and pale yellow in colour. Slowly add the melted butter and the vanilla essence.
 Keep beating at a low speed now; add half of the flour followed by half of the milk. Add the rest of the flour and milk and keep beating making sure that there are no lumps. Divide the mixture into three and 'colour' on part with some blackcurrant powder (to mak...

A super easy and quick recipe for purple blackcurrant and coconut macaroons! My husband loves coconut macaroons, and I often make them if I have some leftover egg whites.  I just made a meringue base with egg white and more or less the same amount of icing sugar (this time I had 2 eggs whites). To add interest I included one tbs of  Fresh As  Blackcurrant powder. The colour was very pretty! Then I folded in some dried coconut, enough to make them 'spoonable' over a baking tray, lined with the  Lynette's baking sheet  I won form blogger  Zo . Nice to use a baking sheet that can be recycled over and over again! I Baked at 100 C for an hour or so and then I let them dry with the oven door open. They aren't pretty, but they are nice, and gluten free too :-).  Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini  ©

Nama choco are my favourite Japanese chocolates, to make them I followed  this  recipe from talented blogger Nami of  Just One Cookbook . Basically it is the same recipe for chocolate ganache: two parts good quality chocolate to one part of cream, and this time I used Whittakers  Dark Cacao  62%. Brake the chocolate with a knife and then melt with the cream over a pot of water at  Bain Marie . Pour into a rectangular/square container, smooth the top and refrigerate. When set cut with a warm knife, rinsing the knife in hot water and drying it between each cut. Yum, the chocolates already look yummy as they are!! At this stage you should dust them with cocoa, but after doing that I added some colour. Mostly I used  Fresh As  powders: passion fruit, pineapple, strawberry and blackcurrant. Then I used some  Fresh As  dried blueberries slices, and some spirulina powder (green tea would go well too!). So all the col...