Frosting - cream cheese and buttercream.

yumyum cakes!

Frosting is a little funny sometimes, it might work out perfectly one time, and another time it just ends up being a runny mess.  here are some pointers to help you get it right.  

At the bottom of the post, there are a bunch of pictures, including "successful" and "failure" frostings. 

First of all, the most important things - it seems like a stupidly long list, but really, once you've made it once successfully, you'll see it's actually not hard!

Nutella Chocolate Chip cookies

Here goes!  a gooey, chocolatey cookie, delicious after they've cooled for 10 minutes, enough to crisp up the edges and still be warm, chocolatey and gooey in the middle. If you don't have hazelnut meal, just replace with the same weight with more flour.   :) 

I've made variations of this recipe over the years, sometimes i replace some of the flour with quick cook oats, used

Shortbread (Gill's mum's)

Gotta love a delicious golden biscuit!  This is a recipe that family friend passed on to us (Gill, she actually hand-wrote a beautiful little recipe book for my mum, and added pictures of Australia and friends as a goodbye present when my family left Malta).  This is her mum's recipe :)

This dough is fantastic to keep rolled into a sausage, and tightly wrapped with cling wrap in the fridge, especially at the Christmas/winter season, ready to be whipped out, sliced, and thrown in the oven for freshly baked shortbread biscuits at any time!

Shortbread (the background ones were wrapped as gifts.

Scandinavian Spicy cookies

I know.  This was meant to be a Christmas Post.  Terrible of me really.

These are delicious - buttery cinnamon and spice flavoured cookies, and they literally bring home the smell of Xmas into the kitchen and all around the house.  it's awesome!

I've seen so many differing recipes for these cookies, but the one I liked best was from an issue of Taste (Issue 7, winter 2005), a Maltese magazine that comes out with the Independent.  They had an article about a Danish and a Swedish person living in Malta, and they gave this recipe for "brown cookies".  I had just been to Sweden and tasted these awesome biscuits so thought i'd make them.  and they were delicious! And so much fun to make!

With shortbread in a plate...