Sharing Sunday: Icing & Crumbs

Since I began blogging. I have become part of an inspiring community of blogging women. Oh ok, and a couple of guys out there too!!  During conversations with friends I would find myself saying, "Oh on this blog there is......" quite a bit. As a person, I have always been about celebrating someone else's joy with them. When a friend has an achievement, I feel such a deep sense of pride for them.

With that in mind, I am going to start "Sharing Sundays". The idea is to share some of the amazing blogs I have been lucky enough to frequent over the past months / years. With that I wanted to start with Icing & Crumbs. 

Kristina is incredibly humble. She is a recipe machine. A GOOD recipe machine and a great writer. Although I have never talked to her, I can hear her through her writing. We reached out to each other and found that we had a lot in common beyond being island moms.

Born and bred in Australia (as well as several years spent living in the mid-west of the US), she now lives on the beautiful island of O'ahu, Hawaii. She is a mother to two beautiful children. She loves to cook and eat healthy foods, and she started blogging in hopes of passing these loves onto her young children. Lucky kids. 

Here are a few of my favorite recipes, but when you explore her blog, don't stop at the recipes. There is so much more!

• Chicken & Broccoli Pasta Bake
• Warm Sweet Potato & Spinach Salad
• Key Lime Cheesecake
• Goat's Cheese & Mushroom Bruschetta

And now we are lucky enough to have a post from her!! Thank you Kristina for joining us here.

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Sweet Memories

by Kristina Hoy

I have wonderful memories of my mother’s desserts growing up… especially those made when we had dinner with friends. Never plain or ordinary, her dishes were rich, full of flavour, and presented with an artistry usually seen among professional cooks. There is one dessert I remember particularly well – constructed in a manner similar to the savoury version, this sweet pizza was simple to make and looked amazing – the round biscuit crust, made from crushed cookies, was topped with a layer of cheesecake-like mixture, and then decorated with slices of fresh, colourful fruit, their brightness glowing through the brush of thin glaze.

My children love dessert… small bowls of ice-cream decorated with sprinkles or little chocolate chips; soft vanilla cupcakes topped with fluffy pink icing; tiny squares of brownies, their dark, fudgy crumbs smearing little fingers and lips as they are quickly eaten up… Ideally, I’d like for my children to have desserts that are always healthy (most nights dessert consists of just a small bowl of yoghurt and some fruit), but I am constantly drawn to the sweet dishes first made by my mother… Wanting to make a healthier version of her fruit pizza, I set to work in the kitchen today…

Little Fruit Pizzas

You need:

For the base-

240g of plain flour

1 teaspoon of finely grated lemon zest

120g of butter

3-5 tablespoons of cold water (enough to bind, but not leave the dough sticky)

½ cup of jam (warmed)

For the topping-

1 cup of ricotta cheese

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

1 teaspoon of honey

fresh fruit

You do:

To make the base, place the flour and lemon zest in a mixing bowl and, using your fingers, rub the butter through until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Slowly add the water and mix until the dough forms a smooth (but not sticky) ball. Shape the dough into a disc, cover in clear wrap, and refrigerate for about 20 minutes.

Pre-heat the oven to 220 degrees Celsius (420 F). When the dough is ready, roll it out until it is a couple of mm thick, and using a large cookie cutter, cut into the desired shapes. Place the shapes on a lined tray and top with the warmed jam. Bake for 10 minutes, or until the edges have just started to turn golden.

 

Remove the tray from the oven and allow to cool completely.

To make the topping, place the ricotta, cinnamon and honey in a small bowl and stir until evenly combined. Spread a layer of this onto each cooled base and top with pieces of fresh fruit.

These little fruity pizzas are so easy and so much fun to make with the kids! They can help mix and roll the dough, cut the shapes out and put the toppings on. It doesn’t matter what type of jam you use – we used apricot and blackberry, but any will do. We used mostly fresh fruit (watermelon, rockmelon (cantaloupe) and kiwi-fruit), as well as some dried blueberries – the combination is up to your imagination! If you don’t want to make all the pizzas at once, any left over uncooked dough or ricotta mixture can be kept covered in the fridge for a couple of days. The recipe above makes 10-12 small pizzas (depending on the size of the cookie cutter).

“Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love,

the things you are, the things you never want to lose.”

(The Wonder Years)

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