Santa's Special delivery

'Tis that time of year again, and today is about making Gingerbread Houses. This is something of a tradition for my fiancé Katie, and it's becoming something I look forward to helping with each Christmas - more-so now that we've been able to source pure icing sugar. That's the suspicious looking delivery in the photo, pure uncut icing sugar. The issue with regular icing sugar is that it'd got 5% starch (tapioca usually), which is to keep the icing soft. This can be good for biscuits and cakes but for 'gluing' together gingerbread  houses it's just not strong enough.

The pure icing sugar is mixed with egg white and lemon juice to make a paste which will dry hastily when exposed to air. Use sandwich bags to keep the icing air-tight until you're ready to construct.

Ginger Bread

200g of butter
100g of Dark Brown sugar
125ml of Golden syrup or Molasses

450g of Self raising Flour
1tsp of ground ginger
1tsp of ground cinnamon
half tsp of ground cloves

Cream butter and brown sugar until smooth and light them thoroughly mix through the Golden syrup. A good cake mixer will make light work of this. Sift dry ingredients into a large bowl and add to the wet mixure in thirds, mixing thoroughly. You will probably have to mix the last third of the dry ingredients by hand. Add a few tablespoons of water if needed Wrap dough in glad wrap and refrigerate for 90 mins. Cut into the shapes for your GB House design and bake for 10 -15 mins at 180c, section sizes will dictate you cooking times. Cool well on a rack before assembling.

I'll post some photo's of our completed houses later this week.

Wet days.

What a lot of rain we had over the last few days.

It washed away the chance of us putting up the gate last Sunday, so we can start on our garden.

We picked the first of our pea shoots tonight, they we amazing.So fresh!

We re-shot the sugar cured salmon pictures, with Scotties new camera and took some shots of sorbets.

Here is the recipe for one of them.

Lemon and Thyme Sorbet

INGREDIENTS

1.4 lt Water

500g Castor Sugar

100g Liquid Glucose

300g Lemon Juice (freshly squeezed)

8 sprigs Thyme

In a large pan mix the water, sugar, and liquid glucose.

Bring the mix to the boil, and simmer for around 5 minutes.

Add the lemon juice and thyme stalks( Pizza thyme is best for this recipe)

Cover the pan with a lid or cling film and turn off the heat.

Allow the thyme to infuse without boiling, like making tea

Leave to cool, and churn in an icecream machine.

Happy Birthday!

Mint Dining Room passed a milestone on the 1st of December, 2 years since it all began.
Thanks to everyone that has dined with us over that time.

Katie baked a cake and it was delicious. Those lucky enough to be here on the night got to try some.

The pictures that started the whole idea.

So a lot of hard work has been done on this book up until now. We have loads of pictures, a few stories, and a lot of recipes to show for it.

We are heading into the busy season not only for our restaurant, but for Scotty, who is soon to be wed.

So apologies if the posts have been less frequent than they could have been.

While writing a post yesterday it occurred to me that the first pictures we took weren't even on the blog. So I have decided to put them up.

Bit of background, Katie and I asked Scotty to help us with a professional entry into the New Zealand Hospitality Awards Of Excellence.

(We needed to defend our title of serving the best Lamb dish in New Zealand.)

We worked well together, tasted some wine, and had an idea......... (Turned out to be this blog.)

Here are the original pictures.

Mint Dining Room

Another week further into it.

What a week it's been. We went all the way up the Wangapeka......too far. We cruised through the Motueka Valley, down Neudorf road over the hill past Woolston Estate to Kina Beach Vineyard. Then through Mapua, to McCashins Brewery (a quick impromptu tasting Later) we then cruised back home.

It was a fun day, we drove through downed trees, off road, and then we met an angry river! Im sure Scotty will put some pictures of our adventure up soon, and you can see the fun we had.

Until then try to make these cookies.

They are my favourite, just the right blend of Chewy and Crunchy.

American Choc Chip Cookies

2 1/4 cup Plain Flour

1 tsp Bicarb Soda

1 tsp Salt

1 cup Soft Unsalted Butter

3/4 cup Granulated Sugar

3/4 cup Brown Sugar

1 tsp Vanilla

2 Eggs

2 cup Chocolate Pistoles

1 cup Chopped Nuts (I use hazelnuts, and walnuts Uncle Joes in Marlborough do an excellent hazelnut meal which is great for baking.)

Sieve the flour baking soda, salt and flour.

In a separate bowl, cream butter and sugar.

Add vanilla, then the eggs one at a time.

Add the sieved flour mixture, chocolate and nuts.

Mix until it just forms a dough.

Over mixing will make the biscuits too firm.

Roll into a sausage, and cool in the fridge. Cut the bisciuts into discs about a centimetre thick. Bake at 160 degrees for 9-11 minutes.

They will feel slightly soft in the middle and begin to brown on the edges.

Don't over bake them or they will loose their chewy texture.

I always eat at least one while they are still hot.

The next big thing. Location shoots.

So today we had a productive shoot, we chatted and decided to head out next Monday into the wilderness!

Well kind of, we are doing a wirl-wind tour of some local producers.

Starting at Wangapeka Dairy we will shoot our way to Mapua where we will meet Monica Mead, aka Braugal to discuss things hop related.

So if anyone has any suggestions as to where we need to visit along the way we are all ears!

Please leave comments if you have any suggestions.

We will try to visit as many places as we can.