Tag: baking

The 15th Annual Hungryandfrozen edible gift guide with 60 recipes for you

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A jar with a ribbon around it surrounded by baubles.

Something we can all count on, or at least, that we can all count: The 15th Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Guide is back! This year you have a round-up of:

  • 60 delicious gift-ready recipes
  • Many also-delicious off-the-shelf ideas if you hate cooking or are simply not up to it at this juncture
  • Gift guide suggestions and further worthy places to powerfully channel whatever consumer dollars you may have

Although it’s hellacious to format I love the work of making this annual list because it serves to disabuse you of the notion that Christmas gifts have to be things. People love food, and food gifts are nothing but upside. They have immediate practical application, they will eventually cease taking up space in the recipient’s house, and it’s a simple way to demonstrate care, appreciation, and love especially in this continually punishing economy. My fifteen-year accumulative model was getting excitingly close to three figures, but in 2025 I respect your time more than mine and have whittled down the list so you have fewer decisions to wrestle with and less scrolling.

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Blonde Redhead Cookies & Marzipan Fruitcake Cookies

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Different cookies on a mint green dish with two bright green Christmas baubles

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the spectre of Christmas approaching one month hence, to say nothing of the ghost of my debut novel Hoods Landing—in that the canonical biscuits mentioned therein, which I made as offerings for my recent Auckland launch, inspired these two Christmas Cookie recipes: Blonde Redhead Cookies and Marzipan Fruitcake Cookies. They’re both exceptionally easy to make, I should know; I baked three batches of the unadorned originals the night before my launch party while in a state of extreme hecticness. And look, you don’t actually have to cordon them off to Christmas alone, useful if you neither condone nor care for that specific holiday; but I certainly was doing my best to evoke the season’s flavours and there’s rarely a more useful time to have some minimal-stress cookie recipes and indeed, cookies at hand.

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2 x Hoods Landing Cocktails

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Two cocktails in tall glasses with mint garnish and four books in the background

Although my debut novel Hoods Landing is now out, alive, sharing the same realm as us; I hope you’ll permit me one more literary-culinary flourish ahead of Thursday’s launch party in Auckland. For what it’s worth, despite actually being a double flourish of two cocktail recipes, I’m going to keep this relatively succinct as I am no less feverish and hectic and wild-eyed than I was eleven days ago when we launched it for the first time (and exceptionally so) in Wellington. Thus far I can tell you that the life of a novelist involves a lot of refreshing notification screens and being immensely humbled and grateful. To celebrate that launch, I made chocolate mousse; to féte Auckland, an Old Fashioned variation that I call the Hermit; plus a bonus reminder of the Hoods Landing Punch recipe that I shared on Instagram before the last launch in a fugue state of optimistic tangential self-promotion.

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Rita’s chocolate mousse

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Two coupe glasses of chocolate mousse, one resting on a stack of small plates with two pink teaspoons also on the plates. A stack of Hoods Landing books are in the background

Kia ora, and welcome to a special edition in honour of my debut novel Hoods Landing launching TODAY, 31 October 2025. If you’re in Wellington, please join me at Unity tonight to fete its arrival, if you’re in Auckland I will see you on 13 November, Christchurch—something’s imminent. And no matter where you are, you can order this book online or ask for it by name in your local indie bookshop! Thank you all so much for both bearing with me and being part of this momentum and this momentous occasion.

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Toasted rice sablés

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rice cookies on a cooling rack on top of a blue and white piece of fabric
More than once have I bellowed “CLAIRE!!” amid baking an eponymous Claire Saffitz recipe; it’s a kind of ruefully recalcitrant acquiescence at her calmly and warmly insisting that I embark upon what feels like an exceptionally complex additional step, usually with annoyingly stunning results. In the case of these toasted rice sablés, it was the titular toasting of the rice flour (delicious, worth it) but the horse had to buck somewhere and in this case I demurred on rolling the cookies in rice bubbles (I tried, they kept falling off, delicious without).

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Chinese five-spice coffee molasses cookies

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Molasses cookies drizzled with white chocolate

As a chronic re-watcher—I have certain films logged seven (A Mighty Wind), eight (Original Cast Album: Company), and eleven times (Go) within the last few years alone on Letterboxd and somewhat freely admit it—and an avid re-reader; it so follows that I also like to return to recipes. And unlike films, when it comes to repeating recipes, I can tinker with the source material. In this case, I saw Angela Chung’s beautifully marbled and delicious-sounding Chinese Five-Spice Molasses Latte Cookies on her Moments of Sugar site and, immediately inspired, thought those flavours could find an ideal and somewhat lazier home in the already incredible Joe Frogger cookies I made last year; the result being these white chocolate-streaked Chinese Five-Spice Coffee Molasses Cookies. Not an improvement, just another excellent option.

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Chocolate peppermint slice

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A top-down shot of squares of peppermint slice on a rack on top of a blue cloth

Although I’d never be so callous to rank food—partially due to indecision, and mostly due to the fact that talking about food in such absolutes is folly and not the behaviour of a real Food Lover—but—I had previously been so vaingloriously certain of my stupid convictions about peppermint and now I’d casually call it a top three flavour. Again, if I was to rank the unrankable, that is, food. And I’m only being rewarded for my incorrect opinions, because, well, now I’m just going to keep making peppermint-related recipes. Like this entirely no-bake Chocolate Peppermint Slice.

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Pink grapefruit posset with white chocolate pumpkin seed mendiants

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A sliced pink grapefruit on a green plate next to four coupes of grapefruit posset

There are a few load-bearing moments in my youthful journey towards becoming a food blogger slash person obsessed with cooking; the epiphanic first time ever I saw Nigella Lawson’s face and cooking show in 2001, winning the best cake award at the 1998 Calf Club, my childhood adventures in microwaving (largely borne from the fact that we only had a microwave, but). Another such signpost is the lemon posset recipe from a Cuisine magazine—I want to say it’s from April 2002 but regrettably I lost the hard copy years ago—being my signature dessert at family gatherings for several years in my teens. It’s one of those recipes that feels like magic, and for reasons I can only chalk up to time management and perception of time itself, this is the first time I’ve recreated this dish for my almost eighteen-years-old blog. Except, here I’ve hoisted up the citrus stakes by replacing lemon with bitter pink grapefruit.

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Very easy chocolate-cherry macaroons

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A top down view of evenly-spaced macaroons

Despite it being monumental false economy, not least because the same people who make the butter make the cream, I found myself purchasing a full litre of cream the other day in order to hand-churn my own butter in order to feel some semblance of control over the avaricious and extortionate pricing; and let’s not even think about eggs. This recipe for very easy chocolate-cherry macaroons sidesteps both ingredients, indeed, it sidesteps most ingredients altogether — and before I lose you, you can easily lose the cherries.

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Absolutely nothing chocolate cake (with a cookie variation)

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A square chocolate cake drizzled in melted chocolate

Given these vile economic times that we find ourselves unwilling pawns in, I’ve resurrected this absolutely nothing chocolate cake recipe which uses no eggs, no butter, and no substitutions after a long time between bites. And it really does come together out of various dusts and a bit of tap water to form a cake that isn’t just surprisingly good, it’s just a good — and functional — chocolate cake. Now, the last thing I want to do is bring you a recipe that I’m obliged to damn through faint praise, and I was somewhat uncertain as this baked away in the oven. Yes, it’s based on the recipe that fed my childhood, but given that I also used to make myself tomato ketchup and cheese sandwiches, microwaved until either the cheese or the plastic plate was volcanically bubbling, and pretend it was pizza, I’m not sure my tastebuds’ memories can be trusted in that regard. I then repurposed this recipe for my 2013 cult hit eponymous cookbook, published through Penguin — but that was a long decade ago, and then some.

After a further, and for now, final tutu with this recipe, I am happy to report that it tastes genuinely, beguilingly fantastic. Whether a birthday is looming ominously or a vexing (or celebratory) day requires dessert, you deserve cake, regardless of possessing the means to make one. This can be that cake.

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