Valentine Delights

This year we didn't do anything for Valentines Day itself but the day before it was a leisurely Sunday Lunch at Koi in Woolwich… Beautiful Food. Fresh sashimi and nigiri sushi with a delightful and well balanced plate of pork belly cubes with crunchy crackling and the smoothest and most delicate of matching mustard sauce to go with it. Well I'm not describing it properly and I'm not in the habit of photographing as I eat so all I can admit to is not doing it justice at well, my description poorly lacking to describe the work of art it was. 

The Daring Bakers challenge for the month was creamy pannacotta with crunchy florentine biscuits… Suitably inspired I made this a few days beforehand for Geoff with Valentines in mind if not marked precisely on the calendar.

For this challenge I chose to make a lavender flavoured pannacotta. It did split a bit, I think I didn't heat the milk enough after adding the cream but someone else might know what was the real cause. It tasted just fine though and I topped it with fresh berries and a berry jelly coolie concoction with a touch of rose water to reflect the floral notes in the pannacotta. 

I tried two plating options, interestingly the one that looked most impressive on the table – the long white presentation tray photographed less well than the pre-valentines treat plating did.

For my florentines, I used this lovely bircher museli mix I had which was oats with bits of apple, currents, wheat flakes and coconut, a great combo for the biscuits which I have already been requested to make regularly to fill the cookie jar up with.

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The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies.

Year of the Rabbit

Well a few weeks back it was all very busy celebrating Chinese New Year. It is the year of the Rabbit and another pair of paper-cut creations have made the way from my cutting board and onto my shelf and to Geoff's family home. They are becoming a very nice way to count the years I've known this wonderful man. 

My new in-laws always throw a big party at their place and I have already established my part in the traditions. Everyone always brings a plate of food and I am permanently assigned now to a contribution to the dessert table. This year I chose this Lime and Coconut Layer Cake because its all fluffy and white like a rabbit. It is layers of sponge brushed with malibu and sandwiched together with lime curd with creme fraiche. To coat it is an Italian Meringue with flaked coconut. It seemed to go down very well with the crowd. The long day full of food culminates in a round of Mahjong, my annual dalliance with this addictive game. 

Back in the nest

Well the wedding day has been and gone, the bags are well and truly unpacked from the honeymoon, the whirl of Christmas has passed and January has been a struggle to catch up with the piles of things needing go be attended too. The nest is now permanently filled with two and all the extra work that entails. 

I will post something more up about the wedding later, when my head is calmer and I have a lazy sunday afternoon to just gaze at all the photos and work out which ones are actually my favourites and capture the essence of the day the most. I don't want to just pencil something up in a rush but I don't want to neglect everything else in the process.  So in the meantime I've been lapse in my daring bakers challenges, missed a few months with the wedding and being away but I managed to just sneak into the January Baking challenge so I'll share my efforts with you here. 

This cake was a challenge, the first attempt at the patterned Jaconde sponge was a mess. A misread of the recipe to blame, instead of 3 egg whites and 3 eggs I just used used 3 eggs splitting the yolks and whites and put the odd consistency down to the fact I was making mine a nut free version without the almond meal.  Second time round though it worked fine. 

Whilst splitting all these eggs I found a rare one - an egg with no yolk… i wonder if anyone else has seen something like that before. 

By the time I came to fillings I had run out of eggs due to the earlier errors so I ad-libbed with a caramel base and the leftover yolks made a custard. I also made a lovely apricot jelly salpicon which turned out well, some when into the middle and some little shapes were also cut from it to decorate the tops.  I had issues with my caramel, forgot to put down wax paper so it glued itself to the plate and I had to wrestle it off without damaging the cake, a delicate blowtorch and yanking operation later they were extracted but there was some damage to the sponge so they were prone to springing a leak when the custard came in - the custard also refused to set for some reason so I lost all the intended layering effect inside but it was a good learning experience and I feel more confident that next time I'll do it better.

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The January 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Astheroshe of the blog accro. She chose to challenge everyone to make a Biscuit Joconde Imprime to wrap around an Entremets dessert.

Kitchen Tea Party

Its getting close now... only a matter of weeks now to the wedding and it was time to gather friends around for my bridal shower - a traditional kitchen tea with a Marie Antoinette inspired theme of "Let them eat cake".

There were good games to play, a lolly jar guessing game, a masterchef inspired "Name that Spice" game and a board game that I designed and handpainted for the occasion.

The cake was decorated by myself including the sugar roses, the results of my cake decorating classes I've been doing recently. 

The table all looked very pretty with mum's fine china cups and tiered cake stands full of little delicate and yummy things to eat. 

As a final note the Kitchen Tea Party was the perfect opportunity to serve up some decorated cookies made for the September Daring Bakers Challenge. The cookies were cut in a variety of leaf shapes and decorated using my new piping nozzles courtesy of cake decorating classes. 

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The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

The challenge of getting through August

It's been a bit of a struggle this month, a lot of pre-wedding conflicts and issues to sort out so I've been disorganised in the kitchen. Things like dropping my mobile phone and wiping a lot of photos didn't help, I had made a second batch of periogi's with a steak and mushroom filling and fried them off in the pan at the end and they were yummy but my photos of them are lost forever courtesy of a knock on the technological head. Time was swallowed into black holes in the middle of things and slipped very much away from me. 

So what do I have to show for Augusts daring challenges. 

For the Daring Cooks Periogi challenge the first flavour I tried to make was prawns with coriander and tomato. I took some green prawns and simmered them in the pan with some diced tomatoes (a little larger than cherry tomatoes but not as big as your average one), chopped fresh coriander stems and olive oil. I only really got one or two successful dumplings out of this first batch as I didn't let my prawns and sauce cool down sufficiently before making them and I had a few issues with the heat melting holes in my dumplings.

Sticking with seafood for my Aussie periogi my second flavour was some slice golden shallots with more of the large cherry tomatoes simmered together with a tiny splash of marsala for sweetness and ras el hanout for a warm spiced note. Added to this was small little pieces of flathead fillet and then some fresh diced chives added at the end when wrapping the up. This time I waited for the mix to cool and didn't roll the dough out as thinly as before and pulled these ones up into more of a Chinese Dumpling style presentation that will need some more practice for sure.

For Daring Bakers I made my brown butter cake and caramel pear ice-cream sandwiched into little petit-fours. I tried making some chocolate fondant but had some issues working with it so only got one covered whilst the others waited in the freezer. I wasn't very organised and with the headaches of spans of time evaporating infront of me I didn't have much idea of what to do with my freezer abandoned petite fours which I wasn't sure would still be very tasty after three + weeks so I whacked on some leftover moscavado cream from another dessert and piped some icing over them without much thought really but its past the deadline and I just need to get something up however poorly styled it is. Hopefully I can revist something like this when things calm down.

I did however enjoy a nice big bowl of caramel pear ice-cream

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The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop”.

Daring to tackle the Swiss Alps of baking

My first Daring Bakers Challenge and the challenge laid at my feet is to scale the seemingly steep climbs of an ice-cream bombe. I would not only have to make two icecreams when I have never attempted ice-cream before it would also require a swiss roll - again something I've not tried to do before and construct it all together... anyway... it seemed daunting but once I started bit by bit I got there and it tasted yummy and I think it would make it a good celebration cake for certain occasions so its good to have it in my repertoire of skills now. 

I tackeld the unknown frontier of ice-cream first with a salted butter caramel from the following site (http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2007/04/salted_butter_c.html) and then filled with confidence after this success I adlibbed a pear ice-cream flavour. I softly caramelised the pears and mashed them up a little but not too finely so that it retained a nice chunky texture before blending in my custard and extra milk to make my icecream gelato creation. The pear is absolutely yummy and my favourite of the two.

Saturday was hectic, I tried to make the swiss rolls and put it all together ready for evening serving, My chocolate swiss rolls were filled with a condensed milk and moscavado sugar based chocolate mousse which helped to carry across the light caramel theme throughout the bombe. When I rolled the final roll I thought it would never set in time but I whacked it in the freezer and it helped make it much easier to slice into neat rolls to line my mould. The rolls were a lot easier than I predicted and I had no issues with cracking which was good.

My fudgy caramel bits kind of ran everywhere else spilling out of the sides and centre once cut but it tasted good and my fiancee preferred to dig into this over the box of zumbo cakes purchased that day also (please don't ask why he thought it was a good idea to line up on the first weekend after a masterchef appearance by the pasty maestro particularly considering I had made a whole ice-cream cake to serve for tour de france watching time but I don't pretend to entirely understand the male psyche)

Finally I would like to give thanks to my Japser Conran Waterford Crystal Bowl for bravely making the dangerous journey into the freezer to make my bombe the arcing conical pyramid it is. Thankfully you survived the ordeal and are safely back in your box with leftovers relegated to assorted tupperware containers

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The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.-

A year of nesting

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This weekend I celebrated a year of having left the nest. Saturday started off simply enough with a walk down to the Kings Cross Markets for breakfast and some stops at the fruit and veg, deli, supermarket aisles. On the way back, the cake shop had miniature croquemboche's for sale so this was perfect, a little tower of decadence to carry carefully home and enjoy on the balcony in the afternoon. There was also a little mini bottle of Möet that I had been saving for an occasion and so this too was shared. A simple celebration but quite fine and dandy indeed. 

On Sunday I had my Grandmother over for afternoon but as usual forgot to photograph my creations. I made leaf shaped honey and lavendar madeline cakes, crackers with english cloth bound cheddar cheese, another with a lovely soft french chevre with Italian proscuitto and a broadbean and mint purree with pork and fennel salami. I also made these cute little cupcakes that are inspired by the concept of a fruit custard tart. You make the basic vanilla cupcake recipe, scoop out a bit in a centre, fill with custard (home made from scratch, no powder involved) and then topped with some fruits (strawberries, blueberries and golden kiwi fruit) and glazed with a little melted strawberry and vanilla jam. I was running late though and rushing at the end to have everything laid out so the doorbell rang before I could photoshoot it. All I had left was two dodgy ones at the end of the day to remind me of the occasion. Everything else was demolished. 

Vive Le Tour

Time speeds past and it is already July. What happened to June, how did it get so buried under pressing duties, long work hours and endless things demanding my time and energy. 

For me July heralds the start of the Tour de France, a great event that I have been following for quite a number of years now. I never really took to sport and nor can I claim to be much of a cyclist at all. Yet despite this there is something quite appealing about this particular event. The scenery itself is so spectacular and no other sport can claim such a stunningly beautiful stadium.

So it is such a pleasure to snuggle up late at night and sleepily watch the roads of France unwind before you. The photographers have a real visual eye for capturing fascinating things and so many of the people it passes are also making their little contributions to the event with their roadside decorations. 

So in the spirit of the Tour de France I have baked some bicycle cookies, they are a ginger/cinnamon flavour with a hint of lemon peel. 

Now if only the members of my Fantasy Cycling Tour will start performing so I can stop regretting the decision to omit Cancellara and Cavendish from my team. Fingers crossed and good luck to you Cadel... 

A dinner party splashed in red and green jewels

It was wonderful to shake off some dust and leap into the role of hosting a small dinner party for my parents and partner. Nor is an excuse needed, after all it's a good chance to try a few recipes I hadn't tried before without the pressure of a 'special event'. First up a nice slow cooked lamb. Unfortunately I didn't have time to photograph the final dish as I was too busy chatting away and satisfying peoples stomachs but I have a shot of it half way through. I can tell you that after some further slow cooking I tore up the lamb into shreds and chunks, scattered pomegranate seeds, toasted pinenuts and mint leaves. The colours were lovely but my guests were well and truly ready to tuck in. 

The previous week I had bought a lovely long tart dish, perfect for a recipe that I had been eyeing off for some time and it was good to make it before the raspberries and figs disappeared until next season. It is a burnt butter tart with pistachio meal and with figs and raspberries embedded in it. After cooking, added is a raspberry caramel drizzle and some more pistachio nuts to bring out a lovely array of colours. My only disappointment is realising I don't actually have a suitable long plate for serving such a tart upon.