We’re back!
Vancouver guy… our sole fan… YOU have inspired us to repost!
Biff and Lexi have undergone a pers0nality change… we are now reborn as… BUSY TUESDAY, an alternate personality with an interest in abstract art and fecundity.
We are also black.
Watch out for our next post. Be there, or be square.
Yours sincerely,
Busy Tuesday.
Hola! Biff and I are BACK! And to celebrate, we slaved for HOURS, across two who days, on this white chocolate celebration cake (also known as wedding cake: the prototype). Well! Where to start? Check out the recipe here… it’s a recipe from Julie Goodwin, the first winner winner of Masterchef, and respected Fountain sauce spruiker. Girlfriend KNOWS her way around a stick of butter and a block of cooking chocolate, as this recipe attests to: it has 1.3 (that’s right, 1.3) KILOS of white chocolate in it, 400 grams of butter, and 500 grams of sugar! Needless to say, it is the last refuge of the fat shit. Check out our handiwork:
Well! We must say, we were pleasantly surprised at the overall taste of this cake. As we stirred the unpleasantly surprising cesspool of molten butter, chocolate, sugar and eggs, we had very grave fears for the success of our latest venture. Admittedly, we did not incorporate the flour with the chocolate mixture very well, resulting on an overly tough cake batter that really gave one’s shoulder a workout when it came time to cut the cake. His royal dootiness, Mr Biff, simply “guessed” at the required even temperature, which resulted in a slightly burned, crunchy cake (no nun has ever been this dry)… thankfully chocolate ganache hides all sins.
Have we mentioned the passionfruit!? It was super tasty, and not too crunetty in the cake… we usually have a pronounced loathing for passionfruit seeds, they are generally pointless and tedious, but these passionfruit seeds seemed to be not horrible and pointless (unlike this sentence). Zing!
All up, the verdict is that there is room for improvement, and we better get it right in time for Lexi and Ben’s wedding day, or ply all of the guests with excessive amounts of wine, so that the overall texture of the cake is not too jarring to their otherwise sensitive palates.
Holy crap! 5 months since my last blog post! Whatever have I been doing with my time? I certainly haven’t been making anything super tasty, in fact I have actually succumbed to the lure of a tub of cookie dough, currently residing in our freezer. It’s awesome because it promotes the idea of “fresh, home baked wholesomeness”, without the hassle of actually having to do it. It’s not the cooking part that’s a problem, it’s the cleaning up part that is presenting a mental barrier.
Apart from being lazy, I have actually been doing stuff. Yesterday was my hens day/night, and my friends organised for us to go to afternoon tea at the Sofitel with family-types, as a dignified precursor to a less dignified, sangria fuelled evening at the pub later on. Gaaaaaah, just the mention of sangria right now makes my stomach shrink with horror… the hangover today as a result of many litres of booze made me certain that today was to be my last day to live. But, I digress. Afternoon tea was bitchen – lots of gorgeous little sandwiches that had been trimmed of their pesky little crusts, smoked salmon blinis (well, I’m personally not a fan, but it did seem terribly posh), scones with jam and cream, and above all, lots of gorgeous little cakes! Can I just say that I LOVE the way a set menu such as afternoon tea pretty much sanctions gross over indulgence? at this rate, I will totally get the gout (although something about gout makes me think it might be a thing that only men get… Is this just wishful thinking though?). Check out the tasty spread!
Shit photo, I know, but take note of the cake on the second tier from the top of the… tiered thing. This was just a delightful piece of awesome, crammed full of custardy delights, and layered with sponge cake. Imagine – a marriage of my passions for sponge and custard! However did they know?
And now, I must go to bed. I am patting myself on the back right now for a job well done in making a blog entry. Good for me.
I wanted to try some biscuits that my friend Ange had made. She put the recipe up on her blog, Dishedup, and they looked so great.
Once again though, I have a biscuit fail – I just never leave enough space to allow them to spread! They kind of merged into one another and became a blob.
They weren’t a terrible failure, they actually taste great, and are beautifully fudgey and soft on the inside – very rich though, you won’t want more than one at a time. The recipe says to use a tablespoon of mix for each one – I may have gotten carried away (I was getting tired and wanted to be finished), but would recommend using about a dessert spoon of mix for each biscuit – and allow lots of room for them to spread!
I will now attempt blogging in Haiku:
Chocolate and sugar
in layered sweet abundance
I can eat no more
I’m trying to get myself back into blogging by convincing myself it’s low fuss. So:
These are some scones I made.
They were good.
I got the recipe here:
http://www.exclusivelyfood.com.au/2006/07/lemonade-scone-recipe.html
For Easter we celebrated Greek style and had a few friends over for dinner. It was a very fun night which ended in playing ‘The humming game’ (where you hum a song until the group guesses its title – a terrible game which you only resort to when there is nothing else to entertain your guests with, and you’re out of food to throw at them).
We started off with Domatokeftedes, which are basically little tomatoey balls of fried goodness. I got the recipe from the March issue of Gourmet Traveller. Mine didn’t turn out quite like the picture in the magazine, but they were tasty.
Anything fried is of course going to be awesome, but the dipping sauce was what made it good. Though it looks a bit murky here, the sauce was fresh and zesty with lemon, parsley, mint, garlic and olive oil. I felt very authentic pounding it into submission in the mortar and pestle.
After that we moved onto individual spinach pies, which I made from Donna Hay’s ‘Seasons’ book – though I didn’t make it in the right season according to Donna. If I ever disappear you know it will be because I’ve met Donna Hay and she’s glassed me for making spinach pies in Autumn. They were yummy, basically just chopped spinach, mint, fetta, eggs and lemon zest. I used filo pastry which was a bit time consuming but worth it.
Betty, my lovely grandma, turned 89 last week. We didn’t see her on her actual birthday, as she was visiting in Windsor, but she did come over to our place yesterday for some lunch. I decided to keep it pretty simple, because Gran is old and doesn’t seem to like “fancy” meals that involve garlic, chilli, or (gasp!) fresh herbs. She does have a penchant for sweet things though, and will often forego a full meal in order to have room in her tummy for dessert. I think I get my sweet tooth from her. So, anyway, we slow roasted some lamb and potatoes, and had a layered meringue with mango and passionfruit and mascarpone for dessert.
We got the recipe for the lamb and potatoes from an ace Greek cookbook called Vefa’s Kitchen that we scored at Christmas. It is MASSIVE, quite weighty, and so far we have only trialled one recipe, but successfully so. The lamb is so easy to do, you just rub it with lemon juice, oregano, salt and pepper, bung on some olive oil, and pop it into a very slow oven for 3-4 hours. In the last hour, you add the potatoes, with lemon juice, oregano, salt and pepper plus some knobs of butter, and increase the heat. The lamb turns out super tender and tasty, but if you have an oven like ours, you need to watch it closely, as the gas has a habit of just cutting out when the oven is on such a low heat, which totally sucks.
Here is our finished lamb and yummy potato product, with broccoli added to the mix as a concession to Gran’s old school tastebuds:
Ben was a total champion, and carved all of the lamb while I entertained, then arranged it artfully on a platter. What a good boy. Gran pronounced the lamb a success, and all went well.
I got the recipe for the dessert from the Bourke Street Bakery Cookbook, and this combination of meringue, mascarpone, mango and passionfruit is pretty fuck off awesome, although it doesn’t make for a particularly pretty looking dessert.
Also, I think I need to face up to the fact that I suck hard when it comes to making meringues. The recipe requires you to mix up some egg whites with sugar, then spread it out onto three sheets of baking paper in the shape of the container it’s going to be eventually placed in, and bake for 25 minutes. Well, I did that, but it didn’t WORK! My first batch of meringue layers were hopelessly undercooked, and when I attempted to get them off the baking paper they just disintegrated. Needless to say, I had a terrible temper tantrum, and Ben required a fair amount of patience when he attempted to calm me down. I eventually sucked it up and made a new batch of meringue – again, not super awesome, but at least I was able to get it off the paper when it had finished baking (I left them in for about 10 minutes extra each). Here is the end result:
As I said, not a particularly attractive looking dessert. But once you’re eating it, you won’t give a crap about the attractive factor, because it’s smooth and sweet and delicious. Check out the layers of awesome that it has:
Ben and I recently attempted to make pizza dough, inspired by our friends Nina and Mario, who recently had us over for home made pizza, and made it look super easy to execute. So, we obediently trundled off to the supermarket to score us some yeast, and hunkered down in the kitchen for some dough kneading. We do have a pizza stone, which we picked up for a bargain price, and then carefully stored it out of sight, to avoid having to use it… Once we had dug up the pizza stone, we were in business, but it seems our business plan was not entirely sound. We managed to undercook both pizzas that we made, the second one quite spectacularly, so much so that when we tried to shift it off the pizza stone, it completely disintegrated, and we were left picking out the most cooked bits, and eating the vegies on top. Unfortunately, I didn’t whip out my trusty camera to capture the moment, so you’ll just have to picture something completely unappetising, possibly resembling vomit on a plate. Completely the opposite of the perfect pizzas we get at Carpaccio in Leichhardt. Check THIS out:
Oh, Carpaccio, you just never disappoint. Your pizza bases are always crisp and tasty, your toppings well cooked, and your sauce never has that nasty canned tomato taste that can be the death of a good pizza.
This place is truly my favourite place to get pizza, in spite of the unappealing noisy fountain and dated brick work outside the restaurant. It does kind of look muy lame-o from the outside, but it’s really really good! Give it a try!
The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.
Basically, we sucked hard at this challenge. We had decided ahead of time that gingerbread, as an edible substance, sucked balls, so we set out to “improve” the flavour of these ghastly biscuits. Instead of adding any ginger, we added cocoa and cinnamon, which to our minds, would have created a lovely, gently spiced and delicate flavour. FAIL. We also had grand, somewhat delusional plans to improve on the overall aesthetic of the gingerbread house, by creating a gingerbread igloo. BAM. Another, EPIC FAIL.
Behold, our grim concoction:
Yeah… Note, even the vampire snowman is so disgusted with this that he has spewed (if you can believe it, this is the best photo we could get of the final product). We had absolutely no luck with this thing, from start to finish. First, the dough was a motherfucker to work with: we couldn’t roll it out, so we ended up hammering it, until we managed to get it semi smooth, and semi thin.
THEN, when we got to construction, we found that the biscuit was way too crumbly to hold the shape of the igloo we had formed (no pictures unfortunately, but it was shit.) So, we went with the back up plan of a Christmas tree – so festive, isn’t it. We just love Christmas. As you can see, we had problems too with the royal icing – that stuff is sticky as all shit, but it failed to stick anything together, apart from our fingers. All in all, a massive failure.
Fat little dumplings 