Archive for February, 2010

Carpaccio = awesome

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:

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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!

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Gingerbread of death – EPIC FAIL!

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:

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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.

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