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Wedding cake: you’re on TRIAL!

August 29, 2010 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Biff and Lexi, Recipe

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.

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Chocolate fudgey biscuits: Semi Fail

May 31, 2010 · Filed under FAIL!, Food we made, Posted by Biff

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!

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Layered chocolate meringue

May 26, 2010 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Biff

I will now attempt blogging in Haiku:

Chocolate and sugar

in layered sweet abundance

I can eat no more

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Scones

May 24, 2010 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Biff

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

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It’s all Greek to me

April 5, 2010 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Biff, Recipe

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.

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Gran’s birthday lunch!

March 8, 2010 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Lexi

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:

Gingerbread of death – EPIC FAIL!

February 7, 2010 · Filed under Daring Bakers!, FAIL!, Food we made, Posted by Biff and Lexi

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.

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Oh look, I just threw it together (Asian pork mince salad)

January 27, 2010 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Biff, Recipe

Here’s a quick mid-week meal I tried for the first time tonight…I had been planning a totally different pork mince dish, using rice noodles, but Woolies thwarted me by having their fridge break down, and I couldn’t get rice noodles. Grabbed some glass noodles/vermicelli noodles instead and decided to go for a cold salad.

It was really tasty! I just cooked the pork mince with some oil, a dash of fish sauce, and lots of soy. The idea for the sauce was borrowed from my friend Rachel, who had used the same thing for a dipping sauce. Unlike me, she has an instinct about mixing asian flavours. For the sauce there was the juice of 1 lime, half a teaspoon fine grated ginger, 4 tablespoons fish sauce, sweet chilli sauce to taste, a dash of peanut oil, chopped mint, and about a third of a bunch of coriander.

An easy, awesome salad.

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Super easy fun happy biscuits!

January 18, 2010 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Biff

Had a crappy food craving today and there was nothing in the house so I had to resort to making something. A quick scan through Taste.com.au found me these quick biscuits – or, as I think they should be called – quiscuits. The recipe claims they are “healthy chocolate biscuits” which is I guess because you use olive oil spread instead of butter. Here they are:

You can see the recipe at here:

http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/15478/healthy+chocolate+biscuits

Given the “healthy” claim, I thought they might be a bit dull, so I added extra nutella and brown sugar. They are quite nice, though their main claim to fame was how quick they are. Prep was 5-10 mins, and only 12 mins in the oven. Definitely worth a try.

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Maggie’s Asparagus and Leek tart

January 7, 2010 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Biff, Recipe

Oh Look, it’s the new year, so I decided to celebrate my return to blogging by cooking something from the recipe book of a good friend, Maggie Beer*. It is a new recipe book, and this is the first thing I have cooked from it…and i’d have to say I was pretty happy with it. Take a look:

It’s not the best photo, but it looked pretty good, and tasted great as well – only VERY rich, it had 14 egg yolks in it! and two cartons of pouring cream. The tart was fairly easy to put together, my downfall though was Maggie’s sour cream pastry – I dodged it up. It needs a food processor, which I don’t have (maybe you should send me one Maggie?). I ended up sort of kneading the butter into the flour, which I think softened the butter too much, and kinda ruined it…buuuuut, overall, pretty awesome.

You can check out the recipe on Maggie’s website:

http://www.maggiebeer.com.au/recipes/Details/?Item=ArtclsAsparagus88

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