Posted by Biff and Lexi « Fat little dumplings

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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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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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Daring Baker’s September challenge: Vols au Vent… like tiny pastry dishes*

September 28, 2009 · Filed under Daring Bakers!, Food we made, Posted by Biff and Lexi, Recipe

The September 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.

Well! We’ve never really felt the compulsion to make puff pastry, but we thought, why the fuck not? We have to. And… voila!

We consider this to have been a sufficiently puffy effort. Unfortunately, we scoffed at the recommended amount of salt to add (one tablespoon), and only put a few twists of our twisty salt stick into the mix, thus ensuring one BLAAAAAAAND pastry. Praise be (!) that the challenge required us to shape our pastry into vols au vent – little flavour delivery systems. The flavours we chose to deliver were chocolate mousse brulees (slightly melted by the heat of our firestick), and custaaaaaaaaaaard (with strawberries).

Check out the end result:

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What a day for us! Emma Flod’s birthday celebrations bitches!

September 14, 2009 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Biff and Lexi, Recipe

Rather than go out and drink ourselves into the gutter last Friday night, we elected to stay in and bake. Oh, what a night for us! We were baking, of course, to celebrate the birth of one of Newcastle’s most artistic residents, Mz Emma Flod (of Emma draws a circle). To mark this auspicious occasion, we made (successfully) Bailey’s cheese cake brownies, and (less successfully) Hazelnut sponge cake with chocolate raspberry cream.

We got the recipes for the Bailey’s cheese cake brownies from a blog we came across, Domestic Goddess in Training, and they were terribly decadent, and oh-so moreish. If you fancy making them, the recipe is on Domestic Goddess’ site. We found them pretty easy to make, but struggled a bit with marbling the cheese and chocolate together – it ended up looking a bit murky. Check it:

Lexi took this photo. Doesn’t it have artistic merit? We are both VERY basic people, so we take an inordinate amount of pride in taking a picture that doesn’t make food look like shit on a plate. Verdict? Success!

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Daring Bakers: Dobos Torte

August 30, 2009 · Filed under Daring Bakers!, Food we made, Posted by Biff and Lexi, Recipe

We recently became DARING BAKERS (it sounds more impressive when you capitalise the name). Basically DARING BAKERS (!) is a group of people who share an interest in baking gorgeous, complicated things.

The August 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers’ cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.

Now, did we tell you it’s complicated? Well, it is. Observe: we cooked the shit out of this baby… a Dobos(h) Torte, basically a finicky sponge cake, with multiple layers of deadly, cholesterol filled chocolate butter cream. Mmmmmmmm (but also – tooooooooo rich, so much so that we were filled with quiet dread at the thought of eating a full piece, let alone going back for seconds). Here is our finished product: