Fat little dumplings

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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Biff’s birfo cake

December 26, 2009 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Lexi, Recipe

Hey dudes! Happy day after Christmas! hopefully everyone’s Christmas days were awesome, and not at all stress filled, as they have a tendency to be. After solemnly swearing last year that we would never host a Christmas event again, Ben and I found ourselves hosting Christmas at our place this year. How did THAT happen? It seems that the practice we got last year had us in good stead for this year though, and we managed to churn out some garlic prawns, roast lamb with potatoes, vegies, trifle, etc with a minimum of stress. Thank Christ. We even managed to enjoy our lunch, and scored some help from Ben’s mum with the washing up afterwards, so we weren’t up until 11pm doing tedious kitchen chores like we were last year. All in all, a success. I didn’t get any pictures of the festivities, apart from one of the trifle (and lets face it – you see one trifle, you’ve seen them all), so I’ve decided to bang on about the birthday cake I made for Biff earlier this month.

Biff turned 28 you see, and to mark the occasion, he decided to regress to his childhood, and go to the park to eat ice creams. He lives such a wild life. Just out of the blue, and completely unrelated to Biff’s birthday celebrations, I purchased an ice cream maker recently, and decided it would have its maiden run making some ice cream for the birthday festivities. I found a recipe for mascarpone ice cream in the Good Living section of the Sydney Morning Herald, and it looked so bloated and decadent I just had to try it. I can highly recommend making it too, especially if you are new to making ice cream, because there is no need to make a custard (which I find extremely fiddly, and so vexing if I get it wrong!), and it tastes pretty awesome.

My ice cream was an accompaniment to the “cake” I made, which I think is actually more of a flan or a slice… or a torte, as the recipe refers to it as. It’s a VERY easy recipe to make, and it looks rather impressive… I give you STRAWBERRY ALMOND TORTE!

Oooph! Just look at all of those little strawberries, all lined up like Stonehenge… or penguins at a meeting on an ice berg. Or just strawberries on top of some mascarpone spread over an almondy cakey base. Super easy, which really appeals to the lazy arse in me. If you too would like to emulate the super easy glory, read on…

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Wedding cake: the prototype

December 9, 2009 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Lexi

Well I am certainly setting a record for being prolific, two blogs in one week seems pretty satisfactory. While I was on my non-internet enforced sabbatical, Biff and I actioned some special cake making. I am getting married you see, to our tech support, the lovely Mr Ben, and in a fit of tight arsery and over exuberance, have managed to strong arm Biff into agreeing to make the wedding cake with me. I’ve chosen a recipe that looked pretty tasty, and also sufficiently special (without being covered in marzipan crap, and without the words “mud cake” in the title… I can’t STAND mud cake!) The recipe is for a white chocolate cake, and it featured in a Woman’s Weekly recipe spread about Julie Goodwin (for the non-nerds, that’s the winner of Australian Masterchef). I don’t really read Woman’s Weekly (I don’t, I swear!), but I saw it at Ben’s Nan’s place and managed to cajole her into giving the copy to me. The cake itself is a monument to over indulgence, it has over a kilogram of chocolate in it, plus a hell of a lot of butter and sugar. I’m sure it will be awesome.

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And I’m back!

December 6, 2009 · Filed under Food we made, Posted by Lexi

After quite the lengthy hiatus (sans internet for TWO MONTHS, due to a range of different and tedious problems) one half of the Biff n Lexi duo is back online, and feeling fine! To be specific, it is I, Lexi, who is typing this right now. Due to a mixture of slackness and stinginess, Biff has lagged on getting internet connected at his place, so it might take him a while to get back on the bloggin’ horse.

Anyway, I can assure you all that I have been uber crafty during my break away from the computer. I made a dress (very inexpertly!), and I’ve been cranking out various tasty treats. I managed to score a copy of the Bourke Street Bakery Cookbook (it’s awesometown!), and it has inspired me to make pastry from scratch (a fairly long and tedious process, but the end result is rather enjoyable). As Ben is a big fan of lemon and lime tarts, I decided that my first efforts at being a Bourke Street worthy baker would be lemon curd tarts… TA DAAAAAAAAAA!:

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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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Epic Fail: Biscuits. Blame the baby.

September 26, 2009 · Filed under FAIL!, Food we made, Posted by Biff

“I’m cooking for the little one” (like that dude in the “perfect Italiano” ads). I was cooking with my daughter who is eighteen months old.

For father’s day I was given some cookie cutters, and so I thought they should be put to use straight away. Usually I only make Anzac biscuits, but this time I tried to branch out with a new recipe. I shouldn’t have.

I got the recipe off a random website:

http://www.bestrecipes.com.au/recipe/Easy-Biscuits-L924.html

Here’s how they turned out.

Basically the biscuits expanded and melded into one another. That was the first batch. The second batch were ruined because I got distracted playing with “the little one”.

They tasted ok (apart from the charred bits), and I will cook them again – but need to space them out a bit more. I wasn’t ready for how much they would spread.

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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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Planet Cake course: Circus tent cake.

September 7, 2009 · Filed under Courses, Posted by Biff

For a while I have been making novelty birthday cakes, mainly from the Women’s Weekly book. I’ve had lots of fun with this, but naturally, they were a little bit rough. My friend Angela and I decided to do a cake decorating course at Planet Cake in Balmain, to gain a few skills. We were excited because we thought we might meet Handi, who was the guy who taught the contestants on Masterchef how to decorate the wedding cake. Alas, Handi wasn’t there – but we had a good teacher in Jessica, who was obviously very knowledgeable and has represented Australia in international competitions. The star of the day for me though was Marianne, the facilitator, who spent a large chunk of the day by my side, salvaging my train wreck of a cake. Here is how it turned out in the end (with lots of help from Jessica and Marianne):

It was a really fun day, but incredibly challenging for someone with my meagre skills. We each started out the day with a square cake, which is about 3 or 4 inches high. Jessica then showed us how to sculpt, cut, ganache, glue, squeeze, force and harass this into a 26cm high round circus tent. This is were I ran into trouble…i’m obviously a terrible sculptor, but found I could rely on my “desperate failure face” to bring help, in the form of Marianne. She stepped me though the shaping of the cake, and though there were twelve students, she spent probably about a third of the day with me.

After we had sculpted the cake into the right shape, we had to ganache it until smooth. Then came the tricky bit, rolling out the fondant icing to cover the cake.

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