Entries Tagged 'Desserts and Sweet Things' ↓

An Australian institution. Note, we call them biscuits here, not cookies.

1 cup plain flour
1 1/2 cup rolled oats
1 cup “soft pack” brown sugar
3/4 cup dessicated coconut
2 tablespoons of golden syrup
125 g butter (half of a small block)
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
50 ml (2 tablespoons) boiling water

If you don’t live in Australia, I don’t like your chances of finding Golden Syrup* (not Molasses), which is pretty much peculiar to Australia, and I think the desiccated coconut is different too.

Anyway.

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In sleepy Bermagui – the last unspoilt fishing village on the south coast – for the past six years Francesca and Alberto Cementon have made the most sublime range of gelati we have encountered outside Italy. (We still remember, don’t we, a kind of creamed rice gelato we sampled on the Piazza del Campidoglio, which set an aspiration standard for tradition and innovation). Go out of your way to visit the Bermagui Gelati Clinic – you can see from the snap below that it used to be the Veterinary Clinic, but the professional tone is appropriate. It’s between the Bottle Shop and Mitre 10. Here you will find an extraordinary range of gelato experiences, all freshly made on the premises.
 
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ETD 7 days…

As the day of my departure looms closer, signs of pre-trip anxiety are beginning to leak out of me and forebode a chaotic week ahead. As if irrational dreams and inexplicable tears are not enough, this morning I put my expensive Italian stove-top coffee maker in the microwave (instead of on the stove top where it rightly belongs). I zapped it on high for at least a minute before I realised what I had done. Amazingly only the plastic knob suffered, now resembling a charcoalled marshmallow.

The plums are rotting on the tree and the yard is beginning to smell like cheap Spanish wine. No time to jam myself (!), so I salvaged what I could and took them over to Mother to deal with.

Family farewell lunch today, during which I ate enough carbs to see me through to Alice Springs. This blog could be over before it even began. My contribution to lunch was a bakers dozen of some banana walnut muffins (no maple today, feeling a bit povo). They’ve come out rather nicely – good to know that even when all else goes to shit my muffins still rise to the occasion. Mother’s chocolate cake was delicious, if a little wobbly. And yes, those are Ken Done place mats…

(Click photos to embiggen)

Zucchini, how I love it. There is nothing more delightfully buttery or charmingly versatile, or, for that matter, quite so easy to grow. Mine are bursting at the seams right now, pushing over the chook wire, and trying to run over the ground, fruiting in black and green stripes, with a pattern like 1960s barkcloth. Having just had a quarter of a year’s worth of rain in one weekend, they’re turning into marrows. And, as I am dead broke until the arrival of the Kevin Bucks, it’s time to get working on ways to use this luxurious, yet cheap, food.

Zucchini Muffins look so damned good the boy recanted his anti-zucchini stance and tucked in. They are also easy. Take a giant marrow or a few small ones and grate until you have 400 grammes worth. Then add: 1 cup white flour, 1 cup of polenta or some polenta and wholemeal, 1 tsp of baking soda, 1 tsp sugar, a pinch of salt, 1 lightly beaten egg and 60g of butter you’ve melted in the microwave. You can add flavourings such as a big handful of grated parmesan; a small handful of shredded herbs; six semi-sundried tomatoes sliced up; a big chunk of crumbled feta; ham, bacon, salami or smoked salmon in chunks; a handful of lightly toasted pine nuts or walnuts. Or any combo. Mix it all together until it just comes together into a lumpy mess and put big spoonfuls, lumps and all, into a lightly greased muffin pan. Bake at 200 degrees for about 20 minutes in a shiny new electric fan-forced oven, if, like me, you have one (I truly love my oven), but any one will do.

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There are lots of different kinds of food blogs, and space for them all, so I really don’t think there’s much point attempting to judge across genres within food bloggery. For instance, there are some blogs which frequently have competitions, or run events or that type of caper and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t. Those blogs are no less a labour of love than this one or any other food blog.

That said, I have found it a bit confronting sometimes when following a newish (to me) blog to all of a sudden find a cheery product review for a jar of sauce or somesuch plonked in the middle of say, reviews of molecular gastronomy restaurants. (A real example, but not an Australian blog.) There are so many blogs out there that the appearance of a discordant review tends to make me hit delete – or at least ignore the mounting posts – in the feedreader.

Because most food bloggers aren’t comped things frequently, I think it’s good practice to say when something is free. If I’m reading reviews in a newspaper culinary insert or magazine I assume samples of all the products have been provided by eager marketeers, but I don’t make the same assumption with food blogs.
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Am currently feeling rather more prepared for Christmas than is usual. (Zoe made me feel very chuffed by asking me advice on pudding preparation by SMS). As a result, I am on top of the shopping and have accepted invites to (a) mother-of-boyfriend’s drinks (b) aunty-of-boyfriend’s Xmas dinner. Was a bit flummoxed when I realised that I really ought to take something to both events, but have no cash whatsoever (as going to Thailand and Vietnam shortly). So, in a fit of idiocy, I decided to make shortbread, using pretty angel, star and love heart cookie cutters that I bought today.

I haven’t done this since I was 24 or 25, which was quite some time ago. And, after I started, I remembered why. All that butter and all that flour, rice flour and sugar surely makes an unholy mess once you get going. Particularly if you have not yet made pastry in the new house and have no bench space. Particularly if you are so stupid as to double the recipe, as I did today (I’m not giving you the recipe, it’s the one off the McCormack rice flour packet, so you can’t go wrong).

I generally, genuinely, love making pastry and home-made pasta, because of that magic moment that occurs when the dry ingredients and the fat or the eggs just, you know, happen, and you get the elastic dough that you are aiming for. I learned a while ago that the old rubbing in method is pretty damned frustrating and that a blender works very well indeed (you do want lumps of butter in pastry, but that’s another story). However, even with a blender, f***ing shortbread just never seems like it is going to come together. This was not at all helped by my sudden discovery that I DON’T HAVE A ROLLING PIN. Jesus, how did I move out from the ex without the freakin’ rolling pin? How have I lived, in two houses, without one?

Despite these setbacks, it did finally come together, with a fair bit of manual handling. There is an old adage about how pastry cooks are supposed to keep things cold and use only the tips of their cool little fingers to rub butter and flour together, but, really, if you don’t use your toasty warm palms you will never, ever, get the butter and flour bits of the shortbread to hang together, let alone be able to flatten them into a nice even pattie and cut them with cookie cutters.

So, I used my palms and rolled out batches with the wine bottle I finished off last night with the boyfriend. God, it went on for hours, the rolling, cutting out and baking. But goodness me, it was worth it. Baked for about 30 minutes in my brand new fan-forced electric oven … yum.

AND I get to be all smug and say ‘yes, of course I made them myself.’ God, home cooking is brilliantly satisfying.

What a wonderful opportunity for temporary insanity a child’s birthday party throws up for the modern parent. Eleven months of the year I could care less for the making, baking and lunchbox fussing that is supposed to come with child ownership, but a birthday party is SHOWTIME. It’s when you get all your crafty ya yas out because, dammit, people are watching. And if I could make one other parent think for just a second that I enjoy nothing more than making sugar paste effigies of Garfield and sewing up darling little costumes then it’s all been a worthwhile charade.

This year, Isaac (recently 6) decided upon a Transformers party. The theme, IMO, just gives you something to work with for cakes and invitations and is a good cue for presents when parents find themselves standing bewildered in the Kmart toy aisles. So a Transformers cake was planned, and it was at some very early stage of the cake planning that a mental picture of the sort of cake you can only realise with fondant was formed in my mind and nothing could be done to dislodge it.

I’ve been quietly obsessed with fondant cakes since forever. It’s food! But it looks like modelling clay! And you can make anything out of it! Then eat it! You could make a futuristic miniature city out of fondant then go stomping through it like Godzilla, randomly taking a bite out of people and buildings as the mood takes you. Despite visiting the Royal Melbourne Show for years just to see the decorated cakes and having unfettered access to all the relevant retail outlets, I had never actually taken the next step: I had never planned and created a fondant iced cake. It had just never occurred to me.

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Today my sister, her partner Anne and their kids Ciara and Reece joined us for The Eating of The Hare. They took our bigger boy out to lunch and Owy went to cricket, so I had a couple of hours of uninterrupted kitchen time to potter while our smaller boy slept. There is nothing nicer than feeding people that you care about, and to be feeding them food which they’d been responsible for increased the pleasure. Anne is a bit of a spoiler, so things kicked off with spiders made with sexy ice cream and Cascade soft drinks:

I’m not sure if that’s sharing or territorial pissing that you’re seeing in that picture, but that’s five year old boys for you.

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