The very first reveal

So today is the very first reveal date for my Daring Bakers challenge. My first challenge and my first official reveal and the anticipation of what next month's challenge will be, its all very exciting! I found the Tiramisu quite a challenge I have to admit. I have never made such a complicated dessert before and it stretched my kitchen skills quite considerably. I found the marscapone the most challenging part. It is not a complicated method on paper but the practice is something else. It kind of worked but it was not the consistency I would have liked and I will certainly have to give it another go as I hate not getting something just right. But the Zabaglione and Pastry Cream turned out beautifully and the Savoiardi although not the most beautiful I have ever seen tasted lovely and gave the Tiramisu a firm but delicate base. Another slight problem i ran into was the construction. I did not have a dish that was exactly the right size so the one I ended up using was slightly too small and the top of my tiramisu came up over the edge of the dish which was less than ideal. At the end of the day I was happy with it as a first attempt and I have learned some valuable skills and I am confident that the next time I make a Tiramisu it will be considerably better! It tasted divine, and after all, they do say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating...

Soooo behind

I know, I know, I have been absolutely awful with dong blog posts for the last week. It has been a crazily hectic week though and so much has happened so I really do have a valid excuse! Last week I was alone again for a lot of the week so I lived off Butternut Soup mostly and spent all my evenings in the gym to keep me busy and to keep trying to work off those stubborn post-Christmas pounds which seem like they have settled for good and are strongly resisting all my efforts to get rid of them. My only real culinary success last week was finishing my Tiramisu which is this month's Daring Bakers Challenge. I can't post pictures of it yet as it is not the 'reveal date' but I can say that it tasted absolutely yummy. To be honest it was not the prettiest Tiramisu that I have ever seen - I do need more practice in constructing them - but it did taste yummy. The Zabaglione/Pastry Cream/Whipped Cream combination was a smooth and creamy, not too sweet and not too rich, just right. I may attempt another one before the month is out to see if I can get the outcome any prettier and more worthy of being posted with all the other challenge results.

One side effect of making Tiramisu is that you are left with a lot of egg whites. I ended up with about 5 of them in the fridge by the end of the weekend and not wanting them to go to waste, I proceeded to make meringues. I haven't made meringues in ages and they can be rather fickle things, sometimes turning out well and sometimes not so much. This batch turned out ok, and they are current;y in a tin in my kitchen awaiting their fate. I am pondering filling them with a chocolate ganache or something as plain old meringues can be a bit boring and a bit too much of a sugar hit without something to break it up. Now to hunt down a good ganache recipe, I have heard that the chocolate to cream proportions is an age-old debate and there are numerous variations on the mixture, so which one will be worthy when it comes to filling my little meringues?

Great beginnings

This months Daring Baker's chellenge is Tiramisu, so I have decided to start on this rather intimidating but very exciting project this week. It takes about 2-3 days to make due to refridgeration times required, so I thought I'd start last night, construct it tonight, and then it will be done by tomorrow when I have a friend (aka Guinea-Pig) coming over for dinner who I would love to impress with a made-from-scratch culinary masterpiece. Now I will not be able to show photos of the finished creation until the official Daring Bakers reveal date on the 1/3, but I can show pictures of the process of construction, which is not a simple process I'll have you know. The challenge includes making Marscapone from scratch, which I started last night and am praying actually looks like marscapone and not butter/curdled cream when I come to use it later. Last night I also started the Zabaglione (is that or is that not a very fun word to say?) and the Pastry Cream which require overnight refridgeration before use. The Zabaglione involved Egg Yolks and sugar and the liqor (Tia Maria in this case), and the Pastry Cream is egg yolk, sugar and milk made into something similar to an egg custard's smooth & creamy consistency. Both smell delicious and I can't wait to use them in the construction process tonight.

The plan for tonight is to make the Ladyfingers/Savoiardi (Sponge finger biscuits) which will be interesting as I have never done anything like them before. If they turn out acceptable I will then construct the Tiramisu and hopefully it will be a beautiful and delicious masterpiece (I believe in the power of positive thinking!). So until tomorrow, fingers crossed and wish me luck!

Simple but effective

The thing I love about pasta is that its so versatile. There are endless possibilities when it comes to pasta and what you can do with it. This is something that I was grateful for last night when I came to make my tomato, basil and brie pasta, and found that I did not in fact have any brie. But as is always something that can be found to put on pasta, even in the most meagre of fridge-contents, all was not lost. There were cherry tomatoes and basil in the fridge, a good foundation for any pasta sauce. There was also chorizo, spinach and parmesan. A bit of fire, a bit of sweet tomato, a bit of veg, perfect! :) So dinner ended up as an improvised pasta sauce containing all of the above, and it wasn't bad at all.

One of the Valentine's Day gifts that I gave Jel was a Brie Baker. This is a little kitchen tool that I discovered when looking for a Christmas present for a friend last year, and it is a gem. Jel and I are both big cheese lovers and this miniature casserole dish which is the perfect size to fit a round of Brie or Camembert, is a cheese-lover's dream. We tried it out for the first time last night and all I can say is YUM! We baked a round of camembert with a splash of white wine and a clove of garlic, and it was liquid, creamy heaven. We dipped Moroccan-style herb and poppy-seed crackers in the cheese at it made a sublime, decadent starter. Although I may have to do a double length run tonight to work it off, it was undoubtably worth it.

 
(Pictures from http://www.alderwoodhampers.co.uk/ where I bought the Brie Baker from)

Return of the muse

Ater a long week without my muse I was back in the kitchen this weekend cooking up a storm. I made  huge batch of last weeks butternut soup to fed me at lunch times in the working week. I also made Nigella's Lamb Tagine from her Christmas cookbook. I know its hardly Christmas any more but I have always wanted to try it an the beautiful, new, shiny cast-iron casserole dish that Jel brought back from America for me seemed like a good an excuse as any to give it a go. It is a very different recipe from the Anthony Worrall-Thompson one that I had tried previously, but it was no less impressive. It was amazingly simple to construct, and once the basic prep was done and it was tucked away safely in the oven to cook slowly for 2 hours, that was it. And it was certainly tasty, a good balance between the onion, garlic, lamb and spices, which were complimented by the sweetness of the dates and pomegranate juice. Served with some plain cous-cous and whichever veg tickles your fancy, you couldn't ask for an easier but still oh-so-impressive Sunday dinner. I'm contemplating making my own Worrall-Thompson/Nigella hybrid Lamb Tagine next time. I love the meaty-richness and pomegranate undertones of the Nigella recipe, but I also like the more genuine moroccan feel of almonds, sultanas, tomatos and apricots in the Worrall-Thompson version, so a hybrid experiment is definitely on the cards. Fingers crossed I wont' turn 2 good dishes into 1 disaster!   

 

I also did a big cupcake run on Sunday. One of my colleagues who is based in another office was due to come in yesterday and as she is never here when I bring in cake, I promised that I'd bring something in for her. So after trawling through my Cookies, Cupcakes & Other Tempting treats book, I settled on the Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes with white and milk chocolate icing. The recipe stated that it should make 24 so I thought that this was more than sufficient, even for the hungry mouths at work. You can imagine my amazement then when after making up the mixture, it filled 9, yes, 9, paper cases. I was left rather baffled at this phenomenon, and concluded that the writer of this book must be using very, very small cupcake paper cases. But not to be disheartened I started again on a recipe for Super Mocha cupcakes, and I managed to stretch the mixture over 12 cases, so not a bad result overall. I has been hoping to use my new, shiny piping bag (another present my darling man brought me from the US) but by the time the Tagine, Butternut Soup and 2 lots of cupcakes were done, my energy was waning. I had made 2 lots of icing, a white chocolate one, which turned out rather runny and did not even try to hold its shape when piped, and the milk chocolate one ended up stiff enough to stand up by itself and therefore was a challenge to squeeze out of the piping bag. But it was a good learning curve on icing consistency, so better luck next time :)

A rather flat week

So this week Jel has been away and I have really not done much cooking. I made the butternut soup the other night and I had that for dinner again yesterday, which I really did not mind as it is yummy! But all my plans for chicken enchiladas, lamb and chickpea pilaff and lamb curry have really gone out of the window. Tonight I will probably be on the last of the butternut soup with bread and goat's cheese and then my favourite Anton Berg liqueur chocolates for dessert; a simple dinner for 1. I have needed the time this week though as I am working on a Valentines present for a friend to give to his wife. It was a bit of a last minute request so I have been working frantically to get it done in time, but without my resident handyman to make the box dividers I have my doubts that it will be there before Sunday. I do Pewter craftwork and use it to decorate various items as a hobby and now I have a website and hopefully in the future will make items to sell - a bit of extra 'pocket money' can only be a good thing. While showing the website to our friend Edwin who we were visiting on the weekend, he decided that one of my tea boxes would make a nice Valentines present for his wife Janita. I am very happy that he likes my work but it is a tight deadline that I fear I may miss, but I'm trying my best. (to get an idea of what I am talking about check out my website: http://www.patinacreations.com/)

After watching The Princess and The Frog on the weekend, I have this strange desire to make a Shrimp Gumbo. The movie was set in New Orleans and the leading lady was a talented cook who specialised in her daddy's recipe for Shrimp Gumbo. It has never even occured to me to attmept to make anything like a Gumbo, but I am quite tickled by the idea now and itching to give it a go. I have trawled through oodles of recipes online and I really don't have a clue which one to try, but I have selected one that sounds nice and had a couple of good reviews and maybe if I can make it to the Fishmonger I have yet to try, this weekend may be the time to take the plunge. It is hard to find nice, fresh prawns so I think that the fate of the dish depends on whether nice prawns are anywhere to be found locally. I do find it funny that nice seafood is harder to find here in Manchester where we are only and hour from the sea than it was in Johannesburg where we were at least 6 hours from the nearest coastline. One of the many things I miss about home...

Warm comforts

There is nothing quite like the promise of a warm bowl of fabulous-smelling soup when you have come in from the cold after a hard gym session. One hot shower and some simple cooking later, and I was digging into my spiced butternut soup with fresh sundried tomato and parmesan bread and some smooth, creamy goats cheese. Satisfyingly filling but relatively healthy, it made for the perfect dinner tonight when I desperately needed comfort from the throbbing in the back of my neck which threatens to turn into a headache and from my legs which feel like lead after the run at the gym. Some roasted butternut with chilli and thyme blended up with softened onion and garlic and some toasted and ground up cumin and coriander seeds. A bit of stock and salt and pepper and yum.

I found an absolutely amazing recipe online tonight which I am absolutely dying to try. It is for Cappuccino Fudge Cheesecake. It looks like all my favourite things mixed up by magic and turned into an edible slice of heaven... chocolate, coffee, Kahlua, Rum, biscuits, cream cheese, and more. Now I just need an excuse to make it - someone give me an excuse!