Cookbook Challenge: Week 28, Breakfast

Recipe: Crepes
From: Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion

The theme for this week's Cookbook Challenge is breakfast - fortunately a much easier theme than last week's! The only problem with the theme this week were all the options - I had visions of omelettes, baked eggs, pancakes, French toast and bacon circulating in my head.

But then I got up this morning and went to the kitchen and suddenly - Crepes! I want to make crepes! As you do.

The best thing about crepes is how quick they are to put together and how quickly they cook. The bad thing about crepes is that I'm not very good at making them. Mine always end up rather thicker than the thin, lacy ones I imagine should come out of the frying pan. The recipe for crepes in The Cook's Companion says "you will get better - and so will the pancakes!" but I don't think this applies to me. I keep trying though.



Whenever I make pancakes or crepes for breakfast, I always like to serve it with fruit - it makes me feel better about eating something that's not terribly healthy! So today I stewed a couple of pears in a raspberry sauce to go with the crepes. We keep receiving masses of pears in our fortnightly fruit and vegetable delivery but I'm not a huge fan of pears. I really only like fresh pears when they are still crunchy, but the bloody things ripen so quickly. Fortunately, I don't mind cooked pears so poaching them is one way I deal with them.

The stewed pears and raspberry sauce is super easy - I cut a couple of peeled pears in half (removing the core), and put them in a small pot with a literal splash of water and a couple of teaspoons of sugar. Into the pot went a handful of frozen raspberries, and then I put the lid on and let it cook until the pears were soft. After that, I removed the pears and simmered the leftover liquid without a lid to reduce and thicken it. When the sauce was nice and thick, I stirred in a small knob of butter, and it was ready.

If you don't like crepes (wtf) there are other pancake/waffle/crepe posts here.

See previous Cookbook Challenge posts here.

Update: see the round up at My Food Trail.



Crepes

From Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion

Makes about 8-10 crepes

30g butter
pinch of salt
1 & 1/2 cups of milk
150g plain flour
2 eggs

Warm the butter, salt and milk until the butter has melted.

In a separate bowl, sift in the flour, and then make a well in the middle. Break the eggs into the well and work in some flour.

Add the warm milk and whisk until smooth. Refrigerate for 2 hours before cooking. Add more milk if the batter seems too thick.

Heat a frying pan over medium-low heat. Wipe the pan with a piece of buttered paper for the first pancake. Lift the pan from the heat, add in a ladle of batter and swirl the pan so the batter spreads to the edges.

Put the pan back on the heat and cook for a minute. Lift the thin outer edge of the crepe with a spatula and flip to cook the other side for another minute. Repeat with the rest of the batter.

Picnic at Montalto, Mornington Peninsula

Isn't it interesting how the older you get, the faster time goes by? Three years ago in March, Alastair and I were married (AWWW) but sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday. Should I write something embarrassingly gushy about love and all that jazz? No, I'll spare you! Be thankful!

Since March is always a very busy month, we waited until April to celebrate our anniversary. I booked us a picnic at Montalto, a winery on the Mornington Peninsula. I have been wanting to picnic there ever since I read about it on Vicious Ange’s blog a couple of years ago. For $70 per person, we were allocated a private picnic spot (there are five) on the winery grounds, with food and other assorted picnic stuff set up for our arrival. We checked in at the cellar door, taking the opportunity to taste a couple of wines, and were then given a map so we could walk down to our picnic spot. Our spot was Half Moon, and would have been a 5-10 minute walk from the cellar door, except we got lost a couple of times and at one point I sent us crashing through the bush in what was pretty much the opposite direction. Now normally I have a fantastic sense of direction, and am very good with maps, but this was a hand drawn one with no sense of scale – what kind of map is that?? Bah! Ultimately, Alastair had to take over and lead the way, figuring out how to get to our secluded spot.

A good picnic is, of course, reliant on the weather and we totally lucked out. It was a beautiful sunny day, with a balmy temperature of about 25°C.



Our picnic spot was set in a clearing surrounded by trees. When we arrived, a table and umbrella had been set up for us.



The table was set with white linen, plates and cutlery, and off to one side was a big esky fridge thing (chillybin!) that held the food.



There was also a picnic basket which was loaded with a picnic blanket, insect repellent and sun screen. The insect repellent was definitely very useful as I started to get bug bites almost straight away - thank goodness it had been provided!


The esky fridge thing!

At the cellar door, we had ordered a bottle of wine, and someone must have driven it down while we were navigating the winery grounds, because there was a freshly opened, cold bottle waiting for us.



It didn't take us long to get stuck into the food. In a covered dish on the table were several chewy bread rolls, and a bowl of nice olive oil.



On our first platter of food were: slices of terrine, a couple of dips (hummus and capsicum), some very good olives, smoked salmon on lentils, and a cherry tomato and basil salad. Good all round, with both of us particularly enjoying the smoked salmon, terrine and olives.



After a rest, we pulled out the mains platter. For mains we had duck, roast beef with chutney, and vegetables. The duck, cooked medium, was flavoursome and not too gamey. I also enjoyed the sweetish chutney with the thick slices of beef. But I would have loved more salady stuff - there was a lot of meat on that plate!



And for dessert, we had two kinds of cheese, crackers, quince paste, a sliced up fig, a couple of seriously fantastic strawberries and raspberries, raisins, a mandarin jelly thing, and a dense and rich chocolate cake.



It was nice to spend the afternoon hanging out under the trees with the sounds of the bush around us: birds chirping, the breeze blowing, cows mooing in the distance...! Yep, we picnicked to the serene sound of the occasional moooooooooooo. Hilarious.

We finished with a complimentary coffee at the Montalto garden café before we had to head back to Melbourne.

We had a very lovely picnic - it's such a beautiful spot and great for a special occasion. It was very well organised, and I was impressed that small things had been thought of e.g. insect repellent being provided, the table being set, and our cold bottle of wine being driven down. It was just a shame that we couldn't spend longer hanging out there!


Montalto Vineyard & Olive Grove
33 Shoreham Road, Red Hill South, Victoria 3937
Phone +61 3 5989 8412

Cookbook Challenge: Week 27, Insect

Recipe: Carrot cupcakes
From: The Australian Women's Weekly "Bake"

The theme for this week's Cookbook Challenge is the most challenging one we've had yet - insect. YES INSECT! I racked my brain the whole week, trying to decide what to make.

In the end, I decided to bake something and decorate it to look like an insect. Carrot cake is one of my favourite cakes, so I decided to bake carrot cupcakes and make them into ladybirds. I made the carrot cakes on Saturday, doing so in a bit of a rush because we were heading out for dinner. I had an hour to do the baking from start to finish - but fortunately the recipe I chose was, with the help of a food processor, super quick and easy and I threw it together in 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, I made a rookie mistake and.......... forgot to put the eggs in the cake mixture............. Sheesh! It's not even the first time I've left eggs out of a cake - I am a fail baker sometimes. Without the eggs, the cupcakes tasted fine, but they didn't rise very much.

Today (Sunday) I did the decorating. It was a very time consuming job - it took me nearly two hours to do six cupcakes! But I think they turned out pretty cute. :) My inspiration for the cupcakes was this image on flickr. Mine weren't as polished, but it was my first time covering cupcakes with fondant (I've only made fondant toppers before - see here and here). If you're interested, here's how I made them:



To start with, I iced the cupcakes with a thin layer of lemon buttercream. I had a small amount of left over buttercream in the freezer - just enough for six cupcakes.



To colour the fondant, I used red and black gel paste food colouring.



I started off with the red fondant - this was for the body. I rolled out the fondant and then cut out circles that were about the same size as the cupcakes.


The circles of fondant were placed on top of the buttercream, and then I smoothed it down and around the buttercream with my fingers.



To make the black faces, I rolled out black fondant and cut out smaller circles. These circles were cut in half. I wet the back of one of the semi circles, and placed it at the edge of the cupcake.


I used my fingers to smooth and pull the straight edge of the black fondant down to the paper case, and cut off the corners that overlapped.



After all that, I was on the home stretch! I cut a line down the body, and then pasted on several small dots of black fondant for spots. I also pasted on some eyes and used a circle cutter to cut a smile into the face.



And - ta dah! All done! I was very pleased with the result. My biggest problem now is I can't bare to eat them - they're way too cute!

See previous Cookbook Challenge posts here

Update: See the round up at My Food Trail.



Carrot cupcakes

Adapted from AWW's Bake

Makes 12

1/2 cup (125ml) vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 & 1/2 cups (225g) self raising flour
1 cup (220g) firmly packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 cups (480g) firmly packed coarsely grated carrot
3/4 cup (90g) coarsely chopped roasted almonds (the book recommends pecans, but I only had almonds)

Preheat oven to 180°C. Line a 12 hole muffin pan with paper cases.

In a bowl, combine the oil, eggs, sifted flour, sugar and cinnamon. Stir in the carrot and chopped almonds. Spoon the mixture into the paper cases.

Bake for about 20-25 minutes, or until cooked. Let them stand for about 5 minutes, before placing on a wire rack to cool.

Top with your favourite frosting and to decorate as ladybirds - see above!

Cutler & Co: Puntastic

We went to Cutler & Co for a leisurely Sunday lunch recently with Maria and Daz from The Gourmet Challenge. On Sundays Cutler & Co have a set menu for $65, which we thought was a great opportunity to try them out.

The fit out of the restaurant is quite stunning, the long room kitted out in dark tones and with a rather flash automatic door to the loos. We were particularly taken with the industrial looking lights with a super long filament that hung above the tables.

There were four courses for the set lunch. We received all of the dishes listed for the first two courses, and then for mains and desserts we selected one dish each from several options.

We started with three small dishes: French breakfast radishes, Clair de Lune oysters, and cured ocean trout toast.

Bro started us off on our punny lunch by saying that the radishes were radiscal. Oh dear. I can’t say that the jokes improved from there, but I have recorded them for prosperity anyway! Apart from being radiscal, the rather cute, little crunchy radishes were mild in flavour.




The oysters were lovely. Served raw with a squirt of lemon, they were fresh and sweet.




The ocean trout toast was also delicious, with little cubes of ocean trout on top of the crispy toast. In Bro’s words: it was troutriffic.




The bread was so good that everyone had second or third servings.

Next we received a selection of starters to share.




This was beetroot salad with goat's curd and apple. It was really nice – seemingly simple, but the little beets were sweet and tender, and fortunately for us non-goat-cheese lovers, the goat's curd was only a little bit “goaty”. It looked beautiful as well.




We received a bowl of pearl barley with radicchio and ricotta salata. I quite liked the firmish barley with the salted ricotta and radicchio, although it wasn't very popular around the table.




The next dish was garlic sausage, potato and ravigot. This perked us all up after the barley. Bold and salty sausage and a bit of potato. Nice.




Next up: FRIED GREEN TOMATOES. Fried green tomatoes, people! Does anyone remember the movie? I have waited years to eat fried green tomatoes! They were great - crumbed slices of slightly tart green tomato on top of what I think may have been eggplant. I loved the little frying pans they were presented in as well.




The last dish before mains was peppers, migas and tuna mayo. This was another nice dish - the peppers were sweet, the bread was crispy, and while the tuna mayonaise sounded strange at first, we all loved it. Alastair said that it was a-mayonaising. Pun of the day!

For mains, there was an option of four dishes:




Alastair had the local line caught snapper, tomato, prawn and chorizo. It looked pretty good, particularly the big bursty prawn underneath the fish.




Bro and Daz had the roast quail, smoked sausage and sauerkraut. The sauerkraut was served separately in a small pot and it was really something – WOW HELLO PORKY PORK - there was nothing sour about that sauerkraut! (ba bow). It was all bacon porky goodness. Poor boys though, they had the biggest appetites and they received the teeniest dish!




Maria and I both had the braised lamb, buckwheat polenta and gremolata. The lamb was very tender although a bit fatty. I liked the soft polenta and the dark wilted greens too.

The fourth mains option was a baked ricotta, eggplant Calabrese and fennel salad, which none of us ordered.

And for dessert, there were three options.




Bro and Alastair both had the Earl Grey tea ice cream, chocolate ganache, and macerated prune. I had a little taste and thought it was delicious, and I adored the faint floral bergamot fragrance of the Earl Grey ice cream. Bro said that the ganache was also great, although I didn't try it.




Maria and I both had the quince baba, sheep's milk yoghurt and cherry. I found the baba a little dry - it was nice, but I was expecting it to be drenched in something. The quinces were gorgeous though. I wouldn't have minded a massive bowl of just the quinces with the yoghurt!

And Daz had... oh Daz... he selected the Gruyere d’Alpage and shiraz jelly (which I neglected to take a photo of – because I was in fits of laughter). Why was I in fits of laughter? Because Daz had been expecting dessert... and received cheese and crackers and a teeny dollop of jelly. Oh we laughed at the disappointment on his face (sorry Daz!). If I had been quicker off the mark, I could've said, "Gryuere’s your dessert?" (bah bow!) but unfortunately I only thought of that one at home. Isn't that always the way it goes.




We finished off with a round of coffees, which saw us all whip out our phones and google coffee puns. Really, really, REALLY terrible coffee puns ie if you drink a lot of coffee, you'll be in a latte trouble.

Dear oh dear. Apologies for the terrible puns. At least they kept us amused during lunch. Speaking of lunch, I think the Sunday lunches at Cutler & Co are a definite goer. There were lots of staff working that day - there seemed to be about twenty on the floor - so we didn't have any issues with service. Apart from a few minor things, overall the food was good (although not mind blowing) and good value for the quality of the dishes. We really enjoyed ourselves and I would be keen to spend a lazy Sunday eating there again.

Cutler & Co
55-57 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
Phone: 03 9419 4888

Cookbook Challenge: Week 26, Green

Recipe: Pandan Cupcakes & Green tea cupcakes
Adapted from: Primrose Bakery's Cupcakes

Wow, it's week 26 of the Cookbook Challenge - and you know what that means, don't you? We're half way through the challenge! The theme for this week is "green" and I really like these kind of themes because it's so open.

This week I really wanted to make something with green tea - but unfortunately I couldn't find any recipes in any of my cookbooks. So I decided I would bake cupcakes and adapt a recipe for my purposes.



For the cupcakes, I thought that using matcha powder would be best. However, when I went to the Asian grocery store I couldn't find it anywhere. Fortunately, I came across a bottle of pandan extract. Perfect - for green week AND cupcakes!



For the pandan cupcakes, I followed a recipe for vanilla cupcakes, but substituted pandan extract for the vanilla extract. The extract was really green, but I wasn't sure how strong the colour would be after baking so I added a few drops of green colouring - it was for green week, after all!



For the frosting, I made pandan flavoured buttercream, piping it on in a rose shape. I didn't really think it through - green roses?? Maybe I should have tried piping leaves!

Taste wise, I didn't think that much of the cupcakes. I wish I had used this recipe for vanilla cupcakes which I have always had great success with. I found these cupcakes a bit dry, and they weren't as fluffy as I would have liked. But the pandan in them was lovely - giving a vanilla-ish, nutty fragrance. I would definitely try using the pandan extract in cakes/cupcakes again, with other recipes.



For the green tea cupcakes, since I couldn't find any matcha, I tried infusing milk with green tea. This didn't work as well as I had hoped - when they were warm and not frosted, there was a faint taste of green tea But when they were cold and with buttercream on top, I couldn't detect it at all.

Oh well! I'll have to get my hands on matcha and have another go. Now, who wants some cupcakes??

See previous Cookbook Challenge posts here.

Update: See the round up at My Food Trail.



Pandan cupcakes

Adapted from the vanilla cupcake recipe in Primrose Bakery's Cupcakes

Makes 12 cupcakes

110g unsalted butter, softened
225g caster sugar
2 large eggs
150g self-raising flour, sifted
125g plain flour, sifted
120ml milk, at room temperature
1 teaspoon pandan extract

Preheat the oven to 180°C and line a 12 hole cupcake tin with cupcake wrappers.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter for several minutes with an electric mixer. Gradually add the sugar, beating well between additions, until the mixture is pale and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time, mixing for a few minutes after each addition.

Add a third of the flours to the butter mixture and beat on low speed. Add a third of the milk and beat again. Repeat these steps until all the flour and milk have been added. Add the pandan extract and beat until just combined.

Spoon the mixture into the cupcakes cases. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until cooked.

Remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool. When completely cool, ice with pandan flavoured buttercream - see recipe below.



Green tea cupcakes

Adapted from the Earl grey cupcake recipe in Primrose Bakery's Cupcakes

Makes 12 cupcakes

125ml milk, at room temperature
4 teaspoons of green tea leaves (I used sencha)
110g unsalted butter, softened
225g caster sugar
2 large eggs
150g self-raising flour, sifted
125g plain flour, sifted

Preheat the oven to 180°C and line a 12 hole cupcake tin with cupcake wrappers.

In a saucepan, heat the milk over medium heat until it just begins to boil. Remove from the heat and add the green tea leaves. Leave to infuse for about 30 minutes. Once infused, strain the milk into a measuring jug. You may need to top up the amount of milk, so do that if necessary.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter for several minutes with an electric mixer. Gradually add the sugar, beating well between additions, until the mixture is pale and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time, mixing for a few minutes after each addition.

Add a third of the flours to the butter mixture and beat on low speed. Add a third of the milk and beat again. Repeat these steps until all the flour and milk have been added.

Spoon the mixture into the cupcakes cases. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until cooked.

Remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool. When completely cool, ice with vanilla flavoured buttercream.




Pandan buttercream


Makes enough for 12 cupcakes

250 grams unsalted butter, cut into cubes and very, very soft
3 cups sifted icing sugar
2 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon pandan extract

Beat the butter in an electric mixer on high until it is very pale and fluffy.

Gradually add the icing sugar (I do this a tablespoon at a time), beating well between additions. Beat until the buttercream is very fluffy - about 5-6 minutes.

Heat the milk in the microwave until it's very warm. Add to the butter cream and beat on high for another couple of minutes. Add the pandan extract and mix to combine. Pipe on top of the cupcakes.

International Dumpling Incident Party

It’s time for another International Incident Party hosted by Penny from Addictive and Consuming, and this time we’re bringing dumplings to the table. When I started thinking about what I was going to make, I immediately thought of the mother of all dumplings (imho) – Shanghai soup dumplings / xiao long bao. But after a bit of research on the internet I decided it would be too much trouble and tried hard to think of an easier alternative.

I walk past a butcher on my way to work every day and as well as all the usual cuts of meat they also sell a lot of offal. Last week I noticed they had a tray of pork skin in the window – and since pork skin is one of the components of the broth that goes in the xiao long bao I decided it was a sign that it was meant to be!



For those uninitiated in the magic of xiao long bao, they are dumplings with a meat filling that contains jelly made from a savoury soup. When the xiao long bao are steamed, the jelly turns into a piping hot soup inside the wrapper. They are WONDERFUL. After picking up my pork skin and chicken carcasses, I set to work.

Stage one in making the dumplings was to prepare a broth out of chicken bones, pork skin, ginger and onions. After the broth was ready, I added flavourless gelatine to set it into a jelly.

On Sunday morning I got up early just so I could make them. First I made the dough for the xiao long bao wrappers. The dough had to rest for thirty minutes, so while that was happening I put together the meat filling, which has the jelly mixed into. I wish I had read the filling recipe before I made the jelly, because it turns out only 1 & 1/2 cups of jelly is required - but the recipe said to make 4 cups of jelly. Rah! I was a bit annoyed - maybe because I was up early and hadn't even eaten breakfast yet!

After that it was time to roll out the dough and pleat the dumplings. I started off by rolling out the dough and using a cookie cutter to cut out circles, but eventually found it easier to roll the pieces of dough thinly into circles. The thinner the dumpling dough was, the easier it was to pleat (and the better they are to eat as well). My pleating was not great - but hey it was my first time!



The xiao long bao were steamed and, after giving them a bit of time to cool down, it was time for a taste test. It probably took me about an hour to make forty xiao long bao – but it certainly didn’t take that long to eat them! I thought my wrappers were still a bit thick, but the filling was tasty and, JOY OF JOYS, the steaming hot soup was contained inside. We ate them with vinegar. Nice! I was rather pleased with my effort - they weren't complicated to make, just time consuming. The hardest part was not losing the soup after they had been steamed - the little buggers had a tendency to stick to anything and everything!

I also made har gow / prawn dumplings, apparently because I hadn't spent enough time making dumplings! I found the har gow much harder to make than the xiao long bao. I could tell when I went to roll out the har gow wrappers that it was too stiff. Because the dough was relatively stiff, I couldn't get the wrappers to be as thin as I wanted them, and I also couldn't pleat them nicely. You really want a very thin wrapper for har gow, because the best ones have that translucent, thin skin when steamed.



The har gow were, as I expected, not great. Bro said they were better than the xiao long bao, but Alastair wasn’t a fan. I didn't think they were terribly great, although not THAT bad for my first attempt. However, I don't think I’ll try making har gow again – it's too much effort to master the wrappers.

So that's it for my contribution to the International Dumpling Incident Party. See Addictive and Consuming for the round up, I'll update this post later with links for all the party goers.

Recipes:



For the xiao long bao, I found Steamy Kitchen's post very useful.



For the har gow, I followed this recipe on About.com.