The inevitability of change

Ah its been a time of upheaval dear reader, I am now well and truly out of my little Preston home and am living the life of a gypsy, hanging my hat where ever I can find space for it. Currently that space is in Bendigo, mercifully it is my last week of work otherwise I think I may fall over having to commute 4 hours every day. This is practise for what is to come though and I tell myself that everything can be survived if you focus on what comes after it.
So what does come after it? I have quit my job, packed up and moved out of my flat and in about 2 weeks will be heading off first on a big red plane to Sydney and then on an even bigger white one to Abu Dhabi, eventually making my way to London where I'll base myself for an as yet undetermined period of time. I will be back for next Christmas, that is a given, I might be back sooner, I might not who knows but I wanted an adventure so I'm making myself one.

This all started last Christmas in the baking heat, it had hovered somewhere around 40 degrees for entirely too long as far as I was concerned and I thought wouldn't it be nice to be somewhere cold, seriously cold, like the Icehotel in Sweden for instance, I had always wanted to go there and see the northern lights, hear if they really do hum or if that was a rumour spread by stoners.
I was tired of wishing for things, tired of thinking wouldn't it be nice and made a decision then and there to make it happen. That if I wanted to see the Icehotel then I should go see it.
So I am. A week before Christmas in fact. I'll be flying to Stockholm, wandering around for a day and then catching a plane up north into the arctic circle to potentially freeze my arse off in a rather unique hotel.
The idea that this is actually happening is still slightly surreal, but that may be down to the lack of sleep I've had even before exiting my little garret in the northern suburbs. Sleep has increasingly become consumed by the details of the trip. Time that once was spent sleeping now ticks past while I plot out details or arrange for books to be ferried back to Casa De Dad or throw out things that I had once decided to keep for some reason that now eludes me.
There might well be a benefit in this exhaustion though, it does leave me too tired to freak out or worry much. I just wearily trust that the plans I've made will come to fruition, trust in my own ability to find my way through tricky travel situations when they arrive and given that I've gotten myself this far with everything I'm prepared to continue to have faith.
It just feels like the right time to do this, global economies not withstanding.
I had thought I was rather a sentimental person but I extracted myself from little home without shedding a tear or feeling too nostalgic, maybe I had that feeling in increments over the last year, maybe it leached out of me in short bursts rather than in one big memorable moment as I looked for the last time on my scrubbed clean and vacant flat.
There is one thing I will miss though and I made an effort to spend a little time saying good bye to it. I've talked a bit about the Preston Market in this blog, one of my favourite places to go and wander. For as long as I lived in Preston I never went longer than 2 weeks without paying it a visit.
So on the day before I was to finally move out, a Saturday, I decided to pay it one last visit.
I wanted to get out of the flat to avoid the awkwardness of the open house that had been organised by the estate agent and I had found about half a dozen empty Rewine bottles that I decided to take back. Off I trekked, clinking like an alchie on my way down to the market. Found once I got there that the Rewine people cant actually take back the bottles apparently for hygiene reasons but they agreed to reuse mine themselves and we talked about my trip for a bit. Its my main topic of conversation at the moment, it must be getting really boring for my friends.
Coffee has increasingly become the glue that holds my personality together in these busy times and there is a fantastic coffee place just in the deli section that sells coffee beans of all types either whole or ground depending on your preference, all kinds of little biscuits and the most satisfying display of Italian chocolates all wrapped up in different coloured foils.
I skulked towards the coffee place and asked them for a coffee so strong it might kill me, I have it black with 2 sugars, as strong as they can make it. Oh dear god, awesome, awesome coffee but hotter than the sun. I grabbed myself some breakfast as it cooled, a bacon roll from one of the many stalls that ring the deli section. I stood there while the cooked it fresh for me, there is one thing I have to say about the market, this may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective, certainly it results in a bit of theatre which can be fun, but in my time going there I've noticed that the market is like a magnet to every whacked out, doped up crazy bogan within a 25 mile radius on Saturday mornings and one stood next to me with his wife/ defacto/significant other next to him. “Give us a chop suey roll” he drawled at the woman behind the counter “This” she said uncertainly pointing towards an egg and bacon roll “Nah, that” that he barked waving a tobacco stained hand at about 10 things in the bain marie. “A spring roll” the counter lady asked picking one up with her tongs “Nah” he shouted “A fuckin chop suey roll”. Counter lady was lost. “A chicko roll” his female counterpart interpreted for him a little too late I thought. “Yeah yeah, a chicko roll and some chips and a coke” he said suddenly feeling grandiose. Then he began a mathematical debate with the counter lady about why she thought that $2.80, $2.20 and $3.00 in her mind made $8 while in his head and his lady friend's head they only added up to $7.
That was the point at which I decided to take my bacon roll and coffee and move down to sit in front of the flower shop to eat in peace. I drank my reviving coffee and read the menu of the take away place on the corner, Cafe Latte $2.20, cappuccino $2.20, Long/Short Black $2.20, Instant coffee $2.20. Yep, somewhere in the world they still sell instant coffee, so if you are one of the rare breed who thinks 'Coffee from a coffee machine, pah, give me instant I say' you will be welcomed with open arms at a take away place in the Preston market as long as you are armed with $2.20.

I ended up buying myself a little carry on suitcase and some of those big plastic bags for my packing and allowed myself one last indulgence of a hot jam donut from the van near the fruit and vegie section before dragging myself home for the last of my packing.

This wont be the last of my posts by any stretch of the imagination, I'll still be cooking my way around the UK and posting to you about that, I'm also posting to a travel blog for all of your non food related needs, links to follow.

Bare with me, this might be fun.

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Life, love and lessons in baking

Well the road to hell is paved with good intentions and my last post was full of them.I wanted to stop the whole sweet thing I really did, I had confined myself to baking sweet things for birthday cake orders only and was enjoying my liberation back into the world of savouries and sauces where all my cooking had begun. Then we had international food day at work.
We used to have international food day when we were in primary school, you'd bring a dish that was representative of your cultural back ground and you'd have to tell the class about it. I always felt somewhat embarrassed because John and I were the only Anglo Saxon kids who went to our primary school and everyone else always came with such fantastic things but all we had to offer was scones.
They don't seem so exotic compared to a vindaloo or goulash, this was the 80's and we were at a catholic primary school in Elwood that felt like it was still in the 50's so vindaloo's and goulash was still very much exotic, atheists were exotic, it was that kind of place.

Mercifully by the time I entered the work force the concept of international food day had simply become a device used to break up the crippling monotony of another day in the office, like lottos, quizes, or the guys who come to clean the windows on their little hydraulic platform because even though they look like paroled bank thieves and probably cant see you through the coated glass anyway, they are an oasis in the vast wasteland that is working for a corporation.
Some one will look around and sense that the morale level is low and cheerfully suggest that we all bring in a little something on a Friday and we'll all latch on to it like we've just been thrown a life line because now we have something to look forward to that isn't a fire drill or free cheap house wine and snacks at a quarterly departmental presentation.Hmm, jaded much?

There are a number of good cooks where I work, we get fantastic currys, dips, breads, I think we even had some baklava this time, but thankfully for me in the absence of a distinct cultural heritage I'm just looked upon to bring something cakey, preferably chocolate.
I use these occasions now to experiment, actually I do that pretty much anytime I'm cooking for someone now unless they're paying me for something specific, and when a food day is announced I'll usually get a couple of people coming up to me asking me what I'm going to bring in or maybe asking for something specific like the flourless nutella cupcakes I made for someone's going away but I'd been thinking of trying something brave.

I'm in a phase of my life at the moment where being brave and confronting scary things is a bit of a theme that I'm embracing, I'm about to pack up my life here and head off into the unknown for a bit of an adventure which while certainly not an indiana jones type adventure certainly feels big to me after working in a steady job for the last 7 years. I'm heading to Abu Dhabi, Sweden to stay at the icehotel and then a bunch of little trips to places like France, Spain, Italy, Norway and where ever else takes my fancy and I have enough money for. Its a deciding what to do with the next 10 years of my life trip basically, I was comfortable in my little rut for a while there but now comfortable isn't enough so instead I'm choosing the unknown.

Having opened that one door now it feels like all doors are opened so, possibly melodramatically, the occasion of deciding which cake to make for international food day is no longer just about a cake, its a metaphor for life damnit.

There has been a cake that I have wanted to try making for a good ten years or so now but I was a little intimidated by it. Ever since my Dad got cable and I watched episodes of the River Cafe and then got a copy of their cook book from a discount cook shop in Bendigo I've wanted to make The River Cafe's signature dessert, Chocolate Nemesis Cake.
What made me hesitate was a couple of things for one there is nearly 700g of chocolate in this recipe depending on which variation you chose and 10 years ago I was a struggling student sometimes forced to exist on minor acts of buffet fraud in order to survive (friends and I would go to the La Trobe Uni bar and buy one plate on all you can eat burger night and then take turns to go up and get refills till we all had a meal) so buying that much chocolate in one hit would pretty much wipe out my entire food budget till next austudy day.

The second hesitation was purely one of guts, there was a cooking technique needed for this recipe that I'd not tried before and I was at a point in my education as a cook that I can now recognise as the rather conservative, total lack of confidence phase that comes after experimenting wildly and failing miserably in the kitchen.

And so begin the metaphors, for me learning to cook has been like life in general, when I was little it was something I decided that I was going to be good at one day, when you're young and you have the luxury of time you imagine yourself being good at a great number of things but often lack the planning to figure out exactly how that is going to happen, its enough to just imagine that it will.

When you get to being a teenager you're hit by the inertia of physical and the social, your head along with the rest of your body makes you think that you know a great deal more than you really do and also that you're ready for a great deal more than you are. Society in the form of laws and some kind of parent or guardian usually steps in to remind you that you aren't as smart as you think you are bucko. At this point in my cooking career I had bought my first blow torch and abandoned recipe books as little more than food porn.

Usually what happens in life to slap you in the face during this phase is you fall in love and it all ends horribly this either causes an epiphany which after some very bad poetry, a drastic change in appearance and a couple of one night stands, serves you well for the rest of your life or alternatively you spend your remaining days playing out that relationship on other people you meet, like a serial killer of the heart, constantly seeking further refined examples of that one first love and forever wondering what went wrong. For me in my cooking history this experience involved blind baking and making my own pastry, and this ended as all tragic first loves do messily and after having done things of which I am not proud.

Whether in pastry making or love the lesson is the same, and its put best by Kenny Rodgers in his classic “The Gambler” “Know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away, know when to run”.

Heartbreak and pastry can make you cautious, and I was, so when The River Cafe recipe called for this giant rather expensive cake to be cooked entirely without flour and in a water bath I just wasn't ready to put myself out there yet. So I put it aside and I moved on, played around with other things, made some cakes with nut meals so I could get my head around the chemistry of cooking without flour until I felt like I was confident enough to tackle the Nemesis.

I was familiar with my oven, I have a bunch of great suppliers for the raw ingredents like chocolate, I had all the equipment I needed, it was time.

So off I went, I preheated my oven to 160C, got myself 675g of dark chocolate (something around 70% cocoa is good but go with what you have on hand if you cant get that) melted it with 450g of unsalted butter and then beat the christ out of 10 eggs and 675g of caster sugar till it was all light and fluffy. Then I combined the melted and slightly cooled butter and chocolate to the eggs and poured into a spring form pan that I'd lightly greased and then floured with cocoa powder instead of flour so that you don't get white marks on your cake. Insulate the tin with a layer of greaseproof paper and foil wrapped around the outside and then place the tin in a roasting tray and fill with boiling water halfway up the sides of the pan, this helps cook the cake evenly.
Bake it for about an hour or until the cake is set, you can test it by putting your hand on the surface.
Then once its set let it cool in the oven with the door ajar, this will stop the surface from cracking, I do the same thing when making cheesecakes.

I took it to work the next day and served it with crème fraiche which I find balances out the cake beautifully and it was a total hit, I even got an order for one on the spot. Apart from the expense of the chocolate and the slight intimidation of having to use the water bath and being paranoid that the cake wouldn't set without flour I had nothing to fear but fear itself.

Let this be a lesson to all of you, don't spend the next 10 years wondering, get out of that crappy relationship, quit that mindless job, bake that expensive and intimidating chocolate cake and embrace your fears.
But don't make your own pastry some things just aren't meant to be.

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Not Entirely By The Bucco

Oh its cold dear readers, colder than a witches teat. Probably shouldn’t say that, I’ll anger the pagans. You know I noticed the other day at a bookshop that there are so many books dealing wholly and solely with cupcakes that they have their own shelf, and this was a Dymocks, not a particularly cupcake centric environment. Made me think I’d gone entirely too mainstream so I vowed to make my next entry sugarless. So here I shall reveal to you the recipe I make whenever it’s cold and I’m feeling in need of bolstering. One gets bored making the same kinds of things all the time anyway, before I did the Melbourne Show generally I wouldn’t make sweet stuff, only on occasion for kids birthdays or friends or when dining guests felt the need of sugar coated comfort and requested it. I don’t want you thinking I’m all one sided or anything. I can cook stuff, really I can.

Osso Bucco or Ossobuco depending on whether you care about spelling (I consider spelling a serving suggestion rather than a rule, shocking I know) is a dish originally from the Lombardy region in Italy apparently. It seems to be traditional in regional cuisine, regardless of which region the aforementioned cuisine happens to be from, to be very pedantic about exactly how the particular dish is cooked, which is understandable. If you feel connected to something you tend to want it to be represented in what you believe to be the best way. I have never been to Lombardy and in fact wasn’t aware that this dish was from Lombardy until after I started cooking it so I have no allegiances to declare. For me it started when I was in uni and it was cold and I wanted meat but couldn’t afford much of it so it had to be cheap, I also wanted something that I could cook once and then eat for a couple of days after and so my version of Osso Bucco was born. If you are from Lombardy you may wish to look away now, I won’t apologise, it is delicious.

I think part of the relationship with food we have is the sometimes selective belief that it can heal us and make us feel better. I say selective because by that logic food that was not so nutritious should then makes us feel sick but we don’t tend to think about that so much when we’re reaching for a little of what we fancy, we nibble on the sly and hope that Mother Nature doesn’t notice. I know that if I feel seedy some lemon juice in water will always make me feel better, if I’m coming down with a cold I’ll make myself something with lemon, parsley and garlic as key ingredients and I can’t go more than 2 days without green peas. Whenever I feel a cold coming on or if I feel as though the ravages of daily life are getting on top of me I go to the butcher and get myself some shin, beef or veal either is fine, they even call it Osso Bucco so you can’t go wrong, I make sure I have some wine on hand, something halfway decent, if you can’t drink it you really shouldn’t cook with it, I mean it’s not like you have to go out and secure yourself something from Chateau Lefite but if there’s a cask of wine you have sitting under the sink that you’ve taken with you from the last three houses you’ve lived in when someone left it at your place after a party you had to celebrate the end of the second year of your arts degree and you didn’t want to drink it but you thought you could get rid of it at the next uni party you had, don’t use that. Throw it away, you’ll never drink it, no one will ever drink it, it’s the lost wine of your twenties and you can never get it back but it’s ok, your friends will get richer and leave you better wine in your thirties, you’ll feel better once you’ve moved on.

One of the next key ingredients in Osso Bucco is stock. If you have something to prove to yourself then by all means make your own stock at home, I will tell you this though, no one is impressed by you, if you have to do it because all the other stocks you find contain gluten and you have someone gluten intolerant coming to eat with you then ok but don’t get arsey about making your own stock. This is an egalitarian cooking blog, if you choose to make your own stock then good luck to you big fella but no one should feel ashamed for using the bought stuff. Get yourself some Bay leaves, these were a relatively late edition to my Osso Busso recipe but they really do make a difference I find. You can add any other type of herbs you like but generally for me I don’t like to add too much of anything, everything in this dish has its own part to play, function rather than fancy. You can cook this in any manner you wish, if you have a nice heavy casserole dish you can cook it on the stove top or in the oven but for me I tend to use my electric fry pan. Ah the electric fry pan, reminds me of my youth, for some reason my mother used ours to cook pretty much everything, the stove top was used for boiling the kettle and vegetables and the electric fry pan was used for everything else. I got one for Christmas from my dad one year and its come in very handy, it allows you to control the heat and slow cook very evenly so I’m describing this recipe on that basis but adapt it as you wish.

Heat a little olive oil in the pan, add a chopped onion and sauté until a little soft, add a little chopped garlic and then brown your beef just to get a little caramelisation happening, let’s go on the assumption that you’re cooking for between 2 and 4 people here so you have about 4 pieces of Osso Bucco. Add your red wine, I like to have a lot of sauce with my osso so I would use about 2 cups of red wine, let this bubble at a high heat for a minute or so to allow the alcohol to evaporate, I find it makes the overall result a little sweeter and more rounded. Add your beef stock, again about 2 cups and a couple of tablespoons of a good tomato paste, lower the temperature to a slow simmer, add your bay leaves at this point and leave it to simmer for at least an hour. After an hour peel some carrots nice big chunky ones and leave them in fairly good sized pieces about the size of your thumb is a good reference, throw them in and let them cook. After another hour peel some potatoes and cut them into chunks as well, I don’t use anything to thicken my sauce when I’m making this dish, I find generally I don’t need to. Osso Bucco means hollow bone, when you buy the Osso Bucco you’ll find that the big bone in the centre of the meat has this kinda creamy marrow in it that will melt into the sauce during the cooking adding to the flavour and thickening the sauce naturally, the potatoes will also assist with thickening as well depending on whether you use floury ones or waxy ones.

When making this dish so I could take a photo for you I decided to make some mashed potatoes as well coz it was particularly cold and I had a friend over to spend the night in watching Dr Who, any excuse is a good one for mashed potato. I don’t know how I became such a geek but Osso Bucco and the Dr was a good night in damnit, we also drank 3 bottles of wine so maybe that helped. One little trick I’ve found with the mash though is that if you heat the milk and butter before adding it to the potatoes it makes them so much creamier. After about 45 mins poke your potatoes with a sharp knife to test them, once the potatoes are ready you’re pretty much close to the end. About 5 mins before I serve I add green peas, oh I love peas sometimes I have them for dinner all on their own, if there is a dish in existence that cannot be improved by the addition of peas then I don’t want to eat it sir. I also make a little gremolata at this point, which basically for me is just lemon zest and parsley finely chopped. Traditionally this would also include garlic and anchovies and if you want to go for that you certainly can, for me particularly if I’m feeling a smidge fragile the combination of the raw galic and anchovy is a little much for me where as the Osso Bucco itself is hearty and sustaining and the parsley and lemon curbs it from being too rich and stodgy. To continue the festival of carbohydrates some crusty bread is nice to go with this dish, it does improve in flavour the next day as well which is what makes this one such a winner. If you happen to get drunk drinking your wine and eating your Bucco the night before and get up the next day wondering if it really was that delicious or if you just had drunken taste buds it’s nice to get a little boost when you try it again and have your dreams realised all over. Make it and share it around, it will be the making of you and your loved ones.

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Gluten Free Tardis

There are so many good things about the recipe that I’m about to give you that I can’t even begin to start this post by focusing on only one. It’s chocolaty, which according to my brother John is the only way to do dessert. Its gluten free, which seems to be an increasing issue now days as people become more sensitive to the environment around them and it’s the most flexible recipe I think I’ve ever found, it’s the tardis of recipes.
This is hands down the most requested recipe I have, I have never once served it to anyone without them asking me for a copy, to have kept it away from you for so long almost makes me think I’ve been holding out. No longer gentle reader, here it is in all its glory.
I stumbled across this recipe originally some years ago when someone asked me for a flourless chocolate cake. When I’m looking for a recipe I want the least amount of ingredients I can get away with, you don’t want to have to go out and buy a heap of things and the less ingredients usually means that you can make it pretty quickly which is handy sometimes if you need to make something during the week. I tend to pare back recipes in any case to kind of tailor them to my own taste.
Normally I’d give you the recipe at the end but this has been an evolutionary kind of recipe so here is the recipe I started with.
Preheat your oven to 180 C and then in a heatproof bowl over simmering water melt 185 g of dark chocolate and 125 g of butter. Beat 5 egg whites and 1/3 cup of sugar until stiff peaks form. Beat the yolks with 2/3 cups of sugar until pale and creamy and then combine the melted chocolate and butter. Fold in 250g of ground almonds. By this point the mixture will be pretty stiff, start to combine the egg whites, the first spoonful will be to loosen the mix then the rest should be folded in gently.
I bake nearly all my cakes in spring form pans essentially because I don’t have any more room for extra kitchen stuff, I’m packed to the rafters with kitchen stuff, and for this recipe you’ll use a 22cm springform pan, line it even if it’s a non stick pan it’s just nice to have the extra insurance.
Spoon your mix into the pan and then bake for about 45 mins, check after about 30 mins because these things often depend on your oven.
I tend not to decorate these beyond a little icing sugar and maybe some berries because the cake speaks for itself but you knock yourself out.
So that was the first stage, I took it to work for my friend’s birthday, everyone oohed and ahhed and I sent out the recipe to a couple of people. I really liked the result so I started to play.
I hadn’t cooked with nut meals before so I started trying those out; I made a version of the cake using the same amount of hazelnut meal and milk chocolate. I love hazelnut, not a fan of nuts generally but hazelnuts have snuck in there anyway, to be honest it was probably nuttella and that was what this version of the cake tasted like, nuttella in cake form. Delicious.
Then for my brother I decided to make a white chocolate version because he loves white chocolate, I cook a lot with the kids when I go over there so for one of Jacks birthdays I made a white chocolate and orange version using the same amount of white chocolate, ½ a cup less sugar and the zest and juice of an orange. Again it turned out really well. Because the texture of the cake is so dense it’s an easy one to cook in ovens that you’re not familiar with or are less reliable, densely textured cakes can hide a multitude of sins that something light like a sponge cake would reveal instantly. Dense cakes are like old friends, welcome at parties and they never tell your secrets. Sponge cakes are like the popular kids in high school, the idea of having them is delicious but they would turn on you in heartbeat.
There are only so many cakes you can make though and one wintery evening I had occasion to come up with a hot pudding. I think I may have been watching a documentary on volcanoes or something but I decided that I wanted to come up with something textural and a little soufflé like so I took the original recipe but took out 2 of the egg yolks and was a lot gentler when combining the whites to retain as much of the air as I could. Then I spooned the mix into 4 ramekins and at the centre of each one placed a couple of squares of whatever chocolate I was using and baked for about 30 mins at 180 C. When they cooked the mixture soufled up and the chocolate melts in the centre forming a magma like pool so that when you crack the surface with your teaspoon it crumbles down into this dark pool of chocolate. A soufflé for those that can’t eat wheat.
As usual I’ve also done a cupcake version, the same recipe but with a tablespoon and a half of honey, the inclusion of honey will make cakes retain a little more moisture so this makes for a tender and decadent little cupcake and that is the picture that you’re getting with this post though I will be taking pictures of the chocolate volcano as well because I think you really have to see that.
Enjoy and make them in good health.
Oh I also included a picture of some cupcakes I made for my friend Ally’s 30th just cos I felt like showing off, they were gluten free as well, it’s a tenuous link because it’s mostly about the showing off, and they look pretty damn it.

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Progress through pancakes

There are points in ones life where you have traveled far enough down a particular road to be able to make something which tangibly demonstrates progress.
For some that may be babies, a house, winning a gold medal but in the humble world of this cook it is the pancake.
Not just any pancake mind you but a mother fluffy pancake, the kind of pancake that if making pancakes was an Olympic sport these are the ones that the Chinese and East Germans would come up with. These are pancakes that beg to be drug tested.
But let’s begin at the beginning, as a young kid who is interested in cooking there are really only a couple of things one can reliably attempt on their own without risking life, limb or property, the allure of whisking things and cracking eggs make pancakes an attractive childhood recipe, they certainly were for me. Both my parents worked so on summer holidays or late at night when parents assumed we were asleep I would try and make pancakes for my brother and I. John liked them thin like crepes and so did I generally because, never being able to remember exactly how to make pancakes, not having actually been given a recipe I’d always struggle to remember exactly how much of everything should go in them. Was is plain flour or self raising? How many eggs should I use? How much milk? Do I really need sugar? Sometimes I would crack it and make at least edible pancakes that would pass muster with the brother. Though more and more I’m convinced that his pleas of “No you make them yours are good” were just because he was too lazy to make them himself much like the time he emotionally blackmailed me into sewing on his cub scout badges one Wednesday morning by looking sad and mournfully entreating “But all the other mothers do it” I’m 11 months younger than he is so that never should have worked but what can I say, I’m a sucker for a quivering bottom lip. I do remember horrible pancakes that I’d made though, pancakes so heavy you could have used them to retread mining trucks, pancakes that cracked and bounced like paper pulp when you tried to fold them over.
There seems to be a two party divide when it comes to pancakes as there is in a number of elements in life, left or right, scrunch or fold, cat or dog, thick or thin.
People seem to be very loyal to their breed of pancake, those who favor thin look at you like you’ve just admitted to marrying your midget, hermaphrodite first cousin from Omaha if you align yourself with the thicker pancake. I asked a number of people for their preferences in order to come up with some kind of refined egalitarian pancake that would appeal to everybody and came to the conclusion that the problem that those in the thin camp had with thick pancakes were that they were often inordinately heavy, there is such a thing as too much pancake so I needed to find a way of encompassing the fluffiness of the thick pancake with the lightness of the thin. There was one tip I got a while back that seemed to work and that was lemonade, instead of using milk in the batter lemonade gave you both lift and a certain amount of sweetness which seemed to be successful when tested on willing lab rats at the time but it still wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
What finally cracked it for me though was a trip to little B &B at the foot of Mount Macedon one weekend with my sister in law and the kids. It was a gorgeous little place, open fire, quiet gardens, chicken coop that the kids would obsessively check for eggs, exactly the kind of place I’d love to run myself one day. My sister in law had the bacon and eggy type breakfast with all the usual accoutrements, me not being a fan of eggs I tend to miss out on the whole full breakfast ritual so the kids and I had pancakes instead.
There are rare but blessed occasions where I’ve had meals that were a revelation to me, the first time I had Kangaroo at the now defunct Bistro Inferno on Brunswick street in the 90’s, the first time I had kippers when I was three, the pea puree and soufflé at Bistro Vue, these pancakes now enter into this category. But first a moment on the bacon that came with them, a happily unexpected bonus as though god himself came down and said “Here’s a treat, you’re doin ok kid”.
I’ve gone on about bacon before, its one of the main things that prevents me from being vegetarian, I thought I’d found some damn fine bacon and had been putting myself through the emotional rigors of the polish deli for a number of years in order to get it, now I feel as if all that was wasted time, like finally breaking out of a volatile relationship my eyes have been opened and I just cant go back there now. I have resigned myself to living with the prospect of infrequent bacon at least until I can ingratiate myself to the owner and find out who she buys it from.
Now to the pancakes, they were cheerily yellow from the free range eggs that the kids had been scaring out of the chickens for the last 20 mins, just a little crispy on the edges and soft and fluffy like soufflé on the inside.
The secret, egg whites, that’s it, egg whites, separate your eggs and beat the whites then fold them in to the rest of the mix at the end. Why hadn’t I thought of this before.
I had to come up with a recipe quick to restore my dignity. And so I did and now I will post it below for you to appropriate as you wish, if you already knew about this, you’ve been holding out on me and I am deeply displeased with you, for those of you that didn’t enjoy them in good health. I served mine with a burnt caramel ice cream that I’d found an old milk bar recipe for and though I would make for a friend who likes caramel but cant eat it because the commercial ones have gluten in them, its very easy to make and beautifully rich.

Mother Fluffy Pancakes (Makes about 8 medium sized pancakes)

1 cup plan flour, if your making gluten free ones as I have you can use the same quantity of self raising gluten free flour.
1 cup buttermilk,
2 egg yolks and 3 egg whites
Half a cup of caster sugar

Separate the egg whites from the yolks and add about half of the quantity of sugar. Beat til stuff peaks form then mix the yolks, buttermilk, flour and remaining sugar until smooth and then fold in the egg whites. Heat a fry pan on a low to medium heat with a little butter and then ladle in the mix, the mix is fairly velvety due to the egg whites so it wont spread out in the pan at all but because they stay really high and fluffy you really only need one ladle and want to keep them small. Usually the way to tell if a pancake is cooked is by seeing airbubbles form on the uncooked surface of the pancakes but you wont see that so much with these ones you want them to be a little soft like soufflés in the middle so look instead for the edges of the pancake to get golden or shake the pan a little when the pancake moves freely on the surface then its cooked on the bottom and you can flip it. I haven’t included spices in this recipe though I normally use vanilla, this is up to you. Try cinnamon or nutmeg or anything you’d like really. Serve immediately.

Burnt Caramel Ice Cream

2/3 cup of caster sugar
1 cup milk
1 cup thin cream
6 egg yolks

Melt the sugar in a heavy bottomed saucepan until it turns a dark gold colour, take it off the heat and gradually stir in the milk and cream. The caramel will get hard and at this point it will all seem like a horrible mess and you will curse me as you wonder how you will ever get your sauce pan clean but take it back to the heat, just a medium heat, and stir and you’ll find that the caramel will melt again into the milk and cream and everything will be fine, trust me. Whisk the egg yolks in a heat proof bowl until pale and then stir in the hot caramel milk mixture a little at a time otherwise you will scramble the eggs. Pour everything back into the sauce pan and heat over a low flame until the custard coats the back of a spoon. Strain the mix and let cool, if you’ve got an ice cream maker then you just follow the manufacturers directions to make the ice cream otherwise put into a covered container and place in the freezer, after a few hours take out and break it up with a fork or electric mixer if your feeling slack. Put back in the freezer and freeze again for another few hours then do the same thing all over again. You know you can probably get an ice cream maker from the good guys for like $30 bucks, they even make shrek ones now. After you’ve done your freezy frezzy beat up thing for the second time put it back in the freezer for another 8 hours until the ice cream is firm. Really, its $30 bucks and you get ice cream in like 20 mins, they’re fantastic things you can even make sorbet.

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The Worlds Oldest Profession

And so I have a confession, not something I’m proud of though nor am I ashamed, at some point necessity and the seductive lure of the demon dollar strikes us all. It all started around Christmas, Livvy needed a pink tea set and Jack needed lego, always with the lego and when I was asked it all seemed so innocent, how bout doin’ something Christmassy for me luv? And so I did, and then there were birthdays, and more birthdays and now I’m in and I don’t know if I’ll ever get out again.
Ladies and Gentleman, I’ve been making cakes for money, yes that’s right, I’m a cake whore. This all started really because I was bringing in my practice cakes that I was making for the show to work and people kept telling me to sell them. Since the show ended I haven’t stopped despite my determinations and now it’s a freakin cottage industry. Not that I’m complaining mind, thought this was never something I’d seen myself doing there’s a reason I’ve kept doing it. It’s like painting but with icing and I kinda like the idea of making temporary art, I realize that might sound somewhat pretentious but I have to say honestly I really don’t care, it is a kind of art and the fact that its fleeting makes me feel more willing to try different things with it because I know that there will always be another chance to try again.
It’s an entirely different and less forgiving branch of cooking requiring me to be more focused on what I’m doing, certainly in the preparation of things. There’s a little amount of leeway sure but ultimately you have to follow a recipe, experimentation really only works when you know the rules as far as sweet baking goes. What I really get out of it though is the decoration, I got myself a bunch of Wiltons colour gels so it really does feel like mixing up paint and I’ve broken myself of my fear of the piping bag thought I still need a bunch more practice, I have all my little decorating accoutrements collected in a box that I can just take out and delve into whenever a project comes up.
I’ve got a few little girls birthdays coming up but the next big one is an Alice in Wonderland themed party for a 31st which I’m really looking forward to. Recipes and photos will follow there I can assure you.
I promise I’ll be posting again shortly because I’m working on something at the moment and you don’t really get a recipe out of this one because I’ve given you my cake recipe before but you will get photos, lots of photos, one of which is of my darling niece Kate who turned one recently and no recipe could top that surely.

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The show must go on

So it’s been a while huh. I’m noticing there’s a pattern with these blogs where I always open them with an apology for my absence. No ones reading anyway so screw it.


I have been a baking machine. Ever since I decided that I was entering the show every weekend was devoted to testing out different recipes, different flavours, decorations and icing. Everywhere I went I foisted cupcakes on unsuspecting friends and work colleagues. It started with the Crabapple bakery cookbook, I tried their vanilla cupcake recipe and it was pretty damn good, though I have to admit that I found their quantities gargantuan. I’ve yet to get to try one of their cupcakes but I can only assume that they must be at least half icing because their butter cream icing recipe stated that it was enough to ice 24 cupcakes but for me it always seemed enough for at least 48.
Then I discovered Cake Deco in flinders arcade in the city, dear god I could bankrupt myself in there. They have stuff you would never even have thought existed for cakes.
All kinds of decorating equipment, different shaped tins and a million different sugar decorations. I shied away from the sugar decorations thinking that, although the rules didn’t stipulate it the spirit of the competition would kind of frown on commercial decorations.
I made the usual leap from vanilla to chocolate but thought they were a little boring so tried Musk and Rose flavorings. They were surprising and did well with the work mates who divided pretty equally in terms of which were their favorite. Personally I favored the musk, which was a turn around on 24 years of having an aversion to it after my grandmother, who had dementia, bombarded us with musk lollies as kids, you remember those musk necklaces and watches that you used to be able to get at milk bars, she gave us millions of those and for years I could just never look at a musk lolly but in cupcake form they come up pretty well.
It was around this point that I started to hate cupcakes and began dreading having to make them, but make them I must.
After finding the rose and musk flavours a little too cloying and sweet I decided to try for something fruity so passion fruit was the next experiment, passion fruit icing is always popular but a little tip, don’t try to make passion fruit butter cream icing, for some reason it tastes kinda creepy. All along I was experimenting with what would make for the perfect texture. I tried using egg whites instead of whole eggs, altering the creaming time for the butter and sugar, different flours and raising agents. I found a really good brand of flour that was milled extra fine for things like sponges and played around with it for a while but in the end it made the cakes too light, great for a sponge but I think cupcakes need to be a little firmer in texture so that you can take the paper case off them without them falling to crumbs in your hand.
After so much sweetness I wanted something a little lighter in flavour for my cupcakes so for flavoring I decided in the end to go with Orange blossom, by this point it was a month away from competition and I just had to pick something so Orange blossom it was. Don’t let my cavalier tone sway you though they were damn delicious.
Instead of using self raising flour I decided to go back to plain and amended an old recipe I had for red velvet cake, it used butter milk and a mixture of 1 teaspoon of baking soda and 1 of white vinegar as the raising agent which gave the cakes a faint tartness that worked really well with the orange blossom flavour.
Thanks to global warming the season for Blood Oranges was a month early this year so I decided to try and use them where I could and used the juice in the icing and the peel for decoration, this worked well but got stupidly expensive so I went back to plan organic navel oranges.
At this point I just could face those freakin’ little cakes anymore, I was supposed to be tasting them but all I could manage was a bite before throwing the rest away, just too too much sweet thing. I never thought I would say it but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Everyone else seemed to look forward to them though, particularly everyone at work, friends kinda rolled their eyes, I’m referring to you Scott Gooding, but work colleagues flocked to my desk on Mondays to try out the latest test batches, half the time I wouldn’t even get to send out an email saying that there were cupcakes on my desk before I’d turn around and there would be a flock of Optus employees crowded round me like they were seagulls and I had chips, I think next time I do this I’ll demand that at least one of them pretend to have only one leg and squawk as I throw them the cakes.
Shortly before the competition I realized I was useless with a piping bag and panicked a little, I’d made so many cupcakes that I couldn’t remember what it was that I was supposed to be doing anymore and had a tiny little ‘my cupcakes are horrible I’m going to my room and never coming out and you cant make me’ tanty, but I maintained my dignity and internalized it like all good Anglo Saxons.
I broke out the piping bag and practiced til I could make the perfect rosettes.
All seemed promising until the day of competition; I awoke early and was driven to the show grounds by my self appointed manager. I had a slight freak out as we drew near and began to make pitiful whining sounds but my manger slapped me like a drunken stage mother and I got over it. The nice arts and crafts people let me put my entries in early and kindly cooed at them and said they were pretty which gave me hope. I totally advise if you’re ever planning to go to the show go as early as you possibly can, its great without all the bogans and screaming children around. I got tired of carrying around the remaining cupcakes as there were only 5 required for competition and so started offering the remainders to stall holders, there was a guy selling kites who happily took some for him and his son but I tried to offer one to a security guard and he wasn’t so forthcoming, bastard, why doesn’t he get a real job.
We killed time wandering around parents island, a collection of gourmet food and liquor stalls and told absolutely everyone that I came into contact with that I was entered in the cupcake competition. Judging was at about 11:30 so we headed back to hear the verdict but got side tracked by these clever women making sugar flowers.
I never got to hear my cupcakes being judged but I can tell you that I didn’t win this time.
I asked the judge for feedback but she didn’t really have anything specific, just that they were good and to try again next year. Personally I think they wanted vanilla, because every other entry was vanilla, I was the only crazy person who tried to flavour them.
I am totally doing this next year though, it might sound a little odd but there is a lot of fun to be had in baking for the royal show, I’m diversifying next year though, I’m going for cupcakes, sponge and mudcake. Cupcakes coz I’m determined to win something now, sponge coz I’m a masochist and mud cake coz there were very few entries in that section and sometimes winning by default is the sweetest victory.
A big thanks to all the friends and family that were guinea pigs and gave me feedback and to all the friends who came to the show and made me feel better by saying supportive things like “You wuz robbed mate”. And thanks also to Rob, the self appointed manager who tested every batch and became quite the connoisseur.
Despite vowing to never make cupcakes again I’ve been suckered into it repeatedly, when I think about it too much it feels like I’ve been sucked into some tiny cake version of hell.
But don’t let me dissuade you from trying to make them, knock yourself out, treat it like doing drugs though, make sure you have a sober friend, drink lots of water and when it stops being fun its time to give it a rest.

Orange Blossom Cupcakes.
Makes 24.

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C, here’s a little tip, get yourself an oven thermometer they’re much more trust worthy than the dial on your oven and you’d be surprised how much the oven temperature differs particularly when you are cooking in a crappy oven in a rented apartment like mine.
Cream together ½ a cup of soft butter and 1 ½ cups of caster sugar either in a stand mixer or with an electric hand held mixer for about 5 minutes on a high speed, if you want to get crafty you can experiment and find the best amount of time for you as the creaming stage is kinda crucial to the overall result of the cupcakes.
Add 2 large eggs one at a time waiting a little bit between each addition to allow the eggs to combine with the butter and sugar, let your eggs get to room temperature before you add them as well as I found this seemed to improve the texture somewhat.
Turn down the speed of your mixture to low and start to add 2 ¼ cups of plain sifted flour in batches of about 4 so that the texture of the mix remains even and you don’t get lumps, alternate the additions of flour with splashes of buttermilk, you’ll add 1 cup of buttermilk in total, you don’t want to beat the mix too much at this point or the gluten in the flour will start to toughen the mix so you can do this part by hand if you’re worried about that.
Add a teaspoon of vanilla essence and 4 tablespoons of Orange blossom water that you can get from pretty much any deli now if not in a darkened corner of your supermarket.
In a small bowl combine 1 teaspoon of baking soda with a teaspoon of vinegar, it’ll fizz up and then you’ll fold it into the mix, this lightens the texture of the cake and is the raising agent. Spoon into paper cases and bake in the oven for about half an hour or until the cakes are golden and a skewer inserted into the center comes out cleanly.
Decorate and enjoy.

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