Ever notice that I seem to be spending a lot of time apologizing for not cooking and not blogging? I hate to say that you had better get used to it.
What is the worst thing that could happen to someone planning what is essentially a baking marathon? Well I could lose my creaming arm in a horrible accident. I could develop a sudden gluten, egg and dairy allergy. I could turn vegan. Well none of those things has happened but my oven has broken down. I’m hoping it isn’t terminal.
In the mean time, not that I have been home much at all, but I have managed to turn out quite a nice plate of pikelets for morning tea today. There is something very satisfying about pikelets and so much easier than pancakes which I always seem to have a problem with.
Isn’t it strange how you can have a nemesis food? Pancakes almost never turn out right for me, and mayonnaise – don’t even start me on that. I know how to make it, I know exactly how it works, I can spend half an hour slowly drizzling oil in and it still splits. One day I’ll crack it, maybe.
Anyway, seeing how unproductive I’ve been I think I deserve a break. I’m off for a week or so but my groaning tomato plants and the fruit getting cheaper in the shops is signaling to me that my time of lethargy will soon have to be at an end.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Atonement
I have been a very bad blogger. I have been a very very bad blogger. It has over a week since my last post – and I have been in the kitchen – and I haven’t blogged. I feel very bad about it – all I can do is ask for forgiveness. That and actually catch up…
So since I last put an effort in what has happened? Well I finished off the pickled onions (in three types of vinegar no less). I did leave them in the brine for 24 hours more than the recipe stated but when you get home at 9.30pm it’s really not a great idea to finish pickling your onions. I’m not about to let pickled onions get in the way of my social life.
So anyway I think I like pickling onions – perhaps given that I didn’t have to peel them – there is quite a sense of satisfaction in this jam and pickle-making thing, I could almost get used to it. In saying that I have quite a few recipes that require really quite large quantities of plums, apricots, peaches, gooseberries, cape gooseberries, lemons, tomatoes and almost every other fruit mentionable – if anyone out there in Auckland has an overly productive garden I think I’ll be running a very convenient fruit for preserves swap business over the next 10 months or so. In other words HELP.
So back to the baking, because lets face it, that’s what Edmonds is all about isn’t it. Last week we had a family BBQ and unsurprisingly I was asked to provide dessert. With there being 20 people I decided to make 3 desserts – chocolate log with mock cream (2) filling, lemon meringue pie and a strawberry shortcake. I also took control of the BBQ, there will be no Men absent mindedly flipping the meat and overcooking it while I'm in control of the tongs.
Chocolate log – now this was my first journey into the world of sponge roll type baking – and it was surprisingly easy. I managed to obtain my Grandmothers sponge roll tin – it’s from at least 1966 and says “Sponge roll tin” on it so it is guaranteed to be the right size. Sponge making always has a slight air of tempting disaster, especially with my small tendency towards not reading a recipe all the way through. Now at least this time when I got to the point where it told me to pour the mixture into the tin and I looked at the mixture and it wasn’t brown, I had the good sense to realise I had missed out an ingredient – I’m getting better at this huh! So anyway I had to add the cocoa when the sponge REALLY didn’t need any additional mixing but it turned out fine, in fact it was great.
Mock Cream (2) – For some reason I felt like chocolate log needed mock cream rather than real cream. I really didn’t think this one was going to work – butter, sugar and boiling water and beat. I put it all in the bowl, turned the mixture on and nothing happened – well something happened, the beaters went around and half the mix flew out of the bowl but in terms of turning into something that looked like mock cream nothing happened. It was like this for three minutes. At this point I gave up and turned around and started some other vital cooking procedure and when I turned back –et voila – it looked like whipped cream. I swear there are little mock cream fairies out there that make that happen. I also added a little vanilla paste – not very Edmonds at all I afraid but it didn’t taste half bad.
The whole chocolate log was assembled with no issues. I didn’t manage to pipe the chocolate icing on the outside to look like bark. I do feel Edmonds down a little here. If I do reach the level of insanity where I start redoing recipes… let’s just hope I don’t get there.
Lemon meringue pie – before there was lemon meringue pie there was sweet short-crust pastry. I did make this in the food processor – every now and then a girl has to sacrifice some moral standards and if the depth of my depravity is using a food processor once in a while, well, I think I can live with that. I did go a little too short on the water so it was very crumbly and rather challenging to transfer to the pie plate. I did manage though; I am quite the legend these days after all.
Well sometimes. I made the filling for the pie – lemon, cornflour, sugar, eggs – the usual. I did think to myself – this is a little runny, I’m not sure that this is going to set. I was right. Sometimes, but only very very rarely, I don’t like being right. So what did I do? I tipped the still liquid (after 30 minutes baking) filling down the drain and made the one from the Donna Hay book that doesn’t require cooking. Disaster averted but one black mark against Edmonds…
Strawberry Shortcake - Sometimes things from 1966 are just really really small. There is a high usage of 6” sandwich tins. 6”. Really. Now I know our portion sizes have gone through the roof but that is just truly ridiculous. Anyway, I digress, again, and with this much writing I can’t afford to indulge myself. So the strawberry shortcake is basically two six inch scones with cream and strawberries in between – I’d love to tell you how it was but I was near the end of the dessert queue and unsurprisingly the shortcake didn’t make it past the first couple of servings!
And that is me all caught up – there hasn’t been any baking in the past week because it has just been too damn hot! I see the first drops of rain falling outside, lets hope that we get some reprieve from the heat so that the baking can recommence.
So since I last put an effort in what has happened? Well I finished off the pickled onions (in three types of vinegar no less). I did leave them in the brine for 24 hours more than the recipe stated but when you get home at 9.30pm it’s really not a great idea to finish pickling your onions. I’m not about to let pickled onions get in the way of my social life.
So anyway I think I like pickling onions – perhaps given that I didn’t have to peel them – there is quite a sense of satisfaction in this jam and pickle-making thing, I could almost get used to it. In saying that I have quite a few recipes that require really quite large quantities of plums, apricots, peaches, gooseberries, cape gooseberries, lemons, tomatoes and almost every other fruit mentionable – if anyone out there in Auckland has an overly productive garden I think I’ll be running a very convenient fruit for preserves swap business over the next 10 months or so. In other words HELP.
So back to the baking, because lets face it, that’s what Edmonds is all about isn’t it. Last week we had a family BBQ and unsurprisingly I was asked to provide dessert. With there being 20 people I decided to make 3 desserts – chocolate log with mock cream (2) filling, lemon meringue pie and a strawberry shortcake. I also took control of the BBQ, there will be no Men absent mindedly flipping the meat and overcooking it while I'm in control of the tongs.
Chocolate log – now this was my first journey into the world of sponge roll type baking – and it was surprisingly easy. I managed to obtain my Grandmothers sponge roll tin – it’s from at least 1966 and says “Sponge roll tin” on it so it is guaranteed to be the right size. Sponge making always has a slight air of tempting disaster, especially with my small tendency towards not reading a recipe all the way through. Now at least this time when I got to the point where it told me to pour the mixture into the tin and I looked at the mixture and it wasn’t brown, I had the good sense to realise I had missed out an ingredient – I’m getting better at this huh! So anyway I had to add the cocoa when the sponge REALLY didn’t need any additional mixing but it turned out fine, in fact it was great.
Mock Cream (2) – For some reason I felt like chocolate log needed mock cream rather than real cream. I really didn’t think this one was going to work – butter, sugar and boiling water and beat. I put it all in the bowl, turned the mixture on and nothing happened – well something happened, the beaters went around and half the mix flew out of the bowl but in terms of turning into something that looked like mock cream nothing happened. It was like this for three minutes. At this point I gave up and turned around and started some other vital cooking procedure and when I turned back –et voila – it looked like whipped cream. I swear there are little mock cream fairies out there that make that happen. I also added a little vanilla paste – not very Edmonds at all I afraid but it didn’t taste half bad.
The whole chocolate log was assembled with no issues. I didn’t manage to pipe the chocolate icing on the outside to look like bark. I do feel Edmonds down a little here. If I do reach the level of insanity where I start redoing recipes… let’s just hope I don’t get there.
Lemon meringue pie – before there was lemon meringue pie there was sweet short-crust pastry. I did make this in the food processor – every now and then a girl has to sacrifice some moral standards and if the depth of my depravity is using a food processor once in a while, well, I think I can live with that. I did go a little too short on the water so it was very crumbly and rather challenging to transfer to the pie plate. I did manage though; I am quite the legend these days after all.
Well sometimes. I made the filling for the pie – lemon, cornflour, sugar, eggs – the usual. I did think to myself – this is a little runny, I’m not sure that this is going to set. I was right. Sometimes, but only very very rarely, I don’t like being right. So what did I do? I tipped the still liquid (after 30 minutes baking) filling down the drain and made the one from the Donna Hay book that doesn’t require cooking. Disaster averted but one black mark against Edmonds…
Strawberry Shortcake - Sometimes things from 1966 are just really really small. There is a high usage of 6” sandwich tins. 6”. Really. Now I know our portion sizes have gone through the roof but that is just truly ridiculous. Anyway, I digress, again, and with this much writing I can’t afford to indulge myself. So the strawberry shortcake is basically two six inch scones with cream and strawberries in between – I’d love to tell you how it was but I was near the end of the dessert queue and unsurprisingly the shortcake didn’t make it past the first couple of servings!
And that is me all caught up – there hasn’t been any baking in the past week because it has just been too damn hot! I see the first drops of rain falling outside, lets hope that we get some reprieve from the heat so that the baking can recommence.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The Comeback
I feel like a paragon of virtue. 4 recipes in one night. If I was a man I would be THE man.
And no disasters! Fantastic!
Hokey pokey biscuits – I have just learned, since bringing these into the office this morning, that Hokey Pokey biscuits are quite a well renowned thing. And here is me never having heard of them before. I feel shamed.
Anyway, this seems like quite a good recipe – the mixture was a little soft – probably as a result of the 40C temperature in the kitchen, possibly as a result of me getting confused between tea cups and breakfast cups and so only putting 3/4C instead of a 1C of flour. I added more flour until I got to the right consistency and put the dough in the freezer before I rolled it into balls.
I did manage to put them in the oven and then forget about them – just remembering about them when they were perfectly cooked. You might think it’s luck, I’m going to call it skill. (That's them in the foreground, spice cake in the background)
Pickled onions – pickled onions may be the first
thing that is cheaper to make rather than buy. The Husband is a HUGE pickled onion fan. I’m not so sure this is a good thing. He surprisingly was quite happy to peel all the onions, I was very happy to hand that job over! All the onions are now in a bucket on the kitchen floor soaking in their brine, ready for bottling tonight.
Coffee cake – coffee sponge basically. Seemed to go fairly well, did require the beating separately of yolks and whites which I’m not a big fan of but I’ll survive. Came out as two thinish layers – I always seem to want the layers to be thicker than they turn out. I think I have bakery envy.This was sandwiched together with coffee icing. Turns out I’m not a big fan of coffee icing – it’s a beaten icing but I was expecting something entirely more fluffy and fantastic. It was barely enough to fill and cover the cake.
So all in all a rather productive night, now all we have to do is eat it all!
And no disasters! Fantastic!
Hokey pokey biscuits – I have just learned, since bringing these into the office this morning, that Hokey Pokey biscuits are quite a well renowned thing. And here is me never having heard of them before. I feel shamed.
Anyway, this seems like quite a good recipe – the mixture was a little soft – probably as a result of the 40C temperature in the kitchen, possibly as a result of me getting confused between tea cups and breakfast cups and so only putting 3/4C instead of a 1C of flour. I added more flour until I got to the right consistency and put the dough in the freezer before I rolled it into balls.
I did manage to put them in the oven and then forget about them – just remembering about them when they were perfectly cooked. You might think it’s luck, I’m going to call it skill. (That's them in the foreground, spice cake in the background)
Pickled onions – pickled onions may be the first
thing that is cheaper to make rather than buy. The Husband is a HUGE pickled onion fan. I’m not so sure this is a good thing. He surprisingly was quite happy to peel all the onions, I was very happy to hand that job over! All the onions are now in a bucket on the kitchen floor soaking in their brine, ready for bottling tonight.Coffee cake – coffee sponge basically. Seemed to go fairly well, did require the beating separately of yolks and whites which I’m not a big fan of but I’ll survive. Came out as two thinish layers – I always seem to want the layers to be thicker than they turn out. I think I have bakery envy.This was sandwiched together with coffee icing. Turns out I’m not a big fan of coffee icing – it’s a beaten icing but I was expecting something entirely more fluffy and fantastic. It was barely enough to fill and cover the cake.
So all in all a rather productive night, now all we have to do is eat it all!
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Baking Purgatory
Some days I think I shouldn’t be let near a kitchen without supervision. About ¾ of the way through cooking dinner last night I decided that I should really do some baking. Leafing through I found ”spice cake” which fitted my criteria – no creaming, no cutting out etc. Fantastic. Or so I thought.
Step 1 - boil water sugar, butter, raisins and spices together for 2 minutes. Now naturally I hadn’t actually measured out all of the ingredients first and put them in the saucepan so I measured out the water, that boiled while I was measuring out the sugar, added it to the saucepan, that boiled while I measured out the butter, added that to the saucepan, that boiled while I measured out the raisins – you are getting the picture here right? I figured it was probably the raisins that needed 2 minutes rather than the rest so I waited until they had been in for about 2 minutes before I took the pan of the heat.
Meanwhile I thought I would measure out the flour and baking powder. Now in my defence the recipe required 4 heaped teaspoons of baking powder – that is one hell of a lot of baking powder. And naturally I didn’t have this much baking powder. And the stir fried vegetables were turning a rather unhealthy shade of olive. So – I thought to myself – the only thing that will change if I leave it sitting is the raisins, so if I drain off the raisins and then recombine the whole lot later (after I’ve been and bought replacement baking powder) everything will be fine. I served up dinner – the husband was charitable enough not to mention the state of the vegetables, or more likely, he didn’t notice – and then raced off to the shops and bought the baking powder.
Now this, this is the really good moment.
As I was standing at the checkout I remembered the 2 boxes of baking powder one of the girls at work had given me when she shifted house. For some reason I had it in my head that it was baking soda. It turned out to be baking powder.
Now you might have thought that at this point I would have reached the peak of my incompetence. You’d be wrong.
After I got home and looked despairingly at my 3 boxes of baking powder I thought I should really reboil my raisins in the syrup to take me back to where I would have been. Done. Read the next step – when the mixture is cool add to the sifted dry ingredients. WHAT! I was actually supposed to boil the whole lot up and then leave it to cool. And now I’ve just reheated it. I could have cried, but I didn’t. I waited until the mixture was not skin-searingly hot any more and then added it to the dry ingredients. The whole thing foamed up to quite amazing proportions. That was possibly why I was supposed to leave it to cool. I was no longer in a mood to care.
I tipped the mix into a shallow tin (again, no measurements) and baked for an hour, which I thought sounded like an excessively long time but it did actually take that long. No I didn’t taste it, but it had better be damn good!
Step 1 - boil water sugar, butter, raisins and spices together for 2 minutes. Now naturally I hadn’t actually measured out all of the ingredients first and put them in the saucepan so I measured out the water, that boiled while I was measuring out the sugar, added it to the saucepan, that boiled while I measured out the butter, added that to the saucepan, that boiled while I measured out the raisins – you are getting the picture here right? I figured it was probably the raisins that needed 2 minutes rather than the rest so I waited until they had been in for about 2 minutes before I took the pan of the heat.
Meanwhile I thought I would measure out the flour and baking powder. Now in my defence the recipe required 4 heaped teaspoons of baking powder – that is one hell of a lot of baking powder. And naturally I didn’t have this much baking powder. And the stir fried vegetables were turning a rather unhealthy shade of olive. So – I thought to myself – the only thing that will change if I leave it sitting is the raisins, so if I drain off the raisins and then recombine the whole lot later (after I’ve been and bought replacement baking powder) everything will be fine. I served up dinner – the husband was charitable enough not to mention the state of the vegetables, or more likely, he didn’t notice – and then raced off to the shops and bought the baking powder.
Now this, this is the really good moment.
As I was standing at the checkout I remembered the 2 boxes of baking powder one of the girls at work had given me when she shifted house. For some reason I had it in my head that it was baking soda. It turned out to be baking powder.
Now you might have thought that at this point I would have reached the peak of my incompetence. You’d be wrong.
After I got home and looked despairingly at my 3 boxes of baking powder I thought I should really reboil my raisins in the syrup to take me back to where I would have been. Done. Read the next step – when the mixture is cool add to the sifted dry ingredients. WHAT! I was actually supposed to boil the whole lot up and then leave it to cool. And now I’ve just reheated it. I could have cried, but I didn’t. I waited until the mixture was not skin-searingly hot any more and then added it to the dry ingredients. The whole thing foamed up to quite amazing proportions. That was possibly why I was supposed to leave it to cool. I was no longer in a mood to care.
I tipped the mix into a shallow tin (again, no measurements) and baked for an hour, which I thought sounded like an excessively long time but it did actually take that long. No I didn’t taste it, but it had better be damn good!
Monday, January 7, 2008
Down to Business
Right – I’ve been quite productive on the baking front if not the blogging one so none of the idle chit-chat – let’s get into it.
Date bars and Chocolate icing– when we left off last time I had made the bars but not iced them. I did the Edmonds chocolate icing which uses actual chocolate plus butter and icing sugar (a waste of chocolate if you ask me). Date bars were not bad – not many dates and the almonds didn’t add much but they were pleasantly cakey and chocolate icing was pretty tasty too – but then when is chocolate icing bad?
Irish stew - Yes I know it’s summer, yes I know it has been a bit overly hot but sometimes you just want stew. Found some very nice lamb neck chops and cooked it on the stove. I did cook it a little longer than suggested as we had impromptu visitors but the meat was meltingly tender. In my personal opinion it would have benefited from some herbs but that is not the Edmonds way!
Lemon soufflé – Not so successful. Cornflour, water and sugar boiled to make a paste. Cool. Add lemon juice and fold in beaten egg whites. Tasted a little bit like the glue they used at school- I’m guessing I must have eaten that at some stage because the recollection was quite strong!
Baked fruit roll – Scone dough rolled around fruit and baked in syrup. Not bad actually – I made this to take to a family gathering was told it tasted like strudel. Strudel sounds much better than baked fruit roll. I served this with crème anglaise or Boiled Custard (2) as Edmonds so lyrically labels it. It was custard so it was good even if it takes infuriatingly long to thicken.
And that’s it – it seemed like more in my head but then things so often do! I might even do some baking tonight – who knows.
Date bars and Chocolate icing– when we left off last time I had made the bars but not iced them. I did the Edmonds chocolate icing which uses actual chocolate plus butter and icing sugar (a waste of chocolate if you ask me). Date bars were not bad – not many dates and the almonds didn’t add much but they were pleasantly cakey and chocolate icing was pretty tasty too – but then when is chocolate icing bad?
Irish stew - Yes I know it’s summer, yes I know it has been a bit overly hot but sometimes you just want stew. Found some very nice lamb neck chops and cooked it on the stove. I did cook it a little longer than suggested as we had impromptu visitors but the meat was meltingly tender. In my personal opinion it would have benefited from some herbs but that is not the Edmonds way!
Lemon soufflé – Not so successful. Cornflour, water and sugar boiled to make a paste. Cool. Add lemon juice and fold in beaten egg whites. Tasted a little bit like the glue they used at school- I’m guessing I must have eaten that at some stage because the recollection was quite strong!
Baked fruit roll – Scone dough rolled around fruit and baked in syrup. Not bad actually – I made this to take to a family gathering was told it tasted like strudel. Strudel sounds much better than baked fruit roll. I served this with crème anglaise or Boiled Custard (2) as Edmonds so lyrically labels it. It was custard so it was good even if it takes infuriatingly long to thicken.
And that’s it – it seemed like more in my head but then things so often do! I might even do some baking tonight – who knows.
Friday, January 4, 2008
It’s Getting Hot in Here
Wow, this is an absolutely inappropriate time of year for baking. I’ve been holding out on account of the excessive temperatures but last night I finally cracked and did some baking.
Lemon biscuits – not fantastically lemony to be fair. Back in 1966 they seemed to really go in for using essence rather than actual fruit, so lemon biscuits contain no actual lemon. I wonder if there were 1966 housewives basking away with their lemon essence while all the actual lemons were outside rotting on the lawn? Lemon essence also smells oddly unlike actual lemons.
So the lemon biscuits were little white, roll out in a sheet, cut out, type biscuits. Rolling and cutting is a little more challenging in these climactic conditions but we persevere. And I cut them out with little wavy cutters. How exciting!
I sandwiched them together with jam – actually I sandwiched some of them together with jam and some with conserve because – fanfare please – I re-boiled my conserve and added a little extra pectin and it has set like a charm. This is actually very exciting for me! Now I have 7 jars of non-runny conserve which I have no idea what to do with – perhaps I should become a black market conserve dealer – jars selling at $3 a pop, you know where to find me!
I also made date bars. These were – half of the cakey mixture spread in the bottom of a shallow tin (no dimensions of course), sprinkled lightly with dates and almonds then the rest of the mix spread over the top and baked. Came up surprisingly cakey – tonight I have to ice it with chocolate icing and sprinkle chopped dates over the top – will be interesting to see the final result.
Lemon biscuits – not fantastically lemony to be fair. Back in 1966 they seemed to really go in for using essence rather than actual fruit, so lemon biscuits contain no actual lemon. I wonder if there were 1966 housewives basking away with their lemon essence while all the actual lemons were outside rotting on the lawn? Lemon essence also smells oddly unlike actual lemons.
So the lemon biscuits were little white, roll out in a sheet, cut out, type biscuits. Rolling and cutting is a little more challenging in these climactic conditions but we persevere. And I cut them out with little wavy cutters. How exciting!
I sandwiched them together with jam – actually I sandwiched some of them together with jam and some with conserve because – fanfare please – I re-boiled my conserve and added a little extra pectin and it has set like a charm. This is actually very exciting for me! Now I have 7 jars of non-runny conserve which I have no idea what to do with – perhaps I should become a black market conserve dealer – jars selling at $3 a pop, you know where to find me!
I also made date bars. These were – half of the cakey mixture spread in the bottom of a shallow tin (no dimensions of course), sprinkled lightly with dates and almonds then the rest of the mix spread over the top and baked. Came up surprisingly cakey – tonight I have to ice it with chocolate icing and sprinkle chopped dates over the top – will be interesting to see the final result.
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