Through a head full of cotton wool

Some weeks are more productive than others. The week before last was less productive than usual but with good reason. Well almost. Looking back my excuse for not cooking much was that we had the brother in law, his wife and their almost newly born child stay with us. How newly born? Still at an age that is referred to in weeks not months.

This was much to the amusement of my colleagues at work – I am not renowned as the most maternal of people. In reality the guests were really no problem, least of all the shiny new niece who never once woke her aunty and uncle up in the middle of the night. Good work!

And coming to the point of this excerpt, I was planning to blame the lack of cooking on the visitors but in reality I did all of the weeks cooking while they were there and none of it during the week.

In a round up of the week that was – we went to quiz night. No we didn’t win, in fact we came 3rd – but – BUT – we only had four team members. And one of those was the husband, who by his own admission is not the quiz guru as such. And the two teams who came in 1st and 2nd hand over 10 people each. And we only lost second by three points. And –this is the really good bit – the team who had beaten us into second for so many weeks were there, and they only had four people too, and we got over double their score. Come on, that’s good.

So back to the cooking. On Saturday night I figured I would make a roast with all the trimmings – roast beef with Yorkshire pud and horseradish sauce. I had been warned that making horseradish sauce is not for the faint hearted, that the grating of horseradish roots requires gloves, a nose peg and ski goggles. Perhaps I’m made of sterner stuff because I had no problems.

I finally managed to acquire some horseradish at Farro – my friendly local – gosh they’re good to me. Here’s a little plug – I buy all my eggs at faro, cheapest place I’ve found to get non tortured eggs and they are nice and big. Fair enough, I do buy them 20 at a time though.

The horseradish sauce made a larger quantity than I could ever imagine someone requiring but the Yorkshire pudding was a different story. Don’t get me wrong, the yield of Yorkshires was probably sufficient for a normal person but I love Yorkshire pud. I might feel the same way as I do about custard if they weren’t so unhealthy, meal specific and fiddly to make. Nothing will overthrow custard’s place in my affections.

Naturally, being the exemplary housewife that I am, I also made dessert. I made lemon meringue pudding – like the pie but with no crust. I encountered the same issue I have had multiple times now with cornflour based desserts not setting properly. It has happened too many times to be a coincidence – in the future I will take advanced action and add extra cornflour.

And on Sunday I whipped up a batch of madelines. No one ever seems to be able to write about madelines without mentioning Proust, yet I always wonder how many people have actually read the book and how much of it has become food writing convention? Convention it would appear that I am adhering to! I have madelines before but had never seen them Edmonds style – dunked in almost set jelly and rolled in coconut like a lamington. They weren’t bad actually.

Now I feel the need to mention that I am typing almost from my sick bed. I have come down with another cold. Such is my dedication to Edmonds that I am sitting here in my fluffy yellow bathrobe with running nose and eyes and pounding head typing away. That and the husband is insisting on catching up with last nights shorters in the lounge and I hate to watch a program twice. Men! He’s done the dishes though so I really shouldn’t grumble!

A draw's as good as a win

One afternoon tea party does not make an Edmonds so Sunday I was up and at’m and ready to do it all again. As a preface to the baking part of the story I feel it necessary to say that our soccer team had our first game where we did not lose. It may have been a nil-nil draw but after a 9 game losing streak it felt like a win to us!

And what is my reward – well I get to come home and bake. Lucky me. I even get to do the dishes. My joy knows no bounds.

Sunday, as you regular readers of the blog – I think there are one or two of you out there in the darkness – will know is the day I fill the tins for work. This Sunday (or actually not this Sunday, not last Sunday but the Sunday before – I am a little behind on my blogging) was no different.

One egg chocolate sponge is a chocolate sponge made with – wait for it – ONE EGG. Where do they get these names from. I made it, it was pretty good – my master plan was to fill it with whipped cream – this was not to be.

I’ve made most of the mock cream recipes in the Edmonds and by and large they have been pretty good. I’m not adverse to a bit of mock cream – in particular in a ginger kiss – mmmmmm. Anyway, I digress. This mock cream recipe was foul.

If a recipe ever tells you to mix gelatine and evaporated milk just don’t do it. Don’t. Please. It was very bad. I even gave it the benefit of the doubt and used it to fill the chocolate sponge. I then came to my senses and scraped it out 5 minutes later.

Loch Katrine cake – somewhat more esoterically named than “one egg chocolate sponge” this was a layer of sdcone like pastry topped with jam and nuts and topped off with a sponge. Again it seemed ok – the numbers of Edmonds things with two layers separated by jam an walnuts is beginning to become a little bit of a blur to me.


Pineapple snow. I don’t know whether pineapple jelly was more popular in times gone by but you certainly don’t seem to be able to find it now – I used lemon instead. Pineapple snow is almost set jelly and egg white beaten together and then poured over pineapple pieces and left to set. It could have been better – it was a bit like trying to eat air. If there is any way that eating air sounds like a good idea – believe me it’s not! I grew bored with mine and gave up after half a bowl, the husband persevered longer.

Tea anyone?

At some point on Friday night – I may or may not have been at the pub - I had a eureka moment (I feel that to grammatically correct that that should be an eureka moment but that doesn’t seem at all right). Baking on the weekend has to be carefully planned. Outside of work I get minimal opportunity to get rid of the piles of baking that are a side effect of the project. So, I say to myself, how do I get rid of all this baking? I have an afternoon tea party. Very 1966, no?

We all sat around and drank tea, some drank coffee, much to my distaste of course. I have a feeling that tea is about to have its day again. Not being a coffee drinker might colour my opinion on this a little. I feel a great compulsion to go and buy one of those little tiered cake stand things but my logical side still has visions of trying to find somewhere to put it.

So I still had a little baking leftover from the end of last week, my generosity is such that I actually jammed the shewsburys myself rather than making my guests do it. It’s quite a step I know. So I had a little plate with shewsburys, date shortcake and duskies all set up.

Naturally this was not enough – I needed more baking. I decided on chocolate éclairs. Chocolate éclairs are one of those things that would be a nightmare to take to the office, fresh cream etc, it all just gets too difficult but they are perfect for afternoon tea. I love making choux pastry, there is something very soothing about it. Possibly not so much when you are nursing a shoulder injury but I managed the manual beating somehow. Gosh I’m a trouper!

While I was making chocolate éclairs I also turned out some cream puffs – cream puffs just being short éclairs it made sense to multitask. I love watching choux pastry in the oven – it’s like magic. When everything was out of the oven and cool I filled them with cream and covered them in chocolate icing. They received rave reviews naturally.

Now I still didn’t think I had quite enough so I also decided to make cheesecakes. Now these might not be the cheesecakes you are thinking of. For a start they contain no cheese. Not even anything particularly cheese like. They are little pastry cases filled with raspberry jam and then covered with sponge mixture.

I remember my Dad being very fond of them. He used to buy them from a little bakery in Panmure, beside the post office – ahhh those were the days. The lovely bakery, also in Panmure although not purveyors of cheesecakes as far as I know, made what I still consider to be the best steak and cheese pies I’ve ever had. Sadly I discovered when I moved back up to Auckland that the lovely Lovely Bakery was no longer there. Probably shut down for poor hygiene standards knowing my luck.

Anyway, back through the mists of time, I make cheesecakes. They were pretty good, the husband liked them but the inclusion of jam made me less than crazy about them. I thought this project might change my opinions about such things as jam and raisins but apparently not. This does not bode well for the cooking of organ meats…

I realise that I have been putting off the offal parts of the book. I have looked at offal in various supermarkets and butchers at various times and thought about it, but not very hard. I think maybe if I just leave it closer to the end perhaps when there is a deadline. Like ripping a band-aid off quickly I suppose.

After all the afternoon tea guests had long departed and dinner had been made and eaten I decided to make egg nog. Now I’ve made egg nog before but this method was a little different – and a little scarier. When I’ve made it before I’ve made a meringue mixture and them mixed that through the hot milk, sugar and egg yolk mixture. That seemed pretty good – like liquidy custard if I can manage to bring custard into it. This was somewhat different.
The Edmonds recipe does not involve whipping the egg fist – just a little beating is all that is apparently required. Unfortunately this meant that when you drank the egg nog there were long mucousy strands of egg white. Not good, not good at all. What’s even worse is that this is supposed to be fed to invalids. No wonder only the strong survived!

Dumpty Doo!

Failure is not my friend but I picked myself back up off the floor and carried on. At the end of the day it’s not about me, it’s about the Edmonds.

Thanks for the show of hands from the crowd. I also received a message passed through via a colleague from one of her friends telling me to pull finger. True, it needed to be said. Feel free to use the comments function of the blog so that all 5 people reading the blog can gang up on me together – more power to the people.

Monday – baking extravaganza. It was time to fill the tins and when the tins were full I also filled the ice cream containers. Thank god for ice cream containers – such a handy size.

Queen cakes – there are a number of these things in Edmonds – small cakes cooked in muffin tins with raisins in them.

I feel the need to rant. Please feel free to skip the following paragraph.

RAISINS! Always raisins. Raisin haters (that includes sultanas – a raisin by any other name…) of the world unite and throw off the shackles of oppression. One day I’m going to work for a cereal company and I’m going to start taking raisins out of products – they don’t need to be there, we don’t like them. If your product is called “tropical” don’t put raisins in there – they aren’t tropical. Put less fruit in there, I don’t care, just not always raisins!!! And capsicums, don’t get me started on capsicums!

So anyway, back to our scheduled program. Queen cakes. Nothing particularly queenly I didn’t think but I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t eat then, because they had raisins in them. Say no more.

Shewsburys. Not quite like the Cookie Bear makes – dumpty doo! They didn’t look too different – I made the holes with the lid off a vivid which I thought was a nice piece of creativity – but my homemade jam was far superior. I did make people assemble their own as my time is too precious to be spent as a shewsbury jammer. There were a lot of issues with people not managing to take one plain biscuit and one biscuit with a hole and I had to provide supervision.

Duskies – like afghans but with walnuts and coconut instead of cornflakes. Dollop of chocolate icing sprinkled with a little coconut. They were very pretty and pretty food leaves the tin fastest.

Date Shortcake – Like an apple shortcake but with dates in the middle. Was pretty good, didn’t go as fast as the Duskies but none was thrown out which is a good sign.

Macaroon Cake – This was good. Spongy, buttery cake with a coconut meringue topping baked ina shallow tin. I have come to have a deep affection for things baked in a shallow tin – not as fancy as a cake, more exciting than a biscuit. It was good. Plus as it had no raisins in I could eat it. And eat it I did…

Fish, physio and failure

Ok, so I’ve been slack. I freely admit that. However, in my defence, I have had medical issues. Slightly over enthusiastic defending in football has led to pain in my shoulder. According to the physio today I have a pinched nerve in my neck, something wrong with my rotator cuff and a non specific issue with my shoulder. In other signs that things are not going my way I had hoped for a hot young physio and had been gifted a lovely older gentleman - balding, glasses and a limp. I think I have karma issues, perhaps I should be a nicer person?

So the shoulder injury actually makes it physically uncomfortable to use the computer. I am putting my body on the line for this. I am also putting a healthy BMI rating on the line as well and it is rapidly going out the window. It would appear there is an inverse proportion of baking to visible waist – that is as baking continues, waistline slowly disappears.

Enough with the excuses I hear you cry. Oh alright, I reply wearily.

Might I also add that my workplace has blocked blog spot so my readership has presumably dropped away to nothing. Hands up if you’re still there!

We were up to Sunday a couple of weeks ago, the Sunday of queens birthday to be precise. I have discovered, as I think I may have mentioned before that the key to this whole thing is to try to wrap lots of little recipes into one big recipe. Well on Sunday I cooked fish.

I had been gifted, from work (see it’s not all blocked websites), a couple of bags of frozen hoki fillets – the proper ones, no crumbs. I decided to make fish timbales. Why? Who knows, seemed like a good idea at the time I guess. Fish timbales requires cooked fish, I figured I cooked cook it in multiple ways. Apparently I am smarter than I sound…

First cook your fish. I decided on boiling and steaming. Now steaming is fairly straight forward. Boiling however requires you to tie the fish up in cloth before plunging it into boiling water. A little odd but it did the job. Both lots of fish were adequately cooked at any rate.

The fish was then flaked and added to a liquidy mixture of breadcrumbs milk and egg yolks, into which was folded egg whites. This my friend is fish timbales. After baking these actually weren’t too bad. A bit like an overly puffy fish omelette. Lets just say the husband and I have had worse. Serving suggestion was tomato sauce, the husband was more than happy to oblige.

What comes next is a bit more embarrassing. Actually, to be honest, and this doesn’t happen often, perhaps this is the real reason why I haven’t updated in a while. I had a bit of a failure.

To give you some background, I have tried and failed to make mayonnaise in the past. I did however think that I was somewhat older and wiser now and I would be able to crack it without any problems. I was wrong.

I tried no less than three times to make it. Three times it split on me. I am in a position now where I will gladly take instruction from anyone happy to teach. Please, I am not one to deal with failure well.

Semetic Baking with Passion

I feel I must apologise for the lack of photos, it’s not that I haven’t been taking them, it’s that my computer has been refusing to open the little pop up box that allows me to attach them. I will see if I can remedy the issue.

Now after Saturday’s gargantuan baking effort you could have thought I might have wanted to take it easy on Monday. You’d be wrong. Well not entirely, I may well have wanted to take it easy but things like that just don’t happen in my life anymore. Instead I bake.

Not only do I bake but I also make steamed puddings. I never made a steamed pudding pre-Edmonds. It’s a very simple and easy process; I’m not sure why I didn’t. Probably because there is a whole world of puddings out there and Aunt Betty’s do a damn good job. Anyway, no Aunt Betty’s (I’m a particularly big fan of the ginger one, mostly because the husband doesn’t like it) for me anymore – no, I steam my own puddings now thank you very much.

In as much as Walnut Pride did not make me feel proud, Mysterious Pudding was in no way mysterious. I’m not sure exactly sure what the ladies of Edmonds were on when they made up some of these names but I’m thinking the wineglass of sherry wasn’t just going in the plum pudding. Mysterious pudding would have been better off renamed unremarkable pudding – plain and spongy, a little lemon ring and jam on the bottom. Good but no great mystery I’m afraid.

Next, and this really did make the husbands day, I made hamburgers. When I say I made them, I measured the ingredients into the bowl and told the husband to roll up his sleeves. He is a good hamburger former, if a little on the inconsistent side. The hamburgers had bacon in them, which was, I thought, quite a worthy addition. There were too many for one sitting so the husband polished off the leftovers the following night pre-quiz. We came 9th in the country, which is not too bad I thought.

Post dinner I needed a little something else to do so I whipped up some minestrone. For once this was an Edmonds soup recipe which produced more than two entrée portions. I’m not going to say it was the best minestrone I’ve ever had but it was edible. Let’s just say I’ve had worse from the Edmonds.

Another one for the slightly odd names department – I made Jewish cake. I’m not entirely sure what made this particular cake Jewish. It was a layer cake with cinnamon and (MORE!) Sultanas. Stuff the price of crude oil, if there is a Sultana price increased I am in serious jeopardy.

According to the recipe when one makes Jewish cake one must serve it with passion fruit filling. This was basically passion fruit curd. It was ok. Just ok. And I like passion fruit. The whole thing was ok. Actually I got mixed reviews but I have a damn good excuse for my recipe selections these days.

An exercise in brevity

Right. Sunday was a baking extravaganza and if I don’t cut the chatter and write up the basement I am facing permanent banishment to the computer room. I have 8 recipes to write up before I will be down to only being a week behind. Actually that’s not true – these long weekends are messing with me.
Walnut pride – Didn’t make me feel particularly proud but I think Edmonds should get extra points for creativity – there doesn’t seem to be a lot of that going on otherwise. It would have been all too easy for them to call it “Just another slice with walnuts and sultanas”. I’ve probably given away what’s in it now. I was ok, I ate around the sultanas. I added a little lemon icing as suggested which jazzed it up nicely.

Apple shortcake – This was nice, just like you’d find in a bakery. The shortbread is made by rubbing the butter in and I was quite lazy with my rubbing which gave a nice flaky result. It’s nice to know that being lazy does pay off sometimes.

Lemon Buns- These were basically lemon flavoured, sultana dosed rock cakes. I made these in the intention of serving them with my home made lemon curd from the day before – they seemed to go down quite nicely.

Smoked fish/ Mashed Potato/ Fish Pie Supreme. This was a triple whammy because I have discovered on certain occasions use a recipe for a constituent part of another recipe. Hence I prepared my mashed potato according to the recipe – with thanks to the husband for doing the potato peeling – and I boiled my smoked fish in milk as directed. Smoked Kahawai remains relatively cheep at $10 a kilo. I was quite impressed, especially at a time when every other type of fish is ridiculously expensive.

There was a time when I would have absolutely turned my nose up at fish pie but times have changed. Even the girls in the lunchroom were none too quietly impressed. I still couldn’t do a seafood pizza – a friend helpfully described it as seal vomit once and the imagery has never left me.

Celery and cheese savoury – this may have impressed the girls in the lunchroom a little less but it was surprisingly good – think cauliflower cheese with celery. I’m not sure that I have ever eaten celery as a cooked vegetable on its own. I was quietly impressed.

Lemon Cheese Pudding – This was the typical lemon self saucing pudding and it was good. Very good. I did make the mistake of using my zest peeler, which creates loooong strings of lemon zest, which ruined the texture a little. The husband made quite a show of removing the stands one by one but he love dessert none the less. The man peels my potatoes, I really have no grounds for complaint.