How to win friends

The baking went down so well I thought I should do a repeat performance. My popularity at work does seem proportional to how full the tins are. I suppose it’s better than having to sleep my way to the top?

Melting moments. I’m going to say these are the poor cousin to a yo yo. I’m not sure whether that is unjustified. No one seemed quite as glad to see a melting moment as they did a yo yo. Similar but different, and possibly not quite as good?

Passion fruit layer cake. My passion fruit vines are going mental. Not in the literal sense, more that they are growing almost uncontrollably. Every night I come home I spend 5 minutes or so trying to train the new growth in the right direction. The next night the plant has grown another couple of inches. Very Exciting. More exciting is the face that the vine is covered in flowers, well flower buds to be exact. I love a passion fruit flower, they always look just a little like the inside of an alien.

So passion fruit layer cake is another one of those nice 6” layer cakes. It’s basically just a plain sponge with some passion fruit pulp thrown in. What’s great about it is teaming it with…

Passion fruit filling. This is basically whipped cream mixed with passion fruit and gelatine. Possibly a little too much gelatine for my liking if I’m being honest. But even with its faults it was very, very pretty.

Keeping my customers satisfied

There are a constant parade of people past my desk at work checking the tins. I started out with quite a heavy focus on the baked goods but as I have diversified to other food types there has been a certain level of disappointment amongst my adoring public. Every now and then I do a couple of baking recipes just to keep them sweet. Pun intended.

Chinese chews – Not particularly Chinese or chewy. More like a cakey oaty slice with walnuts and crystallised ginger. The crystallised ginger was pretty good -I have a suspicion that that was supposed to be the Chinese bit.

Yo-yos – these have to be the quintessential edmonds dish. They were so pretty with their little fork marks and snowy white filling. Almost everyone who came past the feeding station was more than a little excited to see them. Long live the humble yo yo

Earlier on in the Edmonds, Monday baking had been a bit of an institution. I’m afraid that things have changed a little and often, come Monday, there is no baking to bring to work. I figured I should put in the effort and bring something along for old times sake.

Coconut layer cake. Layer cake looks pretty, I like to think there is something much fancier about cooking in two tins and then putting it back together again. I stuck the layers together with lime curd, I actually thought it was lemon curd but when I opened the jar it was quite obviously not. Coconut and lime goes well together though all the same I think.

Ginger kisses. I love ginger kisses. I have been known to squirrel them away in the bedroom to be eaten alone. I am an only child, I have come to terms with the fact that I do not share well.

These ginger kisses were not the same as store bought, that doesn’t mean that they were inherently bad, just different. They were probably the original version off which the wonderful, fluffy, fake cream filled commercial delights were based. I think I’ll be sticking with the commercial version though, just every now and then, when no one is looking.

Orange cakes – odd little orangy muffiny things. I suppose they were really like little naked cupcakes. Perhaps I should have dressed them up a bit, unfortunately time does not allow for niceties so they stayed au natural.

A Custard Kind of Sin

I have mentioned before, I think, that I quite like custard. It follows then, that I also like a custard square. However I know have to hang my head in shame as I am a convicted custard square murderer.

It started relatively well. It is quite challenging to roll out the two pieces of pastry to the same sort of shape and then bake them without burning them. That is quite good for me. However when it came to making the custard I got distracted. This so often happens with me. By the time I remembered about it, it was not burnt but there were little brown specs in the custard. This is not good.

The workaround, I figured, was to make chocolate custard squares. It disguised the brown bits but unfortunately brown custard squares do not look the best. At all. I was so embarrassed that I sent them to work with the husband. I got an email halfway through the day asking exactly what was in the custard squares, I duly ignored it.

Testing the Limits

So obviously we were having veal and ham cookies for dinner – that was a given. In order to fight off the scurvy I also prepared tossed green salad – and this is quite smart, you make the dressing in the bottom of the bowl first! What I particularly liked was the concept of rubbing the garlic clove over the salad bowl first. So clever sometimes Edmonds.

For some unknown reason I decided that we needed more pastry in our diet so I made a jam tart. I used a whole far of our slightly runny pear and ginger jam, any recipe that gets rid of a whole jar of jam is a good recipe as far as I’m concerned. It was very pretty in all its glazed golden wonderfulness. I tried to feed the whole thing to the Husband but he revolted and insisted on taking some of it to work with him. It appears that he does have limits…

The Obedient Wife

Water cooler topic of the week not so many months ago was feeders and feedees or Gainers – I’m sure there are many more terms out there for it and I do not profess to be an expert. This is the relationship dynamic whereby one partner in a relationship feeds the other in order to make them massive. I’m afraid I don’t see the attraction but horses for courses I suppose.

The reason I mention it is because to anyone not fully briefed on the situation may believe that this was what was happening at our house on any given day that I’m doing the Edmonds. I presented the husband with no less than 5 different full sized meals in one sitting, he only made it through 4 and I had to save the last for dinner the next day. I can only hope that this will not have a lasting impact on either of us, if anything he’s probably almost in danger of scurvy – vegetables were not such a heavy focus in the Edmonds.

Bread rolls – I actually made these for lunch, they were fine but did not rise as much as I would have expected. It was at this point that I realised that, yes, I had bought new yeast but, no, I had not remembered to throw out the old yeast which expired 12 months ago. Naturally I accidentally used the old one. They were still fine though, I can pretend that the dense doughyness was intentional.

Fishcakes. Cooked fish and mashed potato with an egg mixed through, shaped into patties, crumbed and fried. I’m more of a Thai fishcake kind of girl but I’m guessing their weren’t too many of those around. Someone told me you had to go to a chemist to get olive oil so I imagine Thai was out of the question…

Stuffed Tomatoes. Now, I don’t really like whole tomatoes so this was never going to be a winner with me. Not so much a recipe as a method, these were tomatoes hollowed out and then filled with breadcrumbs and mince. Mmmmmm. Probably the most nutritionally sound meal of the night.

Stuffed bacon. When I first saw this I thought it sounded great, until I read the recipe and realised that the bacon was stuffed with kidneys. Hmmmm. Take your strip of bacon, cover it with forcemeat (stuffing) and wrap around half a kidney. Cook between two enamel plates – I’m not sure why. The Husband was quite excited to see the bacon, less excited to see the kidney! He actually doesn’t seem to mind kidney’s anymore which is fortunate because…

Kidney savoury was up next. This was totally unappetising. Cook bacon. Use leftover bacon fat to cook floured kidneys, add water and cook until nasty and grey – my instructions, not Edmonds. Serve with bacon. Again the Husband ate it. Quite amazing how much food you can put in one man.

Last of all came the veal and ham cookies. Quite an odd name for something that was basically a pie. Take pastry, add minced meat cooked with ham, seal it up, bake. Naturally they were good, how could they be bad? Pastry, meat – you’re quite naturally onto a winner there. Unfortunately this was the straw (pie) that broke the camel’s (Husband’s) back (Stomach). He took one look at the uncooked sheet of pastries and pleaded with me to leave them until the next day. I took pity on him and did my best impersonation of an obedient wife.

A Fowl By Any Other Name

The appeal of a dish can be severely affected by the words chosen to describe it. Chicken is fairly neutral, Poultry doesn’t sound so bad either. Fowl is not a good choice. Hence it was with some trepidation that I approached boiled fowl.

It’s silly really, I didn’t use a tough old 1960’s boiling fowl, just your standard tortured chicken which has probably never needed to stand, let alone walk, let alone fly. And I love a poached chicken, I’ve been known to make a chicken rice or too in my time. It’s just that boiled fowl and poached chicken sound light years apart even when they aren’t.

And naturally it was fine, actually it was lovely. Possibly boiled too long seeing the times were obviously intended for a bird that had died of naturally causes after a life of scratching, pecking and whatever else chickens do. I tried to lift it out by putting a fork into the cavity and the whole thing disintegrated. I ended up pulling out the pieces with a slotted spoon…

Apparently bread sauce is supposed to go with poultry. I’ve tried bread sauce before. I have failed to be impressed and I wouldn’t say that I have overly high standards. But the Edmonds bread sauce was actually kind of good. Again I was surprised – perhaps I have been setting my expectations to low? I may even venture into the realms of bread sauce again. Possibly. Actually considering my passionate love affair with gravy it’s highly unlikely.

To go with my fowl I also prepared a green salad – with “salad dressing”. This turned out to be that odd recipe where the salad dressing is boiled. I’d love to say that I loved it, in reality it was a bit odd. The taste was fine but the texture was truly off the mark – slightly grainy and curdled but without actually appearing curdled. Not sure whether it was me or the recipe but I don’t think I’ll be going back to find out. In future I might have bread sauce on my salad greens instead. Or gravy… now you’re talking.