A light and airy version of a classic

It was 2009 and I was sitting in the lobby of my London hotel with a friend.

We were waiting for something – I no longer remember what – but while we waited, an array of premium Ben & Jerry’s ice creams stared at us, beckoning us from within phosphorescent glass.

Bored and tempted, we walked towards the humming vending machine. All the flavours were a blur to me – all except one: milk and cookies.

In went the coins and out shot a pot of one of the greatest, most classic flavour combinations around. I didn’t want that tub to end.

For years, my family kept cookies & cream ice cream in the freezer and it was always devoured quicker than any of the other flavours. We don’t buy ice cream much nowadays and I don’t often eat a lot of cookies & cream flavoured things now either – it just sort of disappeared after a while.

It may be this marked absence that explains why this particular flavour combination came to me so strongly when I decided to try out my very first mousse.

I couldn’t find a recipe that gave me what I wanted so I decided to marry two recipes together to create a silky, airy vanilla mousse speckled with chocolate cookies.

Use your favourite chocolate cookie recipe, or here’s how I made mine:

• 3/4 cup plain flour
• 1/3 cup cocoa powder
• 1 cup (113g) unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• A pinch of salt

*Sourced from foodnetwork.com. I halved the original recipe and this was enough to make about 12 small to medium sized cookies.

How to:

1. Preheat oven to 160C.
2. Cream butter and sugar together until light in colour and fluffy. Beat in egg and incorporate fully, then mix in vanilla extract. *If you’re increasing this recipe to make more cookies, beat in each egg individually.
3. Sift in the flour, cocoa and salt and mix until just incorporated.
4. You can refrigerate the dough for about an hour or you can do what I did and just bake it straight away – separate the dough into small balls and squish them gently onto an oven tray lined with baking paper.
5. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Take out of oven and let cool on a rack.

For the mousse, I found a wonderful recipe for vanilla bean mousse on sugarlaws.com and made my own additions and modifications:

I used:

• The equivalent of 1 vanilla bean from my vanilla bean grinder
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 2 egg whites
• 120g creme fraiche

How to:

1. In a mixing bowl, beat together the creme, vanilla bean and 1/4 cup sugar with electric beaters until the creme forms soft peaks.
   *If this makes any sense, I usually whip cream until the ripples created from the beaters stay in place and look nice and thick, kind of like cake batter.
2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with electric beaters until soft peaks form. Gradually add 1/4 cup of sugar, tablespoon by tablespoon, while continuing to beat the eggs until thick and glossy.
3. Crumble 2 or 3 cookies into the cream mixture and fold in. Then fold the egg whites into the cream until everything is just incorporated.
4. Pour or spoon into serving dishes (I used drinking glasses) and top mousse with crumbled cookies. I used about 2 cookies for each mousse but this will depend on how big you make your cookies and how much you want on top 🙂
5. Place in fridge for about 6 hours, or overnight.

This makes 3-4 servings. It’s quite a sweet dessert for my taste but it just melts in your mouth and the cookies I made had a bitterness to them, which cut through the sweetness of the mousse really nicely.

The real positive aspect of making this was how much easier it was than I thought it would be. I’ve always hated beating egg whites and my attempts at making things with egg whites – meringue, souffle – haven’t really turned out that amazingly. In comparison, this was pleasantly successful without being stressful, complicated or time-consuming.

Photo: Tao Lin

A revelatory experiment

There was just one question on my mind as I wandered the supermarket aisles, clutching little jars of star anise and cinnamon in one hand and a pot of creme fraiche in the other: where the bloody hell do they keep the polenta?

I thought it would be in the same section as the flour – nope. What about the cereal section? Nope. Bread? No. Pasta? No. I even tried Google for help, except my phone’s 4G wasn’t working. Thank you, Vodafone.

It was only when I got home and hopped on the wonderful world of the Internet did I realise my mistake. I had been looking solely for ‘polenta’ when I could have also been searching for ‘cornmeal’.

Experienced foodies out there are most likely scoffing at my amateur discovery but you better believe it was a big revelation for me. That thing on TV that always looks like silky potato mash and has developed a bit of a ‘hipster’ status, that thing that always sounded so fancy and almost mysterious, is actually just humble ol’ cornmeal.

According to The New York Times, ‘polenta’ is the Italian term for cornmeal and comes from an ancient Roman dish of the poorer classes called pulmentum.

More precisely, polenta isn’t such until it’s cooked. Until then, it’s just cornmeal.

When I looked up the recipe of an orange syrup cake that I saw on the latest season of My Kitchen Rules, I was confused as to why it used polenta. That confusion has now dissipated after learning what polenta actually is and trying out the cake for myself.

The orange syrup cake was served with caramelised pineapples, toasted nuts and creme fraiche on the show and there was only one word the judges had for it: “Yum”. Naturally, I had to give it a go.

I halved the recipe used and didn’t bother with the caramelised pineapple and the nuts as my primary focus was trying out the cake.

For the syrup:

• 247.5g caster sugar
• 1 star anise
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 2 cloves
• 1/2 vanilla bean, seeded
• 1/2 orange, thinly sliced
• 1 lemon, juiced

How to:

1. Heat all the ingredients up in a saucepan over low heat until all the sugar has dissolved.
2. Simmer on low heat for about 30 minutes until reduced by half
3. Let cool and pour through a fine sieve into a jug to discard the solids

For the cake:

• 1 orange, zested and juiced
• 92.5g unsalted butter, softened
• 75g caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 75g plain flour
• 27.5g fine polenta
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp baking powder

How to:

1. Preheat the oven to 170C and grease cake/muffin tins (I used large ramekins)
2. Using an electric beater, mix together the butter and sugar until light and creamy
3. Beat in the egg and then the reduced orange juice
4. Stir in the zest
5. Sift in the flour, polenta, baking powder and cinnamon and stir to combine
6. Divide mixture among prepared tins
7. Bake for around 20-30 mins, or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.
8. While cakes are hot, prick holes all over it with a skewer and pour half the syrup onto the cakes. Repeat once all the syrup has been absorbed.

I served the cakes with some creme fraiche mixed with 1/2 tsp vanilla extract and 1/2 vanilla bean seeds.

It was moist, crumbly, so light it melted in the mouth and the sourness of the creme fraiche helped prevent the cake from being sickly sweet. It was just so delicious and it’s definitely something I would be excited, happy and proud to make for others.

To be honest, I don’t know what the cornmeal adds to the overall result but it can’t be bad with a result this good!

As you can see, my presentation skills are severely lacking and don’t, in any way, reflect how amazing this cake is – excuse the photo and try it out for yourself 🙂

Photo: Tao Lin

The art of timing

Shows like Masterchef and My Kitchen Rules have taught me many, many things about cooking but perhaps one of the greatest lessons has been the importance of mastering timing.

Too much time in the oven and that beautiful (and expensive) beef tenderloin overcooks, becoming less tender and more dry and tough. Too little time and that pork belly that’s meant to melt in your mouth is a rubbery, chewy, downright nasty slab of greasy meat.

Desserts too rely immensely on correct timing, where one minute could mean the difference between serving your guests a molten chocolate cake that oozes when you dig in with a spoon or just another chocolate cake.

I was faced with this scenario when my friends and I gathered for a potluck dinner. Tasked with dessert, I chose to recreate my previously successful chocolate fondant with the addition of some almond biscuit crumble and vanilla mascarpone cream. I erred on the side of caution with my timing and failed to deliver exactly what I wanted.

The recipe I followed for the cake was one by Nigella Lawson. I used less chocolate – about 300g, whereas the recipe calls for 350g – and it was very rich but I think I would use the recipe again. It tasted really nice and it was really easy to put together, PLUS no left-over egg parts!

I also used a muffin tin because I didn’t have enough ramekins of the same size to serve everyone. I repeated what I did the first time I made these cakes, which was to brush melted butter in every dish and then sprinkle with some cocoa powder. This helps immensely when it comes to removing the baby cakes to serve.

The cakes only needed about 10 or 11 minutes but I cooked them for about 13 minutes. They had been sitting in the fridge for a few hours so I thought they would need those extra couple of minutes but it was too much and they ended up only being a little bit gooey in the middle with no molten flow of chocolate whatsoever – disappointing!

For the almond crumble:

• 125g unsalted butter, chopped, warmed/slightly melted
• 150g plain flour
• 1 tbs sugar
• 150g almonds, chopped coarsely

Simply squish the butter with the flour and sugar until it resembles bread crumbs. Add the almonds and stir together

I got this from a recipe cooked on the latest season of My Kitchen Rules. In hindsight, this made way too much crumble and it was a bit tasteless so I would decrease the amount of butter, flour and almonds by maybe 50g and keep the same amount of sugar.

For the mascarpone cream, I just whisked together 200g of mascarpone with about tsp of vanilla extract, ground vanilla bean (I have pure vanilla beans in a grinder) and about a tbsp of icing sugar. This goes great with a rich dessert like chocolate fondant.

There was a lot of silence during dessert time and plenty of compliments about the taste, which makes me very happy but there’s no denying it: they were hardly chocolate fondants.

Chocolate fondant, lava cakes or molten cakes lose their identity without that melted centre and it can be a gamble to get them out of the oven at the right time in order to achieve the right consistency. That’s just how it is with cooking I suppose and it is a bit of a mix between a fine art and sheer luck to get the food just right. It’s all a matter of trial and error – I’m sure my friends won’t mind being taste testers!

Photo: Tao Lin

 

This is what happens when you lack good food decoration skills

The weekend before Christmas, I helped my friends make some Santa Strawberries. They turned out very cute and all that so I thought, why not make these for my own Christmas meal?

My lack of decorative expertise really showed, especially in the weirdly shaped “eyes” hastily cut out of a gummy snake. The little Santas ended up looking more like zombies, prompting the important eternal question: do these belong at Christmas time or would they be better served at Halloween?

Zombie Santas are coming to get you. Photo: Tao Lin

And so the festive season of eating too much begins…

Roast turkey, meat pie, oven-baked salmon, bread rolls, salad, chocolate cake, tiramisu. That was my lunch this weekend gone by and the start of some serious (over)eating.

My friends and I decided to do a shared lunch and Secret Santa. I was tasked with a main and dessert, both of which turned out pretty well. For the main, I made Guinness steak and mushroom pie and for dessert, tiramisu.

I’ve come to realise that pie takes a heck of a long time to make – much longer than it would take you to drive down to the local pub and order one there, and it would taste about the same too. However, I’m glad I made the effort this time because it turned out delicious. It’s based on a Jamie Oliver recipe for a boozy Guinness steak and cheese pie but I did my own thing with it by adding shiitake mushrooms.

Guinness steak and mushroom pie
Serves 6

Ingredients
1 red onion, peeled and diced
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
About 10 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in water overnight and cut into thin strips. Keep the water that the mushrooms have been in to top up the stew.
600g stewing beef
A couple of sprigs of fresh rosemary, leaves picked and chopped
A couple of sprigs fresh thyme, leaves picked and chopped
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
300ml Guinness
200ml beef stock
2 heaped tablespoons of flour
Puff pastry (I used store bought because I am terrible at making pastry)
One egg, beaten

How to:

1. Preheat oven to 190ºC. Heat olive oil over low heat in saucepan and gently fry the onions for about 10 minutes. Don’t let them color too much.
2. Turn the heat up and add carrots and garlic. Mix it together before adding mushrooms. Stir together and add beef, garlic, herbs, salt and pepper.
3. Fry for 3-4 minutes and then add Guinness and stock. Stir in the flour and then top with the water saved from soaking the mushrooms.
4. Bring to a simmer and then pour into an ovenproof dish. Cover with tin foil and place in oven for about 90 minutes.
5. After 90 mins or so, remove from oven and stir. At this point I added more salt and pepper to taste because it tasted quite bland – it may pay to do the same but always check first!
6. Place back in the oven for another hour or so the beef is tender and stew is thick.

For the pastry lid I took out a sheet of pastry, laid it over the top of the stew, folded the sides down to make a bit of a crust, sliced the top with a sharp knife, brushed it with the egg and popped it back in the oven for about half an hour.

When I was looking for a tiramisu recipe, I quickly came to the realisation that most recipes for the fluffy Italian dessert use raw egg. Considering I didn’t want to unwittingly give my friends food poisoning, I looked semi-hard for a recipe that doesn’t use raw egg. I trawled through some Google results and found one using cooked egg yolks. You can find the recipe here: http://www.askchefdennis.com/2011/04/the-best-tiramisu-you-will-ever-make/ and trust me, you will love it. I had heaps leftover after lunch and I found the tiramisu actually tastes even better once it’s been in the fridge for a day. Not sure whether that’s because I wasn’t so stuffed when I ate it a day later or if it’s actually legitimately better.

I’ve been tasked with making Christmas lunch on the actual day again this year. So far, I have a crayfish. More ideas?

Christmas lunch feast with friends. Photo: Tao Lin

 

Tickled pink

Today is Jenny’s birthday – baker extraordinaire and a close friend of mine since primary school. For a few years now, she has made some visually stunning and taste bud-tantalising birthday cakes for our circle of girlfriends, as well as a number of other cakes for various other people and occasions. The time, effort, imagination and love she puts into each and every single one of those cakes is truly astounding and I hope she knows how much we appreciate her thought, generosity and talent.

Last night, we celebrated her birthday in stylish settings by the beach, where she unveiled her creation for her own birthday: chocolate cake with wonderfully pink raspberry buttercream icing.

Enjoy.

Photo: Tao Lin

Photo: Tao Lin

Photo: Tao Lin

Photo: Tao Lin

Short and sweet

It’s all over. The constant stress about story ideas, the 8am morning lectures, trying to convince people to talk to student journalists. But also getting to know everyone in my course, whining/laughing/sighing over the lack of story ideas, due dates and unreliable sources while quaffing drinks or staring bleary-eyed at an over-lit computer screen, the heartwarming camaraderie – it’s all over.

Last Friday was the final day of my journalism course and yesterday was my first day in full time employment as a reporter. So far, I’ve done vox pops (horrible, soul destroying things), a couple of interviews and I have an ever-growing list of things to do and follow up on. So far, so good.

Unfortunately my cooking and food blogging suffered a lot during this past month or so. The last thing I made was banoffee pie and I can’t find the recipe I used for it. I do remember, though, the basic recipe was pretty much the same regardless of where the recipe came from. The major difference I saw was that some people bought caramel straight from the store while others boiled condensed milk in the tin.

I used caramel straight from the store and made the base out of crushed digestives, squashed together with melted butter. I stuck those in the fridge while I cooked(?) the caramel with some more butter until it was smooth. After refrigerating that for a solid couple of hours, I placed sliced banana tossed with lemon juice on top and finished it off with lightly whipped cream. I added in about half a teaspoon of coffee granules to the cream as well.

I’m fairly certain the recipe I followed called for sugar to be added to the caramel – WHAT?! I understand this dessert is meant to be really sweet but it seems heart-cloggingly criminal to add even more sugar into something that is already incredibly sweet. On the plus side, it didn’t take long to make.

Sugar enthusiasts, this is most definitely one for you.

Cavities guaranteed: banoffee pie. Photo: Tao Lin

A black sesame twist on two classics

When I was younger, about 11 or 12, I remember really wanting to buy other people gifts for their birthdays and for Christmas. I was old enough to understand the gratification of giving, rather than receiving, but I was too young to be able to buy anything really cool. I was never given an allowance or pocket money; I simply asked for money when I needed it (all within reason, of course). I remember buying friends lip glosses from the $2 shops, as well as books, pens, CDs, bath stuff and jewellery.

When it came to my parents, I ended up buying them things with their own money, which is kind of funny but really, really pointless in hindsight. I remember buying my mum a really cheap necklace of her star sign, Aquarius. For my dad, I remember one Christmas gifting him a ring binder and rewriteable CDs. I remember he held them up in a victory-like pose and thanked me with a great, wide smile on his face, even though he had more than enough ring binders and blank CDs to choose from already.

To this day, I still struggle with gifts for my dad. Last year I bought him new headphones, which very much disappeared in comparison to the gift I bought my mum – tickets to see Mary Poppins, the musical. Naturally, he didn’t say anything or show any sort of resentment. He is my dad, after all. For his birthday I got him a massage at one of the city’s most luxurious spas and he enjoyed it but I don’t think he wants to experience something like that again. What I really wanted was to buy him a holiday, even just to Sydney, because the last time he and my mum went overseas was 13 years ago when we all went on a family trip to Los Angeles. Unfortunately I don’t quite have the money for that (yet) but I’m hoping within the next year or two I’ll be able to make that happen.

Nowadays, I’ve been utilising my newfound love of cooking to make food for my parents that they may not ever eat or very rarely eat if I didn’t make it for them – special “treats” if you will. For Mother’s Day, I made lemon drizzle cake. For Father’s Day this year (last weekend for us Kiwis), I made two desserts: black sesame panna cotta and black sesame creme brulee.

My dad has a penchant for black sesame, if you hadn’t figured out already, and I’ve been saying ever since I first made creme brulee that I would make a black sesame variation just for him. Well, for some reason, I thought I’d try panna cotta first. I found what seemed like a really good recipe  and I thought it would be a bit healthier than creme brulee, so I went for it.

I kind of wish I hadn’t.

Following the measurements, ingredients and method in the recipe exactly, I created something that was really tough, hard and completely unpleasant to eat. It was like ingesting black sesame flavoured rubber. I personally think it’s the amount of agar agar the recipe called for. I didn’t have the common sense at the time to look back on my green tea panna cotta and see what I could do better from there, which probably would have helped quite a bit.

Anyway, what’s done is done, rubbery dessert and all. I would be keen to try this dessert again but would, hopefully, remember to use less setting agent.

Black sesame panna cotta. Excuse the laughable lack of presentation skills. Photo: Tao Lin

With this failed experiment and the accompanying sense of disappointment that I wasn’t able to pull through for my dad, I turned to my dearest, most velvety smooth love, creme brulee. I followed the recipe and method by Nigella Lawson – perfect for those times when you really want to make creme brulee but just cannot be bothered turning on the oven (that can’t just be me, right?!) – and guesstimated how much black sesame I used. I think I used about 3 tablespoons for half the amount of ingredients in the Nigella recipe. By the way, you can buy black sesame powder from Asian supermarkets. I’m not sure if they have different “finenesses” of powder but I’d imagine a finer powder would work best.

It turned out fantastic and it made my dad really happy, which was the main point. The colour is really off-putting – grey doesn’t really flatter any sort of food – but other than that, there’s really nothing I would change about it.

Happy Father’s Day Dad. I hope this makes up for all those redundant presents I got you in the past!

A more successful black sesame creme brulee. Photo: Tao Lin

A Colourful Affair

Great Thai food, for me, is synonymous with wonderously generous portions, close friends and family and colour. Lots and lots of colour, both literally – beautiful and brilliant reds, greens, oranges, yellows – and metaphorically, in terms of the taste – a perfect balance of sweet, salty, spicy and sour elements and different textures throughout the dishes.

About one month ago my friends and I organised one of our delightful dinners together (that’s not a typo by the way, we really do need to organise things like this very well in advance) and decided on Thai as a theme, which if I recall correctly was inspired by one of the girls’ recent trips to Thailand and Bali.

There was more than enough food, as there always is at these kinds of things, but everything was delicious (except for 1/2 of my dessert – more on that soon).

There was a refreshing and vibrant tofu salad with lemongrass, crispy noodles and cashews dressed in Thai chilli sauce:

Photo: Tao Lin

The always-reliable and tasty Pad Thai:

Photo: Tao Lin

For mains there was also a Thai red curry with chicken and mixed veges served with sticky white rice but unfortunately I failed to get a photo of it. It was very well-seasoned with Thai spices and red chillis, which gave it a really nice kick.

For dessert, coconut creme brulee with toasted dessicated coconut:

Photo: Tao Lin

The reason I say 1/2 of my dessert wasn’t quite as good as everything else is because I tested two different recipes for creme brulee and all the desserts made from one recipe were undercooked and failed to set. I have to say the flavour was fine, it probably needed a good 15-20 minutes more in the oven. The recipe I followed can be found here.

I made the other creme brulees using the same recipe I follow for creme caramel and those turned out lovely. The reason I chose to follow this recipe, as opposed to a traditional/authentic creme brulee recipe was because I’ve made it twice before and it has always tasted amazingly delicate and fresh. I didn’t make it as a creme caramel for this dinner party because I didn’t want to stress about getting the custards out of the ramekins all perfect and in one piece! This recipe is a real winner and just boosts my love of My Kitchen Rules even more.

Because it was the host’s birthday the weekend before, our resident Baking Queen made a gorgeous yellow cake with buttercream frosting and it truly was something spectacular. The birthday girl loves beautiful things and so the cake reflected this:

Photo: Tao Lin

Photo: Tao Lin

Photo: Tao Lin

Beautiful inside and out. Photo: Tao Lin

Coincidentally, the gift (beauty voucher) and birthday card were also presented in exactly the same colours. It was just meant to be!

We spent a good couple of hours after dinner chatting, gossiping, laughing, conversing and sometimes just sitting in brief silence sipping our tea. There’s something so heartwarming and special about these gatherings and I think a part of it is because we’ve all become so much busier now since we all left school.

When we do manage to get together, we eat too much, our conversation topics change ferociously and they’re always interjected with tremendous laughter and fits of giggles. But no matter what the conversation is about, whether it’s serious, lighthearted, trivial or meaningful, and how much effort it is to organise one of these gatherings, it is always a delightfully colourful affair.

Such a tease

My friend baked and decorated this gorgeous cake. What was it for? What kind of cake is it? What else did we have to eat?? Riveting, I know 😛 More to come soon 🙂

Photo: Tao Lin