And the verdict is...

....unfortunately, I didn’t make the cut for New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker competition.  I feel a mixture of things: a little disappointed, as it would no doubt have been fun to experience my 15 minutes of fame (and given I am still very much a baking novice, 15 minutes is probably all I would have had); a smidge embarrassed, since my pursuit of a place on the show has been so public (mild inner cringe); quite relieved, as I hadn’t really worked out how I was going to take time off work and who was going to look after the kids, and so on. There is also the very real possibility that I would have been way out of my depth and fallen at the first floury hurdle!

So, mixed feelings. But I can now reveal what I made for my audition! We had to make something sweet, something savoury and something ‘uniquely me’. My something sweet was a lemon, coconut and blueberry layer cake. My something savoury was brioche with sundried tomatoes, feta, pesto and spinach. My ‘uniquely me’ dish were little tarts with layers of lemon curd, blueberry coulis, frangipane and crème patissiere (all homemade!) topped with summer berries. I was very proud of this effort!

 

I’m still not sure if we were supposed to bring such large examples of our baking or not – they looked a little surprised at all the trips to the car to bring everything in, and when I left the audition laden with baking tins, baskets and platters, the guy who was auditioning after me had a little plate with a three little morsels on it. It was a funny moment in hindsight – you could see he was packing it, thinking ‘oh, no, I’ve misjudged it’ and I was thinking ‘oh no, I totally overdid it!’ My inner try-hard still lurks within.

So. Where to from here? I’ve come to a bit of an impasse with my baking, now that the show is no longer an option. Funnily enough, the few people I’ve told so far have all said, ‘Please don’t stop your blog’. And I haven’t had any desire to stop baking – if anything, I have more urge than ever to get better. I guess there’s always next year...

Meanwhile I'm still baking, still learning, still making works of art one minute, absolute disasters the next. Here are some of my latest accomplishments:

Passionfruit and coconut meringues

 

Tomato and feta tart with thyme pastsry

Herby focaccia bread

 

Blueberry, lime, coconut and passionfruit cake

 

Baking for the sake of baking is fine, but I feel I need another challenge or goal – so any ideas are welcome!

TTFN x

The mother of muffins

I had a good haul of pressies this Christmas. I suspect by the time you hit thirty you should perhaps have outgrown that smug feeling of receiving a large stash of excellent gifts, but just as Dan’s eyes lit up when he opened his remote control car, Emily squealed with glee at her new doll’s house and Neil pronounced himself “stoked” with his new chilly bin (what? that was what he wanted!), so too did I feel a rush of giddy delight upon receiving some great new recipe books (including Thomas Keller’s ‘Bouchon Bakery’ and Paul Hollywood’s ‘How to Bake’ – thank you Steve and Heather respectively!)

Among them was Peter Gordon’s ‘Everyday’ (thank you, Tristan and Jen!) – a book I’ve been lusting after ever since I spent ten minutes ogling it in Paper Plus, while Dan and Emily ran around the shop and I pretended they weren’t my kids.

I’m somewhat in awe of Peter Gordon, the so-called ‘father of fusion cuisine’, with his Kiwi-British restaurant empire, his column in the Herald and now his amazing new cook book, from which I tried my first recipe last night: blueberry custard tarts. Partly through burning creativity, although more accurately through lack of correct ingredients, I adapted the recipe somewhat to more of a blueberry peach cheesecake tart. 

His sweet pastry is a Spanish version, made with sherry. I was somewhat surprised to find we had sherry in our rather sparse liquor cabinet; even more surprised when I realised post-tart that I’d used brandy instead of sherry (which we actually didn’t have as it turned out), however the texture and taste were great.

 

The pastry was cooked beautifully, or so I thought, until Neil says, in the manner of an airport security guard who has just spotted something dodgy in your hand luggage, “Waaait. Mine is slightly undercooked on the bottom.”

Sure enough, there was a very fine transparent line of raw pastry in the centre of the tart.

“That’s the sort of thing they’ll have a go at you for on the show,” says he, who claims to have never watched it.

The ‘show’ he refers to is, of course, 'Chelsea New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker'. Applications close about now so I should hear soon...

I’ll be honest, the tarts were the first thing I’ve made in a while. The Kiwi summer has morphed into a series of endless, hot, beachy, loll-about-on-a-sun-lounger-with-an-iceblock days, which don't lend themselves to time in front of the oven.  However, summer also means summer fruits – stone fruits, berries, pineapples, melons: I love them all. Neil, on a particularly inspired Daddy daycare morning, took the kids to boysenberry-picking.  They returned with full juicy punnets, so boysenberry muffins with lemon curd centres and cream cheese icing were the order of the day.

 

 

 

If Peter Gordon is the father of fusion, does that make me the mother of muffins? I don’t think anyone’s claimed that yet, so I’ll take it.

Next post, I shall have NEWS! Good or bad, you’ll hear it here first.

 

TTFN x