Matariki meringues and other misadventures

If you have a little boy and a little girl helping you bake cupcakes, you can be certain there will be requests (translation: demands, usually accompanied by a stroppy foot stamp) for both blue and pink icing. I’m definitely looking forward to some more creative colour choices in the adolescent years (although perhaps not the black and purple teenage goth phase). For now, however, the only little bottles of food colouring I need to have in stock are blue and pink.

To be honest, I was relieved when Emily asked if we could make cupcakes this afternoon – she has had a cookie cutter or “shapes” obsession in recent weeks. So much so that when I hear those three words, “Let’s make shapes!” I can rustle up the ingredients in two seconds flat without even opening my trusty Edmonds cookbook to the Shrewsbury biscuit page, and before you know it we have ducks, dogs, T-Rexs and flowers (I have a rather eclectic selection of cookie cutters) all over the kitchen.

But not today; today was all about the cupcakes, which was rather fitting as the challenge on

New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker was to make 100 cupcakes and assemble them into a structure that told a story. The contestants had to have a partner or friend to help make the cupcakes, and I couldn’t help but think how hilarious it would have been, if I had been on the show and brought Dan or Emily in as my helper. Could you imagine Colin Mathura-Jeffree’s face?

Perhaps it was a good thing this plan didn’t eventuate as here were the results of Dan and Em’s cupcakes.

 

 

 

Despite being fairly underwhelmed in the first few weeks, I’m really enjoying the Hottest Home Baker comp. I keep wanting to try my hand at the challenges each week, but in all seriousness when will I ever have a spare uninterrupted four hours to make a St. Honoré gateau? (I haven’t ruled it out yet though, so watch this space!)

Last week they made brioche and Danish pastries. Now, as you all know, I laugh in the face of brioche (*arrogant cackle*) as I make it all the time, but I’ve never had a go at Danishes, although I’ve made croissants a few times. It’s a timely exercise – rising and fridging (a verb I just invented then which means to take items in out of the fridge on a regular basis) of the pastry dough. Once the pastry had been folded and turned and fridged (loving my new verb; I see it becoming a culinary term used by pastry chefs all over the world) and rolled within an inch of its life I set about making all sorts of creations. I made an almond and apple braid; pain au chocolat; blue cheese, pear and pecan windmills; parmesan, sundried tomato and rocket envelopes; frangipane twists. It was all most excellent. Fridging delicious.

 

I didn’t see what the contestants have to produce next week – too busy quickly changing channels to Miranda (such a rockstar existence I lead) – but I guarantee you it won’t be these, which I took to Dan and Emily’s Matariki (Maori New Year) pre-school disco: meringue nests bought from Pak N Save, hurriedly filled with whipped cream, topped with decorations and edible glitter and thrown on a plate.

 

Until next time!
TTFN x

Chopsticks and Chutney

I’m actually nursing an indirect baking injury. I have a strand of steel wool embedded in my thumb nail – a result of some overzealous Steelo pan-scrubbing after my attempt at making spiced feijoa and date chutney left the bottom of the pan scarred with charred chutney.

Despite the damage done to my pan – and my thumb - the chutney is delicious. The long, hot summer has left the feijoas smaller but sweeter than other years, but as with our plum trees, I never know what to do with the hundreds of feijoas that our two trees produce. There’s only so many feijoas you want your two young children to eat, only so many feijoa crumbles you can guzzle. So I was pleased to hear of a chutney recipe that required two kilograms of the fruit. Basically, the chopped feijoas are boiled - skin and everything - with dates, chillis, ginger, limes, lemons, honey, apple cider vinegar and a whole host of spices and other goodies. Feeling very smug as I filled jar after jar with the stuff, I then confronted the inevitable question that probably faces every chutney, jam and preserve maker: what do I do with all these jars?

So far I’ve discovered my spiced feijoa and date chutney works well in baguette sammies, on crostinis with a slab of brie, and also as a filling for pinwheel scones. That’s three uses and approximately half a jar. Only six and a half to go. Any ideas? Any takers?

I’m well aware that this foray into feijoa is the first mention of baking to make its way onto the blog in a long time. I’ve been baking away of course, but nothing particularly new and adventurous and worth talking about...

...until our recent trip to Hoi An, Vietnam, where we went for the wedding of our good friends, Johanna and Aidan. It was an amazing, relaxing, hot, kids-free, friends-filled time spent in a culinary and shopping paradise. Suffice to say we had fun. Amid hen and stag parties and getting clothes tailored Neil and I found time to do a cooking class. While not strictly baking, it was definitely a different sort of kitchen experience and warrants a mention on this blog.

Having ventured into the pungent and noisy (think clucking chickens) Hoi An food market a few times, I was happy to forgo a trip to the market with the chef to pick the ingredients. I know this was opting out – I will clearly never be a Masterchef contestant - but once we found ourselves upstairs in the kitchen above the restaurant, with our lovely chef Lam, I was in my element. We made spring rolls, pork and prawn rice pancakes and a beef noodle soup (or pho).

As we begin our lesson, Neil informs Lam that I am an excellent cook. For a second I consider being humble and rejecting the praise, but then decide, no dammit, I’ll take it, I am awesome, thank you very much. For all Lam knows I could be Annabel Langbein on some intrepid, undercover mission. At this point Lam hands me a carrot and a peeler and I fumble with it like I’ve never held a peeler. Or seen a carrot. Very embarrassingly, Lam has to show me how to peel a carrot, while Neil smirks beside me. I’m fairly certain Lam worked out I wasn’t Annabel at that point. It seems pride does come before a fall, whatever language you’re talking.

I then tried to redeem myself with my deft knife handling and nifty wok work, but Lam did not seem particularly impressed. The end result was great, however – the spring rolls were especially delicious. Of course, the real test is being able to replicate at home, and my first attempt was not baaaaad, but I’m looking forward to having another bash.

Meanwhile, the ads for New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker have started appearing and I must admit to overwhelming relief at not seeing myself on the screen, dropping cupcakes and whatnot. I am quite looking forward to being an armchair critic after all.

TTFN x

 

The Aston Martins of the cake world

1^st March marked the first day of autumn here in New Zealand. But at 31 degrees, with not a cloud in sight, it is clear that summer is showing no signs of relenting just yet. What a summer! It has become the sort of season where jumpers and jeans have gone into complete disuse, the sort where you get dressed in summery clothes before even looking outside, such is the certainty that the sun will be beating down. The last time it rained was about four weeks ago - for approximately 8 minutes. It hasn’t been so long since I’ve abandoned the gumboots of my childhood that I don’t feel for the dairy farmers facing a drought, though.

The 1^st March was significant. It was my second cousin Chelsea and her fiancé Craig’s wedding day. Beautiful day, beautiful bride, beautiful event. And, as this is a baking blog, beautiful cake.

Wedding cakes are the Aston Martins of the cake world. A chance for truly gifted bakers to really show off. Chelsea and Craig’s cake was exquisite – a tower of meringues.

It got me thinking back to our wedding cake (made by Sue Pedley – family friend and gifted cake maker): three gorgeous white tiers, each a different flavour, each separated by layers of strawberries and red roses. Again, exquisite.

It makes me wonder, if I keep it up, my pursuit of baking excellence, will I ever be capable of making something so amazing? I’m beginning to think the self-taught method (i.e. devouring cook books like novels) may have its limitations, and that perhaps there may be a reason why brilliant pastry chefs have usually undergone extensive training. Having said that, I have many friends who simply have a knack and a passion for baking and produce works of art.

I may be lacking in knack, but have plenty of passion! Check out my recent birthday cake attempts. Here is the cake I made for Neil’s 31^stbirthday. Somewhat lacking in theme (I had considered a bike cake in honour of his newfound cycling obsession but ruled it out on the grounds of difficulty and lack of time), but given his advancing years (31 - blimey!) I thought understated might be best. After all, is there any birthday more insignificant than the 31^st? It’s not a big round number, you’ve just had a big party last year, you’re launching out into the wilderness of those middle decades... 

 

Hmm, if my wedding cake was an Aston Martin, this was probably a Toyota Corolla. The observant among you will have spotted the embossed icing – yes, new cake decorating toy. I got to use it again a few weeks later when making my cousin Renée’s birthday cake. Renée turned 12 – a decidedly more exciting age! Pink and girly was the order of the day and I was thrilled to oblige. Here was the result...

 

Hmm, Volkswagen Golf? Birthday cakes aside, I’ll be honest: the sunshine and the busy humdrum of work and kids has kept me out of the kitchen lately and my baking output has been rather pitiful. However, I did whip up these lemony-coconutty-passionfruity little cakes for afternoon tea today. Fortunately my icing bowl lickers weren't far away...

 

Perhaps with the new season will come a surge of productivity.  We’ll see.

TTFN x

 

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

Christmas traditions

It's funny how childhood traditions can become sticking points in a relationship. I find it fascinating how a couple can learn to maturely compromise on meal times and who does the laundry/shopping/childcare, yet lock heads over whether to hang the stockings by the chimney or at the foot of the bed.

In those blissful pre-children years, before death do us part and all that, Neil and I hadn't discussed festive childhood traditions in any great detail. Until recently that is, when we were wrapping the kids' presents and reminiscing about our own Christmas childhood memories.

Mine involved attending a midnight mass church service on Christmas Eve (an attempt, I reckon in hindsight, on my parents' part to prevent us rising too early on Christmas morn, and also to provide an antidote to all the imminent Santa action), then creeping out at the crack of dawn to the fireplace to see if  Santa had been. We knew better than to crack into the pressies - we had to wait until Dad got in from milking the cows. It seemed to take an eternity, even though some years he would get the cows in at 2am after the church service in an effort not to keep us waiting too long. Then present-opening frenzy would ensue, followed by manic Christmas lunch with Mum or Dad's side of the family, then manic Christmas dinner with the other side.

Neil's childhood Christmas involved hanging his stocking up at the foot of the bed on Christmas Eve. Upon waking in the middle of the night, he would check if Santa - sorry, Father Christmas - had been. If he had, then Neil would open a present or two, then fall back asleep until the morning, when he'd open the remaining presents. All this recounted with misty-eyed nostalgia.

Given that we don't have a fireplace (hanging the stockings under the heat pump doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?!) my argument for having the stockings in the living room was perhaps on shaky ground... however Neil agreed he wanted to see the kids' faces upon seeing if Santa/Father Christmas had been. (Privately, I also think that Neil was perhaps a better behaved and more restrained child than our offspring; I don't trust either Dan or Emily not to rip into every present at 2am.)

But I digress. A Christmas tradition that is not to be messed with in my family is the Christmas pudding. When I was a little girl it was my Great Aunty Jean's job to make the pud; she passed the task on to Uncle Bruce. I am lining up as Bruce's 2IC, and have assisted him with pudding-making for two years now. The recipe itself is straightforward, but the best part is using the ancient scales that once belonged to my great-great grandmother.

 

With traditional pudding-making comes little quirks like making a wish with each stir of the pudding. Here, my granny (or GG as she is known to the kids) and Dan have a go.

A newly discovered Christmas tradition in our house is the baking of goodies for the kids' pre-school teachers. Frankly, anyone who can put up with Emily's stubborness and Dan's unwillingness to join in craft activities when sporty options are available, should be given a case of champagne rather than a handful of homemade choccies, but times are tough - homemade choccies it is.

I made a combination of rich brandy and nut truffles and rocky road for each of the eight teachers. Here they are:

Then Christmas drinkies with the cuzzies calls for some more festive baking. Lemon curd cupcakes with cream cheese icing and little fondant decorations.

This little boy (Dan, 4) is soooo excited about Christmas, it literally cannot come fast enough for the wee man. Neil and I can't wait to see his face (and Emily's) on Christmas morning. No doubt the little rascals will gradually cement a whole new range of family Christmas traditions, which, years from now they will fight over with their spouses.

But for now, Merry Christmas everyone!
Jude x

Fairy lights and fruitcake

Post-audition, life has seen an onslaught of all things Christmas: tinsel, advent calendars, the annual debate of whether or not it will irritate people to send them a family Christmas letter, and an endless string of Christmas parties - sadly more involving Santa than champagne. The kids are already at fever pitch over the prospect of a visit from Monsieur Claus; the morning after the Christmas tree (a rather sad looking specimen chosen by Dan and Gramps from the farm) was installed - at 5.45am to be precise - Neil found the kids standing in front of the "tree", fairy lights twinkling, totally enraptured, looking for presents.

And, of course, festive baking. For a learner baker like me, Christmas lends a good excuse to try out things I'm unlikely to cook otherwise. Starting with a brandy-soaked Christmas cake...

It isn't very rewarding, however, making fruit cakes for people who don't like fruit cakes. For instance, it was hard to draw much pride from Neil's "If I liked fruit cake, I'm sure I'd like this", said with his face distorted into obvious displeasure at being forced to sample it. Similarly, Dan's "I like it Mummy, but just the icing, but just the white icing - not that yucky yellow icing". So really, I should have just served up some white fondant icing and basked in the compliments.

And then I had all this dried fruit to find a use for - so I had a bash at mincemeat. I made some festive brioche, filling with the mincemeat and Whittaker's Dark Ghana chocolate, to which I've become addicted. These were duly delivered to the Mainly Music Christmas party, which in hindsight was not a wise move considering the amount of brandy-sodden fruit the brioche contained, and was eaten by hordes of preschoolers. Their parents have me to thank if their children were unusually mellow for the rest of the day.

Then I made mince pies. Athough I cooked them within an inch of their lives, they were delicious. The pastry was beautifully short and perfectly cooked on the bottom, if borderline over-cooked on the edges.

I've also had a few attempts at pavlova making. Our local Nosh store held their annual pavlova competition today, so I duly entered a very homemade looking piece. When presenting it to the store, the lady who was organising it said "I bet it tastes great"... which is the food equivalent of saying "You've got a great personality". So I plonked it down among these meringue, cream and strawberry works of art and haven't heard since. Suffice to say, I don't think I won! Still, I bet it really did taste great...

What else? I had another bash at croissants. Definite improvement. And easier, although I had rolling pin arm ache for a day afterwards. My physio husband's professional opinion was that I needed to, and I quote, "take a concrete pill and harden up".

So, some interesting baking escapades these past few weeks..and more to come!

TTFN x