Last Wednesday was crazy. It was a day on which I’d scheduled myself three things to bake. I only had myself to blame really but the problem, and it wasn’t a problem at all you understand only so far as my insane scheduling practices was concerned – was that I was going out to dinner with Liss and Chantelle. And somehow I was thinking that I would whip up a Watermelon cake based on the one I had at Black Star Pastry a few months back.
Hello my pretties! Take my (severed) hand and let me give you a peek into my annual Halloween party. It’s an event that gets me going throughout the year. This month was particularly busy with the Sydney International Food Festival and before I knew it, it was the 20th of October and I hadn’t even sorted out my costume.
Luckily I had been planning this party even before last year’s finished (yes I’m an obsessive kind of person, can you tell?) and I had my menu sorted. I wanted to make different things from last year and I wanted it to be even more grisly than last year. I waited and waited and waited for my oven. It was about a month late and was on the way to me from the nice people at LG. It finally arrived and I can already see that she (and it is a she no doubt) is also something that loves dramatic entrances so we’ll get along just fine. I was set for my baking duties and so I had to get my costume together.
Bloody Brain Pannacotta and Shortbread Witch’s Fingers
I am not one for sewing. In fact the only craft I can muster up is really cooking. So I chose to buy my costume and there was one I had my heart set on, the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland (I even had the tiara ready for it). Now that I had my outfit sorted, I needed to turn my attention to the decorations. Places were selling out of their Halloween goodies and whenever I’d walk into a shop, there would be a gaggle of people amongst the Halloween section with adults and kids alike grabbing costumes and decorations.
I wanted to go more ghoulish and squeamish this year so I went with Donna the Dead, the moaning sensor activated animated moaning head. I picked up my charming severed head from The Party People in Sans Souci and discovered a treasure trove of ghoulish goodies. We got to chatting and they agreed to lend me some props for the party including these two charming mummies and a faux bloody brain and severed hand! Mr NQN dressed up as a surgeon gone psychotic and answered the door holding the body parts (he was originally to go as Hannibal Lecter holding a bottle of chianti, fava beans and a liver).
But enough dithering, let me show you the food which is always one of the most important parts to a celebration aside from the company!
Allow me to draw you a rather woeful picture: we have finally moved into our new place and were waiting for our new oven to arrive. My baking fingers were itching to bake something. Like an addict I’d pore over cookbooks flagging the recipes that I wanted to make and don’t you know it, they were all cakes that required an oven. My hands would twitch, wanting to beat something or whisk something. Pictures of delicate macarons were pored over lustfully and longingly, my fingers stroking the pages. All things that required my long awaited oven. Until my friend Kathy (who I want to employ one day as she is such a fantastic ideas person unless of course someone else has already hired her) linked me to this recipe for a Five Minute Cheesecake in a Mug from the blog I Really Like Food.
Now those of you that have made baked cheesecakes know that they’re a long process. Whole cheesecakes take at least an hour in the oven although the mixing of one is a relatively quick process. So it should be possible surely? I tried a few variations trying to make my own version using raspberries and some turned out ok and some barely passable but the final recipe if I can say immodestly was rather good indeed.
The raspberries and lemon balance the creaminess and sweetness of the cheese. The key of course is to whisk it thoroughly. If it’s not mixed properly, the resultant cheesecake will be awfully lumpy – it needs to be smooth which does involve some elbow work. I refused to use the Kitchenaid for it, after all the key was to make it as easy as possible with as little equipment and washing up as possible. Like the Five Minute Chocolate Mug Cake, timing is the key. I dislike giving timings for microwaves as they vary so much but mine took 60 seconds on 50% power and then another 45 seconds on 50% power but do check and adjust. It will cook further once it’s out of the microwave.
Of course it’s not an entire miracle and you do need to chill it for a couple of hours to get the true, cold cheesecake texture but you can console yourself with the idea that you only have to cook it for 5 minutes. Might I add that one of the best things is that you really need to use low fat cream cheese and sour cream – yes you need to if you want to beat this by hand. The beautiful part is that it doesn’t taste low fat and truly only takes 5 minutes. OK so it is a miracle indeed.
So tell me Dear Reader, what culinary miracles do you dream of performing? Dinner on the table within 15 minutes? A neverfail souffle or the ability to throw amazing dinner parties? Or something else altogether?
And because it’s Wallpaper Wednesday, here is your image to help you get through Hump Day!
There are often all sorts of problems encountered when baking in someone else’s kitchen. Now I don’t mean to sound ungrateful because I’m just glad I can borrow my mum’s kitchen but as she’s not a baker I find that she doesn’t have many of the tools that I have and love. It’s been fine making savoury items for the most part (and I did bring my Kitchenaid with me, I’m not crazy to think I’d be able to do without it) but baking is another matter. This cake was one that was relatively easy to do but I was lacking one of my favourite items, my Microplane coarse grater and this cake has a lot of grating involved so there was a fair bit of cursing and elbow work involved.
I loved the idea of a Kitchen Garden cake as I am aiming to grow my own kitchen garden (albeit an apartment living version and I am rather handicapped with a Black Thumb) . Please don’t let the idea of parsnip or potato in a cake put you off. Imagine how hard the person that invented carrot cake would have had to have sold the idea and look at how popular it is now. With the heady fragrance of orange zest and cinnamon, you don’t even taste the parsnip although the coarse grating allows for little moist bursts of flavours. It also smells heavenly coming out of the oven and is amazingly as light as a feather. Sure it’s not the prettiest cake, it doesn’t even have any icing to speak of so a light dusting of sifted icing sugar was what it needed so that it didn’t look so “naked”.
This recipe is one of those fantastic Historical recipes from the National Trust in the U.K. and hails from the West Midlands and is based on archive menus adapted to the present day and palate. The best thing about it is that it keeps beautifully moist for days without losing any moistness at all. Call it the new generation Carrot Cake…from an older Generation of course.
So tell me Dear Reader, which generation are you from? Generation X, Y or Baby Boomer? And are you typical of your generation?
I got your attention with the title didn’t I? When I first heard about this cake and saw it on Joy the Baker, I was intrigued so I decided to make this for my husband’s birthday. He had a rotten birthday quite honestly as he was sick with the flu again for the third time these past 2 months. His resistance has been low ever since his hospital visit and the mega antibiotics (although thanks to reader Kyle for her great advice on antibiotics) and at this point, we’re both tired of him being sick. He’s sick of being a patient and I’m sick of being his nurse. This cake was actually good for him as it didn’t contain any dairy, a supposed no-no as far as colds and flus are concerned. It also happened to be Vegan which he isn’t of course but I did find it amusing that I set out some eggs and butter for this cake the night before only to wake up and realise that neither was needed.
While our place is being renovated, we are staying with my parent’s and therefore I was baking in my mum’s kitchen. Baking in a kitchen other than your own is never quite as comfortable as your own kitchen. Couple that with the fact that my mum is not a baker. Her baking powder is rarely used (and had me worried whether it was still in date) and she has a few measuring cups and spoons but not as many as I do as I am a bit of a crazed baker. So sure she may not have had all the equiment but what she had was a garden full of gorgeous flowers including Cherry Blossoms, roses and daisies as she is a keen gardener (sadly, the green thumb was not passed onto me).
The cake itself is quite good indeed. For a cake very low in fat and with no eggs, it has a lovely, light rich chocolate taste to it and is surprisingly moist (although adding some chocolate flakes of chips would have been good in retrospect). The crust is a touch crunchy but the inside tender. I can’t say that I was a huge fan of the avocado buttercream though. In fact I found myself scraping it off the cake and eating the cake by itself. Funnily enough, the avocado buttercream doesn’t turn brown and sets just like a regular buttercream but the taste…well it’s like sweet avocadoes and if you happen to like that idea then it might be the icing for you.
So tell me Dear Reader, are you a fan of vegetables used in sweet dishes e.g. carrot cake, zucchini cake or avocado shakes?
As seen in the Foodies Guide 2010
Receive daily updates via email. Just enter your email address and press Subscribe.
Thanks to our sponsors.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia License.
What is NQN up to now?
NQN on Facebook
RSS